Ubuntu Live and Java
April 16th, 2008I'm not sure if this is specific to the Ubuntu Live based installs, or if this would apply to any Ubuntu installation. However, attempting to install sun-java6-jre (or sun-java5-jre) has left me with a continuous string of errors until I did this…
ln -s / /cow
It seems as though one of the installation scripts has this path hardcoded in it, and, without it, these scripts fail.
I hope this helps you if you should even encounter the same problem.
Say... what? I have no such dir, and got no such errors...
In fact, to find this, I did :
apt-get source sun-java6-jre
fgrep "cow" sun-java6-6-03/debian/* -R
And I find no references to cows. You sure it's not a previously misconfigured package?
I even tried performing a complete uninstall of everything Java and
then reinstalling and it still failed. As I was poking around the
internets looking for a solution I found someone offering this tidbit
of info. I knew the problem I was having was somewhere in the postinst
script, so I greped in it looking for "cow" to no avail. Willing to
try anything I said, "what the hell", made the symlink and it worked.
I was as shocked as you.
I believe this is the web page I found that referenced that fix:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sun-j...