I’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…
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…