Question

I have been trying some different java compilers over the weekend and decided to stick with javac this morning. I then proceeded to clean up the mess that was caused by my testing and removed every last trace of java and did a fresh ‘apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk’ after autoremove and autoclean.

The following weirdness was then encountered:

tarskin@5-PARA-11-0120:~$ javac
The program 'javac' can be found in the following packages:
 * openjdk-6-jdk
 * ecj
 * gcj-4.4-jdk
 * gcj-4.6-jdk
 * gcj-4.5-jdk
 * openjdk-7-jdk
Try: sudo apt-get install <selected package>

I had allready installed openjdk but i tried it anyhow yielding:

tarskin@5-PARA-11-0120:~$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk
[sudo] password for tarskin: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
openjdk-6-jdk is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
tarskin@5-PARA-11-0120:~$ 

I know i must be doing something stupid but I have no idea what, if anyone else could give a pointer in the right direction that would be very much appreciated…

Cheers

EDIT: Found some other weird aspects about the ‘new’ instance of my java distro, it doesn’t seem to recognise for example ‘Pattern’ or ‘Matcher’ that should be coming from the regex import shrugs.

Answer 1

Check /etc/alternatives and /usr/bin. One or both will contain links to old Java versions which you had installed. When those links are broken, you can get the error message above.

To update the links after installing a new version of Java, try update-alternatives