Re: [computer-go] Computer Go Tournament on KGS

[Daniel Hallmark <dgh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 25 February 2005, Evan Daniel wrote:

> Blackdown is a bit slow at releasing things, but given that their
> Debian packages are excellent, I'm reluctant to install Sun's weird
> self-extracting thing.  I'd expect their packages in another 3-6
> months, but that's nothing more than a guess.  I guess I'll go deal
> with the Sun packages this weekend, then.


I have installed a number of the Sun java releases from 1.4 through
1.5 under various versions of SuSE using their rpms without incident
although I agree that having a .deb would be cleaner for you.

The non-rpm installer appears to consist of the binary self-extracting
archive attached to a preliminary shell script that has you accept 
their license agreement (which you already accepted by downloading the
file), updates a number of user files (~/.mailcap mime-types, etc.), 
verifies disk space and checksums the binary and then extracts the
files.

If you would like to skip the preliminary stuff and just extract the
java files themselves you can split off the self-extracting portion 
of the file and execute it manually.  Unfortunately it isn't statically 
linked so it isn't trivial for the very paranoid to run it in a chroot 
jail.

For the 1.5.0_01 release you would use

  tail -n +673 jdk-1_5_0_01-linux-i586.bin > java-1_5_0_01.sfx
  chmod +x java-1_5_0_01.sfx
  ./java-1_5_0_01.sfx

All of the extracted files are placed in a single subdirectory for 
easy cleanup later (assuming Sun isn't doing something unreported
behind the scenes).  If you're particularly concerned you could boot
a system from a recovery CD and perform the extraction onto removeable
media (such as a USB flash drive) and then copy the files over to your
primary machine.

That should leave you in a very clean state for replacing it with
the Blackdown version when it is released if you are unhappy with
the Sun release.

Daniel Hallmark

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