I’ve tested this procedure on Fedora 10 and Ubuntu 9.04 but it should work on other distributions too.

First of all download the latest JDK package from the SUN page: be sure to download the bin file and not the rpm.

From now on you’ll need to run commands using sudo.

Move the package to /opt/ and make it executable.

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cd /path/to/download/folder

mv jdk-versionnumber-linux-i586.bin /opt/

cd /opt/

chmod +x jdk-versionnumber-linux-i586.bin

Now start the installation and follow the onscreen instructions

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./jdk-versionnumber-linux-i586.bin

When the installation is done you’ll need to set the JAVA_HOME enviroment variable and add java executable to the system pah.

Open the file /etc/profile and add the following lines

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JAVA_HOME="/opt/jdk_versionnumber"

export JAVA_HOME

PATH=$PATH:/opt/jdk_versionnumber/bin/

export PATH

Now add a symbolic link for the java command

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ln -s /opt/jdk_versionnumber/bin/java /usr/bin/java

Log off and log in back and you’re done.