How To Install IcedTea Plugin for OpenJDK 8

In this article, we will guide you through the process of installing the IcedTea plugin for OpenJDK 8 on Ubuntu. The IcedTea project provides a harness to build the source code from OpenJDK using Free Software build tools and provides replacements for the binary plugs with code from the GNU Classpath project.

What is IcedTea?

The IcedTea project is an open-source project started by Red Hat in June 2007. The main goal of IcedTea is to make OpenJDK 8 work without using any proprietary code. This project provides a plugin to run Java applets in a browser.

What is OpenJDK?

OpenJDK (Open Java Development Kit) is a free and open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE). It is the result of an effort Sun Microsystems began in 2006. The implementation is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) version 2 with a linking exception.

Pre-requisites

Before we proceed with the installation, make sure you have the following:

• A system running Ubuntu 16.04 or later.
• User with sudo privileges.

Installation Steps

Step 1: Update Your System

First, update your system to ensure you have the latest packages. You can do this by running the following command:

sudo apt-get update

The sudo command is used to run the update command with root privileges. apt-get update is the command to update the package lists for upgrades for packages that need upgrading.

Step 2: Install IcedTea Plugin

For Ubuntu 16.04 and later versions, the icedtea-8-plugin package is available in the official repositories. You can install it using the following command:

sudo apt-get install icedtea-8-plugin

This command tells the system to install the icedtea-8-plugin package. The install command is used to install a package, and icedtea-8-plugin is the name of the package to install.

Step 3: Verify the Installation

After the installation is complete, you can verify it by running the following command:

java -version

This command will display the installed version of Java.

Note for Ubuntu 14.04 Users

If you are using Ubuntu 14.04, the icedtea-8-plugin package is not available in the official repositories. In this case, you can use a PPA repository provided by Maarten Fonville. To install the plugin, follow these steps:

1. Add the PPA repository:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maarten-fonville/ppa

2. Update the package list:

sudo apt-get update

3. Install the IcedTea plugin:

sudo apt-get install icedtea-8-plugin

Conclusion

In this article, we have covered how to install the IcedTea plugin for OpenJDK 8 on Ubuntu. This plugin is necessary if you want to run Java applets in your browser. If you have any questions or run into any issues, feel free to leave a comment below.