The alternaitives system in Debian is a pain in the arse! It’s one of those things that when you need to use it you spend twenty minutes trying to figure out why various paths etc have changed and then you need to figure out the syntax to change to the path that was working before you installed Tomcat or some other related system that downloads a bunch of stuff and sets itself up as default for the rest of the system. It’s a tad irritating.
I am not saying I know a better way to do it but it still pisses me off. Anyway to use a sane version of java I had to run the following command to get eclipse working again.
$:~# update-alternatives –install /usr/bin/java java /usr/local/sdk-5_05/jdk 1
$:~# update-alternatives –list java
/usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java
/usr/local/sdk-5_05/jdk
$:~# update-alternatives –remove java /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java
I now have eclipse working again and tomcat installed. I was going to use jetty6 over tomcat but because Debian comes bundled with a binary tomcat distribution I have decided to use it. This decision may cost me dearly later.