Jdeveloper 10.1.3.4 under 64-bit OpenSuse 11.1

Recently I upgraded my laptop to OpenSuse 11.1. I'm running the 64 bit (x86_64) variant of the distribution. So I had to install jDeveloper again. It's one of the few Oracle tools, besides SqlDeveloper that I don't run in a VM, but directly on the host. This is simple: installing jDeveloper is not much more than unzipping the archive.

Since it's out for a while, and I also upgraded my SoaSuite to 10.1.3.4, I tried the 10.1.3.4 jDeveloper. And where 10.1.3.3 runs smoothly on 64-bit linux, jDeveloper 10.1.3.4 won't. It complaints about having the wrong version of Java Hotspot or not being able to determine the right version.

I've search around for quite sometime, but yesterday I found a solution here.Thanks Nghiem. He wrote it for Ubuntu 8.10 X86_64, but it applies to every Linux X86_64. But at least OpenSuse 11.1.

What you need to do is to edit the jdev.conf, which you can find at <jdev_home>/jdev/bin/jdev.conf.

There you have to set the Java home, which has to be 64-bit:

#
# Directive SetJavaHome is not required by default, except for the base
# install, since the launcher will determine the JAVA_HOME. On Windows
# it looks in ..\..\jdk, on UNIX it looks in the PATH by default.
#
SetJavaHome /usr/lib64/jvm/java-1.5.0

Mark that jDeveloper is certified only for Java 1.5.

Then you have to unset the HotSpot (Java-Client) usage, by unsetting the SetJavaVM option:

#
# The Windows launcher will attempt to use client (hotspot) by default,
# unless a VM is specified below with the following directive. On UNIX
# we use whatever is listed first in the $(JAVA_HOME)/jre/lib/jvm.cfg file.
#
#SetJavaVM hotspot

After that running the jdev script in the <jdev_home>/jdev/bin folder will bring up jDeveloper 10.1.3.4.

According to Nghiem you can run into the problem of having a blank screen at startup. He suggested that it has something to do with a bug in his Java 1.5 version, that should be solved in Java 1.6 update 10. I did not run into that problem. But he solved it with adding the following line to the jdev startup script:

export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit

Add it as the first line in the script (actually the second line, since the first comment-line is about denoting the shell). Save it and run it. I added it to try, but it broke my startup. So I uncommented it again. For me it worked without it.

Last week SoaSuite 11g is introduced. Next friday I go to the introduction event for Oracle partners. But SoaSuite 10.1.3 is used by many customers and I take it that most of them won't upgrade in short notice. Most SoaSuite trajects already run for quite a while and adding new functionality has higher priority than upgrading to the new release. And SoaSuite 10.1.3 has become a quite mature Soa environment. So I think it will be around for quite a while, so this tip might also be usefull for some time.