Installing Aleks Math on Ubuntu Linux 10.4

Our school uses Aleks Math on Ubuntu Linux.  For those trying to do the same, this can be a bit tricky.  Aleks Math only works with the Sun/Oracle version of Java. It does not work with OpenJDK that ships with Ubuntu.  In order to get it working, you need to do the following.

1. Install the Sun Version of Java
2. Manually install the Aleks plugin
3. Remove OpenJDK

1) Install the Sun Version Of Java
For a long time, I was able to install it directly with 'apt-get' using these instructions. However, things changed recently.  Sun Java is no longer available to be distributed by Ubuntu, because of license issues. This means it has to be manually installed by downloading packages and installing them by hand (ick).  Here is an overview of what needs to be done.

Download the following packages from these URL's.
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/i386/sun-java6-bin/download
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/i386/sun-java6-jre/download
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/i386/sun-java6-plugin/download
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/i386/sun-java6-fonts/download
http://packages.debian.org/lenny/i386/sun-java6-jdk/download
 
Once they are downloaded, you can install them with dpkg -i.

sudo dpkg -i sun-java6-jdk_6-26-0lenny1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i sun-java6-bin_6-26-0lenny1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i sun-java6-plugin_6-26-0lenny1_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i sun-java6-fonts_6-26-0lenny1_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i sun-java6-jre_6-26-0lenny1_all.deb

2) Manually Install the Aleks Math Plugin
You'll need to download the AleksPack10.jar file from this page. Once you have it downloaded, copy it to /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/ext/. You need to make sure everyone can read it.  Typical commands might be. 

sudo cp ./aleksPack10.jar /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/ext/
sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/ext/aleksPack10.jar

You then need to tell your machine to use Sun Java:

sudo update-java-alternatives -s java-6-sun

3) Remove the OpenJDK
This one is a simple command.

sudo apt-get -y remove openjdk-6-jre default-jre default-jre-headless

If there is cleanup to be done,. try the following commands.

sudo apt-get -f install
sudo dpkg -a --configure

4) Test
Make sure Sun java shows up on this page:
http://javatester.org/version.html

Check your java version

java -version