No more Java Preferences for you!

1 minute read

Java on Max OS X is a moving target to say the least since stewardship has moved from Apple to Oracle. I had a lot of trouble to make Eclipse run on my machine making me feel like a customer of The Soup Nazi in Seinfeld.

Let me explain some changes.

The failure

I tried to run Eclipse Juno on my machine and got the following encouraging error

The JVM shared library /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/openjdk-1.7-x86_64 does not contain the JNI_CreateJavaVM symbol

Eclipse always uses the system default JVM on Mac OS X and as far as I know you can’t change that. In theory that’s not a big deal, you just have to change the default JVM to use via the Java Preferences application.

No more Java Preferences application

Apple recently removed the Java Preferences application from Mac OS X as they deemed it to be useless. In a sort of twisted way - aka we don’t care about developers - they were right.

It has been replaced in the Java Oracle distribution by a panel in System Preferences under the Other category. Well except that this panel only deals with Oracle JVMs. So if you happen to have OpenJDK or any other JVM installed, you can not choose (or “unchoose”) them.

The side effect for me was that OpenJDK was selected as the default JVM and this created this user friendly error when starting Eclipse.

Hats off to Henri Gomez for helping me find a way out. You basically need to go to /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines and remove OpenJDK

sudo rm -fR openjdk-1.7-x86_64

In my case I actually moved it somewhere else. What if I want to use OpenJDK too? F**k you! told me Orapple.

The combination of:

  • Apple stopping bundling the JVM
  • Oracle coming up with an Oracle only replacement
  • Apple removing a useful tool

makes the open JDK community at large feel quite unwelcome. So much for an open source project and community where both Apple and Oracle are major stakeholders.

By the way that’s not the only glitch I’ve experienced when moving from the Apple VM to Oracle VM. JAVA_HOME now points to the JDK instead of the JRE.

Anyways, moving along.

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