How to re-install Java in Solaris 10

Question

Dear all,
Let me first apologize if this is not the most suitable forum to post my enquiry (if so, please let me know which one is!). I have a SUN Blade 1500 Silver running Solaris 10. After some patching via smpatch, the Solaris Management Console stopped working, I believe due to a problem between java 1.5 and SMC (see problem "Can't start smc " at:
http://forum.sun.com/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=100328&messageID=342909 )
I tried to make the SMC work by tweaking the java path and links to point the old version (1.4.2), but without any success. Moreover, in a desperate effort to solve the problem, I DELETED all the directories, files and symbolic links relating to java under the directories "/usr" and "/usr/bin" (since I couldn't find on the internet a way to "uninstall" java from the system!), and then I tried to install the java packages available at www.sun.com (JRE, J2EE, etc) by using the .sh executables provided there, but without any success. All these installers seem to only unpack java files to complete different directories from the aforementioned (under the path from which they are run), and none seem to install the files in the original locations from which I deleted files ("/usr" and "/usr/bin", and the like).
Now, not only does the SMC continue to fail to work, but also any other application requiring java fails to excecute. IS THERE A WAY TO RESTORE THE ORIGINAL JAVA FILES THAT ARE COPIED IN THE SYSTEM WITH THE INSTALLATION OF THE SOLARIS OS??? Please note that I am not interested neither in the java plugin for browsers, nor in developing apps with/for java: I only want my system (SMC, smpatch, etc) and applications (mostly EDA software - Cadence) to run smoothly without receiving errors due to missing java files!
Thans a lot in advance for any help or clue to overcome this rather unpleasant situation.
Jorge Luis.

Answer 1

You should be able to just download the version that contains the Solaris packages and follow the installation instructions to use pkgadd to add those packages.
[Update: hmm it seems only the JDK is available that way not the JRE. It seems if you don't want to install the JDK (though there is no real reason not to) you'd need to reinstall the original packages from your Solaris install media - and you may need to remove any patches that updated the JRE, first.]
That said if you deleted some of the links then the package install may not necessarily restore them.
Here's my setup. Note I manually set the "latest" link. The default was that /usr/java linked to /usr/jdk/jdk1.5.0_07
hypert > dir /usr/bin/java
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root other 16 Dec 19 2005 /usr/bin/java -> ../java/bin/java
hypert > dir /usr/java
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Aug 29 13:11 /usr/java -> jdk/latest
hypert > dir /usr/jdk
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 4 root bin 512 Aug 29 11:30 .
drwxr-xr-x 40 root sys 1024 Aug 29 13:11 ..
drwxr-xr-x 4 root bin 512 Aug 29 11:29 instances
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root other 7 Dec 19 2005 j2sdk1.4.2_08 -> ../j2se
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root other 18 Jun 2 09:47 jdk1.5.0_07 -> instances/jdk1.5.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root other 18 Aug 29 11:30 jdk1.6.0 -> instances/jdk1.6.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root other 8 Aug 29 11:30 latest -> jdk1.6.0
drwxr-xr-x 7 root bin 512 Dec 19 2005 packages
Message was edited by:
davidholmes