Installing java-gnome on Gentoo Linux

Downloading, building, and installing java-gnome on Gentoo is simple and fast. Of course it is. It's Gentoo!

The following command should install the latest released version of the bindings library:

# emerge >=dev-java/java-gnome-4.0

Use latest release!

java-gnome is a rapidly moving project, and each release immediately obsoletes the proceeding one. There is no reason to use anything other than the latest release; we encourage you to use the package in ~arch as soon as a newer one is available.

Thus it's probably a good idea to either add:

>=dev-java/java-gnome-4.0	~x86

to /etc/portage/package.keywords, or to use ACCEPT_KEYWORDS on the emerge command line, for example:

# ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~x86 emerge java-gnome

The Gentoo .ebuild can be accessed from the dev-java/java-gnome page in case you're curious.

Getting variables from java-config

Somewhat unusually for Gentoo, there is a strict policy in place defining the installed locations of Java libraries. Therefore you'll want to use the java-config tool as a helper to find the java-gnome .jar. For example:

$ java-config -l java-gnome-4.0
/usr/share/java-gnome-4.0/lib/gtk-4.0.jar

This implies that the prototypical command line to run java-gnome programs on Gentoo will look something like:

$ java -client \
	-classpath `java-config -l java-gnome-4.0` \
	package.ClassName

which should resolve to something like:

$ java -client \
	-classpath /usr/share/java-gnome-4.0/lib/gtk-4.0.jar \
	package.ClassName

Either will work.