JPackage on Fedora Core 3

I wanted to install Tomcat and ant on my new Fedora Core 3 box. Installing Tomcat failed, because I was missing jta. Since jta is a non-free package, you need to jump through some hoops.

So, I jumped the hoops and then jta was complaining about missing java-devel. I had actually installed J2SDK from Sun’s RPMs. I decided to go the full-blown JPackage route and install the J2SDK their way. Fine and dandy. Except, the RPMs built via the JPackage build process wouldn’t install! They complained about not having the Java .so files (but I thought that’s what I was installing!). Michael Peters to the rescue: Java in Fedora Core 3 mentions this problem, and he provided a SPEC file to fix this.

Sadly, I was still missing a library that java wanted. Michael Peters’ page also listed the magic incantation to get Sun’s RPM working with JPackage: yum install java-1.4.2-sun-compat. I missed that on the JPackage site.