Comment 5 for bug 657048

See my comments (and earlier ones from others) in bug #577958.

I suspect that DBooth did an upgrade to Lucid like me. This would mean you'd have the Sun JDK and the Lucid version of the visualvm package which won't detect the Sun JDK properly if the OpenJDK JDK is not installed (due to the script issues discussed earlier here).

There are actually 3 alternatives:

(i) Switch to the OpenJDK fully. Install the OpenJDK JDK (package default-jdk, which sorts out update-alternatives for you). Then jvisualvm will work OK (you'll be running the OpenJDK one), but you get the Fluid errors like in bug #577958.

(ii) As specified in bug #577958, you can switch to the proper Sun jvisualvm by running /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/bin/jvisualvm explicitly, or changing the /usr/bin/jvisualvm symlink to permanently point to this.

(iii) Do what DBooth did, which runs the OpenJDK jvisualvm, but with the Sun JDK backend. With this, you get the *same* Fluid error as #577958 (but, as with my comments there, this doesn't seem to affect the ability to link to running/launched Java apps.).

One possible fix for *this* bug is therefore to ensure that a Sun JDK package ensures that an update-alternatives entry for jvisualvm exists to automatically do (ii) above, so that you're either running the full Sun suite or the full OpenJDK suite (and built into update-java-alternatives as well). And then you wouldn't have to worry about all the checking in the OpenJDK jvisualvm script. Of course, this might not be considered valid if the devs want to allow the case of running the OpenJDK jvisualvm frontend with a Sun JDK backend.