Using a PPA (Obsolete)
Note: WebUpd8 team's PPA has been discontinued with effective from April 16, 2019. Thus this PPA doesn't have any Java files. More information can be found on PPA's page on Launchpad. Hence the below method no longer works and exists because of historical reasons.
You can use WebUpd8 PPA (this will download the required files from Oracle and install JDK 8):
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer
Are PPA's safe to add to my system and what are some “red flags” to watch out for?
Also ensure your JAVA_HOME variable has been set to:
/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-oracle
Manual install
The tar.gz provided by Oracle don't have an actual installation process. You just extract those files to a location you want and add them to your path. So the process is the following:
Download a .tar.gz
from Oracle (here I will be using jdk-8u20-linux-x64.tar.gz);
Extract it to somewhere;
Move the extracted folder to /usr/lib/jvm
. This is not required but it is the place where Java runtime software is installed
sudo mv /path/to/jdk1.8.0_20 /usr/lib/jvm/oracle_jdk8
Create a file /etc/profile.d/oraclejdk.sh
with the following content (adapt the paths to reflect the path where you stored your JDK):
export J2SDKDIR=/usr/lib/jvm/oracle_jdk8
export J2REDIR=/usr/lib/jvm/oracle_jdk8/jre
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/jvm/oracle_jdk8/bin:/usr/lib/jvm/oracle_jdk8/db/bin:/usr/lib/jvm/oracle_jdk8/jre/bin
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/oracle_jdk8
export DERBY_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/oracle_jdk8/db
Done! Those paths will only be recognized after you logout or restart, so if you want to use them right away run source /etc/profile.d/oraclejdk.sh
.