I seem to have fixed the problem, thanks to a number of suggestions here--specifically, the suggestions were that I stick to openjdk and perhaps to clean up my loaded versions of java.
I used synaptic to uninstall as many version of Java as I could, though ultimately this may not have made a difference. I could not fully uninstall Sun's Java because two applications I need depend on it: OpenOffice and JEdit. I did eliminate Sun's jdk. I did erase some software associated with gij. I also uninstalled and then reinstalled openjdk. Again, I'm not sure that mattered. When I reran "sudo update-alternatives --config java", openjdk was the default java and its status was 'auto'. It may have been sufficient to set these using update-alternatives. Next, I gave JAVA_HOME a new value (setting it to empty did not work; default setting was Sun): export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre I reran R CMD javareconf, ignoring the message that JAVA_HOME was not a valid path. And then I installed the Java packages, without a hitch. Ubuntu / Debian probably should be able to handle this w/o user intervention, but don't. Thanks for all the suggestions! _______________________________________________ R-SIG-Debian mailing list [email protected] https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-debian
