This is a YAP (yet another post) about how one can manually install Oracle’s proprietary JDK/JRE version (in Debian 7.0 Wheezy as an example).
First of all, download fresh version of JDK/JRE from the Oracle website.
Copy archive to desired location, in the following example we will use
/usr/lib/jvm
as an installation source directory.
Unpack the archive and run next commands:
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/lib/jvm/jdk/bin/java 1071
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/javac javac /media/mydisk/jdk/javac 1071
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/jcontrol jcontrol /media/mydisk/jdk/bin/jcontrol 1071
You may need read man pages for update-alternatives to check out the parameters and what they mean.
Now, if you want freshly installed version of java/javac to be default in your system, run next commands:
sudo update-alternatives --config java
sudo update-alternatives --config javac
sudo update-alternatives --config jcontrol
Follow the instructions issued by update-alternatives to select default version among the list of available installations.
After that, check if everything worked fine by issuing commands
java -version
javac -version
You should see 1.8.0 for both.