When you run apt install x, it may do some of this behind the scenes for you.

Most of the time, this is managed by the package management system. Alternatives seems to be a good solution.Debian Linux (and its derivatives like Ubuntu and Kali) has a system called alternatives that’s designed to manage having different version of some software, or aliasing different commands to different versions within the system. I'm so freakin tired of installing Java manually, I've got to find another (easier) way. Background Information for my questionįor years, I've managed my Java installs manually and would unzip/untar the Java package and when it needed to be updated repeat the unzip/untar into a new directory and manage symlinks to point to the version I was most predominately using.Įnter cloud. There is more to it that is explained in the referenced article. There are 2 programs which provide 'uemacs'.

This is done using the alternatives -config command as shown below. (3) Tell alternatives which version of the app you want to use. $ sudo alternatives -install /usr/bin/em uemacs /usr/local/bin/nem 99 $ sudo alternatives -install /usr/bin/em uemacs /opt/em-legacy/em2 1 I'll give it the name uemacs, and tell alternatives to make it available in /usr/bin/em so I don't need to change my path to run it. In this case one is in /opt/em-legacy/em2 and the other is in /usr/local/bin/nem. (2) Configure the alternatives program to know how where different versions of your app are installed. As long as each version is installed into a different directories then I can use alternatives. (1) Install multiple versions of applications. I'll include examples described in it so this question stands alone (if that link stops working):Īfter alternatives is installed I should be able to: (Q) Can I run the alternatives program on any version of Linux or does it only work with a particular Linux package manager? Previously, I used it with CentOSs yum install command. NOTE: a similar name sudo apt install galternatives (a GUI version of alternatives?) did install so I'm looking at that. If so, how do I install it? I tried installing as shown below and it couldn't be found. My question is can I use the alternatives program with Ubuntu 20.04? One of my systems is Ubuntu 20.04, and the alternatives program doesn't exist. On some Linux systems (RedHat/CentOS based), I have found the UNIX alternatives program being used to manage different versions of java.

Java update alternatives