1. Installing the Java Runtime Engine
Your Linux distribution may provide a sufficiently up-to-date JRE in packaged form. If that is the case, simply install it.
Otherwise, browse to :http://java.sun.com/j2se/ and download the latest version of the JRE (at the time of writing, follow "J2SE downloads", "J2SE 1.4.2", "Linux self-extracting file"/"JRE").
Then, as root:
cd /usr /path/to/j2re/installer -localinstall
You may wish to add the binary path created by the installer to your PATH.
2. Other prerequisites
The JRE is very specific about the glibc versions it requires. You may need to install old versions - for JDK 1.4.1, for example, Debian GNU/Linux needed the libstdc++2.9-glibc2.1 package.
3. Installing FTJava
Download the Windows zip file.
FTJava is not designed to be installed only once on a multi-user machine; if multiple users on the same machine want to use it, they will each need their own copy installed. Create a directory (for example, ~/ftjava) and extract the zip file into it.
4. Starting FTJava
Build a "runftjava" script file. This should do two things:
- Change to the directory in which you installed FTJava.
- Start the ftjava.gui.FTJava class.
To build the second part, examine the RunFTJava.bat file in the distribution. Take the line starting "java", and replace all semicolons with colons (for Linux-style invocation). For example, to run v0.11 in the directory ~/ftjava, you would specify:
#! /bin/sh cd ~/ftjava java -cp .:xerces.jar:activation.jar:mail.jar:pop3.jar ftjava.gui.FTJava
If the JRE is not in your path (blank response to "which java"), specify the full pathname instead.
Each time you start FTJava, you will receive a warning message:
Warning: Cannot convert string "MetaCtrl<Key>Insert" to type VirtualBinding
There is apparently no harm in this.