What’s the difference between jdk…bin and jdk…-rpm.bin?

When you're installing jdks for linux, you'll often find two different versions, one that is named something like this: jdk-6u14-linux-x64.bin and another one like thisjdk-6u14-linux-x64-rpm.bin.

So what is the difference? One of them is a generic package suitable for most Linux installations that don't use RPMs. The other one, is, you guessed it, for RPM based systems.

Both of them need to be made excutable by running the chmod +x filename command.

If you use the jdk-6u14-linux....bin file, then you'll be presented the agreement and then all the files will be unpacked where you ran the command. After this is done, you must set your JAVA_HOME, and other variables you might need. In addition to these nuisances, the system usually doesn't know about JAVA, things like which, rpm -qa, and info, don't really work.

When working on an RPM based system (CentOS, Fedora, RedHat, Rocks, Scientific), you should try using the RPM based install.