Ok. I’ve calmed down a bit since my previous rant.
Apparently there’s an issue running aptitude or synaptic (using Xubuntu Gutsy) on a secured wireless network. It just doesn’t seem to work. I’m sure there’s a fix for it and if I had hours of spare time, I’d find it.
Meanwhile, I took my laptop to a wireless network with a unsecure guest connection and was able to run
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts
(Thanks to ubuntugeek for that one) Then I did the same thing for sun-java6-jdk.
Then I used mousepad to write up a standard helloworld.java example. I went to my terminal and did
sudo javac helloworld.java -d /home
Without the -d I had no idea where the class file was going. Without the sudo I got permission errors.
then I ran
java helloworld
and it worked!