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!