All I wanted was the Sun JDK on the new, shiny Ubuntu I spun up in VMWare. Eclipse (among other things) recommends you do this for performance reasons. So, I tried. I looked through the apt-get system, nothing. I looked at sun’s website and was greeted with a plethora of errors when I got the rpm, installed rpm using apt-get and then tried to rpm -ivh the package.
this is what my error partially looked like:
Failed dependencies: /bin/basename is needed by jdk-2000:1.7.0-fcs.i586 /bin/cat is needed by jdk-2000:1.7.0-fcs.i586 /bin/cp is needed by jdk-2000:1.7.0-fcs.i586 /bin/gawk is needed by jdk-2000:1.7.0-fcs.i586 /bin/grep is needed by jdk-2000:1.7.0-fcs.i586
the final solution was on happy-coding.com and went as so (I would have linked, but it was tough to notice that you had to do 3 steps and not just two–keepin it simple):
apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner" sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk