What happened to LMMS and sun-java-*?

[Tyler]

I just switched from Debian solely for the inclusion of non-free packages like sun-java-*, which are necessary for android dev. Is this not included in LMDE? Can I install it from the normal Mint repos?

Also, LMMS seems to be missing. This makes no sense. Debian itself even has LMMS. Why isn't it in the repo?

Not to be totally critical. LMDE is awesome for the fact it has a great GUI and is user-friendly while still being a rolling release.

Thanks for your time,
Tyler

[xenopeek]

You can often find the answer to why something is available in Debian, and not in LMDE, by having a look at PTS. For LMMS the story is here: http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/lmms.html. Basically, LMMS was removed from Debian testing mid last year, and only two months back was it migrated from unstable back to testing. Inbetween it has not been available in testing. Since LMDE is currently at UP#4, which was released before LMMS was accepted back into testing, this explains why when using LMDE latest with UP#4 you can not find LMMS. Currently UP#5 is being working on, expected to be available on LMDE latest by end of August. LMMS will then be available on LMDE again.

As for Oracle Java (formerly Sun Java), Oracle has revoked the license for operating systems to distribute Oracle Java. See Oracle retires licence for distributing its Java with Linux. You'll have to install it manually from the Oracle website if you can't make do with OpenJDK.

[Tyler]

Oh, okay. Thanks for the really quick answer. I guess if I'm going to develop for android on linux, there's no way around having to install java by hand. Not that it's all that hard. It's just that it seems to violate the whole principle of having a package manager: simplicity.

[xenopeek]

Well, you can thank Oracle for that Do you specifically need Oracle Java though? I'm using OpenJDK instead, as that comes installed by default. And OpenJDK 7 is used by Oracle as the reference implementation for Java 7...