macOS Java 1.6 only on Snow Leopard.

[Alan S]

I was reading on the apple dev list site that Snow Leopard is exclusively Java 1.6. If it finds a Java 1.5 JRE it will uninstall it later.

Does anyone have any confirmation of this?

 

[robbieduncan]

This is what I get on a Snow Leopard machine:

robbie-duncans-macbook-pro:~ robbie$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_15"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_15-b03-219)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.1-b02-90, mixed mode)

 

[RaceTripper]

I was reading on the apple dev list site that Snow Leopard is exclusively Java 1.6. If it finds a Java 1.5 JRE it will uninstall it later.

Does anyone have any confirmation of this?

Only Java 6 comes on Snow Leopard. I copied Java 5 and Java 1.4.2 over from my Leopard backup. Java 5 works fine. I haven't tried 1.4.2 (and probably won't need to). I put them in /usr/local. Anything in /usr/local should be left alone/preserved by any Mac OS X update. The downside is they don't show up in Java Preferences, even though I created the appropriate soft links in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions. You can instead move them to the Versions directory, but you might need to add them back after a system update.

The 10.6.1 update did not step on any older jdks I had in the Versions directory. I had them there originally and only recently moved them to /usr/local