Fix JAVA_HOME and Intellij IDEA’s broken JDK

If you’ve ever run across this error when using IntelliJ IDEA then you may be left wondering what to do to fix it.

ERROR: cannot start IntelliJ IDEA. No JDK found to run IDEA. Please validate either IDEA_JDK, JDK_HOME or JAVA_HOME environment variable points to valid JDK installation.Press

Enter to continue.

Well, here’s how to solve it on Linux Mint / Ubuntu. There was a lot of various solutions on the Internet and none of them worked. Most of them involve setting paths in the bash profile but none of them worked. The odd thing was it had just been working a couple of days before and then stopped. Intellij’s IDEA can be a bit of a pain on Linux but it is still full of awesome.

Install the JDK

Download the 32bit or 64bit Linux “compressed binary file” — it has a “.tar.gz” file extension i.e. “[java-version]-i586.tar.gz” for 32bit and “[java-version]-x64.tar.gz” for 64bit

Uncompress it

tar -xvf jdk-7u2-linux-i586.tar.gz(32bit)

tar -xvf jdk-7u2-linux-x64.tar.gz (64bit)

JDK 7 package is extracted into ./jdk1.7.0_02 directory. — Now move the JDK 7 directory to /usr/lib

sudo mv ./jdk1.7.0_02 /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0

Now run

sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/java" "java" "/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0/bin/java" 1
sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/javac" "javac" "/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0/bin/javac" 1
sudo update-alternatives --install "/usr/bin/javaws" "javaws" "/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0/bin/javaws" 1

Run

sudo update-alternatives --config java
You will see output similar one below - choose the number of jdk1.7.0 - for example 3 in this list:

$sudo update-alternatives --config java
There are 3 choices for the alternative java (providing /usr/bin/java).
Selection Path Priority Status
————————————————————
* 0 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/bin/java 1061 auto mode
1 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/bin/java 1061 manual mode
2 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java 63 manual mode
3 /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0/jre/bin/java 3 manual mode
Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number:
3 update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0/jre/bin/java to provide /usr/bin/java (java) in manual mode.

Check the version of you new JDK 7 installation:

java -version
java version “1.7.0” Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0-b147) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 21.0-b17, mixed mode)

Repeat the above for:

sudo update-alternatives --config javac sudo update-alternatives --config javaws

Enable mozilla firefox plugin:

32 bit: ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/ 64 bit: ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.7.0/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/
Depending on your configuration, you might need to update the apparmor profile for firefox (or other browsers) in /etc/apparmor.d/abstractions/ubuntu-browsers.d/java
# Replace the two lines:
# /usr/lib/jvm/java-*-sun-1.*/jre/bin/java{,_vm} cx -> browser_java,
# /usr/lib/jvm/java-*-sun-1.*/jre/lib/*/libnp*.so cx -> browser_java,
# with those (or adapt to your new jdk folder name)
/usr/lib/jvm/jdk*/jre/bin/java{,_vm} cx -> browser_java,
/usr/lib/jvm/jdk*/jre/lib/*/libnp*.so cx -> browser_java,

Then restart apparmor:

sudo /etc/init.d/apparmor restart
Confirm that the JRE has been successful by using the official oracle website.