Setting up a new Fedora Core 8 Slice: Part I

Setting up a new VPS or more affectionately a new slice from SliceHost to support Java web applications can best be summed up as grunt work with the never ending slew of RPM dependencies!

Hopefully, you wont have to experience my frustation as I relive some of my experiences on this blog to help you start deploying Java web applications in a snap.

Tread Carefully
You will certainly want to take a look at the SliceHost wiki for Fedora Core 8 which is the distro I requested that my slice be based on to provide you with pointers to installing the Apache HTTP server and MySQL server using a neat tool called yum. The full SliceHost wiki is here.

After much googling, I came across Fedora Guide and The Unofficial Fedora FAQ and found the instructions in both wikis to be similar but got stuck somewhere along the way [it was 2am in the morning :-) ].
In case you decide to use the steps in either article to get the latest Linux JDK version installed (which at the time of this writing is version 6 update 6) you may want to keep in mind these points especially for the steps in the second method for installing the Sun JDK of the Fedora Guide article:

At the "Get the Source RPM" step you need to change the url to which wget will attempt to download the source RPM otherwise you'll end up with a 404 not found error.
So the correct url should be:

wget http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/jpackage/1.7/generic/non-free/SRPMS/java-1.6.0-sun-1.6.0.6-1jpp.nosrc.rpm

which is the almost the same as the one used in the wiki but with the minor number updated
from 1.6.0.4 to 1.6.0.6 since the current Linux JDK version is version 6 update 6.

Quick Steps
Although step 2 of the answer to FAQ number 5 at The Unofficial Fedora FAQ strongly discourages
the download of the RPM version of the Sun JDK, the instructions on Alwajdi's blog using the RPM version
help me get the JDK installed in no time, which is ironically what I normally do when installing the
JDK on RPM-based machines. All I needed to do was follow steps 1 through to step 6 and I had the JDK installed in no time.

You can confirm if this is the case by typing
java -version

to see if you get the following output:

java version "1.6.0_06"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_06-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 10.0-b22, mixed mode, sharing).

Tips
In case you get a bash: service: command not found when trying to start the apache httpd and mysql servers after installing using yum, you might want to try creating an alias to /sbin/service like so:
alias service="/sbin/service"
and saving it in your /etc/bashrc file.