Procedure for installing and setting Sun JDK Java on Default Amazon Linux AMI

gistfile1.sh

# First verify the version of Java being used is not SunJSK.
java -version

# Get the latest Sun Java SDK from Oracle http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk-7u1-download-513651.html
wget http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/7u1-b08/jdk-7u1-linux-i586.rpm

# Rename the file downloaded, just to be nice
mv jdk-7u1-linux-i586.rpm\?e\=1320265424\&h\=916f87354faed15fe652d9f76d64c844 jdk-7u1-linux-i586.rpm

# Install Java
sudo rpm -i jdk-7u1-linux-i586.rpm 

# Check if the default java version is set to sun jdk
java -version

# If not then lets create one more alternative for Java for Sun JDK
sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/jdk1.7.0_01/bin/java 20000

# Set the SUN JDK as the default java
sudo /usr/sbin/alternatives --config java

# Verify if change in SDK was done.
java -version

Very very useful. Thank you for the gist and the comments re the cookies.

You can download JDK / JRE of desire version on EC2 (Linux) server instance from Oracle website using following steps
1.On your desktop - install Export cookie plug-in/add-on in Firefox browser. (Needs restart of Firefox browser)
2. Open oracle java download link
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk7-downloads-1880260.html
3. Accept License - (required for download)
4. Go to Tools -> Export Cookie option and store cookies.txt file and upload it to EC2 server instance.
5. execute wget command download JDK by supplying cookie
wget --load-cookies [directory-location]/cookies.txt http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/7u71-b14/jdk-7u71-linux-x64.rpm

replace [directory-location] with path to uploaded cookies.txt file.

get java directly
wget --no-check-certificate --no-cookies --header "Cookie: oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie" http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/7u71-b14/jdk-7u71-linux-x64.rpm

After following these instructions, I still had to set my JAVA_HOME, so don't forget to do that.

This is an issue, because I was compiling all of my classes using Java 8, however $JAVA_HOME was still pointing to the stock Java 7 shipped and was giving me the error Unsupported major.minor version 52.0 because of this.

I had already Oracle JDK 6 on the server and tried to install Oracle JDK 7. I got error

file /etc/init.d/jexec from install of jdk-2000:1.7.0_79-fcs.x86_64 conflicts with file from package jdk-2000:1.6.0_45-fcs.x86_64

but could solve it by using rpm -Uvh instead (the instruction with these flags is from http://www.if-not-true-then-false.com/2010/install-sun-oracle-java-jdk-jre-7-on-fedora-centos-red-hat-rhel/)

Make sure to use x64 (not i586 noted in original post) for AMI 2015-09 when downloading from Oracle website!

If I would like to install a specific minor version of jdk do I have to use the procedure in this post?
Or can I also get specific minor versions (eg: 1.8.0.05) from a repo (for example, when I call "yum install java-1.8.0" I think the jdk is installed from a repo, however it is done with the most up to date minor version (currently 1.8.0.65))?

JDK 8:
wget --no-check-certificate --no-cookies --header "Cookie: oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie" http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/8u102-b14/jdk-8u102-linux-x64.rpm

JDK 8:
wget --no-check-certificate --no-cookies --header "Cookie: oraclelicense=accept-securebackup-cookie" http://download.oracle.com/otn-pub/java/jdk/8u112-b15/jdk-8u112-linux-x64.rpm