Oracle SQL Developer 4 does not run on Oracle Java 7 on Ubuntu 14.04

Wow, ain’t this awkward :-). I cannot run Oracle SQL Developer 4 (4.0.2) on Ubuntu with Oracle JDK 7..

To be complete: when running SQL Developer with JDK 7 from Oracle itself, displays the following error;

joris@dipshit:~/programs/sqldeveloper$ ./sqldeveloper.sh
Oracle SQL Developer
Copyright (c) 1997, 2014, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
LOAD TIME : 968#
# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:
#
# SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x6aa69be0, pid=9537, tid=1836366656
#
# JRE version: Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (7.0_65-b17) (build 1.7.0_65-b17)
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (24.65-b04 mixed mode linux-x86 )
# Problematic frame:
# C 0x6aa69be0
#
# Failed to write core dump. Core dumps have been disabled. To enable core dumping, try "ulimit -c unlimited" before starting Java again
#
# An error report file with more information is saved as:
# /home/joris/programs/sqldeveloper/sqldeveloper/bin/hs_err_pid9537.log
#
# If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit:
# http://bugreport.sun.com/bugreport/crash.jsp
#
/home/joris/programs/sqldeveloper/sqldeveloper/bin/../../ide/bin/launcher.sh: line 1193: 9537 Aborted (core dumped) ${JAVA} "${APP_VM_OPTS[@]}" ${APP_ENV_VARS} -classpath ${APP_CLASSPATH} ${APP_MAIN_CLASS} "${APP_APP_OPTS[@]}"

Solution: Run Oracle SQL Developer with OpenJDK

First we’ll need to install OpenJDK:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk 

Then we’ll need to change the path which SQL Developer uses. This was asked once when you first started it and it is saved in the following path:

~/.sqldeveloper/4.0.0/product.conf

The file [[ product.conf ]] contains the value SetJavaHome, we need to change this to the OpenJDK path;

If you're running 32 bit Ubuntu:

SetJavaHome /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386

Or if you're running 64 bit Ubuntu:

SetJavaHome /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64

After saving this change, you can start SQL Developer on Ubuntu 14.04 and it will use OpenJDK 7, without changing your regular Java settings!

3 Replies to “Oracle SQL Developer 4 does not run on Oracle Java 7 on Ubuntu 14.04”

  1. I am having the same trouble but once I set SetJavaHome to the openjdk location I still get the prompt when opening ./sqldeveloper.sh that I need to type the full pathname of a JDK installation so that it will be stored in the product.conf file.

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