Upgrading to FrostWire 6.8.5 on Ubuntu (troubleshooting possible OpenJDK14 dependency issues)

Download frostwire-6.8.5.amd64.deb

As of FrostWire 6.8.5 we’re moving all of our builds to run on OpenJDK14.

They linux build will still run fine with OpenJDK11 on your ${PATH} but we highly
recommend you have OpenJDK14 to help you sort out any weird behavior and reduce
JRE fragmentation on the network.

If you don’t have openjdk-14-jre installed when you install the FrostWire 6.8.5 .deb file you will get an error like the following:


Unpacking frostwire (6.8.5) ...
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of frostwire:
frostwire depends on openjdk-14-jre-headless; however:
Package openjdk-14-jre-headless is not installed.


In order to solve just issue the command:

sudo apt -f install


It will try to pickup on the last failed install and download all the missing dependencies for you.

$ sudo apt -f install
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
openjdk-14-jre-headless
Suggested packages:
fonts-ipafont-gothic fonts-ipafont-mincho fonts-wqy-microhei | fonts-wqy-zenhei
The following NEW packages will be installed:
openjdk-14-jre-headless
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded.
1 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 43.2 MB of archives.
After this operation, 190 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Y
Get:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu eoan/universe amd64 openjdk-14-jre-headless amd64 14~18-1 [43.2 MB]
Fetched 43.2 MB in 9s (4,920 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package openjdk-14-jre-headless:amd64.
(Reading database ... 377184 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../openjdk-14-jre-headless_14~18-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking openjdk-14-jre-headless:amd64 (14~18-1) ...
Setting up openjdk-14-jre-headless:amd64 (14~18-1) ...
update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/jvm/java-14-openjdk-amd64/bin/jfr to provide /usr/bin/jfr (jfr) in auto mode
update-binfmts: warning: current package is openjdk-11, but binary format already installed by openjdk-6
Setting up frostwire (6.8.5) ...

If this doesn’t work out, that only means your apt sources can’t find the OpenJDK-14 ubuntu packages.
We recommend that you update your ubuntu to the latest version, by the time we wrote this post we were running ubuntu eoan.


If you can’t or won’t upgrade to ubuntu eoan, you can always add the package repo and install the openjdk manually


sudo add-apt-repository ppa:openjdk-r/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install openjdk-14-jre-headless


Why is the new .deb almost twice as large as the previous versions.

In the past, OpenJDK would include a tool called “pack200” which would allow us to greatly compress our Java .class files prior to packing everything in the .deb/.tar.gz or .rpm files

Oracle removed the pack200 tools from the OpenJDK starting at version 14.

Perhaps there were some impossible tradeoffs they made when compiling and pack200 was no longer a viable tool.