I can't seem to find java on esus. Where is it?

Background: bash is the default shell for most esus accounts. Upon login bash parses certain files in your home directory an establishes an environment by creating environment variables and assigning values to them. At any time you can run the env command to see what environment variables bash is aware of:

env

If you don't see references to JDK_HOME and CLASSPATH, you are probably missing some of the files bash is looking for. While you could manually create the desired environment variables by hand, the better solution is to do the following:

cp /etc/skel/.bashrc ~
cp /etc/skel/.bash_profile ~

The two commands above copy the default bash startup files to your home directory. You can source ~/.bash_profile to affect your current session... or you can simply logout and log back in. To verify the fix, you can run the env command again and look at the additions to your environment. You should see JDK_HOME and CLASSPATH (as well as other things) added now.

With the proper environment, you should have more directories in your PATH and should have no trouble finding java, javac, netbeans, bluej, eclipse, etc.

What programming languages are available on the lab machines?

On Windows XP Pro, Linux, and Mac OS X you should easily be able to find Java IDEs like BlueJ, Greenfoot, Netbeans and Eclipse in the application menus offered by the desktop.  Most OSes also have C (GCC or VisualStudio), C++, Objective C, PERL, Python, CLISP, Assembly, and Pascal (Lazarus IDE).  The Macs have Xcode installed.  Machines that have Fedora Linux may have additional languages like OCaml and Haskell.

If you need access to a programming language that isn't available, just ask the system admin.