Installing BlueJ

If you have your own personal computer, you will likely find it convenient to download and install BlueJ so that you can work from home.  Unfortunately, some of the download files are large.  If you have a Zip drive, you can download the files to a Zip disk from a computer on campus connected to the fast network connections and then install from your Zip disk at home.  The following steps will help ensure your success.

1. If it isn't installed already, download and install the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader (some of the documentation requires it).

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

2. Download and install the Sun sdk 1.3

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/download-windows.html

3. Download and install the HTML documentation for the Java 2 SDK from

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs.html

4. Download and install BlueJ from

http://www.bluej.org/download/download.html

BlueJ runs under DOS.  If BlueJ does not run after installation, and you get the message "Out of environment space," you will need to change the MSDOS environment space to be 4096 for the regular DOS prompt and for the BlueJ prompt that shows up at installation (this is a .bat file in the BlueJ installation).

5. Download the BlueJ documentation, including "The BlueJ Tutorial" and "The BlueJ Reference Manual." Put them in your main BlueJ directory. They are PDF files which can be read by Acrobat Reader and can be found at

http://www.bluej.org/doc/documentation.html

6. Create a BlueJ icon to put on the desktop. Directions on creating the BlueJ icon are found on the BlueJ site:

http://www.bluej.org/download/win32-shortcut.html