Fixing Areca Backup on Ubuntu 16.04 (and related distributions)

Seems like I’m at it again, this time fixing Areca Backup on Ubuntu 16.04 (actually Linux Mint 18.1 in my case). For some reason when I download the current version (Areca 7.5 for Linux/GTK) and try and run the areca.sh script I get the following error:

tyler@computer $ ./areca.sh
ls: cannot access ‘/usr/java’: No such file or directory
No valid JRE found in /usr/java.

This is especially odd because I quite clearly do have Java installed:

tyler@computer $ java -version
openjdk version “1.8.0_111”
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_111-8u111-b14-2ubuntu0.16.04.2-b14)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.111-b14, mixed mode)

Now granted this may be an issue exclusive to OpenJDK, or just this version of OpenJDK, but I’m hardly going to install Sun Java just to make this program work.

After some digging I narrowed it down to the look_for_java() function inside of the areca_run.sh script located in the Areca /bin/ directory. Now I’m quite sure there is a far more elegant solution than this but I simply commented out the vast majority of this function and hard coded the directory of my system’s Java binary. Here is how you can do the same.

First locate where your Java is installed by running the which command:

tyler@computer $ which java
/usr/bin/java

As you can see from the output above my java executable exists in my /usr/bin/ directory.

Next open up areca_run.sh inside of the Areca /bin/ directory and modify the look_for_java() function. In here you’ll want to set the variable JAVA_PROGRAM_DIR to your directory above (i.e. in my case it would be /usr/bin/) and then return 0 indicating no error. You can either simply delete the rest or just comment out the remaining function script by placing a # character at the start of each line.

#Method to locate matching JREs
look_for_java() {
JAVA_PROGRAM_DIR=”/usr/bin/”
return 0
# IFS=$’\n’
# potential_java_dirs=(`ls -1 “$JAVADIR” | sort | tac`)
# IFS=
# for D in “${potential_java_dirs[@]}”; do
#    if [[ -d “$JAVADIR/$D” && -x “$JAVADIR/$D/bin/java” ]]; then
#       JAVA_PROGRAM_DIR=”$JAVADIR/$D/bin/”
#       echo “JRE found in ${JAVA_PROGRAM_DIR} directory.”
#       if check_version ; then
#          return 0
#       else
#          return 1
#       fi
#    fi
# done
# echo “No valid JRE found in ${JAVADIR}.”
# return 1
}

Once you’ve saved the file you should be able to run the normal areca.sh script now without encountering any errors!

This post originally appeared on my personal website here.