Installing jDownloader on Linux

JDownloader is an open source download manager, primarily aimed at downloading from captcha-protected download sites (RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile, Netload…) but supporting also any “normal” download (like a picture from photobucket, or actually any file from any server). Since it’s programmed in Java, it’s available for various OSes, and notably Linux. But no help seems to be provided to explain how to run it on Linux. The steps are fairly simple, though:

1. Download the Linux version of jDownloader here
2. Unpack it in any folder, let’s say /home/username/Desktop/jdl
3. In this folder, create a batch file named (for instance) run.sh, with the following content:
   

   java -jar JDownloader.jar

4. Chmod run.sh so that it becomes executable. In case you need more details: open the console, and then type (adapting paths and names to yours):
   

   cd /home/username/Desktop/jdl
   chmod 744 run.sh

5. Finally, run run.sh from the console:
   

   cd /home/username/Desktop/jdl
   ./run.sh

If you get an error message about java, like for instance “java: command not found”, you need to install a Java package. On Fedora, java-1.6.0-openjdk will do the trick: yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk (or more simply yum install java). On Ubuntu you can use apt-get install sun-java6-jre or apt-get install openjdk-6-jre. Once Java is installed, try running run.sh again, jDownloader should open (it will start by updating itself).

This method was tested and working both on Fedora 13 64 bits and Ubuntu 10.04 64 bits (except that on Ubuntu for some reason I only managed to run it as root).