Download Director – now with less Oracle

For those of you who haven’t already read it, I’d highly recommend starting with Steve Bradshaws article “Do I need to pay for Java?” from January. After following the setup guide on the IBM site so that I was using OpenJ9 I was left with the question “I’d rather like to use Download Director, how do I do that?”

The answer as it turns out is a project called IcedTea which can run the .jnlp file you get when you try to use a Download Director link. I’ve gone with the pre-built windows binary v1.8 at time of writing and for ease of keeping everything together I’ve extracted into a subfolder of my OpenJ9 folder:

C:\IBMOpenJava\IcedTea\

I’ve then setup the file extension to point to IcedTea\bin\javaws.exe and away I go:

I’m fairly sure I trust IBM as a publisher, so tick and continue. Next it asks me to confirm if the application is allowed to use resources from my downloads folder and the IBM website, again fairly sure I’m ok with that.

I hit a slight stumbling block here in that it turns out there’s an issue with icedtea where it struggles to accept spaces in folder paths, in my case a username of “David Shears”. A bit of light reading available here, along with a handy workaround for the problem. I imagine for most people in a corporate environment you’re unlikely to hit this but I was playing with a local account so spent an hour or two bashing my head against the wall.

After realising the folly of my ways, I created an account on the machine specifically for the purpose of using Download Director and re-ran the JNLP file successfully:

So, there you have it, now the next time I’m downloading the new version of ACS or some software/PTFs for my i I’ll be able to have more options on how to do it.