14 DAY TRIAL // As announced last month, Canonical is preparing to remove the Sun JDK (Java Development Kit) packages from the software repositories, starting with February 16th, 2012, affecting Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Ubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 11.04.
Users should not be worried, as Canonical will NOT remove the Java packages from their systems! They will be removed ONLY from the software repository and no future updates will be applied to them.
However, for new installations, the Sun JDK packages will no longer be available, as they will be removed from the partner archive.
"In accordance with our previous announcement, we will be removing the Sun JDK packages from the partner archive on February 16th 2012. In order to prevent unexpected failures, we will not be pushing out empty packages before removing them from the archive." - said Marc Deslauriers in the announcement.
Canonical encourages all Sun Java 6 users to migrate as soon as possible an alternative solution, such as OpenJDK or by downloading Oracle Java.