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I have an application I'd like to run on a new MacBook Air that has as one of its requirements installing Apple JRE 6. Prior to Apple Silicon, this would've been as simple as installing it from Apple's website. However, from what I understand there is no official Java implementation for ARM Macs, and even if there were I imagine that OpenJDK won't have a JRE 6.0 version.

Is it possible to install JRE 6 in such a way that it works under Rosetta? Or will this be an impossible configuration to support?

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  • What application? Why exactly does it require Java 6? Nov 20, 2020 at 22:45
  • I'd rather leave the question general at the moment, and not specific to the application (but it's a "current" application that is still under active development, if that's relevant, though probably won't get an Apple Silicon version soon if ever). It lists Apple JRE 6 as a requirement - I would assume it requires JRE 6 because it was developed for that version and not updated when JRE 7 came out (when it switched to Oracle/OpenJDK, which changed a bunch of things in non-backwards-compatible ways), but I don't know the specifics.
    – Joe
    Nov 20, 2020 at 22:52
  • @ReneLarsen Thanks, but that's not applicable here as far as I understand. This is a commercial application; it uses JRE 6, but I'm not running JDK myself or anything like that. This is more akin to how Adobe CS5, for example, required this same thing (required JRE 6), though years ago and on Intel Macs. It did not work with JRE 7 (or later).
    – Joe
    Nov 20, 2020 at 23:12
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    So - ended up being the case that JRE6 isn't actually required for the current version; got ahold of the devs, and they said it uses v9 (via OpenJDK), their documentation was just outdated for some reason. Can't definitively prove this one way or the other to self-answer, unfortunately...
    – Joe
    Nov 23, 2020 at 18:01

1 Answer 1

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Azul is already released openJDK Arm64 8 binaries including JRE. Java8 is backward compatible so can run all previous Java versions. I believe it's possible to setup environment so that java app will use it instead of Apple Java. HomeBrew suggests:

For the system Java wrappers to find this JDK, symlink it with sudo ln -sfn /usr/local/opt/openjdk/libexec/openjdk.jdk /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/openjdk.jdk

or with macports just sudo port install zulu-jdk8 and /usr/bin/java finds it automatically

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