headius often kindly tries to get me to actually overcome my lingering Java allergies to try to run JRuby and now my excuse of FreeBSD amd64 not being Java-friendly has been stripped away.

In reality JRuby of course is a great project running a pretty impressive platform, the JVM, so this should be an interesting experiment. headius suggested using the SoyLatte version of JDK/JRE and looks like not without cause. It is an implementation of Java 6 based off the BSD port. So, steps taken:

1. Java
   1. Downloaded the amd64 binary from the Soylatte site (Intel Core 2 Duo is, oddly enough, kind_of? amd64—EM64T to be precise)
   2. The directory needs to be extracted somewhere, I chose /opt/local
      1. `cd /opt/local`
      2. `sudo tar xjvpf /path/to/tar.bz2`
      3. `sudo mv long_name soylatte16`
   3. Set the Java environment variables (these go in my ~/.bashrc)
      1. export JAVA_HOME=/opt/local/soylatte16
      2. export PATH=/opt/local/soylatte16/bin:$PATH (front to make sure it overrides system JREs)
      3. I wanted to try NetBeans which expects certain paths: `ln -s /opt/local/soylatte16 /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home`
2. JRuby
   1. Downloaded the 1.1b binary package
   2. Extracted in /opt/local again
      1. `cd /opt/local`
      2. `sudo tar xzvpf /path/to/tar.gz`
      3. `sudo mv long_name jruby`
   3. `export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/jruby/bin` to make it visible, ~/.bashrc again
3. Pick up the new envs: `source ~/.bashrc`
4. Test: `jruby -v`
5. Hooray!

Now to see if I can come up with something sensible to use this for.