This happened even after installing OpenJDK and Sun’s JDK. A “which javac” proved that javac was working properly and was in the PATH.

Error:

[[email protected] brut.j.common]$ mvn install

[INFO] Scanning for projects...

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

[INFO] Building Brut Java commons

[INFO]    task-segment: [install]

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

[INFO] [resources:resources {execution: default-resources}]

[INFO] Using 'UTF-8' encoding to copy filtered resources.

[INFO] Copying 2 resources

[INFO] [compiler:compile {execution: default-compile}]

[INFO] Compiling 1 source file to /home/droidzone/apktoolbuild/brut.j.common/target/classes

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

[ERROR] BUILD FAILURE

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

[INFO] Compilation failure

Unable to locate the Javac Compiler in:

  /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/../lib/tools.jar

Please ensure you are using JDK 1.4 or above and

not a JRE (the com.sun.tools.javac.Main class is required).

In most cases you can change the location of your Java

installation by setting the JAVA_HOME environment variable.

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

[INFO] For more information, run Maven with the -e switch

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

[INFO] Total time: 3 seconds

[INFO] Finished at: Tue Mar 27 12:04:29 IST 2012

[INFO] Final Memory: 11M/130M

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

[/code]
Solution:
[[email protected] brut.j.common]$ which javac

/usr/bin/javac

[[email protected] brut.j.common]$ ls -l /usr/bin/javac

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 23 2012-01-24 10:52 /usr/bin/javac -> /etc/alternatives/javac

[[email protected] brut.j.common]$ ls -l /etc/alternatives/javac

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 42 2012-01-24 10:52 /etc/alternatives/javac -> /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386/bin/javac

[[email protected] brut.j.common]$ sudo rm /usr/bin/javac

[[email protected] brut.j.common]$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386/bin/javac /usr/bin/javac

[[email protected] brut.j.common]$ export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386

[[email protected] brut.j.common]$ mvn -e install

+ Error stacktraces are turned on.

[INFO] Scanning for projects...

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

[INFO] Building Brut Java commons

[INFO]    task-segment: [install]

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

[INFO] [resources:resources {execution: default-resources}]

[INFO] Using 'UTF-8' encoding to copy filtered resources.

[INFO] Copying 2 resources

[INFO] [compiler:compile {execution: default-compile}]

[INFO] Compiling 1 source file to /home/droidzone/apktoolbuild/brut.j.common/target/classes

[INFO] [resources:testResources {execution: default-testResources}]

[INFO] Using 'UTF-8' encoding to copy filtered resources.

[INFO] skip non existing resourceDirectory /home/droidzone/apktoolbuild/brut.j.common/src/test/resources

Downloading: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/junit/junit/3.8.1/junit-3.8.1.jar
[/code]
So the error was solved by resolving the symlink properly (A symlink to a symlink doesnt seem too good), and by setting the JAVA_HOME variable to the directory containing bin/javac.