Java SE can't be built on Ubuntu for several, mostly minor reasons. These should be fixed. Note the some or all of these reasons may apply to other releases as well, as noted below.

1) rpm 4 has split the functionality of the rpm utility into two utilities - rpm and rpmbuild (basically, the "rpm -b*" functionality is now the rpmbuild command.) This is also true of Red Hat EL5, and will probably eventually be true of all Distros. Why the rpm maintainers thought this was a good idea is beyond me, but we gotta go with the community flow. Also, Ubuntu has /usr/bin/rpm while other distros tend to have /bin/rpm.

2) Ubuntu (and I'll guess Debian) have /usr/bin/sort while other distros tend to have /bin/sort. Why the difference? Got me. Then again, Linux offers no semantic difference between /bin and /usr/bin so its hard to understand why there isn't more of this.

3) Ubuntu did the right thing and linked /bin/sh (/usr/bin/sh) to dash - a shell which really tries to be compatible with legacy sh. Most distros do the absolutely wrong thing and simply link sh to bash. Dispite its claims, bash is about as compatible with sh as csh - death by 1000 cuts. The specific issue this tripped in the build is that the rpm spec files are laced with "echo -e" and "echo -en" which are unrecognized by the sh "echo" builtin.

Note that these build failures all appear in building the "install" workspace and don't effect the current state of OpenJDK. They eventually would, but not for awhile.