For the easiest method of installation, use the binary distribution of the Connector/J package. Extract the JAR archive from the tar/gzip or zip archive to a suitable location, then optionally make the information about the JAR archive available by changing your CLASSPATH (see Section 3.2, “Installing the Driver and Configuring the CLASSPATH”).

Use the appropriate graphical or command-line utility to extract the distribution (for example, WinZip for the .zip archive, and tar for the .tar.gz archive). Because there are potentially long file names in the distribution, we use the GNU tar archive format. Use GNU tar (or an application that understands the GNU tar archive format) to unpack the .tar.gz variant of the distribution.