Well, this is a bit more complicated when going into more details. This is not a essential live system which is earning me money or has a business name attached. So its not exactly critical infrastructure as many would understand it. Still, for me, my family and friends the server is important enough for me not to screw around with it. I have a identical installation in a vm + snapshots to test every update and try out stuff before replicating on the live system.
that said, it is unacceptable to install x11 and other unneccesary packages for a "simple" small runtime environment like java. that said, none-headless as presented is NOT an option.
I could not definately test if headless/none headless makes the difference. And it would not matter since none-headless is not feasable.
Additionally, other software installed has java6 as a dependency and did behave somewhat unexpected when swapping out openjre 6 with 7 (not thorougly tested)
Long story short, yes, I would have prefered to just apt-get the openjre7, set java manually to 7 and have everything just work. I tried figuring that out, asking here, the debian irc people and other sources and did not get it to work with many hours trying.
I do not have a problem with none-open software. Yes I would prefer the openjre, but its not a neccesity. Security is as always a concern, but the potential damage when the system becomes compromised is minimal. I did not research security differences between oracle java and openjre but if that were a real issue I would have to decide between a) not using openfire or b) live with whatever security risk oracle is exposing me to. For now, I chose a
I wish you luck in figuring out the headless/none headless problematic.