I had to install JIRA trial on my Windows, and decided to give it a go on a debian-vm through virtualbox. It was smooth - downloaded ~200mb bin file, ran it (no

I had to install JIRA trial on my Windows, and decided to give it a go on a debian-vm through virtualbox. It was smooth - downloaded ~200mb bin file, ran it (not root), and installed it. Then all other updates (as you've said) came as .jar packages and installed them while it was running. As a C/C++ programmer I felt impressed :) Oh and there is lovely API to talk to the system (unlike say... other systems that I won't name here for which you have to spent 10K only for the API).