Eduard Gamonal

The Java plug-in for Firefox 3.5 is, as usual, a nightmare for GNU/Linux users. I’m in love with Debian, but I wanted Firefox, so I installed it. I got the flash plugin and some add-ons, but Java… There was no way to have it working.

Just look at the magic:

First of all, check you have JRE installed and where is it. I do that with

debian:/usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre# update-alternatives –config java

Hi ha 4 alternatives que proveeixin «java».

Selecció     Alternativa
———————————————–
1    /usr/bin/gij-4.3
*+        2    /usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre/bin/java
3    /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java
4    /usr/bin/gij-4.2

Premeu retorn per a mantenir l’opció per defecte[*], o introduïu un número de selecció: 3
Using ‘/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java’ to provide ‘java’.
debian:/usr/lib/jvm/java-gcj/jre#

I chose the third option, but please get your favourite flavour. Keep in mind that my Firefox is in /home/edu/firefox .

Now we are going to create a symbolic link in the Firefox folder whose target is a .so file in the Java folder. This way:

debian:/# ln -sf /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so /home/edu/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so

Now let’s check that everything’s ok: go to the Firefox plugins folder and list all files:

edu@debian:~/firefox/plugins$ ls -l
total 20
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    64  1 jul 23:54 libjavaplugin_oji.so -> /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 edu  edu  15792 29 mai  2008 libnullplugin.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    39 30 nov  2008 nphelix.so -> /opt/real/RealPlayer/mozilla/nphelix.so
edu@debian:~/firefox/plugins$

If you’re using bash and you see the bold line in red, something went wrong. It should be cyan. You have probably created a link to something that doesn’t exists. Remember that the second part of the ln -sf command ( /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so ) may be different depending on your system. You should go to /usr/lib and do some research to find a file called, more or less, libjavaplugin_oji.so .

Enjoy your applets

Tags: Firefox, java

This entry was posted on dijous, juliol 2nd, 2009 at 00:14 and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.