Recently I acquired a new client that has a lot of client side Java technology as part of their infrastructure. A lot of this infrastructure is in the form of Java applets.
My primary operating system is Ubuntu Hardy 64 bit. Unfortunately there is still no Java plugin for the 64 bit Linux version of Firefox, therefore, I was finding myself having to boot to Windows to be able to use some of these utilities.
Since I am much more comfortable in a Unix environment, I wanted to find a solution to run this software on my Linux laptop. I knew from past experience that a 32 bit version of Firefox can be installed under 64 bit Linux, and a 32 bit JRE can be installed as well, and the 32 bit firefox can be made to work with the 32 bit JVM.
I searched around and found this thread in the Ubuntu forums, which provides a link to a script that will install the 32 version of Firefox, along with the 32 bit version of the Java plugin and other plugins such as Flash. I downloaded the script and ran it, but unfortunately Java applets were still not working, at least I had 32 bit Firefox in place.
In order to get the Java plugin under Firefox 32, I had to download the 32 bit JRE from java.com, since Ubuntu is a deb based distribution (as opposed to RPM based), the right version to download is the self extracting file.
After downloading the JRE, it needs to be installed, which can be done by simply executing the downloaded shell script as root. I installed mine under /opt.
Once the JRE is installed, I had to cd to my home directory, then cd to .mozilla. At this point, I had to create a plugins subdirectory, and cd to it.
Then I needed to create a symlink for the Java plugin in the downloaded JRE to the ~/.mozilla/plugins directory: ln -s /opt/jre32/jre1.6.0_10/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so ~/.mozilla/plugins.
At this point I started the 32 bit version of Firefox, navigated to a test page and verified that my Java plugin was working properly.
Posted by dooglus on October 30, 2008 at 04:54 AM EDT #
I believe the thread I was referring to is http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1174435 David
Posted by David R. Heffelfinger on October 30, 2008 at 08:38 AM EDT #
Posted by Carlos Scheidecker on November 01, 2008 at 06:49 PM EDT #
My 64 bit Firefox can only detect the IcedTea JRE plugin which unfortunately does not work with some applets that I frequently need to use.
I did install ubuntu-restricted-extras on my brand new installation of Intrepid Ibex, however I had already downloaded Sun's JVM directly from http://java.sun.com and followed this procedure before doing so.
For now, I'm going to follow the "If it aint broken, don't fix it philosophy, but thanks for the tip, I'm sure it will be beneficial to many.
David
Posted by David R. Heffelfinger on November 02, 2008 at 11:35 AM EST #
Posted by Allan Bond on November 20, 2008 at 09:07 AM EST #
Any chance this is the Dave Heffelfinger I know?
Posted by Ray Woodcock on May 08, 2009 at 07:50 PM EDT #
Ray,
I don't believe we've met.
David
Posted by David R. Heffelfinger on May 08, 2009 at 07:57 PM EDT #