October 2007Monthly Archives

 …trying to take the skin off a rice pudding wearing boxing gloves.

Ok, it is a funny quote, but not entirely accurate, just opinion. Java does some things really well, and a lot of websites utilise it. So you want to be able to view their content. (I am assuming you do, or why are you reading this? Go and do something more useful with your time!;)  )

Having trouble with getting Java to work in Firefox on Linux? My Java install worked fine, but Java wasn’t rendering right in the browser. Tres annoying! Solution is to symbolically link to  the Java plugin libjavaplugin_oji.so in your Mozilla plugin directory (.mozilla/plugins, .mozilla/firefox/plugins, or any variation you may have.

In my case, as I am using Java 1.6, /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/ is the directory that contains the plugin. (If you are not sure, java -version in a terminal will tell you what version you are using. If no information appears, check the documentation for your Linux version to ensure you have correctly installed Java). We don’t want to move it, hence the symbolically link (which, in layman’s terms, is sort of a “when we say this file, it means this other file in reality, ok?”)

Change to said plugins directory – cd $directory

Symbolically link -  ln -s  /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so  libjavaplugin_oji.so

So, a listing of your plugins directory (ls -l) would look like:

libjavaplugin_oji.so -> /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so