Plugin problem with Firefox

General Discussions
#1

I am playing around a bit with Linux. I have downloaded and installed Firefox v1.5(latest). I followed the docs to install the plugin for Java in the browser, by creating a symbolic link. It just doesn’t seem to be working.

Before I installed the plugin, I would go to puppygames and the little game applet window would say"Click to download the plugin". After I installed the plugin, this message disappears, but the applet does not work. I also cannot start webstart apps.

Does the plugin just not work? If not, what do people on Linux use for browsing and using the plugin together.

#2

I think you need to go to www.getjava.com and download and install the linux JRE.

I dont think Java plug-in auto-install works in firefox Anyway thats been my experience.

#3

No, there is no auto-install. The docs at Sun give you a couple of steps to set it up in Firefox, but it doesn’t work. I’ll check out getjava to see what they say.

Thanks.

ps. I downloaded v1.4.2_11 and it didn’t work either.

#4

which distro?

#5

Gentoo x86 2006.0

I think it might be a permission problem. I am getting:

Error occurred during initialization of VM
java/lang/NoClassDefFoundError: java/lang/Object

when I try to run anything from the command line. Even java -version throws that. I set JAVA_HOME and CLASSPATH and it still doesn’t work. There is a post on the Sun forums that has suggestions that worked for other people. http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?tstart=75&forumID=14&threadID=441886&trange=15

Thanks.

#6

I can only speak from personal experience when i say that this is typical of Linux. Software installation is a very painful process.

I have managed to get the Java plugin going by putting various libraries from the JRE folder into the FireFox plugin folder. It was something similar to the instructions provided by Sun, but of course this is Linux so it rarely “just works”. I think it was just a matter of getting the right files in that plugins folder though. I think you have to use symlinks so the real files stay in the VM folder.

It seems in your case the VM itself is trying to start. I would not set CLASSPATH. In fact make sure it ISN’T set. The stuff that is failing is the Boot class path, and I’m pretty sure the VM figures out where that is relative to where the VM code loaded from.

#7

Thanks. I’ll keep at it.

#8

Using Mandrake and later Ubuntu I have installed JREs by unpacking and soft linking from the /usr/bin or similar directories. No further configuration was required to make it work from the command line, which seems to be where your problem is. You should try to ask the question in a Gentoo IRC channel or something, that would probably yield a quick answer.

#9

For anything debian based, you should use the debian java packages.

Sadly, due to some silly politiking by debian maintainers, if you read the docs you will get the impression no such thing exists.

Thankfully, there are many good people in this world :slight_smile: and in fact they do :slight_smile:

Google for j2se-package and debian on google and you should find it. IIRC you want the j2se-package (or its successor) from testing, and you need to follow some instructions on how to use it to create a proper debian package for java.

When it works, it takes no more than 3 minutes.

Sadly, last time I used it, they’d made a stupid typo in the shell script so that it failed to find the downloaded jre / jdk file from sun’s site (it was looking for the wrong filename. They’d put a hypen where they needed a dot, or similar. Possibly because sun changed the filenaming system, but I dont think so IIRC). So, if it doesnt work, you may need to ask around for a friendly shell scripter who can make the 20 second change to fix the shell script :(.

#10

NB: I’ve used this dozens of times, and we use it to create debian packages for java for maintaining our live servers, including upgrades and retrogrades.

There really is no reason not to use it, and it’s damn annoying that a handful of people seem to be doing their best to keep it out of the hands of ordinary linux users :(.

#11

ya i had a similar problem with firefox but i cant actaully remember what it was.

#12

Thanks for all the replies everyone. I figured out what it was. I just started over and downloaded it again. The first time I download the RPM file. For some reason it did not work properly. I downloaded the plain bin file and it worked just fine.

I also had the same problem with MySQL. I used the RPM file first and couldn’t get it working. I dowloaded the regular bin file and it worked fine. So I will stay away from RPM files from now on.

#13

Why are you downloading RPM’s? I thought Gentoo had its own package management system? RPM sucks :(.

#14

Yeah, it does, but I didn’t take the time to read the docs yet. I am just trying out some stuff with Ruby on Rails and new what I wanted to get.

Yeah, found out the hard way. :slight_smile:

Thanks.