Blog of Dave

I have now been using Ubuntu for about 2 years, and oddly enough one thing that has always evaded me is how to properly set up the JRE plugin in Firefox. It *seems* like that ought to be an easy process, but it is one of those annoying little things that just hasn't worked for me, although it has never been important enough for me to chase down.

Yesterday I had to do a Webex presentation that required the JRE plugin, so I decided it was time to hack my way through it. One thing that I was thinking my be a factor is that I use Swiftfox instead of Firefox. I decided to take that out of the equation just to make sure, so I went ahead and removed it. When running Firefox and hitting about:plugins in the address bar, I could clearly see that the Java plugin was not in the list. I looked in ~/.mozilla/plugins, and saw a libjavaplugin.so in there, but it was obviously not doing its job.

So, after a lot of floundering, here are the basic steps I took that got me going...

• First, I completely uninstalled Firefox:
  $ sudo apt-get --purge remove firefox
  
• I then reinstalled it:
  $ sudo apt-get install firefox
  
• Next, I had previously installed the sun-java2-bin package, so I wanted to wipe all evidence of that and reinstall it. I did the following:
  $ sudo apt-get --purge remove sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin
  
• To reinistall it I did:
  $ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin
  
• After doing this I opened Firefox and put about:plugins and still didn't see the Java stuff. At this point, I went into my ~/.mozilla/plugins directory. From earlier attempts I had some libjavaplugin.so and libjavaplugin-[something I don't remember].so. I decided to kill those off:
  $ sudo rm libjavaplugin*
  
• At this point looking around I found a file /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so that seemed like a decent candidate, so I did a symlink like this:
  $ ln -s /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so ./libjavaplugin.so

At this point I restarted the browser, hit about:plugins and was thrilled to see an entirely new section for Java!

Now, take the steps above with a grain of salt. I certainly don't want to infer that this is by any means the right way to get it working, but it is the series of steps that finally got it working for me. Hopefully someone else might get something out of it as well.