'Til All Are One

The Open­JDK plug-​​in that comes with mod­ern dis­tros is usu­ally very good at hand­ling Java in Web pages, but some applets are just stub­born. Thank­fully, Sun have finally (after over six years!) released a plug-​​in for x86_​64 Web browsers.

I man­aged to get the JDK ver­sion work­ing on Fedora 11 and Cen­tOS 5.3. Here’s the process.

1. Firstly, down­load the JRE or JDK from Sun. You’ll need to get ver­sion 1.6 Update 12 or above. I got the RPM version.
2. Run the install script to extract the bundle. On the RPM ver­sion, this auto­mat­ic­ally installs it to your sys­tem if you run the script as root.
3. Execute this in a terminal:

   # ln -s /usr/java/default/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins

   This part took me a while to work out, as I was look­ing for a file called libjavaplugin_oji.so, the name of the x86_​32 version.

4. Restart Fire­fox and type about:plugins in the loc­a­tion bar to check if the new plug-​​in has been accepted.
5. Enable the plug-​​in: Edit ? Pref­er­ences ? Con­tent tab ? tick Enable Java
6. You can test your plug-​​in at java​.com and java​tester​.org