Making Java work in Firefox 3.6 (Namoroka)

About two weeks ago I carelessly installed Firefox 3.6 on my Kubuntu 9.10 System (forgot to turn off the mozilla repository before doing a full-upgrade). When I finally realized what had just happened, Firefox 3.6 was already up and running and I figured I might as well give it a try. All in all it works quite well and I have not had a lot of trouble with it.

Today I realized that java applets dont work (If I needed further prove for the fact that java has become completely irrelevant for websites this is probably it). Luckily the solution is relatively simple:

cd /usr/lib/firefox-3.6.2pre/plugins
sudo ln -s  /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.15/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so 

Then restart Firefox and check that java is listed in about:plugins .

Now I am again able to use the ONE java applet that I am forced to use on a regular basis. Hooray!

Advertisement

Fixing Eclipse for Ubuntu 9.10

I recently discovered that Eclipse is broken beyond hope in Ubuntu 9.10. Many Buttons dont work and some other things also seem flaky at best. Apparently this has something to do with the GTK+ version used in Ubuntu 9.10. The bug is fixed in Eclipse 3.6 but previous Eclipse versions are pretty much unusable.

Fortunately I found this excellent blog post which explains the problem in detail and also gives a very simple fix for older Eclipse versions :

The solution is to create a bash script which sets an environment variable before starting eclipse:


#!/bin/sh
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
/home/koen/eclipse-galileo/eclipse


now everything works just fine and I can go back to coding java. Many thanks to the Blogosphere 🙂