success with Firefox 1.0 and Java

[Gerhard Magnus]

Perhaps some other newbie running Fedora 3 can benefit from this
summary:

I've been trying to get the Java runtime environment to work with
Firefox 1.0.  This is the version that comes with Fedora 3 -- it's from
the package firefox-1.0-2.fc3 and its files are in /usr/lib/firefox-1.0.

After much fiddling with this, I ended up two versions of the Java
runtime environment installed in directories /usr/java/j2re1.4.2_06
and /usr/java/jrel.5.0.  I wanted to use the latter, more recent version
5.0 with Firefox.

I went to the directory /usr/java/jre1.5.0/plugin/i386/ns7 where I found
only the file libjavaplugin_oji.so.  Then, as superuser, I created a
link in the /usr/lib/firefox-1.0 directory: ln -sf
libjavaplugin_oji.so /usr/lib/firefox-1.0/plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so.
Executing ls, the link libjavaplugin_oji.so should appear in blue -- if
it appears in red and flashes this means the link has not been
established successfully.

Firefox doesn't telegraph the news that its java plugin has been
successfully installed.  A good place to go to test this is
http://www.java.com/en/download/help/testvm.jsp -- if you can see the
dancing Duke logo™ image animated in the applet, then the JRE is
functioning correctly.

The main thing I've learned from all this is that unix will be merciless
when a user confuses the letter "l" and the number "1".

Thanks for everybody's help -- and happy new year!

Jerry