[FC6] Firefox + Sun Java

Chong Yu Meng chongym at cymulacrum.net
Thu Nov 2 05:30:43 UTC 2006


On Wed, 2006-11-01 at 21:53 -0500, M. Lewis wrote:
> I'm not getting java to work. I followed the directions on Stanton 
> Finley's page 

If you are using FC6, there are a couple of annoyances:

1. Stanton Finley's page is an excellent resource, but I believe there
is an inaccuracy in the Java steps. If you had followed his instructions
to the letter, you would have found this:

> Current `best' version is /usr/lib/jvm/jre-1.4.2-gcj/bin/java.

This is because this command gives Sun's Java the priority of '2' which
is less than the default gcj priority of '1420':

/usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/bin/java
java /opt/jre1.5.0_08/bin/java 2

If you want the 'best' version to be Sun Java, then you need to give
priority a higher value, such as '1421' like so:

/usr/sbin/alternatives --install /usr/bin/java
java /opt/jre1.5.0_08/bin/java 1421

For the most part, this is just me being anal-retentive/pedantic, but
there have been reported problems with Eclipse hanging if you set up
Java as described in SF's doc. 

2. The Java plug-in in IBM's J2SDK1.4.2 seems to fail -silently- when I
tried using it in Firefox for FC6. There seemed to be an additional
plug-in, though, a JNI plug-in that exists in the same directory as the
Java plug-in. According to one site, I need to create a symlink for that
to Firefox's plugin directory. I tried that, but no joy.

I went back to Blackdown's Java SDK 1.4.2. This JVM seems slower than
IBM's (not sure about Sun Java because I don't use it for my own
personal reasons), is always a version behind, lacks certain components
such as a SAX parser, but is the most reliable Java I have ever used.
With each new Fedora release, IBM's Java seems to break until the next
service release (SR)

You may want to try a lower version of Sun Java, or try Blackdown's Java
(still 1.4.2). Or if you really want to use Sun Java, you may want to
try adding "export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1". I read somewhere that this
may work -- or not. I'm not sure whether setting this environment
variable may cause your applications to break. I've never used it
personally. 

Regards,
pascal chong





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