After a long while trying to figure out why Java never worked on my computer (it would crash firefox – this had been going on for a year but I hadn’t bothered to fix it because I hardly used Java) I finally decided to fix it.

First I just got rid of all the javas I didn’t need:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

and sudo apt-get remove-ing all the versions I didn’t need, just leaving sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin, I got the following:

$ sudo update-alternatives --config java
There is only 1 program which provides java
(/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java). Nothing to configure.
$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_03"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_03-b05)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.6.0_03-b05, mixed mode, sharing)

Because firefox kept on wanting to default to a Blackdown Java Linux 1.42 (something like that) – even though only java-6 was installed, I finally solved it by just creating a symlink in the ~/.mozilla/plugins folder:

cd ~/.mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.03/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

now about:plugins gives me

File name: libjavaplugin_oji.so
Java(TM) Plug-in 1.6.0_03

Yay!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Computers & Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.