Java Woes on Fedora 8 (part 2)

2008 Feb 25 at 20:50 » Tagged as :weird, bootstrap,

It's a mystery why Fedora 8 doesn't ship with Sun Java by default. But then again it's presence wouldn't have solved the java plugin issue that I have been experiencing. Why? well the 64 bit version of Sun Java for linux doesn't include plugin.jar . That's what I found out after downloading JDK 1.6 update 5 from the Sun site.

Then I tried downloading the 32 bit version (funny that the download page on java.com says to use the 32 bit version to enable webstart and plugin support. So why on earth did they release a 64 bit version if such core functionality is missing in it?). Sadly even the 32 bit version does not work. Firefox simply refuses to recognize the plugin. This is even after manually creating the symbolic link to the plugin.jar file.

It was then time for a bit of Googling and I came across the Fedora FAQ page that explains how to get the plug in working. Unfortunately those instructions are really about Fedora 7 rather than 8 but I decided to give it a try anyway. But I didn't get far. The instruction