Sym link to java plugin not loading plugin
I have installed java manually but cannot get the java plugin to work correctly. Java itself is working fine, other java applications (e.g. eclipse) are running so I am positive that java is ok. According to the instructions at Sun/Oracle's site and at the Mozilla site the way to install the plugin is to create a link to libnpjp2.so in ~/.mozilla/plugins. I ran:
ln -s /opt/jdk6_21/fastdebug/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/libnpjp2.so
I verified that the link is where I expect it and the permissions are appropriate.
However, when I do that and restart firefox there simply is no java plugin available. If I look in about:plugins there is nothing java related there. If I copy that library into ~/.mozilla/plugins instead of a sym link the plugin loads correctly. The problem is that there is a well known issue that applets will crash the browser immediately if the library is copied into plugins. That is definitely the case, the browser crashes right away when I try to run an applet but the plugin is enabled.
Does anyone have an idea why the plugin would not be loaded when I have a sym link to it but loads up fine when the file is copied?
Firefox version: 3.6.10 Java version: 1.6.0_21
All Replies (3)
Does it work if you place that symlink in a directory where one of the other plugins are located and found by Firefox?
You can try this directory if it exist: /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
You can see the installed plugins on the about:plugins page.
If you set the pref plugin.expose_full_path to true on the about:config page then you see the full path of plugins on the about:plugins page.
It is best not to leave that pref set to true as it exposes that full path to web servers, so reset that pref to false after you are done with the about:plugins page.
Thanks for the response. That directory does exist and has a number of plugins, I had tried adding the symlink to that directory before posting the question but I just tried it again for good measure. The behavior is the same whichever directory I use - if using a sym link the plugin doesn't load, if copying the lib the plugin loads(but it crashes loading applets).
I just found the answer to this. The installation instructions at java.com are out of date. See http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=1094467&tstart=0. In summary, the correct plugin to link to for recent versions of Firefox and Java is <jre install directory>/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so .