I tried to install the java JRE 1.4.2 plugin last night and it didn't seem to go correctly. I am on a laptop with only 128M RAM, so it was going to take awhile if it worked. I ran it from the terminal extracting in the MozillaFirebird/plugins and it was starting to install when I left it for a few hours. On returning it was apparently frozen/very busy so I let it go all night and had to power down this morning. The plugins seem to be in the right place but do not function. Anyone else had problems with this one?

Try the Mozilla plugin FAQ

I should have noted that I read both the Mozilla FAQ page and the Java instructions before install.

Did you place a symlink to the plugin in your Mozilla plugin directory, not a copy of the plugin?
Did you link the version of the plugin that matches your compiler? On my system, it's /usr/lib/j2sdk1.4.2_01/jre/plugin/i386/ns610-gcc32/libjavaplugin_oji.so
What errors are you getting? What errors when you run Moz from a console window?

I just tried to create the link and checking the /mozzilafirebird/plugins dir it shows this as a broken link. What went wrong? Also, I don't get any errors but when I hit a page that's looking for the java plugin(eg nytimes.com/crosswordsandgames) it doesn't come up, but acts as if I don't yet have the plugin.

Not sure why it's broken without knowing what you input or where your Java is installed. I gave you my path as an example. Yours may well be different.
Remove the broken link, then:

locate libjavaplugin_oji.so
cd MozillaFirebird/plugins
ln -s path_to_libjavaplugin_oji.s

OK, I deleted all remains of previous efforts and went to the link at the Mozilla plugin FAQ page and downloaded what ever was there. I downloaded it to my /home/user/MozillaFirebird/plugins directory and I now have, in this dir, something called j2sdk-1_4_2-nb-3_5_1-bin-linux.bin. If I do a locate libjavaplugin_oji.so I get nothing, so I believe the next step is to install as described at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/insta...351_linux.html where they will ask me to do ./ j2sdk-1_4_2-nb-3_5_1-bin-linux.bin. This is the command that so bogged down my computer last night, so I will not try it right now, but what it did then was to install libjavaplugin_oji.so in the mozilla/plugins dir as well as create a dir call j2sdk1.4.2 which had some other stuff in it. The question is why does the mozilla page tell me to create a soft link to a directory that shouldn't exist if I extract this in the plugins dir. Am I supposed to extract/install in some other directory? If so, I missed that info. ](*,)