hey whats up,

love the forum but I dont understand what a M$ banner ad is doing on this site. Anyways....
Just installed Slack 9 yesterday. Everythign seems to be fine except i cant get the Java plugin to work in Mozilla. Everytime I download it I still get that "blue puzzlepiece".
Its not a big deal since I'm only using it to get into Yahoo, so if there is some utility I can use to get into a Yahoo chat room besides a browser I could work with that as well.
I downloaded the plugin from the netscape site as well as the j2re tgz. still nothing.
Any pointers would be helpfull.

have you actually made a symlink from the installation directory to the plugin directory?

ln -s /some/where/libjavaplugin.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins

then check "about plugins" to see...

so in saying "some/where" i just need to create a directory? Or......

You have to find out where that file is.

Do (as root) in a console: "updatedb"

when thats done and a prompt comes up again, do (as any user): "locate libjavaplugin.so"

that should tell you where the file is.

Then do:

ln -s /some/where/libjavaplugin.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins , replacing /some/where/ with the location that "locate" told you.

typed updatedb this is what came up.....

warning: updatedb: could not open database: /v ar/lib/slocate/slocate.db: No such file or directory

interesting........

strange thing, typed the command again, and it actually did something...computers are strange creatures

Another piece to this puzzle is that you need a version of Java compiled with gcc 3.2 to work with the Mozilla that comes in Slack 9. If you use a Java compiled with a 2.x compiler, it will not work.

*slaps forehead*

oh...I see

would it matter if I updated my version of Mozilla?

Sorry if this thread is getting annoying,
Mike

ok, this is a bit dumb, but the better way to make plugins to work ith mozilla is to let mozilla install it by itself. So start mozilla at root, load a page that contain a java applet, then mozilla will ask you if you want to download and install the plugin....
answer yes and let it does the bad work

In answer to your question about if it matters if you upgrade your version of mozilla: Yes, it does. If you download one of the precompiled binaries of mozilla from their site, it will be a version that was compiled with gcc 2.95, no matter which recent version you pick (last I checked their site anyway). So if you get one of these then you can use a version of Java compiled with gcc 2.95.

If you would like to continue to use Mozilla compiled with gcc 3.2, you can download a Java from Blackdown. There is one at ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/java/JDK-1.4.1...586-gcc3.2.bin. There is also a version of Java SDK in the same directory, along with versions compiled with gcc 2.95. This file is executable, so if you make sure it has executable permissions, you can run it as root to install Java on your machine. Then you just create a link to the JRE from your Mozilla plugin directory as acid_kewpie explained earlier. There may also be a Sun JRE compiled with gcc 3.2 by this time, although there was not one available when I installed Java on my Slack 9 box a couple of months ago.

One other point, letting Mozilla install the plugin for you will not work from the Mozilla that comes with Slack 9 because it does not know enough not to get a version compiled with gcc 2.95.