Hello, my distro is Debian.
Before, I tried many times to get J2re working with mozilla and firefox, however It didn't work. Now I discover the problem, we should use the dot bin file from Sun's site not the dot rpm one (with alien).
{use j2re-1_4_2_04-linux-i586.bin instead of j2re<...>.rpm.bin (I was using alien to convert to deb <== bad way) }
Now it is working!
code:
$ su
$ mkdir /usr/local/java
$ cp j2re<...>.bin /usr/local/java
$ cd /usr/local/java
$ chmod 777 j2re<...>.bin
$ ./j2re<...>.bin { space, space ... yes ...}
$ rm /usr/local/java/j2re<...>.bin
$ cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
$ ln -s /usr/local/java/j2re<...>/plugin/i386/ns610-gcc32/libjavaplugin_oji.so { for mozilla }
$ cd /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins
$ ln -s /usr/local/java/j2re<...>/plugin/i386/ns610-gcc32/libjavaplugin_oji.so { for firefox }
Hope it helps and good luck !!!