[ale] Java for 64bit Firefox

[James P. Kinney III]

Welcome to my world!

It is possible to run a 32-bit firefox on a 64-bit systems. It's what I
use by default and install for school servers. It is, however, quite
tricky.

I can't speak to Suse-based distro's as my exposure in this matter is
RedHat based. The 64-bit RedHat-derived distros include 32-bit
compatibility. So there are two version of firefox, 32 and 64-bit. In
order to use the 32-bit, it is required to remove the 64-bit. 

I have found that the 32-bit mplayer (and plugin) works perfectly in
this setup. I have not found a video file I can't access.

In order to truly use java in the browser, this is the only reliable
methodology. nswrapper is pretty good for running flash but fails often
for java applets.

Note: I do not use KDE or Konquerer.

On Tue, 2008-01-01 at 15:39 -0500, Dow Hurst wrote:
> Java on 64bit Firefox doesn't work, isn't available, and so on.  So....
> 
> I've loaded up OpenSuSE 10.3 on a Core2Duo machine using the 64bit
> installation.  I've attempted to move the Firefox environment and all
> packages that have the needed plugins to 32bit.  However, I found even
> though I could install MPlayer as 32bit, when I tried to enable MP3
> support in Xine so Amarok could play MP3 format, I got dependency
> problems.  Diving deeper I found that there doesn't seem to be a way to
> install Xine 32bit without moving KDE to 32bit, or at least a whole
> bunch of it.  Yast2 started timing out on trying to solve dependency
> issues at that point!!!
> 
> So, going back to Firefox, the whole issue revolves back to only having
> the 32bit Java plugin.  If that was solved then all the other stuff
> could stay 64bit.
> 
> My question then:  Is it possible to have a 64bit Firefox somehow start
> up Java by another method such as a helper application?  I don't
> understand how the Java plugin actually plugs into Firefox, but isn't
> there another way to deal with this issue?  Am I reduced to using
> multiple browsers?  Can Konqueror as 64bit run the 32bit Java to do Java
> and Javascript stuff?  How do people deal with this that use a 64bit
> environment?
> 
> If possible, please don't complain about Sun not getting the port of the
> Java plugin to 64bit done as that is an obvious given.  I'm hoping there
> is a practical usable solution to the problem with what I have available
> to me.  I did look at nspluginwrapper but that does not support the Java
> plugin.
> 
> Thanks so much for you time and have a Happy New Year!
> Dow
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> 
-- 
James P. Kinney III          
CEO & Director of Engineering 
Local Net Solutions,LLC        
770-493-8244                    
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part