Making JRE work in Firefox – Suse 10.2 – 64 bit

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| By Webner

Like a lot of other people, I faced problems in enabling Java in Firefox on Suse 64 bit OS. But it is working now so I thought of writing the obstacles and how to get rid of them. Basically it comes down to 2 things:

1. You have to make sure Firefox is 32 bit (till date Oct 02, 2008 – I don’t think 64 bit Firefox is available for Linux, so you should be OK on this requirement). By default SuSE 10.2 64 bit installs 32 bit Firefox. Help -> About Mozilla Firefox shows following on my browser:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061023 SUSE/2.0-30 Firefox/2.0

This confirms that installed Firefox is 32-bit (i686) and is compatible to run on 64 bit architecture (x86_64)

2. Second requirement is very important. On my machine JRE installed was java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0_update8 for x86_64 architecture. This was the main problem. One way to check this is insert SuSE 10.2 DVD, go to Yast>Software Management, search Java. Look for Java-1_5_0-sun. If its checkbox is checked that means this software is installed (if it is not checked – then check it). Now click on Versions tab. You will see there are 2 options there – x86_64 and i586 (32 bit). Select i586 option. Click on Accept . This will make sure you have ix86 compatible JRE.

Now you should be able to view applets in Firefox. If you still cannot play applets, let me know and I will dig more info.

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