Fedora Core 11 and Firefox

These notes aren't entirely FC11 specific, but since I sorted all this out as part of and after doing the upgrade to FC11, here they are.

For some reason after installing FC11, I have no firefox at all on my machine! I did a yum install firefox which gave me the latest 64 bit firefox which turns out to be a beta version of Firefox 3.5, namely: firefox.x86_64 0:3.5-0.20.beta4.fc11. The beta business had an edgy look about it, but sometime in late July it got upgraded to firefox 3.5.1, and that is the version I am sorting all this out with.

Plugin hell

Neither java nor flash works out of the box with the 64 bit browser. What I had done in the past was to drop back to a 32 bit browser, since the plugins are all totally straightforward, but now I am going to try to sort it all out in the 64 bit world.

The flash plugin

This is not available via yum (i.e. as an RPM). However, it turns out that an "alpha" refresh of the Flash Player 10 came out in July 30, 2009 (the day before I am writing this).
Adobe Labs offers: The first of these is the "yum" jive to get the 32 bit plugin (which is not what we want). The second is the current version of the 32 bit plugin (also not what we want). The last is the alpha 64 bit plugin, the tarball contains one file: 
libflashplayer.so
The trick is where to put it. One guess would be: /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

Wow! this just seems to work.

Some handy ways to get information about plugins:

The java plugin

So many choices, so much weird stuff.

A common piece of advice, whichever path you choose to follow, is to NOT copy the plugin into the mozilla plugins directory, but place a symlink to the file in the mozilla plugins directory. The name of the plugin seems to vary wildly depending on what you use as a java plugin, for example:

It used to be that Sun did not have a working Java plugin for x86_64 systems. This seems to be changed with something called JRE 6u12 (which is or was an "early access" item (what Sun calls alpha software?). You can install this to a directory of your choice, then make a symbolic link in /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins to the file JRE/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so or something like that. The amd64 component of the path is OK by me, but what about Intel 64 bit?

Another option is to use something called IcedTea7 as a workaround. I never tried this, and don't even know where to find this IcedTea.

Also suggested is Java openJDK. This looks like the easy path (it is available via yum). I do this: 

yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk-plugin.x86_64

After doing this, I see a link: 

/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so -> /etc/alternatives/libjavaplugin.so.x86_64
This is promising, and the best part is it WORKS!
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org