Firefox and 64 bit Java Plugin

Skien, Norway

Wednesday, April 30th 2008, 14:13 CEST

Because the lazy bastards at Sun still didn't manage to make a 64 bit version of their Java plugin, you have to go through all sorts of hoops to make it actually work. Normally I wouldn't really care about this, but unfortunately my bank decided to require Java working in the browser for authentication. Four hours of my time later, I managed to get it working. To save others from some of the pain, here is how I did that:

Download from ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/java/JDK-1.4.2/amd64/ the file j2sdk-1.4.2-03-linux-amd64.bin .
I downloaded it to ~/install, so go into that directory and run:
```
chmod +x j2sdk-1.4.2-03-linux-amd64.bin
```
Run:
```
./j2sdk-1.4.2-03-linux-amd64.bin
```
and wait until it's done installing (make sure it mentions "Uncompressing Blackdown Java 2 Standard Edition SDK v1.4.2-03" at some point).
Now, to make it work as a plugin, you have to link (not copy, as that makes the browser crash) the plugin to your mozilla directory. For me:
```
cd /home/derick/.mozilla/plugins
ln -s /home/derick/install/j2sdk1.4.2⇢
   /jre/plugin/amd64/mozilla/libjavaplugin_oji.so .
```
Restart the browser and check whether the blackdown java plugin shows up if you go to about:plugins .

Comments

tony

Friday, May 9th 2008, 08:48 UTC

hi... have you got a 64-bit Windows java plugin installation image for java 5 ? thx

Derick

Friday, May 9th 2008, 10:58 UTC

@tony: Sorry, I don't do Windows.

Kris

Sunday, June 22nd 2008, 11:00 UTC

Hi, that sounds great. Do you have possibility to build and publish the working SUN-Java6-JRE-Plugin for AMD64 thing?

Best regards, Kris

Adam

Wednesday, November 19th 2008, 20:32 UTC

Will this work on Intel 64bit architecture?

Rich

Wednesday, December 3rd 2008, 23:12 UTC

Interesting. On FF3 on RHEL4.7, symlinking the plugin kills the browser.

I'm itching to use a version of java for a browser that can handle more than 4GB of RAM! Seriously, why are we using 64-bit browsers?

Nathan

Thursday, December 18th 2008, 23:17 UTC

Lazy bastards at Sun? I'm assuming you have a 100% complete understand of all the intricacies they might have encountered when trying to cater for the 64-bit browser, right? Really, without having a technical concept of what was needed to be done, are you really in a position to call them lazy bastards? Is it frustrating? Sure. Does it justify name-calling? I don't think so.

Petr Dvorak

Tuesday, January 6th 2009, 16:56 UTC

Hi, 64bit Java plugin for Firefox should be available since JRE 6u12:

http://blogs.sun.com/joshis/entry/finally_it_s_here_java

Hope this helps...

Werner Stucky

Saturday, January 31st 2009, 14:25 UTC

I have tried the new jre1.6.0_12 64 bit plugin under openSUSE 10.2 with 64 bit Firefox 3.0.5 but I get the following error.

LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /opt/java/jre1.6.0_12/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so [/opt/java/jre1.6.0_12/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64]

Rich

Wednesday, February 4th 2009, 21:53 UTC

Petr: no it doesn't, because the 64-bit beta03 plug doesn't work on FF3.0.5 on RHEL4.7.