David R. Heffelfinger

The NetBeans Core QA Team has announced that NetBeans 6.5 RC1 will be released soon . It is expected to be available this afternoon.

I would like this opportunity to mention that my new NetBeans Book covers NetBeans 6.5.

For the longest time, 64 bit versions of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and Java Development Kit (JDK) have not included a Java Plugin.

This fact has let us 64 bit Linux users out in the cold when it comes to running Java applets in our operating system of choice. There are workarounds, but they involved downloading a 32 bit browser and a 32 bit JRE, a less than ideal solution.

There has been a bug in Java's bug parade reporting this issue (submitted in 2003!), finally, today I got notice that this issue will finally be addressed.

According to the comments in the bug report, JRE 6u12 will include a Java plugin for 64 bit Linux, freeing us from jumping through hoops to be able to execute Java applets under 64 bit Linux.

JRE 6u12 is scheduled to be released early 2009.

Recently I acquired a new client that has a lot of client side Java technology as part of their infrastructure. A lot of this infrastructure is in the form of Java applets.

My primary operating system is Ubuntu Hardy 64 bit. Unfortunately there is still no Java plugin for the 64 bit Linux version of Firefox, therefore, I was finding myself having to boot to Windows to be able to use some of these utilities.

Since I am much more comfortable in a Unix environment, I wanted to find a solution to run this software on my Linux laptop. I knew from past experience that a 32 bit version of Firefox can be installed under 64 bit Linux, and a 32 bit JRE can be installed as well, and the 32 bit firefox can be made to work with the 32 bit JVM.

I searched around and found this thread in the Ubuntu forums, which provides a link to a script that will install the 32 version of Firefox, along with the 32 bit version of the Java plugin and other plugins such as Flash. I downloaded the script and ran it, but unfortunately Java applets were still not working, at least I had 32 bit Firefox in place.

In order to get the Java plugin under Firefox 32, I had to download the 32 bit JRE from java.com, since Ubuntu is a deb based distribution (as opposed to RPM based), the right version to download is the self extracting file.

After downloading the JRE, it needs to be installed, which can be done by simply executing the downloaded shell script as root. I installed mine under /opt.

Once the JRE is installed, I had to cd to my home directory, then cd to .mozilla. At this point, I had to create a plugins subdirectory, and cd to it.

At this point I started the 32 bit version of Firefox, navigated to a test page and verified that my Java plugin was working properly.