JAVA PLUGIN UNDER LINUX PPC

Ok, finally I have my Ubuntu 8.04 under my iBook G4 working full with JAVA, the process is not really hard, first we need to forget all the Java plugins that are included in the repositories, Why?, because I tried all them and no one works for me, well maybe one or two works with some websites but that is not the idea.

Here we go:

We need to download the IBM java JRE, from here http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/linux/download.html, there is a registration needed, a few minutes and then we can see the site to download.

The file we need is Java SE Version 6 for 32-bit iSeries, note the iSeries because no other works for us, so we go and click the link Download using http, then we select RPM (yes RPM, then we change that) format, and the file ibm-java-ppc-jre-6.0-1.0.ppc.rpm.

After we download the file we need to install a program called "alien" that we are going to use to convert and install the RPM package we have, so we go to console and write "sudo aptitude install alien" yes..and enter.

Once the instalation of Alien is finished we go to the directory where we have downloaded de java RPM package an in the console as root (su and password) we run "alien -i ibm-java-ppc-jre-6.0-1.0.ppc.rpm --scripts", and voila! when this process is finished we are going to have installed Java in "/opt/ibm/java-ppc-60/".


Now we have installed Java we need to make it work for Mozilla Firefox, this is easy, we need to create a link to the to the plugin folder that firefox 3 use, not just mozilla plugins dir, so we go in the console as root to /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.1/plugins/ and inside this folder we create the link in this way "ln -s /opt/ibm/java-ppc-60/jre/plugin/ppc/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so", now we restart firefox 3, and go to Tools---Add-ons and there must be activated Java plugin, it appears like Java(TM) Plug-in 1.6.0-internal-root_10_....... or something like.

Well that is...hope it works for everybody

PD, if you want to skip IBM registration, and Alien step, here is the .deb package I created with alien, http://rapidshare.com/files/137900208/ibm-java-ppc.tar.gz.html just run "sudo dpkg -i ibm-java-ppc-jre_6.0-2_powerpc.deb", and then make the link to plugins folder.