This will work with older versions of Firefox as well. I install Firefox 4 on my Linux boxes by downloading the tarball directly from Mozilla’s FTP servers. I prefer to have the bleeding edge Mozilla software.
Install Firefox 4 on Linux via tarball with Java plugin
- Navigate to ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/4.0/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-4.0.tar.bz2
- Download to your home directory and extract the files, which will give you a directory called “firefox”
- Use mkdir to create a directory called firefox/plugins
- Use the command “ln -s” to create a symlink to the appropriate java plugin file, like so:
$ cd firefox/plugins $ ln -s /usr/java/default/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so libnpjp2.so
Once you load up Firefox after that, click in the address bar and type “about:plugins” to ensure that the Java plugin is now loaded.
