It seems like this is the pattern with me and WebEx. I tinker to get it working, I upgrade, it breaks, repeat. Well, my most recent fling through this cycle started with a broken hard drive. Actually, several things started it. First, I originally thought my laptop had a 32-bit processor. When I found out the new version of PeopleSoft requires a 64-bit OS, I did some research and found that it was actually a 64-bit processor. Then, when I sent the laptop off to have the hard drive replaced, I figured that was the time to put 64-bit Ubuntu on it.
So, that is how it started, and then, I couldn’t get WebEx to work. I got Eclipse to work on 64-bit Java, Java worked in the browser, and everything was fine. I didn’t want to try to pull it all out and reinstall the 32-bit Java just to get WebEx working. So, I decided to attempt to try to install the 64-bit and 32-bit versions side by side. With some help, I got it to work:
Ubuntu Forums: 32-bit and 64-bit Firefox at the same time
The first step was installing Java. It was pretty simple and straight forward. I downloaded it from Sun’s website. Essentially, you just extract it and set your environment variables to use it. The path I chose was $HOME/bin/java.
Next, I found that you cannot use the 32-bit version of Java with the 64-bit version of Firefox. Firefox throws out all of the 32-bit plugins with this message: “wrong ELF class”. So, I installed Firefox by downloading it from Firefox’s website. I extracted it to $HOME/bin/java/firefox.
The next key was linking the Java plugin in the path where Firefox would see it. First, I linked the plugin into plugins directory:
ln -s $JAVA_HOME/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so libnpgp2.so
Once in the Firefox plugins directory, you have to make sure Firefox knows where the plugins directory is with the MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH variable.
So, to recap, I have:
- Java installed at $HOME/bin/java
- Firefox installed at $HOME/bin/java/firefox
- Java pluing installed at $HOME/bin/java/firefox/plugins from $HOME/bin/java/jdk…/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so
Then, I created an environment script that sets all of the paths and variables to make it work:
#!/bin/sh
export PATH=~/bin/java/firefox:~/bin/java/jdk1.6.0_18/jre/bin/:~/bin/java/jdk1.6.0_18/bin/:$PATH
export JAVA_HOME=~/bin/java/jdk1.6.0_18/jre
export MOZ_PLUGIN_PATH=~/bin/java/firefox/plugins
Finally, I created a script to launch firefox:
#!/bin/bash
cd ~/bin/java
. ./env.sh
firefox --no-remote -P WebEx
And, it worked!
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