Annoyances:


Getting this kind of thing working properly on FreeBSD or Linux isn't hard, its just fiddly and obscure. But the main problem is actually finding decent documentation on it. So I've decided to collect together in one place exactly what I did to get the Java VM, Flash, RealPlayer and Acrobat plugins working in Firefox 1.0 on FreeBSD 5.3 (stable).

Java:

Install JDK in the usual way.

Symlink from /usr/local/jdk1.4.2/jre/plugin/i386/ns610/libjavaplugin_oji.so to /usr/X11R6/lib/browser_plugins/libjavaplugin_oji.so

Linux guides to doing this kind of thing will tell you to link to the gcc32 version of the plugin, but the opposite seems to be true with BSD; IE: you just need to create the symlink to the vanilla version.

Flash plugin and others:

You can get most of the popular browser plugins (Flash, Real's Helix Player and Acrobat) by installing the linuxpluginwrapper port. This allows the use of linux plguins with native apps. Very little configuration is needed, you just have to copy the appropriate example libmap.conf from /usr/local/share/examples/linuxpluginwrapper/ to /etc/libmap.conf. I had some difficulty with the Java3D stuff though (Firefox would not run with it present in libmap.conf) so I had to remove that. Once its installed restart Firefox and about:plugins should confirm they have loaded successfully.

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$Id: bsd-firefox.html,v 1.2 2005/03/01 12:10:18 rob Exp $