Following up Petteri’s post about icedtea6-bin package we now have 1.6.0.12 versions of sun-jdk and sun-jre-bin in tree. This version finally adds long awaited (6 year old bug in sun bug database) 64-bit browser plugin along with 64-bit Javaws. Simply install any of the two with nsplugin USE flag and start running Java applets. Note that it only works with Firefox 3.
5 thoughts on “Java Plugin and Java Web Start for x86_64 users”
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What’s the main difference between the icedtea6-bin plugin and the one from Sun? Any performance differences? Does the code of one plugin offer more features than the other?
I’ve been using icedtea6-bin on my laptop and desktop ever since they appeared in the overlay, and I like ’em very much.
I’ve never liked Sun Java since version 1.6 (32-bit), as its performance was simply terrible compared to 1.5 (1.5 was great!). 1.6 was especially terrible when playing Java games at Yahoo, such as the daily crossword. 🙂
“This version finally adds long awaited (6 year old bug in sun bug database) 64-bit browser plugin along with 64-bit Javaws.”
Whoa finally! Updating now. Thanks for the good work!
@nightmorph
I’m not an every day user of Java plugin, so didn’t notice any of the performance issues between releases. Plugin2 is a major rewrite and is available for both x86 and x86_64. You can use the java-nsplugin eselect module to choose between two if you’re on x86. IcedTea also has its own Java plugin now (The ones in older versions in overlay were based on gcj) which I didn’t test myself at all. Probably other devs who tested it may have a word.
Wrt code, Sun’s plugin is still close sourced so we may not now atm.
@bbroeksema
Thanks.
Thanks to both of you for your comments.
Serkan
Hey,
Note that it only works with Firefox 3.
How about opera?
jAzz
Altough the official announcement doesn’t state that people have found a way to run the applets with opera and Sun Java. See http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=269347.