A cup’o java for the opera… [Freebsd 8.0 amd64; Opera 9.x/10.x; Diablo-JRE 1.6]
Not exactly security related but an issue which digested about five hours of my time. To get java applets to work with Opera on FreeBSD using the Diablo JRE:
1. Install Diablo 1.6 JRE, probably easiest trying to install from the port tree and then downloading what it asks, which includes the binary for Diablo.
2. You’ve got Opera amd64 installed, right?
3. Now, Opera does not use a plugin library as Mozilla does but rather uses the java shared libraries directly, specifically libjvm.so and libawt.so. In the Opera configuration, set the Java path to /usr/local/diablo-jre1.6.0/lib/amd64/ and click ‘Validate’ – it should show as correct.
4. For some reason, libjvm.so is in the subdirectory ./server/ where Opera doesn’t find it. The dirty way to resolve this is to just symlink it:
ln -s /usr/local/diablo-jre1.6.0/lib/amd64/server/libjvm.so /usr/local/diablo-jre1.6.0/lib/amd64/libjvm.so
5. Run Opera, et voilà – it works!