After 5 hours of struggle Java works in FireFox

[Ari Torhamo]

After five hours of struggle, frustration and
self-destructive/computer-destructive thoughts I finally got Java to
work in Firefox. Was it really a win - I don't know, because I'm afraid
something died in me during the process... I'm trying to put a smiley
here but my fingers refuse to obey.

I started with
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/AddingJavaSupport/view?searchterm=java .
I soon realized that there was something missing and this wouldn't take
me all the way to Java in FireFox. I search for more info and found a
welth of different instructions for installation with different paths,
folders and syntaxes. I must have tried almost all of them. What finally
made it work, was to link the plugin file in ns7 folder instead of the
one in ns7-gcc29 to FireFox plugin folder (the Java version I installed
is 1.5.0_01). I assumed I should use the one in gcc-folder because that
one (with different version numbers) was used in the instructions I
followed.

I know (Sun) Java isn't officially supported in Ubuntu, but perhaps the
community might be able to put together a how-to (wiki? FAQ? guide?)
that wouldn't have holes size of a newbie here and there. I'm not able
to write such a guide, but I would be happy to help to newbie-proof it.

...suddenly this seems a pretty useless post to me, without much
constructive content - sorry for wasting your time :-/ I would send it
to Ubuntu-whiners if there was one :-)

Regards,

-Ari-