Re: [gentoo-user] Annoying Plugin pop-up, Firefox and Epiphany

["Walter Dnes" <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2005 at 09:39:18AM +1300, Dave Cameron wrote
> Hi All,
> 
> I'm running Gentoo on a SunBlade 100 SPARC machine, and so can't
> install Sun Java or "Macromedia crap". Does anyone know how/if you
> can disable the plugin popup on Epiphany and Firefox, it's really
> frustrating to have these constant nags, especially(sic)  since I
> can't install these binary-only plugins, both because of my social
> conscience, and because of my platform, I would much appreciate it
> if someone knew.

  It's a two-step process...

  1) Plugins used to be stored in /usr/lib/nsbrowser/plugins.  That's
now being deprecated in favour of /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins.  For
the time being, assume that both directories are valid.  Anyhow, go into
those directories and rename or remove libnullplugin.so.  When Firefox
tries to load a plugin, and can't find it, it defaults to libnullplugin.so
which generates the plugin popup.  Removing libnullplugin.so gets rid of
the plugin popup.

  2) If you do just that, Firefox will then display a little strip
across the top, in place of the plugin popup, telling you that you're
missing a required plugin, and the page may not display as intended...
blah...blah...blah.  It's slightly less annoying, but annoying
nevertheless.  To get rid of that, go into about:config and change
plugin.default_plugin_disabled to false.

  You'll have to repeat step 1 each time you update Firefox or Mozilla
or whatever browser.  I don't remember if I had to reset about:config
after updating.

> On the lines of Java, why doesn't sun make Java for Linux on Sun?

  Because Sun is at war with linux, just like Microsoft is at war with
linux.  Sun Java for linux fits in with their plans about as much as
MS-Office-for-linux fits in with Microsoft's plans.  Sun wants to sell
expensive Sparc machines running expensive Solaris.  Cheap commodity
machines running free linux are eating their market alive, even moreso
than MS' market.  It's *MUCH* easier to transition from a unix-based
Solaris to a unix-like linux than from Windows to linux.

> and what is the best Free-Software JVM.

  http://www.blackdown.org calls itself "The home of Java on Linux!".

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> In linux /sbin/init is Job #1
My musings on technology and security at http://tech_sec.blog.ca
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