I want my big-bitted beans!

Posted by drow on the 16th of July, 2007 at 1:23 am under tech.    This post has 4 comments.

I was checking idly this morning whether there was a 64-bit version of Macromedia Flash yet (there isn’t but they claim to be working on one; yes, I do know about gnash). While searching I learned about nspluginwrapper, which was quite gratifying; I have always thought that ought to be possible, but the one time I took a stab at it I got hopelessly lost in the plugin API and had to be evacuated by helicopter.

If nspluginwrapper works, it will kill two of the reasons I run a 32-bit firefox on my amd64 desktop (flash and the Acrobat plugin). I have firefox working quite nicely using schroot, but there are some inconveniences - like having to mount my sshfs filesystems once outside the chroot where I want them and once inside the chroot so that I can access them in firefox. And having to keep a ton of stuff installed in the chroot, too.

Of course that leaves the one other gaping omission: there’s no official 64-bit Sun Java browser plugins yet. Blackdown had a 64-bit browser plugin, but there were a number of reports of its crashiness. And there was a lot of ambiguity in the web pages I found about whether IBM’s JRE had one or not. So I fought with IBM’s registration today (their database server must’ve been horked this morning…) and downloaded their Jave 5 JRE. Well, it doesn’t. No plugin except for IA32 and PPC32. I’m guessing from the links in the documentation that the guts of their browser plugin still come from Sun. Sun claims that JDK 1.7 will have such a plugin, but no one seems to have seen it yet.

I think the only realistic way this will work out is to try building one from OpenJDK, and that’s more work than I have time for this evening. Back to the chroot for now…

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Comment by Jonas

Posted on the 16th of July, 2007 at 2:03 am.

Nspluginwrapper works very well. I use both flash and the Acrobat plugin that way. Not a perfect solution to be sure but at least it works until/if 64-bit plugins are available.

Okay, that still leaves the java plugin. It might be possible using the wrapper as well, but I haven’t tried (I personally have no need for it).

Comment by drow

Posted on the 16th of July, 2007 at 3:11 am.

Nope, you can’t use the Java plugin that way - it uses a different (more invasive, I suspect) API. That probably has something to do with why there isn’t a 64-bit one yet, too.

Comment by chithanh

Posted on the 16th of July, 2007 at 4:12 am.

I never found the pdf plugin very useful.

If you want a 64-bit Java plugin, have a look at gcjwebplugin.
OpenJDK does not include the browser plugin.

Comment by drow

Posted on the 16th of July, 2007 at 11:17 am.

I don’t think gcjwebplugin is seriously usable yet. Unless something has changed recently, it still doesn’t run with the security manager… not very realistic to use.

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