This howto explains what I did to get java working on Mandriva with the Mozilla, Mozilla-Firefox, and Konqueror web browsers. This was on a fresh install of Mandriva (including updates) with the 3 browsers already installed by Mandriva rpm's.
Throughout this howto, please remember to verify the java version and path used on your system. This howto will be showing the java version and path on my system.
First off, the Sun Java site seems to change often so I'll explain how to find java there at the time of this writing.
Go to the Sun Java site and click on the Downloads link.
On that page look for the section Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition and in the drop down box choose J2SE 1.5.0.
On this page click on the Download JRE 5.0 Update 4 link.
On this page look for the section Linux Platform - J2SE(TM) Runtime Environment 5.0 Update 4 and click on the link to download the jre-1_5_0_04-linux-i586-rpm.bin file.
Now cd to the directory where you saved the file. In a terminal, as user, run:
sh jre-1_5_0_04-linux-i586-rpm.bin
Now su to root in the terminal and run:
urpmi jre-1_5_0_04-linux-i586.rpm
Find the path to libjavaplugin_oji.so by performing the following command as root:
updatedb && locate libjavaplugin_oji.so
You will notice in the output that there are 2 different paths, ns7 and ns7-gcc29. The gcc29 is fairly old and the Mandrake Mozilla, Mozilla-Firefox, and Konqueror browsers use the gcc32, so use the ns7 path in the following steps.
Still as root, cd to the Mozilla plugins directory:
cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
Create the required plugin symlink by performing the following command:
ln -s /usr/java/jre1.5.0_04/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so
Verify the link was created and good (not red) by performing the following command:
ls -l
Close the browsers, if they were open. When restarting the browsers you'll find that Mozilla and Mozilla-Firefox have working java, but Konqueror doesn't work. To get Konqueror to work:
Open Konqueror
Off the menu choose 'Settings > Configure Konqueror
Choose Java & Java Script
Change the Path to java executable field to /usr/java/jre1.5.0_04/bin/java
Restart Konqueror
A link to test java - Java Test
That's it. Java should now be working in all 3 browsers.
If it doesn't work on your distro, you might try creating the symlink directly in each browsers plugin directory in case your browsers do not automatically look in the .../mozilla/plugins/ directory