icedtea6-plugin doesn't get installed on Lucid; reg applet doesn't work

[jdreed]

I have two amd64 machines, both installed with the PXE installer. Neither machine had any failures during install that I'm aware of. Neither machine has icedtea6-plugin (probably because it's a suggestion, not a recommendation or dependency).

This means the reg applet doesn't work.

Here's a question: Do we want the kiosk user to just pull in the Java from the Java locker, which a) works and b) is guaranteed to be there.

[andersk]

Uh, you may be confusing Java with the Java plugin. Sun Java does not have a Java browser plugin for amd64; look at /mit/java/current/distrib/*/jre/plugin, for example. OpenJDK has icedtea6-plugin for all architectures.

We currently have debathena-extra-software-nox recommends openjdk-6-jdk for Java itself, and debathena-extra-software recommends sun-java6-plugin | icedtea6-plugin for the browser plugin.

What’s actually causing your problem?

[jdreed]

What’s actually causing your problem?

Beats me. But I have two freshly installed (installed about a week apart) lucid amd64 cluster machines, and neither has icedtea6-plugin. dpkg.log and /var/log/installer/syslog are both unenlightening, as they contain no mention whatsoever of either icedtea6-plugin or sun-java6-plugin. So I'm not sure if APT is just ignoring the recommendation, or what?

As a trivial solution, perhaps debathena-kiosk should Depend: sun-java6-plugin | icedtea6-plugin?

[jdreed]

It's not just my machines. w20-575-1 through 7 also lack icedtea6-plugin. So something awesome is going on here.

I went with my suggestion, and committed the change in r24823. I'm going to assert that that's the Right(tm) answer anyway, since the purpose of kiosk is to provide access to the reg applet, and that requires a java plugin.

[geofft]

Maybe I'm just seeing something particularly odd with KVM/VNC, but I can't see either the registration applet or a more normal Java applet at  http://time.gov/ from the kiosk. I just get a gray box. icedtea6-plugin is installed, though, and about:plugins lists it.

(I moved the dependency change to -proposed as part of moving other things, but this seems not to have worked, so resetting to new.)

[jdreed]

Replying to geofft:

Maybe I'm just seeing something particularly odd with KVM/VNC, but I can't see either the registration applet or a more normal Java applet at  http://time.gov/ from the kiosk. I just get a gray box. icedtea6-plugin is installed, though, and about:plugins lists it.

No, this did work. Did you force-reload the page? Previously, you wouldn't have even seen the grey box. You're running into "IcedTea is a piece of crap" (aka #650, and alexp's comments about a bunch of Java Web Start demos not working).

[alexp]

Hi,

There does now seem to be a 64 bit version of Oracle JDK libnpjp2.so- it's in the java_v1.6.0_19 locker and works for me- for some odd reason it's not present in java_v1.6.0_20 ("current") but I'm planning to install java_v1.2.0_21 later today and hope it will be there.

To test it, make this link in ~/.mozilla/plugins:

libnpjp2.so -> /afs/athena.mit.edu/software/java_v1.6.0_19/distrib/@sys/jre/lib/@sys/libnpjp2.so

[jdreed]

I wonder how that interacts with IcedTea being installed. The state of Java plugins being what it is, I propose the fix in r24839 (basically, give the user a chance to run a standalone reg applet, which actually works)

[andersk]

appletviewer http://web.mit.edu/register/ ?

AFAICT these problems are not with OpenJDK (which is based on the Sun Java source) but with the IcedTea browser plugin (which was rewritten from scratch). appletviewer is in openjdk-6-jdk, which exists on every distro, as opposed to icedtea6-plugin which is missing on lenny, so we can make openjdk-6-jdk a hard dependency.

[jdreed]

Hrm. Appletviewer looks kind of ugly (compared to just running it standalone), and also provides users with a menu with which to shoot themselves in the foot. Let's go with r24839 (uploaded to proposed) for now until we fix #650.