Let me start off by saying that I'm not very savy with Linux ... thus why I have a Knoppix HD installation as opposed to Slackware or Gentoo or FreeBSD or something else that requires one to devote ones life solely to the study its arcane scrolls and grimoires.

If I could comfortably afford it, or if I had a better credit rating, I'd have a G5 Powerbook with OSX, two 2Ghz 64-bit CPUs and a couple of those nifty wide screen 23" flat screen monitors, etc... But, the last time that I checked, purely for shits and giggles mind you, such a system cost $10,731.95, which is $5000.00 more than I paid for my car, give or take. So here we are.

Now to the point, I've had similar problems in trying to download a version of Java that will work in conjunction with Moziila Firefox 0.8.0+. I believe, and mind you I barely know what any of this means, that because the afore mentioned version of Firefox was compiled with a recent version of GCC (gcc-3.2 I think) it won't work with the older version of java installed by default on Knoppix (build Blackdown-1.4.1-beta).

Let me add that java works on my computer. The older java/plugin works fine with Konqueror. I just won't work with Firefox.

Apparently you need (j2sdk1.4.2_03) in order for Firefox 0.8.0+'s plugin to work. My dilemma is that there doesn't seem to be a way to apt-get any other version of java. I tried to apt-get install j2re1.4 j2sdk1.4 from someones private sources repository, as this was the newest one that I could find reference to for Debian. This was a complete failure as well. This is the error message that I got during the post-download configuration ...

Setting up j2re1.4 (1.4.0.99beta-1) ...
update-alternatives: unable to make /usr/lib/mozilla-cvs/plugins/javaplugin_oji.so.dpkg-tmp a symlink to /etc/alternatives/javaplugin_oji-mozilla-cvs.so: No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing j2re1.4 (--configure):
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 2
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of j2sdk1.4:
j2sdk1.4 depends on j2re1.4 (= 1.4.0.99beta-1); however:
Package j2re1.4 is not configured yet.
dpkg: error processing j2sdk1.4 (--configure):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
There doesn't seem to be a mozilla-cvs folder or package anywhere on my system, and of course You cannot apt-get one.

Package mozilla-cvs is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it: mozilla-snapshot
My question is has anyone gotten Java to work with FireFox 0.8.0+, and is so, how?