Installing Netscape Plugins in MozillaFirebird

Your Problem

Your distro (e.g. SuSE Linux) ships with Netscape 7 or Mozilla. But you prefer and have installed another Mozilla-based variant such as MozillaFirebird. And that does not show Flash-animations and PDF files.

Reason

Your browser needs plugins. Those are not shipped with mozilla and its variants.

Solution

Simply use the plugins of your preinstalled mozilla from your distribution. For example on SuSE 8.1 you find those in /opt/netscape/plugins:

# cd /opt/netscape/plugins
/opt/netscape/plugins # ls
.   ShockwaveFlash.class  libflashplayer.so  nppdf.so     rpnp.so
..  cpPack1.jar           libnullplugin.so   raclass.zip

You needn't copy the plugins to the Mozilla directory. Simply create symbolic links. Let's assume, you have installed MozillaFirebird in /usr/local/MozillaFirebird:

# cd /usr/local/MozillaFirebird

Here you find a directory plugins:

/usr/local/MozillaFirebird # cd plugins
/usr/local/MozillaFirebird/plugins # ls
.  ..  libnullplugin.so

Create symbolic links to the plugins in the Netscape directory:

/usr/local/MozillaFirebird/plugins # ln -s /opt/netscape/plugins/* .
ln: »./libnullplugin.so«: File exists
/usr/local/MozillaFirebird/plugins # ll
total 32
drwxrwxr-x  2 root   root      4096 Dec  2 12:53 .
drwxrwxr-x  9 root   root      4096 Oct  8 03:00 ..
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root   root        42 Dec  2 12:53 ShockwaveFlash.class -> /opt/netscape/plugins/ShockwaveFlash.class
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root   root        33 Dec  2 12:53 cpPack1.jar -> /opt/netscape/plugins/cpPack1.jar
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root   root        39 Dec  2 12:53 libflashplayer.so -> /opt/netscape/plugins/libflashplayer.so
-rwxrwxr-x  1 root   root     21056 Oct  8 03:00 libnullplugin.so
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root   root        30 Dec  2 12:53 nppdf.so -> /opt/netscape/plugins/nppdf.so
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root   root        33 Dec  2 12:53 raclass.zip -> /opt/netscape/plugins/raclass.zip
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root   root        29 Dec  2 12:53 rpnp.so -> /opt/netscape/plugins/rpnp.so

Now simply restart you browser and the plugins should work. Furthermore you can check which plugins are loaded by browsing the URL about:plugins

Keywords: netscape mozilla firebird mozillafirebird plugin plugins flash acrobat   Author: Mathias Kettner

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