I had set up a fairly ancient Dell laptop – an Inspiron 3800 (tag XQ4FY) with F7 last week. Did not get to finishing up the setup for all the plugins for Firefox. The machine is not well endowed. It has 256M memory – which was plenty when I got it.

So, I downloaded the JVM from Sun – the self extracting RPM for Linux. This is version 6 update 1. Got is all installed and had to go through the “ln -s” process – why Sun cannot do this right in the rpm is beyond me. [For those who don’t know, Java gets installed in /usr/ and the way the plug-ins work, it has to have a softlink to the libjava that is from the plug-ins directory of the browser. So, in this case, “cd /usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.4/plugins/; ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_01/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so .”

Fired up FF and checked the about:plugins and all was well. Went to http://www.runescape.com to run the MMORPG, but Java (or at least the java_vm) fails. Urrrggghhhh! I am sure this is a memory problem. Had to then go back to java.com and choose at http://java.sun.com/products/archive/, J2SDK/J2RE – 1.4 version 1.4.2_13. Downloaded that, ran the installation and then did the final “ln -s /usr/java/j2re1.4.2_13/plugin/i386/ns610-gcc32/libjavaplugin_oji.so .” in ths /usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.4/plugins/ directory.

Once it was done and with FF started up, runescape ran like a champ. I really wonder why the 256M RAM is an issue? The machine has:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 255372 190300 65072 0 14916 108656
-/+ buffers/cache: 66728 188644
Swap: 524280 0 524280

cat /proc/cpuinfo:
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 8
model name : Celeron (Coppermine)
stepping : 1
cpu MHz : 448.086
cache size : 128 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags :fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse up
bogomips : 896.77
clflush size : 32

Anyway, hope this is of some help to someone.