I'm using Kubuntu 7.10 and am certainly not a Linux newbie. Well, it's my first 2 months with Kubuntu. Everything is fine EXCEPT FOR JAVA!! I tried to install sun-java6-jre in apt-get, it just messes up at sun-java6-bin(that's a dependency[duh!]) Ok great, it crashed. I reboot, and boot up Adept only to find THAT IT THINKS IT'S ALREADY RUNNING FROM BEFORE!! So, I run dpkg --configure. Ok, now, Adept starts up, but when I try to install/remove/purge a package, I find that it notifies: "There was probably an error downloading the packages or the commit would break packages" Oh, no!! So, it being my first time with Ubuntu, I just did a re-install. And the sam thing happened!(i tried installing it again. So, the same cycle 3 TIMES!! I installed Java in the manual way, but I CAN'T USE IT WITH FIREFOX. FrostWire etc. run fine. P.S. Sorry if the rant above the punchline was useless, but if I know the reason, it might help!
Strange... have you got the symlink in ~/.mozilla/firefox/plugins pointing to the right file.. there are 2 different plugin paths gcc and gcc-ns7. It's a bit hit and miss.... the java in the apt repositories just doesn't work... Did you put java in usr/java or usr/local/java. I use the second as it's global.