Bexley IT Solutions

I have just had to install the Sun Java Development Kit on my desktop machine; I haven't had to use it since I installed CentOS 5, and I needed to enable my browser to use Java Applets. Specifically, in order to use SSL Explorer, which is an open source SSL VPN - I've only started using this piece of software fairly recently, and I must say I'm very impressed... However, I won't stray too far from the point of this post!

I followed the usual installation procedure, documented here; I personally use the self-extracting binary file installation rather than the rpm, because it allows me to place the JDK anywhere I please. Another benefit of choosing the self-extracting binary is being able to have different versions of the software installed.

However, when I tried to view a page with a Java applet, it would not load. All I saw was a blank square where the applet should have been. After doing some searching on the web, I found this archived forum post.

Essentially, it would seem that for Red Hat based distributions, you need to install the compat-libstdc++-33 package for backwards-compatibility with certain pre-compiled binaries - including Java 6. Although the forum post explicitly mentions Fedora 7, my desktop machine runs CentOS 5, which means the package scheme is pretty much the same.

To install the required package, I simply ran the following command as root:

yum install compat-libstdc++-33

I'm now happily using SSL Explorer!