Plugins and Mozilla RC3.

By Mark Nielsen

Purpose
Real Player
Flash
Acrobat Reader
Plugger
Conclusion
References

Purpose

The purpose of this article is just to show how I installed various plugins with Mozilla. Getting all the basic plugins to work is one of the last things (besides a spellchecker) which I need to make it so I never use Netscape again. I installed Mozilla RC3 at /usr/local/mozilla and created a file called "/usr/bin/mozilla" with the following contents:

#export XENVIRONMENT=/usr/local/mozilla/Netscape.ad
export NPX_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/local/Acrobat4/Browsers/intellinux
export PATH=/usr/local/Acrobat4/bin:$PATH
/usr/local/mozilla/mozilla

Real Player

Real Player was pretty easy. Just download the free Real Player and copy raclass.zip and rpnp.so to the mozilla plugins directory.

Flash Player

I downloaded the Flash Player and copied libflashplayer.so into the mozilla plugins directory.

Acrobat Reader

This was a little more complicated, but I was thrilled when I got a pdf document embedded into a webpage.

Install Acrobat at "/usr/local/Acrobat4".
Copy nppdf.so into the mozilla plugins directory.
mv /usr/bin/mozilla /usr/bin/mozilla_old

Create a /usr/bin/mozilla script with the following content:

#!/bin/bash

export NPX_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/local/Acrobat4/Browsers/intellinux
export PATH=/usr/local/Acrobat4/bin:$PATH
/usr/local/mozilla/mozilla

chmod 755 /usr/bin/mozilla

Plugger

Plugger is a really cool plugin that connects your browser to all sorts of stuff like audio files, postscript, excel document, word document, etc. Follow the instructions on how to install Plugger. At the end of the instructions, copy plugger.so into the mozilla plugins directory. I was using a RedHat 7.2 system.

After I installed plugger, I got the following to work:

Plugin At first After installing more software

Quicktime no Yes, after I installed xanim. Very slow.

AVI no Yes, after I installed xanim. Very slow.

MPG no Yes, after I installed xanim. Very slow.

FLI no Yes, after I installed xanim. Very slow.

WAV yes as external

Basic Audio no no

MIDI yes

Soundtracker yes

MPEG audio FIle yes

MPEG_url file yes as external

Commadore no Yes, after I installed /usr/local/bin/sidplay

PNG yes, but mozilla already did this.

TIFF yes

Sun Raster yes

MS Bitmap yes

Postscript yes

Acrobat yes, but I already got it to work.

MS Word yes

MS Excel yes

Plugin	At first	After installing more software
Quicktime	no	Yes, after I installed xanim. Very slow.
AVI	no	Yes, after I installed xanim. Very slow.
MPG	no	Yes, after I installed xanim. Very slow.
FLI	no	Yes, after I installed xanim. Very slow.
WAV	yes as external
Basic Audio	no	no
MIDI	yes
Soundtracker	yes
MPEG audio FIle	yes
MPEG_url file	yes as external
Commadore	no	Yes, after I installed /usr/local/bin/sidplay
PNG	yes, but mozilla already did this.
TIFF	yes
Sun Raster	yes
MS Bitmap	yes
Postscript	yes
Acrobat	yes, but I already got it to work.
MS Word	yes
MS Excel	yes

Conclusions.

None, other than this is great and I am glad I finally don't need Netscape for anything (I never really used it anymore anyways). The only thing I might recommend is not to use plugger for videos ,like mpeg, as it was just too slow. Gtv was much faster for mpeg compared to using plugger and xanim.

References

Mark works as an independent consultant at http://www.audioboomerang.com/ and donating time to causes like writing articles, writing free software, and working as a volunteer at eastmont.net.