While testing out my new local cf development virtual machine I came across a strange error while running the NewsWebservice Sample application for ColdBox. This all worked in in Ubuntu 7.10 but it would seem some thing switched up after the Hardy update.

The error I was getting looked like this:

coldfusion.jsp.CompilationFailedException: Errors reported by Java compiler: jikes: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory .

The fix is super simple, Just run this in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

I had an issue where the default plugin was not being recognized by Firefox 2. The first thing I did was upgrade the JRE to version 6 by running an apt-get in terminal:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

Next I checked to make sure the upgrade went as planned by checking the installed Java version using the following terminal command:

java -version

However, it would seem the root of the problem was the Mozilla plugin directory did not exist. In the end I was able to fix the plugin for Firefox by recreating the plugins directory in my Home folder and creating a link to the Java 6 JRE libjavaplugin_oji.so using the following steps (again in terminal):

mkdir .mozilla/plugins
cd .mozilla/plugins
ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so

This was all it took to get the Java plugin functioning again in Firefox 2.