Unable to run Applets

Hey,
Recently, I installed a fresh installation of Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop.
JDK 1.6.06 is installed via Synaptic.
Then, I run this command:
sudo update-java-alternatives --set java-6-sun
But I'm unable to run Java applets in FireFox 3.0.3
Any ideas?

What does "unable to run" mean? Are there any messages in the Java Console?

Is Java turned in the browser?

Can you run applets using appletviewer?

Well, it seems that there is a package called sun-java6-plugin should be installed in addition to sun-java6-jdk , sun-java6-jre , sun-java6-bin and the list go on ...
Why JDK6 is partitioned to many packages in Ubuntu repositories?
How I'm supposed to remember all these packages? why not one package?

Any way, thank you Ulf

So, does it work now?

Note that if you're running the 64-bit version of Ubuntu, it's not going to work, because Sun still doesn't have a 64-bit version of the Java plug-in. As far as I know, this is going to come "soon" (I think with Java 6 update 10).

Yes it works.
I'm running 32-bit version of Ubuntu 8.04

There is, thank goodness! a way to run applets on 64-bit Linux. I found a web site that gave a simple way to hack it in. I forgt its URL though.

No luck with Flash, however. I'm still Flash-blind. Which considering how Flash is abused is sometimes just a well.

It will be nice to have native applet support for 64-bit, however.

Here is another possibility. Do not use the Firefox that comes with your 64-bit Linux distro. Instead, download Firefox from the Mozilla web site - as far as I can tell they are all 32-bit versions - and install that, which involves simply unpacking the tar.gz file. I placed mine at /opt/firefox.

Next, download a 32-bit JDK (or JRE) from the Sun web site, and install it, which involves running the .bin file (for Ubunutu, do not download the *.rpm.bin version, get the other one). I placed mine at /usr/java/32bit/jdk1.6.0_07. Then follow the instructions to manually install the Java applets plugin..

Start (or restart) Firefox, and applets should now work. I did this on Kubuntu 8.04 64-bit and it works for me.