Using Elluminate online collaboration tool with Ubuntu Linux
01/18/2012 - by Travis
Using Elluminate with Ubuntu 11.10 can be very frustrating. The common symptoms are a) Firefox doesn't know how to handle the jnlp file and b) the whiteboard is blank 90% of the time.

Well, you can get this to work 100% with a bit of work. It appears that the blank whiteboard problem is due to an as-yet not understood problem with Elluminate under OpenJDK. It's quite possibly an Elluminate bug but apparently it hasn't been fully debugged yet. Regardless, it works fine under Oracle (Sun) Java.

So, to address the problems:
a) Tell Firefox to use javaws (/usr/bin/javaws) when it asks how to open the jnlp file. Easy enough.

b) Install Oracle Java:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ferramroberto/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-plugin
sudo update-alternatives --config java

Optionally, you may also want to un-install OpenJDK.

In the end, you should see something like this when you run java -version
java version "1.6.0_26"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_26-b03)
Java HotSpot(TM) Server VM (build 20.1-b02, mixed mode)