sun-java6-plugin is an empty package; it installs no files

[Ryan Thompson]

I tried to use a web page that used a java applet, but it failed to load. This was odd to me, because I had installed the sun-java6-plugin package. Then I went to check where this package installs its files, and I discovered that it doesn't install *any* files at all! Here's the output when I list all the files. Notice that the only one that isn't a directory is /usr/share/lintian/overrides/sun-java6-plugin, which is a file informing me that the package contains empty directories. Haha.

$ wajig list-files sun-java6-plugin
/.
/usr
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/lintian
/usr/share/lintian/overrides
/usr/share/lintian/overrides/sun-java6-plugin
/usr/lib
/usr/lib/xulrunner-addons
/usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins
/usr/share/doc/sun-java6-plugin

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Jan 30 13:31:25 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
NonfreeKernelModules: wl nvidia
Package: sun-java6-plugin 6-15-1
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-18.55-generic
SourcePackage: sun-java6
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-18-generic x86_64

[Daniel Letzeisen (dtl131)]

This is by design. sun-java6-plugin is a metapackage.
...
"This is a metapackage containing dependencies for running Java in
various browsers."

[Ryan Thompson (rct86)]

Oops, my later reply didn't show. I found out that I could enable the java plugin by symlinking a specific file into my plugins directory. Without this symlink, java doesn't work in my browser.

$ ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.15/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so ~/.mozilla/plugins/