Friday, July 9, 2010

Aleks on Linux

My wife has recently gone back to college to get her bachelor of nursing and I've been worried that we would be required to get a Windows machine for her to complete assignments. I'm going to resist as hard as possible as we haven't had anything but Linux in our house for some years. This however, came under threat recently with the first week of school. The math class she is taking uses a web service called Aleks for homework. The service is a homework platform that uses a java plug-in in browser. I see no need for anything on the web to not be cross-platform. While they don't officially support Linux they do include some information on how to get it working under Linux.

I followed the steps on the site and logged into my wifes account and much to my chagrin was not greeted by a functioning Aleks. So, I resorted to google for help. There isn't much info out there giving any more help than the installation instructions on the Aleks website. There are reports however, that it does work.

The solution it turns out is quite a simple one and is found on the official java website. Basically you need to create a symbolic link to the java plugin to the Firefox plugin folder to enable in browser java to work.

Hopefully, this info will save some poor Linux user from having to suffer too much to get their homework done.