Fedora 18, WebEx, Java and sound...

I just tried to use WebEx in order to participate in a conference and I was unable to do so. There are a lot of different pages on the Internet that show you what to do. In the end, everything boils down to the fact that WebEx doesn't support 64-bit versions of Linux so all the solutions actually describe how to install 32 bit version of Firefox and Java. Some of those recipes uninstall 64-bit versions of Firefox/Java, some install them in addition to the existing ones. I think the second approach is better, and here is an example of the latter approach.  Note that there isn't problem with sound in Java thanks to the transparent support of ALSA applications by PulseAudio so there is no need to do something like this.

What I found by reading all the recipes is that they assume two things that might catch you:

1. Sun's Java is installed somewhere in the /opt directory. In case you used RPM archive, it will be in /usr/java.
2. People hardcode Java versions, e.g. 1.6.0_21. I don't know why they don't use /usr/java/latest or /usr/java/default because those are valid links on all installations.

In the end I gave up on trying to make WebEx work. Maybe I'll return to it some day and then I'll extend this post...