So I am running an old version of Ubuntu and all of a sudden, my capabilities to run Java in a browser have stopped and it no longer executes properly. Someone else set this up for me, but I believe it's running icedtea plugin 6 and jre 6. What would be the best ways to troubleshoot this? I suppose I could try downloading icedtea 7 and jre 7 (sun or openjdK) and see if that works?

Also, in general, is installing icedtea, installing a java runtime environment, and then symlinking something to the plugins directory of your browser the best way to get Java working on most Linux systems? Unfortunately, there are many guides all over the internet offering totally different solutions, but this is probably the most common I've seen (not sure how well it works).

My main use is downloading an executing .jnlp files (browsers should open it automatically). Although, I've seen people using "javasw" to run the file outside of a browser. Is this something I could consider doing? I can't seem to find javasw packaged for my version of Ubuntu.