I'd think Debian Linux should get simpler all the time. Maybe not. My tricks from Installing Sun Java on Debian Lenny didn't yield the desired results.
Perhaps if I had performed a standard Debian Lenny Desktop install, I would not have had
this problem. Instead, I took the expert/custom route. During the beginning of the
install of Debian Lenny, I chose the advanced options where I could install a KDE desktop.
I'm not sure if the standard variation would have worked out of the box, but, whatever, this
one didn't.
I had to go to
Debian Tutorials to find the answer, which was a basic one-liner, a long, but it required one preparation
step before hand. The directory /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins needed to be corrected first. Then the one liner
could be performed: ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.12/jre/plugin/i386/n s7/libjavaplugin_oji.so
/usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins/
With that in place, I can now run Java applets in IceWeasel.