I can pass options to java programs by setting the environment variable JAVA_ARGS. This works by ultimately passing the contents of the variable on the command line to the java runtime binary, such as /usr/bin/java; well behaved packages do this themselves by using the shell functions in java-wrappers.
This is all great, but what about the java web applets, run by the browser plugin (in my case, the icedtea-6-plugin for iceweasel)? As far as I know this doesn't use the runtime binary, and even if it did it wouldn't know to apply the extra options from JAVA_ARGS. So can I control the java runtime options for applets in any way? Googling for the relevant terms tends to bring up something called Java Control Panel, with instructions where to find such a thing on Windoze and Mac. But nothing about Debian, and indeed a search on packages.debian.org for a package file "ControlPanel" shows nothing promising. Right now my JAVA_ARGS is as follows but I expect it to grow. JAVA_ARGS="-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on -Dswing.aatext=true"
