CentOS

I am VERY uneasy about installing something outside the repos or whatever the update manager tells me to, but I found this:

http://www.oeconomist.com/blogs/daniel/?p=4653

The latest from the Mozilla site is Firefox 6.0. I realize I would just substitute THIS file name for the one in the instructions, but is this sort of pre-compiled binary THIS easy? Any gut feelings from the experts would be appreciated.

(I did check to see if I had a firefox.desktop file as mentioned and I do not.)

Placing it in /opt will not conflict with the rpm database - I am guessing.

3.6.9 is even a tad bit out-of-date for me but I realized CentOS depends on the upstream vendor. This is NOT a complaint posting.

Marti

Only thing that I had to do was, in the directory that it made when I installed it, was create a plugins directory and copy my libflashplayer.so to that directory. If I were worried about java, I would have done it with that too.

I don't know how Gnome menus work, but in openbox, I just changed the path in my openbox/rc.com from firefox to ~/firefox/firefox

Ahh, flash and java. Had not thought of that. Thanks! I had NOT thought about them.

I will still have to decide if I want to try this, or just endure the wait for "upstream" to update it.

If anyone with the permission would like to do so, they could set this to Closed. (At work we differentiate between closed and resolved.)

FWIW, 'upstream' have already updated Firefox several times but those updates have not yet made it to CentOS 6. The latest upstream is ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise/6Workstation/en/os/SRPMS/firefox-3.6.20-2.el6_1.src.rpm (Warning! Source package [b]not[/b] binary!).

Thanks for the link, Trevor. It truly is appreciated. As soon as I saw src.rpm I knew that indicated to me "don't do it!".

src = sorry, really challenging

Hey, I know my Linux limits. :) I will wait for the CentOS repo to reflect the latest.

BTW, the FF6 pre-compiled binary failed on my CentOS box, but the FF8 Aurora does unpack properly on my Ubuntu box and does NOT conflict with the deb package database.

Marti

You don't say what failed. What I have seen at times is that a latest version will fail because they'll only have 32 bit available, and, as I'm running 64 bit, it will error out with couldn't load xpcom. If that is what happened, there are workarounds, but I don't use firefox enough to have ever found out what it is. (It's something simple, like making sure you have the 32 bit version of xulrunner, or something like that.)

The pre-compiled binary package (a bz2) failed on needing a file in /lib. (That is lib from the ROOT directory, not a lib directory under /opt/firefox.) Off the top of my head I can't recall what it was, but since my FF 3.6.9 does work correctly, I don't want to possibly damage my system for a non-package upgrade. I'll just wait for the update manager and the repos.

Thanks for asking, though.

It bothered me not to be able to answer, so I tried again. The terminal message after I ran

/opt/firefox/firefox

complained about /lib/ld-linux.so.2

As this bz2 ff8 package is not RH nor CentOS, I would not be offended at all if this was closed as an entity error: the entity between the keyboard and the chair. ;)

I did want to get back to you, though.

Thanks for taking the trouble. As you say, it's not from any official RH/CentOS package, so at this point, I guess it remains one of those "at your own risk," type of things.