Based on some recent requests over at Daniel Robitaille’s blog he outlined a few tips on how to manually keep up to date with Firefox. Now, Ubuntu normally is pretty quick on keeping critical system parts up-to-date but for those of you that want a little more manual control here are some steps.
(I don’t mean to duplicate instructions that he’s already posted–these steps are slightly different, and I want to reach anyone else that isn’t familiar with his blog. I’m basing these closely on my instructions on Installing Flock on Ubuntu. You might want to visit his post to see the differences.)
- Download Firefox 2.0.0.1 (Save to Desktop)
- Unpack the archive using:
sudo tar -C /opt -xzvf firefox-*.tar.gz - Update the symbolic link to the executable:
sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/local/bin/firefox - Synchronize any existing plugins (see my previous post on synchronizing plugins between browsers) from the default version:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/* /opt/firefox/plugins/
Upon each new release of Firefox you can just repeat these steps and quickly make sure you’re up to the latest and greatest. Thanks again to Daniel for originally laying out the basics of these instructions.
Remember, if you’re not comfortable on the command line or don’t know exactly what you’re doing you might want to just wait for the official updates. As usual it is generally a better idea to use the central maintained packages as customizing your system too much could cause issues. Make sure you know what you’re in for if you follow these steps.
Thanks I was looking for something to cover until the repositories caught up.
Hmm… spell check doesn’t seem to be working /goes investigating
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ubuntu user since 2006/12/18
The wiki has instructions for this, complete with a variety of options, warnings and links to the forum discussions.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FirefoxNewVersion
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I tried this way and had trouble. The only thing that would happen was that a “Starting Firefox” button appeared on my bottom panel, and then after a time it would disappear I had to delete /opt/firebird and repair the link in /usr/local/bin in order to revert back to what came default with 6.10 in /usr/lib/bin.
I also tried your instructions with installing Sunbird and was having similar problems. I’m not sure what’s going on. I’m a Linux noob and am just trying to learn.