[GRLUG] Firefox 2.0 Bon Echo

[Raymond McLaughlin]

Nathan Drier wrote:
> What OS are you running?

SuSE Linux 10.0

> It was probably user error on my part,  but
> after I installed 2.0,  I couldn't run 1.5.

Right. In situations like this I'm disinclined to trust an installer program.

> Did you just dump in into
> /opt and make another shortcut to run-firefox.py or whatever it was?

No.
Short answer:
Download firefox-2.0rc1.tar.gz from firefox.org.

Extract the folder 'firefox' from the tar.gz.
    $ tar -vxzf firefox-2.0rc1.tar.gx
Move the 'firefox' folder to /opt/firefox2.
    # mv firefox /opt/firefox2
Execute /opt/firefox2/firefox from a command line:
    $ /opt/firefox2/firefox
or create a desktop icon to this command. Install plugins seperately.

Longer answer:
SuSE installs firefox into /opt/MozillaFirefox. This is, IMHO a poor
implementation of the filesystem hierarchy standard
<http://www.pathname.com/fhs/> but I leave it alone so long as SuSe's firefox
version is current. In the default SuSE install there is a symlink:
    /usr/bin/firefox ---> /opt/MozillaFirefox/bin/firefox
which is on all user's $PATH, and so will execute any time any user issues the
command 'firefox'.

Once SuSE's version of firefox gets out of date (No distro can keep up with
these releases in "real time", and I don't care to wait) I download the latest
tar.gz from ftp.mozilla.org. When I extract the tar file I get a directory
'firefox'. As root (of course) I create a more fhs compliant directory:
    mkdir /opt/mozilla.org
called, after this, $MOZDIR

then move the newly unzipped directory to $MOZDIR/, appending the version number
to the directory name e.g:
    mv ~/firefox $MOZDIR/firefox-1.5.0.7
create a working directory symlink:
    ln -s $MOZDIR/firefox-1.5.0.7 $MOZDIR/firefox
then I change the system wide symlink:
    rm /usr/bin/firefox
    ln -s $MOZDIR/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

The only adjustment needed after this is to provide for the plugins. More on
plugins later. This arrangement provides an easy, and easily reversible way to
try a new version of firefox. Before 1.5.0.7 $MOZDIR/firefox was (on my system)
a symlink to $MOZDIR/firefox-1.5.0.6. Switching back to a previous version is as
easy as reverting the $MOZDIR/firefox symlink.

I keep the plugins for firefox in a directory which I originally create and
populate like this:
    cp -a /opt/MozillaPlugins/lib/plugins  $MOZDIR/plugins
That original path is, of course, SuSE specific, but note the archive (-a) flag
on the copy command. This makes it recursive (directory and contents) /and/
preservers symbolic links contained in the directory. Next, each directory
($MOZDIR/firefox-*) contains its own plugins directory, which I replace with a
symlink to the common one in $MOZDIR. One gotch here: when you  first unpack
your firefor folder it contains a pluginfold containing the default plugin:
libnullplugin.so. You don't want to over write a new version of this file with
an old version. Vis-versa isn't so bad, but I've seen old versions of this
plugin cause problems.

<Deep breath>
That's how I usually install a new version of Firefox.
In the case of a beta upgrade like this, I did it a little differently. I copied
the firefox directory to $MOZDIR/firefox-2.0rc1, and did the plugin symlink
thing as usual, but then I created a new symlink to the folder:
    ln -s $MOZDIR/firefox-2.0rc1 $MOZDIR/firefox2
and created a new system wide link:
    ln -s $MOZDIR/firefox2/firefox /usr/bin/firefox2
This scheme requires one more symlink to work right:
    ln -s $MOZDIR/firefox2/firefox-bin $MOZDIR/firefox2/firefox2-bin
Look at the file $MOZDIR/firefox2/run-mozilla.sh to see why.

This way, any user can run firefox1.x with the command 'firefox' and
firefox2.0rc1 with the command firefox2 .

> Ill have to play around with getting them to run together when I get
> home tonight.  I run Debian Sid.
> 
> ~Nate