Installing Firefox 2 on Fedora Core 6

Introduction.

Fedora Core 6 comes with Firefox 1.5 installed so if you wish to install Firefox 2 you will need to do this yourself. Firstly I will be installing Firefox 2 by the side of Firefox 1.5 (NOT removing it) this is because various libraries provided by Firefox are required for other applications, most notably yelp, the Gnome help browser.

If you remove the Firefox rpm then these applications will also be removed, probably not what you want. The list of dependencies on my system looks like this:

$ rpm -e firefox-1.5.0.9-1.fc6
error: Failed dependencies:
        libgtkembedmoz.so is needed by (installed) devhelp-0.12-9.fc6.i386
        libgtkembedmoz.so is needed by (installed) yelp-2.16.0-11.fc6.i386
        libxpcom.so is needed by (installed) devhelp-0.12-9.fc6.i386
        libxpcom.so is needed by (installed) yelp-2.16.0-11.fc6.i386
        libxpcom_core.so is needed by (installed) yelp-2.16.0-11.fc6.i386
        gecko-libs = 1.8.0.9 is needed by (installed) devhelp-0.12-9.fc6.i386
        gecko-libs = 1.8.0.9 is needed by (installed) yelp-2.16.0-11.fc6.i386

Download and install.

First download the latest Firefox 2 from mozilla.com, this is a tar.gz compressed file. Save the file wherever you wish, probably your home directory is easiest.

Open a terminal and cd into the location of the saved file then untar the file into your /usr/lib/ directory, you will need to be root to do this.

$ tar -xzvf firefox-2.0.tar.gz -C /usr/lib/

This will create a new folder called firefox under your /usr/lib/ directory containing the uncompressed files.

Note that this will not overwrite your current install as that is located in a directory called /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.x.x depending on the version installed. Also this new version will use the same profile as your currently installed Firefox version.

Create the symbolic link to Firefox 2.

If you wish to run Firefox 2 from this location just run /usr/lib/firefox/firefox but it's easier if you replace the symbolic link pointing to Firefox 1.5 so you can run Firefox by just typing firefox in a terminal.

This will also have the effect that your Gnome menus will also run Firefox 2 instead of Firefox 1.5.

To do this do the following as root:

$ cd /usr/bin/
rm firefox 
rm: remove symbolic link `firefox'? y
ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/firefox

If you do not already have Firefox installed you will need to install the compatibility standard C++ library from GCC 3.3.4. To do this simply use yum to install the package.

$ yum install compat-libstdc++-33

Now running the command 'firefox' in a terminal open Firefox 2 and not Firefox 1.5.

If you update your Firefox 1.5 using yum.

Doing this will overwrite the symbolic link located in /usr/bin/ to point to the /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.x.x/firefox that you have just installed. For this reason you will need to do the above steps again so the link once again points to your Firefox 2 install location.

Updating Firefox 2.

To update your Firefox 2 installation only takes a minute. If like me the 'Check for updates' route in Firefox itself never works (in my case it tries to update but just loops indefinitely) it's easier just to delete your old installation and download the program again.

Assuming you've downloaded the tar.gz package to your home directory just do the following as root.

$ rm -rf /usr/lib/firefox
tar -xzvf firefox-2.0.0.1.tar.gz -C /usr/lib/

This first deletes your /usr/lib/firefox directory and all it's contents and then just recreates the directory with the new install. Doing this has no effect of your profile information such as passwords and cookies as they are located in your $HOME/.mozilla directory.

You do not need to recreate the symbolic link in /usr/bin/ since this still points to /usr/lib/firefox/firefox which is the correct location.