cannot access internet and cannot download firefox 3.6.12

OscarBunson · 12-15-2010, 08:45 AM

Totally new to linux so any help appreciated. I have an acer aspire one notebook (I gather firefox 2 is interwoven on the system?!?!). Anyway, keep pressing firefox icon and it churns over put nothing happens. I found the following advice on another site: (Sorry this is so long, but I wanted to give you as much info for you to help me)

Press Alt+F2 to show the Run program window. Check Run in terminal, leave the input field blank, and click Run to open a terminal. If you're not familiar with the Linux command line just follow the instructions step by step. The easiest way is to simply paste the commands into the terminal with Ctrl+Shift+V. Most of them will only give feedback if an error occurs.

The first command uses wget to download Firefox 3.6 from an official mirror. You can edit the lang variable at the end, in this case en-US, if you'd like another language. All available languages are listed here, just hover over the download link to get the language code from the status bar.

wget -N "http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.6&os=linux〈=en-US"

The next step extracts the just downloaded file and modifies a link to point to it. In a few cases a connection refused error message may be triggered by sudo, which is not an error but a bug in sudo and can be safely ignored.

sudo tar -jxf firefox-3.6.tar.bz2 --directory /opt
sudo chown user -R /opt/firefox
sudo ln -fs /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

The next step links all plug-ins (not to be confused with extensions) to it.

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/* /opt/firefox/plugins

Launch the profile manager using the command below. Create a new profile, name it anything you like and select it. If you want to keep your bookmarks export them via the bookmark manager first. You can then delete the old default profile.

firefox -profilemanager -no-remote

As a bonus you can also change the icon to the official Firefox icon.

sudo sed '/Icon/ s/acs_//' -i /usr/share/applications/linpus-web.desktop

Finally reboot the AA1 to make the desktop aware of the new icon and browser location.

However when I try the above I get the following responses at each point:

--14:19:11-- http://download.mozilla.org/?product...E2%8C%A9=en-US
=> `index.html?product=firefox-3.6&os=linux�%8C�=en-US'
Resolving download.mozilla.org... 63.245.209.58, 63.245.209.58
Connecting to download.mozilla.org|63.245.209.58|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 404 Not Found
14:19:11 ERROR 404: Not Found.

2nd response: [user@localhost ~]$ sudo tar -jxf firefox-3.6.tar.bz2 --directory /opt
tar: firefox-3.6.tar.bz2: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
[user@localhost ~]$ sudo chown user -R /opt/firefox
chown: cannot access `/opt/firefox': No such file or directory
[user@localhost ~]$ sudo ln -fs /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

3rd response: [user@localhost ~]$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/* /opt/firefox/plugins
ln: target `/opt/firefox/plugins' is not a directory
[user@localhost ~]$

4th response: [user@localhost ~]$ firefox -profilemanager -no-remote
bash: firefox: command not found

I do now have a new icon on the desktop! but still no internet. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

BryanM77 · 12-15-2010, 09:03 AM

You will find it easier to get help if you say which Linux variety you are using. The major ones are Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE. You do not need to use the command line to install Firefox on these distributions because they all have package managers which do the job for you.
BryanM77

ntubski · 12-15-2010, 09:04 AM

You have a typo in the url of wget command, it should be

Code:

wget -N "http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.6&os=linux&lang=en-US"

OscarBunson · 12-15-2010, 11:28 AM

Oh my goodness, thank you ntubski - its works. And I was even then able to install 3.6.13 because 3.6.12 is already out of date! The firefox page did however say that I should now download Adobe flash player. I clicked on the drop down menu and selected .tar.gz (I have no idea what this means at all but it was the same ending as the stuff for firefox). So I've now got the flash thing in my 'downloads' but I don't know what to do next through the 'run programme window'.

Any further help would be appreciated.

ntubski · 12-23-2010, 04:07 PM

tar.gz is sort of like a zip file, to extract the contents you can run

Code:

tar -vxzf file.tar.gz

There should be a README or INSTALL file with instructions inside.