Firefox Upgrade
 

Hey everyone!

I am new to Linux and am using RHEL5. I want to upgrade firefox, which by default is Firefox 1.5.0.9. I d.led FF2, but cannot install it. It was a tar+gzipped file, which I unzipped and untarred to a folder. Where do I go next?

IF someone could please point me in the right direction and post up steps to install a particular rpm, I would be grateful! :)

man rpm helps, but not when you don't know what "metadata" and "repositories" mean.

Well, you can go about this one of two ways. You can take the source code that you downloaded and configure/compile it, or you can use RPM to download another version with binaries already compiled.

Easiest is just to download an RPM from firefox and use the graphical tool RH comes with to install the package. More info on that can be found either in the man pages or in Red Hat's forums.

The other way is very easily accomplished since its a very standard method of package installation. Keyword here is standard. This will work for about 90% of packages you can download in source form today. Untar/unzip and change directories into your untarred firefox directory, and issue the following three commands (of course, AFTER you have read the included README and INSTALL text files in the directory):

./configure (or sometimes ./autogen.sh, read the files!)

Then:

make

And finally, as super user:

make install

This will 1) configure the source code and automatically create the necessary makefiles for said package, 2) compile the contained code files into libraries and binary executables, and 3) place everything in the right spot so that you can then type ./exe (where exe is the name of the executable file just created) and BOOM! you have a program. You can then soft link that program to wherever you'd like and you can easily access it.

Anything else you could ever possibly want to know about this process is in the man pages (make), linux books, and everywhere on line. Try google.

Happy Hunting :-)