Help I lost Firefox!!!
 

Hi,

I feel so dumb. :(

I just installed firefox through the terminal in KDE. This is the first time I have installed any programs in Linux. I was unsure of what directory to install programs too. Any suggestions about that would be much appreciated.

Anyway, I installed firefox to my /root directory. Firefox opened and I used it for a bit before closing it and now that I want to reopen it I can't find where to do so!!

This is obviously a really simple question. Will someone please help me?

What procedure did you use to install it? Did you unpack a tar.gz in /root? Or did you use a slackware .tgz? In /root no other users will be able to see it.

Also it's recommended to not run things such as internet browsers as root. The easiest way to install Firefox is to use the .tgz and, as root, run:

installpkg *firefox*.tgz

The executable will be /usr/lib/firefox-1.0.6/firefox

Also, for java and flash and anything else, the plugins will need to be installed into ~/.mozilla/plugins. Example: copy /usr/lib/jre-1.5.0_03/plugin/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so to ~/.mozilla/plugins

Try /opt/MozillaFirefox/lib/ or whereis firefox

Hi,

As root I unpacked a tar.gz in /root then cd into the installer and ./firefox-install

What directory should I have installed firefox to?

I'm a total newbie to Linux and I haven't made any users yet. I guess it is a bad idea to browse as root because of security issues???

So you are saying I should use a different file to install Firefox, one that ends in .tgz?

Thanks

There's nothing wrong with using the firefox-installer. It gives you all the installation options like a windows installer might do. The tgz is an archive of all the files that would be created using the installer. It's just easier to install and eliminates the questions.

When running the installer what path did you put as the destination? That's where the firefox files went. Oh, it doesn't create a /firefox dir of it's own. So if you put /root, the firefox binary is /root/firefox, not /root/firefox/firefox.

I always use my /opt directory for it. In the installer I put as a destination folder /opt/firefox. Any user can access it from there. /usr/local is another decent place for it.

OK, I uninstalled and reinstalled to /opt/firefox

In that folder there is a file that looks like this in the terminal: firefox*
typing this will not execute Firefox from the terminal, BUT within KDE I can click on this file and Firefox will launch.

If I make a copy of this file on my desktop it doesn't work. Also the icon for this file looks like a picture of a terminal rather than the firefox logo. I found the firefox logo in a folder in the same directory.

So I guess my question is now, how do I make shortcuts to launch Firefox from my desktop or the panel AND how do I make it have the correct icon?

I don't know about the icon questions but if you want to run it in a terminal just by typing firefox you need to add /opt/firefox to your PATH (add the line "export PATH=$PATH:/opt/firefox" to your ~/.bashrc file) or type the whole path to run it.