How do I upgrade Firefox?
 

I'm running Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 3 (Taroon Update 4).

I have Firefox 2.0.0.20 installed, and I want to upgrade to Firefox 3.5.3. So I downloaded the firefox-3.5.3.tar.bz2 and opened it with the file-roller and extracted it to /tmp.

In the /tmp/firefox directory, I tried running some of the executable files in there, but I'm getting errors:

[root@hhlinux firefox]# ./firefox
./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libpangocairo-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
[root@hhlinux firefox]# ./updater
./updater: error while loading shared libraries: libasound.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

As a general rule, if you want recent version of things, I would not be using RHEL---especially one that is so far out of date.

I've never seen those particular error messages, but they are self-explanatory----i.e. you'll need to install them. (Google will find them) I would first install a more modern distro, however. YMMV

Is there any way for me to update this distro, without wiping the machine clean? There is some software on here that is set up for work, so I'd rather not have to wipe it.

on RHEL 3 no

back up your data and buy a subscription for RHEL 5.4
or install CentOS 5.3 ( centos 5.4 will be out soon )

sllinux,

Just a reminder, be careful with Firefox 3.5 there are many things to consider upgrading into it, a lot of works, dependency requirement, and risk of data. Older linux versions should be contented with v. 3.04 or below. I remain at v.3.04 until now.

Hope it helps.

use your package manager to keep the updates, or do it manually with package manager.
no need to keep track of everything.

You have a wicked problem. If you upgrade some of your other libraries as you need to do, it may cause problems with other running software. It would appear you are running a rather old version of firefox, so you are probably running older software with other things. If you download new libraries, you may need to keep the old ones too.

it is doable but NOT EASY

To put it a different way .It will be easer to upgrade RH to rhel5.4 than get ANY NEW software to run on RHEL3