How to Upgrade Pre-install Firefox in RHEL
 

Hello!
What is the basic method for upgrading the pre-installed Firefox v1.0 in RHEL4. And in case of any software that already exists on ur system and you have to upgrade it with the new one?

RHEL4 uses "up2date" for doing updates of software packages. This connects to RHN (The RedHat Network) but you have to have a subscription to use it. (RHEL = commercial).

If you don't want to buy a subscription you should use Fedora Core 4 (FC4) or later as this is the non-commercial equivalent. FC uses yum rather than up2date.

For more information on the commands:
man up2date
-OR-
man yum

You specifically asked about Firefox. You can get the latest from www.mozilla.org's web site.

Once you have the download you can use the instructions in the link that follows to do the upgrade:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=554660

I wouldn't recommend Fedora to replace RHEL as there is free alternative of RHEL that is called CentOS. I think CentOS binaries should work straight in RHEL.

CentOS is basicly RHEL without the Red Hat logos or support.

As is Fedora. Fedora being the one that becomes RedHat. Typically the same version of Fedora and RedHat - the Fedora will have more than the RedHat version because the commercial version doesn't take the latest and greatest of everything.

Can i upgrade RHEL 4 to Fedora 4 or 5?

Fedora is also the testing plateform of mature RHEL so Fedora could be same as RHEL but in case of CentOS .. Is CentOS equally reliable as Fedora so we can chose one of them.

You could go from RHEL4 to Fedora 4 or 5 but the question would be why you would want to do so. If you are using RHEL presumably you do so because you want support from RedHat. RHEL is supported commercially by RedHat but Fedora is not. Also some commercial software like Oracle is "supported" on RHEL but not on Fedora. That doesn't mean it won't work on Fedora but rather that it is not considered a "supported" platform - meaning Oracle might help you with any issues you have up to a point but they always can bow out by saying "sorry, that's not a supported platform".

Here we run a Production database on RHEL 3. However, when we wanted to setup an Oracle testbed we put it on FC 6. It works just fine there but if we were going to move into Production and wanted to be sure of vendor support we'd use RHEL 5 (or 6 if it were out by then).

If you're not getting support from commercial vendors like RedHat or Oracle then there is no need to be on RHEL at all and some good reasons not to be on it and upgrading to FC would be the way to go.

By the way so far as "upgrading". Per the Fedora site they recommend doing a save of user data then reinstalling from scratch rather than trying a yum upgrade to a later version. They do provide a link on how to do the yum upgrade but notes drawbacks to doing it that way.

Hello! jlightner
I check the link u gave above but i want to ask that in after extracting the new firefox dir into /usr/lib/ the article told us to creat a symbolic link of our recently exrected firefox directory let's suppose it is
/usr/lib/firefox-2 (the new one)
/usr/lib/firefox (the old one v.1)

and we have a binar file in /usr/bin

/usr/bin/firefox

now the artcile teach us to rename the binary file into

/usr/bin/firefox-old

and creat a new symbolic link of /usr/lib/firefix-2/firefox

/usr/bin/firefox (Our new symbolic link)
/usr/bin/firefox-old (the binary file of old firefox v.1)

I want to ask what if i want to creat a binary file not symbolic link for new firefox?

what is the difference between creating a symbolic link OR binary for launching an application?

:( and the sab news is that i have tried same as described in the post link u gave me but i didn't work... it gave me the following error when i try to launch firefix after creating the symbolic link of
/usr/lib/firefox-2/firefox
into
/usr/bin
with the name of
/usr/bin/firefox

when i try to lauch it with typing firefox it gave the following error...
[root@mustafa bin]# firefox
/usr/lib/firefox-2.0/firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So, what to do now.... i can't understand the libstdc++.so.5 error n how to resolve it! help plz

Answers to your first question:
If you want to have a binary in /usr/bin rather than a symbolic link do:
cp -p /usr/lib/firefox-2/firefox /usr/bin/firefox
The "cp -p" will copy it rather than soft link it as "ln -s" does.
The reason for the symbolic link is it saves space - you don't have two copies of the binary. You could also use ln WITHOUT the -s to make it a hard link - then it shares the same inode and appears to be the same binary in both places. It really doesn't matter which way you do it - I prefer my way because if I look at the binary later it reminds me where firefox is installed.

Answer to your second question/issue:
There are packages called libstdc++ that include libraries. On newer distributions you've actually moved to newer version of those libraries. You would therefore need to install compat-libstdc++ libraries which are compatibility libraries that include the libraries you need.

So IF you are on Fedora Core or RedHat you can:

To see what libstdc++ libraries and compat libraries you already have:
rpm -qa |grep libstdc++
compat-libstdc++-33-3.2.3-47.fc4
libstdc++-devel-4.0.2-8.fc4
libstdc++-4.0.0-8
libstdc++-devel-4.0.0-8
libstdc++-4.0.2-8.fc4


On my FC4 box it was compat-libstdc++-33 that had the files as seen by listing that:
rpm -ql compat-libstdc++-33
/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5
/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5.0.7

Notice that in this case the "-33" is part of the base package name rather than the version which is the -3.2.3-47.fc4. This is atypical of most Linux packages. There is also a compat-libstdc++-128 that I've installed on other FC6 systems.

On Fedora you can install the compat-libstdc++-33 by using yum:
yum install compat-libstdc++-33

For other distros you'd have to check your distro's method of getting packages (e.g. up2date for RHEL before RHEL5, apt-get for Debian/Ubunutu, YAST for Suse).