Keeping up with Firefox
 

Hello, everyone.

I start playing with Slackware and I am amazed about its endless possibilities. :Pengy:

There is a security advisory for Firefox and 4.0.1 must be installed.
Do I need to compile my own FF 4.0.1 build?

Or, instead of inventing the wheel, could Slackware's Firefox 4.0.1 package be pulled from somewhere?

Sorry, if my question sounds naive, just trying to get to the point and catch up with security issues.

Thanks in advance.


M.

Just comment out the appropriate mirror in /etc/slackpkg/mirrors. Then as root do "slackpkg update" and "slackpkg upgrade-all". This will provide you with all the security updates

Wow, I was getting a nuke to blow the open door.
 

Thanks!
I previously got some obsolete info about Slackware and naturally, no repositories.

Everything is fine now.

Thanks again!

It is quite rare, but, on occasion new packages are introduced to the stable branch of Slackware. I generally run these commands when updating my Slackware boxes.

# slackpkg update

# slackpkg install-new

# slackpkg upgrade-all

This is a good guide on how to use slackpkg: slackpkg

Thanks, hitest!
:hattip:

As much as you should definitely be updating security patches with the details hitest gives, I personally allow Firefox and Thunderbird to update themselves. This not only keeps me up to date with patches faster than Pat can package them, but it also allows me to stay with my own language build (en_gb) rather than the default shipped en_us.

The only change you need to make is to give your user account write privileges to the firefox install directory e.g. /usr/lib{,64}/firefox-4.{0,1} and then the Firefox's own "Help -> Check for Updates" fuinctionality will work fine.

If you do this then you ought to blacklist firefox (and thunderbird) from slackpkg updates so you don't overwrite it with Pat's patches.

You guys are just great!

Thanks again.

This is what I had just come to the forum to ask. Firefox has been bugging me for a week to update, but I thought I would have to download the new FF 4.0.1 binary, but I went into the 'About Firefox' tab 'check for updates', and it updated to 4.0.1, and everything seems ok.

I was going to say the same, since FF and TB are not modified in any way by slackware their built in auto update works fine.

Except Mozilla doesn't produce 64-bit versions.

Cheers.

Which means that Firefox itself has write access to its own binaries. Which means scripts on web pages have write access to the Firefox binaries. I honestly wonder, how are you not pwned?

I'm not sure that there are so many exploits out there targeting to modify the Firefox binary itself. Still, that's a valid point. One can try running Firefox as root and doing the update that way (of course, you should use the root account only for that purpose, not for daily browsing use).

Take it up with Mozilla. Any user on any system allowed to use the update functionality must by implication have write access to the firefox install directory.

The whole concept of applications updating themselves. I don't recall ever seeing that before Windows (and I've been computing since about 1982).

The Unix model is that regular users (and hence applications they invoke) do not have write access to files which affect the the system globally.

The Linux model of software updating is for root to compile from source, or else for root to invoke the package manager which updates binaries on her behalf.

Do we really want to adopt the Windows way of maintaining our systems?

I don't want to criticize any Linux administrator's methods. Rather I want to understand what other administrators do, and thus learn better methods for my own purposes. As a Kubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron administrator, I too am faced with the Firefox update problem.

Also, I don't want to drag the thread off topic, especially since it is marked solved. It just seems to me that OP stated his desire for updating was based on security interest. Thus I do believe these questions are relevant to the topic.

They started releasing pre-compiled 64-bit versions with the 4.x series.

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/re...-x86_64/en-US/

Pat V. used to re-package the 32-bit pre-compiled version as a Slackware package and build from source the 64-bit version. However, in 13.37, he's started building both from source.