upgrading to firefox 1.5
 

I want to use apt-get to upgrade to firefox 1.5, however it doesn't seem to be in the official debain repositories yet. Is there a reason for this? i.e. is it not in there yet because it would break something or is it fine to just use a third party repository? It seems that it's a big change to 1.5 from 1.0.x incidentally, how do you upgrade a single app with apt-get? I just want to upgrade firefox.

As far as I know Debian is having some problems with firefox version 1.5 Deer park. You can install this version with apt-get install firefox. Some examples I've seen or heard of include pages not loading, freezing, not finding installed plugins and extensions not working. I know I've had all of these occur.

You can upgrade certain packages with apt-get upgrade and then the package name

Debian 3.1 'sarge' will never get Firefox 1.5 in the official repositories. It will be stuck with 1.0.4 with a lot of security patches applied. There is the choice of backports though for 'sarge'
Debian testing 'etch' will get it reasonably soon
Debian unstable 'sid' has it already (well 1.5 RC3, but that was released as the final one so effectively it is the same)


So if one is using Debian 3.1 stable ('sarge'), one currently has the following choices

• Locate a backport for it and install it. (I think backports.org was supposed to have one but the site seems to be in a bit of disarray at the moment being).
• Add apt sources for unstable and use Apt-Pinning to make packages from unstable available and install it from there. Notice that this will lead to an upgrade of FF's dependencies as well, so it will be a fairly hefty chunk of packages from unstable that will need to be installed for this approach to work
• Download Firefox 1.5 from Mozilla and extract to some directory (e.g. /opt/firefox-1.5 and set up some symlinks for smooth operation)
• Keep using Firefox 1.0.x

Firefox 1.5 is at backports.org. There are a lot of great packages that are backported now and the number is only going to increase! Also check out irc.oftc.net #debian-backports. I requested that they backport the latest and greatest version of icewm and voila, two minutes later they upped it for me!
Very nice folks!

1.5 is now in etch but its still fairly buggy. (extensions and themes etc).

I installed firefox directly from getfirefox.com. Just unpack the archive in /opt. The command to start it will be /opt/firefox/firefox. I did:so I could use the command "firefox15" to start it. You can also use your existing plugins as well:

I'm using SID and 1.5 for a while now. All seems errorless but some plugins need copying. The default dir was /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/plugins which changed to /usr/lib/firefox/plugins. To make the already installed plugins work again simply copy them to the new location.
Some extentions and themes are not ready for 1.5, wait a few days/weeks and those will be ready to.

I have similar problems, but on Fedora.
I downloaded the tar.gz (not sure if it's just an uppgrade or complete installation file). Used 'tar -xvf fire...tar.gz'. It created a folder called Firefox and seems to have expanded the zip file into that. But not sure what happens next. Any clues?

I am using Fedora core 4 which has Firefox 1.0.4 browser
in it. I want to upgrade this browser to Firefox 1.5.x
I tried the command "yum update firefox" but it is failing giving error as:
Error: failure: repodata/primary.xml.gz from extras: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.

Then I downloaded the "firefox-1.5.0.3.tar.gz" file from mozilla.org and unpacked it in the dir /usr/src
Now to start firefox i went to /usr/src/firefox but it started the old firefox version 1.0.4.
Then I tried to run the command ./firefox and it gave me following error:
./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
What should i do to upgrade my firefox?

You have some configuration issues with YUM that I'm not very good at solving. Fedora is an RPM-based distribution, so you should really try to look for an RPM file for Firefox instead. It'll install easily with one command, since all of its dependencies are already installed.
Firefox is hard to install via the plain tar file (or anything else for that matter), which is why I almost always recommend the use of an Apt-Get type management system instead or, in this case, the use of an RPM file.
I'm sure it's somewhere. It might be rather difficult to find, but Firefox is such a standard app that most any RPM repository would have it.

There are 2 files on this page (firefox 1.5 for fc4 with 36 preinstalled extensions and cairo needed)

http://remi.collet.free.fr/index.php...-1503-1fc4remi

It works
 

I successfully upgraded my firefox using the rpm suggested above.
Thanks a lot for your help.