LinuxQuestions.org - [SOLVED] Installing from source

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Installing from source

Hey there

Well, on the other day i download a .tar file with firefox, to compile and install it, since the version i was using(and still am) is quite old(running Debian on a virtual machine btw).

Thing is, after i extracted the .tar file, i saw no install, nor readman, nor .configure files...there is a firefox-bin there that allows me to use the updated version but since the package isn't installed(or i think it's not) i can never use the updated firefox when i type firefox on the terminal.

What should i do?

Thanks in advance.

Firefox doesn't come as source when you download the tar file. It's precompiled. The best way to go about integrating it with your OS is to do the following as root (if you only have sudo commands then you can log into root by "sudo su -").

Code:

mv firefox-version.tar /opt/

cd /opt

tar -xvf firefox-version.tar

rm /usr/bin/firefox

ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/

That's it.

------- Other recommendations -------

After doing all of that I usually move the /opt/firefox folder to it's version and then link it to /opt/firefox like so...

Code:

cd /opt

mv firefox firefox-10.0.0

ln -s firefox-10.0.0 firefox

This way when you update you can simply remove the symlink, untar the new version of firefox to /opt, mv /opt/firefox to it's updated version, then resymlink firefox again to /opt/firefox. This way you can have multiple versions of firefox installed and the only symlink which needs to be changed is /opt/firefox.

SAM

Thanks a lot, really helped me.