firefox 1.5.0.1 - the firefox symlink opens 1.5 instead
 

I have firefox 1.5 installed from the fedora RPM. in the 'about' page, it says:

Firefox 1.5
(blah blah blah...)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051202 Fedora/1.5-0.fc4 Firefox/1.5

Well, I recently wanted 1.5.0.1, so instead of downloading the tar.gz from a website, I compiled my own. Everything went fine, I made the config file, built it, ran the installer option which creates a dist archive, in my case firefox-1.5.0.1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.gz. Here's the problem. After extracting the files from the archive, I get a folder called firefox. This is typical with every firefox archive I've ever extracted. It always comes with a firefox symlink. When I run that, it opens up an occurance of firefox.... 1.5!!!! NOT 1.5.0.1! How do I get the system to run my newly compiled firefox? Are there things I should install?

thnx guys (and gals)

-eric

well, you could always try removing the old version (like, removing the package) and then retrying the new one, but I can't really think of any reason why it would see the other one if it's being run inside the new firefox directory etc etc, the two should be entirely separate. Best thing though, is to just let Firefox 1.5+ update itself. It now does regular auto-updates without you even having to lift a finger :)

I just upgraded to FF 1.5.0.1 this morning.

I noticed with the last version, 1.5, that they aren't using an installer any longer. You just get a tarball. So you just extract the tarball into a directory and you are done.

I renamed my old firefox directory to firefox-1.5, then I extracted the new version.

tar -xvpf firefox-1.5.0.1.tar

It isn't going to create a symbolic link anywhere for you. If you want to put one in /bin then you'll have to do that by hand.

cd /bin
ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox firefox

That is if you put firefox in /opt.

Once I extracted the tarball I then copied the flash files from the old firefox-1.5/plugins directory into the new firefox/plugins directory.

Check permissions and you're done. Oh. I suppose you could delete the old firefox-1.5. I suppose I'll do that once I'm satisfied with the new version.

I had problems with the my desktop and kicker icons too, so after searching on Google for ".desktop files" and reading about them, I edited the firefox.desktop file to point to the new firefox install location.

Edit: This link has all the dirt: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Stan...2dentry_2dspec