I don't understand why this thread has turned into an attack on a users choice. The OP asked if there was a way to obtain the lastest firefox via the repos in Mageia. The answer is 'no'. The OP decides to change to another distro that gives him that functionality and is berated. This is why there are so many flavours of GNU/Linux out there. Some provide functionality that others don't. Some provide a convenience that others don't. Some provide the latest stable releases of software that others don't, and the list goes on. For the OP, convenience, ease of use and current versions of software available appear to be a major factor in his choice of what to run. He has every right to jump to any distro that fulfils his need. I don't see why he should be attacked for that.

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First off I didn't realize that Tim was the OP. Sorry Tim.

My grip is with when someone try's multiple Linux distros and then settles on one. Ask a question
and someone answers try this or that distro. Thats exactly what happened to me.

I tried Mint, Ubuntu, PcLinuxOs (My second favorite and a fork of Mandriva or Mageia), Mandriva, SUSE, Fedora
CentOs (Which I have to use at work) and Debian. They all much better than Windows but they all had different issues.

I asked a question a few yeas ago and was told to switch to Ubuntu. Which I already tried and didn't like the single user and other issues.

From not having all Perl modules available to not detecting all my hardware to Just didn't like their default package selection to menu layout.

Instead of answering the real question it's try their distro! Which doesn't help with the real problem and plus they may have already tried
that distro (like I had) and found other issues which were even bigger than the one in question.

By the way since PcLinuxOs is so close to Mageia and it has Firefox 22 in their repository's.

I have been running every system update and my ff is at 17.0.7

Yeah, I've used PCLOS before. Nice distro, but it has 1 fatal flaw. It uses apt as it's package manager. Which, some might say, is a great thing, apt is fantastic. And it is. So much that most of my pc's use an OS that uses apt (debian, either testing or unstable). So on my remaining few pieces of hardware, I try to avoid anything that uses apt. Right now, I'm failing, I have siduction, debian testing (debian kernel, this is what replaced Mageia) and Chakra. So only 1/3 of the machines I want to avoid Debian on are managing to do so.

The only thing I didn't like about apt was when I would try to instal multiple packages and if it couldn't find one of them it wouldn't install any of them.
I have a file with all the kids games and all on 1 line. urpmi from Mandrake and then Mandriva and now Mageia had no problem install what it could find. With apt I had to break each package into it's own line.

My only issue with apt is that it's one of the SLOWEST package managers. But, the repositories IMO make up for it, because you can find pretty much ANYTHING packaged for Debian.

I have rebuilt Firefox 23 from cauldron for Mageia 3.
Please send a private message if you want to test it.

Unless it's available in a repository so that it continues to autoupdate when I do a urpmi --auto-updates, then there's no reason to use it. This is the whole thing I want. I want to be able to use standard Mageia, but have a repository so that when I update, Firefox AUTOMATICALLY updates to a current version instead of ESR.

I notice that the alpha for Mageia 4 includes FF 23. I hope that means they're getting away from ESR.

Alpha releases are based on cauldron, which usually has the latest version of Firefox. So far as I know there is no plan to depart from using the ESR versions for stable releases. When Mageia 4 is officially released it will probably have the latest ESR version (likely to be 24).

Jim

The futur ESR is Firefox 24, so I think the inclusion of FF 23 in the alpha1 is to prepare the integration of FF24.

However, as already said, I backported Firefox 23 to Mga3, and I understand the 2 points of view (ESR vs last FF).

A way to resolve that would be to use backports from Cauldron to last stable.
I asked for a backport process since Mga1, and even if the repository is here (empty), nothing has changed as we have Mga3 now.

So the only way to go is 3rd-party repositories.
I made mine here : http://ofaurax.free.fr/repo/mga3/

$ sudo urpmi.addmedia 'ofaurax repo' http://ofaurax.free.fr/repo/mga3/

There is no warranty, I'm not even sure if I will maintain it for long.
The rpms are suffixed with .ofa3 so that you can easily the rpms that come from me with : $ rpm -qa | grep ofa3

For now there are firefox (old in stable) and gajim (crash in stable !!!)

Confirmed, the next ESR edition will be FF 24. But I don't see why the Alpha would need to maintain a current Firefox until its release. If they were going to stick with ESR, wouldn't they just maintain FF 17 in the Alpha?

Just wondering

Perhaps all the work done to integrate FF23 will help integrate FF24.

Its always possible to manually install Firefox by downloading it from www.mozilla.org and then just unpack it and run it from the /home/user/folder folder.

That way you can always have the newest version, for any distro

Already been mentioned. That doesn't auto-update via the package manager. If I wanted to do full manual updates, I'd still run Windows.