Firefox suggestion

clifford227 · 07-29-2010, 05:50 AM

Considering Firefox has had 2 important updates within the space of a week, would Slackware users be better advised to create their own 3.6.x packages from the slack build? maybe a sticky in the forum so that we could be aware of new firefox version updates?

brianL · 07-29-2010, 06:09 AM

I'm lazy, I always wait for the "official" updates.

hughetorrance · 07-29-2010, 06:16 AM

brianL me too we are after all Slackers... !

onebuck · 07-29-2010, 06:18 AM

Hi,

Look at the Slackware-current ChangeLog for x86 (32-bit) Architecture or x86_64 Architecture along with other arch.

You could subscribe to 'slackware-security' Mailing Lists.

GazL · 07-29-2010, 06:58 AM

Pat was very quick off the mark with these firefox updates this time. In fact, seeing 3.6.8 in the changelog was the first I knew there'd been another release after 3.6.7. Having said that, on odd occasions he's not been so quick and I've ended up building my own package from the slackbuild in the slackware64 sources directory (usually only to have Pat do an official one a day or two after).

If you're paranoid about browser security then you can always build your own, but there's not really much need to as an official Slackware package won't be far off.

I've been playing with openSUSE 11.3 in a spare partition and they've still got 3.6.6 in their official repos. Any thoughts I had about moving over to SUSE are certainly in decline now. I really expected a distro with the backing and resources openSUSE has to take security more seriously than this. 9 days is a little bit too long IMO to lag behind a new browser version (especially one that fixes 8 CRITICAL holes).

There's always Opera of course.

update: Just to be fair, 3.6.8 finally hit the openSUSE repos this afternoon. I still think it took them too long though.

hitest · 07-29-2010, 08:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by brianL

I'm lazy, I always wait for the "official" updates.

Yeah, me too. I read the changelogs on a daily basis and the security update mails from Slackware as they arrive.

Lufbery · 07-29-2010, 08:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hitest

I read the changelogs on a daily basis and the security update mails from Slackware as they arrive.

Uh yeah, me too. I really need a more exciting life.

P.S. I'll add that I don't typically read the changelogs on weekends. There, I feel better.

qweasd · 07-30-2010, 01:28 AM

Firefox is very easy to build in Slackware. I am using 13.1 64 and the dependencies are met out of the box (you did the full install, right?), one only needs to get the latest:

Code:

wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/lates/source/firefox-*.source.tar.bz2

unpack, create .mozconfig (note the dot) at the top of the source tree:

Code:

. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/objdir-ff-release
mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS="-j4"
ac_add_options --enable-optimize
export CFLAGS="-gstabs+"
export CXXFLAGS="-gstabs+"

and finally

Code:

make -f client.mk

It builds very fast on a multicore, and it works without install, so you are done!

vst · 07-30-2010, 06:39 AM

There's another way of handling firefox updates.

You just do

Code:

chown -R youruser:users /usr/lib/firefox*

After that, firefox fetches and installs it's updates automatically, like it does in another offtopic OS.
As a bonus, if you create a localized firefox package (using Pat's slackbuild, but substituting the english source for another one), firefox will be updating the localized one.

Have fun! :-)