You left a lot of information out such as what account you are using when you try to install Firefox, where the tar archive is located, and your current working directory when you issue the tar command. I can say one thing that is wrong with your tar command. You really need to include the p parameter so that the permissions on the files in the archive are applied when the files are extracted. Otherwise your files will be given the permissions of your current account based on its umask settings.
Let's say that the firefox-1.5.0.7.tar.gz is located in /tmp. The first thing that you want to do is log on as root. Then, since SuSE keeps Firefox in the /opt directory you need to change your current working directory to /opt. Then you should rename the existing firefox directory. Then extract the archive. Here are the commands after you log on as root.
Code:
cd /opt
mv firefox firefox-1.0.5.6
tar -xzvpf /tmp/firefox-1.5.0.7.tar.gz
Then if you had Macromedia Flash Player plugin installed in the old version of Firefox you can copy those files to the new version.
Code:
cp firefox-1.5.0.7/plugins/*flash* firefox/plugins
chmod a+rx firefox/plugins/*
You should see two files for Flash Player, firefox/plugins/flashplayer.xpt and firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so.
Then you need to find out if there is a symbolic link in the normal PATH that points to firefox. You do this with the which command as follows.
If it comes back with a path like /bin/firefox then you have to see if it is correct.
Code:
ls -l /bin/firefox
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Oct 2 13:18 /bin/firefox -> /opt/firefox/firefox
If it looks like that then you should be okay. If it doesn't then you have to delete the link and make it like the one that I have showed you.
Code:
cd /bin
rm firefox
ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox firefox
If you don't have a link in /bin to firefox then just do the cd /bin and the ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox firefox.
Then try it out. You should use a normal user account for this. I try to avoid using the network from the root account. You should substitute an account on your system for "user01" in the example below.
Code:
cd
su - user01
DISPLAY=":0.0"
firefox
And see what happens. If you get an error saying that Firefox cannot open the display then just log off and log on as a normal user. Then enter the firefox command from a command line in a terminal window.
Let us know if you succeeded or not.
Firefox
