devhen.wordpress.com

HOWTO: Install Firefox 2.0 on Fedora Core 6 December 18, 2006

UPDATED: Mar-21-2007

Due to the popularity of this post I’ve decided to include instructions for all three of the most popular methods for installing Firefox 2 on Fedora Core 6. Read through the three options to decide which works best for you.

Option 1: Via yum with the ‘development’ repo

This command will allow you to upgrade to Firefox 2 via the Fedora Development repo. This is the most commonly recommended option.

Instructions (as root):

# yum --enablerepo=development update firefox

Pros: Uses “official” Fedora packages

Cons: Doesn’t include the (optional) bonuses of option 2

Option 2: Via yum with the ‘remi’ repo

Remi Collet, an “official” Fedora developer, has made available a repo of packages that provides Firefox 2. The repo updates Firefox and those packages that depend on it and also contains a few bonuses such as an updated XChat package (version 2.8).

Instructions (as root):

# rpm -Uvh http://remi.collet.free.fr/rpms/fc6.i386/remi-release-1-2.fc6.remi.noarch.rpm

Now make sure that in your /etc/yum.repos.d/remi.repo file you’ve got enabled=1 and then:

# yum update

Pros: All required packages as well as some extra goodies; new versions of Firefox are automatically installed with yum update

Cons: Not “official” Fedora packages–bugs should not be submitted to the Fedora project

Option 3: Via firefox-2.*.tar.gz from Mozilla.com

I always recommend using RPM packages on Fedora, if possible. However, if you’d like to install Firefox 2 using firefox-2.*.tar.gz from Mozilla.com use this option. One benefit of this option is that Firefox 1.5 remains on your machine so have a choice as to which version to run.

Instructions (as root):

Download firefox-*.tar.gz from Mozilla.com.

# mv firefox-2.*.tar.gz /usr/local/
# cd /usr/local
# tar xvfz firefox-2.*.tar.gz
# mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox15
# ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

Firefox 2 will now be your default browser. To run version 1.5 use the command firefox15. I don’t recommend running both versions concurrently because they will be using the same profile which might cause problems.

Pros: Firefox 2 co-exists with version 1.5

Cons: Installation isn’t as straightforward; must be repeated for future releases of Firefox 2