Rob Lindauer wrote:
The Seamonkey install instructions I've been using (successfully) for a
year or two have me expand the Seamonkey tar/bz2 file into a
subdirectory under home, and manually add an entry in my Gnome/Kde menu,
as opposed to installing via Synaptic/Apt. The rationale as I recall is
that I as nonprivileged user can thereafter add extensions, and no have
to run as root when doing so.
With SeaMonkey versions before 2.0 there were extensions that needed to
be installed into the application directory so you needed access to that
directory, which usually meant you needed to be root. Starting with
version 2.0 SeaMonkey uses the same add-on back-end as recent versions
of Firefox which means that you can install all kinds of extensions into
your user profile which does not require special privileges.
Does such thinking still hold, or should I
be using Synaptic to do the installs?
It depends. There are basically three kinds of setups:
1. Global install using packages provided by your Linux distribution (in
your case Ubuntu)
2. Manual global install (as root, e.g. under /opt or /usr/local)
3. Manual local install (as your user, e.g. in your home directory)
Option 1 is the way to go if you have multiple (system) users and/or
want to let your distribution manage the software installed on your
machine. The advantage is that it'll probably just work out-of-the-box,
install all required dependencies and that your distribution will take
care of delivering updates to you. The latter can also be a downside,
though: depending on your distribution, updates might not be offered too
often or not in a timely fashion.
Option 2 is best if you have a multi-user install like above but want
more control or go with what is provided by the SeaMonkey team. With
this setup you'll have to take care of installing any dependencies and
updates yourself, as root.
Option 3 is recommended for single-user installations because you can
let SeaMonkey update itself directly whenever an update is available (or
at any later point in time, whenever you want).
HTH
Jens
--
Jens Hatlak <http://jens.hatlak.de/>
SeaMonkey Trunk Tracker <http://smtt.blogspot.com/>
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