Hello, I am using these relocatable statically linked binary bundles for both thunderbird and firefox on CentOS 5 and RHEL 6 with no problems. In fact I've been doing it for more than a year. (I think its more like 2 years) I do use the 32 bit versions howver due to adobe flash issues. In RHEL 5 / CentOS 5 you do need to add a newer libstdc++.so.6 library to the firefox/thunderbird directory (I use libstdc++.so.6.0.10 placed in that directory from fedora 9) I've also had to add the regular oracle java to my browser instead of the openjdk. I realize this is kind of a hack.
I will probably switch to a 64 bit version of a firefox browser when adobe changes how they support 64 bit OSes. The advantage of doing this is that mozilla firefox itself tells you when a new version is availible. On the day it comes out. And you just click "update" and it magically updates itself to the latest version. As long as you have write access to where the directory is. Kind of like how "minecraft" works with updates to your ~/.minecraft directory. Or the way "Second Life" updates itself in its special directory. You can download these tarballs by going to mozilla.org and click on the "Get Firefox" button. (much like how it works for Windows or Macintosh) It will automaticaly detect you need the Linux version. This does not give you source code. To get that you have to go elsewhere. When I downloaded and tried fedora 15 I noticed they were still on firefox 4. I think its hard for the Linux distros to keep up due to firefox's rapid development pace. People might say if I want firefox 6.0.1 I should go use fedora 16 alpha or a mac / windows or something. Or even switch to chrome. But I don't want GNOME 3 or a 6 month support cycle or any mac/windows crap so I just go ahead and do things a little bit differently and I end up just fine. If your browser doesn't work for some reason one day you could always go back to the distro provided binaries until you figure out what is wrong. I'm pretty sure security issues will get patched in those. Just not any new features. I think that advice about not using source tarballs is very good for beginners but once you've been using Red Hat Linux for a while you are going to want to install some newer software to get some software you care about to work. I have tons of stuff I've installed in /usr/local and /opt and everything installed there works very well for me. I did not feel like dealing with making a spec file for software only I will ever care about. :) Cheers, Gary Gatling | ITECS Systems On Sun, 4 Sep 2011, Yury V. Zaytsev wrote: > On Sat, 2011-09-03 at 16:59 -0700, Akemi Yagi wrote: > >>>> Other than that, I am throughly confused as to your point. Maybe I >>>> am missing something. >>> >>> I guess his point was that you should build your own RPMs if you >>> desperately need latest Firefox, using binary releases from Mozilla is >>> not the best option, although they might work to a certain extent. >> >> About installing from source, this CentOS wiki explains why it must be >> done with great care (if it is indeed needed): > > FYI, he is actually using relocatable statically linked binary bundles > provided by Mozilla which can be unpacked in an arbitrary directory and > run from there, so it's a little bit different than installing from > source, although some considerations still apply. > > -- > Sincerely yours, > Yury V. Zaytsev > > > _______________________________________________ > users mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.repoforge.org/mailman/listinfo/users > _______________________________________________ users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.repoforge.org/mailman/listinfo/users
