How to: Install Mozilla Firefox 2.0 on Fedora Core 6

January 28th, 2007 · No Comments

When Fedora Core 6 (FC6) was released, it came with an earlier version of Mozilla Firefox and decided to skip version 2.0 altogether. Hence, if you’ve just gotten yourself a fresh installation of FC6, you’d probably be using Mozilla Firefox version 1.5.x instead of the latest version.

Taken from FC6 wiki:

For a variety of reasons, we are not planning to update to Firefox 2.0. We are instead focusing resources on Firefox 3.0, which will provide much more substantial benefits. We understand that some users will be willing to accept the risk of running Firefox 2.0 to gain compatibility with new extensions (e.g., Zotero and Halfnote). We have made available an experimental version of Firefox 2.0. However, we must stress that we believe the best experience for Fedora users will be to stay with Firefox 1.5 and wait for the Firefox 3.0 update.

Hence, you’d be stuck with version 1.5.x unless you update the browser version by yourself. Many people tried to use yum to update their Firefox browsers but the repository only contains the earlier versions of Firefox. Here’s a simple guide to how you can upgrade to Firefox 2.0.

It’s not advisable to delete the older version of Firefox, so as to have a fall-back plan if a case of incompatibility occurs. Instead, just leave that version alone and continue with your installation process. Before doing anything, do login to your root account so as to make the installation process much easier.

1) You can get you latest Firefox browser from Mozilla’s Webpage.
2) Download the latest version of Firefox — it’ll look something like firefox-2.0.0.1.tar.gz
3) Extract the files into a folder by either double clicking it and extracting it to a specified folder or by:

tar -zxvf firefox-2.0.0.1.tar.gz

5) copy the extracted folder into the directory usr/lib/
6) Make a backup copy of usr/bin/firefox (you can rename it to “firefox_old“)

These steps are to create a short-cut in your short-cut menu:
7) Open your text editor and go to and edit the file usr/bin/firefox. You will need to change some of the bold codes below.

Old codes

##

## Variables

##

MOZ_LIB_DIR="/usr/lib"

if [ -x "/usr/lib64/firefox-1.5.0.9/firefox-bin” ]

then

MOZ_LIB_DIR=”/usr/lib64″

fi

MOZ_DIST_BIN=”$MOZ_LIB_DIR/firefox-1.5.0.9”

MOZ_PROGRAM=”$MOZ_DIST_BIN/firefox”

MOZ_CLIENT_PROGRAM=”$MOZ_DIST_BIN/mozilla-xremote-client”

MOZ_CLIENT_PROGRAM_PARAM=”-a firefox

New Codes

 ##

## Variables

##

MOZ_LIB_DIR="/usr/lib"

if [ -x "/usr/lib64/firefox/firefox-bin” ]

then

MOZ_LIB_DIR=”/usr/lib64″

fi

MOZ_DIST_BIN=”$MOZ_LIB_DIR/firefox”

MOZ_PROGRAM=”$MOZ_DIST_BIN/firefox”

MOZ_CLIENT_PROGRAM=”$MOZ_DIST_BIN/mozilla-xremote-client”

MOZ_CLIENT_PROGRAM_PARAM=”-a firefox”

To launch Firefox, go to Applications -> Internet -> Firefox Web Browser.

Alternatively, you can go to system -> preferred applications and create a new Firefox 2.0 shortcut by pointing the address of the shortcut to usr/lib/firefox folder and choose firefox from the list.

9) One last thing before we can start using our Firefox. Make sure that the compatibility packages are up to date. To do so, open up your console and type:

yum install compat-libstdc++-33

Now you can test your firefox and it should be working like a charm!!