Entries tagged iceweasel

If you've been following new releases you'll see there is a new Firefox browser out, version 5.0.

This will almost certainly make its way into Debian's experimental tree soon, but that doesn't help users of the Debian Stable release. The only sane option for those users (such as myself), without a backport, is to install locally.

So I did the obvious thing, I made /opt/firefox then installed the binary release into it. Then I found that it was good, lovely and fast.

Unfortunately the system firefox and the local firefox are not really compatible. Run the local one, then click on a link in the gnome terminal and it wants to open the system one. Ho hum.

The solution:

• Remove your local firefox & iceweasel packages.
• Create the shell scripts /usr/bin/firefox & /usr/bin/iceweasel to exec the one stored beneath /opt.
• Rejoice.

Of course this being Debian we don't want to do that. So instead here is a package that will let you do that:

• http://firefox.repository.steve.org.uk/file

Download. Build. Install. If you install your local package to a location different than /opt/firefox update the configuration file /etc/firefox/firefox.conf to point to it.

Possibly useful?

ObQuote: "I could help you cross your yard." - Up

Tags: firefox, iceweasel, mercurial | 15 comments

I've somehow managed to break firefox:

Random downloads fail

They appear in the download manager with "failed" next to them.

Copying and pasting the URL and fetching via wget works.

Random extensions fail to install.

"Ghostery could not be installed because firefox cannot modify the needed file".

Moving ~/.cache/mozilla and ~/.mozilla out of the way don't help. Installing "tree style tabs" fails with no particular error.

The actual error reads "The extension couldn't be installed because firefox couldn't modify the needed file".

Googling didn't help, because it says "Create a new profile", which doesn't help, or "Disable extensions", which doesn't apply since none are present in the new profile.

Running strace doesn't reveal any obvious EACCES, EPERM, or ENOENT errors so I'm struggling to spot an obvious problem.

Downloading a binary firefox to /opt/firefox fails in the same way. Logging out of my desktop fails to make any difference.

Annoying.

The only thing I can say is:

shelob ~ $ dpkg --list | egrep '(xul|icewea)'
ii  iceweasel     29.0.1-1~bpo70+1    ...
ii  xulrunner-29  29.0.1-1~bpo70+1    ...

For the moment I'm hating the use of chromium, but it will suffice until I can try to dig deeper.

Tags: firefox, iceweasel | 16 comments