The Site With the Lamp

December 2, 2005

Downloaded firefox 1.5, like the last time I tried to install firefox things refused to go smoothly. Interesting that the download site has changed to mozilla.com. What hasn't changed is the insistence that they do a browser detection and try to force a file down your throat.

The firefox-1.5.tar.gz file that was delivered does not contain an installer, you just expand it and run. But run it will not.

I do have libstdc++ installed on my Fedora Core 4 installation and find this error rather suprising because of it. A yum update only changed libstdc++ to a different minor version of 4. Then I did yum install libstdc++.so.5 to force yum to manuall update the so file. Hope something else does not break because of this.

After updating libstdc++ firefox now starts up fine. There is still a problem however, my existing installation is an RPM based installation. So replacing that with the 'exapand and run' binary version is going to be a bit of a pain. That would mean having to reconfigure all the preferences again.

Fortunately rpmfind has an RPM for download. Unfortunately grabbing that and installing with the usual rpm -Uvh does not do the the trick. There a still a trio of unresolved dependencies. So what next? wait until firefox 1.5 makes it's way into the yum repositories.