updating firefox in linux

Published on January 27, 2006 By werewolf In Personal Computing

My distro, Ubunto, came with Firefox 1.07. I downloaded the firefox1.5.gz to a folder in 'home' and did the whole dpkg thing and now I have the original firefox 1.07 installation in the 'usr' folder and the new installation in my 'home' folder. It works great. I have a shortcut to it in my panel. The problem comes when I launch a link from email...the old version launches.

I tried updating firefox through the firefox update options, but it didn't see it.

I was going to uninstall the native installation, but the Synaptic Package Manager said it also needed to uninstall the Gnome desktop(!) which seems a bit extreme

How do I get Linux to update the existing installation, or, barring that, how do I get external links to load the new version instead of the old version? Thanks

update: I used the 'preferred applications' app and a hard link to the new installation and now external links open the correct version, but I still have 2 installations of firefox. Can I just move the new firefox folder on top of the old FF folder so that all will be replaced? I don't want to have to reinstall the os again, so I don't want to do anything which would screw everything up.

Comments

BlueDev

on Jan 27, 2006

Search the Ubuntu forums for "Automatix". Run that bad boy and it will take care of all your worries, and install a ton of great stuff if you want it. Amazing work.

werewolf

on Feb 05, 2006

ooohhh....cool software

Thanks BlueDev

BlueDev

on Feb 05, 2006

No problem. Glad it worked for you.

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