FC1 confusing Firefox 1.0 and mozilla-1.4.3-1.fc1.1.legacy

[James Wilkinson]

Beartooth has installed Firefox from a tarball, and is finding Fedora is
still pointing to the old install...

Jeff Vian wrote:
> Doing an install from tarball usually by default puts the binaries
> in /usr/local/bin.  The rpm install usually puts them in /usr/bin.

Beartooth replied:
> OK; I get : 
>                            =====
> [root at localhost root]# ls /usr/local
> bin  etc  games  include  lib  libexec  sbin  share  src
> [root at localhost root]# ls /usr/local/bin
> [root at localhost root]#
>                            =====
> 
> I also tried reversing local and bin. I don't seem to have /usr/bin/local
> at all; but /usr/bin contains one file called firefox; looking at it with
> cat, I find a line near the top that identifies it as 0.9.3. (It's /opt
> that I put 1.0 in, precisely because I knew /opt was empty.)

OK, then, so the rpm will put them in /usr/bin and the tarball somewhere
under /opt.

Jeff said:
> If you have both, you will have to do some playing to make sure the
> launchers get the new one from /usr/local.

and Beartooth replied.
> You mean from /opt ; /usr/local has the old one. If I understand that much
> aright, and I think I do. But I don't understand the playing, or at least
> I doubt I do.

No. Jeff thought that the tarball installed into /usr/local, when (in
fact) it went into /opt. The RPM binary is still in /opt/bin, and
there's nothing Firefox under /usr/local.

> How about this? If I simply do "rm /usr/bin/firefox" and then "mv
> /opt/firefox /usr/bin/firefox" will that do the job?? (Remember the
> present /usr/bin/firefox is an executable script (whatever that is --
> probably not what I think, alas!), while /opt/firefox is a directory.

Bad idea for a number of reasons. One is that it will break the firefox
RPM. If you want to get rid of the firefox rpm, use rpm -e firefox or
yum remove firefox.

Another is that as you found out, /opt/firefox is a directory. The
executable is somewhere under there, and you'd have to run that (you
can't execute a directory: this isn't RiscOS).

The third is that Firefox might expect to run from a directory with
other files in it.

> So I understand; but the way I tried told me I didn't have write
> permission -- and I don't know how to run GUI apps as root unless they ask
> me. That's why I just moved the tarball (as root) out of /home/btth, where
> it downloaded, into /opt, and just untarred it there.

The easiest way is to work out what the command is, and run it from a
command prompt.

The question is, where do you *really* want to go, and how do we get
there from here?

If you want good desktop integration, you're going to have to look for a
FC1 firefox rpm and install that.

If you just want to be able to click something, and have Firefox launch,
I'd recommend right-clicking on the Gnome panel, and adding an
application launcher that points to the /opt Firefox binary. Then you
can remove the Firefox rpm, to save disk space.

James.

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