Installing FireFox 2 on Centos 5

Right out of the box CentOS 5 comes with a lot of standard features, including FireFox as the de facto web browser. This is pleasing for the Firefox affictionados out there but there is only one problem.

The version of Firefox included with CentOS is 1.5, and not the latest which is Firefox 2.0.

That is because CentOS 5 is based on Red Hat REHL distribution and their intention is to maintain full upstream compatibility. This means "No FireFox2 For You!!". At least for now.

The good news is that installing FireFox 2 is not entirely complicated.

The first thing to do is browse to http://www.firefox.com and grab the latest release version. As I'm writing this article, that version is 2.0.0.9, and it comes in a zipped tarball. Grab it and store it somewhere on your filesystem. I chose /usr/lib.

Once you have the tarball, you can proceed to the next step. Which is to remove the currently installed FireFox from the system. Note: This step is not necessary. You can intall FireFox 2 as still keep FireFox 1.5. The two will co-exist just fine but it is not recommended to have them both running at the same time.

If you get dependency errors you may have to remove the adittional programs that depend on firefox before you can remove firefox. These programs can be reinstalled once the new firefox is installed. One such program is Yelp. To remove them you can use the same command as above for removing firefox.

Now that you have a clean slate, you can proceed at untaring firefox 2.

Change the directory to /usr/lib, or the directory you downloaded the firefox 2 to, and proceed to untar it.

Issuing this command will extract firefox and place it in a directory called firefox-2.0. You can now remove the tarball and change directory to the new firefox installation.

The next step is to create a symbolic link for firefox under /usr/bin.

Then, move the default plugin from the /usr/lib/firefox-2.0/plugins directory into the following directory /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. This directory may not exist and you may have to create it first. The commands bellow show how to create the directory and then move the plugins.

Then delete the plugins directory from the firefox installation folder and then create a symbolic link to the plugins directroy in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins

You are now ready to run firefox, but unless you have installed the Legacy Software Development packages with CentOS there's a good chance that FireFox won't start and it will complain that the module libstdc++.so.5 could not be found.

In this case you'll need to install it and the easiest way to do so is from a terminal with root privileges to run the following command

After that you should be able to run firefox by typing firefox in the terminal or through the Web Browser launcher that should be installed on the task bar.