Upgrading Mozilla Firefox on Mandriva Linux Limited Edition 2005

I have recently installed Mandriva Linux Special Edition onto one of my laptops. This is the first Linux since Mandrake and Connectiva Linux merged.

The browser installed by default (and my browser of choice) is Mozilla Firefox.

One of the things I tried to do was to add the extensions that I use to the Mozilla Firefox browser. When going to the extensions page it told me that I had to upgrade to the latest version of the browser. This was a good idea anyway as the version installed included some bugs. Unfortunately the install wasn’t quite as straight forward as it should have been, but it was quite easily resolved.

Firstly I downloaded the Firefox installer. This is a gzip file: firefox-1.0.6.installer.tar.gz
Unzipped the file using
gunzip firefox-1.0.6.installer.tar.gz
and untarred using
tar -xvf firefox-1.0.6.installer.tar

As root I then moved to the installer directory and tried to run the installer. This gave an error message that it was unable to load libstdc++5. This is one the standard c library files. The version installed on Mandriva is version 6, whereas firefox required version 5. Normally applications should work with newer versions of the library, but for some reason firefox was looking for a specific version.

Fortunately the solution was quite straight forward. I found and downloaded the following library files:

• libstdc++5-3.3.2-6mdk.i586.rpm
• libstdc++5-devel-3.3.2-6mdk.i586.rpm
• libstdc++5-static-devel-3.3.2-6mdk.i586.rpm

I found these on www.rpmfind.net and downloaded them. These were installed one at a time (in the same order as listed above) by using
rpm -i <filename>

It was then possible to run the installer, and after specifying a target directory the browser was installed.

I then had to right click on the Firefox icon to update the properties with the new file location and icon.

Once the new version was installed, the extensions were available for download (more about the firefox extensions another time).