Install Firefox 2.0.0.9 in CentOS 5 / RHEL 5

I have been using different Linux distributions on and of since 2001 and right now I’m using more than one of them. The one this short short story is about is CentOS 5 which is based on RedHat Enterprise Linux 5, so this should also work on RHEL 5 even if I haven’t had a chance to test it yet.

I’ve always liked the way CentOS works, it’s a very stable and working distro even if it doesn’t always have the latest software. This is why I had to manually install the latest stable Firefox, since Firefox 2 has many nice plugins I use. Here is how I did it.

First off all we need to install compat-libstdc++-33. Otherwise Firefox won’t run.

#yum install compat-libstdc++-33

Then download the latest version of Firefox and unpack it to /usr/lib

#tar xvzf firefox-2.0.0.9.tar.gz -C /usr/lib

Set the link for the binary

#cd /usr/bin
#mv firefox firefox-1.5
#ln -sf /usr/lib/firefox/firefox ./

Setting up the mplayerplug-in

#cd /usr/lib/firefox/plugins
#ln -sf /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/mplayerplug-in* ./

Shutdown firefox and restart and you should have a working setup.

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Comments

    Anonymous posted the comment on January 22nd, 2008

  1. works fine with me.. more power..

    2. Diezel posted the comment on January 22nd, 2008

  2. Good to hear.

    Cheers

    3. AD posted the comment on January 26th, 2008

  3. I’ve also installed Firefox 2 on my CentOS 5 server. I thought I’d include here a variant of the above instructions for those that are very new to *nix. These instructions will maintain both the 1.5 and the 2 versions intact and wont cause problems with the 1.5 installation even after it is updated (or so I think… I haven’t had a 1.5 update since doing this yet :) All previously installed plug-ins (mozplugger, mplayerplug-in etc.) seem to be working.

    Running Firefox 2 and Firefox 1.5 on RHEL 5 or CentOS 5:

    1) Download the tar.gz file from Mozilla.org into a temporary directory.

    2) Unzip and untar the archive.

    3) Rename the new firefox directory as firefox2_aux

    4) As root copy the firefox2_aux directory to /usr/lib

    5) Do a cp “/usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox_2_test”

    6) Edit the /usr/bin/firefox_2_test file and change all references to the firefox-1.5.0.12 directory (or whatever the current version of firefox 1.5 is) to firefox2_aux (i.e. replace all “firefox-1.5.0.12″ with “firefox2_aux”).

    7) Provided you have the flash plug-in installed, go into /usr/lib/firefox2_aux/plugins/ do a “ln -s /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so ./libflashplayer.so” (i.e. you want to mimick what is in the /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.12/plugins/ directory). If you dont have the flash plug-in installed, skip this step.

    8) As a regular user, test everything out by running the “firefox_2_test” command from the command line.

    9) If everything works and you like using firefox 2 do the following as root:
    9a) “mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox_1_5″
    9b) “mv /usr/bin/firefox_2_test /usr/bin/firefox”

    Now, whenever the system runs the firefox command, firefox 2 will be launched.

    To make sure nothing gets broken when there’s an update of CentOS firefox 1.5 rpm do the following:

    10) As root “cp /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox2_orig”

    11) After an update to the firefox 1.5 rpm, as root “cp /usr/bin/firefox2_orig /usr/bin/firefox”

    4. Diezel posted the comment on January 31st, 2008

  4. I’ll try it this way the next time I’ll install CentOS and see how it goes. Thanks for the info.

    5. Diezel posted the comment on February 12th, 2008

  5. Great to hear that there was no bigger problem.

    6. Mark R posted the comment on May 4th, 2008

  6. With this article and another, I was able to get Flash to work on this version of FFox 64bit.

    Here’s the other article:
    http://justinconover.com/blog/2007/05/12/flash-with-64-bit-firefox/#comment-174

    (copied below)

    Since I run CentOS 5 and Fedora 7 on most of my laptop/desktop(s) I use 64 bit version for the OS. Instead of adding 32 bit firefox (installed too) you can use nspluginwrapper for flash/java/real and several other plugins.

    wget http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/projects/nspluginwrapper/files/nspluginwrapper-0.9.91.4-1.x86_64.rpm

    wget http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/projects/nspluginwrapper/files/nspluginwrapper-i386-0.9.91.4-1.x86_64.rpm
    wget http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz

    sudo rpm -ivh nspluginwrapper-*

    tar xvzf install_flash_player_9_linux.tar.gz

    cp install_flash_player_9_linux/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

    cp install_flash_player_9_linux/flashplayer.xpt /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

    nspluginwrapper -i /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

    Many thanks to the posters of both articles for simplifying this matter :)

    Sincerely,

    Mark R

    7. Anonymous posted the comment on February 12th, 2008

  7. Hi, I had a problem with the first install. when I try to run the program I get this message: “Error: the browser firefox doesn’t exist. Please reconfigure”. Please help me.

    8. Anonymous posted the comment on February 12th, 2008

  8. sorry, I already solved the problem… i missed a part….

    9. Mark posted the comment on November 6th, 2008

  9. When I tried the above I got the message;

    tar: You may not specify more than one ‘Acdtrux’ option.
    Try ‘tar –help; or ‘tar –usage’ for more information.

    I’m new to Linux/CentOS5 so am probably doing something wrong but any advice would be most welcome.

    Thanks,

    Mark

    10. قصص posted the comment on September 30th, 2008

  10. Hi, I had a problem with the first install. when I try to run the program I get this message: “Error: the browser firefox doesn’t exist. Please reconfigure”. Please help me.

    11. Math posted the comment on December 1st, 2009

  11. I followed the steps and it dint work for me, so i installed it in /opt directory.

    12. Mats Hellman posted the comment on December 1st, 2009

  12. Math, I would remember that Firefox 3 is included in RHEL/CentOS 5.
    But good to hear you got it working by installing it in /opt. This article is starting to get quite old :)