Installing Firefox from a Debian Package
20 April 2006My first attempt at installing a major program was to install Firefox. I first installed Firefox using Kpackage. This was very easy. I opened Kpackage, found a menu selection that said "Search for Package" and found "Mozilla-Firefox" as a package that could be installed. No major problems occurred as I worked my way through Kpackage and watched Firefox get installed.
When the install was completed, I though great now let's see how it works. First issue was how to I run Firefox now that it's installed. Is there an icon somewhere? How about a menu entry? I looked around the desktop, but couldn't find anything. I even tried KDE's 'Menu Updating Tool,' which I found in the Settings submenu. I thought maybe it would automatically find Firefox and insert it into the menu. Didn't work. Will have to look into the 'Menu Updating Tool' at another time. While on the topic of menus, there is also a 'Menu Editor' in the Settings submenu. That allows you to modify the menu structure and is reasonably straight forward. But before using that I needed to determine how to access Firefox.
Luckily, in reading the Kpackage documentation, I had noticed the section that talked about a listing of all installed files. Once a package is installed, you can select that package in Kpackage and see a list of all files that were installed and where they were installed. This can be rather intimidating at first because files seem to get stuck all over the place and they all seemed to be named Firefox. Which one was the 'executable' that would launch the program? Once again time for some more online research.
I had earlier stumbled upon a great site with Linux tips - BrunoLinux.com. Besides having great tips, you can also ask to be put on a mailing list and Bruno will let you know whenever he updates the tips. You can also download them and store them locally. I've found it to be a great aid in helping to understand Linux. One of his tips (The Tree) describes in a clear and simple way the file system that Linux uses. From this description, I guessed that the Firefox executable that I was looking for was in /usr/bin. So, I just looked through the list of installed files for Firefox in Kpackage until I found one called Firefox in /usr/bin. I tried executing and it worked!
Now it was time to go back to the Menu Editor and create an entry for Firefox. No real problems with this. Everything about Menu Editor is clear. How about creating a desktop shortcut? Works a lot like Windows. Right click on the desktop select Create New, File, Link to Application. From there everything looks much the same as a Windows shortcut. You can name the shortcut, point it at a particular file and by clicking the icon, select an icon for the shortcut.
Once that was done, i was very happy with what I been able to accomplish, but noticed that the version of Firefox that I had installed was 1.0.4. I knew the 1.5 was the latest version and wanted to have that version. What to do? Now it was time to learn about installng programs that weren't part of a package. That will be the topic of my next post.
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