Installing Firefox from a Tar.Gz
22 April 2006In my last post, I talked about installing Firefox using a Debian package and Kpackage. But, this method provided me with an older version of Firefox than I wanted. So, I went searching for a newer version that was Linux compatible. Once I found it, I then had to learn how to download and install software in Linux that was in a tar.gz format. tar.gz is similar to the familiar zip file format in Windows and all it means is that files have been compressed into a single file.
Finding the new version of Firefox was easy. I just used Google to search and, of course, the first hit was on Firefox's home page. Everything was normal until I got to the download links. Where should I save the download? One thing I always do on my Windows setups is to save all of my downloads in one directory. That way I know where they are and they don't get scattered all over my computer. Once again, I turned to BrunoLinux.com and used his recommandation that download files be placed somewhere in the /home directory. Since I'm logging as tim, the logical directory for me was /home/tim/downloads. That was easy enough and the download using Firefox proceeded just like any download in Windows using Firefox.
Now the question was how to install the new version of Firefox. I used Konqueror in the file manager mode to navigate to my /downloads directory. I double clicked on the file, thinking that maybe a dialog similar to Winzip would open. I did see all of the files contained in the compressed package, but there were listed in the same Konqueror window. At first, I thought that perhaps the files had been extracted in /directory. But, apparently, that is just the way they are displayed because I closed Konqueror and came back to /download and the only file in the directory was Firefox-1.5.0.2.tar.gz, the original download file. Next step was to try a right click. The resulted in a dropdown menu with many choices. Most were the standard - cut, copy, move, delete, properties, etc. But, the one that caught my eye was Ark. What could that be? One thing I love (and hate) about Linux is the names of programs. They generally make sense once you know what they do, but the first time you see them, one is never sure. Anyway, one option was to "Preview in Archiver" so I tried that. After I did that all of the files contained in the package were once again listed in the Konqueror window. There appeared to be slight difference in the way that the files were displayed, but other than that I couldn't discern any difference. Clicking on the "Preview in Archiver" option took longer to execute, however, so I suspect that option was actually unpacking the files where the double click was probably just displaying the file structure in the compressed package without decompressing all of them.
In either case, this still wasn't helping me get the files decompressed and placed somewhere in my directory strucuture where I could execute the new version of Firefox. So, I tried right clicking on the original download file and selecting the Ark option. That caused a new window to open displaying the contents of the download file unpacked. It looked similar to the Winzip I was familiar with from Windows. Under the Action menu was an option to extract. Seemed like I was getting somewhere no. The only question was where to extract the files. Back to BrunoLinux and his file structure tip. From his tip, there were several choices of a directory named /bin. Rather than repeat the tip, here a link to it - The Tree. This has been invaluable to me to help organize my files and keep straight in my mind where everything is stored. It's one of the aspects of Linux that I've found the most confusing in the past.
Using Bruno's advice, I extracted the Firefox package to the /usr/local/bin directory, which is the place that Bruno describes as "programs the user installs himself." Now all I had to do was find the executable file that would start my new version I Firefox. I navigated to /usr/local/bin saw a new subdirectory called Firefox. I looked in that directory and found a shell script named "Firefox." When I clicked on that version 1.5.0.2 of Firefox opened. I was in business. Now all I had to do was open Menu Editior and update the link to Firefox and my access to the latest version of Firefox was complete.
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