Riding Linux

I cannot hold myself anymore. I want Firefox 3 on my Gentoo machine ASAP. I don’t care about the feature, the risk and the hassle I might be facing installing unstable/testing application in my machine, I just want the new version on my PC!

Using emerge to search the package

emerge --search mozilla-firefox

Result:

* www-client/mozilla-firefox
Latest version available: 2.0.0.14
Latest version installed: 2.0.0.14

Fair enough, the stable branch only have version 2.0.0.14 as the latest one. So I enable unstable/testing branch for that particular package by inserting the line below in my /etc/portage/package.keywords

www-client/mozilla-firefox ~x86

Do the search again

emerge --search mozilla-firefox

Result:

* www-client/mozilla-firefox
Latest version available: 3.0-r1
Latest version installed: 2.0.0.14
Size of files: 50,442 kB
Homepage: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox
Description: Firefox Web Browser
License: || ( MPL-1.1 GPL-2 LGPL-2.1 )

Nice, they have version 3.0-r1 in the repository.

After thinking for a while, I decided to proceed with the installation. Of course I have to enable some other unstable/testing packages in order to meet the dependencies.

I added those lines below in my /etc/portage/package.keywords file

net-libs/xulrunner ~x86
dev-libs/nspr ~x86
dev-libs/nss ~x86

Specifying custom USE parameter in /etc/portage/package.use file

www-client/mozilla-firefox java linguas_en_US -ipv6 

I don’t need IPV6

And start the installation process

emerge -av mozilla-firefox

I answered ‘yes’ when asked and the installation process started. It took almost 20 minutes for the system to compile them. When it finished, I’ve been greeted with the message below.

* Old versions of installed libraries were detected on your system.
* In order to avoid breaking packages that depend on these old libs,
* the libraries are not being removed. You need to run revdep-rebuild
* in order to remove these old dependencies. If you do not have this
* helper program, simply emerge the ‘gentoolkit’ package.
*
* # revdep-rebuild –library libnspr4.so.6
* # revdep-rebuild –library libplc4.so.6
* # revdep-rebuild –library libplds4.so.6

Ok. Some post installation works to do. But I would skip those steps for now. I will do them if I encounter any problem on other applications.

So I restarted my Firefox, went to some normal plugin/extension upgrade process and there I go, Firefox version 3 !

Popularity: 33% [?]

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Desktop Workstation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.