Upgrading your firefox manually.

Here is a nice workout if you want to upgrade your firefox. This post is inspired by the fact that a lot linux distrubutions required online update for this upgrade. So here is workaround if you want to upgrade your firefox installation to a higher version or to the latest version.

Step 1: Getting the installation package.
The first and foremost thing is to get the installation package for your system. I have a Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) which came with default Firefox 3.0 version. So, you need to go to the Firefox hompage to get the desired installation package. Try to get the tar.bz2 or tar.gz package. This is a general package for most of the linux distributions.

Step 2: Extract the tarball and move it to a particular location of desired choice
Next, untar the archive using following command.

$tar -xzvf firefoxtarball.tar.gz

firefoxtarball.tar.gz or firefoxtarball.tar.bz2 as per your archive name. Now, move the extracted folder to some special place where you have all your installation reside. I usually store all my personal installations in /home/user/installed. This makes all my installations at one place.
You can use the mv command to do the job.


Step 3: Changing the firefox link to point to your updated version.
Now you need to update the symbolic link for firefox on your system. For it, you need to know which is your main link that points to your default firefox installation. A handy command to achieve this is using whereis command. Just type it on the console and you will get the probable location to find the main symblink. Generally you will find it at /usr/bin/.

Step 4: Update the symblink to point to your updated version
Now comes the final task. Fire the following command to update the symblink. But before you could do that, rename the original link to something else so that if the update doesn't happen, you don't loose your previous installation. So here is how to rename the link.

# sudo mv firefox firefox_backup

Now that you have backed up your earlier installation, create the new link for the new version.

# sudo ln -s /home/user/installed/firefox/firefox ./firefox

The above command should be executed as root. I have used the sudo for this purpose. ;)


Tada...you'are done. Click on your usual link for firefox and check the version of firefox that gets loaded. I hope it gets updated.

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