Why doesn’t Canonical let you keep your firefox up-to-date via normal means? I’m not sure, but I found a cool tool that does. Ubuntuzilla is a little tool that helps you keep firefox up-to-date by automatically checking for the official Mozilla updates and installing them for you. The installation is not self explanatory, so here’s a quick rundown:
- Download Ubuntuzilla
- Run/Install the package. (I just double clicked it and followed the directions)
- Run the installer script (
ubuntuzilla.py -a install -p firefox) - Answer the questions.
- Rejoice in your new Firefox that will update itself ahead of Ubuntu’s normal update cycle.
I did get a bit of help from this site, so the credit doesn’t really go to me: Tombuntu.com: Install Firefox 3.5 in Ubuntu 9.04 using Ubuntuzilla
Flash and some other plugins may not work on x64 if you use Ubuntuzilla, so you may have to follow these instructions to get flash/java to work: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-595685.html
I have fixed this problem on my system. I could not run Flash in the ubuntuzilla firefox, but it would work if I ran “firefox.ubuntu” from the terminal (or changed the launcher to run “firefox.ubuntu”).I’m on a 64 bit system (AMD Turion 64×2). Ubuntu uses “flashplugin-alternatative.so” (probably a 64-bit version) and it looks like ubuntuzilla won’t work with that.
I downloaded the .tar.gz package from Adobe’s website and extracted it to my desktop, then copied “libflashplayer.so” and “flashplayer.xpt” to my ./.mozilla/plugins/ directory. Problem fixed.
The same trick will work with java. I downloaded the java “.bin” from Sun’s website, moved it to /usr/java/ and ran it from a terminal. Then (in the terminal) I changed to my .mozilla/plugins directory and ran:
ln -s /usr/java/jre1.6.0_03/plugin/i386/ns7/libjavaplugin_oji.so ./libjavaplugin_oji.so
Java now works in my ubuntuzilla build.
I figured this out after finding this page that was linked in another thread:
http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/firefox-linux.html#install-where
-Jake