Installing Firefox on Solaris.

Question

Hello all, I am sorry if this is not the right place to post, but I am extremely new to Solaris and I need help.
I recently installed Solaris 10 on VMWare to check it out and when I fired Firefox up it told me it was out-of-date and that I should upgrade and so I got the tar.bz2 package and I wasn't sure how to install and so I googled... I am quite familiar with using the Terminal in Ubuntu, but of course, they aren't the same. I found a page with someone explaining how to upgrade and I followed his steps by step and when I tried to open it would start to open and then just quit with no error messages or anything. Can someone lead me in the right direction of uninstalling, re installing or upgrading or whatever I need to do to fix this? Maybe a good quick guide for terminal commands as well? Thank you for any help.

Answer 1

Hi, I followed the instruction below and it worked for me ::
This directory contains Solaris builds of Firefox 3.6.16,
which are contributed by Oracle Solaris Desktop Beijing Team.
If you have any problem with these builds, please send email to
desktop dash discuss at opensolaris dot org
Installation:
* Tarball format
Extract the tarball to a proper location[1]
$ bzip2 -dc <tarball basename>.tar.bz2 | tar -xf -
[1]: Make sure there is no firefox directory there before you
extract the tarball, it's not recommended to just overwrite the old
firefox directory.
* Pkgadd format
1, First uncompress the zip file
$ bzip2 -d <zip file basename>.bz2
You will get a package datastream file named <zip file basename>
2, Install the package as root
# pkgadd -d ./<zip file basename>
The default install location would be /opt/sfw/lib/firefox
To Enable Java:
cd /path/to/<install location>/plugins
ln -s /path/to/<jave home>/lib/<sparc|i386>/libnpjp2.so
To Enable Flash Player:
1, Download the Flash Player plugin from
http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/
2, Extract the tarball and place the files under
/path/to/<install location>/plugins
To Run The Application:
a, Execute the application by specifying the absolute path
$ /path/to/<install location>/firefox
b, Add <install location> to your PATH and execute "firefox"
c, Add the desktop file and start from menu(pkgadd format only)
# cat >/usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop<<EOF
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=Application
Exec=/path/to/<install location>/firefox
TryExec=/path/to/<install location>/firefox
Icon=/path/to/<install location>/icons/mozicon50.xpm
X-GNOME-DocPath=
Terminal=false
Name=firefox
GenericName=firefox
Comment=firefox
Categories=Application;Network;
EOF
Troubleshooting:
* If you could not start up the application or encounter some
unexpected crash, try to do this,
1, Rename the profile directory("$HOME/.mozilla" for Mozilla suite,
"$HOME/.mozilla/firefox" for Firefox and "$HOME/.thunderbird" for
Thunderbird)
2, Start up the application without importing anything
* For Solaris 10 users, if you have font display problems or crashes with some pages.
Please apply the fontconfig and Freetype patch.
#138353, #119813 (x86)
#138352, #119812 (SPARC)
You can download them at http://sunsolve.sun.com... although, of course, since Sun is no longer, the Sunsolve site is also gone ...