Firefox 4.0b9 and CentOS 5.5

Discussion about official Mozilla Firefox builds
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rkl
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Firefox 4.0b9 and CentOS 5.5

Post by rkl »

I guess it had to come, especially with CentOS 6 only weeks away (and RHEL 6 already out), but it looks like an official beta release of Firefox (4.0b9) has now abandoned CentOS 5 :cry:

Firefox 4.0b8 worked on CentOS 5.5, but 4.0b9 has a problem with the revision of the C++ library and won't run out of the box. All is not lost though, because you can use Fedora 9's C++ library instead as follows (some of this may need sudo/root access):

1. Unpack the Firefox 4.0b9.tar.bz2 somewhere (e.g. /usr/local/firefox). With the "en_GB" release, I throw in a "dictionaries" sub-dir under there with en-GB.aff and en-GB.dic in there (and en-US.aff/.dic soft-linked to the en-GB ones) otherwise, sadly, Firefox 4 uses US spellings on what's supposed to be an en_GB release :-(

2. Download this 32-bit Fedora 9 libstdc++ RPM and unpack it with this command:

rpm2cpio libstdc++-4.3.0-8.i386.rpm | cpio -i --make-directories

3. Move the unpacked shared library into /usr/local/firefox thus:

mv usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.0.10 /usr/local/firefox/libstdc++.so.6

Note: It's "usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6.0.10" above (i.e. the unpacked tree from the RPM, not the system /usr/lib tree) - do NOT put a leading slash there!

4. Run Firefox 4.0b9 with:

/usr/local/firefox/firefox

Hope this helps CentOS 5/RHEL 5 folks stranded without the latest Firefox 4 beta...
dlw_b
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Re: Firefox 4.0b9 and CentOS 5.5

Post by dlw_b »

Thanks! I'm also running CentOS 5.5 and this worked great for me!

I doubt that CentOS 5.6 will upgrade the libstdc++, but hopefully CentOS 6.0 will take care of it eventually.

Best Regards,

Dave W.
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James
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Re: Firefox 4.0b9 and CentOS 5.5

Post by James »

For reading as Bugzilla is Not a forum.
Bug 621704 - Lib dep problem: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9' not found (required by .../libxul.so)
chriscole
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Re: Firefox 4.0b9 and CentOS 5.5

Post by chriscole »

This is a real shame as there's no official upgrade path for CentOS 5.5 users - I'm wary in installing unofficial libraries on a work machine. Also, I imagine many RHEL 5x users will be stranded too until they update to v6.

Why has this major change been made so late in the beta process?
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Bluefang
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Re: Firefox 4.0b9 and CentOS 5.5

Post by Bluefang »

The thing is, the change isn't new. The ANGLE GL shader validation stuff landed back in July, before beta 2. It just got temporarily disabled due to problems on the build and test server.
There have always been ghosts in the machine... random segments of code that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul...
david5717
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Re: Firefox 4.0b9 and CentOS 5.5

Post by david5717 »

chriscole wrote:This is a real shame as there's no official upgrade path for CentOS 5.5 users - I'm wary in installing unofficial libraries on a work machine. Also, I imagine many RHEL 5x users will be stranded too until they update to v6.

Why has this major change been made so late in the beta process?


Perhaps under the belief that only a few users will be affected.
ppstay
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Re: Firefox 4.0b9 and CentOS 5.5

Post by ppstay »

I hate the hack! Please support RHEL/CentOS 5 when you release the official 4.0
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Re: Firefox 4.0b9 and CentOS 5.5

Post by Omega X »

MozilaZine is not Mozilla.
http://www.mozillazine.org/about/
rkl
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Requirements page still needs fixing...

Post by rkl »

ppstay wrote:I hate the hack! Please support RHEL/CentOS 5 when you release the official 4.0

I don't think the hack is too bad, especially since RHEL 6 is already out and CentOS 6 is imminent. However, I have an issue with the proposed Firefox 4 requirements page, which seems to be missing an important libstdc++ requirement (4.3.0 or later). The bug discussing this had an attachment including the libstdc++ requirement, but the final updated page that just got pushed out sadly left it out!

Without that libstdc++ requirement, the page implies that CentOS 5.5 can run Firefox 4 with no mods, but that's not true, as we know from this thread. I've posted a query to the bug asking why the libdstdc++ requirement was removed.
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James
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Re: Firefox 4.0b9 and CentOS 5.5

Post by James »

ppstay wrote:I hate the hack! Please support RHEL/CentOS 5 when you release the official 4.0

Centos 5.5 is basically outdated even though it was released May last year. This is the downside of using a outdated or LTS distro as many of the packages may be too old to really support current applications as users should understand that they may not be able to use the latest applications for a long time as it will eventually hit a wall sooner or later, more likely much sooner compared to the much more current distros.
rkl
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Re: Firefox 4.0b9 and CentOS 5.5

Post by rkl »

James wrote:Centos 5.5 is basically outdated even though it was released May last year.
Perhaps compared to rapid-release desktop-based distros like Fedora or Ubuntu (desktop) it is considered "outdated", but in the enterprise desktop or server space it isn't really (OK, CentOS 6 really shouild have been out by now and that would be thing to outdate CentOS 5.5).

At work, we run 64-bit CentOS 5.5 on both servers and desktops. Whilst the servers run without much "hacking", the desktops need extra love to push out later versions of important desktop software. I use "external" Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Adobe Flash/Reader, Java etc. RPMs and keep them bang up to date. It's a pain that Mozilla point blank refuse to roll either 64-bit binary packages or anything in RPM format (both are left to the lame excuse that distros should do it - but CentOS doesn't track anywhere near the latest releases!) - I end up having to roll my own custom (32-bit) RPMs of Thunderbird and Firefox for example (combining icons, spec files and .tar.bz2 files and now libstdc++.so.6 for Firefox).

As for Chromium, I have a 32-bit CentOS 5.5 VM whose sole purpose in life is to build any new dev, beta or stable releases, which can be as frequent as every 4 hours with Google's mad release schedule. Had to build it against dozens of later hand-built libraries though - I'll hopefully be able to just use the binaries when CentOS 6 finally rolls out.

BTW, the "hate this hack" thing is a bit over the top. The libstdc++.so.6 is extracted from Fedora 9 (a relatively close cousin to CentOS 5's Fedora 6 base), it has worked for months without any side effects for me and it only affects the Firefox binary, Firefox plugins and maybe helper apps spawned from Firefox. Any programs started from outside of Firefox are not affected by the library inclusion at all - it's pretty harmless in other words.
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James
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Re: Firefox 4.0b9 and CentOS 5.5

Post by James »

Mozilla has never planned to provide any packages of Firefox for Linux whether it be .deb or rpm or whatever for the huge list of different distros due to the extra amount of work of compiling and dependencies and such, especially when the Linux distros would likely be providing them anyways. If they did by chance offer RPM's it would probably be compiled for the current distros and not ones with outdated packages like CentOS 5.5 anyways. By the way Firefox 4.0 is the first release for 64-bit builds on Linux and and Mac OSX so be happy for that also.

There was talk in past to work with many of the current Linux distros (CentOS was not in list if I recall) in providing a place on a Mozilla page for one to find and download the packages the Linux distros made but it has yet to happen.

For a time Mozilla was looking at using say Autopackage Bug#277066 (<for reading) for to have cross distribution support as there are how many ways one can install a application on Linux and the dependencies and different dependancy names across distros for same thing can be a pain in the but as a result.

Hey you can have a new nightly of Firefox every hour if you want as the Tinderbox builds new builds quickly to make that four hours be slow.
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