Intro
Mozilla Firefox isn’t available as a package for Debian Wheezy – Debian only offers it’s unbranded version called „Iceweasel“. This Iceweasel is (8. Juni 2013) at the Firefox version 17ESR – which is old compared to Firefox (version 21).
Description
First you need to download Firefox for your system. What version you have – 32 or 64 bit – shows this command:
uname -m
Download the version accordingly:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/linux-x86_64/
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest/linux-i686/
All commands, which get described now, are also collected below for easy copy-pasting!
The downloaded package gets extracted to /opt:
cd /opt
sudo tar -xvf ~/firefox-*.tar.bz2
Additionally another library has to be installed:
sudo apt-get install libdbus-glib-1-dev
Firefox get’s started via the script, which was originally installed by Iceweasel under /usr/bin/firefox. Hence it has to be adjusted.
sudo gedit /usr/bin/firefox
It has to include afterwards this:
#!/bin/sh FIREFOX="$(which $0)" [ -x "$FIREFOX.real" ] && exec "$FIREFOX.real" "$@" LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/firefox/ exec /opt/firefox/firefox "$@" #exec iceweasel "$@"
The last line has to have a „#“ in front of it and before that this line has to be added:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/firefox exec /opt/firefox/firefox "$@"
Now the logos get linked properly:
sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/icons/mozicon128.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/firefox.png
sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/icons/mozicon128.png /usr/share/pixmaps/firefox.png
For Firefox to show up in the menu, afirefox.desktop description file has to be made:
sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop
The content can be copied below.
That’s it already!
Commands in one block:
cd /opt
sudo tar -xvf ~/firefox-*.tar.bz2
sudo apt-get install libdbus-glib-1-dev
sudo gedit /usr/bin/firefox
sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/icons/mozicon128.png /usr/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/firefox.png
sudo ln -s /opt/firefox/icons/mozicon128.png /usr/share/pixmaps/firefox.png
sudo gedit /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop
Content of /usr/bin/firefox:
#!/bin/sh FIREFOX="$(which $0)" [ -x "$FIREFOX.real" ] && exec "$FIREFOX.real" "$@" LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/firefox exec /opt/firefox/firefox "$@" #exec iceweasel "$@"
Content of firefox.desktop:
[Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Name=Firefox Comment=Browse the World Wide Web GenericName=Web Browser X-GNOME-FullName=Firefox Web Browser Exec=/opt/firefox/firefox %u Terminal=false X-MultipleArgs=false Type=Application Icon=firefox Categories=Network;WebBrowser; MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;application/rss+xml;application/rdf+xml;image/gif;image/jpeg;image/png;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https; StartupWMClass=Firefox-bin StartupNotify=true