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Friday, March 29, 2013

Installing Firefox on Solaris (Update)

On this post I'm going over how to install Firefox on Solaris 10. This is an update from one of my earlier posts. The reason for this update is because there has been some changes on how you get Firefox. The place where Mozilla would point it's uses to download Firefox was the OpenSolaris.org website. Oracle took down the OpenSolaris.org website on March 23 2013. As my old instructions used a different install process, I felt I needed to rewrite this how-to.


The other main place to get Firefox is at SunFreeware.com or UNIXpackages.com, which are the same people. The only issue with getting Firefox from there site is that it is not actually from them. They go out of there way to say this on there site and I quote; "They are the ONLY packages in our repository that are not compiled by us, and were contributed by External Offshore developers in East Asia". The quote used to say "contributed by developers in Beijing China", apparently someone complained and a change was made. With all the hacking allegations concerning China you may not not want to get Firefox from them.

The other places that host Solaris software or packages is blastwave and OpenCSW.org. Blastwave is now a dead project and OpenCSW.org doesn't have Firefox in their package list.

Now I have some good news and some bad news. Good news Oracle is now providing patches and/or packages for Firefox. The bad news is that they are not keeping up with the Firefox versions from Mozilla. Not to mention the CVE vulnerabilities that are coming out.

Below I list two places to get Firefox from Oracle. You will need a Oracle Support login to download the files. The 2nd link lets you see the 3rd party patches that are available before you need to login to Oracle. You can get newer versions of Firefox, then what is linked to below, by putting in a ticket (SR) to your MOS (My Oracle Support) account.
Oracle Support document 1448883.1
Third Party Software in Oracle Products webpage.

The main package for Firefox is SUNWfirefox. There are a few additional Firefox packages that you might have installed on your sever. To see what Firefox related packages are on your server run the command below.
# pkginfo -l | grep firefox
PKGINST: SUNWfirefox
PKGINST: SUNWfirefoxl10n-es-ES
PKGINST: SUNWfirefox-devel

To see a complete list of Solaris 10 packages click here.

Oracle has provided the following patches for Firefox: 145080-11 (x86) & 145080-12 (SPARC). Applying this patch may take a little longer then what you are used too but, it will upgrade Firefox from 3.X to Firefox 10.0.7. # mv 145080-12.zip /tmp
# unzip 145080-12.zip
# patchadd 145080-12

Congrats you have install the ESR version Firefox on Solaris 10. Oracle also has an updated version of Firefox for Solaris 11, coming soon.

My Other Firefox posts.
Installing Firefox on a Solaris server
Installing Firefox on Solaris (Update II)
Installing Firefox on Solaris (Update III)

If you have anything to add please post below.

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