July 13th, 2009 | 
Author: Since initially attempting to install Firefox 3.5 on Debian Lenny, I found the package I had made from compiled source was rather blouted, and the processes itself was rather tedious and harry and have been looking for other alternatives. First I tried Swiftfox, but was frustrated by trying to get flash to work. In the past I have used Swiftweasel, but a 3.5 current has not been released yet. Finaly I found glandium’s blog entry for installing Iceweasel 3.5 from experimental. I found I had to midify his instruction just slightly.
First is I added the testing and experimental repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list
#TESTING AND EXPERIMENTAL
deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian testing main
deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian experimental main
then I preformed these commands in terminal:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -t testing libstartup-notification0 libsqlite3-0 libnss3-1d libhunspell-1.2-0 libasound2 libxcb1
apt-get install iceweasel/experimental
Then I commented out the testing and experimental entries in /etc/apt/sources.list and performed an upgrade. To get java and flash to work I simply had to install them as usual.
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree sun-java6-plugin
Thus far I have found this the easiest way to get a Firefox 3.5 based build running on Debian Lenny. However, I am no longer running a strictly stable release of Debian, but with the other third party and backport repositories I use I don’t feel bad about this. For security issues Firefox/Iceweasel/Swiftfox is one of the few programs I actually desire to have the latest release and that it is the most used program on my desktop.
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Yes, that indeed may be the most convenient way. But how about (security) updates for Firefox/Iceweasel 3.5?If you disable the testing/experimental entries in sources.list no updates will be done. I am not a Debian expert yet, but I guess there should be a way to enable certain packages only from other releases by configuring something in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/ ?
I just came to the conclusion, to leave all my Desktop/Laptop installations at 32bit, because none of these machines have more than 2GB RAM, and even if the CPU in some of my computers support EM64T, it does not make any sense, especially because I want to use SMplayer with CoreAVC, which unfortunately can not be compiled on 64bit (there is a thread on Ubuntu forums concerning that proceeding). That means, there are three options:- use the binary directly available from mozilla- build it myself following the mentioned instructions- use the version from experimentalThat’s hard to choose, because I was in the opinion, that compiling myself will lead to the best result. What exactly led to your own package being “bloated”?
The reason I went 64bit is mainly because my system has 4gigs of ram – but ifyou have under 3.2gigs then by all means stick with 32bit (I have encountered some frustrations with 64bit). I am considering trying the processes with the bigmem kernel to see if I can get the full 4gigs in a 32bit system. If i where using a 32 bit system I would use the binary directly from Mozilla (it is easier to make a package for it to). I am not a compiling package making pro, and only have the vaguest idea what I am doing. With another needed package I tried compiling from source and packaging all the language libraries where included even though I already had them and with Firefox there seemed to be a lot of source code and extra files not included in the binary avalible from Firefox. I need to learn more about compiling and making packages, I think.
There might be a way to do that, I don’t know entirely. I would have to do some pocking around other Debian Sites to maybe find out, which would be convenient. As for now, if a new point release of Iceweasel is available I would uncomment them and only upgrade Iceweasel; meaning I would have to keep my eye on the experimental and testing branches. Same thing If I where to use the binaries of Firefox, I would occasional have to manually update; however, in windows Firefox i have seen a built in update utility which I haven’t ever encountered in Linux, but might be available with the official binaries (i don’t know).