Iceweasel 3.5 on Debian Lenny

fishbowl — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:29:56 +0000

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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Iceweasel 3.5 on Debian Lenny