Official Mozilla.com Firefox+Tbird: use mozilla-launcher?[S]

Havin_it · Last edited by Havin_it on Fri Sep 15, 2006 1:00 pm; edited 1 time in total

Hi all,

So here's my situation. A month back I got fed-up with the merry-go-round of Firefox and Thunderbird updates, and decided to dump them and install the mozilla.com distributions so I could tweak the progfiles to my heart's content without losing stuff everytime an update happened. (Oh, and being able to use their quick-updaters too =) )

The experience has been largely painless, but I am getting one bug: when I close Firefox with Ctrl+W (when only one tab is open) I get a crash alert (courtesy of a funky motif-based Talkback popping up!?) - this doesn't seem to be doing any harm, but it is annoying.

Firefox and Tbird are both installed under /opt. I've symlinked their startup scripts to /usr/bin/firefox and /usr/bin/thunderbird, which I launch them from.

What I'm wondering is, would it be better to use mozilla-launcher to run them? If so, how would I go about making it play with them?

And a bonus question: I'd like to get the VLC plugin working with my off-the-shelf Firefox, but I had to remove the 'nsplugin' flag from vlc to prevent it depending on the firefox ebuild. What's the best way to resolve this?

Thanks in advance

monkey89 · Guru Joined: 08 Mar 2004 Posts: 596

You could add firefox/thunderbird to /etc/portage/package.provided to avoid those dependency issues.

Havin_it · Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 11:15 pm Post subject:

Hi, thanks! I looked at the docs for this feature and it sounds good (apart from having to keep the version-number updated in the file). If I use this, I presume it's necessary to move the installs to their Portage-prescribed locations under /usr/lib?

monkey89 · Guru Joined: 08 Mar 2004 Posts: 596

As far as I know, not really... the package.provided file makes portage assume that the package has been installed without actually installing it via portage. Later on, if a package depends on Firefox, I guess you might run into a problem if it looks for necessary files in the default path and cannot figure out that it is installed in an alternate route.

Havin_it · Posted: Fri Sep 15, 2006 1:00 pm Post subject:

That seems to have done the trick.

I added the current versions of both packages to /etc/make.profile/package.provided, and symlinked the real install dirs to /usr/lib/MozillaFirefox and /usr/lib/MozillaThunderbird (correct paths?).

To use mozilla-launcher, I had to first emerge both -bin packages, grab the 'stubs' they placed in /usr/bin, then unmerge them again.

Thanks for the advice =)