Install Firefox 3 beta in CentOS 5 / RHEL 5

This short howto is about is CentOS 5 which is based on RedHat Enterprise Linux 5, so this should also work on RHEL 5.

I use CentOS 5 as a Desktop OS on office PC, it’s a very stable and working distro even if it doesn’t always have the latest software. This is why I had to manually install the latest Beta Firefox 3.

First off all we need to install compat-libstdc++-33. Otherwise Firefox won’t run.
# yum install compat-libstdc++-33

Then download the latest beta version of Firefox 3 from www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-beta.html and unpack it to /usr/lib

# tar jxvf firefox-3.0b3.tar.bz2
# mv firefox /usr/lib/firefox-3.0b3

Set the link for the binary

# cd /usr/bin
# cp firefox firefox-1.5
# gedit firefox

then replace all ‘firefox-1.5.0.12’ with ‘firefox-3.0b3’
and finally for a desktop menu create a firefox-3.desktop on /usr/share/applications

# gedit /usr/share/applications/firefox-3.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Firefox 3 beta 3
GenericName=Web browser
Comment=Send and Receive Email
Exec=firefox
Icon=firefox.png
Terminal=false
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml
Type=Application
Categories=Network;Application;X-Fedora;
Comment=Firefox Web Browser
 
thats all, Firefox 3 beta is ready to run with required plugins.
Same steps can be followed for laatest stable Firefox version 2.