Firefox

If you see Java Runtime Environement (JRE) plugin not available in your Iceweasel or Firefox system and auto installation fail, asking you to do a manual install, then install the following package which will automatically put the JRE plugin in place in Debian/Ubuntu based systems.

# aptitude install icedtea6-plugin

The above loads JRE plugin in the web browser. I really wanted this in order to attend webex sessions from my Debian/Ubuntu boxes. Check your browser's Tools->Add-ons->Plugins which will have "IcedTea Java Web Browser Plugin" loaded after installing the above package.

Today I opened my Firefox 3.5 browser and saw an option which allows me to restore sessions selectively in case if there is any problems which is great! Kudos to firefox developers.

Screenshot attached.

Today I loaded my laptop with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS version which comes along with Firefox version 3.0b5. As soon as I installed I tried hitting http://www.google.com but I got an error which was like an error we used to see when the internet connection is not working. So I checked all my network connections my wireless connection but in vain. Tried rebooting which also did not help. After which I tried to read the error closely which said "Firefox is working in offline mode".

Then immediately I went to Edit -> Preferences and searched through the option to enable the online mode, but couldn't find one. At last after going through all the menu Items found the menu item to enable online mode here File -> Work Offline

We have the stable release of Iceweasel from Debian both for amd64 and i386 after the release of Debian etch which recently happened on April 8th, 2007. Instead of giving a script to install Iceweasel 2.0 this time I thought I can give the actual .deb file changed to suit the needs of Ubuntu users :) You can download the Iceweasel .deb files for your architecture from the following links: iceweasel_2.0.0.3-1_amd64.deb iceweasel_2.0.0.3-1_i386.deb

Finally I figured out a way to install Iceweasel web browser in Ubuntu Edgy Eft. In my workplace I use Ubuntu, and miss Debian a lot. One of the cool features in Debian is they have compiled Iceweasel with Indic fonts support which is a feature missing in Ubuntu Edgy Firefox. Due this I face issues when I access tamil pages in Ubuntu's firefox.

Hence, I decided to install Iceweasel in Ubuntu. After a lot of searching I finally found the procedure to use the debian package of Iceweasel from Debian's unstable package repository. The problem in installing the deb package of Iceweasel is the conflict with libfonconfig1, libpango and libpng versions which is available in Debian testing and that available in Ubuntu. I made some small changes to resolve these conflicts in Ubuntu without breaking the consistency of the system :)

On October 24th, 2006 we had the new release of Firefox ie., version 2.0 Release Candidate (RC) 3. I have Ubuntu Dapper Drake in my laptop and wanted to update my firefox to the new version. I found the installation of firefox is somewhat tricky because it does not have the usual way of configure/make/make install cycle. There was also another happy news today that Ubuntu's latest release Edgy (6.10) is out which has all the latest softwares including Firefox2.0. But I was not in a position to update my Dapper to Edgy today, but I decided to get Firefox2 in my Dapper and this is how I did it with the help of the following script which I obtained from Ubuntu forum: