Tue Feb 20 19:57:26 PST 2007
New Firefox, Thunderbird, and 64-bit Machines
I had a question about websites using Flash from a user with a 64-bit machine. It turns out that Adobe doesn't have a 64-bit Flash plugin available, so the official workaround is to run a 32-bit browser with the 32-bit plugin. Unfortunately, the browser included with CentOS is a 64-bit browser!
Luckily, I have had Firefox installed in
/shared/local for quite some
time, and with some additional jinking with
links to various plugins, I have it working
with Java, Flash, and Acrobat (although you
may get an error when loading the Acrobat
plugin on some machines, it seems to
display PDFs just fine).
To use Firefox, you should be able to just
type firefox at a shell prompt
(ideally, of course, you'd do firefox
& to run it in the background
and allow you to do other things with your
shell!). If you like it, you can change the
browser that comes up when you click the
browser icon by
- Right clicking on the icon
- Choosing the Properties... item from the menu
- Changing the Command field to read
firefox
Firefox 2
I have also installed Firefox 2 in
/shared/local. Because Firefox
2 is not compatible with some of the
add-ins that work with Firefox 1.5, Firefox
1.5 is still the default Firefox in
/shared/local/bin. If you
don't have any add-ons that don't work with
version 2 (or if you don't have any add-ons
at all), you might consider using Firefox 2
instead of Firefox 1.5.
To do so, all you need to do is follow the
same steps for setting your browser icon to
run Firefox 1.5, but instead of just
entering firefox in the
Command field, put
/shared/local/firefox-2/firefox.
You can run Firefox 2 from the command line
by typing the same path.
At some point, probably after the add-ons that I use are all supported by Firefox 2, I will be making Firefox 2 the default.
Thunderbird Updated, Too
I also updated Thunderbird from version 1.5.0.7 to 1.5.0.9. I don't imagine there are any major changes.
Problems? Questions? Comments?
I've tested to verify that these changes work, but you may still have some problems (or run into some weird situation that I didn't think of). If so, please let me know.