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.