[ILUG] Re: ILUG Digest, Vol 2, Issue 24

[Niall O Broin]

On 11 Dec 2005, at 13:59, Keith Hyland wrote:

>> I am using Mandriva 2005 LE Linux and I cannot get it to install at 
>> all.
>> I do a
>>         tar -zxvf firefox-1.5.tar.gz
>> and it decompresses an already compiled/installed version ready to 
>> run or so
>> it seems into a ./firefox folder.
>> There is no option to install to another directory.
>> Apart from all this it doesn't even run propperly. It aborts with no 
>> messages
>> whatsoever immediatly.
>>
>> Any idea how I can get it to go into the usual 
>> /usr/local/bin/firefox/ folder
>> so every account on the machine can use it?
>
> Seán,
>
> i would have thought that you need to specify the directory you want 
> it to untar into:
>
> tar -zxvf firefox-1.5.tar.gz  /usr/local/bin/
>
> check the man page for tar?

Check the man page for tar yourself - the above command will try to 
extract /usr/local/bin/ from firefox-1.5.tar.gz (and will fail 
miserably, because it isn't there). Either

cd /usr/local/bin && tar -zxvf firefox-1.5.tar.gz

or

tar -zxvCf /usr/local/bin firefox-1.5.tar.gz

will do what you want, though I'd find it a strange place to install 
the firefox folder myself (/usr/local/bin is conventionally used to 
install locally compiled binaries). A more common place might be 
/usr/local, so that you'd end up with Firefox installed in 
/usr/local/firefox, and could then either add /usr/local/firefox to the 
general path, or create a symlink from /usr/local/firefox/firefox to 
/usr/local/bin/firefox .

Or you could just wait until somebody produces a Mandriva RPM - surely 
won't take long.



Niall