Iceweasel 4.0 beta 1 preliminary packages for Debian, and a nice trick
Since this blog is now syndicated on Planet Mozilla, a little background for its readers: Iceweasel is the name under which Firefox is distributed in Debian. This is an unfortunate detail due to copyright issues with the Firefox logos that have been solved recently. Work is under progress to get Firefox back in Debian (I do have good hope this will be possible).
Anyways, I've started to work on getting Iceweasel in shape for the 4.0 release in a few months. The packaging being in a good enough shape, I am hereby making available some preliminary packages (meaning there is still some more work needed for proper packaging) for the first beta release.
The packages are available in a separate repository, which you need to add to your sources.list:
deb http://mozilla.debian.net/packages/ ./
Only x86 and x86-64 (amd64) packages are available for now. As far as I tested it, it works as well as the official Firefox 4.0beta1 binaries, though some xpcshell tests failed, and I haven't got reftests working yet.
If you still wish to use a current version of iceweasel (i.e. non-beta), but want to try this beta, here is the nice trick: Instead of installing iceweasel from the above mentioned repository,
- Install xulrunner-2.0,
- Download the iceweasel package (don't install),
- Run the following command:
dpkg-deb -x iceweasel_4.0b1-0_*.deb /some/directory, - Create a necessary symbolic link:
ln -s /usr/lib/xulrunner-2.0 /some/directory/usr/lib.
Now you can start the Iceweasel beta with /some/directory/usr/bin/iceweasel. This trick should work with older versions of iceweasel, too.
2010-07-09 20:59:08+0900
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2010-07-09 21:46:06+0900
“copyright issues with the Firefox logos that have been solved recently.”
=> Tell us more please :)
2010-07-09 22:05:10+0900
Christoph: http://glandium.org/blog/?p=933
2010-07-09 22:45:33+0900
Minor bug: the “Additional plugins are required” bar has come back in this version.
2010-07-09 22:55:41+0900
Another minor bug: right-clicking on a bookmark in the bookmark and choosing “properties” doesn’t do anything.
2010-07-09 22:56:31+0900
(Happy to report these kinds of issues to upstream bugzilla too, but I figured I’d start here in case they don’t apply to upstream. In particular, the plugin issue seemed likely to interact with Debian-specific changes.)
2010-07-09 22:58:13+0900
[…] estaba pegándome con la beta de Firefox y hoy me encuentro con esta gran noticia en Planet Debian. Ya tenemos disponible para nuestras Debian los paquetes preliminares de la flamante (en beta, […]
2010-07-09 23:11:31+0900
So when’s Debian moving back to non-ice* branding?
2010-07-10 15:41:05+0900
[…] Hommey rozpoczÄ…Å‚ prace nad wydaniem Iceweasela 4.0 w ciÄ…gu kilku miesiÄ™cy. PrzygotawaÅ‚ wstÄ™pne pakiety (nadal wymagajÄ… kilku technicznych […]
2010-07-10 16:13:17+0900
_please_ include the fix for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422179 (bilinear filtering of upscaled images) for Linux
AFAICS all driver problems have been fixed, but noone bothers to include the fix for this in xulrunner.
2010-07-10 16:32:52+0900
[…] comportamiento perfecto. Muchas extensiones, sin ir más lejos, aún no están soportadas. Por eso han dejado un truquillo para probar esta 4.0 sin necesidad de […]
2010-07-10 17:13:49+0900
Thanks again for the work. Will the change to firefox make any practical difference for debian? (example, much less effort to make debian packages?); in other recent blogs you’ve mentioned that the gap between iceweasel and upstream is much less now, and I guess the speed with which the Debian iceweasel team is following upstream is proof of that.
2010-07-11 12:50:30+0900
[…] – http://glandium.org/blog/?p=1032 Share/Bookmark var a2a_config = a2a_config || {}; a2a_config.linkname="Firefox^Iceweasel […]
2010-07-11 21:39:57+0900
[…] […]
2010-07-12 09:59:14+0900
Anonymous: If you don’t have the necessary plugin, that’s not unexpected. As for bookmarks properties, works for me.
Christoph: When it’s ready.
oscar: Apparently not as simple as it looks, since X drivers may not be behaving correctly. (and we currently have several problems already with cairo 1.9.x)
tim: It would only simplify a small amount of work, actually.
The current number of patches against xulrunner 1.9.2 (ffx 3.6) is 100+, the number of patches against xulrunner 2.0 (ffx 4.0) is less than 50. Packaging 4.0beta1 took much less time than first packaging 3.6.
2010-07-12 21:44:14+0900
Hi, maybe a bit of topic, but when do you think 3.6 and/or 4.0 will be available in unstable?
2010-07-12 23:26:02+0900
glandium: The bookmarks properties thing seems to have magically fixed itself; no idea why.
However, regarding plugins: that behavior has regressed from 3.5/3.6 in Debian, which did not prompt me about plugins at all. 4.0 pops up the “Additional plugins are required” bar every time a site has any flash on it, a serious annoyance.
2010-07-13 11:15:20+0900
Grzes: after squeeze is released.
Anonymous: I just tested both 3.5 and 3.6, and they both are displaying the “additional plugins are required” bar.
Now, maybe what really happens for you is that you had set plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin in your 3.5/3.6 profile and not in the 4.0 one.
2010-07-13 12:05:32+0900
glandium: I don’t have separate profiles for 4.0 and 3.6, and I haven’t touched that setting.
However, investigating, I *do* have this in user.js:
user_pref(“plugin.default_plugin_disabled”, false);
That preference solves this problem for 3.6 but not 4.0, an annoying incompatibility.
(Now that I think of it, I think Debian’s packages used to do something equivalent to this, like not installing the default plugin, and I made this change when they stopped doing so.)
2010-07-13 12:34:20+0900
Anonymous: the difference then is that 4.0 doesn’t have the default plugin at all, and the plugin.default_plugin_disabled pref has now no effect. plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin is what you want, and works on 3.x and 4.0.
2010-07-14 14:49:29+0900
[…] 1 semana de haber lanzado la beta de Iceweasel, si aun no la han probado les dejo la guÃa que ellos mismos publicaron. La primer forma es si desean instalarlo en consola y como […]
2010-07-15 21:10:22+0900
> Will the change to firefox make any practical difference for debian?
Some stupid (e.g. internal corporate) sites check Browsers based on what name Browser gives and refuse to work with an unknown entity called Iceweasel. I know that one can change user-agent from about:config, but many people don’t know it (or that this can cause issues)…
2010-07-15 21:37:40+0900
Eero Tamminen: the Iceweasel UA includes “like Firefox/x.y” since 3.5.5-1, which solves most of these problems.
2010-08-30 19:53:57+0900
I just tried it out, with unfortunately a failure. I’m running Debian Squeeze on amd64, with xulrunner-1.9.2 installed as specified.
# apt-cache policy xulrunner-1.9.2
xulrunner-1.9.2:
Installé : 1.9.2.4-2
Candidat : 1.9.2.4-2
Table de version :
1.9.2.8-2 0
1 http://ftp.ca.debian.org experimental/main Packages
*** 1.9.2.4-2 0
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
I installed Iceweasel 4 (beta 4 from August 24) in /usr/lib/iceweasel4:
# mkdir /usr/lib/iceweasel4
# dpkg-deb -x iceweasel_4.0~b4-0_amd64.deb /usr/lib/iceweasel4/
# ln -s /usr/lib/xulrunner-2.0 /usr/lib/iceweasel4/usr/lib/
And then, as root or regular user:
# /usr/lib/iceweasel4/usr/bin/iceweasel
exec: 193: /usr/lib/iceweasel4/usr/lib/iceweasel/firefox-bin: not found
The file exists, though:
# ls /usr/lib/iceweasel4/usr/lib/iceweasel
application.ini components iceweasel searchplugins
blocklist.xml defaults iceweasel-xremote-client xulrunner
chrome extensions icons
chrome.manifest firefox-bin modules
Did I miss something? Is there any information that could be useful?
Thx for all the good work,
Mathieu.
2010-08-31 12:15:08+0900
I corrected the procedure, you need to install xulrunner-2.0, not xulrunner-1.9.2. My bad.
2010-08-31 21:34:22+0900
Now it works! (and the use of xulrunner-2.0 makes much more sense to me…)
For the record, here is what I did in the end (with Debian Squeeze and some apt pining):
1) download from http://mozilla.debian.net/packages/
* iceweasel_4.0~b4-0_amd64.deb
* libmozjs4d_2.0~b4-0_amd64.deb
* xulrunner-2.0_2.0~b4-0_amd64.deb
2) install or update the dependencies:
# dpkg –install libmozjs4d_2.0~b4-0_amd64.deb
# aptitude install -t unstable libsqlite3-0
# dpkg –install xulrunner-2.0_2.0~b4-0_amd64.deb
3) finally install iceweasel 4 as previously explained:
# mkdir /usr/lib/iceweasel4
# dpkg-deb -x iceweasel_4.0~b4-0_amd64.deb /usr/lib/iceweasel4/
# ln -s /usr/lib/xulrunner-2.0 /usr/lib/iceweasel4/usr/lib/
And then to launch iceweasel4:
# /usr/lib/iceweasel4/usr/bin/iceweasel
I still have to figure out why it only works as root, and not as a regular user (it launches the regular iceweasel 3.6). I also get the following warning:
(firefox-bin:9710): GnomeUI-WARNING **: While connecting to session manager:
None of the authentication protocols specified are supported.
Seems to work like a charm, though (I already love WebM). Thx for the help, and thank you a lot for providing iceweasel 4!
Mathieu.
2010-09-05 14:27:45+0900
[…] de instalarlo, y por mi parte lo recomendable. Muy sencillo de instalar en Debian y similares, como indican en Glandium [en inglés]. A mi me han funcionado estos pasos en Debian […]
2010-09-12 12:47:19+0900
Thanks for creating 4.0b builds for us – I’m really enjoying the latest and greatest.
I haven’t been too concerned about each new beta build – until now. b6 has JaegerMonkey, which I’d really like to try. Any chance of getting a b6 build?
Thanks again!
2010-09-13 12:26:23+0900
> Any chance of getting a b6 build?
When it is released. Which is not yet.
2010-09-14 00:12:38+0900
> When it is released. Which is not yet.
Ah – all the articles about “b6-pre” confused me. Indeed, you’re correct, sorry about that.
Thanks again for all your work!
2010-09-14 08:53:09+0900
And now b6 is going to be a regression fix for b5. Only b7 will have JägerMonkey.
2010-09-16 09:45:49+0900
Yeah, saw that. And the fixes are (afaict) Windows and Mac, but unrelated to Linux. I’ll be keeping an eye out for b7.
Thanks!
2010-09-26 20:42:19+0900
Beta 5 (4.0~b5-0) seems to lack the “like Firefox” in the user agent; it just says “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b5) Gecko/20100907 Iceweasel/4.0b5”. I haven’t done anything to change this.
2010-10-03 17:42:33+0900
[…] Debian you can use the Iceweasel 4 beta. # Iceweasel 4.0 beta packages for Debian http://glandium.org/blog/?p=1032 # deb http://mozilla.debian.net/packages/ ./ There is nothing to running Firefox, download, […]
2010-10-06 17:23:04+0900
I tried to install iceweasel 4 to Linux Mint but i get error:
“iceweasel: Depends: xulrunner-2.0 (>= 2.0~b5) but it is not going to be installed” If i try to install Xulrunner 2 then it says no can do as it’s depend on something else.
Damn it’s difficult to install one web browser.
2010-11-11 11:12:26+0900
Hi Glandium,
As we all noticed, Firefox 4 beta 7 was just released. I also found that a new iceweasel package had been built at
deb http://mozilla.debian.net/packages ./
Thank you very much for your great work.
The only problem I found with the new version is that iceweasel 4.0~b7-1 requires xulrunner-2.0 >= 2.0~b8~pre. As a result, the new iceweasel cannot be installed due to the unsatisfied dependency. Is there any special reason why iceweasel needs this version of xulrunner-2.0?
2010-11-11 15:06:29+0900
Hongzheng: No other reason than a mistake. I’ll push a fixed version once it’s built. Thanks for the heads-up.
2010-11-11 19:32:02+0900
Great! Thank you very much.
2010-11-11 20:23:38+0900
[…] […]
2010-11-12 10:16:49+0900
I came to request b7 and it’s already done. You rule, as always. Thanks!
2010-11-22 17:53:57+0900
[…] Installing Firefox 4 Beta on Debian Squeeze Filed under: Debian,Linux,Squeeze — nomo17k @ 12:53 Tags: admin, Debian/Squeeze, install procedure, Linux Firefox 3.5 (a.k.a. Iceweasel in Debian) on Squeeze is a bit old, so I wish to install Firefox 4 (still beta) as well. I’d like to keep an option of running stable Firefox 3.5, so what I do here is to install version 4 as a separate install. Much of this note follows the information found in this article and its comments. […]
2011-01-02 03:37:04+0900
Thanks for the packaging. I am seeing these errors(?) on the terminal :
###!!! [Parent][RPCChannel] Error: Channel error: cannot send/recv
Searching leads to some info about problems/issues with a java plugin. I am waiting for debian way of fixing things :-)
Regards.
2011-01-09 07:52:14+0900
[…] Firefox 3.5 (a.k.a. Iceweasel in Debian) on Squeeze is a bit old, so I wish to install Firefox 4 (still beta) as well. I’d like to keep an option of running stable Firefox 3.5, so what I do here is to install version 4 as a separate install. Much of this note follows the information found in this article and its comments. […]
2011-03-23 13:22:48+0900
Since Firefox4 is now officially out, any idea what’s the time for Iceweasel 4?
Or are we going to finally get Firefox4 officially?
2011-03-23 20:58:57+0900
Cae: http://packages.debian.org/experimental/iceweasel
2011-04-13 21:24:32+0900
Any progress on getting originally branded Firefox into Debian?
2011-07-09 06:36:06+0900
[…] comportamiento perfecto. Muchas extensiones, sin ir más lejos, aún no están soportadas. Por eso han dejado un truquillo para probar esta 4.0 sin necesidad de […]