The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

How to run Firefix 3.5 under CentOS 4.4

I finally received a Google Wave Invite (via Smirk) and decided to give it a try. I go to the link, sign in with my Google email address, and get the following:

[Sorry, your browser is not supported, but hey, do you feel lucky?]

I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.20. Yes, it's an older version, but hey, it works—why fix it?

So I download the latest Firefox (3.5) and try the website again:

[spc]lucy:~/bin/firefox>./firefox
./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: 
libpangocairo-1.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: 
No such file or directory
[spc]lucy:~/bin/firefox>

Ah yes, that's what happend the last time I tried running Firefox 3.

I'm using CentOS 4.4 as my desktop, and yes, I'm using an older distribution of a distribution geared towards servers as a desktop. As for the older distribution part, hey, it works, and I dislike upgrading if I don't have to (I used RedHat 5.2 (not to be confused for their latest 5.2 offering) for about ten years prior to my upgrade to CentOS 4.4). As for the server bit, well … I do a lot of server development, and we run CentOS at The Office™ so it makes my life easier.

And I'm used to RedHat/CentOS.

So anyway, back to the current issue—Firefox 3.5.

The default repositories for CentOS 4.4 don't carry libpangocairo and after some searching, I found that installing frysk (ah, so that's what frysk does) I get libpangocairo as part of the package, under /usr/lib/frysk. So, all I need to do is tell Firefox 3.5 where to load that library and I'm good to go.

[spc]lucy:~/bin/firefox>LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/frysk/ ./firefox
./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: 
libdbus-glib-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: 
No such file or directory
[spc]lucy:~/bin/firefox>

Okay … hmm … I do have a libdbus-glib-1.so.0.0.0—what happens if I symbolically link libdbus-glib-1.so.2 to it?

[spc]lucy:~/bin/firefox>LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/frysk/ ./firefox
./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: 
libdbus-1.so.3: cannot open shared object file: 
No such file or directory
[spc]lucy:~/bin/firefox>

Okay, let's symbolically link libdbus-1.so.3 to libdbus-1.so.0.0.0 and see what happens—woot! Success! I'm running Firefox 3.5!

And now I can try out that Google Wave Thang everybody is so hyped about.

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