General software installation question

[maximumbob]

As soon as my sys was up and running, I grabbed a tar of Firefox, but when I install, it installs to the directory where I downloaded it. Where should it be, and is there anything else I need to do to make it work right?

[dkeav]

what distro/OS are you using, most likely there is a binary package for your distrobution, also how are you installing your software?

you most likely downloaded the source code, to install it wou will need to compile it (provided you have dev tools installed on your system) to do that uncompress the tar.gz archive and cd into the directory with the source run ./configure && make && su -c make install

[infiniphunk]

Its OK to do it that way maximumbob, you should end up with a folder in your home dir called "firefox-installer". cd to that directory and do:

./firefox-installer

That will start the GUI installer for Firefox. From then on the firefox executable will also be located in this same folder, and you can run Firefox normally from there.
I take it though that you're using a distro that already has an older version of Firefox bundled with it, right?

[maximumbob]

I take it though that you're using a distro that already has an older version of Firefox bundled with it, right?

That is correct. To upgrade, however, you must download the full current version. My first idea was to find where the old version was installed and install the new version over the old, but that didn't work very well.

About installing it to my home directory: Do I need to be root to do that? Then if I am logged in as another user, I won't be able to use it, which I want to do.

[Parcival]

No, to install anything in your /home folder you don't need to be root at all, it is your space where you can do everything as a regular user. However, that's not necessarily a good place for installing apps as you figured yourself.

The idea of replacing your older Thunderbird version is a good one. I suggest you try this:

as root, you move the current Thunderbird installation into a different folder (e.g. thunderbird.old) and install your new version into the folder where it was previously installed.

As long as you keep your thunderbird account files safe in your home folder you can fiddle with the program files as much as you want.

[maximumbob]

It's not Thunderbird -- Firefox 0.8 was an available pacakge on the SuSE source discs, but I need to upgrade it to 1.06, and to do that, there is no patch, so I have to install the full version. I didn't know where it installed the old version, so I did a search, and it was in /opt ... so, I tried setting the install dir in the FF Installer GUI to the old dir in /opt, and it installed there, but I don't know if that's the correct way to go about it.

[Parcival]

Yes, that sounds all fine to me. When you start Firefox and go to "About Mozilla Firefox" in the Help menue, does it show the new/current version number?