CentOS 7 comes with the ERS (Extended Release Support) version of Mozilla software. This is typical of the basic concept behind RHEL/CentOS and other clones, that you probably only have to install the OS once in the lifetime of the hardware. It will be supported in some fashion for a very long time, so if it runs okay when you first install it, chances are you are done with that.
For example, a default install gives you Firefox 24.x, which is the current ERS version. If you want to install Thunderbird from the standard repositories, you’ll get the same thing. For now, Seamonkey is not available from the repositories I know about. Should you decide you really want the newest version, you’ll need to be careful to find the latest in 64-bit. The typical route through the Mozilla.org websites will not get you there easily. In fact, 64-bit Thunderbird is hidden completely. It’s there, but not easily found.
The proper route is simply start from the FTP folders in the first place: go here. From that starting point, you can drill down into each of the various folders until you find what you seek. For example, the latest and greatest 64-bit Thunderbird as of this posting date is in this folder. Notice where that takes you and observe how it is structured. It’s similar for the other Mozilla projects. You may not want the various releases with lower case letters like “b” as they are beta software.
Once you download what you seek, you’ll find a big, fat b-zipped tar file. Decompress it unwrap it. I do it the old way from the CLI:
bunzip2 thunderbird-31.0.tar.bz2
tar -xvf thunderbird-31.0.tar
I like to watch stuff one step at a time, but if you want to know the shortcuts, you can try other hints you find by searching on the Net or in the manpages (i.e., man bzip2).
You’ll end up with a “thunderbird” folder wherever you performed this operation. Simply move that over into your basic “home” folder. Since I’m using the KDE4 desktop on CentOS 7, I need only right-click on the desktop and chase the context menu listings to create a link to application. Change the name to something meaningful to you, say “Thunderbird” and then on the “Application” tab go down to the “command” line and click “Browse”. The window that opens will allow you to select your own home folder (tagged by your username), then you can drop down into the “thunderbird” folder and find the only file there simply named “thunderbird”. Click that and create the desktop link. The icon will be generic, but for some reason you can’t change that until the thing exists. Right-click on this icon and select “Properties” and you’ll get a slightly different window with that generic icon prominently displayed. Click that and select “Other icons” and “Browse”. Chase back down through the “thunderbird” folder this way: thunderbird/chrome/icons/default/ and select the largest one there. Finish up and you now have your latest and greatest version installed in your own home folder.
The advantage here is updating. You don’t need root credentials to update an executable in your own files. While the application is open, click in the menu line “Help” and select “About Thunderbird” and it will open a smaller window and check for updates. If it needs to update, it should download for you the update of the exact same 64-bit version and tell you to restart once it’s finished. Thus be it ever from now on, we hope.
If you chose to do this with Seamonkey, it’s pretty much the same deal. However, for Firefox we have a complication, because there is already a Firefox installed by default. You either have to log in as root and remove it, or teach them to coexist and run side-by-side. That’s not easy with stuff from Mozilla. They like to use the same profile by default and argue about which version of your add-ons will work. On top of that, even with two profiles, the one already running will simply respawn a new instance of the same version. It’s tricky. We’ll fix this by using the commandline switches that come with Firefox.
First, open any terminal application (I prefer KDE’s Konsole for most things) and launch Firefox there, but with a switch to create a new profile:
firefox -ProfileManager
This opens a little window that lists what you have — likely “default” — and allows you to create another. Pick a simple name, perhaps your system username, and create a new profile. Now, decide which one will use which version of Firefox. Simplicity suggests you would leave default for the ERS version and your new profile for the latest version of Firefox. Now, right-click on your main menu button on the panel and select “Edit Applications”. You’ll find a window with the menu system outlined. Find and open the item for launching the pre-installed version of Firefox (under “Internet”). Find the “command” and change it to something like this:
firefox -P default -new-instance %u
What we do here is add some switches. The “-P” means use a particular profile, followed by the name — “default” in this case. The “-new-instance” tells Firefox not to connect this launch with any already running Firefox instance. That “%u” is used by KDE in case you have Firefox set as your default browser. When you create the launcher for your newly installed Firefox running from your home folder, use a similar command for that launcher, but change the profile name to whatever you created for that.
Enjoy!
