(The updated version of this series can be found here.)
So we have the Chromium browser, but maybe you prefer the other major browser family, called Mozilla. We noted already that Debian doesn’t use the official labels for Firefox, but calls it Iceweasel. That’s some more of the political stuff we don’t really care about. They also don’t offer the latest version of Firefox/Iceweasel.
As it is, Firefox isn’t even the original product, but is itself the product of politics within the developer community involved in various Mozilla projects. Way back when, the browser had a built-in email client and some other stuff, and the whole package was called Mozilla. That name became used for other things, but the actual software package is now called Seamonkey. The leadership at Mozilla don’t hate it, but they aren’t all that supportive of it, either. So most of the folks working on it are volunteers keeping it alive. It’s faster and lighter than Firefox, has more tools included, and is really easy to get. (If you prefer Firefox, just read along and realize that most of the same instructions apply.)
Debian has a version called Iceape, and it’s also not the latest, so we are going to install the real thing. It so happens that the Seamonkey folks always keep a fully usable package that runs just fine on Debian without any special tricks. If you go to their main page using your Debian computer, the website will detect and offer you an immediate download of the correct version. So click that blue link and be prepared to wait a bit as you pull down 22MB. If English is not your preferred language, you can click the link below that to find a list of other language versions.
So what do we do with that big wad sitting your Downloads folder? It’s not in the Debian “deb” format so clicking on it won’t summon the gdebi installer. Instead, we are going to learn how to handle it from the commandline. Open your terminal application. Notice that the prompt has you at your home directory. We need to move ourselves into the Downloads folder. It’s not so hard:
cd Downloads
It’s the same command used on lots of operating systems, including the Windows command prompt. It’s the abbreviation for “change directory”. What do we have here? Let’s ask:
ls
This is the command to list the files present. One of them will say “seamonkey” followed by some numbers and dots and finally a .tar.bz2. That tells us it is a tar archive that is compressed using bzip version 2. You’ll get used to those terms eventually. Tar is an old method of bundling a bunch of files together in their proper order, including folders and sub-folders. There are several different compression tools and bzip2 is very common in the Linux world.
While it’s possible to do this all at once, you won’t learn as much that way. First we unzip it, but we need to learn a new trick. Type this and hit the TAB key.
bunzip2 seamonkey-
What happens is the TAB key tells the commandline to finish it for you. Once you have typed enough that the system recognizes which file you are going to indicate, the TAB key saves you typing it all out and risking getting some detail wrong. If there happens to be several files with similar names, hitting TAB will not work quite that well; it will type for you as much as they all have in common and wait for you to indicate the difference for the rest of it, when you can hit tab again. Once it’s all there, hit ENTER.
So for now, unless you’ve been downloading a lot of stuff in between these lessons, it should easily work as soon as you get “s” and hit TAB because no other file there beings with “s”.
As for the command itself, we aren’t zipping it up, so it’s “b-unzip” and we have to add the 2 because there is a different version without the 2. So we are telling the system to run the bzip2 utility to uncompress the file. When it’s done, what do we get? Try that ls command again, and you should see that the “bz2” part is gone from the name. It’s just a tar file.
The command is not exactly the same and requires using switches to activate specific functions. First, we want to extract the archive (x), and we would like some information about it (v for “verbose”) so list the files as they come out. Of course, we have to be specific to tell it which file, so whatever follows the (f) switch is the thing we want extracted. To use any switch, or all of them together (“concatenated”) we put a space after the command, then a hyphen with all the single letter switches:
tar -xvf sea
Hit the TAB key again and it should choose the right file, so hit ENTER. A long list of files will whizz down the screen. When it’s done, you can hit ls and you’ll see the tar file is still there, but there is now a new folder called “seamonkey”. You can tell it’s a folder because the letters display in blue instead of some other color. Zipped files and tar archives are typically in red letters, ordinary text files in white, and other files in various other colors.
There are several different ways of handling this folder which contains everything to make Seamonkey run. The most common way is to log in as root and move it into the file system somewhere. So use the su command and give your root password while we are still in this same Downloads folder. Then we move it to a safe place. For now, the standard location is in the /usr/local/ part of the file system. As root:
mv ./seamonkey/ /usr/local/
That’s the abbreviated command “move” and the dot in front of slash specifically tells the system we are pointing to this folder inside our current directory — current directory is noted as a single period. We specifically add the trailing slash to the “seamonkey” folder and move it to somewhere else. If you hit ls again, you won’t see the blue label for seamonkey any more. But if you ask your ls command to look in that other location, you should see it listed:
ls /usr/local/
From here on out, when you see a command plastered on the page like that, you should know to automatically hit ENTER every time. You should see the seamonkey folder listed there.
Now, let’s create a launcher so we can use it. You can do this on the disappearing panel or on your desktop. You could also edit the XFCE main menu, because we did all of those in a previous lesson. In the first line of the launcher dialog we enter “Seamonkey”. You can leave the next line blank. Instead of typing in a command in the third, simply click the button with the folder icon and look at the window that pops up. Most of the time, it should open to /usr/bin. It may take awhile to read the long list of stuff there, but eventually the main window will fill with the list of stuff in that folder. Up near the left-hand side of the top you’ll see buttons in a row indicating each of the folder designations in sequence. You’ll see “usr” and “bin”. Click the first one because it’s “next door” to where you are right now. In the window list you’ll see “local”. Double-click that and the buttons across the top will change. Now the list shows what’s inside the “/usr/local” folder. Double-click on “seamonkey”. Inside that folder you’ll see fairly long list. Hunt down a simple “seamonkey” file and double-click on that.
Now the launcher dialog shows your command properly. Would you like the official icon? Click on the button that says “no icon” and you’ll get another dialog to hunt down the images available. It should work the same as searching for the seamonkey command, so here is the location:
/usr/local/seamonkey/chrome/icons/default/
Select the one labeled “default48.png”. We are finished with the launcher so you can save it and close the dialog. Test your launcher now.
Seamonkey contains a lot more detailed options than Firefox, but not so many extensions are available. For example, you can’t get Ghostery. You can get Adblock and you should, using the menu system to find “Add-ons”. There may be others you like from the list of what’s available, but we need something that is built into Chromium — a way to keep Flash videos from playing automatically. This is another place where software politics makes things a little difficult. There is a Flashblock extension, but not in the official list. Find it here and look at the green squares. The one on the right is for us. Click that and you will be taken to the latest version for Seamonkey, with the version number highlighted for you at the top of the box with the word “Install”. Just click that and you’ll get it quickly.
Take the time to walk through the entire set of preferences (Edit > Preferences), but you don’t necessarily have to fill in the information for your email if you don’t want to use Seamonkey that way. There are two items of interest. You can force animated graphics to stop playing after once through. You can also tell Seamonkey to clean its cache without having to install Click & Clean. That way, while surfing around, you can stop and hit Tools > Clear Private Data… Configure it to delete what you want, then make sure you don’t have it ask you each time if you know what you like.
A significant difference between Mozilla browsers and all the others is the option to modify the default history settings so that you require your browser to present a notice for every cookie thrown at it. It’s a little overwhelming at first, since you’d learn some sites are tossing two dozen or more cookies all at once, many from other domains. It’s annoying to wade through that many in layers on top of your display, but there is a point to it. You can choose to accept, accept for session only, or block. Once you’ve told your browser, you can tell it to keep track of that decision for future reference. Once you have your browser trained, it will remember and handle everything according to your preference. Thus, you won’t need to delete cookies routinely, neither from the built-in tools nor when you configure BleachBit for Seamonkey or Firefox.
As with most browsers, you can check to see if it’s up to date with the latest version from the menu: Help > Check for Updates. Unless you elect to keep track of such things more directly (there are mailing lists that do nothing more than notify people of software updates), you should run this check from the menu just about weekly, because there are security updates every now and then. It’s pretty simple to repeat this same process each time.
We are almost there.
