This procedure assumes you’ve downloaded and installed the latest Debian Lenny (aka “testing,” currently) GNU/Linux distribution, along with its standard GNOME desktop environment.
Using Iceweasel for the last time, download Firefox to your home directory. Let’s assume the name of the file you downloaded is “firefox-3.0.5.tar.bz2″ (the current version as of this writing).
Open up a terminal window and, as root, type the following commands (following each by hitting Enter):
apt-get remove iceweasel
mv firefox-3.0.5.tar.bz2 /usr/lib/
cd /usr/lib/
tar -jxvf firefox-3.0.5.tar.bz2
ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox
If you prefer, you can simplify the above commands by copying/pasting the following text onto your terminal command line:
apt-get remove iceweasel; mv firefox-3.0.5.tar.bz2 /usr/lib/; cd /usr/lib/; tar -jxvf firefox-3.0.5.tar.bz2; ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox
Finally, you’ll need a launch icon on your desktop. You can create that the standard way GNOME allows, or simply save this file to your GNOME desktop.
That’s all there is to it!
Well, one other point. To make use of browser plugins that have already been set up by your Debian installation, you’ll want to create a symlink from /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/ to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/, using this two-part command (as root):
rm -rf /usr/lib/firefox/plugins; ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins /usr/lib/firefox/plugins
Incidentally, on my installation, the default flash plugin that came with Lenny (flash-mozilla.so) required me to click a large play button (shown at right) each time I visited a web page that used flash. So, I went to Adobe’s flash plugin download page and downloaded the flash plugin for debian, then installed it with the command “dpkg -i install_flash_player_10_linux.deb” (as root). That plugin (flashplugin-alternative.so) works much bett
