Firefox 3.5 Packages for openSUSE 10.3, 11.0, and 11.1

Wolfgang Rosenauer has made my day. He’s been busy packaging all kinds of Mozilla goodness in the openSUSE Build Service and has Firefox 3.5 packages in OBS for users of openSUSE 10.3, 11.0, and 11.1.

If you want to upgrade via OBS (rather than grabbing the generic Linux tarballs from Mozilla) you can add the appropriate repository for your release like so:

sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla/openSUSE_11.1/ mozilla

sudo zypper ref

sudo zypper in mozilla:MozillaFirefox 

This will install Mozilla Firefox and allow you to pull updates from the newer packages. Our enterprise friends can also grab the Firefox package for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 from the openSUSE Build Service.

Specifically — the first line adds the Mozilla repository and names it “mozilla,” the second line refreshes the local list of packages including the new mozilla repo, and the final line actually tells zypper to install Firefox. Zypper will not only install the Mozilla Firefox package, it will also grab whatever dependencies are needed.

Note that you can do the same thing using YaST and GUI tools, I just find this much simpler.

I grabbed the packages on my laptop (the machine that goes everywhere with me…) last week after 3.5 was released, and updated my home systems today. I’ve tested on SLED 11 and openSUSE 11.1. I don’t have any systems running 11.0 or 10.3 so I haven’t had a chance to test those packages.

Generally speaking, you can usually find the latest releases of important packages for current and older releases of openSUSE almost as soon as they’re released. KDE releases are usually ready for openSUSE as soon as they’re announced by the KDE Project (or very nearly) and many other packages make their way to OBS very quickly.