TOPIC: ICEWEASEL
Using a variant of Debian's Iceweasel that keeps pace with Firefox
5th February 2013Left to its own devices, Debian will leave you with an ever ageing re-branded version of Firefox that was installed at the same time as the rest of the operating system. From what I have found, the main cause of this was that Mozilla's wanting to retain control of its branding and trademarks in a manner not in keeping with Debian's Free Software rules. This didn't affect just Firefox but also Thunderbird, Sunbird and Seamonkey with Debian's equivalents for these being IceDove, IceOwl and IceApe, respectively.
While you can download a tarball of Firefox from the web and use that, it'd be nice to get a variant that updated through Debian's normal apt-get channels. In fact, IceWeasel does get updated whenever there is a new release of Firefox, even if these updates never find their way into the usual repositories. While I have been known to take advantage of the more frozen state of Debian compared with other Linux distributions, I don't mind getting IceWeasel updated so it isn't a security worry.
The first step in so doing is to add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list using root access (using one of sudo, gksu or su to assume root privileges) since the file normally cannot be edited by normal users:
deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports squeeze-backports main
deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ squeeze-backports iceweasel-release
With the file updated and saved, the next step is to update the repositories on your machine using the following command:
sudo apt-get update
With the above complete, it is time to overwrite the existing IceWeasel installation with the latest one using an apt-get command that specifies the squeeze-backports repository as its source using the -t switch. While IceWeasel is installed from the iceweasel-release squeeze-backports repository, there are dependencies that need to be satisfied and these come from the main squeeze-backports one. The actual command used is below:
sudo apt-get install -t squeeze-backports iceweasel
While that was all that I needed to do to get IceWeasel 18.0.1 in place, some may need the pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring package installed too. For those needing extra information beyond what's here, there's always the Debian Mozilla team.
Adding Microsoft core fonts to Debian
18th June 2009When setting up Ubuntu, I usually add in Microsoft's core fonts by installing the msttcorefonts package using either Synaptic or apt-get. Though I am not sure why I didn't try doing the same thing for Debian until now, it's equally feasible. Just pop over to System > Administration > Software Sources and ensure that the check-boxes for the contrib and non-free categories are checked like you see below.
You could also achieve the same end by editing /etc/apt/sources.list and adding the non-free and contrib keywords to make lines look like these before issuing the command apt-get update as root:
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny main non-free contrib
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny main non-free contrib
All that you are doing with the manual editing route is performing the same operations that the more friendly front end would do for you anyway. After that, it's a case of going with the installation method of your choice and restarting Firefox or IceWeasel to see the results.