Debian Package Management and Firefox

[Ilya Palagin]

Anton Markov wrote:

> Hello guys,
> 
> Well, I've been running Debian now for two weeks, and I love it,
> especially the package management system! Except for one thing:
dpkg is absolutely the best

> 
> Now that Firefox 0.8 browser (Mozilla Firebird 0.8 renamed) (YAY!) has
> come out along with Thunderbird 0.5 e-mail client, I want to install
> them on my system. For now I just decompressed them to a folder in my
> home directory and run them from there, but I want to make them the
> default browser/e-mail.
> 
> I have read about the update-alternatives command, but I am not very
> clear whether it will work with a non-dpkg'ed application (there are no
> Firefox packages for Debian that I know of).  Any suggestions are
> appreciated.
> 

Convert the tarball to deb with 'alien' utility, install it with dpkg 
and create softlinks to /usr/bin

Actually, these tasks used to be completed by setting environment 
variables like $BROWSER, but KDE and Gnome will definitely ignore it.


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