Pages

Friday, October 25, 2013

Installing Firefox on Solaris (Update II)

This part three of my "How to Install Firefox" series of posts. Please read the other Firefox posts linked to at the bottom of this post, for additional information. This post is an update on the Firefox situation on Solaris.

The Oracle Security Blog, posted on October 13, 2013, the long awaited patch for Firefox. You will need a MOS (My Oracle Support) login to download the patches though. Patch 145080-13 for SPARC and patch 145081-12 for X86 will upgrade Firefox to 10.0.12 ESR. This is pathetic considering that at the time I'm writing this, Firefox is at version 24.0. Mozilla doesn't even support Firefox 10 ESR anymore. So why is Oracle giving us this now? Most operating systems are using Firefox 17 ESR right now and they will soon be moving to version 24 ESR. On top of that, Oracle's security blog also doesn't address any of the security vulnerabilities for 2013.

Note - Mozilla doesn't offer Firefox install packages for Solaris.

Current Mozilla supported versions
  • Firefox 17.0.9 ESR
  • Firefox 24.0
  • Firefox 24.0 ESR
Now on the install on Firefox.
The package Solaris uses for the Firefox install is SUNWfirefox. Run the command below to make sure that package is installed. There may be other Firefox related packages, that's OK.
root@earth> pkginfo -l | grep firefox
PKGINST: SUNWfirefox
PKGINST: SUNWfirefoxl10n-es-ES
PKGINST: SUNWfirefox-devel

If the package is not installed then you will have to install it. Unfortunately it installs Firefox 3, so you need to patch it right away. As I mentioned above the patch will update Firefox to 10.0.12. If this is the 1st patch to be applied to Firefox it may take some time, this is normal. In the example below we are installing the SPARC patch.

root@earth> mv 145080-13 /tmp
root@earth> unzip 145080-13
root@earth> pkgadd 145080-13

And you're done. Test the application. If your previous version of Firefox was not part of a package, but instead was install using a tar file then you will have to delete it from the server. I have instructions on how to do that in my 1st post on how to install Firefox.

Info
I have removed Firefox from my server at work because I don't think it is secure on Solaris 10. I am instead using Firefox on Linux server, until Oracle gets their act together. I have heard that Oracle will be releasing FireFox 17 ESR soon. The only problem is, Firefox is only coming to Solaris 11 and not Solaris 10. You can still get Firefox at SunFreeware.com or UNIXpackages.comwhich are the same people. The only issue with getting Firefox from there site is that it is not actually from them. They go out of there way to say this on there site and I quote; "They are the ONLY packages in our repository that are not compiled by us, and were contributed by External Offshore developers in East Asia"

Links to my other Firefox install posts
Installing Firefox on Solaris
Installing Firefox on Solaris (Update)
Installing Firefox on Solaris (Update III)

If you have any comments or question please post them below.


2 comments:

  1. Well the updates for Firefox is automatic that means that whenever there is a new update it is installed automatically but if you have set it manual then you must automate it from Option tab in your browser.

    Thanks
    Silvester Norman

    Changing MAC Address

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Firefox does automaticly update on most operating systems, but not on Solaris. Even if Firefox is set to automatic all it can do is tell you that there is a new version out. The closest thing to an automatic update for Firefox is, if the patch is part of a system patchset and it gets updated that way.

      Delete