[Novices] downloaded firefox

[Mike Williams]

>
>
>From: Brock Inglehart <brocki1 at sbcglobal.net>
>To: "novices mail (KLUG)" <novices at kalamazoolinux.org>
>
>I just downloaded firefox 1.0 to my desktop to try, but understand it is
>some zipped file.  When I clicked on it I expected some kind of Wizard
>(I know, bad word) to lead me through the install.  Not so.  I just got
>a box with file names in it.  How do I turn this in to a Icon/working
>program?
>Brock
>
I downloaded  the "tarball" and installed it without too much trouble.  
If you want a little more challenge, here are instructions for 
installing firefox without a package.  It comes as a single file with a 
.tgz extension, usually.  Copy that file to a scratch directory (/tmp, 
or I have a /home/compile for that purpose).  Change to that directory 
and extract the files from the archive with "tar -xvzf <file>" and watch 
lots of text scroll by.  You will then have a firefox directory with a 
firefox-installer or something similar.  Run that file and the "wizard" 
you were looking for will appear.  The main question I remember it 
asking is where to install the firefox files.  If there's only one user 
on your system you can put it all in that user's home directory, but 
it's better (at least in theory) to put it somewhere in /usr/local,  
probably /usr/local/firefox or /usr/local/thunderbird.

The only thing the installation program doesn't do is create an icon for 
you, but that's fairly easy to do by hand, at least in SuSE 9.2 KDE.  
Right click on the desktop, select New -> Link to Application, and 
navigate to /usr/local/firefox/firefox, or wherever you put it.  I'm a 
little unsure about working directories and some of the other settings, 
but mine seems to work fine with the working directory set to my home dir.

Installing Thunderbird from source should be simlar to installing Firefox.