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Updating SeaMonkey on Puppy Linux —

Puppy Linux is a fast and reliable operating system for old computers and yet the distro contains nearly all the applications you may ever need.
These apps are light-weight shadows of their bloated main-stream rivals but they’re quick, feature rich and open source.
One such app is SeaMonkey, the default browser in Precise Puppy.

One problem that I couldn’t resolve through the Puppy package manager is how to keep SeaMonkey up to date. I may be using an old computer but I want the latest and safest browser version.

There is an auto-updater option under Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Software installation but I wasn’t getting any clues as to why that wasn’t working?

So after discovering I was several versions behind I decided to try doing it by hand.

Download latest version:

First use the browser to visit www.seamonkey-project.org
and download the latest Linux GTK version (currently 2.25) to ~/my-documents/tmp

Uncompress the tarball:

Next expand the contents of the compressed download (known as a ‘tarball’). This will create a sub-folder called seamonkey

cd ~/my-documents/tmp
tar jxvf seamonkey-2.25.tar.bz2

Make the new version available:

To preserve the previous version (just in case I needed to rollback) I created a new folder for this new version in the Linux file system.

mkdir /usr/lib/seamonkey-2.25
cp -r ~/my-documents/tmp/seamonkey/* /usr/lib/seamonkey-2.25/

Switch to use the new version:

I found a couple of symbolic links that could be changed to switch between different versions of SeaMonkey.
First list their current settings and make a note of the output in case you need to revert to a previous version.

ls -l /usr/lib/seamonkey
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 Apr 20 2013 /usr/lib/seamonkey -> seamonkey-2.17.1
ls -l /usr/bin/seamonkey
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 33 Apr 20 2013 /usr/bin/seamonkey -> /usr/lib/seamonkey-2.17.1/seamonkey

Then force changes to those links to direct them to our new version.

ln -sfn /usr/lib/seamonkey-2.25 /usr/lib/seamonkey
ln -sfn /usr/lib/seamonkey-2.25/seamonkey /usr/bin/seamonkey

When you next run your SeaMonkey browser it will display an updating screen, ask you to confirm your add-in’s and you will then be running the new version.

[I can report that since upgrading the auto-updater is now functioning ok. This can be found under Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Software installation]


Categorised as: Computer Stuff

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