2013-04-04

Debian Squeeze, chrome and firefox woes

Ok so I am guilty of running stable software, I use Debian Squeeze. It is rather conservative in updating versions of things, doing a lot of testing, and for that reason everything "just works", even if I can't run the latest games and so on.

Google chrome has another strategy, they update their version of the browser all the time. Recently I got updated to Version 26.0.1410.43.
Now chrome says that I am running on an unsupported version of my operating system (Debian 6). It has a link to a page that states what versions are supported. That page says that Debian 6 is supported.
Yeah
Testing

So given the recent public relations stunts that Google has pulled (like ditching google reader - anyone remember orkut, still running....) I wasn't to keen on cutting them any slack, I'll just go back to firefox despite the abbysmal WebGL performance.

Firefox isn't included in Debian because of ... principles. Firefox will not license their logo in a Debian friendly manner because it's like trademark and their property and stuffs. Debian will not include software that have restricted licenses and trademarks and stuffs.
Principles, I can actually dig that. I'll just download it myself.

Happy like a little child finding a fresh puddle of mud on a spring day I headed over to mozilla.org to get me some firefox goodness.
Downloaded the version 19, unpack, click binary, wait for things to break (they usually do). But it ran. That's pretty nice of them.
Only it looked really crappy but I didn't have time to look into what that was about.
Until now, I'm home with a cold and between sneezing and other unpleasantness I tried to get Java-applets running. Only to find out that the reason firefox looks like, pardon the language, shite, and that the java plugin doesn't even get recognized is because it is a 32-bit build.
This is the year of our grace 2013.
I went 64-bit before my niece was born and she is in school now. I mean, come on!
The stupid, stupid, stupid, download page automatically detects I'm on linux and starts a download without asking and it picks the wrong arch. Ok, accidents happen, so where is the download link then? There freaking isn't any!
The solution was to google my way through countless questions until finding ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/
Klicking my way to the 64 bit version 19 beta build. Unpack that, then let firefox auto-update to version 20 and THEN the plugins work.
It looks good now also because it doesn't try to load GTK from the wrong 32-bit libraries that it obviously can't find since this is, as said, a 64-bit clean machine.
Yeah
Testing