MEPIS Community Forum

I'm a newbie to this forum so please excuse any errors. I've been running Mepis 8.0 32-bit on my older laptop for years with great success, and I even run Firefox 9 and Thunderbird 9 on it, even though they're not in the repository (manual DL/install). The problem is that I just installed Mepis 8.0, 64-bit on a friends laptop and I find that I cannot run Firefox 9 and Thunderbird 9 on the 64 bit version. It appears to be a dependency problem as near as I can tell. It seems that the packages that Firefox 9 requires are not available from the repo in the version required. I haven't examined the Thunderbird issue yet, but I suspect a similar problem. It seems strange that version 8.0, 32-bit has the required packages, but the 64 bit version does not. BTW, I already did updates and checked for the packages manually in Synaptic (for the 64-bit). Does anyone have a solution to this problem? I'd hate to have to remove the 64-bit install and put the 32-bit version on the friends 64 bit laptop just to get Firefox and Thunderbird running on the latest version. As I recall, the older version of Firefox (and Thunderbird?) have some security issues, yet the version in the repo is a very early version (ver 2 or 3?).

Install all the 'ia32-libs' packages with Synaptic and try again.

You might also try iceweaswel and icedove which are the same programs if they are packaged for 8.0.

It sounds like you installed the tarball versions that you manually downloaded. Did you actually download the 64bit versions?

If you downloaded the tarballs from either here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/fx/, or here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird, you ended up with the 32bit versions. You need to take a little extra effort to get the 64bit versions.

The latest (currently 9.0.1) en-US 64bit version of firefox is in this directory: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/latest/linux-x86_64/en-US/

The latest (currently 9.0.1) en-US 64bit version of thunderbird is in this directory: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/latest/linux-x86_64/en-US/


I also have built a downloader/installer for firefox that downloads the tarball version thats correct for the type of install your running (32bit or 64bit) . It's attached to this post here: http://forum.mepiscommunity.org/viewtopic.php?p=292518#p292518

Looks like a lot of good information has surfaced in short order, so thanks to all for the info before I begin (in case I forget anyone). This is my first expedition into any 64 bit OS stuff since all my boxes are several years old, despite being excellent for the work I do. My old Dell M60s have superb 1900x1200 video resolution, and that's hard to give up. Thanks Uncle mark, I'll probably give that a try. Thanks Dieselrider, I'll have a fresh look at Icedove. I had a quick look at it some time ago, but not recently. Looks like you have a good solution there Kmathern. Since I'm a newbie on 64 bit I apparently missed any references to a 64 bit version on the Mozilla/Tbird website. As you mentioned, I did indeed DL the 32 bit versions - doh (best Homer S. voice)! There must be a link there somewhere, but with some minimal vision impairment I seem to have missed it. The downloader/installer sounds great too, and much needed, methinks! I'll look into all the above and report back in case others are looking for a similar fix. Many thanks to all!

Kent's suggestion is, as usual, better than mine, but it would still be wise to go ahead and install the ia32 lib packages. As one who has just recently moved to 64bit hardware and software myself, it appears that those are necessary in other applications as well. If it fixes your current difficulties with Fx/TB, then great. If not, no harm done.

If there's a link, they're doing a good job of hiding it.

Clarifying what uncle mark said, the ia32libs are useful for running the 32-bit version on a 64-bit platform.

Your problem makes me wonder if Mozilla is building the 64-bit version on a newer platform than the 32-bit. Are you getting a GLIB error or something like that? (Letting us know the exact error messages helps a lot)

I haven't successfully built a newer Iceweasel or Icedove for 8.0 for a while. I had an idea on maybe how to do it, but the fact that the latest Seamonkey fails to build on 8.0 seems to shoot that down.

What is possible, and I had a system running perfectly fine doing it, is to add the MEPIS 8.5 and 8.5 Community Repos to an 8.0 system and upgrade Firefox from there. It will upgrade the necessary libraries as necessary, such as a newer GTK 2.0 and glib, while leaving KDE 3.5 alone. Just don't go hog-wild and upgrade everything possible.
You can upgrade most anything that is not KDE 4 related, however.

Hmmm...that may make a good wiki entry. I know many are sticking with KDE 3.5. I did this on an older machine with limited memory with great success.

itech hasn't reported back that he's having problems with the 64bit tarball versions. He did say that he had initially downloaded and installed the 32bit tarballs, and those were what he was having problems with.



I was thinking that might be a possibility.

Yes, the 32 bit versions I initially used were the problem. As soon as I DLed the 64-bit versions the problems disappeared. I should have caught that after many years on Linux distros, but this was my first foray into the 64-bit realm and it simply didn't occur me - but it will next time. So, I think that pretty well ends the other concerns, but thanks to everyone for helping. BTW, the friends Inspiron 1501 is running extremely well on 8.0 (64-bit). He and I prefer the older KDE and Gnome desktops, and my Dell M60s won't run an any relatively modern Linux distro on earth that I can find, except Mepis 8.0 (and Anti-X). The issue there seems to be video driver related, despite the units having an Nvidea go1000 3D card with 128K. I sure hope that Mepis 8.0 will be supported for a long time to come. Kudos again to all who responded. It saved the day since the friend will be here for his laptop tomorrow, and I didn't want to disappoint him. It took me a long time to get him in touch with the penguin, and now he depends on Linux 100%.