November 17, 2008 at 9:16 pm · Filed under Linux

Here’s my set up:

• Firefox 3 is installed using the default Ubuntu packages
• I’ve installed Firefox Minefield (Firefox 3.1) to /opt/firefox
• I set up a shell script to run as root daily via cron (dangerous I know, but it’s only readable+writable by root) which downloads the latest 64-bit nightly from Mozilla and extracts it, and recreates the symbolic link to it in case Ubuntu has updated and overriden it at some point (optional).

The script is as follows, be careful of any line breaks my blog puts in, watch for the semi-colons to indicate true line breaks:

#!/bin/sh
cd /opt/;
rm firefox-3.1b2pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2;
wget "http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/firefox-3.1b2pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2";
rm -rf firefox/;
tar -jxvf firefox-3.1b2pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2;
chmod -R a+r firefox;
rm /usr/bin/firefox;
ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox;


It’s crude, but it works. If you are running x86 you’ll need to adjust the wget and tar lines to the correct source. Hope someone finds this useful.

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