How-tos: Install Firefox Nightly Build (64-bit Minefield)

If you don't mind living on the 'bleeding edge' of technology as I do you can try installing Mozilla's Minefield, the latest nightly build of their Firefox 3.x development effort, currently 3.1b. 

Here are directions for installing the 64-bit version into openSUSE 11.0 to your $HOME directory:




1) Download the zipped tarball firefox-3.1b2pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2

2) Open a terminal window and extract tarball with:
 

tar xjf firefox-3.1b2pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2
(all files will be extracted to /home/$USER/firefox)

3) Link your branded openSUSE Firefox plugins to Minefield

a) cd firefox/plugins
b) for i in `ls /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/*.so`; do ln -s $i; done
(typing about:plugins in your awesome bar should show all plugins)

4) Add a link in your search path to preference Minefield over Firefox with:

cd ~/bin && ln -s ../firefox/firefox
(your search $PATH looks in $HOME/$USER/bin first so it will find Minefield!)

5) Enable the JIT compiler with:

a) type about:config in your awesome bar
b) click on "I'll be careful, I promise!"
c) type in the filter field: javascript.options.jit.chrome
d) double-click to toggle the boolean false to 'true'

That's it.  By default, if you click your Firefox icon, it should find Minefield in the search path first and load all of your custom settings from /$HOME/$USER/.mozilla.

Rock On!
--Dietrich