On 02/20/2012 02:32 PM, Chris Pemberton wrote:
> On 02/20/12 13:29, Yasha Karant wrote:
>> Before someone states that this is not a Scientific Linux issue, as it
>> seems to be restricted to this distribution (perhaps other EL
>> distributions as well), this issue would seem to qualify.
>>
>> Rather than using the Mozilla packages that exist within the
>> distribution repository, I use the production (not testing or beta)
>> installations from Mozilla: firefox, thunderbird/lightning, and
>> seamonkey, currently 10.0.2 except SeaMonkey 2.7.2.
>>
>> My laptop and workstation are operating environment identical except
>> that my laptop is IA-32 SL6x and my workstation is X86-64 SL6x (and
>> there are some hardware differences reflected in driver differences).
>> On my workstation, as root, I can update any of the Mozilla
>> applications I have mentioned within a major release (e.g., 10.0.1 to
>> 10.0.2) from within the application. However, on my laptop, this
>> generally fails and I must download a new tar.bz2 file that I must
>> unpack into the appropriate directory. Does anyone have an idea on
>> what is the reason? Note that my mozilla configuration files between
>> the two platforms are the same in so far as I have any control over
>> these (e.g., visitation to different URLs from firefox or seamonkey
>> might have different cookies, etc., loaded -- but all URLs are either
>> mandated by my university or from "clean" sites).
>>
>> I have done a cursory check of the mozilla public lists but have found
>> nothing of relevance.
>>
>> Thanks for any insight.
>>
>> Yasha Karant
> Could you start firefox from a terminal, try the internal update
> process, and see if any usefull information is given in the terminal?
> Sure sounds like a permission problem; but you said you are using root?
> You should be able to destroy anything as root:)
>
> Chris

There is no problem in downloading from Mozilla the entire update as a 
tar.bz2 package followed by the manual installation ( tar -vxjf ) as 
root into the appropriate directory.

However, there is a mechanism, for minor release updates (e.g., 10.0.1 
to 10.0.2) within firefox, thunderbird/lightning, and seamonkey without 
the manual unpacking -- the files are updated within the running 
application and the updated instance is invoked at the next initiation 
(restart) of the application.  This mechanism needs to be as root if the 
files are installed in a systems, as contrasted with an ordinary 
end-user, directory.  However, the mechanism fails on one SL6x box but 
succeeds on another; when the mechanism fails, then I must used the 
manual installation method from the tar.bz2 file as explained above.

Yasha Karant