[Triumf-linux-managers] Re: SL4: Mozilla replaced by Seamonkey

[Kel Raywood]

On Sun, 6 Aug 2006, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
>FYI, current SL errata include "seamonkey" rpms that are supposed to
>replace the "mozilla" rpms. "yum" used by the automatic update script
>cannot handle this replacement and all automatic and manual updates of
>SL4 are presently failing.

I have all the PET-group servers and workstations on CentOS-4 [1] though I
use a few selected packages from SL. They all use yum for updates and had
no problem with the mozilla to seamonkey replacement.  I have a single
server on RHEL-4 (academic license) and it also had no problems though it
updates via up2date.  So the problem seems confined to SL.

>This seems to be part of an unannounced revolution in redhat-land:
>recently, without much warning, firefox-1.something was replaced by
>firefox-1.5.something (yum handled this correctly),

Support for the firefox-1.0 branch has been discountinued by the Mozilla
foundation so RH made the sensible decision to migrate to the 1.5 branch
which solved several security issues.  And it was announced on the
RH-announce mailing-list and copied to the CentOS-announce mailing-list.  
Where else would you expect it to be announced? You can read it here:

https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2006-0610.html

>now mozilla is being renamed/replaced as seamonkey ...

For consistency with the Mozilla foundation.

>... (yum bombed).

Apparently only in SL.

>I am sure there are good reasons for all these gyrations, but users tend
>to become confused ("what happened to my mozilla?") and unhappy ("why
>things change without warning?").

The users won't even notice.  The /usr/bin/mozilla still exists as does 
the menu entry "Applications -> Internet -> Mozilla".

>I am sure we are not the only ones affected by the failing updates and I
>would give Red Hat and SL a few more days to sort things out before we
>take some local action.

One thing that you might notice with firefox-1.5.0.5 is some seemlingly
random crashes.  There is a note in the firefox startup-script
(/usr/bin/firefox) that RH enables the PANGO text renderer for better
support for some scripts (Indic, CJK, ...).  This is not enabled in the
default builds from Mozilla and is the cause of the crashes.  To disable
PANGO you need to ensure that firefox is started with MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1
in its environment.  One way is to add a ".sh" file to
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/ which will be sourced at X11 startup.

For example: /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/moz-disable-pango.sh

   # Disable the PANGO text renderer in Mozilla
   MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO=1
   export MOZ_DISABLE_PANGO

If people start firefox on remote machines then you probably should add 
the same file to /etc/profile.d/ and also make a ".csh" version for the 
philistines [2].

I use some custom rpms for our systems and added these.  The crashes no 
longer occur.

--
Kel Raywood
TRIUMF/UBC Positron-Emission Tomography

[1] CentOS is another source rebuild of RHEL-4 (http://www.centos.org)

[2] See for example http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/