Update firefox in Ubuntu from tar.bz2


Before the days of .deb packages, installing or updating a program in Ubuntu used to highly cumbersome and confusing, even for a novice techie. Nowadays, installation using .deb packages have become as convenient as installing an app from its APK. However, if the situation arises where .deb package is not available and you are forced to install using tarball (.tar.bz2 compressed file), follow the commands below to manually perform some of the essential steps auto-executed during installation using a package.

Below example illustrates manually updating firefox using its tarball.
If you want to install a program instead of updating it, remove the "rm" steps from below procedure.
  1. Download the latest version of Firefox from here.
  2. For this example, we'll assume your downloaded firefox .tar.bz2 file is in "~/Downloads" directory
  3. Open terminal using Ctrl+Shift+T and input the following commands
    $ cd Downloads
    $ tar xvjf <filename>.tar.bz2
    $ sudo rm /usr/bin/firefox
    $ sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/firefox
    $ sudo mv firefox /usr/lib
    $ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox


* FIN *

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