Category: "Applications"

Updating Firefox 3.0.18 to 3.6.4 on CentOS 5

There is an RPM for Firefox 3.6.4 for CentOS. It prevents issues with SELinux which arose when version 3.6.3 was installed as described in the ‘OLD POST’ method and then upgraded to 3.6.4.

That said, 3.6.6 is now out, however, I don’t think there’s an RPM for CentOS, yet.

— OLD POST —

Last night, Google refused my search requests, claiming that something was making too many requests. Since it was late, I shut off the laptop. This morning, I Googled for information and found http://www.digitalspy.com/forums/showthread.php?p=40231435, which is exactly what happened to me. Next I found http://www.fortiguard.com/encyclopedia/vulnerability/firefox.centos.security.update.cesa-2010-0112.html, which led me to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html.

After a bit more surfing, I landed in http://www.esecurityplanet.com/features/article.php/3881621/Security-Firm-Finds-Gaps-in-Popular-AV-Software.htm.

I downloaded FireFox 3.6.3 to my desktop and untarred it. I tried to install it ‘properly’ such that all the users on the laptop would be able to use it, but that didn’t work out. Eventually, I used the package manager to remove the old version of Firefox (3.0.18), changed into the firefox directory, ran updater, then ./run-mozilla.sh ./firefox and it worked. It’s not ideal, but it is running. There’s only one user on this laptop, it’s me.

Several days later I had the same problem. On a hunch, I removed a FireFox toolbar that was displaying the Google page rank. The next response from Google asked me to enter a CAPTCHA code, and then, everything was fine.

Powerful Tools to Quickly Skin an Application

The link above allows you to upload images, which can be compiled into a banner. The banner can then be run through robots-design. That will extract the colors and apply them to the CSS.

Further Application Notes

robots.design works very well through upgrades, in this case, with dojo. Using the tundra theme, I can reskin an application - including dojo/dijit very quickly.

Some colors should not be changed - specifically error and warning displays which are traditionally red and yellow respectively. A backup of the CSS files was invaluable, since a dojo upgrade only required CSS upgrades for the dojo files (dojo.css, dijit.css, tundra.css).

Application Delivery Networks - An Excellent Application of robots.design

The link above suggests integrating diverse, externally hosted applications with polished designs. This is an excellent use of robots.design, because the volume of design translation may be massive.

The basic approach would be to identify those CSS files related to color, get the color attributes, and apply new colors using robots.wizard. You could skin many applications, very quickly, even if their original color schemes were very different.

The key to success will be to limit the skin colors, and augment them with images. If you have a very complex, colorful, comp, the variation in target application color schemes may make it difficult to get a consistent color set out of robots.wizard. You can remove colors from the image, without modifying it, in Step 1 of robots.wizard.

Rapidly changing the colors of X-Cart's skin1.css

robots.design works extremely well with X-Cart’s skin1.css. There are many colors and they map nicely with most images. There is a demo of a static image of an X-Cart home page at http://wirehopper.com/x-cart. The colors are derived from the same image used to color this blog.

Sincere thanks to X-Cart for allowing the use of the files to support this demonstration.

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