Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird Packages for Solaris 8-10 for SPARC and x86, Firefox 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 and Thunderbird 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 for OpenSolaris and Solaris 10


These packages were contributed to sunfreeware.com by Sun internal developers (located in Beijing, China). Thunderbird and Firefox are labeled for Solaris 8 and 10, but the the Solaris 8 packages should also work on Solaris 9. (The Solaris 10 package will not work for Solaris 9.) Sunbird is for Solaris 10 only. Firefox 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 and Thunderbird 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 are available for OpenSolaris and Solaris 10. Note that these packages are compressed with bzip2. Packages containing bunzip2 are on sunfreeware.com if your system does not already have bzip2 installed.

The Firefox and Thunderbird packages install the programs in /opt/sfw subdirectories via the following steps, run as root. For example,

bunzip2 firefox-9.0.1.en-US.solaris-10-fcs-i386-pkg.bz2
pkgadd -d firefox-9.0.1.en-US.solaris-10-fcs-i386-pkg

Some users have reported that if the directory /opt/sfw is actually a link to some other directory, when you run pkgadd to install these packages, it will delete the link and create a new /opt/directory. If this happens, you will need to move the firefox files to your other directory and relink /opt/sfw to it. Alternatively, for Firefox 9.0.1, 8.0.1, 7.0.1, 6.0.2, 5.0, 4.0.1, and 3.6.18 or Thunderbird 3.1.11, 5.0, 6.0.2 7.0.1, 8.0 and 9.0.1, you can use the tarred versions of the packages found in ftp://ftp.sunfreeware.com/pub/freeware/mozilla/.

If you are concerned about file integrity, the .cksum and .md5sum files have the checksums you can compare to your downloaded files.

When I install Sunbird, I put the appropriate file into /opt/sfw and bunzip2 and untar it. It creates an /opt/sfw/sunbird directory. /opt/sfw/sunbird/sunbird starts the program. You can choose a different installation location.

More details on installation and potential issues can be found in README.firefox2, README.firefox3, README.firefox6, or README.thunderbird2.

For details on these programs and other packages, go to Mozilla.org.

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This page was last updated on December 27, 2011.
© Copyright 2011 Steven M. Christensen and Associates, Inc.