A very tragic news has been surfaced, revealing the loss of yet another gem in the computer industry. Dennis Ritchie, the founder of ‘C’ and Unix Operating system, and Ian Murdock, founder of Debian Linux and creator of apt-get, has always been stated as two faces of the same coin. The tragic loss of these great individuals in the programming world is bewailed and the reason for extended sadness in Linux community.
The Docker Blog first put this news on the internet, which was then picked up by many communities worldwide as a shocking information. The death of Ian is questionable, as it appears to be a suicide. Ian claimed that he was involved in some police case and has been beaten by police while in custody. He later tweeted on Monday night that he would commit suicide. The followers of Ian Murdock on twitter assumed that his account was hacked, and no one actually believed that he would commit such action.
On Monday at 2:13 PM Eastern Time, Murdock apparently posted:
I’m committing suicide tonight…do not intervene as I have many stories to tell and do not want them to die with me #debian #runnerkrysty67
Ian’s twitter account has since been deleted. Public records indicate Murdock was arrested on December 27, and released on bail by the San Francisco County Sheriff’s Department, but no details were available on the charges. The cause of the death is still unclear.
Ian Murdock is responsible for forging one of the first Linux distros, a successor of Unix. Ian’s work has included many other parts of the free and open source community, including his role as CTO of the Linux Foundation, a lead of Project Indiana at +Sun, and a recent addition to the Docker team – among many other positions and achievements.
As you all know I use Ubuntu, an open source Linux distros based on Debian, on all my computers; however, Debian (2.2 “woody” to be exact) was my first experience on Linux which made me switch from Windows XP and allowed me to dwell into this amazing world. It isn’t a surprise that I have some sentimental values for the Debian community. I followed Ian’s work very closely and have been a huge admirer.
Recently, there were lots of rumors floating around that Linux Mint is dominating over Ubuntu distros. The reports and graphs collected by “DistroWatch” stirred up the arguments even higher.
People supporting this phenomenon, referred to an even bigger increase in Linux Mint’s DistroWatch ranking, a chart derived from the number of hits each distro page on the site receives.
Like a domino effect of misinformation, this week has been chock full of reports by tech news sites that Ubuntu’s market share is declining, being surpassed by the Ubuntu spin-off and close cousin Linux-Mint.
The source of this dramatic revelation is none other than DistroWatch, the site that all Ubuntu haters love to quote, and all Ubuntu lovers love to hate. – Joey sneddon, author OMG! Ubuntu
To talk about the facts, we should notice what Distrowatch is claiming in their graphs and reports. The Data is collected from their own website and the user who visit their pages. Actually they store the information of the visitors who register a hit on their page (which cannot be taken as any official reports or something which can be a source for some conclusion).
Putting aside the fact that Linux Mint’s recent increase in “Page hits” on the site has been helped in part by blog after blog talking about/linking to Mint on Distrowatch as evidence of its rise against Ubuntu. There is no doubt that Linux Mint is attracting renewed attention.
But many in camp Mint/camp anti-Unity claim that the distro is now well on its way to being, if it’s not already, more popular than Ubuntu. One infamous ‘opensource’ site with a notable distaste for Ubuntu’s Unity desktop even assures its readers that:
“There is no way that Ubuntu will cover this distance in the near future, unless they change something dramatically.”
Well, if you are taking a website page hit as an evidence, why not talk about some other websites which can provide better information with Billions of hits per month?
Let’s say “Wikimedia”, can we get relevant information from that site? Well, we investigated a little bit and this is what we found.
To help give perspective to the whole Mint Vs Ubuntu debate lets see what some real, hard stats say.
The stats were posted on OMG! Ubuntu, which is quoted below:
As ZDNet report, the Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report of Operating Systems Visiting wikimedia Pages* in October 2011 show:
* 16,924,000 hits from Ubuntu
* 556,000 hits from Linux Mint
Half a Billion computer using your OS is not a bad stat at all, but it does challenge the often aggressive posturing of many in the anti-Unity brigade that Unity has been nothing short of a disaster for Ubuntu.
If we look fast-forward to look at Wikimedia stats fro December 2011 then things look even brighter for Ubuntu:-
* 29,432,000 hits from Ubuntu
* 624,000 hits from Linux Mint
There’s a hralthy 68,000 hit increase from Linux Mint users – certainly indicating a surge in its use. But look at Ubuntu – almost 13 million hits up from October, which, perhaps not coincidentally, saw the release of Ubuntu 11.10
Linux Mint is definitely, one of the best Distros out there, which comprises huge dedicated developers swarm and a group of loyal followers thoughout the world, but getting on to a conclusion that Ubuntu is loosing it’s ground just because of it’s “co-distro” will not be a reasonable and noble effort.
(if the link does not work, use Mozilla’s FTP server)
A 64 bit build is also available in the x86_64 directory of Mozilla’s FTP.
This how-to supposes that the downloaded file is saved in the “Downloads” directory situated in your home directory.
2. Extract
The downloaded file is a compressed .tar.bz2 archive. In case you want to Learn more on these extensions: tar, bzip2.
To extract this juicy archive, open the Downloads directory. Look for a file named firefox-8.0.tar.bz2, right-click on it and select “extract here“.
Alternatively, you can extract the archive from the command line:
cd ~/Downloads/
tar xjf firefox-8.0.tar.bz2
For those interested, here are the tar arguments used in the command: x : eXtract j : deal with bzipped file f : read from a file (rather than a tape device)
Launch the newly installed Firefox by running firefox8 in a terminal, or create shortcuts/icons referring to firefox8.
5. Updates & Final
Firefox 8 will manage its own updates independently of your system’s package manager, an download subsequent releases.
There will be no need to repeat the whole “procedure”… Enjoy Firefox 8!
B. Ubuntu’s case, Linux Mint and Debian
1. Ubuntu: no ubuntu-mozilla-daily ppa!
Many howtos on this subject will tell you to install Firefox pre-versions through Mozilla’s ppaubuntu-mozilla-daily.
Using this ppa will not only install the latest Firefox 10 nightly build, used to be called “minefield” – updated daily! It will also update your current Firefox and Thunderbird to test versions.
These testing versions are not meant to be stable or usable.
? Avoid this ppa unless you know exactly what you’re doing!
2. The Firefox Beta ppa: mozillateam/firefox-next
The firefox-next ppa will replace your current Firefox installation with the current available version in Mozillas Beta channel. Simply run these two commands in a terminal:
Note: you can use only one of these three channels (Aurora, Beta, and Daily) at the same time!
3. Official Ubuntu updates for Firefox (automatic)
Since Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”, Ubuntu will update automatically to the newest stable Firefox version when it is released. (it may take a few days more, though) This is also valid for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” and upcoming releases.
5. Linux Mint 11, and Debian 6 “Squeeze”, …
This howto has been tested with success on the following distributions, with Firefox 6, 7 and 8:
Debian 6 “Squeeze” Linux Mint 10 “Julia” Linux Mint 11 “Katya” Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” (Long Term Support, until April 2013) Ubuntu 10.10 “Maverick Meerkat” (support until April 2012) Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” (support until October 2012) Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” (support until April 2013)
this installation procedure is reliable and should work with a wide range of distributions. Please share your experience with OpenSuse and Fedora in the comments.
C. Uninstall/remove Firefox 8 (for non-ppa installations)
Remove the Firefox directory:
sudo rm -r /opt/firefox8
You also should consider changing back or removing symbolic links which pointed to the old Firefox directory. Change back:
sudo mv /usr/bin/firefox-old /usr/bin/firefox
Or remove the firefox8 symlink:
sudo rm /usr/bin/firefox8
D. Run multiple profiles and instances simultaneously
Problem: it is possible to run different Firefox versions with the same profile (profiles are compatible through major versions). However this is not very convenient, as Firefox will check the profiles extensions and plugins every time you start a newer or older version.
Solution: create a profile for each Firefox version. Create new profiles with:
firefox -no-remote -ProfileManager
The -no-remote option starts a new instance of Firefox even if there is already a Firefox instance running. Use the -no-remote option to run Firefox 8 and Firefox 9 instances at the same time.
Let’s say that you’ve created two profiles: ffox8_profile and ffox9-profile. You can start one instance of Firefox 8 and one instance of Firefox 9 with the following commands:
Now you may create desktop shortcuts / icons / launchers (Gnome: Custom Application Launcher) for each of these Firefox versions with their respective profiles.
If you need some svg icons to recognize your different Firefox installations, here they are. (Obviously these are NOT official Mozilla artwork, please use them wisely.)
