title: yum install firefox.i386 link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/yum-install-firefoxi386/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 452 created: 2008/10/03 16:21:32 created_gmt: 2008/10/03 16:21:32 comment_status: open post_name: yum-install-firefoxi386 status: publish post_type: post

yum install firefox.i386

I’ve been running the 32-bit tarball version of firefox out of /opt/firefox for quite some time, ever since the RHEL/CentOS package became unstable back last December. Since that time I moved all my machines over to 64-bit. As a result, I didn’t immediately move back to the packaged version even after the folks at Red Hat jumped firefox versions from 1.5 to 3.0 (which alleviated the instability issues people were having in 1.5 and 2.0). The problem at that point was that yum by default installs both the 32 and 64-bit versions of the product, with /usr/bin/firefox launching the 64-bit version.

That’s all changed since I learned how to selectively install only the 32-bit version of the browser. Basically the key is to specify the architecture after the package name.

For firefox I first removed both packages with a yum erase firefox.

Then I installed only the 32-bit version by executing yum install firefox.i386.

The nice part of this is that I won’t have to go to the trouble of downloading the latest tarball from Mozilla Corp. the next time a security update comes out for my browser.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo