Andy Chase

I love the Debian philosophy and package management system; for the most part, if you stick to the 'stable' packages everything just works once you install it.

Critics are always quick to point out that this stability comes at the cost of generally having somewhat older versions of software packages installed on your system. This became painfully apparent to me after a few days of using Konqueror as my primary browser at home. I am fully dependent on tabs; there's just no way around it.

Not wanting to install the full-blown Mozilla platform with mail, newsreader, instant messaging, chat, and kitchen sink, I Googled for "debian phoenix" and only found some very preliminary packages... hoping to avoid any Redhat-style package dependency nightmares by introducing unstable stuff onto my system, I decided to go for a non-standard install and just download the Mozilla binary direct from the source. I unzipped the tarball into my home directory, where it made a directory named MozillaFireball. I was able to create a KDE panel shortcut to the MozillaFireball executable in that directory, but the first thing I discovered when the program loaded was that the Google search plugin, as essential to the browsing experience as tabs, was broken; the search box would only let you search the text of the current page.

Search after search for the elusive location of the searchplugins directory on Linux returned only page after page of instructions reading "Just put the search plugins in your searchplugins directory". After much cursing and creation/deletion of test searchplugins directories in places like /usr/lib/mozilla, /usr/lib/phoenix, etc., I finally renamed the MozillaFirebird directory to phoenix, making the full path to the search plugin directory /home/andy/phoenix/searchplugins. Firebird opened right up when started from a shell within the phoenix directory, and the Dmoz and Google search plugins were suddenly there!

To get Firebird to start smoothly from the KDE panel I threw together a quick shell script that sets the working directory before launching the app:

#!/bin/sh
cd /home/andy/phoenix
./MozillaFirebird &

The script is what actually gets run by the panel shortcut, and all is well with the world. My Debian installation is no longer "pure", but the Firebird is nicely self-contained - when a stable .deb becomes available the transition should be trivial.

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2003-06-01 - I should have specified, that was the KDE 2.2 version of Konqueror I was stuck with. Not long after my post I got so annoyed with KDE 2's clipboard behavior that I upgraded my whole installation to the still-testing Sid, leaving Woody behind... thus, I now have a much newer version of Konqueror complete with tabs.