Micro Tutorial Comedy On Installing Sea Monkey On Debian

[Mel Thompson]

Indeed it was a most odd odyssey, however, we finally arrived at the other shore. Debian is very stable and beautiful, but hostile to the whole Mozilla suite of browsers. I myself love Sea Monkey, mostly for sentimental reasons. Sea Monkey installs on Mac in no time flat, and is no big deal on Windows either. But how to force it onto Debian and Ubuntu? that is a question that will occur to thousands of souls on any given week, (because it applies to Firefox and other so-called non-free browsers. The journey is a weird one.

The journey starts innocently enough at the Sea Monkey Project, or any other Mozilla browser site, with a smooth download. So far, so good. But then we only have a tarball, so we either have to untar it in a terminal or use an extractor. Thankfully, Debian comes with the File Roller, a solid extractor. All seems goodness and light until we double-click on the the seamonkey-installer file, which, as one might guess, would be almost philosophically opposed to just opening up and working.

Well, well, what now? Looks like we've got to make our way over to SourceForge.net: ubuntuzilla » home where we will learn about Ubuntuzilla, the software-cum-organization that has charitably attempted to respond to the cries of millions of newbies who don't understand why the leading distros of Linux are allergic to the leading distros of browsers. A funny scene indeed, ha ha. Now it will take some poking about to figure out exactly where the actual download of the program itself is, but poke around on various links to you find it.

After Ubuntuzilla appears on your desktop, you naively double-click on the installer. Of course, by divine decree it simply may not be allowed to work. You must go into your command-line terminal and sign in as “su”. (My deep regrets to those of you who spent months of your life trying to figure out why you can't log on as root and then trying to figure out why sudo doesn't work if root doesn't work, only to eventually, after aging prematurely, find out that you must do “su”, then “password”, then “sudo”. It's a spiritual growth thing.)

Now that you're the big “su”, you can follow the Ubuntuzilla site's install routines, and you do, perfectly, only to be told the install cannot be completed because of the good old “dependencies” thing, a thing actually invented as a grand psychological test of the masses in order to see how their self-confidence can be undermined. (I admit, it was fully my idea, but I'm trying to make up for my bad karma by posting this.)

“libstdc++5” is the name of one of the main few “dependencies” that cause most folks who “migrated to” Linux to “migrate back” from Linux. But have no fear, you're already in the terminal. You just write down the list of those dirty dependencies that are making your life hell and then type, in your command terminal, “sudo apt-get name-of-dependency” and, after having to reload your original Debian 4.0 r3 i3 DVDdisk, (oops, you didn't misplace it did you?) voila! Debian has magically gotten those eternally pesky thingies onto your machine.

Now back to Ubuntuzilla: This time when you follow the command line given by Ubuntuzilla's web page, it works! And now Sea Monkey is on your machine. Except that when you got to MSNBC to have your brain ruined by television, you notice that, alas, you cannot watch the videos because your Flash plugin, (the one that took you a week to install into your Iceweasel) doesn't work on your Seamonkey.

Back to the finder. First, find your Seamonkey plugin folder. Oops, the plugin folder is in the Seamonkey folder, but oops, the Seamonkey folder doesn't show up on the find-file program. The finder claims there is no Seamonkey in the entire file system. But it's there in your /opt/ folder, after all. (Apparently the /opt/ directories are yicky and don't deserve to be seen.) You must now copy the libflashplayer.so file from your original installer folder (for Flash) into the /opt/seamonkey/plugins folder. Oh no! You don't have permission to copy any folders there by merely dropping and dragging them there. To allow such a thing would violate the very foundations of the Linux cosmos. And so, inside the terminal, you get back on as “su” and do a manual copy over with the “cp” command. (For the basics of moving and copying and other line commands, and to quickly learn all about the Debian universe, go to the slightly dated, but super compassionate, beginner's course at The Linux Home Page at Linux Online.)

Find your way back to MSNBC and find, e-gads! It works! You're now watching commercial television via Flash via Seamonkey on your Debian OS. It's a thing from the gods.

Mel C. Thompson, Eternal Newbie, aka Free/Non-Free.

[Jonathan183]

Hi Mel,

Maybe I am missing something ... but why don't you use the package manager and software repositories for your distro. It is possible to install software in several way as can be seen from this, but the easiest way is likely to be by using the package manager.
From Ubuntu I think you could have used Synaptic Package Manager a GUI you should find in System->Administration in Ubuntu. A similar GUI tool is also available in Debian.

[devils casper]

I agree with Jonathan183. apt-get is a default Package Manager of Debian and its Graphical Interface, Synaptic Package Manager is pre-installed in Debian Desktop Install. If your machine has internet access then you should use Synaptic only. 16000+ packages are available in Debian sources and you can install any with one-click using Synaptic.