dpkg-divert ...big mess

[dhughes]

To make a long story a bit shorter, I downloaded Firefox 1.5 and tried to install it.

Firefox was there from my install of Debian 3.1 (AMD64 version) but it was version 1.0.4 or something close to that. For security reasons I wanted version 1.5, but any unofficial sources I tried to add to my apt sources.list failed.

So with Firefox 1.5 downloaded I came upon a help page at the Ubuntu website. I ended up doing what they said, without the "sudo". Here is what I did, I saved it just in case:

# First, /usr/bin/firefox
 dpkg-divert --divert /usr/bin/firefox --rename /usr/bin/firefox
 ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

 # Then, /usr/bin/mozilla-firefox, used as the default gnome browser
 dpkg-divert --divert /usr/bin/mozilla-firefox --rename /usr/bin/mozilla-firefox
 ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/mozilla-firefox

link to original post at the Ubuntu website

It didn't work.

Since then I deleted Firefox from /opt and tried to reinstall the old version from Synaptic but it fails.

Do I know have the now deleted /opt/Firefox set as my default Firefox version which means I am unable to stop it from being default or to reinstall Firefox the way it was originally.

This is the first time I've heard of or used dpkg-divert. I guess I shouldn't use it if I have no idea what it does!

Any help would be appreciated, I'll keep searching, it's not a huge deal but I'd like to know what I did.

Thanks.

edit: tried the instructions farther down and used capital F for firefox but still messed up.

[Vergil83]

try

apt-get --purge remove mozilla-firefox

this will also remove the configuration files
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/ap...pt-get.en.html

[dhughes]

Thanks for the tip, but when I do that I get a message that the package is already gone or not there I forget the actual wording.

I'm still messing around with it, it can't be that hard to do, I just don't usually use those commands and I'm not so hot with linking stuff.

The quest continues...