Iceweasel 4 and libcairo2

[gavinhc]

I have been using Iceweasel 3.6 from the Mozilla Debian repositories to get the newest security updates for Firefox/Iceweasel. With the release of Firefox 4, they have added Iceweasel 4 to their repository. The new version requires a higher version of libcairo2 than what is available in the Debian testing repositories (or the version provided in the LMDE repository), so they have included a new version of the library to be installed alongside Iceweasel 4.

It looks like the version of libcairo2 included in LMDE comes from Ubuntu and I'm sure Clem included this specific version for a reason, I just don't know what that was. What I am wondering is, what would I lose installing the Mozilla Debian version that wouldn't be included in the one Clem included in LMDE?

[vrkalak]

I was using Iceweasel-3.6-15 and I wanted to upgrade to Iceweasel-4.0

I couldn't find the required Firefox/Iceweasel package version nor needed dependencies.

I did however, find everything I need over in the #!Crunchbang Forums for Iceweasel-4.0

#!Crunchbang/Linux is, also, Debian-based and uses the Xfce desktop.

http://packages.crunchbanglinux.org/sta ... pool/main/

I downloaded 'everything' and used gDebi to install them in Mint-Debian-Xfce . . .

No problems.

[middling]

I believe the version of libcairo2 in LMDE is patched to give nice, smooth (Mac OS X-like), font rendering.

The standard libcairo2 in Debian does not have the necessary patch and so the fonts are rendered in an ugly, jagged (Windows-like), style.

I *think* that Mepis also patches libcairo2 with the nice font rendering patch but uses the Debian (stable) version as a base rather than Ubuntu's version so you could, theoretically, download their version and install it using dpkg. This should then allow you to install Iceweasel 4.0 from the Debian repositories.

I haven't tried this yet so be aware that it could wreak your system.