64-bit Firefox 6 on CentOS 6 x86_64 (or Fedora) with Flash 11

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:15:14 +0000

So I’ve gone back to Linux from Mac, due to the SSD issues I had with my Macbook Pro basically making VMware unusable. A Win7 VM would grind the guest and host to a halt on the 7200 RPM SATA OEM drive, and the SSD wouldn’t work, so I put the SSD back in my HP and installed CentOS 6 x86_64. Not really ideal, but at least it works.

CentOS 6 ships with Firefox 3.6.9, which is really old by now. Fine for a server, but I wanted FF6. I grabbed the Firefox 6.0.1 bz2 from VoxCast, unzipped it and copied it to /usr/lib64/firefox-6. Then I ran yum remove firefox to remove 3.6.9 and avoid any issues. I tried the instructions from my older post on this subject but for whatever reason it didn’t work - I’m guessing because I’m not using the distro’s Firefox RPM.

Windows XP guests hang on shutdown in VMware Workstation on Linux

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:45:30 +0000

I had this problem with FC11, where I couldn’t properly shut down or suspend the Windows XP VM I run (mostly for Outlook). When I’d shutdown inside the guest, it would mostly do what you’d expect, but then the screen would go blue, then black, and then the only way I could get the thing to exit was to kill the pid of vmware-vmx (or a ‘killall vmware-vmx’). I solved it somehow by removing some RPM, but when I went to FC12 the other day it came back, and I couldn’t remember how I’d fixed it initially. I Googled for nearly a full day before I found the original blog post that told me which RPMs to remove - for some reason I thought it was fprintd, but it was something else completely. Here’s the original post, and when I just read it I was going to comment on it to say thanks for posting it, but apparently I did that already. Anyway, I removed pcsc-lite again and everything appears to be good now.

Rpm on Evan Hoffman

64-bit Firefox 6 on CentOS 6 x86_64 (or Fedora) with Flash 11

Windows XP guests hang on shutdown in VMware Workstation on Linux