Ubuntu – How to install xulrunner

software installationxulrunner

I am trying to migrate a virtual machine I use for my classes at the university from 10.04 to 12.04 and in that I am using xulrunner so that

  • first, I can have SQLiteManager as a stand alone app
  • next, KNIME can provide help for its nodes

I tried adding the the mozilla ppa as described in some posts, e.g. here or here, but when I search for xulrunner in Synaptic I get no match.

I read in this link, that xulrunner was left out intentionally, which, frankly, I think is a bad decision! Anyway, does anyone know a way out of this, i.e. how to get xulrunner?

Best Answer

xulrunner is no longer available in the repositories for 12.04, but it's very easy to install the latest versions provided by the Mozilla Foundation here. Since these xulrunner releases are self-contained, we'll put them in the /opt directory.

  1. Open the terminal with Ctrl+Alt+T
  2. Type cd /opt

  3. The below steps will automatically download the appropriate version of xulrunner based on the currently installed version of Firefox and whether your Ubuntu is 32-bit or 64-bit. (If you are running a Firefox beta, etc., please copy the URL manually from your browser and set XURL= to it (see below)

    • Copy and paste in the terminal, line by line:
    FFVER=`grep -Po  "\d{2}\.\d+" /usr/lib/firefox/platform.ini`
ARCH=`uname -p`
XURL=https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/xulrunner/releases/$FFVER/runtimes/xulrunner-$FFVER.en-US.linux-$ARCH.tar.bz2
cd /opt
sudo sh -c "wget -O- $XURL | tar -xj"
sudo ln -s /opt/xulrunner/xulrunner /usr/bin/xulrunner
sudo ln -s /opt/xulrunner/xpcshell /usr/bin/xpcshell

xulrunner is now installed, and can be run with simply xulrunner from anywhere.

  • To uninstall it, simply remove the xulrunner directory under /opt, and the /usr/bin/xulrunner and /usr/bin/xpcshell symbolic links.
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