Iceweasel release channel for Debian Jessie is now available

First of all, greetings to all after so much absence at the time of writing in this blog. As you know, there are some people who use Debian and on many occasions we have had to settle for the browser Iceweasel, which was born as a consequence of legal conflicts that the Debian team has had with the Mozilla Foundation regarding trademarks and incompatibility of policies.

Normally, we choose to use the repo of Debian-Mozilla to update the ESR branch that comes by default in the main Debian repos to the release branch or install Firefox by hand, or using Launchpad or another automated method to keep Firefox and Thunderbird on hand. Or if it is an extreme case, we switch to the experimental branch in case we use Debian's testing branch, seriously compromising the stability of the distro and the relationship between the packages (in case we are not careful when it comes to manage repositories from branches other than Debian, of course).

However, after Debian released edition 8.0 (codenamed "Jessie"), the Debian Mozilla repository has recently released access to its repository for the current stable version of Iceweasel, which has version 37.0.2, so it will not be necessary to add the branch experimental to those who use Debian Jessie or replace it with Firefox (if they are used to working with Iceweasel, of course).

Installation procedure

This tutorial assumes that the Debian installation has not had the function of Sudo. However, if you have it configured, prepend the word SUDO in the case of editing the list of repositories and installing packages.

To update Iceweasel to the release branch, it is essential to have the package installed pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring in conjunction with debian-keyring, which contain the signatures of the repository in order to access it.

apt-get install pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring debian-keyring

Now, what follows is to verify that the repository signatures are indeed installed.

gpg --check-sigs --fingerprint --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/pkg-mozilla-archive-keyring.gpg --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/debian-keyring.gpg pkg-mozilla-maintainers

Then we add the following repository with Nano or another text editor (in my case, I have edited it with Nano).

deb http://mozilla.debian.net/ jessie-backports iceweasel-release

We update the repositories accordingly and update the browser with this line:

apt-get update && apt-get install -t jessie-backports iceweasel iceweasel-l10n-es-ar

NOTE: the package iceweasel-l10n-en-ar is the Icewaeasel package localized for Spanish speakers in Argentina. For Chile, it is iceweasel-l10n-es-cl; for Spain, it is iceweasel-l10n-en-es; and for Mexico, it is iceweasel-l10n-en-us.

And that would be all. Hope you enjoyed the tutorial.

As an additional note, I should add that Iceweasel has disabled the OpenH.264 codec, so YouTube will not activate the HTML5 browser automatically by default. However, when manually activating this function, you use the H.264 codec based on the GStreamer codec, so you may ask for that package as a suggestion.

Until next time.


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