Looking For Info On Updating Firefox & Open Office

[Tommy Trussell]

On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 8:34 PM, Nathan Bahn <nathan.bahn at gmail.com> wrote:
> The latest version of Firefox is 3.6.2 and all Ubuntu has is 3.5; same thing
> with Open Office -- the latest version is 3.2 but Ubuntu only has 3.1.
> Where can I find information on how to install (compile?) the latest
> programs into the Linux OS? (seeing as the Ubuntu variants don't have the
> ability to get updates)  And please don't tell me to download 10.04; I have
> absolutely NO INTENTION of downloading that version until May or June at the
> earliest!

You may be misinformed about the ability to get updates -- the Ubuntu
packages of Firefox AND OpenOffice get frequent updates that address
security issues; just very few feature updates for any particular
Ubuntu release. (Look carefully at the version numbering and updates
for Firefox -- every time there is an announced security issue you can
expect to see an updated version to address it; the difference from
using the Mozilla version is that the Firefox version won't change in
the same way. OpenOffice gets relatively few security updates, so you
won't see so many.) One serious advantage of this is that if you have
a web service or site that depends upon a particular quirk of Firefox,
there should be no unpleasant surprises or breakages after a security
update.

As for the OpenOffice version, you may discover that Ubuntu includes
some of the Go-OO patches -- http://go-oo.org/ -- so if you install an
"official" OpenOffice .deb you will lose those enhancements. SO you
may find you are happier with the Ubuntu version than the official
one, even if it does not have the higher version number you are
looking for.

As several folks have pointed out, you can download and install any of
the compiled .deb versions packaged for Ubuntu. You should realize,
however, that when you bypass the Ubuntu packages you lose out on the
Ubuntu security updates, and then will be dependent upon the packager
or the application's own update mechanism, if any.