Fri, 09 Apr 2010

DRAC5 Console Redirection Plug-in on Ubuntu 9.10

I'm in charge of some Dell servers, but after installing Ubuntu 9.10 on my laptop I've been unable to get the Dell Remote Access Controller 5 console redirection plugin working. It just kept dying with the error message "Digital Video Viewer 2.2.0.3 could not be installed because it is not compatible with Firefox 3.5.8.". So to get it working, I had to jump through the following hoops:

1. Install firefox 3.0 on ubuntu 9.10
2. Run firefox 3, connect to DRAC and install the plugin
3. The plugin assumes you are using the default profile, which was wrong in my case. When I started it, nothing happened! To fix it, I installed ghex and edited the file $HOME/.mozilla/firefox//extensions/{975F5C72-BB6D-11DD-8236-0DA656D89593}/plugins/librac5vkvm.so. Search for '*.default' and replace it with an equally long wildcard that matches your profile directory. I replaced it with '????*.ff3'. After replacing it should look something like this:

   ~/.mozilla/firefox/????*.ff3/extensions/{975F5C72-BB6D-11DD-8236-0DA656D89593}/videoviewer

Now I finally have console access again!

Still not working for you? Remember to upgrade the RAC firmware version to at least 1.45 (09.01.16)

posted at: 02:42 | path: /2010/04 | permanent link to this entry

Installing Firefox 3.0 on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

I got stuck needing an older version of firefox on Ubuntu to run a legacyi firefox plugin. It can also be useful for web developers needing to test their pages in older browser versions. This is how I installed Firefox 3.0 on Ubuntu 9.10:

1. Download source:

   wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.0.18/source/firefox-3.0.18-source.tar.bz2

2. Install necessary packages. From System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager, choose:

   build-essential
   libx11-dev
   libdbus-1-dev
   libidl-dev
   xserver-xorg-dev
   libxt-dev
   pkg-config

   (You may need more, I've installed other dev packages before)
3. Unpack the source archive, and compile:

   tar xvfj firefox-3.0.18-source.tar.bz2
   cd mozilla
   ./configure --prefix=$HOME/ff3 --enable-application=browser --disable-crashreporter
   make
   make install

4. Before running normally, start firefox with the profile manager and create a new profile for the old version of firefox, eg 'ff3':

   firefox -ProfileManager

5. Install some necessary plugins (flash and java) where firefox will find them:

   mkdir $HOME/.mozilla/plugins
   cd $HOME/.mozilla/plugins
   ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/flashplugin-alternative.so
   ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.15/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so

6. Run firefox 3.0 with your new profile:

   $HOME/ff3/bin/firefox -P ff3

I tried the same with Firefox 2, but the build failed:

wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/2.0.0.9/source/firefox-2.0.0.9-source.tar.bz2
tar xvfj firefox-2.0.0.9-source.tar.bz2
cd mozilla
./configure --prefix=$HOME/ff2 --enable-application=browser --disable-crashreporter
make
(compilation failed on my computer)

posted at: 02:28 | path: /2010/04 | permanent link to this entry