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On the screenshot below is an icon squared in red. Clicking it will launch Mozilla Firefox 3.0.18. I want to upgrade Firefox to version 5.0 so that clicking the same icon should launch the new version.

I do not want to simply install Mozilla Firefox on a different location but overwrite the existing setup so that only one version of Mozilla exists (I do know that I can have different versions by extracting the tar.bz file to a different location). Finally, all this should be done via terminal. How can this be done?

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-If anyone is wondering about the absurdity of the question, know that I am a first time Linux user, migrating from windows. So any help with this task would be appreciated. – Thomas Jul 1 '11 at 8:59

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In order to "replace" a previous version of anything on your system, you are going to want to use your distro's package system. CentOS uses RPM packages, and the yum tool to download and install or upgrade software.

What you will need is an RPM of Firefox-5. I don't think this will be in the standard CentOS repositories yet, but it will soon. If you find an RPM somewhere for CentOS (or RedHat or maybe even Fedora) you can try installing it with something like this:

rpm -Uvh the_firefox_you_downloaded.rpm

When RPM installs a package this way, it usually replaces any previous version of the same name.

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When you say repositories, you mean any one of the options listed in the below site right? wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories. My steps to install Firefox would be to download the package using the GUI and then running the rpm command. How do I download Firefox using terminal. (If you feel I'm squeezing in too many questions, I'll post another). Thanks. – Thomas Jul 1 '11 at 9:53
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Yes, but there is probably a graphical management tool for choosing which repositories you are pulling from. Hopefully some CentOS guys will chime in here. You can download via terminal using wget URL. – Caleb Jul 1 '11 at 9:58
Don't I have to specify a location where to save the file to on disk? eg: wget URL (location on disk). Or is there a default location this command saves the file to. – Thomas Jul 1 '11 at 10:00
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@Thomas: wget will default to saving in the current directory and using the file name of the downloaded file. You can change this using the -O option to specify a target filename. – Caleb Jul 1 '11 at 11:08

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