LMDE: Install latest Iceweasel or Firefox

Question

I am using LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition).
By default, this ships with a quite old Firefox version (21.0). And if you install Iceweasel, it does not get better.

There are a number of forum posts about installing a newer version of Iceweasel OR Firefox. Ultimately a lot of them lead here: http://mozilla.debian.net/, where I am asked to add this repository to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://cdn.debian.net/debian experimental main

and to install as follows

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install -t experimental iceweasel

Unfortunately, this gets me into the following error:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 iceweasel : Depends: libc6 (>= 2.17) but 2.13-37 is to be installed
             Depends: xulrunner-23.0 (>= 23.0-2) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

If this is relevant, here is my /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import
deb http://mirror.rts-informatique.fr/linuxmint/debian/latest testing main contrib non-free
deb http://mirror.rts-informatique.fr/linuxmint/debian/latest/security testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://mirror.rts-informatique.fr/linuxmint/debian/latest/multimedia testing main non-free

deb http://repository.spotify.com stable non-free

# Opera sources added by smxi
deb http://deb.opera.com/opera sid non-free

# for Iceweasel 4
deb http://cdn.debian.net/debian experimental main

and my /etc/apt/sources.bk (which is probably just a backup file, is it?)

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import
deb http://debian.linuxmint.com/latest testing main contrib non-free
deb http://debian.linuxmint.com/latest/security testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://debian.linuxmint.com/latest/multimedia testing main non-free

Answer 1

Lucky you, I decided to create a LMDE Virtual Machine just to answer this question.

Like you, I tried a few things (add-apt-repository)

• the firefox-next PPA on Launchpad [ppa:mozillateam/firefox-next] (no change)
• enabling the Mint unstable "romeo" repo (no change)
• installing the packages from debian experimental repo [deb mozilla.debian.net/ experimental iceweasel] (no change)
• running dist-upgrade from debian unstable repo [deb ftp.debian.org/debian unstable main] (successfully worked with iceweasel 23 until rebooting borked the install)

Thought about just compiling firefox from source.

Unfortunately, the only other option that I'm aware of (besides waiting) is to repackage the .deb package from the firefox-next PPA and change the dependencies listed. You would have to do that for each version though (and hope the only difference is the ~ubuntu appended to the version number rather than compiled against a different version)

If a real rolling release is important to you and you're comfortable with CLI then I'd highly recommend taking the leap to ArchLinux or Gentoo.