1179008 - Release download page should specify which downloads are 32-bit

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(SeaMonkey :: Website, defect)

Description

[bob]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/38.0
Build ID: 20150511103818

Steps to reproduce:

Running Ubuntu 14.04.02 on a 64-bit laptop.

* Accessed <http://www.seamonkey-project.org/releases/> from Firefox 38.0
* Downloaded apparently appropriate tarball (the one auto-selected as "Main Download" which was the same as the English (British) Linux one in the list of official builds:
<https://download.mozilla.org/?product=seamonkey-2.33.1&os=linux&lang=en-GB>
* Followed installation instructions (extract tar and run).


Actual results:

bobbriscoe@Ra:/usr/local/seamonkey2/seamonkey$ ./seamonkey
XPCOMGlueLoad error for file /usr/local/seamonkey2/seamonkey/libxul.so:
libasound.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Couldn't load XPCOM.

I searched the Web for this error, and found a load of people tracking it down back in 2012. I saw mention of 64-bit, so I thought maybe I had downloaded a 32-bit install (even tho it didn't say so).

So I downloaded the little 64-bit link mentioned at the bottom of the page <ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/seamonkey/releases/2.33.1/contrib/seamonkey-2.33.1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2>, extracted and it ran fine, opening up the seamonkey welcome dialogue window to migrate from Thunderbird/Firefox.

Once I had the SeaMonkey browser running, I clicked the British English language pack from the SeaMonkey browser and it installed fine.



Expected results:

In summary, if there had been a simple label against the download saying "32-bit", I wouldn't have downloaded it and wasted my evening working out what went wrong.

In detail, the Web pages need the following mods:
* releases/ : 
  - Clearer labelling of the official builds as 32-bit only;
  - Ideally, the "Main Download" that came up in a green box at the top of the release page should have linked to the one appropriate to my (64-bit) architecture, not the 32-bit tarball. 
  - Bear in mind that most people installing a browser don't have that browser installed (by definition). So you need to make it clear that the language packs are only intended to be clicked from a SeaMonkey browser (it would not be hard to check for this). I clicked them from Firefox while I was waiting for the main tarball to download, because there was no indication as to what sort of links they were. Firefox (understandably) objected - fortunately.

* doc/install-and-uninstall#install_linux : 
  - Ideally, instructions on the process for installing the 64-bit variant (i.e. adding the language pack yourself), altho I guessed this myself.

Comment 1

[Philip Chee]

CC Jens: These suggestions seem reasonable.

Comment 2

[Edmund Wong (:ewong)]

Reasonable idea.

Comment 5

[Ian Neal]

Most of the work to fix this was done in Bug 1564637 and the rest will be done in Bug 1620784, so going to mark as fixed.