[K12OSN] updating, installing, distributing apps

[Carl Keil]

Hi Folks,

I'm hoping that the answer to this is embarrassingly simple.  But I've been 
using Linux for years now and installing stuff is still a mystery to 
me.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  I think part of this is 
that the distros are so awesomely complete and chock full of application 
goodness that I rarely need to install anything, but sometimes it comes up.

So, specifically, how come I can't install firefox 1.0 on my K12LTSP 
machine?  I've tried yum update firefox, I've dowloaded the tar.gz from 
mozilla.org and ran the installer, lots of progress bars later I can find 
no trace of firefox 1.0 on my system.  When I launch firefox, good ol' 
0.9.3 comes up.  Can someone here provide an overview of the proper way to 
install new apps and update old apps on K12LTSP 4.1?  There's got to be an 
algorithm for installing that covers most cases.  I'm also stymied on the 
procedure of making these apps available in the menus/taskbar for all users 
once I'm done doing my root business.  Can someone explain this to me like 
I'm a fifth grader?  A referral to a good book on the subject would be 
awesome as well.

A side note.  I added the dag yum repository to my /etc/yum.conf 
file.  When I ran yum update it started listing package headers for about 5 
minutes.   Needless to say, I got scared of updating that many things and 
aborted.  Does anyone know if it's safe to add any outside repositories to 
yum on a K12LTSP system?  Which ones?  What does this do exactly?

Still a noob after all these years.

TIA, this list rocks!

ck