Installing Firefox and now ended up installing latest glibc

Hi all,

I wanted to install the latest version of firefox 2 but it seems when I attempt to install it, it seems to be saying it is looking for c libraries version 2.3? I believe I currently have an older version of the c libraries. I am currently running Sun's JDS Linux 2003. My Mozilla web browser seems to have packed up and I ended up using Nautilus file and directory navigator to do my web browsing so I thought I'd try using Firefox 2. I downloaded glibc version 2.6 but I have been told there are problems or bugs and that 2.3 is a more stable version, correct?

when I attempt to install glibc 2.6 I think its complaining about some sort of target directory using --prefix argument, but I am slightly lost. I want to make sure I get this right as I don't want to reinstall linux and wine from src :s
If I upgrade glibc then would I have to upgrade the kernel and other packages like gcc, binutils etc?

Can someone who has done this before provide me with details how they went about it (rpm or src) and what other installations they did?

Your help and guidance is much appreciated.

Mani

ok....

apologies if i started off with what seems like a difficult topic.

so far i have managed to install the latest binutils, coreutils, make, texinfo and all works fine. The --version shows the latest is installed. Now... i need to install the latest GCC compiler. The one that seems to be recommended is version 4.2.1. I tried to install this and i got as far as configuring it but when i type make it displays all this info but seems to fail at one point later on. It displays the following

/tmp/ccacyMlE.s: Assembler messages:
/tmp/ccacyMlE.s:72: Error: no such 386 instruction: `stmxcsr'
/tmp/ccacyMlE.s:90: Error: no such 386 instruction: `ldmxcsr'
/tmp/ccacyMlE.s:119: Error: no such 386 instruction: `fxsave'
make[3]: *** [crtfastmath.o] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/gcc-4.2.1/host-i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc'
make[2]: *** [all-stage1-gcc] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/gcc-4.2.1'
make[1]: *** [stage1-bubble] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/gcc-4.2.1'
make: *** [all] Error 2

anyone know where i have gone wrong or what i need to do to correct this?

thanks again

Mani