Installing Firefox5 on RHEL5

I found these instructions Godsend after a lot of blind alleys.

CentOS 5.x FireFox 5 working install

Xserver unable to start after reboot

Suddenly my xserver stopped working after reboot.
I wasted almost a day trying to start xserver again. Then I went through some sites and finally I found a work around. I simply linked usr/X11R6/lib/libXfont.so.1 to libXfont.so.1.4.1 through the intermediary of libXfont.so.1.5 symbolic link and it started working.

ls -la /usr/X11R6/lib/libXfont.so*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Jan 3 11:16 /usr/X11R6/lib/libXfont.so.1 -> libXfont.so.1.5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 Jul 16 17:49 /usr/X11R6/lib/libXfont.so.1.4.1 -> /usr/lib/libXfont.so.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 32 Jul 16 18:33 /usr/X11R6/lib/libXfont.so.1.5 -> /usr/X11R6/lib/libXfont.so.1.4.1
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 388012 Jul 26 2008 /usr/X11R6/lib/libXfont.so.1.5.bak

Tomcat and default welcome page

I was trying to setup a quick website in my machine and installed tomcat and invoked it from browser as http://hostname it wasn't serving anything. Then I realised I had to add this block in web.xml

   index.html
   index.htm
   index.jsp

browser I added it and added an index.html and it still didn't work. Then I looked at webapps folder and saw a folder ROOT and added index.html there and it started serving home page!

Screen, bash and ctrl+a

Today I was using bash and ctrl+a is very useful for going to the start of a command in bash. But it was not working in my Mac. I thouht it was a problem in Mac bindings and opened keyboard and mouse, terminal preferences etc.
When none of this could fix the issue, I realised that I was ssh'ing to my work machine and using a screen to avoid losing session when connection drops. This program uses ctrl+a as the meta key and was not passing this on to bash. So I had to use
screen -e ^xx

to change the meta key to ctrl+x and everything was fine again.