A1

My Fox Is On Fire

A lesson in exploiting the opensource system :)

The Work

Hardware & Software

Intel Pentium 4 2.00 GHz 512 MB of RAM ~6GB Free Space

Microsoft Windows XP Professional Version 2002 w/ Service Pack 2

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003

Cygwin

Moztools

IRC Client

IM Client

Web Browser

Zip Utility

Method

In order to complete this task I utilized the method outlined in Sherman Fernandes' "Building the Fox".

Reflecting on the Fox

"Building" an application such as this was not an activity I had given any thought to prior to this course. I have never really worked with opensource projects at any level, but could not pass up on this opportunity based on lack of experience.

Prior to even starting to research the build I went out and purchased a mobile rack and 80GB HD to utilize for the course. With the help of Tom I was able to install Ubuntu and eventually VMware to run Win XP wherever I happened to be at the time. Unfortunately this proved to be an exercise in frustration as every new pc I seemed to go to simply wouldn't boot my HD - to my home I go.

At the start of this exercise I had literally no idea of where to start, all previous "builds" that I had done consisted of:

1.  Click .exe
2.  Click "Next" 5 or 6 Times
3.  Poof - you have software

Noticing that the deadline was looming, I headed to where any other self-respecting procrastinator would go - other people's work - this is opensource after all. After flipping through a few people's pages, including the popular user Elichak's page, I visited Sherman. Having worked with Sherman before, I knew that we had similar home configurations, and as a result hopefully would have similar steps for building the fox. Thankfully I was right, and the steps outlined in Sherman's method worked very well on my home pc. The one error I encountered during the build:

was due to an oversight in the setup.bat file wherein Sherman had added a further file structure to his moztools that I had not implemented, a quick change got me running again. The build itself took ~2 hours, with the matrix style goop flying across my Cygwin window at an alarming rate:

Once I realized where I was supposed to run the freshly built firefox from thanks to Nanda (once again - no handy icon was on my desktop) I double clicked and kept my fingers crossed. However, my heart soon dropped when I saw this:

contacting the aforementioned Sherman, he assured me that by clicking ignore I would eventually end up with my running FireFox.

My Build Shot

References

Majors go to:

• Sherman Fernandes
• Mozilla Developer Center
• Seneca @ irc.mozilla.org

with minors going to:

• User:Elichak
• User:Ankuswan