!!!!WORK IN PROGRESS!!!!
Introduction
I first started off building Firefox on my Windows XP Professional machine using Visual Studio.Net 2003. Unfortunately I had some problems along the way and solved them by using Google.com and by asking for help in the IRC chat. When I finally built Firefox I tried to run it but wasn’t successful because it crashed on me. So I tried building it on two other hard drives and I got the same error. Since I was short on time I decided to give Linux a try and see if I would be more successful with building Firefox on a Linux operating system.
I was finally able to build Firefox successfully on Ubuntu, which took me about one night to do. This document will cover the build requirements such as hardware and software that I needed in order to build Firefox successfully. I will then discuss the steps that took me to fully complete the build and any problems that I encountered along the way. I will end it off with some useful resources that I found and used throughout the process of the build and then talk about my experience with my first open source build.
Requirements
Hardware
My computer system:
Intel Pentium 3 Processor 450 Mhz 256 MB RAM 40 Gigabyte Hard Drive Ubuntu
Software
Before I could install any packages or libraries I had to install build-essential, which is the synaptic package manager (i.e. Library Manager). Once I got this installed I looked at Linux Build Prerequisites to find out which libraries I needed. The following are a list of the libraries that I installed.
- CVS
- GTK (2.0)
- Libxt-dev
- Libidl-dev
- Make
The Build
info
Steps took to complete build
- Asked Mike Lau a few questions about Ubuntu.
- Installed the build –essential, which is the synaptic package manager (i.e. Library Manager).
sudo apt-get install build-essential
- Installed the CVS library, from the synaptic package manager.
- Added environment variables to my environment script ( /etc/environment)
CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot CVS_RSH=ssh
- Checked out the trunk.
- Started build for Firefox.
- Received an error during my build. The error stated that my /usr/bin/pkg-config was not found.
- I knew I was missing a package but I wasn’t sure what the name of the package was. So I used Google to see if I could find a solution. I didn’t find any useful links so I asked Mike Lau if he had come across any errors like the one I had.
- After speaking with Mike Lau, I got the packages that I needed.
- I Installed packages libidl-dev and libgtk2.0-dev from the synaptic package manager.
- After installing the packages I tried to rebuild Firefox again.
- Received another error during my build. The error stated that it could not compile a basic X program. I knew that my int_types.h was missing so I knew that I was obviously missing a library but wasn’t sure which one.
- I used Google again to see if anyone had faced the same problem. I found a link on Ubuntu Forums that gave me a package libgtk2.0-dev to install. But i had already installed it.
- I then decided to try the IRC chat and pasted the error that I received and asked for some help.
- Philip Vitorino offered to help me and explained to me that I was just missing a package. I told him that I wasn't sure what package I was missing. I told him the packages that I had installed and he gave me a package to install.
- I installed libxt-dev
sudo apt -get install g++ libxt-dev
- Rebuilded Firefox and left it running over night.
- Next morning everything had gone smoothly, I ran Firefox in the terminal and got the browser running.
/dist/bin ./firefox
Problems Encountered
info
Screenshot
Coming soon!
Conclusion
Info