Assignment 1 Building FireFox

Purpose

To boldly go where I have not gone before. In other words build the Firefox application by utilizing the necessary documentation provided by Mozilla and other resources.

Hardware

• Intel Core Duo Processor @ 1.86GHz
• 512 MB of RAM
• 80 gig Samsung Hard Drive

Software

• Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2
• Visual Studio .Net 2003 with Visual C++ included
• Cygwin installed with the following packages
  • ash -- UNIX-like command line interpreter shell (Base category)
  • coreutils -- GNU core utilities (includes fileutils, install, sh-utils, and textutils) (Base category) cvs -- concurrent versions system (Devel category)
  • diffutils -- file comparison utility (Base category)
  • findutils (Base category)
  • gawk -- pattern matching language (Base and Interpretors categories)
  • grep -- text search tool (Base category)
  • libiconv -- character set conversion (Devel category)
  • make 3.80 (not 3.81!) -- dependency analyzer for software builds (Devel category)
  • patchutils -- a small collection of programs that operate on patch files (Devel category)
  • perl -- a scripting language used to control parts of the build (Interpreters category)
  • sed -- a search and replace language (Base category)
  • unzip -- zip file extraction (Archive category)
  • zip -- zip file creation (Archive category)
• moztools
  • package contains binaries and libraries necessary to build mozilla
• CVS
  • source control system used by Mozilla. Downloading the tar balls from Mozilla’s FTP sites can be used also for obtaining the FireFox source code.
• Windows Server 2003 SP1 Platform SDK
• NSIS

Steps to Build FireFox

1. Download and installed Windows Server 2003 SP1 Platform SDK
2. Make sure the Visual C++ module for Visual Studio 2003 or 2005 is installed if not downloaded it from the acs.senecac.on.ca website.
3. Install NSIS
4. Install Cygwin and download the packages( Please see the[ http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Windows_Build_Prerequisites] for the list
5. Follow the link on the Windows Build Preq and download make-3.80-1.tar.bz2
6. Download and look at the Cygwin.bat file from the Windows Build Prerequsites web page.
   1. Changed VCVARS=C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC\bin\vcvars32.bat to point to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\VC7\bin\vcvars32.bat
   2. Checked to see that the MOZTOOLS variable was pointing to right directory
   3. rename %CYGWINBASE%\bin\link.exe to glink.exe