FAQ

This FAQ is meant to provide a place for you to capture knowledge as you begin working on Mozilla development. When someone answers a question for you, consider adding it below. Create new topic headings as necessary.

Building Firefox

1. Where can I get information on building Firefox or other Mozilla products?

   Start with the documentation on MDC: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Build_Documentation.

2. Where can I get more help building Firefox on Windows?

   See Building Firefox on Win32 using Visual Studio .NET 2005.

   Windows Build Documentation is updated - 17:15, Sept 16 2006 (EST)

   Seneca students can get Visual Studios .NET 2003 or 2005 from ACS.

3. How can I checkout the source code when ACS is blocking ports?

   Open up two terminals. The first one makes a tunnel to matrix. In terminal 1:

   ssh -L 2401:cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:2401 -l yourusername yourusername@matrix

   In terminal 2:

   cvs -d :pserver:anonymous:anonymous@localhost:/cvsroot co mozilla/client.mk

IRC

1. Where can I find a comprehensive list of IRC clients?

   Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IRC_clients for a list of IRC clients on various platforms. Two popular choices are Chatzilla and irssi.

2. Where can I ask for help on IRC?

   Use the #seneca, #firefox, #build or #developers channels on irc://irc.mozilla.org.

3. What is the best way to share long error messages or other text that is too big to copy/paste into IRC?

   Use a pastebin at http://pastebin.ca/ or http://pastebin.mozilla.org/ to copy/paste your output. Then paste the resulting URL into IRC.

4. What is the best way to share long URLs in IRC?

   Use http://tinyurl.com/ and paste the resulting URL into IRC.

5. IRSSI + Terminal Server:

   Click for a quick Irssi Tutorial

   IRSSI Documentation and Resources

6. What do all these acronyms stand for?

   Look them up on the Glossary of IRC terminology

Terminology

1. What does MDC or devmo refer to?

   Mozilla Developer Center - http://developer.mozilla.org.

2. What does MoCo stand for?

   Mozilla Corporation - http://www.mozilla.com/.

VMWare

1. What is a VM appliance?

   A VM appliance is pre-configured, pre-packaged image of an operating system or environment. This allows you to simply download these appliances and not have to worry about downloading iso images and burning CD's etc. to installing a given OS. VM appliances are opened with the VMPlayer.

2. How do I get VMWare Player and VM appliances?

   To get started you will need to install the VMWare player. To use other appliances simply download and unzip it to a folder on your hard drive and open it via the VMWare Player.

3. Where can I find a listing of available VM appliances?

   A detailed listing of available VM Appliances can be found at the Virtual Appliance Directory.