Building Firefox 3 beta 2 from Source on Ubuntu 7.10

Although Mozilla have released a binary blob of Firefox 3 beta 2 that is easily unpacked and run from your /home directory , I thought I'd try my hand at building it from source.

The first thing I did was to familiarize myself with the Build Documentation and Configuring Build Options as its a little different from other packages I have built previously.

Then I downloaded the Source and unpacked it.

Next , as per the documentation I created a ~/.mozconfig file containing :-


. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/ff-opt-static
ac_add_options --enable-optimize
ac_add_options --disable-debug
ac_add_options --enable-static
ac_add_options --disable-shared
ac_add_options --disable-libxul
ac_add_options --disable-tests


Then started the build with :-

nice make -f client.mk build

This failed due to a missing dependency , so I installed it with :-

sudo apt-get install libidl-dev

It took two and a half hours to build on my Athlon 2400+ so make sure you have something else to do while it runs.

When it finally finished compiling I built a distribution file with :-

cd ff-opt-static/
nice make package

...and then unpacked this ~/source/mozilla/ff-opt-static/dist/firefox-3.0b2.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2 file into a ~/firefox3-beta/ directory.

Finally I setup a new Gnome Menu icon to run the ~/firefox3-beta/run-mozilla.sh script and hid the previous Firefox icon , this leaves my repository installed Firefox 2 installed and usuable just-in-case I run into any showstopping problems with this beta.

I needed to copy the flash player plugin to the new installations plugin directory to get that working again :-

cp /home/mark/firefox3-beta.old/plugins/libflashplayer.so /home/mark/firefox3-beta/plugins/