11 January 2013

315. Briefly: Compile firefox 18 on debian testing/wheezy

For no better reason than pure curiosity, here's how to build firefox 18. My regular build environment has so many packages installed these days that it's useless for working out dependencies for other people, so I tried it in a fresh chroot to hammer out the current dependencies beyond a doubt. In other words: it will work for you.

In retrospect I'm not sure if you really need the dev package for libgtk2.0.

sudo apt-get install bzip2 build-essential python zip unzip pkg-config libgtk2.0-dev gconf2 libdbus-1-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev yasm libasound2-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libxt-dev mesa-common-dev
mkdir ~/tmp/firefox -p
cd ~/tmp/firefox
wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/18.0/source/firefox-18.0.source.tar.bz2
tar xvf firefox-18.0.source.tar.bz2
mkdir build/
cd build/
../mozilla-release/./configure --prefix=$HOME/.firefox18
make
make install
echo "alias firefox18='$HOME/.firefox18/bin/firefox'" >> $HOME/.bashrc
source $HOME/.bashrc

Launch by typing
firefox18


4 comments:

  1. Any chance you've tried the make uninstall?

    Does that work ?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The short answer is that I haven't tried. I might be able to try next week.

      In this particular case it is installed in $HOME/.firefox18 so you can simply delete the folder and it's completely gone.

      It's obviously a bit more complex if you used the default prefix.

      Delete
    2. OK, checked it -- 'make uninstall' doesn't work.

      Delete
    3. Here's how to set up an uninstall Makefile target with cmake generated projects: http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_FAQ#Can_I_do_.22make_uninstall.22_with_CMake.3F

      Delete