codeninja.net

my projects
my personal site



CSH
vim powered


Get Firefox
Get Vim
GeoURL

I got Mozilla running well under FreeBSD. I am a big fan of the Mozila project, and while Mozilla is contained in the FreeBSD ports collection, they seem to stick to the milestone releases as opposed to the nightly builds.

Here are some tips on grabbing a current copy of the source and using it to build a browser. Since you are working with code in progress, it could very well be broken when you grab it. Wait awhile and try again. :)
  1. Download the Mozilla source code.. You could also also checkout the latest version from CVS.
  2. Extract the tarball
  3. cd mozilla
  4. Apply all the patches in /usr/ports/www/mozilla/patches. You can do this with the command "patch -p0 < filename"
  5. Using the Unix Build Configurator, build a ~/.mozconfig. This saves you the trouble of passing arguments to the configure script to do things like disabling debug info, the Mail/News client, etc..
  6. ./configure
  7. gmake
  8. Wait a fairly long time...
  9. gmake install
  10. cd .. ; chgrp -R root:wheel mozilla ; mv mozilla /usr/local
  11. set the MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME environment variable to '/usr/local/mozilla'
  12. add $MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME/dist/bin to your path
  13. rehash
  14. ./mozilla (Note: The first time you run mozilla, you must run it as root)
I have also created a 48x48 pixel XPM suitable for use as a dock icon. I simply took the mozilla.org logo, shrunk it, and cleaned it up. It is available here