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Technology news and Jobs 
The Linux distillery Make Firefox fly: building from a minefield of source
The Linux distillery Make Firefox fly: building from a minefield of source | Make Firefox fly: building from a minefield of source |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 30 June 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 5 Scroll through the script; although you may not understand what it is doing, the key points are that an environment variable MOZ_LIB_DIR is set based on your processor type as just shown. This forms the basis for all else that follows. At the end of the script you will see the lineexec $MOZ_LAUNCHER $script_args $MOZ_PROGRAM $MOZARGS "$@" $MOZ_LAUNCHER is $MOZ_LIB_DIR/firefox-3.0/run-mozilla.sh and $MOZ_PROGRAM is $MOZ_LIB_DIR/firefox-3.0/firefox. So, for people with 32-bit i686 laptops like mine, these are the files /usr/lib/firefox-3.0/run-mozilla.sh and /usr/lib/firefox-3.0/firefox respectively. Let's take a closer look: [david@dmw ~]$ cd /usr/lib/firefox-3.0 [david@dmw firefox-3.0]$ In this directory you will find, predictably, run-mozilla.sh and firefox. It's the latter, firefox, which is the actual raw binary file that makes up the Firefox web browser. When you invoke 'firefox' from the terminal window or from your window manager's app launcher, it actually runs the shell script in /usr/bin, which in turn runs a shell script here (run-mozilla.sh) which in turn fires up this executable. Phew! While here, you can also view run-mozilla.sh to see what it does; it's fairly straightforward. It merely sets Firefox running but also turns on debugging options if required and sets the regional settings according to parameters passed in. You can satisfy yourself that the firefox binary here really is the end of the line by starting it up: [david@dmw firefox-3.0]$ ./firefox & [1] 4939 This time, you'll see the browser kick into life, perhaps opening the tabs you were at last time. One of the nice new features in Firefox 3.0 is that it will ask you if you want to save its state when you close down, allowing you to resume a browsing session from that point later on. Please read on; we'll now check out how big a footprint this takes up and finally get the source code for ourselves. CONTINUED |
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