Building Firefox (in progress)
I’ve finally gotten around to building Firefox on my Debian system, and as I expected, it is going fairly smoothly.
Things would not have been so easy without Mathew Lam’s in depth post on building the browser under unstable (using the simple trunk build instructions). By knowing that I had to follow the Linux build prerequisites very carefully, I was able to get away with only overlooking one dependency (libxt-dev).
Interestingly, I came across a blog post by Mark Shroyer on building Firefox 3.5.3 that uses a simple apt-get build-dep iceweasel to install most of the dependencies (just like as is described for that other operating system). Until now I hadn’t realize that build-dep was an apt option and not just part of the name of some meta-package (the space should have tipped me off). Unfortunately though, this option has not been implemented in aptitude which I prefer for various reasons (most recommend not mixing the two either).
Look at that! While I was yabbering my build finished! This was actually pretty speedy at ~ 2 hrs. Now to finish this post so I can test out my new browser.
and it works!