Building Mozilla on Unix platforms
v 1.0, June 1998
How to build Mozilla on a Unix System.
What this document is: A guide to building the Mozilla application.
This includes:
- A listing of the development tools you will need to build Mozilla.
- A list of environment variables you will need to set before building.
If you're looking for documentation on developing features or fixing bugs,
the Mozilla
Technical Documents
or Library
are probably what you're looking for.
Each of the following subsections describes, or gives references to
descriptions of, the steps necessary to build Mozilla.
There are two principal ways of getting the code,
ftp and
CVS.
CVS will provide the least outdated code for building, but is
slower than ftp.
The following need to be installed:
- Motif 1.2 (2.1 recommended for RedHat Linux)
- GNU C/C++ compiler 2.7.2
- GNU make 3.74 or better
- Perl (or, if you have no Perl, then set
PERL=/bin/echo
)
Your hardware should be equal to, or better than:
32 MB RAM, 128 MB swap (64 MB RAM recommended)
Change to the directory you copied the source into (for example,
cd /builds
). If this directory was empty before you
installed the source, there should be two directories here:
README
and mozilla
.
cd mozilla
gmake
My linker dies with this error: undefined reference to `_Xsetlocale'
If this error occurs, you might have to recompile libX11.so
with the -DX_LOCALE flag (thanks to Scott Lampert,
fortunato@heavymetal.org).
This problem stems from use of an older version of RedHat Motif.
Moving to Motif 2.1 should resolve this. There are probably other problems
with using the older versions of Motif, but i haven't encountered them.