Building Firefox on Fedora

Today I went to set up a working Firefox build environment ON Linux Fedora. It was actually easier than I first felt. When I would run into an error message, I would google it, and get an answer usually saying to add modifications in the config file to pass over, or to include, or change the version of various products.

Some of the problems:

• Something called necko-wifi was not compatible, researching it I found I could just disable it in the mozconfig file by appending a line "ac_add_options --disable-necko-wifi". Solved, next error!


• Something called maemo was causing an error message, and researching that I found a similar solution that didn't work, to append "ac_add_options --with-maemo-version=5", fixed, but this caused other issues.


• I then found out, I could do a search for the missing files Firefox was complaining about using Fedora's "yum search 'name of file'" looking for something that looked like what was missing, and then "yum install 'file you found'" and crossed my fingers, would sometimes take a couple hits and misses before it would build, but after that each and every error was solved in that manner, including maemo.

I have to say I'm liking Fedora a lot. I also found a neat trick using vim, where you can do ctrl-p while typing a word to finish it, or scroll through words kinda like auto-complete. Linux can pretty much do anything I would need now.