I am new to the linux world, and I am somewhat of a microsoft guy...

I have never compiled a program before, but I would like to for Mozilla 1.4rc2 with xft support (which I believe is the anti-aliased fonts).

Can someone point me in the right direction? I would like to read a howto, and be able to follow it step by step. I have read through mozilla's website their unix build page, unix script configurator, and it is all a little much for me still Should I read a howto on compiling programs first?

I am running RedHat 9 with gnome desktop and another machine with XD2 desktop, 1GHz machines (AMD thunderbirds), nvidia graphic cards with nvidia drivers... blah blah.

I guess what I am asking, is where the hell does someone like me start?

Thanks for the help guys (and any gals out there)

Down load the source code.

At the command line cd to where you downloaded the file and type tar -zxvf mozilla-source-1.0.tar.gz(or what ever the name is) and hit enter.

This will unpack the tarball to a folder. Then type mv mozilla-1.0 /usr/local (the name of your folder might be differnet), this moves the folder to /usrlocal.

Then type cd /usr/local/mozilla-1.0 . Now is a good time to read the README and/or INSTALL files. Some programs need to be complied differently. Below is the usual way to compile from source.

Then you type ./configure . You can type ./confiure --h | more to see a list of options. This is where you might find out how to set it with xft support.

Then type make and when it is done running make sure that there is no errors. Then the last thing to do is type make install.

Building Mozilla is not an easy or fun task.

My suggestion is to find a prebuilt package for your distro. Redhat is obviously pretty common, so you should be able to find one.

If you are interested in Firebird w/XFT: http://pryan.org/phoenix/

Thanks for the tip for phoenix. I have downloaded it already. I still am going to try to compile 1.4rc2.

But when I type ./configure it says:

bash: ./configure: No such file or directory

Does that mean that I don't have the necesary rpms or libs (not sure what they are called) to compile something?

And again, thanks for your help!

you probobly have to bootstrap it first.

run ./autogen.sh , first. that should work.

Also, as long as your building it, look at all the flags, as there may be some other things you want to tweak, like building it with the GTK2 toolkit (i like doing that).

n/t