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"crosscompile" Firefox for SuSE 8.1

Hy there,

I'm stuck with a little problem here, we have a "few" SuSE Linux 8.1 Desktop Computers with an installed Mozilla 1.6.
Thing is, this Mozilla version is not only stone old but also incapable of rendering some new "Web 2.0" Sites.

my idea was to update to Firefox 2.0.x or 1.5.x. problems are:

1.) Firefox needs gtk+-2.0 >= 1.3.7 (Suse 8.1 has 1.2.10)
2.) I can not update or change the installation of the PC to packages not part of the SuSE 8.1 distribution (so updating GTK is not an option)

So i thought I could try and build a static version of Firefox on an Build system that would than run on SuSE 8.1 (easier said than done as I found out)

I fetched sources of Firefox 2.0.7 found out that configure had a "--enable-static" and "--disable-shared" switch, hoped it would do what i was searching for and did a quick make and make install. But as you can guess life ain't easy and this did not what i was searching for. Firefox ran smoothly on the Compile system but was bitching about missing shared libraries on the target system:

Code:

Configure:

#> ./configure --prefix=/home/firefox --exec-prefix=/home/firefox --enable-application=browser --enable-image-encoder=all --enable-canvas --enable-extensions=default --enable-oji --enable-mathml --enable-static --disable-shared

Error on target:

#>./firefox

#> ./firefox-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libfontconfig.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I even tried with CFLAGS="-static"
But then I can not even get past the configure as it complains about missing libraries (which he would find without the static flag)

Code:

#> export CFLAGS="-static"

#> export CXXFLAGS="-static"

#> ./configure --prefix=/home/firefox --exec-prefix=/home/firefox --enable-application=browser --enable-image-encoder=all --enable-canvas --enable-extensions=default --enable-oji --enable-mathml --enable-static --disable-shared

...

checking for inttypes.h... yes

checking for sys/int_types.h... no

configure: error:  Could not find the following X libraries:  -lX11 -lXext -lXt

So any ideas how I can get e recent version of Firefox running on an old SuSE 8.1?

Hi InDubio
I think you should rather search another way to run more recent softwares on your old SUSE Linux 8.1 installations.
You could look into the Klik utility to install packages along with the libraries necessary to run them, all in one file to install.
I've seen that firefox 2.0.0.1 is available.
See http://klik.atekon.de/
I have not used it but it seems good and simple.
Maybe it's the solution for you.
At least try it.
Greetings.

I think you should be able to simply run the Firefox install script on just about any Linux...

But why do you want to flog yourself making things work on something as out of date as SUSE 8.1? If you upgrade to something more modern, this and many other issues will get fixed for free.

@berbae
Looked promising at first but does not work on SuSE 8.1 either (too bad, does not find some files an mount does not support cmg files, and needs firefox to install software into the container) But will keep that in mind maybe i can use it somewhere else.
Thy for the tip

@pixellany

Quote:

I think you should be able to simply run the Firefox install script on just about any Linux...

Yea, thought that too, but that is only true as long as you have a reasonable version of GTK2+ :o

Well and about an update of the client... Nothing would make me more happy than updating the clients, but sadly that is not in my hands

-----
But the berbae's klick thing brought me to the idea to make a firefox install that just brings all needed shared libraries with it in one package, but i do not now how to find out the library dependencies recursively and when I have them how to make firefox use his own ones? Any Ideas on that?

I will also look into the Linux Terminal Server Project I know this will bring me to the problem that i need a Terminal Server but then i wont have the outdated library problems