OSD600 Week 3 (II) (Building Mozilla Minefield)
September 24, 2009
This week we were assigned the task of building Mozilla. This was the first time for me in trying to build such a big project on my own.
Firstly, I needed to decide which platform to use. I had two choices either Windows or Linux. I read the prerequisites for Windows and Linux and decided that Linux was the best choice since the Windows steps required a lot of time and effort. I have a Virtual Machine with Ubuntu but I thought it would be too slow. Then I thought to install Linux in a different partition but remembered of a cool application that I wanted to try long time ago: Wubi.
Wubi allows me to install Linux without modifying my partitions. This feature was what I was looking for (I do not wanted to be messing around with the partitions now that I am so busy). If you want to know how it works, go to this link.
I installed Wubi restarted the pc and then installed Ubuntu. The installation was straightforward. Once done I went to the Firefox’s build instruction and did a quick scan of the page. I decided to use the “For the impatient” since that is what I am. I started to install the build tools without any problem and went to check the status of the building of Firefox on Linux here. Of course, it was in fire (just my luck). I decided to postpone it to the next day.
The next day I check the status of the building and everything was ok. I downloaded the code using Mercurial created the mozconfig file and started the building of Firefox. It took 14 minutes the building. It really surprised me how fast the whole process took and let me wondering how much time it would be in a Virtual Machine competing for resources with Windows. If I have time I will do it and post the results in another blog.
Here is the result of all the work:
