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I first started off building <b>Firefox </b> on my <b>Windows XP Professional</b> machine using <b>Visual Studio.Net 2003. </b> Unfortunately I had some problems along the way and solved them by using Google.com and by asking for help in the IRC chat. When I finally built Firefox I tried to run it but wasn’t successful because it crashed on me. So I tried building it on two other hard drives and I got the same error. Since I was short on time I decided to give Linux a try and see if I would be more successful with building Firefox on a Linux operating system.

I was finally able to build <b>Firefox </b> successfully on <b>Ubuntu</b>, which took me about one night to do. This document will discuss cover the build requirements such as hardware and software that I needed in order to build Firefox successfully. I will then focus on discuss the steps that took me to fully complete the build and any problems that I encountered along the way. I will end it off with some useful resources that I found and used throughout the process of the build and then talk about my experience with my first open source build.

 =BuildRequirements=

Before I could install any packages or libraries I had to install build-essential, which is the synaptic package manager (i.e. Library Manager). Once I got this installed I looked at [http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Linux_Build_Prerequisites] Linux Build prerequisites Prerequisites] to find out which libraries I needed. The following are a list of the libraries that I installed.

==Steps took One of the errors I faced was to complete build==infodo with two missing packages not being installed.

<pre> 1. checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config 2. checking for gtk+-2.0 >=1.3.7 gdk-x11-2.0 glib-2.0 gobject-2.0... Package gtk+-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path. Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gtk+-2.0.pc' to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable No package 'gtk+-2.0' foun d Package gdk-x11-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path. Perhaps you should a dd the directory containing `gdk-x11-2.0.pc' to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variabl e No package 'gdk-x11-2.0' found Package glib-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config searc h path. Perhaps you should add the directory containing `glib-2.0.pc' to the PKG_CONFIG _PATH environment variable No package 'glib-2.0' found Package gobject-2.0 was not foun d in the pkg-config search path. Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gobje ct-2.0.pc' to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable No package 'gobject-2.0' found 3. configure: error: Library requirements (gtk+-2.0 >=Problems Encountered==1.3.7 gdk-x11-2.0 glib-2.0 gobject- 2.0) not met; consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if your libra ries are in a nonstandard prefix so pkg-config can find them. 4. *** Fix above errors and then restart with "make -f client.mk build" 5. make[1]: *** [configure] Error 1 6. make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/admin/mozilla' 7. make: *** [/home/admin/mozilla/firefox-objdir/Makefile] Error 2 </pre>

Coming soon![[Image:vpmirand.jpg]] =Resources=Here are some links that I found useful and helped me in the process of building Mozilla Firefox: *[http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Linux_Build_Prerequisites Linux Build Prerequisites]*[http://whereswalden.com/mozilla/msvcfree/ Setting up an MSVC Toolkit Firefox/Thunderbird Build Environment]*[http://Ubuntuforums.org Ubunutu Forums] Also got some help from people in the <b>IRC Chat</b> in room <b>#Seneca</b>. The name of these individuals are as follows: *Mike Lau (mylau) [Helped with building Firefox on Ubuntu system]*Philip Vitorino (philly) [Helped with building Firefox on Ubuntu system]*Dave Humphrey (dave) [Helped with building Firefox on Windows XP Professional system]*Tom Aratyn(mystic) [Helped with building Firefox on Windows XP Professional system] I would like to thank you all very much for taking the time to help me with the problems I faced when building Firefox.

InfoThis whole process of building Firefox has been an experience that I plan on taking with me where ever I go. I have never worked on such a large project, and having the opportunity to be a part of it was very exciting. Since this was my first time building an open source project I must admit i did get a bit fustrated since I wasn't sure what I had to do or what I needed in order to build Firefox successfully. I got some useful information from Tom Aratyn and Dave Humphrey who first helped me out with trying to build Firefox on the Windows platform. Their information and the information I found on Google helped me to understand what I needed and what I had to do.  Since my Firefox crashed on my Windows platform when the build finished, I decided to try the build on Ubuntu. Installing Ubuntu was a challenge since it was my first time installing a Linux operating system on my machine. After the installation I got even more confused on where to find things. I took some time to get familiarized with the interface which I picked up after a couple of minutes of looking around on the desktop. During the process of building Firefox I started to get confused when I read on the internet that you had to install specific packages and libraries. When I read this I automatically thought that I had to download the package and libraries from the internet. But then I figured out that I just needed to type a command in the terminal to install packages and install the library manager. This was one of the things I found really confusing, but now I am getting used to the Linux environment and plan to keep using it in the near future.