Installing Firefox 3 on Debian Etch

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Requirements
3. Building gtk+ 2.10
4. Starting Firefox 3

Firefox 3 is out and no one knows how long Mozilla supports Firefox 2 for security updates. And since the Internet and in particular browser software is exposed to any kind of attacks this is a critical point.

Since Firefox 3 is supported for Windows down to Windows 2000 I was confident it will work with the recent stable Debian 4.0 release (Etch). So I downloaded the new Firefox and installed it under /opt/firefox:

$ cd /opt
$ tar xvjf /tmp/firefox-3.0.4.tar.bz2

Starting it by

$ cd /opt/firefox
$ ./firefox &

was quite disappointing. The only thing I got was a window telling me my gtk+ version is not sufficient.

Knowing this you have three options:

1. Upgrading your Linux installation to a higher version (Debian Etch -> Lenny)
2. Stick to Firefox 2 and hope it will be supported
3. Upgrade your gtk+ libraries

If you don't want to go for option 1 or 2 you have to upgrade GTK+! This article describes how this can be done on Systems running Debian Etch without interfering with your other gtk based software.

2. Requirements on Debian Etch

Installing FF3 on Debian Etch requires quite some attention. This is because a typical Debian installation lacks a lot of development tools.

Obviously if you want to compile something you need the GNU C++ compiler installed on your system. Check it out with a command like this::

root@deb# dpkg -l | grep -i compiler
ii  g++                               4.1.1-21                             The GNU C++ compiler
ii  gcc                               4.1.1-15                             The GNU C compiler
ii  gcc-3.4-base                      3.4.6-5                              The GNU Compiler Collection (base package)
ii  gcc-4.1                           4.1.1-21                             The GNU C compiler
ii  gcc-4.1-base                      4.1.1-21                             The GNU Compiler Collection (base package)
ii  gcj-4.1-base                      4.1.1-20                             The GNU Compiler Collection (gcj base packag
ii  jikes                             1.22-6                               Fast Java compiler adhering to language and

The g++ package is what we are looking for. If it's there the basic requirement to compile C++ code is met. But we need a lot more...

First we need a small tool called pkg-config to be present. It was not on my system, so I had to install it:

root@deb# aptitude install pkg-config

When trying to build the 5 packages you probably come across some more missing development packages. On my system I had to install 7 development packages:

root@deb# aptitude install libpng-dev
root@deb# aptitude install libx11-dev
root@deb# aptitude install libfontconfig-dev
root@deb# aptitude install libxrender-dev
root@deb# aptitude install libpoppler-glib-dev
root@deb# aptitude install librsvg2-dev
root@deb# aptitude install libtiff4-dev

You have to check the summary of the configure output (i.e., the output of the ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk-ff3, see below) very carefully, because missing libraries not always prevent configure from succeed, but it will disable certain features (e.g. X11 support for cairo!).

3. Building gtk+ 2.10

In order to build the new gtk+ libraries we need to download the sources of 5 packages:

• glib
• atk
• cairo
• pango
• gtk+

The latest sources for glib, atk, pango, and gtk+ can be found at ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources or official mirrors. The cairo sources can be found at cairographics.org/releases.

Once you have them, we can start the build process. The idea is to put all the special libraries in a separate place, let's say under /opt/gtk-ff2. We have to start with the glib2 package:

user@deb$ tar xvjf glib-2.12.13.tar.bz2
user@deb$ cd glib-2.12.13
user@deb$ ./configure --help
user@deb$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk-ff3
user@deb$ make
user@deb$ sudo make install
user@deb$ cd ..

Now we have to set some environment variables - so the build scripts can find the new glib2 version:

user@deb$ export  PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gtk-ff3/lib/pkgconfig
user@deb$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gtk-ff3/lib
user@deb$ export PATH=/opt/gtk-ff3/bin:$PATH

and we can proceed with the other packages. Please note:

• gtk+ has to be the last package to be built since it requires the other three
• You have to recompile atk, cairo, and pango even if the version number of the system versions is high enough! This is because they are linked against the old glib2 which is lacking some symbols.

We start the build process of the other 4 packages, starting with atk

user@deb$ tar xvjf atk-1.19.6.tar.bz2
user@deb$ cd atk-1.19.6/
user@deb$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk-ff3
user@deb$ make
user@deb$ sudo make install
user@deb$ cd ..

cairo...

user@deb$ tar xvzf cairo-1.4.10.tar.gz
user@deb$ cd cairo-1.4.10/
user@deb$ make clean
user@deb$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk-ff3
user@deb$ make
user@deb$ sudo make install
user@deb$ cd ..

pango...

user@deb$ tar xvjf pango-1.17.5.tar.bz2
user@deb$ cd pango-1.17.5/
user@deb$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk-ff3
user@deb$ make
user@deb$ sudo make install
user@deb$ cd ..

and finally gtk+...

user@deb$ tar xvjf gtk+-2.10.14.tar.bz2
user@deb$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk-ff3
user@deb$ cd gtk+-2.10.14/
user@deb$ ./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk-ff3
user@deb$ make
user@deb$ sudo make install
user@deb$ cd ..

5. Starting Firefrox 3

Forgotten why we did all this? We want to start firefox. Assuming it is installed under /opt/firefox we first have to point the LD_LIBRARY_PATH> to our new gtk+ libraries:

user@deb$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/gtk-ff3/lib
user@deb$ /opt/firefox/firefox &

Of course you want to put this into a small script...

And don't worry - this way firefox works quite fine and stable. I had no trouble at all.