Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

General discussion Forum. All YDL related question which are not Install or Beginner questions.

Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

Postby ppietro » 05 Jan 2012, 23:34

Hi everyone,

So - according to cnet:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/fire ... wser/17581

For the first time Mozilla has set an euthanization date for the aged Firefox 3.6 browser - April 24, 2012.


It will be interesting to see what the CentOS folks decide to do. Even though CentOS 6 is out, many people - including all of us YDL 6 folks - are still using CentOS 5.

There is a CentOS Wiki entry about this:
http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/Firefox4onCentOS5

With the release of Firefox 4 by mozilla.com, the version of libstdc++ in CentOS 5.x does not meet the requirements to run this version of Firefox. The error that you will get if you do a normal Firefox install is this:

<path_to>/firefox-bin: <path_to>/libstdc++.so.6: version GLIBCXX_3.4.9 not found (required by <path_to>/libxul.so)

This issue is described in this mozillazine forum entry (Firefox 4.0b9 and CentOS 5.5). The fixes below will work for Version 4.0 of Firefox and CentOS 5.6 as well.

Mozilla has decided that they will not fix issue as noted in their bugzilla (Bug 621704).


At some point we were generating stand-along builds of Firefox. I'll have to see if we can do something similar for YDL.

Cheers,
Paul
User avatar
ppietro
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 4965
Joined: 13 Sep 2007, 22:18

Re: Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

Postby ppietro » 18 Mar 2012, 21:20

Well - we may have an answer to this. Looking here:
http://vault.centos.org/5.8/updates/SRPMS/

There appear to be Firefox 10 builds for CentOS 5.8. I'll try building them and see what happens.

Cheers,
Paul
User avatar
ppietro
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 4965
Joined: 13 Sep 2007, 22:18

Re: Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

Postby ppietro » 18 Mar 2012, 21:27

Okay - I'll split this off in a separate topic in a bit - but for now:

Trying to build xulrunner-10.0.3-1.el5_8.src.rpm required me to build and install new versions of nspr-4.8.9-1.el5_8.src.rpm and nss-3.13.1-5.el5_8.src.rpm. (and - in that order too - nspr first, then nss). You need the nspr-devel and nss-devel as well.

UPDATE: There's an error in the xulrunner spec file. Taking a look now.

UPDATE 2: Okay - there's some bogus-ish code in the xulrunner.spec file that is supposed to check for RHEL 5.0. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to like YDL's numbering scheme, so it breaks, instead of failing. I had to comment out these checks - about 3 or 4 in all. I saved my modified xulrunner.spec for analysis later.

Cheers,
Paul
User avatar
ppietro
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 4965
Joined: 13 Sep 2007, 22:18

Re: Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

Postby ppietro » 19 Mar 2012, 04:10

Okay - I kicked this build off at about 2:30 PM or so. It's 8:00 PM now and still building. That's a good sign - I think. :D

Cheers,
Paul
User avatar
ppietro
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 4965
Joined: 13 Sep 2007, 22:18

Re: Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

Postby ppietro » 19 Mar 2012, 08:34

Feh - it errored out. However, I might know why.

Looking thru the logic of the xulrunner.spec, there's a lot of conditional tests to determine what version of RHEL you're running (5 vs. 6). This determines build directories, applied patches, etc.

Here's one of the conditional RHEL 6 tests:
%if 0%{?rhel} > 5

However - according to this post:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5135 ... centos-5-5

That {rhel} macro isn't defined in CentOS. I certainly couldn't find any evidence of it in /etc/rpm. So - I hard hacked the xulrunner.spec to comment out the RHEL 6 code and force the RHEL 5 code.

I'll try it again with this xulrunner.spec and see what happens.

Cheers,
Paul
Attachments
xulrunner.spec.gz
Custom xulrunner.spec for CentOS 5.x/YDL 6.x. I had to gzip it to upload it.
(8.44 KiB) Downloaded 601 times
User avatar
ppietro
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 4965
Joined: 13 Sep 2007, 22:18

Re: Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

Postby ppietro » 19 Mar 2012, 22:40

Hi everyone,

Here's my latest update. My PS3 is still busy cranking on the build, so I decided to try to build it on my YDL for CUDA box.

And - it works!

I used the xulrunner.spec I posted earlier, and - like YDL - I had to update NSS and NSPR. But - it built without a hitch.

The tag looks like this:
Image

Doing a quick search on the web, ESR stands for Extended Support Release:
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/

Apparently this is a version of Firefox that doesn't follow the super aggressive release schedule Mozilla.org uses now. In fact, it seems like an Enterprise version of Firefox - the timing seems to match the RHEL/CentOS schedule.

Cheers,
Paul
User avatar
ppietro
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 4965
Joined: 13 Sep 2007, 22:18

Re: Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

Postby billb » 20 Mar 2012, 02:15

Very nice! :)
PS3 60GB [CECHA01], FW 3.15, YDL 6.2, Samsung T260HD @ 1920x1200
Powermac G4 1.25 GHz x2, 2 GB RAM, YDL 6.2
User avatar
billb
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 5522
Joined: 24 May 2007, 20:30
Location: Eastern NC, USA

Re: Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

Postby ppietro » 20 Mar 2012, 02:20

Hi everyone,

Okay - the PS3 build has failed now - twice.

However - I don't think it's the code. I'm getting these messages:
Code: Select all
collect2: ld terminated with signal 9 [Killed]
chmod +x libxul.so
chmod: cannot access `libxul.so': No such file or directory

and, when I look at dmesg, I see this:
Code: Select all
Out of memory: kill process 18056 (collect2) score 107137 or a child
Killed process 18057 (ld)

That can't be good.

So - it's running out of memory during the code linking.

I'll check Mozilla's site and see if they have a recommendation. Worst case, I know I can build it on my YDL for CUDA box at work - which has a little bit bigger memory. (It's a virtual machine, so not a lot, though.)

UPDATE: I think you need 2 gigs of RAM to build it now. Boo....
https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Simple_Firefox_build

I'll have to do some file swapping to free more hard disc space. With only a 10 gig partition, things are pretty tight already.

Cheers,
Paul
User avatar
ppietro
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 4965
Joined: 13 Sep 2007, 22:18

Re: Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

Postby billb » 20 Mar 2012, 15:38

Don't have any spare CF/SD/MS/USB flash drives you could dedicate to swap? :wink:

Also, I'd turn off ps3vram as swap when building if you're not doing so already -- I've seen gcc crash on a regular basis when compiling large applications when that's enabled, so I turn it off with /sbin/swapoff /dev/ps3vram. The problem you're having doesn't look the same as that, though.
PS3 60GB [CECHA01], FW 3.15, YDL 6.2, Samsung T260HD @ 1920x1200
Powermac G4 1.25 GHz x2, 2 GB RAM, YDL 6.2
User avatar
billb
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 5522
Joined: 24 May 2007, 20:30
Location: Eastern NC, USA

Re: Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

Postby ppietro » 20 Mar 2012, 19:56

billb wrote:Also, I'd turn off ps3vram as swap when building if you're not doing so already -- I've seen gcc crash on a regular basis when compiling large applications when that's enabled, so I turn it off with /sbin/swapoff /dev/ps3vram. The problem you're having doesn't look the same as that, though.


Funny - I've never had an issue with ps3vram as swap. In fact, if I weren't using it, it would take much longer to compile Mozilla/Firefox - it hits the swap extremely hard as it is. :)

Now - I did see crashes when I had libfreevec enabled. I eventually gave up using it because of that.

Cheers,
Paul
User avatar
ppietro
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 4965
Joined: 13 Sep 2007, 22:18

Re: Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

Postby billb » 21 Mar 2012, 00:27

It doesn't always crash, but it has happened often enough for me to always disable it when I'm compiling anything that gets very memory intensive. It always generates a "internal compiler error: Segmentation fault" error when it does occur, as I mentioned here:

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=7043

Anyway, that doesn't seem to be the case here. Good luck! :)

I don't recall if I tried it on other PS3s back when I had them ... I suppose it could just be my particular system. This one also started having odd graphics glitches in PS3 games and displays a nice "starfield effect" when I'm on Linux.
PS3 60GB [CECHA01], FW 3.15, YDL 6.2, Samsung T260HD @ 1920x1200
Powermac G4 1.25 GHz x2, 2 GB RAM, YDL 6.2
User avatar
billb
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 5522
Joined: 24 May 2007, 20:30
Location: Eastern NC, USA

Re: Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

Postby billb » 21 Mar 2012, 03:33

Oh, I do have this PowerMac with 2GB RAM running YDL 6.2 if you want me to try building it here. :wink:
PS3 60GB [CECHA01], FW 3.15, YDL 6.2, Samsung T260HD @ 1920x1200
Powermac G4 1.25 GHz x2, 2 GB RAM, YDL 6.2
User avatar
billb
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 5522
Joined: 24 May 2007, 20:30
Location: Eastern NC, USA

Re: Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

Postby ppietro » 22 Mar 2012, 20:50

billb wrote:Oh, I do have this PowerMac with 2GB RAM running YDL 6.2 if you want me to try building it here. :wink:


Go for it! It might be an interesting experiment to see how it does. I recommend using the spec file I posted above - it should avoid a bunch of build issues. It looks like my virtual machine has 1 gig of RAM and 512 Meg of virtual space, so it should work fine on your 2 gig machine.

I wonder if the resultant RPM would work on my YDL 6.1 system?

Otherwise, I'll try to build it this weekend.

Cheers,
Paul
User avatar
ppietro
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 4965
Joined: 13 Sep 2007, 22:18

Re: Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

Postby billb » 22 Mar 2012, 22:38

OK -- will give it a try and see how it goes.

EDIT: nspr and nss done ... it's working on xulrunner now
PS3 60GB [CECHA01], FW 3.15, YDL 6.2, Samsung T260HD @ 1920x1200
Powermac G4 1.25 GHz x2, 2 GB RAM, YDL 6.2
User avatar
billb
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 5522
Joined: 24 May 2007, 20:30
Location: Eastern NC, USA

Re: Firefox 3.6 end of life and options for CentOS/YDL

Postby billb » 23 Mar 2012, 03:24

OK, I have the nspr, nss, and xulrunner packages completed and installed.

Did you have to modify the firefox.spec at all? This is what I get when I try to build it:

$ rpmbuild -ba firefox.spec
error: syntax error in expression
error: /home/bill/rpmbuild/SPECS/firefox.spec:4: parseExpressionBoolean returns -1
error: Name field must be present in package: (main package)
error: Version field must be present in package: (main package)
error: Release field must be present in package: (main package)
error: Summary field must be present in package: (main package)
error: Group field must be present in package: (main package)
error: License field must be present in package: (main package)
PS3 60GB [CECHA01], FW 3.15, YDL 6.2, Samsung T260HD @ 1920x1200
Powermac G4 1.25 GHz x2, 2 GB RAM, YDL 6.2
User avatar
billb
Site Admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 5522
Joined: 24 May 2007, 20:30
Location: Eastern NC, USA

Next

Return to General

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 4 guests

cron