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Some of my friends run FreeBSD 4.x on their office workstations. Since Firefox/Thunderbird is supported only on the trio (Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux), we
were compelled to build on our own.
The system has all the pre-requisites, and we had GCC 2.95.4 for building.
Compiling Firefox/Thunderbird on FreeBSD requires the LDFLAGS to be set to “-pthread”, and additionally there were suggestions to stick “-lc” to avoid undefined reference to “memcpy”, “fwrite”, etc.
But that proved to be a problem soon, since we had used “-lc” the build process started segfaulting (bus error) with an error message “rcmdsh: unknown user”. Searching for a similar pattern on the web suggested the use of “-lc_r” instead of “-lc”. It worked!
But soon again, the build stopped with “stdint.h” “file not found. But this time, this seems to be a well known error, and I had to patch the gfx/cairo to workaround for FreeBSD 4.x.
The build was finally successful.
If you want to build Firefox or Thunderbird, you can download my patch and apply it before starting the build process.
If you have to build Thunderbird with calendar or lightning support, you’ll have to apply this patch in addition to the above patch.
technorati tags: mozilla, firefox, freebsd, thunderbird, sunbird, lightning