Peter Evanoff’s Weblog

Ben Hearsum delivers! As noted in my previous blog, we were having problems with the libstdc++5 dependancy, and Ben has provided some answers…

To paraphrase Ben (which actually means to copy/paste his answer) :

Firefox 2 build machines are pretty old — Redhat EL/AS3 (Taroon) — which was apparently released in October of 2003. So, that’s the reason. We won’t be changing our build machines for Fx2, so it will continue to be that way.

However, Firefox 3 uses CentOS5 — which is much more recent. ldd on that shows that it’s using libstdc++.so.6, so, yay.

So although we still have some work to do on the “how” to fix the problem, its nice to know the “why”. Thanks again Ben.

Ben came to visit us at Seneca last Thursday. If a picture is worth a 1000 words, a real person has gotta be worth at least 1MB. Ben was very open with us, and gave us a little overview of what life is like at Mozilla. From a students perspective, it is really encouraging to see success stories in person, rather than than just hearing about them. I asked Ben about the problem I am having with the libstc++5 shared libraries, and he said he would look into it, and promptly got back to me for more details via email. It is very refreshing to have someone follow-up questions on their own, without having to push/prod them for answers. Keep up the good work Ben, and if you can help solve my problem, I will write another blog complementing you even more!

We Peters have a functioning Linux script/setup that allows us to run Universal Firefox from our stick, but not without some wrinkles.  We anticipated a few more problems with the Linux v0.2 release than with the XP 0.1,  if only for the fact the once the script was working for XP, our job there was complete.  On Linux, we encountered a problem with some shared libraries, in particular libstdc++5, which the Firefox binary from Mozilla depends on.   When we tried to run Firefox, we were getting dependency errors for the library, which stopped us in our tracks.   Doing an apt-get or yum solved the problem, but this wasn’t an optimum solution.  As a quick fix, we added the library to our stick and Firefox is working well.  We still have to investigate the root cause,  and as Chris Tyler suggested, maybe set up a path that will search our stick as a last resort.  Our goal remains to have a “Grandma” implementation ( in my family it would be a Grandpa , since Grandma was a wizard with new electronic gadgets) which is to say that  you can just plug it in  and it works without fuss.  I will  stop now and leave it to the other Peter to fill in the rest of the details.

I have completed the Create an Extension lab, and I must say it was quite a pleasure!  I prefer learning  with the bottom-up approach, rather than the top-down, and this lab was perfect.   We created our “hello world” extension by adding a simple “titled” panel to the statusbar, and were  exposed to many of the concepts in building an extension without getting bogged down in the details a more complicated extension would require.(Although Chris Tyler did review the “Tabs Open Relative” add-on, which did some funky search and replace  of JS.)   The beauty of the KISS principle is that it allowed us to use the extra memory(in my brain, not the computer!) to think about other ideas. Peter Chan and I have thought that it would be a good idea to create an extension that displays a web pages “last updated” date in the status bar, since we have both suffered from reading a web page for a couple  minutes only to find that it was last updated some time in the late 1940’s(ENIAC?).  If we find the time, we will share….

We Peters have managed to get Firefox to run from the stick(tentatively!) on Linux(Fedora 8 vmare) .  We seem to have the basic Linux script working fine, but are getting an error from the Firefox binary about LIBSTDC++ 5,  which is the Standard C++ library.  We haven’t figured out the WHY yet, but have managed to install the package and get Firefox running from the stick, using the Universal profile .  The Fedora8 vware image I have at home has LIBSTDC++6 installed, which is apparently good enough for the base Firefox to use, but not for the stick version,  so we have to figure out what is going on.   The same problem happened at Seneca on Friday, and the YUM update worked, but our script was not working then, so we couldn’t get confirmation.  Hopefully, more good news to follow…

Part of our the learning experience for the course is about contributing to other people and their projects.    Our project can benefit from others trying out the 0.2 version with their own profiles, on their own systems.  We plan on setting up a little zip package (soon?) that can be installed on the flash drive.  Details to follow.

Mike came for a chat yesterday, and gave an us an opportunity to ask him some questions. It was refreshing to talk to someone who was very open and honest , and encouraged us to ask him anything we wanted to. He came across as very intelligent and articulate (the silver-tongued (fire) fox?) and gave us all a boost of confidence. It’s nice to finally put a face to a name, and to reinforce the sense of community the Mozilla project represents. Thanks Mike.