This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Building mozilla from source code on CentOS-8

  • 7 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 9 views
  • Last reply by sswien

more options

Hi,

I am trying to build the latest ESR and ESR31 on CentOS 8. I am trying to run the bootstrapper but it is unable to find some packages for both ESR sources ( i.e. 31 and 68 ). Am I doing something wrong with my assumption of building mozilla from source on CentOS 8 ? Please help!!

Hi, I am trying to build the latest ESR and ESR31 on CentOS 8. I am trying to run the bootstrapper but it is unable to find some packages for both ESR sources ( i.e. 31 and 68 ). Am I doing something wrong with my assumption of building mozilla from source on CentOS 8 ? Please help!!

All Replies (7)

more options

First remove any existing version of Firefox from your system sudo yum remove firefox #Redhat based systems sudo dnf remove firefox #Fedora 22+ systems sudo apt-get remove firefox #Debian based systems

unlink or rename the current firefox binary unlink /usr/bin/firefox ## Or rename file mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox_bak

Download Latest Firefox for Linux cd /usr/local wget http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/70.0.1/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-70.0.1.tar.bz2

Firefox archive on your system tar xvjf firefox-70.0.1.tar.bz2

Install Firefox on Linux sudo ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox firefox &

more options

Hi @Dinushi Dhananjani , Thanks for the quick info, but I am talking about building the Firefox from source on CentOS-8 rather than installing directly using the package manager. My question specifically concerns building ESR-31 on centOS 8, while the bootstrapper of ESR-31 release is leading to package and package groups not found failures.

Modified by sswien

more options

ESR 31 is a few years old now, and it is likely that it may not be able to be built with CentOS 8 out of the box - some of the packages will have been updated or changed, and the build requirements may be different to what they were previously.

I'd suggest seeing if there's a CentOS community that have dealt with building and packaging Firefox, they may be able to help.

more options
more options

@Standard8 and @cor-el , thanks guys for your reply. But for me requirements are strict that I have to build Mozilla ESR 31 on CentOS-8. I will be using the replacement packages and tools to satisfy the need of build tools. But I will be using latest compilers coming with CentOS 8 to build the ESR 31. Any relevant information in that direction will be much appreciated. Thanks !

more options

Whilst I understand they're what have been given to you. Making that work on latest Linux implies they will be using it for something - which is a really bad idea.

That's an old version of Firefox which will have known security issues and as a result, should not be connected to the internet or you'll be putting the system at risk. If there's something really missing, I would strongly urge debating if the latest Firefox could be modified (or if you could get it included with the latest FF).

If you really want to continue down this route, the only thing I can suggest is looking at some of the build documentation on developer.mozilla.org and going through the history of it - it might give some hints. Though I expect you'll actually need to bring the code up to date.

more options

Thanks guys for support but I am unable to find any relevant documentation/ support to build an old version of Mozilla ( ESR 31 ) on CentOS over the various platform such as developer.mozilla.org et al. The requirements with us are very strict and the migration to newer ESR is impossible as we have modified the source ESR 31 to suit our own need. Any help with the original issue will be appreciated!