Firefox on Busybox

[Rob Landley]

On Sunday 11 June 2006 7:36 am, Michael Marriott wrote:
> Can someone point me in the right direction as to how I can get the
> Firefox browser running in my busybox system?

You tell me how to run busybox on firefox and I'll tell you how to run FireFox 
on busybox.

BusyBox is one part of a system.  At the very least you also need a kernel and 
a C library.  In order to mess with something like FireFox you also need X11 
and gtk and probably a lot of other stuff.

This is a bit like saying "I'm using your brand of tires on my car, and the 
engine's making funny noises".  Sorry to hear it.  Not much we can do about 
it.

> So far I have installed the firefox directory onto an NFS system mounted
> on the busybox device.
> I get a bunch of warnings about fonts and oh
> yeah...................getpwuid_r(): failed due to unknown user id (0).
> I guess firefox is trying to get user info from /etc/passwd but I don't
> know if any of these warnings are directly related to the SEGMENTATION
> FAULT I am getting.

Do you _have_ an /etc/passwd?

I have no idea why your firefox is segfaulting.  I have no idea where your 
firefox came from.  I don't know what version it is, whether your built it 
from source or extracted it from some other environment (you mention FC3, 
which I've never used).  I don't know what "your busybox system" is.  I don't 
know what processor it has (it's x86?), what shared library you're using 
(glibc or uClibc, let alone version), what other packages are installed (like 
X.org), how much memory is in it...

You never even told me which version of busybox you're using, not that this is 
even likely to be relevant since the problem you're having really sounds like 
it has nothing to do with BusyBox...

> My kernel is 2.6.9

Seven releases of out date, coming up on eight.  (We may support the old 
stuff, but we don't encourage new deployments on it.)

> and the libraries are coming from a FC3 system. 

Why?

> Are there specific kernel paramters that need to be set in order to
> support firefox?

Do you mean kernel configuration, or kernel command line in the bootloader, 
or...?

> Can I simply use the existing FC3 libraries?

Doesn't sound like it so far.

> Are there specific busybox parameters that need to be configured prior
> to compiling?

Is BusyBox involved in your compilation at all?  Last I heard I had the only 
truly BusyBox-based development environment I know of, and I really doubt 
you're using Firmware Linux.  (For one thing, I haven't updated its web page 
in months.  Or for that matter, had time to work on it...)

> Thanks in advance.

What on earth are you trying to do?

Back up from busybox a bit:

You need to know what specific questions to ask before we can give you answers 
that mean anything, and doesn't help to wander into a florist with questions 
about bricklaying.  If FireFox is segfaulting for you, you might want to ask 
why on the firefox list...

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.