Firefox Build

[mrcbax]

It makes no sense to ship without Firefox support.

[mrcbax]

in addition, your chromium build does not yet support xorg.

[wdcallahan]

I've been working on compiling Firefox. Anyone else working on this and want to pool resources with me?

[blizzardfinnegan]

I might look into the debian sid firefox or debian trixie firefox-esr package. They seem to have their stuff figured out.

[binghe]

If you take a look at RISC-V-software-package/Riscv installation package.pdf, there's a prebuilt FireFox Debian package from StarFive:

wget https://github.com/starfive-tech/Debian/releases/download/v0.8.0-engineering-release-wayland/firefox_105.0_202305_riscv64.deb
sudo apt-get install ./firefox_105.0_202305_riscv64.deb

I tried this package, it works.

[bjuergensmeyer]

+1 for the Firefox package up above (it's working for me), although I got a warning when I first started Firefox that one of the built-in keys is going to expire in March.

As a suggestion, it may be a good idea to add a sticky for available software packages that work but aren't distributed by DC. That way, people can find everything in a centralized location. As an example, Codium is also available:

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/releases/download/1.96.2.24355/VSCodium-linux-riscv64-1.96.2.24355.tar.gz

This one also works (although it's just a tarball of the actual app. You have to take care of installing it someplace and adding the desktop link).

[blizzardfinnegan]

You can also build on your device if you want, but Firefox's "easy" build instructions don't work because it detects you're RISC-V and freaks out.

If you install:

• autoconf
• libgtk-3-dev
• python3-pip
• mercurial
• libxt-dev
• yasm
• build-essential
• llvm-19
• clang-19
• lld-19
• libdbus-glib-1-dev
• libpulse-dev
• libgtk2.0-dev

Additionally, you will need the latest version of Rust installed, and you will need to install cbindgen from Cargo.

You can then build an install by running the following commands (note that this will take some time):

hg clone --rev=1 https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-unified # this pulls the build history, and lets you specify the build version in a clearer way; --rev=1 makes the download faster
cd mozilla-unified && hg pull -r $(BOOKMARK) # Bookmark is defined as a valid bookmark found at the above link; Options include central, release, beta, and esr[number]; this downloads a point release of your choice
hg update && hg checkout $(BOOKMARK) # This applies the bookmark previously chosen
./mach bootstrap # This starts the bootstrapping process. Note that on Debian Trixie at time of writing, watchman does not exist, so when the prompt asks if you want to use the fsmonitor, you will likely need to select "n", so the bootstrap can complete safely
./mach configure --release --without-wasm-sandboxed-libraries # Configure the build for release; I can't find a package that ships wasm-ld, which wasm sandboxing requires
./mach build # This should start the build process. The default kernel shipped with this device has an issue with building Rust packages (SIGSEGV, recommends increasing stack size), but the packages it builds do still build so... :shrug: 

Currently running the above setup on my device, will follow up when/if it completes.

[blizzardfinnegan]

Ok, it's been a long time since I posted last. Building takes a couple hours, you need to create and enable a swapfile because the build runs out of memory, and the build needs a new version of the kernel (bianbu linux has 6.6.63 available that works properly). Haven't been able to build a deb package out of it, but it is at least locally runnable. I used a 16GB swapfile and it built fine.

For sake of clarity, the DC Roma 2 uses the same chip as the Milk-V Jupiter, as I've mentioned in a couple different issues here, so I did the build using that rather than the Roma, just for space constraint reasons.

[blizzardfinnegan]

@mrcbax @wdcallahan @binghe
To shorten my above greatly, and ping the relevant curious posters:
Yes, you can build from source, which is definitely the FOSS way of going about it, but it's kinda finicky, and a little bit of a pain.

That being said, the Mozilla PPA generates RISC-V artifacts, meaning if you install the Mozilla PPA, you'll just get Firefox that way. It's a little limited, but that's a Firefox/RISC-V problem, not a Roma-specific problem.