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XPViewer Now Builds and Runs on Linux!

by CHRIS NELSON | Here's Ramiro Estrugo's summary of his work, and how you Linux users can get the new XPViewer compiled and running:

It builds links, runs and browses the web!

If you must comment/flame/etc please keep in mind that this is obviously not the final product.

Please don't focus on the following:

0 We (mostly mozilla.org GTK hackers that hangout on irc.mozilla.org) are working very hard on getting the GTK widgets and gfx libs up and running. Once these are done, they will plug right into the xpviewer without drastic changes to the makefiles.

1 The font sucks.

2 Transparent images are broken.

3 Extra scrollbar.

4 The chrome is not perfect.

5 It's butt ugly.

6 It would look better with JoeFooBar's widget toolkit.

7 It might only work on certain displays/visuals/etc.

8 etc.

Think of the BIG PICTURE! The code that generated this binary is almost entirely cross platform, except for the toolkit specific stuff and a few temporary (hopefully) hacks. The same code recently generated both a mac and an os2 viewer.

Here is the recipe I used:

1 Read http://www.mozilla.org/cvs.html

and

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/autoconf/

2 mkdir nglayout ; cd nglayout

3 cvs co mozilla/nglayout.mk

4 cd mozilla

5 make -f nglayout.mk pull_all

6 autoconf

7 mkdir foo ; cd foo

8 ../configure --enable-toolkit=motif --with-nspr=/usr/local/nspr

9 make

10 cd dist/bin

11 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`:/usr/local/nspr/lib

12 export MOZILLA_HOME=`pwd`

13 cd ../../xpfe

14 make

15 cd xpviewer/src

16 ./xpviewer

The "classic" build system is even more painful -- there are Top Men working on it.

Also, the first xpviewer window will have a screwed up chrome layout. I think the initialization/realization of widgets is happening before resources (such as icons) are available, so the preferred dimensions are out of whack.

Try opening a new window (File->New Window) and resize it - it should look much better.

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