[Solved!] Installing Firefox Nightly?

[wolly01]

Dear Gentoo Fourm:

I would like to add Firefox Nightly to my Gentoo system. To my knowledge and googling there is no portage atom or simple USE flag on the regular ww-client/firefox which enables me to emerge it. I have tried downloading and running the official binary (which is targeted for Ubuntu systems): it immediately crashes! Also, if i launch it via an x-term window that window crashes too so I cannot access debug info / error messages that way. I have done some googling and the stock answers on Stack-Overflow do not seem to work for me.

On this Gentoo forum I can find a few topics pertaining to this problem, but they are targeted at people with greater knowledge of Gento/Programming than I and suggest compiling Nightly ones-self or using a particular overlay. I lack the requisite knowledge to do either off of my own initiative (but am willing to accept help if someone would be kind enough to offer specific instructions). Has anyone managed to get Nightly running on Gentoo and is able to offer specific instructions to help me get it running on my own system?

Best wishes!

[rab0171610]

The Firefox nightly build is released as a binary (pre-compiled). It works on any Linux system, not just Ubuntu. As it is released daily, I don't think it would be practical to have it as a package on your Gentoo system managed through portage, but that is just my own personal opinion. All I did was go to the moziilla site, download the tar.gz file, and extract it. This creates a folder called firefox. Inside are two binary files, firefox and firefox-bin. Click on either one and see if it opens from within that folder. It contains its own libraries in the folder from what I can see. Both files opened just fine on my machine and launched the firefox nightly build. There is not a .desktop file in the folder, but if you need that you can easily create your own. If firefox doesn't open on your system or crashes maybe there is another issue. Just as an example, the file I downloaded is named firefox-110.0a1.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2 if that helps you find what you are looking for. It will be named differently for every build I am sure.
EDIT: FYI, to update the nightly build, you can do that from within the firefox application. Just go to the application menu (hamburger menu in top right corner)>help>about nightly. You will see that it will say checking for updates. There is an updater binary in the folder that firefox uses to perform its own updates of the nightly build.

[wolly01]

Thanks for the reply. This is what I tried and successfully extracted. Unfortunately running either exec causes nothing to happen (it appears to try to run and then immediately crashes). All I can think of is a dependency issue but I have a working kde desktop wherein regular firefox works.

I will retry as suggested later today and report back. But it is unlikely that the problem has fixed itself. (Note when running the binary my system does not crash.)

[wolly01]

Ok I managed to finagle an error message by logging in as root, opening dolphin in xterm and managing to try to exec the file. The xterm window survived and outputted the following:

[wolly01]

Solved!

I needed the dependency:

[rab0171610]

Anytime, glad you got it figured out! For the future, best practice would be to just browse to the directory in the terminal and run the command, in the this case firefox or firefox-bin, as your regular user not as root. You will likely be able to get enough information from the terminal output to troubleshoot the graphical application.

[Hu]

I see that you solved the thread, but I have a question about something you wrote:

[wolly01]

Possibly complete user error. I remember launching xterm then manually exec`ing the binary by specifying its path completely (as not to launch regular firefox) and then it immediately crashing out and killing the xterm. However I was trying a lot of things at the time and there is a decent chance I miss-remember what I actually did!