Peter

Okay! Continuing what Peter started.. I have to say we really got lucky on this one. Linux as I’ve mentioned from the start of our journey was still quite new to us and we’re learning something new every time we sit down with the OS.

It’s interesting how much we play around that we somehow encounter the problems ourselves before naively releasing a package of what we’ve done so far to have others discover it for us. I guess we’re still good at being end-users! We blew away Firefox Linux from the test machine we have and fired up our USB Firefox. Sure enough that was when we discovered a problem with missing the library libstdc++.so.5 . For a few days we tried making static builds of Firefox to see if that cover up the library issue, but failed. The problem was similar to our dll hell on windows, but instead this is library — something. A machine having a later version of the library did not cover the compatibility for an older one. So I guess it doesn’t work like COM objects in Windows :(. The solution was too easy in the end, I for one didn’t want to believe in it, so I was hesitant. However in the end the best way was to just package the USB Firefox with its own copy of the library to use.

In the process this raised many questions of confusion. It’s still the early stage for our project, in terms of reaching a 1.0 it had only kinda made sense to use the latest official release of Firefox 2 on our USB stick. Later on we’ll move on to Firefox 3 when its safe to assume no random bugs will come in the way of packaging this up. We might actually give it a shot in our next release. What was weird is why isn’t this Firefox using the latest library? If it had be following up with development on CentOS then using version 6 would have been the minimum standard no? We’ll find out more about that soon.

Peter Evanoff has gotten me thinking not only user friendly, but building Grandma-friendly software too. It’s an amusing way to put it, but really Linux needs some work to better appeal to the mass market. The best tester would be Grandma.

Now I imagine the goal of our 0.3 will be to make sure that this is working on Mac too. Hopefully that will be a breeze since its similar to Linux. Will Chris let us blow away the Firefox on one of those brand new shiny Macs? Only time will tell.. (I always remember that line from an episode Ninja Turtles..) . I’m thinking that we seek out Danny Roy or someone to test our USB Firefox on Windows95/98. On the Linux side we already tested on Fedora, Ubuntu and CentOS - so that seems to be well covered. On Mac, Chris Tyler mentioned about testing on a Mac with Intel then PowerPC. Extensions I’ll say are covered, we included a super generic one in the package to provide that proof. If other extensions fail, it’s not our fault they did not make it cross-platform :). Annnnnd finally, the ultimate ideal goal for 0.3 would be to have a single entry point that will automatically fiqure out which OS the stick is on and run the correct Firefox Platform, saving Grandma from any brain work.

Those interested in giving our 0.2 a test run can get it here! Check out our wiki page on zenit as well. We would love to hear some feedback.