I prefer Seamonkey to other web browsers. The generic tarball build offered for Linux on the Seamonkey website doesn’t work quite right on my machine. Currently I find no one building it for CentOS 5, and certainly not tracking the current releases. For example, just yesterday, Seamonkey saw version 2.0.4 released. (Please be sure to check for later versions. Seamonkey releases age rather quickly.)
Because my machine is adequate, I wanted to see how hard it would be to build it for myself. Somebody had already prepared some notes, and I simply followed the advice for Fedora regarding dependencies. However, I’m not such a fan as to keep track of it like a developer, so I follow a simplified scheme.
Get the source. You can find links for the latest source here. Currently that’s a huge wad nearly 60MB. I move it to /usr/local/src/ and do the un-bzip and un-tar routine. It opens out to a directory named comm-1.9.1, which is not what you’d expect.
Navigate into that directory. My simplified instructions are:
- echo ‘ac_add_options –enable-application=suite’ > .mozconfig
- echo ‘mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS=”-j4″‘ >> .mozconfig
- make -f client.mk
- make install
If you don’t have at least a dual core processor in your computer, maybe you should change that second line at the end to "-j2" but be sure to keep the trailing single quotation mark (‘). My Athlon dual-core churns away smoothly for about a half-hour, then the prompt returns with no errors. After the make install I find the Seamonkey binary in /usr/local/bin and create a custom launcher on the desktop for it.
I check a couple of times every week and repeat the process for each new release. It simply overwrites the previous installation. I note a particular nice thing is, since having fixed the bytecode hinting in my Freetype2 libraries, and building on them, the fonts display on Seamonkey is sharper than anything pre-packaged for CentOS.
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