A tiny update for Firefox OS on Raspberry Pi
Many of you have been waiting for updates on Firefox OS on the Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately my time is very limited at the moment, and a lot of things are to be done. To get you a bit better involved, I did two things. First, the patch repository with all necessary patches to get Firefox OS building on Raspberry Pi is online. And second, the meta-b2g layer has been changed so that it now can produce a SDK which can be used for compiling Firefox OS with, so that you don't need work with all the OpenEmbedded/Yocto stuff any more.
Patch Repository
You can find the Mercurial patch repository containing all patches for the Mozilla source code necessary to build Firefox OS here:
https://www.philipp-wagner.com/hg/mc-b2g-patches/
To use it, checkout a mozilla-central source tree. Then go to the .hg folder inside your checkout, and checkout the patches repository:
hg clone https://www.philipp-wagner.com/hg/mc-b2g-patches patches
Then go back to the root of your mozilla-central source tree, and update it to the version given in the .hg/patches/changeset file. Now apply all patches by running
hg qpush -a
SDK
Not everybody want's to build a whole distribution only to hack on Firefox OS -- but to compile it, a cross-compiler and various libraries for the target are necessary. To make cross-compiling easier, I've added a new target to the OpenEmbedded/Yocto meta-b2g layer. You can now run
bitbake meta-b2g-sdk
and it will create an installable SDK (after building you can find it in tmp/deploy/sdk in your OpenEmbedded build folder). I've also uploaded a precompiled version (155 MB).
Install it by simply running the shell script, choose an installation location, and after a couple of seconds you have everything setup to cross-compile Firefox.
To compile Firefox OS, get a checkout of mozilla-central and patch it as described above. Then get the mozconfig file from the meta-b2g repository.
$> source /opt/poky/1.4+snapshot/environment-setup-armv6-vfp-poky-linux-gnueabi $> export MOZCONFIG=/path/to/your/downloaded/mozconfig-b2g-linuxgl-rpi
Now you can build Firefox OS just as always:
$> make -f client.mk build
Things left to do
A lot! I currently don't get around to do new binary images, so you need to build from source to get support e.g. for newer/some Raspberry Pi models with different DDR memory on them (they require a newer firmware).
But I hope the SDK as well as the patch queue will help some people to do some changes themselves more easily.