12 October 2012

254. Compiling Thunderbird 16 on Debian Wheezy

I've posted how to compile thunderbird (12 and 13) in the past. Here's v 16.0.1:

First you need to sort out the dependencies:

sudo apt-get install libdbus-glib-1-dev gir1.2-notify-0.7 libnotify-dev yasm checkinstall libzip-dev zip libgtk2.0-dev

As usual, I prefer to do the building in ~/tmp
If you have a ~/tmp/comm-release directory, make sure to delete it first:

rm ~/tmp/comm-release -rf

Now download the new source (106 Mb):

cd ~/tmp
wget ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/releases/16.0.1/source/thunderbird-16.0.1.source.tar.bz2

Untar it, and create a new directory for out-of-tree building:

tar xvf thunderbird-16.0.1.source.tar.bz2
mkdir thunderbird16
cd thunderbird16/

Time to configure:
../comm-release/./configure --disable-necko-wifi

And build (40 minutes on a triple core AMD II)

make -j4

where -j4 indicates that it's built in parallel on a 3 core (3+1=4) processor. Note that this has nothing to do with running the finished binaries in parallel -- it's just a way of speeding up the compilation.


Make sure that you don't have an older version of thunderbird install via dpkg i.e.

aptitude search thunderbird|grep ^i

should come up blank. If not, uninstall that package.

Finally, install your new binaries:

sudo make install

And you're done.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Lindqvist, thank you for these instructions. I am new to linux (as of January of this year).

    I successfully followed your code until configure, which I saw this:

    "checking for gtk+-2.0 >= 2.10.0 gtk+-unix-print-2.0 glib-2.0 gobject-2.0 gdk-x11-2.0... Package gtk+-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path. Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gtk+-2.0.pc' to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable No package 'gtk+-2.0' found Package gtk+-unix-print-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path. Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gtk+-unix-print-2.0.pc' to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable No package 'gtk+-unix-print-2.0' found Package gdk-x11-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path. Perhaps you should add the directory containing `gdk-x11-2.0.pc' to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable No package 'gdk-x11-2.0' found
    configure: error: Library requirements (gtk+-2.0 >= 2.10.0 gtk+-unix-print-2.0 glib-2.0 gobject-2.0 gdk-x11-2.0) not met; consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if your libraries are in a nonstandard prefix so pkg-config can find them."

    It's clearly telling me what to do, but I am not really sure how to go about doing it. Would you help?

    Best,

    Jen

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jen, you're brave to attempt compiling your own software after only using linux for less than a year.
      Anyway, it's not that difficult once you've gotten the hang of it.

      'configure' is complaining about a missing dev package. To find it, do
      aptitude search gtk|grep 2.0|grep dev
      A couple of hits will be returned. You'll want libgtk2.0-dev so do
      sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev

      Let me know if there are any other deps missing so I can add them to the post above.

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