My favorites | Sign in
Project Home Wiki Issues Source
READ-ONLY: This project has been archived. For more information see this post.
Search
for
InstallationInstructions  
Installation instructions for Firemacs
installation, instructions
Updated Feb 26, 2007 by lukas.lo...@gmail.com

Introduction

This document describes the process of installing firemacs. The installation process is rather complicated at the moment and it is recommended only to those who want to get a preview of firemacs.

The description below will assume ~/firemacs as the installation directory.

Installation

Getting Firefox

Firemacs currently requires Firefox 3.0 of which the final release is not available yet. The alpha 2 release works ok with Firemacs at the moment. You can get it from:

http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/granparadiso/alpha2/linux-i686/en-US/granparadiso-alpha2.tar.bz2

After downloading, do the following:

cd ~/firemacs
tar xjvf granparadiso-alpha2.tar.bz2
rm -r firefox/extentsions/talkback@mozilla.org

Note that we delete the directory for the talkback extentsion because it is not accessible to the currently available screen readers.

Now, test Firefox:

cd firefox
./firefox &

Firefox should start. There might be some error messages on the console, but it seems they can be safely ignored.

Firemacs

Firemacs consists of two parts:

  1. A Firefox extension that allows other programs to call javascript functions in Firefox remotely.
  2. A bunch of elisp files that allow emacs to remotely control Firefox via the above extension.

Getting Firemacs

No release of Firemacs has been made yet, so you will have to get Firemacs from its svn repository:

cd ~/firemacs
svn co http://firemacs.googlecode.com/svn/trunk svn-firemacs

Building the extension

You will have to have the xpidl IDL compiler. On Debian, it is in the libxul-dev package. You may have to adapt the Makefile in ~/firemacs/svn-firemacs/mozlab/components to the situation on your system. If this steps proves to be a problem, we might consider putting the .xpt files into the svn repository, because they are small and change rarely.

To build the extension, do:

cd ~/firemacs/svn-firemacs/mozlab
make

Installing the Firefox extension

The above step should have generated an .xpi file. You can install it like any other Firefox extension.

If you do not want to rebuild and reinstall the extension each time there is an update to Firemacs, you can do the following instead of installing the .xpi file:

ln -s ~/firemacs/svn-firemacs/mozlab ~/.mozilla/firefox/your_profile/extensions/mozlab@hyperstruct.net

This way, you will only have to restart Firefox if there is a change to the extension. "your_profile" is the name of your Firefox profile directory, usually something like "XXX.default" , where XXX is some random string. Tis is for the default user profile.

If you do not want to pollute your default Firefox profile with the Firemacs extension, you can create a separate profile in the Firefox profile manager:

./firefox -ProfileManager

To start Firefox with profile "joe", run it like this:

./firefox -P joe 

You can check if the Firemacs extension is loaded in Firefox by looking for the "mozlab" menu in the "Tools" menu in Firefox.

Installation in emacs

Add the directory ~/firemacs/svn-firemacs/lisp to your load path.

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/firemacs/svn-firemacs/lisp")

Compile the elisp files:

C-u M-x byte-recompile-directory ~/firemacs/svn-firemacs/lisp

Running Firemacs

In Emacs, do:

M-x load-library RET firemacs RET
M-x load-library RET emacspeak-firemacs RET

M-x mozremote-connect RET RET

M-x firemacs-browse-url RET http://yahoo.com RET
Powered by Google Project Hosting