Firefox on Gentoo

I recently setup Firefox sync on my work machine which runs Ubuntu, then did the same on my home desktop which runs Gentoo. Before I knew it, all my work add-ons appeared on my home desktop. This was a cool feature that I didn’t know Firefox sync had. However, upon closer inspection, I noticed that only half off my add-ons were working, the other half disabled with.

... is incompatible with Aurora 17.0.9

For those that don’t know, Aurora is the bleeding-edge beta version of Firefox. I knew I was using this but until now it had not been a problem and I experienced no issues with stability.

Replace Aurora with Firefox

To replace Aurora with Firefox, we need to recompile it after disabling the bindist USE flag.

To see what USE flags a program was compiled with, use the following command.

emerge --info firefox

This will show you information like this (and a lot more besides).

=================================================================
                        Package Settings
=================================================================

www-client/firefox-17.0.9 was built with the following:
USE="alsa bindist dbus gstreamer jit libnotify minimal (multilib) startup-notification -custom-cflags -custom-optimization -debug (-pgo) (-selinux) -system-sqlite -wifi" ABI_X86="64" LINGUAS="-af -ak -ar -as -ast -be -bg -bn_BD -bn_IN -br -bs -ca -cs -csb -cy -da -de -el -en_GB -en_ZA -eo -es_AR -es_CL -es_ES -es_MX -et -eu -fa -fi -fr -fy_NL -ga_IE -gd -gl -gu_IN -he -hi_IN -hr -hu -hy_AM -id -is -it -ja -kk -km -kn -ko -ku -lg -lt -lv -mai -mk -ml -mr -nb_NO -nl -nn_NO -nso -or -pa_IN -pl -pt_BR -pt_PT -rm -ro -ru -si -sk -sl -son -sq -sr -sv_SE -ta -ta_LK -te -th -tr -uk -vi -zh_CN -zh_TW -zu"
CFLAGS="-pipe -march=native -mno-avx"
CXXFLAGS="-pipe -march=native -mno-avx"

storm ~ # 

Here you can see bindist included. To disable this for Firefox.

echo "www-client/firefox -bindist" >> /etc/portage/package.use
emerge --ask --update --deep --with-bdeps=y --newuse world
emerge --ask --depclean
revdep-rebuild
reboot

This worked! Kind of.

I now have Firefox and not Aurora, but the same add-ons are still disabled.

This time with the message.

... is incompatible with Firefox 17.0.9

After some digging, it appears that version 17.0.9 is the current stable release. The three disabled plugin seem to be for more recent versions of Firefox.

Stable or Unstable?

As you can see from gentoo.org, version 17.0.9 is the current stable release and version 24.0-r1 is the current unstable release. If I want to get my add-ons working, I would need to do something like the below.

echo "www-client     ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.keyword
emerge --ask --update --deep --with-bdeps=y --newuse world
emerge --ask --depclean
revdep-rebuild
reboot

Note, currently I’m not too fussed about these add-ons so will stick with the stable release for now.