Getting Firefox nightly updates on Fedora through yum

This quarter I have had few students (Tarin, Brett van Gennip and Vitaly) from Seneca working with Release Engineering to try to provide nightly updates for Fedora users. This now works and has been tested with Fedora 14.

They have recently added this feature to their Seneca Fedora-Firefox repository and today I would like to share with you what getting updates on Fedora looks like.

Note that this is just a proof-of-concept and that they will (hopefully) continue dealing with all issues and get it integrated into our Mozilla systems and/or with Fedora's (suggestions/directions welcome!) in following quarters.

This post proves again that a well defined problem when given to Seneca's open-source students helps us move forward when we lack man-power. This is one of the first fruits out of the several MozillaReleng-Seneca projects.

The structure of the post will follow as:

• Getting the repository
• Install Minefield
• New update available
• Feedback
• Files
• What's next?
• Known issues or problems

Getting the repository
First we have to make Fedora to know where to pull the package from.
This means that we have to add our "Firefox Nightly" repository to our list of Software Sources.
To do so download this rpm and install it: firefox-repo-0.3-2.noarch.rpm
Once installed you should be able to see the following screen shot when you do this:

• System -> Administration -> Software Sources

Software Sources view with "Firefox Nightly" integrated into it

I believe we should be listed under "debug and development software sources". Let's see.

Install Minefield (a.k.a. Firefox nightly build)
Now that the software source has been added we can decide to install the latest Firefox nightly.
To do so follow one of these two methods:

• System -> Administration -> Add/Remove Software
• Search for "Minefield"
• Check the latest build and select "Apply"

NOTE: Having two entries looks like a bug to me. We will see.

Once installed, Fedora prompts you to run the application and it reminds you from where you can run the application

You can also install Minefield by typing this in the command line:

• yum install minefield 

NOTE: Both of these methods should add the following to your system:

• /usr/lib/minefield-4.0b8pre/
• /usr/bin/minefield -> /usr/lib/minefield-4.0b8pre/firefox
• Add a Menu item under "Applications->Internet"

That's it! You can now run Minefield and get updates for it through yum!

NOTE: I am not comfortable about where we unpack (/usr/lib/minefield-4.0b8pre) as I don't know what will happen when we bump the version.


New update available
How do I receive updates?

Software Update window showing a "Mozilla Firefox Web Browser Nightly" update

The same way as with any Fedora package!

Feedback
Let me know what your thoughts are or what we are doing wrong by:

• Adding a comment to this post.
• Adding a comment to Bug 600317.
• or you can email me directly armenzg [AT] mozilla.com 

Files
In case you wanted to have a look at the different files in the repository:
http://chile.proximity.on.ca/ffrepo

• no-arch 
• firefox-repo-0.3-2.noarch.rpm
• firefox-repo-0.3-2.src.rpm 
• i686
• minefield-4.0b8pre-20101208.fc13.i686.rpm
• minefield-4.0b8pre-20101208.fc13.src.rpm 
• x86_64
• minefield-4.0b8pre-20101208.fc13.src.rpm
• minefield-4.0b8pre-20101208.fc13.x86_64.rpm

What's next? 

• we need to make sure that we are doing everything according to the guidelines that Fedora has for packaging and third party sources
• get people to test it and take input from Fedora/Linux veterans
• integrate it into Release Engineering systems
• does our setup work for other distributions using yum? if not, why not?
• set things up for more branches than just "mozilla-central"
• set things up for all locales
• set things up for betas
• define what the ideal world would look like
  

Known problems or issues

• Current and previous Minefield nightly show up under "Add/Remove Software"

 

•  Setting Minefield as the default browser seems to mess up the "Preferred Web Browser" icon (I need to verify).

• Using the "Preferred Web Browser" launcher opens "file://home/armenzg/". Is it supposed to be like that?

• Should we be listed under "debug and development software sources" on the Software Sources manager?

• Minefield gets unpacked under /usr/lib/minefield-4.0b8pre. Should this be instead /usr/lib/minefield? (version agnostic)
• Minefield when launched from Applications->Internet->Minefield starts with the ProfileManager and allows running the nightly build with the other instances of Firefox ("minefield --no-remote --ProfileManager); should this not be a feature?
• Since /usr/lib/minefield-4.0b8 is owned by "root" Firefox's update system doesn't work. If we change ownership then updates work again and I wonder what bug would I hit if I can receive updates through yum and through AUS. Only one way to find out!
• I also believe that there is not a way to offer partial updates through yum as we do through our normal update system

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Installing Fedora14 through VMWare 2.0.6

I won't go too much into detail but I will describe the process I went through to get this installed.
I first tried the LiveDVD version which failed and then I tried the normal installation DVD.

LiveDVD Fedora-14-i686-Live-Desktop.iso

• I created a new VM from the ISO (I might have chosen Linux 2.6.x kernel {whatever version F14 is} - I can't recall)
• I double-clicked on the "Install to Hard Drive" link on my desktop
• It tells me:

You do not have enough RAM to use the graphical installer. Try the text mode installer by running:
      '/usr/bin/liveinst -T'
from a root terminal.

• The problem is that I probably created the VM with low memory or that I don't have installed the VMware Tools ("Virtual Machine > Install VMware Tools menu) installed.
• I run "/usr/bin/liveinst -T" from the command line
• I get this beautiful text mode installer which works very well with the offered defaults
• The problem is that somehow it froze on the last screen (I think) and I didn't manage to get it to functional state. I decide to start from 0 but from the normal installation DVD.

Installing now from Fedora-14-i386-DVD.iso

• Create new VM from ISO (this time I select more RAM - 728MB)
• After the VM is created and it boots up it seems that the DVD iso is not detected

"The Fedora disc was not found" yara yara

• I do a right click on the CD icon on the VMware window and I select "Connect CD/DVD"
• I right click again and select "Choose disk image..."
• I choose Fedora-14-i386-DVD.iso 
• The installation continues and I reach this menu:

• I choose the defaults except when I have to choose the environment I want to use
• I chose "Sofware Development" installation type instead of default option
• Additional repos can be added in here
• I added "Fedora 14 - i386"; it required configuring the network devices which worked :D
• 30-40 minutes I am asked to reboot
• I update to the latest updates and I happily have a working Fedora 14 :D

Next:
Try to use Seneca's student's RPM repo for Firefox.


PS = Excuse me if I am using VMware Fusion rather than an open source alternative (which I have used before). I can't recall when or why I continued with VMware. Probably because I had work license.

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Seneca, FSOSS and Release Engineering

This quarter there are many things that are bringing me back to Seneca College for open source related reasons.

This time is about a couple of presentations and a joint project with Fedora.

1. Tomorrow I will be presenting at one of ctyler's courses ("Software Build and Release" - SBR600)with regards how our release engineering systems work.
2. Next month I will be presenting at FSOSS to a larger audience how we use Buildbot in our Release Engineering team.
3. Even more exciting is the joint project with Fedora and ctyler to setup Firefox nightly and beta builds for Fedora users.

I love presentations and I believe there are many good stories from our team that we can share.
The Fedora-Firefox repositories project is very interesting to me as it is an area that I have always wanted to investigate how it works. I also believe that we can have a benefitial impact for both Linux users and the open web.

Let's hack!

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Fedora (32 & 64 bit) unit tests with Zarro permanent oranges :)

Today we have reached another milestone for running unit tests on user desktop operating systems.
Since I enabled unit tests for our Fedora testing machines today is the first time that I have all 10 different test suites enabled and visible!

This means that we can now continue with the next stage and final part of the project:

• disable unit tests on the CentOS machines (where we have been running unit tests up until now)
• enable unit tests for the project branches on the Fedora machines (we now have enough machines)

I will bring this up at the developers' meeting and make sure that everyone is fine with this final part of the project.

For context details:

This project got started in early March to run unit tests on real user operating systems. We have been running all Fedora test suites since April 12th. but the results were only revealed on the main reporting pages as permanent oranges got fixed. Big thanks for Ehsan Akhgari, Zack Weinberg, Dave Townsend, Marco Bonardo, David Bolter, Daniel Holbert, Boris Zbarsky, David Baron, Robert O'Callahan and Phil Ringnalda for contributing, guiding, helping and fixing all these oranges; without their help we would have not been able to accomplish this.

Previous posts and tracking bug:

• Tracking bug - running unit tests on Fedora
• One more Fedora unit test suite made visible
• Unit tests for Fedora - being produced
• Unit tests on user desktops - commencing

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This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.