Just a while back I idly visited http://planet.opensolaris.org/ and read about the Perspectives plugin for Firefox on Simon Phipps’s blog entry. The information at their website http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~perspectives/ captured my interest and I promptly clicked on the link to install the extension.
Unfortunately I got greeted with an unsupported platform dialog box. I downloaded the xpi file and unzipped it only to find that they support Windows, Linux and OSX only. Fortunately however the website also provides a source tarball for download. I spent the last 1.5 hours patching and building the source for OpenSolaris + Firefox 3.0.1 + SUN Studio 12 on BeleniX 0.7.1. It installed fine on my FF3.0.1 and I am able to configure it and see the results.
You can install Perspectives on OpenSolaris by pointing your FF3.0.1 to http://www.belenix.org/binfiles/Perspectives.xpi
You can grab my modified source tarball from here: http://www.belenix.org/binfiles/notary_src_opensolaris.tar.bz2. The modified files have a “*.orig” counterpart containing the original source.
Update
A comment from the Perspectives project lead mentioned that my modified extension should not include the update URL otherwise Perspectives auto-update from the actual project site will break it on OpenSolaris. So I put up an updated file yesterday omitting the URL. Folks who have already installed it should re-install.
August 17, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Thank you!
I’ve successfully installed the extension. I really must praise your reactivity along with the quality of your work!
Best regards,
Hervé
August 17, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Absolutely awesome, thanks! Is there any way to contribute it back so OpenSolaris can become one of their supported platforms?
August 17, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Yes of course I am going to submit patches upstream once I clean up my changes a wee bit more.
August 18, 2008 at 11:59 am
Thanks! locked and ready
August 18, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Hi moinakg,
I’m the lead developer for the Perspectives project. Thanks for putting the time in for the open solaris port. I haven’t had a chance to look at your diff, but I suspect it should be pretty easy to integrate into our codebase. It would be nice to do soon, as unless you changed the install.rdf to remove the the updateURL link, Firefox’s auto-update for Perspectives may break things for people using your XPI. thanks again for your help!
August 18, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Hi Dan,
Thanks for pointing out the install.rdf issue. I will change it soon before it creates problems for more people.
August 18, 2008 at 9:30 pm
[...] Perspectives: Firefox3 Extension for OpenSolaris [...]
August 20, 2008 at 5:52 am
Great job, Moinak. Works fine for me !
August 22, 2008 at 6:37 am
Hi moinakg,
Can you send me an email with regard to integrating the code into the main Perspectives codebase? You mention some additional changes would would like to make in a post above. It would be nice if I could integrate them over the weekend, as we’re about to begin publicizing the extension more widely. thanks!