Re: [Plash] Building Plash (~1.16) from the source in svn in Ubuntu Breezy

[Mark Seaborn]

Toby Murray <address@hidden> wrote:

> I've just pulled down plash from the svn and it appears that a 1.16
> release is very nigh.

Yes, 1.16 is now released!  See http://plash.beasts.org.  The web site
is largely redone.  An RPM and a Debian package are available.

I will post more details about this release's changes later, when I
have more time.


> glibc-2.3.5 doesn't build on breezy with gcc-4.0 (4.0.2 20050808) or
> gcc-3.4 (3.4.5 20050809). The release notes indicate that glibc-2.3.5 is
> known not to build with gcc-4.0. I got an internal compiler error with
> gcc-3.4 (which I didn't investigate). 

I will have to move Plash over to glibc 2.3.6 and/or 2.4, which should
work with gcc 4.0.

> 'configure' seemed to want to use gcc-4.0 by default (despite my
> symlinks pointing to gcc-3.3), so I used the following to ensure it was
> configured with gcc-3.3. (Since glibc was built with this compiler
> version I thought it only prudent to build plash with the same.)

Just as well, because I discovered yesterday that it doesn't work with
gcc 4.0 anyway.  It builds, but gcc 4.0 seems to optimise away a
conditional check (related to weak symbols), causing ld.so to segfault
straight away.  (See libc-comms.h if you're interested.)


Regarding Firefox: I have been able to run it to use the powerbox with
the following script:

#!/bin/sh
mkdir firefox
PB_SO=`pwd`/shobj/powerbox-for-gtk.so
pola-run \
  --env LD_PRELOAD=$PB_SO -f $PB_SO \
  -f /etc -tw $HOME firefox -tw /tmp firefox \
  -B --prog /usr/bin/firefox --x11 --cwd / \
  --powerbox --pet-name "Firefox"

Mapping $HOME to a fresh directory means Firefox doesn't start off
with any configuration files (~/.gtk etc.), but you can see which
configuration files it creates on startup.

Firefox appears to use X to check whether an instance of Firefox is
already running, and if so, it asks that instance to open a new
window.  So, running this script can open windows from non-sandboxed
Firefox instances, which is confusing.  Once we have some X11 access
control, this won't happen.

Cheers,
Mark