Building Seamonkey in Linux

Seamonkey is yet another Web Browser with built-in email reader and address book. Formerly known as Mozilla Suite, Seamonkey is now abandoned by the Mozilla foundation in favor of Firefox and Thunderbird. However, Seamonkey is still being developed by a few people and is in a stable, useful state. Seamonkey is sometimes omitted from Linux distributions. If you want to use Seamonkey in such distros, you can either download a pre-compiled package or compile Seamonkey for yourself. Building Seamonkey in Linux is not as complicated as it may seem.

First, you need to install the necessary compiler tools and libraries:

• g++
  
• libgtk2.0-dev
  
• libidl-dev
  
• libjpeg62-dev
  
• libpng12-dev
  
• libxft-dev
  
• libxt-dev
  
• make
  
• zip
  

Next, download and unpack the seamonkey source from here. In the top-level mozilla directory, create a file, named .mozconfig, with the following contents:

mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=suite
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/obj-i586-pc-linux-gnu
ac_add_options --host=i586-pc-linux-gnu
ac_add_options --prefix=/usr
ac_add_options --enable-application=suite
ac_add_options --enable-default-toolkit=gtk2
ac_add_options --enable-xft
ac_add_options --enable-extensions=default,-irc
ac_add_options --with-system-jpeg
ac_add_options --with-system-zlib
ac_add_options --with-system-png
ac_add_options --disable-system-cairo
ac_add_options --enable-crypto
ac_add_options --enable-optimize=-O2
ac_add_options --enable-strip
ac_add_options --enable-safe-browsing
ac_add_options --enable-url-classifier
ac_add_options --disable-gnomevfs
ac_add_options --disable-gnomeui
ac_add_options --disable-installer
ac_add_options --disable-updater
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --disable-debug

Then, start the compilation:

make -f client.mk build

Once compilation finishes, make a tarball of the compiled binaries:

make -C objdir/xpinstall/packager

mv objdir/dists/seamonkey*.tar.gz $HOME

Finally, install Seamonkey:

make -f client.mk install

ln -s /usr/lib/seamonkey/seamonkey /usr/bin/seamonkey