Firefox OS

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Warning
Mozilla has stopped development of Firefox OS in September 2016. Gentoo has changed since then and the information below might be out of date

This page details how to build Firefox OS and flash it on your phone. Note that Firefox OS is not the Firefox web browser.

Requirements

Phone

• Obviously, you will need a smartphone supported by Firefox OS, see the list here.
• fastboot must be enabled, you may need to unlock the bootloader for that. This is out of the scope of this document.

Computer

• 64bit Gentoo with a multilib profile
• 4GB of RAM
• 30GB of disk space (sources alone take 14GB)

Packages

Quite a few packages are required, so we might as well create a set.

FILE /etc/portage/sets/firefox_os@firefox_os set

# see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Firefox_OS_build_prerequisites
=sys-devel/autoconf-2.13
sys-devel/bison
app-arch/bzip2
dev-java/icedtea-bin
dev-util/ccache 
net-misc/curl
sys-devel/flex
sys-apps/gawk
dev-vcs/git
=sys-devel/make-3.82-r4
sys-devel/patch
media-libs/mesa
x11-libs/libX11
sys-libs/ncurses 
sys-libs/zlib
dev-util/android-tools

You also need the 32bit versions of ncurses and zlib.

FILE /etc/portage/package.use/firefox_os

sys-libs/ncurses abi_x86_32
sys-libs/zlib abi_x86_32

root #emerge --ask @firefox_os

adb/fastboot

Warning
You won't be able to backup or flash your phone via USB if adb/fastboot is not working.

Test adb

Check if adb detects your phone

user $adb devices

* daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
* daemon started successfully *
List of devices attached 
roamer2 device

Udev rule

If your phone is not detected, you may need a new udev rule

FILE /etc/udev/rules.d/firefox_os.rules

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="19d2", ATTR{idProduct}=="1351", MODE="0666", GROUP="plugdev"

Note
replace 19d2 and 1351 (ZTE Open) by the values of your phone, they can be obtained with lsusb, also make sure your user is in the plugdev group

root #/etc/init.d/udev restart

root #adb kill-server

Then retry to detect the phone.

Backing up your data

user $mkdir backup

user $adb pull /system backup/system

user $adb pull /data backup/data

user $# Some phones also have a /vendor

user $adb pull /vendor backup/vendor

This backup can be used later to build Firefox OS because some non-free files are not included in the sources and must be extracted from a backup (or the phone directly)

Alternatively you can use this script to backup and restore user data.

Building Firefox OS

Find the phone's codename

See this table.

Choose a Firefox OS version

The list of versions available can be seen here. As of this writing, v2.2 is the lastest stable version but you can build any version you want.

Python

The script fetching the sources uses python, unfortunatly it only works with python2, if your default python interpreter is python3, you will need this small hack

user $mkdir /tmp/ffos_bin

user $ln -s `which python2` /tmp/ffos_bin/python

user $export PATH="/tmp/ffos_bin:${PATH}"

Note
You could also set python2 as your default interpreter with eselect python, but this may cause problems with other python programs)

GCC

Old versions of Firefox OS require GCC 4.6, the current master can be built with any modern version. See this MDN page for information on how to use older compilers if you need to build an older version.

Non-free files

To build Firefox OS you need some non-free files only present on the phone (or backups of the phone). If you did a backup, you can use it for the build by setting ANDROIDFS_DIR, otherwise you need to connect your phone via USB while building.

user $export ANDROIDFS_DIR="${PWD}/backup"

Fetching the sources

user $git clone git://github.com/mozilla-b2g/B2G.git

user $cd B2G

user $BRANCH=v1.4 ./config.sh inari

Note
Replace v1.4 by the version you want, and inari by the codename of your phone (inari = ZTE Open)

The last command will start fetching the sources, this will take a very long time, possibly hours since it basically downloads 14GB of data.

Build

user $./build.sh

Building takes quite some time and displays a lot of warnings.

Flashing

user $./flash.sh

If all goes well, your phone should reboot on the new version of Firefox OS