Using firefox on Guix distribution

Author: Solène

Date: 16 August 2017

Tags: linux guix

NIL**Update 2020**: This method may certainly not work anymore but I

don't have a Guix installation to try.

I'm new to Guix, it's a wonderful system but it's such different than

any other usual linux distribution that it's hard to achieve some

basics tasks. As Guix is 100% free/libre software, Firefox has been

removed and replaced by icecat. This is nearly the same software but

some "features" has been removed (like webRTC) for some reasons

(security, freedom). I don't blame Guix team for that, I understand

the choice.

But my problem is that I need Firefox. I finally achieve to get it

working from the official binary downloaded from mozilla website.

You need to install some packages to get the libraries, which will

become available under your profile directory. Then, tells firefox to

load libraries from there and it will start.

guix package -i glibc glib gcc gtk+ libxcomposite dbus-glib libxt

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/.guix-profile/lib/ ~/.guix-profile/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 ~/firefox_directory/firefox

Also, it seems that running icecat and firefox simultanously works,

they store data in ~/.mozilla/icecat and ~/.mozilla/firefox so they

are separated.