The Gears plugin is only supported by Google on 32-bit versions of Firefox.

There's a few trivial bugs, and some build infrastructure changes, necessary to make it compile under x86_64. See issue 335 on the project's Google code bugtracker.

The plugin appears to work fine for Google Reader, but another (heavier) app I use regularly has had issues. As this app is in development, I'm not sure if it's the app or a bug in my plugin.

¶ Download

gears

I took the patch created by Scott Wolchok and updated it for the latest svn trunk. I make irregular builds for Firefox 3 available, as well as the patch to gears svn. There's some further instructions beyond applying the patch listed at the head of the patch.

¶ Patch Instructions

The following changes are required to get Google Gears to compile on an x86_64 system. Diff against r3000 of google gears from trunk

The build will fail to link against the 32-bit libraries present in the gecko sdk. To work around this, replace the following follow files with those from a x86_64 system:

 third_party/gtk/linux/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so
 third_party/gecko_1.9/linux/gecko_sdk/lib/libxul.so
 third_party/gecko_1.9/linux/gecko_sdk/lib/libxpcomglue_s.a
 third_party/gecko_1.9/linux/gecko_sdk/lib/libxpcom.so

To build, run 'make BROWSER=FF3' in $(CHECKOUT_ROOT)/gears

The build system does not allow the creation of an installer (.xpi) for Firefox 3 only. To work around this, once the build has completed, fake the existence of the Firefox 2 library by:

 mkdir gears/bin-opt/linux-x86_64/ff2
 touch gears/bin-otp/linux-x86_64/ff2/libgears.so

Creation of the XPI installer also requires the existence of a notifier and notifier_test file:

 touch gears/bin-opt/linux-x86_64/common/notifier
 touch gears/bin-opt/linux-x86_64/common/notifier_test

These files are built only during the Firefox 2 stage of the build. The resulting XPI appears to work fine with Firefox 3, so we just fake their existence.

Now you can build the xpi from $(CHECKOUT_ROOT)/gears:

 make installers

The xpi will be placed in $(CHECKOUT_ROOT)/gears/bin-opt/installers/, named gears-linux-opt-<version>.xpi.

Based on patch by evilsporkman@gmail.com, modified so it applies to current versions of Gears' svn. Also added a the casting of int to a long (not C++ style, but it works).