| How to compile Pale Moon 27.4.1 from source code in Lighthouse 64 Puppy Linux 6.02 Beta 2 |
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Monday, July 31st, 2017 11:35:28 GMT |
| Puppy Linux |
Several days ago, after less than an hour of trying, I successfully compiled my favorite web browser, Pale Moon, from source code, in Lighthouse 64 Puppy Linux 6.02 Beta 2!
The reason I did that was because I thought upgrading my web browser might solve my issues with YouTube's HTML5 player not playing audio. (I was mistaken, but, I finally found a solution!)
And when I tried to simply download the latest precompiled version of Pale Moon for Linux, 27.4.0, it wouldn't run on my system because of this error. (Which also happened with at least one older version many months ago):
So, my only remaining option was to try to build Pale Moon from source code.
Happily, it was a lot easier to build than I thought it might be. That was the first time I ever attempted to build a web browser from source code, and I was prepared to spend hours on it if I had to.
But, to my own surprise, it only took me about 45 minutes to figure out, thanks to various helpful web pages. And it will hopefully take much less time in the future, now that I've written this blog post, which even I will be able to refer to someday when I've forgotten most of the below details.
And I was only able to build it there - a location inside my Puppy Linux RAM disk - because my current computer has a huge amount of RAM - 32 GB, which gives me a 16 GB Puppy Linux RAM disk.
So far, I wasn't able to figure out how to make the ./mach command build Pale Moon someplace other than
If you need a copy of the DevX SFS file, you can get it from here:
So, I downloaded autoconf-2.13.tar.gz from here:
make
new2dir make install
I put "new2dir make install" instead of "make install" because I wanted to make Puppy Linux .pet and .sfs installer files for Autoconf 2.13, so I hopefully wouldn't have to repeat this process again.
That file's size is about 230 MB.
If you don't have as much RAM as I do, you might want to unzip that folder to someplace on a physical disk.
I copied and pasted the example .mozconfig file from the official instructions for how to build Pale Moon in Linux: https://developer.palemoon.org/Developer_Guide:Build_Instructions/Pale_Moon/Linux
But, I found I couldn't use exactly that, because the build got interrupted because I didn't have PulseAudio. And I much preferred to avoid installing PulseAudio because of its association with the infamous systemd.
Here's my final .mozconfig file, which you should place inside the "Pale-Moon-27.4_RelBranch" folder before the next step:
As I mentioned before, I don't know how to do that yet - sorry.
So, the rest of these instructions will simply assume you have enough RAM, as I did.
Then, I just had to wait a while - 801 seconds, or 13.35 minutes. However, I was using a pretty good 2.8 GHz computer with 8 cores. So it might take more or less time depending on what you're using.
Surprisingly, this Mac Pro can run Lighthouse 64 Puppy Linux 6.02 Beta 2, which makes it tremendously nicer for me to use than Mac OS X Lion does.
This was much faster to finish than the build, and resulted in a tarchive quite similar to the official precompiled Pale Moon tarchives.
That tarchive was in the folder
In my system, by default, my Pale Moon profile is located at:
To back it up, I close Pale Moon, and wait a little while to try to make sure Pale Moon is finished writing any files to that folder.
Then I zip the folder, and put the zip file somewhere on a physical disk.
I assume backing up the folder simply by copying the folder to a physical disk might also work, though I haven't tried that lately.
That will launch Pale Moon 27.4.1 with your usual old Pale Moon profile, so, you hopefully won't have to reinstall your add-ons and other customizations from scratch.
I upgraded from Pale Moon 26.2.2, and so far, I haven't noticed any problems with any of my old add-ons or anything else, though I haven't checked thoroughly.
And while you're there, you can add a lot of other handy search engines.
./palemoon: /lib/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.17' not found (required by ./palemoon)
Since the build process was a bit more complicated than just ./configure; make; make install, and I thought I might need to know how to do it again someday, and that others might like to know too, I decided to document it.
However, the below instructions will probably have to be modified if you don't have enough RAM, because the final /home/root/pmbuild folder on my system ended up being over 3 GB, or 3264 M, to be more exact.
/home/root/pmbuild. I'm guessing the best place to look for answers would be the official Pale Moon forum.
I also haven't tried these instructions in any other Puppy Linux, nor any other GNU/Linux. So, I don't know what changes might need to be made for other Puppies or GNU/Linuxes.
./configure
mv /usr/bin/autoconf /usr/bin/autoconf269
ln /usr/local/bin/autoconf /usr/local/bin/autoconf213
Fortunately, this forum thread gave me a clue of how stop Pale Moon from trying to use PulseAudio.
./mach build
I'm actually using a used Mac Pro from 2008, which looks like a giant cheese grater. :-) And I actually like it a lot, even though I usually prefer to avoid Apple products.
The ./mach build command resulted in a large folder at /home/root/pmbuild/. I forgot to check its size before running the next step, but after the next step, it ended up being over 3 GB! 3264 M, to be more exact.
./mach package/home/root/pmbuild/dist/ and named "palemoon-27.4.1.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2".
/root/.moonchild productions
I'm very happy with my Pale Moon upgrade so far. It is noticeably faster than the old version I contentedly used for probably over a year, Pale Moon 26.2.2.