Netsurf, installing it.

I felt I needed a smaller faster browser for my Ubuntu virtual machine. So on the advice of doctor Google I found this page which mentioned seven.

I had a look at Otter and Netsurf. Is Ubuntu losing mind share? I tried several ways to install Otter and they all failed. They claim there’s a ppa repo, but apt failed to download with fatal errors claiming the repo was corrupted. Maybe it’s because they have abandoned .deb packages. I had a look at installing from source, but got stuck at Qt5. Shame, great logo and name.

I have successfully compiled Netsurf although some of the image handling functionality might be a bit underwhelming i.e. I might be missing some image handling software. It’s fast which is good, but it’s functionality is a problem for me. Maybe I should read the documentation but the big problem is that I have compiled from source and thus my regular apt job will not update it.

The purpose of this post is to document the missing software that will permit an error free compilation of Netsurf and the apt calls that will pull them down.

It needed a bunch of pre-reqs that no longer or do not come as standard with ubuntu 22, which surprises me, but I compiled from source. I have documented the missing programs and libraries in a script, on github. (There must be a better way of finding the apt runes.)

The required packages are,

sudo apt install flex bison gperf
sudo apt install expat expat1-dev libexpat1-dev

sudo apt install libcurl4-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev

sudo apt install libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt install libcanberra-gtk-module

I am looking for lightweight because I am running Ubuntu in Virtual Box and I may be short of memory; ayway my preferred browser, Firefox, is slow and hangs. I may report on my usage another day.