One of my friends just told me about a new browser whose goal is to “adhere to the unix philosophy.” It seems pretty neat to try and I’m always up for new things, so I gave it a go. This browser is currently tested on Arch linux. Because I’m running Debian, I had to do a few things to get it working! There seems to be precompiled binaries for some of the dependencies, but I found it easier just to grab them from the unstable branch.
Here’s a quick preview of the browser before we start:
To give you an idea of what I’m running:
$ uname -a Linux phoenix 2.6.29-2-amd64 #1 SMP Tue May 19 07:17:34 UTC 2009 x86_64 GNU/Linux
I really can’t vouch what I’ve done on any other system, but practically any version of Debian will be fine. Ubuntu could probably be done the same way with some slight modifications.
First we are going to add the unstable branch to sources.list in order to get the required version of libwebkit
Add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free
Now before we update the entire system to the unstable branch, we need to configure /etc/apt/preferences; Here’s how mine is setup (note that this configuration is ideal for debian testing)
Package: * Pin: release o=Debian,a=testing Pin-Priority: 900 Package: * Pin: release o=Debian,a=unstable Pin-Priority: 500 Package: * Pin: release o=Debian,a=sid Pin-Priority: 500 Package: * Pin: release o=Debian,a=experimental Pin-Priority: 100
Update
$ sudo apt-get update
Install git if you don’t have it already
$ sudo apt-get install git git-core
Install libwebkit-dev – please note that this is the ONLY thing we need to grab; while uzbl’s site lists quite a few necessary dependencies, libwebkit-dev includes all of these so no need to worry!
$ sudo apt-get install -t unstable libwebkit-dev
Now you can get on to compilation. For those of you who are used to compiling other browsers (i.e. Chromium or firefox) this is going to be a different story. It took me about 5 seconds to compile… literally, I thought something was broken
$ git clone git://github.com/Dieterbe/uzbl.git
$ cd uzbl
$ make
$ sudo make install
Now this next step is optional, but I’d strongly recommend setting up the default config first
$ mkdir ~/.config/uzbl
$ cp /usr/share/uzbl/examples/config/uzbl/config ~/.config/uzbl/config
You should be all good to go! I won’t get into the details of using this browser, mostly because I’m still figuring that out myself. Go to the website and see for yourself.
I would like to thank Noah Fontes and some of the guys at #uzbl on freenode for making this possible.
Cheers