PM Installer 2.4 fails on new Linux Mint 19 XFCE Topic is solved

[Binky]

I've been using Pale Moon via the installer for a couple of years on Ubuntu 16.04 without a problem, but I've just tried running the Pale Moon installer 2.4 on a new Linux Mint 19 XFCE (based on Ubuntu 18.04) system and I keep getting an error message when I get to the 'Install Pale Moon' part of the installation:

The installation was aborted because the necessary files could not be retrieved. Please check your network connection and try again.

My network connection is fine. At first I thought that maybe the Pale Moon installation server was down so I waited 12 hours and tried again, but the same problem occurs.

Now I'm wondering if the installer has some dependency that is missing in Linux Mint 19 XFCE. Is there any way to check what's going wrong here?

Thanks.

P.S. I should have mentioned that Pale Moon 27.9.4 x64 runs without any problem directly from the downloaded and extracted archive, but I would prefer to use the installer to integrate Pale Moon into the system. Also, I don't have a firewall running, so that can't be the issue.

[Binky]

OK, I solved this one myself - and it was all my own fault

I discovered that the Pale Moon installer creates a randomly-named temporary directory and runs the installation from there. By looking through that temporary directory while the PM installer was running, I found the shell script 'gwget', and reading that showed me that the PM installer uses wget to download the files. That led me to check out my wget installation. Eventually I checked the wget configuration file /etc/wgetrc, and I realized that I had mistyped the proxy settings for wget. I hadn't (knowingly) run wget yet so I hadn't realized my mistake.

Once I fixed wget's proxy settings the Pale Moon installer worked perfectly. Doh!

Sorry to have bothered you with this. I'll just get back to simulating two short planks