Pale Moon forum

I am using PM 27.9.4 on FreeBSD, it is by far my favorite browser.
Unfortunately, as some may already know, the PM port has been removed from FreeBSD and some
other BSDs as well, due to a disagreement between the two parties of developers.
I am posting here to find out if there is a 64-bit binary for Devuan, because that should run with Devuan
installed in a FreeBSD jail.

(I've already read the https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=19763 thread, but I didn't find
a conclusive answer.)

Thanks for your help.

Compiling on Linux would be fairly trivial, actually. I actually just got finished with a preliminary port to Solaris/illumos, and I used Linux Mint as a control variable for A/B testing.

If it proves to be necessary, it should be easy to have someone create a .deb (I assume you use .deb, I only know you guys forked from Debian over the SystemD issue?) for you with the standard .mozconfig they provide for developers. But Devuan's IceWeasel also uses UXP and comes with the system, I believe, so that might be an easier solution.

Generally speaking, though, the Pale Moon team doesn't usually make or maintain official .deb or .rpm packages for specific distributions. There's more info on that here:

http://linux.palemoon.org/

That's usually done by the repo maintainers, and then they have to meet specific requirements to be allowed to use official branding. Repository maintainers can be fussy about using system libraries or applying questionable hacks to the program, which can mean they produce buggy/nonstandard builds. The safest bet is to use bzipped tarballs provided on the Pale Moon page that you just extract into your home directory and run from there.

However, if you do want/need a .deb for some reason, you are in luck. According to that page, there is a repo maintained by Steve Pusser for Debian and Ubuntu, and you should be able to just install that. I'm pretty sure Pale Moon doesn't rely on SystemD or Wayland, and so the package should work fine on Devuan. I don't like the direction mainstream Linux is going lately either, so I sympathize with the Devuan team on that.

I'm running Pale Moon on Devuan. I use the tarball from the official Pale Moon for Linux site. And as athenian200 has said, you can download a .deb file from Steve Pusser's site if you prefer (or add his repo).

https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home:stevenpusser&package=palemoon

You can directly download a deb from the amd64 or i386 folders for Debian 10 here, or get the three debianized source files there, too.

I run Pale Moon on Devuan since the 1rst day Devuan (Jessie) was released. Since then everything has gone very fine with both.

I always use this link to get my copy.

http://linux.palemoon.org/download/mainline/
^Here are both binaries architectures.

Thanks also deserve stevep* for complete dedication to provide always latest Pale Moon for Debian / Devuan (.deb).

To me, Pale Moon is very less complexity Browser, unlike many others. For all that value Simplicity or (KISS) fame makes the right choice with PM.

Thanks to all who responded. My first step is now to install Devuan in a FreeBSD jail.
Then I'll try one of the suggested binaries and report back.

(By the way, as far as I can tell, the official Linux binary from http://linux.palemoon.org/download/mainline/
uses systemd, and thus would not be useable on Devuan. Correct?)

Not correct, as far as I can tell, and per the other answers in this thread. The debs in my repo also run fine on antiX, another systemd-free distro.

Hmm, ok.
Anyhow, I just downloaded palemoon_28.7.1+repack-1_amd64.deb from your repo.

stevepusser wrote: ↑

2019-09-19, 22:58

Not correct, as far as I can tell, and per the other answers in this thread. The debs in my repo also run fine on antiX, another systemd-free distro.

My installation of devuan in the FreeBSD jail is almost done. As a test of the installation, I want to install your PM package in it. Keeping in mind that I don't know about Linux package managers, could you show how to do that?

If Devuan has gdebi like Debian, you can install it the normal way
And then use the gdebi-gtk GUI or gdebi on the command line to install the Pale Moon deb and pull in its dependencies automatically.

TBH, all the recent work I've done with chroot 'jails' in Puppy Linux has involved manual installs of the necessary packages that I want to run. AFAIK, you can't 'click-to-install' any mainline-format package directly, because with the jail permissions are all wrong, for a start.....in addition to which, you're using non-standard (or modified) 'paths', anyway.

An acquaintance on the Puppy forums has produced an upgraded 're-master' of the old favourite, Puppy 431 from around 11-12 years ago, with a newer glibc/libstdc++ combo. We found the only way to get current Palemoon running was to use a more recent Puppy, 'Precise 571', as the jail, and simply 'install' the unzipped tarball to that, in its usual location of /opt. The binary was sym-linked into the jail's /usr/bin , then the sym-link called via a script in the 'parent' Puppy's /usr/bin, which looks like this:-
It works very smoothly indeed.....and involved copying the extracted tarball to the jail, creating a sym-link, 'installing' a script, and adding a custom .desktop entry. And with Pup being its own 'root' administrator, that took perhaps 3-4 minutes, all told.....with a re-start of 'X' to let the Menu update itself.

Thanks go, as is so often the case, to watchdog of the 'Puppy' Forums.

Not hard at all. However, I will be the first to admit that in many ways, Pup is NOT a distro for raw beginners, newbies to Linux. Far from it. The Linux 'learning curve' is even steeper in Pup's case!


Mike.

So I have to ask.. What does this have to do with anything? If you want to run Pale Moon, why don't you run it on a supported operating system? If you want to persist in your course and do this bsd to linux chroot to debian package.. Why do you expect to be able to ask for help on this extreme edge case at best and unwise and unsupported configuration at worst?

This forum is not your personal blog, so please take your exploration of non-standard unsupported methods of trying to have your cake and eat it too elsewhere. You can always link your blog post or series back here for those who might be interested. Otherwise it is just noise to everyone else.

I saw this recent discussion on the FreeBSD forum:
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/palemoon.71686/
Apparently Windows Pale Moon runs in BSD Wine but with excess CPU use.
It was removed from the ports tree because it was outdated and unmaintained. You can still see the build info and files here:
https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/head/www/palemoon/?pathrev=505739
The last working build was 27.9.4 which is very outdated. It took 13 patches, perhaps some of those might need to be revised and possibly extras added to build the latest version.
An alternative to a VM install would be a multiboot setup, install Devuan (or whatever) on another partition, you could mount the other OS to access items on that filesystem.

We do not support BSD. Nor support anyone else supporting BSD.

New Tobin Paradigm wrote: ↑

2019-09-26, 22:47

So I have to ask.. What does this have to do with anything? If you want to run Pale Moon, why don't you run it on a supported operating system? If you want to persist in your course and do this bsd to linux chroot to debian package.. Why do you expect to be able to ask for help on this extreme edge case at best and unwise and unsupported configuration at worst?

Y'know, I can see where you're coming from. I would hazard a guess that in your position, you probably have your hands full enough as it is with trying to get builds of Palemoon to behave themselves in mainline, supported systems, never mind trying to cope with requests about totally unorthodox ways of doing things.

I have every respect for folks like yourself. I've often wished I could do what some people seem to do effortlessly.....to whom coding comes as naturally as breathing. It's a skill of which I'm envious..!!

----------------------------------------------

Personally, I posted a response in this thread for the simple reason that I've been doing something similar in recent months, and thought recounting some of my own experiences might help the OP.

I don't use my systems for work. Never been in that sort of position. Being three parts retired, my boxes are purely a hobby for me.....and I've always been one of these daft buggers who likes exploring unusual ways of doing things, on obsolete hardware and with unsupported OSs. It's a laugh, for me.....and I've long been considered something of an 'oddball' by my contemporaries. (Couldn't care less..!) The difference perhaps being that I know full well that any 'official' organization/support forums wouldn't touch it with a bargepole. That's fine by me; I don't 'expect' it.. 99 times out of 100, I sort my own problems out anyway. I've been messing around with these black magic boxes for so many years, on & off, that I can almost always re-use/modify methods that worked, with similar results, to similar problems/scenarios in years gone by.

Experience does count for something in many of these cases. Anyway, I've never yet come across a forum (any forum - and I've belonged to so many fora/bulletin boards over the last 3 ½ decades that I've lost count) where people can't simply chat and ask questions, even if it is seriously 'off-topic'.

You will never, ever - no matter how hard you try, or how draconian your methods - keep any forum 100% 'on-topic', human nature being what it is. You have to give people some leeway! Anyway; why would you want to? That gets boring....fast. I think If I did something 'for a living', the last thing I would want to do is to constantly keep discussing it.

Me and thee are obviously wired-up differently....

I'm always happy to pass on the benefits of decades of experience, on many and varied systems, to less-informed individuals. And who knows; in years to come, some of your forum members may themselves come to contribute, in a more concrete way, to the success of the Palemoon Project. It's worth bearing in mind.

[*shrug*]


Mike.

This has nothing at all to do with being off-topic, and has everything to do with unnecessarily complicating things and creating situations that you cannot reasonably expect developers to take into account. Tobin's question is perfectly valid "Why don't you just run it natively in something that is supported?" is absolutely the right question to pose here.

"I'm having issues running your application in a virtual environment faking compatibility on an unsupported operating system" -- why even bother posting on a support forum for that is beyond me. It's not off-topic, but nevertheless completely pointless, and inevitably you're going to be on your own. Don't reflect this impossible-to-support experimentals environment on the dev as if it's somehow supposed to be not a corner case that can't be reasonably taken into account by ANYONE.

I find Mike's response to be very anti-inflammatory, which was sorely needed here. Thank you Mike.

Two more points:

1. Why don't you just run palemoon on a supported OS?

   Well, I mentioned in my original post that I consider PM to be much better than any other of the current browsers, and that's why I want to use it. However, I don't choose my OS only on the basis of what browser I run. Perhaps other people do likewise.

2. Don't reflect this impossible-to-support experimentals environment on the dev as if it's somehow supposed to be not a corner case that can't be reasonably taken into account by ANYONE.

   Please re-read my post(s). I absolutely did not, and it was never my intention to,

   reflect this impossible-to-support experimentals environment on the dev.

   I just asked if anyone could offer some suggestions.

Non-inflammatory.