• InstallationDebian

Conkeror .deb-Packages for Debian- and Ubuntu-like Operating Systems

The basic installation instructions found at Installation also apply to Debian, Ubuntu, and other Debian-like OSes. However, installing a prepackaged version of conkeror is way simpler.

Sources for Conkeror Packages

Debian

Debian includes packages for Conkeror in the upcoming Lenny (5.0) release as well as in its unstable ("Sid") repository: http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=conkeror

In case of a Debian Lenny or Debian Unstable installation you can install conkeror like this¹ as root:

apt-get install conkeror conkeror-spawn-process-helper

Debian Lenny (5.0), the upcoming stable release will contain the Conkeror version as it was available in the git repository on 29th of June 2008.

Debian Sid (unstable) will get a new snapshot of conkeror as package every one (or two) months as soon as Lenny has been released as stable.

For Debian Etch (4.0), the current stable release, there are no Conkeror packages available since there are no xulrunner 1.9 packages available for Etch (Etch's GTK libraries are too old for xulrunner 1.9) and Conkeror doesn't work with older xulrunner versions.

Ubuntu Jaunty

A Conkeror package is included in the universe repositories for Ubuntu Jaunty: http://packages.ubuntu.com/jaunty/conkeror

Developement Packages

See http://noone.org/conkeror-nightly-debs/ for daily automatically built snapshot packages of Conkeror for Debian Lenny and Sid and instructions on how to use this APT repository. Could also be used on other Debian based systems like Ubuntu.

Developement .deb packages suitable at least for Debian but probably also for other .deb based distributions are available at http://noone.org/debian/ or in the APT repository at http://noone.org/apt/. The Debian packaging is included in conkeror's git repository, so you can also build your own Debian package from a cloned conkeror git working copy. See GitHelp for details.

Older versions of Ubuntu and other Operating Systems using .deb packages, but without conkeror in their repositories

For versions of Ubuntu up to Intrepid² there are currently no packages available, but you may be able to use the Debian or Development packages (see above) without change.

Package installation of non-official packages

Conkeror .deb packages are architecture independent which means on the one hand that they can be used independent of the hardware platform used and on the other hand that newer packages usually still work in operating system releases which contain an earlier or no version of Conkeror if all dependencies (mainly xulrunner version 1.9 or greater, package xulrunner-1.9 in Debian) are installed.

For the C program conkeror-spawn-helper (formerly spawn-process-helper) it's not that easy. Since this is a binary program and therefore packaged in a binary package (named conkeror-spawn-process-helper), it must fit the architecture of the system as well as the C library for which the package has been compiled. For a while, the packages built for Debian experimental and unstable will also run on Debian Lenny, but when a new C library enters Debian unstable, conkeror-spawn-process-helper from unstable will no more fit into Debian Lenny. That's where Backports.org comes into play: There are packages available which were "backported" to earlier Debian releases.

The downloaded .deb files can be installed as root with a command like e.g.

dpkg -i conkeror*.deb

as root³.

Starting Conkeror

You can launch Conkeror installed via a .deb package with the conkeror command or via the Debian menu.

Couldn't be easier!

Note on versions

Since end of August 2008, a few big changes have been made to the Conkeror code base. The version of Conkeror in Debian Lenny is and will be from before this date. See above for instructions how to install newer conkeror and conkeror-spawn-process-helper packages on Lenny.

You may alternatively choose to install an up-to-date version of Conkeror manually as described on the Installation page.

High CPU Usage on Debian Systems

On September 28th, with the upload of xulrunner 1.9.0.3-1 into Debian Sid, JEMALLOC has been disabled globally for xulrunner.⁴ This has caused the CPU usage to be exceptionally high on some systems, even when only displaying a buffer with about:blank. Setting the environment variable MOZILLA_NO_JEMALLOC to 0 fixes the problem here. The following rather ugly wrapper script does the job:

david@homeless:~$ cat /usr/local/bin/conkerar 
#!/bin/bash

MOZILLA_NO_JEMALLOC=0 /usr/bin/conkeror

Just call conkerar to use conkeror now.

Footnotes