• 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. As soon as Lenny has been released and Backports.org started supporting Lenny, packages of newer Conkeror versions should be available via Backports.org for Lenny.

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. Until then, new Debian packages of Conkeror will show up in Debian's Experimental release. See this mail on debian-devel-announce for reasons why only Conkeror's packaging in Debian's unstable distribution will change until Lenny is released.

For Debian Etch (4.0), the current stable release, there are no Conkeror packages available since there are not 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.

Developement Packages

Developement .deb packages suitable at least for Debian but probably also for other .deb based distributions are available at http://noone.org/debian/ and the Mercurial repository for the Debian packaging is available on the web at http://noone.org/hg/conkeror/debian/. Packages and code in there may not be working and can change without further notice. Especially the packages available on this site may change while their name and version number have not changed.

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

For Ubuntu there are currently no packages available (check http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=conkeror to see if this information is still up-to-date), but you may be able to use the Debian or Development packages without change. Download links for the official Debian packages are available on the Debian package site mentioned above.

Package installation of non-official packages

Conkeror .deb packages are architecture independend which means on the one hand that they can be used independend 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 root².

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.

Footnotes