Building Dillo on Ubuntu Lucid

Dillo is one of those niche projects which has always added something I need. Fast is good, but the primary reason I want it is that compromise between Lynx and friends, and the more graphical mouse-able interface. Given too many sites I visit are guarded by webmasters who think Lynx is used only by computer crackers, and are hard to navigate in Lynx anyway, Dillo is one of the best light browsers for protecting from tracking and other privacy invasions. I haven’t been able to find Dillo packaged for Ubuntu, and I think this is wrong-headed. Even the PPA I found seemed badly out of date, so I decided the best solution was to build it myself.

There are instructions for Dillo itself and Fltk 2 on the Dillo site, but they don’t exactly work perfectly on Ubuntu. Here’s how I did it.

The simplest path is first pull in the build dependencies for Fltk:

sudo apt-get build-dep libfltk1.1

This is because Ubuntu is stuck on the 1.1 release and Dillo depends on 2.0. Then you’ll need to add one more item or Fltk will not build:

sudo apt-get install libxi-dev

The source package for Fltk 2 on the repository was fltk-2.0.x-r7725 when I did this. I moved it to /usr/local/src/ and unzipped and untarred there. When you enter the directory, you’ll need to run the configure script first.

sudo ./configure

Then it was the usual:

sudo make
….
sudo make install

Then you walk through a similar routine for the Dillo package. It all installs in under the /usr/local/ hierarchy which isn’t a problem for most uses. You’ll have to create your own menu entries if you want it to show. There are several sets of icons available on the Dillo site. Don’t forget to copy the dillorc from /usr/local/etc/dillo into your ~/.dillo folder and modify it to suit your tastes. The file has sufficient comments to give you some idea what to do.