At Thu, 11 Dec 2025 14:04:03 +0100, Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola%libero.it@localhost> wrote:
Subject: Success with Links browser port build.
>
> trying to attach a screenshot too. Lots of
> building of dependencies, which I will
> gladly share if a space is found, to have
> both lynx (easy) as well as links browser
> with image support
> All running on a SparcStation 4 with
> NetBSD 10.0. NetBSD page displays
> fine. WIkipedia works too.
Yay! Congratulations!
I used to use links-gui extensively with sparc machines as "recently" as
the NetBSD-5 days and it worked well then. Glad to see it still does.
Sadly the lack of full _javascript_ support in browsers is becoming more
and more of an issue. https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite/ still works
with links-gui, but google search does not. I had been hoping NetSurf
would get better _javascript_ support sooner, but that doesn't seem to be
happening.
You might want to try NetSurf anyway -- it has good CSS support. I
haven't built the latest 3.11 yet, but 3.10 builds and works very well
on recent NetBSD (and macos!) without some of the huge bloat of any
full-features browser, though it does still require GTK-3, and even
dynamic-linked it's not small, and it depends on some 60 shared
libraries. If you can get GTK-3 built, then NetSurf is likely an easy
build after that. Development on NetSurf seems to be proceeding, but
they haven't cut a new release in a fairly long time.
Dillo should work too, and does not require GTK (it uses FLTK) and so
only depends on a "mere" 27 libraries. However the pkgsrc version is
way out of date. Someone hijacked dillo.org (their home page is now
https://dillo-browser.org/ and they have their own Git as well as
mirrors on Codeberg and Sourcehut). The 3.0.5 version in pkgsrc has
problems with fonts for its widgets and menus (or at least I have not
yet found how to adjust them). Building FLTK does require building
MesaLib, and that requires meson, and that requires a python3.
Dependency Hell! (low cpu edition)
I wonder if anyone tried this distcc + NetBSD cross tools setup?
Due to lack of hdd space I had another idea, using two qemu-system-sparc instances on same x86 host.
I have two copies of NetBSD/sparc virtual hdd image for qemu (because I never figured complex launching args for snapshot use), and in theory this might work with qemu's port redirection:
But may be I'll spin up cross tools on currently powered down laptop.
Even 2x speed up look promising (esp. if autoswc will work nicely with this setup), but for some reason I am reluctant to launch whole setup .....