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The honeymoon is over. I tried to install librewolf, my go-to browser with no telemetry, but could not get it to work, even with libc-6 compatibility apk installed.
Next I tried to install tor browser. There is a tor package which ran once, but apparently it is just the transport, no browser, which is a serious security problem. And after a ctrl-c, I was unable to restart tor at all.
All of it is weird: I know Firefox is a bit weird with libc, but Alpine comes with a working firefox which I am loath to use. But it does work. So why don't the derivatives work?
Alpine experts, any suggestions?
Jan 22 · 4 months ago
i have librewolf on postmarketos. i thought it came from alpine, since postmarketos community is not that big.
but i am on edge, try edge maybe?
there are also librewolf ebuilds in some gentoo overlay, so i have librewolf on gentoo as well.
on tor browser, i never use it.
i install tor service, and then i configure the browser to use tor proxy by hand.
and there is a checkbox to also route dns via socks proxy, do not forget to use that too.
and i have a story about it. for the long time official tor browser was version 17, though firefox already had version 24 or something.
then i have read that nsa (or police?) was able to catch some child porn engaged group by using vulnerability in the old version of tor browser.
web pages could contain some js code running which browser would expose its real ip to the web page, so tor browser did not help those guys.
and i couldn't help but think that maybe tor team was cooperating with police by keeping the version of their tor browser low though the vulnerability were already known.
I know you've already moved on to another distro, but I'm curious how you tried to install Librewolf. Alpine uses Musl libc so it's not binary compatible with software built for other Linux distros. Likely you would either have to install it using FlatPak or build it from source. FlatPak uses containers and even provides it's own libc, so you can run software compiled against Glibc (the default) on Musl distros like Alpine.
Basically though, if you use Alpine you run software from the Alpine repositories or build it from source. Anything else is kind of missing the point.
@jeang3nie: I didn't try that hard, just dropped the appimage, then tried to install libc6 compatibility package, then tried to trace startup through the shell scripts after installing bash, then gave up -- as what I was really interested in was tor browser... I do like Alpine, and would totally use it on a sever via ssh
Pretty sure that was the problem then. AppImage might include some libraries but generally assumes you have a certain base set of them, including Glibc.
libc6-compat is something different. That's for an even older libc that Linux distros used before Glibc became the standard, and the only reason to use it is in the rare case of trying to run some really, really old binaries from that era on modern linux. We're talking well over 20 years old at this point. Stuff from the 90's.
FYI since I see you're on Void now, Void actually offers two editions. One uses Glibc and one uses Musl. I imagine you installed the Glibc one because you aren't having these same issues.
jeang3nie: I sure did install the glibc version! Void has been problem-free. It's amusing to note that while most of the code I written lately is assembly against kernel calls, I am really dependent (for documentation etc) on the damned web browsers that have a huge footprint. And really spoiled by being able to quickly plug in USB hard drives.
as i said, librewolf is installed on my postmarketos, which is based on alpine.
it is in repos, it works, i use it.
oops...
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