IceCat Browser

IceCat is a Mozilla-free Firefox webrowser.

More information about Free Software Foundation's IceCat:

icecatbrowser.org
fsf.org: GNU Icecat
gnu.org: GNUzilla and IceCat
en.wikipedia.org: GNU IceCat

The FSF project around IceCat only provids a 64bit binary for download.

You can download my 32bit build here:

• icecat-140.3.1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.xz (68MB, build on Debian 12.11)
• icecat-128.14.0.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2 (79MB, build on Debian 12.11)
• icecat-128.13.0.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2 (79MB, build on Debian 12.11)
• icecat11513.tgz (87MB, build on Debian 11)

Building IceCat yourself

Building IceCat (115.13) for a 32bit (i686) architecture.

Build System Preparation

Setting up the build system is the hardest and most essential part.

IceCat is a Mozilla-free Firefox ESR. To build it the rust compiler is used. rustc is extremly resource demanding. The build system has to be a 64bit (x86_64) architecture. On i386 the build will fail due to memory constrains.

So you need to set up a cross-architecture system. This means your system has 64 and 32bit libraries installed.

You can check your architecturre with

# arch
# ld --version

I have used Debian 12 and 13 as build systems.

For suppored distributions and versions see Supported Build Hosts.

I used a Qemu/KVM VM on amd64 with Debian Bookworm (stable). Trixie (testing) was to new.

The VM I configured with (all) 4 cores and almost the entire memory (14GB) plus 15GBB swap space (can be less).

1. Configuring apt to install mulible architecture packages. See Debian MultiarchHOWTO
2. apt install libasound2-dev:i386 python3-pip ccache clang nodejs nasm libdbus-glib-1-dev
   export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig
3. sudo
4. ln -s /usr/include/asm-generic /usr/include/asm
   asm/errno.h: No such file or directory
5. rustc & cargo
   https://www.rust-lang.org/learn/get-started
   curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
6. cargo install cbindgen
7. rustup target add i686-unknown-linux-gnu
8. sccache
   Install Sccache on Ubuntu 24.04

Building Icecat

• mkdir | cd ~/build/src/ic/ic12813/ (WORKDIR)
• running the "git clone" command will create gnuzilla
• .mozconfig goes in gnuzilla/output/icecat-128.13.0/ (SRCDIR)
• in .mozconfig:
  mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=$OBJDIR
• the tar-ball will be created in
  $OBJDIR/dist/icecat-128.13.0.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2

Steps

1. work in a screen session
2. mkdir | cd ~/build/src/ic/ic12813/ (WORKDIR)
3. Download gnuzilla including makeicecat
   git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/gnuzilla.git
4. Make FF source Icecat (will download current version of FF)
   cd gnuzilla
   ./makeicecat
5. vi $SRCDIR/.mozconfig
   This file should be located in SRCDIR
   Object directory is the compille output. (OBJDIR)
6. cd $SRCDIR
7. ./mach bootstrap
   Option 1: Artifact
8. ./mach configure
9. ./mach build 2>&1 | tee ./mach_build.log
   This takes saveral hours and consumes extrem resources (CPU, RAM, swap).
   I could speed-up the build by working on a PCIe SSD instead on a SATA HD.
10. ./mach package
    result in $OBJDIR/dist/

Clean-up after failure: ./mach clobber
This will delete all build fracments.

Troubleshooting

• error: the lock file gnuzilla/output/icecat-140.3.1/Cargo.lock needs to be updated but --frozen was passed to prevent this
  [PATCH] Avoid invalidating vendored crates

Links to read

• Building Firefox On Linux
• Building Firefox 32-bit On Linux 64-bit
• AttributeError: 'RawConfigParser' object has no attribute 'readfp' when running python apps
• How can I add a default include path for GCC in Linux?
• How to Install glibc 2.32 when I already have glibc2.31

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