Falkon-3.1.0

Introduction to falkon

Falkon is a KDE web browser using the QtWebEngine rendering engine. It was previously known as QupZilla. It aims to be a lightweight web browser available through all major platforms.

Although falkon is now part of KDE, it can be installed without KDE (with the loss of kwallet functionality).

[Warning]

Warning

Falkon relies on QtWebEngine. That uses a forked copy of chromium, and is therefore vulnerable to many issues found there. The Qt developers have always preferred to make releases at the same time as the rest of Qt (rather than adding emergency fixes). Now that they are keen to move to Qt6, the 5.15.3 and later Qt-5.15 releases are initially only available to paying customers. QtWebEngine is something of an exception because of its LGPL licence, but getting the git sources (with the forked chromium submodule) to a point where they will successfully build on a current BLFS system can take a lot of effort. Be aware that future fixes for vulnerabilities might be very delayed, to the extent that you might wish to consider using a different browser.

This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS-10.1 platform.

Package Information

falkon Dependencies

Required

extra-cmake-modules-5.79.0 and qtwebengine-20210401

Optional

gnome-keyring-40.0, KDE Frameworks-5.79.0 and PySide2 for experimental Python plugins (compiling this from source is very slow).

User Notes: http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/falkon

Installation of falkon

Install falkon by running the following commands:

Unless you have installed both PySide2 and ki18n, remove the translations for the sample hellopython.py script:

rm -rf po/

Fix a missing include in Qt-5.14:

sed -i '/#include <QSettings>/a#include <QFile>' \
   src/plugins/VerticalTabs/verticaltabsplugin.cpp

Fix a build problem introduced in Qt-5.15:

sed -i '/#include <QPainter>/a #include <QPainterPath>' \
   src/lib/tools/qztools.cpp

Now build the program:

mkdir build &&
cd    build &&

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr \
      -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release  \
      .. &&

make

To test the results, issue: make test. All tests should pass. If any fail, the full results will be in Testing/Temporary/LastTest.log.

Now, as the root user:

make install

If you have installed Pyside2 you will want to examine the hellopython.py which is in the scripts/ directory, and perhaps copy it to your home directory.

Command Explanations

-DBUILD_TESTING=OFF: This will save a little time and space by not building the test programs, use this if you do not wish to run the test.

Contents

Installed Programs: falkon
Installed Library: libFalkonPrivate.so.3
Installed Directory: ${FALKON_PREFIX}/lib/plugins, ${FALKON_PREFIX}/share/falkon.

Short Descriptions

falkon

is a web browser which uses qtwebengine

libFalkonPrivate.so.3

contains functions used by falkon

Last updated on 2021-03-18 23:32:57 -0500