Dillo is a very lightweight browser. I personally enjoy it because I feel it suits Window Maker and it has Gemini and Gopher plugins.

As of writing this article, Dillo in Debian 12’s repo is, I’m told I think, 10 years old.

Compiling Dillo

An article on installing Dillo from the repo

Another article on installing/building Dillo from the repo

Make sure the Dillo from the repo isn’t installed:

sudo apt-get remove dillo

Clone the repo and set as working directory:

git clone https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo
cd dillo

Install the dependencies (maybe more required, I can’t recall, install as you find out what’s missing):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libfltk1.3-dev

You may want to ensure you have OpenSSL 1.1 or 3, I think, for HTTPS.

Now you can start the build process. I had an issue where Base64 encoded images didn’t seem to work. The Dillo browser account on Fosstodon helped me with that, so that’s why I’m trying the --prefix flag here (they also recommended that the ~/.dillo/dpidrc file has the dpi_dir properly set to the dpi directory in the installation, otherwise it won’t be able to find the builtin plugins).

./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr/local

The summary from my ./configure command looked something like this:

Configuration summary:

  CXX     : g++
  CXXFLAGS: -g -O2 -Wall -W -Wno-unused-parameter -fno-rtti -fno-exceptions

  TLS enabled: yes
  TLS library: OpenSSL
  TLS flags  : -lcrypto -lssl

  Cookies enabled: yes
  XEmbed enabled : yes
  RTFL enabled   : no
  JPEG enabled   : no
  PNG enabled    : yes
  GIF enabled    : yes

  HTML tests     : no

I should probably install one of the libjpeg packages I think.

After you’ve ran configure or whatever pay attention to what is supported or not, such as libpng and the like… Now you can finally build:

make
sudo make install

Try opening dillo:

dillo https://www.someodd.zip/

Test loading a Base64 encoded GIF :

dillo "data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODdhFAAXAPAAMf///wAAACwAAAAAFAAXAAACQISPqcvtD02YtFYV4EzZZtSBgMdJR2eV5jimJolebXzBsrRhJP6BXk6J+HqnW5E4M844uyPT5XzmhsLj71rDYgsAOw=="

There’s also a Dillo config file…

Gopher Plugin

I like using the Gopher Protocol, just take a look at projects and posts about the Gopher Protocol I’ve made.

There’s a Gopher Plugin that lets you browse the Gopher Protocol. I think its setup is pretty straightforward.

https://github.com/dillo-browser/dillo-plugin-gopher

Original content in gopherspace: gopher://gopher.someodd.zip:70/1/phlog/dillo.gopher.txt