1 Elinks installation guidelines
2 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
4 Quick guide for the impatient:
6 ./configure && make && make install
8 Check out the bottom of this file if you're upgrading from Links or an older
9 ELinks! And be sure to look at doc/ecmascript.txt if you want (experimental)
10 ECMAScript (that's JavaScript) support.
14 In order to check out the latest tree from CVS:
16 $ export CVSROOT=check_file_SITES_for_value_of_this
23 To update your existing tree to the latest CVS version, do:
27 If you downloaded a nightly snapshot, it already contains CVS/ directories
28 etc. Thus, you should be able to update your tree with the above command as if
29 you had previously done a full cvs checkout.
31 Note that if you obtained the sources directly from CVS, you NEED to run
32 ./autogen.sh! (It should be enough to do it once, automake should be smart
33 enough to rerun itself when needed - however, if you have build problems, try
34 running this first.) Also, you obviously need automake and autoconf installed
35 on your system (note that autoconf-2.13 a automake-1.4p5 are supported, newer
36 ones may cause problems thanks to the auto* developers who don't know how to
37 maintain backwards compatibility). Otherwise, you have to use the nightly CVS
38 snapshot - you don't need to do this there.
43 If you want to compile ELinks, first check the directory named contrib/, it
44 may contain patches that are of use to you. If you're interested in any of
45 them, try to apply them by doing (for each one):
47 $ patch -p0 < contrib/that-patch
49 They may not apply, since I don't update patches in contrib/ regularly - if
50 you want, feel free to go ahead and update the patch for the current tree and
51 submit the newer version.
53 The compilation itself looks like:
60 should be enough. However, in some FreeBSD 3 distributions you have to
61 set CFLAGS=-aout before running ./configure. Also, you may want to
62 adjust some (well, plenty of) compile-time options through ./configure
63 - do ./configure --help and it'll print out a list of them. You can
64 finetune what's going to be included in the binary in the features.conf
65 file, and some really detailed tuning can be performed in src/setup.h.
67 Also, a nice idea is to compile ELinks outside of the source tree (note
68 that this might not quite work right now, but we're working on fixing
69 it). Make another directory and run path_to_source_tree/configure from
70 it. Typically, it looks like:
72 $ mkdir ../elinks-build
77 OS/2 - you can use ./configure.
79 The only supported compiler is EMX, you probably won't be able to
80 compile it with anything else.
82 Configure under OS/2 needs to know paths to gcc, make and bash.
86 SET MACHTYPE=i586-pc-os2
87 SET CONFIG_SHELL=d:/prg/gnu/bin/bash.exe
88 SET CC=d:/prg/emx/bin/gcc.exe
89 SET MAKE=d:/prg/emx/bin/make.exe
92 DOS, Windows - port it by yourself.
94 Usually, even after strip, the ELinks binary can measure a lot, but you can
95 radically reduce the resulting binary size by throwing out stuff you don't like.
96 Detailed discussion of reducing the executable size can be found in
103 Ok, now let's install it:
105 Unix - # make install
108 Copy file links.exe somewhere to your path or create CMD file that runs
111 WARNING: EMX has a nasty limit on open files. Links will work badly or
112 won't work with the default settings. Set the variable EMXOPT=-h100
113 before you run links.
115 Now, check the contrib/ directory again. There may be some useful config
116 file examples there, along with few support tools and some Lua scripts - you
117 probably want them ;) so just copy hooks.lua to ~/.elinks, and edit the
118 configuration part - it adds various functionality to ELinks, like
119 decompression of gzipped files or HTML code rewriting for ELinks-unfriendly
123 !BEWARE! If you _distribute_ an ELinks executable linked with OpenSSL and
124 the OpenSSL library is not part of your base system, you are VIOLATING THE GPL.
125 I honestly believe that for this absurd case no ELinks copyright holder will
126 sue you, and it's not a problem for the OpenSSL people as well, as they have
127 explicitly told me, but you might stay on the safe side.
129 So, people who are making ELinks binaries for systems with no OpenSSL in the
130 base system and who decided to link OpenSSL against the ELinks binary may wish
131 NOT to publish or distribute such an executable, as it's breaking GPL 2(b), if
132 they like to have everything legally perfect (like the Debian people ;-).
134 As a semi-solution to this problem, GNUTLS support was introduced; if you want
135 to distribute ELinks executables with HTTPS support, compile ELinks with the
136 --with-gnutls configure option (assuming that you have GNUTLS 1.2.0 installed;
137 we can't say about later versions since GNUTLS people seem to have strange taste
138 wrt. backwards compatibility).
140 HOWEVER, beware that GNUTLS support in ELinks is not so well tested as
141 OpenSSL, and shall be probably still considered experimental. Therfore, it's
142 recommended to the users to give OpenSSL strong preference whenever possible.
143 (Just to show the GNU ideologists how silly can they sometimes be, if not
149 If you're upgrading from Links or older ELinks (0.4pre7 or older), you will
150 notice that several things have changed. First, the binary name is elinks, not
151 links, now; however, the basic usage is almost the same and it still looks like
152 the old (E)Links, so you probably want to make a links symlink pointing to
155 Then, note that configuration files were moved from /etc to /etc/elinks and
156 from ~/.links to ~/.elinks, because the name and format of some of them was
159 links.cfg became elinks.conf and you need to convert it with
160 contrib/conv/conf-links2elinks.pl; html.cfg was merged into elinks.conf.
162 bookmarks are still bookmarks, but you need to convert it with
163 old_to_new_bookmarks.sh.
165 links.his became gotohist and the format is the same.
167 history became globhist and the format is the same.
169 cookies are still cookies, but you need to convert it with tr " " "\t".
174 $Id: INSTALL,v 1.29 2004/09/22 16:17:23 pasky Exp $