Lagrange on Raspberry Pi

2021-04-23

After briefly trying a few other Gemini browsers, I settled on Lagrange as my go-to.

I've been running it on my Mac, but since I host this site on a Raspberry Pi, I thought I ought to view the site there as well. While Lagrange doesn't ship Raspberry Pi binaries, I was able to build it without too much trouble. The Lagrange README has detailed instructions, but here's what I needed to do on Raspbian Buster.

First, I downloaded a release tarball. As of this writing, it's for version 1.3.3.

I expanded that into its own directory, ~/lagrange-1.3.3. Then, I needed to figure out what dependencies I was missing for the build process. I tried guessing from the README and seeing what I already had installed, but failed attempts to run the build clearly reported ones that I missed. YMMV.

sudo dpkg -l  # lists what you already have
sudo apt install cmake libunistring-dev libsdl2-dev  # what I was missing

If you find something else is missing on your system, try installing the corresponding package suggested for Ubuntu in the README.

Next, I made the temporary build directory in ~/temp/lagrange and ran the build from there.

mkdir ~/temp/lagrange
cd ~/temp/lagrange
cmake ~/lagrange-1.3.3 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local
sudo cmake --build . --target install

That last line needs to run under sudo so that it can install Lagrange system-wide.

Anyway, once that's done, Lagrange shows up under Internet in the menu. (I think I had to re-login for it to appear.) And that's that. Hope this helps those of you also rocking a Raspberry Pi.