[tor-talk] Building Tor Browser on ARM

[Mirimir]

On 05/07/2019 11:37 AM, J.S. Evans wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm attempting to build Tor Browser on an ARM64 machine. However, the install tool requires that you download some x64 packages which of course breaks the build. The following has details where it is breaking: https://pastebin.com/11EFY1sQ Any suggestions for a workaround?
> 
> Jason

Some years ago, I built Tor browser on a Pi2. Maybe things have changed,
but here's what I did:

The Tor Project does not distribute Tor Browser for Raspbian wheezy, and
the Debian/Ubuntu version doesn't work. And so you will need to build
from source. That's actually (truly!) not very hard, because the
instructions at
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorBrowser/Hacking are
clear, and work.

First install required packages.

$ sudo apt-get install --no-install-suggests --no-install-recommends zip
unzip libglib2.0-dev libgtk2.0-dev libdbus-1-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev yasm
libasound2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libxt-dev mesa-common-dev autoconf
autoconf2.13 libtool hardening-wrapper libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev
pkg-config g++ libpulse-dev

Then clone the Tor Browser source.

$ git clone https://git.torproject.org/tor-browser.git

Don't worry about the "can't checkout" error, because git branch -a
handles that.

$ cd tor-browser
$ git branch -a
$ git checkout remotes/origin/tor-browser-31.5.0esr-4.5-1

Generate the configure scripts.

$ make $CONFIGURE_ARGS -f client.mk configure
CONFIGURE_ARGS="--with-tor-browser-version=4.5a4
--enable-update-channel=alpha"

Disable Tor Browser update, because none is available.

nano /home/pi/tor-browser/.mozconfig
...
#ac_add_options --enable-tor-browser-update
...

Compile. It should take 6-7 hours at 100% CPU. I recommend cooling the
Pi 2 with a small fan, to prevent overheating and self-protective shutdown.

$ make $MAKEOPTS -f client.mk build

Now make Tor Browser (Firefox).

$ make -C obj-* package INNER_MAKE_PACKAGE=true

It will be at
/home/pi/tor-browser/obj-armv7l-unknown-linux-gnueabihf/dist/firefox.

Download tor-browser-linux32-4.5a4_en-US.tar.xz and extract in /home/pi/.

$ mv /home/pi/tor-browser-linux32-4.5a4_en-US.tar.xz /home/pi/
$ tar xvfJ tor-browser-linux32-4.5a4_en-US.tar.xz
$ cp -a
/home/pi/tor-browser/obj-armv7l-unknown-linux-gnueabihf/dist/firefox/*
/home/pi/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/
$ /home/pi/tor-browser_en-US/start-tor-browser