Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Some financial sites do not work with Seamonkey and I dislike using Chrome (which will work). I read elsewhere that Brave Browser is recommended for better security and privacy. I searched the Forum and the post by rufwoof "Fatdog unshare xephyr capsh container" is all that I turned up.

This thread is far above my skill level. Does anyone know where I could find a FD64-ready Brave, or have other recommendations? I have already looked at ibiblio and searched the web in general...

Thanks in advance,

Hi fundog,

I don't use Fatdog. But I also don't use BraveBrowser which is now run ad agency; and while blocking some adverts redirects you to their preferred choices. You can accomplish BraveBrowser's hype by using firefox with the adguard and privacy badger addons.

For security & privacy try Ungoogled-Chromium first; firefox-portable 2nd; Iron-portable third. Iron is Chromium stripped and maintained by a security conscious Swiss firm. Like firefox, it can use the adguard and privacy badger addons.
Dooble looks interesting but it's new-to-me.
LibreWolf and falkon are two other privacy oriented web-browsers. But they weren't a cinch to adapt to Puppy and may be difficult to get running under FatDog. The same may be true of Ungoogle-Chromium; but it's packaged as a portable so will only take a couple of minutes to test.

You'll find discussions and links to all those I've mentioned on this Section of the Forum. viewforum.php?f=90

fundog wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 7:49 pm

Some financial sites do not work with Seamonkey and I dislike using Chrome (which will work). I read elsewhere that Brave Browser is recommended for better security and privacy. I searched the Forum and the post by rufwoof "Fatdog unshare xephyr capsh container" is all that I turned up.

This thread is far above my skill level. Does anyone know where I could find a FD64-ready Brave, or have other recommendations? I have already looked at ibiblio and searched the web in general...

Thanks in advance,

I am using this pet file (https://sourceforge.net/projects/dpup/f ... t/download) as spot and works fine on bionicpup64 and fossapup64.

Dissenter is based on Brave, but removes all of Braves own ads that they substitute instead of Google ads (and other things).

I downloaded the Linux .deb file from https://dissenter.com/download and then right clicked and converted that to a Fatdog package format, and then right clicked that and installed it.

I launch it with

dissenter-browser-stable --no-sandbox --test-type

I realize that Puppians like to run applications as Root. But even Barry K at an earlier time when you were less likely to get 'bush-wacked' while wandering on the internet created the Spot mechanism. With a little tweaking dissenter will likely run as Spot (or FatDog's eqivalent) thus allowing you to preserve the protection of Sandboxing.

mikeslr wrote: ↑Wed Feb 24, 2021 2:46 pm

I realize that Puppians like to run applications as Root. But even Barry K at an earlier time when you were less likely to get 'bush-wacked' while wandering on the internet created the Spot mechanism. With a little tweaking dissenter will likely run as Spot (or FatDog's eqivalent) thus allowing you to preserve the protection of Sandboxing.

I run as root within a Xephyr'd chroot with unshares and capabilities dropped. All of the setup for that is in two files (could be one script, but its tidier using two where one sources the other), so as Fatdog updates its usually trivial to migrate, but where the 'contained' desktop I use remains pre-configured/ready to go. jwm based in contrast to the main session being Openbox based - but just because I opted to configure it that way.

Severely limited root, but where real-root is just a ctrl-alt-d away. Most of what I use daily is available within that container (browser, Libre Office, mtpaint, vlc ...etc.).

Running as a regular user such as spot within a main session where root windows are also used/available and that shares the same X server ... is almost pointless as it can be trivial to elevate to root.

rufwoof: "I run as root within a Xephyr'd chroot with unshares and capabilities dropped."

Unfortunately, not everyone has the skill-set or the time/patience to set that up. Which doesn't justify ignoring the problem. As far as I know, EasyOS is only slightly less secure. Using it you can run Xenialpup64* in a container. Although that Xenialpup64's kernel has almost full capabilities --see following-- and a hacker could view all Xenialpup64's files, it may not be apparent that Xenialpup64 is not your entire system nor its files all your files. [EasyOS has one folder and a mechanism to use it to transfer files between it and the contained OS].

Alternatively, there is puli which is designed to sense hacking attempts and frustrate them.

FWIW, I followed my own suggestion and constructed a dissenter browser run as spot from /home. viewtopic.php?p=18334#p18334, Since it functions under Xenialpup64, I assume that it will also function from Xenialpup64 running in a container from EasyOS. [Well, actually, IIRC, OSes running in a container under EasyOS aren't able to SFS-Load: So you'll have to convert the SFS to a pet to use it. Again, relying on a sometimes flaky memory, IIRC the contained operating system does not include the capability of mounting other file-systems].

* EasyOS's repository only includes Xenialpup64, racy and dunfel. I don't know if/how those differ from the originals --but note above the absence of 'mount' capabilities; and if they do differ how BarryK prepared them.

mikeslr wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 2:18 pm

rufwoof: "I run as root within a Xephyr'd chroot with unshares and capabilities dropped."

Unfortunately, not everyone has the skill-set or the time/patience to set that up.

To run a containerized browser a user doesn't don't really need the skill, time or patients to do so because they can use someone eases script to start the containerized system. This works when the script is included with the components of the chrooted system (e.g. the base puppy sfs file). I've done this by including the sfs file and the script to start the containerized system in a cpio archive. This archive can be extracted anywhere (using uextract), and then the containerized system can be run. I've only tested this on fatdog-811 and I could have made smaller systems but I was experimenting with multi-chroot systems with hardlinks to save space.

Anyway, the systems that I've done this for are:
- Chrooted/contianerized Iron Browser (Slacko 571/5.7.2 as the guest). See post
- Chrooted/contianerized Ungoogled Chromium, thas has as the guest system Puli/Xenial64 with some libs upgraded based on WDLGO_UbuntuFocal64. See post.

Which doesn't justify ignoring the problem. As far as I know, EasyOS is only slightly less secure.

I don't know enough to comment here but my understanding is that EasyContainers are ment to be easier to set up. The system, I built based on ruffwoof's scripts are more customized towards a specific system.

Using it you can run Xenialpup64* in a container. Although that Xenialpup64's kernel has almost full capabilities --see following-- and a hacker could view all Xenialpup64's files, it may not be apparent that Xenialpup64 is not your entire system nor its files all your files. [EasyOS has one folder and a mechanism to use it to transfer files between it and the contained OS].

Transferring files isn't hard to/from containers. One can simply copy files to and from the chrooted system using the host OS.

Hello,

if anyone wanted to build a chrooted or containerized brave browser using Tahrpup64 as the guest, then @666philb, has some instructions (see post) on how we can do this in Tahrpup64. To see how to set up a script to run such a system, take a look at the two examples that I relased (linked in my previous post) for chooted/containerized iron and chrooted/containerized ungoogled chromium browser systems.

You've been warned. viewtopic.php?p=18576#p18576

A hundred years ago +/-, a well-respected Judge, then or later serving on the United States Supreme Court, wrote that a contract was a promise to do something or pay damages.. Money = power and signifies as worth. Justice Cardozo was speaking of remedies. But his words have been taken as an open invitation to play the game "Catch me if you can."
American Business culture places the pursuit of money ahead of both the performance of public good and the maintenance of honor.

fundog wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 7:49 pm

This thread is far above my skill level. Does anyone know where I could find a FD64-ready Brave, or have other recommendations? I have already looked at ibiblio and searched the web in general...

Thanks in advance,

I have a working copy here, also seems to work in bionicpup64, works well. Will put up for download here.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... gFjj5BGusu

@Gychang: Hello Gychang, thanks for the file. I did download it but it was a ".pet" and those do not work for FD64. There is a script to convert to a usable form but when I ran it the result would not install. I appreciate your interest.

@All: Of the other posts I thought that the "ungoogled-chromium" might be useful since the web sites that dont' like Seamonkey work okay with the Chrome updated from the FD sources. So, in view of the update cycles that surely will always come I wonder if "ungoogled-chromium" could be easier to keep updated? I did a little reading on GitHub and the present situation is such that it would be very difficult for my skill level.

@rufwoof: Thanks for pointing me to Dissenter! Downloaded, converted, installed and apparently runs well. More experience to come!

It's good to see the forum back, and since the traffic isn't heavy here I hope it's okay to mention why I came to post about Brave. My daily carry phone is a flip-phone. You know, the one where you press a key 1, 2, or 3 times to get each text letter entered? I was helping someone set up a new "Smartphone" and I thought to look for more secure apps. Now this thread has enlightened me about Brave but this was before and I did not know. At the time, I became interested about Brave for my FD64 machines and posted here.

So, could anyone suggest more secure Android browsers. Dissenter did not mention any Android version... only Win, Mac & Linux.
Thanks to all!

You could try the DuckDuckGo browser. And there is one called 'Privacy Browser'. Use both occasionally,but mainly Lightning. Got that via F-Droid.

Has anyone managed to install the latest, stable version of Brave browser from the official .deb file in FatDog without having to rely on a PET?

Brave browser appears to get excellent security ratings in 2022 in the media.

Neo_78 wrote: ↑Sun Jul 17, 2022 6:39 pm

Has anyone managed to install the latest, stable version of Brave browser from the official .deb file in FatDog without having to rely on a PET?

Brave browser appears to get excellent security ratings in 2022 in the media.

@mikewalsh has a recent portable versions here: https://mega.nz/folder/6LYmRTzK#mXaNPN4 ... r/KHhSWKJT. Just extract it to a location outside of your save file and then click on the MenuAdd script to add it to your menu.

m1k3 wrote: ↑Sun Jul 17, 2022 6:48 pm

Neo_78 wrote: ↑Sun Jul 17, 2022 6:39 pm

Has anyone managed to install the latest, stable version of Brave browser from the official .deb file in FatDog without having to rely on a PET?

Brave browser appears to get excellent security ratings in 2022 in the media.

@mikewalsh has a recent portable versions here: https://mega.nz/folder/6LYmRTzK#mXaNPN4 ... r/KHhSWKJT. Just extract it to a location outside of your save file and then click on the MenuAdd script to add it to your menu.

Well; maybe not the absolute newest, but close enough for most of us. The Brave devs seem to have coding diaorrhea when it comes to producing new builds of their browser; nightlies every day, 'dev' & 'beta' builds every other day.....it gets very hard to keep up with it, TBH!

I appreciate that some folks DO like to have the very newest build of their favourite browser all the time; me, I've never been that obsessive about keeping things that up to date.....no "must have the latest & greatest" for me, under the mistaken belief that newest is always best. Obviously, it's easiest to obtain the newest build straight from the browser's website, but the reason so many of our browsers get produced as either .pets, OR SFS packages, OR portables, is because invariably they need modifying to work with Puppy and its derivatives.

------------------------------------------------------

Chrome-portable got a custom updater mechanism because I have a soft spot for it; I've been using it ever since the beta test program in the late summer of 2008, after FF went tits-up as far as I was concerned. And Iron got one too, because a) it's the best direct Chrome replacement there is - or used to be, after Google dropped 32-bit builds of Chrome 6 years ago - and b), because it was an easy one to modify the updater script for.

------------------------------------------------------

I still maintain that portable builds work so well for the Puppy family because they enable use of the browser outside of the save-file/folder.....and caches balloon like crazy these days. And the reason I produce so many portable browsers is because the browser - whatever your preference happens to be - is the "glue" that holds our community together. Without browsers, we wouldn't really HAVE a community.....not in a form that many would recognise, anyway.

I shall probably be updating the Brave portable again within the next few days......though not until the UK has got this upcoming, boiling hot heatwave out of the way. At least not before the end of the week.

Mike.

mikewalsh wrote: ↑Sun Jul 17, 2022 9:25 pm

Without browsers, we wouldn't really HAVE a community.....not in a form that many would recognise, anyway.

I shall probably be updating the Brave portable again within the next few days......though not until the UK has got this upcoming, boiling hot heatwave out of the way. At least not before the end of the week.

You should check out tildeverse.org and sdf.org sometime. We all chat and interact using just the good ol' terminal.

Thanks for building and maintaining all of those portable apps! They're very handy. I'm also using your portable Audacity, DeaDBeeF, Planmaker, and Textmaker bundles. They work great on Fatdog64. I particularly like you that you have the browser launchers using spot.

gychang wrote: ↑Sun Mar 28, 2021 3:24 am

fundog wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 7:49 pm

This thread is far above my skill level. Does anyone know where I could find a FD64-ready Brave, or have other recommendations? I have already looked at ibiblio and searched the web in general...

Thanks in advance,

I have a working copy here, also seems to work in bionicpup64, works well. Will put up for download here.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... gFjj5BGusu

Shouldn't @mikewalsh's portable brave work? https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 0&start=10 I have it, and it runs as spot, but I haven't really been using it much. LibreWolf appimage does much better for my anti-bigtech tastes.

@geo_c :-

I've never used FatDog for any length of time. I have nothing for admiration for the guys who form the project "core" - including our very own @smokey01 - but I just can't get on with it. (And not for lack of trying, either.)

Regardless, the 'portables' should be fairly well distro-agnostic. I ran AntiX 16.1 a while back, and several of the portables, including browsers, ran sweetly on there. Didn't need much in the way of modification, either, since AntiX offers ROX as one of its built-in alternatives. I was right at home with it!

With a bit of tweaking, they ran OK on a recent build of Slax I was playing around with early last year, too. So I'm not surprised at least some of them should run in FatDog, given that it's much closer to Puppy in concept than these others.....

Mike.

With the number of security related bugs that gets fixed in ever stable release, I would recommend to always use the latest version of a particular browser.

I downloaded the nightly .deb file from Brave Github repository, extracted and converted it to SFS and was able to start it from cli with brave-browser-nightly. However, the created menu item for Brave browser did not work.

@mikewalsh Do you know where exactly the latest, stable .deb file of the Brave browser can be found in that repository? Their development team is pushing so many daily updates; it's difficult to find the stable releases.

What exactly is a "portable browser version" compared to the installation scripts for Firefox and Chrome in FatDog?

Does anyone know where these FatDog browser installation scripts from the control panel are located exactly in the file system? Maybe they could be used as the basis to add additional installation scripts for popular browsers like Brave and Vivaldi.

Neo_78 wrote: ↑Tue Jul 19, 2022 1:40 pm

With the number of security related bugs that gets fixed in every stable release, I would recommend to always use the latest version of a particular browser.

The latest stable version of a browser, yes. There's a good reason the "nightly" and "dev" builds, in particular, aren't yet AT "stable" status. Because, putting it simply, they're NOT.

Not much point having a bunch of swoosh new features if the software in question crashes several times an hour.....

Mike.

Here's direct link to the current "stable" brave-browser .deb
https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.br ... _amd64.deb
To find latest stable here https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases (in the future it will be changed to higher than 1.41) you need to scroll down and probably <next> <next> etc... (skip the nightly builds) to find the "Release" version.
Perhaps there's easier way that I don't know of.

EDIT: more simple way to find out what's the latest version (and download), go here and note the latest version
https://brave.com/latest/
Now it's 1.41.96, so to download latest .deb change <version> to the actual version
wget https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/pool/main/b/brave-browser/brave-browser_<version>_amd64.deb

EDIT2:
Or go here or change to actual version, currently v1.41.96: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/ ... g/v1.41.96
The .zip there may be the most suitable for FatDog or/and for to create a portable setup. https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/ ... -amd64.zip
e.g. go into the extracted directory and run (as root) : ./brave-browser --no-sandbox or to run as spot: run-as-spot ./brave-browser

@fredx181 :-

Thanks for the research, Fred.

The biggest problem with the Github repository, I find, is that "nightlies", dev builds, beta builds & stable builds are all jumbled up together. The last to be uploaded is at the top of the list.....absolutely no attempt has been made to organise them in any way.

The other niggle is that not ALL stable releases come in Linux builds. Too often I've found them only as either Android .apk, Windows .exe OR source code. Sometimes as Mac .dmg builds, sometimes as .debs or .rpms. Very rarely can you find it as a zipped Linux package, 'cos for MY purposes that's ideal!

Mike.

To add to my previous post, scripts to download Brave latest stable release:

- download .deb package:

#!/bin/bash
# download stable brave-browser .deb
BRAVE_VER="$(wget -q -O - https://brave.com/latest/ | grep -o -m1 "<strong>v.*" | cut -d "v" -f 2 | cut -d "<" -f 1)"

wget --no-check-certificate "https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/pool/main/b/brave-browser/brave-browser_${BRAVE_VER}_amd64.deb"

- download .zip

#!/bin/bash
# download stable brave-browser .zip from github
BRAVE_VER="$(wget -q -O - https://brave.com/latest/ | grep -o -m1 "<strong>v.*" | cut -d "v" -f 2 | cut -d "<" -f 1)"

wget --no-check-certificate "https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/download/v${BRAVE_VER}/brave-browser-${BRAVE_VER}-linux-amd64.zip"

Hi Mike, just see your post now.

The other niggle is that not ALL stable releases come in Linux builds. Too often I've found them only as either Android .apk, Windows .exe OR source code. Sometimes as Mac .dmg builds, sometimes as .debs or .rpms. Very rarely can you find it as a zipped Linux package, 'cos for MY purposes that's ideal!

Ok, that's a problem that it's without linux version, ok well my scripts above may not work always then.

fredx181 wrote: ↑Tue Jul 19, 2022 5:55 pm

Hi Mike, just see your post now.

The other niggle is that not ALL stable releases come in Linux builds. Too often I've found them only as either Android .apk, Windows .exe OR source code. Sometimes as Mac .dmg builds, sometimes as .debs or .rpms. Very rarely can you find it as a zipped Linux package, 'cos for MY purposes that's ideal!

Ok, that's a problem that it's without linux version, ok well my scripts above may not work always then.

Oh, you can't fault the team for output, mate. But that repo is one unholy mess. A wee bit of organising wouldn't come amiss...!

Mike.

Neo_78 wrote: ↑Tue Jul 19, 2022 1:40 pm

Does anyone know where these FatDog browser installation scripts from the control panel are located exactly in the file system?

1. Each control panel item is referenced in /etc/control-panel-applets <- open this file in your text editor; don't change anything, just take note of the specific item names you are interested in.

2. For each item name you took note of, open /usr/share/applications/TheItemNameYouTookNoteOf.desktop (replace TheItemNameYouTookNoteOf with an actual item name)

3. Search for the line that starts with Exec= and find the path of the update script right after the = sign.

Canned answer for Fatdog64 Control Panel > Third Party Software Installers > Get Google Chrome : /usr/sbin/get-google-chrome.sh

(I got this answer by following steps 1,2,3 above).