Tor browser won’t start

On CRUX 3.7, the Tor browser (version 12.5 at the moment) fails to start. It is not available as a port, so I just downloaded the Linux tarball from the official website, extracted it, and tried to run the program. Nothing. Therefore, I decided to find out what’s wrong and search for a fix.

I am not making a port, instead I put the program’s folder in /opt. Inside /opt/tor-browser/Browser/, there’s a binary called firefox.real. Starting it from the terminal returns the following:

XPCOMGlueLoad error for file /opt/tor-browser/Browser/libxul.so:
/opt/tor-browser/Browser/libxul.so: undefined symbol: gdk_wayland_display_get_wl_compositor
Couldn't load XPCOM.

So, I searched for the error and found a discussion about it in the Gentoo forum, which pointed me to this workaround at the project’s web-site.

Following the instructions, I created a file called shim.c, with these contents:

#include <stdlib.h>
void gdk_wayland_display_get_wl_compositor() { abort(); }
void gdk_wayland_device_get_wl_pointer() { abort(); }
void gdk_wayland_window_get_wl_surface() { abort(); }
void gdk_wayland_display_get_wl_display() { abort(); }

Then I built a shared object out of it:

cc -shared -o shim.so shim.c

This produces a shim.so library file, which I placed within the /opt/tor-browser/Browser/ folder. However, it needs to be pre-loaded upon Tor browser start from the start-tor-browser.desktop file. The problem is that this desktop file gets overwritten each time it’s started, which will reset the changes. I made a custom tor-browser.desktop file, containing:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Tor Browser
GenericName=Web Browser
Comment=Tor Browser  is +1 for privacy and −1 for mass surveillance
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;Security;
Exec=env LD_PRELOAD=/opt/tor-browser/Browser/shim.so sh -c '"/opt/tor-browser/Browser/start-tor-browser" --detach || ([ !  -x "/opt/tor-browser/Browser/start-tor-browser" ] && /opt/tor-browser/Browser/start-tor-browser --detach)' dummy %k
X-TorBrowser-ExecShell=/opt/tor-browser/Browser/start-tor-browser --detach
Icon=/opt/tor-browser/Browser/browser/chrome/icons/default/default128.png
StartupWMClass=Tor Browser

Paths are adjusted to point to /opt. I place it in ~/.local/share/applications, so it appears in my menu. So far, things work.

For the record, I am not paranoid about surveillance, I just like to have the Tor Browser around.