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In short: Mosaic is fairly easy to build on Ubuntu using standard tools, and all the necessary libraries are available through Synaptics Package Manager.

Aside for being a bit of fun, I reckon there's a good reason to play with it. Santayana said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". Well, ok, but not everything about the past is negative. There's a corollary with something more positive than 'condemmed'. We can look to the past for things which worked well, and use what we find to inform decisions about the future.

NCSA Mosaic is often cited as a reason the Web went viral. So I thought I'd have another look. I'm pretty sure trying to download DSP utilities using Mosaic at Sheffield Poly was my first exposure to the Web (also memorable because it gave Caroline her first migraine). It was a few years before I encountered the Web again, and I think by then Netscape Navigator had come along.

Anyhow, the source for Mosaic is available from github, so I gave it a shot. Presumably I had most of the necessary dev tools and libs installed from previous forays into building, if I remember correctly things like make and gcc become available when you install package build-essentials (it's in Synaptics). So after downloading and unzipping Mosaic source, I cd'd into the dir and tried:

make linux

This didn't get far. There are quite a few dependencies, notably Motif. When the compiler gave up it said what was missing. Googling I found a systematic way of finding missing bits, by installing apt-file and doing things like:

$ apt-file search X11/extensions/Print.h
x11proto-print-dev: usr/include/X11/extensions/Print.h

which says X11/extensions/Print.h is in the x11proto-print-dev package. But not knowing ahead of time whether things were available through apt, I googled the filenames instead...

The libs I had to install were:

libmotif-dev
libmotif3
x11proto-print-dev
libxmu-dev
libpng12-dev
libjpeg8-dev
libxpm-dev

Chances are a clean system will need other libs.
After installing the above, the build then gave up with:

gui-dialogs.o: In function `mo_edit_source':
/home/danny/mosaic-src/src/gui-dialogs.c:2751: warning: the use of `tmpnam' is dangerous, better use `mkstemp'

With gcc, using -w gets rid of warnings, so I tried make -w linux. It ran without errors and said "Welcome to Mosaic", but at first I couldn't see the compiled app, so I tried make linux again, which ran without stopping this time. I'm not sure the -w was actually necessary.

To run:

cd src
./Mosaic

[apologies for using italics a lot - this WYSIWYG HTML editor is buggy with code etc]