I see in the myth 0.13 how-to that you can't install mythbrowser, but why? Can you not compile its dependencies from source? I realize myth is running in fvwm but can't we stiill use the kde libraries?

sure you could they are just not installed by default.

compiling from source is easy enough but not as easy as using apt... how come the apt-get fails?

it shouldn't fail. I think some of the repositories in the sources list have moved, but you should still be able to use it. If I'm not mistaken minion.de is in there and his repositories have moved, and maybe others there are like 30 sources in the sources.list, but anything it can't contact it will just ignore.