Web browser refuses to go to wikipedia.org
 

Hi:
I have just installed Slack 9.1 in an old machine. I'm running xfce 3.99.4. When I invoke the webrowser (Mozilla 1.4), I can visit any site, save wikipedia.org. If I do, the browser exists immediately, with no error notification. Also, doing Alt-F6, the console where I started startx, I see no error messages. Why only wikipedia.org?

I'd install Slackware 13.37 with a light WM and visit wikipedia.org again with a browser that's less than eight years old.

We are speaking here of a machine with Pentium Celeron at 600 MHz and 64MB RAM. Do you not think Slack 13 is a bit large for that machine?

cpu is not such an issue with linux, but ram is important. 64 is probably not enough.
i have been running 13.1 with luks-encryption on a 500mhz/256mb ram laptop. i was still able to work on it in a reasonable manner (fluxbox).
i would advise you to go to your nearby second-hand computer store and get 512mb of sdram -- i'm sure it will be rather cheap. unless you intend to run kde, you should be positively surprised about the performance.

by the way: does wikipedia work with lynx?

lynx - it does.
links -g it makes you wonder why yor are using any other browser :)

links wikipedia.org, in the text console, works well. I could update Seamonkey. But would it be enough to uninstall the old seamonkey and compile an install the new one, or should I reinstall other packages too?

the old mozilla and the current seamonkey are VERY ram intencive

firefox might be a bit of a better option

but 64 meg ram , is very low

To be honest, it's 256MB RAM. I wanted to give an idea of why I'm using old software. That is, because the hardware is old. Now, RAM intensive ... do you think that is the cause of the very odd interaction with wikipedia?

I would recommend to try to upgrade the RAM. Using such old Slackware versions is not longer an option in the near future.
From the Slackware 12.0 changelog:

Slackware <= 12.0 is gone. Long life to Slackware!

I think this resolves my doubts about security maintenance of old versions.

By the way, I have managed to run modern Linux distributions with less than 200 Mb of RAM. If you dare, you can give a new version a try.

you could try running firefox from an xterm, maybe "mozilla --help" will offer any "verbose" (or similar) option. it might be a bug fixed in v.1.5:)

seriously, if you have 256mb, try a newer version. if you don't want 13.37, then at least try something that is still updated.

As far as I can remember, it crashes because of some Javascript which is loaded on Wikipedia. You'd better disable Javascript on such an older browser, anyway.

I think a better approach would be to install a newer version of Slackware with a lightweight web browser, such as Opera, for example.

I have a couple of old NEC Powermate sandboxes in my office, both similarly equipped with first generation P-IV 1.4 GHz processors, 512 MB RAM and 40 GB hard disks. These machines were new in 2002, ten years ago. IMHO, it makes no sense to keep any older hardware. And yes, I know many of you guys are probably still running Slackware 1.0 on an 8080 processor board with hex keyboard (I had one of those) or an abacus (I had one of those too, brought from Russia), but hey, YMMV. Only thing I did to these machines was adding NVidia GeForce 6200 video cards, to replace the crappy cards that they were shipped with.

Slackware 13.37 with Robby Workman's XFCE 4.8 and a small collection of GTK applications runs quite nice on these old boxes.

I've been trying to get Slackware-current running on a Babbage Difference Engine, but it's got me beat.

A Babbage Difference Engine???
that would be "INTERESTING"

but on a old P4 box
add ram
but IT IS VERY EXPENSIVE , unlike the current ram for new computers the OLD cards from 2000 - 2005 are NOT Cheep

but i had CentOS 5 running very nicely on a p4 with 512 Meg ram
and right now i am posting on a 10/11 year old P4 with 1 gig ram and SL6.2 installed

ScientificLinux /CentOS /RHEL 5.8 will run nice with 512 meg