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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?
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?
Last edited by san; 07-16-2012 at 05:19 AM.
Reason: added btw
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?
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:
Code:
Thu Jun 14 05:02:39 UTC 2012
####################################################################
# NOTICE OF INPENDING EOL (END OF LIFE) FOR OLD SLACKWARE VERSIONS #
# #
# Effective August 1, 2012, security patches will no longer be #
# provided for the following versions of Slackware (which will all #
# be more than 5 years old at that time): #
# Slackware 8.1, 9.0, 9.1, 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 11.0, 12.0. #
# If you are still running these versions you should consider #
# migrating to a newer version (preferably as recent as possible). #
# Alternately, you may make arrangements to handle your own #
# security patches. If for some reason you are unable to upgrade #
# or handle your own security patches, limited security support #
# may be available for a fee. Inquire at security@slackware.com. #
####################################################################
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.
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.
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.
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