2 distros have major failures on old system (presumed hardware issue)
 

Hi all,

I'm posting this here because it seems obvious this is a hardware issue of some kind.

The system:

AMD Athlon XP @1.2 GHz (I think it's a model 2000 or 2000+)
1 Gb ram

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It previously had Windows XP on it, and it ran fine up through 2013 when we got a new system.

I first tired Lubuntu 16.04 Alternate. The install and upgrades went fine.

However, Firefox always crashes after anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes of light use and on basic web pages like google and Ubuntu wiki. It can stay open longer sometimes if I just let it sit there and don't use it, but that is unpredictable.

I then tried Chromium. But it won't even fully load. It crashes when it gets to around 40Mb or so.

I then downloaded Midori and Qupzilla, but both of those exhibit the same problem as FF.

I decided at that point that it must be a distro issue with the old hardware, so I installed Peppermint. So far, both FF and Chromium and having the exact same issue.

Peppermint has an additional problem. The pkg manager works, but the software manager does not. It refuses to load up. I have not used either distro beyond the browsers and managers, so there could be other issues (I'm planning to give this box away once I get a successful install)

Peppermint seems to be Ubuntu based so maybe that wasn't a good 2nd test. I plan to try Puppy and 1 or 2 others today.

Someone suggested that it could be a memory module issue, so I've been running memtest for 16 hours now but there are no errors.

Does have any ideas on this? Have you heard of this type of problem before? Any help is appreciated.

The only post I've come across so far was from about 8 months ago where someone said that FF was crashing because his old athlon xp cpu did not have SSE2 support.

I just looked up the Athlon XPs on wikipedia and it seems that virtually none of them have SSE2 support.

Firefox requires SSE2

You're going to have to run a different browser, probably one based on an older core, or a completely different core. I'd try dillo, it's one of the most lightweight I'm aware of that still is functional. According to that site, ESR should still work for now at least if it has access to install the ESR instead.

I don't think you have SSE2: check with
cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep sse2

If you don't, you need a distro that supports Pentium 3, like AntiX, Salix, or Vector. That will choose an older browser, or one that doesn't need SSE2. Try a live disk and see what happen before you install, of course.

Thanks for the help. I'll give that browser a try, as well as seeing if I can get the older versions of other browsers, although those won't have the security updates.

I checked wikipedia earlier for my cpu, and my cpu definitely does not support SSE2. Out of the many different lines of Athlon XP, there was only one line of late model mobile cpu's that supported it. So that is definitely the problem.

I will check out the distros you suggest and hunt around for some others too. Sounds like that's the best way to go, as I have no idea what other aspects of the system would be affected by running an incompatible distro.

If you can get the ESR, that will still have security updates. ESR = Extended Service Release.

Debian installs with Firefox-ESR out-of-box. So, maybe give Debian a try next. When you get to the software selection menu, choose the XFCE4 desktop environment. Or choose LXDE if you prefer that.

A quick check shows that both Debian Stable (not Testing) and AntiX use Firefox 52, which is the last version not to require SSE2.