Some thoughts about this subforum and two browsers for Puppy 4.x (Dillo 3.1.1 and links 2.29)

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tommy
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Some thoughts about this subforum and two browsers for Puppy 4.x (Dillo 3.1.1 and links 2.29)

Post by tommy »

I'm quite amazed seeing that this subforum dedicated to very old computer hardware was recently created. Puppy has moved towards the future, I thought that talking about new Puppies able to run in old 'junk' PCs was a matter of the past.

Yet, I'm not surprised that after little time, this subforum counts more posts than the 'Legacy' subforum section that exists from the beginning of the 'post-Murga-forum-era'. I think this is due to the fact that Puppy began his story building a reputation of being a 'low resources operating system' that still today has. The interest that many forum users show in this subforum means that there is still today a need: the need for software able to run in very, very old hardware. The reasons could be different. I can think of people who can't afford to buy new computers; people who don't want to contribute to electric waste pollution; people interested in 'retrocomputing' etc.

That said, I see that this subforum topics show two ways to achieve a similar target:
the way of creating new and modern Puppy releases for old hardware;
the way of uploading software for very old Puppy releases who where known to run well in old hardware.

Both ways are valid and I'd really like to contribute to the former way, but I know nothing of creating a new Puppy release. That's why I will try to contribute with the easier latter way.

Now, whoever, like me, owns a tad of PCs builded from 1997 to 2005 knows that the most versatile Puppy has proved to be the 4th version, and its derivative ultra-light puplets
Turbopup extreme" made by synth
and the 'gtk1.2' Pulp003 by zenfunk. I've run Pulp on a 24MB Ram Pentium 133MHz PC and no swapfile!!!

So here are three .pets to let Puppy 4.2 to be able to browse the modern SSL/TLS web

Dillo 3.1.1 :
https://sabercathost.com/iuYO/dillo-3.1.1-i686.pet

openssl 1.1.1w :
https://sabercathost.com/eiPK/openssl-1.1.1w-i486.pet

links 2.29 with graphics enabled (just run 'links -g' in a terminal console) :
https://sabercathost.com/iuYS/links-2.29-i486.pet

I have compiled them in Turbopup using stock puppy 4.2 devx, adding fltk 1.3.8 to compile dillo 3.1.1 and adding Perl 5.10 to be able to compile openssl-1.1.1w .

Updated certificate authorities .pet is here:
https://sabercathost.com/eiNQ/ca-certificates.pet
please open a console and run

Code: Select all

update-ca-certificates

after installation.

A side note about the reason why I chose not to compile Palemoon or Firefox or Seamonkey:

1) It's a PITA to compile modern browsers needing recent glibc and make them capable to run in Puppies who have older glibc; old-forum user watchdog could do this time-consuming task, but I'm not so skilled like him;

2) I find that old SSE-capable CPUs (from Pentium III 450MHZ to Pentium IV 2GHz) struggle a lot to render pages using modern 'full-featured' browsers. Loading a single HTML5.0 + javascript page on a sub-gigahertz CPU can take so much time that you'll hate surfing the WEB. With links and Dillo browsing the WEB is a lovely and fast experience even using the oldest Pentium PC I have !

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wizard
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Re: Some thoughts about this subforum and two browsers for Puppy 4.x (Dillo 3.1.1 and links 2.29)

Post by wizard »

@tommy

Spent a lot of time using Puppy 4.1.2 and even set up a Pentium 2 laptop file server using it;.

I find that old SSE-capable CPUs (from Pentium III 450MHZ to Pentium IV 2GHz) struggle a lot to render pages using modern 'full-featured' browsers

Exactly correct, those computers can still be useful (have several of them), but many internet task are now beyond their capability.

Thanks
wizard

Big pile of OLD computers

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mikewalsh
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Re: Some thoughts about this subforum and two browsers for Puppy 4.x (Dillo 3.1.1 and links 2.29)

Post by mikewalsh »

@tommy :-

You might be interested in this one, from @darry19662018 :-

Puppy 4.3.11 "The Phoenix" (with glibc 2.19 upgrade)

We had a LOT of fun playing around with this one! Read the thread through; this was responsible for the development of a few concepts I use regularly these days....

Mike. ;)

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wiak
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Re: Some thoughts about this subforum and two browsers for Puppy 4.x (Dillo 3.1.1 and links 2.29)

Post by wiak »

Even for releases not intended for low-powered machines I think the likes of links is a useful default small but capable browser app. For one thing, it is good to keep distro downloads as small as practical, but since the use of zstd compressed sfs addons for increased responsiveness, downloads can be 10 to 20 percent larger so leaving a large browser out at that stage is an appropriate strategy. It is also the case that some prefer firefox based browsers yet others want chrome or chromium varieties so best that users install their preferred browser choice later.

https://www.tinylinux.info/
DOWNLOAD wd_multi for hundreds of 'distros' at your fingertips: viewtopic.php?p=99154#p99154
Αξίζει να μεταφραστεί;

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