heywood on 17/6/2024 at 16:54
I'm glad it turned out to be a straightforward problem of finding a more up-to-date Chromium build. Which software center do you use? The Ubuntu Software Center is obsolete and presumably isn't getting maintained. I thought Ubuntu uses their own branded version of GNOME Software now. If whichever is supposed to be the current package manager doesn't link to a non-broken version of Chromium, that's worth submitting a bug report I think.
I'm sad to hear that Linux i386 is becoming obsolete. After all, Linux was developed on 32-bit platforms, and popularized by students running i386 distros installed from CD-ROMs on commodity desktop PCs. A staggering amount of 32-bit computing hardware was produced during the 1990s and 2000s and it seemed like Linux was ported to all of it. Linux was a lifeline for these old systems.
voodoo47 on 17/6/2024 at 18:46
yes, we can now safely say that if you have a 32bit only machine you don't plan to retire for whatever reason, and want to run an up to date operating system and browser, you will be struggling a lot.
also note that the last Chromium build for 32bit Xubuntu actually already is more than one year old, so while it works ok now, it is bound to stop displaying the web properly at some point - so I've just pushed the inevitable away for a couple of years here (but then again, that is exactly what I wanted to do). then it's Debian (assuming it still will have a 32bit build at that time). then.. oblivion.
all turns to dust eventually.
heywood on 19/6/2024 at 11:06
Browsing the web is far more CPU and network intensive than it used to be, especially due to all the video ads. Back in the early days of the web, with nearly everybody connecting via modem, connection throughput was a precious commodity to be optimized for. Now I think web developers just assume the client is an up-to-date browser on a broadband connection. Full stack developers have fully taken advantage of Moore's law. So now we have all these old computers that are still capable of doing everything they used to do EXCEPT browse the web.
MegaBrutal on 12/7/2024 at 23:14
As I was reading this thread, it looked like you'll need to build Chromium from source; but it's great you found binaries for your distro. But you may still need to do this to obtain newer versions, if containerized solutions (e.g. snap, flatpak) don't work. In that case, however, you'd probably be better off with Debian. But eventually Chromium itself would drop 32 bit support, if hadn't already. Is there any reason why you're sticking to Chromium and can't consider other browsers? As I see, Firefox also has GPU acceleration (getting it work is another story - now that I checked it's not even enabled for me).
voodoo47 on 13/7/2024 at 17:36
the task here was not to find the best solution (or the most sensible solution, which actually is just don't bother, you can get a 64bit equivalent of that machine for the cost of 3 large pizzas, but that's not how I do things), it was to see whether the proposed solution is workable. it is, so no further investigation necessary - for now.
also, fun fact - it seems like there really isn't any way of making this solution future proof (meaning, installable fully offline) - there are a few bits that need to be downloaded from the repos no matter what so once they turn those off, this will no longer work, whatever isn't part of the last iso image will be lost forever. the only fix is to do the full install now, let everything update, and then clone the drive to make a backup should you want to "reinstall" sometime in the future.
call me dumb, but this is just dumb - if I can download all the winxp updates from wherever and run them locally to get a fully updated legacy system, why shouldn't I be able to do the same thing with linux?
MegaBrutal on 13/7/2024 at 21:29
Quote Posted by voodoo47
call me dumb, but this is just dumb - if I can download all the winxp updates from wherever and run them locally to get a fully updated legacy system, why shouldn't I be able to do the same thing with linux?
You can. The repos of older releases are being archived at (
https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/). You only need to update your APT sources (/etc/apt/sources.list) to point to the archive repo.
voodoo47 on 13/7/2024 at 22:07
ok, that is slightly more reasonable. still doesn't beat a zipped update you can just download and install whenever and wherever though.
also one would think asking this question on the ubuntu forums would yield a proper (this) answer, but guess not.
MegaBrutal on 13/7/2024 at 22:45
Quote Posted by voodoo47
ok, that is slightly more reasonable. still doesn't beat a zipped update you can just download and install whenever and wherever though.
You can also clone the repo and store it however you wish, but that's huge. While with Windows XP you get the core operating system with a few basic official software like and image viewer and media player; Ubuntu hosts a plethora of divergent software with multitude of alternatives ready to be installed from the repo anytime. So you typically don't just „ZIP up Ubuntu” – while you could technically do that, it would be highly ineffective to store that much data when you only use a very small subset of it. On the other hand, if you want to achieve something similar by just archiving the software you actually need, you can set up an (
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Apt-Cacher%20NG) apt-cacher-ng, manually download all the software through it to force it to build up the cache, then archive the cache itself. You can also build your customized ISO with all updated packages if you wish. But to be honest, I don't really see much use case, as Ubuntu repos disappearing from Earth with no one having a single operational mirror is not something I would expect in my lifetime, or the lifetime of human civilization. Because there aren't just the official Ubuntu repos: lots of people are hosting mirrors of this stuff. True there are much less mirrors for old releases than for the currently supported ones, but still there are. In case Ubuntu would cease to exist (which is unlikely enough already), I'm pretty sure many people committed to software preservation would step in, as many old obscure distros can be downloaded still, and Ubuntu will always be considered as a major one in Linux history.
Quote Posted by voodoo47
also one would think asking this question on the ubuntu forums would yield a proper (this) answer, but guess not.
You mean you did ask there and didn't get a proper answer? :wot:
voodoo47 on 14/7/2024 at 08:53
ok, that makes much more sense - thanks for all the info. I doubt I will actually try to go any further with this, but it's good to know the options are there in case I change my mind - would probably be fairly easy to put together the "final" iso, getting the os up to date is some extra 500MB and integrating that last chromium build into it wouldn't change that too much, most likely.
yeah, "go get Debian" was the most comprehensive and useful answer I got. iirc they weren't really helpful in the past either, mostly telling me I just shouldn't want to do whatever I was trying to do, or do something else that technically could solve the issue but wasn't really what I needed.
