"a graphical install with 384 MB of RAM" <-- that should be more or less possible, as far as "graphical install" means x11 plus a window manager, and not a DE and DBUS and systemd.

tomman: what radeon drivers were nuked?

(I'm currently on nv, hence the Ge)

tomman: re "plug a retrobox to the Internet" funny, wasn't it Mikko Hyppönen who once said that the risk of an old windows system being plugged wasn't *that* high?

1119|16:49:51 < Guilt> Windows has better compatibility story now <-- depends where you look, there's vendor lock in and planned obsolescence, but there's also work going into keeping it backwards-compatible. Now if the .NET framework didn't exist...

tomman: (and Guilt if you read the log): how do the BSDs compare in hardware support, and specifically GPUs? and old hardware, have you two played with that?

njsg: R100/R200 are gone from mainstream Mesa

they got punted to a separate branch, mesa-amber, but they were broken since before that

(also dumped there got i915/i965 and some Nouveau stuff too)

R100/R200 last worked OK-ish on Mesa 20.3 - starting with Mesa 21, you're getting this instead: media.tsdx.net.ve/borked_gears.png

(that's from the Mobility 7500 on my T40)

and no, I have zero interest on the *BSD ecosystem

that's gonna be wonderful! I'm still not happy about xorg not fully supporting the video modes in my old laptop

1280x1024 with xfree86, 1024x768 with xorg. I'm sure there was something I forgot to toggle but I ended up not trying to fix it, I think I was mostly using the framebuffer console by then

i915/i965 got replaced by some thing called Crocus, and most people haven't noticed breakages so far (but some have reported loss of performance)

Oh, and GNOME remembers that GTK5 will be Wayland EXCLUSIVE on Linux

time to retire the "Linux gives a new lease in life to old hardware" phrase, these days it's far from accurate, it's not even valid anymore

Ironically it's only GPU drivers and GUI toolkits the ones that hate old computers these days

everything else (except for the usual kernel bloat) is actually fine

except for floppy drives, possibly

I never continued debugging that, but last I tested I had trouble using a floppy drive on newer linux

knoppix with an older kernel could use the drive, newer kernel couldn't. FreeDOS could.

I can't recall if I read earlier this year about a regression on the floppy driver in kernel...

this, having happened, was introduced several years ago, I think trouble existed in version 4, and that version 3 worked? Or an early version 4? I'd need to check my notes to be precise :-\

I should check the drive on my Thinkcentre M50, as it is the only thing in this house running 1) modern Linux kernels, and 2) a vintage style FDD

tomman: so apparently Knoppix did *not* work, I misremembered that part. news://news.blueworldhosting.com/p7n0pq$coc$1%40news.datemas.de

Well the ATI r300 9xxx from the T42 area is quite ok. Should not be dropped. Same for the i965 which is in the T61 and even usable in Windows 10 as long as you don't do "complex" media playback.

R300 is aging badly too on Mesa - the X1400 Mobility (R500) on my Inspiron 6400 sometimes locks up, and if you enable desktop compositing, kiss performance goodbye

Actually that generation never had Linux drivers we could call "genuinely good": fglrx gave you top performance... and top crashes

while Mesa/radeon FOSS gives you more stability, but less performance and missing features (except curiously for MPEG-2 hardware decoding, something we never had on fglrx!)

tomman This one is together with the X1300 in the T60. Decent laptop but chipset only capable of addressing 3 GB so not much usable nowadays.

clicking on an (audio track) timeline causes playback to (advance) & pause, rather then advance & play ?

thinking that is a different behavior ?

maybe it is a more "sometimes" behavior? maybe caching is playing in? odd. 2.53.19

therube I know I took some stuff for this but there are probably still issues with some media files/sites. Will update further when I find the time.

What we've all known for years:

Former Mozilla exec: Google has sabotaged Firefox for years

I have a i9x5 on my laptop, but I have to check which. was it x=4?

i915 was garbage. i945 not much better.

(yes, it is likely i945)