Hello,
I've been using an old Dell laptop (CPxJ, PIII, 650MHz, 512MB RAM) in my basement as an audio streamer. I can stream some radio stations using VLC, but others have Web only interfaces that require Flash.
Until recently, I've been letting both Firefox and Flash update willy-nilly. Firefox 11.0 bogging down prompted me to return to this forum for a look see. After a clean install of 5.2.8.004 (probably not necessary), a bit of digging, and a some experimentation, I can run Firefox 11.0 without any infuriating page loading delays. (After I reinstalled 5.2.8.004, I installed Firefox 7.0 from the package manager and then let Firefox update to 11.0.)
I replaced the binary executable /usr/bin/firefox/firefox with an executable script file of the same name. It seemed the easiest fix, minimizing the chances of breaking other programs. The script file contains:
Code: Select all
#!/bin/sh
cd /usr/lib/firefox
/usr/lib/firefox/run-mozilla.sh /usr/lib/firefox-bin "$@"
It's overkill, but it works. I may have to replace /usr/bin/firefox/firefox after every Firefox update, but that's easy enough.
The problem I had with Flash 11.2.202.228 occurred first with Firefox 7.0 and then with Firefox 11.0. Some flash elements would run and others would not, (at least they failed to run as quickly as I expected them to). After I convinced myself that the affected Web pages were loading properly, I replaced /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so with the latest version of Flash 10.3 and all flash elements worked. I guess Flash 11.2.202.228 makes too many demands on my aging laptop.
The trick was finding a 10.3 version of libflashplayer.so. I didn't have one backed up anywhere, so I wound up on Adobe's "Archived Flash Player Versions" page <
http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/ ... sions.html> downloading a fat (67.3 MB) zip file fp_10.3.183.18_archive.zip <
http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/fl ... rchive.zip>. It contains flash players & debuggers for Windows, Mac and Linux, so you'll have to dig a bit to find flashplayer10_3r183_18_linux.tar.gz, which contains libflashplayer.so.
Old hardware has its limits. Even when running Puppy Linux. Good luck keeping yours online!