BSDCon photos

[Rahul Siddharthan]

Mark Valentine wrote:
> I once had Mozilla running but it was just too darned sluggish to be useful
> (this computer may be a few years old, but I still think that any software
> which doesn't run well on a well-spec'd 600MHz Pentium III system is just
> not worth my time!).

I used Mozilla (the full blown version) on a 400 MHz Pentium II, as well
as an 800 MHz Celeron, for a long time.  I found it quite acceptable in
performance and excellent in stability and page-rendering quality.  I've
now switched to Mozilla Firebird, which I'm totally happy with.

> I recently managed to build Mozilla Firebird (which appears my best
> hope at the moment, though I don't hold out too much hope for
> interactive performance), but it just bombed out with a run-time link
> error which I haven't yet resolved (I clearly don't have the
> dependencies built quite right - these things shouldn't be so _hard_
> and _time consuming_ for someone who's been building and using free
> software heavily for two decades!).

Unfortunately I don't have a FreeBSD system right now to experiment
with, but 4 months ago I have used mozilla-firebird on 5-CURRENT and
earlier on 4-STABLE, with absolutely no problems, via the ports...
Definitely building it on a slow machine is a pain though.   One option
is the linux binary (which also gives you access to more plugins) but
some libraries in the linux-base port may need to be upgraded, I seemed
to remember it didn't like the default version of glibc or something.

> I dunno, maybe I'm just getting old, but I still rely heavily on the
> lightning fast virtual desktop switching of olvwm, the familiar
> Mail-meets-vi feel of mush for mail and the incomparable efficiency of
> trn.  All of these are missing modern features, but I'll live without
> these features if having them means foregoing the excellent
> implementations of core functionality I'm used to depending on minute
> by minute, day by day.

If you like all that, you may like links (in the ports) -- it has
graphical as well as text-only modes, and even does some javascript I
think

Rahul