Hi,
commenting to this topic. I was able to first fix and then upgrade my faitfhul Ultra 2 (*). Equipped now with 2x 396 MHz processors and 1GB of RAM, running NetBSD 9 I could for the first time "dare" to install firefox 52 esr, with all the patches done for it by Martin. I am quite impressed: it has no immediately apparent Endianness issues and is capable of browsing without crashing, even performance is acceptable, although of course JS itself is slow. I cannot fully assert speed, since current versions of Xorg are quite slow on the Creator card, as if it running without even 2D acceleration (moving and scrolling is bad, but even with xterm). Images, fonts, interface all display fine. The only broken thing are image operations, but this is a long-standing issue that affects also ArcticFox. So all-in-all that FF version is more modern than AF39 and has no more issue (compared to non-patched official releases).
I did not find any rust-basef FFs in NetBSD packages, so I couldn't compare.
Riccardo
Hello Riccardo,
yes the FF52 on NetBSD/pkgsrc/sparc64 runs very well... also you can install or compile a slightly older seamonkey..2.49 if i remember correctly. Then again there is no libreoffice on NetBSD/sparc64 and also some other stuff is missing that is available on debian.
qt stuff has broken dependencies on debian and also some stuff is missing that is present in pkgsrc, which is why i use pkgsrc also on debian to complete the software collection. However the Mozilla software in pkgsrc ( firefox 52, seamonkey, thunderbird) is not compiling out of box on debian and even if you make it compile, the patches in pkgsrc are not taking linux into account it seems and in the end they will not run. I also don't know how to make debugging possible on pkgsrc with those..gdb will not give any info why and where the bus errors happen.
On debian i can either run a slightly older version of libreoffice where
all dependencies are available from
snapshot.debian.org or i can
compile the latest version from pkgsrc when i patch pkgsrc to remove the
rustc dependencies everywhere so that it will use the debian provided
rustc during compiling.
The latest firefox working from debian repos is firefox 50.1.0, but it is less stable than ff52 on NetBSD and has more problems like not saving certain settings when i activate and modify toolbars.
Linux runs more software but is generally less stable for me than NetBSD on my machines. I have very strange issues with filesystems where checking them will occasionally destroy critical parts of the filesystems. I fixed it it somewhat by using xfs and booting up with read-only filesystems. Then i execute a few runs of xfs_repair -n on them until i get a stable result. Then i can remount to rw and use the systems. Pretty annoying but works reliably.
Another problem is that i have issues with mouse and keyboard on my Ultra 25 on certain kernels. 5.2, 5.6, 5.8 will work for example and a 4.19 or 5.10 kernel will not.
Regards,
Connor