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[LUG] Thoroughly disheartening evening - acx111, Adobe Flash, Google......

 

Tried to revive an older PC to run stuff for the lad.

Stuck an ACX 111 Wifi card in, seems the latest driver for it was
removed from Debian (acx100-source version 20080210-1.2) but this
version doesn't seem to be in the Debian archive anywhere, eventually
found a copy linked in a Debian bug report saying it had disappeared,
found it hang the PC with the latest stable kernel in Debian Squeeze.

ndiswrapper seemed to work till midnight, when my ADSL line went down.
Since it was spot on midnight I assume some sort of BT maintenance.

Tried to install Adobe Flash, but Iceweasel falls over "Illegal
Instruction". Opinion in the net seems to think this is running it on a
Sempron 2300+ CPU, as it uses SSE2 instructions. I didn't hang around to
check.

On uninstalling Adobe Flash, the website I was trying to view worked
briefly, and "top" showed "gtk-gnash" eating 95% CPU. But as per usual
with Gnash I couldn't decipher how to run it in the browser, except in
this case I could reliably run it by uninstalling Adobe Flash whilst the
browser was open, but immediate restarting the browser - nothing.

Tried Google Chrome (don't ask why) it just hangs when you try and start
it, I assume CPU choice again.

So I suspect an otherwise working PC, with 512GB of RAM, a PCI 802.11G
card, is not going to hack it because of lack of support for the AMD
processor. Anyone know if it would work better running XP. Anyone know
for sure if this is typical of Sempron under Linux.

I guess this is why we want free software, it runs GNOME and Debian
applications just fine (with the exception of Gnash). Perhaps I should
keep this PC, and give Isaac mine, which just manages to run the Flash
games he likes.

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