Reply With QuoteI have no answer for you, sorry. But I'm curious what hardware you're running on. A 20 year old PC?
so I've got a fairly simple task at hand, but as always, no matter how much I want to like linux, it just doesn't want to like me back.
anyway, this is a 32bit machine, so Xubuntu 18.04, the repositories are still up so you can get it up to date (as much as possible). and I also need the Chromium browser here, its hw acceleration feature makes internet browsing an acceptable experience. and that's it, this is all that's needed - easy, right?
well, no. the latest official Chromium version you can get from the software center for Xubuntu 18.04 is busted - you guessed it, hw acceleration doesn't work.
so I have to install it manually, either downgrading it just a little bit, or upgrading it, if this is even possible (I'm guessing newer Chromium builds may not be compatible with 32bit Xubuntu 18.04).
quick google search suggests this should be possible - so, any experience with this, anyone? thanks.
I have no answer for you, sorry. But I'm curious what hardware you're running on. A 20 year old PC?
a tiny intel atom pc. the fun part is that should this turn out not solvable, it actually can run win10 32bit where there is no problem with the browser. windows may be slow, bloated, full of ads and other junk (and not free, but hey, five dollar licenses from aliexpress), but in the end, it does the job in three mouseclicks. and that's why it wins 99% of times (or whatever its current desktop os market share is), as much as I don't like to admit it. linux may be lightweight, sleek, free and whatever but all is for naught if it cannot do the one thing that needs to work on this computer.
also the fact that one completely busted build of Chromium is stuck in the software center as the official release for a couple of years now tells me they don't actually give a damn. not about the last 32bit build, anyway. which is kind of odd, because hey, here's a niche you could dominate - no, I'm thinking they are under the impression people are going to install linux on their gaming rigs. yeah, not happening guys, sorry.
No clue here, but I'd humbly suggest to at least try another distro if your patience runs thin.
Ubuntu is kind of mess tbh, at least that has always been my experience with it, be it Ubuntu proper or anything Ubuntu based, especially on old rigs, it's how I began my journey on Linux and gave up each time I tried, and since then there has been countless issues with weird canonical and package maintainers decisions.
If your rig can somehow run windows 10 I don't see why it could not run another distro (I would not presume to suggest one for you though).
I wish I had something less extreme to suggest, but it might still solve your problem since it seems to be an Ubuntu issue.
I'm open to suggestions, but it seems like 32bit support has been killed off almost completely, no matter the distro.
Damn, seems you're right, it's more widespred than I first thought.
For all I know OpenSuse and Debian still support 32bit, since Ubuntu is based on Debian you might still face the same issue though (unless chromium is taken care of by a different maintainer). None of the two would be my first choice, they are not bad but they have their quircks and depending on your experience with linux I can't tell if it'll be a blast or a curse for you to use.
Yet with luck you could try them live without installing them and see if all that you need works well and is easy to get
(damn I just thought of that but have you tried installing a flatpak version of chromium ? Might be an easier fix no matter the distro https://flathub.org/apps/org.chromium.Chromium)
Last edited by WEI; 16th Jun 2024 at 09:45.
just probing the waters currently, right now I'm trying to find out whether the Chromium downgrade is (still) possible, as that would be the fastest/preferred solution.
the last resort indeed seems to be to switch to Debian which still supports 32bit, but not really wanting to dip into that if there's another option. already posted this on the ubuntu forums, so hopefully I'll know soon.
well good luck then
Linux can be a bliss when you are spared this kind of headache inducing oddities, so I hope you find an easy fix.
that pretty much sums up my linux experience - very nice when it just works, but if it does not, well, heavens help you because nobody else will.
turned out to be incredibly easy - got the latest 18.04 32bit Chromium build from here, rightclicked to install via sw center (few complains about some fw not being available but it continued), everything completed ok and the browser works with acceleration enabled. adblock plus is not compatible anymore (probably abandoned 32bit support) but no matter, just installed the second most downloaded ad blocker (adblock ultimate) and looks like all is set and good to go.
there really is a first time for everything, huh.
Last edited by voodoo47; 16th Jun 2024 at 17:59.
I'm glad it turned out to be a straightforward problem of finding a more up-to-date Chromium build. Which software center do you use? The Ubuntu Software Center is obsolete and presumably isn't getting maintained. I thought Ubuntu uses their own branded version of GNOME Software now. If whichever is supposed to be the current package manager doesn't link to a non-broken version of Chromium, that's worth submitting a bug report I think.
I'm sad to hear that Linux i386 is becoming obsolete. After all, Linux was developed on 32-bit platforms, and popularized by students running i386 distros installed from CD-ROMs on commodity desktop PCs. A staggering amount of 32-bit computing hardware was produced during the 1990s and 2000s and it seemed like Linux was ported to all of it. Linux was a lifeline for these old systems.
yes, we can now safely say that if you have a 32bit only machine you don't plan to retire for whatever reason, and want to run an up to date operating system and browser, you will be struggling a lot.
also note that the last Chromium build for 32bit Xubuntu actually already is more than one year old, so while it works ok now, it is bound to stop displaying the web properly at some point - so I've just pushed the inevitable away for a couple of years here (but then again, that is exactly what I wanted to do). then it's Debian (assuming it still will have a 32bit build at that time). then.. oblivion.
all turns to dust eventually.
Browsing the web is far more CPU and network intensive than it used to be, especially due to all the video ads. Back in the early days of the web, with nearly everybody connecting via modem, connection throughput was a precious commodity to be optimized for. Now I think web developers just assume the client is an up-to-date browser on a broadband connection. Full stack developers have fully taken advantage of Moore's law. So now we have all these old computers that are still capable of doing everything they used to do EXCEPT browse the web.
As I was reading this thread, it looked like you'll need to build Chromium from source; but it's great you found binaries for your distro. But you may still need to do this to obtain newer versions, if containerized solutions (e.g. snap, flatpak) don't work. In that case, however, you'd probably be better off with Debian. But eventually Chromium itself would drop 32 bit support, if hadn't already. Is there any reason why you're sticking to Chromium and can't consider other browsers? As I see, Firefox also has GPU acceleration (getting it work is another story – now that I checked it's not even enabled for me).
the task here was not to find the best solution (or the most sensible solution, which actually is just don't bother, you can get a 64bit equivalent of that machine for the cost of 3 large pizzas, but that's not how I do things), it was to see whether the proposed solution is workable. it is, so no further investigation necessary - for now.
also, fun fact - it seems like there really isn't any way of making this solution future proof (meaning, installable fully offline) - there are a few bits that need to be downloaded from the repos no matter what so once they turn those off, this will no longer work, whatever isn't part of the last iso image will be lost forever. the only fix is to do the full install now, let everything update, and then clone the drive to make a backup should you want to "reinstall" sometime in the future.
call me dumb, but this is just dumb - if I can download all the winxp updates from wherever and run them locally to get a fully updated legacy system, why shouldn't I be able to do the same thing with linux?
Last edited by voodoo47; 13th Jul 2024 at 13:52.
You can. The repos of older releases are being archived at https://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/. You only need to update your APT sources (/etc/apt/sources.list) to point to the archive repo.Originally Posted by voodoo47
ok, that is slightly more reasonable. still doesn't beat a zipped update you can just download and install whenever and wherever though.
also one would think asking this question on the ubuntu forums would yield a proper (this) answer, but guess not.
You can also clone the repo and store it however you wish, but that's huge. While with Windows XP you get the core operating system with a few basic official software like and image viewer and media player; Ubuntu hosts a plethora of divergent software with multitude of alternatives ready to be installed from the repo anytime. So you typically don't just „ZIP up Ubuntu” – while you could technically do that, it would be highly ineffective to store that much data when you only use a very small subset of it. On the other hand, if you want to achieve something similar by just archiving the software you actually need, you can set up an apt-cacher-ng, manually download all the software through it to force it to build up the cache, then archive the cache itself. You can also build your customized ISO with all updated packages if you wish. But to be honest, I don't really see much use case, as Ubuntu repos disappearing from Earth with no one having a single operational mirror is not something I would expect in my lifetime, or the lifetime of human civilization. Because there aren't just the official Ubuntu repos: lots of people are hosting mirrors of this stuff. True there are much less mirrors for old releases than for the currently supported ones, but still there are. In case Ubuntu would cease to exist (which is unlikely enough already), I'm pretty sure many people committed to software preservation would step in, as many old obscure distros can be downloaded still, and Ubuntu will always be considered as a major one in Linux history.
You mean you did ask there and didn't get a proper answer?
ok, that makes much more sense - thanks for all the info. I doubt I will actually try to go any further with this, but it's good to know the options are there in case I change my mind - would probably be fairly easy to put together the "final" iso, getting the os up to date is some extra 500MB and integrating that last chromium build into it wouldn't change that too much, most likely.
yeah, "go get Debian" was the most comprehensive and useful answer I got. iirc they weren't really helpful in the past either, mostly telling me I just shouldn't want to do whatever I was trying to do, or do something else that technically could solve the issue but wasn't really what I needed.
Last edited by voodoo47; 14th Jul 2024 at 07:46.
Posting Permissions
