On some of my machines, I run 32 bit Scientific Linux 6.9, a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9. RHEL6.x is supported until November 2020, perhaps to 2023 if Red Hat repeats past practices, and SL (supported by a team at Fermilabs, with extra scientific packages added), is an enhanced clone of RHEL.
However Firefox 52.1esr, the supposedly stable extended release, SEGMENTATION FAULTS with the 32 bit version. Safe mode ditto. No trace files left after the segfault. Could be worse; On one of my laptops (hacked hardware), Firefox sometimes crashes Linux, causing a reboot. My favorite programming language is solder, but that doesn't leave trace files, either. So, I downrevved Firefox to 45.9esr, turned off automatic updates, and will put up with the nagging messages from websites demanding the latest and greatest. Better than crashes. Maybe the next ESR release won't segfault, and I can turn updates back on. I'm told that version 52 is a MAJOR re-redesign of Firefox, an all-singing all-dancing multithreaded media munching monster. Not competely tested, apparently. Perhaps Mozilla should work on their testing processes first. BTW, the good thing is that Firefox stores itself entirely in /usr/lib/firefox, so changing versions is as easy as moving them into directories with names like /usr/lib/firefox45, then simlinking /usr/lib/firefox to that. When the next version XXesr comes along, I will remove the symlink, install to /usr/lib/firefox, rename that to /usr/lib/firefoxXX, then symlink to that. A small hassle, but better than crashes. ------ While I am slowly upgrading the machines to SL7.3 64 bit, I have a 20 year accumulation of more than 1000 binaries to recompile and verify, so this will take a while. I run long term support distros so I don't have to do this often, but our friends at Mozilla seem to prefer churn. Perhaps they should get a job at Microsoft, churning Word. I prefer the fewer failures, fewer features corner of the map. I can generate plenty of my own failures, thank you. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
