Am I the only one that is sad that Iceweasel is changing?

[edbarx]

Xfce is plenty light on Debian, it is heavier on other distros but thats because of other services running in the background. Right not I have a stock Debian 8 Xfce (task and all) running with Iceweasel (one tab), Claws-Mail, keepassx and htop and its only using around 520-530 mb or 8GB of RAM and between 5-12% CPU, keep in mind thats also with firewalld/applet running.

Performance, including speed, depends on hardware, especially the CPU and RAM. A performance comparison without clear reference to hardware type and generation is meaningless. The fact that you are saying there are 8 GB in your system suggests that your system is quite powerful. My post describes the performance on a T4400, 2 GB DDR2 based system. Should I take your post to indicate that hardware like mine should be discarded and thrown into the bin?

[Ardouos]

If it helps in any way, my work laptop is a Dell latitude d520 with an Intel duo core with 2 gb of ram. It seems to run Iceweasel quite well. I user a window manager over a DE though.

The stability of Firefox on that laptop depends on how heavy it gets after future development.

[HuangLao]

Xfce is plenty light on Debian, it is heavier on other distros but thats because of other services running in the background. Right not I have a stock Debian 8 Xfce (task and all) running with Iceweasel (one tab), Claws-Mail, keepassx and htop and its only using around 520-530 mb or 8GB of RAM and between 5-12% CPU, keep in mind thats also with firewalld/applet running.

Performance, including speed, depends on hardware, especially the CPU and RAM. A performance comparison without clear reference to hardware type and generation is meaningless. The fact that you are saying there are 8 GB in your system suggests that your system is quite powerful. My post describes the performance on a T4400, 2 GB DDR2 based system. Should I take your post to indicate that hardware like mine should be discarded and thrown into the bin?

Not at all edbarx. I love old pc's, preference is off lease business computers from tigerdirect. this rig is a HP dual core 800mhrz, AMD Athlon II 64 with 8gb ram. Not powerful at all, and about 5 years old. My wifes laptop (also Debian 8 ) is an old Gateway Intel, 32 bit, single core 1.3 ghrz (I think) with 2gb DDR2 ram, and somewhere around 8 years old. She prefers Seamonkey on there, and only uses Iceweasel for secure sites, shopping etc....

Debian is great at rescuing older/old hardware. Im all for it!

[spacex]

My 15+ year old Toshiba Satellite is still going strong. Upgraded to 2 GB RAM. Fast and furious. But it isn't my main pc though. But I find it fun to keep it alive as long as possible. Actually, there you reminded me. It's been a while since I tried it. I think I have to dig it out. I'm kind of nostalgic about it. Because it wasn't my first pc, but it was my first laptop

[HuangLao]

fire that bad boy up spacex...from a safe distance on non static surface with nothing flammable nearby....

nothing like bringing life back to them....[insert stevepusser avatar here]

[spacex]

fire that bad boy up spacex...from a safe distance on non static surface with nothing flammable nearby....

nothing like bringing life back to them....[insert stevepusser avatar here]

Fired it up. But couldn't remember the password, so I reinstalled. Works like a charm. Gets a little bit warm though. Perhaps I'll disassemble it and clean it up, and add some new thermal paste to it. I was wrong, it's not above 15 years. It's from 2003

[Hallvor]

I set up a repo on the OpenSUSE Build Service that builds Pale Moon packages from source for Debian 7 and 8, as well as for Ubuntu. Pretty much like a PPA, but much easier for a Debian user to set up.

https://software.opensuse.org/download. ... e=palemoon

Thanks! Pale Moon is fast and light on resources on this old netbook. A real gem.

[stevepusser]

I set up a repo on the OpenSUSE Build Service that builds Pale Moon packages from source for Debian 7 and 8, as well as for Ubuntu. Pretty much like a PPA, but much easier for a Debian user to set up.

https://software.opensuse.org/download. ... e=palemoon

Thanks! Pale Moon is fast and light on resources on this old netbook. A real gem.

No problem. Once we got the build config and procedure straightened out for Pale Moon from its old defunct unofficial PPA, it's easy to upload one copy of the source files to OBS and let their machines do all the hard work.

[edbarx]

I downloaded the built package for palemoon but found it uses unsmoothed fonts. I didn't expect the best font smoothing on the planet but at least some smoothing to ease the stress on my eyes. I also tried to compile palemoon from source but failed in my attempts. If there is a way of forcing palemoon to use smoothed fonts, it will be very good new to me.

Thanks Stevepusser for providing that link.

[woteb]

Edbarx; you can try to install the Mozilla/Firefox themes. You also can copy the complete content of your .mozilla directory to the new .moonchild productions directory. Perhaps some extentions will give some problems, but the most will work.

[stevepusser]

Is there any difference with using the Pale Moon binary installed via their installer script?

You can go into about:config, search for "graphite", and switch font rendering with libgraphite on or off by clicking that entry, but it doesn't seem to have any effect on my machine.

This is the first report of nonaliased fonts we've had for Pale Moon; it has the same rendering for me as any other GTK+2 application, including Firefox. Could the problem have something to do with fontconfig on your end? I don't think there's a setting for those in PM, it's more of a system setting. Anyway, to have these packages endorsed as third-party builds by the Pale Moon developers, we have to stick to a approved configuration, which is set in the mozconfig file in the /debian folder. You can see those arguments if you enter "about:buildconfig" in the address bar.

PM would be a bear to build on an older machine; it would take quite a long time, and the last linking step, when it's linking all the object ".o" files into the final binary, ends up consuming close to three GB of RAM on my machine. If your laptop had to resort to using the swap file, that would slow down that process a hundredfold.

A solution to that would be to set up your own build on the OpenSUSE build service; but you have to upload proper Debian source packages to it; you can't just throw a source tarball into it and have it make proper debs automatically. I'm going to have to write a guide on how to use OBS, it's straightforward for the most part, but there are a few "gotchas" that have to be worked around.

[edbarx]

I changed the "graphite" setting without any visible effect. Regarding installing Palemoon using the mentioned script, I couldn't find the script. I only found a description of setting up /etc/apt/sources.list to use their (Open Suse) repository. I also remember a few weeks ago I downloaded a readily compiled version of Palemoon which used to crash unexpectedly; I assume it misbehaves because it may have required a missing library.

Regarding my font configuration. I used fc-list which printed a long list of font files. I am posting the following directory listing in case it may shed light on what is the cause of the problem.

Code: Select all

ls /etc/fonts/conf.d
10-autohint.conf                           57-dejavu-sans.conf
10-scale-bitmap-fonts.conf                 57-dejavu-sans-mono.conf
11-lcdfilter-default.conf                  57-dejavu-serif.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-lgc-sans.conf       58-dejavu-lgc-sans.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-lgc-sans-mono.conf  58-dejavu-lgc-sans-mono.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-lgc-serif.conf      58-dejavu-lgc-serif.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans.conf           60-latin.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans-mono.conf      65-fonts-persian.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-serif.conf          65-nonlatin.conf
20-unhint-small-vera.conf                  69-droid-sans-fallback.conf
30-metric-aliases.conf                     69-unifont.conf
30-urw-aliases.conf                        70-no-bitmaps.conf
40-nonlatin.conf                           80-delicious.conf
45-latin.conf                              90-synthetic.conf
49-sansserif.conf                          99pdftoopvp.conf
50-user.conf                               README
51-local.conf

[dzz]

PM would be a bear to build on an older machine; it would take quite a long time, and the last linking step, when it's linking all the object ".o" files into the final binary, ends up consuming close to three GB of RAM on my machine. If your laptop had to resort to using the swap file, that would slow down that process a hundredfold.

Old lenovo laptop here, 1G ram, intel core2 and not mounted on stilts. 2 hours into building PM it overheated and froze totally. I wanted a slightly modified build, now done on another box.

Using flashblock and noscript, performance (of the result) is adequate. No more browser crashes, even on the lenovo. Fonts here display perfectly.

[stevepusser]

I changed the "graphite" setting without any visible effect. Regarding installing Palemoon using the mentioned script, I couldn't find the script. I only found a description of setting up /etc/apt/sources.list to use their (Open Suse) repository. I also remember a few weeks ago I downloaded a readily compiled version of Palemoon which used to crash unexpectedly; I assume it misbehaves because it may have required a missing library.

Regarding my font configuration. I used fc-list which printed a long list of font files. I am posting the following directory listing in case it may shed light on what is the cause of the problem.

Code: Select all

ls /etc/fonts/conf.d
10-autohint.conf                           57-dejavu-sans.conf
10-scale-bitmap-fonts.conf                 57-dejavu-sans-mono.conf
11-lcdfilter-default.conf                  57-dejavu-serif.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-lgc-sans.conf       58-dejavu-lgc-sans.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-lgc-sans-mono.conf  58-dejavu-lgc-sans-mono.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-lgc-serif.conf      58-dejavu-lgc-serif.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans.conf           60-latin.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans-mono.conf      65-fonts-persian.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-serif.conf          65-nonlatin.conf
20-unhint-small-vera.conf                  69-droid-sans-fallback.conf
30-metric-aliases.conf                     69-unifont.conf
30-urw-aliases.conf                        70-no-bitmaps.conf
40-nonlatin.conf                           80-delicious.conf
45-latin.conf                              90-synthetic.conf
49-sansserif.conf                          99pdftoopvp.conf
50-user.conf                               README
51-local.conf

That's not their openSUSE repo, it's mine (unless they copied what I did). I set it up after several months of waiting for anyone to set up a PPA.

Anyway, here's the pminstaller script which gets and installs their static binary, which is compiled on Centos 5, I believe: https://linux.palemoon.org/download/installer/

Are you saying the fonts in Iceweasel look better than in PM? They should be using the same system autohinting for GTK+2 apps, which you can set by running as superuser

Code: Select all

dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config

The choices are pretty well explained. Then if your desktop environment settings has a module to adjust the font antialiasing, you set it to use the system configuration rather than the DE's.

I do a respin of MX 15 which added KDE 4 (Qt 4) to the existing xfce4 (GTK+2) desktop, so the user has a choice of which one to use for a session, and went through a learning process on how to keep one DE from ruining the theme, fonts, and colors for the other, but I think I've got them looking pretty good. Xfce is very handy to have as a backup DE to the complicated KDE--the only downside is that the menus have quite a load of entries.

It may be enlightening to try a Live session of the CORE 700 MB version I have there, too, since it has the same Pale Moon version for the browser, to see if the same font problem exists there.

[edbarx]

Thanks Stevepusser for the valuable information that solved my issue. I run 'dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config' which seems to have solved Palemoon's font issue. I will reboot to make sure the changes are permanent.

ADDED LATER:
The fontconfig changes were retained. Now Palemoon uses font smoothing. I was already mulling about buying a more recent laptop as Iceweasel was too heavy for my hardware making me recollect my MS Windows nightmares of sluggishness.