OK, I have loaded Netscape 6 for Linux. It's got some nice polish,
but NS6's problems leave me give doubts whether I should even bother
writing up all the problems and hope someone will address them. I
recall some browser discussion on redhat-list a while back, but I
don't see any reliable archives to search.
The installer is braindamaged. There are so many ways for it to
break. And as far as I can tell, every time you have to re-invoke
netscape-installer, it insists on downloading everything again --
no way to tell it you already have the .xpi's sitting around.
I'm running RH7.0 on a 750MHz Athlon machine. I got NS6 to put
itself in /usr/local/netscape, and it seemed to get confused settings
from an .mozilla directory in my home directory. To remedy this,
I made the mistake of doing an rm -r .mozilla, and then NS6 would
segfault whenever I invoked it.
So I re-run netscape-installer, with a slow connection to NS's
AOL-homed server. (Ack!) This time, I did an "su - root", so that
it wouldn't muck with my home directory. (I previously ran a UID
0 process with my home directory set -- why is it dependent on
me?!) I chose the "Recommended" installation, and apparently
there's no newsreader under Linux -- I couldn't find anything
Usenet-related under Edit -> Preferences -> Mail and Newsgroups.
Now I try to look at a RealAudio-enabled page, and NS6 wants to
download a copy. I try to get clever by doing
# cd /usr/lib/netscape/plugins
# find . -print | cpio -pdml /usr/local/netscape/plugins
NS6 faults during startup, and spawns a TalkBack window to report
home what's happened. I remove my .so's from /usr/local/netscape/plugins
and see what NS6 does when I say "yes" to getting the plugin. As
far as I can tell, it's just trying to reload the same old .rpm from
RealNetworks. Hmm, time to see if anyone else has figured it out.
For jollies, I try some other plugins. The speed test from
dslreports.com wants a JRE plugin, so it happily downloads jre.xpi
(15.5 MB), and fails without providing any hints to me. Ugh.
Time to declare victory and go home...
Romain Kang Disclaimer: I speak for myself alone,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] except when indicated otherwise.
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