I finally found a use case for the Raspberry Pi that I got a decade ago. Wasn’t sure which model it is, turns out: Raspberry Pi Model B Rev 2. That’s the very first model, really ancient.
Which means that I needed Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy) for it. But despite “Legacy” it’s current – October last year. And it just worked.
And then I needed a browser. Not necessarily current, it wouldn’t connect to arbitrary websites. The preinstalled Chromium immediately refused to work on such outdated hardware. And internet discussions indicated that things would be similar for Firefox.
Yet Firefox not only installed but started as well. And it is Firefox 102 ESR which was discontinued merely a year ago – compared to the hardware this is brand new. Wow!
(No, I’m not recommending running Firefox on this device for regular browsing, it’s horribly slow. But for my purpose it might do.)
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And now that I got a spare WiFi dongle, this Raspberry Pi is actually doing its job. I ended up using Midori 7.0 instead of Firefox – it goes easier on resources of which this platform doesn’t have too many. Even starting this browser takes close to a minute.
Yet while Midori browser itself it quite outdated (the vendor decided to develop a Chromium fork instead), it uses webkit2gtk and that one is recent enough to run modern JavaScript code without any trouble whatsoever.
The biggest challenge was getting all hardware to work. The WiFi dongle required a custom kernel module which turned out to be rather simple – thanks to some people who forked Realtek’s original drivers and patched them up for newer Linux kernels.
But automating the system, making sure that it displays a single application window in fullscreen mode on boot – that was fairly trivial. I didn’t even need to connect any input devices while setting this up. Quite a breeze after having to deal with Android before.
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