@brokenman
I ran memtest86 for 36 hours (45 passes) and RAM memory apparently has no errors.
How could it be graphic card related? All other xwindows programs start and perform just fine,
it's just a matter of firefox crashing when opening a large local html document locally, or
opening any document online, and the other two browsers. But the rest of the xwindows programs
work just fine, including Mplayer.
Here's the crash report from firefox (minus the dump file):
StartupTime=1358176402
EMCheckCompatibility=true
ProductName=Firefox
Vendor=Mozilla
InstallTime=1357923647
FramePoisonBase=00000000f0dea000
Theme=classic/1.0
Notes=GLXtest process failed (exited with status 1): X error occurred in GLX probe, error_code=9, request_code=55, minor_code=0\n\n
FramePoisonSize=4096
Version=13.0.1
ReleaseChannel=default
ServerURL=
https://crash-reports.mozilla.com/submi ... 0616101010
Add-ons={3d7eb24f-2740-49df-8937-200b1cc08f8a}:1.5.14.2,{972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd}:13.0.1
BuildID=20120616101010
ProductID={ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}
URL=file:///mnt/sda3/How_to_Make_a_REAL_Installation_to_Hard_Disk-1.html
CrashTime=1358176454
SecondsSinceLastCrash=79
@fanthom
I tried loading Porteus Kiosk, but it loads only to the point where the Porteus Kiosk image appears and then the laptop gets stuck there...never gets to open firefox. This on the problem machine, which is a Compaq 1670 laptop, 350 Mhz, 192 MB RAM.
I find this very strange, as I've just tried to boot Porteus Kiosk on a much less capable machine, a Toshiba laptop, 266 MHz, 96 MB RAM, and it loads completely firefox, it does takes five minutes to get there though and it is pretty unusable, but it does load it. So as you can see the problem must be something other than low RAM. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that this laptop has an "internet button" and perhaps it requires special proprietary drivers in order to activate this function...since only the web browsers for some reason fail to load...the rest of the xwindows programs work just fine.
However, to make it even more puzzling, I booted slax popcorn ver. 5.0.6 and was able to open all major programs (Mplayer, Abiword, BPM, Gaim) and have Firefox (v.1.02) work just fine on top of them. They took all together 67 MB of RAM. I think I'm giving up on this laptop...it is a bit of a shame to let it go to waste but it only seems to like Win98 and 2000 (with proprietary drivers) and older versions of slax.
As far as the dir2xzm script from v1.2, I'm sorry to report the problem is with the script itself, it does not preserve directory ownership other than root. I've tried again one minute ago to make an xzm file out of my /home/guest/Desktop directory. It not only chowns all directories within that directory inside the xzm to root, but it also even changes ownership of the actual /home/guest/Desktop directory itself to root. And I'm talking about my actual directory in /home/guest here, not only what is inside the xzm... Please try it yourself and you'll see.
On a side note, your Porteus Kiosk is excellent. May I suggest that you also make it available as a Porteus mini edition by adding a shell terminal and a small xwindows text editor and renaming it something other than Kiosk? It would provide a functional updated firefox browser in a modern system with updated drivers that would bring back to useful life a lot of older hardware uncapable of running anything larger than that. It's more or less along the lines of Larry Ellison's idea for the network computer. What most people with older computers wish for is the possibility to surf the web with a modern browser, with the option of saving the downloaded stuff to a hard drive partition and perhaps a graphic text editor available to modify/write text files. I don't see anything like that around, and don't think it would take much of an effort to add to Kiosk a text editor and a shell terminal, the capability to log in and to write files on an ext2/ext4 fs. Just a thought.