Where have you been? There's been a community produced variant forever. I've still got Firebird (Firefox before it was renamed) on a 4 gig hdd with OS/2 v4 with it.
It might be an OS thing; I've used Flash 9-11 on the same computer (a 1.6GHz Eee running XP SP3) with FF1.5 with no trouble. Sounded like your P3 runs Windows 98?
Debian 5.0. It's good on older machines because you can install it without a GUI and then just add X11 and something like Fluxbox without much ado. I think MS-Windows is generally more effective with lower ram. Linux seems memory hungry by comparison. Unfortunately I've never gotten familiar with Windows, but I get the impression that Win 98 is pretty polished and works well on older stuff.
That's what I found too. There's a huge amount of *%$#. I was using a DOS port which is from 2001 so not very vintage, although it will run on a 386. I would guess that the older versions which were available at the time of the first Linux distros would work as well for our purposes. I just read the Wikipedia article and it says it was initially released in 1992, although it also says it was based on libwww from 1994! Of course there is also the old DosLynx, but I couldn't get it to work for me.
Huh, that's a little odd. Aside from the pure frustration on architectures where Adobe hasn't deigned to release a binary, I've never had issues with Flash on Linux...did you install it via the package manager, or download the installer from Adobe's site?
I'm sure you have superior skills in that regard. It shouldn't be complicated and in most cases I have found it very simple even doing it without any package manager. In fact downloading tzupdater, jce_policy, and diablo-cafe directly from Adobe and unzipping them works in FreeBSD. However I have noticed that some people with more brains than I, and years of Linux experience, have also had problems. It would be nice if somebody would write the definitive, works-every-time, how-to. That would save a lot of grief for some people. We really should be talking about pre 1995, and hopefully earlier, technology here.
They say variety is the slice of life. It really all depends on what you're wanting to run I guess. At the moment I've got dos on a 486, linux on a P200mmx(was just an exercise using RH 7.2 and removing the majority of the gnome bloat and installing some later software), Win98 on a PII 300(haven't used it in a while but was the family PC from 2000 to around 2008) and Xp(classic look n feel) on a 2.4Ghz thing I was given. There's also OS/2 v3/v4 waiting to be slapped back into a machine, along with a couple of Acorn RiscPCs thrown in the mix for the hell of it. Apart from the 486, all the rest seem to load to the desktop, even though RiscOS is in rom, at around the same speed depending on what's loaded on startup. Using a GUI based OS isn't really too much of a hardship if are willing to learn how to use it.