Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

Check out Refracta Linux. It is a very small, and fast distro, that looks very interesting! If you want to revive old hardware, this may be your ticket!

OpenSource.com – David Both column

OpenSource.com – By: David Both – “There are hundreds of Linux distributions out there, many of which are created and live their short lives in relative obscurity. A few have long-term staying power, and that is usually because they have a decent combination of utility, stability, and a loyal following of users. As its release number suggests, Refracta 8.0 has those qualities needed for longevity.

Refracta is an interesting offspring of Devuan Jesse GNU+Linux, which is a systemd-free fork of Debian. Its forte is as a general use distribution for the so-called ‘average’ user, rather than as a specialized distro. It also works very well running as live media using Xfce, a resource conserving desktop.”

Refracta Web Site

From the Refracta web site: “Refracta is an operating system designed for home computer users. It provides a simple and familiar layout that most users will find very comfortable.

Refracta focuses on providing common applications and services that most users will need instead of trying to provide for more specialized uses. It provides a basic desktop with simple applications that are easy to use.

You do not need to install Refracta to try it out. You can run it entirely from the cd without making any changes to your current operating system. If you like it then you can install it in just a few minutes with a few clicks of the mouse.

The default install includes internet, graphic, multimedia, and office software along with various system tools and utilities. Hundreds more applications are available from a trusted source and can be quickly and easily installed.

Refracta also includes special tools – refractainstaller, refractasnapshot and refracta2usb – that allow you to customize your installation and create a live-CD or live-USB of your running system. These tools will work on most Debian or Devuan-based systems.

Refracta is based on Devuan GNU/Linux. Everything installed in Refracta is free and open-source software. You can download it, use it, copy it, and share it with friends. If you install any packages from non-free repositories, you may be asked to accept the appropriate license.”

The Surface 4 is pretty cool; it looks like the Surface 5 will be sweet!

Microsoft Surface Pro 5: The ‘Ultimate Mobile Computer’

Learnbonds – By Muhammad Nadeem – “Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is believed to be releasing the highly-anticipated Surface Pro 5 in the first quarter of 2017. The Redmond-based tech giant is reportedly delaying the launch due to several important components, including processors, are set to arrive in December and early 2017.

The software titan, which called the Surface Pro the ‘ultimate mobile computer,’ is planning to add the Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 to the Surface Pro to turn it into a superb mobile computer. A report from The Verge suggests that Microsoft plans to enable the full Windows 10 operating system and all of its legacy apps to run on ARM-based processors. Compared to the x86 Intel chips every Windows laptop uses now, ARM processors offer a different set of benefits including better power efficiency and integrated cellular connectivity.

Previous reports suggested that the Surface Pro 5 will feature Intel’s next generation core processor, the Kaby Lake, which uses less power and improves performance. Microsoft is still quiet about the purported Surface Pro 5. We expect that the company will announce details about the laptop next month.

Microsoft Surface Pro 5 Rumors

The Surface Pro 5 is rumored to come with a 512 GB of internal storage. The 2-in-1 device will have 16 GB of RAM. It will use the Windows 10 Redstone 2 operating system.

Rumors suggest that Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) will release two versions featuring different display technology. The low-end model will provide full 2K support and the high-end version will offer 4K support.

The Surface Pro 5 will come with the new Surface Pen. It will feature a rechargeable battery with an ability to charge itself when attached to the tablet, according to the recent rumors.”

This is a new, simple, clean, yet Open Source Office Suite. Check it out!

Microsoft Office, Google Docs beware: This open-source startup is after your users

“Seven and a half years ago, a group of Latvian and Russian multimedia developers decided to invest their money in an ambitious project to create a new office platform.

Initially it was called TeamLab and focused on project-management and team-collaboration tools.

ZDNet – By: Kalev Aasmae – ‘Simultaneously, we were working on online document editors. Then we decided to merge these projects, and our solution received a warm welcome from the internet community, so we felt we’d chosen the right path,’ founder Lev Bannov tells ZDNet.

‘Later, we dared to open up the source code of the project and rebrand it OnlyOffice.’

He argues that although there are several big players in the market, there is still a lot of room for newcomers with bright ideas.

‘What do you have, apart from Microsoft Office and Google Docs? Open-source LibreOffice, which is a derivative of OpenOffice, and some proprietary office suites based on it, such as WPS Office, SoftMaker FreeOffice, Hancom Office. In a way, Apple’s Pages application is based on OpenOffice, too,’ he says.

But he believes that each of these options has its own disadvantages.

‘Microsoft Office has a poor online version, which supports only 10 percent of its desktop functionality, and that could be done intentionally to support the desktop Microsoft Office. Google Docs can’t be deployed on a private network, LibreOffice and all its derivatives have problems with Microsoft document formats,’ Bannov argues.

‘Moreover, not all of them have online and mobile versions, and collaboration tools.’

Bannov contrasts those points with OnlyOffice having cloud and server versions and desktop and mobile apps on the same code base.

‘Our editors also show the highest compatibility with Microsoft Office formats,’ he says.

As of now, OnlyOffice has more than two million users worldwide, with most of them using the free products. However, it is being used by one Oracle department in UK, and also by Unisys.

The office suite also has a foot in the door of many educational institutions. Clients include the University of Brunswick, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, University of Paris-Sud, and the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology. Public organizations use OnlyOffice as well. For example, the French Red Cross and Germany’s Social Democratic Party.

While the company recently opened an office in Dallas, its headquarters are in Latvian capital Riga, with most of the developers working in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, 250 miles east of Moscow. Altogether, 80 people are employed in the OnlyOffice team.

Because most of the users are not paying customers, the project is not yet profitable.

‘We’re still putting a lot of money into software engineering, but we’ve entered the stage of forming our business processes and developing a partner network. In a year we expect a massive expanding of our user base and a significant increase in our revenue,’ Bannov says.

He is convinced that OnlyOffice can become ‘the perfect open-source office suite for everyone’. But for it to succeed and change the market situation, he knows it will have to change the mindset of potential customers, many of whom are happy with Microsoft’s products and have never really thought about testing an alternative.

‘Our plan is to continue working on our document editors as we want them to be ideal, like a Swiss watch, so our to-do list is long. We’ll also have to put effort into convincing people that there are other office suites, apart from Microsoft Office,’ he says.

‘That was one of the reasons why we chose an open-source model. We want be open, want people to trust us, want to overcome that barrier they have in mind, those strong beliefs that there’s nothing but Microsoft Office, that nothing better could be created. We won’t change our mind about open source.’

Bannov says he ultimately sees OnlyOffice becoming a firm that provides consulting, technical support and remote managed services to companies using its open-source products.”

AsteroidOS is an open source project that wants to save your smartwatch from obsolescence

Android Police – By: Michael Crider – “Android was once the darling of the open source community, though you’d be forgiven for forgetting that – these days its commercial elements seem to be all that make the news. One developer is hoping that community can save the smartwatch, or at the very least, breathe a little new life into existing designs. Florent Revest, a French computer science student, released the 1.0 alpha version of AsteroidOS today. It’s ready to run on multiple Android Wear devices: the original LG G Watch, the Watch Urbane, the Asus ZenWatch 2, and the Sony Smartwatch 3.

AsteroidOS is fully open source, based on Linux and designed for (relatively) easy porting to existing smartwatch hardware. Revest has been working on it for more than a year, aided by a collection of contributions from the GitHub and XDA communities. At the moment AsteroidOS is functional, but basic – tools are limited to most of the things you’d find in a ‘dumb’ phone, like an alarm clock, calculator, weather app, and a Settings menu. A custom Android app allows syncing notifications and music control via Bluetooth with any Android phone.

Prospective users can download and install AsteroidOS on their watches after unlocking them and flashing the custom ROM via ADB and fastboot, in a process that should be fairly familiar to anyone who’s used CyanogenMod or similar ROMs. But don’t be too hasty with your fastboot OEM unlock just yet: only the original G Watch has full support at the moment. The other smartwatches with semi-official ports of version 1.0 all lack Bluetooth support, which is kind of a killer for a functional smartwatch.

Still, it’s good to see that someone still believes in smartwatches. Pebble has just been swallowed up by Fitbit to join the more focused ranks of ‘activity trackers,’ and Motorola seems to be throwing in the towel on its Moto 360 series. Samsung seems committed to at least another year or two of wearable development, but the other big manufacturers are suspiciously quiet on that front. We’re still waiting to see if Google’s self-branded Wear devices will materialize or not.

So with the specter of gloom hanging over smartwatches in general, can a single passion project inject some life back into the category? Maybe, maybe not. But at the very least it will give owners something to do with hardware that seems to be rapidly fading into mobile history.”

The Libreboot project gives us the first fully open boot BIOS, now they are developing a sweet Open Source notebook!

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Techcrunch – By: John Biggs – “Open source laptops — ones not running any commercial software whatsoever — have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.

The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source; to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.

Open source is not just fun, it’s also wildly important. While Linux on the desktop is still years away, Debian is already fully featured and fun to use and the Libreboot project goes the last mile by ensuring everything is open source from boot time to shutdown.

The laptop itself simply runs a quad-core 1.8GHz ARM CPU (Rockchip RK3288) and has 4GB RAM with 16GB built-in eMMC storage. You can add more storage with a microSD card. It has an 11-inch screen and a three-year warranty.

Not many of us actively hunt down open source laptops, but it’s nice to know that when we want to wrest our freedom back from the corporate computing giants we have some real options.”

Slowly, but surely, Flash is dying!

Google Chrome Slowly Ditching Adobe Flash By Defaulting To HTML5 On Most Websites

Tech Times – By Vamien McKalin – “The slow but sure death of Adobe Flash continues as Google has updated Chrome to make sure the popular web browser prioritizes HTML5 over Flash on most websites. The new update is available for Windows, Linux, and MacOS computers.

The new update, known only as Chrome 55, was in testing via the beta channel for quite some time. Google is feeling confident about the new feature, so it has been pushed out to the public and stable channel for all users. The idea to block Flash on most websites is a great one because the media software is known for causing system vulnerabilities on a regular basis.

‘The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 55 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks,’ according to Google.

‘Chrome 55.0.2883.75 contains a number of fixes and improvements — a list of changes is available in the log.’

It should be noted that blocking Flash was always a possibility in Google Chrome for a number of years now. Users had the option to visit the settings area where they could decide whether or not they wanted to block the Flash plugin from automatically loading videos.

Should users wish to view a blocked video, they had to click on the video’s placeholder to activate it. However, with this new update, there’s no need to block Flash anymore. After taking the updated Google Chrome for a spin, it’s clear that the browser will load Flash on websites that do not yet support HTML5.

This move could push webmasters to abandon Flash in favor of HTML5 faster. As time goes by, internet users should eventually be free from the Adobe software and be fully adopted to what’s perceived as a much safer, and more power efficient, HTML5.

How To Upgrade To Chrome 55

It’s quite easy to upgrade to the newest version of Chrome. Just click on the three vertical dots button, then click on About. You’ll need to wait for the web browser to download the update if it hasn’t already, then after that, click on Relaunch to restart Chrome.

Once the browser is up and running again, you can rest assured that Chrome 55 has been installed.

Google is not only working to make its Chrome web browser better for everyone. The company has not too long ago worked directly with Microsoft to bring Office 365 to Chromebooks. There’s a catch, however, as the software won’t be free on all Chromebook laptop computers.”