Happy Belated New Year and Belated Valentine’s!
Introduction
New Year’s Day was seven weeks ago but this is the first “Cooking With Linux” Computer America show of the new year, so “Happy New Year!” It’s also one day past Valentine’s Day. No one ever accused me of being too often on time.
Before we get too comfortable, please check out my other Cooking With Linux escapades.
First and foremost, PLEASE Subscribe to Marcel’s YouTube channel where you can view the latest editions of the Cooking With Linux show.
https://www.youtube.com/freethinkeratlarge/
“Cooking With Linux” on Flipboard https://flipboard.com/@wftl/cooking-with-linux-oun4gv1ly
My own site is http://marcelgagne.com where I talk about whatever comes into my head, including Linux and Open Source software. If you just want the Linux and Open Source stuff, head over to http://cookingwithlinux.com .
Today’s Wine
Today’s wine comes from Portugal. It’s a 2016 red called Porta 6 (door number 6) with a deep ruby red color. The flavour is very jammy with red and dark berry tones not to mention a fair bit of spite on the palate. The finish is light to medium. Overall, quite pleasant with just enough zing.
News, Rumours, etc
The bum’s rush . . . today, we talk about programming courses badly designed, YouTube is beating up on small creators, Specter (not the James Bond organization of villains) and Meltdown (not the Three Mile Island type), Google’s distros, and more . . .
Specter and Meltdown are the latest bad thing to happen to computers. Honestly, I think the Cylons are due any day now. Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, had things to say on the topic.
https://gizmodo.com/linus-torvalds-is-not-happy-about-intels-meltdown-and-s-1821845198
If you want to check your Linux desktop system, or more importantly, your server, there’s a way, describe here.
https://www.tecmint.com/check-and-patch-meltdown-cpu-vulnerability-in-linux/
You may not know this, but Google’s in-house operating system is a local version of Ubuntu called GooBuntu, or at least it was. They’re replacing this Google Ubuntu with gLinux which is a Google tweaked version of Debian (on which Ubuntu is based).
https://itsfoss.com/goobuntu-glinux-google/
As 2017 came to a close, we did what we always do and that’s reflect on those who passed away, like the Linux Journal. They announced that they were going out of business. Then, on January 1st, they announced that they were coming back from the dead.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/happy-new-year-linux-journal-alive
You might have heard that a high-profile switch from Linux to Windows was taking place in Munich. A reverse transition is happening in Barcelona.
http://www.techradar.com/news/barcelona-abandons-windows-and-office-goes-with-linux-instead
Barcelona is part of the Smart Cities initiative and already uses an open source system called Sentilo for managing city infrastructure. It’s fascinating stuff.
http://www.sentilo.io/xwiki/bin/view/Sentilo.About.Product/Whatis
Just found out about one of the coolest open things in a long time. It’s a service called “Let’s Encrypt” that provides free and open SSL certificates.
Distribution Focus
Speaking of James Bond villains . . . go back to the beginning if this seems like an odd segue. Today, we’re going to look at a few different distributions. The first is Zorin OS. Max Zorin was Bond Villain played by Christopher Walken in the movie, “A View To A Kill””. Zorin OS is not, to the best of my knowledge, the product of an evil organization.
Next on the plate is RevengeOS.
I just finished a video that shows the whole process in action. You can check out this latest “Cooking With Linux” here.
And then, there’s Slackware. This is one of the grand old Linux distributions, going back to 1993 when Patrick Volkerding took another distribution, Softlanding System Linux (by a guy named Peter MacDonald in 1992) and decided to build on it. SlackWare is still around and is the oldest continually maintained Linux distribution out there.
You can get SlackWare at http://www.slackware.com/getslack/
If you want a tour of distributions that have permanently vanished, check out yon friendly link.
http://www.linuxandubuntu.com/home/linux-distros-that-discontinued-unexpectedly
Office Suites Revisited
Over the last few days, I had need to create a small but somewhat complex document. I’ve gotten used to just opening up a document on Google Docs and starting to type and the document you are reading is no different. Unfortunately, despite the apparently simplicity of my document, Docs was letting me down in a big way. So I fired up LibreOffice which, after several minutes of my insane tweaking, would crash on me. So I went to the PPA repositories to get the latest, greatest, and shiniest LibreOffice ever.
https://launchpad.net/~libreoffice/+archive/ubuntu/libreoffice-6-0
This got me thinking about other office suites, because they do exist. So let me show you another one. It’s called FreeOffice and it’s by a company called SoftMaker.
http://www.freeoffice.com/en/download
There is a paid for version as well, but if you opt for the free version, you’ll be emailed a product key that you need to enter in order to activate the software. This is a full office suite complete with a word processor, spreadsheet program, and presentation graphics.
