​It's yet another FOSS Friday! This is a long one and I'm breaking it up into parts.

While reloading Windows 7 on a very old, very slow 32-bit laptop yesterday I got my first pop-up saying that support for Win7 will be ending in January of 2020. It's sad for sure. Windows 7 was the last Microsoft OS that I used and I still like it quite a bit. But, we all have to move on and update to new things in the digital world. There is no standing still.

OTOH, there's an incredible amount of waste out there with old computers that simply can't handle the new operating systems and the tremendous amount of CPU power that is required to keep them running. Sure, you can upgrade to Win8 or Win10, but will your computer handle all of that? It might. But probably not. You can't make Windows 10 run on a computer that was made to run Windows XP. It's just not going to happen.

Fortunately, there's an answer for outdated hardware that still functions like it was meant to - And old hardware can have a very long life.

The answer is Linux. There are a lot of distros (Short for distribution, distro is a term used to describe a specific distribution of Linux that is built from the common Linux operating system and includes additional applications. Red Hat, Debian and SuSe are all examples of a distro. - From Webopedia) out there. Some are high end and run rings around Win10 for productivity and looking good. (They are also much more private.)

There are also distros that are specifically made for old computers that simply can't run all of the things modern tech throws at them.

One of my favorites is Peppermint OS. It's a gorgeous OS that I have on my little Toshiba laptop that was made in the mid-00s. The laptop is 32-bit, has 3.5 gigs of RAM and has 80 gigs of storage. When we took it in, it was running XP. Badly. It ran out of memory and crashed frequently. It couldn't handle basic tasks with all the things that XP needs to keep running in the background.

So, I installed Peppermint 6 (the most recent at the time). It ran beautifully.

Peppermint OS is a small footprint distro that's easy to use straight away. Install it and go. Everything you need is right in front of you. The desktop is intuitive for Windows users with an easy walk through to set up your desktop and explore with a Whiskers Menu at the bottom (it looks like the Win7 start button). See the image below.

Peppermint is also very kid friendly and it can be run from a USB if you want to experiment with it.

If you like what you've heard and seen so far, stop by the shop to check out an older computer running Peppermint 9 (the current version). We think you will like what you see!

Most people use Wikipedia. It's a staple of the internet and rightfully so - There is nowhere else you can go to find the depth and breadth of so many tv sh... Wait, I mean subjects. 
😉
Did you know that there is a lot more to Wiki than the 'pedia' part? Wikimedia Projects is full of amazing stuff as part of its mission for free knowledge for all. You can find books, courses, news, software, dictionaries, quotes, original translations, historical documents, instructional materials, a world-wide travel guide, a world of data and reusable media. There's also the Wiki that I get lost in - Wikispecies. Animals, plants and biology - Very cool.

Enjoy!

It's FOSS Friday! Today's free and open source program is PeaZip. It's a very intuitive file archive application that is available for Windows (XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10 32 and 64 bit), Linux and BSD. It's easy to install and the graphical interface is quite nice. 

PeaZip provides full archiving and extraction capabilities for the following formats:
-7z
-7z-SFX
-ARC/WRC
-bz2
-tar.bz2
-tbz 
-tb2
-gz
-tar.gz
-tgz
-PAQ8 
-LPAQ
-ZPAQ
-PEA
-QUAD/BALZ
-tar
-WIM
-xz
-Zip

PeaZip is able to browse, test and extract the following archive files:
-ACE
-ARJ
-CAB
-CHM
-Compound Files
-CPIO
-deb
-EAR
-ISO
-JAR
-LZMA
-LZH
-NSIS installers
-OpenOffice's OpenDocument
-PET/PUP (Puppy Linux installers)
-PAK/PK3/PK4
-RAR (including archives created with new RARv5 standard)
-RPM
-SMZIP
-U3P
-WAR
-XPI
-Z (compress)
-ZIPX

PeaZip is also able to repair archives with FreeArc's ARC. In addition to archiving, it can also be used for browsing files.

Give it a look-see here:

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Today's free open source software goodie is Franz. It ropes all of your messenger software into one handy package that lives on your desktop.

I downloaded it a couple days ago and once I got it set up (easy!), I started wondering how I lived without it. Currently I'm rocking Telegram, Twitter and Facebook Messenger on Franz, but I'm a moderate user of messenger services. The nice thing about having Franz on my desktop is that I can use more than one account for the same service. I have more than one Telegram account and, of course, I have both business and personal Google accounts to keep up with.

Franz supports a wide range of services including Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat, HipChat, Outlook, Github, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Google Hangouts, Discord, Twitch, Skype just to name a few.

I've only touched the surface of this app's usability. It's open source, so there are plugins available. The services available for the platform will definitely grow as the number of users increases. Give the app a try!

It's FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Friday!

Night sky watching is something that is so much better in rural areas. We are able to see so much more because we have far less light pollution than urban areas. Walking into an open field at night can be an awe inspiring experience.

But, not all of us are astronomers. I can't tell Polaris from Capella. I'm lucky if I can spot the planets. Thankfully, there's an app for that!

Stellarium has been around since 2001 and is available on about as many platforms as possible. It's "a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope."

Stellarium is also available online for people who want to test it out before they download the software.

It's an awesome work of cooperation and one of the best examples of FOSS out there. Anyone who can imagine a use for the the Stellarium software code is free to join the project development or use it to develop it on their own or for others.