My active account is @thayerw.

@thayer is inactive and no longer monitored; it remains only for the sake of post history.


  • 8 Posts
  • 206 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 19th, 2023

help-circle

  • Thanks for clarifying, and I can appreciate your overall concerns as I face the same dilemma with my aging relatives.

    Just to confirm, have you opened these files in Word yourself (or witnessed them being opened), to verify they are in fact valid documents? if valid, are they meant to be in English?

    It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen “other” files renamed with an incorrect file extension.


  • Assuming you meant “.docx files”, those should open without issue in LibreOffice. As others have said, OnlyOffice is another popular option if format preservation is a goal.

    What do you mean when you say the files are “not supported” by the tools you’ve tried? What, exactly, is happening and what are you trying to accomplish? The end goal wasn’t clear to me from your post.

    Getting Word to run under wine will require much more effort than copying the Word binary.






  • Sure, like I said above, GOS doesn’t at all prevent you from rooting the device. They only discourage it from a security point of view. Regarding MicroG, I’ve never had need for it myself but I’ve read many other posts over the years from users who have installed it on GOS in lieu of Graphene’s own implementation.

    I would argue that overall GrapheneOS provides more control over the OS than some other Android-based operating systems.




  • You’ll need to provide specifics if you want solutions to many of these issues.

    • What exactly isn’t working with your Yubikey?
    • Which bank apps? Did you check the compatibility list maintained by GOS?
    • Which apps aren’t working without Google Play?

    For the keyboard, there are several FOSS keyboards which support spacebar navigation, but you can also install Gboard and simply disallow any permissions, including network access.

    Regarding Signal, this would be a reality for anyone with a non-Apple device. You may need to find a compromise and simply use SMS, RCS, or even just email when dealing with certain people.

    There will always be one-off features available only on other devices or platforms. Only you can decide whether they are worth the cost of security and privacy.







  • I’ve been very happy with both Silverblue and Kinoite. I’ve installed it to all of my workstations now and can’t imagine ever going back to a traditional distro.

    Your comments suggest that you’re already aware of distros like Silverblue so, if I may ask, how are these different than what you’re looking for? Silverblue comes with several flatpaks installed, but you can easily remove these and you’ll be left with a pretty barebones ostree image.



  • I was able to extract the img from the ISO using geteltorito as described in section 5 of this ArchWiki article. Once you mount the resulting img file, you’ll end up with the same file contents achieved by running their Windows BIOS Utility through wine.

    The relevant binaries appear to be under the folders, N24ET76P and N24ET76W. Both scan clean for me, for whatever that’s worth:

    curl -X POST -F'file=@N24ET76P/$0AN2400.FL1' https://pk.fail
    {"details":{"analysis-time":"1.395106993s","hashes":{"md5":"ba73792a5fc831ca84b4cd3a21c03247","sha1":"24a5bb42d670c7705aed06588f0092ec11a32564","sha256":"b9510c73657460ae24c550b71d217a543b0fc3c30a3e081eff31d9d8f1a2bdda","sha512":"8ef6f0dcffbca05b79710b8599b1b1c926ee59185a675bc7eeede6da040c751097303ada523611271de6aaf190a597cdd6e9d5cf564d06987abcf712f61227c6"}},"status":"not-vulnerable"}
    
    curl -X POST -F'file=@N24ET76W/$0AN2400.FL1' https://pk.fail
    {"details":{"analysis-time":"1.438471526s","hashes":{"md5":"de1551b0bcc73e19375f7111def72278","sha1":"cd41f36d018f940c308a7be25a20e81bdb7e4cf2","sha256":"b3f646095e47bb94f04390c756cb4133201b1231a8b224174f10bb06bd3835f2","sha512":"55143f4903f92d88057bc9d4232b0d328e9ace36330f35fafdf0485d8bebb3f79b9fedc88ab1dec7fc04a8a3e0890887c1dd7632a2ffa397fb0917be90e3f93f"}},"status":"not-vulnerable"}
    
    

    The linux command mentioned in the Ars Technica article elsewhere here is efi-readvar -v PK. For Fedora and Arch users, efi-readvar is available in the efitools package.

    Edit: Clarity