I have received a number of feature requests lately, so welcome to a Q&A summary.
Hi, I'm interested in using "justbrowsing" for internet bancking, but it does not have Java intalled ! (I tested it through the java's official page). Do you guys plan on making this OS with java support ?
Answer: I'm still not keen on supporting the Oracle (formerly Sun) Java web plugin which is highly exploitable and I believe would be a disservice to include. The open-source IceTea Java plugin suffers from much of the same issues, as the specification is simply fundamentally flawed. Additionally, both plugins use the Netscape cross-browser plugin format (NPAPI) which has been removed from recent builds of Chrome/Chromium. Affected users should complain to their banks, schools, etc. for not upgrading to better, more secure, less clunky websites that use HTML5 implementations.
Hi love JustBrowsing. But I am missing the Broadcom B43 drivers. Are you planning on adding these?
Answer: Added b43-firmware in the stable 20140704 (0.6.5) release. Those with a Broadcom wifi card with the BCM4311 chipset should use the testing release 20140705 (32-bit) / 20140708 (64-bit) with Linux kernel 3.14LTS. For everyone else, 20140808 (0.6.8) and newer is recommended. The upcoming stable release (0.6.9) will have a 3.16 kernel, which fixes the bug in 3.15 affecting the BCM4311 users.
Can I control the time of idle, so that the screen will not be dim ?
Answer: Yes, in 20140808 (0.6.8) and newer, the "Advanced" (third) tab of the settings GUI (jb-config) has a slider to adjust or disable the idle time-out. The default is 10 minutes.
Dear Friend, Is it possible that i can remove CROME and keep only Firefox as Browser Choice? thanks a lot for this excellent piece of work. Dev
Answer: A few people have asked. The 20140808 (0.6.8) release marks the release of two new flavors: OnlyChrome and OnlyFirefox.
[In reference to Japanese keyboard input methods]. Googleing about SKK, The original one is no longer be developed. If you have no problem of capacity, I hope to install Mozc. Thank you for your response ! So Mozc dont work on Puppy Linux. and Puppy's default Japanese Input System is Anthy.
Answer: I plan to add many alternative input method options to the 0.6.9 and 0.7.0 releases.
I may also end up opting to switch all inputs away from XKB in favor of ibus, to workaround the Chrome 35+ xkb whitelist (which should only be enabled in ChromeOS builds, IMO).
I want to turn touchpad tapping off. Especially on Linux, Touchpad is too sensitve. My PC's touchpad is traditional type, have two buttons.and maybe Synaptics. On Ubuntu, TouchPad setting App installed by default is not work well. so i installed and use gpointing-device-settings.
I considered simply installing the aforementioned gpointing-device-settings utility and providing a launcher to it, however it kept segfault-ing. Instead, I added to the jb-config GUI, a slider to adjust mouse acceleration and a checkbox to toggle touchpad tapping.
Can you password protect configuration saved in JUSTDATA Partition so that anonynous user cannot save change permanently?
Answer: I'd rather not encrypt the config file, the elegance is it being plain text. Which allows it be edited from other OSes among other advantages. Wifi networks are stored encrypted though. Additionally, how would that work - ask to input password to save changes?
For the next release, I will add support for a savecfg = false line, which will disable the "save" button in the GUI. I'll also add config = false to disable the internal settings, as well as to disable the GUI completely. You will need to manually edit the justbrowsing.cfg file to add/remove these special settings. On a related note, currently there is a skipcfg=true boot parameter to disable loading the config file.
Add a option to change time sync server, I want to use justbrowsing in intranet environment and are restricted to connect to outside Internet NTP server
Answer: I'm not sure why you can't just set the hardware clock to the correct UTC time and then select your timezone. NTP is optimal but shouldn't be necessary. A desktop with a RTC, that remains plugged into the wall in a computer lab, should only lose fractions of a second per day. Laptops are a different case however, often offset by a couple minutes from anecdotal evidence, as a result of being stored without power to the RTC.
However, reluctantly, I'll add a custom ntp = <hostname> option to the config, though I'm not going to add it to the GUI, at least not initially, so you'll need to edit justbrowsing.cfg manually.
Also, your mileage may vary (YMMV) using JustBrowsing, a distro designed explicitly with web browsing in mind - without an internet connection, so good luck with that.
Does Netflix run on Linux?
Answer: Google Chrome 37+ (currently beta) has the required "widevine" DRM built-in for native Linux support. Changing the browser user-agent to spoof Windows is also currently required, as Netflix still has Linux blacklisted. JustBrowsing 0.7.0 will likely include Chrome 37.0 which will be stable by then. I'll also pre-install a user-agent changing extension in the Chrome profile.
Previously, PipeLight was the only option to watch Netflix on Linux (exception: ChromeOS), however that utilizes Silverlight in WINE (non-native), which is not something I wanted to bundle for various reasons.
i think you are interested in this [Fresh Player Plugin]
Answer: Thank you for the tip! I have tested Fresh Player Plugin, a NPAPI wrapper for Chrome's Pepper API Flash Plugin and it does seem to work correctly in Firefox. The standalone Adobe Flash plugin for Linux is frozen at 11.2 and only receives an occasional security update.
Anyway, JustBrowsing 0.6.9 will have the Fresh Player Plugin installed and enabled by default in Firefox. The standalone version of Flash will remain installed but by virtue of version numbers Flash 14.0 will supersede 11.2 for all content.
cannot include special character = in homepage. when a type a web site as (REDACTED) and save in jb-config, in the homepage , result shown can be saved. but the homepage cannot be properly launched.
Answer: I use the = delimiter for the boot parameters and config file, so it's use should be avoided where possible (a URL shortener is recommended). However, I already had to implement a workaround to the parser for the printer strings, so I'll add that same fix for loading the homepage.
