Google – mintCast https://mintcast.org The podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:57:29 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/cropped-small-logo-32x32.png Google – mintCast https://mintcast.org 32 32 mintCast false CC-BY-SA 4.0 CC-BY-SA 4.0 podcast Google – mintCast https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/big-logo-1600.png https://mintcast.org TV-G 164426984 487 – Goodbye US Office, Hello Euro Office https://mintcast.org/487-goodbye-us-office-hello-euro-office/ Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:57:28 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=8067 First up the news

We have a great little tool in the “Check This Section”

]]> First up the news


We have a great little tool in the “Check This Section”

Link To Full Show Notes

The News:


Linux is Getting a Free Pass on Age Verification in California and Colorado


DuckDuckGo Installs Up 30% After Google Announced AI Search


New social features further Plex’s evolution from media server business


Euro-Office: General availability set for June 9


Acer Launching Streaming-Only Handheld Gaming PC Running Debian


Microsoft cut its engineers off from AI because the bill got too big — why AI might not take your job after all


EU plots long game against US digital supremacy


Brave Software inc releases a stable version of the Brave Origin Browser

Check This Out


Handy is a free, private, local AI speech-to-text app.

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo,
  • .initrd for the animated logo on Discord
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> full 59:32 8067 458 – The Mobile Generation https://mintcast.org/458-the-mobile-generation/ Sat, 05 Apr 2025 20:19:27 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7458 First up in the news: New GIMP, Debian comes to a RISC-V tablet, Google explains why the are putting Terminal on Android, Asahi Linux loses another top dev, Plex goes for the gold – yours, meet EU OS, Kernel 6.14 is released, Gnome 48 released, new GRUB updates, AerynOS is released with GNOME 48

In security and privacy: “MyTerms” wants to let the user dictate privacy

Then in our Wanderings: Moss plays Musical Tablets, Joe Moxes the Prox, Dale has a burpday, Majid is on holiday and Bill is off truckin’ somewhere...

In our Innards section: Dale takes us through Mobile Networks

In Bodhi Corner, Moss covers new translations and work on the next version.

]]> First up in the news: New GIMP, Debian comes to a RISC-V tablet, Google explains why the are putting Terminal on Android, Asahi Linux loses another top dev, Plex goes for the gold – yours, meet EU OS, Kernel 6.14 is released, Gnome 48 released, new GRUB updates, AerynOS is released with GNOME 48

In security and privacy: “MyTerms” wants to let the user dictate privacy

Then in our Wanderings: Moss plays Musical Tablets, Joe Moxes the Prox, Dale has a burpday, Majid is on holiday and Bill is off truckin’ somewhere…

In our Innards section: Dale takes us through Mobile Networks

In Bodhi Corner, Moss covers new translations and work on the next version.

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


GIMP 3.0 Image Editor Is Now Available for Download


A Debian-Based Distro and Hardware Upgrades Come to the PINE64 RISC-V Tablet


Google Explains Why It Added a Linux VM to Pixel Phones


Asahi Linux loses another prominent dev as GPU guru calls it quits


Plex is cracking down on its version of password sharing, and it’s coming with a price hike


EU OS Is a New Community-Led Linux Alternative for Europe’s Public Sector


Linux Kernel 6.14 Officially Released, This Is What’s New


GNOME 48 lands with performance boosts, new fonts, better accessibility


GRUB Bootloader Received 73 Patches To Fix A Variety Of Recent Security Issues


AerynOS 2025.03 Released with GNOME 48, Mesa 25, and Linux Kernel 6.13.8

Security And Privacy:


“MyTerms” wants to become the new way we dictate our privacy on the web

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>

]]> 458 458 The Mobile Generation full 2:31:23 7458 454 – Linux Bans Facebook https://mintcast.org/454-linux-bans-facebook/ Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:11:19 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7381 First up in the news: Solus 4.7 Released, Facebook bans Linux, WINE 10 released, RISC V stuff, and cursing at your AI is the way forward

In security and privacy: Judge Says Controversial FBI Searches Require a Warrant,

Then in our Wanderings: Joe builds things, Bill butters his Mint, Majid likes cursing at his computer

]]>
First up in the news: Solus 4.7 Released, Facebook bans Linux, WINE 10 released, RISC V stuff, and cursing at your AI is the way forward

In security and privacy: Judge Says Controversial FBI Searches Require a Warrant,

Then in our Wanderings: Joe builds things, Bill butters his Mint, Majid likes cursing at his computer

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


Solus 4.7 Released


Facebook bans Linux


Wine 10.0 Release Brings New Drivers, Features & Changes


GTK’s X11 Backend Now Deprecated, Planned For Removal In GTK 5


Linux 6.14 RISC-V Kernel Adds Support For T-Head Vector Extensions, GhostWrite


“Just give me the f***ing links!”—Cursing disables Google’s AI overviews

Security and Privacy:


Judge Says Controversial FBI Searches Require a Warrant

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 454 454 Linux Bans Facebook full 1:48:56 7381 453 – Nice Rack, Joe! https://mintcast.org/453-nice-rack-joe/ Wed, 22 Jan 2025 05:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7359 First up in the news: Linux Mint 22.1 “Xia” released, Parallels can finally run x86 versions of Linux on Apple Silicon, German router maker is latest company to inadvertently clarify the LGPL license, Google and Linux Foundation form Chromium love club

In security and privacy: Microsoft patches Windows to eliminate Secure Boot bypass threat,

Then in our Wanderings: Joe enjoys prepares his rack , Dale does routing , and Eric shares 80s kid culture with his kid.

]]> First up in the news: Linux Mint 22.1 “Xia” released, Parallels can finally run x86 versions of Linux on Apple Silicon, German router maker is latest company to inadvertently clarify the LGPL license, Google and Linux Foundation form Chromium love club

In security and privacy: Microsoft patches Windows to eliminate Secure Boot bypass threat,

Then in our Wanderings: Joe enjoys prepares his rack , Dale does routing , and Eric shares 80s kid culture with his kid.

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


Linux Mint 22.1 “Xia” released joe


Parallels can finally run x86 versions of Linux on Apple Silicon


German router maker is latest company to inadvertently clarify the LGPL license


Google and Linux Foundation form Chromium love club

Security and Privacy:


Microsoft patches Windows to eliminate Secure Boot bypass threat

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> full 1:12:33 7359 451 – Cinnamon Toast https://mintcast.org/451-cinnamon-toast/ Tue, 10 Dec 2024 09:49:30 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7301 First up in the news: mintCast turned 16 while we weren’t watching, Mint 22.1 being tested, Cinnamon 6.4 Desktop Environment released, US lawyers pushing Google to divest Chrome, El Capitan takes the lead

In security and privacy: Hackers push fake BitWarden updates, Chinese hackers push Linux-focused WolfsBane, WordPress security flaw gives hackers admin access

Then in our Wanderings: Bill cools the runnings, Joe cools his printer, Moss cools his ereaders, Majid gives in to temptation, and Eric finds value and delight in his secondhand hardware.

]]> First up in the news: mintCast turned 16 while we weren’t watching, Mint 22.1 being tested, Cinnamon 6.4 Desktop Environment released, US lawyers pushing Google to divest Chrome, El Capitan takes the lead

In security and privacy: Hackers push fake BitWarden updates, Chinese hackers push Linux-focused WolfsBane, WordPress security flaw gives hackers admin access,

Then in our Wanderings: Bill cools the runnings, Joe cools his printer, Moss cools his ereaders, Majid gives in to temptation, and Eric finds value and delight in his secondhand hardware.

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


mintCast is 16!


Linux Mint 22.1 ISOs are now being tested


US lawyers will reportedly try to force Google to sell Chrome and unbundle Android


All hail our new leader — AMD-powered El Capitan becomes officially the world’s fastest supercomputer

Security and Privacy:


Hackers pushing fake Bitwarden updates hit thousands of devices with data stealing malware


Chinese hackers target Linux with new WolfsBane malware


Security plugin flaw in millions of WordPress sites gives admin access

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 451 451 Cinnamon Toast full 1:44:21 7301 448 – The Archive Is Breached! https://mintcast.org/448-the-archive-is-breached/ Thu, 17 Oct 2024 10:06:37 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7220 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – September, Xfce 4.20 creeps toward Wayland support, Archive.org is breached, Arch and Valve team up, WWWFoundation packs it in, More WordPress news, even MORE WordPress News, and Google adds Linux apps to future Android versions

Then in our Wanderings: Bill connects with the younger generation, Joe is still fixing things, Moss whines, and Majid folds some more

]]> First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – September, Xfce 4.20 creeps toward Wayland support, Archive.org is breached, Arch and Valve team up, WWWFoundation packs it in, More WordPress news, even MORE WordPress News, and Google adds Linux apps to future Android versions

Then in our Wanderings: Bill connects with the younger generation, Joe is still fixing things, Moss whines, and Majid folds some more

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


Mint Monthly News – September, 2024


Xfce 4.20 creeps toward Wayland support


Archive.org, a repository of the history of the Internet, has a data breach


Arch Linux and Valve team up to make Steam gaming even better


WWW Foundation packs it in


159 employees are leaving Automattic as CEO’s fight with WP Engine escalates


WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin


Google is preparing to let you run Linux apps on Android, just like Chrome OS


KDE neon upgrades to 24.04.1 Ubuntu base

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>

]]> 448 448 The Archive Is Breached! full 1:50:23 7220 433 – They’re All Out To Get You! https://mintcast.org/theyre-all-out-to-get-you/ Wed, 27 Mar 2024 14:55:24 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6802 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – February 2024, Linux market share passes 4% for first time, SerpentOS makes progress, AMD is told hands off HDMI 2.1, Google blocks RCS on rooted devices, AMDGPU has limits, ProtonMail comes to all desktops, and NVidia bans translation layers

In security and privacy: Avast is fined bigly for selling browser data

Then in our Wanderings: Joe plays a lot of games, Majid does mirrors

In our Innards section: We discuss scams and trying to protect the people we care about

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

]]> First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – February 2024, Linux market share passes 4% for first time, SerpentOS makes progress, AMD is told hands off HDMI 2.1, Google blocks RCS on rooted devices, AMDGPU has limits, ProtonMail comes to all desktops, and NVidia bans translation layers;

In security and privacy: Avast is fined bigly for selling browser data;

Then in our Wanderings: Joe plays a lot of games, Majid does mirrors

In our Innards section: We discuss scams and trying to protect the people we care about

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Full Show Notes Here

The News:

Mint Monthly News – February 2024

Linux market share passes 4% for first time

Serpent OS Makes Progress On Packaging The GNOME 45 Desktop

HDMI Forum to AMD: No, you can’t make an open source HDMI 2.1 driver

Google is blocking RCS on rooted Android devices

AMDGPU Linux Driver No Longer Lets You Have Unlimited Control To Lower Your Power Limit

Proton Mail is coming to all major desktop platforms

Nvidia bans using translation layers for CUDA software

Security and Privacy

Avast fined $16.5 million for ‘privacy’ software that actually sold users’ browsing data

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 433 433 They're All Out To Get You! full 2:37:20 6802 431 – Artificially Intelligent https://mintcast.org/431-artificially-intelligent/ Wed, 21 Feb 2024 05:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6683 First up in the news: Linux Mint Monthly News, Google Is Dying News, Samsung defends GenAI, India bans Protonmail, NGINX Core Dev Quits and Forks

In security and privacy: Critical bootkit vulnerability affects most Linux distros, BitLocker smashed in minutes with pico SBC, and Mozilla helps you wipe your data

Then in our Wanderings: Joe plays games, Moss survives, and Majid finally “gets” Arch

In our Innards section: we discuss the current mintCast infrastructure

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Download
]]> First up in the news: Linux Mint Monthly News, Google Is Dying News, Samsung defends GenAI, India bans Protonmail, NGINX Core Dev Quits and Forks

In security and privacy: Critical bootkit vulnerability affects most Linux distros, BitLocker smashed in minutes with pico SBC, and Mozilla helps you wipe your data

Then in our Wanderings: Joe plays games, Moss survives, and Majid finally “gets” Arch

In our Innards section: we discuss the current mintCast infrastructure

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

New Feature: Now the links below open show notes to the specific section covered on the show! Try It!

  1. 00:00:00 – Intro
  2. 00:01:29 – News
  3. 00:29:27 – Security And Privacy
  4. 00:43:53 – Bi-Weekly Wanderings
  5. 01:06:54 – Innards
  6. 01:32:40 – Vibrations From The Ether
  7. 01:38:17 – Check This Out
  8. 01:38:37 – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
  9. 01:39:30 – Wrap Up
  10. 01:41:58 – Outro
Full Show Notes Here

The News

Linux Mint Monthly News

Google will no longer back up the Internet: Cached webpages are dead

“There is no such thing as a real picture”: Samsung defends AI photo editing on Galaxy S24

Nginx core developer quits project in security dispute, starts “freenginx” fork

Indian government moves to ban ProtonMail after bomb threat

Security And Privacy

Critical vulnerability affecting most Linux distros allows for bootkits

BitLocker encryption broken in 43 seconds with sub-$10 Raspberry Pi Pico — key can be sniffed when using an external TPM

Mozilla’s new service tries to wipe your data off the web

Check This Out

There is a really long, detailed, highly informative, and extremely well-written article explaining The Fediverse on The Verge. If you’re interested, you should check it out.

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 431 431 Artificially Intelligent full 1:43:08 6683 429 – Do You Desktop? https://mintcast.org/429-do-you-desktop/ Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:51:30 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6587 First up in the news: Mint 21.3 released, Linux kernel 4.14 goes EOL, Google sued over patent infringement, OpenSSH phases out DSA keys, Canonical snap steams Valve

In security and privacy: NoaBot worms its way into Linux; Pixieboot vulnerabilities show up in UEFI, and SlippyBook rears its head

Then in our Wanderings: Joe buys things cheap, and Eric talks audio production

In our Innards section: We talk about whether there’s a need for desktop computers anymore.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Download
]]> First up in the news: Mint 21.3 released, Linux kernel 4.14 goes EOL, Google sued over patent infringement, OpenSSH phases out DSA keys, Canonical snap steams Valve

In security and privacy: NoaBot worms its way into Linux; Pixieboot vulnerabilities show up in UEFI, and SlippyBook rears its head

Then in our Wanderings: Joe buys things cheap, and Eric talks audio production

In our Innards section: We talk about whether there’s a need for desktop computers anymore.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Sorry, No Chapters of Timestamps this episode folks. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Full Show Notes Here

The News

Mint 21.3 released

Linux Kernel 4.14 Reaches End of Life After More Than 6 Years of Maintenance

Google’s TPUs could end up costing it a billion-plus, thanks to this patent challenge

OpenSSH Announces Plan to Phase Out DSA Keys

PipeWire Camera Support Is Coming to OBS Studio for Linux Desktops

Canonical’s Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve

Security and Privacy

Linux devices are under attack by a never-before-seen worm

New UEFI vulnerabilities send firmware devs industry wide scrambling

Breaking Down Slippy-Book: The New RCE Flaw in Linux Distros

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Eric Adams for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 429 429 Do You Desktop? full 1:43:41 6587 426 – Happy Birthday, mintCast! https://mintcast.org/426-happy-birthday-mintcast/ Thu, 30 Nov 2023 04:34:37 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6485 First up in the news: mintCast has a birthday, Mint 21.3 is named, Amazon works on a Linux fork for their devices, Ubuntu commits to Netplan, Firefox attempts Wayland, FreeBSD 14 is out, Endeavour releases Galileo, Vivaldi comes to Flathub, Google kills magazine content, OpenMandriva releases Rock 5.0, Pipewire reaches 1.0.0

In security and privacy: Google Chrome’s Privacy Washing

Then in our Wanderings: Bill may just be losing his mind, (there are doubts?), Joe prints everything but money, Majid does VR, Moss hangs on, and Eric spends more quality time with his Linux tablet.

Download
]]> First up in the news: mintCast has a birthday, Mint 21.3 is named, Amazon works on a Linux fork for their devices, Ubuntu commits to Netplan, Firefox attempts Wayland, FreeBSD 14 is out, Endeavour releases Galileo, Vivaldi comes to Flathub, Google kills magazine content, OpenMandriva releases Rock 5.0, Pipewire reaches 1.0.0

In security and privacy: Google Chrome’s Privacy Washing

Then in our Wanderings: Bill may just be losing his mind, (there are doubts?), Joe prints everything but money, Majid does VR, Moss hangs on, and Eric spends more quality time with his Linux tablet.

  1. 00:00:00 – Hacker Public Radio New Years Eve Promo
  2. 00:00:56 – Intro
  3. 00:01:23 – New Intro Music
  4. 00:02:41 – News
  5. 00:54:13 – Security And Privacy
  6. 01:04:49 – Bi-Weekly Wanderings
  7. 01:58:35 – Housekeeping and Announcements
  8. 01:59:43 – Wrap Up
  9. 02:02:24 – Special Thanks
  10. 02:03:10 – New Outro Music

The News

mintCast Turns 15

Linux Mint 21.3 has been named

Amazon moves from Android Fork to Linux

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Committing Fully To Netplan For Network Configuration

Firefox is going to try to ship Wayland as default

FreeBSD 14 Released

EndeavourOS Releases Galileo Desktop

Vivaldi comes to Flathub

Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds

OpenMandriva LX 5 released

Pipewire reaches 1.0.0

Security and Privacy

Google Chrome’s IP Protection is privacy washing

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Someone (probably Bill) for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 426 426 Happy Birthday, mintCast! full 2:04:20 6485 416.5 – Browser Arousal https://mintcast.org/416-5-browser-arousal/ Wed, 19 Jul 2023 05:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6268 In our Innards section we talk browsers

And finally, the feedback

In "Check This Out" a link to a cool project and a YouTube video worth giving a look

Download
]]> In our Innards section we talk browsers

And finally, the feedback

In “Check This Out”

A link to a cool project and a YouTube video worth giving a look.

https://openscad.org/downloads.html

https://youtu.be/KyADkmRVe0U

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

We would like to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> full 1:35:40 6268 416 – The Red Hat Diaries https://mintcast.org/416-the-red-hat-diaries/ Wed, 12 Jul 2023 19:21:03 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6263 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News, Steam Deck exceeds 10,000 games, Red Hat fights public opinion, new LibreBoot is out, Google whines about their new AI search, Peppermint OS upgrades to Bookworm, a new KaOS, First Amendment fails at Supremes, and Solus 4 is released

In security and privacy, StackRot is here, and so is ProtonPass

Then in our Wanderings, Moss makes money, Joe goes 3D, Bill mics up, and Majid thumbs his nose at inflation

Download
]]> First up in the news: Mint Monthly News, Steam Deck exceeds 10,000 games, Red Hat fights public opinion, new LibreBoot is out, Google whines about their new AI search, Peppermint OS upgrades to Bookworm, a new KaOS, First Amendment fails at Supremes, and Solus 4 is released

In security and privacy, StackRot is here, and so is ProtonPass

Then in our Wanderings, Moss makes money, Joe goes 3D, Bill mics up, and Majid thumbs his nose at inflation

The News

Mint Monthly News

Steam Deck hits over 10,000 verified and playable games

Red Hat tried to address criticism over their new source code restrictions

LibreBoot, FOSS BIOS replacement, sees new release

Google Admits Users “Not Quite Happy” With New Search Engine

New Peppermint OS is out, based on Debian 12

New version of KaOS is out, Arch-“inspired” with Plasma

Judge rules White House pressured social networks to “suppress free speech”

Solus 4 is released

Security and Privacy

StackRot, a new Linux Kernel privilege escalation vulnerability

Introducing Proton Pass

Full Shownotes can be found here

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 416 416 The Red Hat Diaries full 1:51:14 6263 413 – Flying Wigs https://mintcast.org/413-flying-wigs/ Wed, 31 May 2023 05:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6198 First up in the news, Arch migrates Git, Ubuntu changes PPAs, Fedora Onyx is approved, Google to remove old accounts, Debian re-imposes a moratorium, Proton goes Family, Red Hat unveils a new Desktop, Fedora plans to drop X11, Thunderbird gets a new logo

In security and privacy, Google’s 2FA isn’t private enough

Then in our Wanderings, Majid is off to University, Joe is manacled to his office, Moss kicks the tires on the new Bodhi, and Bill migrates

Download
]]> First up in the news, Arch migrates Git, Ubuntu changes PPAs, Fedora Onyx is approved, Google to remove old accounts, Debian re-imposes a moratorium, Proton goes Family, Red Hat unveils a new Desktop, Fedora plans to drop X11, Thunderbird gets a new logo;


In security and privacy, Google’s 2FA isn’t private enough;

Then in our Wanderings, I’m off to University, Joe is manacled to his office, Moss kicks the tires on the new Bodhi, and Bill migrates

The News

Arch Migrates Git

Ubuntu Makes “Significant Changes” to PPAs for 23.10

Fedora Onyx, Immutable and with Budgie, approved for Fedora 39

Google To Start Removing Inactive Accounts After 2 Years

Google Chrome’s 2023 UI Refresh on Ubuntu

Debian Votes to Reinstate Merged-usr File Movement Moratorium

Proton Unveils Family Plan

Red Hat Reveals Podman Desktop 1.0

Fedora Intends To Completely Drop X11 in Plasma 6

Thunderbird Gets a Brand New Logo

Security And Privacy

Google’s New 2FA Isn’t End-to-End Encrypted

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

We would like to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 413 413 Flying Wigs full 1:39:56 6198 391.5 – The Subscription Service Rabbit Hole https://mintcast.org/391-5-the-subscription-service-rabbit-hole/ Sat, 30 Jul 2022 19:02:25 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5551 Download
]]> 0:42 Linux Innards
1:24:06 Vibrations from the Ether
1:28:30  Check This Out
1:30:45 Housekeeping and Announcements

In our Innards section, we discuss the subscription services we’re using.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit. Youtube.

The Linux Innards

  • Bill
    • Netflix
    • Amazon Prime
    • Hulu
    • Disney+
    • Discovery+
    • Paramount+
    • HBO Max
    • Philo
    • Mozilla VPN
    • Trust.Zone VPN
    • ABC Mouse
    • Xbox Gamepass Ultimate x 3
    • Big Fish Games
    • Tutanota Email
    • Google Domains
    • GoDaddy
    • Linode
    • Bitwarden
    • Apple Podcasts
    • Github
    • Truckerpath
    • Pandora
    • Protonmail
    • Pluto
    • Tubi
    • Red Circle
  • Moss
    • Xfinity Internet
    • Amazon Prime
    • Protonmail
    • My-diary.org
    • Surfshark
    • Bitwarden
    • Namecheap
    • PurplePenguin
    • Paramount+ with ShowtimeDisney+/Hulu+/ESPN+
    • Peacock
    • Amazon Prime Video
    • PlutoTV
    • Tubi
    • Joe’s Plex
    • Bill’s Jellyfin
    • Hypnotix
    • Real Debrid
    • Trakt.TV
  • Norbert
    • Tidal
    • Google Drive
    • Netflix
    • ProtonMail
    • YouTube Premium
    • Windscribe VPN
    • Spotify
    • Patreon
    • Crunchyroll
  • Joe
    • Prime
    • Netflix
    • PIA VPN
    • Spectrum
    • T-mobile
    • Plex
    • Crackle
    • Google voice

Check This Out

Wrap-up

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible:

  • Norbert and Tony H for our audio production
  • Leo for timestamps and publishing
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.Thanks, Clem!
]]> 391.5 - The Subscription Service Rabbit Hole full 1:35:22 5551 373.5 – App-Get Install https://mintcast.org/373-5-app-get-install/ Wed, 10 Nov 2021 07:03:36 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5267 And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions
Download
]]> 1:39 Linux Innards
28:54 Vibrations from the Ether
35:16 Check This Out
41:57 Announcements & Outro

In our Innards section, we discuss the applications that we use most often

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit. Youtube.

Linux Innards

  • Joe
    • Cura
    • Standard Notes
    • Resilio Sync
  • Tony
    • Firefox
    • GIMP
    • Inkscape
    • Audacity
  • Norbert
    • Brave
    • LibreOffice
    • OBS
    • Photoshop
    • Premiere Pro
    • Illustrator
  •  Josh
    • Firefox
    • Lollypop
    • EasyTAG
    • Syncthing
    • GnuCash

Vibrations from the Ether

  • Alfred

Check This Out

Announcements

Wrap-up

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible …

  • Norbert for our audio production
  • Leo for timestamps and publishing
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 373.5 - App-Get Install full 46:52 5267 373 – Ex-SUSE Me, Microsoft? https://mintcast.org/373-ex-suse-me-microsoft/ Wed, 03 Nov 2021 05:08:09 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5258 In security, an NPM library gets hijacked, Proton will not retain your data, Firefox implements GPC, and black Friday scams abound
Then in our Wanderings, Joe tries his hand at tv repair, Norbert plays with legos, Tony shops for a new pc, and Josh gets a new throne
Download
]]> 1:49 The News
10:37 Security Update
21:47 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
45:39 Announcements & Outro

First up in the news, Raspberry PI Zero 2 W, Xorg has something new, SUSE goes Edge, A new MX linux, and Microsoft Blunders

In security, an NPM library gets hijacked, Proton will not retain your data, Firefox implements GPC, and black Friday scams abound

Then in our Wanderings, Joe tries his hand at tv repair, Norbert plays with legos, Tony shops for a new pc, and Josh gets a new throne

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit. Youtube.

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

  • Joe
    • https://github.com/bluppfisk/coinprice-indicator
  • Norbert
  • Tony
  • Nishant

Announcements

Wrap-up

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible …

  • Norbert for our audio production
  • Leo for timestamps and publishing
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 373 - Ex-SUSE Me, Microsoft? full 50:34 5258 mintCast 359.5 – FLoC Blocked (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-359-5-floc-blocked-mp3/ Wed, 28 Apr 2021 06:34:58 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5039 And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions
Download
]]> Download

2:30 Linux Innards
48:43 Vibrations from the Ether
57:56 Check This Out
1:08:03 Announcements & Outro

In our Innards section, another stroll down privacy lane

And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Reddit.

LINUX INNARDS:

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

CHECK THIS OUT!

Wrap-up:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible …

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 5039 mintCast 359.5 – FLoC Blocked https://mintcast.org/mintcast-359-5-floc-blocked/ Wed, 28 Apr 2021 06:31:21 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5034 And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions
Download
]]> Download

2:30 Linux Innards
48:43 Vibrations from the Ether
57:56 Check This Out
1:08:03 Announcements & Outro

In our Innards section, another stroll down privacy lane

And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Reddit.

LINUX INNARDS:

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

CHECK THIS OUT!

Wrap-up:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible …

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 5034 mintCast 354 – sudo make me an update (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-354-sudo-make-me-an-update-mp3/ Wed, 10 Feb 2021 05:57:09 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4913 Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu loses the lead, Wayland changes, and some new releases
In Security, time to patch… again.
Download
]]> Download

1:54 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
58:30 News
1:19:27 Security Update
1:30:05 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I find a new box, Joe’s light as a feather, Moss explodes a DDE, and Bo hosts his own email

Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu loses the lead, Wayland changes, and some new releases

In Security, time to patch… again.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Picked up a Lenovo M715q Tiny. Ryzen 2400GE, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVMe
      • This will be my “studio” machine.
      • Haven’t gamed on it yet, but it’s supposed to be “not horrible”
      • It’ll free up my laptop to be a laptop again
  • Joe
    • So I got some more headphones done.  Replaced the MMCX cable on 2 of the LG HBS 770’s that I constantly use because the cable had gotten hard and cracked.  I am really impressed with how long they lasted, before I was repairing them every couple of months and I think these lasted about 8 months or so before I had to fix them.  I also really like the cables that I got to fix it.  They are a little thicker so they actually tin which makes the whole process a lot easier.  Also did another set of the Ankers with the cables I built myself and they came out well again.  Only one more to go for those. However the cost for making the cables is a bit more and may not be as economically conservative.
      • Since writing that one of the two Ankers has stopped charging.
      • The other is still working well
    • I got my weight down below 230 lbs again which is awesome.  I am not losing weight as quickly as I was when I first changed my diet again but I am not going as hard as I was before either.
    • Made my own protein bars and they are delicious.  I made one mistake though and did not spray the wax paper with a non stick so they are rather difficult to eat.  The ingredients are not cheap so I don’t know if I will be making them again.  But they are tasty.
    • Very interested in the Raspberry Pi Pico as a USB host controller but I want to give the development around it time to grow some but with the $1.99 price tag at MicroCenter I may pick up a few and put them into a drawer until more data is there.
    • Looking to upgrade my MSI GE72 gaming laptop, since the 950m is getting a bit old, but prices are once again going crazy in the used and new market because of the high cost of graphics cards right now and the fact that everyone is still working from home.  If I can wait until the vaccine is more widely distributed and people start going back to the office I imagine there will be a large volume of people off loading computers that will drive the prices back down.
    • I  have a couple of old phones that I am looking to do some projects with since they are just sitting around  but I am not sure what I should do.  Project ideas accepted jb@mintcast.org or tell me about what you have done with old phones to get some more use out of them
    • I also put the question out to the Telegram group and got a very interesting answer from listener Hob.  An application called Deskreen which can be used from an appimage and can turn any device with a web browser into another screen with some small caveats
      • If you want it to be an independent screen then you need a dummy display adapter hooked up to your system or you can display one of the screens that is already there
      • Control does not go through the device it goes through the computer which does make sense from an extra screen perspective but does mean it is not the best for remote controlling a computer.
      • The adapters are not expensive though, so that is good, and then you just set up like a normal screen and connect through the application.  This is awesome if you have a couple of older-yet-still-decent tablets sitting around.  A lot of older iPads have really good screens but a lot of difficulty adding new applications and would be perfect for something like this
  • Moss
    • I got the FuzZ400 back online with an old AMD Radeon HD 6770 video card on loan from Dale Miracle! Hope my mic sounds good. I still need to get the mic boom installed which will only take a drill bit of the correct size to accomplish. The bootup report that the rear fan was not working was solved when I found a piece of styrofoam wedged in the fan blades.
    • I’ve been having minor issues with the SSD in the FuzZ400 because it thinks it’s still in the Gigabyte Mini. I may have to reinstall Mint altogether to get everything really back together, but my current workarounds are good. Sabayon owned GRUB and I could not update it or add Grub Customizer to Sabayon (because Sabayon repos are permanently offline), and Mint did not want to take GRUB back for some reason, so I installed UbuntuDDE on sda5. No more Gentoo. Sad. The other distros were not affected.
    • I installed a new version of ExLight on the Kudu to replace Lubuntu. I’m having strange wifi issues, but this is the farthest I have gotten with a distro written by Arne Exton. 
    • My Manjaro Cinnamon installation finally glitched out (after maybe 8 months) so I replaced that with UbuntuDDE. There were three issues, and two of them were fixed through a chat in Telegram with the dev, and I filed a bug on the 3rd issue with the thanks of the dev. I now have UbuntuDDE Respin on all three of my machines (not counting the Raspberry Pis), and my wife wants it on her T430. Could this be my new Daily Driver?
    • Listener Dylan Burger submitted another excellent article to It’s MOSS, and I responded by making him an Admin on the site. So now we are two. Anyone else?
    • Not gonna talk about my teeth.
    • I’m told that my mother’s lawyers have finally sent documents out following her demise. I have not yet received them, but one cousin has.
    • We may finish White Night, volume 9 of Dresden Files, tonight.

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

    • Sudo Vulnerability
      • The exploit is in the hands of… well… everyone now. Metasploit has the module.
      • A heap buffer overflow occurs when you stuff a software full of data that causes some kind of breakage. In this case, that breakage leads to root access.
    •  Chrome[ium] Zero Day
      • Monocultuuuuuuurrrrrreeeeee!!!!!
      • Google is being very close to the chest with the details, but we know it’s another heap buffer overflow.
      • The Mitre database does not have information on the CVE. Unlisted other places like NIST.
      • Maybe linked to their nation-state writeup.
      • Electron apps…
  • Update your Stuff

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on February 21, 2021. 

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible …

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4913 mintCast 354 – sudo make me an update https://mintcast.org/mintcast-354-sudo-make-me-an-update/ Wed, 10 Feb 2021 05:46:23 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4909 Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu loses the lead, Wayland changes, and some new releases
In Security, time to patch… again.
Download
]]> Download

1:54 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
58:30 News
1:19:27 Security Update
1:30:05 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I find a new box, Joe’s light as a feather, Moss explodes a DDE, and Bo hosts his own email

Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu loses the lead, Wayland changes, and some new releases

In Security, time to patch… again.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Picked up a Lenovo M715q Tiny. Ryzen 2400GE, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVMe
      • This will be my “studio” machine.
      • Haven’t gamed on it yet, but it’s supposed to be “not horrible”
      • It’ll free up my laptop to be a laptop again
  • Joe
    • So I got some more headphones done.  Replaced the MMCX cable on 2 of the LG HBS 770’s that I constantly use because the cable had gotten hard and cracked.  I am really impressed with how long they lasted, before I was repairing them every couple of months and I think these lasted about 8 months or so before I had to fix them.  I also really like the cables that I got to fix it.  They are a little thicker so they actually tin which makes the whole process a lot easier.  Also did another set of the Ankers with the cables I built myself and they came out well again.  Only one more to go for those. However the cost for making the cables is a bit more and may not be as economically conservative.
      • Since writing that one of the two Ankers has stopped charging.
      • The other is still working well
    • I got my weight down below 230 lbs again which is awesome.  I am not losing weight as quickly as I was when I first changed my diet again but I am not going as hard as I was before either.
    • Made my own protein bars and they are delicious.  I made one mistake though and did not spray the wax paper with a non stick so they are rather difficult to eat.  The ingredients are not cheap so I don’t know if I will be making them again.  But they are tasty.
    • Very interested in the Raspberry Pi Pico as a USB host controller but I want to give the development around it time to grow some but with the $1.99 price tag at MicroCenter I may pick up a few and put them into a drawer until more data is there.
    • Looking to upgrade my MSI GE72 gaming laptop, since the 950m is getting a bit old, but prices are once again going crazy in the used and new market because of the high cost of graphics cards right now and the fact that everyone is still working from home.  If I can wait until the vaccine is more widely distributed and people start going back to the office I imagine there will be a large volume of people off loading computers that will drive the prices back down.
    • I  have a couple of old phones that I am looking to do some projects with since they are just sitting around  but I am not sure what I should do.  Project ideas accepted jb@mintcast.org or tell me about what you have done with old phones to get some more use out of them
    • I also put the question out to the Telegram group and got a very interesting answer from listener Hob.  An application called Deskreen which can be used from an appimage and can turn any device with a web browser into another screen with some small caveats
      • If you want it to be an independent screen then you need a dummy display adapter hooked up to your system or you can display one of the screens that is already there
      • Control does not go through the device it goes through the computer which does make sense from an extra screen perspective but does mean it is not the best for remote controlling a computer.
      • The adapters are not expensive though, so that is good, and then you just set up like a normal screen and connect through the application.  This is awesome if you have a couple of older-yet-still-decent tablets sitting around.  A lot of older iPads have really good screens but a lot of difficulty adding new applications and would be perfect for something like this
  • Moss
    • I got the FuzZ400 back online with an old AMD Radeon HD 6770 video card on loan from Dale Miracle! Hope my mic sounds good. I still need to get the mic boom installed which will only take a drill bit of the correct size to accomplish. The bootup report that the rear fan was not working was solved when I found a piece of styrofoam wedged in the fan blades.
    • I’ve been having minor issues with the SSD in the FuzZ400 because it thinks it’s still in the Gigabyte Mini. I may have to reinstall Mint altogether to get everything really back together, but my current workarounds are good. Sabayon owned GRUB and I could not update it or add Grub Customizer to Sabayon (because Sabayon repos are permanently offline), and Mint did not want to take GRUB back for some reason, so I installed UbuntuDDE on sda5. No more Gentoo. Sad. The other distros were not affected.
    • I installed a new version of ExLight on the Kudu to replace Lubuntu. I’m having strange wifi issues, but this is the farthest I have gotten with a distro written by Arne Exton. 
    • My Manjaro Cinnamon installation finally glitched out (after maybe 8 months) so I replaced that with UbuntuDDE. There were three issues, and two of them were fixed through a chat in Telegram with the dev, and I filed a bug on the 3rd issue with the thanks of the dev. I now have UbuntuDDE Respin on all three of my machines (not counting the Raspberry Pis), and my wife wants it on her T430. Could this be my new Daily Driver?
    • Listener Dylan Burger submitted another excellent article to It’s MOSS, and I responded by making him an Admin on the site. So now we are two. Anyone else?
    • Not gonna talk about my teeth.
    • I’m told that my mother’s lawyers have finally sent documents out following her demise. I have not yet received them, but one cousin has.
    • We may finish White Night, volume 9 of Dresden Files, tonight.

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

    • Sudo Vulnerability
      • The exploit is in the hands of… well… everyone now. Metasploit has the module.
      • A heap buffer overflow occurs when you stuff a software full of data that causes some kind of breakage. In this case, that breakage leads to root access.
    •  Chrome[ium] Zero Day
      • Monocultuuuuuuurrrrrreeeeee!!!!!
      • Google is being very close to the chest with the details, but we know it’s another heap buffer overflow.
      • The Mitre database does not have information on the CVE. Unlisted other places like NIST.
      • Maybe linked to their nation-state writeup.
      • Electron apps…
  • Update your Stuff

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on February 21, 2021. 

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible …

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4909 mintCast 346 – It’s Not You, It’s Me (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-346-its-not-you-its-me-mp3/ Wed, 21 Oct 2020 04:37:58 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4716 Then, our news lots of releases, a new feature and a birthday
In security, we look at an IoT bug
Download
]]>

Download

1:45 Wanderings
55:45 The News
1:03:04 Security Update
1:10:57 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo makes web apps, Moss sends a Telegram, Joe gets an upgrade, Josh fights with a mic, and Bo gets a gnome.

Then, our news lots of releases, a new feature and a birthday

In security, we look at an IoT bug

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • The Chromium based browsers have fixed the AMD/Graphical issue that was plaguing me. Waiting for a new beta update from the Linux Mint Chromium package to test that. But so far, Linux Mint’s Chromium is stable, but still has the issue. Can’t remember if it was Dan or Joe from Linux User Space that said resizing the windows fixes it. It does!
    • Web Apps is my new favorite thing. I use it with Plex and Nextcloud mostly with the Linux Mint Chromium.
    • World of Warcraft crashes on launch from Lutris. Sad times.
  • Moss
    • I have the FuzZ400 about as good as it’s going to be, still need to hit F1 during all boots. This makes it hard to reboot from my recliner, as the F1 key on the wireless mini keyboard does not function. (Note: buy new wireless keyboard with real F-keys when possible.) 
    • I installed the power supply on my mini desktop. It works again. I put my old 2 Tb spinning metal drive in it. All the partitions were there, I thought I had 4 installations on it… but only the Mint partition had a distro in it, and the swap partition had been added to the partition which followed where it was. I reestablished the swap partition, and installed an OEM of Mint 20 Cinnamon on it. I’m looking for a local student to give it to. I have a monitor for it, but I haven’t looked to see if I have a working spare keyboard or mouse.
    • On Tuesday the 13th, I went looking for a Telegram group about Bodhi Linux, and didn’t find any in English so I set up one — with help, as I’ve never done this before. I posted it to all my Linux groups and also to both Bodhi Forums and my LQ blog. We have 20 members now, including lead dev Robert Wiley (aka YLee).
    • I had a great conversation with YLee in the group yesterday, lots of new stuff, including that there is a pre-alpha release now of Bodhi 6.0, available both with Moksha and E24. There is no 6.0 repo yet, but YLee stated that some programs from the 5.1 repo MAY work, such as the bodhi-printing app, no guarantees. I’m a Bodhi-loving fool, I currently have 3 installations on my laptop – 5.1, 6.0 with Moksha and 6.0 with Enlightenment E24.
    • Moksha development has far surpassed E17 levels, and has included most of the improvements through E24; however, unlike the main Enlightenment line, YLee accomplished this without changing the stable E17 codebase. 
    • The Bodhi team is mostly just 2 devs now, so please volunteer if you can help. Donations are up and down as well. [$50 this month, $300 last month]
    • In employment news, I still have not gotten paid by Census 2020, but discovered that was my fault. I fixed it, but I could be waiting another 3-4 weeks to receive my paycheck. I have been hired as a substitute teacher by the local school district, but the past two weeks were Fall Break so no work. I interviewed for an actual computer repair position, but was not called back for the second round. 
    • We’re getting near the end of Dead Beat, the 7th book in the Dresden Files series.
  • Joe
    • The GK61S Bluetooth keyboard.  I still think that changing out the battery might be my best bet for maintaining bluetooth connection but overall I am disappointed.  I do like the buttons and the size is useful but having to use it wired is a bit annoying and I don’t know if replacing the battery will actually fix all the issues since it sometimes has a problem staying connected over bluetooth even with external power.  It can work with just the USB-C cable but wire can get in the way.  
      • I had previously thought that most of the Bluetooth connection issues with Linux had been solved but now I am going to need to look into it a bit more
      • Mostly bluetooth seems to suck on the desktop
    • Having fun with the Repetier snap and my 3D printer.  Had to do a lot of fixing and refixing to get it printing again but it is good to go for now.  Still having some problems with ABS even with the enclosure but I am switching back to pla and petg for now.  I did have to build a couple of dry boxes for the filament rolls and hopefully that will help.  Petg is printing pretty good right now.
    • Still figuring out what i want to do with that Lenovo Flex 4.  It is currently running Repetier and hooked up to my printer.  I think I am going to do a bit more conversion of the space that it is in and see if I can make a mini studio.
      • Used it to do the linux lugcast since we are using Jitsi amongst ourselves
        • Used Droidcam for this.  I think i got better resolution over wifi than i did over USB
      • Waiting on a mic stand to come in and will be using it along with the HyperX Quadcast mic it actually came in today but i have not opened it yet
      • Thinking about getting a green screen and seeing how well it works since you can get them for around 20 dollars
    • Finally made the upgrade on my main laptop to Mint 20 following the upgrade path, really nice to not have to jump through all the hoops to get the graphics card working properly.  
      • Reinstalled both Docker and Resilio Sync and all my scripting seems to be working fine
    • I had to install the flatpak for mumble on all my machines.  I guess the most recent update messed with the certificates.  Great to find out as the show is starting
  • Josh Hawk
    • Mic Mayhem! I have been dealing with trying to get good audio out of my mic. I have a Blue Snowball USB Condenser mic right now and for some reason the audio is good sometimes and sounds hollow others. I have tried messing with the software sound settings but nothing seems to help. I just have to turn it on and hope my recording sounds good this time haha 😅.
    • In other news this led me to buy a new dynamic mic! After looking at a ton of reviews I finally decided on believe it or not an Amazon Basics Mic 😱. I found it on eBay for 16$ but I didn’t have an audio interface so it came with a XLR to ¼” audio jack. I plugged it into my Creative Sound Blaster Z sound card and presto my voice sounded much better but alas it was not to be. There was a rhythmic buzzing that I later found out was coming from my sound card 😭. All that to say I am back using my Blue Snowball and am waiting for a new XLR to USB cable that will fix the buzzing issue.
    • One more quick thing. I have finally installed openSUSE on my parents old Gateway PC and am in the process of setting it up. I tried to use the transactional server install and realized that zypper does not work on that so I reinstalled the normal server version.
  • Bo
    • Gnome experiment
      • Fedora 32 getting stuck on boot (gnome display manager)
      • Ubuntu was cool but I feel like it’s not close to “stock” gnome
      • Pop!_OS
        • Great! Love the window tiling feature and how it’s implemented
      • Gnome: it’s not you, it’s me…
    • Still playing card games on tabletop simulator (tts). Yesterday I taught my sister to play Magic.
    • LOTR the card game had an online convention using tts and Discord.
    • Baldur’s Gate 3 – Will it Proton?

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

      • Three flaws in BlueZ, the Bluetooth controller software in the kernel, could lead to code execution, denial of service and a way to map memory for later exfiltration!
      • Updating to kernel 5.9 seems to be the fix, which is easy enough. This bit is incorrect. Intel made a statement. No fix is available.
      • Ubuntu hasn’t backported the fixes to kernel 5.8 as of yet, but surely it’ll show up soon.
    • Zoom has had a wild history with encryption in the past few months. Things like encryption that wasn’t full encryption, encryption for everyone wasn’t really for everyone, and the ability for internal employees were able to log into supposedly encrypted sessions defeating the entire purpose of encryption.
    • In a four phase approach Zoom is finally rolling out end to end encryption. For now, during phase one, it’ll be opt in only. It’s essentially a beta test.
    • The second phase will roll out in 2021.

Announcements:

  • Our next episode will be Sunday, November 1, 2020 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC. Check when this will be in your local timezone at https://everytimezone.com/s/7d8c1119.
  • Note both the US and UK will have time changes (“fall back” 1 hour) between mintCasts 346 & 347, so those times remain the same, but this makes the UTC time 1 hour later than before.

Wrap-up:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible …

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4716 mintCast 346 – It’s Not You, It’s Me https://mintcast.org/mintcast-346-its-not-you-its-me/ Wed, 21 Oct 2020 04:20:17 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4709 Then, our news lots of releases, a new feature and a birthday
In security, we look at an IoT bug
Download
]]>

Download

1:45 Wanderings
55:45 The News
1:03:04 Security Update
1:10:57 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo makes web apps, Moss sends a Telegram, Joe gets an upgrade, Josh fights with a mic, and Bo gets a gnome.

Then, our news lots of releases, a new feature and a birthday

In security, we look at an IoT bug

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • The Chromium based browsers have fixed the AMD/Graphical issue that was plaguing me. Waiting for a new beta update from the Linux Mint Chromium package to test that. But so far, Linux Mint’s Chromium is stable, but still has the issue. Can’t remember if it was Dan or Joe from Linux User Space that said resizing the windows fixes it. It does!
    • Web Apps is my new favorite thing. I use it with Plex and Nextcloud mostly with the Linux Mint Chromium.
    • World of Warcraft crashes on launch from Lutris. Sad times.
  • Moss
    • I have the FuzZ400 about as good as it’s going to be, still need to hit F1 during all boots. This makes it hard to reboot from my recliner, as the F1 key on the wireless mini keyboard does not function. (Note: buy new wireless keyboard with real F-keys when possible.) 
    • I installed the power supply on my mini desktop. It works again. I put my old 2 Tb spinning metal drive in it. All the partitions were there, I thought I had 4 installations on it… but only the Mint partition had a distro in it, and the swap partition had been added to the partition which followed where it was. I reestablished the swap partition, and installed an OEM of Mint 20 Cinnamon on it. I’m looking for a local student to give it to. I have a monitor for it, but I haven’t looked to see if I have a working spare keyboard or mouse.
    • On Tuesday the 13th, I went looking for a Telegram group about Bodhi Linux, and didn’t find any in English so I set up one — with help, as I’ve never done this before. I posted it to all my Linux groups and also to both Bodhi Forums and my LQ blog. We have 20 members now, including lead dev Robert Wiley (aka YLee).
    • I had a great conversation with YLee in the group yesterday, lots of new stuff, including that there is a pre-alpha release now of Bodhi 6.0, available both with Moksha and E24. There is no 6.0 repo yet, but YLee stated that some programs from the 5.1 repo MAY work, such as the bodhi-printing app, no guarantees. I’m a Bodhi-loving fool, I currently have 3 installations on my laptop – 5.1, 6.0 with Moksha and 6.0 with Enlightenment E24.
    • Moksha development has far surpassed E17 levels, and has included most of the improvements through E24; however, unlike the main Enlightenment line, YLee accomplished this without changing the stable E17 codebase. 
    • The Bodhi team is mostly just 2 devs now, so please volunteer if you can help. Donations are up and down as well. [$50 this month, $300 last month]
    • In employment news, I still have not gotten paid by Census 2020, but discovered that was my fault. I fixed it, but I could be waiting another 3-4 weeks to receive my paycheck. I have been hired as a substitute teacher by the local school district, but the past two weeks were Fall Break so no work. I interviewed for an actual computer repair position, but was not called back for the second round. 
    • We’re getting near the end of Dead Beat, the 7th book in the Dresden Files series.
  • Joe
    • The GK61S Bluetooth keyboard.  I still think that changing out the battery might be my best bet for maintaining bluetooth connection but overall I am disappointed.  I do like the buttons and the size is useful but having to use it wired is a bit annoying and I don’t know if replacing the battery will actually fix all the issues since it sometimes has a problem staying connected over bluetooth even with external power.  It can work with just the USB-C cable but wire can get in the way.  
      • I had previously thought that most of the Bluetooth connection issues with Linux had been solved but now I am going to need to look into it a bit more
      • Mostly bluetooth seems to suck on the desktop
    • Having fun with the Repetier snap and my 3D printer.  Had to do a lot of fixing and refixing to get it printing again but it is good to go for now.  Still having some problems with ABS even with the enclosure but I am switching back to pla and petg for now.  I did have to build a couple of dry boxes for the filament rolls and hopefully that will help.  Petg is printing pretty good right now.
    • Still figuring out what i want to do with that Lenovo Flex 4.  It is currently running Repetier and hooked up to my printer.  I think I am going to do a bit more conversion of the space that it is in and see if I can make a mini studio.
      • Used it to do the linux lugcast since we are using Jitsi amongst ourselves
        • Used Droidcam for this.  I think i got better resolution over wifi than i did over USB
      • Waiting on a mic stand to come in and will be using it along with the HyperX Quadcast mic it actually came in today but i have not opened it yet
      • Thinking about getting a green screen and seeing how well it works since you can get them for around 20 dollars
    • Finally made the upgrade on my main laptop to Mint 20 following the upgrade path, really nice to not have to jump through all the hoops to get the graphics card working properly.  
      • Reinstalled both Docker and Resilio Sync and all my scripting seems to be working fine
    • I had to install the flatpak for mumble on all my machines.  I guess the most recent update messed with the certificates.  Great to find out as the show is starting
  • Josh Hawk
    • Mic Mayhem! I have been dealing with trying to get good audio out of my mic. I have a Blue Snowball USB Condenser mic right now and for some reason the audio is good sometimes and sounds hollow others. I have tried messing with the software sound settings but nothing seems to help. I just have to turn it on and hope my recording sounds good this time haha 😅.
    • In other news this led me to buy a new dynamic mic! After looking at a ton of reviews I finally decided on believe it or not an Amazon Basics Mic 😱. I found it on eBay for 16$ but I didn’t have an audio interface so it came with a XLR to ¼” audio jack. I plugged it into my Creative Sound Blaster Z sound card and presto my voice sounded much better but alas it was not to be. There was a rhythmic buzzing that I later found out was coming from my sound card 😭. All that to say I am back using my Blue Snowball and am waiting for a new XLR to USB cable that will fix the buzzing issue.
    • One more quick thing. I have finally installed openSUSE on my parents old Gateway PC and am in the process of setting it up. I tried to use the transactional server install and realized that zypper does not work on that so I reinstalled the normal server version.
  • Bo
    • Gnome experiment
      • Fedora 32 getting stuck on boot (gnome display manager)
      • Ubuntu was cool but I feel like it’s not close to “stock” gnome
      • Pop!_OS
        • Great! Love the window tiling feature and how it’s implemented
      • Gnome: it’s not you, it’s me…
    • Still playing card games on tabletop simulator (tts). Yesterday I taught my sister to play Magic.
    • LOTR the card game had an online convention using tts and Discord.
    • Baldur’s Gate 3 – Will it Proton?

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

      • Three flaws in BlueZ, the Bluetooth controller software in the kernel, could lead to code execution, denial of service and a way to map memory for later exfiltration!
      • Updating to kernel 5.9 seems to be the fix, which is easy enough. This bit is incorrect. Intel made a statement. No fix is available.
      • Ubuntu hasn’t backported the fixes to kernel 5.8 as of yet, but surely it’ll show up soon.
    • Zoom has had a wild history with encryption in the past few months. Things like encryption that wasn’t full encryption, encryption for everyone wasn’t really for everyone, and the ability for internal employees were able to log into supposedly encrypted sessions defeating the entire purpose of encryption.
    • In a four phase approach Zoom is finally rolling out end to end encryption. For now, during phase one, it’ll be opt in only. It’s essentially a beta test.
    • The second phase will roll out in 2021.

Announcements:

  • Our next episode will be Sunday, November 1, 2020 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC. Check when this will be in your local timezone at https://everytimezone.com/s/7d8c1119.
  • Note both the US and UK will have time changes (“fall back” 1 hour) between mintCasts 346 & 347, so those times remain the same, but this makes the UTC time 1 hour later than before.

Wrap-up:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible …

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4709 mintCast 342 – Security Theater (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-342-security-theater-mp3/ Wed, 26 Aug 2020 04:50:08 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4592 Then, in our news, Pinta, Lutris and Mozilla
In security, we talk security recommendations and the NSA
Download
]]>

Download

We would like to welcome Owen Peery to the team. He’s our new editor!

1:40 Wanderings
46:32 News
1:05:05 Security
1:22:05 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I’ve been testing out a new keyboard, Tony Hughes tries to remove a finger (again), Joe has been soldering and reading, Moss has been adding more distros,

Then, in our news, Pinta, Lutris and Mozilla

In security, we talk security recommendations and the NSA

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Digging into some errors I got, last stream on Youtube. It was complaining that I was streaming at only 3500kbps. That was odd as I’ve always streamed at OBS’s default. Turns out, Youtube wants 4500kbps now. So, I cranked the video bitrate up to 6400 in OBS’s Output section. No errors!
    • Kernel 5.8 is smooth as silk
    • Got a new keyboard. A cheap mechanical with OUTEMU Red switches. Cost $35, but also came with a mouse pad and mouse. They’re all RGB of course, except for the mouse pad.
    • Been watching Star Trek Lower Decks. It’s hilarious. It’s a story of about 5 ensigns that work on the starship Cerritos. They’re not high ranking, and only get to do grunt work for the most part, but they find their niche and get their jobs done. I’ve never been much of a Trek fan, but this is seriously something I can see myself watching until the end of the series. It has the feel of Rick and Morty and Futurama fused together. Hijinks obviously ensue.
    • Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 1 Trailer
  • Tony H
    • So I managed to drill my finger in an accident while doing some work on the matchbox cars, it’s not good when a drill bit brakes while you are drilling a post out and you have the model held in your hand, the cut was very sore and the end of the finger is still numb from a little bit of nerve damage as a result. What with that and cutting myself while cooking my wife thinks I have a death wish.
    • As a result of the accident I haven’t been doing much in the way of restoration for the last couple of weeks but I have made some nice eBay buys which have resulted in the collection and spares to the restoration has grown a little larger, although I had to stop bidding on stuff as I wouldn’t have been around for any deliveries that may have arrived after I came away, it has probably saved me a few shekels.
    • For a little light relief I installed Ubuntu Touch on my OnePlus 1 and while it was a fairly painless process unlike trying to update Lineage OS to 17.1 on the same phone which I can’t get it to do, it is definitely NOT ready for prime time yet. All the apps seem to be web based and do not work very well, I was thinking of Using the phone as my Sat Nav for my car but as you need the internet even if it worked well, which it doesn’t then I would need to get a new sim card and data plan as it will not work on the GPS alone as it needs a web connection for the apps to work. I also tried to connect to the WiFi here at Woodbrooke and it will not connect to the login page to finish authorising access to the WiFi.
    • I’m continuing to play with Mint 20 Mate on the DHD laptop with the intention of this being my review for the September show. Given my findings so far It might be a short review as apart from the Snapd issue and a few programs being updated it is pretty much business as usual, so while I am here at Woodbrooke I’m having a look at a distro suggested by a listener, SparkyLinux and while it is based on Debian they do what Mint used to do with the LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) and base one of the spins on the testing branch with a warning that it is not for those wanting a stable system or are new to Linux. Just to note that both iso’s will fit on a 2Gb Flash drive (or less than 1GB if you opt for one of the stable minimal GUI spins). So if you have an old one kicking around you were wondering what to use it for, then maybe SparkyLinux could be an option.    
    • I wrote the 4th in my Full Circle Magazine series on podcast production the first of which was in issue 159 at the end of July. I’m not a natural writer but I have been enjoying sharing what I have learned since starting on mintCast and DHD.
  • Moss
    • I installed Gecko ROLLING to my desktop. So now I have ROLLING on my desktop and STATIC on my laptop (equivalent to openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap, respectively). 
    • On the 15th, I installed KDE neon, also to my desktop. Oddly, the announcement that neon was available based on 20.04 did not mention that you would still be installing the 18.04 version, and then be greeted with the Upgrade button. It took a few more button pushes to get the upgrade started, but it ran beautifully. I then ran updates and installed some of my more common additions, including Stacer 1.10. Stacer ran great, but Discover popped up and said there was an update to it. I ran the update. And now Stacer wouldn’t load, it said “program not found”. So I reinstalled from my .deb package and it worked again… and Discover said there was an update again. I have posted to the KDE neon user forum to report this issue and ask how I can get Discover to ignore the update. Apparently they think an app in the repo is newer than the same app from a .deb file, but why it disables the program to run the update is beyond me. Note to self: Check the repo to see if an application is there before installing saved .deb files.
    • I now have only one free partition each on my desktop and laptop. And I’m starting to have memory issues — not my computer, me, trying to remember what all I have installed. Updating has already gotten beyond the “fun” level.
    • I am tempted to install Releax Linux to my system even though it’s only 0.5beta. This is a fully independent distro out of India, with a new package manager and everything. It sounds really exciting. Maybe I should dig up Tony Hughes’ instructions and learn how to install it in a VM.
    • I posted a new blog to LinuxQuestions.org.
    • I did some performing on Thursday the 20th on Eurofilk, which is now happening every other Thursday. I got to play with Cecilia Eng, first time for me and she’s a legend, and a total of 9 others in the Zoom room, including my friend K.J. Noren. This is the first performing I’ve done since about 2 weeks after my accident. My shoulder hurt a lot more afterward, but I seem to have gained mobility.
    • We’re about ⅔ of the way through Blood Rites, the 6th Dresden Files book. Dresden missed a huge hint when he had a major data download from Thomas; there is no explanation for that miss. We’re enjoying the book, we just wish Dresden could be more successful stopping people from dying.
  • Joe
    • Watched a lot of YouTube and did some soldering
    • Took a break for a few days from reading but still got some in
      • Up to book 20 in Drizzt
      • Demon Accords book 16
      • Big Damn Hero
        • Firefly book, surprisingly good
    • Soldered some headphones
      • New MMCX connectors came in and got them set up on 2 sets of headphones.
      • Only need to redo one of the connections at this point
    • Was informed that I missed the 8th book of the Incarnations of Immortality series by Piers Anthony.  Although I am more than a little disillusioned by his work since he uses it as a platform to push his ideology on age of consent.
      • Also the book does not exist in audio format from what I can see so if I do read it, it will have to be text aloud
    • Attempted to make the macro keyboard, followed the instructions exactly but was not able to get it working.
      • Rechecked my soldering several times but it was solid
      • Only about 6 of the 12 keys would work.  
      • So I took it apart down to the board on the keypad and did continuity tests on the whole thing
      • Bad board and a slightly different pinout than was in the instructions but the different pinout shouldn’t be a concern
      • I could try to solder directly to the board and to the pins but that seems a little crazy even for me.  Although if I get bored enough you never know.
      • I have ordered a couple of different types of keyboards to give another try using different methods
      • Right before the show a test set of 4 mechanical keys showed up and I was able to get them wired in place although I still need to wire the Promicro and I need to 3D-print the case for it
      • Thinking about ordering a set of 90 MX Cherry Blues and 3d printing everything else
  • Tony W
    • Refinishing my basement practice/rehearsal/studio/home office space
      • Installed carpet to cover concrete floor
      • Covered the one concrete wall in this room with drywall/heavy cloth, for now
      • Have insulation and drywall ready to go for remaining walls/ceilings
      • Will most likely get a permit from county before installing drywall over electrical, ductwork etc
      • This involved disassembling all of my tech, my podcast setup, etc and almost did not set back up before today’s podcast
    • Updated to Mint 20
      • Upgrade was fairly seamless, but had a couple minor issues
        • The update did break my Grub.  Reinstalled Grub very easily using MX Linux live USB Boot Repair (courtesy of Ventoy)
        • The version of Mumble installed from Software Manager didn’t work, had to install the Flatpak
      • Installed Linux via Crouton on Acer Chromebook 314
          • Crostini was great, but somewhat useless to me as there is no direct access to hardware (particularly USB audio devices) 
        • Crouton gives you full Linux desktop courtesy of chroot
        • Process to install:
          • Have to turn on Developer mode (which erases local data)
          • Follow instructions to install via crosh (Chrome terminal)
          • Once installed, to enter Linux desktop: Sudo enter-chroot startxfce4 (or sudo startxfce4 as a shortcut)
        • From there, Ctrl/Alt/Shift Forward and Ctrl/Alt/Shift/Back to switch between ChromeOS and XFCE (or desktop of your choice)
        • Default is XFCE but Cinnamon, KDE, e17, LXDE and Unity are also available 
        • IT WORKED!!!  My audio interface works perfectly with XFCE running on the Chromebook. 
          • Audacity, Mumble, OBS studio ready to go
        • Downsides: 
          • Developer Mode
          • Not supported – ChromeOS updates can break it
          • Default install is 16.04.  I believe you can specify 18.04
        • I think I will be using this.  It’s a cheap, light portable device with 12 hour battery life that I can take on the go

THE NEWS

SECURITY UPDATE

  • NSA reveals SOMETHING about Russian hacks
  • Linux Malware and Securing Your System
    • CTT goes in early about preventive measures and turns his nose up at the idea that someone would be running kernels earlier than 3.7 because it was released in 2012. RHEL 6 is still on 2.6… Sure. For a desktop user, it’s probably not likely, but for Enterprise? The NSA and the FBI didn’t put out a report for grandma in her kitchen. They put it out for the military and other institutions that are slow moving. In some cases, RHEL 5 is still in use and in Extended Life Phase.
    • Don’t install untrusted kernel modules or unsigned kernels.
    • SecureBoot
    • CTT offers a script that does:
      • Turning on UFW
      • Limiting SSH (which prevents brute force/dictionary style attacks)
      • Opening 80/443
      • Denying everything else incoming
      • Allowing everything outgoing
    • The script is a little odd. While limiting SSH is good, much thought should be given to just using keys, and disabling password login altogether. Also, why open 80 and 443? You would really only need this if you’re hosting a website of some kind. Most tools use custom ports (i.e., Cockpit uses port 9090).
  • Alexa Can Be Hacked, Instagram Retains Deleted Data, Linux Malware Found By NSA & FBI – ThreatWire

Announcements:

Our next episode will be September 6, 2020 at 2 pm Central US Time, 7 pm UTC, 8 pm British Summer Time – https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

Add Dallas Tx

Wrap-up:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible … 

  • Londoner for his suggestion to use timeanddate.com
  • Hobstar for his work on the new logo
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we are using to record
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
]]> full 4592 mintCast 342 – Security Theater https://mintcast.org/mintcast-342-security-theater/ Wed, 26 Aug 2020 04:49:31 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4588 Then, in our news, Pinta, Lutris and Mozilla
In security, we talk security recommendations and the NSA
Download
]]>

Download

We would like to welcome Owen Peery to the team. He’s our new editor!

1:40 Wanderings
46:32 News
1:05:05 Security
1:22:05 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I’ve been testing out a new keyboard, Tony Hughes tries to remove a finger (again), Joe has been soldering and reading, Moss has been adding more distros,

Then, in our news, Pinta, Lutris and Mozilla

In security, we talk security recommendations and the NSA

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Digging into some errors I got, last stream on Youtube. It was complaining that I was streaming at only 3500kbps. That was odd as I’ve always streamed at OBS’s default. Turns out, Youtube wants 4500kbps now. So, I cranked the video bitrate up to 6400 in OBS’s Output section. No errors!
    • Kernel 5.8 is smooth as silk
    • Got a new keyboard. A cheap mechanical with OUTEMU Red switches. Cost $35, but also came with a mouse pad and mouse. They’re all RGB of course, except for the mouse pad.
    • Been watching Star Trek Lower Decks. It’s hilarious. It’s a story of about 5 ensigns that work on the starship Cerritos. They’re not high ranking, and only get to do grunt work for the most part, but they find their niche and get their jobs done. I’ve never been much of a Trek fan, but this is seriously something I can see myself watching until the end of the series. It has the feel of Rick and Morty and Futurama fused together. Hijinks obviously ensue.
    • Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 1 Trailer
  • Tony H
    • So I managed to drill my finger in an accident while doing some work on the matchbox cars, it’s not good when a drill bit brakes while you are drilling a post out and you have the model held in your hand, the cut was very sore and the end of the finger is still numb from a little bit of nerve damage as a result. What with that and cutting myself while cooking my wife thinks I have a death wish.
    • As a result of the accident I haven’t been doing much in the way of restoration for the last couple of weeks but I have made some nice eBay buys which have resulted in the collection and spares to the restoration has grown a little larger, although I had to stop bidding on stuff as I wouldn’t have been around for any deliveries that may have arrived after I came away, it has probably saved me a few shekels.
    • For a little light relief I installed Ubuntu Touch on my OnePlus 1 and while it was a fairly painless process unlike trying to update Lineage OS to 17.1 on the same phone which I can’t get it to do, it is definitely NOT ready for prime time yet. All the apps seem to be web based and do not work very well, I was thinking of Using the phone as my Sat Nav for my car but as you need the internet even if it worked well, which it doesn’t then I would need to get a new sim card and data plan as it will not work on the GPS alone as it needs a web connection for the apps to work. I also tried to connect to the WiFi here at Woodbrooke and it will not connect to the login page to finish authorising access to the WiFi.
    • I’m continuing to play with Mint 20 Mate on the DHD laptop with the intention of this being my review for the September show. Given my findings so far It might be a short review as apart from the Snapd issue and a few programs being updated it is pretty much business as usual, so while I am here at Woodbrooke I’m having a look at a distro suggested by a listener, SparkyLinux and while it is based on Debian they do what Mint used to do with the LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) and base one of the spins on the testing branch with a warning that it is not for those wanting a stable system or are new to Linux. Just to note that both iso’s will fit on a 2Gb Flash drive (or less than 1GB if you opt for one of the stable minimal GUI spins). So if you have an old one kicking around you were wondering what to use it for, then maybe SparkyLinux could be an option.    
    • I wrote the 4th in my Full Circle Magazine series on podcast production the first of which was in issue 159 at the end of July. I’m not a natural writer but I have been enjoying sharing what I have learned since starting on mintCast and DHD.
  • Moss
    • I installed Gecko ROLLING to my desktop. So now I have ROLLING on my desktop and STATIC on my laptop (equivalent to openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap, respectively). 
    • On the 15th, I installed KDE neon, also to my desktop. Oddly, the announcement that neon was available based on 20.04 did not mention that you would still be installing the 18.04 version, and then be greeted with the Upgrade button. It took a few more button pushes to get the upgrade started, but it ran beautifully. I then ran updates and installed some of my more common additions, including Stacer 1.10. Stacer ran great, but Discover popped up and said there was an update to it. I ran the update. And now Stacer wouldn’t load, it said “program not found”. So I reinstalled from my .deb package and it worked again… and Discover said there was an update again. I have posted to the KDE neon user forum to report this issue and ask how I can get Discover to ignore the update. Apparently they think an app in the repo is newer than the same app from a .deb file, but why it disables the program to run the update is beyond me. Note to self: Check the repo to see if an application is there before installing saved .deb files.
    • I now have only one free partition each on my desktop and laptop. And I’m starting to have memory issues — not my computer, me, trying to remember what all I have installed. Updating has already gotten beyond the “fun” level.
    • I am tempted to install Releax Linux to my system even though it’s only 0.5beta. This is a fully independent distro out of India, with a new package manager and everything. It sounds really exciting. Maybe I should dig up Tony Hughes’ instructions and learn how to install it in a VM.
    • I posted a new blog to LinuxQuestions.org.
    • I did some performing on Thursday the 20th on Eurofilk, which is now happening every other Thursday. I got to play with Cecilia Eng, first time for me and she’s a legend, and a total of 9 others in the Zoom room, including my friend K.J. Noren. This is the first performing I’ve done since about 2 weeks after my accident. My shoulder hurt a lot more afterward, but I seem to have gained mobility.
    • We’re about ⅔ of the way through Blood Rites, the 6th Dresden Files book. Dresden missed a huge hint when he had a major data download from Thomas; there is no explanation for that miss. We’re enjoying the book, we just wish Dresden could be more successful stopping people from dying.
  • Joe
    • Watched a lot of YouTube and did some soldering
    • Took a break for a few days from reading but still got some in
      • Up to book 20 in Drizzt
      • Demon Accords book 16
      • Big Damn Hero
        • Firefly book, surprisingly good
    • Soldered some headphones
      • New MMCX connectors came in and got them set up on 2 sets of headphones.
      • Only need to redo one of the connections at this point
    • Was informed that I missed the 8th book of the Incarnations of Immortality series by Piers Anthony.  Although I am more than a little disillusioned by his work since he uses it as a platform to push his ideology on age of consent.
      • Also the book does not exist in audio format from what I can see so if I do read it, it will have to be text aloud
    • Attempted to make the macro keyboard, followed the instructions exactly but was not able to get it working.
      • Rechecked my soldering several times but it was solid
      • Only about 6 of the 12 keys would work.  
      • So I took it apart down to the board on the keypad and did continuity tests on the whole thing
      • Bad board and a slightly different pinout than was in the instructions but the different pinout shouldn’t be a concern
      • I could try to solder directly to the board and to the pins but that seems a little crazy even for me.  Although if I get bored enough you never know.
      • I have ordered a couple of different types of keyboards to give another try using different methods
      • Right before the show a test set of 4 mechanical keys showed up and I was able to get them wired in place although I still need to wire the Promicro and I need to 3D-print the case for it
      • Thinking about ordering a set of 90 MX Cherry Blues and 3d printing everything else
  • Tony W
    • Refinishing my basement practice/rehearsal/studio/home office space
      • Installed carpet to cover concrete floor
      • Covered the one concrete wall in this room with drywall/heavy cloth, for now
      • Have insulation and drywall ready to go for remaining walls/ceilings
      • Will most likely get a permit from county before installing drywall over electrical, ductwork etc
      • This involved disassembling all of my tech, my podcast setup, etc and almost did not set back up before today’s podcast
    • Updated to Mint 20
      • Upgrade was fairly seamless, but had a couple minor issues
        • The update did break my Grub.  Reinstalled Grub very easily using MX Linux live USB Boot Repair (courtesy of Ventoy)
        • The version of Mumble installed from Software Manager didn’t work, had to install the Flatpak
      • Installed Linux via Crouton on Acer Chromebook 314
          • Crostini was great, but somewhat useless to me as there is no direct access to hardware (particularly USB audio devices) 
        • Crouton gives you full Linux desktop courtesy of chroot
        • Process to install:
          • Have to turn on Developer mode (which erases local data)
          • Follow instructions to install via crosh (Chrome terminal)
          • Once installed, to enter Linux desktop: Sudo enter-chroot startxfce4 (or sudo startxfce4 as a shortcut)
        • From there, Ctrl/Alt/Shift Forward and Ctrl/Alt/Shift/Back to switch between ChromeOS and XFCE (or desktop of your choice)
        • Default is XFCE but Cinnamon, KDE, e17, LXDE and Unity are also available 
        • IT WORKED!!!  My audio interface works perfectly with XFCE running on the Chromebook. 
          • Audacity, Mumble, OBS studio ready to go
        • Downsides: 
          • Developer Mode
          • Not supported – ChromeOS updates can break it
          • Default install is 16.04.  I believe you can specify 18.04
        • I think I will be using this.  It’s a cheap, light portable device with 12 hour battery life that I can take on the go

THE NEWS

SECURITY UPDATE

  • NSA reveals SOMETHING about Russian hacks
  • Linux Malware and Securing Your System
    • CTT goes in early about preventive measures and turns his nose up at the idea that someone would be running kernels earlier than 3.7 because it was released in 2012. RHEL 6 is still on 2.6… Sure. For a desktop user, it’s probably not likely, but for Enterprise? The NSA and the FBI didn’t put out a report for grandma in her kitchen. They put it out for the military and other institutions that are slow moving. In some cases, RHEL 5 is still in use and in Extended Life Phase.
    • Don’t install untrusted kernel modules or unsigned kernels.
    • SecureBoot
    • CTT offers a script that does:
      • Turning on UFW
      • Limiting SSH (which prevents brute force/dictionary style attacks)
      • Opening 80/443
      • Denying everything else incoming
      • Allowing everything outgoing
    • The script is a little odd. While limiting SSH is good, much thought should be given to just using keys, and disabling password login altogether. Also, why open 80 and 443? You would really only need this if you’re hosting a website of some kind. Most tools use custom ports (i.e., Cockpit uses port 9090).
  • Alexa Can Be Hacked, Instagram Retains Deleted Data, Linux Malware Found By NSA & FBI – ThreatWire

Announcements:

Our next episode will be September 6, 2020 at 2 pm Central US Time, 7 pm UTC, 8 pm British Summer Time – https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

Add Dallas Tx

Wrap-up:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible … 

  • Londoner for his suggestion to use timeanddate.com
  • Hobstar for his work on the new logo
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we are using to record
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
]]> full 4588 mintCast 323 – Ok, Beta https://mintcast.org/mintcast-323-ok-beta/ Wed, 04 Dec 2019 06:42:09 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4038 Then, in our news, Linux Mint has a new update, System76 builds its own laptops, Kali goes undercover, the new 5.4 Kernel, and more!
In security, we talk D-Link remote access.
Download
]]>

Download

In our Innards section, we talk more about Linux Mint and Clem’s comments.
And finally, our listener feedback.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Working on the stream
      • With Josh schedule packed, I gave streaming a try. Back to youtube it is since the barrier to entry was so low.
      • OBS is quite the software. Currently, we’re doing a streaming simple with an image. Nothing fancy, but as I got looking into the details, you can do so much more.
      • I didn’t want to rock the boat too much, but a Telegram, Discord and IRC chat monitor would be nifty, and something I want to look into for the future if we stick with youtube.
      • I know there are people out there that want an audio-only stream. For you all, I have a fix.
    • UBPorts on a Nexus 7 2013 (Wifi)
      • This was an interesting journey. I dusted off my Nexus 7 from a few years ago, plugged it in to charge, and about 30 minutes later, was installing UBPorts using their snap installer.
      • The bootloader was unlocked years ago, so I can’t recall exactly how I did my ADB magic, but I’ve had a few OSes on it over the years.
      • I’m just getting familiar with Ubuntu Touch, but it seems promising.
    • Installed a 1080p panel on my T450s
      • Fun times. For a little under $50, I bought a 1080p replacement panel for my T450s. I had been on the 900p panel since I bought it about two years ago, and finally got fed up with it. The discoloration that comes with TN panels finally wore me down.
      • This 1080p was supposed to be an IPS Field Replacement Unit, so, same same as the OEM screen, but turned out to be a 1080p TN, or low quality VA panel, at best.
      • Still 1080p, still more room, still a huge improvement, and for the price, I’m still happy.
  • Tony H 
    • This week I’ve put Mint onto an HP G62 Laptop with a 2.1 GHz AMD Phenom II Triple-Core Processor N830. This processor came out in December 2010 so the PC is nearly 9 years old. I used it at the LUG last week and the battery life despite being at full capacity (I suspect it is a replacement of the original) is a paltory 1.5-2 Hrs or less if playing video, and it runs quite walm. The top power on the CPU is 35w, compared to modern mobile processors which can be less than half of this processor. It’s probably destined to be passed onto my local homeless charity to give someone a new start in tech.
    • Continuing to get to grips with Ubuntu 19.10, thanks to Peter Jones I now have a half usable system with the Dash to Panel installed and on the bottom of the screen and the side dock hidden from view. Feels a little more like home, but it would be great if this was a one button in a menu somewhere to set it up without having to install all these additional functions to get it to work. Apart from this, it’s a great Linux OS as you would expect from Ubuntu, I can’t say I’ve had any issues with it at all in day to day use. 
    • Also continuing to Invest (code for spending all my money) on my new hobby of restoring Matchbox models. I bought a large consignment on Ebay and got a bargain with many 50’s and 60’s models and only a few of the later 1970’s (which are still nearly 50 years old). I’ve been buying tools and preparing to buy a small modelers spray booth, as well as buying materials for paint stripping and preparing the models for repainting. Starting to appreciate the time these YouTubers put in to the hobby and all the videoing and post production it takes. 
    • As of yesterday I actually completed my first restoration a Matchbox No28 Mk10 Jaguar if any one is interested.     

 

  • Moss 
    • I sold an ASUS MeMOPad to a listener; I hadn’t even put it up for sale, but he asked what I had that was cheap and I told him. It was a turkey of a tablet; I had such high hopes for it when I bought it. I got about $12 for it and bought some groceries.
    • Zorin OS 15 has just released their Lite version, with XFCE Desktop, and they did quite a lovely job on the desktop. I put it on my Kudu 3, and I kinda like it. Yes, I am now triple-booting the Kudu – Core, Ultimate, and Lite – but it’s all Zorin.
    • During a period of digital frustration, I remembered I had a free partition on my Galago Pro 2. I eased my nerves by taking a few hours and successfully installing Sabayon. Yes, it took a while. Yes, it’s Gentoo. But it’s so sweet…
    • I made an attempt to boot my inherited Linux box. Sadly, the password was not what I expected, so I couldn’t log into what was probably an old version of Fedora, so I attempted to install Linux Mint on it. I ran into another instance of the GRUB not being written properly, and I also could not get the CD drive to boot (I could have used my Super Grub 2 disk). I had some discussion with the Telegram group of people, mostly cryptodan and Peter Jones, and got frustrated so I put the box away for a while. I promise to get back to it. The box is pretty nice, a mini ATX with 16 Gb of RAM and a 120 Gb SSD on a Gigabyte motherboard.
    • I have added some tiers and a Donation link to my Sponsus page. Now to get some sponsors and donations. 
    • I found I had opened 2 accounts at ReverbNation sometime in 2014 and promptly forgotten about both; I’ve written RN to see if they can combine the two and then see if I can put the site to some use promoting my music. I did find a recording I didn’t think I had posted anywhere on one of the accounts.
    • I just celebrated my 3rd Anniversary…and Wednesday will be my mmphthy-mmph birthday. Distrohoppers’ Digest is set to be recorded on Wednesday, and Tony should have it out by Friday.

 

  • Joe
    • Listened to an Audio Drama/podcast.  2 Seasons of Wolverine.  
    • Also listened to Piers Anthony’s Bio Of a Space Tyrant
      • Most assuredly not a book for younger readers.  Based on the topics
        • Murder 
        • Piracy
        • Incest
        • Sex with people that I would consider underage
      • I did listen to all 6 books in the series and Anthony is one of my more liked authors.
      • He also writes all his books on linux machines since about 2000
      • Well read series
      • But in the end I am not sure I would recommend to readers.
      • I didn’t dislike it but I find it hard to suggest it for others
    •  Listening to the Dresden Files again, hoping that the next one comes out soon
    •  Replaced the keyboard on that convertible laptop
      • Also removed Linux and reinstalled Windows for my daughter
      • Had to install woeusb in order to get a functioning bootable Windows 10 usb stick
      • Then gave it to my eldest daughter and she gave her laptop to her sister
      • Who ruined another charging port on another tablet, the ASUS Transformer T102HA which I will be taking apart to see if it is an easy fix because it is an awesome device
      • That is 2 T100’s and a T102 that currently have that problem.  Looks like I need to learn how to fix it and get a hot air gun.
    • Also had a problem with one of my Dell Venue 11 keyboards where not all the keys were working
      • I had a spare keyboard with a bad battery so I did a swap between the two but for some reason the touchpad would not work(at least not with the battery connected)
      • So I pulled the touchpad off and swapped that from the one with bad keys
      • Still didn’t work
      • So I swapped the cables for the touchpad.
      • Still didn’t work
      • So I swapped the connector bracket that goes from the keyboard to the tablet, thinking it would be the last time I had to take it apart
      • It wasn’t, still didn’t work
      • Finally I swapped the mainboard hoping that wasn’t what was bad on the other keyboard and it works great(most of the time)
      • Still some issues sometimes on restart but that seems to be a problem with all keyboards for this device.  Just disconnect a reconnect a couple of times and everything works
      • About 7 hours worth of work total with testing and reseating between each step to make sure I had done things correctly.  Also I could have had it done much quicker if I had realized it was the mainboard first.
      • But hey I have 2 fully functioning keyboards again and I know a lot more about how that keyboard is put together.
      • Really need the extra battery power to make it through the day.
      • But I am still thinking about getting one of the soft keyboards without batteries.
    • Picked up a travel router
      • GL.iNet GL-AR300M-EXT 
      • Works good so far.  
      • Easytether install worked like a charm.  But t-mo seems to be detecting and throttling.  May be detecting the router. More testing required. More details in the innards.
  • Tony W
    • RAM upgrade on main/living room PC (why did I not do this before?)
    • Gaming fun: Native Linux and Proton games on Steam, PCSX2 Emulator
      • Native on Linux 
        • Team Fortress 2 (my kid plays this, I watched)
        • CS GO, No Room in Hell are MPO games I still plan to try
        • Was interested in Shadow of Mordr and Tomb Raider but too expensive
      • PCSX2 Emulator
        • Fun, works well
        • Had to change a couple of the defaults for Spiderman 2 
          • Changed graphics to Software vs hardware
      • Reversed axes for controllerProton: 
        • Underpowered machine: PC is an old Lenovo with i3 4th Gen, low profile 1GB Nvidia card, 8GB of Ram
        • Batman Arkham Origins – Unplayable due to lag in Steam/Proton.  I am sure it would have been fine on a more powerful PC. It did run OK in Windows
        • GTA San Andreas – Ran great in Proton, occasional crashing when loading a saved game.  Easy enough to kill with TOP and restart. Not a bi issue for me but I see how minor glitches like this might be annoying enough to make somebody dive back to Windows to play a game
        • Consensus on Proton, definitely awesome if you have a machine that can spare the overhead

THE NEWS:

  • Linux Mint Monthly News ALL
    • “All 3 editions of Linux Mint 19.3 passed QA and we’ll be announcing the BETA release on Tuesday!”
    • Assuming that’s December 3rd.
    • New, unannounced changes to the software section, and three new apps are making their arrival.
    • System Reports will now give messages from the tray. This will give users access to workarounds, solutions  and information. This feature will also be used to announce the full release of 19.3 from within the BETA, and it’s being backported, so you’ll hear about it on 19.2 and previous as well (if you run updates on older releases)!
  • System76 will start designing and building their computers from the ground up in DenverMOSS
  • Kali Linux 2019.4 Released LEO
    • XFCE the new default desktop
    • kali-undercover changes your DE to look like Windows. Icons and all.
    • Our markdown overlords are winning. Kali’s docs are now in markdown!
    • BTRFS 
  • Kape Technologies buys PIA’s parent company (also owns ZenMate and CyberGhost VPNs – total over 2 million paying subscribers)MOSS
  • Kernel 5.4 is released Tony W LTS – last LTS was 4.19
    • Primary feature is a new kernel lockdown mode that aims to improve the separation of UID 0 (aka root) and the kernel.
    • Lots of AMD support added – 
      • Navi 12 and 14 GPUs
      • MD Arcturus graphics cards,
      • AMD Dali APU
      • AMD 2020 APU
    • Lots of added ARM support Snapdragon 855, a bunch of ARM based laptops (ASUS NovaGo, HP Envy X2 and the Lenovo Miix 630)
  • Is full Linux kernel support coming to Android? Google outlines its plans Joe
  • Librem 5 is shipping, First Impressions TONY W
    • Early adopter/developer stage
    • Some flaws that are expected to be fixed in future software updates
      • No audio in calls
      • Camera issues
      • Battery life “meh”
      • Gets really warm
      • Software generally alpha status
    • Former employees have expressed the company releases “disingenuous” updates
    • My opinions:
      • I am glad to hear the progress that some backers have the device in hand, and the early flaws don’t dampen my optimism
      • you REALLY have to believe in the Purism/Librem cause to justify $699 for this device, especially when Pinephone is coming soon at $149!!!  (300 Euros for Volla phone, *Check This Out)
  • Glimpse Released LEO
    • The 0.1.0 release is based on 2.10.12, instead of the current 2.10.14.
    • The Glimpse guys prefer Flatpak as the preferred way to install (it’s on top!)
    • Snap and AUR are in a separate community section.
    • Windows and Mac are also supported (same as GIMP)
  • US Student was building a Gentoo-based distro for ISIS MOSS

SECURITY UPDATE: 

      • D-Link ‘Won’t Fix’ even more routers
        • The flaw (CVE-2019-16920) that D-Link won’t fix allows an attacker to bypass authentication entirely to get admin access to your router. This is very, very not good. 
        • You can mitigate the issue by turning off remote management, but that doesn’t stop the attack from happening from within your network. Please do yourself a favor and move to something else.
        • Models: DIR-866, DIR-655, DHP-1565, DIR-652, DAP-1533, DGL-5500, DIR-130, DIR-330, DIR-615, DIR-825, DIR-835, DIR-855L and DIR-862.
      • Mozilla Increasing Bug Bounty Payouts
        • Doubling, for critical, core and other Mozilla sites. 
        • And, tripling for Remote Code Execution on critical sites.
        • Firefox Monitor and Private Network are added to the list of Core Sites
      • Webmin Attacked by Mr. Roboto Botnet
        • A follow-up to Episode 316.
        • The vulnerability we were talking in that episode has been weaponized
        • Mr. Roboto, the botnet, is utilizing the flaw to be able to create a reverse shell, run commands, run files within URLs, DDoS, and self-uninstall.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • Next Show: Dec 15, 2019 – 2PM US Central Time

WRAP-UP:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible …

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 1:15:38 4038 mintCast 323 – Ok, Beta (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-323-ok-beta-mp3/ Wed, 04 Dec 2019 06:35:49 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4036 Then, in our news, Linux Mint has a new update, System76 builds its own laptops, Kali goes undercover, the new 5.4 Kernel, and more!
In security, we talk D-Link remote access.
Download
]]>

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo Goes Upstream, Moss fights frustration by installing Sabayon again, Tony Hughes grapples with Gnome3, Joe fixes some keyboards, and Tony Watts plays on Proton

Then, in our news, Linux Mint has a new update, System76 builds its own laptops, Kali goes undercover, the new 5.4 Kernel, and more!

In security, we talk D-Link remote access.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Working on the stream
      • With Josh schedule packed, I gave streaming a try. Back to youtube it is since the barrier to entry was so low.
      • OBS is quite the software. Currently, we’re doing a streaming simple with an image. Nothing fancy, but as I got looking into the details, you can do so much more.
      • I didn’t want to rock the boat too much, but a Telegram, Discord and IRC chat monitor would be nifty, and something I want to look into for the future if we stick with youtube.
      • I know there are people out there that want an audio-only stream. For you all, I have a fix.
    • UBPorts on a Nexus 7 2013 (Wifi)
      • This was an interesting journey. I dusted off my Nexus 7 from a few years ago, plugged it in to charge, and about 30 minutes later, was installing UBPorts using their snap installer.
      • The bootloader was unlocked years ago, so I can’t recall exactly how I did my ADB magic, but I’ve had a few OSes on it over the years.
      • I’m just getting familiar with Ubuntu Touch, but it seems promising.
    • Installed a 1080p panel on my T450s
      • Fun times. For a little under $50, I bought a 1080p replacement panel for my T450s. I had been on the 900p panel since I bought it about two years ago, and finally got fed up with it. The discoloration that comes with TN panels finally wore me down.
      • This 1080p was supposed to be an IPS Field Replacement Unit, so, same same as the OEM screen, but turned out to be a 1080p TN, or low quality VA panel, at best.
      • Still 1080p, still more room, still a huge improvement, and for the price, I’m still happy.
  • Tony H 
    • This week I’ve put Mint onto an HP G62 Laptop with a 2.1 GHz AMD Phenom II Triple-Core Processor N830. This processor came out in December 2010 so the PC is nearly 9 years old. I used it at the LUG last week and the battery life despite being at full capacity (I suspect it is a replacement of the original) is a paltory 1.5-2 Hrs or less if playing video, and it runs quite walm. The top power on the CPU is 35w, compared to modern mobile processors which can be less than half of this processor. It’s probably destined to be passed onto my local homeless charity to give someone a new start in tech.
    • Continuing to get to grips with Ubuntu 19.10, thanks to Peter Jones I now have a half usable system with the Dash to Panel installed and on the bottom of the screen and the side dock hidden from view. Feels a little more like home, but it would be great if this was a one button in a menu somewhere to set it up without having to install all these additional functions to get it to work. Apart from this, it’s a great Linux OS as you would expect from Ubuntu, I can’t say I’ve had any issues with it at all in day to day use. 
    • Also continuing to Invest (code for spending all my money) on my new hobby of restoring Matchbox models. I bought a large consignment on Ebay and got a bargain with many 50’s and 60’s models and only a few of the later 1970’s (which are still nearly 50 years old). I’ve been buying tools and preparing to buy a small modelers spray booth, as well as buying materials for paint stripping and preparing the models for repainting. Starting to appreciate the time these YouTubers put in to the hobby and all the videoing and post production it takes. 
    • As of yesterday I actually completed my first restoration a Matchbox No28 Mk10 Jaguar if any one is interested.     

 

  • Moss 
    • I sold an ASUS MeMOPad to a listener; I hadn’t even put it up for sale, but he asked what I had that was cheap and I told him. It was a turkey of a tablet; I had such high hopes for it when I bought it. I got about $12 for it and bought some groceries.
    • Zorin OS 15 has just released their Lite version, with XFCE Desktop, and they did quite a lovely job on the desktop. I put it on my Kudu 3, and I kinda like it. Yes, I am now triple-booting the Kudu – Core, Ultimate, and Lite – but it’s all Zorin.
    • During a period of digital frustration, I remembered I had a free partition on my Galago Pro 2. I eased my nerves by taking a few hours and successfully installing Sabayon. Yes, it took a while. Yes, it’s Gentoo. But it’s so sweet…
    • I made an attempt to boot my inherited Linux box. Sadly, the password was not what I expected, so I couldn’t log into what was probably an old version of Fedora, so I attempted to install Linux Mint on it. I ran into another instance of the GRUB not being written properly, and I also could not get the CD drive to boot (I could have used my Super Grub 2 disk). I had some discussion with the Telegram group of people, mostly cryptodan and Peter Jones, and got frustrated so I put the box away for a while. I promise to get back to it. The box is pretty nice, a mini ATX with 16 Gb of RAM and a 120 Gb SSD on a Gigabyte motherboard.
    • I have added some tiers and a Donation link to my Sponsus page. Now to get some sponsors and donations. 
    • I found I had opened 2 accounts at ReverbNation sometime in 2014 and promptly forgotten about both; I’ve written RN to see if they can combine the two and then see if I can put the site to some use promoting my music. I did find a recording I didn’t think I had posted anywhere on one of the accounts.
    • I just celebrated my 3rd Anniversary…and Wednesday will be my mmphthy-mmph birthday. Distrohoppers’ Digest is set to be recorded on Wednesday, and Tony should have it out by Friday.

 

  • Joe
    • Listened to an Audio Drama/podcast.  2 Seasons of Wolverine.  
    • Also listened to Piers Anthony’s Bio Of a Space Tyrant
      • Most assuredly not a book for younger readers.  Based on the topics
        • Murder 
        • Piracy
        • Incest
        • Sex with people that I would consider underage
      • I did listen to all 6 books in the series and Anthony is one of my more liked authors.
      • He also writes all his books on linux machines since about 2000
      • Well read series
      • But in the end I am not sure I would recommend to readers.
      • I didn’t dislike it but I find it hard to suggest it for others
    •  Listening to the Dresden Files again, hoping that the next one comes out soon
    •  Replaced the keyboard on that convertible laptop
      • Also removed Linux and reinstalled Windows for my daughter
      • Had to install woeusb in order to get a functioning bootable Windows 10 usb stick
      • Then gave it to my eldest daughter and she gave her laptop to her sister
      • Who ruined another charging port on another tablet, the ASUS Transformer T102HA which I will be taking apart to see if it is an easy fix because it is an awesome device
      • That is 2 T100’s and a T102 that currently have that problem.  Looks like I need to learn how to fix it and get a hot air gun.
    • Also had a problem with one of my Dell Venue 11 keyboards where not all the keys were working
      • I had a spare keyboard with a bad battery so I did a swap between the two but for some reason the touchpad would not work(at least not with the battery connected)
      • So I pulled the touchpad off and swapped that from the one with bad keys
      • Still didn’t work
      • So I swapped the cables for the touchpad.
      • Still didn’t work
      • So I swapped the connector bracket that goes from the keyboard to the tablet, thinking it would be the last time I had to take it apart
      • It wasn’t, still didn’t work
      • Finally I swapped the mainboard hoping that wasn’t what was bad on the other keyboard and it works great(most of the time)
      • Still some issues sometimes on restart but that seems to be a problem with all keyboards for this device.  Just disconnect a reconnect a couple of times and everything works
      • About 7 hours worth of work total with testing and reseating between each step to make sure I had done things correctly.  Also I could have had it done much quicker if I had realized it was the mainboard first.
      • But hey I have 2 fully functioning keyboards again and I know a lot more about how that keyboard is put together.
      • Really need the extra battery power to make it through the day.
      • But I am still thinking about getting one of the soft keyboards without batteries.
    • Picked up a travel router
      • GL.iNet GL-AR300M-EXT 
      • Works good so far.  
      • Easytether install worked like a charm.  But t-mo seems to be detecting and throttling.  May be detecting the router. More testing required. More details in the innards.
  • Tony W
    • RAM upgrade on main/living room PC (why did I not do this before?)
    • Gaming fun: Native Linux and Proton games on Steam, PCSX2 Emulator
      • Native on Linux 
        • Team Fortress 2 (my kid plays this, I watched)
        • CS GO, No Room in Hell are MPO games I still plan to try
        • Was interested in Shadow of Mordr and Tomb Raider but too expensive
      • PCSX2 Emulator
        • Fun, works well
        • Had to change a couple of the defaults for Spiderman 2 
          • Changed graphics to Software vs hardware
      • Reversed axes for controllerProton: 
        • Underpowered machine: PC is an old Lenovo with i3 4th Gen, low profile 1GB Nvidia card, 8GB of Ram
        • Batman Arkham Origins – Unplayable due to lag in Steam/Proton.  I am sure it would have been fine on a more powerful PC. It did run OK in Windows
        • GTA San Andreas – Ran great in Proton, occasional crashing when loading a saved game.  Easy enough to kill with TOP and restart. Not a bi issue for me but I see how minor glitches like this might be annoying enough to make somebody dive back to Windows to play a game
        • Consensus on Proton, definitely awesome if you have a machine that can spare the overhead

THE NEWS:

  • Linux Mint Monthly News ALL
    • “All 3 editions of Linux Mint 19.3 passed QA and we’ll be announcing the BETA release on Tuesday!”
    • Assuming that’s December 3rd.
    • New, unannounced changes to the software section, and three new apps are making their arrival.
    • System Reports will now give messages from the tray. This will give users access to workarounds, solutions  and information. This feature will also be used to announce the full release of 19.3 from within the BETA, and it’s being backported, so you’ll hear about it on 19.2 and previous as well (if you run updates on older releases)!
  • System76 will start designing and building their computers from the ground up in DenverMOSS
  • Kali Linux 2019.4 Released LEO
    • XFCE the new default desktop
    • kali-undercover changes your DE to look like Windows. Icons and all.
    • Our markdown overlords are winning. Kali’s docs are now in markdown!
    • BTRFS 
  • Kape Technologies buys PIA’s parent company (also owns ZenMate and CyberGhost VPNs – total over 2 million paying subscribers)MOSS
  • Kernel 5.4 is released Tony W LTS – last LTS was 4.19
    • Primary feature is a new kernel lockdown mode that aims to improve the separation of UID 0 (aka root) and the kernel.
    • Lots of AMD support added – 
      • Navi 12 and 14 GPUs
      • MD Arcturus graphics cards,
      • AMD Dali APU
      • AMD 2020 APU
    • Lots of added ARM support Snapdragon 855, a bunch of ARM based laptops (ASUS NovaGo, HP Envy X2 and the Lenovo Miix 630)
  • Is full Linux kernel support coming to Android? Google outlines its plans Joe
  • Librem 5 is shipping, First Impressions TONY W
    • Early adopter/developer stage
    • Some flaws that are expected to be fixed in future software updates
      • No audio in calls
      • Camera issues
      • Battery life “meh”
      • Gets really warm
      • Software generally alpha status
    • Former employees have expressed the company releases “disingenuous” updates
    • My opinions:
      • I am glad to hear the progress that some backers have the device in hand, and the early flaws don’t dampen my optimism
      • you REALLY have to believe in the Purism/Librem cause to justify $699 for this device, especially when Pinephone is coming soon at $149!!!  (300 Euros for Volla phone, *Check This Out)
  • Glimpse Released LEO
    • The 0.1.0 release is based on 2.10.12, instead of the current 2.10.14.
    • The Glimpse guys prefer Flatpak as the preferred way to install (it’s on top!)
    • Snap and AUR are in a separate community section.
    • Windows and Mac are also supported (same as GIMP)
  • US Student was building a Gentoo-based distro for ISIS MOSS

SECURITY UPDATE: 

      • D-Link ‘Won’t Fix’ even more routers
        • The flaw (CVE-2019-16920) that D-Link won’t fix allows an attacker to bypass authentication entirely to get admin access to your router. This is very, very not good. 
        • You can mitigate the issue by turning off remote management, but that doesn’t stop the attack from happening from within your network. Please do yourself a favor and move to something else.
        • Models: DIR-866, DIR-655, DHP-1565, DIR-652, DAP-1533, DGL-5500, DIR-130, DIR-330, DIR-615, DIR-825, DIR-835, DIR-855L and DIR-862.
      • Mozilla Increasing Bug Bounty Payouts
        • Doubling, for critical, core and other Mozilla sites. 
        • And, tripling for Remote Code Execution on critical sites.
        • Firefox Monitor and Private Network are added to the list of Core Sites
      • Webmin Attacked by Mr. Roboto Botnet
        • A follow-up to Episode 316.
        • The vulnerability we were talking in that episode has been weaponized
        • Mr. Roboto, the botnet, is utilizing the flaw to be able to create a reverse shell, run commands, run files within URLs, DDoS, and self-uninstall.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • Next Show: Dec 15, 2019 – 2PM US Central Time

WRAP-UP:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible …

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 1:15:38 4036 mintCast 320 – Sudos and Sudon’ts https://mintcast.org/mintcast-320-sudos-and-sudonts/ Wed, 23 Oct 2019 06:06:16 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3980 First up, in our Wanderings, I play with audio, Moss tries out two new System76 laptops, Josh has been oggcamping, Joe’s been headphoning, And Tony has been updating a laptop for a friend.
Then, in our news we talk about Ubuntu, Google’s most disappointing pixel yet (the Pixel 4), Linux Mint’s gaming ability, and the releases of Freespire, Tails and Trident.
Finally, in security, we talk sudo.
Download
]]>

Download

This is the new group’s official 1 year anniversary (apart from Josh :D).

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo plays with audio, Moss tries out two new System76 laptops, Josh has been oggcamping, Joe’s been headphoning, And Tony has been updating a laptop for a friend.

Then, in our news we talk about Ubuntu, Google’s most disappointing pixel yet (the Pixel 4), Linux Mint’s gaming ability, and the releases of Freespire, Tails and Trident.

Finally, in security, we talk sudo.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Spilled water on my laptop right before the show…
    • Playing with my audio setup again.
      • Got a new boom stand. A standalone type like you’d see on stage.
      • Haven’t gotten a chance to set it up yet, but an isolation box for the  mic as well.
        • This is mostly because I can’t afford to dish out the cash needed to fully sound deaden a room, so a box with sound deadening is the next best thing!
      • Linux fixes another flash drive.
        • Have had a 32GB flash drive for about 5 years now (AData S102) and thought it died at work recently.
        • During a write operation, a few hundred files, about 200MB, the drive unmounts and then starts to mount and unmount over and over until unplugged. Thought it died.
        • Came home, plugged it into my Mint desktop and used Disks. Removed partitions, reformatted in exFAT, and poof. Fixed.
  • Moss
    • On Tuesday  on the 8th, one of our listeners, Jackie Moore (who has been quite helpful in that past, as you may remember), informed me to expect a package at work. When it arrived, it was a wonderful, though slightly beaten up, System76 Galago Pro 2. It arrived with Pop!_OS on the SSD, and a forgotten installation of Ubuntu on the 1 Terabyte hard drive. I installed Linux Mint 19.2 on the SSD and just installed Ubuntu MATE 19.10 over the old Ubuntu, plus added a couple more distros. This little beast has a 1 Tb hard drive plus a 256 GB SSD, and while it is short on ports, those include a USB-C/Thunderbolt port and two USB 3.1 ports. 
    • As this computer was not the form factor I was looking for, Jackie offered me a deal on a Kudu3, and we came up with a swap; he got my Sans Digital AccuNAS box I had listed on eBay, I got his Kudu3. I hope he is as ecstatic about the trade as I am! I have always dreamed of owning a System76 but thought they would always be beyond my reach — new ones cost more than I have, and used ones are rare — and now I have two of them. I cannot possibly thank Jackie enough, and need to mention he is a fellow Tennessean.
    • I sold 2 tablets on eBay, one of our Kindle Fires and the LG GTab F. This got me about $26 for household. I still have two network switches for sale, one an 8-port and the other a 24-port.
    • I took the extra 4 Gb RAM out of my T430 and placed it in my wife’s T430, and swapped my 9-cell battery with her 6-cell. I can now sell my T430 and get my IdeaPad 110-15acl ready for sale after next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
    • I continue reading Her Majesty’s Dragon to my wife, and also picked up a copy of Animal Farm, which she had never read, and have gotten through a few chapters of that.
    • My mother was in the hospital for a few days and is now back in the rehab facility. She sounds good, but is 90 years old…
  • Josh
    • Visited Oggcamp and joined the podcast panel
      • Lots of things to see
      • Podcast panel with Joe Ressington
      • It was great fun. We covered young people getting into linux, schools, Microsoft adopting linux and generally had a good laugh.
    • Built EduBlocks offline edition. I removed it when I did the overhaul and people want it back. Decided against using Electron as it’s quite heavy on Raspberry Pi.
    • I’m still sorting out my Pixel3 after 4 weeks without a phone now. They offered a refund but tried talking me into store credit even though they said cash. I should have it resolved this week.
    • I’ve 99% decided on the iPhone 11 (non pro) after going to try both that and the Pixel 4 in store tomorrow but I’ll save my thoughts for the news section.
    • All magazines have now shipped, after having a few issues we’ve learnt lots. We still have about 7 damaged copies (which we got replaced with new ones) of which we’re going to donate to local schools. New issue in a few weeks!
  • Joe
    • Ordered 5 HBS 820’s
      • When it arrived it came with 6 which is cool.  
      • 3 of them were working with no issues, which is kind of weird
        • Not that I am complaining
        • The 3 that don’t work, 2 of them have broken neck bands but work otherwise
        • The last one has one side that doesn’t work
        • I also have one from a previous lot that only has one side working
        • Once again just like with the 810s you can only replace same sides with same sides 
        • That means because of the 3 working and the extra parts from the ones with broken bands along with the 2 ones with one side out i will get 5 working total.
        • One of the ones with one side out i also had to glue the connecter to the band back on.  Seems to be holding together well 
        • The interesting part of these is that the soldering is very easy but you have to replace the whole lower plastic section.  You don’t have to desolder the board but you do have to remove everything else around it because of how the earpiece cable goes through the lower assembly
    • Read  book 2 in the last reaper novels and Alex Verus book 10 as well as 6 of the Harley Merlin novels. All shorter books but very enjoyable. I went through the first 6 of the Harley Merlin books in about 2 days. I wouldn’t say that it is great writing but it was engaging enough to keep me listening. No complaints about audio quality
    • Mostly caught up on podcasts but that might be because I don’t know what book to listen to yet.  Maybe some of the Doctor Who audio dramas?
    • Also read Monster Hunter Guardian and Saga of the forgotten warrior book 2 both by larry correia.  Very good author and well done audios.
    • Also Daniel Faust books 1-8
    • Kevin Mitnick   The art of invisibility
      • “You may have nothing to hide but you have everything to protect”
      • Even if you aren’t paranoid about security you should read this book just so you know how privacy doesn’t work.
    • Started up my python classes with a few friends again.
    • I think i have found my next headphone soldering adventures.
      • MMCX connectors.  I have experimented with them before but only with the whole cables.  Now i am going to use the female connectors on cans to go along with the male cables and i am going to try to use the male connectors on the ends of the retractable LGs that usually break near the earpiece.  You can get a couple of sets of the MMCX earpieces for cheap and then rotate through them on the different headsets.
    • Started playing around with MPSYT, aka mps-youtube
      • It is a command line interface to search and play youtube videos
      • I started looking into it to possibly use in conjunction with a pi zero headless
      • I don’t think it would be something I could automate so it doesn’t match my current use case.
      • I have gotten it to load and play playlists, shuffled but i would need to find a way for it to do that automatically.
    • Wrote an article about travel networking.  It is a broad overview at this point
      • covers networking while visiting family
      • Or while at a hotel
      • Or while traveling down the road
  • Tony W
    • Saw Mudhoney live a couple weeks ago, reluctantly didn’t go to Melvins show
      • Good month for grunge concerts in ATL
    • Upgraded a friend’s Toshiba Satellite A505 laptop
      • 5400 HDD to SSD
      • 4G RAM to 8GB
      • Started with fresh Win10 vs OEM preloaded Windows
      • Not a good fit for recommending Linux unfortunately, he is really stuck on itunes 
    • I hate buying printer ink
      • $60 for ink for a printer that’s on its last legs, hard to justify.  At that cost need to contemplate a new printer every time you run out of ink [Moss: I get some really nice printers for under $60, with cheap ink refills.]
    • Played with Bunsenlabs
      • Continuation of the old Crunchbang
      • Really enjoyed crunchbang ‘back in the day’.  It was the only OS I could get to perform well on really old machines
      • System requirements 256 MB of RAM, recommended 1GB
      • Still have 32 bit iso

THE NEWS:

  • Ubuntu 19.10 Released
    • Mint will get the 5.3 kernel “soon.” 5.0 was available about a month after 18.10 was released.
    • Comes with LZ4 compression for faster boot! (coming from Gzip)
    • ZFS on root (experimental)
    • Gnome 3.34
    • Ubuntu Mate, Budgie, Studio, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu also released
    • Ubuntu Cinnamon may be a brand new flavor in 20.04.
  • Ubuntu 20.04 Named
    • Focal Fossa. At least I can pronounce that one (Leo)
    • As the version number implies, it’ll be released in April 2020
  • Happy 15th Birthday, Ubuntu
    • Linux Mint’s 13th birthday was August 27th 2006.
  • Google Pixel 4, Pixelbook Go & Pixel Buds released
    • Josh is highly disappointed
    • The camera sucks (I’ve tried it). If you want a good camera, buy an iPhone
    • The soli radar thing is, weird
    • It’s nice to have a 90Hz display
    • However, they made the battery smaller than the 3!!!! (which was already bad)
  • The Linux Mint 19.2 Gaming Report
    • Gaming Report essentially assesses how easy it is for a new user to get up and running with Steam and Proton and play games on a given distro
    • Assessment was “Promising but room for improvement”
    • Probably biggest knock was lack of inclusion of Vulcan 32-bit libraries, which are required for running proton on machines with AMD graphics
    • Suggested inclusion of Lutris in software center
    • In the Podcast, Jason did say he found Cinnamon “beautiful” and everything was right where he expected it to be
  • Freespire 5.0 Released
    • I remember when this was Lindows. Then Linspire. Now Freespire. (Freespire is the free edition, Linspire is the professional edition.) Freespire got a new start last year: Wikipedia reports, “Freespire 2.0.8, released on 30 November 2007, and based on Ubuntu 7.04, was the final release until the distribution was revived with 3.0 in January 2018.” Some parts of the community are quite critical of the company, as Linspire and Freespire license several proprietary bits of software and codecs intentionally, in order to get more interoperability with Windows features. They do produce a Freespire OSS edition, with only open-source options.
  • Tails 4.0 Released
  • Project Trident dumps BSD, moves to Void Linux
  • Samsung Kills Linux on Dex

SECURITY UPDATE:

  • Bug in sudo allows privilege escalation!
  • Resolution: Upgrade to sudo version 1.8.28.
  • This seems to only be an issue on boxes that have custom sudo privileges (essentially not ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL)
  • Basically, just run updates.

WRAP-UP:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible …

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 1:18:16 3980 mintCast 320 – Sudos and Sudon’ts (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-320-sudos-and-sudonts-mp3/ Wed, 23 Oct 2019 05:57:46 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3978 First up, in our Wanderings, Leo plays with audio, Moss tries out two new System76 laptops, Josh has been oggcamping, Joe’s been headphoning, And Tony has been updating a laptop for a friend.
Then, in our news we talk about Ubuntu, Google’s most disappointing pixel yet (the Pixel 4), Linux Mint’s gaming ability, and the releases of Freespire, Tails and Trident.
Finally, in security, we talk sudo.
Download
]]>

Download

This is the new group’s official 1 year anniversary (apart from Josh :D).

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo plays with audio, Moss tries out two new System76 laptops, Josh has been oggcamping, Joe’s been headphoning, And Tony has been updating a laptop for a friend.

Then, in our news we talk about Ubuntu, Google’s most disappointing pixel yet (the Pixel 4), Linux Mint’s gaming ability, and the releases of Freespire, Tails and Trident.

Finally, in security, we talk sudo.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Spilled water on my laptop right before the show…
    • Playing with my audio setup again.
      • Got a new boom stand. A standalone type like you’d see on stage.
      • Haven’t gotten a chance to set it up yet, but an isolation box for the  mic as well.
        • This is mostly because I can’t afford to dish out the cash needed to fully sound deaden a room, so a box with sound deadening is the next best thing!
      • Linux fixes another flash drive.
        • Have had a 32GB flash drive for about 5 years now (AData S102) and thought it died at work recently.
        • During a write operation, a few hundred files, about 200MB, the drive unmounts and then starts to mount and unmount over and over until unplugged. Thought it died.
        • Came home, plugged it into my Mint desktop and used Disks. Removed partitions, reformatted in exFAT, and poof. Fixed.
  • Moss
    • On Tuesday  on the 8th, one of our listeners, Jackie Moore (who has been quite helpful in that past, as you may remember), informed me to expect a package at work. When it arrived, it was a wonderful, though slightly beaten up, System76 Galago Pro 2. It arrived with Pop!_OS on the SSD, and a forgotten installation of Ubuntu on the 1 Terabyte hard drive. I installed Linux Mint 19.2 on the SSD and just installed Ubuntu MATE 19.10 over the old Ubuntu, plus added a couple more distros. This little beast has a 1 Tb hard drive plus a 256 GB SSD, and while it is short on ports, those include a USB-C/Thunderbolt port and two USB 3.1 ports. 
    • As this computer was not the form factor I was looking for, Jackie offered me a deal on a Kudu3, and we came up with a swap; he got my Sans Digital AccuNAS box I had listed on eBay, I got his Kudu3. I hope he is as ecstatic about the trade as I am! I have always dreamed of owning a System76 but thought they would always be beyond my reach — new ones cost more than I have, and used ones are rare — and now I have two of them. I cannot possibly thank Jackie enough, and need to mention he is a fellow Tennessean.
    • I sold 2 tablets on eBay, one of our Kindle Fires and the LG GTab F. This got me about $26 for household. I still have two network switches for sale, one an 8-port and the other a 24-port.
    • I took the extra 4 Gb RAM out of my T430 and placed it in my wife’s T430, and swapped my 9-cell battery with her 6-cell. I can now sell my T430 and get my IdeaPad 110-15acl ready for sale after next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
    • I continue reading Her Majesty’s Dragon to my wife, and also picked up a copy of Animal Farm, which she had never read, and have gotten through a few chapters of that.
    • My mother was in the hospital for a few days and is now back in the rehab facility. She sounds good, but is 90 years old…
  • Josh
    • Visited Oggcamp and joined the podcast panel
      • Lots of things to see
      • Podcast panel with Joe Ressington
      • It was great fun. We covered young people getting into linux, schools, Microsoft adopting linux and generally had a good laugh.
    • Built EduBlocks offline edition. I removed it when I did the overhaul and people want it back. Decided against using Electron as it’s quite heavy on Raspberry Pi.
    • I’m still sorting out my Pixel3 after 4 weeks without a phone now. They offered a refund but tried talking me into store credit even though they said cash. I should have it resolved this week.
    • I’ve 99% decided on the iPhone 11 (non pro) after going to try both that and the Pixel 4 in store tomorrow but I’ll save my thoughts for the news section.
    • All magazines have now shipped, after having a few issues we’ve learnt lots. We still have about 7 damaged copies (which we got replaced with new ones) of which we’re going to donate to local schools. New issue in a few weeks!
  • Joe
    • Ordered 5 HBS 820’s
      • When it arrived it came with 6 which is cool.  
      • 3 of them were working with no issues, which is kind of weird
        • Not that I am complaining
        • The 3 that don’t work, 2 of them have broken neck bands but work otherwise
        • The last one has one side that doesn’t work
        • I also have one from a previous lot that only has one side working
        • Once again just like with the 810s you can only replace same sides with same sides 
        • That means because of the 3 working and the extra parts from the ones with broken bands along with the 2 ones with one side out i will get 5 working total.
        • One of the ones with one side out i also had to glue the connecter to the band back on.  Seems to be holding together well 
        • The interesting part of these is that the soldering is very easy but you have to replace the whole lower plastic section.  You don’t have to desolder the board but you do have to remove everything else around it because of how the earpiece cable goes through the lower assembly
    • Read  book 2 in the last reaper novels and Alex Verus book 10 as well as 6 of the Harley Merlin novels. All shorter books but very enjoyable. I went through the first 6 of the Harley Merlin books in about 2 days. I wouldn’t say that it is great writing but it was engaging enough to keep me listening. No complaints about audio quality
    • Mostly caught up on podcasts but that might be because I don’t know what book to listen to yet.  Maybe some of the Doctor Who audio dramas?
    • Also read Monster Hunter Guardian and Saga of the forgotten warrior book 2 both by larry correia.  Very good author and well done audios.
    • Also Daniel Faust books 1-8
    • Kevin Mitnick   The art of invisibility
      • “You may have nothing to hide but you have everything to protect”
      • Even if you aren’t paranoid about security you should read this book just so you know how privacy doesn’t work.
    • Started up my python classes with a few friends again.
    • I think i have found my next headphone soldering adventures.
      • MMCX connectors.  I have experimented with them before but only with the whole cables.  Now i am going to use the female connectors on cans to go along with the male cables and i am going to try to use the male connectors on the ends of the retractable LGs that usually break near the earpiece.  You can get a couple of sets of the MMCX earpieces for cheap and then rotate through them on the different headsets.
    • Started playing around with MPSYT, aka mps-youtube
      • It is a command line interface to search and play youtube videos
      • I started looking into it to possibly use in conjunction with a pi zero headless
      • I don’t think it would be something I could automate so it doesn’t match my current use case.
      • I have gotten it to load and play playlists, shuffled but i would need to find a way for it to do that automatically.
    • Wrote an article about travel networking.  It is a broad overview at this point
      • covers networking while visiting family
      • Or while at a hotel
      • Or while traveling down the road
  • Tony W
    • Saw Mudhoney live a couple weeks ago, reluctantly didn’t go to Melvins show
      • Good month for grunge concerts in ATL
    • Upgraded a friend’s Toshiba Satellite A505 laptop
      • 5400 HDD to SSD
      • 4G RAM to 8GB
      • Started with fresh Win10 vs OEM preloaded Windows
      • Not a good fit for recommending Linux unfortunately, he is really stuck on itunes 
    • I hate buying printer ink
      • $60 for ink for a printer that’s on its last legs, hard to justify.  At that cost need to contemplate a new printer every time you run out of ink [Moss: I get some really nice printers for under $60, with cheap ink refills.]
    • Played with Bunsenlabs
      • Continuation of the old Crunchbang
      • Really enjoyed crunchbang ‘back in the day’.  It was the only OS I could get to perform well on really old machines
      • System requirements 256 MB of RAM, recommended 1GB
      • Still have 32 bit iso

THE NEWS:

  • Ubuntu 19.10 Released
    • Mint will get the 5.3 kernel “soon.” 5.0 was available about a month after 18.10 was released.
    • Comes with LZ4 compression for faster boot! (coming from Gzip)
    • ZFS on root (experimental)
    • Gnome 3.34
    • Ubuntu Mate, Budgie, Studio, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu also released
    • Ubuntu Cinnamon may be a brand new flavor in 20.04.
  • Ubuntu 20.04 Named
    • Focal Fossa. At least I can pronounce that one (Leo)
    • As the version number implies, it’ll be released in April 2020
  • Happy 15th Birthday, Ubuntu
    • Linux Mint’s 13th birthday was August 27th 2006.
  • Google Pixel 4, Pixelbook Go & Pixel Buds released
    • Josh is highly disappointed
    • The camera sucks (I’ve tried it). If you want a good camera, buy an iPhone
    • The soli radar thing is, weird
    • It’s nice to have a 90Hz display
    • However, they made the battery smaller than the 3!!!! (which was already bad)
  • The Linux Mint 19.2 Gaming Report
    • Gaming Report essentially assesses how easy it is for a new user to get up and running with Steam and Proton and play games on a given distro
    • Assessment was “Promising but room for improvement”
    • Probably biggest knock was lack of inclusion of Vulcan 32-bit libraries, which are required for running proton on machines with AMD graphics
    • Suggested inclusion of Lutris in software center
    • In the Podcast, Jason did say he found Cinnamon “beautiful” and everything was right where he expected it to be
  • Freespire 5.0 Released
    • I remember when this was Lindows. Then Linspire. Now Freespire. (Freespire is the free edition, Linspire is the professional edition.) Freespire got a new start last year: Wikipedia reports, “Freespire 2.0.8, released on 30 November 2007, and based on Ubuntu 7.04, was the final release until the distribution was revived with 3.0 in January 2018.” Some parts of the community are quite critical of the company, as Linspire and Freespire license several proprietary bits of software and codecs intentionally, in order to get more interoperability with Windows features. They do produce a Freespire OSS edition, with only open-source options.
  • Tails 4.0 Released
  • Project Trident dumps BSD, moves to Void Linux
  • Samsung Kills Linux on Dex

SECURITY UPDATE:

  • Bug in sudo allows privilege escalation!
  • Resolution: Upgrade to sudo version 1.8.28.
  • This seems to only be an issue on boxes that have custom sudo privileges (essentially not ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL)
  • Basically, just run updates.

WRAP-UP:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible …

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 1:23:35 3978 mintCast 318 – Melted Plastic https://mintcast.org/mintcast-318-melted-plastic/ Wed, 25 Sep 2019 20:38:44 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3932 Then, in our News, we cover Ubuntu’s 32-bit library support, the top 5 snaps per distro, the PineTime, and more.
In security, we talk locks, DoH and Lastpass
Download
]]>

Download

This week, in our Wanderings, Leo writes about Nextcloud, Bo spreads the Linux love, Tony Hughes can’t stop Linuxing, even on holiday, Josh considers the new iPhone 11 (wait really??) after yet another broken Pixel 3 , Joe spelunks into splunk, and Tony Watts is building a server.

Then, in our News, we cover Ubuntu’s 32-bit library support, the top 5 snaps per distro, the PineTime, and more.
In security, we talk locks, DoH and Lastpass

WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Finally got some writing done on my blog! Only took me three months to get back in the saddle.
    • I’m using two 1TB external USB drives for Nextcloud. One for the main storage and one for a nightly backup.
    • I’m loving the nextcloud auto-backup for photos on my phone.
    • I only allow Nextcloud to be accessed on the local network, so, through the power of OpenVPN, I’m able to access Nextcloud everywhere!
    • Considered doing this in the cloud, but price-wise, it’s hard to compete with established solutions like Google Drive or OneDrive.
    • But since we don’t use a lot of storage on the show, Nextcloud might still be a good solution at a place like DigitalOcean. $5/mo for 20GB storage that’s fully under our control.
    • I’ve dropped plank!
  • Bo
    • I blew up my wife’s PC
    • Guy at FNM saw my Linux hat and asked about Linux Mint
    • I’ve paid for, but not scheduled my LPIC exam
  • Tony H
    • I have spent the last week in Brussels and had a great if tiring Holiday on the day we went on a trip to Bruges I walked for hours around this very picturesque medieval town, tripling my normal average of about 5-6000 steps. 
    • I joined the BDLL europe live stream on the Saturday evening we arrived in Brussels, just because your on holiday doesn’t stop the geeking 🙂   
    • Researching some refurbished laptops and desktop PC’s to help a couple of friends upgrade their hardware. I’ll be helping them buy and setup the new PC’s now that I’m back home. 
    • Installing Manjaro on my Acer One 2008 8Gb SSD Netbook, installed fine problems with updating will need to play some more. Also installed the MX19.2.1Beta on my Lenovo X201 today and found a bug and decided to do my first bug report, so I created a Bugzilla account and the whole process took less than 10 minutes. Another Linux first for me.
  • Josh
    • I learnt that Google can’t make good glass to put on their phones.
    • Android 10 has broke my banking app.
    • Considering selling the replacement they’re sending me as it’s new phone season.
    • Maybe an iPhone 11:
    • Reasons:
      • New audio stream after people wanted change.
      • The refund for my GPU actually came through! The RTX 2060, what I replaced it with, is really nice. It’s actually gone up £50 in price now so I got it at the right time.
      • We sold 66 magazines!
  • Joe
    • Spent the week without my tablet so was not able to write down ideas as they came to me
    • Attempted to fix the issues that i am having with anlinux on my phone and no such luck so far
      • Created another user and gave sudo permissions but still getting an error when i use it
      • several low level applications will not launch and no errors thrown.
      • i may nuke and start from start.
      • tried looking for some write ups on how to do it properly but i have not found a good one yet
    • Setup tuxtyping for my son
      • He has enjoyed it but he went through most of it very quickly
      • On the lookout for alternatives
      • Also need to get a new battery for the hp mini that he is using for this
      • Picked up a mouse and setup a keyboard with colored stickers for where fingers go
    • 5150 memorial show
      • Went well, Thanks for everyone that came on and talked about 50 and his shenanigans 
    • Studying splunk
      • Seems like an interesting tool and a good thing to know but i am wondering if we need another centralized tool when we can access all of the logs from one location anyway.
    • Started automating everything at work
      • Driving to increase automation through scripting
      • Creating scripts to automate some of the DB cleanup that we do
        • Also deletions 
        • Moving backups
        • Going to make the execution step as copy and paste as possible
        • Going to have a couple of scripts setup for the basic things that we do all the time
          • Hit execute and done
        • Python Python Python
      • Can’t completely automate as we still need to enter db names and paths but it is a start
    • Oscar cpap analysis
      • Choose linux
      • Got it installed hopefully i will get to test it out this afternoon
    • Havent finished the wheel of time series yet.  Had to replace book 8 with a new copy because the copy I had was missing a chapter
    • Stepped up my gym time.  I now do lunches at the gym along with my couple of times a week in the evenings.
    • Had a good time at the local lug, good conversations about dex and linux in general ..
  • Tony W
    • Upgraded a laptop from Win7 to Win10
      • Free upgrade path still works – license fully active
    • Working on a server build
      • Core Duo server tower with 5 drive bays.  8GB RAM, 3 X 2TB hard drives
        • Got hard drives on ebay reasonably – WD caviar green (not the best or most reliable but cheap and I plan to have some fault tolerance)
      • Currently reinstalling heat sink & fan
      • Planning to use either FreeNAS or Ubuntu Server (probably with minimal DE)
    • Finally broke down and had the Oneplus repaired properly
          • Oneplus repair process pretty impressive
          • Whole process shipping and all took about 3 business dayStill a great phone at almost 3 years old
            • 6GB RAM, 128GB storage
          • Running Lineage OS as Oxygen OS will stop getting updates sometime soon
    • Consolidated work and personal mobile phone
        • Both lines/SIM cards in the OnePlus 3T
        • The corporate solution on android is really nice
          • Sandboxed file system for work apps
          • App drawer separated into work and personal
          • Work versions of GMail apps, file manager, Play Store,etc
    • Going to start troubleshooting a Dell all-in-one with suspected bad hard disk
      • The camera is better than the Pixel.
      • Pixel has failed on me twice.
      • Pixel 4 is rumoured to be £900
      • Third party android companies have bad update support.
      • Third party android companies atm are a bit risky, especially with the Huawei stuff. They’re new phone doesn’t have Chrome, Play store or Gmail, and you can’t sideload them either

NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

Tavis Ormandy: “LastPass could leak the last used credentials due to a cache not being updated. This was because you can bypass the tab credential cache being populated by including the login form in an unexpected way!”

WRAP-UP:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible …

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 1:27:42 3932 mintCast 318 – Melted Plastic (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-318-melted-plastic-mp3/ Wed, 25 Sep 2019 20:36:37 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3930 Then, in our News, we cover Ubuntu’s 32-bit library support, the top 5 snaps per distro, the PineTime, and more.
In security, we talk locks, DoH and Lastpass
Download
]]>

Download

This week, in our Wanderings, Leo writes about Nextcloud, Bo spreads the Linux love, Tony Hughes can’t stop Linuxing, even on holiday, Josh considers the new iPhone 11 (wait really??) after yet another broken Pixel 3 , Joe spelunks into splunk, and Tony Watts is building a server.

Then, in our News, we cover Ubuntu’s 32-bit library support, the top 5 snaps per distro, the PineTime, and more.
In security, we talk locks, DoH and Lastpass

WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Finally got some writing done on my blog! Only took me three months to get back in the saddle.
    • I’m using two 1TB external USB drives for Nextcloud. One for the main storage and one for a nightly backup.
    • I’m loving the nextcloud auto-backup for photos on my phone.
    • I only allow Nextcloud to be accessed on the local network, so, through the power of OpenVPN, I’m able to access Nextcloud everywhere!
    • Considered doing this in the cloud, but price-wise, it’s hard to compete with established solutions like Google Drive or OneDrive.
    • But since we don’t use a lot of storage on the show, Nextcloud might still be a good solution at a place like DigitalOcean. $5/mo for 20GB storage that’s fully under our control.
    • I’ve dropped plank!
  • Bo
    • I blew up my wife’s PC
    • Guy at FNM saw my Linux hat and asked about Linux Mint
    • I’ve paid for, but not scheduled my LPIC exam
  • Tony H
    • I have spent the last week in Brussels and had a great if tiring Holiday on the day we went on a trip to Bruges I walked for hours around this very picturesque medieval town, tripling my normal average of about 5-6000 steps. 
    • I joined the BDLL europe live stream on the Saturday evening we arrived in Brussels, just because your on holiday doesn’t stop the geeking 🙂   
    • Researching some refurbished laptops and desktop PC’s to help a couple of friends upgrade their hardware. I’ll be helping them buy and setup the new PC’s now that I’m back home. 
    • Installing Manjaro on my Acer One 2008 8Gb SSD Netbook, installed fine problems with updating will need to play some more. Also installed the MX19.2.1Beta on my Lenovo X201 today and found a bug and decided to do my first bug report, so I created a Bugzilla account and the whole process took less than 10 minutes. Another Linux first for me.
  • Josh
    • I learnt that Google can’t make good glass to put on their phones.
    • Android 10 has broke my banking app.
    • Considering selling the replacement they’re sending me as it’s new phone season.
    • Maybe an iPhone 11:
    • Reasons:
      • New audio stream after people wanted change.
      • The refund for my GPU actually came through! The RTX 2060, what I replaced it with, is really nice. It’s actually gone up £50 in price now so I got it at the right time.
      • We sold 66 magazines!
  • Joe
    • Spent the week without my tablet so was not able to write down ideas as they came to me
    • Attempted to fix the issues that i am having with anlinux on my phone and no such luck so far
      • Created another user and gave sudo permissions but still getting an error when i use it
      • several low level applications will not launch and no errors thrown.
      • i may nuke and start from start.
      • tried looking for some write ups on how to do it properly but i have not found a good one yet
    • Setup tuxtyping for my son
      • He has enjoyed it but he went through most of it very quickly
      • On the lookout for alternatives
      • Also need to get a new battery for the hp mini that he is using for this
      • Picked up a mouse and setup a keyboard with colored stickers for where fingers go
    • 5150 memorial show
      • Went well, Thanks for everyone that came on and talked about 50 and his shenanigans 
    • Studying splunk
      • Seems like an interesting tool and a good thing to know but i am wondering if we need another centralized tool when we can access all of the logs from one location anyway.
    • Started automating everything at work
      • Driving to increase automation through scripting
      • Creating scripts to automate some of the DB cleanup that we do
        • Also deletions 
        • Moving backups
        • Going to make the execution step as copy and paste as possible
        • Going to have a couple of scripts setup for the basic things that we do all the time
          • Hit execute and done
        • Python Python Python
      • Can’t completely automate as we still need to enter db names and paths but it is a start
    • Oscar cpap analysis
      • Choose linux
      • Got it installed hopefully i will get to test it out this afternoon
    • Havent finished the wheel of time series yet.  Had to replace book 8 with a new copy because the copy I had was missing a chapter
    • Stepped up my gym time.  I now do lunches at the gym along with my couple of times a week in the evenings.
    • Had a good time at the local lug, good conversations about dex and linux in general ..
  • Tony W
    • Upgraded a laptop from Win7 to Win10
      • Free upgrade path still works – license fully active
    • Working on a server build
      • Core Duo server tower with 5 drive bays.  8GB RAM, 3 X 2TB hard drives
        • Got hard drives on ebay reasonably – WD caviar green (not the best or most reliable but cheap and I plan to have some fault tolerance)
      • Currently reinstalling heat sink & fan
      • Planning to use either FreeNAS or Ubuntu Server (probably with minimal DE)
    • Finally broke down and had the Oneplus repaired properly
          • Oneplus repair process pretty impressive
          • Whole process shipping and all took about 3 business dayStill a great phone at almost 3 years old
            • 6GB RAM, 128GB storage
          • Running Lineage OS as Oxygen OS will stop getting updates sometime soon
    • Consolidated work and personal mobile phone
        • Both lines/SIM cards in the OnePlus 3T
        • The corporate solution on android is really nice
          • Sandboxed file system for work apps
          • App drawer separated into work and personal
          • Work versions of GMail apps, file manager, Play Store,etc
    • Going to start troubleshooting a Dell all-in-one with suspected bad hard disk
      • The camera is better than the Pixel.
      • Pixel has failed on me twice.
      • Pixel 4 is rumoured to be £900
      • Third party android companies have bad update support.
      • Third party android companies atm are a bit risky, especially with the Huawei stuff. They’re new phone doesn’t have Chrome, Play store or Gmail, and you can’t sideload them either

NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

Tavis Ormandy: “LastPass could leak the last used credentials due to a cache not being updated. This was because you can bypass the tab credential cache being populated by including the login form in an unexpected way!”

WRAP-UP:

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible …

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 1:32:02 3930 mintCast 247 – Segments? https://mintcast.org/mintcast-247-segments/ Tue, 31 May 2016 00:45:46 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3117 247]

Download

News:

Main Topic: Segments?!

  • We have put together a couple of new segments called “Toe the Line” and Wazzup!”. Leave a comment or send us an email to let us know what you think about them.
    • In “Toe the Line”, Rob talks about the power of the “date” command.
    • In “Wazzup!”, Rob talks about recent updates to Linux Mint.

Tips & Websites:

Pre-Show Music:

Podcast Announcements:

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott, Joe and Isaac
Live Stream every other Sunday 2:00 p.m.(Central): mintcast.org/livestream

Contact Us:

More Linux Mint info: website, blog, forums, community

Credits:

Podcast Entry and exit music provided by Mark Blasco (podcastthemes.com). Podcast bumpers provided by Oscar.

]]> full 3117 Google sends cease-and-desist to Android ROM modder https://mintcast.org/google-sends-cease-and-desist-to-android-rom-modder/ Sun, 27 Sep 2009 17:09:26 +0000 http://www.mintcast.org/?p=326 I recently read this story over at engadget mobile and couldn’t help but think this sort of thing really hurts the Android scene. I know CyanogenMod was in the wrong because he was re-distributing non open source programs. (Marketplace, youtube, maps, etc.) Google did give him the go ahead so long as he took those programs out. But here is where I really get worked up about this.
1. Why aren’t those programs open source?
2. If the ROM only runs on Google devices wouldn’t the people already have “licensing” to run the software?
3. I have been using Windows Mobile for 4+ years and have downloaded countless “cooked” ROMs including programs that I am sure were not open source nor were they licensed for my phone. And I have never see a ROM creator get a cease-and-desist from Microsoft to stop distributing their OS or programs provided. I have seen some ROM creators get cease-and-desist for including paid programs, but never from Microsoft. There are quite a few that even include Microsoft Voice Dial in their ROMs which isn’t free and only licensed for certain phones.
Now does this make Microsoft more open than Google? No. Maybe Microsoft just doesn’t care because they are working on a new phone OS. But even then, my phone currently has Windows Mobile 6.5 which isn’t even due out till next month and there have been 6.5 ROMs since before it was announced.
I honestly think the flexibility and non-threatening nature of Windows Mobile has been the only thing that lets it survive. I think the Windows Mobile (now called Windows Phone) has a bigger feature set and better hardware available than any other mobile phone OS. But the OS just sucks when it comes to usability.
If Google really wants Android to make a big splash with the smart phone market they need to stop acting like Apple and a bit more like Microsoft. Especially when you say your OS is “open”.
What do you guys think?

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