Software – mintCast https://mintcast.org The podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux Wed, 30 Sep 2020 04:24:39 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/cropped-small-logo-32x32.png Software – mintCast https://mintcast.org 32 32 mintCast false CC-BY-SA 4.0 CC-BY-SA 4.0 podcast Software – mintCast https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/big-logo-1600.png https://mintcast.org TV-G 164426984 mintCast 344.5 – “Working” from Home (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-344-5-working-from-home-mp3/ Wed, 30 Sep 2020 04:05:44 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4683 And finally, the feedback
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1:38 Linux Innards
58:33 Vibrations from the Ether
1:17:19 Check This Out!
1:20:44 Outro

In our Innards section, we go over the working from home slash home-office setups we have.

And finally, the feedback

LINUX INNARDS:

“Work from Home” setup

  • Tony
    • My views of last time’s topic on Proprietary software v Open Source holding Linux back.
    • For me I’m very pragmatic about using what works, my first preference is Opensource but if there is a proprietary bit of software that would offer a better solution I would use it, and I do as I install the Nvidia drivers on my desktop PC as I have a dedicated Nvidia graphics card.
    • As for the availability of proprietary software for Linux such as Photoshop I’m not sure this is a major issue as this is a very niche package and a very small possible Linux user base making it uneconomic for Adobe to spend time creating a Linux version. Looking at industry leading software one example of Open Source leading the way is Blender, and again very few regular Linux users would even look at this let alone use it too it’s full potential, those that need this software for professional 3D rendering are already using it and probably on Linux.
  • Leo
  • Joe
    • MSI ge72 6qd with an i7-6700HQ and a gtx 960m
    • That has a 17 inch screen
    • For the second screen i have a laptop table with a 32 inch tv on it
    • The table also has a mount for my 7130 so i can do other small things when work is slow or i need to look something up
    • The table that my laptop sits on has an articulated arm for my microphone which is right now a hyperx quadcast or a samson meteor
    • Also use my Samsung Galaxy note 10 all day every day with several of my custom built lg hbs 770 headphones along with a pair of skullcandy crushers if i want to listen to music and a modded pair of sony xb700s for when i can no longer stand the idea of using an in ear but want all day wear and a pair of 99 neos for when it has to be wired
    • Because i rely so heavily on my phone to be able to do my work i also keep my old galaxy s7 around incase something happens to the note
    • Extra wide recliner that is seeing a lot of wear and tear lately
    • Logitech k360 keyboard and m570 trackball mouse
    • ASUS AC2900 router
      • Need to be able to handle all my work stuff and all the kids school stuff
      • 300mbps connection from spectrum
    • My backup workstation in the garage
      • Ryzen 5 3600 16gb of ram rx 560
      • Two lg tvs as monitors
        • One 60 inch that i got for free because of a bad hdmi board
        • One 43 inch that i also got for free because my friend closed out his storage unit
      • Logitech g613 keyboard and m570 mouse
  • Tony H
    • So even though I am no longer working I do obviously use my PC for quite a lot of tasks as well as numerous laptops my main PC is my tower, and this is what I use for podcasting and much more.
    • So my Desktop PC setup is an:
      • HP Compaq Elite 8300 with the following specs:
        • A 2012 Intel® Core™ i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz with 4 cores and 8 threads.
        • 24Gig of DDR3 Ram
        • NVIDIA GeForce 8400 256Mb Ram
        • Generic USB keyboard and mouse
        • And a 1Tb SSD in the primary Bay of my 4 bay IcyDoc. Running Mint Maté 19.3. There are an additional 2 128Gb drives in the dock with Ubuntu Studio 20.04 and Ubuntu Maté 20.04 installed. The 4th bay is not populated because for some reason it does not recognise any drives installed despite all the cables being connected??
    • I have a ProSound USB podcast mic, that I picked up in a bankruptcy sale a few years ago for a very reasonable £12/$15 and this is mounted onto a boom arm and has a pop filter in front of the mic.
    • I also have a SriHome USB webcam that I got a couple of months ago once I could find one that would not mean remortgaging the house. This cost £31 pounds on Amazon.
    • I have 2 4TB USB3 external backup drives with plenty of room for more data at the moment, Both have 1.9Tb of free space, I should have of site backup as well but at the moment I don’t. I also have a 2TB and 1Tb portable USB3 drive for storage on the go.
    • I have 2 Laser printers, a Greyscale Brother and a recently purchased HP Color Laser 150nw, bought for printing my own decals for my models, this cost £130 of Amazon but as buying decals from online sellers can be £2-3 a set this will quickly pay for itself in the next few months. Yes Decal paper is about £1/sheet but you can print many decals on one A4 sheet so the paper is hardly a factor in the decal cost.
  • Bo
    • Work setup
      • Lenovo laptop and docking station at work
      • KVM switch at home
    • Podcasting
      • System76 Kudu
      • Zoom H6 USB interface
    • Gaming
      • Ryzen 7 build
      • Dual Booting win and Linux
  • Tony W

Will talk about my basement office/studio setup

    • 2 desks, catty corner
      • One desk holds both my podcasting/music desktop as well as my work laptop setup
      • Other desk has my server on it and also use for working on any other machines
    • Network
      • Ran wired internet into basement
    • Repurposed wifi extender as access point with DD WRT
    • Work Setup
      • Thinkpad T480
      • Thinkpad dock
      • Lenovo wireless keyboard/mouse
      • Plantronics Savi w720
    • Music/Podcasting setup – Sentimental value and stories with a lot of this gear
      • Share peripherals w/ work setup
      • Old Dell desktop
        • Video card for multiple monitor support
      • M-Audio Delta 66 soundcard (have a presonus studio 24c)
      • Behringer XM1800S microphone (I have a MXL V57M will use at some point)
      • Neewer desk mount boom arm
      • Audio-Technica M50x headphones
      • Dual monitor “Goodwill Edition” setup (sometimes use a 3rd monitor)
      • JVC stereo R-K11
      • Bose bookshelf speakers
    • Tablet
    • PC in living room: Lenovo desktop (unsure of model right now, has 4th gen i3 in it, 8GB RAM)
      • Dual boot, mostly used in Windows these days by my son for homework
      • Linux mint partition

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

  • Larry Murphy

Hello Leo & All,

I just hear episode 342.5. I wanted to let you know that way back when (early to mid 2000’s) when I wanted to multi-boot I found a You Tube that was a step-by step guide. The person had 106 OSes on his computer. The guide was very complete. I modified it for my needs. It worked for about 6 mos. Till it wouldn’t boot. Checking I found out that my downfall was updating the config files. I accepted one that was a default with the system upgrade and I needed to save the one I had filled out. It was a real nooby error.

Now I boot ALL my OSes from my bios, much easier and safer. I use a SSD for each OS, such as Windows and Linux. I only put OSes on SSD,s and data on separate internal and external drives.

I have found that Linux is quicker to install and even with ALL the customizing I do. I customize many of my folder and almost all of my desk top icons for easy identification. I have use the same icon in both Windows and Linux. I find it,s much easier in Linux because I don’t have change the pics I use to .ico files as is needed by Windows. I also find that my internet is faster in Linux as well as download speeds and I can burn dvds faster in Linux as well. I didn’t want you to think setting up multi-boot my my own. I wanted to do it just to see if I could. I always customize my Windows installs but the Linux installs are MUCH easier to do and as always I always enjoy listening to each one of you folks on the show. Thanks for the great content and all your hard work that goes into each show.

  • John Wallis

Hello Leo,

I would appreciate your assistance please with the error messages arising in the attached screenshot at boot stage, before and after the hard disk encryption password is entered. I look forward to hearing from you.

Try This GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash pci=noacpi”
  • John Wallis Part 2

Hi Leo,

I would appreciate your guidance on systemd-udevd.service. What is it used for? Lynis has marked it as unsafe.

  • Raphaël

You guys MADE MY DAY!!!

I was having a long day at work on Thursday. Then, listening to my podcasts, the Linux Mint Podcast was on… and then the listeners questions section was like… all about me 🙂 Sorry if I made this episode longer than you like 😉

This was a great joy to hear you talking about this question. I immediately felt the need to give back to you. I’ve made a donation to archive.org on your behalf!

As for the solutions proposed:

– I just downloaded the LM20 ISO and plan on installing it soon

– I’ve tried “sudo flatpak install org.videolan.VLC” and got the error message “error: REMOTE and REF must be specified”. The correct invocation (source) is “flatpak install flathub org.videolan.VLC” (+ no sudo needed). It seems to work, I have not finished checking yet.

Keep up the good work.

  • Anthony

So I got to ask a question having to do with Foss or bust! Years ago I would use Wine to do things from Windows on linux and it worked at least sometimes. How come I don’t see that option discussed any more?

CHECK THIS OUT!

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, October 4, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC and 8 pm British Summer Time. Time conversions are available at https://www.timeanddate.com. You can use Austin, Texas as a Central Time reference.

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for audio editing
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4683 mintCast 344.5 – “Working” from Home https://mintcast.org/mintcast-344-5-working-from-home/ Wed, 30 Sep 2020 03:23:49 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4671 And finally, the feedback
Download
]]>

Download

1:38 Linux Innards
58:33 Vibrations from the Ether
1:17:19 Check This Out!
1:20:44 Outro

In our Innards section, we go over the working from home slash home-office setups we have.

And finally, the feedback

LINUX INNARDS:

“Work from Home” setup

  • Tony
    • My views of last time’s topic on Proprietary software v Open Source holding Linux back.
    • For me I’m very pragmatic about using what works, my first preference is Opensource but if there is a proprietary bit of software that would offer a better solution I would use it, and I do as I install the Nvidia drivers on my desktop PC as I have a dedicated Nvidia graphics card.
    • As for the availability of proprietary software for Linux such as Photoshop I’m not sure this is a major issue as this is a very niche package and a very small possible Linux user base making it uneconomic for Adobe to spend time creating a Linux version. Looking at industry leading software one example of Open Source leading the way is Blender, and again very few regular Linux users would even look at this let alone use it too it’s full potential, those that need this software for professional 3D rendering are already using it and probably on Linux.
  • Leo
  • Joe
    • MSI ge72 6qd with an i7-6700HQ and a gtx 960m
    • That has a 17 inch screen
    • For the second screen i have a laptop table with a 32 inch tv on it
    • The table also has a mount for my 7130 so i can do other small things when work is slow or i need to look something up
    • The table that my laptop sits on has an articulated arm for my microphone which is right now a hyperx quadcast or a samson meteor
    • Also use my Samsung Galaxy note 10 all day every day with several of my custom built lg hbs 770 headphones  along with a pair of skullcandy crushers if i want to listen to music and a modded pair of sony xb700s for when i can no longer stand the idea of using an in ear but want all day wear and a pair of 99 neos for when it has to be wired
    • Because i rely so heavily on my phone to be able to do my work i also keep my old galaxy s7 around incase something happens to the note
    • Extra wide recliner that is seeing a lot of wear and tear lately
    • Logitech k360 keyboard and m570 trackball mouse
    • ASUS AC2900 router
      • Need to be able to handle all my work stuff and all the kids school stuff
      • 300mbps connection from spectrum
    • My backup workstation in the garage
      • Ryzen 5 3600 16gb of ram rx 560
      • Two lg tvs as monitors
        • One 60 inch that i got for free because of a bad hdmi board
        • One 43 inch that i also got for free because my friend closed out his storage unit
      • Logitech g613 keyboard and m570 mouse
  • Tony H
    • So even though I am no longer working I do obviously use my PC for quite a lot of tasks as well as numerous laptops my main PC is my tower, and this is what I use for podcasting and much more.
    • So my Desktop PC setup is an:
      • HP Compaq Elite 8300 with the following specs:
        • A 2012 Intel® Core™ i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz with 4 cores and 8 threads.
        • 24Gig of DDR3 Ram
        • NVIDIA GeForce 8400 256Mb Ram
        • Generic USB keyboard and mouse
        • And a 1Tb SSD in the primary Bay of my 4 bay IcyDoc. Running Mint Maté 19.3. There are an additional 2 128Gb drives in the dock with Ubuntu Studio 20.04 and Ubuntu Maté 20.04 installed. The 4th bay is not populated because for some reason it does not recognise any drives installed despite all the cables being connected??
    • I have a ProSound USB podcast mic, that I picked up in a bankruptcy sale a few years ago for a very reasonable £12/$15 and this is mounted onto a boom arm and has a pop filter in front of the mic.
    • I also have a SriHome USB webcam that I got a couple of months ago once I could find one that would not mean remortgaging the house. This cost £31 pounds on Amazon.
    • I have 2 4TB USB3 external backup drives with plenty of room for more data at the moment, Both have 1.9Tb of free space, I should have of site backup as well but at the moment I don’t. I also have a 2TB and 1Tb portable USB3 drive for storage on the go.
    • I have 2 Laser printers, a Greyscale Brother and a recently purchased HP Color Laser 150nw, bought for printing my own decals for my models, this cost £130 of Amazon but as buying decals from online sellers can be £2-3 a set this will quickly pay for itself in the next few months. Yes Decal paper is about £1/sheet but you can print many decals on one A4 sheet so the paper is hardly a factor in the decal cost.
  • Bo
    • Work setup
      • Lenovo laptop and docking station at work
      • KVM switch at home
    • Podcasting
      • System76 Kudu
      • Zoom H6 USB interface
    • Gaming
      • Ryzen 7 build
      • Dual Booting win and Linux
  • Tony W

Will talk about my basement office/studio setup

    • 2 desks, catty corner
      • One desk holds both my podcasting/music desktop as well as my work laptop setup
      • Other desk has my server on it and also use for working on any other machines
    • Network
      • Ran wired internet into basement
    • Repurposed wifi extender as access point with DD WRT
    • Work Setup
      • Thinkpad T480
      • Thinkpad dock
      • Lenovo wireless keyboard/mouse
      • Plantronics Savi w720
    • Music/Podcasting setup – Sentimental value and stories with a lot of this gear
      • Share peripherals w/ work setup
      • Old Dell desktop
        • Video card for multiple monitor support
      • M-Audio Delta 66 soundcard (have a presonus studio 24c)
      • Behringer XM1800S microphone (I have a MXL V57M will use at some point)
      • Neewer desk mount boom arm
      • Audio-Technica M50x headphones
      • Dual monitor “Goodwill Edition” setup (sometimes use a 3rd monitor)
      • JVC stereo R-K11
      • Bose bookshelf speakers
    • Tablet
    • PC in living room: Lenovo desktop (unsure of model right now, has 4th gen i3 in it, 8GB RAM)
      • Dual boot, mostly used in Windows these days by my son for homework
      • Linux mint partition

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

  • Larry Murphy

Hello Leo & All,

I just hear episode 342.5. I wanted to let you know that way back when (early to mid 2000’s) when I wanted to multi-boot I found a You Tube that was a step-by step guide. The person had 106 OSes on his computer. The guide was very complete. I modified it for my needs. It worked for about 6 mos. Till it wouldn’t boot. Checking I found out that my downfall was updating the config files. I accepted one that was a default with the system upgrade and I needed to save the one I had filled out. It was a real nooby error.

Now I boot ALL my OSes from my bios, much easier and safer. I use a SSD for each OS, such as Windows and Linux. I only put OSes on SSD,s and data on separate internal and external drives.

I have found that Linux is quicker to install and even with ALL the customizing I do. I customize many of my folder and almost all of my desk top icons for easy identification. I have use the same icon in both Windows and Linux. I find it,s much easier in Linux because I don’t have change the pics I use to .ico files as is needed by Windows. I also find that my internet is faster in Linux as well as download speeds and I can burn dvds faster in Linux as well. I didn’t want you to think setting up multi-boot my my own. I wanted to do it just to see if I could. I always customize my Windows installs but the Linux installs are MUCH easier to do and as always I always enjoy listening to each one of you folks on the show. Thanks for the great content and all your hard work that goes into each show.

  • John Wallis

Hello Leo,

I would appreciate your assistance please with the error messages arising in the attached screenshot at boot stage, before and after the hard disk encryption password is entered. I look forward to hearing from you.

Try This GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash pci=noacpi”
  • John Wallis Part 2

Hi Leo,

I would appreciate your guidance on systemd-udevd.service.  What is it used for?  Lynis has marked it as unsafe.

  • Raphaël

You guys MADE MY DAY!!!

I was having a long day at work on Thursday. Then, listening to my podcasts, the Linux Mint Podcast was on… and then the listeners questions section was like… all about me 🙂 Sorry if I made this episode longer than you like 😉

This was a great joy to hear you talking about this question. I immediately felt the need to give back to you. I’ve made a donation to archive.org on your behalf!

As for the solutions proposed:

 – I just downloaded the LM20 ISO and plan on installing it soon

 – I’ve tried “sudo flatpak install org.videolan.VLC” and got the error message “error: REMOTE and REF must be specified”. The correct invocation (source) is “flatpak install flathub org.videolan.VLC” (+ no sudo needed). It seems to work, I have not finished checking yet.

Keep up the good work.

  • Anthony

So I got to ask a question having to do with Foss or bust! Years ago I would use Wine to do things from Windows on linux and it worked at least sometimes. How come I don’t see that option discussed any more?

CHECK THIS OUT!

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, October 4, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC and 8 pm British Summer Time. Time conversions are available at https://www.timeanddate.com. You can use Austin, Texas as a Central Time reference.

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for audio editing
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4671 mintCast 343.5 – FOSS or Bust (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-343-5-foss-or-bust-mp3/ Wed, 16 Sep 2020 04:08:13 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4630 And finally, the feedback and a suggestion
Download
]]>

Download

1:29 Linux Innards
38:20 Vibrations from the Ether
1:06:58 Check This Out
1:09:29 Outro

In our Innards section, NonFree vs FOSS

And finally, the feedback and a suggestion

LINUX INNARDS: 

Is insistence on FOSS limiting the growth of Linux?

  • This came up because of a recent Humble Bundle sale that had Magix offering their Sound Forge Audio Studio 13, Movie Studio 16 and a few more bits of software all for $25. It’s one version old, but still fully functional and never-expiring software.
  • The kicker: It’s proprietary, close-sourced, and Windows-only.
  • So, what’s your stance on proprietary software?
    • Leo
      • To the prompt, “no.” For Linux, as a technology, a kernel, FOSS has been the driving force of its adoption. It’s made Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, and every other major internet company out there take notice, adopt and adapt.
      • However, for Linux as a desktop, for regular folks like us, it can limit our personal growth. For instance, daVinci Resolve. It’s a full on audio video editor that is Linux native, but proprietary. It’s not wrong to decide you don’t want to use it because of its proprietary nature, but if it has features that you want, and isn’t in other tools, you’re hamstringing yourself.
      • I have a “right tool for the job” mentality. But, I do lean toward and prefer Open Source software. For instance, we use Audacity and Mumble to create the show every week, and I’m pretty proud of that. However, if it turned out that another software, Open Source or not, free or not, reduced the time required to, say, edit the show, from 5-8 hours to 2-4, I would certainly use it and encourage us all internally to try it.
      • To that end, I went ahead and bought this bundle and installed most of it on my Windows disk.
        • Sound Forge Audio Studio is actually pretty good in that you’re able to do non destructive editing and very fast. 
          • These things are important because one of the drawbacks of Audacity for me is that every compress, noise reduction and truncate silence you do is written to the disk before you ever save. And it’s HUGE. 1-4GB per audio track, and there are 4 or 5 of us on at a time. It’s write speed dependent, which means you want to do this on an SSD, not a HDD, but this puts a lot of wear on an SSD.
        • The built-in effects are… fine? It looks like I’m going to need to find a VST for everything that Audacity does out of the box.
          • These look promising:
            • https://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/
        • The Movie Studio software, I haven’t used much yet. But it reminds me so much of Kdenlive, which is what I’m pitting it against. I’ll report back if it’s amazing or not, but with Kdenlive’s 20.08 release… I may have a hard time making a switch.
      • We also use Google Drive, and have been pretty open about that fact for a while. It’s such a good, cross-platform, collaborative, free writing application that is so simple to use, it’s impossible to pass up, and extremely difficult to migrate away from because of the responsibility that’s put on you for alternatives.
        • Syncthing and the like are options, but aren’t instant
        • Nextcloud is an option, but it’s not without maintenance
      • To close out all my rambling, FOSS isn’t holding us back, per se, it’s more that we don’t have any killer apps that are Linux-only on the desktop. If we want that to change, we need to get on “team developer.” Buy them coffee, send them $10 for a job well done, share successes, build them up, and for those adventurous enough, become one. Because remember, we’re competing with the likes of multi-billion dollar companies.
      • Linux is different. It truly is community-based and can be so very user-driven. Let’s use the power we have to invest in our own future.
    • Moss – History Lesson
      • Corel came out with Corel Linux with WordPerfect in late 1999, back when WordPerfect was still *a* leader in the Office market. They wanted $89. They were hoping for positive feedback to improve the product; instead got screamed at by the FOSS crowd and had to pull their product. They finally pulled the Corel Open Source Development website in March 2002.
      • SoftMaker has made Office since 1987. I’ve been using it since 2008 (in Windows) and have used the Linux edition since 2012. (They even had a BSD version in 2006.) It has always been more compatible with MS Office than any of the free office packages. I filed three bugs with OpenOffice.org (2010? 2012?) having to do with MS Office compatibility which greatly impeded my ability to use OOo in my professional editing work, and was told they were not interested in fixing those bugs. I have been loyal to SoftMaker since. I have not seen LibreOffice 7, but at least two of the bugs continued to exist through the latest 6.4 version. I have mentioned on this show many times how I have taken a lot of heat and even been forced to leave discussion groups because I was not using a FOSS word processor.
      • People coming over from Windows are not willing to work without Adobe software, or AutoCAD, or similar professional software. Linux people keep saying it’s up to those companies to OPEN SOURCE it before they can use it. 
      • The only software Linux people seem to be willing to pay for is games.
      • My view is, you use FOSS first, and then look for other software when FOSS software does not meet your needs. Expecting companies to give up the way they operate just to provide a very limited userbase software they will use is closed-minded.
    • Joe
      • I tend to not stress whether an application is open source or not.  As long as it works on Linux with minimal fuss
      • I don’t think this limits the growth of Linux in any significant way.  You will always have people that think the best way to make money is to have complete control of the product.  If you disallow that type of thing then you would be discouraging the platform.  Yes, money can be made as a service, but some just don’t like that dynamic and some applications simply will not fit into that mold.
      • Also if you are going to have an environment that is open then the programmers can make whatever they choose to fit on top of it.
      • Now if something will only run in Windows or is basically unusable in Linux, I will either find an alternative or I will load up Windows long enough to run the application.  I do keep a Windows install around for those purposes.
      • If you are going to have an open platform then people can use it in any way they see fit.  Including writing proprietary code for that open platform.
      • Check out Windows 10 Ameliorated: https://ameliorated.info/
    • Tony W
      • I am not sure that insistence on FOSS is hindering Linux growth in any significant way
        • The main reason I feel this way is I think the vast majority of people that come to Linux desktop are technically savvy, will research and try things on their own.  and are presented with the options to install alongside windows,etc. They can research options for proprietary software vs FOSS and will decide for themselves with the information available to them.
        • DUAL BOOT: This option actually may keep people using Linux more because there is a safety net if something doesn’t work.
      • My stance on proprietary software: If it works and is convenient, I use it.  I do look for FOSS options first.
      • I cannot understate how much I appreciate that most FOSS is free as in beer and that it’s intended to be that way.  Donate to those projects, when you can.
      • The proprietary software/hardware I use and why:
        • Windows software 
          • Have to use Windows and Windows software for work, no choice there)
          • Boss tone studio
          • Studio One
        • Google stuff
          • Chromebook
          • Google Home/Chromecastz
          • Android, Play store, google apps
  • It’s MOSS, the Website
    • My website, which has been mentioned a few times on this podcast, is about using the best tool for the purpose and to encourage the Linux community to stop sending good software away just because the provider wants  to charge for it.  I have a few articles up on the need for, use of, and desire to increase the availability of non-FOSS software in Linux. I am always open to receiving more articles and comments. I have noticed that It’s FOSS sometimes has articles referencing non-FOSS software, and I have suggested to them that they could use my website to post those articles, thereby dodging some slings and arrows from the FOSS community. All submissions are welcome.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

  • Joseph Husak on Youtube

Joseph’s Followup Email

Tony W Response

  • TheComputerKid

Leo’s Response

Moss’ Response

  • Raphaël

Leo’s Response

sudo flatpak install org.videolan.VLC

sudo flatpak install fr.handbrake.ghb
  • John Wallis Saga

I’ve disabled avahi-daemon.  Lynis does not provide more information regarding the services.  I’m puzzled as to why hddtemp.service should be marked as unsafe.  Could we make hddtemp.service the first service to be investigated?

Leo’s Response

Here is some basic usage.

leo@maya ~ > sudo hddtemp /dev/sda

[sudo] password for leo:        

/dev/sda: ADATA SU800: 27°C

leo@maya ~> sudo hddtemp /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb: TCSUNBOW N4 240GB: 40°C

I wouldn’t worry about hddtemp much, especially if you use it with any frequency. If you don’t ever use it, it may be prudent to remove it with 

sudo apt remove hddtemp

If you want to keep it, but are worried that it is listening to its default TCP port 7634, you can run

ss -l4

and check for a line like this

Netid       State        Recv-Q    Send-Q      Local Address:Port

tcp         LISTEN       0         0           0.0.0.0:7634

If you see anything with the port 7634 in the far right there, it’s listening. If you see anything other than 0 under Recv-Q or Send-Q, it’s been talking to remote hosts!

  • Brad Alexander
  • Brad Alexander
[storm@danube ~]$ cp rsx.jpg Media

[storm@danube ~]$ cd !$

cd Media

[storm@danube Media]$

CHECK THIS OUT! 

  • Moss
    • https://itsfoss.com/best-markdown-editors-linux/

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, September 20, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC and 8 pm British Summer Time. Time conversions are available at https://www.timeanddate.com. You can use Austin, Texas as a Central Time reference.

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for audio editing
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4630 mintCast 343.5 – FOSS or Bust https://mintcast.org/mintcast-343-5-foss-or-bust/ Wed, 16 Sep 2020 03:46:43 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4618 And finally, the feedback and a suggestion
Download
]]>

Download

1:29 Linux Innards
38:20 Vibrations from the Ether
1:06:58 Check This Out
1:09:29 Outro

In our Innards section, NonFree vs FOSS

And finally, the feedback and a suggestion

LINUX INNARDS: 

Is insistence on FOSS limiting the growth of Linux?

  • This came up because of a recent Humble Bundle sale that had Magix offering their Sound Forge Audio Studio 13, Movie Studio 16 and a few more bits of software all for $25. It’s one version old, but still fully functional and never-expiring software.
  • The kicker: It’s proprietary, close-sourced, and Windows-only.
  • So, what’s your stance on proprietary software?
    • Leo
      • To the prompt, “no.” For Linux, as a technology, a kernel, FOSS has been the driving force of its adoption. It’s made Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, and every other major internet company out there take notice, adopt and adapt.
      • However, for Linux as a desktop, for regular folks like us, it can limit our personal growth. For instance, daVinci Resolve. It’s a full on audio video editor that is Linux native, but proprietary. It’s not wrong to decide you don’t want to use it because of its proprietary nature, but if it has features that you want, and isn’t in other tools, you’re hamstringing yourself.
      • I have a “right tool for the job” mentality. But, I do lean toward and prefer Open Source software. For instance, we use Audacity and Mumble to create the show every week, and I’m pretty proud of that. However, if it turned out that another software, Open Source or not, free or not, reduced the time required to, say, edit the show, from 5-8 hours to 2-4, I would certainly use it and encourage us all internally to try it.
      • To that end, I went ahead and bought this bundle and installed most of it on my Windows disk.
        • Sound Forge Audio Studio is actually pretty good in that you’re able to do non destructive editing and very fast. 
          • These things are important because one of the drawbacks of Audacity for me is that every compress, noise reduction and truncate silence you do is written to the disk before you ever save. And it’s HUGE. 1-4GB per audio track, and there are 4 or 5 of us on at a time. It’s write speed dependent, which means you want to do this on an SSD, not a HDD, but this puts a lot of wear on an SSD.
        • The built-in effects are… fine? It looks like I’m going to need to find a VST for everything that Audacity does out of the box.
          • These look promising:
            • https://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/
        • The Movie Studio software, I haven’t used much yet. But it reminds me so much of Kdenlive, which is what I’m pitting it against. I’ll report back if it’s amazing or not, but with Kdenlive’s 20.08 release… I may have a hard time making a switch.
      • We also use Google Drive, and have been pretty open about that fact for a while. It’s such a good, cross-platform, collaborative, free writing application that is so simple to use, it’s impossible to pass up, and extremely difficult to migrate away from because of the responsibility that’s put on you for alternatives.
        • Syncthing and the like are options, but aren’t instant
        • Nextcloud is an option, but it’s not without maintenance
      • To close out all my rambling, FOSS isn’t holding us back, per se, it’s more that we don’t have any killer apps that are Linux-only on the desktop. If we want that to change, we need to get on “team developer.” Buy them coffee, send them $10 for a job well done, share successes, build them up, and for those adventurous enough, become one. Because remember, we’re competing with the likes of multi-billion dollar companies.
      • Linux is different. It truly is community-based and can be so very user-driven. Let’s use the power we have to invest in our own future.
    • Moss – History Lesson
      • Corel came out with Corel Linux with WordPerfect in late 1999, back when WordPerfect was still *a* leader in the Office market. They wanted $89. They were hoping for positive feedback to improve the product; instead got screamed at by the FOSS crowd and had to pull their product. They finally pulled the Corel Open Source Development website in March 2002.
      • SoftMaker has made Office since 1987. I’ve been using it since 2008 (in Windows) and have used the Linux edition since 2012. (They even had a BSD version in 2006.) It has always been more compatible with MS Office than any of the free office packages. I filed three bugs with OpenOffice.org (2010? 2012?) having to do with MS Office compatibility which greatly impeded my ability to use OOo in my professional editing work, and was told they were not interested in fixing those bugs. I have been loyal to SoftMaker since. I have not seen LibreOffice 7, but at least two of the bugs continued to exist through the latest 6.4 version. I have mentioned on this show many times how I have taken a lot of heat and even been forced to leave discussion groups because I was not using a FOSS word processor.
      • People coming over from Windows are not willing to work without Adobe software, or AutoCAD, or similar professional software. Linux people keep saying it’s up to those companies to OPEN SOURCE it before they can use it. 
      • The only software Linux people seem to be willing to pay for is games.
      • My view is, you use FOSS first, and then look for other software when FOSS software does not meet your needs. Expecting companies to give up the way they operate just to provide a very limited userbase software they will use is closed-minded.
    • Joe
      • I tend to not stress whether an application is open source or not.  As long as it works on Linux with minimal fuss
      • I don’t think this limits the growth of Linux in any significant way.  You will always have people that think the best way to make money is to have complete control of the product.  If you disallow that type of thing then you would be discouraging the platform.  Yes, money can be made as a service, but some just don’t like that dynamic and some applications simply will not fit into that mold.
      • Also if you are going to have an environment that is open then the programmers can make whatever they choose to fit on top of it.
      • Now if something will only run in Windows or is basically unusable in Linux, I will either find an alternative or I will load up Windows long enough to run the application.  I do keep a Windows install around for those purposes.
      • If you are going to have an open platform then people can use it in any way they see fit.  Including writing proprietary code for that open platform.
      • Check out Windows 10 Ameliorated: https://ameliorated.info/
    • Tony W
      • I am not sure that insistence on FOSS is hindering Linux growth in any significant way
        • The main reason I feel this way is I think the vast majority of people that come to Linux desktop are technically savvy, will research and try things on their own.  and are presented with the options to install alongside windows,etc. They can research options for proprietary software vs FOSS and will decide for themselves with the information available to them.
        • DUAL BOOT: This option actually may keep people using Linux more because there is a safety net if something doesn’t work.
      • My stance on proprietary software: If it works and is convenient, I use it.  I do look for FOSS options first.
      • I cannot understate how much I appreciate that most FOSS is free as in beer and that it’s intended to be that way.  Donate to those projects, when you can.
      • The proprietary software/hardware I use and why:
        • Windows software 
          • Have to use Windows and Windows software for work, no choice there)
          • Boss tone studio
          • Studio One
        • Google stuff
          • Chromebook
          • Google Home/Chromecastz
          • Android, Play store, google apps
  • It’s MOSS, the Website
    • My website, which has been mentioned a few times on this podcast, is about using the best tool for the purpose and to encourage the Linux community to stop sending good software away just because the provider wants  to charge for it.  I have a few articles up on the need for, use of, and desire to increase the availability of non-FOSS software in Linux. I am always open to receiving more articles and comments. I have noticed that It’s FOSS sometimes has articles referencing non-FOSS software, and I have suggested to them that they could use my website to post those articles, thereby dodging some slings and arrows from the FOSS community. All submissions are welcome.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

  • Joseph Husak on Youtube

Joseph’s Followup Email

Tony W Response

  • TheComputerKid

Leo’s Response

Moss’ Response

  • Raphaël

Leo’s Response

sudo flatpak install org.videolan.VLC

sudo flatpak install fr.handbrake.ghb
  • John Wallis Saga

I’ve disabled avahi-daemon.  Lynis does not provide more information regarding the services.  I’m puzzled as to why hddtemp.service should be marked as unsafe.  Could we make hddtemp.service the first service to be investigated?

Leo’s Response

Here is some basic usage.

leo@maya ~ > sudo hddtemp /dev/sda

[sudo] password for leo:        

/dev/sda: ADATA SU800: 27°C

leo@maya ~> sudo hddtemp /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb: TCSUNBOW N4 240GB: 40°C

I wouldn’t worry about hddtemp much, especially if you use it with any frequency. If you don’t ever use it, it may be prudent to remove it with 

sudo apt remove hddtemp

If you want to keep it, but are worried that it is listening to its default TCP port 7634, you can run

ss -l4

and check for a line like this

Netid       State        Recv-Q    Send-Q      Local Address:Port

tcp         LISTEN       0         0           0.0.0.0:7634

If you see anything with the port 7634 in the far right there, it’s listening. If you see anything other than 0 under Recv-Q or Send-Q, it’s been talking to remote hosts!

  • Brad Alexander 
  • Brad Alexander
[storm@danube ~]$ cp rsx.jpg Media

[storm@danube ~]$ cd !$

cd Media

[storm@danube Media]$

CHECK THIS OUT! 

  • Moss
    • https://itsfoss.com/best-markdown-editors-linux/

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, September 20, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC and 8 pm British Summer Time. Time conversions are available at https://www.timeanddate.com. You can use Austin, Texas as a Central Time reference.

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for audio editing
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>

]]> full 4618 mintCast 242 – Void Linux https://mintcast.org/mintcast-242-void-linux/ Fri, 25 Mar 2016 16:58:06 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3073 242]

Download

News:

Main Topic: Void Linux (http://www.voidlinux.eu/)

“Void Linux is an independent distribution, developed entirely by volunteers. Unlike trillions of other existing distros, Void is not a modification of an existing distribution. Void’s package manager and build system have been written from scratch.”

Tips & Websites:

  • Void Linux (http://www.voidlinux.eu/)
  • Sublime Text  (https://www.sublimetext.com/) – I’ve been having to use Windows at bit more at work recently and one of things that Windows has that Linux doesn’t is Notepad++. This is also one of the first things I went looking for when I first started using Linux over Windows and was a little heartbroken to see that I couldn’t use Notepad++ on Linux. Then I found Sublime Text.
    Note: Sublime Text may be downloaded and evaluated for free, however a license must be purchased for continued use. There is currently no enforced time limit for the evaluation.
  • How To Fix The (Annoying) ‘Failed to Fetch’ Chrome apt Error (reddit.com) (omgubuntu.co.uk) The search engine has pulled 32-bit Chrome builds from the official Chrome repo, which gets added to Ubuntu Software Sources when the app is first installed. On Linux Mint, you can update it in Update Manager: Edit > Software Sources > Additional repositories, Select Google -> Edit URL…
  • Record your terminal activity with “script” (ostechnix.com) As a System administrator, you might execute lot of commands in the Terminal everyday. Sometimes you might want to refer the entire command history along with all respective outputs later.

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 3073 mintCast 225 – LibreOffice https://mintcast.org/mintcast-225-libreoffice/ Fri, 05 Jun 2015 01:59:09 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=2974 225]

Download

News:

Main Topic: LibreOffice with Robinson Tryon

Website:

Pre-Show Music:

Podcast Announcements:

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott, and Joe
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 2974 mintCast 202 – Mint 17 Cinnamon and Mate https://mintcast.org/mintcast-202-mint-17-cinnamon-and-mate/ Wed, 04 Jun 2014 00:22:28 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=2824 202] Download

News:

  • Cinnamon PPA will no longer be maintained for Ubuntu users (muktware.com)
  • TrueCrypt shuts down, conspiracy theorists go nuts (tomsguide.com)
  • TrueCrypt isn’t dead.  It has been forked and moved to Switzerland  (softpedia.com)
  • Oh, and Steve Gibson says it is still safe to use (grc.com)
  • Linux Top 3: Fedora, Ubuntu and Gluster Lose Community Leaders (linuxplanet.com)
  • Tizen, once declared dead, continues to gain strength (eweek.com)

Main Topic: Linux Mint 17 Qiana – Cinnamon & Mate

  • Linux Mint 17 Qiana Cinnamon & Mate editions available for download
    (Cinnamon) (Mate)

Website:

  • Linux Mint Essentials from Packt Publishing (packtpub.com)

Tip:

  • 11 things to do after installing Linux Mint 17 (enqlu.com)

Pre-Show Music:

Podcast Announcements:

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott, Joe
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).
The podcast bumpers were provided by Oscar.
Thanks to KWisher for the use of his PiCaster.
Thanks to the Linuxbasix gang for the use of their Mumble server.

]]> full 2824 mintCast 201 – Riding the Ubuntu LTS https://mintcast.org/mintcast-201-riding-the-ubuntu-lts/ Fri, 23 May 2014 21:15:45 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=2818 201] Download

News:

Main Topic: Riding the Ubuntu LTS

Website:

Tip:

Pre-Show Music:

Podcast Announcements:

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott, Joe
Live Stream every other Monday 7:00 p.m. or 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). The podcast bumpers were provided by Oscar.

]]> full 2818 mintCast 199 – Online Backup Services https://mintcast.org/mintcast-199-online-backup-services/ Fri, 18 Apr 2014 01:32:20 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=2809 199] Download

News:

Main Topic: Online Backup Services

Website:

  • BestBackups.com
    • Peter Zaborszky – “As a small business running websites (online games actually), after a certain point I realised I could lose everything if I don’t back everything up frequently. I started searching for backup solutions online, only to find there were a huge amount of providers, and I didn’t know who to choose!

      Then I had an idea, if other people have this problem, they’ll probably be interested in a review site for online backup and cloud backup solutions!

      So that’s how it started, I’ve been building the site ever since, reviewing all providers as much as I can!”

    • http://www.bestbackups.com/

Tip:

  • 16 commands to check hardware information on Linux
    • This post takes a quick look at some of the most commonly used commands to check information and configuration details about various hardware peripherals and devices. The list includes lscpu, hwinfo, lshw, dmidecode, lspci etc.
    • http://www.binarytides.com/linux-commands-hardware-info/

Pre-Show Music:

Podcast Announcements:

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott
Live Stream every other Monday 7:00 p.m. or 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). The podcast bumpers were provided by Oscar.

]]> full 2809 mintCast 198 – Personal Finances https://mintcast.org/mintcast-198-personal-finances/ Fri, 04 Apr 2014 02:44:16 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=2799 198] Download

News:

  • 1993: Term Spam Coined (dayintechhistory.com)
  • 1951: UNIVAC I – First American Commercial Computer is Unveiled (dayintechhistory.com)
  • Linux Mint 17 codenamed Qiana (linuxmint.com)
  • Linux Mint might use the same LTS BASE for Linux Mint 17, 18, 19 and 20 (webupd8.org)
  • Why Linux Mint is a worthwhile Windows XP replacement (zdnet.com)
  • GOG.com to support Linux (linuxmint.com)
  • Ubuntu 14.04 final beta download: A much-needed upgrade for LTS users (extremetech.com)
  • Karen Sandler Steps Down as GNOME Foundation Executive Director (gnome.org)
  • Bletchley Park codebreaker Jerry Roberts dies, aged 93 (bbc.com)

Main Topic: Personal Finance Management Software

  • General Overview of Available Software:
  • Online Financial Management Applications: (about.com)

Tip:

  • Difference Between su and sudo and How to Configure sudo in Linux (thanks to James Eaton)
    • Linux System is much secured than any of its counterpart. One of the way to implement security in Linux is the user management policy and user permission. normal users are not authorized to perform any system operations.
    • A normal user needs to use either “su” or “sudo” command to perform any system wide changes.
    • http://www.tecmint.com/su-vs-sudo-and-how-to-configure-sudo-in-linux/

Pre-Show Music:

Podcast Announcements:

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott
Live Stream every other Monday 7:00 p.m. or 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). The podcast bumpers were provided by Oscar.

]]> full 2799 mintCast 186 – Sonic’s Blender https://mintcast.org/mintcast-186-sonics-blender/ Fri, 13 Dec 2013 02:56:54 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=2723 186] Download

News:

  • Linux Mint Monthly News – November 2013 – The KDE edition was approved for an RC release, the Xfce edition is almost ready, MATE 1.6 and Cinnamon 2.0 are being backported to Linux Mint 13, and work is starting on LMDE UP8. (linuxmint.com)
  • Linux Mint 16 OEM Has Been Officially Released – OEM images are for computer vendors and manufacturers. They allow Linux Mint to be “pre-installed” on a machine which is then used by another person than the one who performed the installation. (softpedia.com) (linuxmint.com)
  • Linux Mint 16 “Petra” KDE RC released! – The highlight of this edition is the latest KDE desktop, KDE 4.11. (linuxmint.com)
  • New Linux worm targets routers, cameras, “Internet of things” devices – Researchers have discovered a Linux worm capable of infecting a wide range of home routers, set-top boxes, security cameras, and other consumer devices. The worm exploits a PHP vulnerability to propagate itself in the wild. It uses an old vulnerability that was patched in May 2012. (arstechnica.com) (tripwire.com)
  • Temperfect mug Kickstarter – The Temperfect mug brings your freshly-brewed beverage to the perfect drinking temperature within minutes, and, using the energy it stores, it maintains that temperature for hours. It requires no batteries or cords, and it’s infinitely reusable! (kickstarter.com) (joeveo.com)

Main Topic: Blender

with guest host Sonic4Spuds (callizera.com)

Websites:

Tips:

  • Terminator Ends the Terminal Window Blahs by Jack M. Germain, LinuxInsider
  • Terminator has its own, innovative approach to providing a user interface. If no other feature appeals to you, the multi-pane display should be priceless. For example, Terminator can divide each terminal window horizontally or vertically. You can open as many panes as you need within the single-window display. You can drag the split windows to resize each one to fit your needs. (linuxinsider.com) (launchpad.net)

Podcast Announcements:

  • Hacker Public Radio will be running a 24-hour New Year’s show again this year. Remember this is not an “HPR Show”, but rather we are providing a platform for the community to get together to wish each other a happy new year. (hackerpublicradio.org)

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott, Joe
Live Stream (Mondays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern): 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). The podcast bumpers were provided by Oscar.

]]> full 2723 mintCast 185 – Mint 16 Petra https://mintcast.org/mintcast-185-mint-16-petra/ Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:45:59 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=2720 185] Download

News:

  • First Steam Machine Priced At $499; Xbox One Is In Trouble– iBuyPower announced that their Steam Machine, due out in early 2014 and bundled with the first iteration of the SteamOS, will be available for only $499. Yes, the exact same price as the Xbox One, but far more powerful. (cinemablend.com)
  • Linux chief: “Open source is safer, and Linux is more secure than any other OS” – “In an interview with Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, VentureBeat got a bird’s-eye view of the future of the open-source operating system for 2014.” The interview addressed the controversial issues of government spying and “backdoors”. Zemlin talked about how and why GNU/Linux remains the most secure option for concerned consumers. (venturebeat.com)
  • Canonical Dev Calls Linux Mint “Vulnerable”, Wouldn’t Use it For Online Banking – Users of the popular Ubuntu-based operating system Linux Mint should not use it for online banking, a Canonical engineer has advised. Mint’s decision to prevent packages with known security issues from updating, from the kernel and browser to the boot-loader and Xorg display server, leaves its users with a “vulnerable system”, says Oliver Grawert. (omgubuntu.co.uk)
  • Clem responds – “I hear a Canonical dev was more opinionated than knowledgeable and the press blew what he said out of proportion. I wouldn’t mind too much, if we weren’t finding ourselves answering questions from panicked users rather than working on what matters right now (i.e. Mint 16 RC). So I’ll be brief.” (segfault.linuxmint.com)

Main Topic: Mint 16 – Petra

  • The purpose of Linux Mint is to produce a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use.

Websites:

Tips:

Pre-show music this week was:

  • Beginner’s Luck by Lindalou and Michael Ryge (Jamendo.com)

Podcast Announcements:

  • Watch for “Event” announcements in the mintCast Community on Google+ to find out when we’re recording!
  • Linux Voice: We want to create an even better magazine; a bigger, more entertaining and more accountable magazine for the community we love to serve. The magazine we want to make is called Linux Voice. (indiegogo.com)

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott, Joe
Live Stream (Mondays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern): 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). The podcast bumpers were provided by Oscar.

]]> full 2720 mintCast 184 – Point Linux https://mintcast.org/mintcast-184-point-linux/ Sat, 23 Nov 2013 20:01:16 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=2714 184] Download

News:

  • Linux Mint 16 release candidate available for download– Clement Lefebvre has announced that the release candidate for Linux Mint 16 is out and ready for testing: “The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 16 ‘Petra’ RC. Linux Mint 16 is the result of six months of incremental development on top of stable and reliable technologies. This new release comes with updated software and brings refinements and new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.”. (Cinnamon) (Mate)
  • Debian finds itself caught up in the “init war”, technical panel to decide direction for next release – The leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project, Lucas Nussbaum, has announced that the question of which init system will be the default in the next release, Jessie, will be decided by the project’s technical committee. (itwire.com)
  • Google Books are ruled legal in a huge win for Fair Use – A long-running copyright lawsuit between the Authors’ Guild and Google over its book-scanning project is over, and Google has won on the grounds that its scanning is “fair use”. (arstechnica.com)
  • Sourceforge responds to the GIMPs departure – A week after the developers of popular graphics-wrangling app the GIMP bailed from SourceForge rather than endure the many odd ads it encourages, the site has responded with a scheme that makes its users the arbiters of acceptable ads. (theregister.co.uk)
  • Sailfish OS Smartphones to hit the market later this month – Finnish startup Jolla has revealed when the first batch of its Sailfish OS based smartphones will be available to customers, along with new information about what software will be on offer when the devices ship. (theregister.co.uk)

Main Topic: A look at Point Linux

  • Point Linux (Point Linux) is a GNU/Linux distribution that aims to combine the power of Debian GNU/Linux with the productivity of MATE, the Gnome 2 desktop environment fork. Point Linux provides an easy to set up and use distribution for users, looking for a fast, stable and predictable desktop.

Websites:

Tips:

Podcast Announcements:

  • Watch for “Event” announcements in the mintCast Community on Google+ to find out when we’re recording!
  • Mumble Server: The LinuxBasix community funded the mumble server we currently use to live stream and record mintCast. Since they have segmented a bit, jneuster has funded it privately. While ~$5 runs the server for a month, it would be nice if it was community funded. (openspeak.cc)
  • London Cryptofestival: Whatever your paranoia, now is not the time to give up on the internet. It’s time for a CryptoFestival! On November 30th we’re coming together to build on the success of the CryptoParty movement and to reclaim our right to communicate and experiment on the internet. (www.cryptoparty.in).
  • Linux Voice: We want to create an even better magazine; a bigger, more entertaining and more accountable magazine for the community we love to serve. The magazine we want to make is called Linux Voice. (indiegogo.com)
  • Thanksgiving Break: The mintCast team will be celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday and will record our next episode on Sunday, December 1st. Check Google+ for the specific recording time.

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott, Joe
Live Stream (Mondays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern): 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). The podcast bumpers were provided by Oscar.

]]> full 2714 mintCast 183 – Python, Twitter, and Pi https://mintcast.org/mintcast-183-python-twitter-pi/ Wed, 13 Nov 2013 03:27:27 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=2705 183] Download

News:

  • Low-end laptops:The rise of the Chromebook– Some people are still in denial about the rise of the Linux operating system with the Chrome Web browser interface, Chrome OS, and its hardware: the Chromebooks. The experts say, however, it’s the one segment of the PC market that’s growing while everything else shrinks. (zdnet.com)
  • Slackware Linux 14.1 – Yes, it is that time again! After well over a year of planning, development, and testing, the Slackware Linux Project is proud to announce the latest stable release of the longest running distribution of the Linux operating system. (distrowatch.com) (slackware.com)
  • Canonical “abused trademark law” to target a site critical of Ubuntu privacy – “Fix Ubuntu” site accused of trademark violation, asked to change domain name. According to Micah Lee, Canonical sent him an e-mail this morning asking him to stop using the Ubuntu logo and also to stop using the word “Ubuntu” in his domain name. Lee reprinted the entire e-mail in a blog post. (arstechnica.com) (muktware.com) (markshuttleworth.com) (softpedia.com)
  • The future of Linux: Evolving everywhere – Mark Shuttleworth’s recent closure of Ubuntu Linux bug No. 1 (“Microsoft has a majority market share”) placed a meaningful, if somewhat controversial, exclamation point on how far Linux has come since Linus Torvalds rolled out the first version of the OS in 1991 as a pet project. But where from here? (itworld.com)
  • Linux Voice – A new Free Software and Linux magazine that gives profits back to the community – from an all-star team of ace Linux journalists. Linux Lifestyle originally shared: OK folks here it is. We’re launching a crowd funding campaign to create a new Linux magazine that puts the community first. That means we’ll donate half of our profits back to the community. There’s loads more details on the campaign page.  (linuxvoice.com) (indiegogo.com)
  • Humble Store Opens with 24-Hour Debut Sale – First there was the Humble Bundle, and it was good. Then came the Humble Weekly Sale, and it was pretty cool too. Now it’s time for the next step in the Humble evolution: The Humble Store, where games go on sale and proceeds go to charity. (escapistmagazine.com) (humblebundle.com)

Main Topic: Python, Twitter, and the Raspberry Pi

  • Python (python.org) is a programming language that lets you work more quickly and integrate your systems more effectively. You can learn to use Python and see almost immediate gains in productivity and lower maintenance costs.
  • Twitter: Developer (dev.twitter.com); Manage Apps (dev.twitter.com/apps); Create a new App (dev.twitter.com/apps/new)
  • NLTK (nltk.org) is a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data.
  • WordNet® (wordnet.princeton.edu) is a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept.
  • @braynebuddy is where the results will eventually appear, and you can follow the development process on Rob’s webwords blog.

Websites:

Tips:

  • Unix: The Art of Being Lazy – One of the most endearing qualities of Unix devotees is how determined they are to be as efficient as possible. Why type three characters if you can do the same thing with two? And one of the best ways to cut down keystrokes is to turn common commands into aliases. (itworld.com)

Podcast Announcements:

  • Watch for “Event” announcements in the mintCast Community on Google+ to find out when we’re recording!
  • Mumble Server: The LinuxBasix community funded the mumble server we currently use to live stream and record mintCast. Since they have segmented a bit, jneuster has funded it privately. While ~$5 runs the server for a month, it would be nice if it was community funded. (openspeak.cc)
  • Texas Linux Fest 2014 has been scheduled. We are going to be at the Austin Convention Center June 13th and 14th! This year we are planning to do two full days of expo floor in a much larger venue! We are already accepting registration for this year’s event! We are also starting the call for papers immediately to get as many exciting talks as we can! If you would like to submit a talk, please check here for more info: http://texaslinuxfest.org.

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott, Joe
Live Stream (Mondays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern): 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). The podcast bumpers were provided by Oscar.

]]> full 2705 mintCast 182 – Ubuntu 13.10 https://mintcast.org/mintcast-182-ubuntu/ Fri, 08 Nov 2013 03:06:49 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=2700 182] Download

News:

  • The Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, is a non-profit that has taken to the courts to fight the good fight in the digital world since 1990.  They’ve initiated legal challenges against the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping.  (talkers.com) (eff.org/)
  • Patent war goes nuclear: Microsoft, Apple-owned “Rockstar” sues Google – Canada-based telecom Nortel went bankrupt in 2009 and sold its biggest asset—a portfolio of more than 6,000 patents covering 4G wireless innovations and a range of technologies—at an auction in 2011. (arstechnica.com)
  • Can Open Source developers fix HealthCare.Gov? As computer experts hired by the U.S. government scramble to fix the much-maligned healthcare.gov website, a corps of independent kibitzers is chiming in from around the world, publicizing coding flaws that they’ve discovered and offering suggestions for fixing them. “It’s not the worst code I’ve ever seen.” (nbcnews.com)
  • Fedora 20 beta delayed yet again – The release of Fedora 20 has been delayed by another week — both the due-out beta and the final release — over unresolved bugs. (phoronix.com)
  • But it will have some cool features when it finally comes out – The latest edition of Fedora Linux, the open source operating system that helps form the basis for Red Hat’s (RHT) enterprise server platform, is set to debut soon — though a couple weeks later than initially planned, as bugs have held up the release. Still, it could bring some of this autumn’s biggest changes in desktop Linux when it appears in December. (thevarguy.com)
  • The Seattle Times goes hands-on with a Valve Steam Machine prototype – “It’s an audacious effort to convince the vast and established PC industry that there’s another path to the living room besides the one blazed by Microsoft and Intel.”(seattletimes.com)

Main Topic: Xubuntu and Ubuntu 13.10

  • Ubuntu 13.10 (ubuntu.com) will be supported for 9 months and includes cutting-edge new features that make your music, videos, documents and apps much easier to access.
  • Xubuntu (xubuntu.org) is an officially recognised flavor of the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Xubuntu comes with Xfce, which is a stable, light and configurable desktop environment.

Websites:

Tips:

  • How to Set Up Secure Remote Networking with OpenVPN on Linux (Part 1) (Part 2)

Podcast Announcements:

  • Watch for “Event” announcements in the mintCast Community on Google+ to find out when we’re recording!
  • Texas Linux Fest 2014 has been scheduled. We are going to be at the Austin Convention Center June 13th and 14th! This year we are planning to do two full days of expo floor in a much larger venue! We are already accepting registration for this year’s event! We are also starting the call for papers immediately to get as many exciting talks as we can! If you would like to submit a talk, please check here for more info: http://texaslinuxfest.org.

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott, Joe
Live Stream (Mondays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern): mintcast.org
Contact Us:

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

Credits:
Podcast Entry and exit music provided by Mark Blasco (podcastthemes.com). The podcast bumpers were provided by Oscar.

]]> full 2700 mintCast 181 – Manjaro… Mint for Arch? https://mintcast.org/mintcast-181-manjaro/ Fri, 01 Nov 2013 02:30:01 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=2695 181] Download

News:

  • SteamOS could really help desktop Linux adoption, says Torvalds – Valve’s Steam efforts could be a big opportunity to drive desktop Linux because it could force the various desktop Linux distributions to standardize their technology. (pcworld.com)
  • Closing Doors – Posted on October 24, 2013 – “It is with a heavy heart that I must announce the closure of SolusOS. Simply put, there is no longer enough manpower to fulfill the vision. What began as a Debian derivative evolved into an independent distribution, without the large development team required to back such an effort.”
    (networkworld.com) (fossforce.com) (solusos.com – dead link?)
  • First Tizen tablets ship to developers – As originally reported, the tablet features a 1.4GHz, quad-core Cortex-A9 processor along with 2GB of DDR3 RAM, 32GB of flash, and a microSD slot. The 10.1-inch display offers 1920 x 1200-pixel resolution, and there’s both a 2-megapixel rear-facing camera, as well as a 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera. Bluetooth 3.0 and WiFi round out the mix. (linuxgizmos.com)
  • LG unveils the Fireweb, its first Firefox OS smartphone – LG is expanding the platform’s reach today by releasing its inaugural Mozilla-powered handset, the Fireweb.  (engadget.com)

Main Topic: Manjaro Linux

  • Manjaro Linux (http://manjaro.org) is a user-friendly Linux distribution based on the independently developed Arch operating system. Developed in Austria, France, and Germany, Manjaro provides all the benefits of the Arch operating system combined with a focus on user-friendliness and accessibility.
  • We looked at Manjaro 0.8.7 “Ascella” Xfce i686 Edition.

Website:

Podcast Announcements:

  • Watch for “Event” announcements in the mintCast Community on Google+ to find out when we’re recording!

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott, Joe
Live Stream (Mondays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern): mintcast.org
Contact Us:

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

Credits:
Podcast Entry and exit music provided by Mark Blasco (podcastthemes.com). The podcast bumpers were provided by Oscar.

]]> full 2695 mintCast 180 – To Gimp or Not https://mintcast.org/mintcast-180-gimp/ Fri, 25 Oct 2013 02:46:40 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=2688 180] Download

News:

  • How to build and install the latest Cinnamon from Git This article explains how to install the very latest Cinnamon, not the very latest stable release, but the current version from the Github development repository. (segfault.linuxmint.com)
  • Farewell Medibuntu The Medibuntu repository was discontinued and is no longer available. As a consequence, you might see error messages in the Update Manager, Package Manager and Software Manager. (blog.linuxmint.com)
  • Q&A: Clement Lefebvre: The man behind Linux Mint “There was no plan to create a new distribution initially…” (computerworld.co.nz)
  • Ubuntu 13.10 Finally Released, Big Yawner Ubuntu 13.10 is officially released. Of course, it’s been in the news so much that the official announcement today feels like old news. (ostatic.com) (arstechnica.com) (fridge.ubuntu.com)
  • Quantal, raring, saucy…“So our titular totem, our tamper-proof taboo, our tranquil memento of mission and dues, our topical target of both cry and hue, the name for our LTS thoughtful and true: I give you, as Seuss would, with hullabaloo, the temperate and thrifty, the talented and tactful but ultimately, and tellingly, trusty tahr.” (markshuttleworth.com)
  • The AMD Radeon Performance Is Incredible On Linux 3.12 “…benchmarks of a Radeon HD 4000 series GPU showed the Linux 3.12 kernel bringing major performance improvements over Linux 3.11 and prior.” “It turns out that this change also affects the closed source drivers for AMD and the open source drivers for NVidia” (phoronix.com #1) (phoronix.com #2) (phoronix.com #3) (phoronix.com #4)
  • LightZone Is a Free, Awesome Photo Editor and Alternative to Lightroom The program lets you quickly manipulate a batch of photos, with great effects and styles and finely adjustable tools. (lifehacker.com) (Also, check the comments for a reference to “darktable” http://www.darktable.org/ another alternative)

Main Topic: The GIMP

with Sonic4Spuds – callizera.com

  • GIMP (www.gimp.org) is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

Website:

Tip:

Podcast Announcements:

  • Watch for “Event” announcements in the mintCast Community on Google+ to find out when we’re recording!

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott, Joe
Live Stream (Mondays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern): mintcast.org
Contact Us:

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

Credits:
Podcast Entry and exit music provided by Mark Blasco (podcastthemes.com). The podcast bumpers were provided by Oscar.

]]> full 2688 mintCast 179 – A Pi in the Cloud https://mintcast.org/mintcast-179-pi-cloud/ Fri, 18 Oct 2013 01:37:13 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=2684 179] Download

News:

  • Ubuntu vs Linux Mint: Distrowatch Ratings Don’t Matter, Dude! Is Distrowatch in fact an indicator of something extremely important…that people are looking for alternatives to Ubuntu? (muktware.com)
  • Would Linux survive if Ubuntu died? Ubuntu is one of the best known and widely used Linux distributions. What would happen if it suddenly died? Would Linux survive? (fossforce.com) (itworld.com)
  • Updated Debian 7: 7.2 released. The Debian project is pleased to announce the second update of its stable distribution Debian 7 (codename “wheezy”). (debian.org)
  • NHS tears out its Oracle Spine in favour of open source. The UK government’s quest to get public services to use more open source technologies seems to be taking hold, judging by the revamp of the NHS’s very large Spine service. (theregister.co.uk) (hscic.gov.uk PDF ~2MB)

Main Topic: The Raspberry Pi as a Cloud?

  • arkOS (arkos.io) is a lightweight Linux-based operating system that runs on a Raspberry Pi. But arkOS more than just an operating system — it is a full software stack managing your self-hosting experience in an intuitive and intelligent way. arkOS does the work for you.
  • Installing ownCloud on Raspberry Pi – Presenting a ready-to-install image of ownCloud for Raspberry Pi. (adityapatawari.com)
  • Build Your Own Cloud Storage with Raspberry Pi and BitTorrent Sync – Don’t believe the hype: the Cloud is far from secure. But have no fear – now you can forget Dropbox once and for all, and show the authorities a solid middle finger by rolling your own private, unlimited, and secure cloud storage platform with a Raspberry Pi and BitTorrent Sync. (makeuseof.com)
  • Raspberry Pi ownCloud – How to build a your own personal Dropbox-like service using a Raspberry Pi and some software called ownCloud. ownCloud gives you freedom and control over your own data. It’s a personal cloud which runs on your own server. (instructables.com)

Website:

Podcast Announcements:

  • OggCamp next week … 19th/20th October (oggcamp.org)
  • Watch for “Event” announcements in the mintCast Community on Google+ to find out when we’re recording!

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott, Joe
Live Stream (Mondays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern): mintcast.org
Contact Us:

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

Credits:
Podcast Entry and exit music provided by Mark Blasco (podcastthemes.com). The podcast bumpers were provided by Oscar.

]]> full 2684 mintCast 176 – SteamOS https://mintcast.org/mintcast-176-steamos/ Fri, 27 Sep 2013 02:40:03 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=2668 176] Download

News:

  • Was Linus approached by U.S. authorities and asked to put a ‘back door’ in the kernel? (theregister.co.uk)
  • Linux Development: 7 Surprising Facts About Who Writes Linux Apps (eweek.com)
  • Raspberry Pi: How I spent almost $150 on a $35 computer (zdnet.com)

Website: Valve – SteamPowered

  • SteamOS: Valve’s Linux-based operating system for the TV and living room (steampowered.com)
  • Valve is planning to take on the living room with SteamOS. This is the video game publisher/digital distribution and community provider’s free, Linux-based operating system. Valve will license it, at no cost, to device manufacturers who wish to release their own Steam-based consoles. SteamOS is due out “soon,” according to the company. (venturebeat.com) (gamasutra.com)

Podcast Announcements:

  • Watch for “Event” announcements in the mintCast Community on Google+ to find out when we’re recording!
  • OGGCamp October 19th & 20th 2013 at Liverpool John Moores university in the UK. (http://oggcamp.org)

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott
Live Stream (Mondays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern): mintcast.org
Contact Us:

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

Credits:
Podcast Entry and exit music provided by Mark Blasco (podcastthemes.com). The podcast bumpers were provided by Oscar.

]]> full 2668 mintCast 173 – Tinfoil Lite https://mintcast.org/mintcast-173-tinfoil-lite/ Fri, 30 Aug 2013 00:51:09 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=2641 173] Download

News:

The Main Topic: Tinfoil Lite

Tip:

  • How to browse the web anonymously with Google Chrome (and Tor) (xmodulo.com)

Podcast Announcements:

  • Watch for “Event” announcements in the mintCast Community on Google+ to find out when we’re recording!
  • The eleventh annual Ohio LinuxFest will be held on September 13-15, 2013 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Hosting authoritative speakers and a large expo, the Ohio LinuxFest welcomes all Free and Open Source Software professionals, enthusiasts, and everyone interested in learning more about Free and Open Source Software. (https://ohiolinux.org/)
  • OGGCamp October 19th & 20th 2013 at Liverpool John Moores university in the UK. (http://oggcamp.org)

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott
Live Stream (Mondays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern): mintcast.org
Contact Us:

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

Credits:
Podcast Entry and exit music provided by Mark Blasco (podcastthemes.com). The podcast bumpers were provided by Oscar.

]]> full 2641 mintCast 157: The World of Desktop BSD https://mintcast.org/mintcast-157-the-world-of-desktop-bsd/ Fri, 26 Apr 2013 02:27:18 +0000 http://www.mintcast.org/?p=2431 Listen: mintcast157.mp3 or mintcast157.ogg

News:

  • Open source desktop developers meet at freedesktop Summit. (h-online.com)
  • Debian 7 Wheezy gets a tentative release date. (ostatic.com)
  • More information on the demise of Fuduntu. (fuduntu.org)
  • Parallella: The $99 Linux supercomputer. (zdnet.com)

The Main Topic: Desktop BSD

Feedback Notes:

  • mockturtl: Web MIDI coming to Blink. (blink-dev)

Featured Website:

  • BSD Magazine: For Novice and Advanced Users. (bsdmag.org)

Tip:

  • Another one from James Eaton: Have you ever seen a train running on Linux command line? Have you ever seen ‘Tom and Jerry’ on Linux command line? Well, working on Linux command line is not that serious always. There lies a fun factor too. Here in this space, we shall discuss the idiosyncrasies of Linux command line. (mylinuxbook.com)

More Information:

Hosts:: Rob, Scott, James

Live Stream (Mondays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern): mintcast.org

Contact Us:

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

Credits: Podcast Entry and exit music provided by Mark Blasco (podcastthemes.com). The podcast’s bumpers were provided by Oscar.

]]> 2431 mintCast 144: grepsedAWK https://mintcast.org/mintcast-144-grepsedawk/ Fri, 18 Jan 2013 03:18:59 +0000 http://www.mintcast.org/?p=2331 mintcast144.mp3
mintcast144.ogg

News:

  • [ 9:20] Developers at the Treasury Board of Canada create popular open source project. (wired.com)
  • [13:10] Fedora 18 – Spherical Cow will be released on Jan 15th. (linuxuser.co.uk)
  • [14:45] Lego goes Linux. (internetnews.com)
  • [19:02] IBM’s Watson undergoes brainwashing to forget all the naughty words in the Urban Dictionary. (techdirt.com)
  • [22:00] The White House responds to a petition calling for the construction of a Death Star. (techcrunch.com) (petitions.whitehouse.gov)

The Main Topic:

[26:50] Regular Expressions

Online Resources:

From Wikipedia:In computing, a regular expression is a specific pattern that provides concise and flexible means to “match” (specify and recognize) strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. Common abbreviations for “regular expression” include regex and regexp.

Basic ideas:

In it’s simplest form, a regular expression is a string of symbols to match “as is” (e.g., “mint” would match those four characters)

Quantifiers let you match more than one character:

  • * matches any number of what’s before it, from zero to infinity.
  • ? matches zero or one.
  • + matches one or more.
  • {n} matches exactly “n” occurances
  • {n,m} matches at least “n” and not more than “m” occurances

Some special characters are used to match things:

  • . – The dot matches any single character.
  • n – Matches a newline character (or CR+LF combination).
  • t – Matches a tab (ASCII 9).
  • d – Matches a digit [0-9].
  • D – Matches a non-digit.
  • w – Matches an alphanumberic character.
  • W – Matches a non-alphanumberic character.
  • s – Matches a whitespace character.
  • S – Matches a non-whitespace character.
  • – “Escape” special characters. For example, . matches a dot, and \ matches a backslash.
  • ^ – Match at the beginning of the input string.
  • $ – Match at the end of the input string.

Group characters by putting them between square brackets. This way, any character in the class will match one character in the input.

  • [abc] Match any of a, b, and c.
  • [a-z] Match any character between a and z. (ASCII order)
  • [^abc] A caret ^ at the beginning indicates “not”.
  • [+*?.] Most special characters have no meaning inside the square brackets.

Group expressions using parentheses “(“ and “)”. The vertical bar “|” is a Boolean OR operator

[35:30] grep

Online Resources:

The grep command searches one or more input files for lines containing a match to a specified pattern. By default, grep prints the matching lines. If no filename is given on the command line, grep searches standard input.

You use grep in the following manner:

$ grep [OPTIONS] PATTERN [FILENAME …]

Common OPTIONS include:

  • -h – if you search more than one file at a time, the results contain the name of the file from which the string was found. (See the example using ‘quite the’). This option turns off that feature, giving you only the lines without the file name.
  • -n – precedes each line with the line number where it was found
  • -i – tells grep to ignore case so that it treats “the” and “The” as the same word
  • -l – displays a list of files that contain the string
  • -w – restricts the search to whole words only

PATTERN is a regular expression. grep understands “basic” (BRE), “Extended” (ERE) and “perl” (PRCE) expressions. In GNU grep, there is no difference between the basic and extended syntax.

The “-f FILE” or “–file=FILE” option allows you to specify the name of a FILE containing regular expressions to be used for PATTERN, one per line.

A common way to use grep is as a filter on the output from another program. This is the most common way people first encounter grep.

see if a process named “firefox” is running:

$ ps -A | grep firefox

get kernel messages related to USB devices:

$ dmesg | grep -i usb

show the serial ports on the machine:

$ dmesg | grep -i tty

Show how much RAM is available on the system:

$ dmesg | grep -i memory

[44:55] sed

Online Resources:

sed (stream editor) is a Unix utility that parses text and implements a programming language which can apply transformations to such text. It reads input line by line (sequentially), applying the operation which has been specified via the command line (or a sed script), and then outputs the line. It was developed from 1973 to 1974 as a Unix utility by Lee E. McMahon of Bell Labs, and is available today for most operating systems.

Sed and Awk (or Gawk) both have their origins in the line editor ed.

Sed works by specifying a pattern to match, and a procedure (or action) to perform, as does Awk.

There are two ways to invoke sed and awk: either you specify your editing instructions on the command line or you put them in a file and supply the name of the file.

sed is very useful for transforming text in a file or series of files. There are several usages that are very common. Perhaps the most common use is for substitution, accomplished like this:

sed s/pattern to match/pattern to replace with/ input file

Printing is another common usage:

Print the single line that corresponds to line-number:

sed -n line_numberp

prints lines 1 thru 10:

sed -n 1,10p

In this example, the -n option suppresses the default output of all lines, while the p option prints the matching line.

By default, sed directs all output to STDOUT. If you want to capture the output, you need to redirect it to a file with the > or >> symbols and a filename.

The -i switch allows for in-place editing, rather than directing output to STDOUT

sed acts on each line in a file, reading the line into a buffer, then applying the specified actions to that line before moving on to the next line. You can specify more than one action to be performed on a line using the -e option

Other useful sed commands allow you to delete, append, insert, list, print line number and more.

[51:49] AWK

Online Resources:

The basic function of awk is to search files for lines (or other units of text) that contain certain patterns. When a line matches one of the patterns, awk performs specified actions on that line. awk keeps processing input lines in this way until it reaches the end of the input files.

The name awk comes from the initials of its designers: Alfred V. Aho, Peter J. Weinberger and Brian W. Kernighan. The original version of awk was written in 1977 at AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 1985, a new version made the programming language more powerful, introducing user-defined functions, multiple input streams, and computed regular expressions.

Paul Rubin wrote the GNU implementation, gawk, in 1986. Jay Fenlason completed it, with advice from Richard Stallman. John Woods contributed parts of the code as well. In 1988 and 1989, David Trueman and Arnold Robbins thoroughly reworked gawk for compatibility with the newer awk.

Current development focuses on bug fixes, performance improvements, standards compliance, and occasionally, new features. In May of 1997, Jürgen Kahrs felt the need for network access from awk, and with help Robbins, set about adding features to do this for gawk. At that time, he also wrote the bulk of TCP/IP Internetworking with gawk (a separate document, available as part of the gawk distribution). His code finally became part of the main gawk distribution with gawk version 3.1. John Haque rewrote the gawk internals, in the process providing an awk-level debugger. This version became available as gawk version 4.0, in 2011.

On a Mint 14 Mate machine, awk is a symbolic link to gawk, or GNU awk version 4.0.1. For simplicity’s sake, I will be using the term awk to refer to the utility from here on out.

“AWK is a language for processing text files. A file is treated as a sequence of records, and by default each line is a record. Each line is broken up into a sequence of fields, so we can think of the first word in a line as the first field, the second word as the second field, and so on. An AWK program is of a sequence of pattern-action statements. AWK reads the input a line at a time. A line is scanned for each pattern in the program, and for each pattern that matches, the associated action is executed.” – Alfred V. Aho

An AWK program is a series of pattern action pairs, written as:

''condition'' { ''action'' }

where condition is typically an expression and action is a series of commands. The input is split into records, where by default records are separated by newline characters so that the input is split into lines. The program tests each record against each of the conditions in turn, and executes the action for each expression that is true. Either the condition or the action may be omitted. The condition defaults to matching every record. The default action is to print the record.

AWK also allows for the inclusion of a BEGIN and or END procedure to be performed before or after the condition/action piece. Once use of this functionality can be to include headers and footers in the output of your awk command or script.

AWK uses a space or tab as its default delimiter, but you can set it to anything you want by using the -F option.

Like sed, awk can print using the following syntax:

Print entire input_file:

$ awk ‘{print $0}’ input_file

Print the first and fourth fields of each line in input_file:

awk ‘{print $1, $4}’ input_file

There are many different different ways awk can be leveraged. Just a few include the following:

  • Add line numbers to a files or files
  • Double or triple-space a file
  • Print the total number of words in a file
  • Convert Unix newlines to Dos (and vice versa)
  • Delete trailing whitespace from the end of each line
  • Add spaces or tabs to the beginning of each line
  • Align text to the left, right or in the center of each line
  • Perform a ”find and replace” on each line (similar to sed)
  • Emulate head, tail, uniq and grep

awk is actually a full-fledged programming language.

[58:20] Case Study – Using grep, sed and AWK

I need to examine the history.log file located in /var/log/apt in order to determine what updates came with LMDE UP 6. The log files is very detailed and it is hard to discern the needed information. Chopping the data up and presenting it in a different manner could be very helpful.

First, we determine how many lines there are in the file:
$ awk 'END { print NR }' history.log

Now we give each line a number. Sed and AWK don’t need this, but it will help us to identify which lines we need. Remember that AWK does not change the original file and sends its output to STDOUT, so we will need to redirect the output to a new file.

$ awk '{ print NR, $0 }' history.log >> num_history.log

We can also determine needed line numbers by using grep. Knowing the structure of the history.log file, we can search for instances of “Start-Date” using this command:

$ grep -n “Start-Date” history.log

Once we determine the date of the upgrade, we can grep for that, allowing us to determine what lines we need to get to identify the installed and upgraded packages.

Now, we copy out the chunk of the log that details UP 6 (you will need to look at the file to determine on what line the update begins and ends. We can then copy those lines to a temp file with this command:

$ sed -n '122,125p' num_history.log >> temp_history.log

Now we have the UP 6 log information in a file. Take a look at it by running

$ cat temp_history.log

I can see how many columns, or fields, are in each line by running this command:

$ awk '{print NF}' temp_history.log

The ouput shows that I have four lines that have 4,23,539, and 1910 fields respectively. This is based on using a space as the field delimiter. I need to more closely examine the structure of the data in order to effectively leverage awk.

If I run this command,

$ awk '{print $1, $2}' temp_history.log

the output is as follows:

122 Start-Date:
123 Commandline:
124 Install:
125 Upgrade:

We are interested in the third and fourth lines, so we will need to look closer at the structure of those lines.

Scripting

Now we will write a script. We will assume that the user provides the two line numbers we are interested in when he or she invokes the script.

To make things easier, we will create two separate files to deal with the Install and Upgrade sections. This is due to the fact that the two sections structure the data in different ways.

sed -n $1p >> install.log

sed -n $2 >> upgrade.log

sed s/")"/"))"/g install.log | sed s/"), "/"n"/g | sed s/"))"/")"/g | sed s/")"/") Installed"/g | sed s/"Install: "/""/ | sort > install_list.log

sed s/")"/"))"/g upgrade.log | sed s/"), "/"n"/g | sed s/"))"/")"/g | sed s/")"/") Upgraded"/g | sed s/"Upgrade: "/""/ | sort >> install_list.log

Both files present an interesting issue because the fields we need are delimited by a comma, but some of the needed field also contains a comma. I solved this issue by adding an additional closing parens, then using a parens-comma as the delimiter. This allowed me to split the fields the way we needed to. I then added a newline character at the end of each field, cleaned up the output of the first and last line, and sorted the list. Finally, I directed the output to a new file.

Now I can manipulate this file to my hearts content. One option is to create a .csv file and open it in LibreOffice Calc. In order to do this, I need to transform the data a little bit.

First we will deal with the upgraded data, saving the output to a temp file.

awk '/Upgraded/' install_list.log | sed s/":"/","/g | sed s/", "/","/g | sed s/" ("/","/ | sed s/") "/","/ | awk '/Upgraded/ {print $0}' > up6.tmp

Then we will do the same for the installed data. Here we need to move some data around to have it line up in the proper column, so we use a slightly different awk command at the end. We will append the output to our temp file.

awk '/Installed/' install_list.log | sed s/":"/","/ | sed s/", "/","/g | sed s/" ("/","/ | sed s/") "/","/ | sed s/"automatic,"/""/g | sed s/"Installed"/" ,Installed"/ | awk -F, '/Installed/ {print $1","$2","$4","$3","$5}' >> up6.tmp

Now we will use awk to print the temp file, piping the output thru the sort utility, to a new .csv file.

awk '{print}' up6.tmp | sort > up6.csv

Lastly, we will open the .csv file in LibreOffice Calc. On some machines this may result in a font error, and the spreadsheet will be populated with strange characters.

localc up6.csv

The whole script is here: grepsedAWK_script.txt. As always, use at your own risk!

Featured Website & Tip:

[1:27:05]

  • GNU Utilities for Win 32: (unxutils.sourceforge.net) If you wish you had access to one of those nifty UNIX command-line tools we talked about in this episode, but you are stuck running Microsoft Windows, these programs/packages can help.
  • GnuWin: (gnuwin32.sourceforge.net) Here are some ports of common GNU utilities to native Win32. In this context, native means the executables do only depend on the Microsoft C-runtime (msvcrt.dll) and not an emulation layer like that provided by Cygwin tools. If you don’t care about having a full UNIX shell environment, this is a great download for you.

More Information:

Hosts:: James, Rob, Scott

Live Stream (Mondays at 8:00 p.m. Eastern): mintcast.org

Contact Us:

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

Credits: Podcast Entry and exit music provided by Mark Blasco (podcastthemes.com). The podcast’s bumpers were provided by Oscar.

]]> full 2331 I want to learn to write programs https://mintcast.org/i-want-to-learn-to-write-programs/ Sat, 12 Dec 2009 22:27:06 +0000 http://www.mintcast.org/?p=382 On our last show we answered a mail from one of our listeners, who asked: I want to learn to write programs in Linux. This is not the first time I have seen some variation of such a request, and it won’t be the last. There are numerous answers available all over the Internet, and here is one more. 🙂

Very often I find that the answer concentrates too much on the selection of a language. I find it especially amusing when someone quite knowledgeable asks: what program do you want to write? In my opinion, most beginners have no idea what they are getting themselves into (that is why they are asking in the first place), and further in my opinion it does not make one a good programmer if they know any particular language, or even a number of languages, particularly well. What makes a good programmer is knowing what different tools (languages, packages, etc., etc.) do, and why, and how. Don’t get me wrong, selecting the first language is important, but the answer given to the beginner should always be: start with Python.

I will next attempt to justify this. If you do not care for a justification skip the next paragraph! Warning: all of the following are just my opinion of how the world works; if you do not appreciate sarcasm, you should stop reading now (and probably contact your Internet provider and beg them to permanently disconnect you).

There are many programming languages out there, each with a different goal in mind. At the low end of the scale are languages meant for beginners at a primary school level, such as BASIC or LOGO. These are languages that are intended to introduce some very basic concepts, but most people should outgrow such a language within a week of study. If not, that is a good indicator that programming is probably not for you. Next step up in my scale are all other scripting languages: Python, Ruby, Perl, and many many others. These are languages that intentionally abstract certain nuances of programming (like type casting, for example) which the beginner does not want to be bogged down with. However, they do introduce some programming concepts that although advanced are very good to learn as soon as you can (like functions and classes). As such, these languages are very good at quickly prototyping ideas, and even being used in production where security or speed are not of primary importance. Next step up are semi-compiled languages like Java and C#. These are almost real languages in that they allow you to manipulate software at almost machine level, but they still abstract some of the dirty work like actually porting code to different machine platforms. Although many beginner-level tutorials exist for Java, I personally strongly advise true beginners against picking this language as their first choice, as you will immediately get bogged down with all the dirty stuff. Next step up from this are, what I call real languages: C, C++. These languages allow you to manipulate software at the hardware level, if you chose to, and will run directly on the hardware without someone else’s interpretation of what you wanted your program to do. With such power comer great responsibility: you often have to perform many meaning tasks, such as cleaning up after yourself. The pinnacle of programming languages is assembler and machine language. No person programs in these languages today, only machines program other machines in assembly.

Just to give you some idea of what you can expect from each of these. Using BASIC, you can make text appear on the screen, and make funny (to a 3 year old) beeps come out of the speaker. If you are familiar with Linux Mint, which I assume many readers of this blog are, most of the Mint-specific tools are written in Python. The application Tomboy is written in C#. No serious desktop applications are written in Java or C#. These language are widely used only in Internet application because of their (often false) promise of OS and hardware non-dependence. The desktop environment GNOME is probably (I have not checked) written primary in C++. The Linux kernel is primary written in C and C++, with some small parts in assembly.

I am currently in the process of putting together a beginner-level course. First a little background on it. At the beginning of this year I had a little time off (downsized) and was looking to pick up another scripting language. In my line of work (software test), there is not much need for compiled languages, but to transition up to one would be quite easy as the concepts of structuring a computer program are the same regardless of the language. By coincidence, my son, whom I had give an old laptop and a Linux Mint CD, was on his own getting quite into Blender; which is an application that can be greatly enhanced with a scripting language: Python. So that is how the decision was made as for the language.

Having worked in the computer industry for about 10 years, I already had a pretty good idea of what a normal day for a software developer is like and what sorts of tools they use. I wanted to take my son “quickly” (say one year) from “playing around with stuff” to using professional level tools, so that he could make a decision 1) if he wants to continue along this career path, and 2) where exactly within that field he wants to go – even in software development there are way too many specialities. I found some tutorials online that are intended for teenage kids who are just starting out in computers – programming games – and I used those to build upon. My son is also homeschooled, and because of that I had to come up with a syllabus; here it is: http://siking.wordpress.com/programming/. I actually came up with this just recently, with the thought that there are other homeschooled kids around that may be interested in the same thing. But being a teenagers is certainly not a prerequisite!

If you get into the course I can offer help; leave a comment / request at the above link.

]]> 382 mintCast Episode 5 https://mintcast.org/mintcast-episode-5/ Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:58:57 +0000 http://www.mintcast.org/?p=9 In this episode

Wine 1.1.13 Released

Stress from a computer screen?

innovations-report

Why Windows 7 will crush Linux

networkworld

Why Windows 7 Will Never Kill Off Linux

networkworld

Rothgar

Palm Pre (runs on linux, looks great)

engadget

palmone.r3h.net .mov link

Vaio P (less than 1″ thick, 1600×768, instant on OS, 1.33 Ghz Atom, built in Verizon network + GPS)

engadget

Asus Eee Keyboard (Wireless HDMI, touch screen, media center)

gizmodo

engadget

ext4 coming to Ubuntu 9.04 through kernel 2.6.28

phoronix

ext4 optimized for SSD where as EXT3 was not

More info on ext4 kernelnewbies

Gnome-Art NG

gnomeartng

Using Templates in OpenOffice.org

Web site of the week

snopes

More info

Linux Mint web site: http://www.linuxmint.com

Linux Mint blog: http://www.linuxmint.com/blog

Linux Mint forums: http://www.linuxmint.com/forum

Rothgar’s site: http://1n73r.net/

[display_podcast]

]]> full 32 mintCast Episode 4 https://mintcast.org/mintcast-episode-4/ Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:16:03 +0000 http://www.mintcast.org/?p=56 In this episode:

The “I’m Linux” Video Contest

linuxfoundation.org

Firefox Share Tops 20% for November

netapplications.com

Rothgar tells us about software that can use various types of media: audio, video, photos.

amarok

xbmc

boxee

linuxmce

videolan

Linux for Writers:

OpenOffice.org: openoffice

Zotero:zotero

Celtx: celtx

Writer’s Café: writerscafe

Screenwriting Goldmine: screenwritinggoldmine

Web site of the week

dafont

Linux commercials by Novell

youtube

More info

Linux Mint web site: http://www.linuxmint.com

Linux Mint blog: http://www.linuxmint.com/blog

Linux Mint forums: http://www.linuxmint.com/forum

Rothgar’s site: http://1n73r.net/

]]> full 56 mintCast Episode 3 https://mintcast.org/mintcast-episode-3/ Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:06:02 +0000 http://www.mintcast.org/?p=49 In this episode

Linux Mint 6 released: www.linuxmint.com

OpenSUSE 11.1 released: opensuse.org

Economist web site recommends Linux for netbooks: www.economist.com

Linux is holding our kids back:

linuxlock.blogspot.com

linuxlock.blogspot.com

Majel Barrett-Roddenberry has passed away

Note-taking software

Tomboy

basKet

Zotero: www.zotero.org

More info

Linux Mint web site: www.linuxmint.com

Linux Mint blog: www.linuxmint.com/blog

Linux Mint forums: www.linuxmint.com/forum

Rothgar’s site: http://1n73r.net/

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