Episode 486 Show Notes

Welcome to mintCast

the Podcast by the Linux Mint Community for All Users of Linux

This is Episode 486!

Recorded on Sunday, May 24, 2026.

Live from Florida Im Joe; Running late, but I’m here, I’m Bill; Working on the server farm, I’m Dale; HTPC like it’s 2003, I’m Jim

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  • First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – May
  • Then in our Wanderings: Bill pays the bills, Joe solders the irons and Jim fins the jelly
  • And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions
  • Please remember if you want to follow along with our discussions, the full show notes for this episode are linked in the show’s description at https://mintcast.org/show-notes/.

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The News

20 minutes

  • Mint Monthly News – May
    • From Mint blog by Clem (via londoner)
    • Changes planned for Mint 23 expected in December
    • Significant improvements to the response time and navigation performance in Nemo. Nemo now uses different rendering modes depending on the situation. It now renders some directories immediately and without delay and looks much more responsive than before.
    • In Nemo, Interactive Search will be replaced by a filtered view instead.
    • Cinnamon new screenshot tool.
    • Window screenshots can be taken with or without shadows
    • Screen screenshots can include all monitors or only a single one
    • Screenshots can be cropped before getting copied or saved
    • Cinnamon is now able to use draggable Clutter dialogs. They stay on top but don’t lock the screen, and can be moved around. This can be handy if you need to access something or click on an app before responding to the dialog.
    • The colors and contrast are improved in the dark version of the Mint-Y theme.
    • Frames and scrolled areas, which were rectangular, are now slightly rounded, like the buttons and combo boxes.
    • Treeviews and listviews got rounded as well.
    • The Mint-Y, Mint-L and Mint-X themes now use XSI icons for GTK dialogs.
    • Cinnamon received support for WPA3 (Wi-Fi Protected Access 3) and OWE (Opportunistic Wireless Encryption).
    • Security Updates and Project Impersonations
    • A severe security flaw was found in Xreader: CVE-2026-46529.
    • Malicious people are making fake websites which impersonate FOSS applications. Warpinator.com and hypnotix.org for example. NEVER, ever download an application from a website you don’t fully trust.

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Security and Privacy

10 minutes

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Monthly Wanderings

30 minutes (~5-8 mins each)

  • Bill
    • New Matrix Space
  • Joe
    • As i have discussed many times before in regards to bluetooth headphones, it is getting harder and harder to find quality neckband headphones so for a while i was using medallion style headphones and also i have been testing out the jlab go pop+ true wireless. I have had two of them that i was hot swapping with each other. I got them at fairly good prices but the first set of them started going bad after 3 months and they are mostly impossible to work on and get back into a useable state. So i pulled out a bunch of the medallion styles again and put on some high quality mmcx cables and started using them again. Still dont like the very short battery life but they do sound good and the mics are not terrible. I have a hard case for them and i can keep 3 or 4 of them on me and charged at any given time.
    • I was also asked to do some 3-d printing of some folding fans. I was having some trouble with it printing some of the walls until i switched from the standard engine back to the arachne engine which is designed to print thin walls by using flow rate. It worked out really well but i think the fans are a little bit loud and i have been asked to look into finding a print that you can add fabric to. or make one of my own.
    • I designed and 3d printed a screw in mount for my 8 port charger so that i can mount it to my chair in the garage. very simple design but still surprised how well it worked on the first try.
    • I also got a convertible laptop for my wife because she was not happy with the dell latitude 5290 because of the soft keyboard.  So i got her the dell latitude 5300 which is honestly a better device with changeable ram and a 360 keyboard.  Thankfully i was able to pull the 2280 m.2 drive from the tablet and put it into the laptop and it just booted right up.  This also allowed me to reclaim the tablet and since it had a second 2242 m.2 i was able to quickly get it up and running once again using iventoy and a network boot into linux mint.  I decided to switch to the 5290 since it is considerably better than the dell venues that i have been using but it does only have 8gb of ram so i may purchase a different one.  maybe the i7 and 16gb of ram or just get another 5300 so i can have 32 or 64 gb of ram.  But i am using it for now to see how i like it.   And then my told me i could install Mint on her laptop because it was trying to force her to install windows 11. So back to iventoy, it really has been way more useful than i thought it would be.  I was not able to get that device to load up network boot but instead of iventoy i switched to my ventoy on usb.  That worked to install mint and i did the updates and installed chromium since she wanted to avoid the AI slop that gets installed with chrome.
    • Still loving having guake installed on all of my devices.  one less thing crowding my desktop and panel.  Just hit f12 and i go back to the terminal and i have it set to go away when it loses focus.
    • I have to admit that i did try and try to installs windows in a VM. for some reason i just could not get the virtual drive to be seen by windows in order to install on it. I added the drivers and changed the settings and still could not get it to be seen.  I will keep trying.  maybe i will have it all together before the show but at this point i doubt it
    • I also was able to get some sony xb950bt’s for 5 dollars at the goodwill.  I saw that they turned on and sound came from both speakers even though the one hinge was busted.  So i figured it was worth a shot.  I was able to 3d print replacements for the physically broken parts and replace them but then it wouldnt charge.  That was an easy enough fix in that it just needed the usb port reflowed with a soldering iron.  but for some reason the pause play and volume buttons would not work.  I checked and the wire is working as it should from one side of the board to the other but i just couldnt find what was wrong.  Then the power button stopped working on the other board as did the bass boost button.  so for some reason the only thing that worked was the power on button.  i almost wanted to buy a couple more boards to swap out and test but i didnt think that i wanted to sink more money into it for the sake of testing.  i can get the boards for ten dollars each but i can get a working set for 24.  I continued testing after that though and concluded it could only be one of two things. Either some component on the board was bad or one of the switches was stuck.  I ran a new cable externally to see if it was a partial short on the wire to another wire which would have the same effect as a stuck switch but got the same issue. So i reflowed all of the connections for all of the switches on the board and blam everything started working again.  I did print the replacement parts in PLA so i will probably have to redo the main portion of work again in the near future but it is working for now.  I will also have to see how good the battery life is but im not too worried about it since it is a 3.7v two wire battery.  i can find or make a replacement for it.  Also i have found 3d prints for basically all of the breakable parts and also a mod to give it bigger earcups which i think the thing needs.  Beyond the testing to find the actual issue the worst part of the fix was the superglue the previous owner used to try and fix the original hinge which meant that i had to remove the external shielding in order to remove the old parts.
    • Then i restarted the quest to find a set of headphones that will connect to my work computer and my phone at the same time and sound good. The 9x is good for my linux machines but since it uses a specific adapter that is made for xbox controllers my work actively blocks it.  So i was looking at the Arctis 7 but it does not have bluetooth built in.  So i ended up buying some parts for the Arctis 9 which has its own adapter. that should work out well.  But while i was doing this i decided to pull out the Arctis 7’s that i had previously given up on after fixing the earcup because i could not get the microphone to work.  I also grabbed the pair of 9’s that i had that had the power issues caused by a bad component.  I pulled the microphone off of the 9’s and disconnected the one on the 7 and hooked it up externally.  this did not work at all still no sound coming from the mic.  So the next thing i did was pull out my multi meter and start going across capacitors.  I did not find them the issue with the multimeter but in looking closely at the caps i did see one that was blackened.  So i went back to the 9 and grabbed one that looked the same and then pulled the blackened one on the 7.  This capacitor is half the size of a grain of rice.  Not a long grain either.  It is tiny.  I probably should have done it with a hot air gun but since i havent had that kind of practice with it and i was worried about launching the rest of the components into space.  But i was able to get both sides with the soldering iron and a pair of tweezers.  I was on the phone with my dad when i was testing it after hooking the original mic back up and i may exclaimed loudly.  I really enjoyed that fix.  I did get it all put back together but i could not find a full 3d print for the 7 series headphones and i can tell that the 9 series is larger and has a different setup for the buttons.  
    • I also ordered the 9 that i wanted because the description said that it was no power issue. Sadly this was a lie and the headphones had the red blink of death. Not a power issue but a component issue on the board. This one i was able to research and find the part that was likely to have gone wrong and found out that bridging it could give you a fix. I gave it a try and with a pair of tweezers i was able to verify the component and that bypassing it would make it work. I did try to get a jumper put into place but there was a lot of small parts close to the item and it was very difficult to get in there. I was a bit frustrated and then pulled out the other 9 that i had pulled the mic from to get a different look. for some reason the components in that area were not there but the pads for them were, so i tried jumping the correct pads and that also worked to allow the device to start and connect. Much easier to solder that one and save the other one for another day. Also reconnected the mic and moved a cap over. It works great and after my vacation i will be swapping it out with the one i am currently taking to work and i will now be able to connect to my work pc and my phone at the same time.
    • Moving on i also finally swapped out that 5 port sata controller for the 6 port. And guess what it did not work. So i booted up in safe mode and found the error. Took it to google and found various grub fixes that people were using in order to fix the problem. I did try several of them but they did not work at all. Some of the fixes seem kernel related so i decided to upgrade from proxmox 8 to proxmox 9 so that i could get something newer than the 6.8 kernel. This seems to have worked for now. But now that i got that one working if it survives a couple of more reboots i am going to retest with the 10 port one. I know that it has a couple of slower ports but i can work with that. I also redid the migration to the 4tb drive for my audiobook library and redid the drive mappings so that it is reading from the new drive again. It works for now. I should also mention that i had my concerns about the move from 8 to 9 so i did a back up of certain of my lxc’s that would be hard to redo the setups for. Not the regular style backup from proxmox but i brought the container down then cloned it then moved the clone to another node manually and then marked it as do not start. Wanted to make sure my openwrt and wireguard were both easily restored.  
    • I have not noticed any real difference between the two.  But i did attend a talk for proxmox through a team up with a couple of the local lugs.  The company was COIT and they went over the inner workings of proxmox for corporate usage very well.   They covered a lot of information about the network stack and the way memory is set up and they are talking about coming back for a talk about CEPH which i am interested in learning. They were also talking about a lot of the utility of HA but i still dont think that i have the hardware for it. I would not want it for all of my images anyway. But some of them it could be helpful to have them automatically move to whatever has the least load.
    • I have a lot of things to write about in regards to the remote setup that I have while on vacation but I will be saving that for next time as we are still at the start of my vacation and I am still testing things out.
  • Jim
    • Why an HTPC? I’ve described my media setup many times on this podcast and the changes I have made to it since I joined the show. Two Fire TV 4K Max devices and one old Fire TV 4K device are still my main interfaces on one smart and two dumb televisions which allow me access to paid and free streaming services. It’s also the interface for live TV from the antenna on my rooftop and my DVR with the Tablo app for OTA TV, with the discontinued Amazon Recast having been replaced by said Tablo 4th gen. I watch a lot of YouTube with SmartTube and TizenTube as well lately when I get “This video is unavailable” errors on SmartTube once in a while. I have a big new hard drive for local downloaded content from the torrents or YouTube with Plex and Jellyfin clients on Fire TV and Android. At some point soon I will will likely start replacing my Fire TV devices with a newer Android device of some kind that have more memory for more apps and a future given that Amazon is going a different, locked down direction with the Fire TV devices. The Fire TV 4K Max takes up one HDMI input on my primary 32″ TV near my desk, and a Blu-ray/DVD set top player takes up another HDMI slot so I can watch disks from the library. However, I also decided that it would be worth investing in yet another device for my third and last available HDMI slot on said office TV. Why did I do this? Because I confirmed after some A/B testing on my Media desktop with 24″ Dell monitor that I could indeed avoid advertisements on several popular streaming services that I either pay for myself or have access to via a shared password including Prime, Hulu, HBO Max, & Peacock by accessing movies and TV shows there in a Firefox browser instead of in the apps on Fire TV. So what did I purchase?
      • Dell Optiplex 3050 Micro Computer Mini Tower PC, Intel Quad Core i5-6500T, 8GB DDR4 RAM, 256GB SSD, Win 11 Pro (Renewed) $160 after tax from Amazon. It has an HDMI slot and Display Port slot. It is a small and flat square-ish shape, about 7 inches wide and 7 inches deep and two inches tall and has two USB slots in the front and four in the back and an antenna for Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth. I already had a spare HDMI cable and it was easy to connect to my 32″ TV at 1080p resolution. It started right up and connected easily and started me on the Windows 11 Pro setup, which I backed out of since I knew I had other options for an operating system on this Home Theater Personal Computer. So what were my solutions?
        • Windows XP Media Center Edition (History) For context I should explain that many years ago, circa 2005, long before streaming TV and streaming devices became ubiquitous, I had a Window XP Media Center Edition desktop from Dell that I had connected via HDMI to my big screen TV at the time. It came with an infrared receiver and associated Windows themed remote control. The desktop didn’t even have Wi-Fi included so at the time I plugged a Linksys USB Wi-Fi dongle into it so I could transfer video files over my local network that I downloaded from Usenet back when ISPs still carried the binaries and sit on my couch to watch TV with a remote control in my hand from 10 feet away. It was pretty far ahead of its time.
        • LibreElec: https://libreelec.tv/ “Just enough OS for Kodi”. LibreElec is a purpose built operating system that is made to be very lightweight and work on multiple devices including personal computers as well as single board computers like the Raspberry Pi. Like their tag line says, upon boot it launches you right into a custom version of Kodi, media software similar to Plex or Jellyfin that you can use on most every device without a server/client format like Plex or Jellyfin to watch your local or network shared TV shows, and movies, listen to your music collection, view photo galleries, and other local content, along with a weather widget and other extras through downloadable add-on modules. A free app called Kore, available on F-Droid or the Play store allows you to control Kodi using your Androd phone like a remote control if you like. Now, their official release version 12.2.1 really is made to be almost entirely focused on Kodi functionality, so was not that interesting to me since it is redundant with both Plex and Jellyfin which I already have set up. Unless I just wanted a different interface and going through the exercise of setting it up, which is bit more challenging than the other two similar apps since you have to use SSH for networked shares I didn’t see the point other than tech curiosity. But then I discovered that some nightly releases of their upcoming version 13 of LibreElec had more capability, since one or more of their developers figured out a way to extend LibreElec’s add-ons to include Firefox, Chromium and Brave browsers through clever use of Flatpak technology. Effectively, when you install the add-on through their interface and launch a browser as an add-on in LibreEelec, it suspends Kodi, the main interface of the o.s. in the background, and it full screens the browser, which you can then interact with using your wired or wireless mouse and keyboard. That makes LibreEelec a lot more flexible than the purpose built system that it is designed to be in the main release channel. It’s fine if you like Kodi and just want occasional web browsing in addition to Kodi as your main interface. However, I thought it wasteful to effectively use Kodi as a life support system for a web browser on my HTPC, so I considered trying another option.
        • Plasma Big Screen: https://plasma-bigscreen.org/get/ I came across this other option reading the HTPC subreddit and decided to check it out. Just like the name suggests, Plasma Big Screen is a project from the KDE people that is made to be a so-called “10-foot interface”, in other words, a user interface or desktop environment for a big screen TV. Their web site advises potential users that “Plasma Bigscreen is not yet widely available. We are planning to join the Plasma release schedule starting with Plasma 6.7 (in June), which will make it possible for distributions to ship it in their repositories.” They do offer a couple of ways to try it out in the meantime including building it yourself with kde-builder; downloading a version for postmarketOS; or the the option I chose, which was to download an .iso of a development version of their own Linux distro.
          • KDE Neon latest releases from their web site has Plasma Bigscreen included as the primary user interface. For those who don’t know, KDE Neon is a rolling release so called “unstable” distro that has Plasma and all the latest apps and utilities from the KDE project updated regularly, while the base system is based on Ubuntu LTS 24.04. Anyway, Neon installed very easily and booted right up to the Plasma Big screen interface. I initially started interacting with it using a wireless mouse and a wired keyboard on my desk which was okay, but a bit awkward since many of the apps go full screen and don’t have an X button on the top right of the window to close them. However I discovered another way to control the Plasma Bigscreen interface.
            • KDE Connect on my Android phone was a good option to use the phone as a remote control. They have a Remote Input function where you can control the user interface on the TV like you were using a virtual mouse and on-screen keyboard, or a TV Remote function so you can press up, down, left, and right, enter, and back buttons so you can navigate around the large tiles on the screen sitting ten feet back on your couch if that’s how you are using it. I was also very pleased to discover that one can install and use the KDE Connect app on my most used computer, the Linux Mint laptop you usually see me sitting in front of to efficiently control the Plasma Bigscreen interface on my TV just off to my right using the keyboard and mouse I am most comfortable with. I also connected the Android phone to my Linux Mint laptop with KDE Connect, so now three of my primary devices are now connected that way if I wish for multiple purposes.
            • Rii X8 Mini Keyboard 2.4GHz Portable Wireless Keyboard with Touchpad Mouse, RGB Backlit, Rechargeable Battery for Android TV Box/Mac/PC/Nvidia Shield. I picked this small remote which fits in the palm of one hand for less than $20 to try it out as another interface in case I wanted to sit back in my chair or elsewhere to control this TV. It has navigation buttons, a small scroll wheel, and fairly complete keyboard for the size, and notably a Home button, which makes going back to the main screen from different apps very easy. I had to plug it into one of the two blue “SuperSpeed” USB 3.0 ports on the back of the Optiplex for it to recognize the input from the device, which seems like a waste of a fast port, but at least it worked.I’ll have to continue to play with this to see if I like the form factor or if I’ll prefer to use my laptop keyboard and mouse via KDE Connect to control my HTPC.
      • Conclusion: I’m continuing to win the battle against encroaching forced advertisement breaks by going against my normal rule of a browser being the last place you should watch videos in the case of these few ad-ridden streaming services and being able to watch on my most used television.
      • Bonus: I can see the potential for smoother live sports streaming as well on the occasions when the aggressive popups and trickery of the sports streaming sites that make watching on the TV via Amazon’s default Silk browser on Fire TV devices a miserable experience, by instead watching in a Firefox browser with uBlock Origin instead.
    • ScreenStream: This app runs a webserver on your phone with a stream of the phone display that you can access from any devices in your network, like your Linux PC, by using the address provided in the ScreenStream App, when you start it. It it available on FDroid: https://www.f-droid.org/packages/info.dvkr.screenstream/
  • Dale
    • I had trouble accessing one of my servers via Tailscale. I could ping it from one of the others. Though I couldn’t ssh into it. So once I got home, I tried it on my office desktop. I couldn’t connect to it either, so that ruled out an issue with Tailscale. I forced a shutdown via the power button and upon reboot it was fine. Based on the uptime of my other servers. There was a power outage at my apartment and I guess it didn’t reboot in a stable condition.
    • I’ve been wanting to get back to my roots on my servers. So I decided to install Debian. I downloaded the netinstall iso for version 13 and pressed enter several times. As I know the Debian ncurses style installer quite well.
      I forgot how nice and straight forward the network and dns configuration is on Debian. After being on Ubuntu based distros for a while, I got used to using Netplan and Network Manager. Though I didn’t like using them all that much.
    • Ubiquiti is going to EOL their Unifi Network Manager. They released the replacement called the Unifi OS Server in December of 2025. It is Linux running inside of a Podman container using the same Network Controller. The reason for this is for better management of deployment of the Network Controller. It has some requirements for specific versions of Java and Mongo DB. Some distros are head or behind in the versions. Which causes some issues. This was made easier by a script that Glenn Rietveld made who goes by Glenn R online.
      With the Podman container, Ubiquiti can control all the versions and make updates easier.
      I exported my configuration from my Unifi Network Controller. Then I followed the installation instructions for the new Unifi OS Server.
      It is still the same web browser based interface as the previous controller. I created a new password and signed in while skipping all the prompts to configure a new site. I imported my configuration from my old controller and after a few minutes my devices were re-adopted. It was as if nothing had changed. My previous installation of the Unifi Network Controller was all native packages via the Glenn R. script. So your experience maybe different if you are using VM’s or containers to host your network controller.

Shape 1 — Play Vibrations Transition Bumper —

Vibrations from the Ether

20 minutes (~5 minutes each)

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Check This Out

10 minutes

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