Episode 488 Show Notes

Welcome to mintCast

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

This is Episode 488!

Recorded on Sunday, June 21, 2026

Still tired im Joe; Late as usual, I’m Bill; Finally gone full Hipster, I’m Jim;

— Play Standard Intro —

  • Then in our Wanderings: Joe Takes a trip, Bill’s got nothing and Jim likes Indiana
  • 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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Monthly Wanderings

30 minutes (~5-8 mins each)

  • Bill
  • Joe
    • Well i was in Florida when i started taking these notes.  I was using wireguard to connect back to the house.  But for some reason the connection on the mini rack was unstable on the laptops even though it is rock solid on my phone.  But when i switched to the one on the router it was much more stable but it still cost speed for the connection as a whole.  For a while i was using it so that i could continue using joplin.  I did try to set up some temporary port forwarding but i didnt want to set up anything in the joplin server that would allow it to work.  It requires the dns to be whitelisted.  So what i ended up doing was setting up a temporary port forward for the proxmox instance and using one of the vms to access joplin.  
    • I also attempted to watch some things from remote with plex.  But plex now requires you to install the desktop application in order to use it from outside the network.  not something i have had to deal with in a long time since i always have wireguard setup.  I did install the flatpak but it bothers me that it has to be done that way.  Plus scrolling with the scroll wheel on the mouse doesnt work.  But the plex app does work with my lifetime pass.  Who knows for how much longer.  We shall see.  I also started the process of moving my family onto jellyfin so that i dont have to do it from far away when things stop working on that front.  
    • Now right before i left for Florida i was having an issue with the wifi extender that is out in my garage.  some of my IOT devices are supposed to be connected to it.  But while the broadcast IDs were there none of them had internet connections.  Even when my phone was connected.  so i hooked it up to my garage pc and and accessed the interface.  The radio that connected to the main router was not working.  Thankfully there are 2 5ghz antennas and one 2.4ghz radio and it was one of the 5ghz radios that was just not working.  I did try to restart that radio but nothing worked so i just made the other 5ghz connect to the router and got everything working again.  i have other of the extenders and i have the backup of openwrt so that it can be set up in a couple of minutes.  I dont think that i will spend the time to take it apart and get it working correctly since i have so many.  I will put it into a separate bin for a future project when i am either bored or all of the others are broken beyond repair.  
    • While in Florida my parents internet went out for whatever reason and that gave me a chance to try out some things.  I pulled out the travel router and tried several things using luci to try and get an internet connection while tethering from my phone.  But in the end i needed to do a full reset and just use the simple mode in the gl.inet version of openwrt for the easy wifi sharing version which also allowed me to use ethernet.  Problem was this only got me something 500kbps and that was just too slow to get internet to everyone.  Thanks tethering.  easytether has not been updated in a very long time so i looked again for an alternative and decided to try out the trail for tetrd which will connection to a pc and has a linux version that is up to date but will not connect directly to a router.  So i installed the server on the 5290 and did the usb sharing and speeds to my laptop were about 20-35 mbps which is a great improvement.  So then i used network manager to switch my ethernet port to sharing and switched it to the wan port on the router and now we had usable internet for everyone.  Which is about the time the regular internet came back on.  So i switched the router back into a wifi repeater and then i set up wireguard and the switch on the side so i can toggle that on and off and now i have a high speed connection back to the house whenever i need it.
    • I mentioned it briefly but tetrd while not as useful as easytether it does work and it does seem to get updates.  it is free to install but that is a 3 day trial.  Once you have the server and client you can choose to pay 15 dollars and get the full version which allows tethering and reverse tethering or you can pay 9.99 for either of them.  It does provide full speeds from your carrier which is the main use of it.  But if i want to do something like use it in my car i am going to have to do something like setup a pi as a router and install it there and hope that it works headless?  I guess more testing will be needed in the future.  
    • But for now for me i think that the wireguard tunnel back to my home network is worth it with the router setup that i can take anywhere,  I will decide in the future about tetrd
    • Back in the DFW i decided to make some adjustments to my work space in the garage. It is a little too hot to work in there during the day anymore most days but there were some changes i wanted to make to my work table which is just an old coffee table with a 4 inch tall board that covers part of the top that i previously added a couple of small sliders to so that i could shift it forward and back on the table. That works pretty well but the rest of the table is short and requires me to hunch over to work on. Plus i also put sliders on the end of the table legs so that i could move it closer to me when working but they did not work well.
    • Two birds one stone i wanted to add wheels to the bottom of the legs to make it easier to move and make it taller. I was able to find several stl’s for chair wheel adapters and i took that as well as the measurements from the bottom of the legs of the table and made some thick end caps. Also spent 6 dollars on some new wheels. I have some some where but i couldnt find them. Anyways i moved all of the stuff on top of and all of the toolboxes and organizers underneath out of the way and 10 hours of printing later i put everything together and it came out perfect. I did also have a couple of test prints for the buttcap portion to make sure that it was the correct size and fit. I did also have to go underneath the table and tighten the legs correctly so they would ot wiggle and unbalance everything. It moves very well and the height is much better for working on soldering without hunching. I also want to make taller sliders for the moveable workspace on top of it so a couple of things can slide under it without me having to remove them from the table. But that is for another day unless i get it done between writing this and the show… But as i was getting ready to move all of the tool boxes back into position my dog found the open space under the table in front of my feet and dragged his bed into there. So i need to find a new spot to put all of my tools and quick access parts. probably should reorganize anyway.
    • Next up i decided to test out ebook2audiobook. which is an application that converts ebooks to audiobooks. I have several series of books that are older that i enjoy that simply never made it to audiobook format of any kind and i want to be able to enjoy them in whatever format i choose. I do have voice aloud which does the job very well but i would prefer to do everything from the same application. Which is audiobookshelf. ebook2audiobook was a simple enough instalation from github and it works surprisingly well. Everything is built in to it. there are several voice models to choose from and there are ways to use gpu or cpu to make things faster. Sadly the gpu that i am using is not supported but there are many other options for that as well. Other than the voice i left most of settings as standard. Running from CPU it does take a significant amount of time to complete and pretty much leaves the cpu maxed out the entire time but it works. THe end product is listenable, especially if you like the old style of audiobook where it was as bland and straightforward of a reading as possible. No inflection changes for different voices etc etc. But it is acceptable so long as you dont crank the speed up too high.
  • Jim
    • Ethernet Cables: After relying on Wi-Fi exclusively for the last year and a half since I moved into the house I currently live in I finally and belatedly decided to invest a few dollars in new ethernet cables to wire up my four main workstations at my two L-shaped glass desks. I didn’t want to use the decades old ethernet cables of various colors that I have, some with tape residue on them, for aesthetic reasons, so I got a three 10 foot black ethernet cables for $5 apiece and a longer 25 foot cable, also black, for $7 so my three primary desktops and one primary laptop could all connect directly to my AT&T gateway and the ethernet cables match all the other black cables under my desk and blend in better. My back and knees didn’t love me getting down and fishing those along the walls behind the mess of spaghetti string that was already there. For day to day web surfing this doesn’t make much of a difference but for downloading huge files or transfers of massive files over the local network it does. Only hitch: for some reason my main laptop using Mint 22.3 can’t make a connection with the ethernet cable plugged in, only with Wi-Fi. And I’m struggling to understand why. Any ideas?
      • Jellyfin Server Interface: I also can no longer connect to the Jellyfin server interface in a browser tab on my media desktop since I plugged the ethernet cable in and used the wired network instead of Wi-Fi. Another mystery to solve.
    • Blu-ray Drive: More hardware woes! I frequently rip Blu-ray disks from the library as I have discussed many times, but I’m tired of having to do it on my laptop since I have to temporarily store huge files and then send them over my local network to my media desktop where I have my Plex and Jellyfin servers running and where my new large external 4 TB hard drive contains my media. I’d rather rip them locally on the desktop and save the files directly to that huge drive. I have had a Pioneer Blu-ray drive in a 5.25 inch bay in that desktop for about fifteen years, but it was never recognized by Linux Mint for some reason unlike when I used to use Windows. So I booted into Windows 10 which I still have on one drive there to check it out and it wasn’t recognized there any more either. So I took a chance to open up the desktop, clean out the dust and see if the power and data cable connections had become dislodged when I moved last year. Sure enough re-seating the connections to the drive fixed it and it was now recognized when I booted back into Linux Mint. Success! Or so I thought. I got four new Blu-rays from the library at once by coincidence so I needed to rip them. However, after opening up the drive with the software button in MakeMKV or VLC and seeing that those apps were not able to play any of them, I recalled that I had to install some libraries and run some other minor code in the terminal to get MakeMKV or VLC to recognize and play Blu-rays in Mint on my laptop. There’s a great article on OMG Ubuntu web site that I followed to make this work. (see show notes below) Just as I was about to do that, I went to open up the drive again with the software button and I heard a grinding sound as it refused to open again. Uh oh! Clearly the mechanism that slides out the tray was now broken or stuck mechanically. Lucky it wasn’t when I had any of the library Blu-rays in the drive trapping one in there. So much for salvaging the Blu-ray drive I already owned. Unfortunately no manufacturers seem to make new internal 5.25 inch Blu-ray drives which means either a- buying cheap external ones, b- buying an expensive specialized unit for hundreds of dollars, or c- buying a 10+ year old used one to fit in a 5.25 inch bay if you are a dinosaur who still uses a desktop. So I ended up buying an open box 5.25 inch internal Blu-ray drive on eBay for $51 after shipping, originally sold as an OEM part with Dell computers, under the HL-DT branding just like the DVD player I also have on that same Dell media desktop. Frustratingly, so far it won’t play any Blu-rays despite doing all the same steps as I did for the drive on my laptop. So now I’m resorting to posting on the MakeMKV forums and elsewhere if necessary to try to figure out why. Not sure if it’s a hardware issue or a software issue or some d.r.m. workaround that has to be solved. I may or may not need to end up purchasing a different brand 5.25 inch BD-ROM
    • Grub Repair for Sager Laptop: When I ran out of space last year on my old 120 GB SSD in my primary laptop I had to purchased a bigger drive of 250 GB and do a fresh install of Mint 22.0 I pulled one of the 120 GB SSDs with Windows out of my laptop to fit the new 250 GB SSD. Meaning I now had Mint 21.3 and Mint 22.3 (after updates) on two different drives in this laptop. However I now had a situation where the boot information was on the old 120 GB drive which I had transferred all my data off and wanted to re-purpose. So my boot process was effectively handcuffed to this smaller, older SSD with Mint 21.3 that I no longer want to use. So since my understanding of the boot process is not what I would like it to be ideally, I had to post on the Linux Mint forum to get help to figure out how to resolve this. The advice varied wildly, and some of it was inappropriate, but I was savvy enough to decide which one person’s advice was worth following up. Putting grub on the appropriate 250 GB drive thankfully worked and now I am able to boot my 250 GB drive with Linux Mint 22.3 without involving any other drive , thereby freeing up the older 120 GB SSD for something else to be discussed shortly.
    • Tower PC RAM: Hardware woes again! I have a gigantic custom built desktop from 2011, with an Intel Core i7 950 with 8 cores and a large GeForce GTX 580 graphics card. This is my oldest working computer here in my house. At one time this was my top dollar ($2500) bespoke HD video editing computer originally running Windows 7 back in the day along with Adobe Premiere Pro before it was a subscription service. I haven’t talked about it much, mostly because it started giving me issues about a year and a half ago by beeping instead of successfully booting up reliably. I’ve mostly been ignoring it for this reason. However, I did notice that sometimes if I removed the four 4 GB RAM chips and re-seated them it would boot up once or twice before beeping again and failing to boot up again. I thought the RAM chips had become unseated or perhaps had dust built up affecting them. However now I am looking at this desktop with new interest because I want to try to solve this once or for all. It occurred to me that maybe one or more of the RAM chips might be bad so I took two of them out and kept switching which two I uses until I found a combination of two that booted up reliably. Then added one and two more until figured out which single RAM chip had gone bad. Now since they work in pairs, I now had 8 GB of RAM instead of 16 GB. I looked online and figured out that for only $14 I could get a used pair of the same exact RAM chips on eBay so I ordered them and now have an extra one as well. Took a few tries to figure out which of the six slots slots should be filled and which direction the chips should be aligned to since the newer RAM chips from 2014 instead of 2011 like the original ones had the stickers on the opposite side facing the other direction. But ultimately it was a success, and I now I have 16 GB of RAM in this computer again and it boots up reliably. So what am I going to do with this monster-sized workstation?
    • APC Back-UPS 1500 Battery: It seems like every time i turn around I need to replace a battery on one of my six Uninterruptible Power Supplies and Surge Protectors. The last little dip in power will often send one that is as little as a year old into a spasm of blinking and clicking to show it has reduced lifespan. Sometimes I can extend the life of the battery by turning off the UPS and disconnecting the battery for ten minutes and reconnecting it. But since the power momentarily dips here in South Florida fairly often, even if only for a fraction of a second, it happens pretty often where that no longer works. So another $55 out the window.
    • GhostBSD 26.1: I talked on the most recent episode of Linux OTC about my frustration since my upgrade to the GhostBSD 26 based on FreeBSD 15 caused issues on my lightweight Celeron with 4 GB of RAM due to the gigantic ZFS snapshot which was automatically made when I upgraded filling up almost the entirety of free space on the tiny 64 GB SSD in that $20 purchase from Craigslist. A fresh install was out of the question due to the higher minimum requirements of 8 GB for the latest GhostBSD. So what did I do? Well I reasoned that my Tower desktop now working reliably again with 16 GB of RAM and a 240 GB SSD, quadruple the RAM and storage space, I could overwrite Windows 10 that I haven’t booted into in a long time. This would be the perfect machine for GhostBSD since it has more than double the minimum RAM and four times bigger SSD than I had in that little Celeron. Linux Mint 22.3 can stay on the other 250 GB SSD and I can hit the appropriate key to interrupt the boot process if by chance I want to switch to it. I downloaded the very latest nightly version of GhostBSD 26.1 with all the latest updates so I didn’t have to upgrade and then update more large files and it installed smoothly. Now GhostBSD has a reasonably powerful desktop all it own. I now need to spend som time re-installing all my preferred software and tweaking it to work the way I like. In addition to that I also installed the latest version of GhostBSD on the 120 SSD in my primary laptop where the old Linux Mint 21.3 was and which I now now free from it’s tethers to the laptop’s boot process for Mint 22.3. As a general rule I don’t like the idea of dual booting- I think it’s far more practical to just use another device side by side since most of us have multiple computers. But in this case, since I have a sophisticated camera carefully mounted in a specific place on my desk and scissor arm for a pro microphone likewise, that if I ever wanted to credibly participate in a BSD related podcast that I should do so using the o.s. sitting in my referred workstation with my webcam setup. Now, I can do that.
    • Windowy Panel Layout for Mate: I’ve complained about how Mate desktop environment doesn’t have a Super key launcher by default. But I discovered when installing GhostBSD on my Tower computer that in teh version of Mate that comes with GhostBSD under Look & Feel -> Station Tweak -> Interface -> Panels, there is an option called Windowy that makes the panels resemble Windows (hence the name) and enables the left Super key as an application launcher. That makes a huge difference to me in usability. It’s not exactly like Cinnamon of course. If you do use the mouse to hit the start button and hover over the menu, the applications don’t fly out like on Cinnamon, for example. But for a keyboard first user like me, it’s close enough to be tolerable.
    • Open Indiana Hipster: That leaves the Celeron desktop that used to host GhostBSD as a lightweight desktop free to experiment with. Which is really what it was purchased for. Too little RAM and too small an SSD for GhostBSD with ZFS. I decided to see how obscure I could get and still have a working computer system for curiosity. So I decided to try out Open Indiana. Open Indiana is the most popular distribution of illumos, a Unix-like operating system derived from OpenSolaris. The latest version of it is nicknamed Hipster. I had to use dd to burn it to a USB since unetbootin wouldn’t work, nor would Mint’s USB Image Writer recognize the .usb format. But if you select the GUI download option it comes with an installer borrowed from FreeBSD and then installs a Mate desktop and suite of software including many well known programs and utilities including Firefox, Thunderbird, Caja file manager, Mate Terminal, Eye of Mate image viewer, and several other applications typically found in a Mate desktop environment. Open Indiana uses the Image Packaging System and allows users to download packages in the terminal from one main repository by default. It’s easy enough following the handbook to add two more repositories including one so-called Encumbered repository to download packages that may be subject to patents like VLC or other multimedia applications as well as a third-party repository for additional software. Obviously a very niche operating system like this this is orders of magnitude more obscure than going from Windows, to Linux, to FreeBSD, and then to something like this. I’m curious how usable it is given the much more stringent constraints and software limitations compared to Linux or one of the BSDs. It’s early going, but so far no issues with getting online with wired connection, audio works fine and Firefox 150 and the terminal works as expected. So for basic computing needs its entirely workable. I’ll be sure to report back next month if I stick with it a while on this Celeron or if you guys want to hear more on Distrohoppers Digest.

Shape 1 — Play Vibrations Transition Bumper —

Vibrations from the Ether

20 minutes (~5 minutes each)

  • Mike S
    • Hello Joe,

      Ive been listening to you for years, and tllts for many years (i recall
      episode 500 when i was installing trim in my basement.  500 back then
      was unheard of).   I did email rich once pointing out that he was being
      a real a**hole (to joel).   Apparently he has moved on.    i have mint
      on one of my 6 – t480s!, not my daily driver though.

      I recall you do quite bit of work with earphones/headphones,  so
      checking if you have any advice before i dive in.  i dont recall if you
      do wired and/or wireless.

      hopefully you dont mind a (potentially) quick question.

      i have a pair of wireless monster 101 plus ear buds.  the right hand
      side battery is done, it lasts about 15 minutes.    i opened one side,
      it looks like a pretty standard 501010 3.7v available online.   any tips
      before i start?   from what i see online, the batteries ship without
      leads, so i will have solder the battery side.   i do have a fine tipped
      soldering iron, and i can solder.


      thanks for any advice.
  • Response from Joe
    • That is awesome.
    • ok couple of tips. get some non expanding glue. super glue can do it but you only get the one chance. if you think the device will stay together without it that is fine
    • kapton tape is helpful. also look close at the battery that is there, if there is a board under the kapton tape that is on it you will need that(might not be one there). I looked at a couple of the 501010 batteries for sale from aliexpress and none of them had one attached.
    • pre-tin the connections so you spend the minimum amount of time heating up the connections on the batteries.
    • I dont do much with true wireless earbuds anymore just because of how much of a pain they are to get back together and have them stay together. I expect since you can solder you understand you will need some flux.
    • also make sure they have a charge before you attach them. if the voltage is too low they might not charge after you have it all put together. anything over 3.4v should be fine. I have a bunch of 18650 charging boards that i keep around that can do it but if you dont, you can take apart someones disposable vape that has a charging port and make one. just move the leads from the battery on the device and put some temporary ones on the 501010 to it. doesnt take long
  • Response from Mike
    • Joe,
    • Thank you for the detailed reply.
    • i checked, it is just the naked battery. kapton tape all around.
    • i think i will go for it. Good point about charging first. Luckily I have a gallon bucket full of those (vapes). I pick up trash along the country roads by my house when I go for my noon walk. these are just some of the assortment of crap i pick up. eventually i have to bring them somewhere to recycle.
    • These particular earbuds snap together, so hopefully they go back together without too much drama.
    • I’ll let you know how i make out.
    • Cheers from Canada (Kingston, Ontario).
    • Mike
  • Response from Joe
    • Heck yeah man. So many projects you can do with those batteries. 3.7v is kinda universal so they are easily adaptable

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10 minutes

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