mintCast 306 – Pi Projects 2

mintCast Episode 306

 

This is mintCast: A podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux

We record every other week on Sunday afternoons

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INTRODUCTION:

 

• Welcome to mintCast Episode 306.
• This is Leo and with me I have Bo, and Joe, and Tony W, and Josh, and Tony H, and last but probably least Moss, and we’re recording live on Sunday April 7th, 2019.

First up, in our wanderings, we’ll hear about a new Pi and podcast project, Bo has proton updates,  Joe has been playing with appimages, Tony Watts has been arcading it up, Josh had a Manjaro journey, Tony Hughes has been working with LMDE, and Moss and Tony Hughes have a new podcast while Moss continues the struggle with Solus!

Then, ASUS had a bug, Intel had some hidden “features”, we cover the Linux Mint monthly news, SPURV makes an appearance, Amazon wants their own internet, and finally Huawei has creepy crawlies, too.

We hit our Innards which covers a ton of Pi stuff.

And finally, we cover listener feedback.

Bo loves Arch!!

 

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

 

• Leo
  • Beta testing Ubuntu 19.04 on the desktop. This time writing down my experiences at leochavez.org.
  • Playing with DietPi
  • Getting my NewsReader voice on! I’m the newest host of Full Circle Magazine Podcast.

 

• Bo
  • Update to proton fixed ESO and FFXIV
  • Proton community database

 

• Joe
  • Switching from simplenote to standard notes
    • Standard notes is encrypted while simplenote isn’t
  • Playing with the PI
  • Found one of my old berryboot images that I wanted to test out
    • 128gb usb stick
    • Still works
    • Marvel vs Capcom is still awesome.
  • Found a free Samsung TV that probably only needs a power supply. Ordered one and will see if it works
  • Redoing crontab with resilio-sync instead of dropbox

 

• Tony W
  • Bought a 3B+, testing various things (arcade cabinet, Ubuntu Mate, etc)
  • Trying out Fedora on Dell 7130

 

• Josh
  • Playing around with gaming on linux after watching the “Complete Noobs Guide to Gaming on Linux” from Linus Tech Tips (Floatplane release). Having a go with Proton and Steam play and have noticed twice the FPS on Linux Mint compared to Windows.
  • Installing Manjaro Arm with limited luck with usage (will save more details for the innards)

 

• Tony H
  • Setting up another Dell laptop I have with Mint 19.1 MATE. I’ve had this PC for a while but prefer it’s more portable cousins as it’s a 15.4 inch Dell E6540 and weighs in at around 5lb, but at home it could be a good alternative podcast box. I removed the Win10 SSD and replaced it with another 120Gb SSD I had and the install went great, even at Woodbrooke with poor WiFi I was able to install and update in less than an hour.
  • I have been installing and playing with LMDE 3 on my Toshiba Z30 and Dell E7250. I will not say much more as this is the 1st subject of a new Distrohoppers podcast that me and my fellow host Moss are going to give a go. Just lets say it’s been an interesting time, with frustrations and successes.
  • Setting up a new Google account and new Blogger Blog for the new podcast ready for our first show at the end of the month.

 

• Moss
  • Went through some issues with what I’m running, but no distro hopping this  episode… except… Tony Hughes and I took so much heat on our distrohopping habits that we are striking back by starting a new podcast, details in Announcements. I’m spending a lot of time writing on the script for the new show. And setting up the MeWe group for it.  I will report that I did manage to get SoftMaker Office installed on Solus finally, but still do not have solutions for my other two issues (VPN and printer).
  • One of our listeners has set up a GoFundMe to get me to SELF in June. If we get $750, I can afford a room in the convention hotel; lesser amounts will mean sharing a room or getting a cheaper hotel or other crash space, but I need to replace my lost income for those two weekend nights, gas, and food for the weekend. She did NOT set it up as a beneficiary account, but GoFundMe is working with the two of us to get her to make that change.  It’s hard to put up a link when we still don’t know for sure how this is going to turn out.
  • Got a new car. That’s the end of that saga. Mom is still fighting pneumonia in the “rehab” facility (nursing home). And we got blindsided by new fees and a rapidly-approaching filing deadline to keep my Canadian wife in the country, trying to raise funds on that.

 

THE NEWS:

 

1. Leo  rant – Asus has more bugs than we thought.
   1. Shadowhammer. A bit overblown, but it seems like there were a few hundred hard coded MAC addresses built into the attack, so it wasn’t a “mass attack.”
   2. This is speculation, but I suspect this was either an inside attack, or state sponsored. Too sophisticated.
   3. Kaspersky had a list of MAC addresses and allowed people to find out if their MAC address was on the list, but didn’t publish the list.
   4. Skylight “hacked” the list from the local checker published by Kaspersky with Nvidia Teslas rented from AWS.
   5. MAC addresses posted here.

 

1. Moss – Another Undocumented Feature Found in Intel chips.

 

1. 1. Leo/Josh Linux Mint March news
      1. 19.2 will be called Tina.
      2. Fonts will change to the Ubuntu fonts from Noto.
      3. It’s all about muffin. Windows will feel lighter soon because of “radical changes”, but regressions keep popping up.
      4. Alpha testing is now available! Add this PPA.

 

• Clem’s lamentations over this dev cycle. Bad logo feedback, bad site feedback, missing devs, muffin regressions all make for a punch in the gut.

 

 

1. Tony W: SPURV: Running containerized android apps in Linux

 

1. Josh – Amazon plans to launch thousands of internet satellites and launch a broadband service  OneWeb launches its satellites (competing company)

 

1. Josh – Huawei laptop backdoor flaw raises concerns

 

LINUX INNARDS:

 

• Joe
  • Alexa pi setup
    • First setup new device on Amazon site with your login
    • https://developer.amazon.com/docs/alexa-voice-service/register-a-product.html
    • Follow the instructions
    • had to manually install
    • sudo apt-get install sqlite3
    • Need USB microphone
    • get config.json and use it with the setup script
    • will not do amazon music.  but will control my lights.
    • I have one other problem with it. The audio starts late.  The first word or 3 gets cut off.
  • Pivpn
    • Was easy to setup following the instructions.  Just had to do it a second time with the DNS set properly and it works like a charm.
    • https://medium.com/@jasonrigden/how-to-use-pivpn-b65a3a3f0759
• Tony W
  • Retropie on arcade cabinet running 3B+
    • Xin-Mo controls required edit of cmdline.txt to detect as 2 player https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Xin-Mo-Controller
    • Used HDMI to DVI-D cable to work with existing monitor ($8 Amazon purchase)
    • 3.5mm audio output to soundbar
    • Power adaptor for pi – you want the original
    • Downloaded arcade ROMS from archive.org https://archive.org/details/MAME2003_Reference_Set_MAME0.78_ROMs_CHDs_Samples
    • Kodi is available as an optional package in retropie!
• Josh –

Trying out Manjaro for Arm and getting used to Arch.

Installation was a pain, had to reinstall twice due installation failure.

It’s quite slow as it’s not as well optimised as Raspbian

Works well for daily use but not yet figured out how to do GPIO stuff

• Tony H – Nothing lately Ubuntu Mate RPi with hardware acceleration
• Moss – out of pi
• Leo
  • DietPi
    • 28MB RAM before any services added
    • 10 processes in all, including htop at the time
    • The list of available apps is extremely exhaustive
      • Desktops (MATE/XFCE)
      • Remote Desktop (VNC/No Machine)
      • Media Systems/Players (Kodi/Plex/Murmur)
      • Torrents/Downloading (Transmission/Sonarr/Radarr)
      • Cloud/Backup (Nextcloud/Syncthing)
      • Gaming (AmiBerry/MineOS)
      • Social, Surveillance, Hotspots, System Stats, Hardware Projects, Stacks (LAMP/LEMP), PiHole/PiVPN, File Servers, Home Automation and Printing
      • I’m currently using Tautulli on mine to see the pretty graphs
    • For a no fuss gateway to installing almost any common Linux app or server, DietPi seems to me to be the best option we have.

 

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

 

• No new emails; lots of chatter on Telegram and Discord groups…
• Discussion: Which password manager should I use? [Scott from Telegram]
  • Leo recommended Enpass or Bitwarden since they do local storage. Use lastpass for a cloud-based solution.
  • Peter recommended Lastpass
  • Frank recommended Bitwarden and KeePassXC
  • CryptoDan recommended simply using Chrome’s Built-In manager and using the cloud share option.
  • Moss uses Firefox’s built-in manager

 

CHECK THIS OUT!

 

• Leo
  • Ubuntu Disco Dingo (19.04) Beta
  • Full Circle Magazine and the Full Circle Podcast
  • Stacer

 

• Moss – Tony Hughes and I are working on a new monthly podcast, named Distrohoppers’ Digest. We will be evaluating 2 new distros each episode. The first episode will feature moderately deep dives into LMDE 3 Cindy and SolusOS 4. We should be recording toward the end of the month; stay tuned and we’ll let you know when it’s hot and ready for downloading.

 

• Josh – Released a new issue of a magazine that I am the assistant editor for which is based around the micro:bit microcontroller. It’s a free magazine and we’re now on the fourth issue, check it out here: http://micromag.cc/issuefour

 

• Joe
  • https://www.technotification.com/2019/04/cloudflare-adds-free-vpn-to-1-1-1-1.html

 

ANNOUNCEMENTS

 

Joe – www.Tllts.org  www.linuxlugcast.com MeWe [email protected]

Bo – undercastnetwork.com

Moss? Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, Bandcamp, MeWe, all over YouTube on various peoples’ pages (mine is zaivala), [email protected]

Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338

Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/

Twitter @TonyH1212

Tony Watts – [email protected]

Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter

Josh – edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter

 

WRAP-UP:

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

• KWisher for the “PiCaster”, a Raspberry Pi that streams each episode as we record it
• The folks at Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we use to communicate
• Archive.org for providing the free space and services
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about

— Play Closing Music and Standard Outro —

 

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