mintCast 330 – Debbie Does Beta

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Bi-weekly Wanderings:

• Leo
  • Gave LMDE 4 Beta a whirl. Seems everything is the way you’d expect, new logos and Cinnamon updates that we’ve touched on in previous episodes.
  • The deal breaker for me on the Desktop will be the Kernel 4.19.
  • The laptop would work fine on this version, but it hasn’t budged from LM 19 save for the incremental upgrades to .1, .2 and .3.
  • Not having PPAs directly available is also a sore spot. Some things just aren’t available via AppImage, Snap or Flatpak, and PPAs can fill the gap.
• Tony H
  • Hi great to be back so since the last show I’ve been up to loads of non Linux geeky stuff. I have been baking sourdough bread several times a week and it really is worth making your own bread. The quality is so good and the flavour is amazing. 
  • Obviously I have been playing around with my model cars a little but a short break away from home down in the south of England to visit friends and some relatives and then a 4 day trip to Birmingham, got in the way a little.
  • The same with Linux, I installed ALT Linux for the upcoming Distrohoppers’ Digest recording, this delayed as I had an emergency root canal filling the day before we were due to record last week but hopefully we are good for next Thursday. But with Vacations and other things that have been going on I have not got around to play with it for as long as I would have liked, sometimes life just gets in the way of things, sometimes I seem to be juggling too many balls in the air at once, and unlike my fellow hosts I can’t even blame work or school for that.       
• Moss
  • Sorry to miss the last show, things got out of control around here. Still are, a bit. But in the interim, I’ve managed to install OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 on both machines, and have run into a snag on installing Solus on my Galago Pro 2. I topped off my current lineup with Zorin OS Ultimate 15.2, although I’m not satisfied with that choice. It does have a nice Grub menu though. I also tried Ubuntu Budgie 20.04 in advance, with no grub menu customization at all and a few papercuts.
  • As Tony stated, we will record Episode 011 of Distrohoppers’ Digest on Thursday, March 12th. Our schedule is slipping a bit more from our intended monthly podcast, but we’re only human. Our stats are still hovering at just over 400 downloads per episode, although Episode 008 is the most recent to top 400 downloads. This month we will be covering ALT Linux and Ubuntu Budgie.
  • Speaking of the Ubuntu Budgie and my presence on their team, I ran into the same problem as I do all too often here, not enough time and too stressed. I resigned this morning from the project, but said I was still interested in doing the voiceover videos.
  • Listener Dale Miracle upped my game again, buying me a WAVLINK ST-336A USB 3 dual hard drive thingie with extra USB and SD card slots (what Leo and I call a “toaster”) and an Anker 9-port USB 3 hub. So now everything on my machine except for my mini keyboards and microphone are USB3.  I have replaced my underutilized 2 Tb spinning disk with 2 256 Gb SSDs, which run cooler and more quietly. I’ll keep the 2 Tb around as my 2nd Backup.
  • Suzanne and I just finished Fool Moon, the second Dresden FIles book, and have launched into book 3, Grave Peril. It seems to be jumping around a bit in the first few chapters.
  • I continue working in the wrong job with no good end in sight and alternatives looking more meager.
• Joe
  • Reading
    • Stormlight archive book 3
    • Artemis by Andy Wier 
    • Junkyard druid.
      • Relistened to the whole series since the books are short.
      • Was able to get the 2 newest books as well
    • Takeshi Kovacs novels because Altered Carbon season 2
    • Neil Gaiman American Gods
  • Put my 3d printer back together.  Have a spare board now.
    • Still having problems with prints
    • Will get more into it at a later date.  
    • For just say it ain’t working
  • Netflix Altered Carbon season 2
    • It was good.
    • Very different from book 2 however.  I really enjoyed first season because of how well it went along with the book
    • This was different though and i understand why.  It would have been very difficult to recreate all the things that happened in the book.  But second season while it did have a lot of things that were in none of the books seemed to have more aspects of the things that were included in the third book than it did the second
    • Still you should watch it if you have the chance.  Also read the books because awesome
    • Very adult themed
  • Installed Fedora Workstation on the 7140
    • Looks good and works well with some small exceptions
    • Have not used gnome in a long time and I am really impressed with how far it has come along and how smooth it runs
    • Only problem I am having so far is that the touchpad works at the login screen but becomes unresponsive after login
      • Probably an issue with the drivers trying to load twice
      • But I was able to correct the issue with sleep 45; sudo modprobe -r hid_multitouch; sudo modprobe hid_multitouch;
      • Which i added to the crontab @reboot
      • I also want to set up something similar whenever the keyboard is docked.  This may clear some of the issues that the tablet has with the docking procedure
    • Had to go into alsamixer and disable the hdmi audio in order to get the built in speakers to work
    • Well it was working.  Got a couple of pops after a couple of reboots even though the audio was muted and then now it cant find the internal audio card.  So I think I may have blown the hardware.  
    • Bluetooth audio works
  • Testing out scrcpy which allows me to mirror and interact with my android phone on my linux machine
    • It is free
    • Does not require root
    • Works using adb so you have to turn on debugging
    • 2 thumbs up for me
    • Full screen looks good and i have not noticed any lag
    • Actually using it a lot
  • Solder fun
    • Mmcx builds
    • Fixed my homemade bluetooth adapter
    • More LG HBS 770’s

The News: 

• LMDE 4 “Debbie” Beta Release
  • Feb 25. The team’s focus is on Debbie and cross platform thingies for a while.
  • It will be possible to update from the Debbie Beta to Debbie Stable when it is released! 
  • There are a few issues, as is common with Betas.
    • root not available in recovery until password is set. Set with “passwd root”
    • Sound issues can be solved by installing pavucontrol
    • VLC needs to be directed to the DVD drive at /dev/sr0 for DVD playback
    • Some KDE apps may need additional packages to function
      • kdelibs-bin kdelibs5-data kdelibs5-plugins
• Linux Mint Monthly News, February 2020
  • New more vibrant color palettes
  • Warpinator, a (temporarily named) application that will allow simple filesharing between two Linux Mint machines, or, later, two machines with Warpinator installed as it gets more popular.
• RASPBERRY PI SLIPS OUT NEW PCB VERSION WITH USB C POWER FIX
  • Also cuts price on 2 Gb RAM version to $35, 4 Gb remains $55
• Hot off the press! APT 2.0 Released
• Linux Foundation adds its 4th Microsoft member

Security Update: 

• 2011-2019 AMD chips vulnerable to two new attacks
• Let’s Encrypt revokes 3 million certs, then unrevokes about a million
• Intel Has an Unfixable Chipset Security Flaw. Is it a Risk?

Announcements:

• Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC, March 22, 2020.

Wrap-up:

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

• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, [email protected], [email protected], Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!

• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338 Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/ Twitter @TonyH1212, [email protected] [email protected]   

• Tony Watts – [email protected], Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – [email protected], [email protected], edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

• Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)

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