March 25, 2020News, OGG, Podcast

mintCast 331 – The Art of Tracking

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo upgrades TLP, Tony Hughes tinkers with LMDE, Manjaro fights with Moss, Josh gets cancelled, and Joe works from home.

Then, in the news, NPM gets acquired, OBS adds a number, Purism and Pinebook have new releases, Basilisk takes us back in time, and Gnome gets new features.

In security, Edge is coming, and it’s worse than we thought.

Bi-Weekly Wanderings:

Leo
- Updated to TLP 1.3, from 1.1.
- Got some $16 Tascam TH-02’s. The original earpads really dug into my ears in a very painful way. Purchased some Brainwavz replacement earpads for the Audio Technica M50X’s. They are the red and fuzzy types and oh so comfortable. My ears warm up for a bit, but I can easily wear these headphones for hours, comfortably.
- I may upgrade to the actual M50X’s one day. It’s between those and the Behringer 770’s.
- Plan on running Ubuntu 20.04 on my Lenovo T450s until Linux Mint 20 comes out probably around June. Considering whether I should use the Beta or not.
- I have Fedora 31 lurking as my 2nd distro right now, and am waiting for 32 to drop next month. This is making it hard.
Tony H
- Still Playing with my model cars, I will be doing much more of this over the coming weeks to help pass the time at the moment. If anyone wants to take a look at some of them there is a picture in the off topic section of the Discord channel.
- Myself and Moss recorded our 11th Episode of Distrohoppers Digest Thursday 12th, we had a bump as I nearly missed the recording time due to the changed time difference at the moment but remembered just in time.
- Watching Alan Pope’s YouTube channel, he did a great tutorial of creating a snap package, also the video before that was on the free software only option in Ubuntu, if you’re interested check out his channel. https://www.youtube.com/user/popeydc/videos
- And now as everything is in lockdown due to this virus, my LUG created a virtual meeting yesterday morning via a Google Hangout so I still got to have my Saturday LUG fix for over 2 hours while not having to leave the house. I also Joined the BDLL international LUG at midnight my time as I could have a sleep in the following morning as my Worship community has closed our weekly meetings for the foreseeable future.
- I also installed the Distribution release of Linux Mint Debian Edition as it went from Beta to DR on Friday, first impressions are good after installing the MATE DE although I had problems with the install not installing GRUB properly and after the third try at getting a bootable install, installed 19.3 as a dual boot and now Grub works and I can boot into LMDE. I will be doing a full review for the next Distrohoppers Digest. I had planned to review AntiX but after the install although it could see my WiFi card it could not find any networks when I scanned and as the install was a laptop It makes things difficult to run it as a credible daily driver.

Moss
- We had another lovely episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest, although we got a late start due to the confusion of time changes. I did manage to get to work on time, or 3 minutes late actually.
- I’ve been going crazy on distros lately. I got Endeavour OS installed on my Galago Pro 2, got all the updates done, and then installed Zorin OS Lite to get my Grub menu back… to discover that Endeavour no longer boots. Black screen, no cursor or anything. I’ve tried a few things the guys in the DHD Telegram group suggested but no luck. I reinstalled, and found I had the Grub issue I had before, where each distro installed had multiple entries on the Grub menu in varying numbers. Bye-bye to Endeavour. I did report these issues to the Endeavour forum.
- I got Manjaro to work on my Kudu, with XFCE desktop, co-resident with OpenMandriva 4.1 and Feren OS for now. And just Friday morning, I got MaBox installed on the Galago Pro, which gives me Manjaro with Openbox window manager. Since that time, however, MaBox has crashed my machine twice, taking my GRUB menu with it and, in particular, keeping me from being able to boot Mint. So I wiped it and Zorin Lite, deleted a partition on /dev/sdb, and reinstalled Zorin Lite. In the offing, I wiped KDE neon, but I have a blank partition I’m considering installing that to AFTER THE SHOW. There are now only 6 distro partitions on the Galago Pro 2 (as opposed to EFI, Restore, and Swap partitions), 4 on /dev/sda and 2 on /dev/sdb.
- During all this, I discovered there are 19 entries in my EFI boot. I looked for an EFI editor and came up with rEFInd, which so far does not look like an EFI editor but rather a Grub/EFI replacement. I can get to my Grub boot menu through option #7, and I’ve identified which of my current installations boot from Options 1, 2, 3, 18, and 19. The menu would be more informative if I could edit the entries to better identify them, most either have an Ubuntu logo or a penguin logo, except Mint has a Mint logo (the old one). Until further notice, I have no idea how to edit the zombie distros from the EFI menu. Stay tuned for further details!
- I was surprised to hear the Destination Linux team finally found Stacer in Episode 164;. I’m pretty sure I’ve been talking about that for nearly a year, and I’m not a self-proclaimed expert on Linux.
- I GOT MY FIRST SPONSUS! It’s probably somebody I know, but they used a handle and their profile is not filled out, so I may never know. Welcome esskaybeenz! Every $3 is a help. On top of that, I sold another CD of my music, and I’m busy setting up my music videos at LBRY.
- Otherwise, things have been oddly lifelike. My wife and I are nearly halfway through Grave Peril.
- My boss is under stress from upper management, Covid-19 has cut our business by more than half, but I’m working 5 days a week at least until the state finally decides to go to lockdown. Tennessee is one of the last three states to make no mandatory closures of any kind.
- My mother is still doing as well as any 90-year-old deserves to be doing. And everything else is in a holding pattern.

Josh
- I suddenly left school. With Coronavirus, schools here in the UK have shut and my exams have been cancelled. So that’s it for me. I now have 5/6 months of doing my own work.
- I installed 20.04 and it’s really nice.
- Started a new podcast, bit:cast
- Launched a new magazine issue, micro:mag Issue 7

Joe
- New Book series galore
  - Las Vegas paranormal police department Ian Dex novels by John P. Logsdon
    - Very short very puerile but I did listen to the whole series, really missing a lot of detail but still enjoyable
  - Hex series Books Craig Zerf and Mia Darien
    - Also very short and not as juvenile but very tropeish, felt like I was reading a mix of the last dragon and the lone ranger
  - The Bowl of Souls by Trevor H Cooley
    - very sword and sorcery
    - Super good altogether I will take a look at this author’s other books.
  - Metal Mage series by Eric Vail.
    - Struggled through the first book
    - Do not recommend
    - Very teenage pubescent fantasy
    - I would have read the second book to see if it improves but the reviews say it stays the same.
  - Hammonds Hardcases
    - Sci fi books
    - Good trilogy. No complaints but nothing spectacular
- Self isolation
  - Kids are hating it
  - Working from home has its ups and down
  - Need more electronics to work on. Send me an email if you have something that you think I might like to work on. I will talk about it all on the show if you send it to me.
  - Also need to get back into my weight lifting from home groove
- Borderlands 3 on steam
  - Enjoying playing it and the 2 expansions since it was 50 percent off on steam
  - Haven’t tested much out yet but I am currently enjoying fl4k for my first playthrough
- Studying some on 3d printers but still need to take mine apart and put it back together. May do some upgrades at the same time.
- Ordered a broken monoprice bluetooth dj headset. Should get this week and while it will be a different fix for me I don’t think it will be hard. And if I can’t fix it I will be able to use the top band to fix other headphones. Got at a really good price for it on ebay.
- Fixed my other pair of Turtle Beach Z2s with the broken band.
- Setting up a multi boot on the Pi 4 using Berryboot
- Still enjoying Fedora on the 7140
- Installed CITRIX receiver on my garage PC so that I can work out there when the kids are getting loud inside.
  - Still an interesting setup you have to install the CITRIX deb and then fix the cert error
  - sudo ln -s /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/* /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts
  - Too bad it has been way too cold and still way too much pollen to work in the garage comfortably
- Reinstalled Windows on a T100ta so that it can replace the 11 year old Toshiba that we are using as a set top box – the Toshiba only has vga out. Want to see if it can do better with lower power consumption. I am thinking that I will need to add a powered usb hub
  - Since it will be plugged in all the time I think I can get away with using the powered hub as the tablet charger as well.
  - Did have to use woeusb to setup the windows

The News:

NPM acquired by Microsoft (through their GitHub subsidiary)
OBS Studio 25.0 released, can capture Vulkan games
Purism “launches” Librem Mini
Pinebook Pro Re-launches with Manjaro
Basilisk, the Old Firefox
- Maintained by the Pale Moon devs
Gnome 3.36 “Gresik” Released

Security Update:

Not Linux, YET.
- Edge Breaks Privacy
- Douglas Leith with the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College in Ireland, Edge sends privacy-invasive telemetry to Microsoft’s back-end servers — including “persistent” device identifiers and URLs typed into browsing pages. Brave ended up being the most private, with Firefox trailing in a second, less-private, group.

Announcements:

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC, April 5, 2020. That’s 8PM British Summer Time. Thanks Londoner, I hope I got that right. 🙂

Wrap-up: