mintCast 344.5 – “Working” from Home

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LINUX INNARDS:

“Work from Home” setup

• Tony
  • My views of last time’s topic on Proprietary software v Open Source holding Linux back.
  • For me I’m very pragmatic about using what works, my first preference is Opensource but if there is a proprietary bit of software that would offer a better solution I would use it, and I do as I install the Nvidia drivers on my desktop PC as I have a dedicated Nvidia graphics card.
  • As for the availability of proprietary software for Linux such as Photoshop I’m not sure this is a major issue as this is a very niche package and a very small possible Linux user base making it uneconomic for Adobe to spend time creating a Linux version. Looking at industry leading software one example of Open Source leading the way is Blender, and again very few regular Linux users would even look at this let alone use it too it’s full potential, those that need this software for professional 3D rendering are already using it and probably on Linux.
• Leo
• Joe
  • MSI ge72 6qd with an i7-6700HQ and a gtx 960m
  • That has a 17 inch screen
  • For the second screen i have a laptop table with a 32 inch tv on it
  • The table also has a mount for my 7130 so i can do other small things when work is slow or i need to look something up
  • The table that my laptop sits on has an articulated arm for my microphone which is right now a hyperx quadcast or a samson meteor
  • Also use my Samsung Galaxy note 10 all day every day with several of my custom built lg hbs 770 headphones  along with a pair of skullcandy crushers if i want to listen to music and a modded pair of sony xb700s for when i can no longer stand the idea of using an in ear but want all day wear and a pair of 99 neos for when it has to be wired
  • Because i rely so heavily on my phone to be able to do my work i also keep my old galaxy s7 around incase something happens to the note
  • Extra wide recliner that is seeing a lot of wear and tear lately
  • Logitech k360 keyboard and m570 trackball mouse
  • ASUS AC2900 router
    • Need to be able to handle all my work stuff and all the kids school stuff
    • 300mbps connection from spectrum
  • My backup workstation in the garage
    • Ryzen 5 3600 16gb of ram rx 560
    • Two lg tvs as monitors
      • One 60 inch that i got for free because of a bad hdmi board
      • One 43 inch that i also got for free because my friend closed out his storage unit
    • Logitech g613 keyboard and m570 mouse
• Tony H
  • So even though I am no longer working I do obviously use my PC for quite a lot of tasks as well as numerous laptops my main PC is my tower, and this is what I use for podcasting and much more.
  • So my Desktop PC setup is an:
    • HP Compaq Elite 8300 with the following specs:
      • A 2012 Intel® Core™ i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz with 4 cores and 8 threads.
      • 24Gig of DDR3 Ram
      • NVIDIA GeForce 8400 256Mb Ram
      • Generic USB keyboard and mouse
      • And a 1Tb SSD in the primary Bay of my 4 bay IcyDoc. Running Mint Maté 19.3. There are an additional 2 128Gb drives in the dock with Ubuntu Studio 20.04 and Ubuntu Maté 20.04 installed. The 4th bay is not populated because for some reason it does not recognise any drives installed despite all the cables being connected??
  • I have a ProSound USB podcast mic, that I picked up in a bankruptcy sale a few years ago for a very reasonable £12/$15 and this is mounted onto a boom arm and has a pop filter in front of the mic.
  • I also have a SriHome USB webcam that I got a couple of months ago once I could find one that would not mean remortgaging the house. This cost £31 pounds on Amazon.
  • I have 2 4TB USB3 external backup drives with plenty of room for more data at the moment, Both have 1.9Tb of free space, I should have of site backup as well but at the moment I don’t. I also have a 2TB and 1Tb portable USB3 drive for storage on the go.
  • I have 2 Laser printers, a Greyscale Brother and a recently purchased HP Color Laser 150nw, bought for printing my own decals for my models, this cost £130 of Amazon but as buying decals from online sellers can be £2-3 a set this will quickly pay for itself in the next few months. Yes Decal paper is about £1/sheet but you can print many decals on one A4 sheet so the paper is hardly a factor in the decal cost.
• Bo
  • Work setup
    • Lenovo laptop and docking station at work
    • KVM switch at home
  • Podcasting
    • System76 Kudu
    • Zoom H6 USB interface
  • Gaming
    • Ryzen 7 build
    • Dual Booting win and Linux
• Tony W

Will talk about my basement office/studio setup

• • 2 desks, catty corner
    • One desk holds both my podcasting/music desktop as well as my work laptop setup
    • Other desk has my server on it and also use for working on any other machines
  • Network
    • Ran wired internet into basement
  • Repurposed wifi extender as access point with DD WRT
  • Work Setup
    • Thinkpad T480
    • Thinkpad dock
    • Lenovo wireless keyboard/mouse
    • Plantronics Savi w720
  • Music/Podcasting setup – Sentimental value and stories with a lot of this gear
    • Share peripherals w/ work setup
    • Old Dell desktop
      • Video card for multiple monitor support
    • M-Audio Delta 66 soundcard (have a presonus studio 24c)
    • Behringer XM1800S microphone (I have a MXL V57M will use at some point)
    • Neewer desk mount boom arm
    • Audio-Technica M50x headphones
    • Dual monitor “Goodwill Edition” setup (sometimes use a 3rd monitor)
    • JVC stereo R-K11
    • Bose bookshelf speakers
  • Tablet
  • PC in living room: Lenovo desktop (unsure of model right now, has 4th gen i3 in it, 8GB RAM)
    • Dual boot, mostly used in Windows these days by my son for homework
    • Linux mint partition

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

• Larry Murphy

Hello Leo & All,

I just hear episode 342.5. I wanted to let you know that way back when (early to mid 2000’s) when I wanted to multi-boot I found a You Tube that was a step-by step guide. The person had 106 OSes on his computer. The guide was very complete. I modified it for my needs. It worked for about 6 mos. Till it wouldn’t boot. Checking I found out that my downfall was updating the config files. I accepted one that was a default with the system upgrade and I needed to save the one I had filled out. It was a real nooby error.

Now I boot ALL my OSes from my bios, much easier and safer. I use a SSD for each OS, such as Windows and Linux. I only put OSes on SSD,s and data on separate internal and external drives.

I have found that Linux is quicker to install and even with ALL the customizing I do. I customize many of my folder and almost all of my desk top icons for easy identification. I have use the same icon in both Windows and Linux. I find it,s much easier in Linux because I don’t have change the pics I use to .ico files as is needed by Windows. I also find that my internet is faster in Linux as well as download speeds and I can burn dvds faster in Linux as well. I didn’t want you to think setting up multi-boot my my own. I wanted to do it just to see if I could. I always customize my Windows installs but the Linux installs are MUCH easier to do and as always I always enjoy listening to each one of you folks on the show. Thanks for the great content and all your hard work that goes into each show.

• John Wallis

Hello Leo,

I would appreciate your assistance please with the error messages arising in the attached screenshot at boot stage, before and after the hard disk encryption password is entered. I look forward to hearing from you.

Try This GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash pci=noacpi”

• John Wallis Part 2

Hi Leo,

I would appreciate your guidance on systemd-udevd.service.  What is it used for?  Lynis has marked it as unsafe.

• Raphaël

You guys MADE MY DAY!!!

I was having a long day at work on Thursday. Then, listening to my podcasts, the Linux Mint Podcast was on… and then the listeners questions section was like… all about me 🙂 Sorry if I made this episode longer than you like 😉

This was a great joy to hear you talking about this question. I immediately felt the need to give back to you. I’ve made a donation to archive.org on your behalf!

As for the solutions proposed:

 – I just downloaded the LM20 ISO and plan on installing it soon

 – I’ve tried “sudo flatpak install org.videolan.VLC” and got the error message “error: REMOTE and REF must be specified”. The correct invocation (source) is “flatpak install flathub org.videolan.VLC” (+ no sudo needed). It seems to work, I have not finished checking yet.

Keep up the good work.

• Anthony

So I got to ask a question having to do with Foss or bust! Years ago I would use Wine to do things from Windows on linux and it worked at least sometimes. How come I don’t see that option discussed any more?

CHECK THIS OUT!

• TonyH
  • Just to remind you that I have put a couple of videos of my restored model cars on YouTube the link is here
• Joe
  • Athlean X
• Bo
  • create temporary email from command tmpmail

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, October 4, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC and 8 pm British Summer Time. Time conversions are available at https://www.timeanddate.com. You can use Austin, Texas as a Central Time reference.

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org linuxlugcast.com MeWe [email protected]
• Bo – undercastnetwork.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, linuxuserspace.show 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 …

• Owen Peery for audio editing
• Josh for all his work on the website
• Hobstar for our logo
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• HPR for our Mumble backup
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>

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