mintCast 348 – 400 Raspberry Pies

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1:56 Wanderings
33:22 News
50:26 Security
56:54 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo colorizes his terminal, Josh eyeballs an eggroll, Tony gives the Gorilla another go, and Joe fiddles with firmware

Then, in our news, the Raspberry Pi launches a whole new dessert, GIMP is almost ready for GTK3, 

In security, Ubuntu’s GDM3 has a root bug

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Put out a video on my channel that was way overdue.
    • A/B testing Nextcloud on my raspberry Pi 4 with an external 1TB USB drive vs. a much more powerful laptop (i7-2630qm, 8GB RAM) running the same thing with 1TB internal USB.
    • Doing some surveillance!
    • Changing terminal colors. Fell in love with the Monokai [Dark] Soda theme. I’m testing out the Dracula theme too. They’re duking it out right now for supremacy. I blame bpytop for having such cool themes.
  • Josh
    •  I have been messing around with Linux gaming some more. Been testing it against Windows and the results are not good for the most part. I am not a Linux guru so maybe I am doing it all wrong but I am trying. I have not gotten to try the Glorious Egg Roll Proton yet but that’s my next step to see what happens. My Nvidia 1650 Super is actually not even running at it’s max speeds under linux or windows because my Ryzen 2600 is just not up to the task for certain games. Overclocking my cpu does help some stuttering issues but not a whole lot. The main game I am playing right now is Kingdom Come Deliverance and under Linux with low to medium graphics settings I get roughly between 50 and 60 fps in towns. You have to test in towns on that game because when out of towns it runs smooth no matter what settings you have. Unfortunately on Windows though I get between 70 and 80 fps with medium to high settings which is a lot more taxing but it’s still getting that much better on windows. I am chalking it down to the translation layer taking some of the CPU power cause that game is really CPU bound. 
  • Tony H
    • Recorded Episode 17 of DHD which is now available on your podcatchers, we have had nearly 300 downloads in a week. I Installed Ubuntu Studio 20.10 on the test machine with mixed results as again I could not get a Dual boot to install. On further investigation I may not have left a big enough partition for the original OS so I will have to have another go.  I did however do a successful inline upgrade to the 20.04 install on one of the drives in my tower, which now has the shiny Plasma DE instead of XFCE.  I suggest you only try this on a test PC or in a VM as unless like the Ubuntu Studio release you need any major changes made.  If you plan on upgrading a production PC in this manner, make sure to back up “ALL” your data, as there is a risk of data loss, and we all know it will happen when you have forgotten to back up.  I have also been playing with the new Beta of GIMP which will eventually be released sometime in 2021 as GIMP 3.0, I’ll talk more about that in the news. 
    • Other than that we successfully navigated our 4 days of shielding and my wife had her hospital procedure without any issues, although it will be another week or so before we get the results of the biopsies they have to test. 
  • Joe
    •   Talked last time about ordering a bunch of PSP’s 
      • Got 7 out of 8 of them working, 4 1001s and 3 3001s although one of them has a bad connector for the UMD drive so I will be doing a battery mod on that one to give a much greater battery life.
      • One of them had a bad motherboard and screen and was only good for the other parts
      •   of the 1001s I had spent a lot of time taking it apart and putting it back together because so many of the parts were messed up, the power board, the UMD drive the faceplate and I think it is slightly warped.  But it all is working except for the UMD drive
      • Also have put custom firmware on all of them in order to be able to play retro emulation and to play games without the UMDs which will save space and battery life
      • I have sold one of them as of last night and made back most of my money that I have invested and may hopefully sell another one later today.
    • My transmission docker setup quit working and I had to figure out why.  I went through a lot of iterations of testing thinking that I had messed something up.  Even tried using a different version of the transmission VPN which I use along with docker chrome to change my ip.  I was able to get a different version of transmission working but it was not showing a new ip address.
      • Did my research and it turns out that PIA my vpn provider had turned off a bunch of older servers.  
      • After finding that out it was just a matter of changing all the docker configs on all my machines that use transmission/chrome(which is all of them) and things were working again
      • I also checked the speeds that I was getting on the new servers and it is super fast I know previously I was limited to 30mbps and this was up around 160mbps
    •  Last Saturday I also did several items on my honey due list including rewiring a wall lamp into a hanging lamp with a switch.  Pretending to be an electrician again but I think I did a good job.  Anything to pull out the soldering iron
    •  I also serviced 2 bicycles for my kids to get them back on the road and I have taken the opportunity to go for a couple of rides with them which is fun.  I may need to get a bike of my own.  Because I obviously need another hobby to eat up my time
    • With the end of year stability at work I have been able to binge watch Big Bang Theory.  Man that show ran for a long time
    • Also have been playing the new DLC for Borderlands 3.  I am liking the new skill trees and have not tried the new mode yet.
    • Got a new kitten.  The wife finally convinced me

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

  • Bug in Ubuntu’s GDM3 allows root access
    • Link .pam_environment to /dev/zero
    • Open Region & Language. It’ll freeze and peg the accounts-daemon process at 100%
    • Send the stop signal (-SIGSTOP)
    • Run (nohup bash -c “sleep 30s; kill -SIGSEGV 597; kill -SIGCONT 597”) where 597 is the process ID of accounts-daemon
    • Logout and wait for the new user creation window
    • Proof of Concept
  • Ransomware for Linux
    • RansomEXX

Announcements:

  • Our next episode will be Sunday, November 29, 2020, at 2 pm Central Time, check for your local time! 

https://everytimezone.com/s/170bc4e1

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • 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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