February 10, 2021News, OGG, Podcast

mintCast 354 – sudo make me an update

1:54 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
58:30 News
1:19:27 Security Update
1:30:05 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I find a new box, Joe’s light as a feather, Moss explodes a DDE, and Bo hosts his own email

Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu loses the lead, Wayland changes, and some new releases

In Security, time to patch… again.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

Leo
- Picked up a Lenovo M715q Tiny. Ryzen 2400GE, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVMe
  - This will be my “studio” machine.
  - Haven’t gamed on it yet, but it’s supposed to be “not horrible”
  - It’ll free up my laptop to be a laptop again

Joe
- So I got some more headphones done. Replaced the MMCX cable on 2 of the LG HBS 770’s that I constantly use because the cable had gotten hard and cracked. I am really impressed with how long they lasted, before I was repairing them every couple of months and I think these lasted about 8 months or so before I had to fix them. I also really like the cables that I got to fix it. They are a little thicker so they actually tin which makes the whole process a lot easier. Also did another set of the Ankers with the cables I built myself and they came out well again. Only one more to go for those. However the cost for making the cables is a bit more and may not be as economically conservative.
  - Since writing that one of the two Ankers has stopped charging.
  - The other is still working well
- I got my weight down below 230 lbs again which is awesome. I am not losing weight as quickly as I was when I first changed my diet again but I am not going as hard as I was before either.
- Made my own protein bars and they are delicious. I made one mistake though and did not spray the wax paper with a non stick so they are rather difficult to eat. The ingredients are not cheap so I don’t know if I will be making them again. But they are tasty.
- Very interested in the Raspberry Pi Pico as a USB host controller but I want to give the development around it time to grow some but with the $1.99 price tag at MicroCenter I may pick up a few and put them into a drawer until more data is there.
- Looking to upgrade my MSI GE72 gaming laptop, since the 950m is getting a bit old, but prices are once again going crazy in the used and new market because of the high cost of graphics cards right now and the fact that everyone is still working from home. If I can wait until the vaccine is more widely distributed and people start going back to the office I imagine there will be a large volume of people off loading computers that will drive the prices back down.
- I have a couple of old phones that I am looking to do some projects with since they are just sitting around but I am not sure what I should do. Project ideas accepted jb@mintcast.org or tell me about what you have done with old phones to get some more use out of them
- I also put the question out to the Telegram group and got a very interesting answer from listener Hob. An application called Deskreen which can be used from an appimage and can turn any device with a web browser into another screen with some small caveats
  - If you want it to be an independent screen then you need a dummy display adapter hooked up to your system or you can display one of the screens that is already there
  - Control does not go through the device it goes through the computer which does make sense from an extra screen perspective but does mean it is not the best for remote controlling a computer.
  - The adapters are not expensive though, so that is good, and then you just set up like a normal screen and connect through the application. This is awesome if you have a couple of older-yet-still-decent tablets sitting around. A lot of older iPads have really good screens but a lot of difficulty adding new applications and would be perfect for something like this

Moss
- I got the FuzZ400 back online with an old AMD Radeon HD 6770 video card on loan from Dale Miracle! Hope my mic sounds good. I still need to get the mic boom installed which will only take a drill bit of the correct size to accomplish. The bootup report that the rear fan was not working was solved when I found a piece of styrofoam wedged in the fan blades.
- I’ve been having minor issues with the SSD in the FuzZ400 because it thinks it’s still in the Gigabyte Mini. I may have to reinstall Mint altogether to get everything really back together, but my current workarounds are good. Sabayon owned GRUB and I could not update it or add Grub Customizer to Sabayon (because Sabayon repos are permanently offline), and Mint did not want to take GRUB back for some reason, so I installed UbuntuDDE on sda5. No more Gentoo. Sad. The other distros were not affected.
- I installed a new version of ExLight on the Kudu to replace Lubuntu. I’m having strange wifi issues, but this is the farthest I have gotten with a distro written by Arne Exton.
- My Manjaro Cinnamon installation finally glitched out (after maybe 8 months) so I replaced that with UbuntuDDE. There were three issues, and two of them were fixed through a chat in Telegram with the dev, and I filed a bug on the 3rd issue with the thanks of the dev. I now have UbuntuDDE Respin on all three of my machines (not counting the Raspberry Pis), and my wife wants it on her T430. Could this be my new Daily Driver?
- Listener Dylan Burger submitted another excellent article to It’s MOSS, and I responded by making him an Admin on the site. So now we are two. Anyone else?
- Not gonna talk about my teeth.
- I’m told that my mother’s lawyers have finally sent documents out following her demise. I have not yet received them, but one cousin has.
- We may finish White Night, volume 9 of Dresden Files, tonight.

Bo
- Steam Game Festival
  - Frozen Flame
  - Graven
  - Trail of Ayash
  - Little Nightmares 2
- Glorious Eggroll Proton build
- Josh and I made a NextCloud and email server.
  - Nextcloud is installed via Snap
  - Mailcow is installed via docker
- My son had absolutely 0 interest in my retropie.
- Ordered the parts for my pi camera and plan to build it on stream.

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

- Sudo Vulnerability
  - The exploit is in the hands of… well… everyone now. Metasploit has the module.
  - A heap buffer overflow occurs when you stuff a software full of data that causes some kind of breakage. In this case, that breakage leads to root access.
- Chrome[ium] Zero Day
  - Monocultuuuuuuurrrrrreeeeee!!!!!
  - Google is being very close to the chest with the details, but we know it’s another heap buffer overflow.
  - The Mitre database does not have information on the CVE. Unlisted other places like NIST.
  - Maybe linked to their nation-state writeup.
  - Electron apps…

Update your Stuff

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on February 21, 2021.

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

Joe – www.Tllts.org, www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, [email protected]
Bo – YouTube Undercast Collective
Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, other blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, [email protected], @[email protected] on Mastodon, [email protected] for quick response, Sponsus!
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 Hawk – [email protected], @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites.
Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, [email protected], linuxuserspace.show and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News. Buy me a coffee!

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

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