mintCast 357.5 – The Endeavour Endeavor

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LINUX INNARDS:

• Musings:
• Is there any interest in us doing a review of Gnome 40?
  • Moss – No. I’ll wait for Pop!_OS to fix it first.

• Listener Dylan Burger asked, “What one feature would you ask to be added to your daily driver distro?”
• Endeavour OS
  • Joe – I run Arch.
    • I installed Endeavour on the 7140 which has been my go to now for a while for installing and testing distros.  
    • It being a tablet, I assumed there would be some vagaries right from the start
    • I do want to say that it installed easily enough and, big surprise, the keyboard and touchpad worked like a charm and had no disconnect issues that I have seen with other distros.
    • It also played Plex videos easily, which is something that the 7130 has been having issues with lately due to overhead, so I was very impressed.  I was able to install chrome from the aur and it was interesting for me to figure out how to install things.  Then I made my life a little easier by installing flatpaks and using appimages where possible
    • First problem I had was in setting up screen rotation.  I was able to find the setting and turn it on in cinnamon just like normal but then nothing would happen when I would rotate the screen.  Next issue that I noticed is that while I was able to see that there was a bluetooth radio it would not see the devices that I had in pairing mode.  Then I realized that despite the icon being there bluetooth was not installed and I was able to get it installed and running in a few minutes.  
      • Screen rotation also took some research and setup but I was able to get that working with a couple of installs and a reboot
    • This feels a bit nostalgic, having to dig up ways to fix things but I do understand that the concern comes when it is time to run updates
    • The next tool I tested was sshfs.  It worked great and was not hard to install at all once I learned the install commands.  Installing from an AUR is not difficult either. But back to sshfs I did not set up the automated connection and reconnection on internet connection.  But what I did was set up an alias to connect and disconnect the sshfs mount which is working very well.  I had tried to set up an executable but for some reason it would not work.  I think that as soon as the script was done running it would close out the connection.
    • I was able to get x2go working which was a bit of a chore getting all the dependencies and the config changes into place so that it would work properly but that does make research and installation easier.  I am able to work from my main machine and do installs directly on the device and view the changes.  This is helpful especially when the tablet has to charge.
    • I was able to get the AUR of Chrome installed but it is listed as out of date. Only since the 14th so not bad but still waiting to see when it will get updated.
    • That being said, I did the setup to mount an external microsd as the downloads folder which more than doubled my space as I am only using a 32Gb M.2 SSD and now the 64gb microSD. The problem comes in that the simlinking prevents running aurs directly from the downloads folder.  I have to move them to a non linked location in order to get them to work.  But I am going to keep this the way it is because of the limited space.  Unless I end up replacing the M.2 which I dont think will happen as I plan on selling this device on at some point
    • No surprise appimage worked fine for standard notes.  
    • I also installed steam but had to set a folder in the Downloads section as the install folder since that is the only place that had any space.
      • Also turned on Proton to test things out.  I installed GTAVC using proton but would not work.  Not sure if it is an issue with the speed of the microSD or the OS.
      • Steam streaming worked just as well on this device as I have seen it work on others.  During still frames it was very clear and good looking but with heavy movements there was artifacting and pixelation 
      • I also installed Torchlight 2, which is a Linux native game, and it also would not play.  I also tried turning off Proton and uninstalling and reinstalling just to make sure that it wasn’t installing the windows version anyway.  Then I did some research and found out I was back in dependency hell.  But this time I could not find all the packages that I would need
      • So I installed the flatpak which would not allow me to switch the library to the Downloads folder.  So I reinstalled Torchlight just to see and it still would not work .
      • GloriousEggroll’s Blog » How to get out of Wine Dependency hell
      • I should have pointed out I do these steps before installing Steam

• Tony.
  • So I already had Endeavour installed on my Toshiba Z30 and had talked about it briefly on Distrohoppers Digest last episode. I have to say this is the only way I have used Arch, although I did try vanilla Arch at one point but after the initial install I could not get my WiFi to work and did not have the patience to figure it out, particularly as just after this Endeavour was released which made the process very easy to get to a working desktop.
  • For this install I used the net install option and chose to install the Mate DE as this is my preferred DE and has been since the demise of Gnome 2. The installer is very easy to use and dual booting with the install on Mint 20 was not an issue, after the install had completed at first boot I was presented with 2 options for Endeavour and 10 for Mint, While I know why they are there they should be in a dropdown menu of options as they are with other Linux installs, which can be collapsed or expanded as required.
  • I managed to install Snapd but so far have not installed any snap packages, I read on the Wiki that Snap and Flatpacks are still work in progress, so a bit hit and miss. I tried get-iplayer which is the main programme I need snapd for, but it could not find the package. I did install Audacity last night expecting the latest 3.0 package and was surprised to find it wasn’t even the latest 2.4.x version only being 2.4.1, so I’m not sure what that is about. I have tried the AUR  without any success there either. 
  • Updates have not been a problem as I run the updater every time I start the system using the welcome screen button. Even after a couple of weeks without using the system it worked flawlessly, but I would not want to try that for too long, due to the risk of broken repositories.
• Moss – The answer to Leo’s question is, No, but I really like *Manjaro* Cinnamon.
  • I had the same boot problem as I‘ve mentioned before and what Tony was just talking about: it creates multiple boot entries for each of the other distros on the hard drive, and no matter how many times I clean it up using Grub Customizer, it creates more (although fewer than the first time). If they are options, as Tony posited, they surely don’t give you any information on why each line exists, they all look identical to me. I posted some screenshots to the Telegram group, maybe to Discord as well.
    • LXQt desktop here is a mess. I try to use a different workspace and the screen goes blank blue with no controls. Sometimes I can get it back, sometimes I can’t, and sometimes the system just locks up.
    • So I switched to Budgie. I wasn’t expecting to see a Gnome footprint for the menu icon, but there it was. The bottom taskbar from LXQt was still there, but was not functional. 
    • There are a lot of really nice touches, but the papercuts are bigger than the successes. I managed to get all my (few) games installed. But when I changed desktops, Budgie couldn’t even find things I’d installed using LXQt Desktop. I knew they wouldn’t be on the taskbar, but they don’t show up on the menus.
    • I couldn’t finish two days with Endeavour and installed something else.
• Josh 
  • Endeavor is not the Linux distro for me.
  • I installed it on both my HP Stream dual core 1.1GHz 4gb RAM 32Gb EMMC and my Desktop which is a custom build with Ryzen 5800X with 16Gb 3200MHz RAM and a Nvidia 1650 Super so my PC may not be the best but it’s no slouch.
  • It installed fine on both systems with no issues but that is where the fun ends for me.
  • On my HP Stream I wanted to install a GUI for pacman called pamac because I cannot stand yay and pacman on the command line. I started by typing in yay pamac and was greeted with about 25 or so choices and I had no idea what to choose. I just chose one and went on my way and after over 10 minutes! It was installed but lo and behold pamac was not actually installed. I tried looking for it in my menu and on the command line but nothing so well I decided maybe I did something wrong in the installer so I just reinstalled Endeavor. This time when I installed it I was not asked what desktop I wanted so I just kept going and when it was done it was xfce yuck! So I reinstalled again and this time it was plasma cause it gave me the option to use that one. So now finally I try installing pamac again and this time it actually installed and I could use it thank goodness.
  • My desktop was another story. I actually got it installed and everything no problem, pamac installed flawlessly and since it had the nvidia drivers preinstalled I didn’t have to fiddle with any display stuff. I installed steam cause this is my gaming rig and I tried to play some games and well let’s just say It wasn’t the best experience on linux. The games would stutter and have screen tearing. I did mitigate this by installing gamemode that Ubuntu has pre installed that helps turn the governor to max on your cpu and does other gaming optimization. Even with that installed it still had major issues and I just couldn’t game with it so back to Mint I went.
• Mike – I have notes
• Leo – Me too
  • Warpinator, Web App Manager, Hypnotix
  • Steam – > Retro City Rampage (native), Brawlhalla (Steam Play)
  • Brave, Edge from AUR

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

• Henrik Hemrin on 354.5
• Henrik Hemrin on 355.5
• Brad Alexander
• Sid32
  • https://taskernet.com/shares/?user=AS35m8mijzgu11T%2Bv4P5XGUCuyQylcuxX17kNjEf%2FDDr5Arovj2UsUqsQfxreYtt9i6MYw%3D%3D&id=Task%3AAmaze+FTP
• John Wallis

Error found when loading /etc/profile:

/etc/profile: line 29: /etc/profile: Permission denied

Leo’s Response

ls -l /etc/profile 

-rw-r–r– 1 root root 581 Dec  5  2019 /etc/profile

sudo chmod 644 /etc/profile

• Highlander [Moss]

CHECK THIS OUT!

• Tony H 
  • Hacker Public Radio
• Moss
  • https://youtu.be/aPvYI-nczXM

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

• Ubuntu 21.04 Testing Week
• Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on April 4, 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, several blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, @[email protected] on Mastodon, [email protected], 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. Crowbar Kernel Panic on Spotify.
• Mike – [email protected] and GrouchyM on Discord
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, [email protected], linuxuserspace.show and 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!>

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