Episode 468 Show Notes

Welcome to mintCast

the Podcast by the Linux Mint Community for All Users of Linux

This is Episode 468!

Recorded on Sunday, September 14, 2025.

needing more coffee im Joe; … Moss; Can’t get enough coffee, I’m Bill; … Majid; … Eric; … Charles; still loving PPAs, I’m Jim

— Play Standard Intro —

  • First up in the news: Linux Mint 22.2 “Zara” released, Mint Monthly News – August,
  • In security and privacy:
  • Then in our Wanderings: Joe , Majid , Charles, Bill and Jim
  • And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions
  • Please remember if you want to follow along with our discussions, the full show notes for this episode are linked in the show’s description at mintcast.org/show-notes

— Play News Transition Bumper —

The News

20 minutes

  • Mint 22.2 ‘Zara’ released
  • LMDE 7 beta expected in Sep. 2025; Mint 22.3 in Dec. 2025
    • Work started on LMDE 7, codename Gigi.
    • The goal for this release is to bring the following features together:
      • A Debian 13 package base
      • The improvements which shipped with Linux Mint 22.2
      • Support for OEM installations
    • The OEM support was already implemented during the Mint 22.2 development cycle, so we were able to progress really fast on this. It’s now been tested in real conditions on top of the new package base and it’s working very well.
    • The new Mint 22.2 features were also ported to LMDE 7. We’re adapting the libadwaita-1.5 changes to libadwaita-1.7 and re-applying patches at the moment.
    • Note that i386 is no longer fully supported upstream by Debian 13 so LMDE 7 will only ship for amd64.
    • The BETA for LMDE 7 will be released this September.
    • Linux Mint 22.3
    • Although the latest release came later than expected and we’re currently focused on LMDE 7, we’re still planning on having a Mint 22.3 release in December.
    • This is going to be a very short release cycle. The priority will be the new version of Cinnamon and shipping some of the important WIP (work in progress / planned features) which were started earlier this year:
      • The new menu
      • The status applet
      • The Wayland-compatible handling for keyboard layouts and input methods
  • KDE launches its own distribution (again)
  • Firefox To End 32-bit support in 2026
  • Run Windows apps in Linux using open source WinBoat
  • Is Roku Driving the Final Nail in the Coffin of Traditional TV?
  • Not completely linux related but Borderlands 4 released Sept 12
    • Mostly mixed reviews seems like you either love it or hate he bad reviews seem to talk about characters. I will reserve judgment
    • good reviews talk about gameplay and the bad ones talk about the characters
    • Many people are saying that the steam deck simply is not powerful enough to run it
    • If that is the case I will have to get something set up on one of my other computers and stream it to my steam deck
    • Turns out after some further research that it is having a lot of trouble running on PC in general. So if you are on the fence about buying it and want to play on PC might want to wait for some optimizations. Or have some very top end hardware.

— Play Security Transition Bumper —

Security and Privacy

10 minutes

  • Plex User Data Exposed
    • Plex has alerted its customers about a security incident that may have affected user accounts. In an email sent to subscribers, the popular media server company confirmed that an unauthorized third party gained access to one of its databases. The breach exposed emails, usernames, and hashed passwords. Plex emphasized that passwords were encrypted following best practices, so attackers cannot simply read them. The company also reassured users that no credit card data was compromised, since Plex does not store that information on its servers. Still, out of caution, it is requiring all account holders to reset their credentials.
    • Users are being directed to reset their passwords at plex.tv/reset. During the process, Plex recommends enabling the option to sign out all connected devices. This measure logs out every device associated with the account, including Plex Media Servers, forcing a fresh login with the updated password. The company says it has already fixed the method used by the intruder to gain entry and is conducting additional security reviews. Plex is also urging subscribers to enable two-factor authentication if they have not already done so.

Charles–

An (almost) catastrophic OpenZFS bug and the humans that made it (and Rust is here too)

Bug Description:

The bug was in the vdev_raidz_asize_to_psize function, which is crucial for converting allocated size to physical size in RAIDZ configurations.

  • The function incorrectly returned the allocated size (asize) instead of the calculated physical size (psize), which could cause data to be written past the end of the allocated space, potentially trampling existing data.

Context of OpenZFS:

OpenZFS handles data with three notions of size: logical, physical, and allocated.

  • Logical size is what the user sees (e.g., file contents).
  • Physical size is the size on disk after transformations like compression and encryption.
  • Allocated size is the space needed on a virtual device, including metadata, parity, and checksums.

Impact and Discovery:

The bug was discovered while testing a new feature with aggressive allocator fragmentation settings, leading to weird errors.

  • It took almost two days to track down the bug, highlighting the subtlety and potential severity of such issues.

Tools Used:

C language is used which has limitations in catching these type of bugs. Rust provides stronger tools for these types of bugs but there’s a learning curve and the code rewrite is a huge effort.

— Play Wanderings Transition Bumper —

Linux Wanderings

30 minutes (~5-8 minutes each)

  • Joe
    • Doing the migration of the drives in my DAS from my garage computer to my mini rack slowly as I do not want to break anything. I have transferred one of the crives over after a couple of rough starts that I talked about last time. But now it is a share that I was able to attacj ti the proxmox from the openmediavault and get to it from the garage pc using credentials and fstab.
    • I moved several tb worth of data onto and I had started the process of pointing the different lxcs to it to start using it for data and realized that there was no write permissions because the lxc’s are unprivileged
    • I understand the need for security in this but it does make things difficult. I tried fixing things the “right” way but because the NAS server is one of the VM’s I can’t really use fstab to make things work. Or use @reboot in crontab the way I have with some of the other shares on other PC’s.
    • I was able to do a short term work around with my garage PC since it is able to robustly connect to the share and provide a share back to the LXC’s. This is a terrible solution as it goes from the mini pc to the garage pc and then back again to the mini pc.
    • I tested a couple of different solutions to make sure that it would reconnect everything on reboot. I tried the fstab and the crontab and neither of those did the job without help on reboot.
    • I then did some research and found out about hookscripts which can be added to different phases of a startup or shutdown of an LXC or a VM and went to work. You can do this in either bash or perl but the documentation for both kind of sucks. I should mention that it allows for the running of scripts on the host machine not in the container.
    • I decided to do it in perl since the setup for it was a little more straightforward and the example file was in perl. The first thing I did was a simple mount which did not work because at the time it executes on a full restart the network is not up for it yet
    • Not hard to fix, I just added a wait before the mount and that did the trick. Now I am in control of the permissions and the timings of when it mounts.
    • Should be super simple to add the new drives to it as I move them over. I have the adapters and cables for two of the 3 drives that need to be moved but I think that I will need to remove one of the 250gb drives so that I can get the other 8tb drive attached.
    • Also because of the new drive locations I will probably need to redo several of my LXC’s from scratch anyway once the permissions are correct. Or at least delete the current databases and remake them using the new file locations
    • Also finished off the spools of petg and moved on to the ABS that I had in storage. Happy to say that so far they are dry enough to print with. Still fun trying to work with ABS and how it warps can be interesting. Havent had problems with adhesion but I have had overhangs that warped. Might try some different supports and see how much that changes things.
    • I had some very small things to design and print and ABS is pretty good with that since it is a bit more rigid. A very tiny piece of one of my old crushers was missing so I had to design it and print it. It took a few iterations but I was able to do it and I am working on some mods for the earcups to make the thing a bit more comfortable.
    • It is missing one of the long screws but hopefully the added plastic and glue will keep it together. I will keep and eye out for a screw that is long enough however
    • This is also in the time frame where my wife purchased me a new set that was on clearance. Pretty cool since the new ones are USB c. But that also leaves me free to experiment with the old ones and find out what works. If I destroy it its not really that much of a concern
  • Jim
    • Upgraded media desktop to Mint 22.0 using Mint Upgrade Tool; added Noble Numbat PPAs
    • Set up Timeshift and Back In Time to auto-backup Sager Laptop afresh
    • Warpinator password on all three Linux Mint computers to enable file transfers
    • Troubleshooting external hard drive that one Mint desktop no longer recognizes
    • LED accent lighting added for background eye candy during evening podcasts
  • Majid
  • Bill

–Play Bodhi Corner Transition Bumper*–

Bodhi Corner

3-5 minutes

  • A user recently requested “I want Super_L to open just the menu, like in Windows.” Developer the_waiter apparently implemented this feature in Nov. 2023 which he confirmed recently in the Bodhi Discord. That makes Moksha one of the only desktop environments aside from Windows, plus Cinnamon, and also suppposedly Gnome, and KDE on Linux that can do this natively. Very handy for those with decades of Windows keyboard muscle memory to use the left Super key alone as an app launcher.

Shape 1 — Play Vibrations Transition Bumper —

Vibrations from the Ether

20 minutes (~5 minutes each)

— Play Check This Transition Bumper —

Check This Out

10 minutes

Charles:

  • AI The Bullshit Machine Two Professors at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA One instructor is a biologist and the other is an information scientist.

“The two have devoted a large part of our research and teaching careers to studying the ways in which information technology facilitates the spread of misinformation and disinformation through traditional and social media, and to studying what we can do about it as individuals and as a society. In short, we study bullshit, and how to fight it.

There has always been plenty of bullshit to go around, but a new source is emerging: generative artificial intelligence (genAI) and in particular, large language models (LLMs) that are exceedingly good at talking like people do. Their greatest strength, but also their greatest danger, is their ability to sound authoritative on nearly any topic irrespective of factual accuracy. In other words, their superpower is their superhuman ability to bullshit.”

Housekeeping & Announcements

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Wrap-up

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

  • Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
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  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>

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