Episode 471 Show Notes

Welcome to mintCast

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

This is Episode 471!

Recorded on Sunday, October 26, 2025.

Like a leaf on the wind im Joe; … Moss; Scrambling to the last minute, I’m Bill; My name is Majid and I’m a fake sysadmin; Remembering the Spaceman, I’m Jim

— Play Standard Intro —

  • First up in the news: LMDE 7 “Gigi” released,
  • Then in our Wanderings: Bill suffers an outage, Joe’s Jellyfin is “ok”, Majid is back to “full time”, and Jim has a lot of extensions.
  • 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

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The News

20 minutes

  • LMDE 7 “Gigi” released
    • From the Mint Blog by Clem (via londoner)
    • LMDE 7 “Gigi” was released on October 14. Upgrade instructions for LMDE 6 users are available at: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4923
    • If you are using LMDE 7 BETA, you don’t need to upgrade. Just apply any available updates.
    • Release Notes for LMDE 7

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Bi-Weekly Wanderings

30 minutes (~5-8 mins each)

  • Bill
    • Well it’s been all about the servers these last couple weeks.
      • ECC Ram in all servers
      • Upgrade all processors to Xeon CPUs
        • Intel Core i7-4770 to Xeon E3-1270v3 on M93p
        • Intel Core i5-3470 to Xeon E3-1275 M93p
      • Perhaps need to update Bios on M93p and M92p
      • If that doesn’t work, I’ll get a couple Dell Poweredge T40 motherboards. I can pick them up for about $120 on ebay.
    • Had internet outage Tuesday night
    • Collabora document server stopped working. Had to downgrade the container.
  • Joe
    • Have not done much. Continue with printing some ABS. I am loving how it is coming out. I still have several rolls to go through but not much that needs printing right this second. Printed some halloween dust collectors and will probably do a few more.
    • Also was able to pick up some light strips at a really good price. two sets at 12v and one at 24v for about two dollars. But i did have to get some controllers and power supplies for them. I picked up one and cut one of the 12v strips and attached it to the inside of the riser for the elegoo centauri carbon. it did improve the lighting but i think i could do better with the 24v line. Still it is pretty good for now. I may switch out the controller however since that one is IR and the other ones that i got were wifi.
    • I ordered some more barrel connectors for them as well so that i can easily hook them to the available power supplies. Which it turns out i have plenty of the 12v ones and one of the 24v ones. The 24v one i have from a filament dryer that did not work out and and the 12v ones from the mesh wifi routers that i put to other uses. They both work well with the barrel connectors that i got.
    • I repaired some of my low cost BT headsets as well. Some of them are still pretty dang good after having the mmcx replaced on them after they wore out but some of the others have terrible mics and worse battery life. still can use them as backups for while at the gym although i wont try to use them for phone calls. They are more than enough to make it through a gym session and get me home where i have better pairs while still being small enough to fit into a pocket without issues.
    • I also grabbed one of my old Razer Nari Ultimates and put it into production. They were previously having issues with the usb dongles but this one seems to be working for now. It means that one of these times that i have a show while i am out in the garage i can start fixing the other side of the arctis headsets that i have.
    • Looks like my jellyfin server is doing well enough. I have not stress tested it to see how many transcodes it can do at the same time or anything but the two that it sometimes has going seems to not be causing an issue. At least until Moss tells me otherwise.
    • I still have not setup the new version of nextcloud but that may change before the start of the show.
    • My son asked for a 3d printed mask so i found one that he might enjoy and printed it for him. Wanted to get at least one printed so that if it didnt fit and he picked another i could atleast guess at the scaling. But it fit and he liked it. He said he might paint it but if he doesnt the black will do well enough. Since it came out so well i also decided to 3d print a couple of things for myself with the roll. i 3d printed a beard pin that is a modded skull that i have printed before. It was a hair pin but needed a shorter skull to work well in the beard. I also found a viking helmet that would fit on my print bed as a single piece and although it uses half a roll of filament i gave it a shot. While writing this i am currently at the office watching it print from my phone.  It did not fit.  at least it did not fit me.  it fit JJ just fine so i am tweaking the scaling a bit and will probably need to switch rolls before i give it a try.  If it still dont fit i will need to thin the walls cause right now it is taking up the whole bed. I also used vase mode to print a coupld of small skulls that did not print out as well when scaled up. Thats ok though i like the look of it and modified the vase mode settings so that there were more walls and printed out a candy bucket. I still have some small rolls of abs left but i think that i will switch back to PLA for a short time and get the last of these halloween prints out.
    • Spoke too soon in regards to my mini rack doing well.  I am having a problem with one of the drives disconnecting.  But i have finally isolated which one it is and sadly it is the one that has all of my movies and kids tv shows on it.  I was able to get it isolated and disconnected from the mini rack and then hooked up to my main pc.  it also disconnected from there the first time i tried to save all the data from it.  But while slow it was working to copy it off of there using the command line although the permissions are as root.  i could put in the extra work to fix that now but i would rather just get the data off there even if it takes a couple of days.  
    • The drive itself is passing smart test and the errors that come up have to do with journal and superblock.  I am hoping that it is not a hardware issue and just something got messed up one of the times when the power went out.  Maybe i will get lucky and all it will need is a reformat.  Much testing will be required.  I do have an 8tb drive that is not being used yet although it is hooked up.  I will try to transfer everything to that one if i cannot get this one to work.  But i will be keeping a backup for now until i verify the status of the other drive.  I guess i could start pulling drives out of the internals on the garage pc.  there are 2 8tb drives in there as well and i probably only need one.  Makes me want to get rich and buy a bunch of brand new 24tb drives.
    • I did Get some of the data off the drive but after a while it would not stay connected long enough to get any data. At that point i moved the data from local onto the unused 8tb drive and remaped all the lxc’s that were using it. Some of the data will have to be rebuilt but i am already in the process of doing that. I dont know how long it will take me to get my movie collection back on there. The old drive i reformatted and I was able to move 2tb of data onto it but i am not satisfied with the testing yet and will try a couple more things before i move it back to the mini rack. Literally moving one cable. It also means that i am going to start looking into replacing these drives one at a time with 16tb drives. Or maybe a mixture of 16tb drives and smaller 1 or 2tb ssd’s and have the lxc’s and vms on there.
  • Majid
    • Back to full time work, but still have some accrued leave to take, which works out quite well
    • Server
      • Export the pool
      • Ubuntu Server
      • Jellyfin – easy!
      • Immich – not so easy
      • Samba – some woes! Now it works
    • Distrohopping
      • Cosmic
    • WSL
    • Retro gaming
      • Handheld
      • Amiga on pi400
        • Retropie
        • recallbox
        • pimiga
    • Laptop replacement experiment Xiaomi Pad 7 – iPadOs 26-like
    • Cambridge Ear Buds and other Codec adventures
    • Deezer – Spotify
    • You don’t find Tool, Tool finds you
    • Wheel of Time
  • Jim
    • I’m now up to nearly 50 Firefox extensions installed. All super necessary.
  • ff2mpv Firefox extension + local companion app downloaded from github to a directory in /opt. Great way to play a YT video from the current URL with a click of the icon or better yet custom keyboard shortcut or play a selected link from a web page in MPV. No ads, no distractions, no loading the YT page few seconds delay, and this is also great for low RAM computers.
  • FTP Server (Swiftly) FOSS app available on F-Droid, is an excellent way to transfer files from Android phone to any computer. Easily access through Nemo in Mint Cinnamon and bookmark the connection for each device, eg laptop, desktop, tablet, phone.
  • yt-dlp –live-from-start option to download live stream while it is playing even if you missed the start of the stream. VPN to get around YouTube geo-blocking since a lot of live content is half-assedly geo-blocked on YouTube. And also on international tv channel web sites.
  • MakeMKV new beta product key is now available on their forum. Good test last week: Jurassic World: Rebirth Blu-ray from the library main feature audio played distorted on my LG set top player. So I ripped all 65 GB incl. Main feature, extra featurettes, and commentary tracks, then played it via Plex. Transcoding, what transcoding? Even huge files stream over Wi-Fi on my local network with no issues.
  • Thunderbird “notifications” on Mint Cinnamon annoying, can’t figure out how to turn off the trivial notifications every time I click any folder or tab. I’m not talking about new email arriving notifications, but any interaction with the app generates an unnecessary notification repeatedly. Turning off notifications globally in Cinnamon is undesirable.
  • Google Calendar(s) on my laptop for the first time, not just Calendar Pad front end on my Android phone.
  • 1- GNOME Calendar- Pre-installed on Mint. Issues: A) Start of Week is Sunday, can’t change to Monday without editing config file or other tricks. Madness. B) Pop-up of a day’s events from month view is really skinny and doesn’t show enough text. C) App doesn’t open up with keyboard shortcut when added to panel and docked with KDocker. Gave up on this.
  • 2- Google Calendar Web App: First time making a web app, used both Firefox and Chromium to make it. Worked well on the surface, added to menu like expected. No problem making Monday the first day of the week. The issue: The app doesn’t leave the task switcher when docked with KDocker, it stays as if it was still open and shows when using Alt + Tab. This annoys me. Gave up on this.
  • 3- Thunderbird: Worked well. No problem making Monday the first day of the week. Worked as expected with KDocker. But it annoyed me that my email would often start downloading in the other tab every time I wanted to check my calendar so gave up on this.
  • 4- Betterbird: Thunderbird fork. (Used install script to place it in /opt). Didn’t link it to my Thunderbird account purposefully. No problem making Monday the first day of the week. Worked as expected with KDocker and keyboard shortcut. Calendar notifications seem reasonable so far.
  • TECKNET USB Wired Mouse, $9. Finally needed to replace a mouse after many years of using old mice.
  • OS Hopping: GhostBSD, based on FreeBSD 14.3. “The Linux Mint of FreeBSD”, my words. Designed as an integrated operating system by one team. Not like Linux, a collection of a kernel, plus core utils, plus init system, plus desktop environment, plus various software. Installed on 2013 era Celeron desktop with 4 GB of RAM that I purchased on CL for $20 last year. No Wi-Fi, but using my twenty year old Linksys Wireless G USB device for Wi-Fi. Mate desktop environment. Customized the theme, and my keyboard shortcuts as well as aliases in Fish shell to sort-of resemble Mint Cinnamon. Pre-installed with Firefox 144.0, (not ESR) so is up to date, and Evolution Mail & Calendar, plus Libre Office, and Caja file manager. Installed Albert Launcher, CopyQ clipboard manager, Thunderbird, Celluloid, VLC, gThumb, & yt-dlp, all from software manager. Have to figure out a few limitations like getting my paid VPN to work through the command line., Very nice friendly system for BSD noobs. Active forum and Telegram channel as well.
  • The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror XXXVI (S37 E03). Fox OTA Oct. 19th, 2025. On Hulu now. Parodied The Blob, Late Night With The Devil, and Waterworld/Mad Max.
  • R.I.P. Ace Frehley, I was a Kiss fan as a child, then saw Frehley’s Comet tour, opening for Iron Maiden in Albany, NY with my brother in 1988. Wish I had seen him again since then in a club or theater venue. Listening to radio host Eddie Trunk’s podcasts remembering him.

Shape 1 — Play Vibrations Transition Bumper —

Vibrations from the Ether

20 minutes (~5 minutes each)

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Check This Out

10 minutes

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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
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • 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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