Welcome to mintCast

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

This is Episode 489!

Recorded on Sunday, July 5th, 2026

Happy America Birthday I’m Joe; Fumbling with the new tools, I’m Bill; failing with AI, I’m Majid; …Eric; …Charles; Saying goodbye to Fire TV, I’m Jim

Insert Intro

First up in the news: PlayStation and Microsoft goes fully digital, Amazon blames piracy, Brave goes “containerized”, and Immich has “Big Upgrades.”
In security and privacy: Give a hint of the privacy news coming up, if there is any
Then in our Wanderings: Joe does more with the mini rack and plans ahead, Jim drops Fire TV like a hot potato,
In Check this Out: Myna lets you talk instead of type in Ubuntu
In Vibrations from the Ether: Send us your thoughts and questions

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.

The News (20 min.)

Security and Privacy (10 min.)

Wanderings (40 min.)

Joe
My wanderings are a bit shorter this time because we switched back to a bi weekly and it has been attrociously hot in my garage to the point where some of my hardware is not working. Like my rk100 wireless mechanical keyboard and my garage pc. We have also had the power go out a couple of times and the UPS’s are working very well for the devices that hooked up to them. I think i will need to also connect the garage pc to it. Yes currently it is just the mini rack and the networking gear. But i dont want the power issues to break the ram in my garage pc. I till greatly reduce the amount of time that the UPS can run for but the power never goes out for long anyway.
Well i have started migrating my jellyfin from a vm to an LXC. I started doing it because of the network shares on the VM. If i restarted the server with the shares then it would break the jellyfin. So i was trying out the lxc on the same machine as the share. I may try a couple of different things in regards to the machine it is set up on and how it connects to the drives. And then i tried to migrate some of the movies from one drive to the other and my usb fan that i was using was pointed in the wrong direction and it was a very hot day. So long story short i thought the sata controller died. This gave me the chance to test out the 10 port that i had been planning to switch. For whatever reason it was still not coming up. But the old 5 port is working. I dropped the 4tb drive from OMV so that the container would start and connected all the other drives so that it was working without audiobookshelf(i have a mostly complete backup). So then i ordered another of the 6 ports for now and i pulled back out the 40mm fan that i had tried previously from the set top box that i gutted for the hard drive. I took another look at it and tested it with the external power supply and it worked fine. I compared it to the sata to 4 pin fan adapter and saw that the problem was that the power and ground were opposite. Really should have thought of that before. I switched the pins around on the connector for the fan and it kicks right on. hopefully the little bit of extra cooling is all it really needs. The smarter solution is probably to move all of this inside somewhere with climate control especially now that two of the kids have moved out and i am lifting weights at the gym instead of the garage. Or atleast the nas portion of it. And then i went and hooked up the new 6 port and it still didnt work. So maybe the old one is still good but i still have a problem.
So back to digging through journactl and various forums to see if i can find the actual issue. yes the fan is hooked up this time so i hopefully wont get the same problem again. But in looking through and trying out various things i discovered that it was probably an issue with IOMMU which is the firmware that allows for pci passthrough. What ended up working was turning it off at boot for one reboot which allowed the pci device to be seen and booting again with it turned back on. Then i was able to get multiple boots with the drives coming back on. But now i have multiple of the pci cards that are probably working and i am thinking that i may need to find a use for them. I may even test the other internal ones that i had and see if i can get something setup on another computer. I am also back to needing to test the 10 port again. But that may do better on another device. Like my garage pc with a bunch of 2.5s hooked up to it. I have plenty of power supplies so i can make more racks and i ordered 4 more spools of petg on prime day cause i got them for 30 dollars. now i just need to import all the different stls that i will use into tinkercad and align it all before i start printing so that i can plan it all ahead. the power supply takes up the most space and i will need to make a mock up of it in the design phase.
Because of how terrible the battery life is on my lattitude i have started using my mini laptop more. The latitude doesnt last an hour off the charger while the mini will do 6 hours or more. the mini laptop doesnt do graphics processing very well and that sometimes slows things down but the extra battery life is nice. Something that has always bothered me on this device was the splash screen and the loading text. The splash screen was was sideways and the loading text was upside down from the last time i tried to fix. The text was easy enough to fix, just needed to update grub with the correct orientation. The splash screen took a bit more research but i found that it is controlled by plymouth and that there is a file location that has a series of images that can be changed. There was two sets of images and all i did was adjust the rotation on each image so that it would show as oriented correctly. I know this is more of a workaround than it is a fix but i will take the win. Then i decided to have some fun with it and replaced the images with another. i did have to scale it down alot to get it to fit but now my splash screen is a picture of yoda. I will probably swap it out again for something else in the future. for those that are curious /usr/share/plymouth/themes/mint-logo is the path if you want to it yourself. you do have to do an update-initramfs -u.
I am also using it to podcast right now.
Majid
Been a while! April was my last time on
Been a year since my near death experience !
CachyOS on work laptop
Was great till I borked it!
Very quick, had to change schedulers
Gnome vs KDE
Damn AI! Claude has a lot to answer for
BTFRS Snapshots
Back to fedora
Trying to convert wife
Immutable?
LMDE?
Manjaro!
Oppo Find N5 Chinese ROM
Hacks required!
Like lots! E.g quick share, local send, revanced, app markets etc
Required changes to my Wear OS
More secure? ironically
Earbud changes
Due to phone
Open earbuds?
Daughter took Nothing (a)
Nothing ear / Noise / Bose QC (Prime Day)
Sold Sennheisers & OP4s
Moto g32 upgraded to Redmi Note 15 5G
Samson Q2U issues
Distro issues? USB issues?
Interface time?
M-Audio Solo
Vodcaster
Fire Stick
Atypical Doctor Episode with a Communist
Bad audio
Problem on these podcasts too ?solution
Media
Muse album
Spider Noir
X Men 97
Agency season 2
House of the Dragon
Jim
Favorite Light Weight Distro or DE?: Question for the hosts- If you have a viable laptop or other computer that is more than 15 years old and has 4 GB of RAM or less, do you have a lightweight distro or desktop environment that you like to use instead of Mint or your other usual ones that you’d normally use on a newer device?
HP Pavilion dv7: Laptop that I purchased for $65 on Craigslist last year has an AMD Turion X2 Dual-Core Mobile RM-75 chip and a whopping 1 GB of L2 cache, and 4 GB of RAM. It came with an original 320 GB WD spinning rust hard drive with a March 2009 date stamped on it, meaning that this is a more than 17 year old laptop. But I replaced that and put the ow spare Intel 120 GB SSD originally purchased with my high end Sager laptop in 2012 as the internal drive. It also has a second internal slot for an additional hard drive if I want another for more data storage, plus three USB ports, one eSATA port, one HDMI port, an ethernet port, a DVD drive, a couple of legacy ports including a PCMCIA slot, and a built in webcam, along with a 17″ WXGA 1440 x 900 pixel screen.
Quark OS: Sister project of Q4OS which I talked about before, based on Ubuntu 26.04 Resolute Raccoon instead of Debian 13 Trixie. Using Linux kernel 7.0.0.-27 and the Trinity Desktop Environment (R14.1.6) based on the old KDE version 3.5 for its very low RAM usage compared to the other option KDE Plasma. I used to install Bodhi Linux with the Moksha desktop for older computers with little RAM like this, but since it hasn’t been updated in a long time and is still based on Ubuntu 22.04 while Quark OS is even more recently updated than the current Linux Mint for comparison, both in its Ubuntu base and Linux kernel version. Trinity Desktop Environment or TDE is i deal if you want to full desktop environment rather than a window manager, but want it to use as little RAM as possible. In my experience as little as ~400 MB upon initial boot. I discussed on a previous episode of the mintCast that it’s easy to enable the left Super key behavior as an app launcher while also allowing Super key + other key combos by using terminal program xcape in Q4OS and it works as well here in Quark OS to make the desktop environment act like Cinnamon and others in that respect. With an Ubuntu base I have the possibility of using my preferred PPAs rather than Flatpak, so this is my new go-to for a lightweight distro and desktop environment in old and under-powered computers. https://quark-os.sourceforge.io/
RCA Cambio 10.1″ Mini-Laptop/Tablet hybrid device that I purchased in 2018 for $100 that originally came with Windows 8.1. So I had this device sitting on the far side of my desk unused for the past few years and unclear if it would ever work again. It has a mini-keyboard and could attach to it if you wanted to sit it horizontally on the desk like a small laptop with a plastic kickstand in the back open to keep the tablet part upright. Or you could close the keyboard over the front of the screen to carry it around or open it up with the kickstand closed to use it like a tablet, vertically or horizontally. A few years ago, I saw a Github instructional about how to install Linux on it despite the fact that it had an Atom processor with a 32 bit bootloader and a 64 bit OS. I read the info and followed a link to a now non-existent blog where some enthusiastic people made re-spins of various distros that would work with the 32-bit bootlader and I selected Lubuntu to install on it since I had just settled on Mint and that seemed like the closest option that was available. Now, there were a few compromises with wiping Windows, most notably, that the screen is stuck in portrait orientation. Supposedly there is some command you can insert into the boot process to fix that but at the time I was new to Linux and couldn’t figure that out at the time. Also, audio didn’t work from the speaker or 3.5 mm audio output any more, although I have confirmed that Bluetooth audio works fine. Nor does the camera work according to what I read at the time. So sitting in this condition, unsure as to what to do with it, I left it sitting gathering dust. However, since I recently fixed most of my hardware issues plaguing me on my other computers, I decided to try to give one last attempt to give this device purpose. I decided to chuck the keyboard built into the decaying soft plastic cover that was falling part in small plastic flakes, and embrace the vertical nature of the device and use it that way. I have an extra medium sized plastic stand that my Dad gave me a while ago to keep tablets upright on a desk or table, and I realized that the Cambio could sit upright in that on my desk to the side of my main laptop, lugged into power with the a.c. connection at the top and a wireless mouse USB dongle in the one USB slot at the top. So I gave it a renewed purpose that it used to serve in a different configuration when it had Windows on it in a different arrangement of my desk- that is, as a display monitor that I could look over at a glance to look at a specific web site where I track markets that I follow, similar to stock day traders or crypto traders having a screen around their desk dedicated to updating the latest prices constantly using an extension called Tab Reloader. https://github.com/devinsmith/rca-cambio-linux
Specs: It has an Intel Atom quad-core CPU Z3735F @ 1.33 GHz with 2 GB of RAM. a 32 GB eMMC, microSD slot (up to 64GB), Realtek ALC5642 audio card, Realtek RGN RTL8723BS Wireless LAN 802.11 b/g/n 2.4GHz SDIO Network Adapter for Wi-Fi, Realtek RGN RTL8723BS for Bluetooth 4.0, a 10.1″ display at 1280×800 pixels, Intel HD integrated graphics, SileadTouch 10-finger multi-touch screen that worked much better under Windows. For audio output it has a mono speaker, a 3.5 mm combo audio jack that doesn’t work since I installed Lubuntu, but Bluetooth audio to speakers or headphones works fine. For video output it has one micro HDMI, and it also has one micro USB 2.0 port
Lubuntu: with the LXQT desktop environment is based on Ubuntu LTS 22.04, and the last time I updated it before the other day was in 2023. I managed to do a full system update using the update tool in the menu and then figured out I had to do sudo refresh snap firefox to bring Firefox up from version 99.0 to 152.0. Then I Installed Chromium via apt package manager through the command line and it installed the snap for me. Then I installed a virtual keyboard app called onboard with sudo apt install onboard, so I didn’t need to attach a hub at the top of the Cambio with some kind of keyboard dongle. The virtual keyboard on screen with input from the wireless mouse would suffice for occasional text input since I’m using it to update one web site.
Firefox with uBlock Origin and Tab Reloader extensions eventually locked up multiple times when I set it to auto reload at regular intervals. Not sure why.
Chromium however, with uBlock Origin Light and Tab Reloader has been working pretty reliably for its intended purpose- automatically refreshing one aggregation web site showing at a glance to my left the latest prices in the markets I follow updated at whatever specific interval I set. Fifteen minutes or one hour are both working well. So this cheap device now has a purpose. It also has the potential to act as an extended desktop for certain apps that I may want to span across multiple screens from my laptop to this Cambio, assuming the tiny processor and extremely limited RAM can handle that. Perhaps a project for another day.
Google TV Streamer 4K: Purchased from Amazon for $99. Minor gripe, the gray color was more expensive than the white, at least when I purchased it a few days ago. And it still had a white USB power cable to the plug. I eschew white electronics if at all possible, because they look like Apple i-devices and I hate that. Bad enough my AT&T Fiber gateway is white while nearly every computer, monitor and peripheral I have is black or gray as they should be. Unlike the Fire TV 4K Max which has a HDMI male plug built into it to plug into a TV HDMI input, the Google TV Streamer 4K requires an HDMI cable, not included. Luckily I had a spare one. And the device isn’t a slim “stick” that hangs from the back of the TV input, so it has to sit flat on your TV stand or desk or somewhere else. It also has an ethernet port if you want to hard wire your internet connection, which I didn’t bother with. I placed the unit on top of the back of my set top Blu-ray player sitting on my desk underneath my 32″ TV. The device has a whopping 32 GB of storage and 4 GB of RAM, much, much more than Fire TV 4K Max. I was out of space for apps on Fire TV 4K Max with only 5 GB of storage. So far I just did the basics of setting it up. It’s been awkward to get used to the controller after using the Fire TV remote controls for several years. The ubiquitous controller disc is much higher up on the top of the remote than the Fire TV ones are, and there isn’t as much of a dip or depression in the center of the disc to hit select, making it harder to discern by touch leading to a lot of mis-clicks when I set this device up. That’s something I will have to get used to unless there are compatible third party remotes I can purchase to substitute for the included one. I’m sure I will miss the dedicated Play, Rewind, and Fast Forward buttons that the Fire TV had in the middle of the remote.The Google remote makes you use the disc at the top for those functions. It will be very important that It can sideload apps like my VPN provider Surfshark, SmartTube, TizenTube, Plex, Jellyfin, and a browser like Silk browser, or other. The reviews I read online lead me to believe all those were possible. If not, it goes back. I’m sure that I’l have more to report on the next episode depending on how I get along with it.
Amazon ecosystem: Now in steep decline since 2019 when I first cut the cord from cable/satellite TV with my first Fire TV 4K streaming stick and Recast DVR for OTA TV. The Fire TV 4K Max, second generation devices I have now have too little storage space which is causing my apps to get offloaded against my will, and the Recast is long discontinued and replaced with the Tablo 4th gen. I’m having the same issue with limited storage space on my Fire HD 8 tablet, my most used tablet, especially since I installed the four large files needed to enable the Google Play on this tablet. I love the form factor and the way it fits in my hands so I use it mainly as an electronic book reader for books borrowed from Hoopla or that I downloaded as PDFs from the Internet Archive. I also have a larger 10 inch Fire HD device my Dad gave me that I feel is too large to comfortably hold and which awaits a better purpose someday, as well as a small 6 inch Kindle Paperwhite e-reader that I inherited from my Mom if I ever want something lightweight with a long battery life. Down the line I can see myself following an online guide to replace the operating system on the Fire HD 8 with something open source, despite the difficulty that entails. Even Prime is only tolerable now that I have an HTPC to watch movies or TV shows in a browser with commercials stripped out by uBlock Origin on the standard plan. It’s torture to watch any long form content in the apps. Only my inexpensive 32″ Hisense TV itself is Fire TV based, but I skip right past the built in OS for the Google TV Streamer on input one so it’s not that relevant.
TV Time: The popular app for keeping track of tv series episodes watched is shutting down. The Android app and associated web site will be no more after July 15th, 2026. Their press release gave about two weeks notice of this. https://whipmedia.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/68000029988-tv-time-is-shutting-down GDPR export of my data as .csv files took about 25 minutes online. So now need to find a replacement app to keep track of my TV shows just like I use Lettboxd for movies and Goodreads for books.There are many choices with varying features. TV Time was loved by millions of users worldwide because it had a great user interface, very complete data for almost every TV series, even international ones, as well as synopses of episodes. Notably, it also allowed people to leave comments about the episodes aside from just checking them off as watched, so there was a community aspect of it as well.
Refract Android app: The TV Time Out by Refract Chrome extension in Chromium took less than a minute to export data as .csv and .json files, the latter of which Refract prefers. Their Discord had a massive influx of very enthusiastic people and the app went from three thousand users to tens of thousands of users almost overnight, over 70,000 according to the chatter on their Discord. The queue to import data is more than 16,000 people deep and may take a week to import my data. Then I saw an update Saturday afternoon that I am now #940 of 2730 in the smaller queue. Apparently they upgraded their servers and made multiple queues. I think I qualify for one of the queues for smaller imports because I only have 50 series data to import, There are other users who have been using the app for ten to fifteen years that may have hundreds or over a thousands series tracked there, especially if, unlike me, they added show from before they started using the app, from years ago. I hope the app lives up to the promise. Meanwhile I tried some others with mixed results.
Media-Tracker web site and web app on Android (via Chrome): Imported 45 of 50 shows from the .csv file , but not my watched status of episodes. It only took about ten minutes to add the other five shows and mark my series and episodes watched since many shows are caught up or finished and I was able to check those off pretty quickly by entire series or season. Some shows are missing episodes or entire seasons compared to TV Time and I don’t love the layout as much as TV Time, but the visuals are nice and the progressive web app works well. The app isn’t exclusively focused on TV series. But the developer answers questions on Reddit.
Next Episode: Web site. Imported the zip file from TV Time quickly Found 36 of 50 shows. Easily added the others minus one that wasn’t in the database. This is mostly a text based site that has been around a very long time without much visual pizazz, so it has a dated look.
Showly & Trakt.tv: Used the Chrome extension to export my TV Time History, then import the zip file into Trakt.TV, which has a very confusing interface in my opinion with what seems like half of my shows missing, the ones that are no longer broadcasting new episodes in particular. Then I synced Trakt.tv with Android app Showly, which acts as a front end app that uses Trakt.tv data , and they have a much more logical interface. Some 44 out of 60 of my shows are present in Showly, inexplicably, although many of them the watched episodes are not accurate.
SeriesGuide: Android app. Can import .json files, but it didn’t work for me. Looks nice enough, but I have to experiment with it more.
Media::
The Studio: Seth Rogen stars in this satirical cringe comedy as Matt Remick, the newly appointed head of floundering film production company Continental Studios, trying to stay relevant in this day and age of i.p. driven schlock and streaming services. It kind of reminds me a bit of HBO’s Entourage from the early 2000s, with a lot of Hollywood celebrity cameos. Season one is on Apple TV+ or anywhere you get your torrents.

Check This Out (5 min.)

Ubuntu’s new ‘Myna’ AI lets you talk instead of type – here’s how

Vibrations from the Ether (15 min.) (any feedback received, and any chat from Matrix)

General

Thank you for listening to this episode of mintCast!
If you see something that you think we should be talking about, tell us!Chat with us on Matrix or send us email at [email protected]

Next Saturday, July 11, will a Roundtable episodeat 2pm US Central Time (convert to your time zone) . Everyone is welcome to join us at mintcast.org/roundtable.Just click the link. No software required. Everyone’s welcome to take part, with camera or not, or come join us in the Live Chat on YouTube.

The week after, Sunday, July 19, will be a News/Wanderings episode at 2 pm US Central time (convert to your time zone). Come join us in the Live Chat on YouTube.

Listen to other Podcasts of the Linux Syndicate Family

Join Bill, Majid, Eric and Charlie on Linux OTC, Linux Off The Cuff, for an unscripted and unpredictable conversation about all things Linux, Open Source and more.

Join Dale and Majid on Distrohoppers’ Digest to hear about their experiences and challenges with trying out different Linux distros.

Our Hosts

Joe – jeboylan on Matrix, [email protected], & The Linux Link Podcast, The Linux Lug Cast, Buy him coffee on Ko-fi as Joeeb.
Bill – Bill_H on Matrix, [email protected], wchouser3 on fosstodon.org.
Majid – AtypicalDoctor on Matrix, [email protected], & The Atypical Doctor Podcast.
Eric – esa1975 on Matrix, [email protected].
Charles – Mr PDX on Matrix, [email protected]
Jim – GNU2Linux on Matrix, [email protected], & The Linux Shortcut on YouTube

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

Bill for our audio editing, hosting & maintaining our Nextcloud & web servers.
Londoner for his contributions, from News to Time Syncs.
The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about. Thanks Clem & Team.

Insert Outro

Episode 489 Show Notes