In security and privacy: nada

Then in our Wanderings: Bill plays Pacman, Joe fixes more things, Moss sells cars, Majid is Synologised, and I am in search of a new mesh WiFi setup.

• [skipto time=”00:00:00″] – Intro
• [skipto time=”00:01:42″] – News
• [skipto time=”00:37:18″] – Security And Privacy
• [skipto time=”00:37:39″] – Bi-Weekly Wanderings
• [skipto time=”01:42:23″] – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
• [skipto time=”01:43:25″] – Wrap Up
• [skipto time=”01:45:01″] – Special Thanks
• [skipto time=”01:45:29″] – Outro

The News

Mint 22 Beta in Testing

Cinnamon 6.2 Desktop Environment Released

Linux’s New DRM Panic “Blue Screen of Death” In Action

Ubuntu is Finally Adding DEB Installer Support to App Center

AlmaLinux OS Now Officially Supports the Raspberry Pi 5 Computer

Introducing a new RISC-V Mainboard from DeepComputing – Now On Framework

Proton is going non-profit

Light-Based Chips Could Help Slake AI’s Ever-Growing Thirst for Energy

Contact Info:

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, bardmoss@pm.me, Mastodon @zaivala@hostux.social,
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, also – checkout my other two podcasts Linux OTC and 3 Fat Truckers
• Majid – drmajid@mintcast.org @atypical_dr@mastodon.social, AtypicalDr on Instagram and Threads and The Atypical Doctor Podcast on Spotify and also Linux OTC.
• Eric – You can hear and see me on this and the Linux OTC & DHD podcasts as well as the Linux Saloon and LinuxLUGCast streams. If you’d like to get in touch with me I can be reached by email at eric@mintcast.org.

Special Thanks To:

• Bill for our audio editing
• 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
• Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>

In security and privacy: nope, nada

Then in our Wanderings: Joe preps for zombies, Bill migrates, Majid is starstruck, Moss is car swapping, Popey is job swapping

• [skipto time=”00:00:00″] – Intro
• [skipto time=”00:01:17″] – News
• [skipto time=”00:42:15″] – Security And Privacy
• [skipto time=”00:42:47″] – Bi-Weekly Wanderings
• [skipto time=”01:28:40″] – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
• [skipto time=”01:29:20″] – Wrap Up
• [skipto time=”01:31:26″] – Special Thanks
• [skipto time=”01:32:12″] – Outro

The News

AlmaLinux 9.4 Beta Restores Support For Some Hardware Deprecated By RHEL

Former Nouveau Lead Developer Joins NVIDIA, Continues Working On Open-Source Driver

Linux can finally run your car’s safety systems and driver-assistance features

Microsoft adds MS-DOS 4.0 to their Open-Source Github page

Ubuntu 24.04 Official Flavours Available to Download

Why You Shouldn’t Upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Yet

Contact Info:

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, bardmoss@pm.me, Mastodon @zaivala@hostux.social, music on YouTube and Bandcamp if you look for it.
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, also – checkout my other two podcasts Linux OTC and 3 Fat Truckers
• Majid – drmajid@mintcast.org @atypicaldr870on twitter, AtypicalDr on instagram and The Atypical Doctor Podcast on Spotify and also Linux OTC.
• Eric – You can hear and see me on this and the Linux OTC podcasts as well as the Linux Saloon, Distrohoppers’ Digest and LinuxLUGCast streams. If you’d like to get in touch with me I can be reached by email at eric@mintcast.org, Discord (eric_adams), Telegram (https://t.me/ericadams), Matrix (@esa1975:matrix.org), and Mastodon (https://fosstodon.org/@ericadams). Links in the show notes.
• Alan – popey.me

Special Thanks To:

• Bill Houser for our audio editing
• 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
• Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

• Leo
  • Dropping FCWN, but it’s not going far.
  • Linux User Space Season 1 is wrapped up.
  • Revising some of my audio editing workflow
    1. The “Compress Dynamics” plugin replaces Audacity’s own AND the Amplify plugin.
    2. The Noise Gate by Audacity, but that isn’t installed by default, is absolutely fantastic
  • Went with a pop filter over a wind screen for this episode. We’ll see if there’s a big difference in sibilants.

• Joe
  • Well I need to redo one of the two Razers and reverse the connections on one of the 1mores, the Razer I guess I went a bit harsh at first with the soldering iron and I need to get a new 3.5mm connector
  • I also disassembled a couple of mice with my new Pinecil soldering iron.  I like it.  The price is 25 dollars for a good working soldering iron that heats up very fast and is easily portable.  I am still looking for a stand for it that I like.
    1. I took apart the mice for the switches so that I can use them to fix a couple of other M570 mice so that I don’t have to buy more of them.  The M570 seems to have a bit of a short half life.
  • I ordered and received the Dell Latitude 5290, which cost a bit more than I wanted to pay for a tablet but I have to say that it works well.  I also discovered that there may be a good reason to switch to the i7 instead of the i5 version even with the minimal performance gains.  The i7 version has actual Thunderbolt ports instead of just USB 3.1 but I am very happy with the tablet as is.
    1. I first installed Endeavour and then added Gnome because I wanted to give it more of a try
    2. That did not last long and I had the same issues with Steam and my ongoing dislike for Gnome out of the box
    3. Switched to Mint and things started working, other than rotation which had the issue where it would rotate the screen but not the touch.  This was easily fixed by installing screenrotate in the exact same way as with arch.
    4. Steam just plain worked and looked pretty good with Torchlight and Borderlands 2, I would have tried Borderlands 3 but the game takes 112 Gb and that would have fit on the 256 Gb SSD but would not have much left room for anything else.  BL2 was installed using proton so I could use all of the DLC
    5. I will say that BL2 sent the thing from 75 percent battery to shutdown very fast but I am also not done putting the battery through its testing to make sure that it is good
    6. The only thing that I have not been able to get working is the cameras.  Neither of them work.  Didn’t work on Arch or Mint and from what I have found online no one else has been able to get them to work either
  • Ordered a 128 Gb SSD that was supposed to work and it didn’t fit into the WAN port, so I did my research the second time and found out I need a b+m SSD in order to make it work. And it needed to be a 2242 instead of the 2230 that was marked on the board.  But the b+m 128 that I ordered came and did not match the picture or the writing on the front which also said b+m the thing was only an m.  So IDK 
  • I did put a 64Gb micro SD into it but really want the faster m.2 drive either for game storage or for a second operating system.  Maybe I should get a much larger 2280 drive instead.
  • Tried to install Garuda Linux to an external drive to test it out on my tablet but after multiple tries with issues caused by the drives and not the OS I gave up the idea of running Garuda from external media and wiped out Mint on the device and installed Garuda bare bones
  • I have to say that, for Arch, it is extremely robust and takes most of the work out of everything
  • I also found out that the game that I was using as a test case that was not working in steam in endeavour was also not working in Garuda but the reason is because it was a 32-bit game.  So there is an issue with 32-bit libraries needing to be pointed to. 
  • I also should mention that I installed the Gnome version of Garuda but I will get into that in the innards section
  • Also yesterday i picked up a large volume of broken electronics for a decent price.  Lots of bluetooth and wired headphones that need some work.  Already got a couple of them working.  My current favorite is the Razer Nari Ultimate.  I will talk more about them later but some highlights are 2 DT770s, several Shure SE215 and SE315’s and several AT M30, M40, M50

• Moss
  • In a surprise development, I got a message in Telegram from Ronnie Tucker, congratulating me as the new voice of Full Circle Weekly News podcast. I have only one person to thank for this. Thank you, Leo. Big shoes to fill, but I hope to fill them *weekly*.
  • I had some problems for a week or so with Linux Mint 20.1, the system was locking up or sometimes just the mouse buttons stopped working. A number of other people reported similar issues on the Linux Mint group on MeWe, but nothing made it to the Mint Forum. After a couple more updates, including a kernel update and two systemd updates, my machines are working fine… the Zia800 was locking up when things get plugged into the top USB port on the front of the machine but I think this has been resolved by magic. The Fellowes keyboard I bought on eBay proved to not work so we went to Voldemart and bought her a Logitech keyboard.
  • I plugged Suzanne’s Fellowes keyboard into my computer to test it, and proved it really was not working… but in doing so, I broke off the headphone jack on my nice old Koss headphones. I thought that was all, but when I plugged my other headset into the jack to do Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 021 on Wednesday, I found I could not hear anyone. Tony Hughes reminded me I had a USB soundcard on my Raspberry Pi 4 and I used it, and continue to do so. Should get a second identical card in the mail in the next couple days.
  • Tony Hughes, Dale Miracle and I recorded Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 021 last Wednesday and it is out now, following our record-breaking Episode 020 which exceeded 800 downloads. We had a great time as usual, and covered Mageia, Debian Unstable, Endeavour, and others. I’m already working on Episode 022. Episode 020 is at 818 downloads as of this recording.
  • It’s time to get your votes in on Distro Madness, Elite Eight; voting will close this Friday before moving on to the Semifinals. Surprise! Most of my readers come from mintCast listeners, so all four versions of Mint are favored to make the Final Four… but can Solus sneak in?

• Tony Hughes
  • Lots and lots of walking. Last Monday I did a 12.5 mile walk with my wife along the coast from South Blackpool to Fleetwood to the North of us. I’m regularly doing 5+ miles a day. It is getting quite addictive to complete the virtual walk challenge I’m on.    
  • As Moss has said we recorded Distrohoppers’ Digest last Wednesday and I managed to get it all edited and Posted by Friday so all is good with the world. 
  • During the pre show chat last night I did manage to get Audacity 3.0.0 installed on Endeavor although I have not had a chance to play with it as yet. On my main box I have tried the Snap install and it opens the previous .aup files without a hitch but as it is in a snap it can only see the drive the OS is on so I had to copy a folder from another drive to the PC to try this out. One day I will work out these permission issues with Snap and Flatpak apps.   

• Mike
  • Proton suite – VPN works very well if you’re comfortable with light CLI usage. Minor adjustments need to be made to work properly (add startup script). Drive is pretty bare bones in its current form but works perfectly, I signed up to beta test iOS app. Mail is mail.
  • Whonix – An operating system designed to help protect your privacy and anonymity. It runs on a VM and forces all programs to connect through Tor network, all clearnet connections are blocked, DNS leaks are blocked.
  • I’ve been wanting to buy a bicycle lately but the prices are so high due to increased demand and the pandemic ($1200 – $1500) that I decided to build a bicycle instead. I found a company that sells a bike partially built for a cheap price, you must complete half of it. City cruiser bicycle. I’m somewhat worried because I’m not mechanically inclined and I’ve never built a bicycle before. [Get the bike tires from Mars next year – Moss]

THE NEWS:

• Mint News: New Linux Mint notification system. “We designed a notification system which acts as a gentle and welcome reminder and took great care not to turn it into an annoyance.” The notification system will be a desktop popup notification which can be easily dismissed and won’t reappear for 2 days. Default settings have casual users in mind and will show a notification if an update has been available for 7 “logged-in” days or older than 15 calendar days. By default the Update Manager only considers security and kernel updates. The notification system has a grace period, where if you’ve installed ANY updates in any way (update manager, terminal, synaptic) in the last 30 days then it won’t notify you. The notification system is completely configurable for more intermediate to advanced users.
  • Clem on the release for the update changes: This is planned for Mint 20.2 but it could also be backported. We’ve a journalistic slack, we can send you an invite if you contact us by email.
  • Clem noted in the comments that Flatpak will also be controllable through the Update Manager. Clem also notes that a Flatpak update from 1.6.5 to a more current one is on the roadmap.
  • Clem said of Wayland and GTK4: There are no plans to move to GTK4 right now but like anything new this is something we have an interest in and so we’re keeping an eye on it. Regarding Wayland I have no news. We’re investigating the idea of making the latest Cinnamon work with Mutter, there are many pros and cons associated with that, it’s not directly related to Wayland but it could help getting closer.
  • Clem on more Desktop Environments: Not at the moment. We’re very happy with the Cinnamon – MATE – Xfce trio.
  • Clem on usrmerge for LMDE: Although we’re likely to move to a merged system in LMDE 5, in LMDE 4 you don’t need to merge your system. First, our build environment for LMDE is not merged. Second, Debian has been aware of this issue and actively fixed it in their repositories. The Ubuntu version of plymouth produces unreproducible builds, the Debian version does not. Debian detected this issue and already patched it.
• Londoner reminds us that ventoy-1.0.00 was released on April 5th in 2020.
• JingOS released v. 0.8 to the public, with a lot of new features, and further announced they were starting a crowdfunding campaign for the JingPad A1 – the world’s first consumer-level Linux tablet. JingOS is intended to be a full-Linux experience for tablet computers, but with an interface that could be mistaken easily for iPad OS. They are designing a product with a 2k+ screen, Gorilla Glass, 4:3 screen ratio, and premium components, with a pen and a keyboard both available. They have Discord, Telegram, Facebook, and other forums to get involved in. It should be pointed out that they got this announcement in under the wire on March 31, there were murmurings about it being a joke.
• Man-Pages 5.11 released featuring 50,000 line changes and 480 commits by 40 contributors. 950 pages have been changed (more than 90%). The release features various patches and bug fixes. One of the largest man-pages updates in 20 years.
• AlmaLinux is Official
  • There is a conversion script to get you from CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux 8
  • Do you think the first-to-market will win? Or are folks waiting for Rocky because of community?

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• Your smartphone is spying on you more than you realize. Researchers from the University of Dublin have found that smartphones transmit telemetry data “back home” on average every 4½ minutes, however Android transmits 20x more data back to Google than iOS sends to Apple. This transfer happens even when the device is idle. Currently there are very few, if any, options to prevent telemetry collection. – Mike
• 533,000,000 Facebook users have their data leaked online – Moss
• Vulnerability Disclosure Norms
  • What are your feelings on hackers/security researchers dropping their research to the public directly without letting developers know first.
  • Do you think the typical 90-day requirement is enough?
  • Do you think companies should have an indefinite amount of time to fix issues?

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, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, several blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, @zaivala@hostux.social on Mastodon, zaivalananda@protonmail.ch, Full Circle Weekly News, Sponsus! 
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com 
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites. Crowbar Kernel Panic on Spotify.
• Mike – GrouchyM@pm.me and GrouchyM on Discord
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show. 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!>

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

• Leo
  • Dropping FCWN, but it’s not going far.
  • Linux User Space Season 1 is wrapped up.
  • Revising some of my audio editing workflow
    1. The “Compress Dynamics” plugin replaces Audacity’s own AND the Amplify plugin.
    2. The Noise Gate by Audacity, but that isn’t installed by default, is absolutely fantastic
  • Went with a pop filter over a wind screen for this episode. We’ll see if there’s a big difference in sibilants.

• Joe
  • Well I need to redo one of the two Razers and reverse the connections on one of the 1mores, the Razer I guess I went a bit harsh at first with the soldering iron and I need to get a new 3.5mm connector
  • I also disassembled a couple of mice with my new Pinecil soldering iron.  I like it.  The price is 25 dollars for a good working soldering iron that heats up very fast and is easily portable.  I am still looking for a stand for it that I like.
    1. I took apart the mice for the switches so that I can use them to fix a couple of other M570 mice so that I don’t have to buy more of them.  The M570 seems to have a bit of a short half life.
  • I ordered and received the Dell Latitude 5290, which cost a bit more than I wanted to pay for a tablet but I have to say that it works well.  I also discovered that there may be a good reason to switch to the i7 instead of the i5 version even with the minimal performance gains.  The i7 version has actual Thunderbolt ports instead of just USB 3.1 but I am very happy with the tablet as is.
    1. I first installed Endeavour and then added Gnome because I wanted to give it more of a try
    2. That did not last long and I had the same issues with Steam and my ongoing dislike for Gnome out of the box
    3. Switched to Mint and things started working, other than rotation which had the issue where it would rotate the screen but not the touch.  This was easily fixed by installing screenrotate in the exact same way as with arch.
    4. Steam just plain worked and looked pretty good with Torchlight and Borderlands 2, I would have tried Borderlands 3 but the game takes 112 Gb and that would have fit on the 256 Gb SSD but would not have much left room for anything else.  BL2 was installed using proton so I could use all of the DLC
    5. I will say that BL2 sent the thing from 75 percent battery to shutdown very fast but I am also not done putting the battery through its testing to make sure that it is good
    6. The only thing that I have not been able to get working is the cameras.  Neither of them work.  Didn’t work on Arch or Mint and from what I have found online no one else has been able to get them to work either
  • Ordered a 128 Gb SSD that was supposed to work and it didn’t fit into the WAN port, so I did my research the second time and found out I need a b+m SSD in order to make it work. And it needed to be a 2242 instead of the 2230 that was marked on the board.  But the b+m 128 that I ordered came and did not match the picture or the writing on the front which also said b+m the thing was only an m.  So IDK 
  • I did put a 64Gb micro SD into it but really want the faster m.2 drive either for game storage or for a second operating system.  Maybe I should get a much larger 2280 drive instead.
  • Tried to install Garuda Linux to an external drive to test it out on my tablet but after multiple tries with issues caused by the drives and not the OS I gave up the idea of running Garuda from external media and wiped out Mint on the device and installed Garuda bare bones
  • I have to say that, for Arch, it is extremely robust and takes most of the work out of everything
  • I also found out that the game that I was using as a test case that was not working in steam in endeavour was also not working in Garuda but the reason is because it was a 32-bit game.  So there is an issue with 32-bit libraries needing to be pointed to. 
  • I also should mention that I installed the Gnome version of Garuda but I will get into that in the innards section
  • Also yesterday i picked up a large volume of broken electronics for a decent price.  Lots of bluetooth and wired headphones that need some work.  Already got a couple of them working.  My current favorite is the Razer Nari Ultimate.  I will talk more about them later but some highlights are 2 DT770s, several Shure SE215 and SE315’s and several AT M30, M40, M50

• Moss
  • In a surprise development, I got a message in Telegram from Ronnie Tucker, congratulating me as the new voice of Full Circle Weekly News podcast. I have only one person to thank for this. Thank you, Leo. Big shoes to fill, but I hope to fill them *weekly*.
  • I had some problems for a week or so with Linux Mint 20.1, the system was locking up or sometimes just the mouse buttons stopped working. A number of other people reported similar issues on the Linux Mint group on MeWe, but nothing made it to the Mint Forum. After a couple more updates, including a kernel update and two systemd updates, my machines are working fine… the Zia800 was locking up when things get plugged into the top USB port on the front of the machine but I think this has been resolved by magic. The Fellowes keyboard I bought on eBay proved to not work so we went to Voldemart and bought her a Logitech keyboard.
  • I plugged Suzanne’s Fellowes keyboard into my computer to test it, and proved it really was not working… but in doing so, I broke off the headphone jack on my nice old Koss headphones. I thought that was all, but when I plugged my other headset into the jack to do Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 021 on Wednesday, I found I could not hear anyone. Tony Hughes reminded me I had a USB soundcard on my Raspberry Pi 4 and I used it, and continue to do so. Should get a second identical card in the mail in the next couple days.
  • Tony Hughes, Dale Miracle and I recorded Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 021 last Wednesday and it is out now, following our record-breaking Episode 020 which exceeded 800 downloads. We had a great time as usual, and covered Mageia, Debian Unstable, Endeavour, and others. I’m already working on Episode 022. Episode 020 is at 818 downloads as of this recording.
  • It’s time to get your votes in on Distro Madness, Elite Eight; voting will close this Friday before moving on to the Semifinals. Surprise! Most of my readers come from mintCast listeners, so all four versions of Mint are favored to make the Final Four… but can Solus sneak in?

• Tony Hughes
  • Lots and lots of walking. Last Monday I did a 12.5 mile walk with my wife along the coast from South Blackpool to Fleetwood to the North of us. I’m regularly doing 5+ miles a day. It is getting quite addictive to complete the virtual walk challenge I’m on.    
  • As Moss has said we recorded Distrohoppers’ Digest last Wednesday and I managed to get it all edited and Posted by Friday so all is good with the world. 
  • During the pre show chat last night I did manage to get Audacity 3.0.0 installed on Endeavor although I have not had a chance to play with it as yet. On my main box I have tried the Snap install and it opens the previous .aup files without a hitch but as it is in a snap it can only see the drive the OS is on so I had to copy a folder from another drive to the PC to try this out. One day I will work out these permission issues with Snap and Flatpak apps.   

• Mike
  • Proton suite – VPN works very well if you’re comfortable with light CLI usage. Minor adjustments need to be made to work properly (add startup script). Drive is pretty bare bones in its current form but works perfectly, I signed up to beta test iOS app. Mail is mail.
  • Whonix – An operating system designed to help protect your privacy and anonymity. It runs on a VM and forces all programs to connect through Tor network, all clearnet connections are blocked, DNS leaks are blocked.
  • I’ve been wanting to buy a bicycle lately but the prices are so high due to increased demand and the pandemic ($1200 – $1500) that I decided to build a bicycle instead. I found a company that sells a bike partially built for a cheap price, you must complete half of it. City cruiser bicycle. I’m somewhat worried because I’m not mechanically inclined and I’ve never built a bicycle before. [Get the bike tires from Mars next year – Moss]

THE NEWS:

• Mint News: New Linux Mint notification system. “We designed a notification system which acts as a gentle and welcome reminder and took great care not to turn it into an annoyance.” The notification system will be a desktop popup notification which can be easily dismissed and won’t reappear for 2 days. Default settings have casual users in mind and will show a notification if an update has been available for 7 “logged-in” days or older than 15 calendar days. By default the Update Manager only considers security and kernel updates. The notification system has a grace period, where if you’ve installed ANY updates in any way (update manager, terminal, synaptic) in the last 30 days then it won’t notify you. The notification system is completely configurable for more intermediate to advanced users.
  • Clem on the release for the update changes: This is planned for Mint 20.2 but it could also be backported. We’ve a journalistic slack, we can send you an invite if you contact us by email.
  • Clem noted in the comments that Flatpak will also be controllable through the Update Manager. Clem also notes that a Flatpak update from 1.6.5 to a more current one is on the roadmap.
  • Clem said of Wayland and GTK4: There are no plans to move to GTK4 right now but like anything new this is something we have an interest in and so we’re keeping an eye on it. Regarding Wayland I have no news. We’re investigating the idea of making the latest Cinnamon work with Mutter, there are many pros and cons associated with that, it’s not directly related to Wayland but it could help getting closer.
  • Clem on more Desktop Environments: Not at the moment. We’re very happy with the Cinnamon – MATE – Xfce trio.
  • Clem on usrmerge for LMDE: Although we’re likely to move to a merged system in LMDE 5, in LMDE 4 you don’t need to merge your system. First, our build environment for LMDE is not merged. Second, Debian has been aware of this issue and actively fixed it in their repositories. The Ubuntu version of plymouth produces unreproducible builds, the Debian version does not. Debian detected this issue and already patched it.
• Londoner reminds us that ventoy-1.0.00 was released on April 5th in 2020.
• JingOS released v. 0.8 to the public, with a lot of new features, and further announced they were starting a crowdfunding campaign for the JingPad A1 – the world’s first consumer-level Linux tablet. JingOS is intended to be a full-Linux experience for tablet computers, but with an interface that could be mistaken easily for iPad OS. They are designing a product with a 2k+ screen, Gorilla Glass, 4:3 screen ratio, and premium components, with a pen and a keyboard both available. They have Discord, Telegram, Facebook, and other forums to get involved in. It should be pointed out that they got this announcement in under the wire on March 31, there were murmurings about it being a joke.
• Man-Pages 5.11 released featuring 50,000 line changes and 480 commits by 40 contributors. 950 pages have been changed (more than 90%). The release features various patches and bug fixes. One of the largest man-pages updates in 20 years.
• AlmaLinux is Official
  • There is a conversion script to get you from CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux 8
  • Do you think the first-to-market will win? Or are folks waiting for Rocky because of community?

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• Your smartphone is spying on you more than you realize. Researchers from the University of Dublin have found that smartphones transmit telemetry data “back home” on average every 4½ minutes, however Android transmits 20x more data back to Google than iOS sends to Apple. This transfer happens even when the device is idle. Currently there are very few, if any, options to prevent telemetry collection. – Mike
• 533,000,000 Facebook users have their data leaked online – Moss
• Vulnerability Disclosure Norms
  • What are your feelings on hackers/security researchers dropping their research to the public directly without letting developers know first.
  • Do you think the typical 90-day requirement is enough?
  • Do you think companies should have an indefinite amount of time to fix issues?

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, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, several blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, @zaivala@hostux.social on Mastodon, zaivalananda@protonmail.ch, Full Circle Weekly News, Sponsus! 
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com 
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites. Crowbar Kernel Panic on Spotify.
• Mike – GrouchyM@pm.me and GrouchyM on Discord
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show. 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!>

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:

• Linux Mint Monthly News – January
• Bo – martin-wimpress-ubuntu-desktop-lead-leaving-canonical
• Ubuntu 21.04 Will Have Wayland by Default
• Bo – New EndeavourOS release brings the latest XFCE desktop
• Google removes The Great Suspender Chrome Plugin as malware
• Debian releases 10.8 “Buster” with 45 security updates
• Nvidia Driver 460.39 Supports Kernel 5.10
• Bo – Pop_OS! Publishes Guide to Gaming
• Follow Up: AlmaLinux Beta Out

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, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, other blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, moss@mintcast.org, @zaivala@hostux.social on Mastodon, zaivalananda@protonmail.ch for quick response, Sponsus! 
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com 
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites.
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, 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!>

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:

• Linux Mint Monthly News – January
• Bo – martin-wimpress-ubuntu-desktop-lead-leaving-canonical
• Ubuntu 21.04 Will Have Wayland by Default
• Bo – New EndeavourOS release brings the latest XFCE desktop
• Google removes The Great Suspender Chrome Plugin as malware
• Debian releases 10.8 “Buster” with 45 security updates
• Nvidia Driver 460.39 Supports Kernel 5.10
• Bo – Pop_OS! Publishes Guide to Gaming
• Follow Up: AlmaLinux Beta Out

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, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, other blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, moss@mintcast.org, @zaivala@hostux.social on Mastodon, zaivalananda@protonmail.ch for quick response, Sponsus! 
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com 
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites.
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, 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!>

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

• Leo
  • Having second thoughts about Kubuntu 20.10
  • Doubling down on Brave browser.
    • Found out it is the first to support IPFS
    • Looking at becoming a Brave Creator. This allows me to generate tips in the BAT currency from Brave users.
  • Took a leap of faith and installed the Flatpak PPA to get the latest flatpak so I could test out Chromium which requires 1.8.5 or above. Everything seems to be working. A little apprehensive because mumble is flatpak, and it’s what I use for the YouTube stream audio.

• Joe
  • Ordered some new parts for the Samsung Galaxy S3 Watch so that I could fix the small issues with it because I saw a really good price for a set of parts that would do the job.
    • It works well and the rest of the parts make for almost a whole watch.  I may purchase another battery and put it all together to have another mostly working watch.
    • This new motherboard is actually a cellular version but because of the limitations of the eSIM that is included on the board I cannot get it to work with TMobile.  This is not a big deal for me because I would not use it as a phone anyway it was just something cool to contemplate
  • Also purchased some more neckband headphones to work on since I have not done so in a while. I know that I have 19 or so working headphones but I found some that have active noise cancelling that are not in the LG line that I would like to work on and see if I can do some of the same fixes to that I normally do with the LG’s. So it is the Anker Soundcores that I will be working on and adding the MMCX connections to.  They are also supposed to have a better battery life but it looks like they will be a lot more of a pain to take apart and put back together since I think that it is all glued.  So keeping the parts in usable physical condition may be difficult.  I may also have to look into replacement batteries as I do not know what is wrong with them.
    • The 5 headphones arrived and I have started working on them.  2 of the headsets have bad batteries.  So with the Anker phones that had the bad battery I started taking that apart first as I knew that there would be a learning curve in figuring out how to take the device apart
    • I did get it apart and figure out the best way to do it with minimal breakage but let’s just say that I don’t recommend it for modding purposes or repairability
  • Had some fun with the rename utility.  Bulk renaming of files was super easy and saved me a lot of time.  Wouldn’t mind doing a show on that and SED. 
    • rename ‘s/old-name/new-name/g’ files
    • But i have been told that it is way too nerdy
  • Picked up a fridge for free.  My wife found it on FB and it is a very nice fridge.  Granted it did cost me some money to rent the truck to move it but it was still a lot less than a new fridge (which I was planning on buying my wife this year)  The people that had it were moving and needed it gone as soon as possible.  It is probably the nicest side by side that I have ever owned. I can’t complain, it works and it looks awesome.
    • The only thing is, I was the only person moving the thing and I am super lucky that I did not hurt myself.  The thing was heavy.
  • Because of changes in my insurance, the copay for prescriptions has gone up a lot.  To the point that I don’t know how much money I am going to be able to put towards projects this year.  All this means is that I will be forced to go through my backlog of old projects or almost-projects and get it all up to date.  Maybe do a little bit with software again.
  • My Eldest Child turned 18 this week.  That is weird.  
  • On my VM download server I was still having problems with transmission-rss so I attempted to downgrade the Ruby version so that it would work properly again.  This did not work well.  I made several attempts to downgrade and all failed miserably.
    • Then I realized that the reason I was using transmission-rss initially was because that was available in a docker
    • So I shut down the transmission setup and moved everything over to qbittorrent which allowed me to re-setup all my former automation so that the files automatically go where I want them.  I do like the UI for qbittorrent and it is working well.
    • The rules that you can set up for automatic downloads and for after download moves was perfect for how I had things set up before.

• Moss
  • Joshua Hawk sent me a laptop, a Dell Inspiron 7353 2-in-1 with touchscreen. He had installed Fedora on it, which I soon destroyed, and I’ve run a carousel of distros on it, to Pop!_OS, Bodhi 5.1, back to Fedora, and back to Bodhi. There are interesting touchpad issues: in Fedora, the touchpad right-click sends a left-click (it works fine Bodhi), and in Bodhi it does not load the screen keyboard. This is a great addition to my collection, and as it only has a 128 Gb SSD and a lot of screws keeping me from being brave enough to replace the SSD, this will be my machine to test distros for Distrohoppers’ Digest for the foreseeable future.
  • Speaking of Distrohoppers’ Digest, Episode 19 is out. Episodes 15 through 18 are also in the top 5 of our download numbers. For Episode 19 we actually have Dale in the header and footer readings. We had a great time, I get the idea we could banter a bit more but we’re still getting our team-feet under.
  • My Sponsus account now has 3 monthly sponsors and has also taken in a nice donation. You can hear them named at the end of the current episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
  • My recording and work space is in flux right now. There really was a short on the sound card in the Mini, and contacting that is what blew the power supply a few months ago. It’s not catastrophic but not something I want to have on a system I’m doing sound recording on, and I’ll be moving that along to someone who needs it. Dale has sent me an AMD sound card, which will replace the FX 1800 Nvidia card in the FuzZ400, which will take over as my main machine. Right now I’m recording on my Kudu laptop, still the most powerful machine I have. 
  • School is in and out, depending on the week and the school. I worked 4 days in the last two weeks and got paid for a 5th when they forgot to cancel an assignment.
  • My other business is poised to take off, and we plan to sell a lot of common products and donate 80% of our profits to projects providing housing funds and services to homeless people in America.  I’ll post the link when we are actually doing business.
  • My teeth are not working yet, and I have an appointment for a refitting this week.
  • We are more than halfway through White Night, the 9th book in the Dresden Files series. 
  • I have also been reading Grail and Cosmos: Arthurian Explorations by Alby Stone. Portions of this book were previously published by my friend Bob Trubshaw of Heart of Albion Press. Everything Bob publishes is worth reading if you’re interested in the roots of folklore, and much of it is available as free downloads from his website.
  • My mother has passed, of covid pneumonia which she caught in the rehab facility. She was 91. I miss her. When I come home after having something happen at work I want to talk to her about, I reach for the phone… and remember I can’t call.

• Tony H
  • So as Moss has said, this week we recorded the latest Distrohoppers Digest which I published on Saturday 23rd after doing the edit, including our new intro with Dale as part of the team. Great show if I do say so myself although we continue to strive to get better. 
  • Mint 20.1 is firmly established on my Laptop although I continue with 19.3 as my main driver on the i7 HP Tower which is my main production PC, at some stage I will get around to upgrading although at the moment as I have the IcyDock on this PC I can boot into a Mint 20 install whenever I want to.
  • I have bought some small storage racks with 32 boxes for putting in spares and components for the diecast models I restore, and I have been busy filling them up and labeling them. With the result my workshop is tidier, I can actually find things.
  • On the home front the Covid situation continues to get worse and by the time you hear this we will have passed 100K deaths for C19 here in the UK. It may mean we have even stricter restrictions before this is all over, The Netherlands have just introduced a curfew from 21.00 to 04.30 to try and stop some of the abuses of the current regulations restricting large gatherings indoors. 

• Josh
  • Arch is still working. Now it’s not. I tried to install Linux Mint as a dual boot with arch and quickly found out that was a mistake. I first noticed a problem when I did not see arch as a boot option after hitting f12. When Mint’s grub booted arch was there as an option but when clicking it nothing happens just a black screen forever. I rebooted and then booted into mint and that worked fine. I checked my install of arch and everything looked to be in place; it just won’t boot. Anyways long story short I wiped mint and installed openSUSE tumbleweed cause I wanted to and I am just waiting for a good chunk of time again to try and fix or possibly reinstall my arch install.m
  • Been playing a lot of games while I can before school starts next week and I won’t have much time for them. I won’t go into detail but finally after 7 years I finally got around to beating Dragon Age Inquisition. It was a great story line and I can’t wait for the next chapter in that saga. I have also been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance as well and I have mentioned it before it’s one of my favorite RPG’s and I cannot recommend it enough.
  • Also getting ready for school which starts this week. I am taking a networking class. It’s technically the continuation of another networking class I took 3 semesters ago or so I am hoping it all comes back to me. 
  • I got a new mouse! I had my RedDragon M901 for over 5 years now and I loved that thing but the left mouse click was starting to get a little wonky. I tried to get another RedDragon mouse, the M913 but when I received it the left click was sticking to the point you couldn’t tell when you clicked. I returned that and decided to splurge a little and after a lot more research settled on the Corsair Scimitar Elite. All of the mice I have been talking about have had 12 side buttons but the Scimitar was the first I could set macros on and boy has it changed my gaming experience. Unfortunately there is no way to set the macros and all without windows but there are 3 profiles that save right to the mouse itself so once set you can change between them no matter what OS you’re running.

• Bo
  • Whelp, I got COVID.
  • Raspberry Pi Webcam – https://youtu.be/8fcbP7lEdzY
    • https://thepihut.com/products/mounting-plate-for-high-quality-camera
    • https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera-lens
    • https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-camera-adapter
    • https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera/
    • https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/
    • https://github.com/geerlingguy/pi-webcam
  • A Steam Link Raspberry Pi 4 – https://youtu.be/6WRLlAkTbBY

THE NEWS:

• Tony – The new Raspberry Pi Pico has been launched, this is a $4 microcontroller from the Pi Foundation  
• Someone just ported Android 10 to RISC-V architecture 
• Ubuntu Booting on M1 Mac
  • Asahi Linux will benefit. Their target now is GPU reverse engineering. Specifically this is the work of Alyssa Rosenzweig whose done a lot of work on the Panfrost driver for Mali and Bifrost GPUs
  • The progress is… drawing a triangle on the screen. While it seems small, the impact of this is huge. It was done with all original, open source, code and signifies a big step forward for the platform.
• Flatpak 1.10.0 is released 
  • Downloading the app lists will become much faster
  • The change is helped in big part by not downloading everything, but simply downloading what’s available only for your architecture. In the test Alexander shows in his blog, this resulted in a reduction by almost 2/3
• Ubuntu Making Home Folders Private in 21.04
• Project Lenix from CloudLinux Gets a Name
  • AlmaLinux
• Free RHEL up to 16 licenses per account…
• Valve Will Continue Their Linux Investment
  • Linux – We’re continuing to invest in technology that improves game compatibility and performance through Steam Play. We’re also putting together new ways for prospective users to get into Linux gaming and experience these improvements.
• Chrome Cutting off API Access to Everyone but Themselves. Sync No Longer Available.
  • Fedora mulling over dropping Chromium altogether.

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• IPFS (Interplanetary File System)
  • Originally created back in 2015
  • The purpose is, like Bittorrent, to make file storage distributed to increase the resilience of the web by allowing people that opt into IPFS to store little bits of data they’ve seen to then share it to someone else geographically close to them to make it so that even if the main website goes down, the content can still be accessed.
  • To become one of the IPFS content sharers, enable the Local Node option
  • To simply make use of IPFS, just enable IPFS and ensure you’re using a third-party gateway.
  • The way I see it, Google’s AMP is the main competitor.
• Brave is the first browser to support it
  • It’s as simple as turning a toggle on in Settings.
  • You can easily choose to be a node the first time you access IPFS content. It’s a simple yes or no.
    • Brave asks if you want to enable the IPFS local daemon.

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

• Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on February 7, 2021. 
• Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com , YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – Peaceful Hippo, It’s Moss, MeWe, @bardictriad on Twitter, blogs on Peaceful Hippo, LinuxQuestions.org, and Dreamwidth, music on Bandcamp and my YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus!!
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com 
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@protonmail.com, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites.
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News 

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!>

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

• Leo
  • Having second thoughts about Kubuntu 20.10
  • Doubling down on Brave browser.
    • Found out it is the first to support IPFS
    • Looking at becoming a Brave Creator. This allows me to generate tips in the BAT currency from Brave users.
  • Took a leap of faith and installed the Flatpak PPA to get the latest flatpak so I could test out Chromium which requires 1.8.5 or above. Everything seems to be working. A little apprehensive because mumble is flatpak, and it’s what I use for the YouTube stream audio.

• Joe
  • Ordered some new parts for the Samsung Galaxy S3 Watch so that I could fix the small issues with it because I saw a really good price for a set of parts that would do the job.
    • It works well and the rest of the parts make for almost a whole watch.  I may purchase another battery and put it all together to have another mostly working watch.
    • This new motherboard is actually a cellular version but because of the limitations of the eSIM that is included on the board I cannot get it to work with TMobile.  This is not a big deal for me because I would not use it as a phone anyway it was just something cool to contemplate
  • Also purchased some more neckband headphones to work on since I have not done so in a while. I know that I have 19 or so working headphones but I found some that have active noise cancelling that are not in the LG line that I would like to work on and see if I can do some of the same fixes to that I normally do with the LG’s. So it is the Anker Soundcores that I will be working on and adding the MMCX connections to.  They are also supposed to have a better battery life but it looks like they will be a lot more of a pain to take apart and put back together since I think that it is all glued.  So keeping the parts in usable physical condition may be difficult.  I may also have to look into replacement batteries as I do not know what is wrong with them.
    • The 5 headphones arrived and I have started working on them.  2 of the headsets have bad batteries.  So with the Anker phones that had the bad battery I started taking that apart first as I knew that there would be a learning curve in figuring out how to take the device apart
    • I did get it apart and figure out the best way to do it with minimal breakage but let’s just say that I don’t recommend it for modding purposes or repairability
  • Had some fun with the rename utility.  Bulk renaming of files was super easy and saved me a lot of time.  Wouldn’t mind doing a show on that and SED. 
    • rename ‘s/old-name/new-name/g’ files
    • But i have been told that it is way too nerdy
  • Picked up a fridge for free.  My wife found it on FB and it is a very nice fridge.  Granted it did cost me some money to rent the truck to move it but it was still a lot less than a new fridge (which I was planning on buying my wife this year)  The people that had it were moving and needed it gone as soon as possible.  It is probably the nicest side by side that I have ever owned. I can’t complain, it works and it looks awesome.
    • The only thing is, I was the only person moving the thing and I am super lucky that I did not hurt myself.  The thing was heavy.
  • Because of changes in my insurance, the copay for prescriptions has gone up a lot.  To the point that I don’t know how much money I am going to be able to put towards projects this year.  All this means is that I will be forced to go through my backlog of old projects or almost-projects and get it all up to date.  Maybe do a little bit with software again.
  • My Eldest Child turned 18 this week.  That is weird.  
  • On my VM download server I was still having problems with transmission-rss so I attempted to downgrade the Ruby version so that it would work properly again.  This did not work well.  I made several attempts to downgrade and all failed miserably.
    • Then I realized that the reason I was using transmission-rss initially was because that was available in a docker
    • So I shut down the transmission setup and moved everything over to qbittorrent which allowed me to re-setup all my former automation so that the files automatically go where I want them.  I do like the UI for qbittorrent and it is working well.
    • The rules that you can set up for automatic downloads and for after download moves was perfect for how I had things set up before.

• Moss
  • Joshua Hawk sent me a laptop, a Dell Inspiron 7353 2-in-1 with touchscreen. He had installed Fedora on it, which I soon destroyed, and I’ve run a carousel of distros on it, to Pop!_OS, Bodhi 5.1, back to Fedora, and back to Bodhi. There are interesting touchpad issues: in Fedora, the touchpad right-click sends a left-click (it works fine Bodhi), and in Bodhi it does not load the screen keyboard. This is a great addition to my collection, and as it only has a 128 Gb SSD and a lot of screws keeping me from being brave enough to replace the SSD, this will be my machine to test distros for Distrohoppers’ Digest for the foreseeable future.
  • Speaking of Distrohoppers’ Digest, Episode 19 is out. Episodes 15 through 18 are also in the top 5 of our download numbers. For Episode 19 we actually have Dale in the header and footer readings. We had a great time, I get the idea we could banter a bit more but we’re still getting our team-feet under.
  • My Sponsus account now has 3 monthly sponsors and has also taken in a nice donation. You can hear them named at the end of the current episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
  • My recording and work space is in flux right now. There really was a short on the sound card in the Mini, and contacting that is what blew the power supply a few months ago. It’s not catastrophic but not something I want to have on a system I’m doing sound recording on, and I’ll be moving that along to someone who needs it. Dale has sent me an AMD sound card, which will replace the FX 1800 Nvidia card in the FuzZ400, which will take over as my main machine. Right now I’m recording on my Kudu laptop, still the most powerful machine I have. 
  • School is in and out, depending on the week and the school. I worked 4 days in the last two weeks and got paid for a 5th when they forgot to cancel an assignment.
  • My other business is poised to take off, and we plan to sell a lot of common products and donate 80% of our profits to projects providing housing funds and services to homeless people in America.  I’ll post the link when we are actually doing business.
  • My teeth are not working yet, and I have an appointment for a refitting this week.
  • We are more than halfway through White Night, the 9th book in the Dresden Files series. 
  • I have also been reading Grail and Cosmos: Arthurian Explorations by Alby Stone. Portions of this book were previously published by my friend Bob Trubshaw of Heart of Albion Press. Everything Bob publishes is worth reading if you’re interested in the roots of folklore, and much of it is available as free downloads from his website.
  • My mother has passed, of covid pneumonia which she caught in the rehab facility. She was 91. I miss her. When I come home after having something happen at work I want to talk to her about, I reach for the phone… and remember I can’t call.

• Tony H
  • So as Moss has said, this week we recorded the latest Distrohoppers Digest which I published on Saturday 23rd after doing the edit, including our new intro with Dale as part of the team. Great show if I do say so myself although we continue to strive to get better. 
  • Mint 20.1 is firmly established on my Laptop although I continue with 19.3 as my main driver on the i7 HP Tower which is my main production PC, at some stage I will get around to upgrading although at the moment as I have the IcyDock on this PC I can boot into a Mint 20 install whenever I want to.
  • I have bought some small storage racks with 32 boxes for putting in spares and components for the diecast models I restore, and I have been busy filling them up and labeling them. With the result my workshop is tidier, I can actually find things.
  • On the home front the Covid situation continues to get worse and by the time you hear this we will have passed 100K deaths for C19 here in the UK. It may mean we have even stricter restrictions before this is all over, The Netherlands have just introduced a curfew from 21.00 to 04.30 to try and stop some of the abuses of the current regulations restricting large gatherings indoors. 

• Josh
  • Arch is still working. Now it’s not. I tried to install Linux Mint as a dual boot with arch and quickly found out that was a mistake. I first noticed a problem when I did not see arch as a boot option after hitting f12. When Mint’s grub booted arch was there as an option but when clicking it nothing happens just a black screen forever. I rebooted and then booted into mint and that worked fine. I checked my install of arch and everything looked to be in place; it just won’t boot. Anyways long story short I wiped mint and installed openSUSE tumbleweed cause I wanted to and I am just waiting for a good chunk of time again to try and fix or possibly reinstall my arch install.m
  • Been playing a lot of games while I can before school starts next week and I won’t have much time for them. I won’t go into detail but finally after 7 years I finally got around to beating Dragon Age Inquisition. It was a great story line and I can’t wait for the next chapter in that saga. I have also been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance as well and I have mentioned it before it’s one of my favorite RPG’s and I cannot recommend it enough.
  • Also getting ready for school which starts this week. I am taking a networking class. It’s technically the continuation of another networking class I took 3 semesters ago or so I am hoping it all comes back to me. 
  • I got a new mouse! I had my RedDragon M901 for over 5 years now and I loved that thing but the left mouse click was starting to get a little wonky. I tried to get another RedDragon mouse, the M913 but when I received it the left click was sticking to the point you couldn’t tell when you clicked. I returned that and decided to splurge a little and after a lot more research settled on the Corsair Scimitar Elite. All of the mice I have been talking about have had 12 side buttons but the Scimitar was the first I could set macros on and boy has it changed my gaming experience. Unfortunately there is no way to set the macros and all without windows but there are 3 profiles that save right to the mouse itself so once set you can change between them no matter what OS you’re running.

• Bo
  • Whelp, I got COVID.
  • Raspberry Pi Webcam – https://youtu.be/8fcbP7lEdzY
    • https://thepihut.com/products/mounting-plate-for-high-quality-camera
    • https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera-lens
    • https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-camera-adapter
    • https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera/
    • https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/
    • https://github.com/geerlingguy/pi-webcam
  • A Steam Link Raspberry Pi 4 – https://youtu.be/6WRLlAkTbBY

THE NEWS:

• Tony – The new Raspberry Pi Pico has been launched, this is a $4 microcontroller from the Pi Foundation  
• Someone just ported Android 10 to RISC-V architecture 
• Ubuntu Booting on M1 Mac
  • Asahi Linux will benefit. Their target now is GPU reverse engineering. Specifically this is the work of Alyssa Rosenzweig whose done a lot of work on the Panfrost driver for Mali and Bifrost GPUs
  • The progress is… drawing a triangle on the screen. While it seems small, the impact of this is huge. It was done with all original, open source, code and signifies a big step forward for the platform.
• Flatpak 1.10.0 is released 
  • Downloading the app lists will become much faster
  • The change is helped in big part by not downloading everything, but simply downloading what’s available only for your architecture. In the test Alexander shows in his blog, this resulted in a reduction by almost 2/3
• Ubuntu Making Home Folders Private in 21.04
• Project Lenix from CloudLinux Gets a Name
  • AlmaLinux
• Free RHEL up to 16 licenses per account…
• Valve Will Continue Their Linux Investment
  • Linux – We’re continuing to invest in technology that improves game compatibility and performance through Steam Play. We’re also putting together new ways for prospective users to get into Linux gaming and experience these improvements.
• Chrome Cutting off API Access to Everyone but Themselves. Sync No Longer Available.
  • Fedora mulling over dropping Chromium altogether.

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• IPFS (Interplanetary File System)
  • Originally created back in 2015
  • The purpose is, like Bittorrent, to make file storage distributed to increase the resilience of the web by allowing people that opt into IPFS to store little bits of data they’ve seen to then share it to someone else geographically close to them to make it so that even if the main website goes down, the content can still be accessed.
  • To become one of the IPFS content sharers, enable the Local Node option
  • To simply make use of IPFS, just enable IPFS and ensure you’re using a third-party gateway.
  • The way I see it, Google’s AMP is the main competitor.
• Brave is the first browser to support it
  • It’s as simple as turning a toggle on in Settings.
  • You can easily choose to be a node the first time you access IPFS content. It’s a simple yes or no.
    • Brave asks if you want to enable the IPFS local daemon.

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

• Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on February 7, 2021. 
• Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com , YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – Peaceful Hippo, It’s Moss, MeWe, @bardictriad on Twitter, blogs on Peaceful Hippo, LinuxQuestions.org, and Dreamwidth, music on Bandcamp and my YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus!!
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com 
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@protonmail.com, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites.
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News 

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!>