In security and privacy: Proton Mail now supports post-quantum encryption,

The News:

Mint Monthly News – April 2026

NHS to close-source hundreds of GitHub repos over AI, security concerns

After Days of DDoS, Now Ubuntu’s Twitter Account Seems to be Compromised

Linux Kernel 7.0 is Out With Improvements Across the Board for Intel, AMD, and Storage

Linux is Getting a New Default Folder in Your Home Directory

Chrome Silently Installs a 4GB A.I. Model On Your Device Without Consent

Oh No! Now A Federal Bill Wants OS-Level Age Verification for Everyone in the USA

Kids Bypass Age Verification With Fake Moustaches

The Audio Industry Is Grappling With the Rise of ‘Podslop’

Will Euro-Office be using ODF?

Dell and Lenovo Sponsoring LVFS

Security And Privacy:

‘Dirty Frag’ Linux flaw one-ups CopyFail with no patches and public root exploit

Proton Mail now supports post-quantum encryption

Contact Info:

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, moss@bodhilinux.com, Mastodon @zaivala@hostux.social, occasionally on HPR
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, also checkout the other podcast I am on, Linux OTC (with Eric, Majid & Charlie).
• Majid – drmajid@mintcast.org, AtypicalDoctor on Discord, and The Atypical Doctor Podcast and also Linux OTC and Distrohoppers Digest.
• Eric – I can be reached by email at eric@mintcast.org.
• Charles – charles@mintcast.org, Mr PDX on Discord
• Jim– jim@mintcast.org, GNU2Linux on Discord, The Linux Shortcut on YouTube
• Charlie– ImmutableCharlie on Discord, charlie@mintcast.org

Special Thanks To:

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

In security and privacy: Age Verification coming to your Linux PC?; Anthropic turns Claud loose on Firefox code.

The News:

Mint Monthly News for March 2026

Firefox Is Getting a Major Redesign After 5 Years

Google Chrome on Linux is Getting the Much Awaited Upgrade

Debian 13.4 Released With Dozens Of Fixes

Xfwl4 – The roadmap for a Xfce Wayland Compositor

SUSE May Undergo Another Ownership Change in Potential $6 Billion Sale

Asus Co-CEO: MacBook Neo Is a ‘Shock’ to the PC Industry

HBO Max and Paramount+ will soon merge into one mega streaming service — here’s what you need to know

Security and Privacy:

Age Verification Laws Are Multiplying Like a Virus, and Your Linux Computer Might be Next

Anthropic found a heap of Firefox security flaws using new Claude tools

Check This Out:

YTDown YouTube Downloader

Vogon Poetry

Contact Info:

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, moss@bodhilinux.com, Mastodon @zaivala@hostux.social, occasionally on HPR
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, also checkout the other podcast I am on, Linux OTC (with Eric & Majid).
• Majid – drmajid@mintcast.org @atypical_doctor@mastodon.social, Atypical.doctor on Instagram and Threads and The Atypical Doctor Podcast and also Linux OTC and Distrohoppers Digest.
• Eric – I can be reached by email at eric@mintcast.org.
• Charles – charles@mintcast.org, Mr PDX on Discord
• Jim– jim@mintcast.org, GNU2Linux on Discord, The Linux Shortcut on YouTube

Special Thanks To:

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

In security and privacy: Hackers push fake BitWarden updates, Chinese hackers push Linux-focused WolfsBane, WordPress security flaw gives hackers admin access,

Then in our Wanderings: Bill cools the runnings, Joe cools his printer, Moss cools his ereaders, Majid gives in to temptation, and Eric finds value and delight in his secondhand hardware.

• 00:00:00 – Intro
• 00:01:39 – News
• 00:47:11 – Bi-Weekly Wanderings
• 01:40:25 – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
• 01:41:12 – Wrap Up
• 01:42:33 – Special Thanks
• 01:43:00 – Outro

The News:

mintCast is 16!

Linux Mint 22.1 ISOs are now being tested

US lawyers will reportedly try to force Google to sell Chrome and unbundle Android

All hail our new leader — AMD-powered El Capitan becomes officially the world’s fastest supercomputer

Security and Privacy:

Hackers pushing fake Bitwarden updates hit thousands of devices with data stealing malware

Chinese hackers target Linux with new WolfsBane malware

Security plugin flaw in millions of WordPress sites gives admin access

Contact Info:

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, moss@bodhilinux.com, Mastodon @zaivala@hostux.social, occasionally on HPR
• 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 – 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: Hackers leak 2.7 billion data records with Social Security numbers, and there are lots of zeros attacking Mac and Linux browsers

Then in our Wanderings: Bill is broken down Joe goes virtual, Moss has stopped watching, Majid is in India and will be back next month.

• 00:00:00 – Intro
• 00:01:44 – News
• 00:59:39 – Security And Privacy
• 01:11:33 – Bi-Weekly Wanderings
• 01:35:05 – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
• 01:35:52 – Wrap Up
• 01:38:02 – Special Thanks
• 01:38:32 – Outro

The News

Canonical Moves To Shipping Very Latest Upstream Kernel Code For Ubuntu Releases

Google’s online search monopoly is illegal, US judge rules

WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free

Google is discontinuing the Chromecast line

SUSE upgrades its distros with 19 years of support – no other Linux comes close

Google is killing one of Chrome’s biggest ad blockers

GitLab is reportedly up for sale

Robbins Changed His Mind, Funtoo Shifts to “Hobby Mode”

Security and Privacy

Hackers leak 2.7 billion data records with Social Security numbers

0.0.0.0 Day: 18-Year-Old Browser Vulnerability Impacts MacOS and Linux Devices

Contact Info:

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, moss@bodhilinux.com, Mastodon @zaivala@hostux.social, occasionally on HPR
• 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 the Distrohoppers’ Digest and Linux OTC podcasts as well as the Linux Saloon and LinuxLUGCast streams. 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: Google Chrome’s Privacy Washing

Then in our Wanderings: Bill may just be losing his mind, (there are doubts?), Joe prints everything but money, Majid does VR, Moss hangs on, and Eric spends more quality time with his Linux tablet.

1. 00:00:00 – Hacker Public Radio New Years Eve Promo
2. 00:00:56 – Intro
3. 00:01:23 – New Intro Music
4. 00:02:41 – News
5. 00:54:13 – Security And Privacy
6. 01:04:49 – Bi-Weekly Wanderings
7. 01:58:35 – Housekeeping and Announcements
8. 01:59:43 – Wrap Up
9. 02:02:24 – Special Thanks
10. 02:03:10 – New Outro Music

The News

mintCast Turns 15

Linux Mint 21.3 has been named

Amazon moves from Android Fork to Linux

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Committing Fully To Netplan For Network Configuration

Firefox is going to try to ship Wayland as default

FreeBSD 14 Released

EndeavourOS Releases Galileo Desktop

Vivaldi comes to Flathub

Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds

OpenMandriva LX 5 released

Pipewire reaches 1.0.0

Security and Privacy

Google Chrome’s IP Protection is privacy washing

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, Distrohoppers’ Digest, bardmoss@pm.me, Mastodon @zaivala@hostux.social, and my other contact information can be found at It’s Moss dot com
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, also – checkout my other podcasts Linux OTC and 3 Fat Truckers
• Majid – drmajid@mintcast.org @atypicaldr870 on twitter, AtypicalDr on instagram and The Atypical Doctor Podcast on Spotify
• Eric – You can hear and see me on this and the Linux OTC podcasts as well as the Linux Saloon and LinuxLUGCast streams plus Distrohoppers’ Digest. 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.

Special Thanks To:

• Someone (probably 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!>

And finally, the feedback

In “Check This Out”

A link to a cool project and a YouTube video worth giving a look.

https://openscad.org/downloads.html

https://youtu.be/KyADkmRVe0U

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, Distrohoppers’ Digest, bardmoss@pm.me, I’m on Mastodon as @zaivala@hostux.social, and other contact information can be found at It’s Moss dot com
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, @wchouser3 on Twitter, and wchouser3 on Facebook also – checkout my other podcasts Linux OTC and 3 Fat Truckers
• Majid – drmajid@mintcast.org @atypicaldoctor on twitter, AtypicalAnaesthetist on instagram and The Atypical Anaesthetist Podcast on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/6Uo4DsJE8fJmvo8npljbmx)

We would like to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible:

• 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 contribution
• 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 our Innards section we discuss how we would build our own distro

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions.

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit. Youtube.

Wrap-up

• Joe – Tllts.org, linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Norbert – norbert@mintcast.org
• Josh T – jt@mintcast.org, Josh Thacker on Discord, and @Metal_FOSS on Twitter
• Nishant – nishant@mintcast.org,riconghost on instagram, riconghost@Github, Ghost.Ricon on DIscord, maverick00783 @ Steam
• Moss – bardmoss@pm.me, you can hear me on Distrohoppers’ Digest and Full Circle Weekly News, and you can find more contact information for me on It’s MOSS.
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, @wchouser3 on Twitter,and Bill_H on Discord

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

• Norbert and Tony H for our audio production
• Leo for timestamps and publishing
• Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
• Hobstar for our logo
• initrd for the animated Discord logo
• 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!

First up in the news: Ubuntu is out-fedoring Fedora; Linux 5.18 brings new optimizations; the Budgie has landed; Debian 12 has a projected birthday, and Asahi has its first Alpha;

In security and privacy, a new Spectre has arisen;

Then in our Wanderings, Bill gets “Jitsi with it”, Moss goes down the “pi-hole”, and Norbert hops onto the Fedora bandwagon

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit. Youtube.

The News

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS To Carry GNOME Triple Buffering Support
• Linux 5.18 To Bring New Intel Drivers, Optimization For AMD EPYC
• Budgie 10.6 is Here as its First Release Under the New Organization
• Asahi Linux Alpha Release is here
• Debian 12.0 “Bookworm” Looks Like It Will Release Around Mid-2023

Security Update

• Branch History Injection – A new Spectre vulnerability affecting Intel & Arm CPUs (Moss)

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time onApril 3, 2022
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream – 2 pm US Central time on March 26, 2022
• Get the Live Stream converted to your time zone

Wrap-up

• Joe – Tllts.org, linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Norbert – norbert@mintcast.org
• Josh T – jt@mintcast.org, Josh Thacker on Discord, and @Metal_FOSS on Twitter
• Nishant – nishant@mintcast.org,riconghost on instagram, riconghost@Github, Ghost.Ricon on DIscord, maverick00783 @ Steam
• Moss – bardmoss@pm.me, you can hear me on Distrohoppers’ Digest and Full Circle Weekly News, and you can find more contact information for me on It’s MOSS.
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, @wchouser3 on Twitter,and Bill_H on Discord

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

• Norbert and Tony H for our audio production
• Leo for timestamps and publishing
• Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
• Hobstar for our logo
• initrd for the animated Discord logo
• 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!

First up in the news, Raspberry PI Zero 2 W, Xorg has something new, SUSE goes Edge, A new MX linux, and Microsoft Blunders

In security, an NPM library gets hijacked, Proton will not retain your data, Firefox implements GPC, and black Friday scams abound

Then in our Wanderings, Joe tries his hand at tv repair, Norbert plays with legos, Tony shops for a new pc, and Josh gets a new throne

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit. Youtube.

The News

• New Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W 
• Ex-org? Not at all! Three and a half years after X.Org Server 1.20, 1.21 is released
• SUSE heads for the Edge Computing with SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro 5.1
• MX Linux 21 released, based on Debian Bullseye – AHS version to release soon
• Microsoft repents of its open-source .NET blunder

Security Update

• If you’re using this hijacked NPM library anywhere in your software stack, read this
• Protonmail celebrates Swiss court victory exempting it from telco data retention laws
• Mozilla Firefox joins browsers implementing Global Privacy Control
• TA575 criminal group using ‘Squid Game’ lures for Dridex malware
• Google fixes two high-severity zero-day flaws in Chrome
• Fortinet warns of Black Friday scams involving PS5s, Xboxes and fake Amazon gift card generators that steal crypto

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

• Joe
  • https://github.com/bluppfisk/coinprice-indicator
• Norbert
• Tony
  • YouTube channel
• Nishant

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on Sunday, November 14th
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream – 2 pm US Central time on Saturday November 6th
• Get the Live Stream converted to your time zone

Wrap-up

• Joe – Tllts.org, linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Norbert – norbert@mintcast.org
• The Other Other Josh – jt@mintcast.org, Josh Thacker on Discord, and @Metal_FOSS on Twitter
• Nishant – nishant@mintcast.org,riconghost on instagram, riconghost@Github, Ghost.Ricon on DIscord, maverick00783 @ Steam

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

• Norbert for our audio production
• Leo for timestamps and publishing
• Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
• Hobstar for our logo
• initrd for the animated Discord logo
• 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!>

More Chromium Talk – Leo

• What do we use?
• Chromium-based? Firefox?
• The monoculture…

What’s My Distro? – Moss

As I was just pressed into service on this topic yesterday, some early bits of this article were borrowed from or inspired by the article, “What Does The Penguin Say?” on LinuxInsider.com,

So Windows gives you “Windows the Windows Way”, Mac gives you “Mac the Mac Way”, and Linux gives you… everything you ever dreamed of — or your worst nightmares — in a user salad of options.

Just look at the desktop paradigms.

• Does the desktop try to capture a “traditional” or revolutionary desktop interface paradigm?
• Does it favor sleekness or no-frills functionality?
• Do the developers strive for constant evolution or stability and consistency?
• Are windows, menus, and settings panels minimalist or information-dense?
• Should users accept the UI as it is, or make it their own?

As founder and co-host of Distrohoppers’ Digest, these and other issues come to the fore. 

• Which installer does it use, or do they write their own? 
  • Ubiquity – most Ubuntu, Mint
  • Calamares – other Ubuntu, Ubuntu forks, GeckoLinux, and others
  • Anaconda – Fedora
  • Debian-Installer
  • YaST

Now that Ubuntu is setting off writing an all-new installer, this issue is even more timely. How will it be better than Ubiquity? Anyone who has used Calamares has a few answers to that one. But can it be better than Calamares? What about flexibility? Some users of OpenSUSE claim their installer is better than Calamares because it has much more and better options, while others, like me, say those options are not the least understood by most users.

… or does the distro provide a pure image (.img) file, and you have to install GRUB or another bootloader yourself? (EasyOS)

• Which package manager do they use, or do they write their own?
  • APT with .deb packages (or .rpm packages, in PCLinuxOS)
  • Portage or Entropy
  • URPM, dnf
  • pacman, pamac
  • YUM
  • YaST, zypper
  • eopkg
  • .pup, .snf, you name it

I guess next would be to discuss families, which mostly boils down to:

• Debian Family
  • Ubuntu sub-family – probably 90-95% of all desktop Linux users
    • Ubuntu
    • Ubuntu wannabes, remixes, respins
    • Linux Mint
    • Indies (Peppermint, FerenOS, Zorin)
  • Independents
• Slackware Family
  • OpenSUSE variants
• Red Hat Family
  • Red Hat variants (Fedora, Scientific, CentOS, Rocky, Clear, Oracle)
  • Mandrake variants (PCLinuxOS, Mageia, OpenMandriva, Rosa)
• Arch Family (Endeavour, Manjaro)
• Gentoo Family (Sabayon, ChromeOS, Mocaccino, Calculate, Redcore)
• LFS and Homebrew Family (SolusOS, Clear Linux OS)

Then there is the topic of Desktop Environments. We’ve discussed this rather extensively in the past on this show. The major choices are:

• Gnome or variants, which includes Cinnamon and Budgie, as well as forks of earlier versions such as MATE
• KDE Plasma, or forks such as Trinity
• Enlightenment, or forks such as Moksha
• XFCE
• LXDE or LXQt
• Independents such as Deepin, Pantheon, and Lumina

So in terms of complete packages of distros, according to statistics seen by Martin Wimpress, mentioned by Martin Wimpress in the past year or so, but not referenced anywhere public, around 85% of all Linux Desktop users run Ubuntu (Gnome), perhaps 5% run Ubuntu MATE, around 4-5% run Linux Mint, and that leaves 5-6% for everything else. What are the other “everything else”s that I would recommend for new users?

Everyone has an opinion. I’m running 9 different distros across 4 machines, with eight on one machine alone.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to just recommend the main version of Ubuntu or Linux Mint, and you’d be right to do so, but there are others I’d also recommend based on the machine and the user. Right now, my list would include UbuntuDDE Remix, Bodhi Linux, Lubuntu, PCLinuxOS, OpenMandriva, KDE neon, Zorin OS, FerenOS, and PeppermintOS. The first two are the most unusual and forward-looking, and the last three are the easiest to make them look or work the most like Windows 7 or 10. You are of course encouraged to try anything Official or unofficial Ubuntu, including Linux Mint and Pop!_OS. On that list, only OpenMandriva and PCLinuxOS are not Ubuntu-based, and what is missing from that list includes Fedora or OpenSUSE or Arch-based distros.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

• Erik Lietz
• Henrik Hemrin
  • wget -O – https://raw.githubusercontent.com/laurent22/joplin/dev/Joplin_install_and_update.sh | bash
  • See the start page for the Installation: https://joplinapp.org/
• John Wallis
  • postfix@-.service:
  • rc-local.service:
  • rescue.service:
  • rsync.service:
  • rsyslog.service:
• Leo’s Response
  • Add the, for example “cramfs”, to this file -> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

CHECK THIS OUT!

• Leo
  • Via Whosy – Ruffle – Rust Flash player 
• Moss
  • Raspberry Pi respin of MX Linux is now in beta, you need to grab a copy of their app “Imager” to install it.
  • Most anticipated distros of 2021 – I don’t know about them, but I’m waiting for Bodhi 6 still and also Slackware 15

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!>

More Chromium Talk – Leo

• What do we use?
• Chromium-based? Firefox?
• The monoculture…

What’s My Distro? – Moss

As I was just pressed into service on this topic yesterday, some early bits of this article were borrowed from or inspired by the article, “What Does The Penguin Say?” on LinuxInsider.com,

So Windows gives you “Windows the Windows Way”, Mac gives you “Mac the Mac Way”, and Linux gives you… everything you ever dreamed of — or your worst nightmares — in a user salad of options.

Just look at the desktop paradigms.

• Does the desktop try to capture a “traditional” or revolutionary desktop interface paradigm?
• Does it favor sleekness or no-frills functionality?
• Do the developers strive for constant evolution or stability and consistency?
• Are windows, menus, and settings panels minimalist or information-dense?
• Should users accept the UI as it is, or make it their own?

As founder and co-host of Distrohoppers’ Digest, these and other issues come to the fore. 

• Which installer does it use, or do they write their own? 
  • Ubiquity – most Ubuntu, Mint
  • Calamares – other Ubuntu, Ubuntu forks, GeckoLinux, and others
  • Anaconda – Fedora
  • Debian-Installer
  • YaST

Now that Ubuntu is setting off writing an all-new installer, this issue is even more timely. How will it be better than Ubiquity? Anyone who has used Calamares has a few answers to that one. But can it be better than Calamares? What about flexibility? Some users of OpenSUSE claim their installer is better than Calamares because it has much more and better options, while others, like me, say those options are not the least understood by most users.

… or does the distro provide a pure image (.img) file, and you have to install GRUB or another bootloader yourself? (EasyOS)

• Which package manager do they use, or do they write their own?
  • APT with .deb packages (or .rpm packages, in PCLinuxOS)
  • Portage or Entropy
  • URPM, dnf
  • pacman, pamac
  • YUM
  • YaST, zypper
  • eopkg
  • .pup, .snf, you name it

I guess next would be to discuss families, which mostly boils down to:

• Debian Family
  • Ubuntu sub-family – probably 90-95% of all desktop Linux users
    • Ubuntu
    • Ubuntu wannabes, remixes, respins
    • Linux Mint
    • Indies (Peppermint, FerenOS, Zorin)
  • Independents
• Slackware Family
  • OpenSUSE variants
• Red Hat Family
  • Red Hat variants (Fedora, Scientific, CentOS, Rocky, Clear, Oracle)
  • Mandrake variants (PCLinuxOS, Mageia, OpenMandriva, Rosa)
• Arch Family (Endeavour, Manjaro)
• Gentoo Family (Sabayon, ChromeOS, Mocaccino, Calculate, Redcore)
• LFS and Homebrew Family (SolusOS, Clear Linux OS)

Then there is the topic of Desktop Environments. We’ve discussed this rather extensively in the past on this show. The major choices are:

• Gnome or variants, which includes Cinnamon and Budgie, as well as forks of earlier versions such as MATE
• KDE Plasma, or forks such as Trinity
• Enlightenment, or forks such as Moksha
• XFCE
• LXDE or LXQt
• Independents such as Deepin, Pantheon, and Lumina

So in terms of complete packages of distros, according to statistics seen by Martin Wimpress, mentioned by Martin Wimpress in the past year or so, but not referenced anywhere public, around 85% of all Linux Desktop users run Ubuntu (Gnome), perhaps 5% run Ubuntu MATE, around 4-5% run Linux Mint, and that leaves 5-6% for everything else. What are the other “everything else”s that I would recommend for new users?

Everyone has an opinion. I’m running 9 different distros across 4 machines, with eight on one machine alone.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to just recommend the main version of Ubuntu or Linux Mint, and you’d be right to do so, but there are others I’d also recommend based on the machine and the user. Right now, my list would include UbuntuDDE Remix, Bodhi Linux, Lubuntu, PCLinuxOS, OpenMandriva, KDE neon, Zorin OS, FerenOS, and PeppermintOS. The first two are the most unusual and forward-looking, and the last three are the easiest to make them look or work the most like Windows 7 or 10. You are of course encouraged to try anything Official or unofficial Ubuntu, including Linux Mint and Pop!_OS. On that list, only OpenMandriva and PCLinuxOS are not Ubuntu-based, and what is missing from that list includes Fedora or OpenSUSE or Arch-based distros.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

• Erik Lietz
• Henrik Hemrin
  • wget -O – https://raw.githubusercontent.com/laurent22/joplin/dev/Joplin_install_and_update.sh | bash
  • See the start page for the Installation: https://joplinapp.org/
• John Wallis
  • postfix@-.service:
  • rc-local.service:
  • rescue.service:
  • rsync.service:
  • rsyslog.service:
• Leo’s Response
  • Add the, for example “cramfs”, to this file -> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

CHECK THIS OUT!

• Leo
  • Via Whosy – Ruffle – Rust Flash player 
• Moss
  • Raspberry Pi respin of MX Linux is now in beta, you need to grab a copy of their app “Imager” to install it.
  • Most anticipated distros of 2021 – I don’t know about them, but I’m waiting for Bodhi 6 still and also Slackware 15

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
  • 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!>

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

Leo

• Been playing with more Pi!
  • Dug up my old Pi 2, have some download automation running on it now. Made a VM of mine redundant. Considering converting it to a Gitea server to manage my notes.
  • Will relieve my i7 2630qm from Nextcloud duty. The Pi 4 is working beautifully. Now, what to do with it? Docker time?
  • Have some ideas for my old rickety Pi one. Use TMUX to ssh into multiple servers and run bpytop or some monitoring tool on a screen, 24/7. Basically, blinking lights. Raspbian Lite will likely do the job nicely.

Moss

• I thought I had a problem with the FuzZ400…and before I determined what the problem was, I grabbed my now-repaired mini box and hooked it up. Just as I was tightening the screws on the case, I saw that my tablet, which had been plugged in for charging, was sitting on the keyboard. Problem solved, but too late to go back.
• I had to reinstall everything on the Mini’s SSD except Mint and Manjaro, probably having to do with having been installed on a completely different computer (Xeon and Nvidia instead of i3 and Intel). 
• I’ve added more partitions to my Kudu’s 1 Tb SSD. I now have 10 distro partitions, one of them unused. I installed Enso OS, and am probably going to review that for the next Distrohoppers’ Digest. I’m also trying 4M Linux on a USB stick, as it seems to be a Puppy-like version of Arch.
• I had a lot of other issues, but I’ll save those for the next DHD, which should be out right about the time of the next mintCast.
• Distrohoppers’ Digest now has 4 episodes with over 500 downloads – 1 of those over 600 –  and only 4 under 400. We’re averaging 463 downloads per episode. Episode 018 featured Dale Miracle live in studio for the first time. Dale covers distros NOT made for beginners, a welcome addition. The next episode is currently scheduled to be recorded on December 9.
• I’ve been getting a few days’ work as a substitute teacher, but they keep closing the schools. Last week it was that they didn’t have enough healthy bus drivers, next week it’s that they don’t have enough teachers and subs. I got paychecks from Grainger Schools, All Women Housed, and finally from Census2020! I’m still way behind on lots of things, since it has been so long since I last had a paycheck.
• I’m reading the Kevin Mitnick book. It did not convince me why I need that much security, and completely convinced me that I won’t be secure no matter how much time, effort, and money I spend. So why bother? I’m about to give up and give Google all my money.
• We are working our way through Proven Guilty, in the Dresden Files series. Almost halfway through.

Josh

• I have been trying out Plasma and really trying to give it a good shot. I tried openSUSE Tumbleweed first because it has a great plasma representation. It uses the newest plasma available because it’s a rolling release. I personally don’t like anything about default plasma, it just rubs me wrong. I quickly discovered that it just won’t work for me due to look & feel and settings issues. 
• Next I tried Manjaro Plasma and that felt much better out of the gate. I could live with it as default but some small quarks just keep me at bay. Right clicking on both openSUSE and Manjaro resulted in a menu that I was unfamiliar with. You had to not only right click but then open a menu inside of the dialogue to get the open in terminal option. Also there is no open as root by default but as stated to me by Dale Miracle there is an add-on. The dolphin file browser also does not feel right to me for either of these first two distros I tried. Things get really out of hand when trying to compensate for HiDpi monitors. It’s so hard to get every aspect of the desktop to look right that I just gave up entirely and I tried for hours with both tweaking and resetting but nothing looked good. 
• Finally I tried FerenOS and, by George, I think he’s done it. Next to Solus (which I will mention later) FerenOS has the best customized plasma desktop hands down. Everything looks proportionate, nothing seems out of place or not scaled right and he fixes the Dolphin issue by ripping it out and replacing it with good old Nemo! Theming is great and you can change everything, the dark or light theme, the accent color, and even the layout of plasma right from the welcome screen. Now that all being said the HiDpi issue of scaling still persists with FerenOS unfortunately. I think that’s just a plasma issue. 
• So I did try Solus Plasma a while back and I feel that it is the best Plasma Distro but I don’t recommend it anymore because they have fallen behind on the kernel (last I saw it was 5.6). I understand they have an LTS kernel as well but it’s not default and there have been many vulnerability patches applied to the kernel since 5.6. 
• Even with how good FerenOS is I still went back to Linux Mint with the cinnamon desktop. Cinnamon just looks better to me and is the perfect balance between customizability and functionality. Also when I scale the desktop to anything between 100% and 200% it does not look wrong it scales everything appropriately. An example being when I set it to 125% on my HiDpi dell laptop it scales all aspects of the desktop exactly the same. In plasma unless you know how to edit the panel (which is not obvious) it remains the same size. Only downside to this on Cinnamon is when you set it to 125% 150% or 175% it has screen tearing and I am submitting a bug report for that asap.
• One last thing I want to mention. I am trying out Manjaro Cinnamon as we speak. It is what I am recording my segment on Mintcast with and it’s given me some options that I would not have known about if I didn’t give it a go. More on this next time.

Joe

• I have mostly stopped talking about books on here but I read 2 recently that I wanted to mention.  Ready Player 2 and Rhythm of War.  Both really good book and you should check them out as soon as you can
• Well I decided to put one of the more messed up PSPs in a new cover.  Things did not go in my favor.
  • Was able to get it removed easy enough despite the stripped screws and wrong size screws from the last guy that took it apart.
  • Got it most of the way put back together when the power switch broke (it was loose before I swear)
  • I was able to desolder that power switch and one from a known bad board and move it over but had some trouble with the positioning so had to do it over again a couple of times until I ended up putting it at the far end of where it should sit
  • Also started having problems keeping the ribbon cable for it seated but was finally able to get that into place as well. 
  • Had to take it apart and put it back together in the new case several times due to small errors and needing to get the front of the case seated properly which never really happened
  • Because the one side of the mobo is higher than it should be, the joystick does not work and the volume down is stuck the way it was last time I tried to fix this device with a new front. Was really hoping that it was just the casing that was bent but this turned out to not be the case
  • Being disappointed in how that turned out I decided to pick up another broken psp for 20 dollars. The device supposedly had a broken screen and charging issues and I had an extra screen from this build. Well I got very lucky and the only thing wrong with the device was a bad battery and a broken casing.  One of the previous psps that I had purchased for 20 dollars had come with 2 extra sets of buttons as well as the full housing that I had just tried to use and a brand new piano black faceplate.  I put the faceplate on and put one of the batteries into it and it looks immaculate. I almost want to take it apart and verify that it is the original screen and not an upgraded one because of how good it looks.
  • Now I have a broken battery to work with as well which I will be able to use for a battery mod on a device with a umd drive in the future.  Or if I feel the need to do it for the sake of doing it. 
• Tried to print some small thin items with PETG and it has not worked very well.  Evidently PETG does not do well in the 1mm range.  Granted it took me several tries with various settings to go and look at what other people had to say on the subject before I came to this conclusion.  So I may try the print in ABS and see how it turns out.  PLA works but is too soft for long term. I however think that ABS will be too brittle.   Maybe I should use carbon fiber or something similar but that would require a lot of refitting of my 3d printer
• My laptop was overheating while gaming.  It was not doing this before so I don’t know if it was a change from the new update for Borderlands 3 or the laptop itself so I decided to take it apart and clean the fans and replace the thermal paste.  
  • This is not normally an overly difficult fix for my particular laptop, the MSI GE72-6QD 
  • But one of the screws that connect the heatsink to the CPU stripped at the top in a very inconvenient location down next to another heatsink and the arm that holds it all down is very thin.  The  only thing I could do was get out the dremel and the cutting bit and cut a new groove for a straight tip instead of a phillips head screwdriver
  • It worked and I didn’t mess it up.  It was very nerve wracking though cause it would not have taken much of a slip to ruin my laptop
  • Still happy with the results so far

THE NEWS: 

• IPO rumored for SUSE
• November Update for Pine64 – KDE phone, PineTime improvements, and more!
• Fourth major release of Blender in 2020
• Mudita – beautiful, new, open source… feature phone OS? For this phone.
• Everybody gets Ray Tracing on Linux!
• Valve Making OpenGL to Vulkan a Reality

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Microsoft Defender for Linux adds a new feature just for Linux
• Dell is adding webcam and microphone kill switches to the Linux Kernel
• Firefox Enables HTTPS-Only Mode, Go Turn it ON!
• Slipstream
  • Chrome, with the release of 87, now blocks outbound port 5060 and 5061.
  • Firefox is doing the same in Firefox 84.

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, November 29, 2020, at 2 pm Central Time, check for your local time!

https://everytimezone.com/s/1506acff

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

• Been playing with more Pi!
  • Dug up my old Pi 2, have some download automation running on it now. Made a VM of mine redundant. Considering converting it to a Gitea server to manage my notes.
  • Will relieve my i7 2630qm from Nextcloud duty. The Pi 4 is working beautifully. Now, what to do with it? Docker time?
  • Have some ideas for my old rickety Pi one. Use TMUX to ssh into multiple servers and run bpytop or some monitoring tool on a screen, 24/7. Basically, blinking lights. Raspbian Lite will likely do the job nicely.

Moss

• I thought I had a problem with the FuzZ400…and before I determined what the problem was, I grabbed my now-repaired mini box and hooked it up. Just as I was tightening the screws on the case, I saw that my tablet, which had been plugged in for charging, was sitting on the keyboard. Problem solved, but too late to go back.
• I had to reinstall everything on the Mini’s SSD except Mint and Manjaro, probably having to do with having been installed on a completely different computer (Xeon and Nvidia instead of i3 and Intel). 
• I’ve added more partitions to my Kudu’s 1 Tb SSD. I now have 10 distro partitions, one of them unused. I installed Enso OS, and am probably going to review that for the next Distrohoppers’ Digest. I’m also trying 4M Linux on a USB stick, as it seems to be a Puppy-like version of Arch.
• I had a lot of other issues, but I’ll save those for the next DHD, which should be out right about the time of the next mintCast.
• Distrohoppers’ Digest now has 4 episodes with over 500 downloads – 1 of those over 600 –  and only 4 under 400. We’re averaging 463 downloads per episode. Episode 018 featured Dale Miracle live in studio for the first time. Dale covers distros NOT made for beginners, a welcome addition. The next episode is currently scheduled to be recorded on December 9.
• I’ve been getting a few days’ work as a substitute teacher, but they keep closing the schools. Last week it was that they didn’t have enough healthy bus drivers, next week it’s that they don’t have enough teachers and subs. I got paychecks from Grainger Schools, All Women Housed, and finally from Census2020! I’m still way behind on lots of things, since it has been so long since I last had a paycheck.
• I’m reading the Kevin Mitnick book. It did not convince me why I need that much security, and completely convinced me that I won’t be secure no matter how much time, effort, and money I spend. So why bother? I’m about to give up and give Google all my money.
• We are working our way through Proven Guilty, in the Dresden Files series. Almost halfway through.

Josh

• I have been trying out Plasma and really trying to give it a good shot. I tried openSUSE Tumbleweed first because it has a great plasma representation. It uses the newest plasma available because it’s a rolling release. I personally don’t like anything about default plasma, it just rubs me wrong. I quickly discovered that it just won’t work for me due to look & feel and settings issues. 
• Next I tried Manjaro Plasma and that felt much better out of the gate. I could live with it as default but some small quarks just keep me at bay. Right clicking on both openSUSE and Manjaro resulted in a menu that I was unfamiliar with. You had to not only right click but then open a menu inside of the dialogue to get the open in terminal option. Also there is no open as root by default but as stated to me by Dale Miracle there is an add-on. The dolphin file browser also does not feel right to me for either of these first two distros I tried. Things get really out of hand when trying to compensate for HiDpi monitors. It’s so hard to get every aspect of the desktop to look right that I just gave up entirely and I tried for hours with both tweaking and resetting but nothing looked good. 
• Finally I tried FerenOS and, by George, I think he’s done it. Next to Solus (which I will mention later) FerenOS has the best customized plasma desktop hands down. Everything looks proportionate, nothing seems out of place or not scaled right and he fixes the Dolphin issue by ripping it out and replacing it with good old Nemo! Theming is great and you can change everything, the dark or light theme, the accent color, and even the layout of plasma right from the welcome screen. Now that all being said the HiDpi issue of scaling still persists with FerenOS unfortunately. I think that’s just a plasma issue. 
• So I did try Solus Plasma a while back and I feel that it is the best Plasma Distro but I don’t recommend it anymore because they have fallen behind on the kernel (last I saw it was 5.6). I understand they have an LTS kernel as well but it’s not default and there have been many vulnerability patches applied to the kernel since 5.6. 
• Even with how good FerenOS is I still went back to Linux Mint with the cinnamon desktop. Cinnamon just looks better to me and is the perfect balance between customizability and functionality. Also when I scale the desktop to anything between 100% and 200% it does not look wrong it scales everything appropriately. An example being when I set it to 125% on my HiDpi dell laptop it scales all aspects of the desktop exactly the same. In plasma unless you know how to edit the panel (which is not obvious) it remains the same size. Only downside to this on Cinnamon is when you set it to 125% 150% or 175% it has screen tearing and I am submitting a bug report for that asap.
• One last thing I want to mention. I am trying out Manjaro Cinnamon as we speak. It is what I am recording my segment on Mintcast with and it’s given me some options that I would not have known about if I didn’t give it a go. More on this next time.

Joe

• I have mostly stopped talking about books on here but I read 2 recently that I wanted to mention.  Ready Player 2 and Rhythm of War.  Both really good book and you should check them out as soon as you can
• Well I decided to put one of the more messed up PSPs in a new cover.  Things did not go in my favor.
  • Was able to get it removed easy enough despite the stripped screws and wrong size screws from the last guy that took it apart.
  • Got it most of the way put back together when the power switch broke (it was loose before I swear)
  • I was able to desolder that power switch and one from a known bad board and move it over but had some trouble with the positioning so had to do it over again a couple of times until I ended up putting it at the far end of where it should sit
  • Also started having problems keeping the ribbon cable for it seated but was finally able to get that into place as well. 
  • Had to take it apart and put it back together in the new case several times due to small errors and needing to get the front of the case seated properly which never really happened
  • Because the one side of the mobo is higher than it should be, the joystick does not work and the volume down is stuck the way it was last time I tried to fix this device with a new front. Was really hoping that it was just the casing that was bent but this turned out to not be the case
  • Being disappointed in how that turned out I decided to pick up another broken psp for 20 dollars. The device supposedly had a broken screen and charging issues and I had an extra screen from this build. Well I got very lucky and the only thing wrong with the device was a bad battery and a broken casing.  One of the previous psps that I had purchased for 20 dollars had come with 2 extra sets of buttons as well as the full housing that I had just tried to use and a brand new piano black faceplate.  I put the faceplate on and put one of the batteries into it and it looks immaculate. I almost want to take it apart and verify that it is the original screen and not an upgraded one because of how good it looks.
  • Now I have a broken battery to work with as well which I will be able to use for a battery mod on a device with a umd drive in the future.  Or if I feel the need to do it for the sake of doing it. 
• Tried to print some small thin items with PETG and it has not worked very well.  Evidently PETG does not do well in the 1mm range.  Granted it took me several tries with various settings to go and look at what other people had to say on the subject before I came to this conclusion.  So I may try the print in ABS and see how it turns out.  PLA works but is too soft for long term. I however think that ABS will be too brittle.   Maybe I should use carbon fiber or something similar but that would require a lot of refitting of my 3d printer
• My laptop was overheating while gaming.  It was not doing this before so I don’t know if it was a change from the new update for Borderlands 3 or the laptop itself so I decided to take it apart and clean the fans and replace the thermal paste.  
  • This is not normally an overly difficult fix for my particular laptop, the MSI GE72-6QD 
  • But one of the screws that connect the heatsink to the CPU stripped at the top in a very inconvenient location down next to another heatsink and the arm that holds it all down is very thin.  The  only thing I could do was get out the dremel and the cutting bit and cut a new groove for a straight tip instead of a phillips head screwdriver
  • It worked and I didn’t mess it up.  It was very nerve wracking though cause it would not have taken much of a slip to ruin my laptop
  • Still happy with the results so far

THE NEWS: 

• IPO rumored for SUSE
• November Update for Pine64 – KDE phone, PineTime improvements, and more!
• Fourth major release of Blender in 2020
• Mudita – beautiful, new, open source… feature phone OS? For this phone.
• Everybody gets Ray Tracing on Linux!
• Valve Making OpenGL to Vulkan a Reality

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Microsoft Defender for Linux adds a new feature just for Linux
• Dell is adding webcam and microphone kill switches to the Linux Kernel
• Firefox Enables HTTPS-Only Mode, Go Turn it ON!
• Slipstream
  • Chrome, with the release of 87, now blocks outbound port 5060 and 5061.
  • Firefox is doing the same in Firefox 84.

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, November 29, 2020, at 2 pm Central Time, check for your local time!

https://everytimezone.com/s/1506acff

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!>

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Upgraded to Ubuntu 20.10’s 5.8 kernel in Linux Mint. My 5700XT’s performance has increased! Yay!
  • Playing with Kubuntu 20.10 which also has kernel 5.8.
  • Recording this on an AMD A10-7870K with 16GB RAM and all my other audio gear. If something goes wrong today, I’m gonna blame that…
  • Last episode I mentioned that World of Warcraft was crashing in Wine from Lutris. Fixed this by moving from the Wine 5.7 TkG version that Lutris provides to Wine Staging 5.19. That upgraded to 5.20 recently as well.
  • Chromium got upgrades! It’s now part of the Linux Mint repo.

• Bo
  • At work I’ve been hardening servers. I’ve actually locked myself out of one.
  • New monitors
    • AOC C24G1
    • 144hz
    • FreeSync
  • Bo, don’t read this
    • https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Variable_refresh_rate
  • Baldur’s gate 3 on linux
    • Protondb gives it a gold rating.
    • GloriousEggroll’s custom proton
    • Symlinking the launcher

cd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Baldurs/Gate/3/Launcher/

mv LariLauncher.exe LariLauncher.exe.old

ln -s ../bin/bg3.exe LariLauncher.exe

cp ./*.dll ../bin/

• Josh
  • My openSUSE samba server is still alive and kicking!
  • After seeing the error of my ways with btrfs I decided to reinstall Mint on my desktop pc.
  • Linux Mint gaming is broken on my newly installed OS #DualMonitorWoes.
  • Testing out Edge on Linux after hearing a ton of good feedback about it.

• Tony H
  • So the last few weeks have not been brilliant health wise, I missed the last recording as I was ill with acid reflux, which when it flares up really knocks me for 6. At the moment still not a 100% but getting a little better.
  • As we go on air I am currently in a 3 day of shielding with my wife who has to go into hospital for a small operation on Tuesday, luckily this is a day procedure or the lockdown would have been 2 weeks, so I can not leave the house until Tuesday at 6.40am when I take her into the hospital for the operation and even then I can not be there to support her during the process. Blast Covid. On a positive note her covid test came back negative, so the opp can go ahead as planned.
  • One of the downsides of my health issues is it drains me of energy and I’ve not felt like doing much in the way of modeling or preparing my review of KaOS for Distrohoppers that we are hoping to record this coming week, but I will have something to say but not as comprehensive a review as I would like.

• Moss
  • I had all my teeth removed and they are currently covered by temporary dentures, which is why I’m talking funny right now. This will be going on for some time, but the show must go on!
  • We’re getting ready to record Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 017, presumably the day after this episode hits your podcatcher. This will be another adventure in diction. On another note, Tony has noticed that some of our download numbers have gone backwards, so we should all donate to Archive and ask for our downloads back.
  • I just installed PCLinuxOS on Friday. I was amazed at how easily it went this time, and I’m still reeling from being able to use APT to install RPM packages. The installer has a little catch: it will not tell you what distros are installed on which partitions. This is why I have not yet installed it on my desktop, I didn’t identify my available partitions prior to attempting the install and was not brave enough to take a guess and soldier on.
  • I also installed Feren OS again, and found that they have yet to update the base to 20.04. I looked it up and it is promised for November. I may not spend much time working with Feren until the upgrade.
  • My work has been sporadic, and no paychecks have been received for months. We’re down to our last $30. But Social Security comes tomorrow, and those missing paychecks should come some day. I have a new job on the side, selling a line of products to raise money to house and employ homeless women across the country. I’ve worked with this promoter before, and while it hasn’t always worked out well, it’s not from lack of trying.
  • We finally finished Dead Beat and are working on the next book, Proven Guilty, more slowly now that I can’t talk well.

• Joe
  • Got a couple of dirt cheap broken handhelds.  I had a lot of fun with it.  So far I have gotten
    • 2 PSP 1001s that did not power on
    • One 3DS XL old that did not power on
    • One DS Lite
  • The NDS Lite needed the lower display replaced
    • This was not a hard fix but when I was putting it back together I noticed that the ribbon cable for the digitizer was a bit  frayed.  I put it back together as best I could any way
    • It seemed to work.  Both screens came on and displayed the need for touchscreen calibration.  It died as soon as I touched the screen and would not power back on.
    • I took it apart again and I saw that the leads were lifted off the ribbon cable
    • I hope that replacing the touchscreen will fix the problem but I know that the board might also be fried like bacon
    • Only one way to find out.
    • It was also acting like the battery was bad …
    • So I replaced the battery and it would still not turn on
    • I attempted to replace the touchpad but it was a little more delicate than I am and now the thing is good for parts but i am fairly sure that i had already messed up the motherboard anyway
  • The 3DS XL was supposedly broken and would not turn on.  But I replaced the battery and hooked it up to power and it turned right on with no issues. I did have to bypass the parental controls which was super easy and I did notice that the joystick felt a little stiff but that cleared up after some time.
    • I was also able to get a multicart off eBay for pretty cheap and it works like the R4 card is supposed to and allowed me to run all the games that were on the cart.
    • It also allowed me to replace the Micro SD card that was in the cart and after I copied over the control files I was able to double the memory of the SD card and add in some of the other roms that I have sitting around.  I was also able to install one of the Genesis emulators and one of the NES emulators to play some of those roms that I own.  As well as adding many of the DS games.  Although I could not play 3DS games from there.
    • I enjoyed the Genesis emulator from there but it would not allow me to switch to full screen or view the whole image at once.  It was not insurmountable but it did take away from the immersion of the game
    • So I went ahead and set up homebrew on the device (everything was done from Linux). This was a long and tedious process but in the end I was able to set up a second 32 gb micro SD card on it with a different Genesis emulator that did allow me to see the whole image and to stretch it to full screen.
    • This also allowed me to set up and remove 3DS games (all legally obtained) and to add custom theming to the device.  I really like how Shovel Knight looked and played on the device and I love playing old school Shadowrun on it.  The Sega version and I have been playing a lot of it
    • So now I can play 3DS games and Sega games from one card and I can play NES, SNES and DS games from the other card.  I suppose I could also set up some Atari emulation if I wanted and get some Centipede or Space Command or Star Raider going.
    • Plus with the DS card that goes into the top I can set up multiple micro SD cards for different setups and just swap them out as needed with as many games as I want.
  • Also ordered 2 PSP 1001’s for a decent price for parts not working
    • One of them had an issue with the battery not wanting to charge but I was able to get the battery working again with a bit of work
    • Also had an issue with the front buttons where the select key was stuck
    • The other one looked good but had a lot of issues and you could tell that it had been apart several times and had pieces removed. Not sure if the screen is good or not but it was not connected.  The power light does come on and batteries do charge when hooked up to it so some decent parts.
    • But other than the screen being completely disconnected the board on the right hand side was completely loose as the retention pins were broken off.  The UMD door was not seated all the way and the latch for it was missing the spring so had to be removed manually
    • But it did have a good set of buttons on the bottom which I was able to move over to the other device to get it working properly.  However this 8 dollar part does not make up for the cost of the device that I paid so I am a little disappointed and may try to troubleshoot it further anyway or simply test parts from it on other devices.
    • But yeah, one of them is working perfectly which makes me happy.  It is running older software so I am going to do the update today.
    • The device is very old so it will not do WPA2 and I am not going to set up an insecure network device so I have to do the updates and mods from the internal memory
      • Not that big of a deal but it is something that should be noted
    • Have done some gaming with the genesis emulator and while it does not feel as refined as the 3DS emulator it still worked well and looked good
    • I also looked up and found the methods that most people were using to transfer movies onto the psp and most of that was using applications that only ran in windows and were outdated.  But looking at those applications I could see that most of them were front ends for ffmpeg.  So I looked for and found a terminal command that worked.
    • ffmpeg -y -i INPUTFILE -flags +bitexact -vcodec libx264 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -s 480×272 -r 29.97 -b:v 384k -acodec aac -b:a 96k -ar 48000 -f psp -strict -2 OUTPUTFILE.MP4
    • I am still looking for an up to date way to play PSX games on the PSP.  The old methods were also program based and many of those programs are not available any more.  Because I have many more PS1 games on file than I do PSP because I actually own a couple of different PS1s
  • My main server/garage computer died.  Trouble shooting the issues for that was not what I would call fun.  I was able to narrow the problem down to one of the big 3 which is never good
    • I would go into detail on all the issues and the ways that I tested but it gets tedious
    • Lets just say when one of the big 3 starts going but doesnt brick hard it can lead to some interesting faults that are hard to track down
    • But since I don’t have any other computers that use that chipset or ddr4 RAM I have no other way to test than to purchase parts and swap.  So I have started with RAM.  At least with RAM if it is bad then I have fixed the issue and if it is good and something else is bad I can still use the RAM
    • After that I have to guess but when I am done I will be one or two parts short of having a second complete computer.
    • Financially this has come at a terrible time but I will get it fixed.  If I had known that it was going to break then I would not have started working on old handhelds
    • But it looks like replacing the RAM has worked for now.  Hopefully that is actually the problem and it is solved now
    • I still need to swing by Micro Center and see if they will replace the bad RAM sticks which would bring me up to 32 gig in my server

• Tony W
  • Redoing the floor in my basement due to my poor choices in life
  • Did the upgrade to next LTS on my server and it was uneventful
  • Chromecast Audio on PA system = WIN
  • Upgrade to Nest Wifi + add’l network switch
  • Chromecast with Google TV, YouTube TV ($65/mo!!!)
  • Magnetic charging cables are awesome
  • LineageOS updating
  • Have been using my Dell 7130 more
  • Sometimes Linux is just better…
    • My old school audio setup works flawlessly in Linux and is NO FUN in Windows

THE NEWS:

• Linux Mint Monthly News for October
  • http://linuxmint.com/tmp/blog/3978/hypnotix_1.0.0_all.deb
• Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla and Flavors Released
• Ubuntu 21.04 codename released: Hirsute (Heer-suit) Hippo
• Ubuntu 21.04 Release Date: the 22nd of April 2021
• Fedora 33, Flavors and Spins Available – What’s New
• XDA Pro 1x runs either UBPorts (Ubuntu Touch), LineageOS or ‘Android’ – Tony W
  • Indiegogo
• Microsoft Edge, Developer Edition, Released
• Youtube-dl DMCA’d
  • Replacements already out there
  • Community rallies behind Youtube-dl, GitHub CEO says the takedown is in violation of their principles and the whole concept of Archive.org.

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Chromium Will Block Malicious and Fake Notifications in 86
• Chromium Also Fixes a Font Rendering Flaw
• Quick Addition. Update WordPress to 5.5.2 Or Later
  • 10 security fixes, 2 of which could lead to privilege escalation or RCE

Announcements:

• Our next episode will be Sunday, November 15, 2020, at 2 pm Central Time, check for your local time! https://everytimezone.com/s/b3937eae

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com
• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338 Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/ Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, 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 …

• Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• HPR for our Mumble backup
• Hobstar for our logo
• Londoner for our time zone link
• Owen Peery for our audio editing
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Upgraded to Ubuntu 20.10’s 5.8 kernel in Linux Mint. My 5700XT’s performance has increased! Yay!
  • Playing with Kubuntu 20.10 which also has kernel 5.8.
  • Recording this on an AMD A10-7870K with 16GB RAM and all my other audio gear. If something goes wrong today, I’m gonna blame that…
  • Last episode I mentioned that World of Warcraft was crashing in Wine from Lutris. Fixed this by moving from the Wine 5.7 TkG version that Lutris provides to Wine Staging 5.19. That upgraded to 5.20 recently as well.
  • Chromium got upgrades! It’s now part of the Linux Mint repo.

• Bo
  • At work I’ve been hardening servers. I’ve actually locked myself out of one.
  • New monitors
    • AOC C24G1
    • 144hz
    • FreeSync
  • Bo, don’t read this
    • https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Variable_refresh_rate
  • Baldur’s gate 3 on linux
    • Protondb gives it a gold rating.
    • GloriousEggroll’s custom proton
    • Symlinking the launcher

cd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Baldurs/Gate/3/Launcher/

mv LariLauncher.exe LariLauncher.exe.old

ln -s ../bin/bg3.exe LariLauncher.exe

cp ./*.dll ../bin/

• Josh
  • My openSUSE samba server is still alive and kicking!
  • After seeing the error of my ways with btrfs I decided to reinstall Mint on my desktop pc.
  • Linux Mint gaming is broken on my newly installed OS #DualMonitorWoes.
  • Testing out Edge on Linux after hearing a ton of good feedback about it.

• Tony H
  • So the last few weeks have not been brilliant health wise, I missed the last recording as I was ill with acid reflux, which when it flares up really knocks me for 6. At the moment still not a 100% but getting a little better.
  • As we go on air I am currently in a 3 day of shielding with my wife who has to go into hospital for a small operation on Tuesday, luckily this is a day procedure or the lockdown would have been 2 weeks, so I can not leave the house until Tuesday at 6.40am when I take her into the hospital for the operation and even then I can not be there to support her during the process. Blast Covid. On a positive note her covid test came back negative, so the opp can go ahead as planned.
  • One of the downsides of my health issues is it drains me of energy and I’ve not felt like doing much in the way of modeling or preparing my review of KaOS for Distrohoppers that we are hoping to record this coming week, but I will have something to say but not as comprehensive a review as I would like.

• Moss
  • I had all my teeth removed and they are currently covered by temporary dentures, which is why I’m talking funny right now. This will be going on for some time, but the show must go on!
  • We’re getting ready to record Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 017, presumably the day after this episode hits your podcatcher. This will be another adventure in diction. On another note, Tony has noticed that some of our download numbers have gone backwards, so we should all donate to Archive and ask for our downloads back.
  • I just installed PCLinuxOS on Friday. I was amazed at how easily it went this time, and I’m still reeling from being able to use APT to install RPM packages. The installer has a little catch: it will not tell you what distros are installed on which partitions. This is why I have not yet installed it on my desktop, I didn’t identify my available partitions prior to attempting the install and was not brave enough to take a guess and soldier on.
  • I also installed Feren OS again, and found that they have yet to update the base to 20.04. I looked it up and it is promised for November. I may not spend much time working with Feren until the upgrade.
  • My work has been sporadic, and no paychecks have been received for months. We’re down to our last $30. But Social Security comes tomorrow, and those missing paychecks should come some day. I have a new job on the side, selling a line of products to raise money to house and employ homeless women across the country. I’ve worked with this promoter before, and while it hasn’t always worked out well, it’s not from lack of trying.
  • We finally finished Dead Beat and are working on the next book, Proven Guilty, more slowly now that I can’t talk well.

• Joe
  • Got a couple of dirt cheap broken handhelds.  I had a lot of fun with it.  So far I have gotten
    • 2 PSP 1001s that did not power on
    • One 3DS XL old that did not power on
    • One DS Lite
  • The NDS Lite needed the lower display replaced
    • This was not a hard fix but when I was putting it back together I noticed that the ribbon cable for the digitizer was a bit  frayed.  I put it back together as best I could any way
    • It seemed to work.  Both screens came on and displayed the need for touchscreen calibration.  It died as soon as I touched the screen and would not power back on.
    • I took it apart again and I saw that the leads were lifted off the ribbon cable
    • I hope that replacing the touchscreen will fix the problem but I know that the board might also be fried like bacon
    • Only one way to find out.
    • It was also acting like the battery was bad …
    • So I replaced the battery and it would still not turn on
    • I attempted to replace the touchpad but it was a little more delicate than I am and now the thing is good for parts but i am fairly sure that i had already messed up the motherboard anyway
  • The 3DS XL was supposedly broken and would not turn on.  But I replaced the battery and hooked it up to power and it turned right on with no issues. I did have to bypass the parental controls which was super easy and I did notice that the joystick felt a little stiff but that cleared up after some time.
    • I was also able to get a multicart off eBay for pretty cheap and it works like the R4 card is supposed to and allowed me to run all the games that were on the cart.
    • It also allowed me to replace the Micro SD card that was in the cart and after I copied over the control files I was able to double the memory of the SD card and add in some of the other roms that I have sitting around.  I was also able to install one of the Genesis emulators and one of the NES emulators to play some of those roms that I own.  As well as adding many of the DS games.  Although I could not play 3DS games from there.
    • I enjoyed the Genesis emulator from there but it would not allow me to switch to full screen or view the whole image at once.  It was not insurmountable but it did take away from the immersion of the game
    • So I went ahead and set up homebrew on the device (everything was done from Linux). This was a long and tedious process but in the end I was able to set up a second 32 gb micro SD card on it with a different Genesis emulator that did allow me to see the whole image and to stretch it to full screen.
    • This also allowed me to set up and remove 3DS games (all legally obtained) and to add custom theming to the device.  I really like how Shovel Knight looked and played on the device and I love playing old school Shadowrun on it.  The Sega version and I have been playing a lot of it
    • So now I can play 3DS games and Sega games from one card and I can play NES, SNES and DS games from the other card.  I suppose I could also set up some Atari emulation if I wanted and get some Centipede or Space Command or Star Raider going.
    • Plus with the DS card that goes into the top I can set up multiple micro SD cards for different setups and just swap them out as needed with as many games as I want.
  • Also ordered 2 PSP 1001’s for a decent price for parts not working
    • One of them had an issue with the battery not wanting to charge but I was able to get the battery working again with a bit of work
    • Also had an issue with the front buttons where the select key was stuck
    • The other one looked good but had a lot of issues and you could tell that it had been apart several times and had pieces removed. Not sure if the screen is good or not but it was not connected.  The power light does come on and batteries do charge when hooked up to it so some decent parts.
    • But other than the screen being completely disconnected the board on the right hand side was completely loose as the retention pins were broken off.  The UMD door was not seated all the way and the latch for it was missing the spring so had to be removed manually
    • But it did have a good set of buttons on the bottom which I was able to move over to the other device to get it working properly.  However this 8 dollar part does not make up for the cost of the device that I paid so I am a little disappointed and may try to troubleshoot it further anyway or simply test parts from it on other devices.
    • But yeah, one of them is working perfectly which makes me happy.  It is running older software so I am going to do the update today.
    • The device is very old so it will not do WPA2 and I am not going to set up an insecure network device so I have to do the updates and mods from the internal memory
      • Not that big of a deal but it is something that should be noted
    • Have done some gaming with the genesis emulator and while it does not feel as refined as the 3DS emulator it still worked well and looked good
    • I also looked up and found the methods that most people were using to transfer movies onto the psp and most of that was using applications that only ran in windows and were outdated.  But looking at those applications I could see that most of them were front ends for ffmpeg.  So I looked for and found a terminal command that worked.
    • ffmpeg -y -i INPUTFILE -flags +bitexact -vcodec libx264 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -s 480×272 -r 29.97 -b:v 384k -acodec aac -b:a 96k -ar 48000 -f psp -strict -2 OUTPUTFILE.MP4
    • I am still looking for an up to date way to play PSX games on the PSP.  The old methods were also program based and many of those programs are not available any more.  Because I have many more PS1 games on file than I do PSP because I actually own a couple of different PS1s
  • My main server/garage computer died.  Trouble shooting the issues for that was not what I would call fun.  I was able to narrow the problem down to one of the big 3 which is never good
    • I would go into detail on all the issues and the ways that I tested but it gets tedious
    • Lets just say when one of the big 3 starts going but doesnt brick hard it can lead to some interesting faults that are hard to track down
    • But since I don’t have any other computers that use that chipset or ddr4 RAM I have no other way to test than to purchase parts and swap.  So I have started with RAM.  At least with RAM if it is bad then I have fixed the issue and if it is good and something else is bad I can still use the RAM
    • After that I have to guess but when I am done I will be one or two parts short of having a second complete computer.
    • Financially this has come at a terrible time but I will get it fixed.  If I had known that it was going to break then I would not have started working on old handhelds
    • But it looks like replacing the RAM has worked for now.  Hopefully that is actually the problem and it is solved now
    • I still need to swing by Micro Center and see if they will replace the bad RAM sticks which would bring me up to 32 gig in my server

• Tony W
  • Redoing the floor in my basement due to my poor choices in life
  • Did the upgrade to next LTS on my server and it was uneventful
  • Chromecast Audio on PA system = WIN
  • Upgrade to Nest Wifi + add’l network switch
  • Chromecast with Google TV, YouTube TV ($65/mo!!!)
  • Magnetic charging cables are awesome
  • LineageOS updating
  • Have been using my Dell 7130 more
  • Sometimes Linux is just better…
    • My old school audio setup works flawlessly in Linux and is NO FUN in Windows

THE NEWS:

• Linux Mint Monthly News for October
  • http://linuxmint.com/tmp/blog/3978/hypnotix_1.0.0_all.deb
• Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla and Flavors Released
• Ubuntu 21.04 codename released: Hirsute (Heer-suit) Hippo
• Ubuntu 21.04 Release Date: the 22nd of April 2021
• Fedora 33, Flavors and Spins Available – What’s New
• XDA Pro 1x runs either UBPorts (Ubuntu Touch), LineageOS or ‘Android’ – Tony W
  • Indiegogo
• Microsoft Edge, Developer Edition, Released
• Youtube-dl DMCA’d
  • Replacements already out there
  • Community rallies behind Youtube-dl, GitHub CEO says the takedown is in violation of their principles and the whole concept of Archive.org.

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Chromium Will Block Malicious and Fake Notifications in 86
• Chromium Also Fixes a Font Rendering Flaw
• Quick Addition. Update WordPress to 5.5.2 Or Later
  • 10 security fixes, 2 of which could lead to privilege escalation or RCE

Announcements:

• Our next episode will be Sunday, November 15, 2020, at 2 pm Central Time, check for your local time! https://everytimezone.com/s/b3937eae

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com
• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338 Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/ Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, 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 …

• Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• HPR for our Mumble backup
• Hobstar for our logo
• Londoner for our time zone link
• Owen Peery for our audio editing
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Configuring GPU rendering on Firefox
    • In about:config , change “gfx.webrender.all” to “true”
    • Great on the desktop where I have a discrete card. Not so much on the laptop where it’s integrated and can get choppy at higher loads.
  • One thing I keep running into in other distributions besides Mint is odd color profiles in anything Chromium based. 
    • My eyes aren’t good enough to see if it’s absolutely everything, but I can certainly see a red hue on links which turn them purple.
    • This includes electron apps like Discord. The links and my profile picture look funny.
    • I can fix it in Chrome and Chromium by changing the Force Color Profile option in chrome://flags from “default” to “sRGB”
    • This doesn’t work in Electron apps cause I don’t know how to do this! Is there a command line addition? In flatpak? Curious and annoying.
  • Got a windscreen for my PodMic. 
    • I was noticing a lot of air in my P’s and B’s in the recordings. This should cut it down a little.
    • It was a non standard size, and since it already has an internal pop filter, there weren’t many choices. $12 later, I have one.
• Moss
  • I added Manjaro Cinnamon to my Desktop PC last week, and last night I burned a USB stick with the latest Feren OS and installed it. I then reburned the stick for Gecko ROLLING, but it was too late to start another installation. And you have no idea how much willpower it took to not install it just before the show.. This means I have at least one variant of every base Linux distro except Red Hat and Slackware (unless you count that SuSE was the first variant of Slackware). I also do not have any independents such as Solus. I have not quite finished configuring everything I have installed, but I did make up a neat checklist to make sure I was getting everything. I will still have 2 free partitions on my desktop and 1 on my laptop… gotta get serious and do more hopping!
  • I got my new Raspberry Pi 4, a gift from Firecat which I previously mentioned, working with Ubuntu MATE 20.04. I even got Mullvad working on it. The only software I can’t load are SoftMaker Office (or FreeOffice) and PySolFC, neither of which apparently come in ARM64 versions. I discovered that the sound features of the Pi are a bit on the weak side; at no more than 80% of the normal loudness of my desktop, using the same powered speakers, the sound is a bit on the fuzzy side. I have ordered a USB sound “card” from eBay, and it should be here soon.
  • I also just received some new Bluetooth earbuds, AMZLAB Gmbh T16. It’s weird having something just “sit comfortably in your ear” and not be actually affixed with rubber earplugs. For the most part, they sit. I’ve had them drop out a couple times, and accidentally turn off when I pick them up. Still learning the ins and outs of these, but they seem cool. I decided to order them with the last of my covid-19 money when the nice LG headset Joe had sent me started having the right ear go in and out. And of course they are having trouble working with my desktop and Mumble, so I’m still wearing my old wired earbuds for this show.
  • My wife’s T430 messed up running Mint 20 Cinnamon. After trying a few things, I wound up replacing the SSD with another one and doing a clean install of Mint 20 MATE. I also attempted to put KDE neon on it, but that would not boot AND messed up the Mint boot. I put Ubuntu Unity in the second partition and ran Grub Customizer, and now Mint boots. That was 3 hours of a whole lot of not fun, but I got the job done.
  • I’m finding a few more jobs to apply for. I have yet to get an actual response except for the one two months ago, and they also had their own employment section for seniors but I haven’t heard from them either. There have been a few online tests, but I haven’t heard the results from those either; you rarely do, except for possibly getting an interview or a next step.
  • Ubuntu Unity 20.04.1 was released on the 6th. I did a complete new installation, and used the same partition I previously had installed Unity 20.04. I got everything set up the way I wanted it, and then returned control of GRUB to OpenMandriva, (because nobody does a beautiful GRUB screen like OM4). I immediately discovered that I could not boot into Ubuntu Unity but all my other distros worked. DUH. OM4 had not been updated for the new installation and was still looking for the old one. Back into OM4: sudo update-grub2. 
  • We finished reading Death Masks, the 5th book in the Dresden Files series, and have started the 6th, Blood Rites. Still don’t think it’s as good as Demon Squad, but we’re enjoying it.
• Joe
  • I know Josh and I discussed it before but I am going to make my own macro keyboard
    • I have ordered a solderable 12 key keyboard and an arduino pro micro
    • I will set it up along with hotkeys to run programs that are already setup or to kick off bash scripts in a specific locations
  • Ended up with 12 of the Lenovo docks in the set of 10 that I ordered to see if I could fix.
    • All of them worked but 3 were missing some of the outer casing
      • Was able to 3D print some mounts that cover the missing parts and I will be keeping those for myself to use in future projects
    • This is probably also the right time of year to be selling with school about to start
    • Still need to buy some power supplies for them, which I think I can get for around 7 dollars a piece
    • That means the total cost will be around 9 dollars each and I am going to try and sell 9 of them for 30 dollars each (which is 10 dollars less than you can find them anywhere else)
  • Started playing around with X2Go screen mirroring instead of the usual spinning off a new desktop and I have to say that it works really well.
    • It used to be that you would have to install a whole new application specific for the task but now it is built into the server application and it works awesome.  
    • Using it with the 7140 in conjunction with the dock until I get some more HDMI cables
    • I do see some occasional latency but nothing insurmountable and only on the wifi in the garage.  I should put a wifi access point out there and see if that helps
  • Small problem with the 7130 and the 7140 with the dock.  They heat up and dont charge worth a darn.  Not sure what the issue is at this point.  I could try modding the dock so that it has a cooling fan in the back that blows against the tablet but that won’t fix the underlying issue.  Why is it heating up?  It doesn’t do that when connected to the keyboard dock or when connected to the other power supply. 
  • Borderlands 3 on mint with proton
    • Worked after reinstalling Vulkan
    • Slow to start but runs smooth after the first few seconds  *ACO 
  • Made it to book 12 in the Drizzt collection and decided to take a break so I don’t get burned out on it with 24 left to go
  • M.R. Forbes Ghost and Magic books
    • 4 book series
  • Son of the Blacksword books 1 and 2
  • Steve McHugh Death Unleashed one of the Hellequin novels
  • Stephen Blackmoore’s Eric Carter novel 1-3
  • Headphones fun
    • Found a really good deal on 6 broken Skullcandy Hesh 3’s which are not as good as the Crushers but have some really good things going for them.  Like passthrough power. And the fact that all the electronics are on one side.  Which makes them better for building my own bluetooth dongles
    • Already have two different types of female connectors that I can use but I will only do it to the ones that I cannot get back in good working order.
    • My other Hesh 3’s that I had sitting around ended up with a bloated battery but I was able to replace it with one from one of the 2 Crushers that I was not able to get working. The battery size was a little different but there was plenty of room to work and they are all the same 3.7 volts.
    • Someone asked me to fix a PS3 headset that their kid was using for school and I agreed.  Cechya 0080
      • Loaned them one of the Crushers with the 3D printed hinges and a couple of extra hinges just in case
      • Bad battery and some broken plastic around the mic and some occasional static on the mic
      • Replaced the battery easy enough with one with a lot more capacity.  It turns on but takes a super long time to charge fully
      • Used Gorilla Glue to reseat the plastic for the mic but my son then broke it again so I ended up gluing it to the side at full extension.  

• Tony W
  • Beverage sampling
  • I gots me a NEW ELECTRIC GUITAR Y’ALL!!
    • https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/SECU24CB–prs-se-custom-24-charcoal-burst
    • Upgrade from my Dean Hardtail Select which I will now most likely be selling
  • GIGS!
    • Played at Ironshield Brewing Friday night.  New brewery right in my backyard, serving up German lagers and Belgian ales.  Lovely place, great crowd, and everyone really seemed to enjoy the music.  I met a couple of the owners.  Owners and staff were very pleased with the live music and I’ll be back again in September, and hopefully regularly after that.  
    • Played Lucky’s in Brookhaven (near Atlanta) Saturday night, last minute pickup gig to fill in for a musician who injured his hand.
  • New gaming headset for my kid
    • JBL Quantum 200
  • Chromebook exchange
    • Bought a 2020 Acer Chromebook 314 Open Box on Ebay
    • This was to replace the 2018 Chromebook I bought a couple weeks ago that didn’t last 24 hours (wouldn’t charge)
      • That model had a puny barrel connection for power and seemed like the charge port had broken loose – newer model uses USB C (yay)
      • Bought for my kid who is special needs and it’s simple enough for him to use – it’s very similar in operation to his Android phone (Myself I’d be interested in used Thinkpad for a personal laptop).  But I actually really enjoy using the Chromebook
      • Some features 
        • 64GB storage
        • 4GB Ram
        • Celeron N4000
        • Battery lasts about 12 hours
        • Able to run linux apps as well as Android apps – available to launch just like any other ChromeOS app
        • Sync with android phone, smartlock etc
        • Family Link 
        • Stadia works well!
        • Have not yet tried Linux via Crouton yet but I will!

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint Monthly News July 2020
  • Lots of donations as expected a month after a release
  • Most of the user base, a little more than half,  is on some version of 19
    • Most of those are on 19.3, just slightly edging out 20.
    • But, a little under a quarter of the user base are already on 20.
    • Coming in slightly under LM20 is LM 19.1, Tessa
    • Next in line is LM 18.3, Sylvia
  • The chart shows about half the Linux Mint users surveyed use the most recently or close-to-recent versions of Linux Mint.
  • However, the chart leaves out anybody that has changed their default Linux Mint Firefox start page, which is probably, a very sizable chunk.

• <Moss>Gnome software memory bug: Rudra Saraswat of Ubuntu Unity writes: Thanks for reporting this issue [memory getting eaten up in UUE]. gnome-software seems to be the main culprit in this memory hogging issue. There is an open High priority issue in Launchpad for this. This started with 17.04, and the issue still exists in Focal Fossa. Even on fresh boot of Gnome, people have reported 500-600 MB of ram usage (some even reported 22 GB and above). Also, check – https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/gn5an6/gnome_software_memory_bug/ (This should be fixed in the 20.04.1 release.)
• Ubuntu 20.04.1 released

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Whoops! Intel “Misplaces” 20GB of Data
  • Till Kottman, an IT consultant that has helped break other data dumps in the past, linked to a trove of 20GB of Intel proprietary information named “Intel exconfidential Lake Platform Release ;)” 
  • Kottman says the anonymous source claims to have breached Intel’s security, while Intel claims this is false.
  • Here’s some of the chat log
    • Anon: They have a server hosted online by Akam[a]i CDN that wasn’t properly secure. After an internet wide nmap scan I found my target port open and went through a list of 370 possible servers based on details that nmap provided with an NSE script. {reconnaissance / port scanning}

• • • Anon: I used a python script I made to probe different aspects of the server including username defaults and unsecure file/folder access. {enumeration}

• • • Anon: The folders were just lying open if you could guess the name of one. Then when you were in the folder you could go back to root and just click into the other folders that you didn’t know the name of. {directory traversal attack}

• • • Anon: Best of all, due to another misconfiguration, I could masqu[e]rade as any of their employees or make my own user. {privilege escalation}

• • • Anon: Another funny thing is that on the zip files you may find password protected. Most of them use the password Intel123 or intel123.

• •  
  • None of that is confirmed, so grain of salt.
  • The initial posting was done in an effort to have people download the data dump and scour it for interesting or useful information.
  • If the titles are to be believed, there’ll be Intel ME flash tools (oh no), Intel dev and debugging tools, roadmaps, schematics, Intel Snowridge Process Simulator dev kit, among other things.
• GRUB Breaks the Internet
  • Researchers at Eclypsium identified a buffer overflow that happens in GRUB2 as it goes through the grub.cfg file allowing an attacker to gain arbitrary code execution. Dubbed Boothole. For those playing along at home, that means game over.
  • What would happen is that an attacker would configure grub.cfg to run malware of her choosing before handing off the boot sequence to the OS.
  • If administrative privileges on the box are available to the attacker, this exploit can even be used on SecureBoot enabled systems without altering the vendor shim, which is the bit that actually boots the system while still being recognized as “secure”. While that makes this attack a bit harder, surely there are no shortage of additional attacks that can grant this privilege.
  • So here’s the rub. Every. Single. Version. Of. Linux. Needs. An. Update.
  • With the exception of one, unnamed, vendor.

• • What needs to happen to actually fix this once and for all

• • • An update to GRUB2
    • Distros need to update their installers, shims and bootloaders
    • Microsoft needs to sign off on all of the new shims
    • Users and Admins need to be aware of this exploit and use only the newest, patched versions of install and recovery media
    • Firmware updates on affected hardware to prevent this attack

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, August 23, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC and 8 pm British Summer Time. Time conversions are available at Calculator.net should you need to determine your time.

Wrap-up:

• Jason – monsterjavaguns.com, Open Source Creative, Blender For Dummies, 4th edition, @monsterjavaguns just about everywhere on social media
• Joe – www.Tllts.org  linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com
• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338 Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/ Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org   
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, 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 … 

• Hobstar for his work on the new logo
• Josh for all his work on the website
• Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we are using to record
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Configuring GPU rendering on Firefox
    • In about:config , change “gfx.webrender.all” to “true”
    • Great on the desktop where I have a discrete card. Not so much on the laptop where it’s integrated and can get choppy at higher loads.
  • One thing I keep running into in other distributions besides Mint is odd color profiles in anything Chromium based. 
    • My eyes aren’t good enough to see if it’s absolutely everything, but I can certainly see a red hue on links which turn them purple.
    • This includes electron apps like Discord. The links and my profile picture look funny.
    • I can fix it in Chrome and Chromium by changing the Force Color Profile option in chrome://flags from “default” to “sRGB”
    • This doesn’t work in Electron apps cause I don’t know how to do this! Is there a command line addition? In flatpak? Curious and annoying.
  • Got a windscreen for my PodMic. 
    • I was noticing a lot of air in my P’s and B’s in the recordings. This should cut it down a little.
    • It was a non standard size, and since it already has an internal pop filter, there weren’t many choices. $12 later, I have one.
• Moss
  • I added Manjaro Cinnamon to my Desktop PC last week, and last night I burned a USB stick with the latest Feren OS and installed it. I then reburned the stick for Gecko ROLLING, but it was too late to start another installation. And you have no idea how much willpower it took to not install it just before the show.. This means I have at least one variant of every base Linux distro except Red Hat and Slackware (unless you count that SuSE was the first variant of Slackware). I also do not have any independents such as Solus. I have not quite finished configuring everything I have installed, but I did make up a neat checklist to make sure I was getting everything. I will still have 2 free partitions on my desktop and 1 on my laptop… gotta get serious and do more hopping!
  • I got my new Raspberry Pi 4, a gift from Firecat which I previously mentioned, working with Ubuntu MATE 20.04. I even got Mullvad working on it. The only software I can’t load are SoftMaker Office (or FreeOffice) and PySolFC, neither of which apparently come in ARM64 versions. I discovered that the sound features of the Pi are a bit on the weak side; at no more than 80% of the normal loudness of my desktop, using the same powered speakers, the sound is a bit on the fuzzy side. I have ordered a USB sound “card” from eBay, and it should be here soon.
  • I also just received some new Bluetooth earbuds, AMZLAB Gmbh T16. It’s weird having something just “sit comfortably in your ear” and not be actually affixed with rubber earplugs. For the most part, they sit. I’ve had them drop out a couple times, and accidentally turn off when I pick them up. Still learning the ins and outs of these, but they seem cool. I decided to order them with the last of my covid-19 money when the nice LG headset Joe had sent me started having the right ear go in and out. And of course they are having trouble working with my desktop and Mumble, so I’m still wearing my old wired earbuds for this show.
  • My wife’s T430 messed up running Mint 20 Cinnamon. After trying a few things, I wound up replacing the SSD with another one and doing a clean install of Mint 20 MATE. I also attempted to put KDE neon on it, but that would not boot AND messed up the Mint boot. I put Ubuntu Unity in the second partition and ran Grub Customizer, and now Mint boots. That was 3 hours of a whole lot of not fun, but I got the job done.
  • I’m finding a few more jobs to apply for. I have yet to get an actual response except for the one two months ago, and they also had their own employment section for seniors but I haven’t heard from them either. There have been a few online tests, but I haven’t heard the results from those either; you rarely do, except for possibly getting an interview or a next step.
  • Ubuntu Unity 20.04.1 was released on the 6th. I did a complete new installation, and used the same partition I previously had installed Unity 20.04. I got everything set up the way I wanted it, and then returned control of GRUB to OpenMandriva, (because nobody does a beautiful GRUB screen like OM4). I immediately discovered that I could not boot into Ubuntu Unity but all my other distros worked. DUH. OM4 had not been updated for the new installation and was still looking for the old one. Back into OM4: sudo update-grub2. 
  • We finished reading Death Masks, the 5th book in the Dresden Files series, and have started the 6th, Blood Rites. Still don’t think it’s as good as Demon Squad, but we’re enjoying it.
• Joe
  • I know Josh and I discussed it before but I am going to make my own macro keyboard
    • I have ordered a solderable 12 key keyboard and an arduino pro micro
    • I will set it up along with hotkeys to run programs that are already setup or to kick off bash scripts in a specific locations
  • Ended up with 12 of the Lenovo docks in the set of 10 that I ordered to see if I could fix.
    • All of them worked but 3 were missing some of the outer casing
      • Was able to 3D print some mounts that cover the missing parts and I will be keeping those for myself to use in future projects
    • This is probably also the right time of year to be selling with school about to start
    • Still need to buy some power supplies for them, which I think I can get for around 7 dollars a piece
    • That means the total cost will be around 9 dollars each and I am going to try and sell 9 of them for 30 dollars each (which is 10 dollars less than you can find them anywhere else)
  • Started playing around with X2Go screen mirroring instead of the usual spinning off a new desktop and I have to say that it works really well.
    • It used to be that you would have to install a whole new application specific for the task but now it is built into the server application and it works awesome.  
    • Using it with the 7140 in conjunction with the dock until I get some more HDMI cables
    • I do see some occasional latency but nothing insurmountable and only on the wifi in the garage.  I should put a wifi access point out there and see if that helps
  • Small problem with the 7130 and the 7140 with the dock.  They heat up and dont charge worth a darn.  Not sure what the issue is at this point.  I could try modding the dock so that it has a cooling fan in the back that blows against the tablet but that won’t fix the underlying issue.  Why is it heating up?  It doesn’t do that when connected to the keyboard dock or when connected to the other power supply. 
  • Borderlands 3 on mint with proton
    • Worked after reinstalling Vulkan
    • Slow to start but runs smooth after the first few seconds  *ACO 
  • Made it to book 12 in the Drizzt collection and decided to take a break so I don’t get burned out on it with 24 left to go
  • M.R. Forbes Ghost and Magic books
    • 4 book series
  • Son of the Blacksword books 1 and 2
  • Steve McHugh Death Unleashed one of the Hellequin novels
  • Stephen Blackmoore’s Eric Carter novel 1-3
  • Headphones fun
    • Found a really good deal on 6 broken Skullcandy Hesh 3’s which are not as good as the Crushers but have some really good things going for them.  Like passthrough power. And the fact that all the electronics are on one side.  Which makes them better for building my own bluetooth dongles
    • Already have two different types of female connectors that I can use but I will only do it to the ones that I cannot get back in good working order.
    • My other Hesh 3’s that I had sitting around ended up with a bloated battery but I was able to replace it with one from one of the 2 Crushers that I was not able to get working. The battery size was a little different but there was plenty of room to work and they are all the same 3.7 volts.
    • Someone asked me to fix a PS3 headset that their kid was using for school and I agreed.  Cechya 0080
      • Loaned them one of the Crushers with the 3D printed hinges and a couple of extra hinges just in case
      • Bad battery and some broken plastic around the mic and some occasional static on the mic
      • Replaced the battery easy enough with one with a lot more capacity.  It turns on but takes a super long time to charge fully
      • Used Gorilla Glue to reseat the plastic for the mic but my son then broke it again so I ended up gluing it to the side at full extension.  

• Tony W
  • Beverage sampling
  • I gots me a NEW ELECTRIC GUITAR Y’ALL!!
    • https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/SECU24CB–prs-se-custom-24-charcoal-burst
    • Upgrade from my Dean Hardtail Select which I will now most likely be selling
  • GIGS!
    • Played at Ironshield Brewing Friday night.  New brewery right in my backyard, serving up German lagers and Belgian ales.  Lovely place, great crowd, and everyone really seemed to enjoy the music.  I met a couple of the owners.  Owners and staff were very pleased with the live music and I’ll be back again in September, and hopefully regularly after that.  
    • Played Lucky’s in Brookhaven (near Atlanta) Saturday night, last minute pickup gig to fill in for a musician who injured his hand.
  • New gaming headset for my kid
    • JBL Quantum 200
  • Chromebook exchange
    • Bought a 2020 Acer Chromebook 314 Open Box on Ebay
    • This was to replace the 2018 Chromebook I bought a couple weeks ago that didn’t last 24 hours (wouldn’t charge)
      • That model had a puny barrel connection for power and seemed like the charge port had broken loose – newer model uses USB C (yay)
      • Bought for my kid who is special needs and it’s simple enough for him to use – it’s very similar in operation to his Android phone (Myself I’d be interested in used Thinkpad for a personal laptop).  But I actually really enjoy using the Chromebook
      • Some features 
        • 64GB storage
        • 4GB Ram
        • Celeron N4000
        • Battery lasts about 12 hours
        • Able to run linux apps as well as Android apps – available to launch just like any other ChromeOS app
        • Sync with android phone, smartlock etc
        • Family Link 
        • Stadia works well!
        • Have not yet tried Linux via Crouton yet but I will!

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint Monthly News July 2020
  • Lots of donations as expected a month after a release
  • Most of the user base, a little more than half,  is on some version of 19
    • Most of those are on 19.3, just slightly edging out 20.
    • But, a little under a quarter of the user base are already on 20.
    • Coming in slightly under LM20 is LM 19.1, Tessa
    • Next in line is LM 18.3, Sylvia
  • The chart shows about half the Linux Mint users surveyed use the most recently or close-to-recent versions of Linux Mint.
  • However, the chart leaves out anybody that has changed their default Linux Mint Firefox start page, which is probably, a very sizable chunk.

• <Moss>Gnome software memory bug: Rudra Saraswat of Ubuntu Unity writes: Thanks for reporting this issue [memory getting eaten up in UUE]. gnome-software seems to be the main culprit in this memory hogging issue. There is an open High priority issue in Launchpad for this. This started with 17.04, and the issue still exists in Focal Fossa. Even on fresh boot of Gnome, people have reported 500-600 MB of ram usage (some even reported 22 GB and above). Also, check – https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/gn5an6/gnome_software_memory_bug/ (This should be fixed in the 20.04.1 release.)
• Ubuntu 20.04.1 released

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Whoops! Intel “Misplaces” 20GB of Data
  • Till Kottman, an IT consultant that has helped break other data dumps in the past, linked to a trove of 20GB of Intel proprietary information named “Intel exconfidential Lake Platform Release ;)” 
  • Kottman says the anonymous source claims to have breached Intel’s security, while Intel claims this is false.
  • Here’s some of the chat log
    • Anon: They have a server hosted online by Akam[a]i CDN that wasn’t properly secure. After an internet wide nmap scan I found my target port open and went through a list of 370 possible servers based on details that nmap provided with an NSE script. {reconnaissance / port scanning}

• • • Anon: I used a python script I made to probe different aspects of the server including username defaults and unsecure file/folder access. {enumeration}

• • • Anon: The folders were just lying open if you could guess the name of one. Then when you were in the folder you could go back to root and just click into the other folders that you didn’t know the name of. {directory traversal attack}

• • • Anon: Best of all, due to another misconfiguration, I could masqu[e]rade as any of their employees or make my own user. {privilege escalation}

• • • Anon: Another funny thing is that on the zip files you may find password protected. Most of them use the password Intel123 or intel123.

• •  
  • None of that is confirmed, so grain of salt.
  • The initial posting was done in an effort to have people download the data dump and scour it for interesting or useful information.
  • If the titles are to be believed, there’ll be Intel ME flash tools (oh no), Intel dev and debugging tools, roadmaps, schematics, Intel Snowridge Process Simulator dev kit, among other things.
• GRUB Breaks the Internet
  • Researchers at Eclypsium identified a buffer overflow that happens in GRUB2 as it goes through the grub.cfg file allowing an attacker to gain arbitrary code execution. Dubbed Boothole. For those playing along at home, that means game over.
  • What would happen is that an attacker would configure grub.cfg to run malware of her choosing before handing off the boot sequence to the OS.
  • If administrative privileges on the box are available to the attacker, this exploit can even be used on SecureBoot enabled systems without altering the vendor shim, which is the bit that actually boots the system while still being recognized as “secure”. While that makes this attack a bit harder, surely there are no shortage of additional attacks that can grant this privilege.
  • So here’s the rub. Every. Single. Version. Of. Linux. Needs. An. Update.
  • With the exception of one, unnamed, vendor.

• • What needs to happen to actually fix this once and for all

• • • An update to GRUB2
    • Distros need to update their installers, shims and bootloaders
    • Microsoft needs to sign off on all of the new shims
    • Users and Admins need to be aware of this exploit and use only the newest, patched versions of install and recovery media
    • Firmware updates on affected hardware to prevent this attack

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, August 23, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC and 8 pm British Summer Time. Time conversions are available at Calculator.net should you need to determine your time.

Wrap-up:

• Jason – monsterjavaguns.com, Open Source Creative, Blender For Dummies, 4th edition, @monsterjavaguns just about everywhere on social media
• Joe – www.Tllts.org  linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com
• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338 Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/ Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org   
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, 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 … 

• Hobstar for his work on the new logo
• Josh for all his work on the website
• Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we are using to record
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Kernel 5.5 fixed everything and improved gaming performance!
  • A development snapshot of mesa 20 broke everything!
  • Updating to 5.5.2 and the February 8th development snapshot of mesa fixed everything again!
  • What a ride
• Moss
  • Distrohoppers’ Digest has moved into double digit episode numbers, with Episode 10 recorded on February 5th. Download numbers are well above what we expected when we started this project.
  • I’m getting my Galago Pro 2 reconfigured after the Mint Crash. The actual cause was a Grub mess-up, but until I really learn how to work with Grub it’s just easier to reinstall.  Anyone who wants to know what my current 7 installations are can ask me in Telegram.
  • I installed OpenMandriva 4.1 on my Kudu, currently residing along with Feren OS and Ubuntu Budgie. It looks really good. But I still don’t know the package manager, and have no idea whether I can get Mullvad on it.
  • On Feb 3, I got word that I have been added to the team at Ubuntu Budgie. While this is exciting, and I’ve been added to the Ubuntu Budgie Discourse and Slack, I still don’t know how to actually do anything when I find something to fix. At any rate, Leo was wrong, my next podcast project will be BudgieCast.
  • We’re getting deep into Fool Moon, the second of the Dresden Files series. I read the graphic novel of it, and it hardly scratches the surface of the novel itself. Especially the chapter where he is wiped out to the point of getting to talk to his subconscious self. Good stuff. Firecat has managed to get me copies of the rest of the books, so we won’t have to stop reading just because I’m a pauper.
  • Work is being stressful, although I’m still employed; It would be more stressful if I were not.  I keep getting ideas of how to move on into other work, and keep running into the papercut issues which are bad enough to prevent me from moving forward with those ideas.  If people really did want to move to Linux from Windows 7, I can’t think of anyone better than myself to do those installations. 
  • I went out this morning to drive for Postmates, just another food delivery service but one which averages more income than GrubHub or Uber Eats, and found to my chagrin that I did not have one essential tool with me. So I had to drive home and I’ll try again tomorrow.     
• Joe
  • Good reading
    • Found a copy of Demon Squad
      • Simple read and not for everyone but I enjoyed it 
    • Catching up on podcasts
    • Wanted a quick read so I also listened to one of my favorites: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.
      • If you did not like the movie give the book a try
      • If you did like the movie definitely give the book a try 
    • Wax and Wayne series from Brandon Sanderson
      • I really like the first 2 books
      • Third book isn’t as good and the fourth book should be coming this year
  • Picked up a Pi 4 and a couple more pi Zeros
    • Still debating projects for the Zeros.
    • Testing out the 4
    • Will give my impressions on it at a later date
  • Having been researching Pi projects, I think I like the project for multiroom audio.
    • Don’t know if I have a use for it but it does seem fun
    • And I have 3 Pi Zeros ready to go
  • Also thinking about soldering a USB hub onto one of the Zeros.
    • Kinda negates the point of the zero but still a cool project and it is still cheaper than a 3B
    • Using a slim hub would not add much space.
  • Working on a new set of scripts to automatically convert and transfer newly purchased Amazon ebooks
    • Will work a lot like my automation of torrents
    • Purchase and download book on any of my devices
    • Move to a location on said device that uses resilio sync
    • Automatically gets transfered to my server which then moves it to another location
    • Book gets converted to epub or mobi, then the original and the copy get moved to my calibre library and a copy of the converted file gets moved to a resilio location that transfers to my phone. 
    • This then can be played using voice aloud.
  • Broke my second pair of Earforce z2’s  Not sure how they ended up breaking while sitting on my desk at work but they did, and I can’t find anyone selling the replacement bands unless I want to buy them from aliexpress and I don’t.  So I am looking for alternatives
  • I had purchased a lot of ‘as is’ wireless tv headphones with base stations from Sony (wh-rf400r if curious) so that I could give 2 of them to my dad and step mom for christmas and a have a few extra.  I was hoping that the hooks on them were the correct size but no such luck
  • They were however correct enough in size for a pair of Skullcandy Hesh 3’s that I had picked up from a previous job lot of broken headphones and the hesh’s only issue was a broken band.  I had to drill the hook holes a bit larger and cut back some of the internal bracing on the Hesh’s but now they work great
    • The Hesh are a great sounding pair of headphones with nice soft earpads and the new band provides a nice amount of clamping force.  I do need to make sure I put my ears in the earcups just the right way because the cups are pretty small. Otherwise the amount of time I can wear them is fairly small.  Also the batteries are pretty good considering how much time these set on a shelf waiting for me to find parts for them
    • Also very easy to work on with well placed easily accessible solder joins
    • Also the sonys have extra cables that run through the band, i was thinking about seeing what the output voltage is and seeing if i could use the base to charge the battery in the hesh
  • In testing the Pi 4 i had some networking issues because the wifi adapter in the pi is not very good
    • I don’t want to get into too many details on the Pi
    • But here is what I tried
    • External USB wifi.
    • Wifi router as bridge
      • This is the fault of the router though as it was an older one that had issues.  This fix should have worked and provided better speeds and stability
    • Brought back my powerline adapters and this greatly helped although it has not fixed all the networking issues
• Bo
  • Missing you guys
  • Using terminal for as much as possible to prepare for LPIC, even for simple tasks.
    • Cat, join, sort
    • Ls | Xargs chmod 755
  • AWX
    • Credential manager
    • Inventory management
    • Roles
  • non -linux life
    • Tabletop RPGs
    • Star Trek Adventures podcast

THE NEWS:

• Linux Mint Monthly News, January 2020
• MIDI 2.0 released, 32-bit not 7-bit
• Kernel 5.4 is an LTS
• Ubuntu Confirms 5.4 will be the kernel for 20.04
• Ubuntu Kylin’s UKUI 3.0 is moving to QT
  • https://www.bilibili.com/video/av86825973
• Godot Receives Epic MegaGrant ($250,000)
• ProtonVPN Applications are now open-source
• Wireguard Merged into Kernel 5.6
• Nvidia Dropping Support for Older Drivers in Linux
• LibreOffice 6.4 Released
• FSF “demands” Windows 7 Be Open Sourced
• Linux Unplugged episode on Mint should be discussed

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Stealing data using screen brightness
• By Chrome 86, HTTP downloads will be blocked
• CacheOut Intel Flaw. Add another one to the pile.

Announcements:

• Our Next Episode will be live Feb 23, 2020. 2PM CST, 8PM UTC

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org  linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – ecnradio.com

• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!

• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338 Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/ Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org   

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, 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 … 

• Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Kernel 5.5 fixed everything and improved gaming performance!
  • A development snapshot of mesa 20 broke everything!
  • Updating to 5.5.2 and the February 8th development snapshot of mesa fixed everything again!
  • What a ride
• Moss
  • Distrohoppers’ Digest has moved into double digit episode numbers, with Episode 10 recorded on February 5th. Download numbers are well above what we expected when we started this project.
  • I’m getting my Galago Pro 2 reconfigured after the Mint Crash. The actual cause was a Grub mess-up, but until I really learn how to work with Grub it’s just easier to reinstall.  Anyone who wants to know what my current 7 installations are can ask me in Telegram.
  • I installed OpenMandriva 4.1 on my Kudu, currently residing along with Feren OS and Ubuntu Budgie. It looks really good. But I still don’t know the package manager, and have no idea whether I can get Mullvad on it.
  • On Feb 3, I got word that I have been added to the team at Ubuntu Budgie. While this is exciting, and I’ve been added to the Ubuntu Budgie Discourse and Slack, I still don’t know how to actually do anything when I find something to fix. At any rate, Leo was wrong, my next podcast project will be BudgieCast.
  • We’re getting deep into Fool Moon, the second of the Dresden Files series. I read the graphic novel of it, and it hardly scratches the surface of the novel itself. Especially the chapter where he is wiped out to the point of getting to talk to his subconscious self. Good stuff. Firecat has managed to get me copies of the rest of the books, so we won’t have to stop reading just because I’m a pauper.
  • Work is being stressful, although I’m still employed; It would be more stressful if I were not.  I keep getting ideas of how to move on into other work, and keep running into the papercut issues which are bad enough to prevent me from moving forward with those ideas.  If people really did want to move to Linux from Windows 7, I can’t think of anyone better than myself to do those installations. 
  • I went out this morning to drive for Postmates, just another food delivery service but one which averages more income than GrubHub or Uber Eats, and found to my chagrin that I did not have one essential tool with me. So I had to drive home and I’ll try again tomorrow.     
• Joe
  • Good reading
    • Found a copy of Demon Squad
      • Simple read and not for everyone but I enjoyed it 
    • Catching up on podcasts
    • Wanted a quick read so I also listened to one of my favorites: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.
      • If you did not like the movie give the book a try
      • If you did like the movie definitely give the book a try 
    • Wax and Wayne series from Brandon Sanderson
      • I really like the first 2 books
      • Third book isn’t as good and the fourth book should be coming this year
  • Picked up a Pi 4 and a couple more pi Zeros
    • Still debating projects for the Zeros.
    • Testing out the 4
    • Will give my impressions on it at a later date
  • Having been researching Pi projects, I think I like the project for multiroom audio.
    • Don’t know if I have a use for it but it does seem fun
    • And I have 3 Pi Zeros ready to go
  • Also thinking about soldering a USB hub onto one of the Zeros.
    • Kinda negates the point of the zero but still a cool project and it is still cheaper than a 3B
    • Using a slim hub would not add much space.
  • Working on a new set of scripts to automatically convert and transfer newly purchased Amazon ebooks
    • Will work a lot like my automation of torrents
    • Purchase and download book on any of my devices
    • Move to a location on said device that uses resilio sync
    • Automatically gets transfered to my server which then moves it to another location
    • Book gets converted to epub or mobi, then the original and the copy get moved to my calibre library and a copy of the converted file gets moved to a resilio location that transfers to my phone. 
    • This then can be played using voice aloud.
  • Broke my second pair of Earforce z2’s  Not sure how they ended up breaking while sitting on my desk at work but they did, and I can’t find anyone selling the replacement bands unless I want to buy them from aliexpress and I don’t.  So I am looking for alternatives
  • I had purchased a lot of ‘as is’ wireless tv headphones with base stations from Sony (wh-rf400r if curious) so that I could give 2 of them to my dad and step mom for christmas and a have a few extra.  I was hoping that the hooks on them were the correct size but no such luck
  • They were however correct enough in size for a pair of Skullcandy Hesh 3’s that I had picked up from a previous job lot of broken headphones and the hesh’s only issue was a broken band.  I had to drill the hook holes a bit larger and cut back some of the internal bracing on the Hesh’s but now they work great
    • The Hesh are a great sounding pair of headphones with nice soft earpads and the new band provides a nice amount of clamping force.  I do need to make sure I put my ears in the earcups just the right way because the cups are pretty small. Otherwise the amount of time I can wear them is fairly small.  Also the batteries are pretty good considering how much time these set on a shelf waiting for me to find parts for them
    • Also very easy to work on with well placed easily accessible solder joins
    • Also the sonys have extra cables that run through the band, i was thinking about seeing what the output voltage is and seeing if i could use the base to charge the battery in the hesh
  • In testing the Pi 4 i had some networking issues because the wifi adapter in the pi is not very good
    • I don’t want to get into too many details on the Pi
    • But here is what I tried
    • External USB wifi.
    • Wifi router as bridge
      • This is the fault of the router though as it was an older one that had issues.  This fix should have worked and provided better speeds and stability
    • Brought back my powerline adapters and this greatly helped although it has not fixed all the networking issues
• Bo
  • Missing you guys
  • Using terminal for as much as possible to prepare for LPIC, even for simple tasks.
    • Cat, join, sort
    • Ls | Xargs chmod 755
  • AWX
    • Credential manager
    • Inventory management
    • Roles
  • non -linux life
    • Tabletop RPGs
    • Star Trek Adventures podcast

THE NEWS:

• Linux Mint Monthly News, January 2020
• MIDI 2.0 released, 32-bit not 7-bit
• Kernel 5.4 is an LTS
• Ubuntu Confirms 5.4 will be the kernel for 20.04
• Ubuntu Kylin’s UKUI 3.0 is moving to QT
  • https://www.bilibili.com/video/av86825973
• Godot Receives Epic MegaGrant ($250,000)
• ProtonVPN Applications are now open-source
• Wireguard Merged into Kernel 5.6
• Nvidia Dropping Support for Older Drivers in Linux
• LibreOffice 6.4 Released
• FSF “demands” Windows 7 Be Open Sourced
• Linux Unplugged episode on Mint should be discussed

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Stealing data using screen brightness
• By Chrome 86, HTTP downloads will be blocked
• CacheOut Intel Flaw. Add another one to the pile.

Announcements:

• Our Next Episode will be live Feb 23, 2020. 2PM CST, 8PM UTC

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org  linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – ecnradio.com

• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!

• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338 Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/ Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org   

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, 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 … 

• Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo bakes a camera Pi, Tony Watts gets steamed, Joe gets an unexpected upgrade, Tony Hughes installed Lineage on a new old phone, Moss has an Xapp mishap, and Oliver treats his ears.

Then, in our news, Linux Mint 19.3 is here, Vivaldi champions Linux, DXVK forges ahead, and more.

In security, we talk Chrome flaws and the risks of Ring.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Upgraded to 19.3! No issues so far.
  • Raspberry Pi Zero W + Pi camera = Front Door Motion Detector
• Tony W
  • Travel recording setup 
    • Had a great solution with Presonus audiobox and XLR mic with boom stand… but abandoned it in the interest of traveling very light
    • Currently using Samsung earbuds to record to Audacity on one machine, and using Anker ‘true wireless’ earbuds for mumble on the phone
  • Mint install without disabling secureboot
    • No 3rd party drivers, graphics, wifi, etc
    • Adds ‘ubuntu’ option to boot order in BIOS
    • Booting to Ubuntu changes the time to GMT in BIOS, have to manually change it back
  • Created persistent live USB using mkusb,
  •  Linux Updated to mint 19.3 on multiple machines
    • No issues, though prompted via system reports to make several changes
      • Set root pw, add the xapp status applet, something else I don’t remember
    • Noticed Mint logo did not change when updated Dell tablet from 19.1 to 19.3
  • Dell venue 11 pro tablet keyboard cover
    • Detection is still an issue with both keyboards
  • Steam games!
    • Sale still ongoing until Jan 2 (around the time this episode will air)
    • Bought Need for Speed Hot Pursuit for $5, the Valve Pack for around $13 (Portal 1 and 2, half life 1 and 2 and others, loads of Counter Strike games…)
• Joe
  • My reading choices and projects are so far pretty slim because of traveling for vacation
  • For reading while driving long distances I wanted something familiar. So I listened to the Mercy Thompson books because the book needs to be familiar enough that if I miss something, it is not a big deal but interesting enough that it doesn’t make me sleepy
  • Also went through the Alpha Omega series by the same author in the same universe
  • Next I am listening to the Hellequin novels.
    • Finished the first of the 3 series for this one and am about to start the second series.
    • I will get the third series when I am able to get it.
    • I like this series  
  • All the series are decent and a bit different.  
  • Last show right before the show the plastic broke on one of my Earforce Z2’s  
    • Going to give fixing it a try with the glue that Tony H suggested and see how well things work.
    • Have never had any luck fixing the bands on any of the headphones. So we will see
  • Installed 19.3 on all my machines through the update manager
    • Very simple
    • Don’t see much difference
    • Still have not upgraded the kernels past 5.0
  • Setting up a remote workstation at the in-laws.  
    • Setup in the cupboard area to try and get some noise free area. Not really working out but can’t complain
    • The acoustics are a bit different but I don’t think that they are bad.
  • The 7130 I ordered ended up being a 7140 
    • Still for 40 dollars you can complain
    • Hooked it up to the chargers that i have, gave it a couple of minutes and it fired right up
    • And this one is the 8 Gb of ram model
    • Very similar to the 7130, takes the same peripherals including the same size ngff card so I was able to use the 32 Gb SSD that I had on hand as a backup for the 7130
    • But everything worked right out of the box including the wifi.
    • Two issues that i have come across
      • Audio from the 3.5mm port will only come out as mono and the mic will not work
      • The 7140 cannot do suspend to ram
        • Working on alternatives
        • Freeze
        • Suspend to disk
    • When I did the upgrade to 19.3 the touchpad quit working but the same did not happen on the 7130
    • Thought that a full reinstall might clear some of the issues that i am having since upgrading to 14.3
    • Didn’t do a full reinstall.  The live disk was not even giving me access to the touchpad
      • sudo depmod -a  
      • Cleared the issue right up after a reboot
    • Had been thinking that I would either need to go back to 4.15 kernel or go back to mint 19.2
    • Very glad that the fix worked.
    • Battery life is still not that great.  Not all day use but it is slightly better than the 7130
    • And it is silent, the 7130 has fans and you know it when you use it.  The 7140 doesn’t have fans.
    • The only problem I’m having with it is in regards to the cheap ngff drive that I have in it.  Was thinking about buying another as a replacement but I am thinking that I will need to sell it.   
  • Got a waveshare game hat setup for my son. Gave him my last raspberry pi 3 to get it running
    • It’s an add on for the raspberry pi that turns it into a handheld retro gaming system
    • Works pretty well
    • Just used the image from the waveshare site that contains retropie
    • The buttons are not all that well positioned and the edges feel very sharp but all in all 
    • The games that come with the image are pretty good; I will go back later and add a few more
    • Couldn’t use the 16gb micro sd that I had (the image was too large) so I pulled the 128gb stick out of one of my tablets and will need to replace it when i get home
    • Also needed an 18650 battery to get it working mobile
    • Will say that the battery life is not that good but you can use it passthrough.
    • Still need to connect to network.
  • Going to convert some more of my old LG headsets that no longer work over to mmcx so i ordered some parts to do that
  • Also instead of gluing my Earforce Z2’s back together i have ordered a replacement band that is very similar that I am hoping to be able to get working.  Always have the choice to go back later with the glue if it doesn’t work.
    • I can get the headsets for 20-30 dollars and the replacement part i ordered for 10.
  • Will be on the HPR new years show for at least part of the day
    • Or at least I am planning to be.
• Tony H
  • Well Christmas has kind of got in the way but I managed to download and install Ubuntu Studio 19.10 on the test laptop for the review on February’s Distrohoppers show but I’ve not had a lot of time to play with it. I will make that laptop my main portable PC for January but currently using the Mint 19.3 install on its non identical twin brother, an i5 as opposed to an i7 Dell E7440.
  • Santa brought me a 4 bay Icy Dock, the nice all metal one which should last longer if swapping out drives on a regular basis. I’m wondering if I should install it in the current tower unit or wait a few weeks until I get a newer Ryzen based system tower, decisions, decisions. 
  • Went to visit my wife’s family in Scotland for a few days before Christmas and drove home on Christmas Eve, Christmas was just the two of us, I cooked lunch and we went for a post lunch walk to counteract some of the excess calories consumed.
  • Also continuing to interact with a new community around my new Diecast toy hobby, I’ve found there are nearly of many diecast geeks, as Linux ones, possibly more. Another Christmas present was a collectors book for Matchbox from 1953-1969, what is considered the golden era to many collectors. This was pre Hotwheels and Matchbox’s  superfast response to falling sales in the US as a result of the Hot Wheels models.
  • After buying my wife a New Phone for Christmas (her first new phone) she gave me back my old OnePlus1 that she has been using since February this year. I finally managed to update the LineageOS to the latest daily build on 26th December, previously I left it too long between updates and it would no longer install the daily build automatically so I had to do a manual install. I now have a fully working and updated Android 9 based Lineage 16 backup phone in case I break the one Josh let me buy off him after I trashed my Nokia 6 screen. Incidentally I bought my wife the Nokia 6.2 and so far she likes it.  
• Moss 
  • I received a gift from an old friend. It was supposed to be a couple of 256 Gb SSDs, but Amazon messed up and sent me a whole box of 10 Lexar NS100 256 Mb drives. I can accept those kinds of mistakes!
  • I have converted the main drives on my Kudu 3 and my wife’s T430 to SSDs, while keeping the Galago Pro 2 as it was (1 Tb spinning metal drive and 128 Gb M.2 drive), and also converted two external drives and my Timeshift drive to SSD, leaving the the 2 Tb external spinning metal alone. 
  • This also gives me a stack of spinning metal drives to use as paperweights or sell on LetGo, Craigslist or eBay.
  • I also installed Zorin OS 15 Ultimate on my wife’s T430, as she had been reporting issues and preferred that to upgrading her Linux Mint install, and between the SSD speed and the new distro she is quite happy.  She has had to learn a few things about how Zorin does various setup and display things differently than Mint. Whoda thunk the Workspace switcher would be on the Superkey?
  • I replaced the drive in the T430 I have for sale with an SSD. I think I have a buyer for it from one of our listeners, and have finally posted the Ideapad 110 on eBay. I have 4 unused SSDs at present.
  • I upgraded my Mint Mate machine to Tricia 19.3, and it works all right, but my icons in the bottom right which are not system icons, such as Mullvad, and Discord, show as doubled tiny icons rather than a single icon the size of the others; Telegram has a single tiny icon, covered by the number of current unread messages. (Leo gave me the fix for this, which is to install the XApp Status Applet.) I installed Mint Cinnamon also on my SSD in the Galago Pro, and it does not have this issue. Also, when I minimize Firefox Mint actually closes it, although it doesn’t log me out of Google. In further observations, Tricia Mate still shows the icon of the program opened in a workspace; Tricia Cinnamon just shows a lighter shade of grey for the active workspace but no icon.
  • After experiencing just a few too many issues with Q4OS and not responses I was happy with, I installed KDE neon on that partition. Had  to have SOME Plasma on my machine. It makes for a nicer boot menu, with the exception of only showing the top five choices — you have to scroll down to see the others, and there is nothing on the screen to indicate that.  It also keeps me having a KDE install on my main machine. After installing Mint Cinnamon, I got to see the new Mint menus, and they are almost as sharp as Plasma but do not need scrolling.
  • This frees up the Kudu 3 for something new, and right now I’m toying with Russian-developed, Gentoo-based Calculate Linux in the LXQt flavor. The installation offered a lot more options than I’m used to, but, unlike Fedora and Suse installation attempts, the language was simple and easy to understand. It looks as though I’ll need to learn Portage package manager to get any updates done though; with Sabayon, I only had to learn the Aptitude-like Entropy package manager. I have a ways to go on learning this one, and somehow I managed to get my user account installed without sudo privileges.
  • Playing with Sabayon and Calculate have given me a tiny glimpse into the world of Linux as seen by Arch users (well, Gentoo users anyhow). The amount of configuration and control made available when you’re doing more than just a generic, plug-and-play installation makes me want to try a Void challenge or something…
  • Things have been too hectic to do much thinking about the next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest, but I got a script started up earlier today.
  • I thought I was going to get a better job, but I failed the physical, including learning about an issue of which I was not previously aware. I could jump through more hoops and MAYBE qualify, but it was a disappointment.
  • My wife and I have started reading the first book in The Dresden Files. For the moment, we have stopped reading Empire of Jade (Temeraire) and started reading the first Jim Butcher story. Not sure how much we like it yet but it’s holding our interest, wondering where it is going. We will, of course, return to Temeraire, probably after we finish this book. We got a deal on the Kindle version, only $2.99, but the rest of the series is $5.99 – $6.99 each. If this keeps up we’re going to have to subscribe to Kindle Unlimited.
  • I will be absent next episode, as I’m going to my annual family reunion / music gathering in Atlanta. If Bo or Tony Watts wants to join me there, we could set up for the podcast, otherwise I’ll be too involved in having fun. There will be videos.
  • I take the blame for Oliver Kelly being here this episode. I wrote up the blank show notes, listing everyone who might possibly be here, and another team member thought he had volunteered. So he did. Take it from here, Olzi!
• Oliver
  • Installed 19.3
    • Love the new Logo
  • New headphones – https://north-america.beyerdynamic.com/dt-770-pro.html 
    • No new mic, so apologies for the audio 
  • STEM ambassador signup and DBS Check cleared

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint 19.3 Is Out!
  • Get it from the System Reports app, or through the Update Manager. 
• Linux Mint Monthly News, December
  • Keyboard shortcuts were removed in Cinnamon’s grouped window list, but will make their way back
  • The root password notice was confusing, so they’re looking into ways to make this more clear
  • grub2-theme-mint and grub2-theme-mint-2k now remove cleanly
  • Locales other than enUS may display incorrect clock information. Report it here!
  • The XappStatusIcon is giving some people trouble. If it’s you, report that here! Include which desktop you’re using, what your panel layout is (i.e. which applets it contains), and the list of your installed packages (you can get this with “dpkg -l”).
  • The current state of the “Luxury” Mintbox 3
    • Two available for $1399 and $2499 depending on the specification:
    • The MintBox3 Basic is the entry model with Core i5-9500 6 core CPU, 16 GB RAM and 256 GB Samsung NVMe SSD.
    • The MintBox3 Pro is the high-end model with Core i9-9900K 8 core CPU, GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6 GB graphics, 32 GB RAM and 1 TB Samsung NVMe SSD.
• The Librem 5 phone just got even more expensive! 
• Calculate Linux is out, now with many flavors
• Endeavour OS got their Net Installer off the ground! This allows you to install any desktop without downloading the whole ISO first…
• Firefox adds Gnome Search (previously only available in Web/Epiphany, now available in Firefox only in Fedora)
• Peppermint 10 Respin Released
• Kdenlive 19.12 Released
• Vivaldi 2.10 Released
  • User Agent Changes
    • Using the Vivaldi User Agent for trusted sites, but Google Chrome for everything else
  • Vivaldi Blog –  https://vivaldi.com/blog/replace-windows-7-with-linux/
  • End of Windows 7 Support

• Purism Server Now An Option
  • The cheapest option will run $2700, but seems very capable. A 45W Xeon D-1541, 2x 10Gbps, 2x 1Gbps, and 1x IPMI ports, up to 128GB RAM, and 6 SATA ports and an M.2 slot.
• DXVK 1.5 Released
  • D9VK is now part of DXVK! Now you can play all your DX9 games, same as you do DX11. (Michael Tunnell said it the other way around if I understood correctly, that DXVK is no longer being maintained but D9VK added it to their project.  And the last time I understood something differently from what you thought, I was wrong.)
  • Some other HUD improvements as well as fixes for Crysis 3, Fifa 19, Halo and Star Citizen.

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• Chrome and Chromium affected by Magellan 2.0
  • https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-13734
  • https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-13750
  • https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-13751
  • https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-13752
  • https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-13753
  • Five CVE’s affecting the SQLite backend within Chrome and Chromium versions prior to 79.0.3945.79 with WebSQL enabled.
  • These flaws can allow things like obtaining info from memory.
  • Researchers are not going to follow the normal 90 day disclosure deadline, but will keep these close to the chest for now.
  • Upgrading to 79.0.3945.79 will fix the issue. But the real risk is using applications that bundle Chromium within. Those versions of Chrome or Chromium only get upgraded when the application itself gets updated.
• Ring Doorbell Plagued by Security Issues
  • Many of the issues with Ring stem from unsecured Wifi, bad passwords, etc.
  • Ring does not appear to limit incorrect attempts that a user can make for logging into their app nor does it alert users to suspicious logins.
  • NulledCast

WRAP-UP:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org  linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com 

• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!

• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338 Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/ Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org   

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, 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 … 

• Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo bakes a camera Pi, Tony Watts gets steamed, Joe gets an unexpected upgrade, Tony Hughes installed Lineage on a new old phone, Moss has an Xapp mishap, and Oliver treats his ears.

Then, in our news, Linux Mint 19.3 is here, Vivaldi champions Linux, DXVK forges ahead, and more.

In security, we talk Chrome flaws and the risks of Ring.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Upgraded to 19.3! No issues so far.
  • Raspberry Pi Zero W + Pi camera = Front Door Motion Detector
• Tony W
  • Travel recording setup 
    • Had a great solution with Presonus audiobox and XLR mic with boom stand… but abandoned it in the interest of traveling very light
    • Currently using Samsung earbuds to record to Audacity on one machine, and using Anker ‘true wireless’ earbuds for mumble on the phone
  • Mint install without disabling secureboot
    • No 3rd party drivers, graphics, wifi, etc
    • Adds ‘ubuntu’ option to boot order in BIOS
    • Booting to Ubuntu changes the time to GMT in BIOS, have to manually change it back
  • Created persistent live USB using mkusb,
  •  Linux Updated to mint 19.3 on multiple machines
    • No issues, though prompted via system reports to make several changes
      • Set root pw, add the xapp status applet, something else I don’t remember
    • Noticed Mint logo did not change when updated Dell tablet from 19.1 to 19.3
  • Dell venue 11 pro tablet keyboard cover
    • Detection is still an issue with both keyboards
  • Steam games!
    • Sale still ongoing until Jan 2 (around the time this episode will air)
    • Bought Need for Speed Hot Pursuit for $5, the Valve Pack for around $13 (Portal 1 and 2, half life 1 and 2 and others, loads of Counter Strike games…)
• Joe
  • My reading choices and projects are so far pretty slim because of traveling for vacation
  • For reading while driving long distances I wanted something familiar. So I listened to the Mercy Thompson books because the book needs to be familiar enough that if I miss something, it is not a big deal but interesting enough that it doesn’t make me sleepy
  • Also went through the Alpha Omega series by the same author in the same universe
  • Next I am listening to the Hellequin novels.
    • Finished the first of the 3 series for this one and am about to start the second series.
    • I will get the third series when I am able to get it.
    • I like this series  
  • All the series are decent and a bit different.  
  • Last show right before the show the plastic broke on one of my Earforce Z2’s  
    • Going to give fixing it a try with the glue that Tony H suggested and see how well things work.
    • Have never had any luck fixing the bands on any of the headphones. So we will see
  • Installed 19.3 on all my machines through the update manager
    • Very simple
    • Don’t see much difference
    • Still have not upgraded the kernels past 5.0
  • Setting up a remote workstation at the in-laws.  
    • Setup in the cupboard area to try and get some noise free area. Not really working out but can’t complain
    • The acoustics are a bit different but I don’t think that they are bad.
  • The 7130 I ordered ended up being a 7140 
    • Still for 40 dollars you can complain
    • Hooked it up to the chargers that i have, gave it a couple of minutes and it fired right up
    • And this one is the 8 Gb of ram model
    • Very similar to the 7130, takes the same peripherals including the same size ngff card so I was able to use the 32 Gb SSD that I had on hand as a backup for the 7130
    • But everything worked right out of the box including the wifi.
    • Two issues that i have come across
      • Audio from the 3.5mm port will only come out as mono and the mic will not work
      • The 7140 cannot do suspend to ram
        • Working on alternatives
        • Freeze
        • Suspend to disk
    • When I did the upgrade to 19.3 the touchpad quit working but the same did not happen on the 7130
    • Thought that a full reinstall might clear some of the issues that i am having since upgrading to 14.3
    • Didn’t do a full reinstall.  The live disk was not even giving me access to the touchpad
      • sudo depmod -a  
      • Cleared the issue right up after a reboot
    • Had been thinking that I would either need to go back to 4.15 kernel or go back to mint 19.2
    • Very glad that the fix worked.
    • Battery life is still not that great.  Not all day use but it is slightly better than the 7130
    • And it is silent, the 7130 has fans and you know it when you use it.  The 7140 doesn’t have fans.
    • The only problem I’m having with it is in regards to the cheap ngff drive that I have in it.  Was thinking about buying another as a replacement but I am thinking that I will need to sell it.   
  • Got a waveshare game hat setup for my son. Gave him my last raspberry pi 3 to get it running
    • It’s an add on for the raspberry pi that turns it into a handheld retro gaming system
    • Works pretty well
    • Just used the image from the waveshare site that contains retropie
    • The buttons are not all that well positioned and the edges feel very sharp but all in all 
    • The games that come with the image are pretty good; I will go back later and add a few more
    • Couldn’t use the 16gb micro sd that I had (the image was too large) so I pulled the 128gb stick out of one of my tablets and will need to replace it when i get home
    • Also needed an 18650 battery to get it working mobile
    • Will say that the battery life is not that good but you can use it passthrough.
    • Still need to connect to network.
  • Going to convert some more of my old LG headsets that no longer work over to mmcx so i ordered some parts to do that
  • Also instead of gluing my Earforce Z2’s back together i have ordered a replacement band that is very similar that I am hoping to be able to get working.  Always have the choice to go back later with the glue if it doesn’t work.
    • I can get the headsets for 20-30 dollars and the replacement part i ordered for 10.
  • Will be on the HPR new years show for at least part of the day
    • Or at least I am planning to be.
• Tony H
  • Well Christmas has kind of got in the way but I managed to download and install Ubuntu Studio 19.10 on the test laptop for the review on February’s Distrohoppers show but I’ve not had a lot of time to play with it. I will make that laptop my main portable PC for January but currently using the Mint 19.3 install on its non identical twin brother, an i5 as opposed to an i7 Dell E7440.
  • Santa brought me a 4 bay Icy Dock, the nice all metal one which should last longer if swapping out drives on a regular basis. I’m wondering if I should install it in the current tower unit or wait a few weeks until I get a newer Ryzen based system tower, decisions, decisions. 
  • Went to visit my wife’s family in Scotland for a few days before Christmas and drove home on Christmas Eve, Christmas was just the two of us, I cooked lunch and we went for a post lunch walk to counteract some of the excess calories consumed.
  • Also continuing to interact with a new community around my new Diecast toy hobby, I’ve found there are nearly of many diecast geeks, as Linux ones, possibly more. Another Christmas present was a collectors book for Matchbox from 1953-1969, what is considered the golden era to many collectors. This was pre Hotwheels and Matchbox’s  superfast response to falling sales in the US as a result of the Hot Wheels models.
  • After buying my wife a New Phone for Christmas (her first new phone) she gave me back my old OnePlus1 that she has been using since February this year. I finally managed to update the LineageOS to the latest daily build on 26th December, previously I left it too long between updates and it would no longer install the daily build automatically so I had to do a manual install. I now have a fully working and updated Android 9 based Lineage 16 backup phone in case I break the one Josh let me buy off him after I trashed my Nokia 6 screen. Incidentally I bought my wife the Nokia 6.2 and so far she likes it.  
• Moss 
  • I received a gift from an old friend. It was supposed to be a couple of 256 Gb SSDs, but Amazon messed up and sent me a whole box of 10 Lexar NS100 256 Mb drives. I can accept those kinds of mistakes!
  • I have converted the main drives on my Kudu 3 and my wife’s T430 to SSDs, while keeping the Galago Pro 2 as it was (1 Tb spinning metal drive and 128 Gb M.2 drive), and also converted two external drives and my Timeshift drive to SSD, leaving the the 2 Tb external spinning metal alone. 
  • This also gives me a stack of spinning metal drives to use as paperweights or sell on LetGo, Craigslist or eBay.
  • I also installed Zorin OS 15 Ultimate on my wife’s T430, as she had been reporting issues and preferred that to upgrading her Linux Mint install, and between the SSD speed and the new distro she is quite happy.  She has had to learn a few things about how Zorin does various setup and display things differently than Mint. Whoda thunk the Workspace switcher would be on the Superkey?
  • I replaced the drive in the T430 I have for sale with an SSD. I think I have a buyer for it from one of our listeners, and have finally posted the Ideapad 110 on eBay. I have 4 unused SSDs at present.
  • I upgraded my Mint Mate machine to Tricia 19.3, and it works all right, but my icons in the bottom right which are not system icons, such as Mullvad, and Discord, show as doubled tiny icons rather than a single icon the size of the others; Telegram has a single tiny icon, covered by the number of current unread messages. (Leo gave me the fix for this, which is to install the XApp Status Applet.) I installed Mint Cinnamon also on my SSD in the Galago Pro, and it does not have this issue. Also, when I minimize Firefox Mint actually closes it, although it doesn’t log me out of Google. In further observations, Tricia Mate still shows the icon of the program opened in a workspace; Tricia Cinnamon just shows a lighter shade of grey for the active workspace but no icon.
  • After experiencing just a few too many issues with Q4OS and not responses I was happy with, I installed KDE neon on that partition. Had  to have SOME Plasma on my machine. It makes for a nicer boot menu, with the exception of only showing the top five choices — you have to scroll down to see the others, and there is nothing on the screen to indicate that.  It also keeps me having a KDE install on my main machine. After installing Mint Cinnamon, I got to see the new Mint menus, and they are almost as sharp as Plasma but do not need scrolling.
  • This frees up the Kudu 3 for something new, and right now I’m toying with Russian-developed, Gentoo-based Calculate Linux in the LXQt flavor. The installation offered a lot more options than I’m used to, but, unlike Fedora and Suse installation attempts, the language was simple and easy to understand. It looks as though I’ll need to learn Portage package manager to get any updates done though; with Sabayon, I only had to learn the Aptitude-like Entropy package manager. I have a ways to go on learning this one, and somehow I managed to get my user account installed without sudo privileges.
  • Playing with Sabayon and Calculate have given me a tiny glimpse into the world of Linux as seen by Arch users (well, Gentoo users anyhow). The amount of configuration and control made available when you’re doing more than just a generic, plug-and-play installation makes me want to try a Void challenge or something…
  • Things have been too hectic to do much thinking about the next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest, but I got a script started up earlier today.
  • I thought I was going to get a better job, but I failed the physical, including learning about an issue of which I was not previously aware. I could jump through more hoops and MAYBE qualify, but it was a disappointment.
  • My wife and I have started reading the first book in The Dresden Files. For the moment, we have stopped reading Empire of Jade (Temeraire) and started reading the first Jim Butcher story. Not sure how much we like it yet but it’s holding our interest, wondering where it is going. We will, of course, return to Temeraire, probably after we finish this book. We got a deal on the Kindle version, only $2.99, but the rest of the series is $5.99 – $6.99 each. If this keeps up we’re going to have to subscribe to Kindle Unlimited.
  • I will be absent next episode, as I’m going to my annual family reunion / music gathering in Atlanta. If Bo or Tony Watts wants to join me there, we could set up for the podcast, otherwise I’ll be too involved in having fun. There will be videos.
  • I take the blame for Oliver Kelly being here this episode. I wrote up the blank show notes, listing everyone who might possibly be here, and another team member thought he had volunteered. So he did. Take it from here, Olzi!
• Oliver
  • Installed 19.3
    • Love the new Logo
  • New headphones – https://north-america.beyerdynamic.com/dt-770-pro.html 
    • No new mic, so apologies for the audio 
  • STEM ambassador signup and DBS Check cleared

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint 19.3 Is Out!
  • Get it from the System Reports app, or through the Update Manager. 
• Linux Mint Monthly News, December
  • Keyboard shortcuts were removed in Cinnamon’s grouped window list, but will make their way back
  • The root password notice was confusing, so they’re looking into ways to make this more clear
  • grub2-theme-mint and grub2-theme-mint-2k now remove cleanly
  • Locales other than enUS may display incorrect clock information. Report it here!
  • The XappStatusIcon is giving some people trouble. If it’s you, report that here! Include which desktop you’re using, what your panel layout is (i.e. which applets it contains), and the list of your installed packages (you can get this with “dpkg -l”).
  • The current state of the “Luxury” Mintbox 3
    • Two available for $1399 and $2499 depending on the specification:
    • The MintBox3 Basic is the entry model with Core i5-9500 6 core CPU, 16 GB RAM and 256 GB Samsung NVMe SSD.
    • The MintBox3 Pro is the high-end model with Core i9-9900K 8 core CPU, GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6 GB graphics, 32 GB RAM and 1 TB Samsung NVMe SSD.
• The Librem 5 phone just got even more expensive! 
• Calculate Linux is out, now with many flavors
• Endeavour OS got their Net Installer off the ground! This allows you to install any desktop without downloading the whole ISO first…
• Firefox adds Gnome Search (previously only available in Web/Epiphany, now available in Firefox only in Fedora)
• Peppermint 10 Respin Released
• Kdenlive 19.12 Released
• Vivaldi 2.10 Released
  • User Agent Changes
    • Using the Vivaldi User Agent for trusted sites, but Google Chrome for everything else
  • Vivaldi Blog –  https://vivaldi.com/blog/replace-windows-7-with-linux/
  • End of Windows 7 Support

• Purism Server Now An Option
  • The cheapest option will run $2700, but seems very capable. A 45W Xeon D-1541, 2x 10Gbps, 2x 1Gbps, and 1x IPMI ports, up to 128GB RAM, and 6 SATA ports and an M.2 slot.
• DXVK 1.5 Released
  • D9VK is now part of DXVK! Now you can play all your DX9 games, same as you do DX11. (Michael Tunnell said it the other way around if I understood correctly, that DXVK is no longer being maintained but D9VK added it to their project.  And the last time I understood something differently from what you thought, I was wrong.)
  • Some other HUD improvements as well as fixes for Crysis 3, Fifa 19, Halo and Star Citizen.

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• Chrome and Chromium affected by Magellan 2.0
  • https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-13734
  • https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-13750
  • https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-13751
  • https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-13752
  • https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-13753
  • Five CVE’s affecting the SQLite backend within Chrome and Chromium versions prior to 79.0.3945.79 with WebSQL enabled.
  • These flaws can allow things like obtaining info from memory.
  • Researchers are not going to follow the normal 90 day disclosure deadline, but will keep these close to the chest for now.
  • Upgrading to 79.0.3945.79 will fix the issue. But the real risk is using applications that bundle Chromium within. Those versions of Chrome or Chromium only get upgraded when the application itself gets updated.
• Ring Doorbell Plagued by Security Issues
  • Many of the issues with Ring stem from unsecured Wifi, bad passwords, etc.
  • Ring does not appear to limit incorrect attempts that a user can make for logging into their app nor does it alert users to suspicious logins.
  • NulledCast

WRAP-UP:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org  linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com 

• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!

• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338 Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/ Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org   

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, 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 … 

• Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)

Download

In our Innards section, we talk more about Linux Mint and Clem’s comments.
And finally, our listener feedback.

LINUX INNARDS:

Clement Lefebvre on Episode 321

oh.. mint tools and apps, cool

mintbackup should list all added software, not just software added through mintinstall

but it does so only in Mint, not in LMDE

it relies on a list of pre-installed software which is generated by ubiquity (that’s something live-installer doesn’t do atm)

you might remember Alberto Milone’s Envy

that’s how it started, then he was hired by Canonical and worked on drivers and integrating them with the OS

that’s jockey;

nowadays this is just embedded in something we don’t use in Mint called software-properties-gtk

anyway, ubuntu-drivers is the backend (libs and command line utilities) behind all that

and it’s used by two frontends, software-properties-gtk in Ubuntu and mint-drivers in Mint

in 19.3 mint-report will put a little warning icon in your taskbar if it detects drivers for you, so it won’t just be the welcome screen telling you about mint-drivers

although it’s integrated in Mint, timeshift is not developed by us

https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift

GitHub

teejee2008/timeshift

System restore tool for Linux. Creates filesystem snapshots using rsync+hardlinks, or BTRFS snapshots. Supports scheduled snapshots, multiple backup levels, and exclude filters. Snapshots can be re…

I never tried to export a timeshift backup from one machine to another

I suppose it could work, but you’d need the entire timeshift dir… since backups are incremental

it’s probably better to ghost or disk image though

to move a window to another workspace: ctrl-alt-shift + arrow

alternatively, drag the window with the mouse, press arrow button

you can use expo too (ctrl-alt-up)

or there might be extensions using the edges.. but that’s usually used for tiling

open as root and open in terminal have been in Mint (in all DEs) since the very start

since we dev nemo, we just made these core features, but we also still add these to caja and thunar

regarding snap, the main issue is vendor locking. Imagine you’re developing software for windows and it happens to work more or less for mac and linux.

you don’t want to spend too much time testing it in various distros and you definitely don’t want to package it in a hundred different formats.

somebody comes to you and say “we’re Ubuntu, put your software in our store and it’ll work everywhere in every Linux distribution”

it sounds good and you don’t have to worry about it anymore

if there are commercial aspects you negotiate them with ubuntu, if there are integration aspects, Ubuntu tells you what to change

basically if there’s money involved it goes to Ubuntu, if there’s one theme and one DE to work with, it’ll be the ones used by Ubuntu

if you go here

https://www.spotify.com/ie/download/linux

Music for everyone.

Spotify is all the music you’ll ever need.

first you’re told Linux is a 2nd class citizen and you’re lucky Spotify supports it

second you’re told whatever distro you’re running is a 2nd class citizen and all they care about is Ubuntu.. but that’s ok cause you can install snap

they could have an appimage, they could have a flatpak repo, if they didn’t want to work on it, they could put it in flathub (or just link to it, since it’s already there

https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.spotify.Client)

Flathub—An app store and build service for Linux

Find and install hundreds of apps and games for Linux. Enjoy GIMP, GNU Octave, Spotify, Steam and many more!

they could basically make it so a Fedora user or an Arch user isn’t constantly reminded they’re running a weird distro to access a software app they’re actually paying for

eventually if they think snap is great they’ll drop their APT repo and if we won’t have access to a .deb anymore

do you guys remember what happened when adobe delegated the Linux distribution of their flash plugin to google? for a while we were stuck with old broken versions in Firefox and the only format we were getting updates for was the one that was supported by chromium..

and then we found out it couldn’t play DRM, but the one in Chrome could

you basically do not want to rely on a commercial third party between you and the editor, there’s a huge conflict of interest.

as it turns out Flash died, good riddance.

(on Episode 320):

Linspire was one of the easiest ootb distribution for a while. When we developed mintinstall, to many people we became the first distribution with an “app store”. At the time Android and iOS already had one though, and Linspire already had CNR. You had to pay for it and Linspire wasn’t as popular, but it was an inspiration for us.

I also remember something had been done before Mint in PCBSD if I remember well…

ok I found it, mintinstall was introduced in Mint 3.0 Cassandra (2007), it was predated by Click’n’Run (Linspire) and a solution (I think it was PBIdir) in PCBSD.

it’s weird to look back after so many years :slight_smile:

and all of that was after Google and Apple had done their app stores in Android/iOS of course.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

• Marc
• David
• Gordon
• George from Tulsa

Topic for MintCast:

What, if anything, do these other distros offer that Mint doesn’t?

If it’s something like “newer software” how about a Mint user taking a Timeshift snapshot, trying the new install from PPA or otherwise, so if things don’t work out, safely reverting?

How about a guide to updating software versions within Mint, if that’s important to the user?

CHECK THIS OUT!

• Leo
  • Linux Mint rates #2 in Best Linux Distros by ItsFoss.org
  • Red Hat’s Command Line Heroes

• Moss
  • chkservice is a systemd Unit Manager with a terminal user interface
    • Note that only the AUR has v. 0.3, others have 0.1; instructions are provided to create a .deb package or just install it, and no, I haven’t done it.
• Joe
  • Pocket Popcorn Computer being crowdfunded
• Oliver
  • Gen2 Juno laptops

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

• Next Show: Nov 17, 2019 – 2PM central time

WRAP-UP:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org www.linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com
• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and all over YouTube (search for Moss Bliss, ignore the young black South African gospel singer), moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338
  • Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/
  • Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and Full Circle Weekly News
• Oliver Kelly – olzi.tk, @0lzi

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

• Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>

Download

In our Innards section, we talk more about Linux Mint and Clem’s comments.
And finally, our listener feedback.

LINUX INNARDS:

Clement Lefebvre on Episode 321

oh.. mint tools and apps, cool

mintbackup should list all added software, not just software added through mintinstall

but it does so only in Mint, not in LMDE

it relies on a list of pre-installed software which is generated by ubiquity (that’s something live-installer doesn’t do atm)

you might remember Alberto Milone’s Envy

that’s how it started, then he was hired by Canonical and worked on drivers and integrating them with the OS

that’s jockey;

nowadays this is just embedded in something we don’t use in Mint called software-properties-gtk

anyway, ubuntu-drivers is the backend (libs and command line utilities) behind all that

and it’s used by two frontends, software-properties-gtk in Ubuntu and mint-drivers in Mint

in 19.3 mint-report will put a little warning icon in your taskbar if it detects drivers for you, so it won’t just be the welcome screen telling you about mint-drivers

although it’s integrated in Mint, timeshift is not developed by us

https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift

GitHub

teejee2008/timeshift

System restore tool for Linux. Creates filesystem snapshots using rsync+hardlinks, or BTRFS snapshots. Supports scheduled snapshots, multiple backup levels, and exclude filters. Snapshots can be re…

I never tried to export a timeshift backup from one machine to another

I suppose it could work, but you’d need the entire timeshift dir… since backups are incremental

it’s probably better to ghost or disk image though

to move a window to another workspace: ctrl-alt-shift + arrow

alternatively, drag the window with the mouse, press arrow button

you can use expo too (ctrl-alt-up)

or there might be extensions using the edges.. but that’s usually used for tiling

open as root and open in terminal have been in Mint (in all DEs) since the very start

since we dev nemo, we just made these core features, but we also still add these to caja and thunar

regarding snap, the main issue is vendor locking. Imagine you’re developing software for windows and it happens to work more or less for mac and linux.

you don’t want to spend too much time testing it in various distros and you definitely don’t want to package it in a hundred different formats.

somebody comes to you and say “we’re Ubuntu, put your software in our store and it’ll work everywhere in every Linux distribution”

it sounds good and you don’t have to worry about it anymore

if there are commercial aspects you negotiate them with ubuntu, if there are integration aspects, Ubuntu tells you what to change

basically if there’s money involved it goes to Ubuntu, if there’s one theme and one DE to work with, it’ll be the ones used by Ubuntu

if you go here

https://www.spotify.com/ie/download/linux

Music for everyone.

Spotify is all the music you’ll ever need.

first you’re told Linux is a 2nd class citizen and you’re lucky Spotify supports it

second you’re told whatever distro you’re running is a 2nd class citizen and all they care about is Ubuntu.. but that’s ok cause you can install snap

they could have an appimage, they could have a flatpak repo, if they didn’t want to work on it, they could put it in flathub (or just link to it, since it’s already there

https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.spotify.Client)

Flathub—An app store and build service for Linux

Find and install hundreds of apps and games for Linux. Enjoy GIMP, GNU Octave, Spotify, Steam and many more!

they could basically make it so a Fedora user or an Arch user isn’t constantly reminded they’re running a weird distro to access a software app they’re actually paying for

eventually if they think snap is great they’ll drop their APT repo and if we won’t have access to a .deb anymore

do you guys remember what happened when adobe delegated the Linux distribution of their flash plugin to google? for a while we were stuck with old broken versions in Firefox and the only format we were getting updates for was the one that was supported by chromium..

and then we found out it couldn’t play DRM, but the one in Chrome could

you basically do not want to rely on a commercial third party between you and the editor, there’s a huge conflict of interest.

as it turns out Flash died, good riddance.

(on Episode 320):

Linspire was one of the easiest ootb distribution for a while. When we developed mintinstall, to many people we became the first distribution with an “app store”. At the time Android and iOS already had one though, and Linspire already had CNR. You had to pay for it and Linspire wasn’t as popular, but it was an inspiration for us.

I also remember something had been done before Mint in PCBSD if I remember well…

ok I found it, mintinstall was introduced in Mint 3.0 Cassandra (2007), it was predated by Click’n’Run (Linspire) and a solution (I think it was PBIdir) in PCBSD.