In security and privacy: Apple Suddenly Drops NSO Group Spyware Lawsuit;

Then in our Wanderings: Bill flirts with Ladybird, Joe gets jiggy with his ports, Moss does something or other, Eric gets COSMIC;

In our Innards section: we discuss DRM and digital media providers

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

The News:

Mint Monthly News – August 2024

Software Freedom Day

Mozilla Firefox 130 Released with Labs, Overscroll & Web Codecs API

ArchBang Calls It Quits

Upgrades to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Paused [Update: Now Resolved]

Linux Mint Tease ‘Improved’ Default Cinnamon Theme

Linux Mint Tease ‘Improved’ Default Cinnamon Theme

Security And Privacy

Apple Suddenly Drops NSO Group Spyware Lawsuit

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 our Innards section: We talk Mint 22

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

• 00:00:00 – Intro
• 00:01:18 – Bi-Weekly Wanderings
• 01:20:56 – Innards
• 01:56:18 – Vibrations From The Ether
• 01:56:42 – Check This Out
• 02:02:06 – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
• 02:02:52 – Wrap Up
• 02:05:04 – Special Thanks
• 02:05:58 – Outro

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 also 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!>

First up in the news: The Kudu is out, with a Lobster on its tail, Fedora 37 is dragging, the next Kernel takes less power from the people, Steam Snap switches stacks, Flatpak gets Meson, and Linus wants to forget about 486;

In security and privacy: we get the first security update for the Kudu;

Then in our Wanderings: Joe goes to Micro Center, Moss is having a ball, and Bill is clouding around

In our Innards section, we continue our historical journey through Linux distros;

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

The News

• Ubuntu 22.10 is Available to Download
• Ubuntu 23.04 Codename Revealed – And It’s a Lucently Likeable Label
• Fedora Linux 37 update
• Linux 6.2 Likely To Enjoy Measurable Power-Savings While Idle Or Lightly Loaded
• Canonical’s Steam Snap Will Let You Switch Mesa Stacks
• Brave Browser to start blocking annoying Cookie Consent Banners
• Google is shutting down Stadia
• GNU Toolchain Plans Move To The Linux Foundation’s Infrastructure
• Flatpak 1.15 Released With Initial Meson Build System Support
• Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

Security and Privacy Update

• Ubuntu 22.10 Gets First Kernel Security Update to Address Recent Wi-Fi Stack Vulnerabilities

Check This Out

• First Look at LURE! Bringing AUR to All Linux Distros

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, other information found at It’s Moss dot com

• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3 on Twitter, and wchouser3 on Facebook also – checkout my podcast 3ftpodcast.org
• Norbert – norbert@mintcast.org

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

• Norbert, Londoner, Tony H, AudioFreak(Riyo) and all others for our audio editing
• Josh Lowe, and Bill Houser for all his work on the website
• Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
• Linode for hosting mintcast.org
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.Thanks, Clem!

First up in the news, AWK gets Unicode, GIMP out, Firefox improves its memory, Nitrux released, Unity is a Flavour, Microsoft drops Linux, Makulu adds to the confusion, and Debian wrestles with firmware;

In security and privacy, 8 Year Old Linux Kernel Vulnerability Uncovered, and Plex gets exposed;

Then in our Wanderings, Moss reconfigures again, and Norbert contradicts himself.

In our Innards section, Mint and Gnome have lots to show us;

And finally, the feedback and a suggestion or two.

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

The News

• Universal Unix tool AWK gets Unicode support
• GIMP 2.99.12 Released – “A Huge Milestone Towards GIMP 3.0”
• Firefox 105 Beta Brings Memory Fixes, Return of the Two-Finger Swipe Gesture on Linux
• Nitrux 2.4 Released with Linux Kernel 5.19, KDE Gear 22.08, and New Maui Apps
• Ubuntu Unity to become an official Ubuntu flavour for 22.10
• Microsoft Decides to Drop the Linux App for Teams to Replace it as a Progressive Web App Instead
• Makulu Linux adds to the confusion with Makulu Max
• Debian moves to resolve the firmware question
  • Post on Debian’s website
• Malcat – hexadecimal editor and disassembler for malware analysis
• Lutris is now available on Flathub, as is an update of Un-Googled Chromium
• Arti 1.0.0 released

Security and Privacy Update

• “As Nasty as Dirty Pipe” — 8 Year Old Linux Kernel Vulnerability Uncovered
• Plex breach exposes usernames, emails, and encrypted passwords

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, Londoner, Tony H, and all others for our audio editing
• 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!

In our Innards section we discuss the changes we usually make to the systems and desktop environments we use to fit our workflows and to make them feel like home.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

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

Check This Out

• Surveillance Report (podcast)
• Opt Out (podcast)

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, other information found at It’s Moss dot com
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3 on Twitter, and wchouser3 on Facebook also – checkout my podcast 3ftpodcast.org
• Norbert – norbert@mintcast.org
• 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 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: Vanessa is finally here, so is the Linux kernel version 5.19, which was published from an M1 Mac by Linus Torvalds

In security and privacy, Sale of over a billion Chinese users’ data found, DuckDuckGo is (finally) blocking Microsoft trackers, and Linux 6.0 to have run-time verification for running on safety critical systems

Then in our Wanderings, Bill is hearing things, Moss is losing power, Joe is soldering on, and Norbert is taming the fox

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

The News

• Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa” is out
• Linux Kernel 5.19 Released With 7 New Features
• Linus Torvalds released  kernel 5.19 on M2 Macbook Air

Security and Privacy Update

• Security Warning After Sale of Stolen Chinese Data
• Single-Core CPU Cracked Post-Quantum Encryption Candidate Algorithm in Just an Hour
• DuckDuckGo rolls out new Microsoft blockers after backlash
• Linux 6.0 Adding Run-Time Verification For Running On Safety Critical Systems

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on Sunday, August 21, 2022
  • Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream –  2 pm US Central time on Saturday, August 13, 2022.
  • Get the Live Stream converted to your time zone
• Livestream information is at mintcast.org/livestream

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, There are new Regolith and Cinnamon desktops, KDE has new gear, Telegram Premium to launch, Plex has new Linux apps, Atom editor gets nuked, noUbuntu works to tame a daemon, System76 goes to Europe, and Europe is all about the C;

In security, Symbiote malware discovered, and Apple M1 chips are found to be flawed;

Then in our Wanderings, Joe is fighting trees, Bill is editing shows from the cab of a truck, Moss is spending Jeff Bezos’ money, Norbert is in a galaxy far far away, and we get to meet our guest, Steve Seguin

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

The News

• Cinnamon 5.4 Desktop Environment Released for Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa”
• Regolith Desktop 2.0 is Out with Many Changes
• KDE Gear 22.04.2 announced
• Telegram to launch Premium plan at $4.99/month
• Plex’s new Linux apps arrive on Flathub
• Atom editor support ends in December
• Asahi Linux Celebrates First Triangle On Apple M1 With Fully Open-Source Driver
• System76 Hardware is Making its Way to Europe Soon
• Ubuntu tries to tame systemd Out Of Memory Daemon
• Europe Makes Type-C Charger Mandatory For All Phones

Security and Privacy Update

• New Symbiote malware affects all running processes on Linux systems
• MIT Researchers discover “unpatchable” flaw in Apple M1 chips

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on June 26, 2022
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream – 2 pm US Central time on June 18, 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!

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!

In our Wanderings, Joe does some 3d printing, Josh got a new monitor, Norbert switches OS’s, and Clayton looks back

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

The News

• Linux Mint Blog-November
• The European Commission Will Make its Software Solutions Open Source for Public Benefit
• The Sad State Of Web Browser Support Currently Within Debian
• Fedora 36 Planning To Run Wayland By Default With NVIDIA’s Proprietary Driver
• Firefox Relay is Now Out of Beta & Adds New Premium Plan to Help Protect Your Real Email Address
• Updated Rust Code For Linux Kernel Patches Posted

Security Update

• New Ubuntu Linux Kernel Security Patches for 6 Vulnerabilities
• FGKASLR Appears Closer To Mainline For Improving Linux Security
• New Payment Data Stealing Malware Hides in Nginx Process on Linux Servers
• Go Daddy Data Breach

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

• Joe
  • 3d printing, crypto, food
• Josh
  • Health, monitors, outdoors
• Norbert
  • Debian testing, Gnome, Japanese
• Clayton
  • The old days, SSD’s, printing

Announcements

• Our next episode will be Sunday, December 26, 2021 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC/GMT.
• Check when this will be in your local timezone
• Our next Saturday live stream will be Saturday, January 1, 2022 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC/GMT.
  Check when this will be in your local timezone

Wrap-up

• Joe – Tllts.org, linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• 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
• Clayton

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!>

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

The News

• No More Microsoft! This German State Plans to Switch 25,000 Windows PCs to Linux and LibreOffice
• Slackware 15.0 Takes Another Step Closer To Release With RC2
• Cinnamon 5.2 Desktop Environment Released
• KDE Plasma 5.24 Adds Overview Effect Inspired By GNOME’s Activities Overview
• Microsoft Working On Direct3D 12 Video Acceleration For Mesa
• New Features & Improvements to Expect in GIMP 3.0 Release
• Linus Torvalds Announces First Linux 5.16 Kernel Release Candidate

Security Update

• Hive ransomware now encrypts Linux and FreeBSD systems
• EU needs more cybersecurity graduates, says ENISA infosec agency – pointing at growing list of master’s degree courses
• Version 2.3.12 of the apt package manager now prevents breaking your system

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

• Joe
  • Fitbit Versa 3
• Norbert
• Josh
  • Coolpad Snap
• Tony

Announcements

• Our next episode will be Sunday, December 12, 2021 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC/GMT.
• Check when this will be in your local timezone
• Our next Saturday live stream will be Saturday, December 4, 2021 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC/GMT.
  Check when this will be in your local timezone

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!>

First up in the news Linux Mint gets a new website, A new point release, Firefox snaps back, Gnome and Plasma get updates, and much more

In security, no encrypted chats are safe

Then in our Wanderings, we hear from the old AND new crew

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

The News

• Linux Mint Website Finally Updated!
• Un-scheduled Ubuntu 18.04.6 Point Release
  • Boothole
• Firefox Snap Default in Ubuntu 21.10 and beyond, Encourage in Flavors 
• Gnome 41 RC1 Out
• KDE Plasma 5.23 Anniversary Edition Beta Out
• Manjaro Community Edition, Cinnamon to Ship Vivaldi by Default
• Steam Makes Fixes to Linux Client and Compatibility
• Kernel 5.15 with NTFS, SMB3 Support
• Ubuntu Podcast to end after 14 seasons

Security Update

• Matrix Advises Everyone to Update (Element, FluffyChat, Nheko, etc.)
• WhatsApp Not So Secure

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

• Joe
  • Manjaro Phosh
• Nishant
• Norbert
  • Debian Testing
• Josh
  • Samson Q2u
• Tony
• Leo
  • Keychron K3

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on Sunday 3th October
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream –  2 pm US Central time on September 25, 2021
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone

Wrap-up

• Joe – www.Tllts.org, www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org
• Bo – Crowbar Kernel Panic, crowbarkernelpanic@pm.me
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites, Crowbar Kernel Panic
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show. Buy me a coffee!

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

• Owen Peery for our audio production, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord 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!>

In our Innards section Debian 11, and what that means for LMDE

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

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

Linux Innards

What will LMDE 5 look like?

• Leo
• Tony
• Joe
  • Debian 11

Vibrations from the Ether

• Henrik
  • Haiku OS
• Hank
• Raphaël
  • https://linuxmint-troubleshooting-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/faq.html

Check This Out

• Leo
  • New OpenShot 2.6 Out

Announcements

• If you had issues getting to mintCast.org over the past few weeks, there was an issue with billing even though we were all paid up. Thanks to Josh Lowe for wrangling everything for us. The site is back up and going strong.
• Leo will be stepping down as Host for the foreseeable future starting with Episode 272. You’re in very capable hands and who knows? Maybe more community hosts!
  • I’m not going far. I’ll stay on to help produce the shows in content and editing, and I’ll likely be back with a voice where I can find the open weekends.
• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on Sunday September 19, 2021
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream –  2 pm US Central time on September 25, 2021

Wrap-up

• Joe – www.Tllts.org, www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org
• Bo – Crowbar Kernel Panic, crowbarkernelpanic@pm.me
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites, Crowbar Kernel Panic
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show. Buy me a coffee!

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

• Owen Peery for our audio production, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord 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!>

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit.

Linux Innards

Mint 20.2 was released about 4 days ago as we record this and take our first look at our version of choice.

Vibrations from the Ether

• Brad A.
  • https://www.babylonpodcast.com/
• Jack
• Hank B.
• Nick C.
  • https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?p=190869&sid=b991af3cefbc17b2fe3c578f421604ed#p190869

Check This Out

• Leo
  • Croc
• Listener Jack
  • windy.com is a fantastic site for weather of all sorts. the amount of data in there is amazing and very nicely presented. maps for temperature, waves, clouds, rain, snow, wind, air quality,humidity… the list seems endless. also fires, webcams, surfing spots…

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on July 24, 2021
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream –  2 pm US Central time on July 31, 2021

Wrap-up

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – Crowbar Kernel Panic, crowbarkernelpanic@pm.me
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites, Crowbar Kernel Panic
• Mike – Mike@mintcast.org and GrouchyM on Discord and Telegram
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show. Buy me a coffee!

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

• Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord 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!>

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit.

The News

• Linux Mint 20.2 Released!
  • Cinnamon
  • MATE
  • Xfce
  • How to Upgrade!
• Linux Foundation celebrates the upcoming 30 years of Torvalds’ kernel with a dry T-shirt contest
  • Link to 30th anniversary merch
• Ubuntu Makes a Major Theme Change For its Next Release
• Audacity fork maintainer quits after alleged harassment

Security Update

• Kaseya
• PrintNightmare

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

• Mike
  • MacOS VM

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on July 24, 2021
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream –  2 pm US Central time on July 17, 2021
• Get the Live Stream converted to your time zone

Wrap-up

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – Crowbar Kernel Panic, crowbarkernelpanic@pm.me
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites, Crowbar Kernel Panic
• Mike – Mike@mintcast.org and GrouchyM on Discord and Telegram
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show. Buy me a coffee!

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

• Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord 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!>

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit.

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

• Tony – Snapcraft site

The News

• Linux Mint 20.2 Beta
  • Cinnamon
  • Mate
  • XFCE
• Rocky Linux 8.4 Released
• ElementaryOS 6, Odin, Beta 2 Out
• Jingpad A1
• Firefox 89.0.1 and 89.0.2
• Gnome Shell Dash to Panel v43 now Available for Gnome 40

Security Update

• An SSID that Breaks iPhone Wifi!
• Throw away the Western Digital MyBook Live

Announcements

• Our next episode will be Sunday, July 11, 2021 at 2 pm US Central Time
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone!
• Our next Saturday stream will be at 2 pm US Central time on July 3, 2021
• Get the Saturday stream converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – Crowbar Kernel Panic, crowbarkernelpanic@pm.me
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites, Crowbar Kernel Panic
• Mike – Mike@mintcast.org and GrouchyM on Discord and Telegram
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show. Buy me a coffee!

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

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

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

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

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

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

THE NEWS:

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

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

• Ubuntu 21.04 Testing Week
• Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on April 4, 2021. 
• Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

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

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

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

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

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

THE NEWS:

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

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

• Ubuntu 21.04 Testing Week
• Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on April 4, 2021. 
• Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

• Leo
  • I wrote that backup script I promised. It will backup all contents of your home folder, including dot files, into a gz, xz, bz2 or 7z archive.
  • It’s in my personal, local gitea, but I can post it to my public github if there’s interest.
• Joe
  • One of the 1more headsets the cable has gone bad which is why I have had so many problems with it.  Basically the cable just deteriorated away.  So I took the driver end apart and pulled the cable all the way through and put in another one.  The first one that I tried to replace it with was too thick so I removed some cable from another headset that I had no use for, that was for a side with a mic and used two wires for each connection.  It came out well and I may do it to another of the 1mores where I have had to do a lot of repairs because the wire was falling apart
  • On that 5285 tablet I was not able to get anything working on it despite trying to figure out what needed to be replaced.  I know it is one of the surface mount components but I don’t have the proper tools to remove and replace and while I do know the area I need to start in I don’t have the replacement parts.
    1. So instead I have ordered a replacement motherboard.  It is the i3 version instead of the i5 version but it was 60 dollars and it will still be an improvement over a couple of the other systems that I use
    2. I will eventually get to order another one with the specs I want.  Or maybe a 5290.  My analysis of price to performance leads me to believe that it is the current winner for value when it comes to cpu performance.  The 7000 series does not provide much of a difference in performance for a large price bump and the 5290 has double the performance of the 5285 for a marginal price difference
    3. Also ordered a 2230 ssd for 15 dollars that should add a lot of high performance hard drive space to the tablet for a similar price to the much slower micro sd. I may also throw in whatever micro sd I have sitting around but we shall see, well I will when I get another one anyway
    4. Did get the new motherboard and put it in easy enough but it turns out the creen is bad.  So I have repurposed it along with a usb c adapter to work as a set top box for my living room tv.  The problem is that used screens cost nearly as much as new ones which is in the 150 dollar range
    5. I am thinking about writing a buyer’s guide for Windows tablets that seem to have a good record of running Linux or could be made to work with a little work.  My problem with it is it would not be good for more than a year or two other than the general guidelines because of how technology changes. I would like to know if people would want to read it before I write it though. I suppose that I could write a new guide every year or two.
  • I got wrapped up in the headphone cord that was attached to my laptop.  The laptop ended up on the floor but thankfully I have not been able to find any damage for that.  The cable for my 99 neos however was damaged.  A new cable costs 20 dollars so I am fixing the old one.  I may still buy a new one but I do want to replace the 3.5mm jack anyway.  Cant have too many cables.  It is a 4 pole connector and I have not had much luck getting those to work correctly. But I was able to get some practice recently when I was able to pick up 2 razer kraken pro v2s and an xbox headset for free from FB marketplace.  The last person had tried to do a jack replacement and gotten the cabling wrong.  So far I have been able to get one of the Razers working like new by fixing the work that was already done.
  • I ended up replacing the battery in my bluetooth/wired mechanical keyboard.  The battery that was in it was not holding a charge for very long and that would make the connection very wonky after only a short period of time.  I am hoping that the issue was an aging battery but I did also replace the 750 mAh with 4000 mAh battery. It should not be a problem moving to a larger capacity battery on the lower power charger, it will just take a lot longer to charge.  But slow charging is supposed to be better for batteries anyway.

• Moss
  • I spent an hour here and an hour there getting the Zia800 up and running. I met with complete success on the 13th, dual-booting Linux Mint 20.1 MATE and Windows 10 Pro. I still need to install and configure Kodi for her, and she still has some configuring to do. She continues to use her T430 exclusively; I have not seen her turn the Zia800 on to this point. She blushes and goes silent when I ask her why not.
  • I have a problem. I have one swap partition on my Kudu, and every time I install a distro, that distro finds it and renames it, so other distros can’t find it anymore. This makes for a really slow boot. With help from Londoner, I tried to delete Mint’s use of the swap partition and install a swapfile. The attempt failed, and I had to do a complete reinstall. Even so, I learned enough to get it right this time. So now I have one fewer distro looking for the swap partition. Seven to go.
  • Here is the info I was using from Londoner:
    • To configure swapfile (as root or using sudo). 2G creates 2 GiB swapfile.
    • sudo swapoff /swapfile
    • sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile
    • sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
    • sudo mkswap /swapfile
    • sudo nano /etc/fstab
  • Delete existing entry for swap partition and replace with
    • /swapfile none swap sw 0 0
    • Save & reboot

• • I got a new phone yesterday, a Google Pixel 3a XL. I charged it up and was going to root it and put Lineage OS on it before using it… but… As soon as I turned it on, it started installing Android 11, which I’ve never gotten close to. I caved. I have moved all my files over, which required the use of my Wavlink toaster as the Pixel does not accommodate SD cards. I will, however, go ahead and put Lineage on my old Moto X4, and will make that available as a business phone for AWH…which still hasn’t taken off but we’re being promised a lot of things.
  • I’ve been keeping neofetch data on every installation I do one every machine I own, and updating it as needed. The file is available on our Telegram and Discord groups. The result shows how much memory is used by the system with nothing running, except Terminal and neofetch, and makes a good baseline for deciding which distro to use according to your system’s amount of memory.
  • We’re getting ready for another exciting episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest, scheduled for March 31st. For the first time since Episode 001, our current episode 020 is our most-viewed episode at 781, with Episode 019 next at 745 and Episode 018 in 3rd at 727! 
  • I have managed to successfully install three distros this month, and instead of reviewing more than one, our Telegram group voted on it and picked Mageia 8, which I had hinted earlier I *might* be reviewing. This means I know what I’m reviewing for April as well, also based on the votes and comments.
  • It’s time to get your votes in on Distro Madness, Round 3; voting will close this Friday before moving on to Round 4. There were some interesting upsets in Round 2. We’re getting a lot of participation in this fun little diversion. We would like to encourage you to become a member of the site; we have some plans in the works for making additional features for members only, and membership is free.
  • Dresden fights on. [Chapter 32 of Small Favors] And we have just been gifted a complete collection of The Expanse novels and shorts, as well as the rest of the Codex Alera collection.
• Tony Hughes
  • Lots of walking, Monday 8th and Tuesday 9th March, myself and my wife went on 2 long walks. On Monday 8th, we walked 8 Miles and Tuesday 9th, nearly 12 miles. Myself and my Wife also started a virtual walking challenge last Wednesday, “Mizen to Malin Virtual Challenge” which is 360 miles from the North Coast of Ireland to the South coast. My Wife has just completed the Lands End to John O Groats challenge which was 874 miles and now has a T shirt and shiny medal to prove it.   
  • Not talked about it for a while but I have been doing some Diecast restoration work, preparing castings for repaint, it has been quite cold here so painting in my outside workshop was out so I have been busy getting the castings dismantled, paint striped and the posts drilled and tapped out ready for reassembly. I managed to get some prepared castings painted and reassembled this last week as the weather has warmed up enough to make painting possible. 
  • I nearly missed the show this week as I hadn’t been given the heads up about the clocks going forward in the US, ours don’t go forward till next week, so my time is an hour earlier than my usual 8pm. (to echo another podcast) I blame Leo lol. 

• Josh
  • CKP ep 3 coming to a podcatcher near you soon!
  • Linux Mint is still the champion of Linux gaming!
  • Did some distrohopping going from Mint to openSUSE Tumbleweed to Endeavor back to Mint all in one 3 day period.
  • dd + pigz is going to be my method of backup from now on even though it’s slower.
  • Btrfs send/receive is awesome but I need to learn more about it…
  • Got a new audio interface, the Presonus Audiobox usb96. Also getting a new mic, the Audio Technica AT2020!

• Bo
  • The 3d printed dice tray heard round the world
  • Valheim server
  • CKP progress

• Mike
  • I THOUGHT I finally fixed WiFi. New microphone (Samsung Q2u), new headphones (Sony WH1000XM3), work on recording room.
  • Removed my information (People Finder, White Pages, MyLife) [Moss-HOW?]
  • New hardware wallet (Ledger Nano S)

THE NEWS:

• Ubuntu 21.04 gets Kernel 5.11
• LibreOffice 7.0.5 release with over 100 bug fixes.
• Version 3.0 of Audacity has been released
• Telegram 2.7 Gives Us More Voice
• Calamares Now Supports Configurable Setups for BTRFS Volumes
• 7z Is Official on Linux
• In the blogosphere:
  • Is Mint 20 Better than Ubuntu and Windows?
  • Mint Cinnamon vs MATE vs XFCE

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• The Linux Foundation announces new sigstore
• A Hacker Got My Texts for $16!

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on April 4th, 2021.

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, several blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, @zaivala@hostux.social on Mastodon, zaivalananda@protonmail.ch, Sponsus! 
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com 
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites. Crowbar Kernel Panic on Spotify.
• Mike – GrouchyM@pm.me and GrouchyM on Discord
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show and 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
  • I wrote that backup script I promised. It will backup all contents of your home folder, including dot files, into a gz, xz, bz2 or 7z archive.
  • It’s in my personal, local gitea, but I can post it to my public github if there’s interest.
• Joe
  • One of the 1more headsets the cable has gone bad which is why I have had so many problems with it.  Basically the cable just deteriorated away.  So I took the driver end apart and pulled the cable all the way through and put in another one.  The first one that I tried to replace it with was too thick so I removed some cable from another headset that I had no use for, that was for a side with a mic and used two wires for each connection.  It came out well and I may do it to another of the 1mores where I have had to do a lot of repairs because the wire was falling apart
  • On that 5285 tablet I was not able to get anything working on it despite trying to figure out what needed to be replaced.  I know it is one of the surface mount components but I don’t have the proper tools to remove and replace and while I do know the area I need to start in I don’t have the replacement parts.
    1. So instead I have ordered a replacement motherboard.  It is the i3 version instead of the i5 version but it was 60 dollars and it will still be an improvement over a couple of the other systems that I use
    2. I will eventually get to order another one with the specs I want.  Or maybe a 5290.  My analysis of price to performance leads me to believe that it is the current winner for value when it comes to cpu performance.  The 7000 series does not provide much of a difference in performance for a large price bump and the 5290 has double the performance of the 5285 for a marginal price difference
    3. Also ordered a 2230 ssd for 15 dollars that should add a lot of high performance hard drive space to the tablet for a similar price to the much slower micro sd. I may also throw in whatever micro sd I have sitting around but we shall see, well I will when I get another one anyway
    4. Did get the new motherboard and put it in easy enough but it turns out the creen is bad.  So I have repurposed it along with a usb c adapter to work as a set top box for my living room tv.  The problem is that used screens cost nearly as much as new ones which is in the 150 dollar range
    5. I am thinking about writing a buyer’s guide for Windows tablets that seem to have a good record of running Linux or could be made to work with a little work.  My problem with it is it would not be good for more than a year or two other than the general guidelines because of how technology changes. I would like to know if people would want to read it before I write it though. I suppose that I could write a new guide every year or two.
  • I got wrapped up in the headphone cord that was attached to my laptop.  The laptop ended up on the floor but thankfully I have not been able to find any damage for that.  The cable for my 99 neos however was damaged.  A new cable costs 20 dollars so I am fixing the old one.  I may still buy a new one but I do want to replace the 3.5mm jack anyway.  Cant have too many cables.  It is a 4 pole connector and I have not had much luck getting those to work correctly. But I was able to get some practice recently when I was able to pick up 2 razer kraken pro v2s and an xbox headset for free from FB marketplace.  The last person had tried to do a jack replacement and gotten the cabling wrong.  So far I have been able to get one of the Razers working like new by fixing the work that was already done.
  • I ended up replacing the battery in my bluetooth/wired mechanical keyboard.  The battery that was in it was not holding a charge for very long and that would make the connection very wonky after only a short period of time.  I am hoping that the issue was an aging battery but I did also replace the 750 mAh with 4000 mAh battery. It should not be a problem moving to a larger capacity battery on the lower power charger, it will just take a lot longer to charge.  But slow charging is supposed to be better for batteries anyway.

• Moss
  • I spent an hour here and an hour there getting the Zia800 up and running. I met with complete success on the 13th, dual-booting Linux Mint 20.1 MATE and Windows 10 Pro. I still need to install and configure Kodi for her, and she still has some configuring to do. She continues to use her T430 exclusively; I have not seen her turn the Zia800 on to this point. She blushes and goes silent when I ask her why not.
  • I have a problem. I have one swap partition on my Kudu, and every time I install a distro, that distro finds it and renames it, so other distros can’t find it anymore. This makes for a really slow boot. With help from Londoner, I tried to delete Mint’s use of the swap partition and install a swapfile. The attempt failed, and I had to do a complete reinstall. Even so, I learned enough to get it right this time. So now I have one fewer distro looking for the swap partition. Seven to go.
  • Here is the info I was using from Londoner:
    • To configure swapfile (as root or using sudo). 2G creates 2 GiB swapfile.
    • sudo swapoff /swapfile
    • sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile
    • sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
    • sudo mkswap /swapfile
    • sudo nano /etc/fstab
  • Delete existing entry for swap partition and replace with
    • /swapfile none swap sw 0 0
    • Save & reboot

• • I got a new phone yesterday, a Google Pixel 3a XL. I charged it up and was going to root it and put Lineage OS on it before using it… but… As soon as I turned it on, it started installing Android 11, which I’ve never gotten close to. I caved. I have moved all my files over, which required the use of my Wavlink toaster as the Pixel does not accommodate SD cards. I will, however, go ahead and put Lineage on my old Moto X4, and will make that available as a business phone for AWH…which still hasn’t taken off but we’re being promised a lot of things.
  • I’ve been keeping neofetch data on every installation I do one every machine I own, and updating it as needed. The file is available on our Telegram and Discord groups. The result shows how much memory is used by the system with nothing running, except Terminal and neofetch, and makes a good baseline for deciding which distro to use according to your system’s amount of memory.
  • We’re getting ready for another exciting episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest, scheduled for March 31st. For the first time since Episode 001, our current episode 020 is our most-viewed episode at 781, with Episode 019 next at 745 and Episode 018 in 3rd at 727! 
  • I have managed to successfully install three distros this month, and instead of reviewing more than one, our Telegram group voted on it and picked Mageia 8, which I had hinted earlier I *might* be reviewing. This means I know what I’m reviewing for April as well, also based on the votes and comments.
  • It’s time to get your votes in on Distro Madness, Round 3; voting will close this Friday before moving on to Round 4. There were some interesting upsets in Round 2. We’re getting a lot of participation in this fun little diversion. We would like to encourage you to become a member of the site; we have some plans in the works for making additional features for members only, and membership is free.
  • Dresden fights on. [Chapter 32 of Small Favors] And we have just been gifted a complete collection of The Expanse novels and shorts, as well as the rest of the Codex Alera collection.
• Tony Hughes
  • Lots of walking, Monday 8th and Tuesday 9th March, myself and my wife went on 2 long walks. On Monday 8th, we walked 8 Miles and Tuesday 9th, nearly 12 miles. Myself and my Wife also started a virtual walking challenge last Wednesday, “Mizen to Malin Virtual Challenge” which is 360 miles from the North Coast of Ireland to the South coast. My Wife has just completed the Lands End to John O Groats challenge which was 874 miles and now has a T shirt and shiny medal to prove it.   
  • Not talked about it for a while but I have been doing some Diecast restoration work, preparing castings for repaint, it has been quite cold here so painting in my outside workshop was out so I have been busy getting the castings dismantled, paint striped and the posts drilled and tapped out ready for reassembly. I managed to get some prepared castings painted and reassembled this last week as the weather has warmed up enough to make painting possible. 
  • I nearly missed the show this week as I hadn’t been given the heads up about the clocks going forward in the US, ours don’t go forward till next week, so my time is an hour earlier than my usual 8pm. (to echo another podcast) I blame Leo lol. 

• Josh
  • CKP ep 3 coming to a podcatcher near you soon!
  • Linux Mint is still the champion of Linux gaming!
  • Did some distrohopping going from Mint to openSUSE Tumbleweed to Endeavor back to Mint all in one 3 day period.
  • dd + pigz is going to be my method of backup from now on even though it’s slower.
  • Btrfs send/receive is awesome but I need to learn more about it…
  • Got a new audio interface, the Presonus Audiobox usb96. Also getting a new mic, the Audio Technica AT2020!

• Bo
  • The 3d printed dice tray heard round the world
  • Valheim server
  • CKP progress

• Mike
  • I THOUGHT I finally fixed WiFi. New microphone (Samsung Q2u), new headphones (Sony WH1000XM3), work on recording room.
  • Removed my information (People Finder, White Pages, MyLife) [Moss-HOW?]
  • New hardware wallet (Ledger Nano S)

THE NEWS:

• Ubuntu 21.04 gets Kernel 5.11
• LibreOffice 7.0.5 release with over 100 bug fixes.
• Version 3.0 of Audacity has been released
• Telegram 2.7 Gives Us More Voice
• Calamares Now Supports Configurable Setups for BTRFS Volumes
• 7z Is Official on Linux
• In the blogosphere:
  • Is Mint 20 Better than Ubuntu and Windows?
  • Mint Cinnamon vs MATE vs XFCE

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• The Linux Foundation announces new sigstore
• A Hacker Got My Texts for $16!

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on April 4th, 2021.

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

LINUX INNARDS:

Linux Mint 20.1 … now that we’ve had time to look at it…

• Moss
  • My two machines upgraded without an actual hitch, although one of them said something didn’t work. I did a clean install on the Dell laptop. I’ve watched a bit of Hypnotix, with most issues seem to be just what happens on streaming TV. I’ve https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHXt27qpvGUhad a lockup or two though. I tried once to set up a webapp, but didn’t quite understand it and didn’t have enough spoons to read up on it at the time.
• TonyH
  • So 20.1 has been on my laptop for just over 2 weeks and it is working just fine. Apart from the Hypnotix app and Web Apps, there doesn’t seem to be much difference that impacts my day to day use on the laptop. I do not print or scan from this PC so for the improvements to this I will have to wait to get 20.1 or above on my Tower PC. I’m sure there were lot’s of things done under the hood to make things smoother, such as the improved hardware acceleration in the video playback client Celluloid.
• JoshH 
  • 20.1 has been really solid for me. I have been using it now since the beta started and even then it was solid just some of the apps they were releasing with 20.1 were a little rough till it went stable. 
• Joe
  • It has been on my gaming laptop since the last show.  I have not noticed much of a difference between this and the previous version which is good for an incremental update
    • Has not impacted my work which is always a plus
    • Im able to log in and do all my work just like before
  • I have not used hypnotix at all in the 2 weeks since but that is because i have my own already established flow for watching movies and tv shows on my own schedule
  • Web Apps is extremely useful now that i can set it up with chrome and it creates a menu item.  Very simple to get whatsapp running
  • The only other useful things that i have noticed:
    • Menu search is now by relevance which is useful
  • The only real negative that i have seen is that per monitor fractional scaling is not working yet
• Leo
  • Has been nothing but amazing. As mentioned before, the upgrade went smoothly and without a single hitch.
  • Cinnamon does feel more responsive on the desktop. To my surprise, I still have yet to see a single skipped frame at 144hz.
  • Edited a 2hr show (Linux User Space) in 20.1.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

• John Wallis

kernel.modules_disabled (exp: 1)                 [ DIFFERENT ]

https://forums.whonix.org/t/enforce-kernel-module-software-signature-verification-module-signing-disallow-kernel-module-loading-by-default/7880/40

• John Wallis, part 2

Lynis has marked the following startup services as unsafe:

- networkd-dispatcher.service:                        [ UNSAFE ]

- ondemand.service:                                   [ UNSAFE ]

- osspd.service:                                      [ UNSAFE ]

- plymouth-start.service:                             [ UNSAFE ]

- polkit.service:                                     [ UNSAFE ]

CHECK THIS OUT!

• Leo
  • chrome://gpu
  • brave://gpu
  • vivaldi://gpu
• Tony H
  • If you are interested in the Librem5 phone check out this YouTube video.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH8DRyKUZDg 
  • Hackspace Magazine issue 39 carries an article about the Raspberry Pi Pico and is free to download the pdf of all issues as licenced under CC
  • Distrohoppers Digest Episode 19
• Moss
  • Listener Dylan Burger reviews the Odyssey J145, a SBC with a Celeron chip, on It’s Moss.
  • For those of you (like me) still coding in HTML4, the Frames feature has been completely deprecated. This is why when you visit sites like Peaceful Hippo, my personal website, you don’t see the menus. I need to get to work on a fix for this.
  • Command line installer for VMs in Ubuntu, something I’ve never used but which was referenced in Full Circle’s Telegram group and just sounded sexy enough to include here
  • It’s Foss has an article highlighting Haruna Video Player you may find interesting.
  • It’s Foss also has an excellent article on customizing your Plasma settings.
• Josh
  • FairEmail: An android mail client that is fully open source and that works! I have been using it for probably a month now with no hitches at all.

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!>

LINUX INNARDS:

Linux Mint 20.1 … now that we’ve had time to look at it…

• Moss
  • My two machines upgraded without an actual hitch, although one of them said something didn’t work. I did a clean install on the Dell laptop. I’ve watched a bit of Hypnotix, with most issues seem to be just what happens on streaming TV. I’ve https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHXt27qpvGUhad a lockup or two though. I tried once to set up a webapp, but didn’t quite understand it and didn’t have enough spoons to read up on it at the time.
• TonyH
  • So 20.1 has been on my laptop for just over 2 weeks and it is working just fine. Apart from the Hypnotix app and Web Apps, there doesn’t seem to be much difference that impacts my day to day use on the laptop. I do not print or scan from this PC so for the improvements to this I will have to wait to get 20.1 or above on my Tower PC. I’m sure there were lot’s of things done under the hood to make things smoother, such as the improved hardware acceleration in the video playback client Celluloid.
• JoshH 
  • 20.1 has been really solid for me. I have been using it now since the beta started and even then it was solid just some of the apps they were releasing with 20.1 were a little rough till it went stable. 
• Joe
  • It has been on my gaming laptop since the last show.  I have not noticed much of a difference between this and the previous version which is good for an incremental update
    • Has not impacted my work which is always a plus
    • Im able to log in and do all my work just like before
  • I have not used hypnotix at all in the 2 weeks since but that is because i have my own already established flow for watching movies and tv shows on my own schedule
  • Web Apps is extremely useful now that i can set it up with chrome and it creates a menu item.  Very simple to get whatsapp running
  • The only other useful things that i have noticed:
    • Menu search is now by relevance which is useful
  • The only real negative that i have seen is that per monitor fractional scaling is not working yet
• Leo
  • Has been nothing but amazing. As mentioned before, the upgrade went smoothly and without a single hitch.
  • Cinnamon does feel more responsive on the desktop. To my surprise, I still have yet to see a single skipped frame at 144hz.
  • Edited a 2hr show (Linux User Space) in 20.1.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

• John Wallis

kernel.modules_disabled (exp: 1)                 [ DIFFERENT ]

https://forums.whonix.org/t/enforce-kernel-module-software-signature-verification-module-signing-disallow-kernel-module-loading-by-default/7880/40

• John Wallis, part 2

Lynis has marked the following startup services as unsafe:

- networkd-dispatcher.service:                        [ UNSAFE ]

- ondemand.service:                                   [ UNSAFE ]

- osspd.service:                                      [ UNSAFE ]

- plymouth-start.service:                             [ UNSAFE ]

- polkit.service:                                     [ UNSAFE ]

CHECK THIS OUT!

• Leo
  • chrome://gpu
  • brave://gpu
  • vivaldi://gpu
• Tony H
  • If you are interested in the Librem5 phone check out this YouTube video.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH8DRyKUZDg 
  • Hackspace Magazine issue 39 carries an article about the Raspberry Pi Pico and is free to download the pdf of all issues as licenced under CC
  • Distrohoppers Digest Episode 19
• Moss
  • Listener Dylan Burger reviews the Odyssey J145, a SBC with a Celeron chip, on It’s Moss.
  • For those of you (like me) still coding in HTML4, the Frames feature has been completely deprecated. This is why when you visit sites like Peaceful Hippo, my personal website, you don’t see the menus. I need to get to work on a fix for this.
  • Command line installer for VMs in Ubuntu, something I’ve never used but which was referenced in Full Circle’s Telegram group and just sounded sexy enough to include here
  • It’s Foss has an article highlighting Haruna Video Player you may find interesting.
  • It’s Foss also has an excellent article on customizing your Plasma settings.
• Josh
  • FairEmail: An android mail client that is fully open source and that works! I have been using it for probably a month now with no hitches at all.

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
  • My focus has been at work and editing Linux User Space these past couple of weeks.
  • I am finally going to put Aaron’s Docker compose file to good use to get a long term Gitea instance now that my NAS is settled and running well.
• Joe
  • Got the screen adapter for the Arcade1Up machine.  Still need to finish putting it together
  • 3d printed a part for listener Dustin for a pair of headphones that I had sent him.
    • Had to switch to pla for the print
    • Happy to say that it printed perfectly and seemed very sturdy using the gcode that I had used before for the same print
    • Sad to say that this means that I need to go back to tweaking the settings for PETG.  Slow it down even more and see if that gets the prints to turn out right
  • Was able to fix the Samsung Galaxy Gear S3 Frontier watch with a 15 dollar part from ebay
    • I had purchased a broken motherboard for the watch that was only supposed to have issues with the heart rate sensor and the pedometer so that I could verify that the screen was working correctly
    • The screen does work and most of the functions on the watch itself works as well
    • Thought that I got lucky and the pedometer and the heart rate monitor were correct.  I verified that the heart rate monitor was working by comparing it to my other watch and everything seemed to be fine.  I did see that the number of steps were being counted but when I compared it to my phone over the course of the day the number on the watch was lower than the phone.  This should not be the case it should be the other way around.  
    • Then i found out that the watch was showing that i was going up and down stairs all day so i ordered another one and will be getting it soon in order to do another fix
    • I am giving my other watch to my wife to see if she likes it or not.  If not, I will probably sell it.
  • Got a family portrait coming in a few months. The pictures were taken for it
    • We won a raffle for it but there was still a lot of cost involved because we wanted the larger size because it comes with a couple of extra 10 inch paintings that we can send to the rest of the family
    • Way more money than i wanted to pay but with my eldest child turning 18 I really want to get it done whilst the kids have no choice in the matter
    • But it is a rather large expense for me and I don’t want to go through that same company in order to get the frame
    • I could really use some suggestions and knowledge on framing.  If you have any knowledge on the subject please advise me on the best way to frame a museum quality painting, please email me jb@mintcast.org

• Tony Hughes
  • Not a lot going on here as we went into another stay at home order right after New Year, so I have been baking, modeling and watching other people modeling on YouTube.
  • On a good note regarding the Virus, my wife has now had the FULL vaccination as she works in the critical care department of our local hospital in an admin role. She was lucky to get her second dose just before they changed it to be 12 weeks after the first, the day after she had her second injection. This will reduce my risk considerably given where she works.
  • On the Diecast modeling as it is winter and my paintshop is in the garage which is not heated. So I have mainly been preparing models for the paint stage so dismantling them, drilling and taping the posts ready for reassembly and paint stripping then storing for later paint and reassembly. I will also print the decals needed for those models that require them at the reassembly stage.   
  • Very quiet Linux wise although last night I installed the Mint 20.1 upgrade onto my main Laptop which we will be talking about later. 

• Josh Hawk
  •  First to clarify my predictions.
    • 1. Linux phones will double in number and power in 2021.
      • What I mean by number is the amount of phones on the market.
      • What I mean by power is a benchmark score would be doubled.
      • Only to include phones that use an official Linux kernel.
    • 2. All mainstream cable tv channels will switch to apps.
      • I know they all have apps now but what I meant was they will all have an app that requires a monthly subscription to access. Such as Discovery+ and the likes.
      • I do not mean that cable tv will die and only have apps with subscriptions but will have cable tv broadcasts and the option to use their streaming service with a small monthly fee.
    • 3. Firefox will be given to the community.
      • I don’t think that would be a totally bad thing depending on who picked up the code base.
  •      I put a poll on the mintcast group asking what distro I should use for a year long run on my main laptop. The consensus was Arch Linux and I have been working since then to get it installed and functional on that laptop.  I have the base system installed at this point and it boots but no desktop yet because I cannot get wifi connection even though I had it on the live usb. I am working with cryptodan and londoner on the issue. Finally I got WIFi working and I got to install my desktop (Cinnamon of course). I actually had to use nmcli to finally connect to wifi instead of iwd that I was using but was not working. Once I got WiFi working it was a few simple installs and I had a desktop but I did run into one more issue. After installing the desktop and lightdm I was greeted with “Failed to load light display manager” and found out I needed what was called the  lightdm-gtk-greeter and then it would load the login screen.
  • I have been working on my HP server at my parents house. I had to replace 3 drives that must have been damaged in shipping and learn how to set up hardware RAID. I finally got openSUSE Leap 15.2 installed but the wifi card I was using to install would not work once openSUSE Leap 15.2 was installed. I have since ordered some ethernet over powerline adapters to see if that solves my internet woes. The powerline ethernet was the plan all along but I was just wanting to get the system set up at least and I had the wifi usb dongle already so I figured i’d use that till it didn’t work. 

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint 20.1 Ulyssa Released: Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE
  • Upgrade Instructions
• Hector Martin Getting Closer to M1 Linux Support
  • Asahi Linux
• Firefox Is In for a Makeover
• Project Lenix, a Real Alternative – An Interview with Igor Seletskiy
• File This Under “It’s about time:”
  • Nvidia Beginning Wayland Support

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Qt 5.15 is now LTS and commercial only, closed to community contributions

Announcements:

• Our next show will be Sunday, January 24th, at 2pm Central US Time.
• Get the showtime 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
  • My focus has been at work and editing Linux User Space these past couple of weeks.
  • I am finally going to put Aaron’s Docker compose file to good use to get a long term Gitea instance now that my NAS is settled and running well.
• Joe
  • Got the screen adapter for the Arcade1Up machine.  Still need to finish putting it together
  • 3d printed a part for listener Dustin for a pair of headphones that I had sent him.
    • Had to switch to pla for the print
    • Happy to say that it printed perfectly and seemed very sturdy using the gcode that I had used before for the same print
    • Sad to say that this means that I need to go back to tweaking the settings for PETG.  Slow it down even more and see if that gets the prints to turn out right
  • Was able to fix the Samsung Galaxy Gear S3 Frontier watch with a 15 dollar part from ebay
    • I had purchased a broken motherboard for the watch that was only supposed to have issues with the heart rate sensor and the pedometer so that I could verify that the screen was working correctly
    • The screen does work and most of the functions on the watch itself works as well
    • Thought that I got lucky and the pedometer and the heart rate monitor were correct.  I verified that the heart rate monitor was working by comparing it to my other watch and everything seemed to be fine.  I did see that the number of steps were being counted but when I compared it to my phone over the course of the day the number on the watch was lower than the phone.  This should not be the case it should be the other way around.  
    • Then i found out that the watch was showing that i was going up and down stairs all day so i ordered another one and will be getting it soon in order to do another fix
    • I am giving my other watch to my wife to see if she likes it or not.  If not, I will probably sell it.
  • Got a family portrait coming in a few months. The pictures were taken for it
    • We won a raffle for it but there was still a lot of cost involved because we wanted the larger size because it comes with a couple of extra 10 inch paintings that we can send to the rest of the family
    • Way more money than i wanted to pay but with my eldest child turning 18 I really want to get it done whilst the kids have no choice in the matter
    • But it is a rather large expense for me and I don’t want to go through that same company in order to get the frame
    • I could really use some suggestions and knowledge on framing.  If you have any knowledge on the subject please advise me on the best way to frame a museum quality painting, please email me jb@mintcast.org

• Tony Hughes
  • Not a lot going on here as we went into another stay at home order right after New Year, so I have been baking, modeling and watching other people modeling on YouTube.
  • On a good note regarding the Virus, my wife has now had the FULL vaccination as she works in the critical care department of our local hospital in an admin role. She was lucky to get her second dose just before they changed it to be 12 weeks after the first, the day after she had her second injection. This will reduce my risk considerably given where she works.
  • On the Diecast modeling as it is winter and my paintshop is in the garage which is not heated. So I have mainly been preparing models for the paint stage so dismantling them, drilling and taping the posts ready for reassembly and paint stripping then storing for later paint and reassembly. I will also print the decals needed for those models that require them at the reassembly stage.   
  • Very quiet Linux wise although last night I installed the Mint 20.1 upgrade onto my main Laptop which we will be talking about later. 

• Josh Hawk
  •  First to clarify my predictions.
    • 1. Linux phones will double in number and power in 2021.
      • What I mean by number is the amount of phones on the market.
      • What I mean by power is a benchmark score would be doubled.
      • Only to include phones that use an official Linux kernel.
    • 2. All mainstream cable tv channels will switch to apps.
      • I know they all have apps now but what I meant was they will all have an app that requires a monthly subscription to access. Such as Discovery+ and the likes.
      • I do not mean that cable tv will die and only have apps with subscriptions but will have cable tv broadcasts and the option to use their streaming service with a small monthly fee.
    • 3. Firefox will be given to the community.
      • I don’t think that would be a totally bad thing depending on who picked up the code base.
  •      I put a poll on the mintcast group asking what distro I should use for a year long run on my main laptop. The consensus was Arch Linux and I have been working since then to get it installed and functional on that laptop.  I have the base system installed at this point and it boots but no desktop yet because I cannot get wifi connection even though I had it on the live usb. I am working with cryptodan and londoner on the issue. Finally I got WIFi working and I got to install my desktop (Cinnamon of course). I actually had to use nmcli to finally connect to wifi instead of iwd that I was using but was not working. Once I got WiFi working it was a few simple installs and I had a desktop but I did run into one more issue. After installing the desktop and lightdm I was greeted with “Failed to load light display manager” and found out I needed what was called the  lightdm-gtk-greeter and then it would load the login screen.
  • I have been working on my HP server at my parents house. I had to replace 3 drives that must have been damaged in shipping and learn how to set up hardware RAID. I finally got openSUSE Leap 15.2 installed but the wifi card I was using to install would not work once openSUSE Leap 15.2 was installed. I have since ordered some ethernet over powerline adapters to see if that solves my internet woes. The powerline ethernet was the plan all along but I was just wanting to get the system set up at least and I had the wifi usb dongle already so I figured i’d use that till it didn’t work. 

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint 20.1 Ulyssa Released: Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE
  • Upgrade Instructions
• Hector Martin Getting Closer to M1 Linux Support
  • Asahi Linux
• Firefox Is In for a Makeover
• Project Lenix, a Real Alternative – An Interview with Igor Seletskiy
• File This Under “It’s about time:”
  • Nvidia Beginning Wayland Support

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Qt 5.15 is now LTS and commercial only, closed to community contributions

Announcements:

• Our next show will be Sunday, January 24th, at 2pm Central US Time.
• Get the showtime 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
  • Playing with Arco Linux and a Tiling Window Manager.
  • Owen sent me a Pi 3B. Thanks! 
  • Giving Gitea a try. More in the feedback!
• Joe
  •  Have not been doing much of my own stuff in the past 2 weeks.
    • Lots of people on vacation at work so I have been putting in a lot of extra hours doing what would normally be their work and my work and trying to lighten the load for my boss.
  • Have sliced several designs to print but have not had a good time to get those printed and ready to go.  Plus I think I still need to tweak some of the settings.  Maybe try a much slower speed with petg or try a different brand.  The brand I am currently using seems like I get about half way through the roll and it becomes progressively harder to get a good print
  • Edited some audio from last year’s HPR new years show for my daughter so that she can remember it forever.  
  • Picked up a PSP Go for a good price that was listed as for parts only.
    • Have to say that I am both happy and disappointed with my purchase
    • Once again got a low cost device and it works perfectly
    • CFW and a selection of games installed but limited by the internal memory of 16gb
    • The device takes a very proprietary memory module (M2) and there is only one prebuilt adapter available for it that is in Japan but is not currently available due to covid.
    • It is possible to directly solder to this device and convert to memory stick duo but I don’t want to hard mod the device and bring the value down succeed or fail the hardware would no longer be original
    • I was hoping that the backlight was out or the screen needed to be replaced so I could work on a new fix.
    • But I have been using it to play Hydro Thunder 
    • Also sold another of the PSP 1001s so I have just about broken even for all the PSPs and the parts I have purchased
  • Was able to get the VPN Docker instance with Transmission to connect to a VPN from internally but I could not get it to work from startup.  Also getting to work from inside would then cause it to close down. So I am still using the VM to do the heavy lifting.
    • But I was able to find a VPN client Docker instance for which I was able to modify the ovpn file from my provider to get it working.  
    • This has allowed me to set up my Docker version of Chrome with the traffic pushed through the VPN container on all my machines
  • Have started biking in the evenings
    • Forgot how much I enjoy biking.  Have been getting a lot of time in and it seems to be helping a bit with the hip arthritis 
    • But I did get pulled over.  
• Josh
  • Messing around with my new server HP dl380 g5 and laptop Dell XPS P54G.
  • Writing some python.
  • Back on Linux Mint on my main desktop and Dell XPS.

• Tony Hughes
  • Recorded the latest episode of Distrohoppers Digest with Dale, who at the end we inaugurated as a permanent team member. By the time you listen to the edited show, the episode should be available for download.
  • A week and a half ago I had a camera down my throat to check out why I have been unwell recently and have a diagnosis of a Hiatus Hernia, now I know what the issue is, I can now hopefully mitigate some of the unpleasant symptoms with a few lifestyle changes.
  • And I have just recently celebrated my birthday, although I’m only the second oldest of the mintCast team lol. As a present from my wife I got a new toy to help me do my modeling a little safer, a small pedestal drill. It works great and will reduce the risk of me drilling my fingers as I will be able to use a small vice to hold things I’m drilling and it is far more accurate and so far the results I’m getting are fantastic.  

• Moss
  • Last night, I thought I would do my wife a favor and remove Ubuntu Unity from her machine; she wasn’t using it and sometimes booted into it accidentally, causing some freaking out. I thought I did everything right, wrote a new boot on the Mint partition, used GPartEd to remove the partition, and expanded the Mint partition to fill the vacated space. About 90 minutes before showtime today, while talking to my mother about her Medicare running out on her rehab care and she would have to pay $300 a day to stay there while her hip continued to heal, my wife informed me she had a Grub Repair screen. I tried a lot of things I have learned over the years, but eventually had to get my Ventoy stick out and boot to Mint. When I still couldn’t get GRUB restored, and with time running out before the show, I took the easy way out and installed Mint again, and was pleased to see that it allowed me to install alongside the original boot so she still has her original installation to run. There is still a lot of work to do to get it back to a single installation which actually boots. That will happen after the show.
  • I just managed to complete another circuit of the Homestar, and am now 68 years old as measured in this backwards system. As celebrations went, this was not one of my finest, nor was the year itself, but I’m happy to have survived this far and thrilled to be on mintCast team.
  • We will have released Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 018 by the time anyone hears this episode. To date, three episodes have reached or exceeded 600 downloads each, which warms my furry little heart, and Episode 017 is over 500 already.
  • I am set up this episode in my second bedroom, with a TV tray and my laptop. If I get any money over the holidays which is not necessary for my continued existence (bills, food), I will add a smallish desk and a mid-sized TV, say 24-26”, and use my mini-desktop; this also means I will have to get the Pi 4 working as my Kodi server for the living room.
  • Dresden-wise, we’re about 75% through Proven Guilty. Dresden and team have just marched into Mab’s broken-looking stronghold.
• Bo
  •  Learning JS by developing a custom Foundry VTT system
    • Gitlab – https://gitlab.com/boisapunk/sta-foundry-vtt
    • Boilerplate – https://html5boilerplate.com/
    • Handlebars – https://handlebarsjs.com/
    • Tutorial I mentioned – https://youtu.be/gcSN4AQcUzM

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint November News
• Cinnamon 4.8 Hit Github
• Clem Begins Uploading Testing ISOs for 20.1 * thanks to Londoner
• Raspberry Pi OS Gets Updated
  • A switch to the Pulse Audio sound applet makes configuring individual audio stream volumes easier
  • The CUPS service and GUI come preinstalled making it easier to get printers working as well
  • And updates to Orca help those with visual impairments
• Elementary OS Has a Raspberry Pi Pre-Release
• CentOS Is Dead * thanks to Dale
• You can’t stop the signal: CentOS lives again as Rocky Linux
• QT6 is out! All you KDE neon users can start cringing now.
• Guix 1.2 is out with an 8-year anniversary.
• Souk – For Flatpaks in Gnome

SECURITY UPDATE:

• ODOH (Oblivious DNS over HTTPS) * thanks to Londoner
  • FTA: Together, the added encryption and proxying provide the following guarantees:

• The target sees only the query and the proxy’s IP address.
• The proxy has no visibility into the DNS messages, with no ability to identify, read, or modify either the query being sent by the client or the answer being returned by the target.
• Only the intended target can read the content of the query and produce a response.

• Open Source Devs not concerned about security
• Trickbot
  • A banking fraud trojan converted to a full malware-as-a-service solution.
  • While UEFI malware is rare because of the difficulty, Trickbot is changing that.
  • This could open the door to OS agnostic UEFI malware that can persist between OS installs and disk swaps.

Announcements:

• Our next show will be Sunday, December 27, at 2:00pm Central US Time.
• Get the showtime 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
  • Playing with Arco Linux and a Tiling Window Manager.
  • Owen sent me a Pi 3B. Thanks! 
  • Giving Gitea a try. More in the feedback!
• Joe
  •  Have not been doing much of my own stuff in the past 2 weeks.
    • Lots of people on vacation at work so I have been putting in a lot of extra hours doing what would normally be their work and my work and trying to lighten the load for my boss.
  • Have sliced several designs to print but have not had a good time to get those printed and ready to go.  Plus I think I still need to tweak some of the settings.  Maybe try a much slower speed with petg or try a different brand.  The brand I am currently using seems like I get about half way through the roll and it becomes progressively harder to get a good print
  • Edited some audio from last year’s HPR new years show for my daughter so that she can remember it forever.  
  • Picked up a PSP Go for a good price that was listed as for parts only.
    • Have to say that I am both happy and disappointed with my purchase
    • Once again got a low cost device and it works perfectly
    • CFW and a selection of games installed but limited by the internal memory of 16gb
    • The device takes a very proprietary memory module (M2) and there is only one prebuilt adapter available for it that is in Japan but is not currently available due to covid.
    • It is possible to directly solder to this device and convert to memory stick duo but I don’t want to hard mod the device and bring the value down succeed or fail the hardware would no longer be original
    • I was hoping that the backlight was out or the screen needed to be replaced so I could work on a new fix.
    • But I have been using it to play Hydro Thunder 
    • Also sold another of the PSP 1001s so I have just about broken even for all the PSPs and the parts I have purchased
  • Was able to get the VPN Docker instance with Transmission to connect to a VPN from internally but I could not get it to work from startup.  Also getting to work from inside would then cause it to close down. So I am still using the VM to do the heavy lifting.
    • But I was able to find a VPN client Docker instance for which I was able to modify the ovpn file from my provider to get it working.  
    • This has allowed me to set up my Docker version of Chrome with the traffic pushed through the VPN container on all my machines
  • Have started biking in the evenings
    • Forgot how much I enjoy biking.  Have been getting a lot of time in and it seems to be helping a bit with the hip arthritis 
    • But I did get pulled over.  
• Josh
  • Messing around with my new server HP dl380 g5 and laptop Dell XPS P54G.
  • Writing some python.
  • Back on Linux Mint on my main desktop and Dell XPS.

• Tony Hughes
  • Recorded the latest episode of Distrohoppers Digest with Dale, who at the end we inaugurated as a permanent team member. By the time you listen to the edited show, the episode should be available for download.
  • A week and a half ago I had a camera down my throat to check out why I have been unwell recently and have a diagnosis of a Hiatus Hernia, now I know what the issue is, I can now hopefully mitigate some of the unpleasant symptoms with a few lifestyle changes.
  • And I have just recently celebrated my birthday, although I’m only the second oldest of the mintCast team lol. As a present from my wife I got a new toy to help me do my modeling a little safer, a small pedestal drill. It works great and will reduce the risk of me drilling my fingers as I will be able to use a small vice to hold things I’m drilling and it is far more accurate and so far the results I’m getting are fantastic.  

• Moss
  • Last night, I thought I would do my wife a favor and remove Ubuntu Unity from her machine; she wasn’t using it and sometimes booted into it accidentally, causing some freaking out. I thought I did everything right, wrote a new boot on the Mint partition, used GPartEd to remove the partition, and expanded the Mint partition to fill the vacated space. About 90 minutes before showtime today, while talking to my mother about her Medicare running out on her rehab care and she would have to pay $300 a day to stay there while her hip continued to heal, my wife informed me she had a Grub Repair screen. I tried a lot of things I have learned over the years, but eventually had to get my Ventoy stick out and boot to Mint. When I still couldn’t get GRUB restored, and with time running out before the show, I took the easy way out and installed Mint again, and was pleased to see that it allowed me to install alongside the original boot so she still has her original installation to run. There is still a lot of work to do to get it back to a single installation which actually boots. That will happen after the show.
  • I just managed to complete another circuit of the Homestar, and am now 68 years old as measured in this backwards system. As celebrations went, this was not one of my finest, nor was the year itself, but I’m happy to have survived this far and thrilled to be on mintCast team.
  • We will have released Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 018 by the time anyone hears this episode. To date, three episodes have reached or exceeded 600 downloads each, which warms my furry little heart, and Episode 017 is over 500 already.
  • I am set up this episode in my second bedroom, with a TV tray and my laptop. If I get any money over the holidays which is not necessary for my continued existence (bills, food), I will add a smallish desk and a mid-sized TV, say 24-26”, and use my mini-desktop; this also means I will have to get the Pi 4 working as my Kodi server for the living room.
  • Dresden-wise, we’re about 75% through Proven Guilty. Dresden and team have just marched into Mab’s broken-looking stronghold.
• Bo
  •  Learning JS by developing a custom Foundry VTT system
    • Gitlab – https://gitlab.com/boisapunk/sta-foundry-vtt
    • Boilerplate – https://html5boilerplate.com/
    • Handlebars – https://handlebarsjs.com/
    • Tutorial I mentioned – https://youtu.be/gcSN4AQcUzM

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint November News
• Cinnamon 4.8 Hit Github
• Clem Begins Uploading Testing ISOs for 20.1 * thanks to Londoner
• Raspberry Pi OS Gets Updated
  • A switch to the Pulse Audio sound applet makes configuring individual audio stream volumes easier
  • The CUPS service and GUI come preinstalled making it easier to get printers working as well
  • And updates to Orca help those with visual impairments
• Elementary OS Has a Raspberry Pi Pre-Release
• CentOS Is Dead * thanks to Dale
• You can’t stop the signal: CentOS lives again as Rocky Linux
• QT6 is out! All you KDE neon users can start cringing now.
• Guix 1.2 is out with an 8-year anniversary.
• Souk – For Flatpaks in Gnome

SECURITY UPDATE:

• ODOH (Oblivious DNS over HTTPS) * thanks to Londoner
  • FTA: Together, the added encryption and proxying provide the following guarantees:

• The target sees only the query and the proxy’s IP address.
• The proxy has no visibility into the DNS messages, with no ability to identify, read, or modify either the query being sent by the client or the answer being returned by the target.
• Only the intended target can read the content of the query and produce a response.

• Open Source Devs not concerned about security
• Trickbot
  • A banking fraud trojan converted to a full malware-as-a-service solution.
  • While UEFI malware is rare because of the difficulty, Trickbot is changing that.
  • This could open the door to OS agnostic UEFI malware that can persist between OS installs and disk swaps.

Announcements:

• Our next show will be Sunday, December 27, at 2:00pm Central US Time.
• Get the showtime 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!>

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

• Owen
  • Continue to refurbish donated computers with older hardware, add RAM and SSDs, install Mint 19.3, and deliver them to families in need at my school
  • Won an Innovative Teacher award from the Fab Foundation and Chevron for this project which also came with a $1000 cash award, which also allowed me to purchase more/better RAM and SSDs
  • 3d printing PPE like face shields and ear savers
  • Ordered 2 new 3d printers via a Kickstarter campaign, one for me, one for school
  • Test driving Mint 20.04 beta after finally separating my /home directory and OS into different partitions, and a few days of being really lost in the weeds, but I had a backup so I knew it would all be OK
  • Attended a virtual STEM conference in June called Inclusive STEM and CS
  • Been learning how to use Kdenlive by using an action camera on top of my helmet and going on different bike rides each day
  • Slowly working on installing motioneyeOS on a Raspberry Pi with one of the new fancy cameras to setup a security camera due to a recent arson at my condo complex
  • Exploring Ubuntu Studio and am almost certain my main machine at home will to to Ubuntu Studio for 20.10 when it’ll be Plasma by default
  • Setup a Ventoy USB stick and started installing all.the.ISOs.in.the.world.
  • Working my way through a lynda.com course on Bash scripting to get better using the command line
  • Staying sane during shelter in place by taking a bicycle ride everyday, not new since I”m a bike commuter for almost 2 decades now, having a standing Sunday morning Zoom call with friends from around the world, walking my dog further than before and more frequently, using the kids playground at the school next to my home to work out on, and trying to think each day of at least one thing I”m grateful for.
  • Gardening, community garden, gardening on our terrace, and gardening in the front of our building
• Leo
  • Upgraded to Linux Mint 20 on the laptop I’m recording on!
  • Still need to do the desktop, but have a few things going on this weekend, so I may not make it.
  • I’m on a new show! Linux User Space
• Tony H
  • Baking and playing with my model cars, I also won a few eBay auctions of some nice models to go straight into the collection. Today I spent the afternoon with my sister and her husband as it was their 1st wedding anniversary and I restored a little matchbox Rolls Royce model and painted it up as a wedding saloon which they missed out on as they got married on a cruise ship last summer. My sister is into bead jewelry making so I thought something a little crafty would be appreciated, and they both loved it, so my model restoration hobby has a new fan. 
  • I’ve recently been recording a series of episodes for HPR about my diecast model restorations and I have been having problems with Firefox not letting me reserve a slot in the HPR schedule to upload the show too. It returns an error message. However If I use Chromium to book the slot, not a problem, I can then go back into Firefox and do the remainder of the process from there. It used to work just fine, I’m wondering if my ad blocking plugins might be the issue?  
  • The big story for me this week is, since the last show I purchased a new colour Laser printer, the HP Color Laser 150nw, so I can produce high quality decals for my models that require them. I bought this printer as I was led to believe that it had Linux support. I set it up, downloaded the HP driver package HPLIP from the Developers page which is a more up to date version than that in Mint 19.3, and I thought great, we are good to go. No this did not recognise that the printer was present even after restarting the printer several times with the USB cable attached to the PC. So I went into CUPS which prior to installation of the HPLIP package had not had any idea what this HP printer was, it now recognised it was there and came up with the model and a recommended driver which I installed. I tried a test print the light on the printer starts to flash but apart from a little noise from it as the paper feed whirls around nothing else happens. Several attempts later I started to suspect I had a faulty printer, but I had one last option before I gave up. Here’s where I have to say the dreaded ‘Windows word’ I got out my Dell 7250 laptop that has W10 installed as a test machine for troubleshooting windows issues for other folk, I plugged in the printer and it picked it up right away and started to install the driver, after installing I printed the test page and it worked. In one way I was relieved as my $160 / £130 I spent for the printer is not wasted but I’m more than a little disgruntled that I have to have a Windows laptop to drive the thing instead of just working on my Mint 19.3 box like it should!!!! I then had an idea and booted into Ubuntu Studio 20.04 and it picked the printer up without the addition of any other software so the moral of the story is run the latest OS you can if you want your printer to be supported in Linux.
• Moss
  • Distrohoppers’ Digest 014 is out. We’d love to have everyone listen to it. Tony and I have a great time doing this little monthly hop.
  • Sometime after the last show was in the can but before we did Distrohoppers’ Digest, I accessed my two machines and did what can only be called Adventures In GPartEd. My desktop box went from 2 partitions to 3, and my laptop went from 3 to 4, complete with cleaning up unnecessary partitions and moving things around so much that if GPartEd *were* dangerous to use, I would have lost lots of data. It is of interest to note my desktop’s hard drive somehow had both EFI and Grub partitions; I removed and reallocated the latter, and also increased the size of my swap partition. Everything works. I’m waiting for all the distros which have been promised, including a new openSUSE, and Slackware 15.
  • Over the past couple days, I have been trying the new Mint 20 on the laptop. I overwrote the Manjaro partition… I tried Cinnamon, but found something mildly upsetting in yesterday’s show meeting and installed MATE instead, then had a couple minor catastrophes causing me to reinstall MATE… TWICE… so I was up all night again. When I get Mint 20 up to the level I need for working, probably today or tomorrow, I will reinstall Manjaro over the Mint 19.3 partition… and will lose the GRUB niceties of 19.3, which were removed in 20 because they caused some machines to not boot. I guess I can make OpenMandriva the Grubholder then, so I can still have a pretty boot menu.  For the record, my memory use in 20 Cinnamon was 1.7 Gb at rest, where in MATE it’s about 770 Mb. Both of those are high for these desktops, but I assume they will work on getting it down soon.
  • I am making an effort to use Bodhi for more of my daily stuff, rather than treating it like a fun curiosity. It is interesting to learn what stuff goes where in a superlight desktop, very different from what I’ve been used to in heavier desktops like XFCE. For instance, I created Key Bindings to turn my touchpad on and off. What I mean by “superlight”: Stacer reports 324 Mb in use with only Stacer open, and 14 Mb of that is Stacer itself. We usually call a desktop “light” if it has 550-700 Mb in use at rest.
  • I still don’t have a distro to review for next Distrohoppers’, but Mint should be out soon. I already have downloaded what should be the final, but they haven’t announced it yet.
  • I bought a new tablet, a Hyundai Technologies Koral 10×3. I was trying to order a PineTab but my wife blocked the purchase. It turns out she thought I was just trying to order another Raspberry Pi, and then, when she approved me buying it, it was sold out. Then a friend told me about her tablet, and I got excited and bought one… I probably jumped at it too quickly, and I do have a bit of buyers’ remorse, having read a few more reviews, but I’ll wait until it arrives before I bad-mouth it… or talk it up…
  • I’ve been running around with all this extra Covid money from Congress, getting  clothes and bedsheets and all the things we have absolutely needed but couldn’t afford, and spending out of pocket for my wife’s health care, which we previously had no money for and still can’t get insurance for. Also due to the Covid money, we are not currently eligible for the various low-income healthcare programs. I’m  cleaning up debt, most of which was caused by importing my wife from Canada — all the money the government and lawyers need for that to happen. Everything’s done except the debt reduction program I’m in, which will be over in less than a year. But all this good money is scheduled to end July 31, which will mean a $540 per week dropoff, and there are no legal jobs in sight.  I can’t even work in my previous employment, as I’m more of a driver risk, have a still-injured shoulder, and otherwise I’m still 67 years old. This is the first time in my life I haven’t been stuck at around 140% of poverty level, and it’s ending in 33 days.
  • As I haven’t been sleeping in bed since the accident, our Dresden Files reading has dropped off, but we’re pretty deep in the 5th book right now.
  • Enough of this. Let’s get to Joe.
• Joe
  • Attended a virtual LUG
    • It was interesting
    • It was nice to get to see all the people that I normally hang out with at the LUG even if it was over Zoom
    • Got to help a bunch of people and learn a couple of things about top and htop
  • Jim Butcher Codex Alera
    • Good series.  The last book is the weakest but still a really good conclusion
    • Remember the new book comes out next month for the Dresden Files
      • The first few chapters are available online although i have not read them as i would rather wait for the whole book
  • Larry Correia 
    • Grimnoir
      • Trilogy with some short stories attached.
      • Alternate history book post WW2
    • Monster Hunter
      • Really good series that I keep going back to
    • Saga of the Forgotten Warrior
      • Only two books in the series so far but I am liking it
  • Book 14 of the Nate Temple series.  
    • I thought the series was starting to lag but it seems to be picking up again.  Really good book
  • Decided that if i am going to use the Pi as an sshfs gateway then I should make the internet connection a bit more stable.  The Powerline ethernet adapter that I use doesn’t provide much speed and has many drops.  I could possibly code my way around that being a major issue but I would like more reliability.  I have a few wifi adapters that i could try out but my set top box in the garage has a solid connection and good speeds on 5 GHz so i am going to use internet sharing on that to a network switch.  https://www.tecmint.com/share-internet-in-linux/
    • Also found out that the if up and if down folders do not work so i tried dhclient-enter-hooks.d
    • Which i have not been able to get to work so far
    • Trying out systemctl which i am seeing a response from using the simple statements that i was using before.  I am able to keep that service running +with an extremely simple while loop but it currently lacks flexibility on failures so i will need to write some loops that are dependant on the response from pings
  • I was able to print a mount for my 7130 that allows me to keep it directly under the monitor that I use for work.  This allows me to watch fix it videos during the slow times or when i am doing something routine.  As well as do things like type up my bi-weekly wanderings during my breaks.
• Bo
  • ESO on stadia
    • PC and Steam accounts
    • Performance

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon Released! 
  • Release Notes
  • What’s new
  • Also MATE
  • Also XFCE
  • Fixing snaps
    • sudo rm /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref
  • Fixing Chromium
    • There are about four different ways to get Chromium outside of the snap store. None of them are official Linux Mint packages.
• Linux Mint Monthly News 
  • Taking the next two weeks to work on upgrade path from 19.3 and porting new features to LMDE4
  • The new Mint-Y colors were postponed until Linux Mint 20.1
  • The change which made the Grub menu always visible was reverted, and the Grub theme, which in this release prevented Linux Mint 20 to boot on particular laptops was removed.
  • There is a new User Guide!
  • LM received a total of $14,879 from 747 donors in May!
• Defender ATP Out for Linux — Just not for your desktop
• Dell XPS 13 Now Available with Ubuntu 20.04

SECURITY UPDATE

•  Ripple20 Is a Pack of Almost 20 Bugs Affecting Millions of Devices
  • Specifically, it’s pinned to a service called Treck with DNS support
  • The bugs can cause Denial of Service all the way up to Remote Code Execution
  • Affected devices can be just about anything since this is a supply chain flaw.
    • Essentially, a vulnerable piece of software is made available by, in this case Treck, and it is then taken by manufacturers and used in TONS of devices to add additional functionality without having to write code themselves.
    • Printers, Uninterruptible Power Supplies, Smart home thingies like thermostats and light bulbs. This library is truly pervasive.
  • Update your Treck libraries to 6.0.1.67 and all is well for every bug that’s part of Ripple20.
  • Easy right? Well, no, actually. When’s the last time you updated your smart light bulb? Your UPS? This problem will be with us for years. How many people do you think will hear these advisories? It’s been out for almost two weeks at the time of this recording.
  • Folks, it really is time to ask yourself if it’s worth having someone know everything about you, or take control of your network in exchange for being able to shut off a light from two rooms away.
  • NanoLeaf light panels, the app allows you to download other people’s light patterns and put them on

Announcements:

The next show will be Sunday, the 12th of July at 7PM UTC, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM British Summer Time

Wrap-up:

• Owen Peery – peeryo@sfusd.edu Twitter @owenpeery
• 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 … 

• 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: 

• Owen
  • Continue to refurbish donated computers with older hardware, add RAM and SSDs, install Mint 19.3, and deliver them to families in need at my school
  • Won an Innovative Teacher award from the Fab Foundation and Chevron for this project which also came with a $1000 cash award, which also allowed me to purchase more/better RAM and SSDs
  • 3d printing PPE like face shields and ear savers
  • Ordered 2 new 3d printers via a Kickstarter campaign, one for me, one for school
  • Test driving Mint 20.04 beta after finally separating my /home directory and OS into different partitions, and a few days of being really lost in the weeds, but I had a backup so I knew it would all be OK
  • Attended a virtual STEM conference in June called Inclusive STEM and CS
  • Been learning how to use Kdenlive by using an action camera on top of my helmet and going on different bike rides each day
  • Slowly working on installing motioneyeOS on a Raspberry Pi with one of the new fancy cameras to setup a security camera due to a recent arson at my condo complex
  • Exploring Ubuntu Studio and am almost certain my main machine at home will to to Ubuntu Studio for 20.10 when it’ll be Plasma by default
  • Setup a Ventoy USB stick and started installing all.the.ISOs.in.the.world.
  • Working my way through a lynda.com course on Bash scripting to get better using the command line
  • Staying sane during shelter in place by taking a bicycle ride everyday, not new since I”m a bike commuter for almost 2 decades now, having a standing Sunday morning Zoom call with friends from around the world, walking my dog further than before and more frequently, using the kids playground at the school next to my home to work out on, and trying to think each day of at least one thing I”m grateful for.
  • Gardening, community garden, gardening on our terrace, and gardening in the front of our building
• Leo
  • Upgraded to Linux Mint 20 on the laptop I’m recording on!
  • Still need to do the desktop, but have a few things going on this weekend, so I may not make it.
  • I’m on a new show! Linux User Space
• Tony H
  • Baking and playing with my model cars, I also won a few eBay auctions of some nice models to go straight into the collection. Today I spent the afternoon with my sister and her husband as it was their 1st wedding anniversary and I restored a little matchbox Rolls Royce model and painted it up as a wedding saloon which they missed out on as they got married on a cruise ship last summer. My sister is into bead jewelry making so I thought something a little crafty would be appreciated, and they both loved it, so my model restoration hobby has a new fan. 
  • I’ve recently been recording a series of episodes for HPR about my diecast model restorations and I have been having problems with Firefox not letting me reserve a slot in the HPR schedule to upload the show too. It returns an error message. However If I use Chromium to book the slot, not a problem, I can then go back into Firefox and do the remainder of the process from there. It used to work just fine, I’m wondering if my ad blocking plugins might be the issue?  
  • The big story for me this week is, since the last show I purchased a new colour Laser printer, the HP Color Laser 150nw, so I can produce high quality decals for my models that require them. I bought this printer as I was led to believe that it had Linux support. I set it up, downloaded the HP driver package HPLIP from the Developers page which is a more up to date version than that in Mint 19.3, and I thought great, we are good to go. No this did not recognise that the printer was present even after restarting the printer several times with the USB cable attached to the PC. So I went into CUPS which prior to installation of the HPLIP package had not had any idea what this HP printer was, it now recognised it was there and came up with the model and a recommended driver which I installed. I tried a test print the light on the printer starts to flash but apart from a little noise from it as the paper feed whirls around nothing else happens. Several attempts later I started to suspect I had a faulty printer, but I had one last option before I gave up. Here’s where I have to say the dreaded ‘Windows word’ I got out my Dell 7250 laptop that has W10 installed as a test machine for troubleshooting windows issues for other folk, I plugged in the printer and it picked it up right away and started to install the driver, after installing I printed the test page and it worked. In one way I was relieved as my $160 / £130 I spent for the printer is not wasted but I’m more than a little disgruntled that I have to have a Windows laptop to drive the thing instead of just working on my Mint 19.3 box like it should!!!! I then had an idea and booted into Ubuntu Studio 20.04 and it picked the printer up without the addition of any other software so the moral of the story is run the latest OS you can if you want your printer to be supported in Linux.
• Moss
  • Distrohoppers’ Digest 014 is out. We’d love to have everyone listen to it. Tony and I have a great time doing this little monthly hop.
  • Sometime after the last show was in the can but before we did Distrohoppers’ Digest, I accessed my two machines and did what can only be called Adventures In GPartEd. My desktop box went from 2 partitions to 3, and my laptop went from 3 to 4, complete with cleaning up unnecessary partitions and moving things around so much that if GPartEd *were* dangerous to use, I would have lost lots of data. It is of interest to note my desktop’s hard drive somehow had both EFI and Grub partitions; I removed and reallocated the latter, and also increased the size of my swap partition. Everything works. I’m waiting for all the distros which have been promised, including a new openSUSE, and Slackware 15.
  • Over the past couple days, I have been trying the new Mint 20 on the laptop. I overwrote the Manjaro partition… I tried Cinnamon, but found something mildly upsetting in yesterday’s show meeting and installed MATE instead, then had a couple minor catastrophes causing me to reinstall MATE… TWICE… so I was up all night again. When I get Mint 20 up to the level I need for working, probably today or tomorrow, I will reinstall Manjaro over the Mint 19.3 partition… and will lose the GRUB niceties of 19.3, which were removed in 20 because they caused some machines to not boot. I guess I can make OpenMandriva the Grubholder then, so I can still have a pretty boot menu.  For the record, my memory use in 20 Cinnamon was 1.7 Gb at rest, where in MATE it’s about 770 Mb. Both of those are high for these desktops, but I assume they will work on getting it down soon.
  • I am making an effort to use Bodhi for more of my daily stuff, rather than treating it like a fun curiosity. It is interesting to learn what stuff goes where in a superlight desktop, very different from what I’ve been used to in heavier desktops like XFCE. For instance, I created Key Bindings to turn my touchpad on and off. What I mean by “superlight”: Stacer reports 324 Mb in use with only Stacer open, and 14 Mb of that is Stacer itself. We usually call a desktop “light” if it has 550-700 Mb in use at rest.
  • I still don’t have a distro to review for next Distrohoppers’, but Mint should be out soon. I already have downloaded what should be the final, but they haven’t announced it yet.
  • I bought a new tablet, a Hyundai Technologies Koral 10×3. I was trying to order a PineTab but my wife blocked the purchase. It turns out she thought I was just trying to order another Raspberry Pi, and then, when she approved me buying it, it was sold out. Then a friend told me about her tablet, and I got excited and bought one… I probably jumped at it too quickly, and I do have a bit of buyers’ remorse, having read a few more reviews, but I’ll wait until it arrives before I bad-mouth it… or talk it up…
  • I’ve been running around with all this extra Covid money from Congress, getting  clothes and bedsheets and all the things we have absolutely needed but couldn’t afford, and spending out of pocket for my wife’s health care, which we previously had no money for and still can’t get insurance for. Also due to the Covid money, we are not currently eligible for the various low-income healthcare programs. I’m  cleaning up debt, most of which was caused by importing my wife from Canada — all the money the government and lawyers need for that to happen. Everything’s done except the debt reduction program I’m in, which will be over in less than a year. But all this good money is scheduled to end July 31, which will mean a $540 per week dropoff, and there are no legal jobs in sight.  I can’t even work in my previous employment, as I’m more of a driver risk, have a still-injured shoulder, and otherwise I’m still 67 years old. This is the first time in my life I haven’t been stuck at around 140% of poverty level, and it’s ending in 33 days.
  • As I haven’t been sleeping in bed since the accident, our Dresden Files reading has dropped off, but we’re pretty deep in the 5th book right now.
  • Enough of this. Let’s get to Joe.
• Joe
  • Attended a virtual LUG
    • It was interesting
    • It was nice to get to see all the people that I normally hang out with at the LUG even if it was over Zoom
    • Got to help a bunch of people and learn a couple of things about top and htop
  • Jim Butcher Codex Alera
    • Good series.  The last book is the weakest but still a really good conclusion
    • Remember the new book comes out next month for the Dresden Files
      • The first few chapters are available online although i have not read them as i would rather wait for the whole book
  • Larry Correia 
    • Grimnoir
      • Trilogy with some short stories attached.
      • Alternate history book post WW2
    • Monster Hunter
      • Really good series that I keep going back to
    • Saga of the Forgotten Warrior
      • Only two books in the series so far but I am liking it
  • Book 14 of the Nate Temple series.  
    • I thought the series was starting to lag but it seems to be picking up again.  Really good book
  • Decided that if i am going to use the Pi as an sshfs gateway then I should make the internet connection a bit more stable.  The Powerline ethernet adapter that I use doesn’t provide much speed and has many drops.  I could possibly code my way around that being a major issue but I would like more reliability.  I have a few wifi adapters that i could try out but my set top box in the garage has a solid connection and good speeds on 5 GHz so i am going to use internet sharing on that to a network switch.  https://www.tecmint.com/share-internet-in-linux/
    • Also found out that the if up and if down folders do not work so i tried dhclient-enter-hooks.d
    • Which i have not been able to get to work so far
    • Trying out systemctl which i am seeing a response from using the simple statements that i was using before.  I am able to keep that service running +with an extremely simple while loop but it currently lacks flexibility on failures so i will need to write some loops that are dependant on the response from pings
  • I was able to print a mount for my 7130 that allows me to keep it directly under the monitor that I use for work.  This allows me to watch fix it videos during the slow times or when i am doing something routine.  As well as do things like type up my bi-weekly wanderings during my breaks.
• Bo
  • ESO on stadia
    • PC and Steam accounts
    • Performance

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon Released! 
  • Release Notes
  • What’s new
  • Also MATE
  • Also XFCE
  • Fixing snaps
    • sudo rm /etc/apt/preferences.d/nosnap.pref
  • Fixing Chromium
    • There are about four different ways to get Chromium outside of the snap store. None of them are official Linux Mint packages.
• Linux Mint Monthly News 
  • Taking the next two weeks to work on upgrade path from 19.3 and porting new features to LMDE4
  • The new Mint-Y colors were postponed until Linux Mint 20.1
  • The change which made the Grub menu always visible was reverted, and the Grub theme, which in this release prevented Linux Mint 20 to boot on particular laptops was removed.
  • There is a new User Guide!
  • LM received a total of $14,879 from 747 donors in May!
• Defender ATP Out for Linux — Just not for your desktop
• Dell XPS 13 Now Available with Ubuntu 20.04

SECURITY UPDATE

•  Ripple20 Is a Pack of Almost 20 Bugs Affecting Millions of Devices
  • Specifically, it’s pinned to a service called Treck with DNS support
  • The bugs can cause Denial of Service all the way up to Remote Code Execution
  • Affected devices can be just about anything since this is a supply chain flaw.
    • Essentially, a vulnerable piece of software is made available by, in this case Treck, and it is then taken by manufacturers and used in TONS of devices to add additional functionality without having to write code themselves.
    • Printers, Uninterruptible Power Supplies, Smart home thingies like thermostats and light bulbs. This library is truly pervasive.
  • Update your Treck libraries to 6.0.1.67 and all is well for every bug that’s part of Ripple20.
  • Easy right? Well, no, actually. When’s the last time you updated your smart light bulb? Your UPS? This problem will be with us for years. How many people do you think will hear these advisories? It’s been out for almost two weeks at the time of this recording.
  • Folks, it really is time to ask yourself if it’s worth having someone know everything about you, or take control of your network in exchange for being able to shut off a light from two rooms away.
  • NanoLeaf light panels, the app allows you to download other people’s light patterns and put them on

Announcements:

The next show will be Sunday, the 12th of July at 7PM UTC, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM British Summer Time

Wrap-up:

• Owen Peery – peeryo@sfusd.edu Twitter @owenpeery
• 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 … 

• 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

LINUX INNARDS: 

Let’s Talk About Ubuntu 20.04 (See OMGubuntu article on 20.04 flavors)

• Ubuntu (Gnome) Features

• • Linux Kernel 5.4
  • Faster boot speeds
  • OEM logo displayed during boot
  • Improved appearance
  • Dark theme
  • Fractional scaling setting
  • Ships with GNOME 3.36
  • Redesigned login screen
  • New lock screen
  • Snap-based Ubuntu Software app
  • Improved GNOME Shell performance
  • Refined ZFS install support
  • Game mode added to the archives

• • Joe – Installed Ubuntu 20.04 on my 7140 tablet with gnome.  Had some small problems with Gnome and the touchpad left and right click not wanting to work although both did work with an external mouse.  So I installed Cinnamon and Mate and my touchpad worked fine in both.
    • Rotation also worked without a hitch in Gnome and Cinnamon but I did not search for the setting in Mate since I will use that with X2go for remote access
    • Haven’t set up my normal scripting for file movement and sshfs yet but it should work fine. 
    • Noticed a series of games already installed.  Very Windows XP style
    • Turning on touchpad scrolling did not work until after reboot
    • I also didn’t like the touchpad acceleration.  After I adjusted it I did not notice any change until after a reboot and then it was fine
    • Boot times are fast and smooth although there is a device related problem with reboot
    • Looks beautiful and runs smooth
    • Still haven’t installed UKUU and upgraded to the most recent kernel
    • But I did check out snap which is built in.  works great. 
      • Installed the snap for Standard Notes and Mumble and was able to use auto completion with no issues and they immediately were available in the start menu
  • Leo
    • Installed Ubuntu 20.04 Beta on the T450s. This laptop!
    • Tried to stick with the default install on all of the apps I use. This meant installing lots and lots of things via Snap. The only reason I tend to shy away from Snaps is the theming issues (the wonky looking cursor, off-looking GTK Themes, and slow startup times).
    • Talked to Martin Wimpress about these on BDLL last night and got some clarification about where the Ubuntu team is headed. These issues are absolutely on their radar, but got pushed back for some more technical issues that needed to land in 20.04. These issues are now a priority again and will land soon!
    • Another thing we ended up talking about was the fact that all desktop installations of Ubuntu are automatically set up to take the HWE kernel when it drops. So no more confusion about whether you’re on a point release or not and what that means.
    • Historically, if you installed with 18.04, you didn’t get the HWE kernel. You could opt in, but required installing a couple of packages. If you installed 18.04.1 or later, you got the HWE kernel automatically.
    • Stuck with it until a little after release when the Gnome desktop really started to grind on me. It was great overall, and fine on my desktop, but on my laptop, the animations were struggling to stay smooth. I’m petty enough to allow that to be a game breaker. I know that to get things to look “nicer” that sometimes comes with more animations. I just figured that a business-class laptop from 2015 would be able to handle it!

• Ubuntu MATE Features

• • • Ubuntu MATE 20.04 features include better support for HiDPI rendering throughout the UI, minimised window previews in the task bar, and new Notification Indicator settings (including a do-not-disturb mode).
    • The distro has decided to drop Compiz and Compton from the default install as they’re no longer considered necessary (and this is an LTS release).

• There’s also a new GTK frontend for the fwupd application. This will make it easy to check for firmware updates for connected devices and apply said updates if available.

• • Finally, all the goodies present in the upstream MATE desktop 1.24 release are present here.

• • Who on the team has tried it?
  • Moss’ biggest peeve: The icons for “End the Current Session”, “Lock Screen”, and “Turn Off the Device” are not evocative of those features in any way and are tinier than ever. This is a serious problem for visually impaired people, and the icons themselves are an issue for everyone. Question: Is this a MATE issue, or just Ubuntu MATE?
    • Otherwise, this felt like the old, familiar shirt you’ve worn for the last 10 years when you just want to relax. Nothing feels new, everything works.

• Kubuntu Features

• recent KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS release

• For instance, there’s a new colour emoji selector, better theming of GTK apps, refined app and system notifications, and a system tray toggle for the Night Color option.

• • A swathe of updated KDE applications are available through Discover (the software store), including newer versions of Kdenlive, KDE Connect, and Latte Dock.
  • there’s a new default music player in Kubuntu 20.04. The distro has chosen to switch from the Qt-based Cantata to the Qt-based Elisa as of this release.

• • Moss – I installed Kubuntu 20.04 on my Galago Pro. 
  • I tried to use Clementine music player in Kubuntu 20.04, I was using it in the beta. But it seemed to freak out to the point of appearing to wipe my music drive and bombarding me with tons of notifications, but in fact just freaked out all by itself; the drive is fine. That gave me a chance to update my backups. I saw later on YouTube where sneekylinux had the same issue with Clementine on Xubuntu, and switched to Strawberry Player, so I did the same. I’m also having some issues with Konsole in Kubuntu, it looks like it tears under each line almost like thin underlining. Might be my resolution.

• • Leo
    • Moved to Kubuntu 20.04 and have been there ever since. Animations are smooth, no slowdowns that I notice, and TERMINAL. BLUR. So, so so so nice. It’s a touch that I didn’t realize made the terminal feel “premium.”
  • Tony W briefly, only from live USB)
    • Ran just fine on my low powered Dell 7130 tablet.  No performance issues, touchpad/touchscreen etc all work well

• Xubuntu Features

• • No release notes for new features
  • There is a new dark theme

• • Who on the team has tried it?

• Ubuntu Budgie Features

• • Chief amongst these is a brand new application menu inspired by Slingshot, the stock app launcher used in elementary OS. The app launcher has an optional ‘power strip’ mode which embeds session management buttons into the app launcher, beside the search box.
  • There’s also a new, native Network Manager applet for managing wired and wi-fi web connections, better HiDPI support, a new ‘desktop layout’ chooser, and better ‘Window Shuffler’ too.
  • App wise the Ubuntu Budgie team has replaced GNOME MPV with its successor, Celluloid, and adds the (really terrific) Drawing app to its default software roster.

• Ubuntu Studio Features

• • The audio plugin selection is expanded further, with a handful of new plugins included for audio production needs.
  • MyPaint returns to the default install, where it sits alongside the latest version of the GIMP image editor.
  • The Ubuntu Studio Controls utility now lets you assign names to pulseaudio-Jack bridges and has been organized a touch to make it take up less screen space.

• Who on the team has tried it? (Moss, briefly)

• • Tony W (briefly, only from live USB)
    • 3.6GB ISO is actually not bad at all, for everything it comes with
    • IT LOOKS AMAZING!
    • I am LOVING the selection of pre-installed goodies!
    • Video goodies – It comes with OBS pre-installed, along with both Kdenlive and Openshot
    • Audio – more than you can shake a stick at.  
      • Ardour, Audacity, 
      • Loads of custom soundcard support, including the ENVY24 utility that my old school sound card/audio interface needs
      • Guitarix, rackarack, a looper, multiple drum samplers, the list goes on
      • Multiple media players – VLC, Parole, Xjadeo
      • BONUS – KDE Connect!

• Lubuntu Features

• First Lubuntu LTS with LXQt

• • Who on the team has tried it? (Moss attempted to install it but couldn’t get past Calamares UEFI installer requirements for some reason)

• Ubuntu Kylin Features

• • new Qt-based desktop environment
  • Who on the team has tried it?

• Ubuntu Cinnamon Respin

• • Features?
  • Who on the team has tried it?

• Ubuntu Lumina Respin

• • Based on Lumina from TrueOS

• Overall Issues with Ubuntu 20.04

• • We have commented on the fact that this is a new LTS. Several apps did not work properly in 18.04 which worked fine in 16.04 and had to be reworked, and in this vein several users have noted a problem with Clementine music player. Any others noted?

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

• Londoner (Telegram)

• K Wisher (mewe)

• x1cygnus, Scott (Telegram)

• Dale Miracle (Telegram)

• Dave W. (Email)

• Larry P. (Email)

http://170.187.156.171/2020/04/29/mintcast-333-5-efired/

• John Wallis Security Saga

CHECK THIS OUT!

• Listener John Wallis
  • Mastering Linux Security and Hardening by Donald A Tevault
• Leo
  • Bashtop
  • For John Wallis, but really, anybody that wants a look into Kernel Parameters
    • https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/managing_monitoring_and_updating_the_kernel/configuring-kernel-parameters-at-runtime_managing-monitoring-and-updating-the-kernel
• Joe
  • Ben Heck Hacks
  • RaspbianX
    • X86 emulation on the piz
    • Runs steam games

Announcements: 

• Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC, May 17, 2020. That’s 8 pm British Summer Time.

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 … 

• 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.

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LINUX INNARDS: 

Let’s Talk About Ubuntu 20.04 (See OMGubuntu article on 20.04 flavors)

• Ubuntu (Gnome) Features

• • Linux Kernel 5.4
  • Faster boot speeds
  • OEM logo displayed during boot
  • Improved appearance
  • Dark theme
  • Fractional scaling setting
  • Ships with GNOME 3.36
  • Redesigned login screen
  • New lock screen
  • Snap-based Ubuntu Software app
  • Improved GNOME Shell performance
  • Refined ZFS install support
  • Game mode added to the archives

• • Joe – Installed Ubuntu 20.04 on my 7140 tablet with gnome.  Had some small problems with Gnome and the touchpad left and right click not wanting to work although both did work with an external mouse.  So I installed Cinnamon and Mate and my touchpad worked fine in both.
    • Rotation also worked without a hitch in Gnome and Cinnamon but I did not search for the setting in Mate since I will use that with X2go for remote access
    • Haven’t set up my normal scripting for file movement and sshfs yet but it should work fine. 
    • Noticed a series of games already installed.  Very Windows XP style
    • Turning on touchpad scrolling did not work until after reboot
    • I also didn’t like the touchpad acceleration.  After I adjusted it I did not notice any change until after a reboot and then it was fine
    • Boot times are fast and smooth although there is a device related problem with reboot
    • Looks beautiful and runs smooth
    • Still haven’t installed UKUU and upgraded to the most recent kernel
    • But I did check out snap which is built in.  works great. 
      • Installed the snap for Standard Notes and Mumble and was able to use auto completion with no issues and they immediately were available in the start menu
  • Leo
    • Installed Ubuntu 20.04 Beta on the T450s. This laptop!
    • Tried to stick with the default install on all of the apps I use. This meant installing lots and lots of things via Snap. The only reason I tend to shy away from Snaps is the theming issues (the wonky looking cursor, off-looking GTK Themes, and slow startup times).
    • Talked to Martin Wimpress about these on BDLL last night and got some clarification about where the Ubuntu team is headed. These issues are absolutely on their radar, but got pushed back for some more technical issues that needed to land in 20.04. These issues are now a priority again and will land soon!
    • Another thing we ended up talking about was the fact that all desktop installations of Ubuntu are automatically set up to take the HWE kernel when it drops. So no more confusion about whether you’re on a point release or not and what that means.
    • Historically, if you installed with 18.04, you didn’t get the HWE kernel. You could opt in, but required installing a couple of packages. If you installed 18.04.1 or later, you got the HWE kernel automatically.
    • Stuck with it until a little after release when the Gnome desktop really started to grind on me. It was great overall, and fine on my desktop, but on my laptop, the animations were struggling to stay smooth. I’m petty enough to allow that to be a game breaker. I know that to get things to look “nicer” that sometimes comes with more animations. I just figured that a business-class laptop from 2015 would be able to handle it!

• Ubuntu MATE Features

• • • Ubuntu MATE 20.04 features include better support for HiDPI rendering throughout the UI, minimised window previews in the task bar, and new Notification Indicator settings (including a do-not-disturb mode).
    • The distro has decided to drop Compiz and Compton from the default install as they’re no longer considered necessary (and this is an LTS release).

• There’s also a new GTK frontend for the fwupd application. This will make it easy to check for firmware updates for connected devices and apply said updates if available.

• • Finally, all the goodies present in the upstream MATE desktop 1.24 release are present here.

• • Who on the team has tried it?
  • Moss’ biggest peeve: The icons for “End the Current Session”, “Lock Screen”, and “Turn Off the Device” are not evocative of those features in any way and are tinier than ever. This is a serious problem for visually impaired people, and the icons themselves are an issue for everyone. Question: Is this a MATE issue, or just Ubuntu MATE?
    • Otherwise, this felt like the old, familiar shirt you’ve worn for the last 10 years when you just want to relax. Nothing feels new, everything works.

• Kubuntu Features

• recent KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS release

• For instance, there’s a new colour emoji selector, better theming of GTK apps, refined app and system notifications, and a system tray toggle for the Night Color option.

• • A swathe of updated KDE applications are available through Discover (the software store), including newer versions of Kdenlive, KDE Connect, and Latte Dock.
  • there’s a new default music player in Kubuntu 20.04. The distro has chosen to switch from the Qt-based Cantata to the Qt-based Elisa as of this release.