flatpak – mintCast https://mintcast.org The podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux Wed, 15 Apr 2026 01:17:12 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/cropped-small-logo-32x32.png flatpak – mintCast https://mintcast.org 32 32 mintCast false episodic CC-BY-SA 4.0 CC-BY-SA 4.0 podcast flatpak – mintCast https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/big-logo-1600.png https://mintcast.org TV-G 164426984 483 – Chucking at Charlie https://mintcast.org/483-chucking-at-charlie/ Wed, 15 Apr 2026 01:17:10 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7883 First up in the news: Mint 23 is named, Ubuntu 26.04 coming up and its already causing controversy, Firefox gets more features, big tech making some changes, and the governments of the world are meddling, in good and bad ways… and we welcome another host!

In security and privacy: Flatpak getting more secure allegedly

]]> First up in the news: Mint 23 is named, Ubuntu 26.04 coming up and its already causing controversy, Firefox gets more features, big tech making some changes, and the governments of the world are meddling, in good and bad ways… and we welcome another host!

In security and privacy: Flatpak getting more secure allegedly

Link To Full Show Notes

The News:


The code name for Mint 23 is “Alfa”


26.04 Beta


Does Ubuntu Now Require More RAM Than Windows 11?


26.10 could drop btfrs zfs and luks


Firefox Announces Built-in VPN and Other New Features Including New Mascot


Google Now Lets You Change Your Gmail address


Samsung’s Messages App Is Shutting Down


Microsoft Mysteriously Freezes Accounts for VeraCrypt, WireGuard, Windscribe


Why did the FCC ban foreign-made consumer routers?


NHS staff resist using Palantir software


France Launches Government Linux Desktop Plan as Windows Exit Begins


Student Loans Fiasco, and its IT underpins


LibreOffice Drama: TDF Removes Collabora Developers in One Sweep

Security And Privacy:


Flatpak 1.16.4 Brings Important Security Fixes


CPUID website hacked: users report HWMonitor and CPU-Z delivering malware


Cloudflare aims to dethrone WordPress with EmDash, its new plugin-secure CMS

Check This Out:


New & Update Flatpaks – Nora


26.04 – Another view

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> full 1:47:56 7883 424 – Meh Snap https://mintcast.org/424-meh-snap/ Thu, 02 Nov 2023 05:27:30 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6430 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News; Ubuntu 23.10 re-released; GNOME gets new CEO; new RaspPi Imager released; Plasma 6 Release Dates released; Matrix reaches 115 Million users; Bodhi Linux 7.0 AppPack released

In security and privacy: BlackCat ransomware attacks Linux and VMs; 1Password Breach – no harm, no foul; new vulnerabilities found and patched in XWayland, X.org

Then in our Wanderings: Bill shuffles cards; Joe tests more things; Moss keeps busy

Then in our Innards section: We discuss containerized package systems

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Download
]]> First up in the news: Mint Monthly News; Ubuntu 23.10 re-released; GNOME gets new CEO; new RaspPi Imager released; Plasma 6 Release Dates released; Matrix reaches 115 Million users; Bodhi Linux 7.0 AppPack released

In security and privacy: BlackCat ransomware attacks Linux and VMs; 1Password Breach – no harm, no foul; new vulnerabilities found and patched in XWayland, X.org

Then in our Wanderings: Bill shuffles cards; Joe tests more things; Moss keeps busy

Then in our Innards section: We discuss containerized package systems

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

  1. 00:00:00 – Intro
  2. 00:01:36 – News
  3. 00:24:26 – Security And Privacy
  4. 00:29:56 – Wanderings
  5. 00:45:57 – Innards
  6. 01:11:52 – Vibrations From The Ether
  7. 01:15:30 – Check This Out
  8. 01:20:45 – Housekeeping and Announcemtns
  9. 01:21:28 – Wrap Up

The News

Mint Monthly News – October 2023

Ubuntu 23.10 Desktop ISOs Re-Released Following Translation Snafu

GNOME Foundation Welcomes Holly Million as Executive Director

Raspberry Pi Imager Gets New Tabbed OS Customization UI, Raspberry Pi 5 Support

KDE Plasma 6.0 Release Date Revealed

Raspberry Pi 5 Available Now

Decentralized Matrix messaging network says it now has 115M users

Bodhi 7.0 64-bit AppPack Released

Security and Privacy

BlackCat ransomware uses new ‘Munchkin’ Linux VM in stealthy attacks

Okta Support System incident and 1Password

XWayland & X.Org Server See New Releases Due To Three More Security Vulnerabilities

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 429 429 Meh Snap full 1:25:03 6430 408 – Ffmpegged https://mintcast.org/408-ffmpegged/ Wed, 22 Mar 2023 09:03:22 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6016 First up in the news: Meet Ubuntu Flatpak Remix, KDE Plasma 6 Begins, No Peeking, Vanilla goes to Debian, LibreOffice 7.4.6, Nitrux goes “sh”, Elementary updates, DuckDuckGo goes AI on Wikipedia, Debian gets new APT, Proton joins the fight against censorship, Firefox 111 features, Kali 2023.1 released, and Wine 8.4 with old Wayland released.

In security and privacy, Brave needs no permission to do Google, NordVPN open sources code;

Then in our Wanderings, we are posting no Bills this episode,

In our Innards section, Joe talks ffmpeg

Download ]]> First up in the news: Meet Ubuntu Flatpak Remix, KDE Plasma 6 Begins, No Peeking, Vanilla goes to Debian, LibreOffice 7.4.6, Nitrux goes “sh”, Elementary updates, DuckDuckGo goes AI on Wikipedia, Debian gets new APT, Proton joins the fight against censorship, Firefox 111 features, Kali 2023.1 released, and Wine 8.4 with old Wayland released;

In security and privacy, Brave needs no permission to do Google, NordVPN open sources code;

Then in our Wanderings, we are posting no Bills this episode,

In our Innards section, Joe talks ffmpeg;

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

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

Wrap-up

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

Archive.org for hosting our audio files

Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo

Londoner for our time syncs

Bill Houser for hosting the Pi400 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

]]> 408 408 Ffmpegged full 1:17:00 6016 395 – Buttery Smooth Experience https://mintcast.org/396-buttery-smooth-experience/ Wed, 28 Sep 2022 14:34:01 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5614 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.
Download
]]> 1:08 The News
26:46 Security and Privacy
33:17 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
55:54 Linux Innards

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

Security and Privacy Update

Wrap-up

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!
]]> 395 - Buttery Smooth Experience full 1:17:43 5614 394 – With music on our side to break the old hard drives https://mintcast.org/394-with-music-on-our-side-to-break-the-old-hard-drives/ Fri, 26 Aug 2022 15:20:07 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5598 In security and privacy, Discord and your passwords are pythoned, and hard drives apparently have a taste in music
Then in our Wanderings, Joe plays with his handheld, Bill is setting up a new server, Moss skips the assault and gets a couple batteries, and Norbert has had done some things.
Download
]]> 1:25 The News
16:15 Security and Privacy
26:03 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:22:59 Housekeeping and Announcements

First up in the news, The Kernel gets a bump, LibreOffice adds a point, Android 13 is out if you have a Pixel, and Gnome has a birthday,

In security and privacy, Discord and your passwords are pythoned, and hard drives apparently have a taste in music

Then in our Wanderings, Joe plays with his handheld, Bill is setting up a new server, Moss skips the assault and gets a couple batteries, and Norbert has had done some things.

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

The News

Security and Privacy Update

Announcements

Wrap-up

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!
]]> 394 - With music on our side to break the old hard drives full 1:26:24 5598 386.5 – Interview with Flathub contributor Jorge Castro https://mintcast.org/386-interview-with-flathub-contributor-jorge-castro/ Wed, 15 Jun 2022 11:23:40 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5487 Download
]]> 1:00 Linux Innards
1:37:50 Vibrations From the Ether
1:51:02 Check This Out
1:52:58 Announcements

In our Innards section, we have an interview with Jorge Castro, community manager for Flatpak and former community manager for Canonical.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions.

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

Linux Innards

Check This Out

Wrap-up

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!
]]> 386 - Interview with Flathub contributor Jorge Castro full 2:00:59 5487 386 – Microsoft’s Redemption Arc https://mintcast.org/386-microsoft-redemption-arc/ Wed, 15 Jun 2022 10:38:03 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5481 Download
]]> 2:32 The News
13:25 Security and Privacy
22:10 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:05:28 Announcements

First up in the news, NTFS is orphaned, a hare-brained C alternative, and some new Pop!

In security and privacy, Microsoft found it, and Musk open sources

Then in our Wanderings, Jorge is steaming right along, Joe is destroying more stuff, Norbert had a little too much linux, Moss is redoing EVERYTHING, and Bill is pulling his hair out.

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

The News

Wrap-up

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!
]]> 386 - Microsoft's Redemption Arc full 1:04:36 5481 384.5 – New Linux Tech https://mintcast.org/384-5-new-linux-tech/ Sat, 11 Jun 2022 02:09:35 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5452 Download
]]> 0:29 Linux Innards
1:08:28 Vibrations From the Ether
1:15:03 Check This Out
41:09 Announcements

In our Innards section we discuss some of the newer additions to Linux and what we think about them.

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

The Linux Innards

Tech added to Linux

  • systemd
  • Wireguard
  • Snaps, Flatpak, and Appimage
  • Wayland
  • PulseAudio and PipeWire
  • Btrfs and ZFS
  • WINE-based tech (Bottles, Proton, Lutris, PlayOnLinux)

Check This Out

  • Podcasts (Josh T) – Play, update, and manage your podcasts from a lightweight interface that seamlessly integrates with GNOME. Podcasts can play various audio formats and remember where you stopped listening. You can subscribe to shows via RSS/Atom, iTunes, and Soundcloud links. Subscriptions from other apps can be imported via OPML files.
  • PeerGOS (Moss) – an open source replacement for Google Drive, able to be self-hosted, or hosted on the company’s servers, free to 500 Mb and decent prices for larger storage amounts.
  • App Outlet (Norbert) – A universal Linux app store

Announcements

Wrap-up

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!
]]> full 1:24:29 5452 382 – Kernel Metamorphosis https://mintcast.org/382-kernel-metamorphosis/ Sat, 14 May 2022 01:14:52 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5393 Download
]]> 1:30 The News
20:32 Security and Privacy Update
31:45 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
56:04 Announcements & Outro

First up in the news: Linux crosses the C; We look into Steam; Flatpak improves; Gnome gets more customizable.

In security and privacy: Bvp47 found after 10 years.

Then in our Wanderings: Moss is shaking in his boots and singing about it; Joe fixes more things; JoshT is back from the farm; Bill keeps trucking; and Norbert goes to Maui.

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

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

  • Moss: This is my first time hosting mintCast. Distro Madness is back at It’s MOSS! I participated in Eurofolk a week ago.
  • Joe: I was able to get another motherboard for that Dell XPS 13 9360.  Between going back to the office and working on the campaign for AISD school board of trustees I have not had much time to work on my own projects. I am back in the office which does make things more difficult when it comes to projects and getting things done. Along with the school board I am feeling a little under prepared today. Also I have been having problems with my garage computer again.
  • Norbert: Since I’ve become a host on mintCast and have been spending more time talking with native English speakers on this show and occasionally on Linux Saloon, I’ve become more conscious about my pronunciation of certain words, as well as I’ve been trying to improve my accent. I decided to take another look at the Maui Shell, the upcoming DE from Nitrux, which aims to be a good experience on desktops, tablets and phones.
  • Josh T: I took a trip out to my cousin’s farm in the foothills of California last weekend and spent a couple of days with him and his family. I’d been wanting a decent bluetooth speaker for a while but didn’t want to break the bank on one, so I purchased a Soundcore Motion+ by Anker off of Amazon for a little over $100. I came into the new year firmly set on selling my motorcycle as I just don’t ride much these days but with fuel prices now having eclipsed $5 a gallon. I started to improve my diet this past week and many salads were eaten.
  • Bill: This week has been more iterative improvements to the work-flow with regards to my other podcast, 3 Fat Truckers. I’ve been having a lot of fun learning how to make proper podcast episodes using Audacity. My work week was somewhat standard, though a bit hectic towards the end. Some challenges we will need to address for the future are the state of Dave and Steve’s internet service. They both have a similar situation where they have excellent download speed, though their upload speed is – shall we say less than stellar.

Announcements

Wrap-up

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!
]]> 382 - Kernel Metamorphosis full 59:54 5393 mintCast 365.5 – The Test Drive https://mintcast.org/mintcast-365-5-the-test-drive/ Thu, 22 Jul 2021 07:58:09 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5147 And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions
Download
]]> 1:38 Linux Innards
22:57 Vibrations from the Ether
46:26 Check This Out
51:13 Announcements & Outro

In our Innards section, we’ve been running Linux Mint 20.2. How about you?

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

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

Check This Out

  • Leo
  • 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

Wrap-up

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!>
]]> mintCast 365.5 - The Test Drive full 55:51 5147 mintCast 364.5 – Dynamic Audio https://mintcast.org/mintcast-364-5-dynamic-audio/ Wed, 07 Jul 2021 06:25:20 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5131 And finally, the feedback and a couple things to check out
Download
]]> 1:29 Linux Innards
39:02 Vibrations from the Ether
1:09:10 Check This Out
1:10:09 Announcements & Outro

In our Innards section, we talk travelling studios

And finally, the feedback and a couple things to check out

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit.

Linux Innards

Vibrations from the Ether

  • Allan N.
  • Elizabeth T.
  • Brad A.

randstring:

#!/usr/local/bin/bash
COUNT=$1
if [ "$COUNT" = "" -o !"$COUNT" ] ; then
  echo "Enter a number of characters to generate", read $COUNT
fi
head -c $COUNT /dev/random | uuencode -m - | sed -n '2s/=*$//;2p' | cut -c1-$COUNT
  • John Wallis
  • A. Stombough
  • Stan R.

Check This Out

Announcements

Wrap-up

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!>
]]> full 5131 mintCast 353 – Brave New WWW (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-353-brave-new-www-mp3/ Wed, 27 Jan 2021 05:46:48 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4892 Then, our news we talk RPi Pico, Ubuntu’s Booting on an Apple M1, Flatpak is faster, Project Linux turns into Alma Linux, and more
In security, the InterPlanetary File System
Download
]]> Download

1:58 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:01:23 The News
1:29:47 Security Update
1:38:43 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I have second thoughts about Kubuntu, Moss has a new toy, Joe has been playing with watches, Tony has been editing audio, Josh hasn’t broken Arch, Bo survived the pandemic!

Then, our news we talk RPi Pico, Ubuntu’s Booting on an Apple M1, Flatpak is faster, Project Linux turns into Alma Linux, and more

In security, the InterPlanetary File System

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Having second thoughts about Kubuntu 20.10
    • Doubling down on Brave browser.
      • Found out it is the first to support IPFS
      • Looking at becoming a Brave Creator. This allows me to generate tips in the BAT currency from Brave users.
    • Took a leap of faith and installed the Flatpak PPA to get the latest flatpak so I could test out Chromium which requires 1.8.5 or above. Everything seems to be working. A little apprehensive because mumble is flatpak, and it’s what I use for the YouTube stream audio.
  • Joe
    • Ordered some new parts for the Samsung Galaxy S3 Watch so that I could fix the small issues with it because I saw a really good price for a set of parts that would do the job.
      • It works well and the rest of the parts make for almost a whole watch.  I may purchase another battery and put it all together to have another mostly working watch.
      • This new motherboard is actually a cellular version but because of the limitations of the eSIM that is included on the board I cannot get it to work with TMobile.  This is not a big deal for me because I would not use it as a phone anyway it was just something cool to contemplate
    • Also purchased some more neckband headphones to work on since I have not done so in a while. I know that I have 19 or so working headphones but I found some that have active noise cancelling that are not in the LG line that I would like to work on and see if I can do some of the same fixes to that I normally do with the LG’s. So it is the Anker Soundcores that I will be working on and adding the MMCX connections to.  They are also supposed to have a better battery life but it looks like they will be a lot more of a pain to take apart and put back together since I think that it is all glued.  So keeping the parts in usable physical condition may be difficult.  I may also have to look into replacement batteries as I do not know what is wrong with them.
      • The 5 headphones arrived and I have started working on them.  2 of the headsets have bad batteries.  So with the Anker phones that had the bad battery I started taking that apart first as I knew that there would be a learning curve in figuring out how to take the device apart
      • I did get it apart and figure out the best way to do it with minimal breakage but let’s just say that I don’t recommend it for modding purposes or repairability
    • Had some fun with the rename utility.  Bulk renaming of files was super easy and saved me a lot of time.  Wouldn’t mind doing a show on that and SED. 
      • rename ‘s/old-name/new-name/g’ files
      • But i have been told that it is way too nerdy
    • Picked up a fridge for free.  My wife found it on FB and it is a very nice fridge.  Granted it did cost me some money to rent the truck to move it but it was still a lot less than a new fridge (which I was planning on buying my wife this year)  The people that had it were moving and needed it gone as soon as possible.  It is probably the nicest side by side that I have ever owned. I can’t complain, it works and it looks awesome.
      • The only thing is, I was the only person moving the thing and I am super lucky that I did not hurt myself.  The thing was heavy.
    • Because of changes in my insurance, the copay for prescriptions has gone up a lot.  To the point that I don’t know how much money I am going to be able to put towards projects this year.  All this means is that I will be forced to go through my backlog of old projects or almost-projects and get it all up to date.  Maybe do a little bit with software again.
    • My Eldest Child turned 18 this week.  That is weird.  
    • On my VM download server I was still having problems with transmission-rss so I attempted to downgrade the Ruby version so that it would work properly again.  This did not work well.  I made several attempts to downgrade and all failed miserably.
      • Then I realized that the reason I was using transmission-rss initially was because that was available in a docker
      • So I shut down the transmission setup and moved everything over to qbittorrent which allowed me to re-setup all my former automation so that the files automatically go where I want them.  I do like the UI for qbittorrent and it is working well.
      • The rules that you can set up for automatic downloads and for after download moves was perfect for how I had things set up before.
  • Moss
    • Joshua Hawk sent me a laptop, a Dell Inspiron 7353 2-in-1 with touchscreen. He had installed Fedora on it, which I soon destroyed, and I’ve run a carousel of distros on it, to Pop!_OS, Bodhi 5.1, back to Fedora, and back to Bodhi. There are interesting touchpad issues: in Fedora, the touchpad right-click sends a left-click (it works fine Bodhi), and in Bodhi it does not load the screen keyboard. This is a great addition to my collection, and as it only has a 128 Gb SSD and a lot of screws keeping me from being brave enough to replace the SSD, this will be my machine to test distros for Distrohoppers’ Digest for the foreseeable future.
    • Speaking of Distrohoppers’ Digest, Episode 19 is out. Episodes 15 through 18 are also in the top 5 of our download numbers. For Episode 19 we actually have Dale in the header and footer readings. We had a great time, I get the idea we could banter a bit more but we’re still getting our team-feet under.
    • My Sponsus account now has 3 monthly sponsors and has also taken in a nice donation. You can hear them named at the end of the current episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
    • My recording and work space is in flux right now. There really was a short on the sound card in the Mini, and contacting that is what blew the power supply a few months ago. It’s not catastrophic but not something I want to have on a system I’m doing sound recording on, and I’ll be moving that along to someone who needs it. Dale has sent me an AMD sound card, which will replace the FX 1800 Nvidia card in the FuzZ400, which will take over as my main machine. Right now I’m recording on my Kudu laptop, still the most powerful machine I have. 
    • School is in and out, depending on the week and the school. I worked 4 days in the last two weeks and got paid for a 5th when they forgot to cancel an assignment.
    • My other business is poised to take off, and we plan to sell a lot of common products and donate 80% of our profits to projects providing housing funds and services to homeless people in America.  I’ll post the link when we are actually doing business.
    • My teeth are not working yet, and I have an appointment for a refitting this week.
    • We are more than halfway through White Night, the 9th book in the Dresden Files series. 
    • I have also been reading Grail and Cosmos: Arthurian Explorations by Alby Stone. Portions of this book were previously published by my friend Bob Trubshaw of Heart of Albion Press. Everything Bob publishes is worth reading if you’re interested in the roots of folklore, and much of it is available as free downloads from his website.
    • My mother has passed, of covid pneumonia which she caught in the rehab facility. She was 91. I miss her. When I come home after having something happen at work I want to talk to her about, I reach for the phone… and remember I can’t call.
  • Tony H
    • So as Moss has said, this week we recorded the latest Distrohoppers Digest which I published on Saturday 23rd after doing the edit, including our new intro with Dale as part of the team. Great show if I do say so myself although we continue to strive to get better. 
    • Mint 20.1 is firmly established on my Laptop although I continue with 19.3 as my main driver on the i7 HP Tower which is my main production PC, at some stage I will get around to upgrading although at the moment as I have the IcyDock on this PC I can boot into a Mint 20 install whenever I want to.
    • I have bought some small storage racks with 32 boxes for putting in spares and components for the diecast models I restore, and I have been busy filling them up and labeling them. With the result my workshop is tidier, I can actually find things.
    • On the home front the Covid situation continues to get worse and by the time you hear this we will have passed 100K deaths for C19 here in the UK. It may mean we have even stricter restrictions before this is all over, The Netherlands have just introduced a curfew from 21.00 to 04.30 to try and stop some of the abuses of the current regulations restricting large gatherings indoors. 
  • Josh
    • Arch is still working. Now it’s not. I tried to install Linux Mint as a dual boot with arch and quickly found out that was a mistake. I first noticed a problem when I did not see arch as a boot option after hitting f12. When Mint’s grub booted arch was there as an option but when clicking it nothing happens just a black screen forever. I rebooted and then booted into mint and that worked fine. I checked my install of arch and everything looked to be in place; it just won’t boot. Anyways long story short I wiped mint and installed openSUSE tumbleweed cause I wanted to and I am just waiting for a good chunk of time again to try and fix or possibly reinstall my arch install.m
    • Been playing a lot of games while I can before school starts next week and I won’t have much time for them. I won’t go into detail but finally after 7 years I finally got around to beating Dragon Age Inquisition. It was a great story line and I can’t wait for the next chapter in that saga. I have also been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance as well and I have mentioned it before it’s one of my favorite RPG’s and I cannot recommend it enough.
    • Also getting ready for school which starts this week. I am taking a networking class. It’s technically the continuation of another networking class I took 3 semesters ago or so I am hoping it all comes back to me. 
    • I got a new mouse! I had my RedDragon M901 for over 5 years now and I loved that thing but the left mouse click was starting to get a little wonky. I tried to get another RedDragon mouse, the M913 but when I received it the left click was sticking to the point you couldn’t tell when you clicked. I returned that and decided to splurge a little and after a lot more research settled on the Corsair Scimitar Elite. All of the mice I have been talking about have had 12 side buttons but the Scimitar was the first I could set macros on and boy has it changed my gaming experience. Unfortunately there is no way to set the macros and all without windows but there are 3 profiles that save right to the mouse itself so once set you can change between them no matter what OS you’re running.

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Wrap-up:

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!>
]]> full 4892 mintCast 353 – Brave New WWW https://mintcast.org/mintcast-353-brave-new-www/ Wed, 27 Jan 2021 05:36:39 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4885 Then, our news we talk RPi Pico, Ubuntu’s Booting on an Apple M1, Flatpak is faster, Project Linux turns into Alma Linux, and more
In security, the InterPlanetary File System
Download
]]> Download

1:58 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:01:23 The News
1:29:47 Security Update
1:38:43 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I have second thoughts about Kubuntu, Moss has a new toy, Joe has been playing with watches, Tony has been editing audio, Josh hasn’t broken Arch, Bo survived the pandemic!

Then, our news we talk RPi Pico, Ubuntu’s Booting on an Apple M1, Flatpak is faster, Project Linux turns into Alma Linux, and more

In security, the InterPlanetary File System

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Having second thoughts about Kubuntu 20.10
    • Doubling down on Brave browser.
      • Found out it is the first to support IPFS
      • Looking at becoming a Brave Creator. This allows me to generate tips in the BAT currency from Brave users.
    • Took a leap of faith and installed the Flatpak PPA to get the latest flatpak so I could test out Chromium which requires 1.8.5 or above. Everything seems to be working. A little apprehensive because mumble is flatpak, and it’s what I use for the YouTube stream audio.
  • Joe
    • Ordered some new parts for the Samsung Galaxy S3 Watch so that I could fix the small issues with it because I saw a really good price for a set of parts that would do the job.
      • It works well and the rest of the parts make for almost a whole watch.  I may purchase another battery and put it all together to have another mostly working watch.
      • This new motherboard is actually a cellular version but because of the limitations of the eSIM that is included on the board I cannot get it to work with TMobile.  This is not a big deal for me because I would not use it as a phone anyway it was just something cool to contemplate
    • Also purchased some more neckband headphones to work on since I have not done so in a while. I know that I have 19 or so working headphones but I found some that have active noise cancelling that are not in the LG line that I would like to work on and see if I can do some of the same fixes to that I normally do with the LG’s. So it is the Anker Soundcores that I will be working on and adding the MMCX connections to.  They are also supposed to have a better battery life but it looks like they will be a lot more of a pain to take apart and put back together since I think that it is all glued.  So keeping the parts in usable physical condition may be difficult.  I may also have to look into replacement batteries as I do not know what is wrong with them.
      • The 5 headphones arrived and I have started working on them.  2 of the headsets have bad batteries.  So with the Anker phones that had the bad battery I started taking that apart first as I knew that there would be a learning curve in figuring out how to take the device apart
      • I did get it apart and figure out the best way to do it with minimal breakage but let’s just say that I don’t recommend it for modding purposes or repairability
    • Had some fun with the rename utility.  Bulk renaming of files was super easy and saved me a lot of time.  Wouldn’t mind doing a show on that and SED. 
      • rename ‘s/old-name/new-name/g’ files
      • But i have been told that it is way too nerdy
    • Picked up a fridge for free.  My wife found it on FB and it is a very nice fridge.  Granted it did cost me some money to rent the truck to move it but it was still a lot less than a new fridge (which I was planning on buying my wife this year)  The people that had it were moving and needed it gone as soon as possible.  It is probably the nicest side by side that I have ever owned. I can’t complain, it works and it looks awesome.
      • The only thing is, I was the only person moving the thing and I am super lucky that I did not hurt myself.  The thing was heavy.
    • Because of changes in my insurance, the copay for prescriptions has gone up a lot.  To the point that I don’t know how much money I am going to be able to put towards projects this year.  All this means is that I will be forced to go through my backlog of old projects or almost-projects and get it all up to date.  Maybe do a little bit with software again.
    • My Eldest Child turned 18 this week.  That is weird.  
    • On my VM download server I was still having problems with transmission-rss so I attempted to downgrade the Ruby version so that it would work properly again.  This did not work well.  I made several attempts to downgrade and all failed miserably.
      • Then I realized that the reason I was using transmission-rss initially was because that was available in a docker
      • So I shut down the transmission setup and moved everything over to qbittorrent which allowed me to re-setup all my former automation so that the files automatically go where I want them.  I do like the UI for qbittorrent and it is working well.
      • The rules that you can set up for automatic downloads and for after download moves was perfect for how I had things set up before.
  • Moss
    • Joshua Hawk sent me a laptop, a Dell Inspiron 7353 2-in-1 with touchscreen. He had installed Fedora on it, which I soon destroyed, and I’ve run a carousel of distros on it, to Pop!_OS, Bodhi 5.1, back to Fedora, and back to Bodhi. There are interesting touchpad issues: in Fedora, the touchpad right-click sends a left-click (it works fine Bodhi), and in Bodhi it does not load the screen keyboard. This is a great addition to my collection, and as it only has a 128 Gb SSD and a lot of screws keeping me from being brave enough to replace the SSD, this will be my machine to test distros for Distrohoppers’ Digest for the foreseeable future.
    • Speaking of Distrohoppers’ Digest, Episode 19 is out. Episodes 15 through 18 are also in the top 5 of our download numbers. For Episode 19 we actually have Dale in the header and footer readings. We had a great time, I get the idea we could banter a bit more but we’re still getting our team-feet under.
    • My Sponsus account now has 3 monthly sponsors and has also taken in a nice donation. You can hear them named at the end of the current episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
    • My recording and work space is in flux right now. There really was a short on the sound card in the Mini, and contacting that is what blew the power supply a few months ago. It’s not catastrophic but not something I want to have on a system I’m doing sound recording on, and I’ll be moving that along to someone who needs it. Dale has sent me an AMD sound card, which will replace the FX 1800 Nvidia card in the FuzZ400, which will take over as my main machine. Right now I’m recording on my Kudu laptop, still the most powerful machine I have. 
    • School is in and out, depending on the week and the school. I worked 4 days in the last two weeks and got paid for a 5th when they forgot to cancel an assignment.
    • My other business is poised to take off, and we plan to sell a lot of common products and donate 80% of our profits to projects providing housing funds and services to homeless people in America.  I’ll post the link when we are actually doing business.
    • My teeth are not working yet, and I have an appointment for a refitting this week.
    • We are more than halfway through White Night, the 9th book in the Dresden Files series. 
    • I have also been reading Grail and Cosmos: Arthurian Explorations by Alby Stone. Portions of this book were previously published by my friend Bob Trubshaw of Heart of Albion Press. Everything Bob publishes is worth reading if you’re interested in the roots of folklore, and much of it is available as free downloads from his website.
    • My mother has passed, of covid pneumonia which she caught in the rehab facility. She was 91. I miss her. When I come home after having something happen at work I want to talk to her about, I reach for the phone… and remember I can’t call.
  • Tony H
    • So as Moss has said, this week we recorded the latest Distrohoppers Digest which I published on Saturday 23rd after doing the edit, including our new intro with Dale as part of the team. Great show if I do say so myself although we continue to strive to get better. 
    • Mint 20.1 is firmly established on my Laptop although I continue with 19.3 as my main driver on the i7 HP Tower which is my main production PC, at some stage I will get around to upgrading although at the moment as I have the IcyDock on this PC I can boot into a Mint 20 install whenever I want to.
    • I have bought some small storage racks with 32 boxes for putting in spares and components for the diecast models I restore, and I have been busy filling them up and labeling them. With the result my workshop is tidier, I can actually find things.
    • On the home front the Covid situation continues to get worse and by the time you hear this we will have passed 100K deaths for C19 here in the UK. It may mean we have even stricter restrictions before this is all over, The Netherlands have just introduced a curfew from 21.00 to 04.30 to try and stop some of the abuses of the current regulations restricting large gatherings indoors. 
  • Josh
    • Arch is still working. Now it’s not. I tried to install Linux Mint as a dual boot with arch and quickly found out that was a mistake. I first noticed a problem when I did not see arch as a boot option after hitting f12. When Mint’s grub booted arch was there as an option but when clicking it nothing happens just a black screen forever. I rebooted and then booted into mint and that worked fine. I checked my install of arch and everything looked to be in place; it just won’t boot. Anyways long story short I wiped mint and installed openSUSE tumbleweed cause I wanted to and I am just waiting for a good chunk of time again to try and fix or possibly reinstall my arch install.m
    • Been playing a lot of games while I can before school starts next week and I won’t have much time for them. I won’t go into detail but finally after 7 years I finally got around to beating Dragon Age Inquisition. It was a great story line and I can’t wait for the next chapter in that saga. I have also been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance as well and I have mentioned it before it’s one of my favorite RPG’s and I cannot recommend it enough.
    • Also getting ready for school which starts this week. I am taking a networking class. It’s technically the continuation of another networking class I took 3 semesters ago or so I am hoping it all comes back to me. 
    • I got a new mouse! I had my RedDragon M901 for over 5 years now and I loved that thing but the left mouse click was starting to get a little wonky. I tried to get another RedDragon mouse, the M913 but when I received it the left click was sticking to the point you couldn’t tell when you clicked. I returned that and decided to splurge a little and after a lot more research settled on the Corsair Scimitar Elite. All of the mice I have been talking about have had 12 side buttons but the Scimitar was the first I could set macros on and boy has it changed my gaming experience. Unfortunately there is no way to set the macros and all without windows but there are 3 profiles that save right to the mouse itself so once set you can change between them no matter what OS you’re running.

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Wrap-up:

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!>
]]> full 4885 mintCast 344.5 – “Working” from Home (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-344-5-working-from-home-mp3/ Wed, 30 Sep 2020 04:05:44 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4683 And finally, the feedback
Download
]]>

Download

1:38 Linux Innards
58:33 Vibrations from the Ether
1:17:19 Check This Out!
1:20:44 Outro

In our Innards section, we go over the working from home slash home-office setups we have.

And finally, the feedback

LINUX INNARDS:

“Work from Home” setup

  • Tony
    • My views of last time’s topic on Proprietary software v Open Source holding Linux back.
    • For me I’m very pragmatic about using what works, my first preference is Opensource but if there is a proprietary bit of software that would offer a better solution I would use it, and I do as I install the Nvidia drivers on my desktop PC as I have a dedicated Nvidia graphics card.
    • As for the availability of proprietary software for Linux such as Photoshop I’m not sure this is a major issue as this is a very niche package and a very small possible Linux user base making it uneconomic for Adobe to spend time creating a Linux version. Looking at industry leading software one example of Open Source leading the way is Blender, and again very few regular Linux users would even look at this let alone use it too it’s full potential, those that need this software for professional 3D rendering are already using it and probably on Linux.
  • Leo
  • Joe
    • MSI ge72 6qd with an i7-6700HQ and a gtx 960m
    • That has a 17 inch screen
    • For the second screen i have a laptop table with a 32 inch tv on it
    • The table also has a mount for my 7130 so i can do other small things when work is slow or i need to look something up
    • The table that my laptop sits on has an articulated arm for my microphone which is right now a hyperx quadcast or a samson meteor
    • Also use my Samsung Galaxy note 10 all day every day with several of my custom built lg hbs 770 headphones along with a pair of skullcandy crushers if i want to listen to music and a modded pair of sony xb700s for when i can no longer stand the idea of using an in ear but want all day wear and a pair of 99 neos for when it has to be wired
    • Because i rely so heavily on my phone to be able to do my work i also keep my old galaxy s7 around incase something happens to the note
    • Extra wide recliner that is seeing a lot of wear and tear lately
    • Logitech k360 keyboard and m570 trackball mouse
    • ASUS AC2900 router
      • Need to be able to handle all my work stuff and all the kids school stuff
      • 300mbps connection from spectrum
    • My backup workstation in the garage
      • Ryzen 5 3600 16gb of ram rx 560
      • Two lg tvs as monitors
        • One 60 inch that i got for free because of a bad hdmi board
        • One 43 inch that i also got for free because my friend closed out his storage unit
      • Logitech g613 keyboard and m570 mouse
  • Tony H
    • So even though I am no longer working I do obviously use my PC for quite a lot of tasks as well as numerous laptops my main PC is my tower, and this is what I use for podcasting and much more.
    • So my Desktop PC setup is an:
      • HP Compaq Elite 8300 with the following specs:
        • A 2012 Intel® Core™ i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz with 4 cores and 8 threads.
        • 24Gig of DDR3 Ram
        • NVIDIA GeForce 8400 256Mb Ram
        • Generic USB keyboard and mouse
        • And a 1Tb SSD in the primary Bay of my 4 bay IcyDoc. Running Mint Maté 19.3. There are an additional 2 128Gb drives in the dock with Ubuntu Studio 20.04 and Ubuntu Maté 20.04 installed. The 4th bay is not populated because for some reason it does not recognise any drives installed despite all the cables being connected??
    • I have a ProSound USB podcast mic, that I picked up in a bankruptcy sale a few years ago for a very reasonable £12/$15 and this is mounted onto a boom arm and has a pop filter in front of the mic.
    • I also have a SriHome USB webcam that I got a couple of months ago once I could find one that would not mean remortgaging the house. This cost £31 pounds on Amazon.
    • I have 2 4TB USB3 external backup drives with plenty of room for more data at the moment, Both have 1.9Tb of free space, I should have of site backup as well but at the moment I don’t. I also have a 2TB and 1Tb portable USB3 drive for storage on the go.
    • I have 2 Laser printers, a Greyscale Brother and a recently purchased HP Color Laser 150nw, bought for printing my own decals for my models, this cost £130 of Amazon but as buying decals from online sellers can be £2-3 a set this will quickly pay for itself in the next few months. Yes Decal paper is about £1/sheet but you can print many decals on one A4 sheet so the paper is hardly a factor in the decal cost.
  • Bo
    • Work setup
      • Lenovo laptop and docking station at work
      • KVM switch at home
    • Podcasting
      • System76 Kudu
      • Zoom H6 USB interface
    • Gaming
      • Ryzen 7 build
      • Dual Booting win and Linux
  • Tony W

Will talk about my basement office/studio setup

    • 2 desks, catty corner
      • One desk holds both my podcasting/music desktop as well as my work laptop setup
      • Other desk has my server on it and also use for working on any other machines
    • Network
      • Ran wired internet into basement
    • Repurposed wifi extender as access point with DD WRT
    • Work Setup
      • Thinkpad T480
      • Thinkpad dock
      • Lenovo wireless keyboard/mouse
      • Plantronics Savi w720
    • Music/Podcasting setup – Sentimental value and stories with a lot of this gear
      • Share peripherals w/ work setup
      • Old Dell desktop
        • Video card for multiple monitor support
      • M-Audio Delta 66 soundcard (have a presonus studio 24c)
      • Behringer XM1800S microphone (I have a MXL V57M will use at some point)
      • Neewer desk mount boom arm
      • Audio-Technica M50x headphones
      • Dual monitor “Goodwill Edition” setup (sometimes use a 3rd monitor)
      • JVC stereo R-K11
      • Bose bookshelf speakers
    • Tablet
    • PC in living room: Lenovo desktop (unsure of model right now, has 4th gen i3 in it, 8GB RAM)
      • Dual boot, mostly used in Windows these days by my son for homework
      • Linux mint partition

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

  • Larry Murphy

Hello Leo & All,

I just hear episode 342.5. I wanted to let you know that way back when (early to mid 2000’s) when I wanted to multi-boot I found a You Tube that was a step-by step guide. The person had 106 OSes on his computer. The guide was very complete. I modified it for my needs. It worked for about 6 mos. Till it wouldn’t boot. Checking I found out that my downfall was updating the config files. I accepted one that was a default with the system upgrade and I needed to save the one I had filled out. It was a real nooby error.

Now I boot ALL my OSes from my bios, much easier and safer. I use a SSD for each OS, such as Windows and Linux. I only put OSes on SSD,s and data on separate internal and external drives.

I have found that Linux is quicker to install and even with ALL the customizing I do. I customize many of my folder and almost all of my desk top icons for easy identification. I have use the same icon in both Windows and Linux. I find it,s much easier in Linux because I don’t have change the pics I use to .ico files as is needed by Windows. I also find that my internet is faster in Linux as well as download speeds and I can burn dvds faster in Linux as well. I didn’t want you to think setting up multi-boot my my own. I wanted to do it just to see if I could. I always customize my Windows installs but the Linux installs are MUCH easier to do and as always I always enjoy listening to each one of you folks on the show. Thanks for the great content and all your hard work that goes into each show.

  • John Wallis

Hello Leo,

I would appreciate your assistance please with the error messages arising in the attached screenshot at boot stage, before and after the hard disk encryption password is entered. I look forward to hearing from you.

Try This GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash pci=noacpi”
  • John Wallis Part 2

Hi Leo,

I would appreciate your guidance on systemd-udevd.service. What is it used for? Lynis has marked it as unsafe.

  • Raphaël

You guys MADE MY DAY!!!

I was having a long day at work on Thursday. Then, listening to my podcasts, the Linux Mint Podcast was on… and then the listeners questions section was like… all about me 🙂 Sorry if I made this episode longer than you like 😉

This was a great joy to hear you talking about this question. I immediately felt the need to give back to you. I’ve made a donation to archive.org on your behalf!

As for the solutions proposed:

– I just downloaded the LM20 ISO and plan on installing it soon

– I’ve tried “sudo flatpak install org.videolan.VLC” and got the error message “error: REMOTE and REF must be specified”. The correct invocation (source) is “flatpak install flathub org.videolan.VLC” (+ no sudo needed). It seems to work, I have not finished checking yet.

Keep up the good work.

  • Anthony

So I got to ask a question having to do with Foss or bust! Years ago I would use Wine to do things from Windows on linux and it worked at least sometimes. How come I don’t see that option discussed any more?

CHECK THIS OUT!

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, October 4, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC and 8 pm British Summer Time. Time conversions are available at https://www.timeanddate.com. You can use Austin, Texas as a Central Time reference.

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for audio editing
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4683 mintCast 344.5 – “Working” from Home https://mintcast.org/mintcast-344-5-working-from-home/ Wed, 30 Sep 2020 03:23:49 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4671 And finally, the feedback
Download
]]>

Download

1:38 Linux Innards
58:33 Vibrations from the Ether
1:17:19 Check This Out!
1:20:44 Outro

In our Innards section, we go over the working from home slash home-office setups we have.

And finally, the feedback

LINUX INNARDS:

“Work from Home” setup

  • Tony
    • My views of last time’s topic on Proprietary software v Open Source holding Linux back.
    • For me I’m very pragmatic about using what works, my first preference is Opensource but if there is a proprietary bit of software that would offer a better solution I would use it, and I do as I install the Nvidia drivers on my desktop PC as I have a dedicated Nvidia graphics card.
    • As for the availability of proprietary software for Linux such as Photoshop I’m not sure this is a major issue as this is a very niche package and a very small possible Linux user base making it uneconomic for Adobe to spend time creating a Linux version. Looking at industry leading software one example of Open Source leading the way is Blender, and again very few regular Linux users would even look at this let alone use it too it’s full potential, those that need this software for professional 3D rendering are already using it and probably on Linux.
  • Leo
  • Joe
    • MSI ge72 6qd with an i7-6700HQ and a gtx 960m
    • That has a 17 inch screen
    • For the second screen i have a laptop table with a 32 inch tv on it
    • The table also has a mount for my 7130 so i can do other small things when work is slow or i need to look something up
    • The table that my laptop sits on has an articulated arm for my microphone which is right now a hyperx quadcast or a samson meteor
    • Also use my Samsung Galaxy note 10 all day every day with several of my custom built lg hbs 770 headphones  along with a pair of skullcandy crushers if i want to listen to music and a modded pair of sony xb700s for when i can no longer stand the idea of using an in ear but want all day wear and a pair of 99 neos for when it has to be wired
    • Because i rely so heavily on my phone to be able to do my work i also keep my old galaxy s7 around incase something happens to the note
    • Extra wide recliner that is seeing a lot of wear and tear lately
    • Logitech k360 keyboard and m570 trackball mouse
    • ASUS AC2900 router
      • Need to be able to handle all my work stuff and all the kids school stuff
      • 300mbps connection from spectrum
    • My backup workstation in the garage
      • Ryzen 5 3600 16gb of ram rx 560
      • Two lg tvs as monitors
        • One 60 inch that i got for free because of a bad hdmi board
        • One 43 inch that i also got for free because my friend closed out his storage unit
      • Logitech g613 keyboard and m570 mouse
  • Tony H
    • So even though I am no longer working I do obviously use my PC for quite a lot of tasks as well as numerous laptops my main PC is my tower, and this is what I use for podcasting and much more.
    • So my Desktop PC setup is an:
      • HP Compaq Elite 8300 with the following specs:
        • A 2012 Intel® Core™ i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz with 4 cores and 8 threads.
        • 24Gig of DDR3 Ram
        • NVIDIA GeForce 8400 256Mb Ram
        • Generic USB keyboard and mouse
        • And a 1Tb SSD in the primary Bay of my 4 bay IcyDoc. Running Mint Maté 19.3. There are an additional 2 128Gb drives in the dock with Ubuntu Studio 20.04 and Ubuntu Maté 20.04 installed. The 4th bay is not populated because for some reason it does not recognise any drives installed despite all the cables being connected??
    • I have a ProSound USB podcast mic, that I picked up in a bankruptcy sale a few years ago for a very reasonable £12/$15 and this is mounted onto a boom arm and has a pop filter in front of the mic.
    • I also have a SriHome USB webcam that I got a couple of months ago once I could find one that would not mean remortgaging the house. This cost £31 pounds on Amazon.
    • I have 2 4TB USB3 external backup drives with plenty of room for more data at the moment, Both have 1.9Tb of free space, I should have of site backup as well but at the moment I don’t. I also have a 2TB and 1Tb portable USB3 drive for storage on the go.
    • I have 2 Laser printers, a Greyscale Brother and a recently purchased HP Color Laser 150nw, bought for printing my own decals for my models, this cost £130 of Amazon but as buying decals from online sellers can be £2-3 a set this will quickly pay for itself in the next few months. Yes Decal paper is about £1/sheet but you can print many decals on one A4 sheet so the paper is hardly a factor in the decal cost.
  • Bo
    • Work setup
      • Lenovo laptop and docking station at work
      • KVM switch at home
    • Podcasting
      • System76 Kudu
      • Zoom H6 USB interface
    • Gaming
      • Ryzen 7 build
      • Dual Booting win and Linux
  • Tony W

Will talk about my basement office/studio setup

    • 2 desks, catty corner
      • One desk holds both my podcasting/music desktop as well as my work laptop setup
      • Other desk has my server on it and also use for working on any other machines
    • Network
      • Ran wired internet into basement
    • Repurposed wifi extender as access point with DD WRT
    • Work Setup
      • Thinkpad T480
      • Thinkpad dock
      • Lenovo wireless keyboard/mouse
      • Plantronics Savi w720
    • Music/Podcasting setup – Sentimental value and stories with a lot of this gear
      • Share peripherals w/ work setup
      • Old Dell desktop
        • Video card for multiple monitor support
      • M-Audio Delta 66 soundcard (have a presonus studio 24c)
      • Behringer XM1800S microphone (I have a MXL V57M will use at some point)
      • Neewer desk mount boom arm
      • Audio-Technica M50x headphones
      • Dual monitor “Goodwill Edition” setup (sometimes use a 3rd monitor)
      • JVC stereo R-K11
      • Bose bookshelf speakers
    • Tablet
    • PC in living room: Lenovo desktop (unsure of model right now, has 4th gen i3 in it, 8GB RAM)
      • Dual boot, mostly used in Windows these days by my son for homework
      • Linux mint partition

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

  • Larry Murphy

Hello Leo & All,

I just hear episode 342.5. I wanted to let you know that way back when (early to mid 2000’s) when I wanted to multi-boot I found a You Tube that was a step-by step guide. The person had 106 OSes on his computer. The guide was very complete. I modified it for my needs. It worked for about 6 mos. Till it wouldn’t boot. Checking I found out that my downfall was updating the config files. I accepted one that was a default with the system upgrade and I needed to save the one I had filled out. It was a real nooby error.

Now I boot ALL my OSes from my bios, much easier and safer. I use a SSD for each OS, such as Windows and Linux. I only put OSes on SSD,s and data on separate internal and external drives.

I have found that Linux is quicker to install and even with ALL the customizing I do. I customize many of my folder and almost all of my desk top icons for easy identification. I have use the same icon in both Windows and Linux. I find it,s much easier in Linux because I don’t have change the pics I use to .ico files as is needed by Windows. I also find that my internet is faster in Linux as well as download speeds and I can burn dvds faster in Linux as well. I didn’t want you to think setting up multi-boot my my own. I wanted to do it just to see if I could. I always customize my Windows installs but the Linux installs are MUCH easier to do and as always I always enjoy listening to each one of you folks on the show. Thanks for the great content and all your hard work that goes into each show.

  • John Wallis

Hello Leo,

I would appreciate your assistance please with the error messages arising in the attached screenshot at boot stage, before and after the hard disk encryption password is entered. I look forward to hearing from you.

Try This GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash pci=noacpi”
  • John Wallis Part 2

Hi Leo,

I would appreciate your guidance on systemd-udevd.service.  What is it used for?  Lynis has marked it as unsafe.

  • Raphaël

You guys MADE MY DAY!!!

I was having a long day at work on Thursday. Then, listening to my podcasts, the Linux Mint Podcast was on… and then the listeners questions section was like… all about me 🙂 Sorry if I made this episode longer than you like 😉

This was a great joy to hear you talking about this question. I immediately felt the need to give back to you. I’ve made a donation to archive.org on your behalf!

As for the solutions proposed:

 – I just downloaded the LM20 ISO and plan on installing it soon

 – I’ve tried “sudo flatpak install org.videolan.VLC” and got the error message “error: REMOTE and REF must be specified”. The correct invocation (source) is “flatpak install flathub org.videolan.VLC” (+ no sudo needed). It seems to work, I have not finished checking yet.

Keep up the good work.

  • Anthony

So I got to ask a question having to do with Foss or bust! Years ago I would use Wine to do things from Windows on linux and it worked at least sometimes. How come I don’t see that option discussed any more?

CHECK THIS OUT!

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, October 4, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC and 8 pm British Summer Time. Time conversions are available at https://www.timeanddate.com. You can use Austin, Texas as a Central Time reference.

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for audio editing
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4671 mintCast 343.5 – FOSS or Bust (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-343-5-foss-or-bust-mp3/ Wed, 16 Sep 2020 04:08:13 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4630 And finally, the feedback and a suggestion
Download
]]>

Download

1:29 Linux Innards
38:20 Vibrations from the Ether
1:06:58 Check This Out
1:09:29 Outro

In our Innards section, NonFree vs FOSS

And finally, the feedback and a suggestion

LINUX INNARDS: 

Is insistence on FOSS limiting the growth of Linux?

  • This came up because of a recent Humble Bundle sale that had Magix offering their Sound Forge Audio Studio 13, Movie Studio 16 and a few more bits of software all for $25. It’s one version old, but still fully functional and never-expiring software.
  • The kicker: It’s proprietary, close-sourced, and Windows-only.
  • So, what’s your stance on proprietary software?
    • Leo
      • To the prompt, “no.” For Linux, as a technology, a kernel, FOSS has been the driving force of its adoption. It’s made Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, and every other major internet company out there take notice, adopt and adapt.
      • However, for Linux as a desktop, for regular folks like us, it can limit our personal growth. For instance, daVinci Resolve. It’s a full on audio video editor that is Linux native, but proprietary. It’s not wrong to decide you don’t want to use it because of its proprietary nature, but if it has features that you want, and isn’t in other tools, you’re hamstringing yourself.
      • I have a “right tool for the job” mentality. But, I do lean toward and prefer Open Source software. For instance, we use Audacity and Mumble to create the show every week, and I’m pretty proud of that. However, if it turned out that another software, Open Source or not, free or not, reduced the time required to, say, edit the show, from 5-8 hours to 2-4, I would certainly use it and encourage us all internally to try it.
      • To that end, I went ahead and bought this bundle and installed most of it on my Windows disk.
        • Sound Forge Audio Studio is actually pretty good in that you’re able to do non destructive editing and very fast. 
          • These things are important because one of the drawbacks of Audacity for me is that every compress, noise reduction and truncate silence you do is written to the disk before you ever save. And it’s HUGE. 1-4GB per audio track, and there are 4 or 5 of us on at a time. It’s write speed dependent, which means you want to do this on an SSD, not a HDD, but this puts a lot of wear on an SSD.
        • The built-in effects are… fine? It looks like I’m going to need to find a VST for everything that Audacity does out of the box.
          • These look promising:
            • https://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/
        • The Movie Studio software, I haven’t used much yet. But it reminds me so much of Kdenlive, which is what I’m pitting it against. I’ll report back if it’s amazing or not, but with Kdenlive’s 20.08 release… I may have a hard time making a switch.
      • We also use Google Drive, and have been pretty open about that fact for a while. It’s such a good, cross-platform, collaborative, free writing application that is so simple to use, it’s impossible to pass up, and extremely difficult to migrate away from because of the responsibility that’s put on you for alternatives.
        • Syncthing and the like are options, but aren’t instant
        • Nextcloud is an option, but it’s not without maintenance
      • To close out all my rambling, FOSS isn’t holding us back, per se, it’s more that we don’t have any killer apps that are Linux-only on the desktop. If we want that to change, we need to get on “team developer.” Buy them coffee, send them $10 for a job well done, share successes, build them up, and for those adventurous enough, become one. Because remember, we’re competing with the likes of multi-billion dollar companies.
      • Linux is different. It truly is community-based and can be so very user-driven. Let’s use the power we have to invest in our own future.
    • Moss – History Lesson
      • Corel came out with Corel Linux with WordPerfect in late 1999, back when WordPerfect was still *a* leader in the Office market. They wanted $89. They were hoping for positive feedback to improve the product; instead got screamed at by the FOSS crowd and had to pull their product. They finally pulled the Corel Open Source Development website in March 2002.
      • SoftMaker has made Office since 1987. I’ve been using it since 2008 (in Windows) and have used the Linux edition since 2012. (They even had a BSD version in 2006.) It has always been more compatible with MS Office than any of the free office packages. I filed three bugs with OpenOffice.org (2010? 2012?) having to do with MS Office compatibility which greatly impeded my ability to use OOo in my professional editing work, and was told they were not interested in fixing those bugs. I have been loyal to SoftMaker since. I have not seen LibreOffice 7, but at least two of the bugs continued to exist through the latest 6.4 version. I have mentioned on this show many times how I have taken a lot of heat and even been forced to leave discussion groups because I was not using a FOSS word processor.
      • People coming over from Windows are not willing to work without Adobe software, or AutoCAD, or similar professional software. Linux people keep saying it’s up to those companies to OPEN SOURCE it before they can use it. 
      • The only software Linux people seem to be willing to pay for is games.
      • My view is, you use FOSS first, and then look for other software when FOSS software does not meet your needs. Expecting companies to give up the way they operate just to provide a very limited userbase software they will use is closed-minded.
    • Joe
      • I tend to not stress whether an application is open source or not.  As long as it works on Linux with minimal fuss
      • I don’t think this limits the growth of Linux in any significant way.  You will always have people that think the best way to make money is to have complete control of the product.  If you disallow that type of thing then you would be discouraging the platform.  Yes, money can be made as a service, but some just don’t like that dynamic and some applications simply will not fit into that mold.
      • Also if you are going to have an environment that is open then the programmers can make whatever they choose to fit on top of it.
      • Now if something will only run in Windows or is basically unusable in Linux, I will either find an alternative or I will load up Windows long enough to run the application.  I do keep a Windows install around for those purposes.
      • If you are going to have an open platform then people can use it in any way they see fit.  Including writing proprietary code for that open platform.
      • Check out Windows 10 Ameliorated: https://ameliorated.info/
    • Tony W
      • I am not sure that insistence on FOSS is hindering Linux growth in any significant way
        • The main reason I feel this way is I think the vast majority of people that come to Linux desktop are technically savvy, will research and try things on their own.  and are presented with the options to install alongside windows,etc. They can research options for proprietary software vs FOSS and will decide for themselves with the information available to them.
        • DUAL BOOT: This option actually may keep people using Linux more because there is a safety net if something doesn’t work.
      • My stance on proprietary software: If it works and is convenient, I use it.  I do look for FOSS options first.
      • I cannot understate how much I appreciate that most FOSS is free as in beer and that it’s intended to be that way.  Donate to those projects, when you can.
      • The proprietary software/hardware I use and why:
        • Windows software 
          • Have to use Windows and Windows software for work, no choice there)
          • Boss tone studio
          • Studio One
        • Google stuff
          • Chromebook
          • Google Home/Chromecastz
          • Android, Play store, google apps
  • It’s MOSS, the Website
    • My website, which has been mentioned a few times on this podcast, is about using the best tool for the purpose and to encourage the Linux community to stop sending good software away just because the provider wants  to charge for it.  I have a few articles up on the need for, use of, and desire to increase the availability of non-FOSS software in Linux. I am always open to receiving more articles and comments. I have noticed that It’s FOSS sometimes has articles referencing non-FOSS software, and I have suggested to them that they could use my website to post those articles, thereby dodging some slings and arrows from the FOSS community. All submissions are welcome.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

  • Joseph Husak on Youtube

Joseph’s Followup Email

Tony W Response

  • TheComputerKid

Leo’s Response

Moss’ Response

  • Raphaël

Leo’s Response

sudo flatpak install org.videolan.VLC

sudo flatpak install fr.handbrake.ghb
  • John Wallis Saga

I’ve disabled avahi-daemon.  Lynis does not provide more information regarding the services.  I’m puzzled as to why hddtemp.service should be marked as unsafe.  Could we make hddtemp.service the first service to be investigated?

Leo’s Response

Here is some basic usage.

leo@maya ~ > sudo hddtemp /dev/sda

[sudo] password for leo:        

/dev/sda: ADATA SU800: 27°C

leo@maya ~> sudo hddtemp /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb: TCSUNBOW N4 240GB: 40°C

I wouldn’t worry about hddtemp much, especially if you use it with any frequency. If you don’t ever use it, it may be prudent to remove it with 

sudo apt remove hddtemp

If you want to keep it, but are worried that it is listening to its default TCP port 7634, you can run

ss -l4

and check for a line like this

Netid       State        Recv-Q    Send-Q      Local Address:Port

tcp         LISTEN       0         0           0.0.0.0:7634

If you see anything with the port 7634 in the far right there, it’s listening. If you see anything other than 0 under Recv-Q or Send-Q, it’s been talking to remote hosts!

  • Brad Alexander
  • Brad Alexander
[storm@danube ~]$ cp rsx.jpg Media

[storm@danube ~]$ cd !$

cd Media

[storm@danube Media]$

CHECK THIS OUT! 

  • Moss
    • https://itsfoss.com/best-markdown-editors-linux/

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, September 20, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC and 8 pm British Summer Time. Time conversions are available at https://www.timeanddate.com. You can use Austin, Texas as a Central Time reference.

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for audio editing
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4630 mintCast 343.5 – FOSS or Bust https://mintcast.org/mintcast-343-5-foss-or-bust/ Wed, 16 Sep 2020 03:46:43 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4618 And finally, the feedback and a suggestion
Download
]]>

Download

1:29 Linux Innards
38:20 Vibrations from the Ether
1:06:58 Check This Out
1:09:29 Outro

In our Innards section, NonFree vs FOSS

And finally, the feedback and a suggestion

LINUX INNARDS: 

Is insistence on FOSS limiting the growth of Linux?

  • This came up because of a recent Humble Bundle sale that had Magix offering their Sound Forge Audio Studio 13, Movie Studio 16 and a few more bits of software all for $25. It’s one version old, but still fully functional and never-expiring software.
  • The kicker: It’s proprietary, close-sourced, and Windows-only.
  • So, what’s your stance on proprietary software?
    • Leo
      • To the prompt, “no.” For Linux, as a technology, a kernel, FOSS has been the driving force of its adoption. It’s made Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, and every other major internet company out there take notice, adopt and adapt.
      • However, for Linux as a desktop, for regular folks like us, it can limit our personal growth. For instance, daVinci Resolve. It’s a full on audio video editor that is Linux native, but proprietary. It’s not wrong to decide you don’t want to use it because of its proprietary nature, but if it has features that you want, and isn’t in other tools, you’re hamstringing yourself.
      • I have a “right tool for the job” mentality. But, I do lean toward and prefer Open Source software. For instance, we use Audacity and Mumble to create the show every week, and I’m pretty proud of that. However, if it turned out that another software, Open Source or not, free or not, reduced the time required to, say, edit the show, from 5-8 hours to 2-4, I would certainly use it and encourage us all internally to try it.
      • To that end, I went ahead and bought this bundle and installed most of it on my Windows disk.
        • Sound Forge Audio Studio is actually pretty good in that you’re able to do non destructive editing and very fast. 
          • These things are important because one of the drawbacks of Audacity for me is that every compress, noise reduction and truncate silence you do is written to the disk before you ever save. And it’s HUGE. 1-4GB per audio track, and there are 4 or 5 of us on at a time. It’s write speed dependent, which means you want to do this on an SSD, not a HDD, but this puts a lot of wear on an SSD.
        • The built-in effects are… fine? It looks like I’m going to need to find a VST for everything that Audacity does out of the box.
          • These look promising:
            • https://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/
        • The Movie Studio software, I haven’t used much yet. But it reminds me so much of Kdenlive, which is what I’m pitting it against. I’ll report back if it’s amazing or not, but with Kdenlive’s 20.08 release… I may have a hard time making a switch.
      • We also use Google Drive, and have been pretty open about that fact for a while. It’s such a good, cross-platform, collaborative, free writing application that is so simple to use, it’s impossible to pass up, and extremely difficult to migrate away from because of the responsibility that’s put on you for alternatives.
        • Syncthing and the like are options, but aren’t instant
        • Nextcloud is an option, but it’s not without maintenance
      • To close out all my rambling, FOSS isn’t holding us back, per se, it’s more that we don’t have any killer apps that are Linux-only on the desktop. If we want that to change, we need to get on “team developer.” Buy them coffee, send them $10 for a job well done, share successes, build them up, and for those adventurous enough, become one. Because remember, we’re competing with the likes of multi-billion dollar companies.
      • Linux is different. It truly is community-based and can be so very user-driven. Let’s use the power we have to invest in our own future.
    • Moss – History Lesson
      • Corel came out with Corel Linux with WordPerfect in late 1999, back when WordPerfect was still *a* leader in the Office market. They wanted $89. They were hoping for positive feedback to improve the product; instead got screamed at by the FOSS crowd and had to pull their product. They finally pulled the Corel Open Source Development website in March 2002.
      • SoftMaker has made Office since 1987. I’ve been using it since 2008 (in Windows) and have used the Linux edition since 2012. (They even had a BSD version in 2006.) It has always been more compatible with MS Office than any of the free office packages. I filed three bugs with OpenOffice.org (2010? 2012?) having to do with MS Office compatibility which greatly impeded my ability to use OOo in my professional editing work, and was told they were not interested in fixing those bugs. I have been loyal to SoftMaker since. I have not seen LibreOffice 7, but at least two of the bugs continued to exist through the latest 6.4 version. I have mentioned on this show many times how I have taken a lot of heat and even been forced to leave discussion groups because I was not using a FOSS word processor.
      • People coming over from Windows are not willing to work without Adobe software, or AutoCAD, or similar professional software. Linux people keep saying it’s up to those companies to OPEN SOURCE it before they can use it. 
      • The only software Linux people seem to be willing to pay for is games.
      • My view is, you use FOSS first, and then look for other software when FOSS software does not meet your needs. Expecting companies to give up the way they operate just to provide a very limited userbase software they will use is closed-minded.
    • Joe
      • I tend to not stress whether an application is open source or not.  As long as it works on Linux with minimal fuss
      • I don’t think this limits the growth of Linux in any significant way.  You will always have people that think the best way to make money is to have complete control of the product.  If you disallow that type of thing then you would be discouraging the platform.  Yes, money can be made as a service, but some just don’t like that dynamic and some applications simply will not fit into that mold.
      • Also if you are going to have an environment that is open then the programmers can make whatever they choose to fit on top of it.
      • Now if something will only run in Windows or is basically unusable in Linux, I will either find an alternative or I will load up Windows long enough to run the application.  I do keep a Windows install around for those purposes.
      • If you are going to have an open platform then people can use it in any way they see fit.  Including writing proprietary code for that open platform.
      • Check out Windows 10 Ameliorated: https://ameliorated.info/
    • Tony W
      • I am not sure that insistence on FOSS is hindering Linux growth in any significant way
        • The main reason I feel this way is I think the vast majority of people that come to Linux desktop are technically savvy, will research and try things on their own.  and are presented with the options to install alongside windows,etc. They can research options for proprietary software vs FOSS and will decide for themselves with the information available to them.
        • DUAL BOOT: This option actually may keep people using Linux more because there is a safety net if something doesn’t work.
      • My stance on proprietary software: If it works and is convenient, I use it.  I do look for FOSS options first.
      • I cannot understate how much I appreciate that most FOSS is free as in beer and that it’s intended to be that way.  Donate to those projects, when you can.
      • The proprietary software/hardware I use and why:
        • Windows software 
          • Have to use Windows and Windows software for work, no choice there)
          • Boss tone studio
          • Studio One
        • Google stuff
          • Chromebook
          • Google Home/Chromecastz
          • Android, Play store, google apps
  • It’s MOSS, the Website
    • My website, which has been mentioned a few times on this podcast, is about using the best tool for the purpose and to encourage the Linux community to stop sending good software away just because the provider wants  to charge for it.  I have a few articles up on the need for, use of, and desire to increase the availability of non-FOSS software in Linux. I am always open to receiving more articles and comments. I have noticed that It’s FOSS sometimes has articles referencing non-FOSS software, and I have suggested to them that they could use my website to post those articles, thereby dodging some slings and arrows from the FOSS community. All submissions are welcome.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

  • Joseph Husak on Youtube

Joseph’s Followup Email

Tony W Response

  • TheComputerKid

Leo’s Response

Moss’ Response

  • Raphaël

Leo’s Response

sudo flatpak install org.videolan.VLC

sudo flatpak install fr.handbrake.ghb
  • John Wallis Saga

I’ve disabled avahi-daemon.  Lynis does not provide more information regarding the services.  I’m puzzled as to why hddtemp.service should be marked as unsafe.  Could we make hddtemp.service the first service to be investigated?

Leo’s Response

Here is some basic usage.

leo@maya ~ > sudo hddtemp /dev/sda

[sudo] password for leo:        

/dev/sda: ADATA SU800: 27°C

leo@maya ~> sudo hddtemp /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb: TCSUNBOW N4 240GB: 40°C

I wouldn’t worry about hddtemp much, especially if you use it with any frequency. If you don’t ever use it, it may be prudent to remove it with 

sudo apt remove hddtemp

If you want to keep it, but are worried that it is listening to its default TCP port 7634, you can run

ss -l4

and check for a line like this

Netid       State        Recv-Q    Send-Q      Local Address:Port

tcp         LISTEN       0         0           0.0.0.0:7634

If you see anything with the port 7634 in the far right there, it’s listening. If you see anything other than 0 under Recv-Q or Send-Q, it’s been talking to remote hosts!

  • Brad Alexander 
  • Brad Alexander
[storm@danube ~]$ cp rsx.jpg Media

[storm@danube ~]$ cd !$

cd Media

[storm@danube Media]$

CHECK THIS OUT! 

  • Moss
    • https://itsfoss.com/best-markdown-editors-linux/

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, September 20, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC and 8 pm British Summer Time. Time conversions are available at https://www.timeanddate.com. You can use Austin, Texas as a Central Time reference.

Wrap-up:

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

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

]]> full 4618 mintCast 343 – Tinfoil Not Included (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-343-tinfoil-not-included-mp3/ Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:27:36 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4615 Then, in the news, we have news from Mint, Debian, and  MX Linux. We also say goodbye to a team member.
In security, we take a break from the doom and gloom and just talk tinfoil.
Download
]]>

Download

1:47 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
42:01 Vibrations from the Ether
1:05:00 Check This Out
1:26:51 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I recorded some how-to’s, Moss has computers raining on him, Joe reads and repairs, Tony Watts jams and tinkers, and Bo and Tony Hughes will be back next episode.

Then, in the news, we have news from Mint, Debian, and  MX Linux. We also say goodbye to a team member.

In security, we take a break from the doom and gloom and just talk tinfoil.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • I’ve finally gotten some time to record a couple more how-to’s. Bashtop and Bpytop.
    • Also, I’m fairly current on Full Circle Weekly News again! I plan on doing a two-week episode this week to get current and it feels good.
  • Moss
    • About 2 hours after completing the last episode, I went to plug my speakers back into my desktop, slipped, and somehow shorted out my computer. A new power supply, thanks to Tony Hughes, arrived on Tuesday, and surprise, it was the wrong size. I’m supposed to have a mini ITX machine, and ordered accordingly, but the power supply in the box (and, yes, I should have looked first) was a full sized ATX. 
    • After complaining about that to the Telegram group, Fuzzy shipped me a new tower computer which will blow the socks off what I had. That should get here next Saturday.
    • I went ahead and returned the power supply to Amazon and have ordered the correct power supply from NewEgg, and when I get the old desktop repaired and running, I will find a deserving schoolkid to give it to.
    • On top of that, I went out to visit a friend last night, and came home with a pretty high-end older HP tower computer (Win 7 Home Premium license, early i7 processor). It’s quite dirty right now, so I’ll clean it up, check the specs and whether it runs, and see if I can find someone to give (or sell cheap) it to.
    • I tried using the Pi 4 as my TV machine but could not get my VPN to start, even though it was installed. Mullvad customer support was disappointing, considering how long I have been a customer.
    • So I signed up for a new VPN called Surfshark. If I can get it to work, it will cost about the same for 2 years as I would have paid for 8 months to Mullvad. It’s good when it works, but apparently that’s only on Ubuntu-based systems (a fact they neglected to mention). The Linux app is non-existent, although it has a nice app for Android and anything else. Their tech support was friendly initially, but now they’re falling into patterns of “Well, Linux users don’t want an easy way to run our VPN…”
    • What I haven’t done yet is try Surfshark on the Pi 4. Coming soon.
    • I moved the 1 Tb SSD from my desktop to my laptop last Tuesday night. I started running updates, as it had been about 11 days since these 7 distros had been updated. My Manjaro installation would not load, so I reinstalled it, then installed OpenMandriva on the remaining unused partition. I had both Feren OS and KDE neon which were basically Ubuntu-running-KDE and yearned for more diversity, so I flipped a coin and replaced Feren OS with Ubuntu Unity. I’m way behind on getting all these distros as near equivalent as possible or even evaluating their current status, things have been so much in flux.  I have also installed Surfshark on the four Ubuntu-based distros.
    • I have a new digital watch and fitness tracker. It only cost $7.95 and a two-month wait for it to get here from Szenchen, China. It connects to a phone app and can attach to social media and email but I don’t want that. I have no idea what other data it collects, but I’ve gained 20 pounds since my accident and want some incentive and help to start going the other way again. Besides the time function, it also detects my pulse, blood pressure, and even blood oxygen, as well as my steps. You ease the friction-fit watchband off on one end to expose the USB terminal — yes, you plug the entire watch into a USB port to charge it. A charge seems to last 3-4 days. There are virtually no controls on the watch, everything is run through the app.
    • My unemployment ran out. Not weeks, but dollars. My final check was under $100, so no covid money for Moss this week. On the other hand, I have 3 job possibilities, and it looks as if one of them will go through, although it will be a temporary job. Feast or famine. I’m not completely out of money yet, but it could be a race between that and my first paycheck. I have been encouraged to talk to a lawyer about the fact that I have been getting paid out of Unemployment dollars instead of Worker’s Comp funds, but the covid-19 money received puts a major question mark in that process as that comes only with unemployment money. While the potential fraud was not on my part, I was the beneficiary of it.
    • My mother went back to the hospital after she fell and broke the pin in her hip. They repaired the pin successfully. She has been moved from the hospital to the rehab facility, where she will spend at least a few weeks. She’s 91 now, in case you lost count.
    • We finished reading Blood Rites, the 6th Dresden book, and have started in on Dead Beat.
  • Joe
    • Soulwood series by Faith Hunter,  4 books of 5
      • Same universe as the Jane Yellowrock series.
      • Good series
    • Locke and Key audio drama
      • Based on the comics
      • Well done, easy to follow and interesting
    • Junkyard Pirate by Jamie McFarlane
      • Second book as well
    • Also from Jamie Mcfarlane
      • Wizard in a Witchy World series
    • Ministry of Curiosity (10 books)
      • Good series. Feels a bit generic, nothing really stands out for me
      • Sometimes the books in the series felt like nothing really happened.  Like there was no overriding antagonistic event
    • Suggest some good cyberpunk novels
    • 3D-printed a whole setup for the macro keyboards.  
      • 12 key and it works very well
      • I am very happy with the quality and I may do a few more
      • Using it to control my mic mute button and also have it setup for vlc and docker using auto hotkey functions
      • Still looking for the most comfortable position to mount it
    • Also got some very thin wire .1mm to see if I can bridge the bad spots on that other board so I can have another one.
      • Once I get it working correctly I will 3D print a case for it
      • It is also the wire that I used to run the grounds for all the other keys on the one i printed
    • My water heater started leaking.  Went through a good chunk of my garage and most of my kitchen.  Caught it quickly though and got the water shut off so not much damage.
      • Going through the warranty company to get it fixed. 
      • Warranty company has been somewhat hit or miss over the years so…
      • Cost me a bit over 500 so that is not too bad.
      • Need to build a moisture sensor for it and not sure if I should use an arduino or a Pi.  What do you think?
    • This also meant that I had to shuffle my garage around a couple of times.  Once to get everything off the far wall and once to get everything out of the way so that they could get the new one in.
      • This allowed me to restructure my storage and work area
      • My son helped me figure out where to put some things in order to maximize my space and make it look neater
      • Still have a lot more work to do 
    • I have  an iPod docking station that is going to be my next item to work on.  Looks more like a sound bar.  It turns on and the clock works but no sound comes out no matter what you set the input to.  Gonna be fun taking it apart and seeing where the break is.
    • Revamping my workout
  • Tony Watts
    • Basement finishing continues
      • Added some insulation to the ceiling.  This helps contain music noise a bit but also has the benefit of keeping unwanted noise out of the Studio/Office
      • First jam session in my basement rehearsal space was a success!
        • Despite is playing pretty loud, no ringing ears on our part and the sound didn’t carry outside too much
    • “Adventure” with bathroom flood
    • Some more chromebook crouton tinkering
      • One of my kids accidentally reset the Chromebook due to developer mode screen on startup (my fault, forgot to prep him) 
      • Installed both KDE and Gnome variants of Crouton.
        • KDE was buggy on this particular Chromebook
        • Gnome was just too slow
        • Went back to XFCE which is Crouton’s default and works very well
    • Really debating a new phone purchase, Pixel 4a
      • After 3.5 years of heavy use my OnePlus 3T still holding up well but the charge port is worn out and that is getting annoying
      • Most new phones will support dual sim which is kind of a requirement for me
    • On vacation this week, working on 
      • More basement refinishing
      • Music recording
      • Prep for another Ironshield Brewing gig next weekend

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

  • There wasn’t much Linux centric today, and to keep this discussion episode going with discussion: 
    • How much of a tinfoil hatter are you?
    • What do you do in your life to secure yourself up?
  • Londoner: Proton Drive

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, September 20, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC and 8 pm British Summer Time. Time conversions are available at https://www.timeanddate.com. You can use Austin, Texas as a Central Time reference.

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for audio editing
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4615 mintCast 343 – Tinfoil Not Included https://mintcast.org/mintcast-343-tinfoil-not-included/ Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:08:25 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4610 Then, in the news, we have news from Mint, Debian, and  MX Linux. We also say goodbye to a team member.
In security, we take a break from the doom and gloom and just talk tinfoil.
Download
]]>

Download

1:47 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
42:01 The News
1:05:00 Security
1:26:51 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I recorded some how-to’s, Moss has computers raining on him, Joe reads and repairs, Tony Watts jams and tinkers, and Bo and Tony Hughes will be back next episode.

Then, in the news, we have news from Mint, Debian, and  MX Linux. We also say goodbye to a team member.

In security, we take a break from the doom and gloom and just talk tinfoil.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • I’ve finally gotten some time to record a couple more how-to’s. Bashtop and Bpytop.
    • Also, I’m fairly current on Full Circle Weekly News again! I plan on doing a two-week episode this week to get current and it feels good.
  • Moss
    • About 2 hours after completing the last episode, I went to plug my speakers back into my desktop, slipped, and somehow shorted out my computer. A new power supply, thanks to Tony Hughes, arrived on Tuesday, and surprise, it was the wrong size. I’m supposed to have a mini ITX machine, and ordered accordingly, but the power supply in the box (and, yes, I should have looked first) was a full sized ATX. 
    • After complaining about that to the Telegram group, Fuzzy shipped me a new tower computer which will blow the socks off what I had. That should get here next Saturday.
    • I went ahead and returned the power supply to Amazon and have ordered the correct power supply from NewEgg, and when I get the old desktop repaired and running, I will find a deserving schoolkid to give it to.
    • On top of that, I went out to visit a friend last night, and came home with a pretty high-end older HP tower computer (Win 7 Home Premium license, early i7 processor). It’s quite dirty right now, so I’ll clean it up, check the specs and whether it runs, and see if I can find someone to give (or sell cheap) it to.
    • I tried using the Pi 4 as my TV machine but could not get my VPN to start, even though it was installed. Mullvad customer support was disappointing, considering how long I have been a customer.
    • So I signed up for a new VPN called Surfshark. If I can get it to work, it will cost about the same for 2 years as I would have paid for 8 months to Mullvad. It’s good when it works, but apparently that’s only on Ubuntu-based systems (a fact they neglected to mention). The Linux app is non-existent, although it has a nice app for Android and anything else. Their tech support was friendly initially, but now they’re falling into patterns of “Well, Linux users don’t want an easy way to run our VPN…”
    • What I haven’t done yet is try Surfshark on the Pi 4. Coming soon.
    • I moved the 1 Tb SSD from my desktop to my laptop last Tuesday night. I started running updates, as it had been about 11 days since these 7 distros had been updated. My Manjaro installation would not load, so I reinstalled it, then installed OpenMandriva on the remaining unused partition. I had both Feren OS and KDE neon which were basically Ubuntu-running-KDE and yearned for more diversity, so I flipped a coin and replaced Feren OS with Ubuntu Unity. I’m way behind on getting all these distros as near equivalent as possible or even evaluating their current status, things have been so much in flux.  I have also installed Surfshark on the four Ubuntu-based distros.
    • I have a new digital watch and fitness tracker. It only cost $7.95 and a two-month wait for it to get here from Szenchen, China. It connects to a phone app and can attach to social media and email but I don’t want that. I have no idea what other data it collects, but I’ve gained 20 pounds since my accident and want some incentive and help to start going the other way again. Besides the time function, it also detects my pulse, blood pressure, and even blood oxygen, as well as my steps. You ease the friction-fit watchband off on one end to expose the USB terminal — yes, you plug the entire watch into a USB port to charge it. A charge seems to last 3-4 days. There are virtually no controls on the watch, everything is run through the app.
    • My unemployment ran out. Not weeks, but dollars. My final check was under $100, so no covid money for Moss this week. On the other hand, I have 3 job possibilities, and it looks as if one of them will go through, although it will be a temporary job. Feast or famine. I’m not completely out of money yet, but it could be a race between that and my first paycheck. I have been encouraged to talk to a lawyer about the fact that I have been getting paid out of Unemployment dollars instead of Worker’s Comp funds, but the covid-19 money received puts a major question mark in that process as that comes only with unemployment money. While the potential fraud was not on my part, I was the beneficiary of it.
    • My mother went back to the hospital after she fell and broke the pin in her hip. They repaired the pin successfully. She has been moved from the hospital to the rehab facility, where she will spend at least a few weeks. She’s 91 now, in case you lost count.
    • We finished reading Blood Rites, the 6th Dresden book, and have started in on Dead Beat.
  • Joe
    • Soulwood series by Faith Hunter,  4 books of 5
      • Same universe as the Jane Yellowrock series.
      • Good series
    • Locke and Key audio drama
      • Based on the comics
      • Well done, easy to follow and interesting
    • Junkyard Pirate by Jamie McFarlane
      • Second book as well
    • Also from Jamie Mcfarlane
      • Wizard in a Witchy World series
    • Ministry of Curiosity (10 books)
      • Good series. Feels a bit generic, nothing really stands out for me
      • Sometimes the books in the series felt like nothing really happened.  Like there was no overriding antagonistic event
    • Suggest some good cyberpunk novels
    • 3D-printed a whole setup for the macro keyboards.  
      • 12 key and it works very well
      • I am very happy with the quality and I may do a few more
      • Using it to control my mic mute button and also have it setup for vlc and docker using auto hotkey functions
      • Still looking for the most comfortable position to mount it
    • Also got some very thin wire .1mm to see if I can bridge the bad spots on that other board so I can have another one.
      • Once I get it working correctly I will 3D print a case for it
      • It is also the wire that I used to run the grounds for all the other keys on the one i printed
    • My water heater started leaking.  Went through a good chunk of my garage and most of my kitchen.  Caught it quickly though and got the water shut off so not much damage.
      • Going through the warranty company to get it fixed. 
      • Warranty company has been somewhat hit or miss over the years so…
      • Cost me a bit over 500 so that is not too bad.
      • Need to build a moisture sensor for it and not sure if I should use an arduino or a Pi.  What do you think?
    • This also meant that I had to shuffle my garage around a couple of times.  Once to get everything off the far wall and once to get everything out of the way so that they could get the new one in.
      • This allowed me to restructure my storage and work area
      • My son helped me figure out where to put some things in order to maximize my space and make it look neater
      • Still have a lot more work to do 
    • I have  an iPod docking station that is going to be my next item to work on.  Looks more like a sound bar.  It turns on and the clock works but no sound comes out no matter what you set the input to.  Gonna be fun taking it apart and seeing where the break is.
    • Revamping my workout
  • Tony Watts
    • Basement finishing continues
      • Added some insulation to the ceiling.  This helps contain music noise a bit but also has the benefit of keeping unwanted noise out of the Studio/Office
      • First jam session in my basement rehearsal space was a success!
        • Despite is playing pretty loud, no ringing ears on our part and the sound didn’t carry outside too much
    • “Adventure” with bathroom flood
    • Some more chromebook crouton tinkering
      • One of my kids accidentally reset the Chromebook due to developer mode screen on startup (my fault, forgot to prep him) 
      • Installed both KDE and Gnome variants of Crouton.
        • KDE was buggy on this particular Chromebook
        • Gnome was just too slow
        • Went back to XFCE which is Crouton’s default and works very well
    • Really debating a new phone purchase, Pixel 4a
      • After 3.5 years of heavy use my OnePlus 3T still holding up well but the charge port is worn out and that is getting annoying
      • Most new phones will support dual sim which is kind of a requirement for me
    • On vacation this week, working on 
      • More basement refinishing
      • Music recording
      • Prep for another Ironshield Brewing gig next weekend

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

  • There wasn’t much Linux centric today, and to keep this discussion episode going with discussion: 
    • How much of a tinfoil hatter are you?
    • What do you do in your life to secure yourself up?
  • Londoner: Proton Drive

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, September 20, 2020 at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC and 8 pm British Summer Time. Time conversions are available at https://www.timeanddate.com. You can use Austin, Texas as a Central Time reference.

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for audio editing
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4610 mintCast 339 – OLTs? More Like OLGeez (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-339-olts-more-like-olgeez-mp3/ Wed, 15 Jul 2020 04:17:50 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4525 Then, in the news, Linux is more popular than ever, there’s a snake in my boot menu, Firefox fixes the fixes, and more
In security, DuckDuckGo Stops, and hackers are stealing your interwebs.

Download
]]>

Download

1:46 Wanderings
40:36 News
54:43 Security
1:04:28 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Joshua Hawk is fighting with his mic, I upgrade all the things, Tony Hughes inkscapes and breaks lockdown, Moss gets Full Circle love, and Joe does TV repair

Then, in the news, Linux is more popular than ever, there’s a snake in my boot menu, Firefox fixes the fixes, and more

In security, DuckDuckGo Stops, and hackers are stealing your interwebs.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Joshua Hawk
    •  I have been searching for the perfect linux desktop distro for the past 2 plus years and have been everywhere from Linux Mint to Manjaro. I was on solus for about a year and then found out that it did not have the software I needed. The beginning of this year I settled back on linux mint for my main desktop and have also enjoyed openSUSE especially for servers. 
    • Before the show I had a major issue with my mic on my desktop. The audio sounded like I put the mic out of the window of a moving car. I figured it out and It happened to be the overclock on my desktop, it was really bad.
  • Leo
    • Finally got the desktop upgraded to LM20, but haven’t done anything fancy with it yet. The kernel is 5.4, and I don’t want to wait til November to get a newer one. I’ll probably move to Ukuu soon. Same with Mesa. 20.2 has given me lots of performance improvement
    • Had a couple bugs show up in LM20 on the laptop.
      • Bluetooth stutters a lot
      • cinnamon-screensaver freezes the screen in an unlocked state after waking up from suspend. However, this has been resolved.
    • Warpinator. Fantastic. It may not be better than whatever you have now, but it’s really, really good.
      • It is quite literally AirDrop for Linux.
    • I’ve installed Chromium using the Apt pinning solution provided by Clem. Chromium… is annoying. It will crash every now and then.
    • Excited to see the new episode of Linux User Space hit the internet. Tomorrow if you’re listening live, yesterday if you’re listening on mintCast release day, and a while back if you listen later. Any which way. July 12th.
  • Tony H
    • This last 2 weeks have been a little more relaxed as the lock down here in England has relaxed quite a lot so a friend came up from London and stayed a few days which was great as we had not seen each other for over 4 years. It is one of those friendships that we may not talk for months but when we do it is like it was just a few days ago. I sent him home with a loaf of homemade sourdough bread and one of my Matchbox models from the early 1960’s that he remembered having as a child.
    • The new printer is working well and I have started to use Inkscape more to design decals for the model restorations, as this gives a much better result when printing them out despite the small scale you can tell if they are just scaled photo reproductions of the original decal, although for some of the decals a upscaled picture of an original can work. There was a problem with Inkscape 0.92 not allowing me to flow text to a path, so I installed the Flatpak of 1.0 and this is working well in the new version. I’ve now got some laser decal paper and will try that out soon!!!! 
    • I’ve been using bunsenlabs Linux on the Distrohoppers laptop and it is very lightweight in respect of resources, I’m also getting more use to using keyboard shortcuts to access the web browser and various things, although I’m still using the mouse to access menus although you can use a shortcut to bring up a run menu to start software so it is possible not to use the mouse unless the software needs mouse input. As it is based on Debian 10 (Buster) then the software is a little dated but it is not a major issue as it all works.
    • Joe joined my Zoom LUG meeting last week at 4AM in the morning! ‘His’ time, that is what I call dedication or serious insomnia!!!!  
    • I joined BDLL Europe edition last night and had a good time geeking out with the crew again, I no longer feel able to stay up till 3-4am Sunday Mornings due to the disruption to my sleep pattern so the Monthly Euro edition is my BDLL fix at the moment.
  • Moss
    • I wrote up a bio of my computing life for the Linux Mint telegram group and the members insisted I submit it to Full Circle Magazine. I did so, and it was accepted for a future issue. So then I submitted my little writeup on Ventoy to FCM, and it was accepted for a NEAR future issue: Ronnie not only accepted it for an App Pick but said he was going to rush off and try it himself. Feeling good about this. If you want to read the bio, I posted it as a blog on LinuxQuestions.org. I also posted the Ventoy article as a blog, and you should also see Leo’s video.
    • I had a problem with Manjaro booting when Linux Mint 19.3 controlled Grub. I used my Ventoy stick to boot to Manjaro’s GRUB and ran grub-install there, which worked fine. I tried the OpenMandriva GRUB, and that didn’t want to work quite right (but it worked later when I went back to it). So I let Manjaro control GRUB. The guys in the Telegram group told me to try this and that, but none of it fit into my head at the time.
    • On Saturday night, the 3rd of July, I downloaded three versions of openSUSE Leap 15.2 and copied them to my Ventoy stick. I then got Joshua Hawk talking with me in the Distrohoppers’ Digest Telegram room, and figured out that Leap refuses to load from Ventoy (although Tumbleweed does work in Ventoy). So I burned a stick by itself for the netinstaller… and it could not find the website online. Did I log into my modem correctly? I don’t know. So at 23.30, I started an installation using the DVD installer on a USB stick. There were a couple times when I didn’t know what to do and Joshua helped me out. For some reason, the installer did not see my 2 Gb EFI sector, and reported I didn’t have one which was at least 550 Mb. I went ahead with the installation… and it completed. But  when I attempted to boot, it again said it could not find any boot for itself. I booted to Manjaro and attempted to fix the boot using Grub Customizer, but no. I now have a complete installation of openSUSE Leap 15.2, but no way to boot to it. I have asked for help in the openSUSE forum on LinuxQuestions.org but so far the answers are lacking understanding on one side or the other. 
    • Due to this issue, I still have no distro for the next Distrohoppers’ Digest. I tried going with BionicPup64, but it obviously is not meant to be run as a daily driver and has problems updating to current versions of apps. Still trying to work around this issue.
    • I received a Canakit with a Raspberry Pi 4, 4 Gb model, from my old friend and mintCast listener, Firecat. It’s assembled, and I only plugged it in, without OS, to make sure that it runs and to determine that it did not have a blue LED on the fan like Firecat’s fan did.
    • I received the Hyundai Technology Koral 10×3 tablet I talked about last show. But in the end, it was not even close to the hype: The advertising said it was as powerful as a desktop PC; the reality was that it was not half as powerful as my Moto X4 phone. I could not load GIF images; the camera was poor; motion in videos was blurry. I returned it to Target for full credit, and the return process was sweet as could be.
    • I did buy another tablet, helped by listener cryptodan. This one is unbranded on Amazon but met all the specs and was even cheaper, and came with an included cover, screen protector, and earphones. It is considerably better than the Hyundai was, and you can even avoid going full Android as most Google apps need to be installed. The brand turned out to be DUODUOGO, the price was $84 (although they’re sold out of the black one, and the gold one they have now – also not labeled by the brand, but called “Novel TTT” is $90). Very generic, MediaTek SoC with Mali 400 GPU. I really, really like this tablet, and have been talking about it a lot on our Telegram groups. I’ve posted a review on the new site, and am trying to elicit help in getting it to layout right. I still wish I could have gotten a PineTab, so I could have actual Linux on a tablet.
    • I was goofing around with Leo and the DHD gang on Telegram about my threatened joke site, It’s MOSS. And Cryptodan put up the money for 2 years’ domain registration, and Firecat gave me webspace, so dammit, I had to write the site. I quickly learned how much WordPress has changed, to the point that I had serious trouble even getting stuff to publish to the site and still don’t have the menus and stuff right.
    • On Thursday night the 9th, I attempted to run the Mint 20 Upgrade. I got lots of error messages, several restarts, repeated it to see if I got the same errors, and I did. So I gave up on it, and reported the same to the Linux Mint Telegram group. I booted my machine normally on Friday afternoon, and watched the usual things I watch. About 22.00, I saw an icon I didn’t recognize, telling me I had updates, and then noticed that several other icons were more Dark Mode than I was used to. I went to my computer and opened the Welcome Screen, to see that it reported I was now running Mint 20. So I opened my Terminal and ran sudo apt autoremove to get rid of the old 19.3 files, which went smoothly. I did have to install the flatpak of Mumble, and had to reinstall Kodi as there is no PPA for Focal as yet.
    • My wife has been in increasing amounts of pain, and her doctor does not seem to be willing to do anything and the chiropractor does not seem able to do anything. We are exploring other options. I just started physical therapy for my shoulder; more pain, but some increase in motion as of today. My mother is still alive and about as well as a 91-year-old woman can be expected. And we haven’t read any Dresden since before the last show. Which leads us to Joe.
  • Joe
    • Restarted the Dresden Files books so I can be all caught up when Peace Talks comes out on the 14th
    • Picked up a 60 inch 1080p TV for free with a bad HDMI chip.  HDMI did not work at all.  So I purchased a 16 dollar adapter for HDMI-to-composite and everything on the TV is working great
      • But it is hooked up to my little mini PC in the garage. which does not seem to have the graphical processing power to handle two large TVs at the same time, so I get a bit of screen tearing but I swapped the outputs of the 2 TVs and that helps the tearing a lot.  Lowering the resolution on both screens got rid of it almost entirely
      • Plus it is a plasma which probably won’t do well out in the heat for very long
      • But hey — free
    • Because it is a plasma I really can’t leave it on all the time either so I ordered an IR Blaster hub that works with Alexa since I wont be able to hook the TV up to the smart outlet, which I doubt would be able to provide enough power throughput.  
      • It works very well with both of the TVs that i have out there which are both LG
      • So I have timers setup on the computers to turn it off and the blaster to be able to quickly turn both back on.
      • This seems like a low cost substitute for a harmony remote.  You don’t need to use Alexa, you can use your phone.  Reminds me a lot of the Note 3 and Galaxy Tab 2
    • Also worked with an NFC tag and IFTTT to get some silent actions on some of my smart devices so I don’t wake the wife when I go to bed after her.  It was not too hard to setup but you have to do it from the individual apps instead of directly from Alexa which can get a little annoying 
    • Redoing my work space out in the garage because of the replacement TV.
      • Pulled out every extension cord and plug and got rid of the TV stand and a desk so far.  Reboxing some of the storage, throwing some things away and giving away some other things trying to make room for new projects
    • Priced getting ethernet run out to the garage.  Didn’t like the prices but hey I kinda expected it.  I miss having friends around that have the tools and the skills to do that type of thing.
      • It is now run and I have much more stable speeds and should be able to do several projects.
      • I moved my server out there but I don’t know how it will handle the heat of the garage.
      • I need to check the cable from the router to the wall but I am not seeing speeds as fast I should in the garage
      • Have not used the tower as a PC in a while although I have kept up with updates I may completely reformat and start over 
    • Attended Tony H LUG because I could.  
      • It was fun talking TV shows and books.
      • 4 am is a terrible time for a LUG but I had a lot of fun
      • Thanks for inviting me and I may join again.
    • Sold all of the working f*** Insignia Headphones.
      • Did not make much of a profit doing it and they were not fun to work on.  
      • Will not buy Insignia headphones again.  I have yet to find any that were worth the cost which is saying a lot considering I got this set for a bout a dollar a piece 
    • I only have one of the Skullcandy Crushers left which means I have sold 3 of them not including the ones with the 3D printed hinges.  
      • Have made a decent profit selling these so far
      • Paid less than 90 for the headphones 
      • Sold 3 so far at 60 dollars each so I have doubled my money
      • Seems like this might be a good time of year to sell cans
      • Have given or traded 2 of the ones with 3D printed hinges.
        • One to my daughter which she loves
        • One to a listener in exchange for a broken laptop
        • I am also using one of the ones with 3D printed hinges which leaves one left.  Wonder what I should do with it
    • Put a graphics card into my server and set it up to use as a desktop in my garage
      • I let it sit for a day powered in my garage to make sure that it was stable and had no problems
      • In the wee hours of the morning i could not sleep so i finished hooking it up to my monitors and after some finagling it worked although I had intermittent cut outs on one of the monitors which I was still troubleshooting and thinking that it was an issue with power
      • I did the upgrade path for Linux Mint 20 although I did have to go through 19.3 to get there.  The power cut part-way through the update
      • It was not hard to fix, just restarted and configure all and it was done
      • The upgrade path required removing all the external repos so it removed x2go docker resilio sync and plex
      • Installed a couple of applications since the update required removal of some of the repos
      • It shut down again but I was monitoring temperatures.  While they were higher than I would have liked, they should not have caused the shut off
      • I let the machine sit for about ten minutes and then powered it on again.  It powered back off after the login twice.
      • But the third time it shut off before the login was finished so it was not programmatical 
      • Turns out both of my back up power supplies were also bad.  One provided no power and the other would turn on and then turn off.
      • My assumptions of the possibilities at this point are 
        • The power supply is bad and I need a new one
        • The motherboard is bad and I need a new one
        • There is a problem with the motherboard cpu combo and I need a new motherboard
        • Any way you cut it I need new hardware
        • Haven’t decided if I am going to get the new mobo power supply and reuse the processor and ram or if I am just going to completely upgrade

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE

Announcements:

The next show will be Sunday, the 26th of July at 7PM UTC, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM British Summer Time

Wrap-up:

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.
]]> full 4525 mintCast 339 – OLTs? More Like OLGeez https://mintcast.org/mintcast-339-olts-more-like-olgeez/ Wed, 15 Jul 2020 03:52:53 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4520 Then, in the news, Linux is more popular than ever, there’s a snake in my boot menu, Firefox fixes the fixes, and more
In security, DuckDuckGo Stops, and hackers are stealing your interwebs.
Download
]]>

Download

1:46 Wanderings
40:36 News
54:43 Security
1:04:28 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Joshua Hawk is fighting with his mic, I upgrade all the things, Tony Hughes inkscapes and breaks lockdown, Moss gets Full Circle love, and Joe does TV repair

Then, in the news, Linux is more popular than ever, there’s a snake in my boot menu, Firefox fixes the fixes, and more

In security, DuckDuckGo Stops, and hackers are stealing your interwebs.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Joshua Hawk
    •  I have been searching for the perfect linux desktop distro for the past 2 plus years and have been everywhere from Linux Mint to Manjaro. I was on solus for about a year and then found out that it did not have the software I needed. The beginning of this year I settled back on linux mint for my main desktop and have also enjoyed openSUSE especially for servers. 
    • Before the show I had a major issue with my mic on my desktop. The audio sounded like I put the mic out of the window of a moving car. I figured it out and It happened to be the overclock on my desktop, it was really bad.
  • Leo
    • Finally got the desktop upgraded to LM20, but haven’t done anything fancy with it yet. The kernel is 5.4, and I don’t want to wait til November to get a newer one. I’ll probably move to Ukuu soon. Same with Mesa. 20.2 has given me lots of performance improvement
    • Had a couple bugs show up in LM20 on the laptop.
      • Bluetooth stutters a lot
      • cinnamon-screensaver freezes the screen in an unlocked state after waking up from suspend. However, this has been resolved.
    • Warpinator. Fantastic. It may not be better than whatever you have now, but it’s really, really good.
      • It is quite literally AirDrop for Linux.
    • I’ve installed Chromium using the Apt pinning solution provided by Clem. Chromium… is annoying. It will crash every now and then.
    • Excited to see the new episode of Linux User Space hit the internet. Tomorrow if you’re listening live, yesterday if you’re listening on mintCast release day, and a while back if you listen later. Any which way. July 12th.
  • Tony H
    • This last 2 weeks have been a little more relaxed as the lock down here in England has relaxed quite a lot so a friend came up from London and stayed a few days which was great as we had not seen each other for over 4 years. It is one of those friendships that we may not talk for months but when we do it is like it was just a few days ago. I sent him home with a loaf of homemade sourdough bread and one of my Matchbox models from the early 1960’s that he remembered having as a child.
    • The new printer is working well and I have started to use Inkscape more to design decals for the model restorations, as this gives a much better result when printing them out despite the small scale you can tell if they are just scaled photo reproductions of the original decal, although for some of the decals a upscaled picture of an original can work. There was a problem with Inkscape 0.92 not allowing me to flow text to a path, so I installed the Flatpak of 1.0 and this is working well in the new version. I’ve now got some laser decal paper and will try that out soon!!!! 
    • I’ve been using bunsenlabs Linux on the Distrohoppers laptop and it is very lightweight in respect of resources, I’m also getting more use to using keyboard shortcuts to access the web browser and various things, although I’m still using the mouse to access menus although you can use a shortcut to bring up a run menu to start software so it is possible not to use the mouse unless the software needs mouse input. As it is based on Debian 10 (Buster) then the software is a little dated but it is not a major issue as it all works.
    • Joe joined my Zoom LUG meeting last week at 4AM in the morning! ‘His’ time, that is what I call dedication or serious insomnia!!!!  
    • I joined BDLL Europe edition last night and had a good time geeking out with the crew again, I no longer feel able to stay up till 3-4am Sunday Mornings due to the disruption to my sleep pattern so the Monthly Euro edition is my BDLL fix at the moment.
  • Moss
    • I wrote up a bio of my computing life for the Linux Mint telegram group and the members insisted I submit it to Full Circle Magazine. I did so, and it was accepted for a future issue. So then I submitted my little writeup on Ventoy to FCM, and it was accepted for a NEAR future issue: Ronnie not only accepted it for an App Pick but said he was going to rush off and try it himself. Feeling good about this. If you want to read the bio, I posted it as a blog on LinuxQuestions.org. I also posted the Ventoy article as a blog, and you should also see Leo’s video.
    • I had a problem with Manjaro booting when Linux Mint 19.3 controlled Grub. I used my Ventoy stick to boot to Manjaro’s GRUB and ran grub-install there, which worked fine. I tried the OpenMandriva GRUB, and that didn’t want to work quite right (but it worked later when I went back to it). So I let Manjaro control GRUB. The guys in the Telegram group told me to try this and that, but none of it fit into my head at the time.
    • On Saturday night, the 3rd of July, I downloaded three versions of openSUSE Leap 15.2 and copied them to my Ventoy stick. I then got Joshua Hawk talking with me in the Distrohoppers’ Digest Telegram room, and figured out that Leap refuses to load from Ventoy (although Tumbleweed does work in Ventoy). So I burned a stick by itself for the netinstaller… and it could not find the website online. Did I log into my modem correctly? I don’t know. So at 23.30, I started an installation using the DVD installer on a USB stick. There were a couple times when I didn’t know what to do and Joshua helped me out. For some reason, the installer did not see my 2 Gb EFI sector, and reported I didn’t have one which was at least 550 Mb. I went ahead with the installation… and it completed. But  when I attempted to boot, it again said it could not find any boot for itself. I booted to Manjaro and attempted to fix the boot using Grub Customizer, but no. I now have a complete installation of openSUSE Leap 15.2, but no way to boot to it. I have asked for help in the openSUSE forum on LinuxQuestions.org but so far the answers are lacking understanding on one side or the other. 
    • Due to this issue, I still have no distro for the next Distrohoppers’ Digest. I tried going with BionicPup64, but it obviously is not meant to be run as a daily driver and has problems updating to current versions of apps. Still trying to work around this issue.
    • I received a Canakit with a Raspberry Pi 4, 4 Gb model, from my old friend and mintCast listener, Firecat. It’s assembled, and I only plugged it in, without OS, to make sure that it runs and to determine that it did not have a blue LED on the fan like Firecat’s fan did.
    • I received the Hyundai Technology Koral 10×3 tablet I talked about last show. But in the end, it was not even close to the hype: The advertising said it was as powerful as a desktop PC; the reality was that it was not half as powerful as my Moto X4 phone. I could not load GIF images; the camera was poor; motion in videos was blurry. I returned it to Target for full credit, and the return process was sweet as could be.
    • I did buy another tablet, helped by listener cryptodan. This one is unbranded on Amazon but met all the specs and was even cheaper, and came with an included cover, screen protector, and earphones. It is considerably better than the Hyundai was, and you can even avoid going full Android as most Google apps need to be installed. The brand turned out to be DUODUOGO, the price was $84 (although they’re sold out of the black one, and the gold one they have now – also not labeled by the brand, but called “Novel TTT” is $90). Very generic, MediaTek SoC with Mali 400 GPU. I really, really like this tablet, and have been talking about it a lot on our Telegram groups. I’ve posted a review on the new site, and am trying to elicit help in getting it to layout right. I still wish I could have gotten a PineTab, so I could have actual Linux on a tablet.
    • I was goofing around with Leo and the DHD gang on Telegram about my threatened joke site, It’s MOSS. And Cryptodan put up the money for 2 years’ domain registration, and Firecat gave me webspace, so dammit, I had to write the site. I quickly learned how much WordPress has changed, to the point that I had serious trouble even getting stuff to publish to the site and still don’t have the menus and stuff right.
    • On Thursday night the 9th, I attempted to run the Mint 20 Upgrade. I got lots of error messages, several restarts, repeated it to see if I got the same errors, and I did. So I gave up on it, and reported the same to the Linux Mint Telegram group. I booted my machine normally on Friday afternoon, and watched the usual things I watch. About 22.00, I saw an icon I didn’t recognize, telling me I had updates, and then noticed that several other icons were more Dark Mode than I was used to. I went to my computer and opened the Welcome Screen, to see that it reported I was now running Mint 20. So I opened my Terminal and ran sudo apt autoremove to get rid of the old 19.3 files, which went smoothly. I did have to install the flatpak of Mumble, and had to reinstall Kodi as there is no PPA for Focal as yet.
    • My wife has been in increasing amounts of pain, and her doctor does not seem to be willing to do anything and the chiropractor does not seem able to do anything. We are exploring other options. I just started physical therapy for my shoulder; more pain, but some increase in motion as of today. My mother is still alive and about as well as a 91-year-old woman can be expected. And we haven’t read any Dresden since before the last show. Which leads us to Joe.
  • Joe
    • Restarted the Dresden Files books so I can be all caught up when Peace Talks comes out on the 14th
    • Picked up a 60 inch 1080p TV for free with a bad HDMI chip.  HDMI did not work at all.  So I purchased a 16 dollar adapter for HDMI-to-composite and everything on the TV is working great
      • But it is hooked up to my little mini PC in the garage. which does not seem to have the graphical processing power to handle two large TVs at the same time, so I get a bit of screen tearing but I swapped the outputs of the 2 TVs and that helps the tearing a lot.  Lowering the resolution on both screens got rid of it almost entirely
      • Plus it is a plasma which probably won’t do well out in the heat for very long
      • But hey — free
    • Because it is a plasma I really can’t leave it on all the time either so I ordered an IR Blaster hub that works with Alexa since I wont be able to hook the TV up to the smart outlet, which I doubt would be able to provide enough power throughput.  
      • It works very well with both of the TVs that i have out there which are both LG
      • So I have timers setup on the computers to turn it off and the blaster to be able to quickly turn both back on.
      • This seems like a low cost substitute for a harmony remote.  You don’t need to use Alexa, you can use your phone.  Reminds me a lot of the Note 3 and Galaxy Tab 2
    • Also worked with an NFC tag and IFTTT to get some silent actions on some of my smart devices so I don’t wake the wife when I go to bed after her.  It was not too hard to setup but you have to do it from the individual apps instead of directly from Alexa which can get a little annoying 
    • Redoing my work space out in the garage because of the replacement TV.
      • Pulled out every extension cord and plug and got rid of the TV stand and a desk so far.  Reboxing some of the storage, throwing some things away and giving away some other things trying to make room for new projects
    • Priced getting ethernet run out to the garage.  Didn’t like the prices but hey I kinda expected it.  I miss having friends around that have the tools and the skills to do that type of thing.
      • It is now run and I have much more stable speeds and should be able to do several projects.
      • I moved my server out there but I don’t know how it will handle the heat of the garage.
      • I need to check the cable from the router to the wall but I am not seeing speeds as fast I should in the garage
      • Have not used the tower as a PC in a while although I have kept up with updates I may completely reformat and start over 
    • Attended Tony H LUG because I could.  
      • It was fun talking TV shows and books.
      • 4 am is a terrible time for a LUG but I had a lot of fun
      • Thanks for inviting me and I may join again.
    • Sold all of the working f*** Insignia Headphones.
      • Did not make much of a profit doing it and they were not fun to work on.  
      • Will not buy Insignia headphones again.  I have yet to find any that were worth the cost which is saying a lot considering I got this set for a bout a dollar a piece 
    • I only have one of the Skullcandy Crushers left which means I have sold 3 of them not including the ones with the 3D printed hinges.  
      • Have made a decent profit selling these so far
      • Paid less than 90 for the headphones 
      • Sold 3 so far at 60 dollars each so I have doubled my money
      • Seems like this might be a good time of year to sell cans
      • Have given or traded 2 of the ones with 3D printed hinges.
        • One to my daughter which she loves
        • One to a listener in exchange for a broken laptop
        • I am also using one of the ones with 3D printed hinges which leaves one left.  Wonder what I should do with it
    • Put a graphics card into my server and set it up to use as a desktop in my garage
      • I let it sit for a day powered in my garage to make sure that it was stable and had no problems
      • In the wee hours of the morning i could not sleep so i finished hooking it up to my monitors and after some finagling it worked although I had intermittent cut outs on one of the monitors which I was still troubleshooting and thinking that it was an issue with power
      • I did the upgrade path for Linux Mint 20 although I did have to go through 19.3 to get there.  The power cut part-way through the update
      • It was not hard to fix, just restarted and configure all and it was done
      • The upgrade path required removing all the external repos so it removed x2go docker resilio sync and plex
      • Installed a couple of applications since the update required removal of some of the repos
      • It shut down again but I was monitoring temperatures.  While they were higher than I would have liked, they should not have caused the shut off
      • I let the machine sit for about ten minutes and then powered it on again.  It powered back off after the login twice.
      • But the third time it shut off before the login was finished so it was not programmatical 
      • Turns out both of my back up power supplies were also bad.  One provided no power and the other would turn on and then turn off.
      • My assumptions of the possibilities at this point are 
        • The power supply is bad and I need a new one
        • The motherboard is bad and I need a new one
        • There is a problem with the motherboard cpu combo and I need a new motherboard
        • Any way you cut it I need new hardware
        • Haven’t decided if I am going to get the new mobo power supply and reuse the processor and ram or if I am just going to completely upgrade

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE

Announcements:

The next show will be Sunday, the 26th of July at 7PM UTC, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM British Summer Time

Wrap-up:

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.
]]> full 4520 mintCast 327.5 – Doppelganger https://mintcast.org/mintcast-327-5-doppelganger/ Wed, 05 Feb 2020 05:27:09 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4200 Some listener feedback and "check this out."
Download
]]>

Download

In our Innards section, we talk Linux Mint’s new Doppelganger with Joshua Peisach (@ItzSwirlz) from Ubuntu Cinnamon (@UbuntuCinnamon).

Some listener feedback and “check this out.”

LINUX INNARDS:

Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix with Josh Peisach

What was your motivation for creating Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix?

Who is working on it with you?

  • Simon Quigly
  • FossFreedom
  • Lubuntu team
  • Moss
    •  I don’t get to lead too many of these things off, but as the resident mad distrohopper, I thought I’d try this one. It installed easily and cleanly; I love Calamares when it works. I have only had one complaint, and that was the color scheme. I don’t often tweak themes, but that Ubuntu Brown and Orange gets pretty tedious and my active tabs in Firefox have an orange bar above them. I’m still not a huge fan of Cinnamon, but am currently using both Mint and Ubuntu Cinnamon (still using Mint Mate as my main distro), and Mint is easier to look at. The missing Mint tools make a difference, and I’m sure Ubuntu users would comment obversely. I definitely need to add Mintstick if I’m going to keep using this. Really, for me the Mint tools are better than the Ubuntu tools, or at least I use them more, so I don’t see why I can’t have a nice minty-green screen.
  • Joe
    • Took a couple of tries and an assist from Moss to get it installed because of an issue with the installer 
    • Very Modern looking and a very nice color scheme
    • Applications ran smooth and startup times were not that long.  All in all, no complaints although I did notice that some of the tools that I use were missing.  Most specifically disks, which i can handle using fstab and i am not sure what ubuntu uses instead also disk usage analyzer.  
    • Rotation works well after I went into settings general and turned it on
    • I went through my usual, installing x2go client and server and the snap of Standard Notes. All are working well. 
    • Going to try Pluma instead of gedit and see how I like it.
    • For some reason sshfs set up but none of my normal scripting/automation stuff worked for it.  If-up and if-down did not seem to function. I am able to make the scripts work when I run them manually but they are ignored by the system
    • The most interesting aspect that I have found in this release is that it includes a 32 bit efi built in.  So I attempted to install it on one of my old 8 inch tablets that had a 32bit efi but a 64 bit processor. It loaded up and i was able to start up the install process but it would lock up everytime it got to the region selection.  It was also very slow on the device. But that is the fault of the device. I also went through the hoops to try and install Linux Mint and got the same issue. Mate worked though. Forgot how much work it was to get one of these set up. 
    • Beyond that, I can say that the OS feels very nice and is responsive, other than the issue with not being able to do a basic install.  
    • Do want to mention that since this is the 7140 I have no way of testing if suspend and resume work properly. 
    • No pinch to zoom.
  • Tony Hughes 
    • Installed to Virtualbox and even in a VM it boots in 10 seconds with 2 cores of my i7 and 4Gb RAM allocated in VB. By default I was happy to find GIMP installed out of the box, but still no Synaptic or Audacity but, as this is Ubuntu under the hood, all these applications are either an ‘sudo apt install’ away or ‘sudo snap install’ if that is your chosen method of installing software. So all the regular tools I use for podcasting such as Mumble and Audacity.
    • As Moss said, it is a nice OS, it was easy to install and I could see this being one of the systems on a drive in the ‘icy dock’ when I finally get around to upgrading my main i7 tower later this spring.    
  • Leo
    • The first thing that struck me was the theme, Kimmo. A bright orange take on Mint-Y, which was, as far as I can tell, forked from the Arc theme.
    • I really enjoy the icon theme itself, but the orange highlighting with the orange icons cause visibility issues on the taskbar. Hovering over the folders especially. I think this is probably why Ubuntu went with a more burnt orange in a lot of cases. But orange is my favorite color, so it’s hard to admit “too much orange” is a thing.
    • My personal preference would be Kimmo-dark everywhere except the icon theme. Go Kimmo-light there and all those issues go away.
    • Seconds counter in the clock!
    • Desktop font is set to “none” in the Font Selection too, but looks like it defaults to Sans Regular. I wonder if the plan is to use the Ubuntu fonts as Linux Mint does, or go with something different?
    • Has the same boot splash as Ubuntu, so I expect lots of new customization in the future.
    • Games like 2048, Sudoku and Chess come pre-installed. Is this the same for all Ubuntu flavors?
    • Of course, Xapps are dropped in favor of their Gnome counterparts. For instance, instead of Pix, you have Gnome-Photos.
    • Oddly, there is no Gnome Disks. Just GParted. This affects the accessibility of disk configurations for the new user.
  • Tony W
    • The ISO download took about an hour
    • Installed in VM
    • Probably the biggest quirks I ran into were Virtualbox itself and not Ubuntu Cinnamon
      • For some reason the ‘launch’ option wasn’t there after installing via Software Manager.  Virtualbox did not appear in my menu in Linux Mint either (required reboot) but had no problem launching it from Terminal
      • ‘Running in software rendering mode’ message
    • I did not readily see an ‘install’ option on desktop from liveUSB; I searched ‘install’ from menu and see the install option is under Administration in menu tree.  
    • Installed Mumble from Software, chose the first Mumble option (of 2) and it was a Snap (mumble 1.3).  Snaps get priority in search results from Software, presumably same behavior as Ubuntu. Mumble was not added to menu until I rebooted
    • I am not a big fan of the color scheme either but it is probably appropriate for this distro, being an Ubuntu spinoff (I am not a big fan of stock Ubuntu color scheme either and I probably like Ubuntu Cinnamon’s better)
  • Josh
    • Super fast on my Ryzen 2600 build
    • Modern theme and I really like it
    • My favourite colour is orange so obviously like the theme
    • Really like the installer, one of the nicest i’ve used next to Deepin
    • For a volunteer effort, it’s a pretty good distro and look forward to the developments
    • I imagine it’s coming in the future, but it’d be nice to have a website to host the distro

How are you dealing with the newfound fame? You’re all over the Linux News sites now!?

What do you think of Flatpak?

What would you say to people that might say that you don’t need Ubuntu Cinnamon because Mint Exists?

Why a new distro, why not just install Cinnamon on the base Ubuntu?

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

CHECK THIS OUT! 

Announcements:

  • Our Next Episode will be live Feb 9, 2020. 2PM CST, 8PM UTC

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)
]]> full 1:22:38 4200 mintCast 327.5 – Doppelganger (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-327-5-doppelganger-mp3/ Wed, 05 Feb 2020 05:25:58 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4196 Some listener feedback and "check this out."
Download
]]>

Download

In our Innards section, we talk Linux Mint’s new Doppelganger with Joshua Peisach (@ItzSwirlz) from Ubuntu Cinnamon (@UbuntuCinnamon).

Some listener feedback and “check this out.”

LINUX INNARDS:

Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix with Josh Peisach

What was your motivation for creating Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix?

Who is working on it with you?

  • Simon Quigly
  • FossFreedom
  • Lubuntu team
  • Moss
    •  I don’t get to lead too many of these things off, but as the resident mad distrohopper, I thought I’d try this one. It installed easily and cleanly; I love Calamares when it works. I have only had one complaint, and that was the color scheme. I don’t often tweak themes, but that Ubuntu Brown and Orange gets pretty tedious and my active tabs in Firefox have an orange bar above them. I’m still not a huge fan of Cinnamon, but am currently using both Mint and Ubuntu Cinnamon (still using Mint Mate as my main distro), and Mint is easier to look at. The missing Mint tools make a difference, and I’m sure Ubuntu users would comment obversely. I definitely need to add Mintstick if I’m going to keep using this. Really, for me the Mint tools are better than the Ubuntu tools, or at least I use them more, so I don’t see why I can’t have a nice minty-green screen.
  • Joe
    • Took a couple of tries and an assist from Moss to get it installed because of an issue with the installer 
    • Very Modern looking and a very nice color scheme
    • Applications ran smooth and startup times were not that long.  All in all, no complaints although I did notice that some of the tools that I use were missing.  Most specifically disks, which i can handle using fstab and i am not sure what ubuntu uses instead also disk usage analyzer.  
    • Rotation works well after I went into settings general and turned it on
    • I went through my usual, installing x2go client and server and the snap of Standard Notes. All are working well. 
    • Going to try Pluma instead of gedit and see how I like it.
    • For some reason sshfs set up but none of my normal scripting/automation stuff worked for it.  If-up and if-down did not seem to function. I am able to make the scripts work when I run them manually but they are ignored by the system
    • The most interesting aspect that I have found in this release is that it includes a 32 bit efi built in.  So I attempted to install it on one of my old 8 inch tablets that had a 32bit efi but a 64 bit processor. It loaded up and i was able to start up the install process but it would lock up everytime it got to the region selection.  It was also very slow on the device. But that is the fault of the device. I also went through the hoops to try and install Linux Mint and got the same issue. Mate worked though. Forgot how much work it was to get one of these set up. 
    • Beyond that, I can say that the OS feels very nice and is responsive, other than the issue with not being able to do a basic install.  
    • Do want to mention that since this is the 7140 I have no way of testing if suspend and resume work properly. 
    • No pinch to zoom.
  • Tony Hughes 
    • Installed to Virtualbox and even in a VM it boots in 10 seconds with 2 cores of my i7 and 4Gb RAM allocated in VB. By default I was happy to find GIMP installed out of the box, but still no Synaptic or Audacity but, as this is Ubuntu under the hood, all these applications are either an ‘sudo apt install’ away or ‘sudo snap install’ if that is your chosen method of installing software. So all the regular tools I use for podcasting such as Mumble and Audacity.
    • As Moss said, it is a nice OS, it was easy to install and I could see this being one of the systems on a drive in the ‘icy dock’ when I finally get around to upgrading my main i7 tower later this spring.    
  • Leo
    • The first thing that struck me was the theme, Kimmo. A bright orange take on Mint-Y, which was, as far as I can tell, forked from the Arc theme.
    • I really enjoy the icon theme itself, but the orange highlighting with the orange icons cause visibility issues on the taskbar. Hovering over the folders especially. I think this is probably why Ubuntu went with a more burnt orange in a lot of cases. But orange is my favorite color, so it’s hard to admit “too much orange” is a thing.
    • My personal preference would be Kimmo-dark everywhere except the icon theme. Go Kimmo-light there and all those issues go away.
    • Seconds counter in the clock!
    • Desktop font is set to “none” in the Font Selection too, but looks like it defaults to Sans Regular. I wonder if the plan is to use the Ubuntu fonts as Linux Mint does, or go with something different?
    • Has the same boot splash as Ubuntu, so I expect lots of new customization in the future.
    • Games like 2048, Sudoku and Chess come pre-installed. Is this the same for all Ubuntu flavors?
    • Of course, Xapps are dropped in favor of their Gnome counterparts. For instance, instead of Pix, you have Gnome-Photos.
    • Oddly, there is no Gnome Disks. Just GParted. This affects the accessibility of disk configurations for the new user.
  • Tony W
    • The ISO download took about an hour
    • Installed in VM
    • Probably the biggest quirks I ran into were Virtualbox itself and not Ubuntu Cinnamon
      • For some reason the ‘launch’ option wasn’t there after installing via Software Manager.  Virtualbox did not appear in my menu in Linux Mint either (required reboot) but had no problem launching it from Terminal
      • ‘Running in software rendering mode’ message
    • I did not readily see an ‘install’ option on desktop from liveUSB; I searched ‘install’ from menu and see the install option is under Administration in menu tree.  
    • Installed Mumble from Software, chose the first Mumble option (of 2) and it was a Snap (mumble 1.3).  Snaps get priority in search results from Software, presumably same behavior as Ubuntu. Mumble was not added to menu until I rebooted
    • I am not a big fan of the color scheme either but it is probably appropriate for this distro, being an Ubuntu spinoff (I am not a big fan of stock Ubuntu color scheme either and I probably like Ubuntu Cinnamon’s better)
  • Josh
    • Super fast on my Ryzen 2600 build
    • Modern theme and I really like it
    • My favourite colour is orange so obviously like the theme
    • Really like the installer, one of the nicest i’ve used next to Deepin
    • For a volunteer effort, it’s a pretty good distro and look forward to the developments
    • I imagine it’s coming in the future, but it’d be nice to have a website to host the distro

How are you dealing with the newfound fame? You’re all over the Linux News sites now!?

What do you think of Flatpak?

What would you say to people that might say that you don’t need Ubuntu Cinnamon because Mint Exists?

Why a new distro, why not just install Cinnamon on the base Ubuntu?

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

CHECK THIS OUT! 

Announcements:

  • Our Next Episode will be live Feb 9, 2020. 2PM CST, 8PM UTC

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)
]]> full 1:22:38 4196 mintCast 322.5 – Clem Before the Storm https://mintcast.org/mintcast-322-5-clem-before-the-storm/ Wed, 27 Nov 2019 05:02:21 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4030 And finally, our listener feedback.
Download
]]>

Download

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

LINUX INNARDS:

Clement Lefebvre on Episode 321

oh.. mint tools and apps, cool

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

but it does so only in Mint, not in LMDE

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

you might remember Alberto Milone’s Envy

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

that’s jockey;

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

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

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

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

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

https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift

GitHub

teejee2008/timeshift

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

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

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

it’s probably better to ghost or disk image though

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

if you go here

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

Music for everyone.

Spotify is all the music you’ll ever need.

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

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

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

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

Flathub—An app store and build service for Linux

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

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

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

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

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

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

as it turns out Flash died, good riddance.

(on Episode 320):

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

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

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

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

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

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

  • Marc
  • David
  • Gordon
  • George from Tulsa

Topic for MintCast:

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

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

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

CHECK THIS OUT!

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

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

WRAP-UP:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 52:01 4030 mintCast 322.5 – Clem Before the Storm (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-322-5-clem-before-the-storm-mp3/ Wed, 27 Nov 2019 05:01:50 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4028 And finally, our listener feedback.
Download
]]>

Download

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

LINUX INNARDS:

Clement Lefebvre on Episode 321

oh.. mint tools and apps, cool

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

but it does so only in Mint, not in LMDE

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

you might remember Alberto Milone’s Envy

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

that’s jockey;

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

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

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

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

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

https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift

GitHub

teejee2008/timeshift

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

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

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

it’s probably better to ghost or disk image though

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

if you go here

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

Music for everyone.

Spotify is all the music you’ll ever need.

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

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

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

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

Flathub—An app store and build service for Linux

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

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

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

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

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

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

as it turns out Flash died, good riddance.

(on Episode 320):

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

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

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

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

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

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

  • Marc
  • David
  • Gordon
  • George from Tulsa

Topic for MintCast:

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

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

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

CHECK THIS OUT!

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

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

WRAP-UP:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 52:01 4028 mintCast 322 – The Linux Defender https://mintcast.org/mintcast-322-the-linux-defender/ Wed, 20 Nov 2019 06:25:01 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4019 Then, in the news, Microsoft is working overtime, Docker gets a second wind, new Debian updates, big .org changes, and more.
In security, Microsoft brings Defender ATP to Linux, and another speculative execution vulnerability.
Download
]]>

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo picks up a hard drive docking station, Tony tests the new Gnome, Moss fights overscanning, and Joe volunteers for Full Circle — And last minute guest Oliver Kelly

Then, in the news, Microsoft is working overtime, Docker gets a second wind, new Debian updates, big .org changes, and more.

In security, Microsoft brings Defender ATP to Linux, and another speculative execution vulnerability.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Got a new hard drive docking station.
    • Working on news hunting and gathering up some reliable sources to pull from. Some staff changes at Full Circle means that I’ll be gathering up a lot, if not all, of my news myself.
    • So far, so good. Plenty of things to cover, which means that the show here will pull from the same pot!
  • Tony H 
    • Continuing to work with the Ubuntu 19.10 Gnome install on the test laptop for Distrohoppers Digest, I’m actually starting to get used to some of the differences in DE layout. After the install of the Arc menu things are a little easier to navigate, and I am finding myself resorting to the keyboard for some of the things I would normally use the mouse/trackpad for.
    • Buying more Matchbox diecast models from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s and getting some real bargains off Ebay. I have bought a drill for drilling out the rivets and have started to dismantle a few of the poorer condition models apart with a view to starting a restoration. I’ll let you know how it goes.
    • It’s a good job we postponed the next DH recording as I’ve got another funeral to attend which would have made me unavailable to record. Otherwise life is starting to stabilize a little with my health back on the up and feeling a little more like normal (whatever that is)     
  • Moss
    • I’ve been working slowly on my next review for Distrohoppers’ Digest. Some interesting things going on in Zorin OS.
    • I can’t seem to keep my power supply plug plugged into my Galago Pro 2. If it just moves a tiny fraction of a millimeter it stops charging. I’m not sure what to do about that, other than to keep an eye on the battery icon on my desktop.
    • I received a Raspberry Pi 3B with a Pimoroni clear case from Tony Hughes via George Doscher of Tech + Coffee (Thanks, Tony and George!). Handing this little item off to George at OggCamp saved Tony quite a few quid in postage, and George, I am told, refused to accept money from Tony for US postage. 
    • So I plugged in and started up the Pi 3B while my Galago Pro was running. The Pi was on HDMI-1 and the Galago Pro was on HDMI-3 on my TV/monitor. The Pi worked great, but when I switched the monitor over to HDMI-3, my Linux Mint was badly overscanned (about 20%) so I could barely use it. I changed resolution to 1480×720 and it worked, but of course everything was so much larger. I later discovered that it had the same effect on my Bodhi 5.1 installation, which was doubly weird and not as easy to fix (ARndR is much harder to work with on an overscanned screen than Displays is), but there was no effect at all on my installs of Pearl Desktop 8 (based on Ubuntu 19.04), Ubuntu Budgie 19.10, or Q4OS (Debian 10 Buster). Apparently it triggered something in 18.04 code *only*. The fix ultimately was to change the Galago Pro to HDMI-2, and it’s a good thing the TV has 3 HDMI inputs. The guys in the mintCast Telegram group tried to talk me into plugging in the Pi again to prove the concept, but I decided I had my system working and wanted to keep it that way.
    • Dale Miracle sent a nice donation, including a new Logitech M570 trackball. Thank you, Dale.  I now have all the tech stuff I can use at the present time, and still have two laptops for sale as well as a few other miscellaneous bits of gear.
    • Just before the show, I got the proverbial wild hair up my patootie to set up a new partition on my 1 Tb drive in the Galago Pro 2. So I did. GPartEd performed like a champ. I shrunk sda1 to 250 Gb, and then shrunk sda3 the other way — forcing GPartEd to copy files to a new location on the partition. While that is scary, and while they say it CAN destroy files, once again GPartEd performed like a champ and did everything without a hitch. And I learned something — I thought you could only have 3 Primary partitions on a drive, but I now have 4. Sda4 is now formatted and waiting for a new distro to be put on it. I’m going to go out on a limb and try Sabayon first.
    • Reading-wise we are on Empire of Jade, the second Temeraire book by Naomi Novik, moving slowly as we’ve had quite a few crises keeping me busy until it was too sleepy out to read.
  • Joe
    • Demon Accords by John Conroe
      • Once again an OK series.
      • Some of the downside of the series is the main character is just way too OP
      • But my main issue with it has to do with the reader.  I will have to pick up a copy of the book because through the first half of the series the reader makes all the speakers sound like they are asking a question.  It is a bit distracting.  
      • I will say that the reader greatly improved later on and I did end up liking the story especially with the introduction of some of the other main characters.
    • Jack Campbell – The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier [1-5]
      • Good read.  Didn’t realize it was a sequel series until I had started it
      • Will read the first series later on
      • Well read.  The reader does an excellent job of using different voices for different people
    • Talked to the guys from Full Circle about the article I wrote and they got back to me saying it might be a few issues before we do anything and that I would need to add some graphics or screen shots.  Also found a mistake I had made in the article I sent for review where I mention ssl forwarding instead of ssh -l for local port forwarding. Got that cleaned up and now I am adding images.
      • Also discussed a portion of the article on TLLTS
    • Local Lug
      • Spent a lot of time talking about security and VPNs.
      • The guy I was talking to sells electronic insurance and wants to protect clients and client data.
      • Discussed when using a vpn was a good choice and how it was secure
      • Someone brought in the pinebook pro
        • Really cool device
    • Had to work on my toilet last weekend
      • One of those things where the more you fix the more that breaks
      • The original problem is that the float arm started breaking so if you did not shut it off from the wall it would slowly continue running and draining down the overflow.  
      • We were holding off on fixing it because I am not a plumber
      • But then the shut off valve quit shutting all the way off so I figured to just fix the toilet since I already had the parts and then I work on the shut off valve later
      • Had to shut off the mains from the meter which was a pain.  That replacement was not too difficult other then making a bit of a watery mess but after I got it in place there was still a constant running.  Turns out someone had previously done a glue repair on the overflow and it was not holding up any longer. So had to go to walmart and get more tools and a new overflow valve.
      • In order to replace that part you need to take the tank off.  Problem is that one of the copper bolts was completely rusted stuck.  Well this means that I have to dremel it. I have a dremel but I am all out of cutting bits so I ended up needing to go back to walmart for more bits.  Got it cut out
      • Walmart doesn’t sell the replacement bolts.  So I got everything put back together except for that one bolt and wedged the valve so that the family could use water,  had to wait for home depot to open up so that I could get the bolts.  
      • Did get it all put back together but on the bolt I didn’t replace there is a small leak only when the tank first starts filling. So I will need to replace that and still need to replace the wall valve.
  • Oliver Kelly
    • https://medium.com/@pentacent/nginx-and-lets-encrypt-with-docker-in-less-than-5-minutes-b4b8a60d3a71
    • https://www.humankode.com/ssl/how-to-set-up-free-ssl-certificates-from-lets-encrypt-using-docker-and-nginx
    • http://0lzi.tk/episode-009
    • https://junocomputers.com/

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE: 

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

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

WRAP-UP:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 1:15:08 4019 mintCast 322 – The Linux Defender (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-322-the-linux-defender-mp3/ Wed, 20 Nov 2019 06:23:02 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4017 Then, in the news, Microsoft is working overtime, Docker gets a second wind, new Debian updates, big .org changes, and more.
In security, Microsoft brings Defender ATP to Linux, and another speculative execution vulnerability.
Download
]]>

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo picks up a hard drive docking station, Tony tests the new Gnome, Moss fights overscanning, and Joe volunteers for Full Circle — And last minute guest Oliver Kelly

Then, in the news, Microsoft is working overtime, Docker gets a second wind, new Debian updates, big .org changes, and more.

In security, Microsoft brings Defender ATP to Linux, and another speculative execution vulnerability.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Got a new hard drive docking station.
    • Working on news hunting and gathering up some reliable sources to pull from. Some staff changes at Full Circle means that I’ll be gathering up a lot, if not all, of my news myself.
    • So far, so good. Plenty of things to cover, which means that the show here will pull from the same pot!
  • Tony H 
    • Continuing to work with the Ubuntu 19.10 Gnome install on the test laptop for Distrohoppers Digest, I’m actually starting to get used to some of the differences in DE layout. After the install of the Arc menu things are a little easier to navigate, and I am finding myself resorting to the keyboard for some of the things I would normally use the mouse/trackpad for.
    • Buying more Matchbox diecast models from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s and getting some real bargains off Ebay. I have bought a drill for drilling out the rivets and have started to dismantle a few of the poorer condition models apart with a view to starting a restoration. I’ll let you know how it goes.
    • It’s a good job we postponed the next DH recording as I’ve got another funeral to attend which would have made me unavailable to record. Otherwise life is starting to stabilize a little with my health back on the up and feeling a little more like normal (whatever that is)     
  • Moss
    • I’ve been working slowly on my next review for Distrohoppers’ Digest. Some interesting things going on in Zorin OS.
    • I can’t seem to keep my power supply plug plugged into my Galago Pro 2. If it just moves a tiny fraction of a millimeter it stops charging. I’m not sure what to do about that, other than to keep an eye on the battery icon on my desktop.
    • I received a Raspberry Pi 3B with a Pimoroni clear case from Tony Hughes via George Doscher of Tech + Coffee (Thanks, Tony and George!). Handing this little item off to George at OggCamp saved Tony quite a few quid in postage, and George, I am told, refused to accept money from Tony for US postage. 
    • So I plugged in and started up the Pi 3B while my Galago Pro was running. The Pi was on HDMI-1 and the Galago Pro was on HDMI-3 on my TV/monitor. The Pi worked great, but when I switched the monitor over to HDMI-3, my Linux Mint was badly overscanned (about 20%) so I could barely use it. I changed resolution to 1480×720 and it worked, but of course everything was so much larger. I later discovered that it had the same effect on my Bodhi 5.1 installation, which was doubly weird and not as easy to fix (ARndR is much harder to work with on an overscanned screen than Displays is), but there was no effect at all on my installs of Pearl Desktop 8 (based on Ubuntu 19.04), Ubuntu Budgie 19.10, or Q4OS (Debian 10 Buster). Apparently it triggered something in 18.04 code *only*. The fix ultimately was to change the Galago Pro to HDMI-2, and it’s a good thing the TV has 3 HDMI inputs. The guys in the mintCast Telegram group tried to talk me into plugging in the Pi again to prove the concept, but I decided I had my system working and wanted to keep it that way.
    • Dale Miracle sent a nice donation, including a new Logitech M570 trackball. Thank you, Dale.  I now have all the tech stuff I can use at the present time, and still have two laptops for sale as well as a few other miscellaneous bits of gear.
    • Just before the show, I got the proverbial wild hair up my patootie to set up a new partition on my 1 Tb drive in the Galago Pro 2. So I did. GPartEd performed like a champ. I shrunk sda1 to 250 Gb, and then shrunk sda3 the other way — forcing GPartEd to copy files to a new location on the partition. While that is scary, and while they say it CAN destroy files, once again GPartEd performed like a champ and did everything without a hitch. And I learned something — I thought you could only have 3 Primary partitions on a drive, but I now have 4. Sda4 is now formatted and waiting for a new distro to be put on it. I’m going to go out on a limb and try Sabayon first.
    • Reading-wise we are on Empire of Jade, the second Temeraire book by Naomi Novik, moving slowly as we’ve had quite a few crises keeping me busy until it was too sleepy out to read.
  • Joe
    • Demon Accords by John Conroe
      • Once again an OK series.
      • Some of the downside of the series is the main character is just way too OP
      • But my main issue with it has to do with the reader.  I will have to pick up a copy of the book because through the first half of the series the reader makes all the speakers sound like they are asking a question.  It is a bit distracting.  
      • I will say that the reader greatly improved later on and I did end up liking the story especially with the introduction of some of the other main characters.
    • Jack Campbell – The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier [1-5]
      • Good read.  Didn’t realize it was a sequel series until I had started it
      • Will read the first series later on
      • Well read.  The reader does an excellent job of using different voices for different people
    • Talked to the guys from Full Circle about the article I wrote and they got back to me saying it might be a few issues before we do anything and that I would need to add some graphics or screen shots.  Also found a mistake I had made in the article I sent for review where I mention ssl forwarding instead of ssh -l for local port forwarding. Got that cleaned up and now I am adding images.
      • Also discussed a portion of the article on TLLTS
    • Local Lug
      • Spent a lot of time talking about security and VPNs.
      • The guy I was talking to sells electronic insurance and wants to protect clients and client data.
      • Discussed when using a vpn was a good choice and how it was secure
      • Someone brought in the pinebook pro
        • Really cool device
    • Had to work on my toilet last weekend
      • One of those things where the more you fix the more that breaks
      • The original problem is that the float arm started breaking so if you did not shut it off from the wall it would slowly continue running and draining down the overflow.  
      • We were holding off on fixing it because I am not a plumber
      • But then the shut off valve quit shutting all the way off so I figured to just fix the toilet since I already had the parts and then I work on the shut off valve later
      • Had to shut off the mains from the meter which was a pain.  That replacement was not too difficult other then making a bit of a watery mess but after I got it in place there was still a constant running.  Turns out someone had previously done a glue repair on the overflow and it was not holding up any longer. So had to go to walmart and get more tools and a new overflow valve.
      • In order to replace that part you need to take the tank off.  Problem is that one of the copper bolts was completely rusted stuck.  Well this means that I have to dremel it. I have a dremel but I am all out of cutting bits so I ended up needing to go back to walmart for more bits.  Got it cut out
      • Walmart doesn’t sell the replacement bolts.  So I got everything put back together except for that one bolt and wedged the valve so that the family could use water,  had to wait for home depot to open up so that I could get the bolts.  
      • Did get it all put back together but on the bolt I didn’t replace there is a small leak only when the tank first starts filling. So I will need to replace that and still need to replace the wall valve.
  • Oliver Kelly
    • https://medium.com/@pentacent/nginx-and-lets-encrypt-with-docker-in-less-than-5-minutes-b4b8a60d3a71
    • https://www.humankode.com/ssl/how-to-set-up-free-ssl-certificates-from-lets-encrypt-using-docker-and-nginx
    • http://0lzi.tk/episode-009
    • https://junocomputers.com/

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE: 

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

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

WRAP-UP:

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

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