Full Circle Magazine – mintCast https://mintcast.org The podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux Wed, 12 May 2021 05:09:28 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/cropped-small-logo-32x32.png Full Circle Magazine – mintCast https://mintcast.org 32 32 mintCast false episodic CC-BY-SA 4.0 CC-BY-SA 4.0 podcast Full Circle Magazine – mintCast https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/big-logo-1600.png https://mintcast.org TV-G 164426984 mintCast 360.5 – What’s a Distro? (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-360-5-whats-a-distro-mp3/ Wed, 12 May 2021 04:54:27 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5062 And finally, the feedback and a humble suggestion
Download
]]> Download

2:11 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
43:58 The News
1:05:46 Security Update
1:07:29 Announcements & Outro

In our Innards section, what makes a distro a distro? It’s Elementary, my dear Watson.

And finally, the feedback and a humble suggestion

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit.

LINUX INNARDS:

  • When is a distro not a distro?

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

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 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 5062 mintCast 360.5 – What’s a Distro? https://mintcast.org/mintcast-360-5-whats-a-distro/ Wed, 12 May 2021 04:54:03 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5058 And finally, the feedback and a humble suggestion
Download
]]> Download

2:11 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
43:58 The News
1:05:46 Security Update
1:07:29 Announcements & Outro

In our Innards section, what makes a distro a distro? It’s Elementary, my dear Watson.

And finally, the feedback and a humble suggestion

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit.

LINUX INNARDS:

  • When is a distro not a distro?

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

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 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 5058 mintCast 351 – Greasy Joysticks (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-351-greasy-joysticks-mp3/ Wed, 30 Dec 2020 06:02:28 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4840 Then in the news, Mint’s 20.1 Beta is available, Kentucky Fried Chicken reduces, reuses and recycles, XFCE sees an upgrade, and Gnome not far behind.
In security, Solarwinds...
Download
]]> Download

0:27 HPR Spot
1:22 Show Start
2:46 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
42:01 News
1:06:10 Security Update
1:16:09 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I nuke an SSD on accident, Joe gets buff…er, Tony fills a doggy bag, Moss is grateful, and Erik Linuxes all the things!

Then in the news, Mint’s 20.1 Beta is available, Kentucky Fried Chicken reduces, reuses and recycles, XFCE sees an upgrade, and Gnome not far behind.

In security, Solarwinds…

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • As promised, rebuilt my NAS during the holiday downtime
    • Traded the Pi 4 for the NAS for Nextcloud.
    • Nextcloud storage lives in BTRFS now!
    • Neal Gompa, of Fedora and openSUSE fame, advises a move to the HWE kernel for better btrfs support.
    • My ESXi server bit the dust… sort of.
      • I was convinced an SSD had died, but it was the OS flash drive
      • Nuked the SSD for testing and realized it was fine…
  • Joe
    • Enjoying time off with the kids. Still haven’t killed any of them yet so things must be going ok.
    • My doctor told me my cholesterol was high again so I need to come off the diet that I am on and try something else.  Going to try out calorie restriction and see if coach Greg knows what he is talking about.  High volume, low calorie dense foods, while maintaining a low caloric intake.  He has a new cookbook but I am not paying those prices for it.
    • At this point the PSP’s have paid for themselves including all the replacement parts.  Thanks listener Dustin I hope it is treating you well.
    • I was able to pick up a broken Samsung Gear S3 at a decent price and tried to get it to work.  I was able to get the battery to charge but I was not able to get it to turn on.  I was able to find a temporary replacement motherboard for it on eBay for 15 dollars without the pedometer or the heart rate monitor which will allow me to test the functionality of the screen and make sure that the problem is the motherboard and not the screen.  Either way I used the profit from the PSP’s to get and I have had fun trying out different things to get it working.  I will be keeping my eyes open on ebay for others that look promising.  I have plenty of replacement parts at this point if I can find one that has just a dead battery or a broken back screen.  But I want to get the test board first so that I can make sure I know what the issues are. I should mention that the item was water damaged and I went through the normal process to try and fix that (IPA and a toothbrush).
    • Lots of exercise while on vacation.  Have done a lot of bike riding and weight lifting.
    • Someone got me an Arcade 1Up machine.  The Space Invaders version.  Which is really cool.  It is an expensive gift to have come from someone not family.  Probably one of the cooler gifts that I have ever gotten.  Definitely going to be modding it after a whole lot of research. 
      • I have already built several USB encoders in the past so that will not be much of an issue.  I will probably use a 3B+ or the batocera ThinkPad so that I can easily hook up a keyboard for quick fixes and setup.  May drill a hole in the side for external USB ports.
      • I will order the display adapter and I have not decided how the control setup will be yet because I do want to be able to play the most amount of games on it that I can including fighting games.  Might be hard for games that require shoulder buttons but not impossible. 
      • I will also have a temporary setup that allows the use of a controller and that could also cover for any games that I cannot get the arcade setup for.
      • I am going to see if I can get some boards and some drill bits and make multiple arcade setups.  Well I would like to, it depends on the cost and the time involved.  But the atmegas for the USB encoders are not hard to make and not expensive, the various arcade buttons can be if I go for good ones.
      • But first I am going to put it together stock and play with it like that
  • Tony Hughes
    • Enjoying Christmas as much as possible with the restrictions here in the UK we had one guest for Lunch on Christmas day which I cooked. After he went home we went for a Christmas day walk and popped in on a relative of my wife who lives 10 minutes walk away. We were in time to say Hi to some of her cousins and her aunt on a Zoom call, we only stayed 5 minutes or so but it was nice to connect with family on the holiday.
    • For the last week it was mainly planning and preparing for Christmas Day baking traditional mince pies, shopping for and preparing everything for the Christmas meal. I like to prepare all the vegetables ready for cooking the day before saves work on the day and I can relax a little. I also cooked the chicken the night before to give me oven space on the day. Only 2 meat eaters so not a massive bird but plenty for leftovers and our friend to take a doggy bag home for his leftover meal.
  • Moss
    • I received some Yule money from Firecat which allowed me to get the computer desk, UPS and monitor I needed to finish setting up my studio space. I need to get a drill bit so I can mount my mic boom and then I’ll be done. 
    • I got a new sponsor on Sponsus! My second…
    • I’ve been hunting for that next great distro to review. I installed Ultimate Edition, which looked really great — like a major media company wanted to make Ubuntu look flashy — but it didn’t write GRUB anywhere it can find. I tried Mageia 8 Beta2, but couldn’t find how to use or install dnfdragora, which is listed as the second choice in package management (it would be my first choice). I tried to install Slax and SolydK, but they refused to install on a UEFI system. So I installed Lubuntu 20.10. I don’t think we’ve reviewed anything with an LX-type desktop yet. I’ve had no issues, and LXQt looks like it has come of age at last.
    • Just prior to yesterday’s team meeting, I decided to reinstall Mint 20 on my desktop and restore it from my latest Timeshift backup. Nope. I then spent several hours trying different things, and the ultimate solution was to nuke the SSD and start over. I installed Linux Mint 20 MATE on it, and was going to leave it there but I just couldn’t, so I split the SSD in half (partitioned, people, I’m not a lunatic), and split the second half ⅔-⅓. I put OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 on the larger partition and Bodhi 5.1 on the smaller. I have those two mostly set up, and as of right now I’m 100% (I think) on the Mint partition being back up to snuff.
    • I’ve had a few promises of articles for It’s Moss dot com, but nothing has yet been submitted. mintCast listeners, this is for you, please submit stuff. I’ve kept up with a couple of blog posts of my own, usually echoed to my blog at LinuxQuestions.org. 
    • Mom is still in the rehab home, and has to pay for her room now as she ran out of days covered by Medicare. But there are other family issues: My uncle and aunt moved from their home in Yakima WA to a senior center in Utah, but my aunt was seriously injured on the trip, had to spend some hospital and rehab time before moving on to Utah, but died shortly after arriving. During this, my uncle went to the hospital with Covid, but he’s back at the center and doing ok (he was back home with his wife before she passed).
    • We have been running out of shows to watch, so we went scanning for old ones we missed. I don’t know how we missed Haven, but it’s on the list now, and we also found Locke & Key (sort of the same thing as Stranger Things but based on a comic) and, to keep things light, Mr. Iglesias, a Welcome-Back-Kotter remake using comedian Gabriel Iglesias and a mostly minority cast taking place in his native Long Beach (which is also where my grandmother lived, so I know some of the places).
    • Dresden-wise, we have started Book 9, White Night.
  • Erik Lietz
    • Office on Mint 20 – since the last episode I was part of, we have completed our transition to Mint 20 on all of our production machines. Transition went well and other than our Windows VM – very stable. 
    • Microsoft Office in a Windows VM – I forgot how long it takes to install Microsoft software. 
    • Switching away from AutoCAD – looking at BricsCAD, which is a Linux native CAD program that may replace AutoCAD for 2D drawing work and most of our 3D design work. 
    • Nextcloud on Intel NUC. For the office, we bought a pre-configured Nextcloud setups on an Intel NUC. I love the NUC form factor. This system has a customized version of Arch Linux tuned to run Nextcloud. Now I just need to wrap my head around using Nextcloud. 
    • Intel NUC as automated off-site backup. Seeing the form factor of the Intel NUC (and really liking them) we got 2 of the NUC’s to set up as off-site daily backup machines. I haven’t gotten into these yet but the idea is to use a minimal installation of Ubuntu Server or Debian using Rsync as the transfer system. 
    • https://www.howtogeek.com/116032/how-to-encrypt-your-home-folder-after-installing-ubuntu/ 
    • https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-use-7zip-to-encrypt-files/ 
    • Raspberry Pis for kids workstations. My wife and I are setting up individual computer stations for the kids using Raspberry Pi 4Bs with 4 GB. I’m hoping they will be desktop replacements. Not sure yet if I will use the Raspberry OS or Ubuntu MATE. 
    • PinePhone! I got my PinePhone last week. It’s the Manjaro edition phone with their FOSH operating system. The build quality on the phone is very good, especially for the price. The Manjaro operating system is a little buggy. I haven’t gotten a phone call to go through yet. Some apps like Telegram work just fine. It does have a fully functioning terminal. After some checking online, I think I am going to get an SD card for it and then try a couple of different operating systems. From what I can tell either Sailfish OS or Ubuntu Touch are the two OS’s that are the most polished right now. (Moss: /e/ and Lineage OS are better than Ubuntu Touch, about the same level of polish as Sailfish, and Sailfish doesn’t sell to the US.)

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

  • The SolarWinds Hack
    • As far as we know malicious updates were released in new versions of Orion, SolarWinds’ network outage monitoring utility, back in March.
    • FireEye discovered this month because they were on the list of hacked companies, which is how they caught on initially.
    • A big downside is that FireEye makes red team tools. Essentially reconnaissance and hacking tools for penetration testers. Now that code is in the hands of malicious actors.
    • Turns out, over 18,000 of 33,000 customers were using Orion in their networks including, seemingly, every department in the US government that has IT staff, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, and hospitals, just to name a few. More infections noted in every continent but Oceania and Antarctica.
    • We don’t know much about other companies, even the named ones, since this is a damaging issue.
    • Solarwinds has been noted as using a password “solarwinds123” and asking customers to disable antivirus on machines using Orion.
    • …Screaming scientists at the beginning of a catastrophe film.
    • SUSE not affected by SolarWinds Orion vulnerability

Conspiracy Time: The CEO of Solarwinds, Kevin Thompson, signaled he would be moving to another position at the end of the year. It happened, and a successor appointed, a day before the FireEye announcement.

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 4840 mintCast 351 – Greasy Joysticks https://mintcast.org/mintcast-351-greasy-joysticks/ Wed, 30 Dec 2020 06:02:27 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4836 Then in the news, Mint’s 20.1 Beta is available, Kentucky Fried Chicken recycles, XFCE sees an upgrade, and Gnome not far behind.
In security, Solarwinds...
Download
]]> Download

0:16 HPR Spot
1:26 Show Start
2:44 Linux Innards
50:34 Vibrations from the Ether
1:04:09 Check This Out
1:07:14 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I nuke an SSD on accident, Joe gets buff…er, Tony fills a doggy bag, Moss is grateful, and Erik Linuxes all the things!

Then in the news, Mint’s 20.1 Beta is available, Kentucky Fried Chicken reduces, reuses and recycles, XFCE sees an upgrade, and Gnome not far behind.

In security, Solarwinds…

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • As promised, rebuilt my NAS during the holiday downtime
    • Traded the Pi 4 for the NAS for Nextcloud.
    • Nextcloud storage lives in BTRFS now!
    • Neal Gompa, of Fedora and openSUSE fame, advises a move to the HWE kernel for better btrfs support.
    • My ESXi server bit the dust… sort of.
      • I was convinced an SSD had died, but it was the OS flash drive
      • Nuked the SSD for testing and realized it was fine…
  • Joe
    • Enjoying time off with the kids. Still haven’t killed any of them yet so things must be going ok.
    • My doctor told me my cholesterol was high again so I need to come off the diet that I am on and try something else.  Going to try out calorie restriction and see if coach Greg knows what he is talking about.  High volume, low calorie dense foods, while maintaining a low caloric intake.  He has a new cookbook but I am not paying those prices for it.
    • At this point the PSP’s have paid for themselves including all the replacement parts.  Thanks listener Dustin I hope it is treating you well.
    • I was able to pick up a broken Samsung Gear S3 at a decent price and tried to get it to work.  I was able to get the battery to charge but I was not able to get it to turn on.  I was able to find a temporary replacement motherboard for it on eBay for 15 dollars without the pedometer or the heart rate monitor which will allow me to test the functionality of the screen and make sure that the problem is the motherboard and not the screen.  Either way I used the profit from the PSP’s to get and I have had fun trying out different things to get it working.  I will be keeping my eyes open on ebay for others that look promising.  I have plenty of replacement parts at this point if I can find one that has just a dead battery or a broken back screen.  But I want to get the test board first so that I can make sure I know what the issues are. I should mention that the item was water damaged and I went through the normal process to try and fix that (IPA and a toothbrush).
    • Lots of exercise while on vacation.  Have done a lot of bike riding and weight lifting.
    • Someone got me an Arcade 1Up machine.  The Space Invaders version.  Which is really cool.  It is an expensive gift to have come from someone not family.  Probably one of the cooler gifts that I have ever gotten.  Definitely going to be modding it after a whole lot of research. 
      • I have already built several USB encoders in the past so that will not be much of an issue.  I will probably use a 3B+ or the batocera ThinkPad so that I can easily hook up a keyboard for quick fixes and setup.  May drill a hole in the side for external USB ports.
      • I will order the display adapter and I have not decided how the control setup will be yet because I do want to be able to play the most amount of games on it that I can including fighting games.  Might be hard for games that require shoulder buttons but not impossible. 
      • I will also have a temporary setup that allows the use of a controller and that could also cover for any games that I cannot get the arcade setup for.
      • I am going to see if I can get some boards and some drill bits and make multiple arcade setups.  Well I would like to, it depends on the cost and the time involved.  But the atmegas for the USB encoders are not hard to make and not expensive, the various arcade buttons can be if I go for good ones.
      • But first I am going to put it together stock and play with it like that
  • Tony Hughes
    • Enjoying Christmas as much as possible with the restrictions here in the UK we had one guest for Lunch on Christmas day which I cooked. After he went home we went for a Christmas day walk and popped in on a relative of my wife who lives 10 minutes walk away. We were in time to say Hi to some of her cousins and her aunt on a Zoom call, we only stayed 5 minutes or so but it was nice to connect with family on the holiday.
    • For the last week it was mainly planning and preparing for Christmas Day baking traditional mince pies, shopping for and preparing everything for the Christmas meal. I like to prepare all the vegetables ready for cooking the day before saves work on the day and I can relax a little. I also cooked the chicken the night before to give me oven space on the day. Only 2 meat eaters so not a massive bird but plenty for leftovers and our friend to take a doggy bag home for his leftover meal.
  • Moss
    • I received some Yule money from Firecat which allowed me to get the computer desk, UPS and monitor I needed to finish setting up my studio space. I need to get a drill bit so I can mount my mic boom and then I’ll be done. 
    • I got a new sponsor on Sponsus! My second…
    • I’ve been hunting for that next great distro to review. I installed Ultimate Edition, which looked really great — like a major media company wanted to make Ubuntu look flashy — but it didn’t write GRUB anywhere it can find. I tried Mageia 8 Beta2, but couldn’t find how to use or install dnfdragora, which is listed as the second choice in package management (it would be my first choice). I tried to install Slax and SolydK, but they refused to install on a UEFI system. So I installed Lubuntu 20.10. I don’t think we’ve reviewed anything with an LX-type desktop yet. I’ve had no issues, and LXQt looks like it has come of age at last.
    • Just prior to yesterday’s team meeting, I decided to reinstall Mint 20 on my desktop and restore it from my latest Timeshift backup. Nope. I then spent several hours trying different things, and the ultimate solution was to nuke the SSD and start over. I installed Linux Mint 20 MATE on it, and was going to leave it there but I just couldn’t, so I split the SSD in half (partitioned, people, I’m not a lunatic), and split the second half ⅔-⅓. I put OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 on the larger partition and Bodhi 5.1 on the smaller. I have those two mostly set up, and as of right now I’m 100% (I think) on the Mint partition being back up to snuff.
    • I’ve had a few promises of articles for It’s Moss dot com, but nothing has yet been submitted. mintCast listeners, this is for you, please submit stuff. I’ve kept up with a couple of blog posts of my own, usually echoed to my blog at LinuxQuestions.org. 
    • Mom is still in the rehab home, and has to pay for her room now as she ran out of days covered by Medicare. But there are other family issues: My uncle and aunt moved from their home in Yakima WA to a senior center in Utah, but my aunt was seriously injured on the trip, had to spend some hospital and rehab time before moving on to Utah, but died shortly after arriving. During this, my uncle went to the hospital with Covid, but he’s back at the center and doing ok (he was back home with his wife before she passed).
    • We have been running out of shows to watch, so we went scanning for old ones we missed. I don’t know how we missed Haven, but it’s on the list now, and we also found Locke & Key (sort of the same thing as Stranger Things but based on a comic) and, to keep things light, Mr. Iglesias, a Welcome-Back-Kotter remake using comedian Gabriel Iglesias and a mostly minority cast taking place in his native Long Beach (which is also where my grandmother lived, so I know some of the places).
    • Dresden-wise, we have started Book 9, White Night.
  • Erik Lietz
    • Office on Mint 20 – since the last episode I was part of, we have completed our transition to Mint 20 on all of our production machines. Transition went well and other than our Windows VM – very stable. 
    • Microsoft Office in a Windows VM – I forgot how long it takes to install Microsoft software. 
    • Switching away from AutoCAD – looking at BricsCAD, which is a Linux native CAD program that may replace AutoCAD for 2D drawing work and most of our 3D design work. 
    • Nextcloud on Intel NUC. For the office, we bought a pre-configured Nextcloud setups on an Intel NUC. I love the NUC form factor. This system has a customized version of Arch Linux tuned to run Nextcloud. Now I just need to wrap my head around using Nextcloud. 
    • Intel NUC as automated off-site backup. Seeing the form factor of the Intel NUC (and really liking them) we got 2 of the NUC’s to set up as off-site daily backup machines. I haven’t gotten into these yet but the idea is to use a minimal installation of Ubuntu Server or Debian using Rsync as the transfer system. 
    • https://www.howtogeek.com/116032/how-to-encrypt-your-home-folder-after-installing-ubuntu/ 
    • https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-use-7zip-to-encrypt-files/ 
    • Raspberry Pis for kids workstations. My wife and I are setting up individual computer stations for the kids using Raspberry Pi 4Bs with 4 GB. I’m hoping they will be desktop replacements. Not sure yet if I will use the Raspberry OS or Ubuntu MATE. 
    • PinePhone! I got my PinePhone last week. It’s the Manjaro edition phone with their FOSH operating system. The build quality on the phone is very good, especially for the price. The Manjaro operating system is a little buggy. I haven’t gotten a phone call to go through yet. Some apps like Telegram work just fine. It does have a fully functioning terminal. After some checking online, I think I am going to get an SD card for it and then try a couple of different operating systems. From what I can tell either Sailfish OS or Ubuntu Touch are the two OS’s that are the most polished right now. (Moss: /e/ and Lineage OS are better than Ubuntu Touch, about the same level of polish as Sailfish, and Sailfish doesn’t sell to the US.)

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

  • The SolarWinds Hack
    • As far as we know malicious updates were released in new versions of Orion, SolarWinds’ network outage monitoring utility, back in March.
    • FireEye discovered this month because they were on the list of hacked companies, which is how they caught on initially.
    • A big downside is that FireEye makes red team tools. Essentially reconnaissance and hacking tools for penetration testers. Now that code is in the hands of malicious actors.
    • Turns out, over 18,000 of 33,000 customers were using Orion in their networks including, seemingly, every department in the US government that has IT staff, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, and hospitals, just to name a few. More infections noted in every continent but Oceania and Antarctica.
    • We don’t know much about other companies, even the named ones, since this is a damaging issue.
    • Solarwinds has been noted as using a password “solarwinds123” and asking customers to disable antivirus on machines using Orion.
    • …Screaming scientists at the beginning of a catastrophe film.
    • SUSE not affected by SolarWinds Orion vulnerability

Conspiracy Time: The CEO of Solarwinds, Kevin Thompson, signaled he would be moving to another position at the end of the year. It happened, and a successor appointed, a day before the FireEye announcement.

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 4836 mintCast 340 – Unit of Measurement (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-340-unit-of-measurement-mp3/ Wed, 29 Jul 2020 04:57:59 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4552 Then, in our news, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix changes course, Android comes to a real phone, Blender needs blenders, and more
In security, we talk Twitter
Download
]]>

Download

1:41 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
53:01 The News
1:13:28 Security
1:20:12 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Jason prints a masterpiece, I get knee deep in Mint, Tony Hughes becomes a journalist, Moss has new toys, Joe springs a leak, and Tony Watts is rockin’ in the free world.

Then, in our news, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix changes course, Android comes to a real phone, Blender needs blenders, and more

In security, we talk Twitter

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Jason
    • Trying a large life-size-ish 3D print of an old sculpt I made
    • Been going a bit analog recently with carving in wood. I was gifted some large chunks of cherry and walnut, so I’ve been trying to do interesting things with those.
    • Related to carving and 3D printing, I designed (in Blender!) and printed a mount for carving wooden and horn rings. Did that a while ago, but some folks were asking for more information about it, so I recorded an episode about that on my own podcast that I relaunched a month or so ago, the Open Source Creative Podcast (not-so-shameless plug). Got the thing posted up on Thingiverse for anyone interested.
    • Got a pretty cool audio interface for recording, but then realized that my trusty Røde Smartlav+ won’t properly connect to it without chaining a series of adapters, which I’d much rather not do.
    • Been digging a bit into various web technology stuff
      • Flask and all kinds of crazy Python stuff for databases. Plus that also means playing with Javascript and learning what a REST API is and how to make one
      • Self-hosted analytics with Goatcounter
      • Self-hosted mailing list with phpList
      • Migrated all of my websites to static sites generated by Hugo
      • Messing with getting SSL to play nice on subdomains with different hosting
  • Leo
    • Video capture card + some Raspberry Pi goodness. Plan on adding a few videos to the Terminal Tricks channel about Raspberry Pi’s. Not sure yet what I want to do, but now I have the things I need to do it! I’m open to suggestions.
    • Really putting LM20 through its paces. After a few hiccups I mentioned on the last show, stable stable stable.
    • Got a dock for my t450s! It’s great, except… Droidcam dies on me if I use the powered USB port on the dock. Have to go straight to the laptop’s powered port. Easy fix.
    • The BDLL I miss is the BDLL where they talk about my real, actual profession…

 

  • Tony H
    • Around the end of last year beginning of this I started to write a series on podcast production in Linux for Full Circle Magazine and Ronnie accepted it, due to publishing timings the first in this series is to be in the next issue of the magazine. I have written the first 3 installments, and in the process of starting to write the 4th part.   
    • I have been doing little group restorations of some of my Matchbox castings and doing 4 or 5 of the same casting at the same time. This week I did 5 Lamborghini Marzal’s and was quite pleased with the results. 
    • Myself and Moss recorded Episode 015 of Distrohoppers Digest and the show went out on Friday. Apologies to Moss as his audio on the edit did not come out the best it could, but I freely admit to not being a professional sound engineer and don’t always get it completely right on the edits.
    • On Friday night I did a fresh install of Mint 20 Mate on the Distrohoppers Laptop with the intention of this being my review for what will be the September show, as I will be away and not have sufficient bandwidth to record and edit while away from ‘Studio’ A here in Blackpool.  
  • Moss
    • I’m probably reviewing Ubuntu Unity for Episode 016 of Distrohoppers’. I have had a brief but fun conversation with its dev, Rudra Saraswat. I also haven’t yet decided what to burn to SD to run my Pi 4 on, and am waiting for Rudra to port UUR to the Pi, which he is working on, but am still considering Ubuntu MATE and Manjaro RPi versions.
    • We recorded Episode 015 of Distrohoppers’ Digest on this past Wednesday and had a grand time doing it. It should be available now. Episode 012 has gone over 400 downloads, our 8th episode to do so. 
    • I sold a laptop to one of our listeners. From the proceeds of that sale, I purchased a few things: A new microphone, which you should be hearing now. New SSDs for my desktop and laptop (1 Tb for the desktop, 512 Gb for the laptop), which are installed and will give me more room to install even more distros! I still had half the money from the sale to put into savings against my unemployment period or continued savings should I get a job soon.
    • Yes, I now have 200 distros on each of my computers. No, it’s not that bad. I have 6 distro partitions on my laptop, 1 of which is unused at present, and 8 on my desktop, 5 of which are unused. I did things the easy way on my desktop, cloning the old drive to the new one and then adding partitions, and the hard way on the laptop, as Clonezilla refused to load on my laptop, completely partitioning the disk using GPartEd and doing 5 installations in one night. Thanks to USB 3.1 and the magic of SSDs, I did all of that in 5.25 hours, bringing each distro to a complete install and upgrade with a few programs removed and a couple things added, about 85% complete. Since then, I have Mint, Bodhi, and Ubuntu Unity Edition up to about 98%, I got my printer installed but I’m still needing to configure some programs and tweak one or two things. OpenMandriva and Gecko are still pretty much in the 85-90% range of completion due to lack of time.
    • I talked with Rudra Saraswat, dev of Ubuntu Unity Edition, UbuntuEd, and a couple other new distros, and found he didn’t really have a good mirror, so I hooked him up with my old friend and listener Firecat, and now he does. Always good to make connections in the community.
    • We actually did get one or two chapters of Dresden files read since last show, which brings us to Joe.
  • Joe
    • New Dresden Files book Peace Talks came out.  I enjoyed it but it felt incomplete and despite the several years since the last book it still felt like the book was very rushed and incomplete
      • This is likely because the book was split into two and the next book will be out in a couple of months
    • Started reading the full Drizzt collection by Salvatore which is 36 books.  I have attempted to read the whole collection before and I usually only make it about half way through.  But with the completion of the most recent series I really want to give it another go.
    • My freezer out in the garage had an issue.  An operator issue.  It was still full of ice which then melted.  
      • Yeah that sucks but what is worse is that the water that leaked out was absorbed by the box next to the fridge which happened to be one of my double boxes of comic books.  
      • About half of the comics in it were ruined despite being bagged
    • My server gave up the ghost finally after years of limping along so I had to build a new one
      • Ryzen 5 3600 
        • Would have preferred the 3600g but that one is not out yet.  
      • B450m matx motherboard
      • Cube case
      • Rx 560 graphics card
        • It will eventually get upgraded
      • They gave me the incorrect power supply at Micro Center so I had to make do with another one.
        • Still need to get this taken back
      • G.SKILL 16GB 2X8GB DDR4 3200 KIT
      • I was however able to use the old operating system setup from the ssd out of the old system
      • After I reinstalled plex all the old library setup was in place and working 
      • Same with Docker, once it was installed my old images showed up and I was able to pick up everything where it was before
      • Some of the Icons images are not as they should be but it is really not an issue for me. After the upgrade from 18 to 19 to 20
      • Resilio Sync however I had to go through and start from scratch
        • Still some small issues with permissions but I am working on it
      • Have started using psensor to keep track of temperatures
    • Purchased a dock for the 7130 to test out some of the functions because I had read that the HDMI and displayport output did not work on Linux.
      • It worked fine right out of the box.  I thought it may have been displaylink which eats a lot of processor in Linux but in checking it is not installed on my tablet
        • For those that don’t know, Displaylink is the USB-to-video output technology that most adapters and docks and port replicators use
        • Very optimized for Windows and while they do make a driver for Linux it has a lot of overhead
      • So this could very easily serve as a convergence device.  I will be working on a setup for it
      • The dock costs a bit more than I would like but I am looking for ways around that as it is the power supply for it that costs the most.
    • Ordered a lot of as-is ThinkPad USB 3.0 docks for 25 dollars
      • Should have been here before this weekend so I would have something to work on but got delayed
      • I would need to buy power supplies for them separately and those would be about 10 dollars apiece but I don’t want to order any until I know how many I will get fixed
      • Should be able to sell for around 40 dollars each.  Which is less than the local area has been selling hubs and docks and port replicators for
    • I have to install Windows on 3 devices in the next couple of weeks
  • Tony W
    • New (to me) guitar amp!  Boss Katana 100W
      • Built-in amp “modeling” + every guitar effect you can think of 
      • Bought used, 100W version with GA-FC footswitch and EV-30 expression pedal included
      • Boss tone studio software makes this really powerful (but unfortunately Windows only) 
    • Reworked hard drives in studio computer
      • One more new 120GB SSD
      • Total of 3 drives (2 X SSD for “filthy dual booting” + 1 spinning for storage)
      • Used Ventoy for the Windows install
      • Played with a few distros via Ventoy startup USB
        • PopOS, manjaro, others
    • Bought a chromebook (Acer CB-431) for my kid’s school, 
    • Would have been a used thinkpad if it was for me, but seems good for use I got it for (Thinkpad T430/T440/T450/X220/X230 all still plentiful at good prices on ebay) 
      • Linux Beta
        • Linux virtual machine within ChromeOS
        • Turn it on in settings, allocate how many GB.  It installs, drops you in terminal (tony76tfg@penguin)
        • It’s Debian 10 Buster underneath
        • VLC was already installed
    • Music gigs 
      • Had a good streak of about 5 gigs over 6 weeks, slowing down a bit now (only one each in Jul/Aug)
    • Lots of grilling and barbecuing!  
      • New grill, char griller Akorn (similar to big green egg, cheaper)

THE NEWS

SECURITY UPDATE

Announcements:

The next show will be Sunday, the 9th of August 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 4552 mintCast 340 – Unit of Measurement https://mintcast.org/mintcast-340-unit-of-measurement/ Wed, 29 Jul 2020 04:41:02 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4547 Then, in our news, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix changes course, Android comes to a real phone, Blender needs blenders, and more
In security, we talk Twitter
Download
]]>

Download

1:41 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
53:01 The News
1:13:28 Security
1:20:12 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Jason prints a masterpiece, I get knee deep in Mint, Tony Hughes becomes a journalist, Moss has new toys, Joe springs a leak, and Tony Watts is rockin’ in the free world.

Then, in our news, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix changes course, Android comes to a real phone, Blender needs blenders, and more

In security, we talk Twitter

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Jason
    • Trying a large life-size-ish 3D print of an old sculpt I made
    • Been going a bit analog recently with carving in wood. I was gifted some large chunks of cherry and walnut, so I’ve been trying to do interesting things with those.
    • Related to carving and 3D printing, I designed (in Blender!) and printed a mount for carving wooden and horn rings. Did that a while ago, but some folks were asking for more information about it, so I recorded an episode about that on my own podcast that I relaunched a month or so ago, the Open Source Creative Podcast (not-so-shameless plug). Got the thing posted up on Thingiverse for anyone interested.
    • Got a pretty cool audio interface for recording, but then realized that my trusty Røde Smartlav+ won’t properly connect to it without chaining a series of adapters, which I’d much rather not do.
    • Been digging a bit into various web technology stuff
      • Flask and all kinds of crazy Python stuff for databases. Plus that also means playing with Javascript and learning what a REST API is and how to make one
      • Self-hosted analytics with Goatcounter
      • Self-hosted mailing list with phpList
      • Migrated all of my websites to static sites generated by Hugo
      • Messing with getting SSL to play nice on subdomains with different hosting
  • Leo
    • Video capture card + some Raspberry Pi goodness. Plan on adding a few videos to the Terminal Tricks channel about Raspberry Pi’s. Not sure yet what I want to do, but now I have the things I need to do it! I’m open to suggestions.
    • Really putting LM20 through its paces. After a few hiccups I mentioned on the last show, stable stable stable.
    • Got a dock for my t450s! It’s great, except… Droidcam dies on me if I use the powered USB port on the dock. Have to go straight to the laptop’s powered port. Easy fix.
    • The BDLL I miss is the BDLL where they talk about my real, actual profession…

 

  • Tony H
    • Around the end of last year beginning of this I started to write a series on podcast production in Linux for Full Circle Magazine and Ronnie accepted it, due to publishing timings the first in this series is to be in the next issue of the magazine. I have written the first 3 installments, and in the process of starting to write the 4th part.   
    • I have been doing little group restorations of some of my Matchbox castings and doing 4 or 5 of the same casting at the same time. This week I did 5 Lamborghini Marzal’s and was quite pleased with the results. 
    • Myself and Moss recorded Episode 015 of Distrohoppers Digest and the show went out on Friday. Apologies to Moss as his audio on the edit did not come out the best it could, but I freely admit to not being a professional sound engineer and don’t always get it completely right on the edits.
    • On Friday night I did a fresh install of Mint 20 Mate on the Distrohoppers Laptop with the intention of this being my review for what will be the September show, as I will be away and not have sufficient bandwidth to record and edit while away from ‘Studio’ A here in Blackpool.  
  • Moss
    • I’m probably reviewing Ubuntu Unity for Episode 016 of Distrohoppers’. I have had a brief but fun conversation with its dev, Rudra Saraswat. I also haven’t yet decided what to burn to SD to run my Pi 4 on, and am waiting for Rudra to port UUR to the Pi, which he is working on, but am still considering Ubuntu MATE and Manjaro RPi versions.
    • We recorded Episode 015 of Distrohoppers’ Digest on this past Wednesday and had a grand time doing it. It should be available now. Episode 012 has gone over 400 downloads, our 8th episode to do so. 
    • I sold a laptop to one of our listeners. From the proceeds of that sale, I purchased a few things: A new microphone, which you should be hearing now. New SSDs for my desktop and laptop (1 Tb for the desktop, 512 Gb for the laptop), which are installed and will give me more room to install even more distros! I still had half the money from the sale to put into savings against my unemployment period or continued savings should I get a job soon.
    • Yes, I now have 200 distros on each of my computers. No, it’s not that bad. I have 6 distro partitions on my laptop, 1 of which is unused at present, and 8 on my desktop, 5 of which are unused. I did things the easy way on my desktop, cloning the old drive to the new one and then adding partitions, and the hard way on the laptop, as Clonezilla refused to load on my laptop, completely partitioning the disk using GPartEd and doing 5 installations in one night. Thanks to USB 3.1 and the magic of SSDs, I did all of that in 5.25 hours, bringing each distro to a complete install and upgrade with a few programs removed and a couple things added, about 85% complete. Since then, I have Mint, Bodhi, and Ubuntu Unity Edition up to about 98%, I got my printer installed but I’m still needing to configure some programs and tweak one or two things. OpenMandriva and Gecko are still pretty much in the 85-90% range of completion due to lack of time.
    • I talked with Rudra Saraswat, dev of Ubuntu Unity Edition, UbuntuEd, and a couple other new distros, and found he didn’t really have a good mirror, so I hooked him up with my old friend and listener Firecat, and now he does. Always good to make connections in the community.
    • We actually did get one or two chapters of Dresden files read since last show, which brings us to Joe.
  • Joe
    • New Dresden Files book Peace Talks came out.  I enjoyed it but it felt incomplete and despite the several years since the last book it still felt like the book was very rushed and incomplete
      • This is likely because the book was split into two and the next book will be out in a couple of months
    • Started reading the full Drizzt collection by Salvatore which is 36 books.  I have attempted to read the whole collection before and I usually only make it about half way through.  But with the completion of the most recent series I really want to give it another go.
    • My freezer out in the garage had an issue.  An operator issue.  It was still full of ice which then melted.  
      • Yeah that sucks but what is worse is that the water that leaked out was absorbed by the box next to the fridge which happened to be one of my double boxes of comic books.  
      • About half of the comics in it were ruined despite being bagged
    • My server gave up the ghost finally after years of limping along so I had to build a new one
      • Ryzen 5 3600 
        • Would have preferred the 3600g but that one is not out yet.  
      • B450m matx motherboard
      • Cube case
      • Rx 560 graphics card
        • It will eventually get upgraded
      • They gave me the incorrect power supply at Micro Center so I had to make do with another one.
        • Still need to get this taken back
      • G.SKILL 16GB 2X8GB DDR4 3200 KIT
      • I was however able to use the old operating system setup from the ssd out of the old system
      • After I reinstalled plex all the old library setup was in place and working 
      • Same with Docker, once it was installed my old images showed up and I was able to pick up everything where it was before
      • Some of the Icons images are not as they should be but it is really not an issue for me. After the upgrade from 18 to 19 to 20
      • Resilio Sync however I had to go through and start from scratch
        • Still some small issues with permissions but I am working on it
      • Have started using psensor to keep track of temperatures
    • Purchased a dock for the 7130 to test out some of the functions because I had read that the HDMI and displayport output did not work on Linux.
      • It worked fine right out of the box.  I thought it may have been displaylink which eats a lot of processor in Linux but in checking it is not installed on my tablet
        • For those that don’t know, Displaylink is the USB-to-video output technology that most adapters and docks and port replicators use
        • Very optimized for Windows and while they do make a driver for Linux it has a lot of overhead
      • So this could very easily serve as a convergence device.  I will be working on a setup for it
      • The dock costs a bit more than I would like but I am looking for ways around that as it is the power supply for it that costs the most.
    • Ordered a lot of as-is ThinkPad USB 3.0 docks for 25 dollars
      • Should have been here before this weekend so I would have something to work on but got delayed
      • I would need to buy power supplies for them separately and those would be about 10 dollars apiece but I don’t want to order any until I know how many I will get fixed
      • Should be able to sell for around 40 dollars each.  Which is less than the local area has been selling hubs and docks and port replicators for
    • I have to install Windows on 3 devices in the next couple of weeks
  • Tony W
    • New (to me) guitar amp!  Boss Katana 100W
      • Built-in amp “modeling” + every guitar effect you can think of 
      • Bought used, 100W version with GA-FC footswitch and EV-30 expression pedal included
      • Boss tone studio software makes this really powerful (but unfortunately Windows only) 
    • Reworked hard drives in studio computer
      • One more new 120GB SSD
      • Total of 3 drives (2 X SSD for “filthy dual booting” + 1 spinning for storage)
      • Used Ventoy for the Windows install
      • Played with a few distros via Ventoy startup USB
        • PopOS, manjaro, others
    • Bought a chromebook (Acer CB-431) for my kid’s school, 
    • Would have been a used thinkpad if it was for me, but seems good for use I got it for (Thinkpad T430/T440/T450/X220/X230 all still plentiful at good prices on ebay) 
      • Linux Beta
        • Linux virtual machine within ChromeOS
        • Turn it on in settings, allocate how many GB.  It installs, drops you in terminal (tony76tfg@penguin)
        • It’s Debian 10 Buster underneath
        • VLC was already installed
    • Music gigs 
      • Had a good streak of about 5 gigs over 6 weeks, slowing down a bit now (only one each in Jul/Aug)
    • Lots of grilling and barbecuing!  
      • New grill, char griller Akorn (similar to big green egg, cheaper)

THE NEWS

SECURITY UPDATE

Announcements:

The next show will be Sunday, the 9th of August 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 4547 mintCast 321 – Celluloid Service https://mintcast.org/mintcast-321-celluloid-service/ Wed, 06 Nov 2019 06:24:17 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4001 Then, our news Firefox, MX, Tails and Fedora all have new releases, and we cover the Linux Mint Monthly News. 
In the security section, we talk two bugs, one with Ubuntu and one on Firefox.
Download
]]>

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo finally gets upgraded to kernel 5.3, Tony Hughes tries out Ubuntu 19.10, Moss fights with Ubuntu Mate 19.10, Joe picks up an HP tablet to fix, and Tony Watts has a new guitar.

Then, our news Firefox, MX, Tails and Fedora all have new releases, and we cover the Linux Mint Monthly News. 

In the security section, we talk two bugs, one with Ubuntu and one on Firefox.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Testing out kernel 5.3 on my desktop and laptop. Been on it about 5 days now.
      • It may have cleared up the freezing issue I was seeing that I think was caused by power states on my CPU. Time will tell here. It was fairly random and could take days to show up.
      • On my laptop, I haven’t seen a huge change, but seems stable.
  • Tony H
    •  Attending 2 family funerals which was the reason for my absence on the last episode, sadly I’m at that time when I see family at more funerals than weddings.
    • Buying and ‘playing’ with old diecast models, I’ve developed a liking for watching youtube videos of people restoring them. One of the Guys I watch is Marty from Australia who does Marty’s Matchbox Makeovers  I sent him a couple of cars to have a go at a while back.
    • Recorded the latest Distrohoppers Digest, and have now installed Ubuntu 19.10 Gnome on the test laptop for next months show. (We are recording the first week in December) 
  • Moss
    • I just added Bodhi to the Galago Pro 2, bringing it to 5 distros. I think I’ll leave it at 5, and I have been looking up what I did to fix the little paper cuts I had when installing Bodhi on the T430. I also saw a nice review of Bodhi by Jason M in the new issue of Full Circle Magazine.
    • I reported a bug in Ubuntu MATE 19.10. I literally had to get Alan Pope to get me to the right page to file it. (And doesn’t that say a lot of good things about the Linux community!) My desktop completely loaded sometimes, but most times it forgot to load the taskbar. And one day it loaded correctly, but after a while it went into Suspend mode, and when I entered my password to log back in, it opened without the taskbar. It’s not a lot of fun opening a terminal via right-clicking the desktop and running the program from terminal.
    • We recorded Episode 7 of Distrohoppers’ Digest on October 30th. We’re getting pretty good download numbers. Episode 4 has exceeded 450 downloads, two others have exceeded 350, and only Episode 2 has not yet reached 300, still sitting at 291. Tony Hughes got back from his trip to Glasgow. We reviewed OpenMandriva Lx 4 and MX Linux 19 (beta2 and final release). Go and have a listen, you’ll enjoy it.
    • Also, my wife and I both have been having issues where PIA locks us out of a website we’re trying to load, and we have to change nodes. This has been going on for all of the 2 months we’ve had the service. We have decided to go back to Mullvad, which is still a bit cheaper on month-to-month billing, when the current month runs out sometime today as we record this.
    • Now that Distrohoppers’ Digest is out of the way for this month, I attempted to install Manjaro on the Kudu 3, and ran into the same problem as before; it will download updates or programs I want to install, and stop. I have to log out and back in and run the installer again, and installs what got downloaded. So I have dumped Manjaro for this month and installed Zorin OS Core 15 on the Kudu 3. I’ll keep the results to myself (unless you’re in our chat or Terminal), but it should do for next month.
    • Which means I have an IdeaPad to get ready for sale. I haven’t done much more than download Windoze 10 and the installer program, haven’t even tried burning the iso yet, but it’s on the list.
    • We have a new kitten. We rescued it from being feral just outside our trailer. Then the trouble started. He climbed up inside our dashboard, unbeknownst to us, and we thought he had gotten out of the car without our knowledge. So after a lot of emotions being displayed, I got back into the car and started driving back to the last place we went to, and heard him mewing inside the dash. Our two nearest neighbors came to help me tear the dashboard apart. No luck. He spent the night in the car, with an open can of cat food. When I got up in the morning, he was still in the dash. I drove to the fire department, but nobody was there when I got there, including police or anyone else. I got back in the car… and there he was on the floor, looking at me like, “What is all the fuss about?” So he’s home now. Tiny little thing. Black, with white paws, blue eyes and a white bib. We have named him Gremlin. He is as cute as can be and instantly bonded to us.
  • Joe
    • Fixed my downstairs toilet.  Replaced some of the internals and readjusted the float so it doesn’t run all the time.
      • It is a bit more broken so I will be replacing more parts.  Or the whole damn thing
    • Picked up an HP Pavilion X360 with an i3 7th gen for 50 bucks on FB.  
      • https://www.amazon.com/HP-Pavilion-touchscreen-i3-7100U-Bluetooth/dp/B078VP7GX2
      • Not in very good condition because it has been dropped.  
      • It had a bad hard drive but I was able to replace that.  
      • Also has a bad keyboard where only some of the keys work.
        • Tried readjusting the ribbon cable but no luck
        • A replacement costs about 20 bucks.  Ordered but it will take some time to arrive
      • The digitizer is also broken so no touch screen but the monitor itself is still useable
        • Replacement digitizer cost $130-150
        • Have watched the videos on youtube on how to replace
        • Looks difficult
        • For people that dont know the digitizer is the glass that sits in front of the monitor used for touch screens.  Including phones and tablets
    • Going through the Larry Correia collection again.
    • Charley Davidson series by Darynda Jones
      • Not my favorite series but it was ok
      • Seems very cookie cutter meaning not much originality of its own.  Mostly it feels like the author just took her favorite parts of other book series and put them together.  But it hasn’t stopped me from reading it.
    • More Python classes with friends. went over boolean, if statements and while loops today.  Probably gonna go over for loops next time.
    • Got the MMCX connectors but I am not sure about the tension relief on them so I have not done anything with them yet.  May order a couple more cable versions of the connectors and not do the retractables just yet, 
    • Attempted to purchase a set of 14 LG headsets of different types on auction.  Prices looked good and thought I was going to get a deal until the last day and the bidding went higher than I wanted.
    • Still a fan of how easy the Turtle Beach Earforce Z2’s and X50’s are to work on.  Also the Z2’s are great for podcasting but terrible for music listening without a very good equalizer.  The X50’s sound much more crisp but are terrible for long-term wear and distort at higher volumes. Thinking about trying out a headphone amp on the Z2’s and see if that helps.  Also looking to see some of the mods that are floating around that might help with the sound quality. I am open to suggestions
    • I guess that came about because I did bust out the Sennheiser Urbanite XL’s, which, while comfortable and get reasonably good sound, have very small earcups and very poorly placed touch controls.
  • Tony W
    • The Tascam Model 24 acquired!
      • Will not Multi function
        • Audio interface to DAW, 22 simultaneous channels
        • Can also record directly to SD card
        • Can use as live sound board
      • Using with Reaper recording software
        • Proprietary but does work on Linux
      • New guitar – PRS SE Angelus A40E

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

  • Ubuntu 19.10 bug Shares Your Media Folders Without Permission
    • Users of non-Gnome versions of Ubuntu 19.10 are getting hit with automatically shared home folder bits (Photos, Videos, Music). On those flavors, the rygel media server is starting automatically.
    • The quick band-aid is running ‘sudo apt remove rygel’
  • Firefox fixes security bug in Master Password
    • This is an issue in Firefox 68.0.2 that allows an attacker to see your passwords without using the master password. This should already be fixed in your current version of Firefox as long as you’ve updated, but may affect you on the ESR. However, the fix is still the same. Update!
  • And here

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 54:11 4001 mintCast 321 – Celluloid Service (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-321-celluloid-service-mp3/ Wed, 06 Nov 2019 06:23:44 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3999 Then, our news Firefox, MX, Tails and Fedora all have new releases, and we cover the Linux Mint Monthly News. 
In the security section, we talk two bugs, one with Ubuntu and one on Firefox.
Download
]]>

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo finally gets upgraded to kernel 5.3, Tony Hughes tries out Ubuntu 19.10, Moss fights with Ubuntu Mate 19.10, Joe picks up an HP tablet to fix, and Tony Watts has a new guitar.

Then, our news Firefox, MX, Tails and Fedora all have new releases, and we cover the Linux Mint Monthly News. 

In the security section, we talk two bugs, one with Ubuntu and one on Firefox.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Testing out kernel 5.3 on my desktop and laptop. Been on it about 5 days now.
      • It may have cleared up the freezing issue I was seeing that I think was caused by power states on my CPU. Time will tell here. It was fairly random and could take days to show up.
      • On my laptop, I haven’t seen a huge change, but seems stable.
  • Tony H
    •  Attending 2 family funerals which was the reason for my absence on the last episode, sadly I’m at that time when I see family at more funerals than weddings.
    • Buying and ‘playing’ with old diecast models, I’ve developed a liking for watching youtube videos of people restoring them. One of the Guys I watch is Marty from Australia who does Marty’s Matchbox Makeovers  I sent him a couple of cars to have a go at a while back.
    • Recorded the latest Distrohoppers Digest, and have now installed Ubuntu 19.10 Gnome on the test laptop for next months show. (We are recording the first week in December) 
  • Moss
    • I just added Bodhi to the Galago Pro 2, bringing it to 5 distros. I think I’ll leave it at 5, and I have been looking up what I did to fix the little paper cuts I had when installing Bodhi on the T430. I also saw a nice review of Bodhi by Jason M in the new issue of Full Circle Magazine.
    • I reported a bug in Ubuntu MATE 19.10. I literally had to get Alan Pope to get me to the right page to file it. (And doesn’t that say a lot of good things about the Linux community!) My desktop completely loaded sometimes, but most times it forgot to load the taskbar. And one day it loaded correctly, but after a while it went into Suspend mode, and when I entered my password to log back in, it opened without the taskbar. It’s not a lot of fun opening a terminal via right-clicking the desktop and running the program from terminal.
    • We recorded Episode 7 of Distrohoppers’ Digest on October 30th. We’re getting pretty good download numbers. Episode 4 has exceeded 450 downloads, two others have exceeded 350, and only Episode 2 has not yet reached 300, still sitting at 291. Tony Hughes got back from his trip to Glasgow. We reviewed OpenMandriva Lx 4 and MX Linux 19 (beta2 and final release). Go and have a listen, you’ll enjoy it.
    • Also, my wife and I both have been having issues where PIA locks us out of a website we’re trying to load, and we have to change nodes. This has been going on for all of the 2 months we’ve had the service. We have decided to go back to Mullvad, which is still a bit cheaper on month-to-month billing, when the current month runs out sometime today as we record this.
    • Now that Distrohoppers’ Digest is out of the way for this month, I attempted to install Manjaro on the Kudu 3, and ran into the same problem as before; it will download updates or programs I want to install, and stop. I have to log out and back in and run the installer again, and installs what got downloaded. So I have dumped Manjaro for this month and installed Zorin OS Core 15 on the Kudu 3. I’ll keep the results to myself (unless you’re in our chat or Terminal), but it should do for next month.
    • Which means I have an IdeaPad to get ready for sale. I haven’t done much more than download Windoze 10 and the installer program, haven’t even tried burning the iso yet, but it’s on the list.
    • We have a new kitten. We rescued it from being feral just outside our trailer. Then the trouble started. He climbed up inside our dashboard, unbeknownst to us, and we thought he had gotten out of the car without our knowledge. So after a lot of emotions being displayed, I got back into the car and started driving back to the last place we went to, and heard him mewing inside the dash. Our two nearest neighbors came to help me tear the dashboard apart. No luck. He spent the night in the car, with an open can of cat food. When I got up in the morning, he was still in the dash. I drove to the fire department, but nobody was there when I got there, including police or anyone else. I got back in the car… and there he was on the floor, looking at me like, “What is all the fuss about?” So he’s home now. Tiny little thing. Black, with white paws, blue eyes and a white bib. We have named him Gremlin. He is as cute as can be and instantly bonded to us.
  • Joe
    • Fixed my downstairs toilet.  Replaced some of the internals and readjusted the float so it doesn’t run all the time.
      • It is a bit more broken so I will be replacing more parts.  Or the whole damn thing
    • Picked up an HP Pavilion X360 with an i3 7th gen for 50 bucks on FB.  
      • https://www.amazon.com/HP-Pavilion-touchscreen-i3-7100U-Bluetooth/dp/B078VP7GX2
      • Not in very good condition because it has been dropped.  
      • It had a bad hard drive but I was able to replace that.  
      • Also has a bad keyboard where only some of the keys work.
        • Tried readjusting the ribbon cable but no luck
        • A replacement costs about 20 bucks.  Ordered but it will take some time to arrive
      • The digitizer is also broken so no touch screen but the monitor itself is still useable
        • Replacement digitizer cost $130-150
        • Have watched the videos on youtube on how to replace
        • Looks difficult
        • For people that dont know the digitizer is the glass that sits in front of the monitor used for touch screens.  Including phones and tablets
    • Going through the Larry Correia collection again.
    • Charley Davidson series by Darynda Jones
      • Not my favorite series but it was ok
      • Seems very cookie cutter meaning not much originality of its own.  Mostly it feels like the author just took her favorite parts of other book series and put them together.  But it hasn’t stopped me from reading it.
    • More Python classes with friends. went over boolean, if statements and while loops today.  Probably gonna go over for loops next time.
    • Got the MMCX connectors but I am not sure about the tension relief on them so I have not done anything with them yet.  May order a couple more cable versions of the connectors and not do the retractables just yet, 
    • Attempted to purchase a set of 14 LG headsets of different types on auction.  Prices looked good and thought I was going to get a deal until the last day and the bidding went higher than I wanted.
    • Still a fan of how easy the Turtle Beach Earforce Z2’s and X50’s are to work on.  Also the Z2’s are great for podcasting but terrible for music listening without a very good equalizer.  The X50’s sound much more crisp but are terrible for long-term wear and distort at higher volumes. Thinking about trying out a headphone amp on the Z2’s and see if that helps.  Also looking to see some of the mods that are floating around that might help with the sound quality. I am open to suggestions
    • I guess that came about because I did bust out the Sennheiser Urbanite XL’s, which, while comfortable and get reasonably good sound, have very small earcups and very poorly placed touch controls.
  • Tony W
    • The Tascam Model 24 acquired!
      • Will not Multi function
        • Audio interface to DAW, 22 simultaneous channels
        • Can also record directly to SD card
        • Can use as live sound board
      • Using with Reaper recording software
        • Proprietary but does work on Linux
      • New guitar – PRS SE Angelus A40E

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

  • Ubuntu 19.10 bug Shares Your Media Folders Without Permission
    • Users of non-Gnome versions of Ubuntu 19.10 are getting hit with automatically shared home folder bits (Photos, Videos, Music). On those flavors, the rygel media server is starting automatically.
    • The quick band-aid is running ‘sudo apt remove rygel’
  • Firefox fixes security bug in Master Password
    • This is an issue in Firefox 68.0.2 that allows an attacker to see your passwords without using the master password. This should already be fixed in your current version of Firefox as long as you’ve updated, but may affect you on the ESR. However, the fix is still the same. Update!
  • And here

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 55:48 3999 mintCast 319.5 – Cron https://mintcast.org/mintcast-319-5-cron/ Wed, 16 Oct 2019 03:52:43 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3968 Download
]]>

Download

This week, in our Innards section, we chat about the terminal and cron. And finally, community feedback!

INNARDS:

  • Tony
    • Using terminal in Debian based systems.
    • sudo apt update – updates the repositories
    • sudo apt upgrade – updates packages
    • sudo apt dist-upgrade only updates packages used in your system and removes what it is replacing
    • ls – lists file and directories in the current directory
    • ls -a  list all files and folders including those hidden with a period at the beginning of name
    • lshw – list hardware
    • lscpu – lists cpu info
    • lsusb – lists usb hubs/connected devices
    • top (Htop if installed) – list top most resource intensive services while running typing M will sort by memory use typing C will sort by CPU usage 
    • ip link show – show all ethernet and wifi devices
    • Leo’s Edit: ip -c a will give general network info colorized!
    • cd – change the current directory
        • cd .. – takes you back to the previous directory
        • cd /full/path
        • cd / takes you to the root directory
    • man (name of package) opens up a manual of the application
    • (command) > file.txt – puts a text file of the command output into the current working directory. (where file is the name you give the text file output.
    • nano file.txt – opens the file in the terminal 
  • Joe
    • Cron: an extremely powerful scheduling tool made in 1975.
      • Used for running bash commands at designated times
      • Generally used for scheduling system maintenance but its general purpose nature makes it perfect for downloading files from the internet moving files to new locations.
      • Including commands to run scripts
        • /usr/bin/env bash /full/path/script.sh
        • The best thing is being able to set up timing
      • Crontab -l crontab -e
      • Also wanted to mention that I set up a working instance of auto-update in cron for my server
        • Generally not a fan of autoupdate my preference is to do it manually
        • But the setup is kinda easy
        • nano file.sh
#!/bin/bash
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade -y
apt-get autoclean
    • Chmod 755 on the file
        • 0 5 * * 1 /usr/bin/env bash /home/user/update.sh
        • Leo’s Edit: Add it to root’s crontab with sudo crontab -e
      • Here is how the timings work:
        • Min: the minute of the hour (0-59).
        • Hour: the hour of the day (0-23).
        • DoM: the day of the month (1-31).
        • Mon: the month of the year (1-12 or Jan-Dec).
        • DoW: the day of the week (0-6 or Sun-Sat).
        • Command: anything you can normally run on a command line.
        • Shortcuts:
        • @yearly (or @annually)
        • @monthly
        • @weekly
        • @daily (or @midnight)
        • @hourly
        • @reboot (most useful) 
        • Cron Expression Generator & Explainer – Quartz
      • What?  That is too difficult you say? Well there is another way:
        • /etc/cron.d/
        • /etc/crond.daily/
        • /etc/cron.hourly/
        • /etc/cron.monthly/
        • /etc/crontab
        • /etc/cron.weekly/
        • These folder locations simply create your bash script make it executable and dump them into the corresponding folder
      • Last time I brought up cron i mentioned one of the issues is that you could have overlapping commands if you did not give enough time between your commands.  I was speaking with Toyam and he gave me a great idea. Use a simple lockfile and an if statement 
#!/bin/bash
FILE=/home/user/my_file
if [ -f "$FILE" ]
then
    stop
else 
        touch $FILE
        apt-get update
        apt-get upgrade -y
        apt-get autoclean
        rm $FILE
fi
      • Cron is an extremely powerful yet low level tool that can help you automate everything
      • Londoner from Telegram: recommends `ll` instead of  `ls -l`
  • Leo – Practical cron
    • I talked about a script that updates my Dynamic DNS information in the first half of the show. Here’s exactly what I did to make it work.
    • I start with deciding when I need this thing to run. In the case of my Dynamic DNS, I decided every 6 hours would be good enough. Afraid.org had an example that was something like every 5 minutes. I felt that was too much for a free service, so I scaled it back.
    • If I ever do cron stuff that’s more complex than once a day, I use a calculator to check myself, or to just do the heavy lifting for me.
      • https://crontab.guru/
    • This is the line I have in my Pi-Hole VM that takes care of Dynamic DNS.
    • 2 0,6,12,18 * * * /home/leo/afraid.org-ddns-update
    • This is just a text file that has two separate commands inside of it.
      • date >> ~/ddns-update.log
      • curl http://freedns.afraid.org/dynamic/update.php?XXXXXXXXXXXXXX >> ~/ddns-update.log
    • I didn’t even add the typical #!/bin/bash line to it. Literally only those two lines.
    • Each line does two things.
      • The date line takes the current date and time and adds it to a file called ddns-update.log
      • The curl line accesses the afraid.org site, and adds the response to the ddns-update.log.
  • Moss – Grub Customizer

They put me at the end to wake up all the n00bs and non-techies. 

Grub Customizer is an easy-to-use way to organize your boot sequence, and can be used to clean things up a bit. It has its detractors, but they are mostly people who would rather write their own Grubs, and that does not include me. Where do you find it? How do you install it?

    • After installing just look for Grub Customizer in your menus and double-click it, or just run “sudo grub-customizer” in Terminal
    • You can move distros up and down in the boot order, delete “advanced” boots, etc. as desired.
    • SAVE
    • When you boot after that, you will have the menu in the order you wanted, and it will autoboot to the top listed distro.
    • There are ways to pretty up the boot menu appearance, but in my experience I just make it uglier. You’re on your own here.

VIBRATIONS:

  •  Henrik Hemrin

Sync and backup, two related topics which also are easy to confuse yourself about… are interesting, and thanks for sharing your knowledge today! I’m not there yet to have everything automized, nor which will be my “final” solution.

Talking about RAID, trying to remember many years back when I had a RAID mirroring setup, and as I recall data became corrupted on the “main” drive, which meant also the mirror soon was corrupted. That can be correct memory, right? So mirroring is a backup for broken discs, but will not be a lifeline for all data troubles.

A reflection about sync to an own eg NextCloud cloud server at home, is that a backup is still relevant to have, at another location. Right? One option is a eg to have USB discs, swap them and keep one at the time at another geographic place. Another option is to have a cloud storage for backup. But I believe, if I have a cloud storage, that company should have a backup system for the service, and then a local sync server is not really needed… but of course an advantage to have a sync and access without internet.

Another general thought about sync, similar to my RAID discussion above, is like in Leo’s case with three Mint machines; if you by mistake delete your home directory on one machine, the sync will delete it on the server, as well as on the other two machines? And on any automatic backup. Which means the backup, sync, or both, must have several versions stored?

Hope you can follow my thoughts – and maybe give a comment any answer or tell me I mess up and think wrongly.

Cheers

    • Joe Boylan <jb@mintcast.org>

to hehemrin

I follow your thoughts and you are correct.  it is a good reason to have a bit of time setup between your rsync backups.  The resilio sync I think I said I don’t recommend as that type of backup but is good for restoring when one system has a catastrophic sudden failure.  

  • George from Tulsa

to mintcast

Guys, please, this content is not appropriate for a podcast, and if it is, that podcast is not the Mintcast. “Magic” words, e.g., nodes re BT Sync, only make sense in context the normal Mintcast listener doesn’t have. A show that’s so deeply geeky conflicting cron jobs have to be mentioned as dangers is just too deep for audio. To use Heinlein’s term, no one listening who doesn’t already know the subject will grok that content as it streams by in audio, in my case, while driving, for deity’s sake.

If you want to get that deep, you need written tutorials starting at the very beginning. You’ll have to teach about permissions, cron, rsync options, and more.

Far more appropriate for Mintcast would be in depth discussion how to use Mint’s built in tools, TimeShift, Mint backup, and what they will and won’t do, plus exercises in restoration.

Then cover GUI tools like LuckyBackup and Déjà Dup. Maybe Clonezilla –

G

to George, MintCast

We will be discussing conflicting cron jobs on this weekends show.  Also how to prevent them. We have had less in-depth shows lately and it has been mentioned by several listeners that they would like more deep dives on topics.  We will also move into more gui related topics at some point as well we are trying to line up more interviews with people.  

  • <Moss> MintCast has been doing deep dives from the beginning, Rob and Isaac were famous for them. I do like the idea of deep dives into LM tools.
    • George from TulsA

Thanks for the response. In depth is very difficult in audio –

CHECK THIS OUT:

ANNOUNCEMENT:

Next show is Sunday October 20th, 2PM CDT / 7PM UTC

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 48:28 3968 mintCast 319.5 – Cron (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-319-5-cron-mp3/ Wed, 16 Oct 2019 03:51:20 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3966 Download
]]>

Download

This week, in our Innards section, we chat about the terminal and cron. And finally, community feedback!

INNARDS:

  • Tony
    • Using terminal in Debian based systems.
    • sudo apt update – updates the repositories
    • sudo apt upgrade – updates packages
    • sudo apt dist-upgrade only updates packages used in your system and removes what it is replacing
    • ls – lists file and directories in the current directory
    • ls -a  list all files and folders including those hidden with a period at the beginning of name
    • lshw – list hardware
    • lscpu – lists cpu info
    • lsusb – lists usb hubs/connected devices
    • top (Htop if installed) – list top most resource intensive services while running typing M will sort by memory use typing C will sort by CPU usage 
    • ip link show – show all ethernet and wifi devices
    • Leo’s Edit: ip -c a will give general network info colorized!
    • cd – change the current directory
        • cd .. – takes you back to the previous directory
        • cd /full/path
        • cd / takes you to the root directory
    • man (name of package) opens up a manual of the application
    • (command) > file.txt – puts a text file of the command output into the current working directory. (where file is the name you give the text file output.
    • nano file.txt – opens the file in the terminal 
  • Joe
    • Cron: an extremely powerful scheduling tool made in 1975.
      • Used for running bash commands at designated times
      • Generally used for scheduling system maintenance but its general purpose nature makes it perfect for downloading files from the internet moving files to new locations.
      • Including commands to run scripts
        • /usr/bin/env bash /full/path/script.sh
        • The best thing is being able to set up timing
      • Crontab -l crontab -e
      • Also wanted to mention that I set up a working instance of auto-update in cron for my server
        • Generally not a fan of autoupdate my preference is to do it manually
        • But the setup is kinda easy
        • nano file.sh
#!/bin/bash
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade -y
apt-get autoclean
    • Chmod 755 on the file
        • 0 5 * * 1 /usr/bin/env bash /home/user/update.sh
        • Leo’s Edit: Add it to root’s crontab with sudo crontab -e
      • Here is how the timings work:
        • Min: the minute of the hour (0-59).
        • Hour: the hour of the day (0-23).
        • DoM: the day of the month (1-31).
        • Mon: the month of the year (1-12 or Jan-Dec).
        • DoW: the day of the week (0-6 or Sun-Sat).
        • Command: anything you can normally run on a command line.
        • Shortcuts:
        • @yearly (or @annually)
        • @monthly
        • @weekly
        • @daily (or @midnight)
        • @hourly
        • @reboot (most useful) 
        • Cron Expression Generator & Explainer – Quartz
      • What?  That is too difficult you say? Well there is another way:
        • /etc/cron.d/
        • /etc/crond.daily/
        • /etc/cron.hourly/
        • /etc/cron.monthly/
        • /etc/crontab
        • /etc/cron.weekly/
        • These folder locations simply create your bash script make it executable and dump them into the corresponding folder
      • Last time I brought up cron i mentioned one of the issues is that you could have overlapping commands if you did not give enough time between your commands.  I was speaking with Toyam and he gave me a great idea. Use a simple lockfile and an if statement 
#!/bin/bash
FILE=/home/user/my_file
if [ -f "$FILE" ]
then
    stop
else 
        touch $FILE
        apt-get update
        apt-get upgrade -y
        apt-get autoclean
        rm $FILE
fi
      • Cron is an extremely powerful yet low level tool that can help you automate everything
      • Londoner from Telegram: recommends `ll` instead of  `ls -l`
  • Leo – Practical cron
    • I talked about a script that updates my Dynamic DNS information in the first half of the show. Here’s exactly what I did to make it work.
    • I start with deciding when I need this thing to run. In the case of my Dynamic DNS, I decided every 6 hours would be good enough. Afraid.org had an example that was something like every 5 minutes. I felt that was too much for a free service, so I scaled it back.
    • If I ever do cron stuff that’s more complex than once a day, I use a calculator to check myself, or to just do the heavy lifting for me.
      • https://crontab.guru/
    • This is the line I have in my Pi-Hole VM that takes care of Dynamic DNS.
    • 2 0,6,12,18 * * * /home/leo/afraid.org-ddns-update
    • This is just a text file that has two separate commands inside of it.
      • date >> ~/ddns-update.log
      • curl http://freedns.afraid.org/dynamic/update.php?XXXXXXXXXXXXXX >> ~/ddns-update.log
    • I didn’t even add the typical #!/bin/bash line to it. Literally only those two lines.
    • Each line does two things.
      • The date line takes the current date and time and adds it to a file called ddns-update.log
      • The curl line accesses the afraid.org site, and adds the response to the ddns-update.log.
  • Moss – Grub Customizer

They put me at the end to wake up all the n00bs and non-techies. 

Grub Customizer is an easy-to-use way to organize your boot sequence, and can be used to clean things up a bit. It has its detractors, but they are mostly people who would rather write their own Grubs, and that does not include me. Where do you find it? How do you install it?

    • After installing just look for Grub Customizer in your menus and double-click it, or just run “sudo grub-customizer” in Terminal
    • You can move distros up and down in the boot order, delete “advanced” boots, etc. as desired.
    • SAVE
    • When you boot after that, you will have the menu in the order you wanted, and it will autoboot to the top listed distro.
    • There are ways to pretty up the boot menu appearance, but in my experience I just make it uglier. You’re on your own here.

VIBRATIONS:

  •  Henrik Hemrin

Sync and backup, two related topics which also are easy to confuse yourself about… are interesting, and thanks for sharing your knowledge today! I’m not there yet to have everything automized, nor which will be my “final” solution.

Talking about RAID, trying to remember many years back when I had a RAID mirroring setup, and as I recall data became corrupted on the “main” drive, which meant also the mirror soon was corrupted. That can be correct memory, right? So mirroring is a backup for broken discs, but will not be a lifeline for all data troubles.

A reflection about sync to an own eg NextCloud cloud server at home, is that a backup is still relevant to have, at another location. Right? One option is a eg to have USB discs, swap them and keep one at the time at another geographic place. Another option is to have a cloud storage for backup. But I believe, if I have a cloud storage, that company should have a backup system for the service, and then a local sync server is not really needed… but of course an advantage to have a sync and access without internet.

Another general thought about sync, similar to my RAID discussion above, is like in Leo’s case with three Mint machines; if you by mistake delete your home directory on one machine, the sync will delete it on the server, as well as on the other two machines? And on any automatic backup. Which means the backup, sync, or both, must have several versions stored?

Hope you can follow my thoughts – and maybe give a comment any answer or tell me I mess up and think wrongly.

Cheers

    • Joe Boylan <jb@mintcast.org>

to hehemrin

I follow your thoughts and you are correct.  it is a good reason to have a bit of time setup between your rsync backups.  The resilio sync I think I said I don’t recommend as that type of backup but is good for restoring when one system has a catastrophic sudden failure.  

  • George from Tulsa

to mintcast

Guys, please, this content is not appropriate for a podcast, and if it is, that podcast is not the Mintcast. “Magic” words, e.g., nodes re BT Sync, only make sense in context the normal Mintcast listener doesn’t have. A show that’s so deeply geeky conflicting cron jobs have to be mentioned as dangers is just too deep for audio. To use Heinlein’s term, no one listening who doesn’t already know the subject will grok that content as it streams by in audio, in my case, while driving, for deity’s sake.

If you want to get that deep, you need written tutorials starting at the very beginning. You’ll have to teach about permissions, cron, rsync options, and more.

Far more appropriate for Mintcast would be in depth discussion how to use Mint’s built in tools, TimeShift, Mint backup, and what they will and won’t do, plus exercises in restoration.

Then cover GUI tools like LuckyBackup and Déjà Dup. Maybe Clonezilla –

G

to George, MintCast

We will be discussing conflicting cron jobs on this weekends show.  Also how to prevent them. We have had less in-depth shows lately and it has been mentioned by several listeners that they would like more deep dives on topics.  We will also move into more gui related topics at some point as well we are trying to line up more interviews with people.  

  • <Moss> MintCast has been doing deep dives from the beginning, Rob and Isaac were famous for them. I do like the idea of deep dives into LM tools.
    • George from TulsA

Thanks for the response. In depth is very difficult in audio –

CHECK THIS OUT:

ANNOUNCEMENT:

Next show is Sunday October 20th, 2PM CDT / 7PM UTC

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 51:10 3966 mintCast 319 – New Mumble https://mintcast.org/mintcast-319-new-mumble/ Wed, 09 Oct 2019 05:33:51 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3961 Then, our news: CentOS 8 and Mumble 1.3 are released, Ubuntu 19.10 is almost here, the GNOME Foundation and Docker navigate rough seas, and more.
In security, we talk Exim.
Download
]]>

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, I talk Dynamic DNS, Tony is writing articles, Moss test drives EndeavourOS, Josh visited Media City, and Joe relaxes with fiction.

Then, our news: CentOS 8 and Mumble 1.3 are released, Ubuntu 19.10 is almost here, the GNOME Foundation and Docker navigate rough seas, and more.

In security, we talk Exim.

WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Dynamic DNS – Finally got this setup with a lot of personal resistance.
      • Took inspiration from Telegram. Quite a few people were setting up Dynamic DNS a couple of months ago, and I was resistant because my IP address hardly changed. Seems like my address is changing all the time now.
      • Not quite sure if my router is handling it correctly (ER-POE-5) even though I have it configured as the Ubiquity forums suggest.
      • So as a backup, I’m running a cron job once every 6 hours on my Pi-Hole to update the IP address.
      • Used afraid.org. Very simple setup once you dig into it. To update, you basically have to visit a URL.
    • Installed two new packages that are supposed to give better battery statistics and life.
      • sudo apt install tp-smapi-dkms acpi-call-dkms
      • I’m not testing this scientifically, but these packages should help calibrate my Thinkpad batteries properly. I’ve only gone through one charge cycle, so it’s hard to tell if things have changed.
  • Tony H 
    • Starting to write a series of articles on Getting started in podcasting, for Full Circle Magazine, I have written the first 2 articles so check out the October magazine as you may see me in print.
    • Continuing to use MX 19 beta 2.1 – beta 3 was released yesterday I have downloaded the iso and will install as just updating may miss some bug fixes.
    • Got a reply to my bug notification about dropping into the login screen when rebooting, as it’s not a critical bug it is on the to do list as they want to fix it but at the moment they are not sure how to do it.
  • Moss
    • Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 006 was a rollicking good time, I hope our listeners enjoy it as much as we did.
    • I installed Endeavour OS on my T430. A few issues, easily solved, and everything else installed. I had everything except Mumble & Audacity. Then I noticed it kept creating copies of boot records — my boot was a mass of multiple selections of the same distros. I used Grub Customizer to clean them up, and at next boot it created more. I reported the issue. It has now come off my T430.
    • I still wanted to have something to review for October, and so decided to try a SINGLE INSTALL (what a concept!) on the IdeaPad. I attempted to install OpenMandriva, but got nowhere, it failed to create a partition. I got my GPartEd disk out and redid the disk, with a small Swap partition and a large Primary. I installed OpenMandriva Lx 4 just fine, and rebooted. No boot. It didn’t write Grub properly or whatever, I’ve had this issue before. So I tried Manjaro, and it wouldn’t even find my wifi. I’m using SuperGrub2 on a CD to boot, then going into OM4. There is supposed to be a way to use SuperGrub2 to write Grub but it isn’t obvious, got more reading to do.
    • I have some items for sale from my earlier inheritance. See my eBay listings (moss23) and talk to me if you’re interested in any of them. I did sell the Hackintosh, did not really get fair value for it. I now have $95 saved up towards the new laptop; eBay sales go towards that as well. I have also started a Sponsus for Distrohoppers, but you’re all welcome to join in. http://sponsus.org/zaivala 
    • My job has gone sideways. I still have it, and finally am working part time, but my wonderful manager got demoted and moved for no reason, and the new manager just isn’t the same. I had wanted 4 days per week, I’m getting 3. I’m looking for work again. Some employees have not stopped crying about the change, and it was 3 weeks ago. Another result of the change is I’m making even less income.
    • As this show is turning into Readers’ Corner, I should note that I finished reading the Nightside series by Simon R. Green to my wife, and have started in on Temeraire by Naomi Novik. Unlike Joe, I don’t get audiobooks, I *am* the audiobook reader.
  • Joe
    • I need to solder something.  Don’t know what yet
      • Ordered a small set of HBS 820’s
      • Haven’t worked on those before but i am willing to give them a try
    • My CPAP machine is dying.  Makes getting sleep difficult.  Which makes motivation to do projects even more difficult
      • I pulled out one of the spare CPAPs that i have and reprogrammed it to match my other one.  I think i got everything right and i am sleeping a little better
      • Have to wait for my referral to go through with the VA and it is taking longer than it should so that i can get the right one refurbished or replaced.
    • Finished up the Wheel of time series again.  I love the book series.
      • Very well done audiobook series.
      • Still think they should have split the last book in two.  Very long
    • I will be listening to the new Alex Verus novel as well as the second book in the last reaper series.
      • Alex Verus is still very good as a series.  It may have slowed a bit but it is still enjoyable
      • The last reaper series is fun.  Not necessarily great writing but a bit of mindless action and adventure.
    • I am also waiting to pick up the new M.D. Massey novels books 7 and 8 of the junkyard druid series
    • I am acting manager at work for most of the month,  That should be fun
    • Picked up some usb cables with switches in the middle.
      • Needed one for the wireless phone charger in my car since my accessory port does not turn off with the vehicle and i don‘t want to run down the battery or wear out the connectors on the cable or the charger.
      • Works very well.  Thinking of replacing the power supply with something a bit more powerful.  Then maybe work on some cable management.
  • Josh
    • Visited the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) for micro:bit Live, the first ever micro:bit conference!
    • Some big announcements regarding micropython and other micro:bit classroom tools
    • Did a talk, Panel Discussion and did a stand for the magazine.
    • No updates on the phone situation. Still waiting for them to send a replacement.

NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

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 1:02:03 3961 mintCast 319 – New Mumble (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-319-new-mumble-mp3/ Wed, 09 Oct 2019 05:30:45 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3959 Then, our news: CentOS 8 and Mumble 1.3 are released, Ubuntu 19.10 is almost here, the GNOME Foundation and Docker navigate rough seas, and more.
In security, we talk Exim.
Download
]]>

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, I talk Dynamic DNS, Tony is writing articles, Moss test drives EndeavourOS, Josh visited Media City, and Joe relaxes with fiction.

Then, our news: CentOS 8 and Mumble 1.3 are released, Ubuntu 19.10 is almost here, the GNOME Foundation and Docker navigate rough seas, and more.

In security, we talk Exim.

WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Dynamic DNS – Finally got this setup with a lot of personal resistance.
      • Took inspiration from Telegram. Quite a few people were setting up Dynamic DNS a couple of months ago, and I was resistant because my IP address hardly changed. Seems like my address is changing all the time now.
      • Not quite sure if my router is handling it correctly (ER-POE-5) even though I have it configured as the Ubiquity forums suggest.
      • So as a backup, I’m running a cron job once every 6 hours on my Pi-Hole to update the IP address.
      • Used afraid.org. Very simple setup once you dig into it. To update, you basically have to visit a URL.
    • Installed two new packages that are supposed to give better battery statistics and life.
      • sudo apt install tp-smapi-dkms acpi-call-dkms
      • I’m not testing this scientifically, but these packages should help calibrate my Thinkpad batteries properly. I’ve only gone through one charge cycle, so it’s hard to tell if things have changed.
  • Tony H 
    • Starting to write a series of articles on Getting started in podcasting, for Full Circle Magazine, I have written the first 2 articles so check out the October magazine as you may see me in print.
    • Continuing to use MX 19 beta 2.1 – beta 3 was released yesterday I have downloaded the iso and will install as just updating may miss some bug fixes.
    • Got a reply to my bug notification about dropping into the login screen when rebooting, as it’s not a critical bug it is on the to do list as they want to fix it but at the moment they are not sure how to do it.
  • Moss
    • Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 006 was a rollicking good time, I hope our listeners enjoy it as much as we did.
    • I installed Endeavour OS on my T430. A few issues, easily solved, and everything else installed. I had everything except Mumble & Audacity. Then I noticed it kept creating copies of boot records — my boot was a mass of multiple selections of the same distros. I used Grub Customizer to clean them up, and at next boot it created more. I reported the issue. It has now come off my T430.
    • I still wanted to have something to review for October, and so decided to try a SINGLE INSTALL (what a concept!) on the IdeaPad. I attempted to install OpenMandriva, but got nowhere, it failed to create a partition. I got my GPartEd disk out and redid the disk, with a small Swap partition and a large Primary. I installed OpenMandriva Lx 4 just fine, and rebooted. No boot. It didn’t write Grub properly or whatever, I’ve had this issue before. So I tried Manjaro, and it wouldn’t even find my wifi. I’m using SuperGrub2 on a CD to boot, then going into OM4. There is supposed to be a way to use SuperGrub2 to write Grub but it isn’t obvious, got more reading to do.
    • I have some items for sale from my earlier inheritance. See my eBay listings (moss23) and talk to me if you’re interested in any of them. I did sell the Hackintosh, did not really get fair value for it. I now have $95 saved up towards the new laptop; eBay sales go towards that as well. I have also started a Sponsus for Distrohoppers, but you’re all welcome to join in. http://sponsus.org/zaivala 
    • My job has gone sideways. I still have it, and finally am working part time, but my wonderful manager got demoted and moved for no reason, and the new manager just isn’t the same. I had wanted 4 days per week, I’m getting 3. I’m looking for work again. Some employees have not stopped crying about the change, and it was 3 weeks ago. Another result of the change is I’m making even less income.
    • As this show is turning into Readers’ Corner, I should note that I finished reading the Nightside series by Simon R. Green to my wife, and have started in on Temeraire by Naomi Novik. Unlike Joe, I don’t get audiobooks, I *am* the audiobook reader.
  • Joe
    • I need to solder something.  Don’t know what yet
      • Ordered a small set of HBS 820’s
      • Haven’t worked on those before but i am willing to give them a try
    • My CPAP machine is dying.  Makes getting sleep difficult.  Which makes motivation to do projects even more difficult
      • I pulled out one of the spare CPAPs that i have and reprogrammed it to match my other one.  I think i got everything right and i am sleeping a little better
      • Have to wait for my referral to go through with the VA and it is taking longer than it should so that i can get the right one refurbished or replaced.
    • Finished up the Wheel of time series again.  I love the book series.
      • Very well done audiobook series.
      • Still think they should have split the last book in two.  Very long
    • I will be listening to the new Alex Verus novel as well as the second book in the last reaper series.
      • Alex Verus is still very good as a series.  It may have slowed a bit but it is still enjoyable
      • The last reaper series is fun.  Not necessarily great writing but a bit of mindless action and adventure.
    • I am also waiting to pick up the new M.D. Massey novels books 7 and 8 of the junkyard druid series
    • I am acting manager at work for most of the month,  That should be fun
    • Picked up some usb cables with switches in the middle.
      • Needed one for the wireless phone charger in my car since my accessory port does not turn off with the vehicle and i don‘t want to run down the battery or wear out the connectors on the cable or the charger.
      • Works very well.  Thinking of replacing the power supply with something a bit more powerful.  Then maybe work on some cable management.
  • Josh
    • Visited the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) for micro:bit Live, the first ever micro:bit conference!
    • Some big announcements regarding micropython and other micro:bit classroom tools
    • Did a talk, Panel Discussion and did a stand for the magazine.
    • No updates on the phone situation. Still waiting for them to send a replacement.

NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

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 1:04:03 3959