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Introduction:

  • Welcome to mintCast Episode 311.
  • First up, in our Wanderings, I had to rebuild my network, Moss becomes more reliant on Linux Mint, Joe games on an Atari, Josh gets nominated for awards and installs Deepin, and Tony Hughes gets scammed.
  • Then, in the news, Firefox protects everyone and lots of new releases.
  • In our innards, we talk secure connections.
  • Finally, we wrap up the show with lots of feedback and a couple recommendations

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Got a 64GB SD card (Patriot V30, A1) for Batocera. Gives more room than the 32GB ADATA USB I was using, and fully hides itself within the laptop! And turns out, my HP Stream won’t boot from an SD card, so I had to get a 64GB Sandisk Cruzer Fit. Worked like a charm. Now to find a use for a 64GB SD card.
    • pavucontrol – Pulse Audio Volume Control. Allows me to increase the input volume on the mic on the way in, which allows me to avoid adjusting it within Audacity itself.
    • Arch… a busy week and a dead switch this weekend put my plans on hold
    • Now I’ll be testing out the newish Cisco SG350P and an ERPOE-5.
  • Moss
    • The new job has kept me completely occupied, but I’m listening to more podcasts during drive time. No new money, no new hardware. I did sell the Canon printer at last, and ordered the HDMI cable so I can test those other computers I have.
    • I found that I did not have Mumble or multiple workspaces set up for Ubuntu Budgie 19.04, and ARandR in Bodhi is not that easy compared to Displays, so I will likely continue to use Linux Mint for podcasts for the present. Once again, when you need something to work the first time and every time, Linux Mint for the win.
    • I’ve been polishing my script for the next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest. The last episode could have stood a bit more work on my end, and I will take the learning experience and grow from it.
    • I was hoping to install OpenMandriva Lx 4 on the announced date of June 6, but it is not out yet and the announcement seems to have been pulled. Large parts of the openmandriva.org website were giving 404 or 505 errors but have been revived just this week. Softpedia states that the final version will be out “in summer or early autumn”, with no source quoted.
    • The donation to Linux Mint has been made in the name of mintCast Team, as promised (6/1/19, so it will be in the June numbers). I have spent a lot of time being sad as the Destination Linux Telegram group is exploding with all the wonderfulness of SELF.
  • Josh
    • Finalist in Tech4Good awards and the ARM Young Coder of the Year
    • Revising for mock exams 🙁
    • Installed Deepin on my Dell XPS 13 and it’s great! Screen setup is a pain though. The config window is the worst I’ve ever seen. The installation process is amazing, it’s really graphical and is probably the best installer i’ve ever seen on a distro. Worked straight away with my DSP MST hub (unlike Ubuntu) and I would highly recommend it as a starting distro.
  • Tony H
    • Buying and installing Windows 10 1903, and Mint19.1 mate to another E7440 I picked up on eBay, not only was it a good deal for the advertised specification, it was even better when I got it and it was an i7 as opposed from the i5 in the description on the auction. WIN
    • Well it’s finally happened I fell for an online scam during the week, I couldn’t find my Euro health insurance card (ehic) and went online to order a new one, and got caught out by a dodgy processing website that charges you to do what you can do for free. ALL my fault, not feeling well due to an ear problem and in a rush I didn’t read all the small print on the site. As my wife did it last time I didn’t realize it was an NHS Portal and should have had the NHS logo etc. This has cost me £33 to learn a painful lesson in how not to behave on the web. Made me feel quite vulnerable, and understanding of others that get scammed far more seriously than that.
    • And after a conversation with Ken Fallon, HPR will be airing the first episode of Distrohoppers Digest to give us a little publicity (Thursday 20th June 2019 http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2839)
  • Joe
    • Family in town.  Minimal projects
    • Working on a bluetooth speaker.
      • Had no battery when i received it but a 5v power was hooked directly up to the battery power input.
      • The speaker was also hooked up manually and no solder was used.  The speaker did not work at all until I took it apart and moved the connections
      • I took apart a battery bank and a couple of USB cables so that I could give it external and battery power and soldered all the connections.  Works pretty well now.
      • Drilled a hole in the back so that you can get to the button on the bank and see the lights so you know how much charge it has.
      • Got a hot glue gun to hold the board in the correct position.
    • My dad brought me an Atari 1010
    • Ordered a bunch of broken speakers and headphones to work on, plus I am consolidating a bunch of the old ones that I have for my vacation next week.  Going to do a lot of trouble shooting and soldering. Yes I spend my vacation doing crazy crap
    • Borderlands 2: Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary
      • Doesn’t work on Linux yet.  So far even with proton for me although I see others have it working fine.
      • Going to try Lutris
      • May have to finally go fix my Windows install.

The News:

  1. Firefox has Tracking Protection baked in
  2. E3 2019: games list, news and everything you might have missed
    1. Josh is VERY excited about the new MS Flight sim
  3. Zorin OS 15 release
  4. Deluge 2.0 BitTorrent Client released
  5. OpenProject 9, FOSS alternative to Trello or Jira, released
  6. Unity Editor for games officially available for Linux, supported by CentOS and Ubuntu for now – NOT OPEN SOURCE

Linux Innards:

  • Leo
    • SSH stands for Secure SHell. It’s a remote control protocol that allows you to remotely give commands to another machine.
    • If you’re good at networking, this means that you can touch files or run commands at home, when you’re on the other side of the world!
    • We’ll focus on the local network today
    • Make sure the user account that you want to use is created on the computer you want to connect to. In my case, that’s the Leo account
    • While you’re creating the account on the computer you want to control, also install the package: sudo apt install openssh-server. The ssh server turns on by default, and enables itself on startup. systemctl disable ssh will stop this from starting up on boot.
    • Back on your local machine, use the command ssh $USER@$IP. As long as there isn’t a firewall in the way, it’ll ask if you want to remember this machine. Hit yes and supply your username and password.
    • You can now run any command you would normally run as if you were right in front of the remote computer. Update things, install new packages, whatever you’re comfortable with in the terminal.
    • The real benefit here is the file sharing that’s enabled with this process through SFTP.
    • Open up Nemo or Caja (I believe Thunar has this ability too, but the names might be different), click File, then Connect to Server. Make sure SSH is the protocol and supply the IP address in the Server field, and fill out your username and password. This will log you in and give you access to all the files your user has permission to.

—–

    • To add a large amount of security, you would want to use Public Key Authentication. In short, you create a padlock and a key. The padlock is your public key, and the key to open it is your private key. You can give anybody your public key, but you MUST keep your private key private. Otherwise, the security is gone
    • To create this pair, run ssh-keygen. Your keys get stuck in your home folder within the .ssh directory. The permissions are automatically set on your private key to only allow you to see and change it. No one else on the system has permissions.
    • To place the public key on the remote computer, use the ssh-copy-id command. In my case the command would look like ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub leo@$IP
    • You can now log in via SSH in the terminal, or through Nemo or Caja with no password at all! Your keys are being used and you’re now much harder to hack.
    • The last step would be to disable password authentication entirely. In the terminal run sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Find the line that says PasswordAuthentication no, and remove the hash mark from the beginning of the line.
    • Restart the ssh service with systemctl restart ssh
    • Now, your key is the only key that will work for ssh.
  • Joe
    • I wanted to go a bit further with automating ssh and show something useful that you can do on a daily basis with it
    • So i am going to tell you how to setup sshfs so that you can access all of your files as if they were local.
    • Access times are pretty good.  Even from outside my network i am able to watch movies using VLC
    • So even with a thin device you can have all of your files as if the drives are mounted to the local machine.
    • First make sure that the ssh keys are setup as described by a couple of the others.
    • Next make sure that sshfs is installed.  It might be already installed but it needs to be on the client machine at least.
    • Then you need to create a local folder to mount to.  This should be set to some permissions that you can use.  755 should do it.
    • Test your sshfs
      • sshfs user@remote:/location path/localMount -C
      • The -C allows for compression which is very helpful
      • I usually mount my whole /mnt from my server to whatever folder i setup
    • The next thing to do is setup some alias’ so that your less used mounts are easy to access
    • Then setup a couple of scripts so that you can automount the remote drives whenever you are connected to the internet.  Also to correctly unmount and remove when you lose connection.
    • This is done using tools that are already available to use in linux mint
    • I redid my setup to verify that it works and it is not perfect but it works pretty well
    • There are 2 places that you are going to want to put scripts
      • /etc/network/if-up.d/
        • For when you are connecting to a network
      • And /etc/network/if-down.d/
        • For when you are disconnecting
      • The files that you create should be bash scripts but should not have .sh in the name
      • /etc/network/if-up.d/
        • /etc/network/if-up.d/name
        • #!/bin/sh
        • sleep 5s
        • su user <<‘EOF’
        • sshfs user@server:/mnt /mnt/local -C
        • EOF
        • I want the mount to be owned by the user instead of root but the script needs to be owned and run by root hence the su user
        • I want the network to be fully connected to i am giving a 5 second delay.
        •  etc/network/if-down.d/name
          • #!/bin/sh
          • killall -9 sshfs
          • sudo umount /mnt/local
          • #This will clear the mount so you don’t get conflicts on reconnect
          • This is a very simple setup that works a large portion of the time.  I want to re-write the scripts so that they are always looking to see if the mount is connected and for internet connections in a much more robust manner.  Probably by pinging a website and checking for the mount.
        • My server is overheating under load again.  Which means it is a motherboard problem. So when i can afford it i will need to rebuild.  Not sure what kind of setup i should get.
          • Needs to be pretty fast
          • Lots of ram
          • Space for 5 3.5 inch drives
          • Preferably quiet
          • Not huge
  • Moss – So you want to know how hard it is. Most of our listeners understand that I’m the least technical member on the mintCast team… Well, it works. I may not remember how we got there, but with a lot of help from Leo, I managed to ssh to my wife’s computer. Checked files in Terminal, ran caja, opened her external drive. Whoopee.

Vibrations from the Ether:

[A large number of HP printers still have the printhead on the ink cartridge. Here is a 2.5-year-old list (we could not find an update).]

Check This Out!

  • Tony H
    • If you do need to create an install medium for Windows 10 which now needs a 5Gb disc, and you don’t have a dual layer DVD RW or DLDVD and need to create a bootable USB drive check out this utility, WoeUSB. In the last week I have used it to create the latest Win10 1903 .iso into a number of USB drives for installing to a couple of machines I was preparing for other people. In fact Etcher even suggested using it to create the bootable disk when I tried to use it to do the job, if it doesn’t like the drive you’re using, use GParted to wipe the partition recreate the partition table then format to fat32, after that it should work fine.

Announcements:

  • No Tony H next show as he will be sailing the high seas on Holiday :-))
  • Maybe no Joe

Wrap-Up:

Thanks:

  • Josh for working on redesigning our website, setting up the YouTube and Twitch streams, and providing lots of technical help.
  • Bytemark hosting for providing the new hosting server for the website. (Which will roll out soon, we promise!)
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files.
  • The folks at Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we use to communicate
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
]]> 3644 mintCast 311 – SSH (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-311-ssh-mp3/ Wed, 19 Jun 2019 05:12:12 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3642 Download
]]>

Download

Introduction:

  • Welcome to mintCast Episode 311.
  • First up, in our Wanderings, I had to rebuild my network, Moss becomes more reliant on Linux Mint, Joe games on an Atari, Josh gets nominated for awards and installs Deepin, and Tony Hughes gets scammed.
  • Then, in the news, Firefox protects everyone and lots of new releases.
  • In our innards, we talk secure connections.
  • Finally, we wrap up the show with lots of feedback and a couple recommendations

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Got a 64GB SD card (Patriot V30, A1) for Batocera. Gives more room than the 32GB ADATA USB I was using, and fully hides itself within the laptop! And turns out, my HP Stream won’t boot from an SD card, so I had to get a 64GB Sandisk Cruzer Fit. Worked like a charm. Now to find a use for a 64GB SD card.
    • pavucontrol – Pulse Audio Volume Control. Allows me to increase the input volume on the mic on the way in, which allows me to avoid adjusting it within Audacity itself.
    • Arch… a busy week and a dead switch this weekend put my plans on hold
    • Now I’ll be testing out the newish Cisco SG350P and an ERPOE-5.
  • Moss
    • The new job has kept me completely occupied, but I’m listening to more podcasts during drive time. No new money, no new hardware. I did sell the Canon printer at last, and ordered the HDMI cable so I can test those other computers I have.
    • I found that I did not have Mumble or multiple workspaces set up for Ubuntu Budgie 19.04, and ARandR in Bodhi is not that easy compared to Displays, so I will likely continue to use Linux Mint for podcasts for the present. Once again, when you need something to work the first time and every time, Linux Mint for the win.
    • I’ve been polishing my script for the next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest. The last episode could have stood a bit more work on my end, and I will take the learning experience and grow from it.
    • I was hoping to install OpenMandriva Lx 4 on the announced date of June 6, but it is not out yet and the announcement seems to have been pulled. Large parts of the openmandriva.org website were giving 404 or 505 errors but have been revived just this week. Softpedia states that the final version will be out “in summer or early autumn”, with no source quoted.
    • The donation to Linux Mint has been made in the name of mintCast Team, as promised (6/1/19, so it will be in the June numbers). I have spent a lot of time being sad as the Destination Linux Telegram group is exploding with all the wonderfulness of SELF.
  • Josh
    • Finalist in Tech4Good awards and the ARM Young Coder of the Year
    • Revising for mock exams 🙁
    • Installed Deepin on my Dell XPS 13 and it’s great! Screen setup is a pain though. The config window is the worst I’ve ever seen. The installation process is amazing, it’s really graphical and is probably the best installer i’ve ever seen on a distro. Worked straight away with my DSP MST hub (unlike Ubuntu) and I would highly recommend it as a starting distro.
  • Tony H
    • Buying and installing Windows 10 1903, and Mint19.1 mate to another E7440 I picked up on eBay, not only was it a good deal for the advertised specification, it was even better when I got it and it was an i7 as opposed from the i5 in the description on the auction. WIN
    • Well it’s finally happened I fell for an online scam during the week, I couldn’t find my Euro health insurance card (ehic) and went online to order a new one, and got caught out by a dodgy processing website that charges you to do what you can do for free. ALL my fault, not feeling well due to an ear problem and in a rush I didn’t read all the small print on the site. As my wife did it last time I didn’t realize it was an NHS Portal and should have had the NHS logo etc. This has cost me £33 to learn a painful lesson in how not to behave on the web. Made me feel quite vulnerable, and understanding of others that get scammed far more seriously than that.
    • And after a conversation with Ken Fallon, HPR will be airing the first episode of Distrohoppers Digest to give us a little publicity (Thursday 20th June 2019 http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2839)
  • Joe
    • Family in town.  Minimal projects
    • Working on a bluetooth speaker.
      • Had no battery when i received it but a 5v power was hooked directly up to the battery power input.
      • The speaker was also hooked up manually and no solder was used.  The speaker did not work at all until I took it apart and moved the connections
      • I took apart a battery bank and a couple of USB cables so that I could give it external and battery power and soldered all the connections.  Works pretty well now.
      • Drilled a hole in the back so that you can get to the button on the bank and see the lights so you know how much charge it has.
      • Got a hot glue gun to hold the board in the correct position.
    • My dad brought me an Atari 1010
    • Ordered a bunch of broken speakers and headphones to work on, plus I am consolidating a bunch of the old ones that I have for my vacation next week.  Going to do a lot of trouble shooting and soldering. Yes I spend my vacation doing crazy crap
    • Borderlands 2: Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary
      • Doesn’t work on Linux yet.  So far even with proton for me although I see others have it working fine.
      • Going to try Lutris
      • May have to finally go fix my Windows install.

The News:

  1. Firefox has Tracking Protection baked in
  2. E3 2019: games list, news and everything you might have missed
    1. Josh is VERY excited about the new MS Flight sim
  3. Zorin OS 15 release
  4. Deluge 2.0 BitTorrent Client released
  5. OpenProject 9, FOSS alternative to Trello or Jira, released
  6. Unity Editor for games officially available for Linux, supported by CentOS and Ubuntu for now – NOT OPEN SOURCE

Linux Innards:

  • Leo
    • SSH stands for Secure SHell. It’s a remote control protocol that allows you to remotely give commands to another machine.
    • If you’re good at networking, this means that you can touch files or run commands at home, when you’re on the other side of the world!
    • We’ll focus on the local network today
    • Make sure the user account that you want to use is created on the computer you want to connect to. In my case, that’s the Leo account
    • While you’re creating the account on the computer you want to control, also install the package: sudo apt install openssh-server. The ssh server turns on by default, and enables itself on startup. systemctl disable ssh will stop this from starting up on boot.
    • Back on your local machine, use the command ssh $USER@$IP. As long as there isn’t a firewall in the way, it’ll ask if you want to remember this machine. Hit yes and supply your username and password.
    • You can now run any command you would normally run as if you were right in front of the remote computer. Update things, install new packages, whatever you’re comfortable with in the terminal.
    • The real benefit here is the file sharing that’s enabled with this process through SFTP.
    • Open up Nemo or Caja (I believe Thunar has this ability too, but the names might be different), click File, then Connect to Server. Make sure SSH is the protocol and supply the IP address in the Server field, and fill out your username and password. This will log you in and give you access to all the files your user has permission to.

—–

    • To add a large amount of security, you would want to use Public Key Authentication. In short, you create a padlock and a key. The padlock is your public key, and the key to open it is your private key. You can give anybody your public key, but you MUST keep your private key private. Otherwise, the security is gone
    • To create this pair, run ssh-keygen. Your keys get stuck in your home folder within the .ssh directory. The permissions are automatically set on your private key to only allow you to see and change it. No one else on the system has permissions.
    • To place the public key on the remote computer, use the ssh-copy-id command. In my case the command would look like ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub leo@$IP
    • You can now log in via SSH in the terminal, or through Nemo or Caja with no password at all! Your keys are being used and you’re now much harder to hack.
    • The last step would be to disable password authentication entirely. In the terminal run sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Find the line that says PasswordAuthentication no, and remove the hash mark from the beginning of the line.
    • Restart the ssh service with systemctl restart ssh
    • Now, your key is the only key that will work for ssh.
  • Joe
    • I wanted to go a bit further with automating ssh and show something useful that you can do on a daily basis with it
    • So i am going to tell you how to setup sshfs so that you can access all of your files as if they were local.
    • Access times are pretty good.  Even from outside my network i am able to watch movies using VLC
    • So even with a thin device you can have all of your files as if the drives are mounted to the local machine.
    • First make sure that the ssh keys are setup as described by a couple of the others.
    • Next make sure that sshfs is installed.  It might be already installed but it needs to be on the client machine at least.
    • Then you need to create a local folder to mount to.  This should be set to some permissions that you can use.  755 should do it.
    • Test your sshfs
      • sshfs user@remote:/location path/localMount -C
      • The -C allows for compression which is very helpful
      • I usually mount my whole /mnt from my server to whatever folder i setup
    • The next thing to do is setup some alias’ so that your less used mounts are easy to access
    • Then setup a couple of scripts so that you can automount the remote drives whenever you are connected to the internet.  Also to correctly unmount and remove when you lose connection.
    • This is done using tools that are already available to use in linux mint
    • I redid my setup to verify that it works and it is not perfect but it works pretty well
    • There are 2 places that you are going to want to put scripts
      • /etc/network/if-up.d/
        • For when you are connecting to a network
      • And /etc/network/if-down.d/
        • For when you are disconnecting
      • The files that you create should be bash scripts but should not have .sh in the name
      • /etc/network/if-up.d/
        • /etc/network/if-up.d/name
        • #!/bin/sh
        • sleep 5s
        • su user <<‘EOF’
        • sshfs user@server:/mnt /mnt/local -C
        • EOF
      • I want the mount to be owned by the user instead of root but the script needs to be owned and run by root hence the su user
      • I want the network to be fully connected to i am giving a 5 second delay.
      • etc/network/if-down.d/name
        • #!/bin/sh
        • killall -9 sshfs
        • sudo umount /mnt/local
        • #This will clear the mount so you don’t get conflicts on reconnect
    • This is a very simple setup that works a large portion of the time.  I want to re-write the scripts so that they are always looking to see if the mount is connected and for internet connections in a much more robust manner.  Probably by pinging a website and checking for the mount.
    • My server is overheating under load again.  Which means it is a motherboard problem. So when i can afford it i will need to rebuild.  Not sure what kind of setup i should get.
      • Needs to be pretty fast
      • Lots of ram
      • Space for 5 3.5 inch drives
      • Preferably quiet
      • Not huge
  • Moss – So you want to know how hard it is. Most of our listeners understand that I’m the least technical member on the mintCast team… Well, it works. I may not remember how we got there, but with a lot of help from Leo, I managed to ssh to my wife’s computer. Checked files in Terminal, ran caja, opened her external drive. Whoopee.

Vibrations from the Ether:

[A large number of HP printers still have the printhead on the ink cartridge. Here is a 2.5-year-old list (we could not find an update).]

Check This Out!

  • Tony H
    • If you do need to create an install medium for Windows 10 which now needs a 5Gb disc, and you don’t have a dual layer DVD RW or DLDVD and need to create a bootable USB drive check out this utility, WoeUSB. In the last week I have used it to create the latest Win10 1903 .iso into a number of USB drives for installing to a couple of machines I was preparing for other people. In fact Etcher even suggested using it to create the bootable disk when I tried to use it to do the job, if it doesn’t like the drive you’re using, use GParted to wipe the partition recreate the partition table then format to fat32, after that it should work fine.

Announcements:

  • No Tony H next show as he will be sailing the high seas on Holiday :-))
  • Maybe no Joe

Wrap-Up:

Thanks:

  • Josh for working on redesigning our website, setting up the YouTube and Twitch streams, and providing lots of technical help.
  • Bytemark hosting for providing the new hosting server for the website. (Which will roll out soon, we promise!)
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files.
  • The folks at Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we use to communicate
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
]]> 3642 mintCast 310 – Mint https://mintcast.org/mintcast-310-mint/ Wed, 05 Jun 2019 01:50:23 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3634 Download
]]>

Download

Introduction:

    • Welcome to mintCast Episode 310.
    • This is Leo and with me this week are Bo, Joe, Moss, Josh and Tony Hughes, and we’re recording live on Sunday 2nd June 2019.
    • First up, in our Wanderings, I get familiar with Batocera, Bo talks Doom 2016 and automatic Arch, Josh upgrades our live streaming setup and gives a keynote in France, Tony Hughes repairs Firefox and a laptop, Moss fixes a slow bootup thanks to Discord and takes on Bodh, and Joe wades through broken projects but enjoys Texas Linux Fest.
    • In the news, we talk life and death for Linux, some new apps, and what’s going on with Linux Mint
    • In the Innards, we dive into why we use Mint.
    • Finally, we rummage through feedback.BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:
      • Leo
        • Playing with Batocera. The install was super easy. Just a quick Etcher image copy.
          • Boot up is very quick on a 11” HP Stream using a fast-ish flash drive. 80MB/s read. Had to set Legacy boot, but UEFI options were available. Maybe It was just my laptop. More testing required!
          • I realized after booting that a second partition called SHARED showed up. It used up the rest of the empty space on the flash drive. Gave me about 28GB. This is where you’re supposed to store ROMS, or you can easily use a second drive for this.
          • The wife and I tried, Atari 2600, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis (Mega Drive), Gameboy Advance, Playstation 1 and N64.
          • All this using a PS3 controller over USB. Had absolutely no issue setting it up.
      • Josh
        • Went to Lyon, France to give a keynote about Open Source.
        • Also did a Raspberry Jam event to give developers an insight as to what kids are doing with coding in school
        • A more complicated Live streaming setup (MacroDeck, Kauna, Youtube Chat, VoiceMeeter, UniversalSoundboard, OBS & Youtube’s new streaming dashboard, Using Chatv2 (http://chatv2.septapus.com) to change the CSS on the OBS browser overlay)
        • New PCBs arrived after a mess up on the last ones, these ones fit but the LEDs are a nightmare to solder!
      • Tony H
        • Recording and editing the intro and outgoing segments of Distrohoppers Digest to include the music and save a little time editing the final show each month.
        • Repairing my Firefox install which after the update to ff67 broke and would not start, after a suggestion in one of the many community forums we are in I deleted the .mozilla folder from home, restarted Firefox then reinstalled my backup .mozilla folder and all is well again. (wipes brow)
        • Myself and Moss recorded the second episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest last Wednesday and it is now out in the wild for your listening pleasure. We review Fedora 29/30 and Linux Lite 4.4.  The feed is at : http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/jejQf
        • Installing Windows 10 to a Sony Vaio i5 laptop after upgrading it to a 128Gb SSD and 8Gb RAM, this was for a friend as the laptop was dog slow with a load of manufacturer bloatware. The slow spinning HDD didn’t help. After reinstalling and updating to the May 2019 update, the Laptop boots in just over 25s  
        • Buying a Dell E7440 with a 256Gb SSD and 16Gb RAM on eBay and getting what I thought was a good deal at $210 (including delivery)
      • Moss
        • Tony and I had a lovely meeting for the next Distrohoppers’ Digest. As Tony said, recording happened on Wednesday, May 29, and we’re working on our next episode now. The first episode had 135 downloads (6/1). I am still debating what to use for the June show, and am considering cheating and just reviewing Bodhi 5.0.0, since I saved most of the things I had to do to get it installed and I love using it so much. I did check out the latest version of Feren OS, but had problems from installation on and have decided not to go there at this time. I will probably wait until June 6 or so when OpenMandriva Lx 4 gets released and put that on the 4th partition.
        • I had a chat with listener Kat in our Discord group regarding my slow boot times on Bodhi, as I’ve discussed. She helped me fix it, and now my boot time is 1:16 instead of 3:05. Apparently, the swap sector was reformatted and renamed by one of my other installations, and Bodhi was waiting for that sector. We managed to tell the machine the current name of the swap sector. Bodhi has decided that if we’re going to call it by that name, it doesn’t need to load it, so it just marks it “Failed” and continues. As I have 8 Gb RAM, I really don’t need a swap, so no harm. Kat is amazing.
        • I did sign up for the free parts of Librem One, which got me Librem Chat and Librem Social… in other words, Riot and Mastodon. I have one contact in Mastodon, thanks to this show, so it’s not totally useless and it WAS totally free.
        • I will not be going to SELF in June. Only $130 of the $750 goal was reached. I will make efforts to save towards going next year, and I have already sent a $55 donation to Linux Mint (although I had to contact them via email to tell them it was to be credited as being from our team, not me personally.) I will send another $55 to Archive.org soon, and the remaining $20, by designation of the donor, will be kept to help my wife and I with immigration issues.
        • I have a new job. I got a position as an auto parts driver for O’Reilly Auto Parts. using their car or truck, which is a big change from Uber. Not much per hour, and it’s part time; the manager said he could get me hours at other stores, but that will likely take a week or three.  I got a positive response from one of the computer jobs I applied for, but they said their business lags during the summer and they promised they would call me when Autumn approaches.
        • The rehabilitation facility has sent my mother home — not because she’s significantly better, but because her insurance has run out. She will now have to spend her own money to get 24/7 care until she is stronger. The alternative not taken was to consign her healthcare and enter a nursing home, no longer living independently. We all love the US healthcare system.
      • Joe
        • Attempted to install batocera on one of the really old windows tablets that I spoke about a few weeks ago
          • Would not read the USB at boot for some reason.  May have to do with PAE
          • Then I tried to install retroarch but there was a problem with the graphics drivers thank you -vvv
          • So i tried to install a genesis emulator and got the same issue.  
        • I am thinking that my garage computer might have some overheating issues in the dallas weather so i am looking at a way to keep this gigabit brix computer cool enough to run.  
        • Took my t100ta apart again to see if i could re-seat the usb port and the answer is no.  I got out the soldering iron and heated the feet to reflow the solder and it still will not charge.  
        • Seems like a week for broken projects.
        • Woo, I have been watching tronicsfix on youtube and decided to bust out the old xbox one that my former roommate left me when he moved to Arizona.
          • Originally thought it had a bad hard drive because it was having issues when he was using it.
          • It still might have hard drive issues but it turned on and updated and has run several games with no issues
          • Its weird but even though i am not signed into his account i am still able to access all the games he has used on it.  Even the ones that are currently not installed. I uninstalled all the games but i still have access to reinstall them.
          • I assume that he also had files on there that only his user has access to because of how full the HDD still is.  
          • May do a full wipe and sell because I have little use for it
          • May also give it to my daughters and put the 360 they have on a shelf as a backup for the one my wife has because they seem to die quick these days and the xbox one does not play a lot of the games that she likes
        • TLF
          • Loved getting to talk to the Jupiter Broadcasting team
            • Ell and myself had a good conversation about audiobooks and the titles that we enjoy
            • Got to meet 5150
            • Talked to a couple of listeners really enjoyed that
            • Shout out to Mordency, Ed and Danny
          • Got to go to a containerization talk and a couple of ansible talks.

      THE NEWS:

      1. Antergos discontinued, community may pick it up under a different name if enough interest is shown
        1. Endeavour, Antergos community’s next step
      2. Zettler Markdown Editor
      3. Slimbook Battery Optimizer for laptop users running Ubuntu-based distros
      4. Scientific Linux and Antergos are shutting down: It’s time for Linux Mint to go
      5. Linux Mint Monthly News
        1. Wine 4 stable will be backported for easy installation and use.
          1. This work will relieve issues like, obsolete Wine packages, no Vulkan, being forced to launch Windows binaries from the CLI, and non-working controllers.
          2. This will soon be available with the metapackage wine-installer and wine-desktop-files and replaces Wine 3.0 in the Ubuntu repo.
        2. A new look on the old community website. Inactive users and info were purged.
          1. With the removal of features like “friends” and “user scores” the site became much more responsive.
          2. Hint at a new logo
        3. Xed, the default text editor, will soon support toggling comments and comment blocks. This allows you to press Ctrl+/ to comment entire sections of code out!
        4. The settings widget has been rewritten in python-xapp. This reduces 2200 lines of code down to less than 700. This resulted in better performance, a more consistent look, and makes the code much more portable so other projects can take advantage.

      LINUX INNARDS:

      Why Choose Linux? Why Mint?

      • Leo
        • Linux Mint is one of the few distros that keeps the basic desktop paradigm.
        • Timeshift and a version of Ukuu make it one of the easiest distros to get going for new users. It’s no wonder it’s recommended as much as it is.
        • People aren’t gonna work on what you want them to work on if they’re doing it for free. They’ll work on what they want.
        • Ubuntu and Mint’s trajectories are different. One of the biggest examples of this is that Mint ships with Flatpak, not Snap. However, Mint doesn’t prevent you from adding the snapd package yourself. You get the best of both!
        • No matter what fear, uncertainty and doubt gets said, Mint’s not going anywhere.
      • Josh
        • Ubuntu was buggy
        • Tony H recommended it (he’s the UK’s mint promoter!)
        • Nice UI
        • Friendly community
        • Don’t want to get kicked off mintCast 🙂 (near-zero chance of that – Moss)
      • Tony Hughes

      For me the main issue first is why do I choose Linux over those other popular proprietary operating systems. The first issue is the cost of the hardware associated with the Apple ecosystem as far as I am aware MacOS is a very secure and less intrusive OS than Windows and because of its popularity with the creative community it is well served with some of the most popular software not available in Linux, but I feel that the hardware is vastly overpriced for what you get, compared with similar hardware from other manufacturers.

      Windows on the other hand is very intrusive, and although it has become more stable as the years have passed, I personally would not use it for my daily driver despite Microsoft now virtually giving Windows 10 away if you have a Windows 7/8 licence for personal use. Also I refurbish a lot of older PC hardware and the cost of a new licence if you do not have an active one is prohibitive, and often more than the value of the hardware you are reinstalling. Also the process of doing a fresh install of Windows is quite long, and while I can install Linux and have it fully updated within an hour on most hardware from the last 8-9 years and have a fully productive PC with all the most common software needed all ready installed, in Windows (and Mac, as far as I know) I would have to take further time, and if not installing open source software, spend more money to get the productivity software installed before I can use the PC.

      When I first started to use Linux in 2006/7 I started with the then fairly new kid on the block Ubuntu, depending on the hardware this was Gnome or the lighter Xubuntu with the xfce DE which would be usable on a Pentium 2 with 196Mb of RAM. In 2009 Ubuntu with the Gnome 2 DE became my daily driver after I ditched my dual boot setup with Windows XP, having hardly used the Windows partition in almost a year. But it was the Unity DE that lead me to move over to Mint as the workflow of Unity just didn’t work for me on a Desktop PC for what I use it for.

      Over the last 10 years I have tried many Linux distros, mainly of the Debian family. I have delved into the world of RPM as well, but I haven’t found a distribution which has offered me anything that Mint doesn’t and is as easy to use. However I recognise that modern Linux is increasingly becoming more refined, and despite the different DE’s available many of the most popular Linux Distros out there could, once I became familiar with their little differences, do just as good a job of meeting my computing needs as Linux Mint (Mate) does for me. I say this while typing on a PCLinuxOS setup on test for the next DH podcast.  

      • Bo
        • The first time I saw linux – Playing MTG with a guy who had it on his laptop. “Oh, it’s like windows but you can make it how you want it”
        • My first distro – Some version of Ubuntu, I have no idea. My friends and I had a the classic installation party.
        • I quit when Counter Strike wouldn’t work.
        • My second installation – Fedora, dude at GS brought in a Fedora laptop.
        • I sorta became the Free as in Beer, Free as in Speech guy amongst my friends.
        • Decided to start podcasting on Linux. Still gaming on Windows.
        • Though I’ve used many distros and am constantly changing, I switched to Linux Mint when Ubuntu switched to Unity. (although I learned to love Unity eventually)
        • I’ve only just now started ditching Windows all together because of the progress of Proton and DXVK.
        • For the past year I’ve had a job working as a CentOS/RHEL sysadmin.
        • With little more experience than most hobbyists I was and am obnoxiously enthusiastic about Linux

       

     

  • Moss – I’ve been playing with Linux since about 2002, not being a programmer or anything, just curious. I had a dislike of Microsoft for lack of diversity and an inability to control viruses and fragmentation and bloatware and updates, things which still persist to this day.  At that time, I had disks and books for Slackware and Red Hat, and they required more brain cells to install than I had available. Then I got a Mandrake disk, loaded it, and it worked. Still didn’t provide all the experience I needed, but it was fun to play with. After a couple years, the new version of Mandrake would not load to my computer, and I’m not one to keep old software unless it works. I tried SuSE (just before it went to OpenSuSE), and that, too, worked but did not give me a full online experience. So I went dormant for a while, and upgraded from my 486DX to a P-II. Every now and then I would poke my head back into Linux, but I couldn’t seem to get any of my friends to develop a similar interest so it mostly stayed in the background.

  • In 2011, after I stopped being Senior Editor at a tiny publishing company, I once again felt comfortable playing on my computer and installed Ubuntu 10.04 (I had played with 8.04 briefly). Then 12.04 came out with Unity (first used in 10.10, but I only do LTS for the most part), and would not install to my system. Rather than try to figure out how to make it work with another desktop or try another distro, I just went back to XP. I had a couple computers during a bad relationship which ran 8 or 8.1, and hated those. When I moved out, I went back to 7. Then Windows tried to force me to version 10. I resisted for a while, learning about all the security issues, and then went ahead and did the “upgrade”. I looked for the security holes, found them, found I could not close all of them no matter what I did and that much of the “wonderful new” software REQUIRED them, and downgraded back to Windows 7 … only to discover it left the holes open. That was enough for me. For some reason, I had resisted trying Linux Mint previously, seeing it as an example of Sturgeon’s Law (95% of everything is crap), but for some reason, I decided to try it. I went from Windows 7 directly to Linux Mint, and have not gone back since. Linux Mint was everything I had hoped for 5 or 10 years earlier. My office package (Ashampoo Office, made by SoftMaker) had a Linux version, so I didn’t even have to change that.I also noticed that it hardly took up any space on my hard drive, and I had a couple external hard drives, so I moved my personal files to an external hard drive, partitioned my computer drive, and started trying other distros while keeping Linux Mint installed. This gives me the best of both worlds — a stable operating system which does everything I need, and room to play with other distros. My Dell PC died, don’t know why but it was on the motherboard, and I got a Lenovo X130e, room for easily 2 partitions. I have since upgraded to a Lenovo T430, about 3 years ago now. But I keep using Linux Mint as my main driver. Because it does everything, every time, predictably. Might be seen as being a bit boring, but that’s why I play with other distros. My current favorite fun distro is Bodhi 5.0.0, and it’s just not as stable.

    • Joe
      • Not going to have much to add here, basically everything everyone else said.
      • I started using mint when it was the one that provided the non-free codecs
      • But what drew me to it is the way the interface is so much like xp or 95 while still looking new. I can use it without making changes or I can customize it how I want.
      • I have to do less installs out of the box which is always a plus.

    VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

    Hilander

    Brad Alexander

    ixSystems has a couple of articles on beating ransomware:

    https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/defeating-cryptolocker-attacks-with-zfs/

    https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/combating-ransomware/

    CHECK THIS OUT!

    • Joe
      • TronicsFix
        • Youtube channel about fixing electronics

    Next show is live on June 16, 2019 at 2 pm CT.

    Wrap-Up:

               Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/

               Twitter @TonyH1212

        th@mintcast.org

        distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com

    Thanks:

    • Josh for working on redesigning our website, setting up the YouTube stream, and providing lots of technical help.
    • Archive.org for hosting our audio files.
    • The folks at Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we use to communicate
    • Bytemark hosting for providing the new hosting server for the website.
    • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
]]> 3634 mintCast 310 – Mint (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-310-mint-mp3/ Wed, 05 Jun 2019 01:48:42 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3632 Download
]]>

Download

Introduction:

  • Welcome to mintCast Episode 310.
  • This is Leo and with me this week are Bo, Joe, Moss, Josh and Tony Hughes, and we’re recording live on Sunday 2nd June 2019.
  • First up, in our Wanderings, I get familiar with Batocera, Bo talks Doom 2016 and automatic Arch, Josh upgrades our live streaming setup and gives a keynote in France, Tony Hughes repairs Firefox and a laptop, Moss fixes a slow bootup thanks to Discord and takes on Bodh, and Joe wades through broken projects but enjoys Texas Linux Fest.
  • In the news, we talk life and death for Linux, some new apps, and what’s going on with Linux Mint
  • In the Innards, we dive into why we use Mint.
  • Finally, we rummage through feedback.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

 

  • Leo
    • Playing with Batocera. The install was super easy. Just a quick Etcher image copy.
      • Boot up is very quick on a 11” HP Stream using a fast-ish flash drive. 80MB/s read. Had to set Legacy boot, but UEFI options were available. Maybe It was just my laptop. More testing required!
      • I realized after booting that a second partition called SHARED showed up. It used up the rest of the empty space on the flash drive. Gave me about 28GB. This is where you’re supposed to store ROMS, or you can easily use a second drive for this.
      • The wife and I tried, Atari 2600, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis (Mega Drive), Gameboy Advance, Playstation 1 and N64.
      • All this using a PS3 controller over USB. Had absolutely no issue setting it up.

 

 

  • Josh
    • Went to Lyon, France to give a keynote about Open Source.
    • Also did a Raspberry Jam event to give developers an insight as to what kids are doing with coding in school
    • A more complicated Live streaming setup (MacroDeck, Kauna, Youtube Chat, VoiceMeeter, UniversalSoundboard, OBS & Youtube’s new streaming dashboard, Using Chatv2 (http://chatv2.septapus.com) to change the CSS on the OBS browser overlay)
    • New PCBs arrived after a mess up on the last ones, these ones fit but the LEDs are a nightmare to solder!

 

  • Tony H
    • Recording and editing the intro and outgoing segments of Distrohoppers Digest to include the music and save a little time editing the final show each month.
    • Repairing my Firefox install which after the update to ff67 broke and would not start, after a suggestion in one of the many community forums we are in I deleted the .mozilla folder from home, restarted Firefox then reinstalled my backup .mozilla folder and all is well again. (wipes brow)
    • Myself and Moss recorded the second episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest last Wednesday and it is now out in the wild for your listening pleasure. We review Fedora 29/30 and Linux Lite 4.4.  The feed is at : http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/jejQf
    • Installing Windows 10 to a Sony Vaio i5 laptop after upgrading it to a 128Gb SSD and 8Gb RAM, this was for a friend as the laptop was dog slow with a load of manufacturer bloatware. The slow spinning HDD didn’t help. After reinstalling and updating to the May 2019 update, the Laptop boots in just over 25s  
    • Buying a Dell E7440 with a 256Gb SSD and 16Gb RAM on eBay and getting what I thought was a good deal at $210 (including delivery)

 

  • Moss
    • Tony and I had a lovely meeting for the next Distrohoppers’ Digest. As Tony said, recording happened on Wednesday, May 29, and we’re working on our next episode now. The first episode had 135 downloads (6/1). I am still debating what to use for the June show, and am considering cheating and just reviewing Bodhi 5.0.0, since I saved most of the things I had to do to get it installed and I love using it so much. I did check out the latest version of Feren OS, but had problems from installation on and have decided not to go there at this time. I will probably wait until June 6 or so when OpenMandriva Lx 4 gets released and put that on the 4th partition.
    • I had a chat with listener Kat in our Discord group regarding my slow boot times on Bodhi, as I’ve discussed. She helped me fix it, and now my boot time is 1:16 instead of 3:05. Apparently, the swap sector was reformatted and renamed by one of my other installations, and Bodhi was waiting for that sector. We managed to tell the machine the current name of the swap sector. Bodhi has decided that if we’re going to call it by that name, it doesn’t need to load it, so it just marks it “Failed” and continues. As I have 8 Gb RAM, I really don’t need a swap, so no harm. Kat is amazing.
    • I did sign up for the free parts of Librem One, which got me Librem Chat and Librem Social… in other words, Riot and Mastodon. I have one contact in Mastodon, thanks to this show, so it’s not totally useless and it WAS totally free.
    • I will not be going to SELF in June. Only $130 of the $750 goal was reached. I will make efforts to save towards going next year, and I have already sent a $55 donation to Linux Mint (although I had to contact them via email to tell them it was to be credited as being from our team, not me personally.) I will send another $55 to Archive.org soon, and the remaining $20, by designation of the donor, will be kept to help my wife and I with immigration issues.
    • I have a new job. I got a position as an auto parts driver for O’Reilly Auto Parts. using their car or truck, which is a big change from Uber. Not much per hour, and it’s part time; the manager said he could get me hours at other stores, but that will likely take a week or three.  I got a positive response from one of the computer jobs I applied for, but they said their business lags during the summer and they promised they would call me when Autumn approaches.
    • The rehabilitation facility has sent my mother home — not because she’s significantly better, but because her insurance has run out. She will now have to spend her own money to get 24/7 care until she is stronger. The alternative not taken was to consign her healthcare and enter a nursing home, no longer living independently. We all love the US healthcare system.
  • Joe
    • Attempted to install batocera on one of the really old windows tablets that I spoke about a few weeks ago
      • Would not read the USB at boot for some reason.  May have to do with PAE
      • Then I tried to install retroarch but there was a problem with the graphics drivers thank you -vvv
      • So i tried to install a genesis emulator and got the same issue.  
    • I am thinking that my garage computer might have some overheating issues in the dallas weather so i am looking at a way to keep this gigabit brix computer cool enough to run.  
    • Took my t100ta apart again to see if i could re-seat the usb port and the answer is no.  I got out the soldering iron and heated the feet to reflow the solder and it still will not charge.  
    • Seems like a week for broken projects.
    • Woo, I have been watching tronicsfix on youtube and decided to bust out the old xbox one that my former roommate left me when he moved to Arizona.
      • Originally thought it had a bad hard drive because it was having issues when he was using it.
      • It still might have hard drive issues but it turned on and updated and has run several games with no issues
      • Its weird but even though i am not signed into his account i am still able to access all the games he has used on it.  Even the ones that are currently not installed. I uninstalled all the games but i still have access to reinstall them.
      • I assume that he also had files on there that only his user has access to because of how full the HDD still is.  
      • May do a full wipe and sell because I have little use for it
      • May also give it to my daughters and put the 360 they have on a shelf as a backup for the one my wife has because they seem to die quick these days and the xbox one does not play a lot of the games that she likes
    • TLF
      • Loved getting to talk to the Jupiter Broadcasting team
        • Ell and myself had a good conversation about audiobooks and the titles that we enjoy
        • Got to meet 5150
        • Talked to a couple of listeners really enjoyed that
        • Shout out to Mordency, Ed and Danny
      • Got to go to a containerization talk and a couple of ansible talks.

 

THE NEWS:

  1. Antergos discontinued, community may pick it up under a different name if enough interest is shown
    1. Endeavour, Antergos community’s next step
  2. Zettler Markdown Editor
  3. Slimbook Battery Optimizer for laptop users running Ubuntu-based distros
  4. Scientific Linux and Antergos are shutting down: It’s time for Linux Mint to go
  5. Linux Mint Monthly News
    1. Wine 4 stable will be backported for easy installation and use.
      1. This work will relieve issues like, obsolete Wine packages, no Vulkan, being forced to launch Windows binaries from the CLI, and non-working controllers.
      2. This will soon be available with the metapackage wine-installer and wine-desktop-files and replaces Wine 3.0 in the Ubuntu repo.
    2. A new look on the old community website. Inactive users and info were purged.
      1. With the removal of features like “friends” and “user scores” the site became much more responsive.
      2. Hint at a new logo
    3. Xed, the default text editor, will soon support toggling comments and comment blocks. This allows you to press Ctrl+/ to comment entire sections of code out!
    4. The settings widget has been rewritten in python-xapp. This reduces 2200 lines of code down to less than 700. This resulted in better performance, a more consistent look, and makes the code much more portable so other projects can take advantage.

 

LINUX INNARDS:

Why Choose Linux? Why Mint?

 

  • Leo
    • Linux Mint is one of the few distros that keeps the basic desktop paradigm.
    • Timeshift and a version of Ukuu make it one of the easiest distros to get going for new users. It’s no wonder it’s recommended as much as it is.
    • People aren’t gonna work on what you want them to work on if they’re doing it for free. They’ll work on what they want.
    • Ubuntu and Mint’s trajectories are different. One of the biggest examples of this is that Mint ships with Flatpak, not Snap. However, Mint doesn’t prevent you from adding the snapd package yourself. You get the best of both!
    • No matter what fear, uncertainty and doubt gets said, Mint’s not going anywhere.

 

  • Josh
    • Ubuntu was buggy
    • Tony H recommended it (he’s the UK’s mint promoter!)
    • Nice UI
    • Friendly community
    • Don’t want to get kicked off mintCast 🙂 (near-zero chance of that – Moss)

 

  • Tony Hughes

For me the main issue first is why do I choose Linux over those other popular proprietary operating systems. The first issue is the cost of the hardware associated with the Apple ecosystem as far as I am aware MacOS is a very secure and less intrusive OS than Windows and because of its popularity with the creative community it is well served with some of the most popular software not available in Linux, but I feel that the hardware is vastly overpriced for what you get, compared with similar hardware from other manufacturers.

 

Windows on the other hand is very intrusive, and although it has become more stable as the years have passed, I personally would not use it for my daily driver despite Microsoft now virtually giving Windows 10 away if you have a Windows 7/8 licence for personal use. Also I refurbish a lot of older PC hardware and the cost of a new licence if you do not have an active one is prohibitive, and often more than the value of the hardware you are reinstalling. Also the process of doing a fresh install of Windows is quite long, and while I can install Linux and have it fully updated within an hour on most hardware from the last 8-9 years and have a fully productive PC with all the most common software needed all ready installed, in Windows (and Mac, as far as I know) I would have to take further time, and if not installing open source software, spend more money to get the productivity software installed before I can use the PC.

 

When I first started to use Linux in 2006/7 I started with the then fairly new kid on the block Ubuntu, depending on the hardware this was Gnome or the lighter Xubuntu with the xfce DE which would be usable on a Pentium 2 with 196Mb of RAM. In 2009 Ubuntu with the Gnome 2 DE became my daily driver after I ditched my dual boot setup with Windows XP, having hardly used the Windows partition in almost a year. But it was the Unity DE that lead me to move over to Mint as the workflow of Unity just didn’t work for me on a Desktop PC for what I use it for.

 

Over the last 10 years I have tried many Linux distros, mainly of the Debian family. I have delved into the world of RPM as well, but I haven’t found a distribution which has offered me anything that Mint doesn’t and is as easy to use. However I recognise that modern Linux is increasingly becoming more refined, and despite the different DE’s available many of the most popular Linux Distros out there could, once I became familiar with their little differences, do just as good a job of meeting my computing needs as Linux Mint (Mate) does for me. I say this while typing on a PCLinuxOS setup on test for the next DH podcast.  

 

  • Bo
    • The first time I saw linux – Playing MTG with a guy who had it on his laptop. “Oh, it’s like windows but you can make it how you want it”
    • My first distro – Some version of Ubuntu, I have no idea. My friends and I had a the classic installation party.
    • I quit when Counter Strike wouldn’t work.
    • My second installation – Fedora, dude at GS brought in a Fedora laptop.
    • I sorta became the Free as in Beer, Free as in Speech guy amongst my friends.
    • Decided to start podcasting on Linux. Still gaming on Windows.
    • Though I’ve used many distros and am constantly changing, I switched to Linux Mint when Ubuntu switched to Unity. (although I learned to love Unity eventually)
    • I’ve only just now started ditching Windows all together because of the progress of Proton and DXVK.
    • For the past year I’ve had a job working as a CentOS/RHEL sysadmin.
    • With little more experience than most hobbyists I was and am obnoxiously enthusiastic about Linux

 

  • Moss – I’ve been playing with Linux since about 2002, not being a programmer or anything, just curious. I had a dislike of Microsoft for lack of diversity and an inability to control viruses and fragmentation and bloatware and updates, things which still persist to this day.  At that time, I had disks and books for Slackware and Red Hat, and they required more brain cells to install than I had available. Then I got a Mandrake disk, loaded it, and it worked. Still didn’t provide all the experience I needed, but it was fun to play with. After a couple years, the new version of Mandrake would not load to my computer, and I’m not one to keep old software unless it works. I tried SuSE (just before it went to OpenSuSE), and that, too, worked but did not give me a full online experience. So I went dormant for a while, and upgraded from my 486DX to a P-II. Every now and then I would poke my head back into Linux, but I couldn’t seem to get any of my friends to develop a similar interest so it mostly stayed in the background.

  • In 2011, after I stopped being Senior Editor at a tiny publishing company, I once again felt comfortable playing on my computer and installed Ubuntu 10.04 (I had played with 8.04 briefly). Then 12.04 came out with Unity (first used in 10.10, but I only do LTS for the most part), and would not install to my system. Rather than try to figure out how to make it work with another desktop or try another distro, I just went back to XP. I had a couple computers during a bad relationship which ran 8 or 8.1, and hated those. When I moved out, I went back to 7. Then Windows tried to force me to version 10. I resisted for a while, learning about all the security issues, and then went ahead and did the “upgrade”. I looked for the security holes, found them, found I could not close all of them no matter what I did and that much of the “wonderful new” software REQUIRED them, and downgraded back to Windows 7 … only to discover it left the holes open. That was enough for me. For some reason, I had resisted trying Linux Mint previously, seeing it as an example of Sturgeon’s Law (95% of everything is crap), but for some reason, I decided to try it. I went from Windows 7 directly to Linux Mint, and have not gone back since. Linux Mint was everything I had hoped for 5 or 10 years earlier. My office package (Ashampoo Office, made by SoftMaker) had a Linux version, so I didn’t even have to change that.I also noticed that it hardly took up any space on my hard drive, and I had a couple external hard drives, so I moved my personal files to an external hard drive, partitioned my computer drive, and started trying other distros while keeping Linux Mint installed. This gives me the best of both worlds — a stable operating system which does everything I need, and room to play with other distros. My Dell PC died, don’t know why but it was on the motherboard, and I got a Lenovo X130e, room for easily 2 partitions. I have since upgraded to a Lenovo T430, about 3 years ago now. But I keep using Linux Mint as my main driver. Because it does everything, every time, predictably. Might be seen as being a bit boring, but that’s why I play with other distros. My current favorite fun distro is Bodhi 5.0.0, and it’s just not as stable.

    • Joe
      • Not going to have much to add here, basically everything everyone else said.
      • I started using mint when it was the one that provided the non-free codecs
      • But what drew me to it is the way the interface is so much like xp or 95 while still looking new. I can use it without making changes or I can customize it how I want.
      • I have to do less installs out of the box which is always a plus.

    VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

    Hilander

    Brad Alexander

    ixSystems has a couple of articles on beating ransomware:

    https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/defeating-cryptolocker-attacks-with-zfs/

    https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/combating-ransomware/

    CHECK THIS OUT!

    • Joe
      • TronicsFix
        • Youtube channel about fixing electronics

    Next show is live on June 16, 2019 at 2 pm CT.

    Wrap-Up:

               Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/

               Twitter @TonyH1212

        th@mintcast.org

        distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com

    Thanks:

    • Josh for working on redesigning our website, setting up the YouTube stream, and providing lots of technical help.
    • Archive.org for hosting our audio files.
    • The folks at Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we use to communicate
    • Bytemark hosting for providing the new hosting server for the website.
    • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
]]> 3632 mintCast 309 – Virtualization https://mintcast.org/mintcast-309-virtualization/ Wed, 22 May 2019 04:59:18 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3624 Download
]]>

Download

Introduction:

  • This is Leo, Joe, Josh, Tony Watts, Tony Hughes and Moss!
  • First up, in our Wanderings, I get some new gear and upgrade kernels, Tony Hughes is back home and LUGging again, Moss gets a new printer and some recording gear, Josh is jetsetting to France next week, Joe’s gaming more and heading to Texas Linux Fest on the 31st of this month, and Tony Watts is looking for a cheap server and trying RetroPie ports.
  • Then, in the news, we have lots of releases like RHEL 8, and plenty of vulnerabilities
  • In our Innards section, we talk virtualization
  • And finally, plenty of feedback and LOTS of check this out
    • [0:00] Theme
    • [1:03] Introduction
    • [2:17] Bi-Weekly Wanderings
    • [38:04] News
    • [1:01:15] Innards
    • [1:34:14] Vibrations
    • [1:40:48] Check This Out!
    • [1:50:27] Wrap Up & Thanks

Introduction:

  • This is Leo, Joe, Josh, Tony Watts, Tony Hughes and Moss!
  • First up, in our Wanderings, I get some new gear and upgrade kernels, Tony Hughes is back home and LUGging again, Moss gets a new printer and some recording gear, Josh is jetsetting to France next week, Joe’s gaming more and heading to Texas Linux Fest on the 31st of this month, and Tony Watts is looking for a cheap server and trying RetroPie ports.
  • Then, in the news, we have lots of releases like RHEL 8, and plenty of vulnerabilities
  • In our Innards section, we talk virtualization
  • And finally, plenty of feedback and LOTS of check this out
    • [0:00] Theme
    • [1:03] Introduction
    • [2:17] Bi-Weekly Wanderings
    • [38:04] News
    • [1:01:15] Innards
    • [1:34:14] Vibrations
    • [1:40:48] Check This Out!
    • [1:50:27] Wrap Up & Thanks

Bi-Weekly Wanderings:

  • Leo
    • Got some new recording gear. MXL 990 and a Beringher UM-2. I’m still getting everything calibrated.
    • I spent some time this last week getting the 3 Mint boxes I used upgraded to kernel 5.0.0. My laptop is the only one that really needed it for the battery improvements, but I figured I’d try out everything.
  • Tony H
    • I’ve returned home Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre and getting back into day to day living.
    • Still playing with Linux, at the LUG yesterday morning I installed Fedora 29 on a 10 year Old Dell 15” laptop that was one of our members Expensive Desktop replacement 10 years ago, Core 2 Duo with a whopping 4Gig of Ram 🙂 my install iso for mint 19.1 was corrupt and would not install so I used my Fedora 29 Matѐ spin and after installing a 128 Gig SSD the install went great. On reboot the laptop boots in 50 seconds from pressing the power button to it being connected to the internet and applications being available to use, which is not bad for a 10 year old machine.
    • Installed Kernel 5.0.0.xx on my desktop Mint 19.1 install and broke the Nvidia driver, had to return to the open source driver.
  • Moss
    • As you know, it’s Printer Week. After a lot of advice, I got a Canon Pixma TS9210. And I could not get it installed. I made some headway, hit a brick wall, got some help, hit another brick wall, got more advice which didn’t help… so I called Amazon. What with the ink already installed, they told me to keep the printer and gave me a full refund, so I ordered a Brother MFC-J491DW. It is up and running on all 4 of my distros as well as my wife’s, easy peasy once you know how to do Brother installation (requires the use of a Terminal). I did get a LOT of people recommending HP printers, despite my pleas for them to not do so. Bottom line, be careful before you buy a new PIXMA, and Brother Is Best. (Boy, I wish I could get paid for all these sponsor-like comments!)
    • I did get a new boom and pop filter to aid in my podcasting. It was quite inexpensive…and maybe a bit small and maybe not the best quality gooseneck but seems to be working.  If you’re on a budget like I am, I would recommend this setup… got it on eBay, company is Neewer.
    • I’ve been working on my review of Linux Lite 4.4 for Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 2, to be recorded at the end of May.  Next month: Clear Linux OS? Sabayon?
    • I’ve only gotten 3 donations to date in the fundraiser to get me to SELF. This fundraiser was started by a listener, Jackie Moore, and I am very grateful that a few listeners understood my need and responded. Getting to SELF would help me promote mintCast and perhaps make some inroads into a career in computers. Only about $125 has been raised to date, including one donation through PayPal, and unless I get at least $500 I simply can’t go. But here’s a problem: GoFundMe disburses donations every week (if any), and it’s my job to manage the funds. There is no way to send refunds (especially to anonymous donors). So I had to decide what to do with the money if I don’t get enough to go. After much discussion with my wife and the mintCast team, any money not used (including if we have unused funds after going) will be sent as a donation from mintCast, divided between Linux Mint and Archive.org.  I will make the decision to go or not on May 31, as that’s about the latest I could get good rates on hotel rooms for June 14-16.
  • Josh
    • Working on talk for a conference in france. I’ll be giving a talk on building an open source project. I’ll cover GitHub, Licensing, Publishing, Packaging, Community and Monetization (Patreon)
    • Playing around with ByteMark hosting (thanks to them) and a wordpress server to migrate our website
    • Working on a website redesign for mintcast
    • Playing with the adafruit PyPortal, internet connected python display. Made a eurovision countdown timer.
    • Photography setup
  • Joe
    • Helped someone at my lug with their install of VirtualBox on Fedora
    • Tested out the xbox one controller on linux and it is working much better than before.  But not as well as the 360 controller which has vibration working.
    • After much searching for the connectors/cables needed for the Earforce z2 i discovered that the connector exactly matches the old ps2 connectors.  So i spent a couple of dollars on female to female connectors so that they will match up with the other turtle beach 3.5mm connectors that i ordered.  This will also allow me to get creative with the other connector that i have. Replace the 3 pin 3.5 for the mic or cut the cable short and put on a new 4 pin jack.
    • Received the adapter and it works perfect.  Mic and audio both.
    • Did a lot of work with OBS and Icecast but have not got them to play well together yet.  Can’t find the right settings to get to actually stream. I have gotten it to recognize the ‘mount’ for OBS and i can see it trying to load on the page but then nothing.
    • Going to TLF  Before the next show.  Let me know if there is anything that i can find out for you to bring to the show.
  • Tony W
    • Listening to MintCast!
    • Home repairs, music gig last weekend
    • OnePlus repair SAGA –
    • Switched to T Mobile
    • Bought phone for the kid, Moto E5 Play for $80 [Swappa has the X4 for $115]
    • Google Family Link is great – we need something like this in Librem or other non proprietary solution, someday
    • Kindle Fire Launcher Hijack was blocked – got it working using one that was repackaged: https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=79434906&postcount=395
    • Exploring options for a *very cheap* server

The News:

  • RHEL 8 Released
    • The headline feature is support and focus on containers after their acquisition of CoreOS
    • Running kernel 4.18 and has Python 3 as the default version
    • If your enterprise has money to burn, can support up to 4PB of RAM. Up from 64TB in RHEL 7.
  • Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 Released
    • This comes two months after the release of OTA-8
    • Supported on devices like the Fairphone 2 and Nexus 5
    • Little quality of life improvements like “Paste and Go”
  • Kernel 5.1 Released with performance improvements
    • Improvements in the Linux Security Model found in SELinux and Apparmor. A major feature here is the SafeSetID. It essentially prevents unprivileged users from giving themselves too much permission in the filesystem.
    • Brings support for NVDIMM persistent memory, which is just a fancy way of saying using flash memory in addition or as a replacement to RAM. Think Intel Optane.
    • Improvement in Live Patching
  • OpenMandriva 4 RC released May 12, last step before stable
  • Microsoft Announces WSL2
    • Up to 20x faster than WSL1
    • Uses a REAL LIVE 4.19 kernel
    • Can be compiled on Windows from git if you’re excited to try it
  • Tilix (terminal) needs a new project maintainer
  • South Korea and the Indian State of Kerala Convert to Linux
  • Zombieload Attack on Almost Every Intel Chip in Existence
    • This vulnerability affects Intel processors. From first-gen Core i-series to the current 9000 series, only chips without hyper-threading are immune from.
    • Like Meltdown, Spectre, Speculative Store Bypass, Foreshadow before it, Zombieload is a way for threads on a CPU to reach out a read data from other threads.
    • This attack essentially allows the reading of encryption keys, history, etc.
    • Red Hat’s 3 minute video explanation
  • Vulnerabilities in Kernels up to 5.0.8
    • A semi-dangerous vulnerability, but a bit complex to exploit. It clocks in with a exploitability score of 2.2. It results from a specially crafted TCP packet, and can lead to remote code execution!
    • https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-11815
  • Whatsapp vulnerability allows hackers to infect phones
    • Install the update now
    • This happened when a malicious call came in to the app. Users didn’t even have to pick the call up to be compromised! So, even if you didn’t notice the missed call, it can infect your phone..

Linux Innards:

    • Joe
      • VirtualBox
        • I don’t have as much experience with this as others
        • Two ways to install
          • Grab the deb from the virtualbox website
          • Sudo apt install virtualbox-qt
        • I do use the occasional VM but i prefer barebones or Docker
        • I like the functionality of being able to run a VM off of a disk drive pulled from another machine
        • I attempted this with my hanging Windows partition but it did not work because Virtualbox seems to have a problem with UEFI
        • I have a 32gb msata drive and an adapter that i will be testing with
        • I picked up a centos course from UDEMY and will be installing a VM of that
          • Did install
        • Was successful in getting one of the msata drives from the 7130 to work in a VM
          • Sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename “/root/VirtualBox VMs/linux/tablet.vmdk” -rawdisk /dev/sdb1
          • Worked perfect
          • Will need to run virtualbox as root in order to run a VM of a disk image.
        • But that is boring so batocera got installed in a vm
          • Didn’t work, efi
        • The difference between installing the deb and installing from repo
          • The repo updates and the deb is static.
        • https://www.howtoforge.com/converting-a-vmware-image-to-a-physical-machine
          • Use clonezilla cd, add to vm
          • Add physical disk to vm
          • Make sure boot order is cd first
          • Clone image to physical drive
          • fsck -y
          • Go into /etc/udev/rules.d and delete the file 70-persistent-net.rules then reboot
    • Leo
      • I don’t have a lot of experience here on the desktop either. However I’ve run it quite often headless to run other headless servers.
      • In the past, it was quite difficult to get all the packages gathered and installed without the use of tasksel. But while testing, there’s a quick way.
        • sudo apt install gnome-boxes virt-manager
        • virtual-manager is being deprecated in favor of the web interface Cockpit.
      • The biggest reason to use KVM on the desktop is GPU passthrough. All other desktop host features are done simpler, or just plain better by other hypervisors. However, for headless VMs, there’s almost nothing better.
      • AMD GPU passthrough
      • Nvidia GPU passthrough
    • Tony H
      • As part of this dive into virtual computing I checked out Gnome Boxes, while this is a simpler way to boot qemu-kvm virtual PC’s I found issues with it not working properly with local .iso/.img files. However I did manage to download and install Debian 9 through the app and was surprised how well it worked with the allocated 1Gig of RAM. I also managed to download and install Ubuntu 18.10 which runs OK although I couldn’t access the terminal in the VM for some reason.
    • Tony W – tried out Gnome Boxes as well
      • Options to download RHEL, FEDORA, etc from Boxes is great
      • Very simple menus
      • Had to install in Ubuntu 19.04, wasn’t installed by default

 

  • Leo – Installed on Ubuntu 18.04 and it never allowed me to start a VM.

 

    • Josh
      • ESXI server
      • VCloud Director

 

  • Leo – This is what I use instead of KVM now. But with Cockpit, I’m reconsidering that, too!

 

Vibrations from the Ether:

  • KWisher requested that I post a picture of my hard drive, showing which distro is on which partitions. It is being removed from the show notes so as to not cause your podcaster apps to hiccup. But you can find it in the mintCast MeWe group, and also in the Distrohoppers’ Digest MeWe group. Leo is seeing to posting it to the Telegram group.
  • Followup from Brad A.

Moz: I apologize if I wasn’t clear. Bitwarden runs as a plugin for whatever browser you run. You can access it simultaneously from any and all devices that are running the add-on. For example, I have the add-on on my personal laptop, my desktop, and my work laptop, and have been simultaneously logged in on all three devices. For non-web passwords, I use the keepassx/keepassxc app. The nice thing about that app is that it stores all of the information in an encrypted database, which you can share around to all of your devices.

Leo: Since your OpenMediaVault installation is on the fritz, can I suggest a FreeNAS installation? It is based on FreeBSD, but is effectively an appliance. And ZFS protects your data better than ext4 or even btrfs.

Joe: Feel free to ping me if you want more info on setting up encryption with /boot on a thumb drive. I have been doing this for many years on Debian.

  • Suggestion from Highlander

Regardless of whether you are using windows or linux, everyone should

create offline backups of your most critical data.

Here’s why:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/10/politics/ransomware-attacks-us-cities/index.html

Fixed media might be your best choice for data you think is critical

or irreplaceable.

  • Christopher P.

To add a podcast to Spotify all you have to do is add the rss feed Spotify podcast at https://podcasters.spotify.com/submit

Check This Out!

Announcements:

  • Next episode on June 2nd, 2019

Wrap-Up:

 

 

Thanks:

  • Josh for working on redesigning our website, setting up the YouTube stream, and providing lots of technical help.
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files.
  • The folks at Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we use to communicate
  • Bytemark hosting for providing the new hosting server for the website.
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
]]> 3624 mintCast 309 – Virtualization (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-309-virtualization-mp3/ Wed, 22 May 2019 04:59:04 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3622 Download
]]>

Download

Introduction:

  • This is Leo, Joe, Josh, Tony Watts, Tony Hughes and Moss!
  • First up, in our Wanderings, I get some new gear and upgrade kernels, Tony Hughes is back home and LUGging again, Moss gets a new printer and some recording gear, Josh is jetsetting to France next week, Joe’s gaming more and heading to Texas Linux Fest on the 31st of this month, and Tony Watts is looking for a cheap server and trying RetroPie ports.
  • Then, in the news, we have lots of releases like RHEL 8, and plenty of vulnerabilities
  • In our Innards section, we talk virtualization
  • And finally, plenty of feedback and LOTS of check this out
    • [0:00] Theme
    • [1:03] Introduction
    • [2:17] Bi-Weekly Wanderings
    • [38:04] News
    • [1:01:15] Innards
    • [1:34:14] Vibrations
    • [1:40:48] Check This Out!
    • [1:50:27] Wrap Up & Thanks

Bi-Weekly Wanderings:

  • Leo
    • Got some new recording gear. MXL 990 and a Beringher UM-2. I’m still getting everything calibrated.
    • I spent some time this last week getting the 3 Mint boxes I used upgraded to kernel 5.0.0. My laptop is the only one that really needed it for the battery improvements, but I figured I’d try out everything.
  • Tony H
    • I’ve returned home Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre and getting back into day to day living.
    • Still playing with Linux, at the LUG yesterday morning I installed Fedora 29 on a 10 year Old Dell 15” laptop that was one of our members Expensive Desktop replacement 10 years ago, Core 2 Duo with a whopping 4Gig of Ram 🙂 my install iso for mint 19.1 was corrupt and would not install so I used my Fedora 29 Matѐ spin and after installing a 128 Gig SSD the install went great. On reboot the laptop boots in 50 seconds from pressing the power button to it being connected to the internet and applications being available to use, which is not bad for a 10 year old machine.
    • Installed Kernel 5.0.0.xx on my desktop Mint 19.1 install and broke the Nvidia driver, had to return to the open source driver.
  • Moss
    • As you know, it’s Printer Week. After a lot of advice, I got a Canon Pixma TS9210. And I could not get it installed. I made some headway, hit a brick wall, got some help, hit another brick wall, got more advice which didn’t help… so I called Amazon. What with the ink already installed, they told me to keep the printer and gave me a full refund, so I ordered a Brother MFC-J491DW. It is up and running on all 4 of my distros as well as my wife’s, easy peasy once you know how to do Brother installation (requires the use of a Terminal). I did get a LOT of people recommending HP printers, despite my pleas for them to not do so. Bottom line, be careful before you buy a new PIXMA, and Brother Is Best. (Boy, I wish I could get paid for all these sponsor-like comments!)
    • I did get a new boom and pop filter to aid in my podcasting. It was quite inexpensive…and maybe a bit small and maybe not the best quality gooseneck but seems to be working.  If you’re on a budget like I am, I would recommend this setup… got it on eBay, company is Neewer.
    • I’ve been working on my review of Linux Lite 4.4 for Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 2, to be recorded at the end of May.  Next month: Clear Linux OS? Sabayon?
    • I’ve only gotten 3 donations to date in the fundraiser to get me to SELF. This fundraiser was started by a listener, Jackie Moore, and I am very grateful that a few listeners understood my need and responded. Getting to SELF would help me promote mintCast and perhaps make some inroads into a career in computers. Only about $125 has been raised to date, including one donation through PayPal, and unless I get at least $500 I simply can’t go. But here’s a problem: GoFundMe disburses donations every week (if any), and it’s my job to manage the funds. There is no way to send refunds (especially to anonymous donors). So I had to decide what to do with the money if I don’t get enough to go. After much discussion with my wife and the mintCast team, any money not used (including if we have unused funds after going) will be sent as a donation from mintCast, divided between Linux Mint and Archive.org.  I will make the decision to go or not on May 31, as that’s about the latest I could get good rates on hotel rooms for June 14-16.
  • Josh
    • Working on talk for a conference in france. I’ll be giving a talk on building an open source project. I’ll cover GitHub, Licensing, Publishing, Packaging, Community and Monetization (Patreon)
    • Playing around with ByteMark hosting (thanks to them) and a wordpress server to migrate our website
    • Working on a website redesign for mintcast
    • Playing with the adafruit PyPortal, internet connected python display. Made a eurovision countdown timer.
    • Photography setup
  • Joe
    • Helped someone at my lug with their install of VirtualBox on Fedora
    • Tested out the xbox one controller on linux and it is working much better than before.  But not as well as the 360 controller which has vibration working.
    • After much searching for the connectors/cables needed for the Earforce z2 i discovered that the connector exactly matches the old ps2 connectors.  So i spent a couple of dollars on female to female connectors so that they will match up with the other turtle beach 3.5mm connectors that i ordered.  This will also allow me to get creative with the other connector that i have. Replace the 3 pin 3.5 for the mic or cut the cable short and put on a new 4 pin jack.
    • Received the adapter and it works perfect.  Mic and audio both.
    • Did a lot of work with OBS and Icecast but have not got them to play well together yet.  Can’t find the right settings to get to actually stream. I have gotten it to recognize the ‘mount’ for OBS and i can see it trying to load on the page but then nothing.
    • Going to TLF  Before the next show.  Let me know if there is anything that i can find out for you to bring to the show.
  • Tony W
    • Listening to MintCast!
    • Home repairs, music gig last weekend
    • OnePlus repair SAGA –
    • Switched to T Mobile
    • Bought phone for the kid, Moto E5 Play for $80 [Swappa has the X4 for $115]
    • Google Family Link is great – we need something like this in Librem or other non proprietary solution, someday
    • Kindle Fire Launcher Hijack was blocked – got it working using one that was repackaged: https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=79434906&postcount=395
    • Exploring options for a *very cheap* server

The News:

  • RHEL 8 Released
    • The headline feature is support and focus on containers after their acquisition of CoreOS
    • Running kernel 4.18 and has Python 3 as the default version
    • If your enterprise has money to burn, can support up to 4PB of RAM. Up from 64TB in RHEL 7.
  • Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 Released
    • This comes two months after the release of OTA-8
    • Supported on devices like the Fairphone 2 and Nexus 5
    • Little quality of life improvements like “Paste and Go”
  • Kernel 5.1 Released with performance improvements
    • Improvements in the Linux Security Model found in SELinux and Apparmor. A major feature here is the SafeSetID. It essentially prevents unprivileged users from giving themselves too much permission in the filesystem.
    • Brings support for NVDIMM persistent memory, which is just a fancy way of saying using flash memory in addition or as a replacement to RAM. Think Intel Optane.
    • Improvement in Live Patching
  • OpenMandriva 4 RC released May 12, last step before stable
  • Microsoft Announces WSL2
    • Up to 20x faster than WSL1
    • Uses a REAL LIVE 4.19 kernel
    • Can be compiled on Windows from git if you’re excited to try it
  • Tilix (terminal) needs a new project maintainer
  • South Korea and the Indian State of Kerala Convert to Linux
  • Zombieload Attack on Almost Every Intel Chip in Existence
    • This vulnerability affects Intel processors. From first-gen Core i-series to the current 9000 series, only chips without hyper-threading are immune from.
    • Like Meltdown, Spectre, Speculative Store Bypass, Foreshadow before it, Zombieload is a way for threads on a CPU to reach out a read data from other threads.
    • This attack essentially allows the reading of encryption keys, history, etc.
    • Red Hat’s 3 minute video explanation
  • Vulnerabilities in Kernels up to 5.0.8
    • A semi-dangerous vulnerability, but a bit complex to exploit. It clocks in with a exploitability score of 2.2. It results from a specially crafted TCP packet, and can lead to remote code execution!
    • https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-11815
  • Whatsapp vulnerability allows hackers to infect phones
    • Install the update now
    • This happened when a malicious call came in to the app. Users didn’t even have to pick the call up to be compromised! So, even if you didn’t notice the missed call, it can infect your phone..

Linux Innards:

    • Joe
      • VirtualBox
        • I don’t have as much experience with this as others
        • Two ways to install
          • Grab the deb from the virtualbox website
          • Sudo apt install virtualbox-qt
        • I do use the occasional VM but i prefer barebones or Docker
        • I like the functionality of being able to run a VM off of a disk drive pulled from another machine
        • I attempted this with my hanging Windows partition but it did not work because Virtualbox seems to have a problem with UEFI
        • I have a 32gb msata drive and an adapter that i will be testing with
        • I picked up a centos course from UDEMY and will be installing a VM of that
          • Did install
        • Was successful in getting one of the msata drives from the 7130 to work in a VM
          • Sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename “/root/VirtualBox VMs/linux/tablet.vmdk” -rawdisk /dev/sdb1
          • Worked perfect
          • Will need to run virtualbox as root in order to run a VM of a disk image.
        • But that is boring so batocera got installed in a vm
          • Didn’t work, efi
        • The difference between installing the deb and installing from repo
          • The repo updates and the deb is static.
        • https://www.howtoforge.com/converting-a-vmware-image-to-a-physical-machine
          • Use clonezilla cd, add to vm
          • Add physical disk to vm
          • Make sure boot order is cd first
          • Clone image to physical drive
          • fsck -y
          • Go into /etc/udev/rules.d and delete the file 70-persistent-net.rules then reboot
    • Leo
      • I don’t have a lot of experience here on the desktop either. However I’ve run it quite often headless to run other headless servers.
      • In the past, it was quite difficult to get all the packages gathered and installed without the use of tasksel. But while testing, there’s a quick way.
        • sudo apt install gnome-boxes virt-manager
        • virtual-manager is being deprecated in favor of the web interface Cockpit.
      • The biggest reason to use KVM on the desktop is GPU passthrough. All other desktop host features are done simpler, or just plain better by other hypervisors. However, for headless VMs, there’s almost nothing better.
      • AMD GPU passthrough
      • Nvidia GPU passthrough
    • Tony H
      • As part of this dive into virtual computing I checked out Gnome Boxes, while this is a simpler way to boot qemu-kvm virtual PC’s I found issues with it not working properly with local .iso/.img files. However I did manage to download and install Debian 9 through the app and was surprised how well it worked with the allocated 1Gig of RAM. I also managed to download and install Ubuntu 18.10 which runs OK although I couldn’t access the terminal in the VM for some reason.
    • Tony W – tried out Gnome Boxes as well
      • Options to download RHEL, FEDORA, etc from Boxes is great
      • Very simple menus
      • Had to install in Ubuntu 19.04, wasn’t installed by default

 

  • Leo – Installed on Ubuntu 18.04 and it never allowed me to start a VM.

 

    • Josh
      • ESXI server
      • VCloud Director

 

  • Leo – This is what I use instead of KVM now. But with Cockpit, I’m reconsidering that, too!

 

Vibrations from the Ether:

  • KWisher requested that I post a picture of my hard drive, showing which distro is on which partitions. It is being removed from the show notes so as to not cause your podcaster apps to hiccup. But you can find it in the mintCast MeWe group, and also in the Distrohoppers’ Digest MeWe group. Leo is seeing to posting it to the Telegram group.
  • Followup from Brad A.

Moz: I apologize if I wasn’t clear. Bitwarden runs as a plugin for whatever browser you run. You can access it simultaneously from any and all devices that are running the add-on. For example, I have the add-on on my personal laptop, my desktop, and my work laptop, and have been simultaneously logged in on all three devices. For non-web passwords, I use the keepassx/keepassxc app. The nice thing about that app is that it stores all of the information in an encrypted database, which you can share around to all of your devices.

Leo: Since your OpenMediaVault installation is on the fritz, can I suggest a FreeNAS installation? It is based on FreeBSD, but is effectively an appliance. And ZFS protects your data better than ext4 or even btrfs.

Joe: Feel free to ping me if you want more info on setting up encryption with /boot on a thumb drive. I have been doing this for many years on Debian.

  • Suggestion from Highlander

Regardless of whether you are using windows or linux, everyone should

create offline backups of your most critical data.

Here’s why:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/10/politics/ransomware-attacks-us-cities/index.html

Fixed media might be your best choice for data you think is critical

or irreplaceable.

  • Christopher P.

To add a podcast to Spotify all you have to do is add the rss feed Spotify podcast at https://podcasters.spotify.com/submit

Check This Out!

Announcements:

  • Next episode on June 2nd, 2019

Wrap-Up:

 

 

Thanks:

  • Josh for working on redesigning our website, setting up the YouTube stream, and providing lots of technical help.
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files.
  • The folks at Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we use to communicate
  • Bytemark hosting for providing the new hosting server for the website.
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
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