In security and privacy: SecureBoot is broken on over 200 computers from 5 major vendors, new Android malware drains bank accounts and wipes your device afterwards, and TGRat attacks Linux

• 00:00:00 – Intro
• 00:01:58 – News
• 00:49:19 – Security And Privacy
• 01:05:26 – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
• 01:06:23 – Wrap Up
• 01:08:34 – Special Thanks
• 01:09:30 – Outro

The News:

Linux Mint 22 “Wilma” released

Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source

Intel Suffers Major Stock Loss Due to Workforce Restructuring

Proton Now Has a Bitcoin Wallet

Intel admits damage to unstable 14th-gen and 13th-gen CPUs is permanent – incoming patch is a preventative, not a cure

Funtoo Calls It Quits

The long-awaited Linux distro Serpent OS is finally here

Secuity and Privacy:

Secure Boot is completely broken on 200+ models from 5 big device makers

New Android malware wipes your device after draining bank accounts

Telegram-Controlled TgRat Attacking Linux Servers to Exfiltrate Data

Contact Info:

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, moss@bodhilinux.com, Mastodon @zaivala@hostux.social, occasionally on HPR
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, also – checkout my other two podcasts Linux OTC and 3 Fat Truckers
• Majid – drmajid@mintcast.org @atypical_dr@mastodon.social, AtypicalDr on Instagram and Threads and The Atypical Doctor Podcast on Spotify and also Linux OTC.
• Eric – You can also hear and see me on the Distrohoppers’ Digest and Linux OTC podcasts as well as the Linux Saloon and LinuxLUGCast streams. I can be reached by email at eric@mintcast.org.

Special Thanks:

• Bill for our audio editing
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
• Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
• Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio

First up in the news, Linux Mint Monthly News, Firefox 94 released, Steam OS announcement, System76 Desktop announcement, Intel has been doing this for a long time and Nvidia released a fix

In security, A Dutch newspaper gets hacked, Azure is vulnerable, and AMD and Intel have more security flaws

Then in our Wanderings, Joe works on an xbox, Josh remodels a bathroom, Tony got a new phone and Norbert tells us about running arch

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

The News

• Linux Mint Monthly News, November
• Firefox 94, the release we’ve been waiting for?
• Valve Says SteamOS 3.0 Will Be Available for Everyone to Download and Install
• System76 is Building its Own Desktop Environment
• Intel Celebrates 50 years of their 4004 microprocessor
  • November 15, 1971
• NVIDIA 470.86 Linux Driver Released With VRR/G-SYNC Fix

Security Update

• Dutch newspaper accuses US spy agencies of orchestrating 2016 Booking.com breach
• ChaosDB: Infosec bods could pull anyone’s plaintext Azure Cosmos DB keys at will from Microsoft admin tools
• AMD reveals an Epyc 50 flaws – 23 of them rated high severity. Intel has 25 bugs, too

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

• Joe
• Josh
  • MX Linux
• Tony
  • Juno Computers a Brutus 5000
• Norbert
  • The AUR

Announcements

• Our next episode will be Sunday, November 28, 2021 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC/GMT.
• Check when this will be in your local timezone
• Our next Saturday live stream will be Saturday,  November 20, 2021 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC/GMT.
  Check when this will be in your local timezone

Wrap-up

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

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

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

LINUX INNARDS:

• Leo
  • Issue where the default refresh rate went from 144hz to 60hz. Just a quick display configuration to fix it.
  • Possibly OBS issues
  • Here’s my journey with LM 20.1 and kernel 5.8

• Joe
  • Upgraded my main laptop, the GE72-6QD with nvidia gtx 960m hybrid graphics.  Very smooth update process using the update manager
  • I was pleasantly surprised at the reboot speed.  It was up and running in seconds
  • Hybrid graphics worked perfectly on reboot with no need to fall back to the intel drivers to get things running
  • Everything else seemed very incremental and nothing really stood out to me as new or innovative
  • It just worked and I am happy with the upgrade especially considering that i use this machine on a regular basis for work.

• Tony
  • So I upgraded my Dell E7440 which is my main portable PC with a 128Gb SSD and 16Gb RAM that has been running Mint 20 since the release last summer.  
  • I think the world and his wife must have been downloading the upgrade because it was a little slow to download all the files about 10-15 minutes, but once downloaded the install was very fast, rebooted and I have a working Mint 20.1 Mate system all ready to go. 
  • I’ve had a little play with Hypnotix and it’s not bad at all, a lot of non english channels but a few that look interesting from the US. Could be a useful tool for people on the road without access to a TV, but a good internet connection, like a road trip with the Kids.

• Josh
  • Been using Mint 20.1 on my 2010 Macbook Pro and it has been great. The new apps Hypnotix and Web Apps have been really cool! I can’t wait to upgrade my desktop to make full use of them! Oh also easy mute microphone shortcut FTW!
  • I finally got the prompt to upgrade my Linux Mint 20 to 20.1. It worked with no issues at all and I am actually writing this on that desktop! 
  • I got to check out the hypnotix app a bit and it’s really cool. I can get a lot of the channels that I can get on my antenna and more. It’s got a lot of news channels so that is nice including the weather channel. I am going to keep looking into this app for more channels in the future.
  • Web Apps the application that makes websites into somewhat of a native application for linux mint is equally as amazing! I can now have many websites just pinned to my panel to just click and pop open. I love the nice clean look of the “apps” personally.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

• Glen
• Hank Barta
• Randall Routh
• Phil
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE&t=283s 
• stan reichardt
• Brad Alexander 

CHECK THIS OUT! 

• Leo
  • Demystifying Ansible
  • The Case for usr Merge
• Josh H
  • PigZ: (pronounced pig-zee) is a re-implementation of gzip but takes advantage of multithreaded processors. I went from over 1 hour with gzip to under 30 minutes to create a .img.gz backup of my /dev/sda partition. To install pigz on Linux Mint you need to add the universe repository ppa and then “sudo apt install pigz”.
  • Midnight Commander: A terminal based ncurses file manager. It is fully mouse aware and can even change permissions and ownership of files and directories. To install Midnight Commander all you have to do is either go to the mint software manager and look it up or “sudo apt install mc” in the terminal.
• Joe 
  • I built a Handheld Gaming PC! (2021) 

• Tony
  • This is a video from Explaining Computers, on Linux for an old laptop. It talks about the Eee PC 901 so really old. I’ve not watched it yet but it looks interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJcWcQ8ew6Q

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com , YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – Peaceful Hippo, It’s Moss, MeWe, @bardictriad on Twitter, blogs on Peaceful Hippo, LinuxQuestions.org, and Dreamwidth, music on Bandcamp and my YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus!!
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com 
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@protonmail.com, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites.
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News 

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

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

LINUX INNARDS:

• Leo
  • Issue where the default refresh rate went from 144hz to 60hz. Just a quick display configuration to fix it.
  • Possibly OBS issues
  • Here’s my journey with LM 20.1 and kernel 5.8

• Joe
  • Upgraded my main laptop, the GE72-6QD with nvidia gtx 960m hybrid graphics.  Very smooth update process using the update manager
  • I was pleasantly surprised at the reboot speed.  It was up and running in seconds
  • Hybrid graphics worked perfectly on reboot with no need to fall back to the intel drivers to get things running
  • Everything else seemed very incremental and nothing really stood out to me as new or innovative
  • It just worked and I am happy with the upgrade especially considering that i use this machine on a regular basis for work.

• Tony
  • So I upgraded my Dell E7440 which is my main portable PC with a 128Gb SSD and 16Gb RAM that has been running Mint 20 since the release last summer.  
  • I think the world and his wife must have been downloading the upgrade because it was a little slow to download all the files about 10-15 minutes, but once downloaded the install was very fast, rebooted and I have a working Mint 20.1 Mate system all ready to go. 
  • I’ve had a little play with Hypnotix and it’s not bad at all, a lot of non english channels but a few that look interesting from the US. Could be a useful tool for people on the road without access to a TV, but a good internet connection, like a road trip with the Kids.

• Josh
  • Been using Mint 20.1 on my 2010 Macbook Pro and it has been great. The new apps Hypnotix and Web Apps have been really cool! I can’t wait to upgrade my desktop to make full use of them! Oh also easy mute microphone shortcut FTW!
  • I finally got the prompt to upgrade my Linux Mint 20 to 20.1. It worked with no issues at all and I am actually writing this on that desktop! 
  • I got to check out the hypnotix app a bit and it’s really cool. I can get a lot of the channels that I can get on my antenna and more. It’s got a lot of news channels so that is nice including the weather channel. I am going to keep looking into this app for more channels in the future.
  • Web Apps the application that makes websites into somewhat of a native application for linux mint is equally as amazing! I can now have many websites just pinned to my panel to just click and pop open. I love the nice clean look of the “apps” personally.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

• Glen
• Hank Barta
• Randall Routh
• Phil
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE&t=283s 
• stan reichardt
• Brad Alexander 

CHECK THIS OUT! 

• Leo
  • Demystifying Ansible
  • The Case for usr Merge
• Josh H
  • PigZ: (pronounced pig-zee) is a re-implementation of gzip but takes advantage of multithreaded processors. I went from over 1 hour with gzip to under 30 minutes to create a .img.gz backup of my /dev/sda partition. To install pigz on Linux Mint you need to add the universe repository ppa and then “sudo apt install pigz”.
  • Midnight Commander: A terminal based ncurses file manager. It is fully mouse aware and can even change permissions and ownership of files and directories. To install Midnight Commander all you have to do is either go to the mint software manager and look it up or “sudo apt install mc” in the terminal.
• Joe 
  • I built a Handheld Gaming PC! (2021) 

• Tony
  • This is a video from Explaining Computers, on Linux for an old laptop. It talks about the Eee PC 901 so really old. I’ve not watched it yet but it looks interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJcWcQ8ew6Q

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com , YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – Peaceful Hippo, It’s Moss, MeWe, @bardictriad on Twitter, blogs on Peaceful Hippo, LinuxQuestions.org, and Dreamwidth, music on Bandcamp and my YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus!!
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com 
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@protonmail.com, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites.
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News 

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

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

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • The Chromium based browsers have fixed the AMD/Graphical issue that was plaguing me. Waiting for a new beta update from the Linux Mint Chromium package to test that. But so far, Linux Mint’s Chromium is stable, but still has the issue. Can’t remember if it was Dan or Joe from Linux User Space that said resizing the windows fixes it. It does!
  • Web Apps is my new favorite thing. I use it with Plex and Nextcloud mostly with the Linux Mint Chromium.
  • World of Warcraft crashes on launch from Lutris. Sad times.
• Moss
  • I have the FuzZ400 about as good as it’s going to be, still need to hit F1 during all boots. This makes it hard to reboot from my recliner, as the F1 key on the wireless mini keyboard does not function. (Note: buy new wireless keyboard with real F-keys when possible.) 
  • I installed the power supply on my mini desktop. It works again. I put my old 2 Tb spinning metal drive in it. All the partitions were there, I thought I had 4 installations on it… but only the Mint partition had a distro in it, and the swap partition had been added to the partition which followed where it was. I reestablished the swap partition, and installed an OEM of Mint 20 Cinnamon on it. I’m looking for a local student to give it to. I have a monitor for it, but I haven’t looked to see if I have a working spare keyboard or mouse.
  • On Tuesday the 13th, I went looking for a Telegram group about Bodhi Linux, and didn’t find any in English so I set up one — with help, as I’ve never done this before. I posted it to all my Linux groups and also to both Bodhi Forums and my LQ blog. We have 20 members now, including lead dev Robert Wiley (aka YLee).
  • I had a great conversation with YLee in the group yesterday, lots of new stuff, including that there is a pre-alpha release now of Bodhi 6.0, available both with Moksha and E24. There is no 6.0 repo yet, but YLee stated that some programs from the 5.1 repo MAY work, such as the bodhi-printing app, no guarantees. I’m a Bodhi-loving fool, I currently have 3 installations on my laptop – 5.1, 6.0 with Moksha and 6.0 with Enlightenment E24.
  • Moksha development has far surpassed E17 levels, and has included most of the improvements through E24; however, unlike the main Enlightenment line, YLee accomplished this without changing the stable E17 codebase. 
  • The Bodhi team is mostly just 2 devs now, so please volunteer if you can help. Donations are up and down as well. [$50 this month, $300 last month]
  • In employment news, I still have not gotten paid by Census 2020, but discovered that was my fault. I fixed it, but I could be waiting another 3-4 weeks to receive my paycheck. I have been hired as a substitute teacher by the local school district, but the past two weeks were Fall Break so no work. I interviewed for an actual computer repair position, but was not called back for the second round. 
  • We’re getting near the end of Dead Beat, the 7th book in the Dresden Files series.
• Joe
  • The GK61S Bluetooth keyboard.  I still think that changing out the battery might be my best bet for maintaining bluetooth connection but overall I am disappointed.  I do like the buttons and the size is useful but having to use it wired is a bit annoying and I don’t know if replacing the battery will actually fix all the issues since it sometimes has a problem staying connected over bluetooth even with external power.  It can work with just the USB-C cable but wire can get in the way.  
    • I had previously thought that most of the Bluetooth connection issues with Linux had been solved but now I am going to need to look into it a bit more
    • Mostly bluetooth seems to suck on the desktop
  • Having fun with the Repetier snap and my 3D printer.  Had to do a lot of fixing and refixing to get it printing again but it is good to go for now.  Still having some problems with ABS even with the enclosure but I am switching back to pla and petg for now.  I did have to build a couple of dry boxes for the filament rolls and hopefully that will help.  Petg is printing pretty good right now.
  • Still figuring out what i want to do with that Lenovo Flex 4.  It is currently running Repetier and hooked up to my printer.  I think I am going to do a bit more conversion of the space that it is in and see if I can make a mini studio.
    • Used it to do the linux lugcast since we are using Jitsi amongst ourselves
      • Used Droidcam for this.  I think i got better resolution over wifi than i did over USB
    • Waiting on a mic stand to come in and will be using it along with the HyperX Quadcast mic it actually came in today but i have not opened it yet
    • Thinking about getting a green screen and seeing how well it works since you can get them for around 20 dollars
  • Finally made the upgrade on my main laptop to Mint 20 following the upgrade path, really nice to not have to jump through all the hoops to get the graphics card working properly.  
    • Reinstalled both Docker and Resilio Sync and all my scripting seems to be working fine
  • I had to install the flatpak for mumble on all my machines.  I guess the most recent update messed with the certificates.  Great to find out as the show is starting
• Josh Hawk
  • Mic Mayhem! I have been dealing with trying to get good audio out of my mic. I have a Blue Snowball USB Condenser mic right now and for some reason the audio is good sometimes and sounds hollow others. I have tried messing with the software sound settings but nothing seems to help. I just have to turn it on and hope my recording sounds good this time haha .
  • In other news this led me to buy a new dynamic mic! After looking at a ton of reviews I finally decided on believe it or not an Amazon Basics Mic . I found it on eBay for 16$ but I didn’t have an audio interface so it came with a XLR to ¼” audio jack. I plugged it into my Creative Sound Blaster Z sound card and presto my voice sounded much better but alas it was not to be. There was a rhythmic buzzing that I later found out was coming from my sound card . All that to say I am back using my Blue Snowball and am waiting for a new XLR to USB cable that will fix the buzzing issue.
  • One more quick thing. I have finally installed openSUSE on my parents old Gateway PC and am in the process of setting it up. I tried to use the transactional server install and realized that zypper does not work on that so I reinstalled the normal server version.
• Bo
  • Gnome experiment
    • Fedora 32 getting stuck on boot (gnome display manager)
      • Attempts to repair grub failed
    • Ubuntu was cool but I feel like it’s not close to “stock” gnome
    • Pop!_OS
      • Great! Love the window tiling feature and how it’s implemented
    • Gnome: it’s not you, it’s me…
  • Still playing card games on tabletop simulator (tts). Yesterday I taught my sister to play Magic.
  • LOTR the card game had an online convention using tts and Discord.
  • Baldur’s Gate 3 – Will it Proton?

THE NEWS:

• Wine 5.19 Out
• System76 Lets Tiling Windows Stack
• Kernel 5.9 Out
• Plasma 5.20 Is a Huge Release
• Happy Birthday KDE!

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• Google, Intel Warn of IoT Kernel Bug

• • • Three flaws in BlueZ, the Bluetooth controller software in the kernel, could lead to code execution, denial of service and a way to map memory for later exfiltration!
    • Updating to kernel 5.9 seems to be the fix, which is easy enough. This bit is incorrect. Intel made a statement. No fix is available.
    • Ubuntu hasn’t backported the fixes to kernel 5.8 as of yet, but surely it’ll show up soon.

• Zoom rolls out E2E Encryption for EVERYONE

• • Zoom has had a wild history with encryption in the past few months. Things like encryption that wasn’t full encryption, encryption for everyone wasn’t really for everyone, and the ability for internal employees were able to log into supposedly encrypted sessions defeating the entire purpose of encryption.
  • In a four phase approach Zoom is finally rolling out end to end encryption. For now, during phase one, it’ll be opt in only. It’s essentially a beta test.
  • The second phase will roll out in 2021.

Announcements:

• Our next episode will be Sunday, November 1, 2020 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC. Check when this will be in your local timezone at https://everytimezone.com/s/7d8c1119.
• Note both the US and UK will have time changes (“fall back” 1 hour) between mintCasts 346 & 347, so those times remain the same, but this makes the UTC time 1 hour later than before.

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • The Chromium based browsers have fixed the AMD/Graphical issue that was plaguing me. Waiting for a new beta update from the Linux Mint Chromium package to test that. But so far, Linux Mint’s Chromium is stable, but still has the issue. Can’t remember if it was Dan or Joe from Linux User Space that said resizing the windows fixes it. It does!
  • Web Apps is my new favorite thing. I use it with Plex and Nextcloud mostly with the Linux Mint Chromium.
  • World of Warcraft crashes on launch from Lutris. Sad times.
• Moss
  • I have the FuzZ400 about as good as it’s going to be, still need to hit F1 during all boots. This makes it hard to reboot from my recliner, as the F1 key on the wireless mini keyboard does not function. (Note: buy new wireless keyboard with real F-keys when possible.) 
  • I installed the power supply on my mini desktop. It works again. I put my old 2 Tb spinning metal drive in it. All the partitions were there, I thought I had 4 installations on it… but only the Mint partition had a distro in it, and the swap partition had been added to the partition which followed where it was. I reestablished the swap partition, and installed an OEM of Mint 20 Cinnamon on it. I’m looking for a local student to give it to. I have a monitor for it, but I haven’t looked to see if I have a working spare keyboard or mouse.
  • On Tuesday the 13th, I went looking for a Telegram group about Bodhi Linux, and didn’t find any in English so I set up one — with help, as I’ve never done this before. I posted it to all my Linux groups and also to both Bodhi Forums and my LQ blog. We have 20 members now, including lead dev Robert Wiley (aka YLee).
  • I had a great conversation with YLee in the group yesterday, lots of new stuff, including that there is a pre-alpha release now of Bodhi 6.0, available both with Moksha and E24. There is no 6.0 repo yet, but YLee stated that some programs from the 5.1 repo MAY work, such as the bodhi-printing app, no guarantees. I’m a Bodhi-loving fool, I currently have 3 installations on my laptop – 5.1, 6.0 with Moksha and 6.0 with Enlightenment E24.
  • Moksha development has far surpassed E17 levels, and has included most of the improvements through E24; however, unlike the main Enlightenment line, YLee accomplished this without changing the stable E17 codebase. 
  • The Bodhi team is mostly just 2 devs now, so please volunteer if you can help. Donations are up and down as well. [$50 this month, $300 last month]
  • In employment news, I still have not gotten paid by Census 2020, but discovered that was my fault. I fixed it, but I could be waiting another 3-4 weeks to receive my paycheck. I have been hired as a substitute teacher by the local school district, but the past two weeks were Fall Break so no work. I interviewed for an actual computer repair position, but was not called back for the second round. 
  • We’re getting near the end of Dead Beat, the 7th book in the Dresden Files series.
• Joe
  • The GK61S Bluetooth keyboard.  I still think that changing out the battery might be my best bet for maintaining bluetooth connection but overall I am disappointed.  I do like the buttons and the size is useful but having to use it wired is a bit annoying and I don’t know if replacing the battery will actually fix all the issues since it sometimes has a problem staying connected over bluetooth even with external power.  It can work with just the USB-C cable but wire can get in the way.  
    • I had previously thought that most of the Bluetooth connection issues with Linux had been solved but now I am going to need to look into it a bit more
    • Mostly bluetooth seems to suck on the desktop
  • Having fun with the Repetier snap and my 3D printer.  Had to do a lot of fixing and refixing to get it printing again but it is good to go for now.  Still having some problems with ABS even with the enclosure but I am switching back to pla and petg for now.  I did have to build a couple of dry boxes for the filament rolls and hopefully that will help.  Petg is printing pretty good right now.
  • Still figuring out what i want to do with that Lenovo Flex 4.  It is currently running Repetier and hooked up to my printer.  I think I am going to do a bit more conversion of the space that it is in and see if I can make a mini studio.
    • Used it to do the linux lugcast since we are using Jitsi amongst ourselves
      • Used Droidcam for this.  I think i got better resolution over wifi than i did over USB
    • Waiting on a mic stand to come in and will be using it along with the HyperX Quadcast mic it actually came in today but i have not opened it yet
    • Thinking about getting a green screen and seeing how well it works since you can get them for around 20 dollars
  • Finally made the upgrade on my main laptop to Mint 20 following the upgrade path, really nice to not have to jump through all the hoops to get the graphics card working properly.  
    • Reinstalled both Docker and Resilio Sync and all my scripting seems to be working fine
  • I had to install the flatpak for mumble on all my machines.  I guess the most recent update messed with the certificates.  Great to find out as the show is starting
• Josh Hawk
  • Mic Mayhem! I have been dealing with trying to get good audio out of my mic. I have a Blue Snowball USB Condenser mic right now and for some reason the audio is good sometimes and sounds hollow others. I have tried messing with the software sound settings but nothing seems to help. I just have to turn it on and hope my recording sounds good this time haha .
  • In other news this led me to buy a new dynamic mic! After looking at a ton of reviews I finally decided on believe it or not an Amazon Basics Mic . I found it on eBay for 16$ but I didn’t have an audio interface so it came with a XLR to ¼” audio jack. I plugged it into my Creative Sound Blaster Z sound card and presto my voice sounded much better but alas it was not to be. There was a rhythmic buzzing that I later found out was coming from my sound card . All that to say I am back using my Blue Snowball and am waiting for a new XLR to USB cable that will fix the buzzing issue.
  • One more quick thing. I have finally installed openSUSE on my parents old Gateway PC and am in the process of setting it up. I tried to use the transactional server install and realized that zypper does not work on that so I reinstalled the normal server version.
• Bo
  • Gnome experiment
    • Fedora 32 getting stuck on boot (gnome display manager)
      • Attempts to repair grub failed
    • Ubuntu was cool but I feel like it’s not close to “stock” gnome
    • Pop!_OS
      • Great! Love the window tiling feature and how it’s implemented
    • Gnome: it’s not you, it’s me…
  • Still playing card games on tabletop simulator (tts). Yesterday I taught my sister to play Magic.
  • LOTR the card game had an online convention using tts and Discord.
  • Baldur’s Gate 3 – Will it Proton?

THE NEWS:

• Wine 5.19 Out
• System76 Lets Tiling Windows Stack
• Kernel 5.9 Out
• Plasma 5.20 Is a Huge Release
• Happy Birthday KDE!

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• Google, Intel Warn of IoT Kernel Bug

• • • Three flaws in BlueZ, the Bluetooth controller software in the kernel, could lead to code execution, denial of service and a way to map memory for later exfiltration!
    • Updating to kernel 5.9 seems to be the fix, which is easy enough. This bit is incorrect. Intel made a statement. No fix is available.
    • Ubuntu hasn’t backported the fixes to kernel 5.8 as of yet, but surely it’ll show up soon.

• Zoom rolls out E2E Encryption for EVERYONE

• • Zoom has had a wild history with encryption in the past few months. Things like encryption that wasn’t full encryption, encryption for everyone wasn’t really for everyone, and the ability for internal employees were able to log into supposedly encrypted sessions defeating the entire purpose of encryption.
  • In a four phase approach Zoom is finally rolling out end to end encryption. For now, during phase one, it’ll be opt in only. It’s essentially a beta test.
  • The second phase will roll out in 2021.

Announcements:

• Our next episode will be Sunday, November 1, 2020 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC. Check when this will be in your local timezone at https://everytimezone.com/s/7d8c1119.
• Note both the US and UK will have time changes (“fall back” 1 hour) between mintCasts 346 & 347, so those times remain the same, but this makes the UTC time 1 hour later than before.

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

Download

LINUX INNARDS:

“Work from Home” setup

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

Will talk about my basement office/studio setup

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

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

• Larry Murphy

Hello Leo & All,

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

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

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

• John Wallis

Hello Leo,

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

Try This GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash pci=noacpi”

• John Wallis Part 2

Hi Leo,

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

• Raphaël

You guys MADE MY DAY!!!

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

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

As for the solutions proposed:

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

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

Keep up the good work.

• Anthony

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

CHECK THIS OUT!

• TonyH
  • Just to remind you that I have put a couple of videos of my restored model cars on YouTube the link is here
• Joe
  • Athlean X
• Bo
  • create temporary email from command tmpmail

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

Download

LINUX INNARDS:

“Work from Home” setup

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

Will talk about my basement office/studio setup

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

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

• Larry Murphy

Hello Leo & All,

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

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

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

• John Wallis

Hello Leo,

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

Try This GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash pci=noacpi”

• John Wallis Part 2

Hi Leo,

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

• Raphaël

You guys MADE MY DAY!!!

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

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

As for the solutions proposed:

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

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

Keep up the good work.

• Anthony

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

CHECK THIS OUT!

• TonyH
  • Just to remind you that I have put a couple of videos of my restored model cars on YouTube the link is here
• Joe
  • Athlean X
• Bo
  • create temporary email from command tmpmail

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

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

THE NEWS: 

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

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

SECURITY UPDATE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

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

THE NEWS: 

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

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

SECURITY UPDATE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

Download

Bi-weekly Wanderings:

• Leo
  • Gave LMDE 4 Beta a whirl. Seems everything is the way you’d expect, new logos and Cinnamon updates that we’ve touched on in previous episodes.
  • The deal breaker for me on the Desktop will be the Kernel 4.19.
  • The laptop would work fine on this version, but it hasn’t budged from LM 19 save for the incremental upgrades to .1, .2 and .3.
  • Not having PPAs directly available is also a sore spot. Some things just aren’t available via AppImage, Snap or Flatpak, and PPAs can fill the gap.
• Tony H
  • Hi great to be back so since the last show I’ve been up to loads of non Linux geeky stuff. I have been baking sourdough bread several times a week and it really is worth making your own bread. The quality is so good and the flavour is amazing. 
  • Obviously I have been playing around with my model cars a little but a short break away from home down in the south of England to visit friends and some relatives and then a 4 day trip to Birmingham, got in the way a little.
  • The same with Linux, I installed ALT Linux for the upcoming Distrohoppers’ Digest recording, this delayed as I had an emergency root canal filling the day before we were due to record last week but hopefully we are good for next Thursday. But with Vacations and other things that have been going on I have not got around to play with it for as long as I would have liked, sometimes life just gets in the way of things, sometimes I seem to be juggling too many balls in the air at once, and unlike my fellow hosts I can’t even blame work or school for that.       
• Moss
  • Sorry to miss the last show, things got out of control around here. Still are, a bit. But in the interim, I’ve managed to install OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 on both machines, and have run into a snag on installing Solus on my Galago Pro 2. I topped off my current lineup with Zorin OS Ultimate 15.2, although I’m not satisfied with that choice. It does have a nice Grub menu though. I also tried Ubuntu Budgie 20.04 in advance, with no grub menu customization at all and a few papercuts.
  • As Tony stated, we will record Episode 011 of Distrohoppers’ Digest on Thursday, March 12th. Our schedule is slipping a bit more from our intended monthly podcast, but we’re only human. Our stats are still hovering at just over 400 downloads per episode, although Episode 008 is the most recent to top 400 downloads. This month we will be covering ALT Linux and Ubuntu Budgie.
  • Speaking of the Ubuntu Budgie and my presence on their team, I ran into the same problem as I do all too often here, not enough time and too stressed. I resigned this morning from the project, but said I was still interested in doing the voiceover videos.
  • Listener Dale Miracle upped my game again, buying me a WAVLINK ST-336A USB 3 dual hard drive thingie with extra USB and SD card slots (what Leo and I call a “toaster”) and an Anker 9-port USB 3 hub. So now everything on my machine except for my mini keyboards and microphone are USB3.  I have replaced my underutilized 2 Tb spinning disk with 2 256 Gb SSDs, which run cooler and more quietly. I’ll keep the 2 Tb around as my 2nd Backup.
  • Suzanne and I just finished Fool Moon, the second Dresden FIles book, and have launched into book 3, Grave Peril. It seems to be jumping around a bit in the first few chapters.
  • I continue working in the wrong job with no good end in sight and alternatives looking more meager.
• Joe
  • Reading
    • Stormlight archive book 3
    • Artemis by Andy Wier 
    • Junkyard druid.
      • Relistened to the whole series since the books are short.
      • Was able to get the 2 newest books as well
    • Takeshi Kovacs novels because Altered Carbon season 2
    • Neil Gaiman American Gods
  • Put my 3d printer back together.  Have a spare board now.
    • Still having problems with prints
    • Will get more into it at a later date.  
    • For just say it ain’t working
  • Netflix Altered Carbon season 2
    • It was good.
    • Very different from book 2 however.  I really enjoyed first season because of how well it went along with the book
    • This was different though and i understand why.  It would have been very difficult to recreate all the things that happened in the book.  But second season while it did have a lot of things that were in none of the books seemed to have more aspects of the things that were included in the third book than it did the second
    • Still you should watch it if you have the chance.  Also read the books because awesome
    • Very adult themed
  • Installed Fedora Workstation on the 7140
    • Looks good and works well with some small exceptions
    • Have not used gnome in a long time and I am really impressed with how far it has come along and how smooth it runs
    • Only problem I am having so far is that the touchpad works at the login screen but becomes unresponsive after login
      • Probably an issue with the drivers trying to load twice
      • But I was able to correct the issue with sleep 45; sudo modprobe -r hid_multitouch; sudo modprobe hid_multitouch;
      • Which i added to the crontab @reboot
      • I also want to set up something similar whenever the keyboard is docked.  This may clear some of the issues that the tablet has with the docking procedure
    • Had to go into alsamixer and disable the hdmi audio in order to get the built in speakers to work
    • Well it was working.  Got a couple of pops after a couple of reboots even though the audio was muted and then now it cant find the internal audio card.  So I think I may have blown the hardware.  
    • Bluetooth audio works
  • Testing out scrcpy which allows me to mirror and interact with my android phone on my linux machine
    • It is free
    • Does not require root
    • Works using adb so you have to turn on debugging
    • 2 thumbs up for me
    • Full screen looks good and i have not noticed any lag
    • Actually using it a lot
  • Solder fun
    • Mmcx builds
    • Fixed my homemade bluetooth adapter
    • More LG HBS 770’s

The News: 

• LMDE 4 “Debbie” Beta Release
  • Feb 25. The team’s focus is on Debbie and cross platform thingies for a while.
  • It will be possible to update from the Debbie Beta to Debbie Stable when it is released! 
  • There are a few issues, as is common with Betas.
    • root not available in recovery until password is set. Set with “passwd root”
    • Sound issues can be solved by installing pavucontrol
    • VLC needs to be directed to the DVD drive at /dev/sr0 for DVD playback
    • Some KDE apps may need additional packages to function
      • kdelibs-bin kdelibs5-data kdelibs5-plugins
• Linux Mint Monthly News, February 2020
  • New more vibrant color palettes
  • Warpinator, a (temporarily named) application that will allow simple filesharing between two Linux Mint machines, or, later, two machines with Warpinator installed as it gets more popular.
• RASPBERRY PI SLIPS OUT NEW PCB VERSION WITH USB C POWER FIX
  • Also cuts price on 2 Gb RAM version to $35, 4 Gb remains $55
• Hot off the press! APT 2.0 Released
• Linux Foundation adds its 4th Microsoft member

Security Update: 

• 2011-2019 AMD chips vulnerable to two new attacks
• Let’s Encrypt revokes 3 million certs, then unrevokes about a million
• Intel Has an Unfixable Chipset Security Flaw. Is it a Risk?

Announcements:

• Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC, March 22, 2020.

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

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

Download

Bi-weekly Wanderings:

• Leo
  • Gave LMDE 4 Beta a whirl. Seems everything is the way you’d expect, new logos and Cinnamon updates that we’ve touched on in previous episodes.
  • The deal breaker for me on the Desktop will be the Kernel 4.19.
  • The laptop would work fine on this version, but it hasn’t budged from LM 19 save for the incremental upgrades to .1, .2 and .3.
  • Not having PPAs directly available is also a sore spot. Some things just aren’t available via AppImage, Snap or Flatpak, and PPAs can fill the gap.
• Tony H
  • Hi great to be back so since the last show I’ve been up to loads of non Linux geeky stuff. I have been baking sourdough bread several times a week and it really is worth making your own bread. The quality is so good and the flavour is amazing. 
  • Obviously I have been playing around with my model cars a little but a short break away from home down in the south of England to visit friends and some relatives and then a 4 day trip to Birmingham, got in the way a little.
  • The same with Linux, I installed ALT Linux for the upcoming Distrohoppers’ Digest recording, this delayed as I had an emergency root canal filling the day before we were due to record last week but hopefully we are good for next Thursday. But with Vacations and other things that have been going on I have not got around to play with it for as long as I would have liked, sometimes life just gets in the way of things, sometimes I seem to be juggling too many balls in the air at once, and unlike my fellow hosts I can’t even blame work or school for that.       
• Moss
  • Sorry to miss the last show, things got out of control around here. Still are, a bit. But in the interim, I’ve managed to install OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 on both machines, and have run into a snag on installing Solus on my Galago Pro 2. I topped off my current lineup with Zorin OS Ultimate 15.2, although I’m not satisfied with that choice. It does have a nice Grub menu though. I also tried Ubuntu Budgie 20.04 in advance, with no grub menu customization at all and a few papercuts.
  • As Tony stated, we will record Episode 011 of Distrohoppers’ Digest on Thursday, March 12th. Our schedule is slipping a bit more from our intended monthly podcast, but we’re only human. Our stats are still hovering at just over 400 downloads per episode, although Episode 008 is the most recent to top 400 downloads. This month we will be covering ALT Linux and Ubuntu Budgie.
  • Speaking of the Ubuntu Budgie and my presence on their team, I ran into the same problem as I do all too often here, not enough time and too stressed. I resigned this morning from the project, but said I was still interested in doing the voiceover videos.
  • Listener Dale Miracle upped my game again, buying me a WAVLINK ST-336A USB 3 dual hard drive thingie with extra USB and SD card slots (what Leo and I call a “toaster”) and an Anker 9-port USB 3 hub. So now everything on my machine except for my mini keyboards and microphone are USB3.  I have replaced my underutilized 2 Tb spinning disk with 2 256 Gb SSDs, which run cooler and more quietly. I’ll keep the 2 Tb around as my 2nd Backup.
  • Suzanne and I just finished Fool Moon, the second Dresden FIles book, and have launched into book 3, Grave Peril. It seems to be jumping around a bit in the first few chapters.
  • I continue working in the wrong job with no good end in sight and alternatives looking more meager.
• Joe
  • Reading
    • Stormlight archive book 3
    • Artemis by Andy Wier 
    • Junkyard druid.
      • Relistened to the whole series since the books are short.
      • Was able to get the 2 newest books as well
    • Takeshi Kovacs novels because Altered Carbon season 2
    • Neil Gaiman American Gods
  • Put my 3d printer back together.  Have a spare board now.
    • Still having problems with prints
    • Will get more into it at a later date.  
    • For just say it ain’t working
  • Netflix Altered Carbon season 2
    • It was good.
    • Very different from book 2 however.  I really enjoyed first season because of how well it went along with the book
    • This was different though and i understand why.  It would have been very difficult to recreate all the things that happened in the book.  But second season while it did have a lot of things that were in none of the books seemed to have more aspects of the things that were included in the third book than it did the second
    • Still you should watch it if you have the chance.  Also read the books because awesome
    • Very adult themed
  • Installed Fedora Workstation on the 7140
    • Looks good and works well with some small exceptions
    • Have not used gnome in a long time and I am really impressed with how far it has come along and how smooth it runs
    • Only problem I am having so far is that the touchpad works at the login screen but becomes unresponsive after login
      • Probably an issue with the drivers trying to load twice
      • But I was able to correct the issue with sleep 45; sudo modprobe -r hid_multitouch; sudo modprobe hid_multitouch;
      • Which i added to the crontab @reboot
      • I also want to set up something similar whenever the keyboard is docked.  This may clear some of the issues that the tablet has with the docking procedure
    • Had to go into alsamixer and disable the hdmi audio in order to get the built in speakers to work
    • Well it was working.  Got a couple of pops after a couple of reboots even though the audio was muted and then now it cant find the internal audio card.  So I think I may have blown the hardware.  
    • Bluetooth audio works
  • Testing out scrcpy which allows me to mirror and interact with my android phone on my linux machine
    • It is free
    • Does not require root
    • Works using adb so you have to turn on debugging
    • 2 thumbs up for me
    • Full screen looks good and i have not noticed any lag
    • Actually using it a lot
  • Solder fun
    • Mmcx builds
    • Fixed my homemade bluetooth adapter
    • More LG HBS 770’s

The News: 

• LMDE 4 “Debbie” Beta Release
  • Feb 25. The team’s focus is on Debbie and cross platform thingies for a while.
  • It will be possible to update from the Debbie Beta to Debbie Stable when it is released! 
  • There are a few issues, as is common with Betas.
    • root not available in recovery until password is set. Set with “passwd root”
    • Sound issues can be solved by installing pavucontrol
    • VLC needs to be directed to the DVD drive at /dev/sr0 for DVD playback
    • Some KDE apps may need additional packages to function
      • kdelibs-bin kdelibs5-data kdelibs5-plugins
• Linux Mint Monthly News, February 2020
  • New more vibrant color palettes
  • Warpinator, a (temporarily named) application that will allow simple filesharing between two Linux Mint machines, or, later, two machines with Warpinator installed as it gets more popular.
• RASPBERRY PI SLIPS OUT NEW PCB VERSION WITH USB C POWER FIX
  • Also cuts price on 2 Gb RAM version to $35, 4 Gb remains $55
• Hot off the press! APT 2.0 Released
• Linux Foundation adds its 4th Microsoft member

Security Update: 

• 2011-2019 AMD chips vulnerable to two new attacks
• Let’s Encrypt revokes 3 million certs, then unrevokes about a million
• Intel Has an Unfixable Chipset Security Flaw. Is it a Risk?

Announcements:

• Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time, 7 pm UTC, March 22, 2020.

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

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

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS:

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

SECURITY UPDATE:

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

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

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

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS:

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

SECURITY UPDATE:

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

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

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

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, Special Guest Alan Pope finds gold in the loft and plays 30+ year old games online, Leo wins at gifts, but fails at MicroK8s, Tony Hughes plays with Ubuntu Studio, more Matchbox cars, and donates some tech, Joe tries to repair a pebble, fixes more headphones and listens to lots of books, Tony Watts converts 8mm film to digital, plays with a dual monitor setup on his Thinkpad and reconfigures his recording setup.

Then, in our news – Dell shows a new developer XPS 13 laptop at CES, there is a new enterprise Chromebook from Samsung and EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield and more.

In Security – It’s time to update Firefox… again. And Cablehaunt spooks your modem.

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

• Alan P
  • Found a bunch of old audio cassettes in the loft. Bought a cassette player off ebay to sample them into a PC (thinkpad, of course) and then feed them into an emulator if they’re computer stuff.
  • Some of them were programs that I’d written with a friend over 30 years ago.
  • Also played some old 8-bit games with my friend Martin Wimpress on our new twitch channel “8bitversus”. We decided to start playing games online when a friend in the Ubuntu Podcast telegram channel suggested it might be fun to watch. I was a massive sinclair spectrum fan, and he was a commodore 64 fan. In these streams we take turns choosing games and get the other person to play games on the other persons platform. It’s fun!
• Leo
  • Got handed a desktop sans case from a friend that wasn’t using it anymore and was moving out of state. I’ve been wanting to build a new server for quite a while to get more into Docker and other enterprisey-type things and I saw it as a sign to forge ahead!
  • i5-6600k, 16GB 2400MHz RAM, ASUS Fancy Pants motherboard, and a 700W PSU.
  • Planning on moving the services I have at home, like Nextcloud, from snap and VMs to MicroK8s, but am having some issues with getting the Dashboard to listen outside on a local LAN subnet.
  • Making slow but steady progress on the manual Raspberry Pi Zero W motion camera setup.
• Tony H
  • Having issues with Ubuntu Studio that I had installed on my Dell 7440 i7 it was reporting errors every time I started it. So I swapped out the M2 SSD with a 2.5” SSD and did a clean install to this drive. More problems, the new iso would not boot, so I ended up finding and using the original iso off my portable HDD to make a new bootable USB install drive this worked and I have a clean install of Ubuntu Studio on the Test laptop for January’s test distro. One issue I have found so far is not an Ubuntu issue but a Firefox issue, I can no longer copy my Firefox folder over to the new machine and have all my bookmarks as they were previously installed. Yes I have a FireFox account but it does not seem to be doing what it is supposed to and syncing bookmarks which is a pain when you have several Hundred of these that you would like to access. Previously it was a doddle to copy my FireFox over to a new install and it was one of the reasons I still use it. And yes my desktop PC is linked to the laptop as far as sync is concerned, just not doing it.
  • Recording the latest Distrohoppers Digest episode with Moss, it went out on Friday.
  • Continuing to play with Matchbox models, pick up a couple of bargains over the holiday but now it’s time to start actually restoring a few. Started on a Ford GT superfast restoration and have a couple of others on the go as well. I’ve ordered some replacement parts from one of the model suppliers here in the UK to enable me to restore some of the models with parts missing, but where possible I try to use parts from other models bought for this purpose. Yesterday I went to a collectors Fair / swap meet and bought a few things and did a couple of swaps, thinking next time I may get a table to sell a few things that I have surplus, in the collection.    
  • Going back to PC stuff, I made a donation of some Pi stuff and a couple of Laptops to a friend of my friend Les Pounder. Drew works in Egypt and is hoping to teach local children Computing, but has absolutely no equipment, or didn’t have until Les sent him some Pi’s and an old Lenovo x61s with Raspbian x86 installed so the children will be using the same software on all the machines. One of the PC’s I am sending is an x61s and also a Dell E6220 with some random Pi stuff and a couple of Pi’s to the cause. It’s easy to forget that having access to fairly cheap older hardware via various sources such as ebay is beyond the financial ability of many in much of the world, and for some even in the rich countries. A shout out to Zeb from Destination Linux who did a 24Hr marathon YouTube stream of Euro Truck simulator over the holiday to raise funds for Free Geek, in the US you can find them HERE. There are similar projects in the UK one is the WEEECharity based in the North West so if you want to help people in your own community bridge the digital divide consider a donation of unused and unloved hardware or bung them a small donation to help out. 
  • Finally joined the BDLL Euro show, realised at the last minute that it was the second Saturday of the month, so after a quick check in with the crew dropped out of the pre show mumble chat and jumped into the BDLL Zoom after installing the Zoom client as I was on the Ubuntu Studio laptop, after a bit of a glitch at the beginning with the hardware it went OK for the rest of the 2 hours. 
• Joe
  • Someone gave me an equallogic ps6500  Toyam gave it to me.
  • I have no idea what to do with it
  • Honkeymagoo sent me a pair of pebble watches to work on
    • They both needed battery replacements
    • I failed miserably
    • Ruined one of the ribbon cables that go around the side on one
    • Did get the new batteries connected but was not able to get them to turn on
    • Other then the ribbon break i am not sure what I did wrong
    • One of the boards did get hot at one point but I reflowed the connection for the battery and it settled down
    • Interesting highlights.  I did have to solder a cable onto one of the battery boards.  Just used some wire from some ethernet cable that i had sitting around.  The cable is a little stiff for this application but when i checked the voltages it came out fine.
  • Jim Butchers Codex Alera
    • Good series.
    • Had to replace my copy because the old one was corrupt.  
    • Not sure if it is my hard drive with bad sectors or one of the ones that I used for a backup
  • The book of 5 rings
    • Interesting but because of the type of book and the fact that i am going over it with audio i think i am going to have to go through it several more times before i get the most out of it
  • Shattered Bonds, book 13 in the Jane Yellowrock series
    • Good book, not the easiest to follow.
    • Jumps around a bit and references some obscure aspects of the long series before it
  • Alex Verus novels again
    • Really good series.
    • Better after a couple of read throughs and getting in all the details
  • Also was able to get a python class in this morning.  We should start meeting weekly again. I think the next class that we are going to take may be centos
  • Working on old headphones again
    • Replaced the cable on my daughter’s cheap little headphones
    • Not even sure what brand they are just grabbed an old aux cable and replaced the broken cable
    • I have found that full cable replacements are sturdier and more reliable than patching the cable or replacing the jack
  • Fixed one set of 770’s by shortening the cable on one side
  • Fixed one set of 510’s by shortening the cable on one side and replacing the other
    • I had a problem with the replaced side
    • I tried shortening the original cable first but the sound was dim so i just did a replacement.  
    • Sound was still dim on that side so what I ended up doing was putting some flux down on the board and running my iron over a bunch of the connections while the device was on and playing music(do not try that) this reseated whatever was loose and fixed the sound issues
  • Fixed 2 sets of 810’s and a set of insignia’s by opening the speaker up and shortening the cable from that side
    • 1 more 810 to do that on
    • This is a very difficult fix because of the small size and the fact that it doesnt like to go back together if you get too harsh taking it apart
      • One of the 810s have another problem that i am not going to be able to fix but the insignias work well
        • The 810s i was able to get the earpiece working but it is much dimmer than the other side.  Next time i am setup i may try to reflow some of it 
        • But I think the problem is the connections on the spindle are wearing out so i may take it all the way apart and try to clean that up
        • The insignias work well for audio books but have terrible call quality in and out
      • The other 810 is working good
  • Full cable replacement on some earforce recon 50x’s that i found at goodwill for 4 dollars
    • Will probably also do the same for my other pair of 60p’s
    • This model has a separate line going to each ear one with the cables for the mic
    • The only issue that i have found is when the mic is in the correct position the left and right channels are reversed
  • Did a full band replacement on the z2’s.  Glad the replacement model worked.
    • Was not an exact match on the hinges but was close enough to the same size that i was able to get it together
    • Had to switch back to the standard sized ear cups because this band is narrower than the original
    • Much more clamping force but still comfortable
    • Used the earcups on the razer kraken z2’s
  • Attempted to replace the full cable from the board to the earpiece on a pair of 780’s but was plagued with problems and had to set it aside before i got frustrated while wielding a soldering iron. But as i mentioned before that is a difficult fix.
  • Picked up a pair of Meze 99 neos for 20 dollars
    • These headphones are 200 new on Amazon
    • Work perfectly and sound great
    • I am using a portable amp to push the headphones when i want a good sound
  •  Also picked up a pair of razer krakens for 15 dollars.
    • Had some problems where the left speaker was acting as the mic instead of the mic but was also pushing through sound
    • This had the side effect where everything that played on the headphones was transmitted in complete clarity back through the mic connection.
    • Attempted a cable fix directly at the 3.5mm jack but this did not work and left me somewhat confused as to the actual pinout of the device. Essentially when i had it hooked up right it was doing the same thing as before.
    • Cut the cable again above the included remote as that is the next likely place for an issue to arise. Hooked up a second cable from there and still got the same issue
    • Did a full cable replacement and while testing i found out that the mic is completely shot.
    • Works as a pair of headphones until i find another solution but i think i may mod an old mic from another system. 
    • Basically bypassed the surface mount board that is built in and hooked everything up direct except for the offside speaker
    • Sound good and are comfortable
    • I have a couple mono connectors that i might be able to use, i will need to look more closely 
    • Did not realize that it took proprietary ear cups but the ones i bought for the z2’s to add extra padding worked fine with the extra built in edge material.
    • Even covers up the hole from where i removed the mic 
  • Gave serious consideration to recording the whole thing and while i could have done it from my phone i had 2 problems
    • My phone is my bluetooth testing device
    • If I were planning on posting anywhere i would have had to refrain from cursing. And I was not about to do that.
  • For those of you that are wondering I go through a lot of bt headphones and my kids go through a lot of cans.  Dont think they are going to be using the meze’s though
  • Ordered some new tips for my soldering iron as the ones from microcenter dont quite fit
    • These do fit and work very well.  
  • My server is down after the most recent round of updates.  Not sure what is wrong yet. Need to put the video card back into the server. Which is annoying.  
    • Nope just a hard restart
    • Wait it dropped again.
    • I need to figure out what is going wrong with my server 
    • https://cockpit-project.org/
• Tony W
  • Miracle Morning 
    • First heard about it from User Error
    • S.A.V.E.R.S. explained – “The Miracle Morning”
    • More about habit and discipline than time spent or results 
    • Will stick with some variation of this morning routine
  • Music keeping me very busy (4 “gigs” in the last 4 days)
  • Converting old 8mm video using VLC
    • Tested with this adapter, about $10: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XJKSJZ8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 
    • First test with Super Nintendo quasi-successful
    • VLC able to capture video but not audio for some reason (Your input Can’t Be Opened, VLC Can’t Open MRL File…)
    • Audacity captures the audio no problem – can join VLC video capture with Audacity audio capture
  • Thinkpad dual display conundrum
    • Was initially hesitant to request a $200 thinkpad dock from work, so bought a USB C hub for about $30.  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Miracle MorningM8QR83T/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 
    • This hub did not work for multiple display, but adding another USB C to HDMI cable did
      • What I have learned is that anything 
    • Total cost of this solution around $40
    • CONS – 
      • No power button
      • 2 cables instead of one 
  •  Recording setup revisions
    • New boom stand (cheap Neewer)
    • Presonus Audiobox
    • Still using budget Behringer XLR mic
  • Have really been enjoying convenience of true wireless earbuds
    • Using Anker Liberty Soundcore buds that were a Christmas gift
    • Plex on the go is great for breaks

News:

• New Developer Dell XPS 13
• CES 2020: Samsung introduces enterprise-ready Galaxy Chromebook – Samsung Galaxy Chrombook
• EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield V, Penguinistas respond by demanding crippling boycott
• Firefox 72 Released (with Caveats: See Security Update)
  • Picture in Picture mode for Linux (and MacOS).
  • Now supports silencing Notification messages from various websites.
• Linus Torvalds Apprehensive About ZFS Licensing
  • All of the headlines are over the top!
• Kali Drops Default Root User
• Pixelorama v0.6 is Out!

Security Update:

• Mozilla Patches Zero-Day Being Actively Exploited in 72
  • The Firefox team updated version 72 one day after initial release because of a Type Confusion flaw that is being exploited in the wild.
  • These flaws essentially do not look at some specific input and run whatever is given to it. This can cause issues when privileged data is requested.
  • Upgrade to Firefox 72.0.1 or Firefox ESR 68.4.1 to fix this issue.
• Cable Haunt Vulnerability Affects Hundreds of Millions of Cable Modems
  • Users of cable modems with Broadcom chips are affected.
  • The spectrum analyzer on the Broadcom chip, typically used for debugging and testing purposes, can be leveraged to:
    • Change default DNS server
    • Conduct remote man-in-the-middle attacks
    • Hot-swap code or even the entire firmware
    • Upload, flash, and upgrade firmware silently
    • Disable ISP firmware upgrade
    • Change every config file and settings
    • Get and Set SNMP OID values
    • Change all associated MAC Addresses
    • Change serial numbers
    • Be exploited in botnet
  • ISPs or manufacturers can fix the issue with a firmware update. There’s not much you can do about it. However, the complexity of the attack is very high, so unless you’re under the microscope, you’ll likely not be affected.

Announcements:

• Ubuntu 19.04 and variants are End of Life on January 23. Please update as soon as possible!
• The next show will be January 26th, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM UTC.

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

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

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, Special Guest Alan Pope finds gold in the loft and plays 30+ year old games online, Leo wins at gifts, but fails at MicroK8s, Tony Hughes plays with Ubuntu Studio, more Matchbox cars, and donates some tech, Joe tries to repair a pebble, fixes more headphones and listens to lots of books, Tony Watts converts 8mm film to digital, plays with a dual monitor setup on his Thinkpad and reconfigures his recording setup.

Then, in our news – Dell shows a new developer XPS 13 laptop at CES, there is a new enterprise Chromebook from Samsung and EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield and more.

In Security – It’s time to update Firefox… again. And Cablehaunt spooks your modem.

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

• Alan P
  • Found a bunch of old audio cassettes in the loft. Bought a cassette player off ebay to sample them into a PC (thinkpad, of course) and then feed them into an emulator if they’re computer stuff.
  • Some of them were programs that I’d written with a friend over 30 years ago.
  • Also played some old 8-bit games with my friend Martin Wimpress on our new twitch channel “8bitversus”. We decided to start playing games online when a friend in the Ubuntu Podcast telegram channel suggested it might be fun to watch. I was a massive sinclair spectrum fan, and he was a commodore 64 fan. In these streams we take turns choosing games and get the other person to play games on the other persons platform. It’s fun!
• Leo
  • Got handed a desktop sans case from a friend that wasn’t using it anymore and was moving out of state. I’ve been wanting to build a new server for quite a while to get more into Docker and other enterprisey-type things and I saw it as a sign to forge ahead!
  • i5-6600k, 16GB 2400MHz RAM, ASUS Fancy Pants motherboard, and a 700W PSU.
  • Planning on moving the services I have at home, like Nextcloud, from snap and VMs to MicroK8s, but am having some issues with getting the Dashboard to listen outside on a local LAN subnet.
  • Making slow but steady progress on the manual Raspberry Pi Zero W motion camera setup.
• Tony H
  • Having issues with Ubuntu Studio that I had installed on my Dell 7440 i7 it was reporting errors every time I started it. So I swapped out the M2 SSD with a 2.5” SSD and did a clean install to this drive. More problems, the new iso would not boot, so I ended up finding and using the original iso off my portable HDD to make a new bootable USB install drive this worked and I have a clean install of Ubuntu Studio on the Test laptop for January’s test distro. One issue I have found so far is not an Ubuntu issue but a Firefox issue, I can no longer copy my Firefox folder over to the new machine and have all my bookmarks as they were previously installed. Yes I have a FireFox account but it does not seem to be doing what it is supposed to and syncing bookmarks which is a pain when you have several Hundred of these that you would like to access. Previously it was a doddle to copy my FireFox over to a new install and it was one of the reasons I still use it. And yes my desktop PC is linked to the laptop as far as sync is concerned, just not doing it.
  • Recording the latest Distrohoppers Digest episode with Moss, it went out on Friday.
  • Continuing to play with Matchbox models, pick up a couple of bargains over the holiday but now it’s time to start actually restoring a few. Started on a Ford GT superfast restoration and have a couple of others on the go as well. I’ve ordered some replacement parts from one of the model suppliers here in the UK to enable me to restore some of the models with parts missing, but where possible I try to use parts from other models bought for this purpose. Yesterday I went to a collectors Fair / swap meet and bought a few things and did a couple of swaps, thinking next time I may get a table to sell a few things that I have surplus, in the collection.    
  • Going back to PC stuff, I made a donation of some Pi stuff and a couple of Laptops to a friend of my friend Les Pounder. Drew works in Egypt and is hoping to teach local children Computing, but has absolutely no equipment, or didn’t have until Les sent him some Pi’s and an old Lenovo x61s with Raspbian x86 installed so the children will be using the same software on all the machines. One of the PC’s I am sending is an x61s and also a Dell E6220 with some random Pi stuff and a couple of Pi’s to the cause. It’s easy to forget that having access to fairly cheap older hardware via various sources such as ebay is beyond the financial ability of many in much of the world, and for some even in the rich countries. A shout out to Zeb from Destination Linux who did a 24Hr marathon YouTube stream of Euro Truck simulator over the holiday to raise funds for Free Geek, in the US you can find them HERE. There are similar projects in the UK one is the WEEECharity based in the North West so if you want to help people in your own community bridge the digital divide consider a donation of unused and unloved hardware or bung them a small donation to help out. 
  • Finally joined the BDLL Euro show, realised at the last minute that it was the second Saturday of the month, so after a quick check in with the crew dropped out of the pre show mumble chat and jumped into the BDLL Zoom after installing the Zoom client as I was on the Ubuntu Studio laptop, after a bit of a glitch at the beginning with the hardware it went OK for the rest of the 2 hours. 
• Joe
  • Someone gave me an equallogic ps6500  Toyam gave it to me.
  • I have no idea what to do with it
  • Honkeymagoo sent me a pair of pebble watches to work on
    • They both needed battery replacements
    • I failed miserably
    • Ruined one of the ribbon cables that go around the side on one
    • Did get the new batteries connected but was not able to get them to turn on
    • Other then the ribbon break i am not sure what I did wrong
    • One of the boards did get hot at one point but I reflowed the connection for the battery and it settled down
    • Interesting highlights.  I did have to solder a cable onto one of the battery boards.  Just used some wire from some ethernet cable that i had sitting around.  The cable is a little stiff for this application but when i checked the voltages it came out fine.
  • Jim Butchers Codex Alera
    • Good series.
    • Had to replace my copy because the old one was corrupt.  
    • Not sure if it is my hard drive with bad sectors or one of the ones that I used for a backup
  • The book of 5 rings
    • Interesting but because of the type of book and the fact that i am going over it with audio i think i am going to have to go through it several more times before i get the most out of it
  • Shattered Bonds, book 13 in the Jane Yellowrock series
    • Good book, not the easiest to follow.
    • Jumps around a bit and references some obscure aspects of the long series before it
  • Alex Verus novels again
    • Really good series.
    • Better after a couple of read throughs and getting in all the details
  • Also was able to get a python class in this morning.  We should start meeting weekly again. I think the next class that we are going to take may be centos
  • Working on old headphones again
    • Replaced the cable on my daughter’s cheap little headphones
    • Not even sure what brand they are just grabbed an old aux cable and replaced the broken cable
    • I have found that full cable replacements are sturdier and more reliable than patching the cable or replacing the jack
  • Fixed one set of 770’s by shortening the cable on one side
  • Fixed one set of 510’s by shortening the cable on one side and replacing the other
    • I had a problem with the replaced side
    • I tried shortening the original cable first but the sound was dim so i just did a replacement.  
    • Sound was still dim on that side so what I ended up doing was putting some flux down on the board and running my iron over a bunch of the connections while the device was on and playing music(do not try that) this reseated whatever was loose and fixed the sound issues
  • Fixed 2 sets of 810’s and a set of insignia’s by opening the speaker up and shortening the cable from that side
    • 1 more 810 to do that on
    • This is a very difficult fix because of the small size and the fact that it doesnt like to go back together if you get too harsh taking it apart
      • One of the 810s have another problem that i am not going to be able to fix but the insignias work well
        • The 810s i was able to get the earpiece working but it is much dimmer than the other side.  Next time i am setup i may try to reflow some of it 
        • But I think the problem is the connections on the spindle are wearing out so i may take it all the way apart and try to clean that up
        • The insignias work well for audio books but have terrible call quality in and out
      • The other 810 is working good
  • Full cable replacement on some earforce recon 50x’s that i found at goodwill for 4 dollars
    • Will probably also do the same for my other pair of 60p’s
    • This model has a separate line going to each ear one with the cables for the mic
    • The only issue that i have found is when the mic is in the correct position the left and right channels are reversed
  • Did a full band replacement on the z2’s.  Glad the replacement model worked.
    • Was not an exact match on the hinges but was close enough to the same size that i was able to get it together
    • Had to switch back to the standard sized ear cups because this band is narrower than the original
    • Much more clamping force but still comfortable
    • Used the earcups on the razer kraken z2’s
  • Attempted to replace the full cable from the board to the earpiece on a pair of 780’s but was plagued with problems and had to set it aside before i got frustrated while wielding a soldering iron. But as i mentioned before that is a difficult fix.
  • Picked up a pair of Meze 99 neos for 20 dollars
    • These headphones are 200 new on Amazon
    • Work perfectly and sound great
    • I am using a portable amp to push the headphones when i want a good sound
  •  Also picked up a pair of razer krakens for 15 dollars.
    • Had some problems where the left speaker was acting as the mic instead of the mic but was also pushing through sound
    • This had the side effect where everything that played on the headphones was transmitted in complete clarity back through the mic connection.
    • Attempted a cable fix directly at the 3.5mm jack but this did not work and left me somewhat confused as to the actual pinout of the device. Essentially when i had it hooked up right it was doing the same thing as before.
    • Cut the cable again above the included remote as that is the next likely place for an issue to arise. Hooked up a second cable from there and still got the same issue
    • Did a full cable replacement and while testing i found out that the mic is completely shot.
    • Works as a pair of headphones until i find another solution but i think i may mod an old mic from another system. 
    • Basically bypassed the surface mount board that is built in and hooked everything up direct except for the offside speaker
    • Sound good and are comfortable
    • I have a couple mono connectors that i might be able to use, i will need to look more closely 
    • Did not realize that it took proprietary ear cups but the ones i bought for the z2’s to add extra padding worked fine with the extra built in edge material.
    • Even covers up the hole from where i removed the mic 
  • Gave serious consideration to recording the whole thing and while i could have done it from my phone i had 2 problems
    • My phone is my bluetooth testing device
    • If I were planning on posting anywhere i would have had to refrain from cursing. And I was not about to do that.
  • For those of you that are wondering I go through a lot of bt headphones and my kids go through a lot of cans.  Dont think they are going to be using the meze’s though
  • Ordered some new tips for my soldering iron as the ones from microcenter dont quite fit
    • These do fit and work very well.  
  • My server is down after the most recent round of updates.  Not sure what is wrong yet. Need to put the video card back into the server. Which is annoying.  
    • Nope just a hard restart
    • Wait it dropped again.
    • I need to figure out what is going wrong with my server 
    • https://cockpit-project.org/
• Tony W
  • Miracle Morning 
    • First heard about it from User Error
    • S.A.V.E.R.S. explained – “The Miracle Morning”
    • More about habit and discipline than time spent or results 
    • Will stick with some variation of this morning routine
  • Music keeping me very busy (4 “gigs” in the last 4 days)
  • Converting old 8mm video using VLC
    • Tested with this adapter, about $10: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XJKSJZ8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 
    • First test with Super Nintendo quasi-successful
    • VLC able to capture video but not audio for some reason (Your input Can’t Be Opened, VLC Can’t Open MRL File…)
    • Audacity captures the audio no problem – can join VLC video capture with Audacity audio capture
  • Thinkpad dual display conundrum
    • Was initially hesitant to request a $200 thinkpad dock from work, so bought a USB C hub for about $30.  https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Miracle MorningM8QR83T/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 
    • This hub did not work for multiple display, but adding another USB C to HDMI cable did
      • What I have learned is that anything 
    • Total cost of this solution around $40
    • CONS – 
      • No power button
      • 2 cables instead of one 
  •  Recording setup revisions
    • New boom stand (cheap Neewer)
    • Presonus Audiobox
    • Still using budget Behringer XLR mic
  • Have really been enjoying convenience of true wireless earbuds
    • Using Anker Liberty Soundcore buds that were a Christmas gift
    • Plex on the go is great for breaks

News:

• New Developer Dell XPS 13
• CES 2020: Samsung introduces enterprise-ready Galaxy Chromebook – Samsung Galaxy Chrombook
• EA boots Linux gamers out of multiplayer Battlefield V, Penguinistas respond by demanding crippling boycott
• Firefox 72 Released (with Caveats: See Security Update)
  • Picture in Picture mode for Linux (and MacOS).
  • Now supports silencing Notification messages from various websites.
• Linus Torvalds Apprehensive About ZFS Licensing
  • All of the headlines are over the top!
• Kali Drops Default Root User
• Pixelorama v0.6 is Out!

Security Update:

• Mozilla Patches Zero-Day Being Actively Exploited in 72
  • The Firefox team updated version 72 one day after initial release because of a Type Confusion flaw that is being exploited in the wild.
  • These flaws essentially do not look at some specific input and run whatever is given to it. This can cause issues when privileged data is requested.
  • Upgrade to Firefox 72.0.1 or Firefox ESR 68.4.1 to fix this issue.
• Cable Haunt Vulnerability Affects Hundreds of Millions of Cable Modems
  • Users of cable modems with Broadcom chips are affected.
  • The spectrum analyzer on the Broadcom chip, typically used for debugging and testing purposes, can be leveraged to:
    • Change default DNS server
    • Conduct remote man-in-the-middle attacks
    • Hot-swap code or even the entire firmware
    • Upload, flash, and upgrade firmware silently
    • Disable ISP firmware upgrade
    • Change every config file and settings
    • Get and Set SNMP OID values
    • Change all associated MAC Addresses
    • Change serial numbers
    • Be exploited in botnet
  • ISPs or manufacturers can fix the issue with a firmware update. There’s not much you can do about it. However, the complexity of the attack is very high, so unless you’re under the microscope, you’ll likely not be affected.

Announcements:

• Ubuntu 19.04 and variants are End of Life on January 23. Please update as soon as possible!
• The next show will be January 26th, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM UTC.

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

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

Download

In our Innards section, we make our 2020 Predictions!

And finally, our listener feedback

LINUX INNARDS: 

2020 Predictions:

• Joe
  • We will see many more operating systems that are optimized and working for the Raspberry Pi 4.  
  • Probably also see a new slim version sometime this year
  • Microsoft will push more towards applications that can run on either operating system.  We will still be blind to their evil plans.
  • The announcement for edge OS will be towards the end of the year
• Leo
  • Microsoft Office will have a native Linux version released
  • Adobe Photoshop will have a native Linux version released
  • AutoCAD will have a native Linux version released
  • Moss will record a Gentoo show
  • Firefox vs. The World. Firefox will be the last popular non-Chromium holdout.
• Tony W
  • Maru OS will significantly expand supported devices
    • Will add support for a Oneplus device, very likely 3/3T
    • Will also add support for Galaxy Note devices, Note 9 and/or Note 10
  • We will see convergence on Pine64 devices, with Pinephone able to dock to peripherals and run full desktop applications
  • A big box store will sell a PC preconfigured with Linux in 2020
• Tony H
  • Linux Driver support will continue to improve and more hardware manufacturers (Nvidia I’m looking at you) will develop open source Linux Drivers. 
  • I’m banking on a New R.Pi revision if not a totally new model, I still think that adding M.2 support, as other SBC manufacturers have, is the way to go in the long term. But this will probably require a totally new board design and may still be a year or 2 away. It may be that someone designs an add on board that will provide this function, but if they do it needs to be a device that allows the drive to be the boot drive.  
• Moss
  • I was going to beg off on any predictions. But no. Now that Canonical has agreements with Microsoft for WSL and Amazon for Ubuntu Pro and AWS, I predict they will begin (or continue, if they have already begun in secret) working on agreements with other megacorps such as Alphabet, Oracle, SAP, and Apache.
  • If they succeed with any one of these new alliances, they will be insulated from potential buyouts and takeovers. I therefore predict this is the year they go IPO.
• Oliver
  • End of Windows 7 support won’t increase the Linux desktop uptake
  • Intel’s new Graphics card wont suck on Linux
• Eric Lietz (listener)
  • Purism will go out of business – the Librem 5 phone endeavor will put it under
  • The PinePhone will be an amazing product and success story for Pine64
  • An major industry specific software company (Adobe, Autodesk (for AutoCAD), or similar) will offer a Linux version for a flagship software product
  • Microsoft will offer Office 365 on Linux
  • Linux preinstalled from a major hardware supplier will be available in big box stores available off of the shelf

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

•  Katya* (from Discord)
• Erik Lietz
• Benjamin Moser

CHECK THIS OUT! 

• Moss
  • Is Safari converting to chromium?
• Tony H 
  • HPR New Years Eve Show/Marathon 
• Joe 
  • Rambler will drop NGINX criminal case

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

• Next Episode will be January 12th, 2PM Central, 8PM UTC

WRAP-UP:

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

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

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

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

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

Download

In our Innards section, we make our 2020 Predictions!

And finally, our listener feedback

LINUX INNARDS: 

2020 Predictions:

• Joe
  • We will see many more operating systems that are optimized and working for the Raspberry Pi 4.  
  • Probably also see a new slim version sometime this year
  • Microsoft will push more towards applications that can run on either operating system.  We will still be blind to their evil plans.
  • The announcement for edge OS will be towards the end of the year
• Leo
  • Microsoft Office will have a native Linux version released
  • Adobe Photoshop will have a native Linux version released
  • AutoCAD will have a native Linux version released
  • Moss will record a Gentoo show
  • Firefox vs. The World. Firefox will be the last popular non-Chromium holdout.
• Tony W
  • Maru OS will significantly expand supported devices
    • Will add support for a Oneplus device, very likely 3/3T
    • Will also add support for Galaxy Note devices, Note 9 and/or Note 10
  • We will see convergence on Pine64 devices, with Pinephone able to dock to peripherals and run full desktop applications
  • A big box store will sell a PC preconfigured with Linux in 2020
• Tony H
  • Linux Driver support will continue to improve and more hardware manufacturers (Nvidia I’m looking at you) will develop open source Linux Drivers. 
  • I’m banking on a New R.Pi revision if not a totally new model, I still think that adding M.2 support, as other SBC manufacturers have, is the way to go in the long term. But this will probably require a totally new board design and may still be a year or 2 away. It may be that someone designs an add on board that will provide this function, but if they do it needs to be a device that allows the drive to be the boot drive.  
• Moss
  • I was going to beg off on any predictions. But no. Now that Canonical has agreements with Microsoft for WSL and Amazon for Ubuntu Pro and AWS, I predict they will begin (or continue, if they have already begun in secret) working on agreements with other megacorps such as Alphabet, Oracle, SAP, and Apache.
  • If they succeed with any one of these new alliances, they will be insulated from potential buyouts and takeovers. I therefore predict this is the year they go IPO.
• Oliver
  • End of Windows 7 support won’t increase the Linux desktop uptake
  • Intel’s new Graphics card wont suck on Linux
• Eric Lietz (listener)
  • Purism will go out of business – the Librem 5 phone endeavor will put it under
  • The PinePhone will be an amazing product and success story for Pine64
  • An major industry specific software company (Adobe, Autodesk (for AutoCAD), or similar) will offer a Linux version for a flagship software product
  • Microsoft will offer Office 365 on Linux
  • Linux preinstalled from a major hardware supplier will be available in big box stores available off of the shelf

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

•  Katya* (from Discord)
• Erik Lietz
• Benjamin Moser

CHECK THIS OUT! 

• Moss
  • Is Safari converting to chromium?
• Tony H 
  • HPR New Years Eve Show/Marathon 
• Joe 
  • Rambler will drop NGINX criminal case

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

• Next Episode will be January 12th, 2PM Central, 8PM UTC

WRAP-UP:

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

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

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

• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

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

Download

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS: 

• A private equity fund acquired the .ORG registry in toto
  • Internet Society (ISOC) has sold the .org registry Public Interest Registry (PIR) to private equity company Ethos Capital.
  • This will quite likely result in an increase in domain registration cost over time, as these private equity companies tend to really, really like money.
  • Richard Kirkendall, CEO of Namecheap filed a reconsideration request to ICANN over the price cap removal.
• Microsoft Edge Coming to Linux
  • The new version of Edge that’s based on Chromium will be available January 15, 2020, but I suspect the Linux version will be a little further out.
• Mirantis Acquired Docker Enterprise
  • Docker has been struggling to become profitable, so Kubernetes-as-a-Service company Mirantis has bought them up. 
• PinePhone Brave Heart Edition is now available for pre-order
• Debian 10.2 Released
• Brave Browser 1.0 Announced
  • Based on chromium with the Google bits stripped out.
  • Brave tries to fix the problem of users wanting to block ads, and sites wanting ad revenue.
  • Brave attempts to block ads on behalf of the users, display their own “safe” ads in your notifications area of your desktop, and then pay you for viewing those ads. Something like a penny per ad view.
  • With 1.0, iOS is added to the list of devices that can acquire the Basic Attention Token, which completes the spectrum of supported devices.
• OnlyOffice Available on Flathub
• ElementaryOS Now Supports Flatpak

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• Microsoft Defender ATP is coming to Linux in 2020
• New Intel Exploit

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

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

WRAP-UP:

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

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

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

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

Download

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS: 

• A private equity fund acquired the .ORG registry in toto
  • Internet Society (ISOC) has sold the .org registry Public Interest Registry (PIR) to private equity company Ethos Capital.
  • This will quite likely result in an increase in domain registration cost over time, as these private equity companies tend to really, really like money.
  • Richard Kirkendall, CEO of Namecheap filed a reconsideration request to ICANN over the price cap removal.
• Microsoft Edge Coming to Linux
  • The new version of Edge that’s based on Chromium will be available January 15, 2020, but I suspect the Linux version will be a little further out.
• Mirantis Acquired Docker Enterprise
  • Docker has been struggling to become profitable, so Kubernetes-as-a-Service company Mirantis has bought them up. 
• PinePhone Brave Heart Edition is now available for pre-order
• Debian 10.2 Released
• Brave Browser 1.0 Announced
  • Based on chromium with the Google bits stripped out.
  • Brave tries to fix the problem of users wanting to block ads, and sites wanting ad revenue.
  • Brave attempts to block ads on behalf of the users, display their own “safe” ads in your notifications area of your desktop, and then pay you for viewing those ads. Something like a penny per ad view.
  • With 1.0, iOS is added to the list of devices that can acquire the Basic Attention Token, which completes the spectrum of supported devices.
• OnlyOffice Available on Flathub
• ElementaryOS Now Supports Flatpak

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• Microsoft Defender ATP is coming to Linux in 2020
• New Intel Exploit

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

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

WRAP-UP:

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

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

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

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