NextCloud – mintCast https://mintcast.org The podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux Sun, 28 Sep 2025 22:47:13 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/cropped-small-logo-32x32.png NextCloud – mintCast https://mintcast.org 32 32 164426984 469 – Bill Loves Windows https://mintcast.org/469-bill-loves-windows/ Sun, 28 Sep 2025 22:45:46 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7666 First up in the news: LMDE 7 ‘Gigi” BETA released

In security and privacy: Mississippi enforces Age Assurance Law, NPM suffers a security breach.

Then in our Wanderings, Joe works with Proxmox, and Openmediavault, Jim Troubleshoots hard disks, Majid goes back to work, and Bill works on his "Immich."

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

]]> First up in the news: LMDE 7 ‘Gigi” BETA released

In security and privacy: Mississippi enforces Age Assurance Law, NPM suffers a security breach.

Then in our Wanderings, Joe works with Proxmox, and Openmediavault, Jim Troubleshoots hard disks, Majid goes back to work, and Bill works on his “Immich.”

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Link To Full Show Notes

The News:


LMDE 7 ‘Gigi” BETA released


Vivaldi takes a stand: keep browsing human

Security and Privacy


Mississippi’s Age Assurance Law


NPM Packages Security Breach

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 7666 430.5 – Infrastructure Bill https://mintcast.org/430-5-infrastructure-bill/ Wed, 14 Feb 2024 05:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6643 In our Innards section: Bill explains the current mintCast infrastructure

In "Check This Out" we share a call for new shows by Hacker Public Radio

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions.

Download
]]>

In our Innards section: Bill explains the current mintCast infrastructure

In “Check This Out” we share a call for new shows by Hacker Public Radio

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

  1. [skipto time=”00:00:00″] – Intro
  2. [skipto time=”00:01:06″] – Innards
  3. [skipto time=”00:40:07″] – Check This Out
  4. [skipto time=”00:45:07″] – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
  5. [skipto time=”00:45:48″] – Wrap Up
  6. [skipto time=”00:48:49″] – Outro
Full Show Notes Here

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6643 419.5 – Bill & Majid’s Bogus Journey https://mintcast.org/419-5-bill-majids-bogus-journey/ Wed, 30 Aug 2023 04:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6332 In our Innards section we talk about cloud storage solutions and attempt to demystify some of the procedures for hosting your own cloud storage.

In "Check This Out" On August 12, 1981 IBM Introduces Personal Computer

Download
]]> In our Innards section we talk about cloud storage solutions and attempt to demystify some of the procedures for hosting your own cloud storage.

In “Check This Out”

On August 12, 1981 IBM Introduces Personal Computer

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6332 mintCast 401 – Bill Hammers Nextcloud https://mintcast.org/mintcast-401-bill-hammers-nextcloud/ Wed, 30 Nov 2022 23:40:13 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5771 First up in the news: Network-crashing leap seconds to be abandoned, Asahi Linux Improves Apple Silicon Support
In security and privacy: OpenSSL3 Patch Arrives
In security and privacy: updates are required
Then in our Wanderings: Bill hammers nextcloud, Joe does tinkering
In our Innards section: we discuss more history and finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Download
]]> First up in the news: Network-crashing leap seconds to be abandoned, Asahi Linux Improves Apple Silicon Support

In security and privacy: updates are required

Then in our Wanderings: Bill hammers nextcloud, Joe does tinkering

In our Innards section: we discuss more history and finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

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

The News

Wrap-up

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

  • Norbert, Londoner, Tony H, AudioFreak(Riyo) and all others for our audio editing
  • Josh Lowe, and Bill Houser for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Linode for hosting mintcast.org
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.Thanks, Clem!
]]> 5771 394 – With music on our side to break the old hard drives https://mintcast.org/394-with-music-on-our-side-to-break-the-old-hard-drives/ Fri, 26 Aug 2022 15:20:07 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5598 In security and privacy, Discord and your passwords are pythoned, and hard drives apparently have a taste in music
Then in our Wanderings, Joe plays with his handheld, Bill is setting up a new server, Moss skips the assault and gets a couple batteries, and Norbert has had done some things.
Download
]]> 1:25 The News
16:15 Security and Privacy
26:03 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:22:59 Housekeeping and Announcements

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

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

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

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

The News

Security and Privacy Update

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

  • Norbert, Londoner, Tony H, and all others for our audio editing
  • Leo for timestamps and publishing
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.Thanks, Clem!
]]> 5598 387 – The Curious Case of Debian Downloads https://mintcast.org/387-the-curious-case-of-debian-downloads/ Wed, 15 Jun 2022 12:13:29 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5496 ]]> 2:32 The News
13:25 Security and Privacy
22:10 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:05:28 Announcements

First up in the news: NVIDIA is transitioning, Debian talks non-free, Ubuntu has new ISOs and Docker news.

In security and privacy: Intel has more microcode

Then in our Wanderings: Joe lost the election, Norbert watches sci-fi and Bill sets up NextCloud.

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

The News

Security and Privacy Update

Wrap-up

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

  • Norbert and Tony H for our audio production
  • Leo for timestamps and publishing
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.Thanks, Clem!
]]> 5496 mintCast 354 – sudo make me an update (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-354-sudo-make-me-an-update-mp3/ Wed, 10 Feb 2021 05:57:09 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4913 Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu loses the lead, Wayland changes, and some new releases
In Security, time to patch… again.
Download
]]> Download

1:54 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
58:30 News
1:19:27 Security Update
1:30:05 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I find a new box, Joe’s light as a feather, Moss explodes a DDE, and Bo hosts his own email

Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu loses the lead, Wayland changes, and some new releases

In Security, time to patch… again.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Picked up a Lenovo M715q Tiny. Ryzen 2400GE, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVMe
      • This will be my “studio” machine.
      • Haven’t gamed on it yet, but it’s supposed to be “not horrible”
      • It’ll free up my laptop to be a laptop again
  • Joe
    • So I got some more headphones done.  Replaced the MMCX cable on 2 of the LG HBS 770’s that I constantly use because the cable had gotten hard and cracked.  I am really impressed with how long they lasted, before I was repairing them every couple of months and I think these lasted about 8 months or so before I had to fix them.  I also really like the cables that I got to fix it.  They are a little thicker so they actually tin which makes the whole process a lot easier.  Also did another set of the Ankers with the cables I built myself and they came out well again.  Only one more to go for those. However the cost for making the cables is a bit more and may not be as economically conservative.
      • Since writing that one of the two Ankers has stopped charging.
      • The other is still working well
    • I got my weight down below 230 lbs again which is awesome.  I am not losing weight as quickly as I was when I first changed my diet again but I am not going as hard as I was before either.
    • Made my own protein bars and they are delicious.  I made one mistake though and did not spray the wax paper with a non stick so they are rather difficult to eat.  The ingredients are not cheap so I don’t know if I will be making them again.  But they are tasty.
    • Very interested in the Raspberry Pi Pico as a USB host controller but I want to give the development around it time to grow some but with the $1.99 price tag at MicroCenter I may pick up a few and put them into a drawer until more data is there.
    • Looking to upgrade my MSI GE72 gaming laptop, since the 950m is getting a bit old, but prices are once again going crazy in the used and new market because of the high cost of graphics cards right now and the fact that everyone is still working from home.  If I can wait until the vaccine is more widely distributed and people start going back to the office I imagine there will be a large volume of people off loading computers that will drive the prices back down.
    • I  have a couple of old phones that I am looking to do some projects with since they are just sitting around  but I am not sure what I should do.  Project ideas accepted jb@mintcast.org or tell me about what you have done with old phones to get some more use out of them
    • I also put the question out to the Telegram group and got a very interesting answer from listener Hob.  An application called Deskreen which can be used from an appimage and can turn any device with a web browser into another screen with some small caveats
      • If you want it to be an independent screen then you need a dummy display adapter hooked up to your system or you can display one of the screens that is already there
      • Control does not go through the device it goes through the computer which does make sense from an extra screen perspective but does mean it is not the best for remote controlling a computer.
      • The adapters are not expensive though, so that is good, and then you just set up like a normal screen and connect through the application.  This is awesome if you have a couple of older-yet-still-decent tablets sitting around.  A lot of older iPads have really good screens but a lot of difficulty adding new applications and would be perfect for something like this
  • Moss
    • I got the FuzZ400 back online with an old AMD Radeon HD 6770 video card on loan from Dale Miracle! Hope my mic sounds good. I still need to get the mic boom installed which will only take a drill bit of the correct size to accomplish. The bootup report that the rear fan was not working was solved when I found a piece of styrofoam wedged in the fan blades.
    • I’ve been having minor issues with the SSD in the FuzZ400 because it thinks it’s still in the Gigabyte Mini. I may have to reinstall Mint altogether to get everything really back together, but my current workarounds are good. Sabayon owned GRUB and I could not update it or add Grub Customizer to Sabayon (because Sabayon repos are permanently offline), and Mint did not want to take GRUB back for some reason, so I installed UbuntuDDE on sda5. No more Gentoo. Sad. The other distros were not affected.
    • I installed a new version of ExLight on the Kudu to replace Lubuntu. I’m having strange wifi issues, but this is the farthest I have gotten with a distro written by Arne Exton. 
    • My Manjaro Cinnamon installation finally glitched out (after maybe 8 months) so I replaced that with UbuntuDDE. There were three issues, and two of them were fixed through a chat in Telegram with the dev, and I filed a bug on the 3rd issue with the thanks of the dev. I now have UbuntuDDE Respin on all three of my machines (not counting the Raspberry Pis), and my wife wants it on her T430. Could this be my new Daily Driver?
    • Listener Dylan Burger submitted another excellent article to It’s MOSS, and I responded by making him an Admin on the site. So now we are two. Anyone else?
    • Not gonna talk about my teeth.
    • I’m told that my mother’s lawyers have finally sent documents out following her demise. I have not yet received them, but one cousin has.
    • We may finish White Night, volume 9 of Dresden Files, tonight.

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

    • Sudo Vulnerability
      • The exploit is in the hands of… well… everyone now. Metasploit has the module.
      • A heap buffer overflow occurs when you stuff a software full of data that causes some kind of breakage. In this case, that breakage leads to root access.
    •  Chrome[ium] Zero Day
      • Monocultuuuuuuurrrrrreeeeee!!!!!
      • Google is being very close to the chest with the details, but we know it’s another heap buffer overflow.
      • The Mitre database does not have information on the CVE. Unlisted other places like NIST.
      • Maybe linked to their nation-state writeup.
      • Electron apps…
  • Update your Stuff

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on February 21, 2021. 

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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!>
]]> 4913 mintCast 354 – sudo make me an update https://mintcast.org/mintcast-354-sudo-make-me-an-update/ Wed, 10 Feb 2021 05:46:23 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4909 Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu loses the lead, Wayland changes, and some new releases
In Security, time to patch… again.
Download
]]> Download

1:54 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
58:30 News
1:19:27 Security Update
1:30:05 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I find a new box, Joe’s light as a feather, Moss explodes a DDE, and Bo hosts his own email

Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu loses the lead, Wayland changes, and some new releases

In Security, time to patch… again.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Picked up a Lenovo M715q Tiny. Ryzen 2400GE, 16GB RAM, 256GB NVMe
      • This will be my “studio” machine.
      • Haven’t gamed on it yet, but it’s supposed to be “not horrible”
      • It’ll free up my laptop to be a laptop again
  • Joe
    • So I got some more headphones done.  Replaced the MMCX cable on 2 of the LG HBS 770’s that I constantly use because the cable had gotten hard and cracked.  I am really impressed with how long they lasted, before I was repairing them every couple of months and I think these lasted about 8 months or so before I had to fix them.  I also really like the cables that I got to fix it.  They are a little thicker so they actually tin which makes the whole process a lot easier.  Also did another set of the Ankers with the cables I built myself and they came out well again.  Only one more to go for those. However the cost for making the cables is a bit more and may not be as economically conservative.
      • Since writing that one of the two Ankers has stopped charging.
      • The other is still working well
    • I got my weight down below 230 lbs again which is awesome.  I am not losing weight as quickly as I was when I first changed my diet again but I am not going as hard as I was before either.
    • Made my own protein bars and they are delicious.  I made one mistake though and did not spray the wax paper with a non stick so they are rather difficult to eat.  The ingredients are not cheap so I don’t know if I will be making them again.  But they are tasty.
    • Very interested in the Raspberry Pi Pico as a USB host controller but I want to give the development around it time to grow some but with the $1.99 price tag at MicroCenter I may pick up a few and put them into a drawer until more data is there.
    • Looking to upgrade my MSI GE72 gaming laptop, since the 950m is getting a bit old, but prices are once again going crazy in the used and new market because of the high cost of graphics cards right now and the fact that everyone is still working from home.  If I can wait until the vaccine is more widely distributed and people start going back to the office I imagine there will be a large volume of people off loading computers that will drive the prices back down.
    • I  have a couple of old phones that I am looking to do some projects with since they are just sitting around  but I am not sure what I should do.  Project ideas accepted jb@mintcast.org or tell me about what you have done with old phones to get some more use out of them
    • I also put the question out to the Telegram group and got a very interesting answer from listener Hob.  An application called Deskreen which can be used from an appimage and can turn any device with a web browser into another screen with some small caveats
      • If you want it to be an independent screen then you need a dummy display adapter hooked up to your system or you can display one of the screens that is already there
      • Control does not go through the device it goes through the computer which does make sense from an extra screen perspective but does mean it is not the best for remote controlling a computer.
      • The adapters are not expensive though, so that is good, and then you just set up like a normal screen and connect through the application.  This is awesome if you have a couple of older-yet-still-decent tablets sitting around.  A lot of older iPads have really good screens but a lot of difficulty adding new applications and would be perfect for something like this
  • Moss
    • I got the FuzZ400 back online with an old AMD Radeon HD 6770 video card on loan from Dale Miracle! Hope my mic sounds good. I still need to get the mic boom installed which will only take a drill bit of the correct size to accomplish. The bootup report that the rear fan was not working was solved when I found a piece of styrofoam wedged in the fan blades.
    • I’ve been having minor issues with the SSD in the FuzZ400 because it thinks it’s still in the Gigabyte Mini. I may have to reinstall Mint altogether to get everything really back together, but my current workarounds are good. Sabayon owned GRUB and I could not update it or add Grub Customizer to Sabayon (because Sabayon repos are permanently offline), and Mint did not want to take GRUB back for some reason, so I installed UbuntuDDE on sda5. No more Gentoo. Sad. The other distros were not affected.
    • I installed a new version of ExLight on the Kudu to replace Lubuntu. I’m having strange wifi issues, but this is the farthest I have gotten with a distro written by Arne Exton. 
    • My Manjaro Cinnamon installation finally glitched out (after maybe 8 months) so I replaced that with UbuntuDDE. There were three issues, and two of them were fixed through a chat in Telegram with the dev, and I filed a bug on the 3rd issue with the thanks of the dev. I now have UbuntuDDE Respin on all three of my machines (not counting the Raspberry Pis), and my wife wants it on her T430. Could this be my new Daily Driver?
    • Listener Dylan Burger submitted another excellent article to It’s MOSS, and I responded by making him an Admin on the site. So now we are two. Anyone else?
    • Not gonna talk about my teeth.
    • I’m told that my mother’s lawyers have finally sent documents out following her demise. I have not yet received them, but one cousin has.
    • We may finish White Night, volume 9 of Dresden Files, tonight.

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

    • Sudo Vulnerability
      • The exploit is in the hands of… well… everyone now. Metasploit has the module.
      • A heap buffer overflow occurs when you stuff a software full of data that causes some kind of breakage. In this case, that breakage leads to root access.
    •  Chrome[ium] Zero Day
      • Monocultuuuuuuurrrrrreeeeee!!!!!
      • Google is being very close to the chest with the details, but we know it’s another heap buffer overflow.
      • The Mitre database does not have information on the CVE. Unlisted other places like NIST.
      • Maybe linked to their nation-state writeup.
      • Electron apps…
  • Update your Stuff

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on February 21, 2021. 

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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!>
]]> 4909 mintCast 351 – Greasy Joysticks (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-351-greasy-joysticks-mp3/ Wed, 30 Dec 2020 06:02:28 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4840 Then in the news, Mint’s 20.1 Beta is available, Kentucky Fried Chicken reduces, reuses and recycles, XFCE sees an upgrade, and Gnome not far behind.
In security, Solarwinds...
Download
]]> Download

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

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

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

In security, Solarwinds…

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

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

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

Announcements:

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4840 mintCast 351 – Greasy Joysticks https://mintcast.org/mintcast-351-greasy-joysticks/ Wed, 30 Dec 2020 06:02:27 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4836 Then in the news, Mint’s 20.1 Beta is available, Kentucky Fried Chicken recycles, XFCE sees an upgrade, and Gnome not far behind.
In security, Solarwinds...
Download
]]> Download

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

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

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

In security, Solarwinds…

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

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

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

Announcements:

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4836 mintCast 349 – NAT Ain’t A Firewall (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-349-nat-aint-a-firewall-mp3/ Wed, 02 Dec 2020 05:19:55 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4794 Then in the news, OpenSUSE’s going public?, Pine64 feels the Plasma, and Linux gets Ray tracing.
In security, kill switches and a reminder that NAT ain’t a firewall.
Download
]]> Download

1:44 Wanderings
42:27 News
50:35 Security
59:43 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo has another helping of Pi, Moss gets spooked, Josh changes up the desktop, and Joe strips.

Then in the news, OpenSUSE’s going public?, Pine64 feels the Plasma, and Linux gets Ray tracing.

In security, kill switches and a reminder that NAT ain’t a firewall.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

Leo

  • Been playing with more Pi!
    • Dug up my old Pi 2, have some download automation running on it now. Made a VM of mine redundant. Considering converting it to a Gitea server to manage my notes.
    • Will relieve my i7 2630qm from Nextcloud duty. The Pi 4 is working beautifully. Now, what to do with it? Docker time?
    • Have some ideas for my old rickety Pi one. Use TMUX to ssh into multiple servers and run bpytop or some monitoring tool on a screen, 24/7. Basically, blinking lights. Raspbian Lite will likely do the job nicely.

Moss

  • I thought I had a problem with the FuzZ400…and before I determined what the problem was, I grabbed my now-repaired mini box and hooked it up. Just as I was tightening the screws on the case, I saw that my tablet, which had been plugged in for charging, was sitting on the keyboard. Problem solved, but too late to go back.
  • I had to reinstall everything on the Mini’s SSD except Mint and Manjaro, probably having to do with having been installed on a completely different computer (Xeon and Nvidia instead of i3 and Intel). 
  • I’ve added more partitions to my Kudu’s 1 Tb SSD. I now have 10 distro partitions, one of them unused. I installed Enso OS, and am probably going to review that for the next Distrohoppers’ Digest. I’m also trying 4M Linux on a USB stick, as it seems to be a Puppy-like version of Arch.
  • I had a lot of other issues, but I’ll save those for the next DHD, which should be out right about the time of the next mintCast.
  • Distrohoppers’ Digest now has 4 episodes with over 500 downloads – 1 of those over 600 –  and only 4 under 400. We’re averaging 463 downloads per episode. Episode 018 featured Dale Miracle live in studio for the first time. Dale covers distros NOT made for beginners, a welcome addition. The next episode is currently scheduled to be recorded on December 9.
  • I’ve been getting a few days’ work as a substitute teacher, but they keep closing the schools. Last week it was that they didn’t have enough healthy bus drivers, next week it’s that they don’t have enough teachers and subs. I got paychecks from Grainger Schools, All Women Housed, and finally from Census2020! I’m still way behind on lots of things, since it has been so long since I last had a paycheck.
  • I’m reading the Kevin Mitnick book. It did not convince me why I need that much security, and completely convinced me that I won’t be secure no matter how much time, effort, and money I spend. So why bother? I’m about to give up and give Google all my money.
  • We are working our way through Proven Guilty, in the Dresden Files series. Almost halfway through.

Josh

  • I have been trying out Plasma and really trying to give it a good shot. I tried openSUSE Tumbleweed first because it has a great plasma representation. It uses the newest plasma available because it’s a rolling release. I personally don’t like anything about default plasma, it just rubs me wrong. I quickly discovered that it just won’t work for me due to look & feel and settings issues. 
  • Next I tried Manjaro Plasma and that felt much better out of the gate. I could live with it as default but some small quarks just keep me at bay. Right clicking on both openSUSE and Manjaro resulted in a menu that I was unfamiliar with. You had to not only right click but then open a menu inside of the dialogue to get the open in terminal option. Also there is no open as root by default but as stated to me by Dale Miracle there is an add-on. The dolphin file browser also does not feel right to me for either of these first two distros I tried. Things get really out of hand when trying to compensate for HiDpi monitors. It’s so hard to get every aspect of the desktop to look right that I just gave up entirely and I tried for hours with both tweaking and resetting but nothing looked good. 
  • Finally I tried FerenOS and, by George, I think he’s done it. Next to Solus (which I will mention later) FerenOS has the best customized plasma desktop hands down. Everything looks proportionate, nothing seems out of place or not scaled right and he fixes the Dolphin issue by ripping it out and replacing it with good old Nemo! Theming is great and you can change everything, the dark or light theme, the accent color, and even the layout of plasma right from the welcome screen. Now that all being said the HiDpi issue of scaling still persists with FerenOS unfortunately. I think that’s just a plasma issue. 
  • So I did try Solus Plasma a while back and I feel that it is the best Plasma Distro but I don’t recommend it anymore because they have fallen behind on the kernel (last I saw it was 5.6). I understand they have an LTS kernel as well but it’s not default and there have been many vulnerability patches applied to the kernel since 5.6. 
  • Even with how good FerenOS is I still went back to Linux Mint with the cinnamon desktop. Cinnamon just looks better to me and is the perfect balance between customizability and functionality. Also when I scale the desktop to anything between 100% and 200% it does not look wrong it scales everything appropriately. An example being when I set it to 125% on my HiDpi dell laptop it scales all aspects of the desktop exactly the same. In plasma unless you know how to edit the panel (which is not obvious) it remains the same size. Only downside to this on Cinnamon is when you set it to 125% 150% or 175% it has screen tearing and I am submitting a bug report for that asap.
  • One last thing I want to mention. I am trying out Manjaro Cinnamon as we speak. It is what I am recording my segment on Mintcast with and it’s given me some options that I would not have known about if I didn’t give it a go. More on this next time.

Joe

  • I have mostly stopped talking about books on here but I read 2 recently that I wanted to mention.  Ready Player 2 and Rhythm of War.  Both really good book and you should check them out as soon as you can
  • Well I decided to put one of the more messed up PSPs in a new cover.  Things did not go in my favor.
    • Was able to get it removed easy enough despite the stripped screws and wrong size screws from the last guy that took it apart.
    • Got it most of the way put back together when the power switch broke (it was loose before I swear)
    • I was able to desolder that power switch and one from a known bad board and move it over but had some trouble with the positioning so had to do it over again a couple of times until I ended up putting it at the far end of where it should sit
    • Also started having problems keeping the ribbon cable for it seated but was finally able to get that into place as well. 
    • Had to take it apart and put it back together in the new case several times due to small errors and needing to get the front of the case seated properly which never really happened
    • Because the one side of the mobo is higher than it should be, the joystick does not work and the volume down is stuck the way it was last time I tried to fix this device with a new front. Was really hoping that it was just the casing that was bent but this turned out to not be the case
    • Being disappointed in how that turned out I decided to pick up another broken psp for 20 dollars. The device supposedly had a broken screen and charging issues and I had an extra screen from this build. Well I got very lucky and the only thing wrong with the device was a bad battery and a broken casing.  One of the previous psps that I had purchased for 20 dollars had come with 2 extra sets of buttons as well as the full housing that I had just tried to use and a brand new piano black faceplate.  I put the faceplate on and put one of the batteries into it and it looks immaculate. I almost want to take it apart and verify that it is the original screen and not an upgraded one because of how good it looks.
    • Now I have a broken battery to work with as well which I will be able to use for a battery mod on a device with a umd drive in the future.  Or if I feel the need to do it for the sake of doing it. 
  • Tried to print some small thin items with PETG and it has not worked very well.  Evidently PETG does not do well in the 1mm range.  Granted it took me several tries with various settings to go and look at what other people had to say on the subject before I came to this conclusion.  So I may try the print in ABS and see how it turns out.  PLA works but is too soft for long term. I however think that ABS will be too brittle.   Maybe I should use carbon fiber or something similar but that would require a lot of refitting of my 3d printer
  • My laptop was overheating while gaming.  It was not doing this before so I don’t know if it was a change from the new update for Borderlands 3 or the laptop itself so I decided to take it apart and clean the fans and replace the thermal paste.  
    • This is not normally an overly difficult fix for my particular laptop, the MSI GE72-6QD 
    • But one of the screws that connect the heatsink to the CPU stripped at the top in a very inconvenient location down next to another heatsink and the arm that holds it all down is very thin.  The  only thing I could do was get out the dremel and the cutting bit and cut a new groove for a straight tip instead of a phillips head screwdriver
    • It worked and I didn’t mess it up.  It was very nerve wracking though cause it would not have taken much of a slip to ruin my laptop
    • Still happy with the results so far

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, November 29, 2020, at 2 pm Central Time, check for your local time!

https://everytimezone.com/s/1506acff

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4794 mintCast 349 – NAT Ain’t A Firewall https://mintcast.org/mintcast-349-nat-aint-a-firewall/ Wed, 02 Dec 2020 05:18:09 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4788 Then in the news, OpenSUSE’s going public?, Pine64 feels the Plasma, and Linux gets Ray tracing.
In security, kill switches and a reminder that NAT ain’t a firewall.
Download
]]> Download

1:44 Wanderings
42:27 News
50:35 Security
59:43 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo has another helping of Pi, Moss gets spooked, Josh changes up the desktop, and Joe strips.

Then in the news, OpenSUSE’s going public?, Pine64 feels the Plasma, and Linux gets Ray tracing.

In security, kill switches and a reminder that NAT ain’t a firewall.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

Leo

  • Been playing with more Pi!
    • Dug up my old Pi 2, have some download automation running on it now. Made a VM of mine redundant. Considering converting it to a Gitea server to manage my notes.
    • Will relieve my i7 2630qm from Nextcloud duty. The Pi 4 is working beautifully. Now, what to do with it? Docker time?
    • Have some ideas for my old rickety Pi one. Use TMUX to ssh into multiple servers and run bpytop or some monitoring tool on a screen, 24/7. Basically, blinking lights. Raspbian Lite will likely do the job nicely.

Moss

  • I thought I had a problem with the FuzZ400…and before I determined what the problem was, I grabbed my now-repaired mini box and hooked it up. Just as I was tightening the screws on the case, I saw that my tablet, which had been plugged in for charging, was sitting on the keyboard. Problem solved, but too late to go back.
  • I had to reinstall everything on the Mini’s SSD except Mint and Manjaro, probably having to do with having been installed on a completely different computer (Xeon and Nvidia instead of i3 and Intel). 
  • I’ve added more partitions to my Kudu’s 1 Tb SSD. I now have 10 distro partitions, one of them unused. I installed Enso OS, and am probably going to review that for the next Distrohoppers’ Digest. I’m also trying 4M Linux on a USB stick, as it seems to be a Puppy-like version of Arch.
  • I had a lot of other issues, but I’ll save those for the next DHD, which should be out right about the time of the next mintCast.
  • Distrohoppers’ Digest now has 4 episodes with over 500 downloads – 1 of those over 600 –  and only 4 under 400. We’re averaging 463 downloads per episode. Episode 018 featured Dale Miracle live in studio for the first time. Dale covers distros NOT made for beginners, a welcome addition. The next episode is currently scheduled to be recorded on December 9.
  • I’ve been getting a few days’ work as a substitute teacher, but they keep closing the schools. Last week it was that they didn’t have enough healthy bus drivers, next week it’s that they don’t have enough teachers and subs. I got paychecks from Grainger Schools, All Women Housed, and finally from Census2020! I’m still way behind on lots of things, since it has been so long since I last had a paycheck.
  • I’m reading the Kevin Mitnick book. It did not convince me why I need that much security, and completely convinced me that I won’t be secure no matter how much time, effort, and money I spend. So why bother? I’m about to give up and give Google all my money.
  • We are working our way through Proven Guilty, in the Dresden Files series. Almost halfway through.

Josh

  • I have been trying out Plasma and really trying to give it a good shot. I tried openSUSE Tumbleweed first because it has a great plasma representation. It uses the newest plasma available because it’s a rolling release. I personally don’t like anything about default plasma, it just rubs me wrong. I quickly discovered that it just won’t work for me due to look & feel and settings issues. 
  • Next I tried Manjaro Plasma and that felt much better out of the gate. I could live with it as default but some small quarks just keep me at bay. Right clicking on both openSUSE and Manjaro resulted in a menu that I was unfamiliar with. You had to not only right click but then open a menu inside of the dialogue to get the open in terminal option. Also there is no open as root by default but as stated to me by Dale Miracle there is an add-on. The dolphin file browser also does not feel right to me for either of these first two distros I tried. Things get really out of hand when trying to compensate for HiDpi monitors. It’s so hard to get every aspect of the desktop to look right that I just gave up entirely and I tried for hours with both tweaking and resetting but nothing looked good. 
  • Finally I tried FerenOS and, by George, I think he’s done it. Next to Solus (which I will mention later) FerenOS has the best customized plasma desktop hands down. Everything looks proportionate, nothing seems out of place or not scaled right and he fixes the Dolphin issue by ripping it out and replacing it with good old Nemo! Theming is great and you can change everything, the dark or light theme, the accent color, and even the layout of plasma right from the welcome screen. Now that all being said the HiDpi issue of scaling still persists with FerenOS unfortunately. I think that’s just a plasma issue. 
  • So I did try Solus Plasma a while back and I feel that it is the best Plasma Distro but I don’t recommend it anymore because they have fallen behind on the kernel (last I saw it was 5.6). I understand they have an LTS kernel as well but it’s not default and there have been many vulnerability patches applied to the kernel since 5.6. 
  • Even with how good FerenOS is I still went back to Linux Mint with the cinnamon desktop. Cinnamon just looks better to me and is the perfect balance between customizability and functionality. Also when I scale the desktop to anything between 100% and 200% it does not look wrong it scales everything appropriately. An example being when I set it to 125% on my HiDpi dell laptop it scales all aspects of the desktop exactly the same. In plasma unless you know how to edit the panel (which is not obvious) it remains the same size. Only downside to this on Cinnamon is when you set it to 125% 150% or 175% it has screen tearing and I am submitting a bug report for that asap.
  • One last thing I want to mention. I am trying out Manjaro Cinnamon as we speak. It is what I am recording my segment on Mintcast with and it’s given me some options that I would not have known about if I didn’t give it a go. More on this next time.

Joe

  • I have mostly stopped talking about books on here but I read 2 recently that I wanted to mention.  Ready Player 2 and Rhythm of War.  Both really good book and you should check them out as soon as you can
  • Well I decided to put one of the more messed up PSPs in a new cover.  Things did not go in my favor.
    • Was able to get it removed easy enough despite the stripped screws and wrong size screws from the last guy that took it apart.
    • Got it most of the way put back together when the power switch broke (it was loose before I swear)
    • I was able to desolder that power switch and one from a known bad board and move it over but had some trouble with the positioning so had to do it over again a couple of times until I ended up putting it at the far end of where it should sit
    • Also started having problems keeping the ribbon cable for it seated but was finally able to get that into place as well. 
    • Had to take it apart and put it back together in the new case several times due to small errors and needing to get the front of the case seated properly which never really happened
    • Because the one side of the mobo is higher than it should be, the joystick does not work and the volume down is stuck the way it was last time I tried to fix this device with a new front. Was really hoping that it was just the casing that was bent but this turned out to not be the case
    • Being disappointed in how that turned out I decided to pick up another broken psp for 20 dollars. The device supposedly had a broken screen and charging issues and I had an extra screen from this build. Well I got very lucky and the only thing wrong with the device was a bad battery and a broken casing.  One of the previous psps that I had purchased for 20 dollars had come with 2 extra sets of buttons as well as the full housing that I had just tried to use and a brand new piano black faceplate.  I put the faceplate on and put one of the batteries into it and it looks immaculate. I almost want to take it apart and verify that it is the original screen and not an upgraded one because of how good it looks.
    • Now I have a broken battery to work with as well which I will be able to use for a battery mod on a device with a umd drive in the future.  Or if I feel the need to do it for the sake of doing it. 
  • Tried to print some small thin items with PETG and it has not worked very well.  Evidently PETG does not do well in the 1mm range.  Granted it took me several tries with various settings to go and look at what other people had to say on the subject before I came to this conclusion.  So I may try the print in ABS and see how it turns out.  PLA works but is too soft for long term. I however think that ABS will be too brittle.   Maybe I should use carbon fiber or something similar but that would require a lot of refitting of my 3d printer
  • My laptop was overheating while gaming.  It was not doing this before so I don’t know if it was a change from the new update for Borderlands 3 or the laptop itself so I decided to take it apart and clean the fans and replace the thermal paste.  
    • This is not normally an overly difficult fix for my particular laptop, the MSI GE72-6QD 
    • But one of the screws that connect the heatsink to the CPU stripped at the top in a very inconvenient location down next to another heatsink and the arm that holds it all down is very thin.  The  only thing I could do was get out the dremel and the cutting bit and cut a new groove for a straight tip instead of a phillips head screwdriver
    • It worked and I didn’t mess it up.  It was very nerve wracking though cause it would not have taken much of a slip to ruin my laptop
    • Still happy with the results so far

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

Announcements:

Our next episode will be Sunday, November 29, 2020, at 2 pm Central Time, check for your local time!

https://everytimezone.com/s/1506acff

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4788 mintCast 348.5 – Shepherding Pis (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-348-5-shepherding-pis-mp3/ Wed, 25 Nov 2020 03:29:24 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4783 And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions

Download
]]> Download

1:40 Linux Innards
33:11 Vibrations from the Ether
44:54 Check This Out
54:32 Outro

In our Innards section, we continue our talk on Raspberry Pi Projects.

And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions

LINUX INNARDS:

Pi Stuff

  • Joe
    • After setting up Ubuntu 20.10 on the Pi I had to redo the setup for sshfs on the Pi. I also wanted to start with some fresh drives so I formatted all the drives and started the setup from scratch using the 4 repurposed 2.5 inch drives I had ready to go.  
    • I also set up the Pi to be a repetier host for my 3D printer to test out how well it worked.  
      • It installed and it opened but when I attempted to connect to the printer it would freeze
      • I suppose I could have written the repetier image and run it that way but I am short on SD cards and I didnt want to overwrite the ubuntu 20.10 image
    • The sshfs setup is not difficult.  I set the Pi to automatically connect at startup to my server over sshfs using compression
      • This does require to setup passwordless ssh using keys which is something that I tend to do anyway because of how much I use different machines at home
      • This was set up using cron @reboot because I was unable to get rc.local and if-up working
    • I also setup my server and my laptop to auto reconnect on internet connection back to the pi so that I always have what appears to be local access to the drives so long as I have an internet connection using if-up and if-down
    • This was a simple setup so I also made the pi my gateway for ssh and X2go to the rest of my machines from an external IP.  Fail to ban was easy to get going 
    • Then after all that, the fan started going out on my pi case so the noise was unbearable.  I need a new case.
  • Leo
    • Video Surveillance on the Pi Zero W
      • https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneyeos
    • Nextcloud on the Pi 4
  • Josh 
    • Pi 3 B+ Video Surveillance kinda, using motioneyeOS.
    • Pi 3 B+ Now being used as my pi hole addblocker.
    • Asus Tinkerboard and Lakka retro gaming. Works for most late 90s consoles and earlier.  
    • Batocera

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

  • Jim Daldry
  • John Wallis (Saga’s really on hold now)

CHECK THIS OUT! 

  • Leo
    • Gogh: A bash script to colorize your terminal. 

Announcements:

  • Our next episode will be Sunday, November 29, 2020, at 2 pm Central Time, check for your local time! 

https://everytimezone.com/s/170bc4e1

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • 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!>
]]> 4783 mintCast 348.5 – Shepherding Pis https://mintcast.org/mintcast-348-5-shepherding-pis/ Wed, 25 Nov 2020 03:22:35 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4777 And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions
Download
]]> Download

1:40 Linux Innards
33:11 Vibrations from the Ether
44:54 Check This Out
54:32 Outro

In our Innards section, we continue our talk on Raspberry Pi Projects.

And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions

LINUX INNARDS:

Pi Stuff

  • Joe
    • After setting up Ubuntu 20.10 on the Pi I had to redo the setup for sshfs on the Pi. I also wanted to start with some fresh drives so I formatted all the drives and started the setup from scratch using the 4 repurposed 2.5 inch drives I had ready to go.  
    • I also set up the Pi to be a repetier host for my 3D printer to test out how well it worked.  
      • It installed and it opened but when I attempted to connect to the printer it would freeze
      • I suppose I could have written the repetier image and run it that way but I am short on SD cards and I didnt want to overwrite the ubuntu 20.10 image
    • The sshfs setup is not difficult.  I set the Pi to automatically connect at startup to my server over sshfs using compression
      • This does require to setup passwordless ssh using keys which is something that I tend to do anyway because of how much I use different machines at home
      • This was set up using cron @reboot because I was unable to get rc.local and if-up working
    • I also setup my server and my laptop to auto reconnect on internet connection back to the pi so that I always have what appears to be local access to the drives so long as I have an internet connection using if-up and if-down
    • This was a simple setup so I also made the pi my gateway for ssh and X2go to the rest of my machines from an external IP.  Fail to ban was easy to get going 
    • Then after all that, the fan started going out on my pi case so the noise was unbearable.  I need a new case.
  • Leo
    • Video Surveillance on the Pi Zero W
      • https://github.com/ccrisan/motioneyeos
    • Nextcloud on the Pi 4
  • Josh 
    • Pi 3 B+ Video Surveillance kinda, using motioneyeOS.
    • Pi 3 B+ Now being used as my pi hole addblocker.
    • Asus Tinkerboard and Lakka retro gaming. Works for most late 90s consoles and earlier.  
    • Batocera

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

  • Jim Daldry
  • John Wallis (Saga’s really on hold now)

CHECK THIS OUT! 

  • Leo
    • Gogh: A bash script to colorize your terminal. 

Announcements:

  • Our next episode will be Sunday, November 29, 2020, at 2 pm Central Time, check for your local time! 

https://everytimezone.com/s/170bc4e1

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • 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!>
]]> 4777 mintCast 348 – 400 Raspberry Pies (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-348-400-raspberry-pies-mp3/ Wed, 18 Nov 2020 04:39:51 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4771 Then, in our news, the Raspberry Pi launches a whole new dessert, GIMP is almost ready for GTK3, 
In security, Ubuntu’s GDM3 has a root bug
Download
]]> Download

1:56 Wanderings
33:22 News
50:26 Security
56:54 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo colorizes his terminal, Josh eyeballs an eggroll, Tony gives the Gorilla another go, and Joe fiddles with firmware

Then, in our news, the Raspberry Pi launches a whole new dessert, GIMP is almost ready for GTK3, 

In security, Ubuntu’s GDM3 has a root bug

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Put out a video on my channel that was way overdue.
    • A/B testing Nextcloud on my raspberry Pi 4 with an external 1TB USB drive vs. a much more powerful laptop (i7-2630qm, 8GB RAM) running the same thing with 1TB internal USB.
    • Doing some surveillance!
    • Changing terminal colors. Fell in love with the Monokai [Dark] Soda theme. I’m testing out the Dracula theme too. They’re duking it out right now for supremacy. I blame bpytop for having such cool themes.
  • Josh
    •  I have been messing around with Linux gaming some more. Been testing it against Windows and the results are not good for the most part. I am not a Linux guru so maybe I am doing it all wrong but I am trying. I have not gotten to try the Glorious Egg Roll Proton yet but that’s my next step to see what happens. My Nvidia 1650 Super is actually not even running at it’s max speeds under linux or windows because my Ryzen 2600 is just not up to the task for certain games. Overclocking my cpu does help some stuttering issues but not a whole lot. The main game I am playing right now is Kingdom Come Deliverance and under Linux with low to medium graphics settings I get roughly between 50 and 60 fps in towns. You have to test in towns on that game because when out of towns it runs smooth no matter what settings you have. Unfortunately on Windows though I get between 70 and 80 fps with medium to high settings which is a lot more taxing but it’s still getting that much better on windows. I am chalking it down to the translation layer taking some of the CPU power cause that game is really CPU bound. 
  • Tony H
    • Recorded Episode 17 of DHD which is now available on your podcatchers, we have had nearly 300 downloads in a week. I Installed Ubuntu Studio 20.10 on the test machine with mixed results as again I could not get a Dual boot to install. On further investigation I may not have left a big enough partition for the original OS so I will have to have another go.  I did however do a successful inline upgrade to the 20.04 install on one of the drives in my tower, which now has the shiny Plasma DE instead of XFCE.  I suggest you only try this on a test PC or in a VM as unless like the Ubuntu Studio release you need any major changes made.  If you plan on upgrading a production PC in this manner, make sure to back up “ALL” your data, as there is a risk of data loss, and we all know it will happen when you have forgotten to back up.  I have also been playing with the new Beta of GIMP which will eventually be released sometime in 2021 as GIMP 3.0, I’ll talk more about that in the news. 
    • Other than that we successfully navigated our 4 days of shielding and my wife had her hospital procedure without any issues, although it will be another week or so before we get the results of the biopsies they have to test. 
  • Joe
    •   Talked last time about ordering a bunch of PSP’s 
      • Got 7 out of 8 of them working, 4 1001s and 3 3001s although one of them has a bad connector for the UMD drive so I will be doing a battery mod on that one to give a much greater battery life.
      • One of them had a bad motherboard and screen and was only good for the other parts
      •   of the 1001s I had spent a lot of time taking it apart and putting it back together because so many of the parts were messed up, the power board, the UMD drive the faceplate and I think it is slightly warped.  But it all is working except for the UMD drive
      • Also have put custom firmware on all of them in order to be able to play retro emulation and to play games without the UMDs which will save space and battery life
      • I have sold one of them as of last night and made back most of my money that I have invested and may hopefully sell another one later today.
    • My transmission docker setup quit working and I had to figure out why.  I went through a lot of iterations of testing thinking that I had messed something up.  Even tried using a different version of the transmission VPN which I use along with docker chrome to change my ip.  I was able to get a different version of transmission working but it was not showing a new ip address.
      • Did my research and it turns out that PIA my vpn provider had turned off a bunch of older servers.  
      • After finding that out it was just a matter of changing all the docker configs on all my machines that use transmission/chrome(which is all of them) and things were working again
      • I also checked the speeds that I was getting on the new servers and it is super fast I know previously I was limited to 30mbps and this was up around 160mbps
    •  Last Saturday I also did several items on my honey due list including rewiring a wall lamp into a hanging lamp with a switch.  Pretending to be an electrician again but I think I did a good job.  Anything to pull out the soldering iron
    •  I also serviced 2 bicycles for my kids to get them back on the road and I have taken the opportunity to go for a couple of rides with them which is fun.  I may need to get a bike of my own.  Because I obviously need another hobby to eat up my time
    • With the end of year stability at work I have been able to binge watch Big Bang Theory.  Man that show ran for a long time
    • Also have been playing the new DLC for Borderlands 3.  I am liking the new skill trees and have not tried the new mode yet.
    • Got a new kitten.  The wife finally convinced me

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

  • Bug in Ubuntu’s GDM3 allows root access
    • Link .pam_environment to /dev/zero
    • Open Region & Language. It’ll freeze and peg the accounts-daemon process at 100%
    • Send the stop signal (-SIGSTOP)
    • Run (nohup bash -c “sleep 30s; kill -SIGSEGV 597; kill -SIGCONT 597”) where 597 is the process ID of accounts-daemon
    • Logout and wait for the new user creation window
    • Proof of Concept
  • Ransomware for Linux
    • RansomEXX

Announcements:

  • Our next episode will be Sunday, November 29, 2020, at 2 pm Central Time, check for your local time! 

https://everytimezone.com/s/170bc4e1

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • 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!>
]]> 4771 mintCast 348 – 400 Raspberry Pies https://mintcast.org/mintcast-348-400-raspberry-pies/ Wed, 18 Nov 2020 04:19:50 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4765 Then, in our news, the Raspberry Pi launches a whole new dessert, GIMP is almost ready for GTK3, 
In security, Ubuntu’s GDM3 has a root bug
Download
]]> Download

1:56 Wanderings
33:22 News
50:26 Security
56:54 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo colorizes his terminal, Josh eyeballs an eggroll, Tony gives the Gorilla another go, and Joe fiddles with firmware

Then, in our news, the Raspberry Pi launches a whole new dessert, GIMP is almost ready for GTK3, 

In security, Ubuntu’s GDM3 has a root bug

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Put out a video on my channel that was way overdue.
    • A/B testing Nextcloud on my raspberry Pi 4 with an external 1TB USB drive vs. a much more powerful laptop (i7-2630qm, 8GB RAM) running the same thing with 1TB internal USB.
    • Doing some surveillance!
    • Changing terminal colors. Fell in love with the Monokai [Dark] Soda theme. I’m testing out the Dracula theme too. They’re duking it out right now for supremacy. I blame bpytop for having such cool themes.
  • Josh
    •  I have been messing around with Linux gaming some more. Been testing it against Windows and the results are not good for the most part. I am not a Linux guru so maybe I am doing it all wrong but I am trying. I have not gotten to try the Glorious Egg Roll Proton yet but that’s my next step to see what happens. My Nvidia 1650 Super is actually not even running at it’s max speeds under linux or windows because my Ryzen 2600 is just not up to the task for certain games. Overclocking my cpu does help some stuttering issues but not a whole lot. The main game I am playing right now is Kingdom Come Deliverance and under Linux with low to medium graphics settings I get roughly between 50 and 60 fps in towns. You have to test in towns on that game because when out of towns it runs smooth no matter what settings you have. Unfortunately on Windows though I get between 70 and 80 fps with medium to high settings which is a lot more taxing but it’s still getting that much better on windows. I am chalking it down to the translation layer taking some of the CPU power cause that game is really CPU bound. 
  • Tony H
    • Recorded Episode 17 of DHD which is now available on your podcatchers, we have had nearly 300 downloads in a week. I Installed Ubuntu Studio 20.10 on the test machine with mixed results as again I could not get a Dual boot to install. On further investigation I may not have left a big enough partition for the original OS so I will have to have another go.  I did however do a successful inline upgrade to the 20.04 install on one of the drives in my tower, which now has the shiny Plasma DE instead of XFCE.  I suggest you only try this on a test PC or in a VM as unless like the Ubuntu Studio release you need any major changes made.  If you plan on upgrading a production PC in this manner, make sure to back up “ALL” your data, as there is a risk of data loss, and we all know it will happen when you have forgotten to back up.  I have also been playing with the new Beta of GIMP which will eventually be released sometime in 2021 as GIMP 3.0, I’ll talk more about that in the news. 
    • Other than that we successfully navigated our 4 days of shielding and my wife had her hospital procedure without any issues, although it will be another week or so before we get the results of the biopsies they have to test. 
  • Joe
    •   Talked last time about ordering a bunch of PSP’s 
      • Got 7 out of 8 of them working, 4 1001s and 3 3001s although one of them has a bad connector for the UMD drive so I will be doing a battery mod on that one to give a much greater battery life.
      • One of them had a bad motherboard and screen and was only good for the other parts
      •   of the 1001s I had spent a lot of time taking it apart and putting it back together because so many of the parts were messed up, the power board, the UMD drive the faceplate and I think it is slightly warped.  But it all is working except for the UMD drive
      • Also have put custom firmware on all of them in order to be able to play retro emulation and to play games without the UMDs which will save space and battery life
      • I have sold one of them as of last night and made back most of my money that I have invested and may hopefully sell another one later today.
    • My transmission docker setup quit working and I had to figure out why.  I went through a lot of iterations of testing thinking that I had messed something up.  Even tried using a different version of the transmission VPN which I use along with docker chrome to change my ip.  I was able to get a different version of transmission working but it was not showing a new ip address.
      • Did my research and it turns out that PIA my vpn provider had turned off a bunch of older servers.  
      • After finding that out it was just a matter of changing all the docker configs on all my machines that use transmission/chrome(which is all of them) and things were working again
      • I also checked the speeds that I was getting on the new servers and it is super fast I know previously I was limited to 30mbps and this was up around 160mbps
    •  Last Saturday I also did several items on my honey due list including rewiring a wall lamp into a hanging lamp with a switch.  Pretending to be an electrician again but I think I did a good job.  Anything to pull out the soldering iron
    •  I also serviced 2 bicycles for my kids to get them back on the road and I have taken the opportunity to go for a couple of rides with them which is fun.  I may need to get a bike of my own.  Because I obviously need another hobby to eat up my time
    • With the end of year stability at work I have been able to binge watch Big Bang Theory.  Man that show ran for a long time
    • Also have been playing the new DLC for Borderlands 3.  I am liking the new skill trees and have not tried the new mode yet.
    • Got a new kitten.  The wife finally convinced me

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

  • Bug in Ubuntu’s GDM3 allows root access
    • Link .pam_environment to /dev/zero
    • Open Region & Language. It’ll freeze and peg the accounts-daemon process at 100%
    • Send the stop signal (-SIGSTOP)
    • Run (nohup bash -c “sleep 30s; kill -SIGSEGV 597; kill -SIGCONT 597”) where 597 is the process ID of accounts-daemon
    • Logout and wait for the new user creation window
    • Proof of Concept
  • Ransomware for Linux
    • RansomEXX

Announcements:

  • Our next episode will be Sunday, November 29, 2020, at 2 pm Central Time, check for your local time! 

https://everytimezone.com/s/170bc4e1

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • 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!>
]]> 4765 mintCast 346 – It’s Not You, It’s Me (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-346-its-not-you-its-me-mp3/ Wed, 21 Oct 2020 04:37:58 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4716 Then, our news lots of releases, a new feature and a birthday
In security, we look at an IoT bug
Download
]]>

Download

1:45 Wanderings
55:45 The News
1:03:04 Security Update
1:10:57 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo makes web apps, Moss sends a Telegram, Joe gets an upgrade, Josh fights with a mic, and Bo gets a gnome.

Then, our news lots of releases, a new feature and a birthday

In security, we look at an IoT bug

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)
      • 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:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

      • 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 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:

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!>
]]> 4716 mintCast 346 – It’s Not You, It’s Me https://mintcast.org/mintcast-346-its-not-you-its-me/ Wed, 21 Oct 2020 04:20:17 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4709 Then, our news lots of releases, a new feature and a birthday
In security, we look at an IoT bug
Download
]]>

Download

1:45 Wanderings
55:45 The News
1:03:04 Security Update
1:10:57 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo makes web apps, Moss sends a Telegram, Joe gets an upgrade, Josh fights with a mic, and Bo gets a gnome.

Then, our news lots of releases, a new feature and a birthday

In security, we look at an IoT bug

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)
      • 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:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

      • 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 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:

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!>
]]> 4709 mintCast 323.5 – Traveling Networker Problem https://mintcast.org/mintcast-323-5-traveling-networker-problem/ Wed, 11 Dec 2019 06:54:26 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4047 And finally, our listener feedback
Download
]]>

Download

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Working on the stream
      • With Josh schedule packed, I gave streaming a try. Back to youtube it is since the barrier to entry was so low.
      • OBS is quite the software. Currently, we’re doing a streaming simple with an image. Nothing fancy, but as I got looking into the details, you can do so much more.
      • I didn’t want to rock the boat too much, but a Telegram, Discord and IRC chat monitor would be nifty, and something I want to look into for the future if we stick with youtube.
      • I know there are people out there that want an audio-only stream. For you all, I have a fix.
    • UBPorts on a Nexus 7 2013 (Wifi)
      • This was an interesting journey. I dusted off my Nexus 7 from a few years ago, plugged it in to charge, and about 30 minutes later, was installing UBPorts using their snap installer.
      • The bootloader was unlocked years ago, so I can’t recall exactly how I did my ADB magic, but I’ve had a few OSes on it over the years.
      • I’m just getting familiar with Ubuntu Touch, but it seems promising.
    • Installed a 1080p panel on my T450s
      • Fun times. For a little under $50, I bought a 1080p replacement panel for my T450s. I had been on the 900p panel since I bought it about two years ago, and finally got fed up with it. The discoloration that comes with TN panels finally wore me down.
      • This 1080p was supposed to be an IPS Field Replacement Unit, so, same same as the OEM screen, but turned out to be a 1080p TN, or low quality VA panel, at best.
      • Still 1080p, still more room, still a huge improvement, and for the price, I’m still happy.
  • Tony H 
    • This week I’ve put Mint onto an HP G62 Laptop with a 2.1 GHz AMD Phenom II Triple-Core Processor N830. This processor came out in December 2010 so the PC is nearly 9 years old. I used it at the LUG last week and the battery life despite being at full capacity (I suspect it is a replacement of the original) is a paltory 1.5-2 Hrs or less if playing video, and it runs quite walm. The top power on the CPU is 35w, compared to modern mobile processors which can be less than half of this processor. It’s probably destined to be passed onto my local homeless charity to give someone a new start in tech.
    • Continuing to get to grips with Ubuntu 19.10, thanks to Peter Jones I now have a half usable system with the Dash to Panel installed and on the bottom of the screen and the side dock hidden from view. Feels a little more like home, but it would be great if this was a one button in a menu somewhere to set it up without having to install all these additional functions to get it to work. Apart from this, it’s a great Linux OS as you would expect from Ubuntu, I can’t say I’ve had any issues with it at all in day to day use. 
    • Also continuing to Invest (code for spending all my money) on my new hobby of restoring Matchbox models. I bought a large consignment on Ebay and got a bargain with many 50’s and 60’s models and only a few of the later 1970’s (which are still nearly 50 years old). I’ve been buying tools and preparing to buy a small modelers spray booth, as well as buying materials for paint stripping and preparing the models for repainting. Starting to appreciate the time these YouTubers put in to the hobby and all the videoing and post production it takes. 
    • As of yesterday I actually completed my first restoration a Matchbox No28 Mk10 Jaguar if any one is interested.     

 

  • Moss 
    • I sold an ASUS MeMOPad to a listener; I hadn’t even put it up for sale, but he asked what I had that was cheap and I told him. It was a turkey of a tablet; I had such high hopes for it when I bought it. I got about $12 for it and bought some groceries.
    • Zorin OS 15 has just released their Lite version, with XFCE Desktop, and they did quite a lovely job on the desktop. I put it on my Kudu 3, and I kinda like it. Yes, I am now triple-booting the Kudu – Core, Ultimate, and Lite – but it’s all Zorin.
    • During a period of digital frustration, I remembered I had a free partition on my Galago Pro 2. I eased my nerves by taking a few hours and successfully installing Sabayon. Yes, it took a while. Yes, it’s Gentoo. But it’s so sweet…
    • I made an attempt to boot my inherited Linux box. Sadly, the password was not what I expected, so I couldn’t log into what was probably an old version of Fedora, so I attempted to install Linux Mint on it. I ran into another instance of the GRUB not being written properly, and I also could not get the CD drive to boot (I could have used my Super Grub 2 disk). I had some discussion with the Telegram group of people, mostly cryptodan and Peter Jones, and got frustrated so I put the box away for a while. I promise to get back to it. The box is pretty nice, a mini ATX with 16 Gb of RAM and a 120 Gb SSD on a Gigabyte motherboard.
    • I have added some tiers and a Donation link to my Sponsus page. Now to get some sponsors and donations. 
    • I found I had opened 2 accounts at ReverbNation sometime in 2014 and promptly forgotten about both; I’ve written RN to see if they can combine the two and then see if I can put the site to some use promoting my music. I did find a recording I didn’t think I had posted anywhere on one of the accounts.
    • I just celebrated my 3rd Anniversary…and Wednesday will be my mmphthy-mmph birthday. Distrohoppers’ Digest is set to be recorded on Wednesday, and Tony should have it out by Friday.

 

  • Joe
    • Listened to an Audio Drama/podcast.  2 Seasons of Wolverine.  
    • Also listened to Piers Anthony’s Bio Of a Space Tyrant
      • Most assuredly not a book for younger readers.  Based on the topics
        • Murder 
        • Piracy
        • Incest
        • Sex with people that I would consider underage
      • I did listen to all 6 books in the series and Anthony is one of my more liked authors.
      • He also writes all his books on linux machines since about 2000
      • Well read series
      • But in the end I am not sure I would recommend to readers.
      • I didn’t dislike it but I find it hard to suggest it for others
    •  Listening to the Dresden Files again, hoping that the next one comes out soon
    •  Replaced the keyboard on that convertible laptop
      • Also removed Linux and reinstalled Windows for my daughter
      • Had to install woeusb in order to get a functioning bootable Windows 10 usb stick
      • Then gave it to my eldest daughter and she gave her laptop to her sister
      • Who ruined another charging port on another tablet, the ASUS Transformer T102HA which I will be taking apart to see if it is an easy fix because it is an awesome device
      • That is 2 T100’s and a T102 that currently have that problem.  Looks like I need to learn how to fix it and get a hot air gun.
    • Also had a problem with one of my Dell Venue 11 keyboards where not all the keys were working
      • I had a spare keyboard with a bad battery so I did a swap between the two but for some reason the touchpad would not work(at least not with the battery connected)
      • So I pulled the touchpad off and swapped that from the one with bad keys
      • Still didn’t work
      • So I swapped the cables for the touchpad.
      • Still didn’t work
      • So I swapped the connector bracket that goes from the keyboard to the tablet, thinking it would be the last time I had to take it apart
      • It wasn’t, still didn’t work
      • Finally I swapped the mainboard hoping that wasn’t what was bad on the other keyboard and it works great(most of the time)
      • Still some issues sometimes on restart but that seems to be a problem with all keyboards for this device.  Just disconnect a reconnect a couple of times and everything works
      • About 7 hours worth of work total with testing and reseating between each step to make sure I had done things correctly.  Also I could have had it done much quicker if I had realized it was the mainboard first.
      • But hey I have 2 fully functioning keyboards again and I know a lot more about how that keyboard is put together.
      • Really need the extra battery power to make it through the day.
      • But I am still thinking about getting one of the soft keyboards without batteries.
    • Picked up a travel router
      • GL.iNet GL-AR300M-EXT 
      • Works good so far.  
      • Easytether install worked like a charm.  But t-mo seems to be detecting and throttling.  May be detecting the router. More testing required. More details in the innards.
  • Tony W
    • RAM upgrade on main/living room PC (why did I not do this before?)
    • Gaming fun: Native Linux and Proton games on Steam, PCSX2 Emulator
      • Native on Linux 
        • Team Fortress 2 (my kid plays this, I watched)
        • CS GO, No Room in Hell are MPO games I still plan to try
        • Was interested in Shadow of Mordr and Tomb Raider but too expensive
      • PCSX2 Emulator
        • Fun, works well
        • Had to change a couple of the defaults for Spiderman 2 
          • Changed graphics to Software vs hardware
      • Reversed axes for controllerProton: 
        • Underpowered machine: PC is an old Lenovo with i3 4th Gen, low profile 1GB Nvidia card, 8GB of Ram
        • Batman Arkham Origins – Unplayable due to lag in Steam/Proton.  I am sure it would have been fine on a more powerful PC. It did run OK in Windows
        • GTA San Andreas – Ran great in Proton, occasional crashing when loading a saved game.  Easy enough to kill with TOP and restart. Not a bi issue for me but I see how minor glitches like this might be annoying enough to make somebody dive back to Windows to play a game
        • Consensus on Proton, definitely awesome if you have a machine that can spare the overhead

THE NEWS:

  • Linux Mint Monthly News ALL
    • “All 3 editions of Linux Mint 19.3 passed QA and we’ll be announcing the BETA release on Tuesday!”
    • Assuming that’s December 3rd.
    • New, unannounced changes to the software section, and three new apps are making their arrival.
    • System Reports will now give messages from the tray. This will give users access to workarounds, solutions  and information. This feature will also be used to announce the full release of 19.3 from within the BETA, and it’s being backported, so you’ll hear about it on 19.2 and previous as well (if you run updates on older releases)!
  • System76 will start designing and building their computers from the ground up in DenverMOSS
  • Kali Linux 2019.4 Released LEO
    • XFCE the new default desktop
    • kali-undercover changes your DE to look like Windows. Icons and all.
    • Our markdown overlords are winning. Kali’s docs are now in markdown!
    • BTRFS 
  • Kape Technologies buys PIA’s parent company (also owns ZenMate and CyberGhost VPNs – total over 2 million paying subscribers)MOSS
  • Kernel 5.4 is released Tony W LTS – last LTS was 4.19
    • Primary feature is a new kernel lockdown mode that aims to improve the separation of UID 0 (aka root) and the kernel.
    • Lots of AMD support added – 
      • Navi 12 and 14 GPUs
      • MD Arcturus graphics cards,
      • AMD Dali APU
      • AMD 2020 APU
    • Lots of added ARM support Snapdragon 855, a bunch of ARM based laptops (ASUS NovaGo, HP Envy X2 and the Lenovo Miix 630)
  • Is full Linux kernel support coming to Android? Google outlines its plans Joe
  • Librem 5 is shipping, First Impressions TONY W
    • Early adopter/developer stage
    • Some flaws that are expected to be fixed in future software updates
      • No audio in calls
      • Camera issues
      • Battery life “meh”
      • Gets really warm
      • Software generally alpha status
    • Former employees have expressed the company releases “disingenuous” updates
    • My opinions:
      • I am glad to hear the progress that some backers have the device in hand, and the early flaws don’t dampen my optimism
      • you REALLY have to believe in the Purism/Librem cause to justify $699 for this device, especially when Pinephone is coming soon at $149!!!  (300 Euros for Volla phone, *Check This Out)
  • Glimpse Released LEO
    • The 0.1.0 release is based on 2.10.12, instead of the current 2.10.14.
    • The Glimpse guys prefer Flatpak as the preferred way to install (it’s on top!)
    • Snap and AUR are in a separate community section.
    • Windows and Mac are also supported (same as GIMP)
  • US Student was building a Gentoo-based distro for ISIS MOSS

SECURITY UPDATE: 

      • D-Link ‘Won’t Fix’ even more routers
        • The flaw (CVE-2019-16920) that D-Link won’t fix allows an attacker to bypass authentication entirely to get admin access to your router. This is very, very not good. 
        • You can mitigate the issue by turning off remote management, but that doesn’t stop the attack from happening from within your network. Please do yourself a favor and move to something else.
        • Models: DIR-866, DIR-655, DHP-1565, DIR-652, DAP-1533, DGL-5500, DIR-130, DIR-330, DIR-615, DIR-825, DIR-835, DIR-855L and DIR-862.
      • Mozilla Increasing Bug Bounty Payouts
        • Doubling, for critical, core and other Mozilla sites. 
        • And, tripling for Remote Code Execution on critical sites.
        • Firefox Monitor and Private Network are added to the list of Core Sites
      • Webmin Attacked by Mr. Roboto Botnet
        • A follow-up to Episode 316.
        • The vulnerability we were talking in that episode has been weaponized
        • Mr. Roboto, the botnet, is utilizing the flaw to be able to create a reverse shell, run commands, run files within URLs, DDoS, and self-uninstall.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • Next Show: Dec 15, 2019 – 2PM US Central Time

WRAP-UP:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4047 mintCast 323.5 – Traveling Networker Problem (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-323-5-traveling-networker-problem-mp3/ Wed, 11 Dec 2019 06:51:15 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4045 And finally, our listener feedback
Download
]]>

Download

In our Innards section, we talk travel networking and access

And finally, our listener feedback

LINUX INNARDS:

Travel Networking

  • Joe
    • First get a travel router unless you want to set up one of your laptops as a hotspot
      • I suggest the GL.iNet GL-AR300M if you want a robust machine.
        • Comes stock with openwrt and 128mb nand flash which allows you to install applications.
        • It does not have 5ghz which is a con
        • Installed easytether and nano using opkg
      • Otherwise if you want a simple setup I suggest the TP-Link MR3040
      • Setting up a netbook as router with dnsmasq is not too difficult and while it adds to complexity in some ways it removes some in others
    • If not one of the routers that I suggested then try something that is 5v.  I know a couple of podcasters that stand by the HooToo TripMate Titan.
      • The 5v travel routers are nice because you can use any cell phone charger or a port on your laptop.  Any USB port.
      • Comparatively the 12v or higher voltage routers have more functionality but are more limited in where you can hook them up
    •  The point of getting a setup like this is that you can set the wifi to be the same name and password as the one from home
      • This means that everyone’s devices will almost automatically connect.
      • Because it is a different device you may have to tell your devices to connect to it the first time but the password will already be stored
      • This means that you will be able to take it to the grandparents house and just hook up the ethernet cable and everyone will be ready to go
    • This device can also be useful while traveling down the road.
      • You can set up a local area network in your vehicle and have one of your devices act like a server and provide media to all the other devices
      • Texas is a big place that takes a long time to drive across with many open spaces with very little cell connectivity
      • A simple low power device like a netbook or a pi which keeps things at five volts and a plex server can provide endless entertainment for the kids and passenger.
      • The server is why you need something that can set static IP addresses
    • Usually your phone is more than good enough for your listening needs but if phone memory is a premium it may also be nice to have a music server setup.
    • As for hotels the setup is mostly the same as for at the grandparents house with some addendums
      • Many hotels limit the number of devices that can be connected at one time.  The router is a good way around that
      • The easiest way to get up and running is to allow your phone to connect to the wifi and then use easytether to provide that connection to the router
        • This however can be limiting to speeds
        • You will also need to use the phones browser to get past whatever login screen the hotel has
      •  The next way to do it is a bit more complicated
        • Hook the router directly into the ethernet(if you are lucky)
        • Then you will need to connect your laptop to the router wifi and use ssh -l to forward port 80 and then go through the login screen.  All your other devices should then work fine
        • Also recommend using a vpn which I will cover soon
    • VPN
      • A VPN is a great tool while traveling
      • It has 2 main uses.
        • One is security
        • The other is giving you access to your entire home network without opening more than one hole
        • We have done other shows where we talked about how to set one up and why your public internet connections should always be encrypted.
    • Easytether
      • Pretty easy to use.  Need the android app and the server/drivers.
      • You need to go out to the easytether drivers website and grab the proper one based on the processor or operating system that you have
      • For the AR300M I needed the ar7xx drivers which I had to extract from the zip and push to the devices tmp
      • Then I used opkg to install and had to use the command easytether-usb to get it listening
      • I also needed to make that command run at startup which is a matter of adding it to the rc
        • Make sure the first line of your script reads:
          #!/bin/sh /etc/rc.common
        • Copy your script to the /etc/init.d/ directory
        • Make sure the execute bit is on
          chmod +x /etc/init.d/your script
        • Enable your script
          /etc/init.d/your script enable
          Your script should now have a symlink in /etc/rc.d/
          ls -lh /etc/rc.d | grep your script
        • Confirm your init script is enabled:asy
          /etc/init.d/your script enabled && echo on
          If this command returns on, then you’re all set. If this command doesn’t return anything, then your script isn’t enabled. Here’s an example of a script that’s enabled:
          root@OpenWrt:~# /etc/init.d/system enabled && echo on on
        • https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33340659/how-to-auto-start-an-application-in-openwrt
      • Also needed to add the interface for the network
cat  EOF /etc/config/network

config interface 'wan'

option ifname 'tap-easytether'

option proto 'dhcp'

EOF
      • On the phone you need to turn on developer mode and usb debugging
      • With a laptop running Ubuntu it is a matter of installing the drivers and then turning off your other interfaces before connecting your phone. You also will need the proper drivers for your device as well as adb.
      • Found out something very disappointing.  My cell company now detects easytether usage and throttles like any other tethering.  Yes I am still looking for a workaround.
  • Leo
    • Most of the apps I use are directly on my phone. Bring a pair of headphones with a mic, and I’m golden. Most of the time, I try to disconnect, though. Mental fortitude is at a premium!
    • If I need to access things at home from away, I have my VPN certs on both my phone and my laptop. Phone when I don’t have wifi, and laptop for when I do.
    • The Nextcloud desktop app is where I do all of my work like news articles, or accessing docs or pictures.
    • I can get to my VSphere host, my NAS and other little devices via VPN as well.
    • If I’m in a no service area altogether, Plex sync is fantastic. Fill up your device before you go, and you’ve got hours of watching/listening.
  • Tony Watts
    • Have a plan for NO connectivity
      • Local media on external HDD, for VAC
      • Bring portable set-top box or HDMI capable laptop, HDMI cable, to connect to a TV in hotel etc
      • Pro Tip: Bring a Raspberry Pi and set it up with both Kodi and Retropie (Batocera has BOTH – also there is a Kodi plugin for Retropie)
      • Scope nearby places with wifi, in case network is not good

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

  • David
  • Henrik Hemrin via mintcast.org (Re: 321.5 mp3)
  • KWisher (via MeWe, with response from MeWe)

CHECK THIS OUT!

  • Leo
  • Moss
    • Volla Phone Kickstarter – 300 Euro privacy phone, only needs $385k to get going, kickstarter ends SOON Dec 15, lots of cool things about this one. Runs AOSP with no Google apps but almost all Android apps, or can run with Ubuntu Touch. No US phone yet, Europe only.
    • Synaptic is 18 years old (unmaintained for the past 2 years)
    • MS Users Now can use Puppy with just a few mouse clicks (LICK Installer, no CD/DVD or USB stick needed) LICK can be used with any distro and is MIT licensed, but uses Puppy to demonstrate the concept.
  • Joe
    • One Netbook One Mix 2S Yoga
      • Same processor as the GPD Pocket 2 and same form factor. Just can rotate the screen 360 degrees. ($770!!! Can’t even use it as a phone – Moss)(IKR???!!!JB)
  • Tony W
    • ncdu – utility to analyze disk storage, what files/directories are using up your storage

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • Next Episode will be December 15, 2019, 2pm Central US time.

WRAP-UP:

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

  • Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)
]]> 4045 mintCast 318.5 – Syncing Files https://mintcast.org/mintcast-318-5-syncing-files/ Wed, 02 Oct 2019 06:09:46 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3942 And finally, community feedback!
Download
]]>

Download

In our Innards section, we cover backups like Rsync, Nextcloud and some underlying storage.

And finally, community feedback!

INNARDS:

  • Joe
    • Rsync
      • Used as the back end for most backup systems 
      • works on most operating systems
      • It has been around for 23 years!
      • Comes stock on nearly every linux operating system
      • I have used it in production on several systems for back ups or syncing data on request
      • fairly standard setup for the command 
        • rsync [options] from to
      • what makes it great is the way that it will remember where you left off with a broken or partial sync.
        • so if you lose your connection you can run the same command again and pick up where you left off
          • especially if you use -P which will allow you to watch the progress and continue from where you left off even if it is mid file
        • The -a flag is great as it preserves symbolic links so you will not get stuck in a loop the way that it was possible to do with scp
      • Plus for backups it will only move files that it can verify have changed which makes it faster and use less data.
        • It will check file sizes and time stamps to see if it needs to sync a new file
        • You can set it to instead check hashes for differences which is much slower but it will find all the changes
        • –checksum is the option to add for this
      • Great to mix with cron for automating backups on your own
        • timing can be a small issue if your backup runs long so don’t set it up to run every minute
    • Resilio sync/btsync/bittorrent sync
      • Does not use rsync
      • uses the bittorrent protocol
      • Started out as bittorrent sync but everyone called it btsync and then when they tried to switch to a paid model they changed to resilio sync
      • The setup is very similar to other syncing programs.  Install the software and setup the user permissions and the places that it will have access to
        • After setup you pick the folders that you want to share
        • then you choose to share it and either a link a code or a qr code is generated
        • you add this to resilio sync on another machine or multiple machines
        • you can choose to limit this by making a single use code or a code that expires after a few days or by leaving it open
        • you can also choose if the other clients will have write permissions on the data or just read
        • you can limit it further on systems by controlling the user permissions and or setting up resilio under its own user
      • Works across multiple OS’s including android
      • The more nodes that you have setup with the data that you are syncing the faster it will be synced across devices.
      • it is self hosted so your data will only be on your computers
      • as for the bittorrent protocol here is how it works
        • Files within the set shared space are broken into small parts then shared then reassembled on the “client side” when all portions are received
        • the smaller files are easier to send then larger files would be
        • so you could be downloading multiple small portions from separate locations at the same time which greatly increases speed based on how many nodes that you have
        • Much like with torrents it is possible for none of the nodes to have a complete copy and still to get a complete copy on all the systems by the end as long as all portions are distributed.
      • it is possible to backup an entire system with resilio sync if you give the group or user enough permissions or run it as root.  
      • better for files that you want to backup but there are pitfalls
        • if you have write permissions on all the nodes then if one of them gets corrupt it will copy across all the systems and all will be corrupt
      • Great to run commands on your home system
        • very tinkery tool when used this way
        • just as an example, set up a cron script to execute a bash script every minute, this bash script looks for a file within the btsync location.  If it is there then you run the commands placed within this file and rename the file with a date stamp so that it is not picked up again(you can also get creative with the output if you want)
        • it is seriously a one line command ‘bash -i /path/to/filename >> filename2’ to execute commands and record output and then mv the filename to doneFilename then echo filename2 >> doneFilename and rm filename2
  • Leo
    • The Nextcloud setup was too easy! (For someone that tinkers all the time)
      • sudo snap install nextcloud
      • sudo nextcloud.manual-install leo password
      • sudo nextcloud.occ config:system:set trusted_domains 1 –value=domainname
      • sudo nextcloud.enable-https self-signed
    • If you’re storing your files on external storage like myself, you’ll need to install a removable media plugin.
      • sudo snap connect nextcloud:removable-media
    • The config file lives at
      • sudo nano /var/snap/nextcloud/current/nextcloud/config/config.php
    • Finally, move your data to the new place
      • sudo mv /var/snap/nextcloud/common/nextcloud/data /media/nextcloud/data
    • Nextcloud auto backups
    • In the settings, there is an Auto Upload Photos/Videos toggle.
    • Underneath, define where you want the folder to live, then turn the toggle on. Like magic, Nextcloud starts to suck up all of the files you specify!
    • I haven’t tried the feature with anything other than Photos and Videos, but for a phone, those are typically the types of files you’re trying to backup.
    • For the desktop, the sync is similar. For every device I’ve installed the Nextcloud client on, I have the Desktop directory synced across all the devices. This is fantastic for me since that’s where all my working files go. I just have to ensure that the client is on to do the sync and my files are there, updated, and ready to be edited.
    • Thoughts
    • Overall, the setup is easy if you’ve played with stuff like this before. But, compared to a traditional setup with a manual install of a database, php and webserver, it was extremely easy.
    • The best part of the entire setup is that I’m bad at remembering to do manually backup files with a drag and drop. So, as long as they’re in the right place, I don’t have to do anything!

 

  • Tony W
  • DISCLAIMER before beginning: This is from a beginner’s perspective.
    • RAID, ZFS Z pools
      • Reasons to use:
        • Allow data redundancy across multiple drives/partitions
        • Can simply mirror a drive
        • Windows has a version of this
        • Use multiple drives/partitions as one volume
      • Typically used for server but can be used for home machines
      • Still recommend backup to other machine or drive
    • RAID
      • RAID can be hardware or software RAID 
        • Hardware RAID is a bit legacy
      • Ubuntu offers mdadm for software RAID management
      • RAID 0 (Disk striping): RAID 0 splits data across any number of disks allowing higher data throughput. …
      • RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring): …
      • RAID 5 (Striping with parity): …
      • RAID 6 (Striping with double parity): …
      • RAID 10 (Striping + Mirroring):
      • Doesn’t seem to be much reason to use software RAID mdadm over ZFS?
      • Windows offers mirrored volume, similar to RAID 1
    • ZFS 
      • Supported natively in Ubuntu 18.04
      • FREENAS uses ZFS
      • ZFS Pools are equivalent of RAID levels

VIBRATIONS:

Tony – Peter Jones on Telegram writes

Really sorry, but didn’t enjoy this episode (317.5). Toyam spoke very passionately, but didn’t seem the right kind of distro to get a guest on about based on the MintCast audience. Anyway. I’m sure others loved it. And I can’t enjoy every episode!

I responded 

[In reply to Peter Jones]

I can see where you are coming from on the type of distro that Void is, but I think that the interview does highlight that it is possible to get involved with Linux projects, and the amount of work that the maintainers of Distros and the software we use on a day to day basis do so we get to use fantastic software. Mint might be an easier distro for a beginner to use but the work that has gone into it is as much if not more. Also it highlights that many of these distros and software development projects are running on very few people making it all happen. My feeling is even if you are not a coder is that there are many ways you can support, from beta testing and reporting bugs, to getting involved with documentation or creating wallpapers. If you feel that’s not possible then send the project a couple of dollars to help the cause and show your appreciation, or if you can’t even afford that, just send a message to say thank you for the work they are doing.

Peter replied

Hi, running a website and forum I understand the small team thing. Thanks for reading my feedback though and you make fair comments.

Stephen Heckler also commented on this episode:

I agree with Peter on this one, Void is pretty niche, and Toyam’s take on it even more so due to being a maintainer. mintCast has always been pretty broad within the Linux world and approachable

Leo – A discussion about Gentoo and compiling in Telegram

Londoner writes:

BTW, after I did Gentoo I installed Plasma base and some other packages. Compiling the Falkon browser (or rather qtwebengine) took 4 days on my i7 desktop! Thought it would never finish

Leo

The Juno Computer Gemini was finally reviewed by Oliver Kelly!

Oliver writes:

I reached out to them asked if I can help promote them as a company and write about them, they then offered to loan a laptop to review. They paid for shipping the laptop and collection. No pressure to write a positive review, to be fair I should have stated, but genuinely was a really nice laptop but £770 is steep for me for how it feels compared to my works xps , like I said , that’s the only other laptop I have to compare quality and feel to.

Writeup Link: https://0lzi.tk/episode-009-gemini15/

Tony H – Stan R – From tonight’s chat room

The new web page has really improved since the last show. It seemed that nothing was working. This time around things on web page seem much more usable to me.

Me – Yes Josh has put a lot of work in to get it working right

Stan – I had sent a number of complaining messages, then within a few hours it was either fixed or I realized what I was doing wrong.

Stan has also asked if it would be possible to put the show timer on the main page of the site.

CHECK THIS OUT:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Next episode will be Sunday October 6th, 2PM CDT, 7PM UTC

WRAP-UP:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 3942 mintCast 318.5 – Syncing Files (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-318-5-syncing-files-mp3/ Wed, 02 Oct 2019 06:07:15 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3940 And finally, community feedback!
Download
]]>

Download

In our Innards section, we cover backups like Rsync, Nextcloud and some underlying storage.

And finally, community feedback!

INNARDS:

  • Joe
    • Rsync
      • Used as the back end for most backup systems 
      • works on most operating systems
      • It has been around for 23 years!
      • Comes stock on nearly every linux operating system
      • I have used it in production on several systems for back ups or syncing data on request
      • fairly standard setup for the command 
        • rsync [options] from to
      • what makes it great is the way that it will remember where you left off with a broken or partial sync.
        • so if you lose your connection you can run the same command again and pick up where you left off
          • especially if you use -P which will allow you to watch the progress and continue from where you left off even if it is mid file
        • The -a flag is great as it preserves symbolic links so you will not get stuck in a loop the way that it was possible to do with scp
      • Plus for backups it will only move files that it can verify have changed which makes it faster and use less data.
        • It will check file sizes and time stamps to see if it needs to sync a new file
        • You can set it to instead check hashes for differences which is much slower but it will find all the changes
        • –checksum is the option to add for this
      • Great to mix with cron for automating backups on your own
        • timing can be a small issue if your backup runs long so don’t set it up to run every minute
    • Resilio sync/btsync/bittorrent sync
      • Does not use rsync
      • uses the bittorrent protocol
      • Started out as bittorrent sync but everyone called it btsync and then when they tried to switch to a paid model they changed to resilio sync
      • The setup is very similar to other syncing programs.  Install the software and setup the user permissions and the places that it will have access to
        • After setup you pick the folders that you want to share
        • then you choose to share it and either a link a code or a qr code is generated
        • you add this to resilio sync on another machine or multiple machines
        • you can choose to limit this by making a single use code or a code that expires after a few days or by leaving it open
        • you can also choose if the other clients will have write permissions on the data or just read
        • you can limit it further on systems by controlling the user permissions and or setting up resilio under its own user
      • Works across multiple OS’s including android
      • The more nodes that you have setup with the data that you are syncing the faster it will be synced across devices.
      • it is self hosted so your data will only be on your computers
      • as for the bittorrent protocol here is how it works
        • Files within the set shared space are broken into small parts then shared then reassembled on the “client side” when all portions are received
        • the smaller files are easier to send then larger files would be
        • so you could be downloading multiple small portions from separate locations at the same time which greatly increases speed based on how many nodes that you have
        • Much like with torrents it is possible for none of the nodes to have a complete copy and still to get a complete copy on all the systems by the end as long as all portions are distributed.
      • it is possible to backup an entire system with resilio sync if you give the group or user enough permissions or run it as root.  
      • better for files that you want to backup but there are pitfalls
        • if you have write permissions on all the nodes then if one of them gets corrupt it will copy across all the systems and all will be corrupt
      • Great to run commands on your home system
        • very tinkery tool when used this way
        • just as an example, set up a cron script to execute a bash script every minute, this bash script looks for a file within the btsync location.  If it is there then you run the commands placed within this file and rename the file with a date stamp so that it is not picked up again(you can also get creative with the output if you want)
        • it is seriously a one line command ‘bash -i /path/to/filename >> filename2’ to execute commands and record output and then mv the filename to doneFilename then echo filename2 >> doneFilename and rm filename2
  • Leo
    • The Nextcloud setup was too easy! (For someone that tinkers all the time)
      • sudo snap install nextcloud
      • sudo nextcloud.manual-install leo password
      • sudo nextcloud.occ config:system:set trusted_domains 1 –value=domainname
      • sudo nextcloud.enable-https self-signed
    • If you’re storing your files on external storage like myself, you’ll need to install a removable media plugin.
      • sudo snap connect nextcloud:removable-media
    • The config file lives at
      • sudo nano /var/snap/nextcloud/current/nextcloud/config/config.php
    • Finally, move your data to the new place
      • sudo mv /var/snap/nextcloud/common/nextcloud/data /media/nextcloud/data
    • Nextcloud auto backups
    • In the settings, there is an Auto Upload Photos/Videos toggle.
    • Underneath, define where you want the folder to live, then turn the toggle on. Like magic, Nextcloud starts to suck up all of the files you specify!
    • I haven’t tried the feature with anything other than Photos and Videos, but for a phone, those are typically the types of files you’re trying to backup.
    • For the desktop, the sync is similar. For every device I’ve installed the Nextcloud client on, I have the Desktop directory synced across all the devices. This is fantastic for me since that’s where all my working files go. I just have to ensure that the client is on to do the sync and my files are there, updated, and ready to be edited.
    • Thoughts
    • Overall, the setup is easy if you’ve played with stuff like this before. But, compared to a traditional setup with a manual install of a database, php and webserver, it was extremely easy.
    • The best part of the entire setup is that I’m bad at remembering to do manually backup files with a drag and drop. So, as long as they’re in the right place, I don’t have to do anything!

 

  • Tony W
  • DISCLAIMER before beginning: This is from a beginner’s perspective.
    • RAID, ZFS Z pools
      • Reasons to use:
        • Allow data redundancy across multiple drives/partitions
        • Can simply mirror a drive
        • Windows has a version of this
        • Use multiple drives/partitions as one volume
      • Typically used for server but can be used for home machines
      • Still recommend backup to other machine or drive
    • RAID
      • RAID can be hardware or software RAID 
        • Hardware RAID is a bit legacy
      • Ubuntu offers mdadm for software RAID management
      • RAID 0 (Disk striping): RAID 0 splits data across any number of disks allowing higher data throughput. …
      • RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring): …
      • RAID 5 (Striping with parity): …
      • RAID 6 (Striping with double parity): …
      • RAID 10 (Striping + Mirroring):
      • Doesn’t seem to be much reason to use software RAID mdadm over ZFS?
      • Windows offers mirrored volume, similar to RAID 1
    • ZFS 
      • Supported natively in Ubuntu 18.04
      • FREENAS uses ZFS
      • ZFS Pools are equivalent of RAID levels

VIBRATIONS:

Tony – Peter Jones on Telegram writes

Really sorry, but didn’t enjoy this episode (317.5). Toyam spoke very passionately, but didn’t seem the right kind of distro to get a guest on about based on the MintCast audience. Anyway. I’m sure others loved it. And I can’t enjoy every episode!

I responded 

[In reply to Peter Jones]

I can see where you are coming from on the type of distro that Void is, but I think that the interview does highlight that it is possible to get involved with Linux projects, and the amount of work that the maintainers of Distros and the software we use on a day to day basis do so we get to use fantastic software. Mint might be an easier distro for a beginner to use but the work that has gone into it is as much if not more. Also it highlights that many of these distros and software development projects are running on very few people making it all happen. My feeling is even if you are not a coder is that there are many ways you can support, from beta testing and reporting bugs, to getting involved with documentation or creating wallpapers. If you feel that’s not possible then send the project a couple of dollars to help the cause and show your appreciation, or if you can’t even afford that, just send a message to say thank you for the work they are doing.

Peter replied

Hi, running a website and forum I understand the small team thing. Thanks for reading my feedback though and you make fair comments.

Stephen Heckler also commented on this episode:

I agree with Peter on this one, Void is pretty niche, and Toyam’s take on it even more so due to being a maintainer. mintCast has always been pretty broad within the Linux world and approachable

Leo – A discussion about Gentoo and compiling in Telegram

Londoner writes:

BTW, after I did Gentoo I installed Plasma base and some other packages. Compiling the Falkon browser (or rather qtwebengine) took 4 days on my i7 desktop! Thought it would never finish

Leo

The Juno Computer Gemini was finally reviewed by Oliver Kelly!

Oliver writes:

I reached out to them asked if I can help promote them as a company and write about them, they then offered to loan a laptop to review. They paid for shipping the laptop and collection. No pressure to write a positive review, to be fair I should have stated, but genuinely was a really nice laptop but £770 is steep for me for how it feels compared to my works xps , like I said , that’s the only other laptop I have to compare quality and feel to.

Writeup Link: https://0lzi.tk/episode-009-gemini15/

Tony H – Stan R – From tonight’s chat room

The new web page has really improved since the last show. It seemed that nothing was working. This time around things on web page seem much more usable to me.

Me – Yes Josh has put a lot of work in to get it working right

Stan – I had sent a number of complaining messages, then within a few hours it was either fixed or I realized what I was doing wrong.

Stan has also asked if it would be possible to put the show timer on the main page of the site.

CHECK THIS OUT:

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Next episode will be Sunday October 6th, 2PM CDT, 7PM UTC

WRAP-UP:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 3940 mintCast 318 – Melted Plastic https://mintcast.org/mintcast-318-melted-plastic/ Wed, 25 Sep 2019 20:38:44 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3932 Then, in our News, we cover Ubuntu’s 32-bit library support, the top 5 snaps per distro, the PineTime, and more.
In security, we talk locks, DoH and Lastpass
Download
]]>

Download

This week, in our Wanderings, Leo writes about Nextcloud, Bo spreads the Linux love, Tony Hughes can’t stop Linuxing, even on holiday, Josh considers the new iPhone 11 (wait really??) after yet another broken Pixel 3 , Joe spelunks into splunk, and Tony Watts is building a server.

Then, in our News, we cover Ubuntu’s 32-bit library support, the top 5 snaps per distro, the PineTime, and more.
In security, we talk locks, DoH and Lastpass

WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Finally got some writing done on my blog! Only took me three months to get back in the saddle.
    • I’m using two 1TB external USB drives for Nextcloud. One for the main storage and one for a nightly backup.
    • I’m loving the nextcloud auto-backup for photos on my phone.
    • I only allow Nextcloud to be accessed on the local network, so, through the power of OpenVPN, I’m able to access Nextcloud everywhere!
    • Considered doing this in the cloud, but price-wise, it’s hard to compete with established solutions like Google Drive or OneDrive.
    • But since we don’t use a lot of storage on the show, Nextcloud might still be a good solution at a place like DigitalOcean. $5/mo for 20GB storage that’s fully under our control.
    • I’ve dropped plank!
  • Bo
    • I blew up my wife’s PC
    • Guy at FNM saw my Linux hat and asked about Linux Mint
    • I’ve paid for, but not scheduled my LPIC exam
  • Tony H
    • I have spent the last week in Brussels and had a great if tiring Holiday on the day we went on a trip to Bruges I walked for hours around this very picturesque medieval town, tripling my normal average of about 5-6000 steps. 
    • I joined the BDLL europe live stream on the Saturday evening we arrived in Brussels, just because your on holiday doesn’t stop the geeking 🙂   
    • Researching some refurbished laptops and desktop PC’s to help a couple of friends upgrade their hardware. I’ll be helping them buy and setup the new PC’s now that I’m back home. 
    • Installing Manjaro on my Acer One 2008 8Gb SSD Netbook, installed fine problems with updating will need to play some more. Also installed the MX19.2.1Beta on my Lenovo X201 today and found a bug and decided to do my first bug report, so I created a Bugzilla account and the whole process took less than 10 minutes. Another Linux first for me.
  • Josh
    • I learnt that Google can’t make good glass to put on their phones.
    • Android 10 has broke my banking app.
    • Considering selling the replacement they’re sending me as it’s new phone season.
    • Maybe an iPhone 11:
    • Reasons:
      • New audio stream after people wanted change.
      • The refund for my GPU actually came through! The RTX 2060, what I replaced it with, is really nice. It’s actually gone up £50 in price now so I got it at the right time.
      • We sold 66 magazines!
  • Joe
    • Spent the week without my tablet so was not able to write down ideas as they came to me
    • Attempted to fix the issues that i am having with anlinux on my phone and no such luck so far
      • Created another user and gave sudo permissions but still getting an error when i use it
      • several low level applications will not launch and no errors thrown.
      • i may nuke and start from start.
      • tried looking for some write ups on how to do it properly but i have not found a good one yet
    • Setup tuxtyping for my son
      • He has enjoyed it but he went through most of it very quickly
      • On the lookout for alternatives
      • Also need to get a new battery for the hp mini that he is using for this
      • Picked up a mouse and setup a keyboard with colored stickers for where fingers go
    • 5150 memorial show
      • Went well, Thanks for everyone that came on and talked about 50 and his shenanigans 
    • Studying splunk
      • Seems like an interesting tool and a good thing to know but i am wondering if we need another centralized tool when we can access all of the logs from one location anyway.
    • Started automating everything at work
      • Driving to increase automation through scripting
      • Creating scripts to automate some of the DB cleanup that we do
        • Also deletions 
        • Moving backups
        • Going to make the execution step as copy and paste as possible
        • Going to have a couple of scripts setup for the basic things that we do all the time
          • Hit execute and done
        • Python Python Python
      • Can’t completely automate as we still need to enter db names and paths but it is a start
    • Oscar cpap analysis
      • Choose linux
      • Got it installed hopefully i will get to test it out this afternoon
    • Havent finished the wheel of time series yet.  Had to replace book 8 with a new copy because the copy I had was missing a chapter
    • Stepped up my gym time.  I now do lunches at the gym along with my couple of times a week in the evenings.
    • Had a good time at the local lug, good conversations about dex and linux in general ..
  • Tony W
    • Upgraded a laptop from Win7 to Win10
      • Free upgrade path still works – license fully active
    • Working on a server build
      • Core Duo server tower with 5 drive bays.  8GB RAM, 3 X 2TB hard drives
        • Got hard drives on ebay reasonably – WD caviar green (not the best or most reliable but cheap and I plan to have some fault tolerance)
      • Currently reinstalling heat sink & fan
      • Planning to use either FreeNAS or Ubuntu Server (probably with minimal DE)
    • Finally broke down and had the Oneplus repaired properly
          • Oneplus repair process pretty impressive
          • Whole process shipping and all took about 3 business dayStill a great phone at almost 3 years old
            • 6GB RAM, 128GB storage
          • Running Lineage OS as Oxygen OS will stop getting updates sometime soon
    • Consolidated work and personal mobile phone
        • Both lines/SIM cards in the OnePlus 3T
        • The corporate solution on android is really nice
          • Sandboxed file system for work apps
          • App drawer separated into work and personal
          • Work versions of GMail apps, file manager, Play Store,etc
    • Going to start troubleshooting a Dell all-in-one with suspected bad hard disk
      • The camera is better than the Pixel.
      • Pixel has failed on me twice.
      • Pixel 4 is rumoured to be £900
      • Third party android companies have bad update support.
      • Third party android companies atm are a bit risky, especially with the Huawei stuff. They’re new phone doesn’t have Chrome, Play store or Gmail, and you can’t sideload them either

NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

Tavis Ormandy: “LastPass could leak the last used credentials due to a cache not being updated. This was because you can bypass the tab credential cache being populated by including the login form in an unexpected way!”

WRAP-UP:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 3932 mintCast 318 – Melted Plastic (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-318-melted-plastic-mp3/ Wed, 25 Sep 2019 20:36:37 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3930 Then, in our News, we cover Ubuntu’s 32-bit library support, the top 5 snaps per distro, the PineTime, and more.
In security, we talk locks, DoH and Lastpass
Download
]]>

Download

This week, in our Wanderings, Leo writes about Nextcloud, Bo spreads the Linux love, Tony Hughes can’t stop Linuxing, even on holiday, Josh considers the new iPhone 11 (wait really??) after yet another broken Pixel 3 , Joe spelunks into splunk, and Tony Watts is building a server.

Then, in our News, we cover Ubuntu’s 32-bit library support, the top 5 snaps per distro, the PineTime, and more.
In security, we talk locks, DoH and Lastpass

WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Finally got some writing done on my blog! Only took me three months to get back in the saddle.
    • I’m using two 1TB external USB drives for Nextcloud. One for the main storage and one for a nightly backup.
    • I’m loving the nextcloud auto-backup for photos on my phone.
    • I only allow Nextcloud to be accessed on the local network, so, through the power of OpenVPN, I’m able to access Nextcloud everywhere!
    • Considered doing this in the cloud, but price-wise, it’s hard to compete with established solutions like Google Drive or OneDrive.
    • But since we don’t use a lot of storage on the show, Nextcloud might still be a good solution at a place like DigitalOcean. $5/mo for 20GB storage that’s fully under our control.
    • I’ve dropped plank!
  • Bo
    • I blew up my wife’s PC
    • Guy at FNM saw my Linux hat and asked about Linux Mint
    • I’ve paid for, but not scheduled my LPIC exam
  • Tony H
    • I have spent the last week in Brussels and had a great if tiring Holiday on the day we went on a trip to Bruges I walked for hours around this very picturesque medieval town, tripling my normal average of about 5-6000 steps. 
    • I joined the BDLL europe live stream on the Saturday evening we arrived in Brussels, just because your on holiday doesn’t stop the geeking 🙂   
    • Researching some refurbished laptops and desktop PC’s to help a couple of friends upgrade their hardware. I’ll be helping them buy and setup the new PC’s now that I’m back home. 
    • Installing Manjaro on my Acer One 2008 8Gb SSD Netbook, installed fine problems with updating will need to play some more. Also installed the MX19.2.1Beta on my Lenovo X201 today and found a bug and decided to do my first bug report, so I created a Bugzilla account and the whole process took less than 10 minutes. Another Linux first for me.
  • Josh
    • I learnt that Google can’t make good glass to put on their phones.
    • Android 10 has broke my banking app.
    • Considering selling the replacement they’re sending me as it’s new phone season.
    • Maybe an iPhone 11:
    • Reasons:
      • New audio stream after people wanted change.
      • The refund for my GPU actually came through! The RTX 2060, what I replaced it with, is really nice. It’s actually gone up £50 in price now so I got it at the right time.
      • We sold 66 magazines!
  • Joe
    • Spent the week without my tablet so was not able to write down ideas as they came to me
    • Attempted to fix the issues that i am having with anlinux on my phone and no such luck so far
      • Created another user and gave sudo permissions but still getting an error when i use it
      • several low level applications will not launch and no errors thrown.
      • i may nuke and start from start.
      • tried looking for some write ups on how to do it properly but i have not found a good one yet
    • Setup tuxtyping for my son
      • He has enjoyed it but he went through most of it very quickly
      • On the lookout for alternatives
      • Also need to get a new battery for the hp mini that he is using for this
      • Picked up a mouse and setup a keyboard with colored stickers for where fingers go
    • 5150 memorial show
      • Went well, Thanks for everyone that came on and talked about 50 and his shenanigans 
    • Studying splunk
      • Seems like an interesting tool and a good thing to know but i am wondering if we need another centralized tool when we can access all of the logs from one location anyway.
    • Started automating everything at work
      • Driving to increase automation through scripting
      • Creating scripts to automate some of the DB cleanup that we do
        • Also deletions 
        • Moving backups
        • Going to make the execution step as copy and paste as possible
        • Going to have a couple of scripts setup for the basic things that we do all the time
          • Hit execute and done
        • Python Python Python
      • Can’t completely automate as we still need to enter db names and paths but it is a start
    • Oscar cpap analysis
      • Choose linux
      • Got it installed hopefully i will get to test it out this afternoon
    • Havent finished the wheel of time series yet.  Had to replace book 8 with a new copy because the copy I had was missing a chapter
    • Stepped up my gym time.  I now do lunches at the gym along with my couple of times a week in the evenings.
    • Had a good time at the local lug, good conversations about dex and linux in general ..
  • Tony W
    • Upgraded a laptop from Win7 to Win10
      • Free upgrade path still works – license fully active
    • Working on a server build
      • Core Duo server tower with 5 drive bays.  8GB RAM, 3 X 2TB hard drives
        • Got hard drives on ebay reasonably – WD caviar green (not the best or most reliable but cheap and I plan to have some fault tolerance)
      • Currently reinstalling heat sink & fan
      • Planning to use either FreeNAS or Ubuntu Server (probably with minimal DE)
    • Finally broke down and had the Oneplus repaired properly
          • Oneplus repair process pretty impressive
          • Whole process shipping and all took about 3 business dayStill a great phone at almost 3 years old
            • 6GB RAM, 128GB storage
          • Running Lineage OS as Oxygen OS will stop getting updates sometime soon
    • Consolidated work and personal mobile phone
        • Both lines/SIM cards in the OnePlus 3T
        • The corporate solution on android is really nice
          • Sandboxed file system for work apps
          • App drawer separated into work and personal
          • Work versions of GMail apps, file manager, Play Store,etc
    • Going to start troubleshooting a Dell all-in-one with suspected bad hard disk
      • The camera is better than the Pixel.
      • Pixel has failed on me twice.
      • Pixel 4 is rumoured to be £900
      • Third party android companies have bad update support.
      • Third party android companies atm are a bit risky, especially with the Huawei stuff. They’re new phone doesn’t have Chrome, Play store or Gmail, and you can’t sideload them either

NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

Tavis Ormandy: “LastPass could leak the last used credentials due to a cache not being updated. This was because you can bypass the tab credential cache being populated by including the login form in an unexpected way!”

WRAP-UP:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 3930 mintCast 251 – Personal Clouds https://mintcast.org/mintcast-251-personal-clouds/ Tue, 09 Aug 2016 21:30:28 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3156 251]

Download

News:

Main Topic: Personal Clouds

  • Rob and Isaac talk about OwnCloud, NextCloud and Sandstorm.io.

Tips & Websites:

Pre-Show Music:

Podcast Announcements:

More Information:

Hosts: Rob, Scott, Joe and Isaac
Live Stream every other Sunday 2:00 p.m.(Central): mintcast.org/livestream

Contact Us:

More Linux Mint info: website, blog, forums, community

Credits:

Podcast Entry and exit music provided by Mark Blasco (podcastthemes.com). Podcast bumpers provided by Oscar.

]]> 3156