Proton – mintCast https://mintcast.org The podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux Sat, 17 May 2025 23:46:13 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/cropped-small-logo-32x32.png Proton – mintCast https://mintcast.org 32 32 mintCast false episodic CC-BY-SA 4.0 CC-BY-SA 4.0 podcast Proton – mintCast https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/big-logo-1600.png https://mintcast.org TV-G 164426984 461 – Virtualization https://mintcast.org/461-virtualization/ Sat, 17 May 2025 23:45:31 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7511 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News, BackBlaze backups may be in trouble, you can run Arch inside Windows, Linux kernel drops 486 and early 586 support, and a new RaspberryPiOS release, and the end of Windows 10 support brings new opportunities

In security and privacy: openSUSE removes Deepin Desktop over security issues, Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law

Then in our Wanderings: Bill goes mobile, Moss plays with a Pangolin, Eric finally fixes his WiFi.

In our Innards section: we talk about Virtual Machines

In Bodhi Corner, just a bit about theming

]]> First up in the news: Mint Monthly News, BackBlaze backups may be in trouble, you can run Arch inside Windows, Linux kernel drops 486 and early 586 support, and a new RaspberryPiOS release, and the end of Windows 10 support brings new opportunities

In security and privacy: openSUSE removes Deepin Desktop over security issues, Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law

Then in our Wanderings: Bill goes mobile, Moss plays with a Pangolin, Eric finally fixes his WiFi.

In our Innards section: we talk about Virtual Machines

In Bodhi Corner, just a bit about theming

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


Mint Monthly News


Your Backblaze Backups Might Be in Trouble


Linux Kernel to Drop Support for Legacy i486 and Early 586 CPUs


A new Raspberry Pi OS release


The End of 10 group aims to save Windows 10 PCs from landfills using Linux

Security and Privacy:


openSUSE Removes Deepin Desktop Over Security Policy Violations


Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law

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!>

]]> full 2:30:10 7511 447 – Real Time Linux https://mintcast.org/447-real-time-linux/ Wed, 02 Oct 2024 04:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7188 First up in the news: Linux Kernel 6.11 released, Intel spins off its foundry business, Real Time comes to Linux, Qualcomm wants to buy Intel, WP Engine faces off against Automattic, Nvidia publishes open source Linux vGPU driver, Proton finishes open-sourcing all its apps

In security and privacy: Kaspersky deletes itself and inserts UltraAV

Then in our Wanderings: Bill goes loco(l), Majid folds, Moss goes Full Circle, Joe modifies something, Eric dodges another bullet, and Ken uses all the words

Happy 41st Birthday GNU!

]]> First up in the news: Linux Kernel 6.11 released, Intel spins off its foundry business, Real Time comes to Linux, Qualcomm wants to buy Intel, WP Engine faces off against Automattic, Nvidia publishes open source Linux vGPU driver, Proton finishes open-sourcing all its apps

In security and privacy: Kaspersky deletes itself and inserts UltraAV

Then in our Wanderings: Bill goes loco(l), Majid folds, Moss goes Full Circle, Joe modifies something, Eric dodges another bullet, and Ken uses all the words

Happy 41st Birthday GNU!

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


Linux Kernel 6.11 Officially Released, Here’s What’s New


Intel frees its Foundry biz


Real-time Linux is officially part of the kernel after decades of debate


Qualcomm wants to buy Intel


WP Engine Filed Legal Action Against WordPress


NVIDIA Publishes Open-Source Linux Driver Code For GPU Virtualization “vGPU” Support


All Proton Drive apps are now open source

Security and Privacy:


Kaspersky deletes itself, installs UltraAV antivirus without warning

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>

]]> 447 447 Real Time Linux full 2:18:33 7188 440 – Schrödinger’s mintCast https://mintcast.org/440-schrodingers-mintcast/ Wed, 26 Jun 2024 04:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6995 First up in the news: Mint 22 Beta in testing, Cinnamon 6.2 Desktop Environment Released, Linux's New DRM Panic "Blue Screen of Death" In Action, Ubuntu is Finally Adding DEB Installer Support to App Center, AlmaLinux comes to the RPi 5, Proton goes non-profit, and light-based chips are coming

In security and privacy: nada

Then in our Wanderings: Bill plays Pacman, Joe fixes more things, Moss sells cars, Majid is Synologised, and I am in search of a new mesh WiFi setup.

]]> First up in the news: Mint 22 Beta in testing, Cinnamon 6.2 Desktop Environment Released, Linux’s New DRM Panic “Blue Screen of Death” In Action, Ubuntu is Finally Adding DEB Installer Support to App Center, AlmaLinux comes to the RPi 5, Proton goes non-profit, and light-based chips are coming

In security and privacy: nada

Then in our Wanderings: Bill plays Pacman, Joe fixes more things, Moss sells cars, Majid is Synologised, and I am in search of a new mesh WiFi setup.

Full Show Notes Here

The News

Mint 22 Beta in Testing

Cinnamon 6.2 Desktop Environment Released

Linux’s New DRM Panic “Blue Screen of Death” In Action

Ubuntu is Finally Adding DEB Installer Support to App Center

AlmaLinux OS Now Officially Supports the Raspberry Pi 5 Computer

Introducing a new RISC-V Mainboard from DeepComputing – Now On Framework

Proton is going non-profit

Light-Based Chips Could Help Slake AI’s Ever-Growing Thirst for Energy

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 440 440 Schrödinger's mintCast full 1:46:51 6995 435 – Eric’s Back! https://mintcast.org/435-erics-back/ Fri, 19 Apr 2024 18:25:53 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6843 First up in the News: Mint Monthly News, Mint is testing new CDN setup for repositories, EndeavourOS ends ARM branch due to lack of help, Proton buys Standard Notes, Dynebolic portable Linux renewed after 10 year hiatus, APT 2.9 released, 3.0 announced

In Security and Privacy: Over 92,000 DLink NAS devices exposed via backdoor, with no patch (out of service)

Then in our Wanderings: Bill gets his game on with a new handheld device, Joe gets his game on with every device, Majid gets to be the family IT guy, and Eric deals with technical debt

]]> First up in the News: Mint Monthly News, Mint is testing new CDN setup for repositories, EndeavourOS ends ARM branch due to lack of help, Proton buys Standard Notes, Dynebolic portable Linux renewed after 10 year hiatus, APT 2.9 released, 3.0 announced

In Security and Privacy: Over 92,000 DLink NAS devices exposed via backdoor, with no patch (out of service)

Then in our Wanderings: Bill gets his game on with a new handheld device, Joe gets his game on with every device, Majid gets to be the family IT guy, and Eric deals with technical debt

Full Show Notes Here

The News

Mint Monthly News – March 2024

Mint testing new CDN setup for repositories

EndeavourOS Devs Say “Goodbye” to Their ARM Branch, Maintainers Needed

Standard Notes is joining the Proton family

Dynebolic is a portable Linux distribution that can be used without installation

APT 2.9 Released: Debian’s APT 3.0 To Have A New UI With Colors, Columnar Display & More

Security and Privacy

Over 92,000 exposed D-Link NAS devices have a backdoor account

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!>
]]> 435 435 Eric's Back! full 2:08:19 6843 425 – Firefox Down https://mintcast.org/425-firefox-down/ Sun, 19 Nov 2023 03:17:20 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6460 First up in the news: Ubuntu 24.04 gets a name, Mozilla Doubles Down on Firefox DEB Package, Discord is now official on Flathub, scrcpy gets an update, LXQt 1.4.0 is released, Firefox Accounts gets a Mozilla rename, Brave launches an AI, there is a new Audacity, OpenELA forms to preserve RHEL access, Element gets a new license, Proton has a new app, Fedora 39 is released, and OBS Studio 30 is out

Then in our Wanderings: Bill gets things linked up, Joe plays with Nextcloud, Moss shuffles his files around, Majid plays musical chairs, and Eric finally buys a tablet.

Download
]]> First up in the news: Ubuntu 24.04 gets a name, Mozilla Doubles Down on Firefox DEB Package, Discord is now official on Flathub, scrcpy gets an update, LXQt 1.4.0 is released, Firefox Accounts gets a Mozilla rename, Brave launches an AI, there is a new Audacity, OpenELA forms to preserve RHEL access, Element gets a new license, Proton has a new app, Fedora 39 is released, and OBS Studio 30 is out

In security and privacy: we got nothing

Then in our Wanderings: Bill gets things linked up, Joe plays with Nextcloud, Moss shuffles his files around, Majid plays musical chairs, and Eric finally buys a tablet.

  1. 00:00:00 – Intro
  2. 00:01:48 – News
  3. 01:09:23 – Bi-Weekly Wanderings
  4. 01:37:57 – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
  5. 01:38:45 – Wrap Up
  6. 01:40:38 – Special Thanks

The News

Ubuntu 24.04 gets a name

Mozilla Doubles Down on Firefox DEB Package

Discord is now Verified on Flathub

scrcpy v2.2

LXQt 1.4.0 Released

Why ‘Firefox accounts’ are becoming ‘Mozilla accounts’

Brave launches Leo AI

Audacity 3.4 Released with New Music Workflows, Time Stretch Tool

CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE unite behind OpenELA to take on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

Proton releases a brand-new Linux app with many new features for its Proton VPN service

Fedora Linux 39 is officially here!

OBS Studio 30 Released with Support for Intel QSV H264, HEVC, and AV1 on Linux

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!>
]]> 425 425 Firefox Down full 1:42:37 6460 413 – Flying Wigs https://mintcast.org/413-flying-wigs/ Wed, 31 May 2023 05:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6198 First up in the news, Arch migrates Git, Ubuntu changes PPAs, Fedora Onyx is approved, Google to remove old accounts, Debian re-imposes a moratorium, Proton goes Family, Red Hat unveils a new Desktop, Fedora plans to drop X11, Thunderbird gets a new logo

In security and privacy, Google’s 2FA isn’t private enough

Then in our Wanderings, Majid is off to University, Joe is manacled to his office, Moss kicks the tires on the new Bodhi, and Bill migrates

Download
]]> First up in the news, Arch migrates Git, Ubuntu changes PPAs, Fedora Onyx is approved, Google to remove old accounts, Debian re-imposes a moratorium, Proton goes Family, Red Hat unveils a new Desktop, Fedora plans to drop X11, Thunderbird gets a new logo;


In security and privacy, Google’s 2FA isn’t private enough;

Then in our Wanderings, I’m off to University, Joe is manacled to his office, Moss kicks the tires on the new Bodhi, and Bill migrates

The News

Arch Migrates Git

Ubuntu Makes “Significant Changes” to PPAs for 23.10

Fedora Onyx, Immutable and with Budgie, approved for Fedora 39

Google To Start Removing Inactive Accounts After 2 Years

Google Chrome’s 2023 UI Refresh on Ubuntu

Debian Votes to Reinstate Merged-usr File Movement Moratorium

Proton Unveils Family Plan

Red Hat Reveals Podman Desktop 1.0

Fedora Intends To Completely Drop X11 in Plasma 6

Thunderbird Gets a Brand New Logo

Security And Privacy

Google’s New 2FA Isn’t End-to-End Encrypted

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

We would like to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible:

  • 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!>
]]> 413 413 Flying Wigs full 1:39:56 6198 411 – We Like It GUI https://mintcast.org/411-we-like-it-gui/ Thu, 04 May 2023 00:58:47 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6120 First up in the news, Linux Kernel 6.3 Officially Released, blendOS 2 supports Android, new Vivaldi out, new Opera One Dev Release, GIMP completes GTK3 rewrite, QEMU drops 32-bit, Ryzens are burning, Proton launches a password app, Jetpack Announces the end of twitter auto-sharing, and Red Hat lays of 4% due to high profits;

In security and privacy, Mullvad foils a search warrant, and RTM Locker targets NAS and ESXi;

Then in our Wanderings, Joe goes 3D, Moss upgrades, Bill shuffles cards, Majid has a few lightbulb moments, and Dale has entered the Void.

Download
]]> First up in the news, Linux Kernel 6.3 Officially Released, blendOS 2 supports Android, new Vivaldi out, new Opera One Dev Release, GIMP completes GTK3 rewrite, QEMU drops 32-bit, Ryzens are burning, Proton launches a password app, Jetpack Announces the end of twitter auto-sharing, and Red Hat lays of 4% due to high profits;


In security and privacy, Mullvad foils a search warrant, and RTM Locker targets NAS and ESXi;


Then in our Wanderings, Joe goes 3D, Moss upgrades, Bill shuffles cards, Majid has a few lightbulb moments, and Dale has entered the Void.

The News

Linux Kernel 6.3 Officially Released

Ubuntu 23.04 is Now Available for Download (All Flavours)

blendOS 2 Is Already Here and Supports Android Apps Out of the Box

Vivaldi 6.0: Organize Tabs and More

New Opera One Browser

GTK3 port of GIMP is “officially finished”

QEMU 8.0 Released with 32-bit support deprecated

Ryzen 7000 processors are burning up

Proton launches encrypted password manager

The World Wide Web becomes public 30 years ago today

Jetpack Announces End of Twitter Auto-Sharing

Red Hat, Black Anger

Security And Privacy

Mullvad Subjected to Search Warrant, Nothing To Find, Cops Left

RTM Locker’s First Linux Ransomware Strain Targeting NAS and ESXi Hosts

Full Show notes can be found here

Wrap Up

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

  • Joe for the Audio Editing
  • Josh Lowe, and Bill Houser for all their work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for show research, time syncs, and general contribution.
  • Bill Houser  for managing the pi 400 that hosts 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!
]]> 411 411 We Like It GUI full 2:18:55 6120 384.5 – New Linux Tech https://mintcast.org/384-5-new-linux-tech/ Sat, 11 Jun 2022 02:09:35 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5452 Download
]]> 0:29 Linux Innards
1:08:28 Vibrations From the Ether
1:15:03 Check This Out
41:09 Announcements

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

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

The Linux Innards

Tech added to Linux

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

Check This Out

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

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

  • Norbert and Tony H for our audio production
  • Leo for timestamps and publishing
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.Thanks, Clem!
]]> full 1:24:29 5452 373 – Ex-SUSE Me, Microsoft? https://mintcast.org/373-ex-suse-me-microsoft/ Wed, 03 Nov 2021 05:08:09 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5258 In security, an NPM library gets hijacked, Proton will not retain your data, Firefox implements GPC, and black Friday scams abound
Then in our Wanderings, Joe tries his hand at tv repair, Norbert plays with legos, Tony shops for a new pc, and Josh gets a new throne
Download
]]> 1:49 The News
10:37 Security Update
21:47 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
45:39 Announcements & Outro

First up in the news, Raspberry PI Zero 2 W, Xorg has something new, SUSE goes Edge, A new MX linux, and Microsoft Blunders

In security, an NPM library gets hijacked, Proton will not retain your data, Firefox implements GPC, and black Friday scams abound

Then in our Wanderings, Joe tries his hand at tv repair, Norbert plays with legos, Tony shops for a new pc, and Josh gets a new throne

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

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

  • Joe
    • https://github.com/bluppfisk/coinprice-indicator
  • Norbert
  • Tony
  • Nishant

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

  • Norbert for our audio production
  • Leo for timestamps and publishing
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 373 - Ex-SUSE Me, Microsoft? full 50:34 5258 371 – Rounded Corners https://mintcast.org/371-rounded-corners/ Wed, 06 Oct 2021 05:37:05 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5230 In security, More bugs and more malware
Then in our Wanderings, Joe does vacation, Norbert Listens to the Doctor, Josh tries ventoy, Tony is making ice cream trucks, Leo plays D2
Download
]]> 1:49 The News
28:03 Security Update
38:05 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:19:37 Announcements & Outro

First up in the news, Linux Mint Monthly updates, Ubuntu news, Windows being Windows and Steam deck news

In security, More bugs and more malware

Then in our Wanderings, Joe does vacation, Norbert Listens to the Doctor, Josh tries ventoy, Tony is making ice cream trucks, Leo plays D2

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

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

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 production
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logg
  • 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!>
]]> 371 - Rounded Corners full 1:27:49 5230 mintCast 361.5 – X2Joe https://mintcast.org/mintcast-361-5-x2joe/ Wed, 26 May 2021 03:18:45 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5077 And finally, the feedback and a first look
Download
]]> Download

2:37 Linux Innards
43:52 Vibrations from the Ether
1:03:21 Check this Out
1:07:26 Announcements & Outro

In our Innards section, we pick some of our favorite (free and?) open source software

And finally, the feedback and a first look

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit.

LINUX INNARDS:

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

  • Brad

CHECK THIS OUT! 

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • We’re putting OGG to sleep. Forever.
    • Mp3 has been patentless for more than three years now and that’s free enough for us. It cuts down on back end workload since we do most everything manually when it comes to getting the show out there.
    • No need to change feeds! The mp3 will now come down in the OGG feed. Just don’t look under the covers, and hopefully absolutely nothing noticeable will change.
  • Moss extended hiatus
  • The New Saturday Show (mintNight? mintTalk? No official name yet.)
  • Our next episode will be at 2 pm US Central time on May 30, 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, initrd for the animated logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 5077 mintCast 351.5 – Batting a Thousand (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-351-5-batting-a-thousand-mp3/ Wed, 06 Jan 2021 05:30:34 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4852 And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions Download
]]> Download

1:40 Linux Innards
1:12:18 Vibrations from the Ether
1:17:37 Check This Out
1:21:21 Outro

In our Innards section, we look back on last year’s predictions, and make new ones.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

LINUX INNARDS:

What Did We Get Wrong?

  • Joe
  • Leo
    • Microsoft Office will have a native Linux version released
    • Adobe Photoshop will have a native Linux version released
    • AutoCAD will have a native Linux version released
      • Nope, Nope, and Nope
    • Moss will record a Gentoo show
      • Moss has moved away from Gentoo but is getting closer to Bodhi, and even started a Bodhi Telegram group which is semi-official
    • Firefox vs. The World. Firefox will be the last popular non-Chromium holdout.
      • The key word is “popular”. At the current rate, that soon won’t include Firefox. Gnome Web and Safari (Mac only) are also still blink-free.
    • 1
  • Tony H
    • Linux Driver support will continue to improve and more hardware manufacturers (Nvidia I’m looking at you) will develop open source Linux Drivers. 
      • Nope
    • I was banking on a New R.Pi revision if not a totally new model, I still think that adding M.2 support, as other SBC manufacturers have, is the way to go in the long term. But this will probably require a totally new board design and may still be a year or 2 away. It may be that someone designs an add on board that will provide this function, but if they do it needs to be a device that allows the drive to be the boot drive.  
      • As for Driver support not much has changed with this so that is probably a Zero  
      • But I nailed it in respect of the Pi, a new compute module 4 was released which if you get a board to plug it that has a PCIe slot you can add a M.2 SATA board and use this for the drive storage. Also the Pi 400 was also released which is a totally new model based on the Pi 4 chipset but clocked at 1800MHz and with a totally new layout that allows for a good passive heat sink across the whole of the board that sits in the Keyboard.
    • 2  100 percent
  • Moss
    • Now that Canonical has agreements with Microsoft for WSL and Amazon for Ubuntu Pro and AWS, I predict they will begin (or continue, if they have already begun in secret) working on agreements with other megacorps such as Alphabet, Oracle, SAP, and Apache.
      • Nope. All wrong. Or they kept it quite well-hidden.
    • If they succeed with any one of these new alliances, they will be insulated from potential buyouts and takeovers. I therefore predict this is the year they go IPO.
      • If not-A then not-B. But SUSE is rumored to be heading for an IPO in 2021.
  • Tony W
    • Maru OS will significantly expand supported devices
      • Will add support for a Oneplus device, very likely 3/3T
      • Will also add support for Galaxy Note devices, Note 9 and/or Note 10
        • Nope
    • We will see convergence on Pine64 devices, with Pinephone able to dock to peripherals and run full desktop applications
      • Oh, Yeah
    • A big box store will sell a PC preconfigured with Linux in 2020
      • Nope
  • Oliver Kelly
    • End of Windows 7 support won’t increase the Linux desktop uptake
      • Point
    • Intel’s new Graphics card wont suck on Linux
      • Not released yet.
  • Erik Lietz
    • Purism will go out of business – the Librem 5 phone endeavor will put it under
       (Purism’s reach into so many products will be their undoing and even with some products doing well, this will be too much for their business to sustain)

      • Although not out of business but Purism has been much much quieter in 2020 than they were in 2019.
    • The PinePhone will be an amazing product and success story for Pine64
       (I am waiting for the second offering after the Brave Heart edition. The PinePhone product development will set a ‘gold’ standard how to correctly launch new product)

      • Pine64 has been a joy to watch their activity in 2020. So much I have just received my Manjaro edition PinePhone. What a great product for $200.
    • An major industry specific software company (Adobe, Autodesk (for AutoCAD), or similar) will offer a Linux version for a flagship software product
       (Adobe, Autodesk, or another specific flagship program dedicated for a very specific task. Running natively, no Wine, no web apps – AutoCAD can already run as a web app)

      • Dud on this one… As a side note for our business we are looking to migrate away from AutoCAD.
    • Microsoft will offer Office 365 on Linux
       (MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint at a minimum will be running natively on Linux, no Wine, no web apps)

      • Again a zero – although we are using Edge on Linux in the office for our web accounting systeming.
    • Linux preinstalled from a major hardware supplier will be available in big box stores available off of the shelf (a large hardware vendor (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc)
      • I claim a handicap on this one as with all the goings on people weren’t allowed in stores most of the year. Although, both HP and Lenovo in particular have made major releases with Linux including both Fedora and Ubuntu on a whole bunch of Lenovo products. [Moss: Don’t forget that Dell increased their offerings of Linux machines.]

What About Next Year?

  • Leo
    •  Apple’s M1 Air and Pro will work moderately well on Linux.
    • Microsoft Office will have a native Linux version released.
    • Everybody focuses on the browser and not the CEO. Firefox sees an upswing in users. 5% and going up.
  • Joe
    • Red Hat will somehow disappoint us more over the next year and become even more corporate.
    • Game streaming services will have a very good year and become much more common.  Steam will release a Stadia competitor, with no local install.
    • It will be both a good year and a bad year for linux because of online services.  There will be many more ‘computers’ using the linux kernel but not actually linux. Similar to the chromebook.
  • Tony H
    • Well as I have been successful with my Pi predictions I’m going to do another one and  go way out on a limb and  suggest we may be heading for a Pi 5 or at least a Pi 4+. I will also predict that the Pi 400 will get a revision with 8Gb of RAM and possibly a further overclock of the CPU so those not comfortable doing things like that will have a 2.1Ghz CPU out of the box, as with the very good passive cooling it has been shown to be very stable at this clock speed.
  • Moss
    • Distrohoppers’ Digest will exceed 18,000 total downloads. (this would require our average downloads per episode to exceed 600, and at least 10 episodes)
    • At least 6 long-standing distros (3 years or longer) will close or merge, and be replaced by at least 8 new distros – at least 4 of them forks of what just closed shop.
    • I and/or my wife will have a job which pays enough for our needs and will survive 2021 much better than we did 2020.
    • Covid will be a minor irritation by the end of the year, not a world-spanning pandemic and contact-tracking apps will be a thing of the past.
  • Josh Hawk
    • Linux phones will double in number and power in 2021
    • All mainstream cable tv channels will switch to apps.
    • Firefox will be given to the community to maintain (maybe for the better) or be so underfunded that they will lay off almost all working on it.
  • Erik Lietz 
    • Wayland – the transition to Wayland will become much more prevalent or mainstream among distributions in 2021. It won’t completely transition from X but it will gain much more traction in 2021. (Hedge! hedge!) (Durden!)
    • Microsoft Office 365 natively on Linux (repeat of 2020).
    • A Linux phone (probably the Pine Phone) will be available for the ‘average’ consumer in 2021 and be able to be a daily driver phone.
    • Warpinator will expand to almost all distributions and become the ‘go to’ solution for easy computer to computer file transactions similar to the Apple AirDrop.
    • A new, independent non-Chrome based web browser will enter the market. This will either push Mozilla to retool and reinvigorate Firefox or the downward spin will speed up.
  • Owen Peery
    • Raspberry Pi will continue to develop either the 4 or the 400 so that all the models can easily come with 8G RAM minimum and with processor speeds above 2 Ghz with no overclocking necessary
      • So more distros will function on it, and it can BE A REPLACEMENT for low end Chromebooks that are pretty crappy
    • Linux podcasts will continue to fumble advertising and promotion and alienate their listeners as they pile on more and more promotional spots. Spots for legitimate companies, who might even be our friends, and support our interests, but the sheer number of spots we hear each week as we listen to our favorite podcasts, turns the signal into noise, and noise that we will ignore. Let’s not adopt the advertising models that many of us are trying to get away from, we can do better.
    • Linux audio will get better as Pipewire rolls out in more places. Even if it’s not widely adopted at the beginning it will show a simpler path forward is possible.
    • Linux influencers will continue to wring their hands about the perpetual issue of lack of diversity in the Linux ecosystem, while at the same time, failing to take public stands against white supremacy and toxic masculinity in our very community. It’s not enough to just invite people from underrepresented groups to our spaces, we have to make sure our spaces are not hostile to the very people some of us are trying to include. This is where a lot of growth in Linux use and adoption can happen, but will it?
    • Software for creative endeavors will continue to get better and better on Linux so hobbyists can make our fun pet projects, on software that works, that has tons of options to make it pretty, AND that doesn’t have an obtuse soul crushing work flow. Sometimes we focus on getting the pro level users a good experience on Linux software, but I think the hobbyists are where we should focus. A pro level user probably works for a company that already has a license locked in, and has an entire workflow based on proprietary solutions, and dozens, if not hundreds of employees, so that will be a hard nut to crack.
    • The onboarding path for beginners will not get easier. The time investment needed to get up to speed on some basic tasks will continue to be just enough to scare off the competent but casual users, let alone semi incompetent users. We need to either change that or accept that Linux might not be a good option for beginners. If we want to make space for beginners in Linux, we must hold space, without judgments, for beginners, and bring them in with intention, not left in the wild.
  • Josh Lowe
    • Ubuntu support on Raspberry Pi will improve dramatically and become as popular or overtake Raspbian as the main Raspberry Pi OS
    • We could see an Official Raspberry Pi Laptop
    • a RISC-V Powered RPi
  • Oliver Kelly
    • A new demonstration of MS <3 Linux with desktop compatible Office suite via Electron or some container system like Snap or LXD.
  • Utopic Unicorn (Discord)
    • Canonical will go closed source.
    • Linux Mint will see a huge controversy.
    • Manjaro gets shut down.
    • Arco linux sees a huge increase in new users.
    • Redhat gets decimated in the server industry in favour of other distros including Debian.
  • rockhazard (Discord)
    • MS will *drop* development of Edge for Linux. (a man can hope)
  • Sundaram (Telegram)
    • Proton/Wine will support EAC
    • Matrix users will skyrocket.
    • Linux will run on Apple M1.
    • Lots and lots of ARM devices.
    • RISC-V will grow a lot.
    • Nvidia will open source its drivers. (Lol)
    • Due to the release of many cloud gaming platforms fragmentation will occur (also timed exclusives will be more common).
  • J Arun Mani (Telegram)
    • Microsoft will expand its poison net: WSL, VSCode and many things that will prevent users from really moving to Linux
    • Adobe will continue to call Linux a modest platform
    • Emacs will become more modern and beginner friendly.
  • Dave Goldsbrough (Twitter)
    • (More of a wish!) Accessibility will be much better in Linux.
  • Joussef Jouda 
    • No innovative changes in Linux in 2021

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

  • Clay Stone
  • From Alex
  • Brad Alexander
  • Avinash

CHECK THIS OUT! 

Announcements:

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4852 mintCast 351.5 – Batting a Thousand https://mintcast.org/mintcast-351-5-batting-a-thousand/ Wed, 06 Jan 2021 05:13:38 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4846 And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions
Download
]]> Download

1:40 Linux Innards
1:12:18 Vibrations from the Ether
1:17:37 Check This Out
1:21:21 Outro

In our Innards section, we look back on last year’s predictions, and make new ones.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

LINUX INNARDS:

What Did We Get Wrong?

  • Joe
  • Leo
    • Microsoft Office will have a native Linux version released
    • Adobe Photoshop will have a native Linux version released
    • AutoCAD will have a native Linux version released
      • Nope, Nope, and Nope
    • Moss will record a Gentoo show
      • Moss has moved away from Gentoo but is getting closer to Bodhi, and even started a Bodhi Telegram group which is semi-official
    • Firefox vs. The World. Firefox will be the last popular non-Chromium holdout.
      • The key word is “popular”. At the current rate, that soon won’t include Firefox. Gnome Web and Safari (Mac only) are also still blink-free.
    • 1
  • Tony H
    • Linux Driver support will continue to improve and more hardware manufacturers (Nvidia I’m looking at you) will develop open source Linux Drivers. 
      • Nope
    • I was banking on a New R.Pi revision if not a totally new model, I still think that adding M.2 support, as other SBC manufacturers have, is the way to go in the long term. But this will probably require a totally new board design and may still be a year or 2 away. It may be that someone designs an add on board that will provide this function, but if they do it needs to be a device that allows the drive to be the boot drive.  
      • As for Driver support not much has changed with this so that is probably a Zero  
      • But I nailed it in respect of the Pi, a new compute module 4 was released which if you get a board to plug it that has a PCIe slot you can add a M.2 SATA board and use this for the drive storage. Also the Pi 400 was also released which is a totally new model based on the Pi 4 chipset but clocked at 1800MHz and with a totally new layout that allows for a good passive heat sink across the whole of the board that sits in the Keyboard.
    • 2  100 percent
  • Moss
    • Now that Canonical has agreements with Microsoft for WSL and Amazon for Ubuntu Pro and AWS, I predict they will begin (or continue, if they have already begun in secret) working on agreements with other megacorps such as Alphabet, Oracle, SAP, and Apache.
      • Nope. All wrong. Or they kept it quite well-hidden.
    • If they succeed with any one of these new alliances, they will be insulated from potential buyouts and takeovers. I therefore predict this is the year they go IPO.
      • If not-A then not-B. But SUSE is rumored to be heading for an IPO in 2021.
  • Tony W
    • Maru OS will significantly expand supported devices
      • Will add support for a Oneplus device, very likely 3/3T
      • Will also add support for Galaxy Note devices, Note 9 and/or Note 10
        • Nope
    • We will see convergence on Pine64 devices, with Pinephone able to dock to peripherals and run full desktop applications
      • Oh, Yeah
    • A big box store will sell a PC preconfigured with Linux in 2020
      • Nope
  • Oliver Kelly
    • End of Windows 7 support won’t increase the Linux desktop uptake
      • Point
    • Intel’s new Graphics card wont suck on Linux
      • Not released yet.
  • Erik Lietz
    • Purism will go out of business – the Librem 5 phone endeavor will put it under
       (Purism’s reach into so many products will be their undoing and even with some products doing well, this will be too much for their business to sustain)

      • Although not out of business but Purism has been much much quieter in 2020 than they were in 2019.
    • The PinePhone will be an amazing product and success story for Pine64
       (I am waiting for the second offering after the Brave Heart edition. The PinePhone product development will set a ‘gold’ standard how to correctly launch new product)

      • Pine64 has been a joy to watch their activity in 2020. So much I have just received my Manjaro edition PinePhone. What a great product for $200.
    • An major industry specific software company (Adobe, Autodesk (for AutoCAD), or similar) will offer a Linux version for a flagship software product
       (Adobe, Autodesk, or another specific flagship program dedicated for a very specific task. Running natively, no Wine, no web apps – AutoCAD can already run as a web app)

      • Dud on this one… As a side note for our business we are looking to migrate away from AutoCAD.
    • Microsoft will offer Office 365 on Linux
       (MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint at a minimum will be running natively on Linux, no Wine, no web apps)

      • Again a zero – although we are using Edge on Linux in the office for our web accounting systeming.
    • Linux preinstalled from a major hardware supplier will be available in big box stores available off of the shelf (a large hardware vendor (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc)
      • I claim a handicap on this one as with all the goings on people weren’t allowed in stores most of the year. Although, both HP and Lenovo in particular have made major releases with Linux including both Fedora and Ubuntu on a whole bunch of Lenovo products. [Moss: Don’t forget that Dell increased their offerings of Linux machines.]

What About Next Year?

  • Leo
    •  Apple’s M1 Air and Pro will work moderately well on Linux.
    • Microsoft Office will have a native Linux version released.
    • Everybody focuses on the browser and not the CEO. Firefox sees an upswing in users. 5% and going up.
  • Joe
    • Red Hat will somehow disappoint us more over the next year and become even more corporate.
    • Game streaming services will have a very good year and become much more common.  Steam will release a Stadia competitor, with no local install.
    • It will be both a good year and a bad year for linux because of online services.  There will be many more ‘computers’ using the linux kernel but not actually linux. Similar to the chromebook.
  • Tony H
    • Well as I have been successful with my Pi predictions I’m going to do another one and  go way out on a limb and  suggest we may be heading for a Pi 5 or at least a Pi 4+. I will also predict that the Pi 400 will get a revision with 8Gb of RAM and possibly a further overclock of the CPU so those not comfortable doing things like that will have a 2.1Ghz CPU out of the box, as with the very good passive cooling it has been shown to be very stable at this clock speed.
  • Moss
    • Distrohoppers’ Digest will exceed 18,000 total downloads. (this would require our average downloads per episode to exceed 600, and at least 10 episodes)
    • At least 6 long-standing distros (3 years or longer) will close or merge, and be replaced by at least 8 new distros – at least 4 of them forks of what just closed shop.
    • I and/or my wife will have a job which pays enough for our needs and will survive 2021 much better than we did 2020.
    • Covid will be a minor irritation by the end of the year, not a world-spanning pandemic and contact-tracking apps will be a thing of the past.
  • Josh Hawk
    • Linux phones will double in number and power in 2021
    • All mainstream cable tv channels will switch to apps.
    • Firefox will be given to the community to maintain (maybe for the better) or be so underfunded that they will lay off almost all working on it.
  • Erik Lietz 
    • Wayland – the transition to Wayland will become much more prevalent or mainstream among distributions in 2021. It won’t completely transition from X but it will gain much more traction in 2021. (Hedge! hedge!) (Durden!)
    • Microsoft Office 365 natively on Linux (repeat of 2020).
    • A Linux phone (probably the Pine Phone) will be available for the ‘average’ consumer in 2021 and be able to be a daily driver phone.
    • Warpinator will expand to almost all distributions and become the ‘go to’ solution for easy computer to computer file transactions similar to the Apple AirDrop.
    • A new, independent non-Chrome based web browser will enter the market. This will either push Mozilla to retool and reinvigorate Firefox or the downward spin will speed up.
  • Owen Peery
    • Raspberry Pi will continue to develop either the 4 or the 400 so that all the models can easily come with 8G RAM minimum and with processor speeds above 2 Ghz with no overclocking necessary
      • So more distros will function on it, and it can BE A REPLACEMENT for low end Chromebooks that are pretty crappy
    • Linux podcasts will continue to fumble advertising and promotion and alienate their listeners as they pile on more and more promotional spots. Spots for legitimate companies, who might even be our friends, and support our interests, but the sheer number of spots we hear each week as we listen to our favorite podcasts, turns the signal into noise, and noise that we will ignore. Let’s not adopt the advertising models that many of us are trying to get away from, we can do better.
    • Linux audio will get better as Pipewire rolls out in more places. Even if it’s not widely adopted at the beginning it will show a simpler path forward is possible.
    • Linux influencers will continue to wring their hands about the perpetual issue of lack of diversity in the Linux ecosystem, while at the same time, failing to take public stands against white supremacy and toxic masculinity in our very community. It’s not enough to just invite people from underrepresented groups to our spaces, we have to make sure our spaces are not hostile to the very people some of us are trying to include. This is where a lot of growth in Linux use and adoption can happen, but will it?
    • Software for creative endeavors will continue to get better and better on Linux so hobbyists can make our fun pet projects, on software that works, that has tons of options to make it pretty, AND that doesn’t have an obtuse soul crushing work flow. Sometimes we focus on getting the pro level users a good experience on Linux software, but I think the hobbyists are where we should focus. A pro level user probably works for a company that already has a license locked in, and has an entire workflow based on proprietary solutions, and dozens, if not hundreds of employees, so that will be a hard nut to crack.
    • The onboarding path for beginners will not get easier. The time investment needed to get up to speed on some basic tasks will continue to be just enough to scare off the competent but casual users, let alone semi incompetent users. We need to either change that or accept that Linux might not be a good option for beginners. If we want to make space for beginners in Linux, we must hold space, without judgments, for beginners, and bring them in with intention, not left in the wild.
  • Josh Lowe
    • Ubuntu support on Raspberry Pi will improve dramatically and become as popular or overtake Raspbian as the main Raspberry Pi OS
    • We could see an Official Raspberry Pi Laptop
    • a RISC-V Powered RPi
  • Oliver Kelly
    • A new demonstration of MS <3 Linux with desktop compatible Office suite via Electron or some container system like Snap or LXD.
  • Utopic Unicorn (Discord)
    • Canonical will go closed source.
    • Linux Mint will see a huge controversy.
    • Manjaro gets shut down.
    • Arco linux sees a huge increase in new users.
    • Redhat gets decimated in the server industry in favour of other distros including Debian.
  • rockhazard (Discord)
    • MS will *drop* development of Edge for Linux. (a man can hope)
  • Sundaram (Telegram)
    • Proton/Wine will support EAC
    • Matrix users will skyrocket.
    • Linux will run on Apple M1.
    • Lots and lots of ARM devices.
    • RISC-V will grow a lot.
    • Nvidia will open source its drivers. (Lol)
    • Due to the release of many cloud gaming platforms fragmentation will occur (also timed exclusives will be more common).
  • J Arun Mani (Telegram)
    • Microsoft will expand its poison net: WSL, VSCode and many things that will prevent users from really moving to Linux
    • Adobe will continue to call Linux a modest platform
    • Emacs will become more modern and beginner friendly.
  • Dave Goldsbrough (Twitter)
    • (More of a wish!) Accessibility will be much better in Linux.
  • Joussef Jouda 
    • No innovative changes in Linux in 2021

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

  • Clay Stone
  • From Alex
  • Brad Alexander
  • Avinash

CHECK THIS OUT! 

Announcements:

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 1:24:25 4846 mintCast 347 – For the Halibut (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-347-for-the-halibut-mp3/ Wed, 04 Nov 2020 17:46:45 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4743 Then, in our news, Linux Mint gives us an update, Ubuntu and Fedora both get released, XDA has a phone now, and Microsoft Edges into the Linux browser market
In security, Chromium blocks annoyances and fixes a font rendering flaw, and Wordpress fixes some bad ones
Download
]]>

Download

2:53 Wanderings
1:13:18 The News
1:43:29 Security
1:47:39 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I pop a kernel, Bo gets refreshed, Josh keeps his chameleon alive, Tony Hughes becomes a hermit, Moss bites into another distro, Joe gets it HANDled, and Tony Watts does the upgrade dance

Then, in our news, Linux Mint gives us an update, Ubuntu and Fedora both get released, XDA has a phone now, and Microsoft Edges into the Linux browser market

In security, Chromium blocks annoyances and fixes a font rendering flaw, and WordPress fixes some bad ones

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Upgraded to Ubuntu 20.10’s 5.8 kernel in Linux Mint. My 5700XT’s performance has increased! Yay!
    • Playing with Kubuntu 20.10 which also has kernel 5.8.
    • Recording this on an AMD A10-7870K with 16GB RAM and all my other audio gear. If something goes wrong today, I’m gonna blame that…
    • Last episode I mentioned that World of Warcraft was crashing in Wine from Lutris. Fixed this by moving from the Wine 5.7 TkG version that Lutris provides to Wine Staging 5.19. That upgraded to 5.20 recently as well.
    • Chromium got upgrades! It’s now part of the Linux Mint repo.
cd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Baldurs/Gate/3/Launcher/

mv LariLauncher.exe LariLauncher.exe.old

ln -s ../bin/bg3.exe LariLauncher.exe

cp ./*.dll ../bin/
  • Josh
    • My openSUSE samba server is still alive and kicking!
    • After seeing the error of my ways with btrfs I decided to reinstall Mint on my desktop pc.
    • Linux Mint gaming is broken on my newly installed OS #DualMonitorWoes.
    • Testing out Edge on Linux after hearing a ton of good feedback about it.
  • Tony H
    • So the last few weeks have not been brilliant health wise, I missed the last recording as I was ill with acid reflux, which when it flares up really knocks me for 6. At the moment still not a 100% but getting a little better.
    • As we go on air I am currently in a 3 day of shielding with my wife who has to go into hospital for a small operation on Tuesday, luckily this is a day procedure or the lockdown would have been 2 weeks, so I can not leave the house until Tuesday at 6.40am when I take her into the hospital for the operation and even then I can not be there to support her during the process. Blast Covid. On a positive note her covid test came back negative, so the opp can go ahead as planned.
    • One of the downsides of my health issues is it drains me of energy and I’ve not felt like doing much in the way of modeling or preparing my review of KaOS for Distrohoppers that we are hoping to record this coming week, but I will have something to say but not as comprehensive a review as I would like.
  • Moss
    • I had all my teeth removed and they are currently covered by temporary dentures, which is why I’m talking funny right now. This will be going on for some time, but the show must go on!
    • We’re getting ready to record Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 017, presumably the day after this episode hits your podcatcher. This will be another adventure in diction. On another note, Tony has noticed that some of our download numbers have gone backwards, so we should all donate to Archive and ask for our downloads back.
    • I just installed PCLinuxOS on Friday. I was amazed at how easily it went this time, and I’m still reeling from being able to use APT to install RPM packages. The installer has a little catch: it will not tell you what distros are installed on which partitions. This is why I have not yet installed it on my desktop, I didn’t identify my available partitions prior to attempting the install and was not brave enough to take a guess and soldier on.
    • I also installed Feren OS again, and found that they have yet to update the base to 20.04. I looked it up and it is promised for November. I may not spend much time working with Feren until the upgrade.
    • My work has been sporadic, and no paychecks have been received for months. We’re down to our last $30. But Social Security comes tomorrow, and those missing paychecks should come some day. I have a new job on the side, selling a line of products to raise money to house and employ homeless women across the country. I’ve worked with this promoter before, and while it hasn’t always worked out well, it’s not from lack of trying.
    • We finally finished Dead Beat and are working on the next book, Proven Guilty, more slowly now that I can’t talk well.
  • Joe
    • Got a couple of dirt cheap broken handhelds.  I had a lot of fun with it.  So far I have gotten
      • 2 PSP 1001s that did not power on
      • One 3DS XL old that did not power on
      • One DS Lite
    • The NDS Lite needed the lower display replaced
      • This was not a hard fix but when I was putting it back together I noticed that the ribbon cable for the digitizer was a bit  frayed.  I put it back together as best I could any way
      • It seemed to work.  Both screens came on and displayed the need for touchscreen calibration.  It died as soon as I touched the screen and would not power back on.
      • I took it apart again and I saw that the leads were lifted off the ribbon cable
      • I hope that replacing the touchscreen will fix the problem but I know that the board might also be fried like bacon
      • Only one way to find out.
      • It was also acting like the battery was bad …
      • So I replaced the battery and it would still not turn on
      • I attempted to replace the touchpad but it was a little more delicate than I am and now the thing is good for parts but i am fairly sure that i had already messed up the motherboard anyway
    • The 3DS XL was supposedly broken and would not turn on.  But I replaced the battery and hooked it up to power and it turned right on with no issues. I did have to bypass the parental controls which was super easy and I did notice that the joystick felt a little stiff but that cleared up after some time.
      • I was also able to get a multicart off eBay for pretty cheap and it works like the R4 card is supposed to and allowed me to run all the games that were on the cart.
      • It also allowed me to replace the Micro SD card that was in the cart and after I copied over the control files I was able to double the memory of the SD card and add in some of the other roms that I have sitting around.  I was also able to install one of the Genesis emulators and one of the NES emulators to play some of those roms that I own.  As well as adding many of the DS games.  Although I could not play 3DS games from there.
      • I enjoyed the Genesis emulator from there but it would not allow me to switch to full screen or view the whole image at once.  It was not insurmountable but it did take away from the immersion of the game
      • So I went ahead and set up homebrew on the device (everything was done from Linux). This was a long and tedious process but in the end I was able to set up a second 32 gb micro SD card on it with a different Genesis emulator that did allow me to see the whole image and to stretch it to full screen.
      • This also allowed me to set up and remove 3DS games (all legally obtained) and to add custom theming to the device.  I really like how Shovel Knight looked and played on the device and I love playing old school Shadowrun on it.  The Sega version and I have been playing a lot of it
      • So now I can play 3DS games and Sega games from one card and I can play NES, SNES and DS games from the other card.  I suppose I could also set up some Atari emulation if I wanted and get some Centipede or Space Command or Star Raider going.
      • Plus with the DS card that goes into the top I can set up multiple micro SD cards for different setups and just swap them out as needed with as many games as I want.
    • Also ordered 2 PSP 1001’s for a decent price for parts not working
      • One of them had an issue with the battery not wanting to charge but I was able to get the battery working again with a bit of work
      • Also had an issue with the front buttons where the select key was stuck
      • The other one looked good but had a lot of issues and you could tell that it had been apart several times and had pieces removed. Not sure if the screen is good or not but it was not connected.  The power light does come on and batteries do charge when hooked up to it so some decent parts.
      • But other than the screen being completely disconnected the board on the right hand side was completely loose as the retention pins were broken off.  The UMD door was not seated all the way and the latch for it was missing the spring so had to be removed manually
      • But it did have a good set of buttons on the bottom which I was able to move over to the other device to get it working properly.  However this 8 dollar part does not make up for the cost of the device that I paid so I am a little disappointed and may try to troubleshoot it further anyway or simply test parts from it on other devices.
      • But yeah, one of them is working perfectly which makes me happy.  It is running older software so I am going to do the update today.
      • The device is very old so it will not do WPA2 and I am not going to set up an insecure network device so I have to do the updates and mods from the internal memory
        • Not that big of a deal but it is something that should be noted
      • Have done some gaming with the genesis emulator and while it does not feel as refined as the 3DS emulator it still worked well and looked good
      • I also looked up and found the methods that most people were using to transfer movies onto the psp and most of that was using applications that only ran in windows and were outdated.  But looking at those applications I could see that most of them were front ends for ffmpeg.  So I looked for and found a terminal command that worked.
      • ffmpeg -y -i INPUTFILE -flags +bitexact -vcodec libx264 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -s 480×272 -r 29.97 -b:v 384k -acodec aac -b:a 96k -ar 48000 -f psp -strict -2 OUTPUTFILE.MP4
      • I am still looking for an up to date way to play PSX games on the PSP.  The old methods were also program based and many of those programs are not available any more.  Because I have many more PS1 games on file than I do PSP because I actually own a couple of different PS1s
    • My main server/garage computer died.  Trouble shooting the issues for that was not what I would call fun.  I was able to narrow the problem down to one of the big 3 which is never good
      • I would go into detail on all the issues and the ways that I tested but it gets tedious
      • Lets just say when one of the big 3 starts going but doesnt brick hard it can lead to some interesting faults that are hard to track down
      • But since I don’t have any other computers that use that chipset or ddr4 RAM I have no other way to test than to purchase parts and swap.  So I have started with RAM.  At least with RAM if it is bad then I have fixed the issue and if it is good and something else is bad I can still use the RAM
      • After that I have to guess but when I am done I will be one or two parts short of having a second complete computer.
      • Financially this has come at a terrible time but I will get it fixed.  If I had known that it was going to break then I would not have started working on old handhelds
      • But it looks like replacing the RAM has worked for now.  Hopefully that is actually the problem and it is solved now
      • I still need to swing by Micro Center and see if they will replace the bad RAM sticks which would bring me up to 32 gig in my server
  • Tony W
    • Redoing the floor in my basement due to my poor choices in life
    • Did the upgrade to next LTS on my server and it was uneventful
    • Chromecast Audio on PA system = WIN
    • Upgrade to Nest Wifi + add’l network switch
    • Chromecast with Google TV, YouTube TV ($65/mo!!!)
    • Magnetic charging cables are awesome
    • LineageOS updating
    • Have been using my Dell 7130 more
    • Sometimes Linux is just better…
      • My old school audio setup works flawlessly in Linux and is NO FUN in Windows

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

Announcements:

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!>
]]> full 4743 mintCast 347 – For the Halibut https://mintcast.org/mintcast-347-for-the-halibut/ Wed, 04 Nov 2020 17:10:14 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4737 Then, in our news, Linux Mint gives us an update, Ubuntu and Fedora both get released, XDA has a phone now, and Microsoft Edges into the Linux browser market
In security, Chromium blocks annoyances and fixes a font rendering flaw, and Wordpress fixes some bad ones
Download
]]>

Download

2:53 Wanderings
1:13:18 The News
1:43:29 Security
1:47:39 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I pop a kernel, Bo gets refreshed, Josh keeps his chameleon alive, Tony Hughes becomes a hermit, Moss bites into another distro, Joe gets it HANDled, and Tony Watts does the upgrade dance

Then, in our news, Linux Mint gives us an update, Ubuntu and Fedora both get released, XDA has a phone now, and Microsoft Edges into the Linux browser market

In security, Chromium blocks annoyances and fixes a font rendering flaw, and WordPress fixes some bad ones

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Upgraded to Ubuntu 20.10’s 5.8 kernel in Linux Mint. My 5700XT’s performance has increased! Yay!
    • Playing with Kubuntu 20.10 which also has kernel 5.8.
    • Recording this on an AMD A10-7870K with 16GB RAM and all my other audio gear. If something goes wrong today, I’m gonna blame that…
    • Last episode I mentioned that World of Warcraft was crashing in Wine from Lutris. Fixed this by moving from the Wine 5.7 TkG version that Lutris provides to Wine Staging 5.19. That upgraded to 5.20 recently as well.
    • Chromium got upgrades! It’s now part of the Linux Mint repo.
cd ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/common/Baldurs/Gate/3/Launcher/

mv LariLauncher.exe LariLauncher.exe.old

ln -s ../bin/bg3.exe LariLauncher.exe

cp ./*.dll ../bin/
  • Josh
    • My openSUSE samba server is still alive and kicking!
    • After seeing the error of my ways with btrfs I decided to reinstall Mint on my desktop pc.
    • Linux Mint gaming is broken on my newly installed OS #DualMonitorWoes.
    • Testing out Edge on Linux after hearing a ton of good feedback about it.
  • Tony H
    • So the last few weeks have not been brilliant health wise, I missed the last recording as I was ill with acid reflux, which when it flares up really knocks me for 6. At the moment still not a 100% but getting a little better.
    • As we go on air I am currently in a 3 day of shielding with my wife who has to go into hospital for a small operation on Tuesday, luckily this is a day procedure or the lockdown would have been 2 weeks, so I can not leave the house until Tuesday at 6.40am when I take her into the hospital for the operation and even then I can not be there to support her during the process. Blast Covid. On a positive note her covid test came back negative, so the opp can go ahead as planned.
    • One of the downsides of my health issues is it drains me of energy and I’ve not felt like doing much in the way of modeling or preparing my review of KaOS for Distrohoppers that we are hoping to record this coming week, but I will have something to say but not as comprehensive a review as I would like.
  • Moss
    • I had all my teeth removed and they are currently covered by temporary dentures, which is why I’m talking funny right now. This will be going on for some time, but the show must go on!
    • We’re getting ready to record Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 017, presumably the day after this episode hits your podcatcher. This will be another adventure in diction. On another note, Tony has noticed that some of our download numbers have gone backwards, so we should all donate to Archive and ask for our downloads back.
    • I just installed PCLinuxOS on Friday. I was amazed at how easily it went this time, and I’m still reeling from being able to use APT to install RPM packages. The installer has a little catch: it will not tell you what distros are installed on which partitions. This is why I have not yet installed it on my desktop, I didn’t identify my available partitions prior to attempting the install and was not brave enough to take a guess and soldier on.
    • I also installed Feren OS again, and found that they have yet to update the base to 20.04. I looked it up and it is promised for November. I may not spend much time working with Feren until the upgrade.
    • My work has been sporadic, and no paychecks have been received for months. We’re down to our last $30. But Social Security comes tomorrow, and those missing paychecks should come some day. I have a new job on the side, selling a line of products to raise money to house and employ homeless women across the country. I’ve worked with this promoter before, and while it hasn’t always worked out well, it’s not from lack of trying.
    • We finally finished Dead Beat and are working on the next book, Proven Guilty, more slowly now that I can’t talk well.
  • Joe
    • Got a couple of dirt cheap broken handhelds.  I had a lot of fun with it.  So far I have gotten
      • 2 PSP 1001s that did not power on
      • One 3DS XL old that did not power on
      • One DS Lite
    • The NDS Lite needed the lower display replaced
      • This was not a hard fix but when I was putting it back together I noticed that the ribbon cable for the digitizer was a bit  frayed.  I put it back together as best I could any way
      • It seemed to work.  Both screens came on and displayed the need for touchscreen calibration.  It died as soon as I touched the screen and would not power back on.
      • I took it apart again and I saw that the leads were lifted off the ribbon cable
      • I hope that replacing the touchscreen will fix the problem but I know that the board might also be fried like bacon
      • Only one way to find out.
      • It was also acting like the battery was bad …
      • So I replaced the battery and it would still not turn on
      • I attempted to replace the touchpad but it was a little more delicate than I am and now the thing is good for parts but i am fairly sure that i had already messed up the motherboard anyway
    • The 3DS XL was supposedly broken and would not turn on.  But I replaced the battery and hooked it up to power and it turned right on with no issues. I did have to bypass the parental controls which was super easy and I did notice that the joystick felt a little stiff but that cleared up after some time.
      • I was also able to get a multicart off eBay for pretty cheap and it works like the R4 card is supposed to and allowed me to run all the games that were on the cart.
      • It also allowed me to replace the Micro SD card that was in the cart and after I copied over the control files I was able to double the memory of the SD card and add in some of the other roms that I have sitting around.  I was also able to install one of the Genesis emulators and one of the NES emulators to play some of those roms that I own.  As well as adding many of the DS games.  Although I could not play 3DS games from there.
      • I enjoyed the Genesis emulator from there but it would not allow me to switch to full screen or view the whole image at once.  It was not insurmountable but it did take away from the immersion of the game
      • So I went ahead and set up homebrew on the device (everything was done from Linux). This was a long and tedious process but in the end I was able to set up a second 32 gb micro SD card on it with a different Genesis emulator that did allow me to see the whole image and to stretch it to full screen.
      • This also allowed me to set up and remove 3DS games (all legally obtained) and to add custom theming to the device.  I really like how Shovel Knight looked and played on the device and I love playing old school Shadowrun on it.  The Sega version and I have been playing a lot of it
      • So now I can play 3DS games and Sega games from one card and I can play NES, SNES and DS games from the other card.  I suppose I could also set up some Atari emulation if I wanted and get some Centipede or Space Command or Star Raider going.
      • Plus with the DS card that goes into the top I can set up multiple micro SD cards for different setups and just swap them out as needed with as many games as I want.
    • Also ordered 2 PSP 1001’s for a decent price for parts not working
      • One of them had an issue with the battery not wanting to charge but I was able to get the battery working again with a bit of work
      • Also had an issue with the front buttons where the select key was stuck
      • The other one looked good but had a lot of issues and you could tell that it had been apart several times and had pieces removed. Not sure if the screen is good or not but it was not connected.  The power light does come on and batteries do charge when hooked up to it so some decent parts.
      • But other than the screen being completely disconnected the board on the right hand side was completely loose as the retention pins were broken off.  The UMD door was not seated all the way and the latch for it was missing the spring so had to be removed manually
      • But it did have a good set of buttons on the bottom which I was able to move over to the other device to get it working properly.  However this 8 dollar part does not make up for the cost of the device that I paid so I am a little disappointed and may try to troubleshoot it further anyway or simply test parts from it on other devices.
      • But yeah, one of them is working perfectly which makes me happy.  It is running older software so I am going to do the update today.
      • The device is very old so it will not do WPA2 and I am not going to set up an insecure network device so I have to do the updates and mods from the internal memory
        • Not that big of a deal but it is something that should be noted
      • Have done some gaming with the genesis emulator and while it does not feel as refined as the 3DS emulator it still worked well and looked good
      • I also looked up and found the methods that most people were using to transfer movies onto the psp and most of that was using applications that only ran in windows and were outdated.  But looking at those applications I could see that most of them were front ends for ffmpeg.  So I looked for and found a terminal command that worked.
      • ffmpeg -y -i INPUTFILE -flags +bitexact -vcodec libx264 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -s 480×272 -r 29.97 -b:v 384k -acodec aac -b:a 96k -ar 48000 -f psp -strict -2 OUTPUTFILE.MP4
      • I am still looking for an up to date way to play PSX games on the PSP.  The old methods were also program based and many of those programs are not available any more.  Because I have many more PS1 games on file than I do PSP because I actually own a couple of different PS1s
    • My main server/garage computer died.  Trouble shooting the issues for that was not what I would call fun.  I was able to narrow the problem down to one of the big 3 which is never good
      • I would go into detail on all the issues and the ways that I tested but it gets tedious
      • Lets just say when one of the big 3 starts going but doesnt brick hard it can lead to some interesting faults that are hard to track down
      • But since I don’t have any other computers that use that chipset or ddr4 RAM I have no other way to test than to purchase parts and swap.  So I have started with RAM.  At least with RAM if it is bad then I have fixed the issue and if it is good and something else is bad I can still use the RAM
      • After that I have to guess but when I am done I will be one or two parts short of having a second complete computer.
      • Financially this has come at a terrible time but I will get it fixed.  If I had known that it was going to break then I would not have started working on old handhelds
      • But it looks like replacing the RAM has worked for now.  Hopefully that is actually the problem and it is solved now
      • I still need to swing by Micro Center and see if they will replace the bad RAM sticks which would bring me up to 32 gig in my server
  • Tony W
    • Redoing the floor in my basement due to my poor choices in life
    • Did the upgrade to next LTS on my server and it was uneventful
    • Chromecast Audio on PA system = WIN
    • Upgrade to Nest Wifi + add’l network switch
    • Chromecast with Google TV, YouTube TV ($65/mo!!!)
    • Magnetic charging cables are awesome
    • LineageOS updating
    • Have been using my Dell 7130 more
    • Sometimes Linux is just better…
      • My old school audio setup works flawlessly in Linux and is NO FUN in Windows

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

Announcements:

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!>

]]> full 4737 mintCast 343 – Tinfoil Not Included (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-343-tinfoil-not-included-mp3/ Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:27:36 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4615 Then, in the news, we have news from Mint, Debian, and  MX Linux. We also say goodbye to a team member.
In security, we take a break from the doom and gloom and just talk tinfoil.
Download
]]>

Download

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

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

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

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

Download

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

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

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

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for audio editing
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4610 mintCast 324.5 – We Got It All Wrong! https://mintcast.org/mintcast-324-5-we-got-it-all-wrong/ Wed, 25 Dec 2019 06:58:47 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4072 And finally, our listener feedback.
Download
]]>

Download

In our Innards section, we ask where we went wrong? We revisit last year’s predictions…

And finally, our listener feedback.

LINUX INNARDS: 

Revisiting 2019 Predictions:

Joe

  • This year we will not only see edge on chromium we will also see edge OS based on chromium.
    • Probably next year, although the announcement for edge chromium is official
  • Dex/Linux will develop into something useable
    • boooo
  • A distro that uses snap for all applications by design.
    • That was already done last year 

Leo

  • Microsoft Edge will be available for Linux
    • Almost. Give it another month or two
  • GUI Applications will be supported in Windows Subsystem for Linux

Bo

  • Year of the Proton desktop! I predict in 2019 games will advertise Proton support.
  • What the hell is happening to Ubuntu? IPO or Purchased by IBM competitor?
    • Neither as yet. Mark Shuttleworth continues to maintain he is not interested in selling or going public.

Tony W

  • N64 Classic Mini will be released, with Goldeneye and running Linux
    • Nope, nothing from Nintendo.  There was, however a Sega Genesis mini released in September 2019.
  • Librem 5 will ship in late 2019 (November/December)
    • Mostly true, but not the finished product they promised (and kept changing their promises)
  • A big box store will sell a computer with desktop Linux pre-installed
    • Nope

Tony H

  • A new Raspberry Pi will be launched with better hardware (USB3, 2Gig Ram, m2 SSD port) and a new board format but at the $35 price point
    • New model except no M.2 SSD port and the $35 was 1Gb Ram but we did get a 2 and 4GB Ram version for $45 and $55 also they maintained the current format if some of the components were switched around.  
    • This, despite the fact that Raspberry Pi specifically announced that they would NOT have a new model in 2019. Huge points for Tony H. 

Moss

  • Microsoft will purchase SUSE Linux
    • MS instead bought into the Linux Foundation, Open Software Foundation, and just about every other Linux thing out there, and unless they are paying Canonical for the work on WSL is hardly shelling out anything, with no added responsibility.  And now it looks like Canonical has taken an insulating step away from Microsoft, with the unveiling of Ubuntu Pro on AWS.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

  •  Nigel Verity
  • T L 
  • Tony Sirna 
  • Benjamin Moser
  • DWY 
  • Dave Lindberg 

CHECK THIS OUT! 

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

  • Next Episode will be December 29th, 2PM Central, 8PM UTC
  • While it should be back up by the time you hear this in your podcast catcher, mintcast.org is currently down. We’re working on getting it back up and seems to be a mistake in billing.

WRAP-UP:

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

  • Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)
]]> full 48:39 4072 mintCast 324.5 – We Got It All Wrong! (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-324-5-we-got-it-all-wrong-mp3/ Wed, 25 Dec 2019 06:58:18 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4070 And finally, our listener feedback.
Download
]]>

Download

In our Innards section, we ask where we went wrong? We revisit last year’s predictions…

And finally, our listener feedback.

LINUX INNARDS: 

Revisiting 2019 Predictions:

Joe

  • This year we will not only see edge on chromium we will also see edge OS based on chromium.
    • Probably next year, although the announcement for edge chromium is official
  • Dex/Linux will develop into something useable
    • boooo
  • A distro that uses snap for all applications by design.
    • That was already done last year 

Leo

  • Microsoft Edge will be available for Linux
    • Almost. Give it another month or two
  • GUI Applications will be supported in Windows Subsystem for Linux

Bo

  • Year of the Proton desktop! I predict in 2019 games will advertise Proton support.
  • What the hell is happening to Ubuntu? IPO or Purchased by IBM competitor?
    • Neither as yet. Mark Shuttleworth continues to maintain he is not interested in selling or going public.

Tony W

  • N64 Classic Mini will be released, with Goldeneye and running Linux
    • Nope, nothing from Nintendo.  There was, however a Sega Genesis mini released in September 2019.
  • Librem 5 will ship in late 2019 (November/December)
    • Mostly true, but not the finished product they promised (and kept changing their promises)
  • A big box store will sell a computer with desktop Linux pre-installed
    • Nope

Tony H

  • A new Raspberry Pi will be launched with better hardware (USB3, 2Gig Ram, m2 SSD port) and a new board format but at the $35 price point
    • New model except no M.2 SSD port and the $35 was 1Gb Ram but we did get a 2 and 4GB Ram version for $45 and $55 also they maintained the current format if some of the components were switched around.  
    • This, despite the fact that Raspberry Pi specifically announced that they would NOT have a new model in 2019. Huge points for Tony H. 

Moss

  • Microsoft will purchase SUSE Linux
    • MS instead bought into the Linux Foundation, Open Software Foundation, and just about every other Linux thing out there, and unless they are paying Canonical for the work on WSL is hardly shelling out anything, with no added responsibility.  And now it looks like Canonical has taken an insulating step away from Microsoft, with the unveiling of Ubuntu Pro on AWS.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

  •  Nigel Verity
  • T L 
  • Tony Sirna 
  • Benjamin Moser
  • DWY 
  • Dave Lindberg 

CHECK THIS OUT! 

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

  • Next Episode will be December 29th, 2PM Central, 8PM UTC
  • While it should be back up by the time you hear this in your podcast catcher, mintcast.org is currently down. We’re working on getting it back up and seems to be a mistake in billing.

WRAP-UP:

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

  • Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)
]]> full 48:39 4070