In security and privacy: Theres an SSH Stalker

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

The News:

Mint Monthly News – January 2026

Discord Launches Teen-by-Default Settings Globally. Face scan or I.D. needed?

Firefox Announces ‘A.I. Controls’ To Block Its Upcoming A.I. Features

AppManager offers drag-and-drop AppImage management.

Sony Will Ship Its Final Blu-ray Recorders This Month

The Memory Crisis Is Taking No Prisoners

RaspberyPi goes Dual RAM

Linux 6.19

KDE 6.6 & Gnome 50 Betas out

Ubuntu getting rid of the Software & Updater tool

Libreoffice 26.2 released

Security and Privacy:

SSHStalker Botnet Uses IRC C2 to Control Linux Systems via Legacy Kernel Exploits

Contact Info:

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, moss@bodhilinux.com, Mastodon @zaivala@hostux.social, occasionally on HPR
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, also checkout the other podcast I am on, Linux OTC (with Eric & Majid).
• Majid – drmajid@mintcast.org @atypical_doctor@mastodon.social, Atypical.doctor on Instagram and Threads and The Atypical Doctor Podcast and also Linux OTC and Distrohoppers Digest.
• Eric – I can be reached by email at eric@mintcast.org.
• Charles – charles@mintcast.org, Mr PDX on Discord
• Jim– jim@mintcast.org, GNU2Linux on Discord, The Linux Shortcut on YouTube

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!>

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

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:

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, moss@bodhilinux.com, Mastodon @zaivala@hostux.social, occasionally on HPR
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, also checkout the other two podcasts I am on, Linux OTC (with Eric & Majid) and 3 Fat Truckers
• Majid – drmajid@mintcast.org @atypical_dr@mastodon.social, AtypicalDr on Instagram and Threads and The Atypical Doctor Podcast and also Linux OTC.
• Eric – I can be reached by email at eric@mintcast.org.

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!>

First up in the news: Ubuntu is out-fedoring Fedora; Linux 5.18 brings new optimizations; the Budgie has landed; Debian 12 has a projected birthday, and Asahi has its first Alpha;

In security and privacy, a new Spectre has arisen;

Then in our Wanderings, Bill gets “Jitsi with it”, Moss goes down the “pi-hole”, and Norbert hops onto the Fedora bandwagon

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

The News

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS To Carry GNOME Triple Buffering Support
• Linux 5.18 To Bring New Intel Drivers, Optimization For AMD EPYC
• Budgie 10.6 is Here as its First Release Under the New Organization
• Asahi Linux Alpha Release is here
• Debian 12.0 “Bookworm” Looks Like It Will Release Around Mid-2023

Security Update

• Branch History Injection – A new Spectre vulnerability affecting Intel & Arm CPUs (Moss)

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time onApril 3, 2022
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream – 2 pm US Central time on March 26, 2022
• Get the Live Stream converted to your time zone

Wrap-up

• Joe – Tllts.org, linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Norbert – norbert@mintcast.org
• Josh T – jt@mintcast.org, Josh Thacker on Discord, and @Metal_FOSS on Twitter
• Nishant – nishant@mintcast.org,riconghost on instagram, riconghost@Github, Ghost.Ricon on DIscord, maverick00783 @ Steam
• Moss – bardmoss@pm.me, you can hear me on Distrohoppers’ Digest and Full Circle Weekly News, and you can find more contact information for me on It’s MOSS.
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, @wchouser3 on Twitter,and Bill_H on Discord

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!

In our Innards section we talk about Raspberry Pis and other single-board computers.

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

The Linux Innards

• Joe: I have a project that I found to be very interesting even though I don’t think that it was very difficult: to use USBIP on the pi so that I can use my headset with my computer while moving around the house without having to switch between multiple devices while podcasting.

• Moss: I’m using a Pi 4 as a computer and TV server. I keep woossing out on setting up the Pi 3B as a Pihole.

• Josh: Unfortunately, I do not own a Raspberry Pi or any other similar SoC’s.

• Bill: I have several Pi’s floating about the place doing various things. I’ve tried several projects with all the devices. I’ll outline some of the more useful things I’ve set my Pi’s up with.

• Norbert: I never had a Pi but am considering getting one to set it up as a home file server

Check This Out

10 minutes

• Nala – a prettier terminal front-end for apt
• cool-retro-term (in Bodhi repo, so probably in Ubuntu) – an uglier terminal but wow it’s cool. Customizable on the run (right-click, settings) [YouTube video]
• Open Source Voices (A podcast focusing on the person, not the project)

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on March 6, 2022
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream – 2 pm US Central time on February 26, 2022
• Get the Live Stream converted to your time zone

Wrap-up

• Joe – Tllts.org, linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Norbert – norbert@mintcast.org
• Josh T – jt@mintcast.org, Josh Thacker on Discord, and @Metal_FOSS on Twitter
• Nishant – nishant@mintcast.org,riconghost on instagram, riconghost@Github, Ghost.Ricon on DIscord, maverick00783 @ Steam
• Moss – bardmoss@pm.me, you can hear me on Distrohoppers’ Digest and Full Circle Weekly News, and you can find more contact information for me on It’s MOSS.
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, @wchouser3 on Twitter,and Bill_H on Discord

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!

First up in the news, Raspberry Pi OS has a 64-bit version, Nvidia has a release, System76 releases their scheduler, the This Week in Gnome blog, Slackware and Peppermint OS have new releases and Debian uses Arch.

In security, PolicyKit vulnerability lies dormant for a decade, GNU coreutils are being rewritten in Rust, Ubuntu improves low memory handling andSurfshark VPN jumps the shark.

Then in our Wanderings, Moss strikes a chord, Norbert further bodges his system, Bill gets more air time, Leo goes on an XL MX adventure, Joe runs for board and Nishant is distro hopping.

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

The News

20 minutes

• Raspberry Pi’s RaspberryPiOS Finally Spins 64-bit Version
• NVIDIA 510.47.03 Driver Released with support for Kernel 5.17 and Vulkan 1.3
• System76-Scheduler is a Rust-based tool To Improve Responsiveness
• This Week in Gnome – New Year, New Calendar, New Screencast Utility
• Slackware 15.0 Officially Released, Powered by Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS
• Peppermint OS 11 Released, Now Based on Debian and Xfce
• Project Una launches

Security Update

• 12-Year-Old PolKit Local Privilege Escalation Flaw Now Patched
• Rust-written replacement to GNU Coreutils progressing, some binaries now faster
• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Integrating systemd-oomd For Improving Low Memory Handling
• Surfshark VPN Revelations
• Surfshark merged with Nord

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

• Moss joined the February Album Writing Month
• Norbert found a way to save space when dual-booting
• Bill starts a new podcast titled 3 Fat Truckers
• Leo tries MX Linux and gives Gnome a real fair shake
• Joe started testing usbip on his Pi 4
• Nishant has been preparing for LPIC-1

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on February 20, 2022
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream – 2 pm US Central time on January 12, 2022
• Get the Live Stream converted to your time zone

Wrap-up

• Joe – Tllts.org, linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Norbert – norbert@mintcast.org
• Josh T – jt@mintcast.org, Josh Thacker on Discord, and @Metal_FOSS on Twitter
• Nishant – nishant@mintcast.org,riconghost on instagram, riconghost@Github, Ghost.Ricon on DIscord, maverick00783 @ Steam
• Moss – bardmoss@pm.me, you can hear me on Distrohoppers’ Digest and Full Circle Weekly News, and you can find more contact information for me on It’s MOSS.
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, @wchouser3 on Twitter,and Bill_H on Discord

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!

In our Linux Innards, we review our 2021 predictions and make our new predictions for 2022.

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit. YouTube.

The Linux Innards

Our predictions for the new year

• Joe
  • Steam Deck will be a success and will contribute to the number of Linux machines in the wild
  • The Chip shortage will continue and prices on computers will remain high
  • Graphics card prices will somewhat return to normal as a new hardware competitor will come out that will be better for crypto than graphics cards
• Norbert
  • When using the proprietary Nvidia drivers on Ubuntu, Wayland will be at least enabled on Ubuntu 22.04 and will be the default session in 22.10
  • EndeavourOS will be in first place on DistroWatch on the default 6-month ranking list at some point during the year
  • GTK theming will still be viable with GTK4, but with libraries as opposed to CSS
  • Increased focus on Wayland will lead to development of the X12 protocol
• Josh Hawk
  • Steam Deck will succeed (not everyone will cancel orders)
  • SteamOS will only be really good on steam deck
  • Pop OS will have at least a beta of their new DE by end of 2022.
  • Community arguments about Gnome will worsen and lead to many leaving Gnome as users.
  • Alma Linux will become more popular than RHEL/CentOS Stream.
• Nishant
  • Gaming on Linux will pick up.
  • Fedora will lead the forefront in adoption of latest kernel/DE
  • I will make my foray into Linux System Administration.
  • Linux phones will double in number and power in 2022.
  • I am throwing my elbows out here, Linux will overtake Mac OS in market share by end of 2022
• Bill
  • The Steam Deck will not ship in February
  • Asahi Linux will gain hardware acceleration on the Mac

Check This Out

• Quick Close in Overview (Gnome extension)
  iNotch (Gnome extension)

Announcements

• Our next episode will be Sunday, January 9, 2021 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC/GMT.
• Check when this will be in your local timezone
• Our next Saturday live stream will be Saturday, January 1, 2022 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC/GMT.
  Check when this will be in your local timezone

Wrap-up

• Joe – Tllts.org, linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Norbert – norbert@mintcast.org
• The Other Other Josh – jt@mintcast.org, Josh Thacker on Discord, and @Metal_FOSS on Twitter
• Nishant – nishant@mintcast.org,riconghost on instagram, riconghost@Github, Ghost.Ricon on DIscord, maverick00783 @ Steam
• Clayton
• Bill – Bill_H on Discord, @Wchouser3, Wchouser3 on Facebook

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!>

In the news, Pop OS 21.10 is released, GNOME 42 – Top New Feature and Release Detail, ReactOS 0.4.14 has been released, Krita 5.0 has been released, and there’s yet another desktop environment on the horizon

In security, a grub update causes problems with Ubuntu and a Log4shell update

Then in our wanderings, Joe’s on vacation, Norbert’s full of gingerbread, Nishant is surviving the winter, Josh is on Windows, and Bill’s just glad to be here

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

The News

• Pop OS 21.10 has been released
• GNOME 42 – Top New Feature and Release Details
• ReactOS 0.4.14 has been released
• Krita 5.0 has been released
• Apple helps Asahi Linux developers
• Nitrux announced their new desktop environment

Security Update

• Ubuntu Developers Figuring Out Dual-Boot Changes Ahead Of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
• The Log4Shell 0-day, four days on: What is it, and how bad is it really?

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

• Joe
  • Vacationing, Troubleshooting, Testing Docker, and VPNing
• Norbert
  • XFCE WM Hybrid, zentile, OpenSUSE
• Nishant
• Josh
• Bill

Announcements

• Our next episode will be Sunday, December 26, 2021 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC/GMT.
• Check when this will be in your local timezone
• Our next Saturday live stream will be Saturday, January 1, 2022 at 2 pm US Central Standard Time, 8 pm UTC/GMT.
  Check when this will be in your local timezone

Wrap-up

• Joe – Tllts.org, linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Norbert – norbert@mintcast.org
• The Other Other Josh – jt@mintcast.org, Josh Thacker on Discord, and @Metal_FOSS on Twitter
• Nishant – nishant@mintcast.org,riconghost on instagram, riconghost@Github, Ghost.Ricon on DIscord, maverick00783 @ Steam
• Clayton
• Bill – Bill_H on Discord, @Wchouser3, Wchouser3 on Facebook

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!>

In our Innards section, we discuss the applications that we use most often

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

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

Linux Innards

• Joe
  • Cura
  • Standard Notes
  • Resilio Sync
• Tony
  • Firefox
  • GIMP
  • Inkscape
  • Audacity
• Norbert
  • Brave
  • LibreOffice
  • OBS
  • Photoshop
  • Premiere Pro
  • Illustrator

•  Josh
  • Firefox
  • Lollypop
  • EasyTAG
  • Syncthing
  • GnuCash

Vibrations from the Ether

• Alfred

Check This Out

• Chicago95
• Raspberry Pi Imager

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on Sunday, November 14th
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream – 2 pm US Central time on Saturday November 20th
• Get the Live Stream converted to your time zone

Wrap-up

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

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

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

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

• New Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W 
• Ex-org? Not at all! Three and a half years after X.Org Server 1.20, 1.21 is released
• SUSE heads for the Edge Computing with SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro 5.1
• MX Linux 21 released, based on Debian Bullseye – AHS version to release soon
• Microsoft repents of its open-source .NET blunder

Security Update

• If you’re using this hijacked NPM library anywhere in your software stack, read this
• Protonmail celebrates Swiss court victory exempting it from telco data retention laws
• Mozilla Firefox joins browsers implementing Global Privacy Control
• TA575 criminal group using ‘Squid Game’ lures for Dridex malware
• Google fixes two high-severity zero-day flaws in Chrome
• Fortinet warns of Black Friday scams involving PS5s, Xboxes and fake Amazon gift card generators that steal crypto

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

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

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on Sunday, November 14th
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream – 2 pm US Central time on Saturday November 6th
• Get the Live Stream converted to your time zone

Wrap-up

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

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

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

First up in the news Pinephone Pro, KDE’s 5.23 on their 25th, Ubuntu Frame, Windows 11 Ryzen slowdowns, and Nvidia updates

In security Retpolines patches for performance and Azure Linux boot failures

Then in our Wandering, Joe has some Pi, Norbert edits video, Tony Updates a BIOS, and Nishant upgrades Fedora

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

The News

• Introducing the PinePhone Pro
• KDE’s 25th Anniversary
• KDE 5.23 is released
• Ubuntu Frame
• Linux OS Market to Rise at 19.2% CAGR till 2027
• AMD Ryzen CPU’s L3 Latency Performance Fix To Be Resolved By Microsoft
• AMD Ryzen 6000 processors might finally support external GPUs via USB 4
• Nvidia 495 Linux Beta Driver Released

Security Update

• Linux Patches Rewrite The Retpoline Rewrite Code – Possible Performance Benefit
• USN-5091-1 introduced a regression in the Linux kernel for Microsoft Azure cloud systems which can result in boot failure

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

• Joe
• Norbert
• Tony
  • Windows 11 Upgrade Registry workaround
• Nishant

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on Sunday 31st October
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream –  2 pm US Central time on Saturday 23rd October
• Get the Live Stream converted to your time zone

Wrap-up

• Joe – Tllts.org, linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com , YouTube Undercast Collective
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites, Crowbar Kernel Panic.
• Norbert –
• Josh – @Metal_FOSS on Twitter
• Nishant – indianmintcasthost@gmail.com, riconghost on instagram, riconghost@Github, Ghost.Ricon on DIscord, maverick00783 @ Steam

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

• Bo 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!>

In our Innards section, Pi’s Pi’s and more Pi’s

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

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

Linux Innards

• Joe
  • Noobs
• Leo
  • Wireguard
    • Using fast.com
    • VM 1gbps – Wireguard 45mbps, Local Only 140mbps
    • Raspberry Pi 1gbps (300mbps effective) – Wireguard 30mbps (but took quite a while to ramp up), Local Only 65mbps
      • Generate keys with wg genkey | tee privkey | wg pubkey > pubkey
      • nano /etc/wireguard/wg0.conf
        • Set Private Key, Address, Listening port and iptables rules for the setup and tear down
        • Add client pubkey and the address it’s allowed to use
      • /etc/sysctl.conf
        • Uncomment net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
      • Bring it Up: sudo wg-quick up wg0
      • Bring it Down: sudo wg-quick down wg0
  • FreshRSS
  • Gitea

Vibrations from the Ether

• Brad
• Jeff
• Hilander

Check This Out

• Joe
• Leo
  • Krita 5 Beta
  • Kdenlive 20.08 Out

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on Sunday September 5, 2021
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream –  2 pm US Central time on September 11, 2021

Wrap-up

• Joe – www.Tllts.org, www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org
• Bo – Crowbar Kernel Panic, crowbarkernelpanic@pm.me
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites, Crowbar Kernel Panic
• Mike – Mike@mintcast.org and GrouchyM on Discord and Telegram
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show. Buy me a coffee!

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 Discord 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!>

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit.

The News

• OpenSSH 8.7 Released with Experimental SFTP support for SCP
• Firefox 91 and first point release out
• Thunderbird 91 out
• ElementaryOS 6, Odin, out
• Debian 11 out
• Manjaro 21.1 Pahvo , Zorin OS 16 and Slackware 15 RC1 out
• AV1 Support Headed for Linux

Security Update

• Valve fixes a bug that would allow unlimited funds

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

• Joe
• Leo

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on Sunday September 5, 2021
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream –  2 pm US Central time on August 28, 2021
• Get the live stream converted to your time zone

Wrap-up

• Joe – www.Tllts.org, www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org
• Bo – Crowbar Kernel Panic, crowbarkernelpanic@pm.me
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites, Crowbar Kernel Panic
• Mike – Mike@mintcast.org and GrouchyM on Discord and Telegram
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show. Buy me a coffee!

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 Discord 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!>

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit.

Linux Innards

• Leo
• Joe
• Tony
  • Moss Bliss

Vibrations from the Ether

• Brad A.
• Liz T.
  • https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Multihead#VGA1_left_of_HDMI1_at_their_preferred_resolutions

Check This Out

• JingPad A1 Review by LearnLinuxTV (thanks Londoner)
• Remove Image Background

Announcements

• Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on August 22nd, 2021
• Get mintCast converted to your time zone
• Next Live Stream –  2 pm US Central time on August 28, 2021

Wrap-up

• Joe – www.Tllts.org, www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org
• Bo – Crowbar Kernel Panic, crowbarkernelpanic@pm.me
• Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites, Crowbar Kernel Panic
• Mike – Mike@mintcast.org and GrouchyM on Discord and Telegram
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show. Buy me a coffee!

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 Discord 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!>

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

• Mike
  • Finished reading 2 Mitnick books recently (Ghost in the Wires and The Art of Invisibility)
  • Bought a new guitar (Fender Newporter Special)

• Leo
  • Path of Exile runs 95% as good as Windows via Proton Experimental
  • Played with Trinity Desktop Environment for a month

• Joe
  • It has been cold in Texas which tends to slow me down because it hurts.
  • I did get a new 8 Tb hard drive for my server.  Transferred all the data from my 2 Tb onto it but I still need to swap it into the PC instead of the external enclosure.  Then I will be changing the name to match the 2 Tb drive and after I restart it should work fine with my Plex auto detecting.
  • Picked up 5 Raspberry Pi Picos for future projects but I have not found the right project for me yet
    1. Plus as of yet you can use Thonny which gives you an environment for micropython but I am waiting for arduino to get their UI up and running for it which they say they are doing so that I can more easily use c/c++ and more easily convert some of the pro micro code over.
    2. This will make things easier to build a usb controller although I think I will try  a few other projects first
  • I have spent a lot of time cooking and looking up recipes.  Mostly cause if I’m cooking in the kitchen that means that it is warm in the kitchen
    1. Got an air fryer / toaster oven combo that I have been using quite a bit to make healthier fish and chips.  
    2. Also made another batch of protein bars.  This time it was the caramel chocolate version instead of the Skor bar.  It does not firm up as much as I would like in the freezer but is still very tasty and the silicone dish that I used was very helpful as was adding a bit of nonstick to the wax paper.
    3. The burrito skillet was a big hit and I am looking for other recipes to add to my favorites list
  • Work was a little rough here in Texas with the record cold and snowfall
    1. For most places the cold and the snow that we got would not be a problem.  But because this area never gets that we are not prepared for such a thing.  We don’t have snow plows and salt on standby so things got a little crazy here
    2. Millions of people without power for extended periods of time.  Schools closed even though the majority of students are SFH right now anyway.  Road and business closures
    3. I was lucky in that my power was very stable at my house.  Because of this I also ended up working a lot more because most of my team was unavailable.  Lots of 14 hour days and lots of getting called back into work after hours because everyone else had lost connection
    4. While this was going on I also had a water pipe burst due to freezing.  It was fun.  The pipe actually burst in 2 places so the first fix didn’t work.  Thankfully I was able to get a plumber out pretty quick to get the work done.  Which is surprising considering how many people had the same problem including the local post office.
    5. The drain for the washing machine is also frozen so I will not be able to run clothes for a few days and I will need to remember how to do drywall soon after I am satisfied that the wall is dry
  • Been playing a lot of Borderlands 3 to pass the cold Texas days.  I am still liking it.  Also playing some Victor Vran on occasion.  
    1. Someone on Telegram mentioned that a redone version of Diablo 2 is supposed to be coming out.  I have to wonder if it will be playable on linux.  I know that you can easily get the old one to play on linux but Blizzard and Steam don’t have any kind of deal and probably never will.

• Moss
  • There are updates taking OpenMandriva Lx to version 4.2. If you run them as upgrades and don’t read the blog posts first, you will have issues. I’ll talk more about that in Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 020, which we should be recording this week. I have a clean install on the FuzZ400 but have issues with the upgrade on my Kudu, all reported to the OMA Forum.  Distrohoppers’ Digest will also feature a brand new segment, Beautiful Failures. We will talk about the distros we *almost* got to review and what happened. Our most-downloaded episode, 018, has stalled out just below 700 downloads.
  • Listener Dylan Burger has been added to the growing team at It’s MOSS, and added a new feature: Distro Madness 2021. This features head-to-head choices between distros, with a winner emerging. We haven’t had many visitors to the site on a daily basis, so Dylan came up with this idea. The first round of voting is nearly over, so get your votes in now. We intend to have the voting for each round end on the Friday following each whole-numbered episode of mintCast.
  • I have a new sponsor on Sponsus. Every little bit helps, and I am grateful for the support.
  • My other project, All Women Housed, is taking some big steps forward. We are currently in the “almost” phase: almost on the shelves in two southern California grocery chains and in negotiations with a monster chain in Florida most of you have heard of. We have almost completed negotiations for online sales of produce and other products as well. I should have something to actually announce by next episode, don’t wanna jinx it. 
  • My mother’s estate should be settled in 60 days or less, and that will help a lot. She will finally be laid to rest on Friday, February 26th.
  • My wife wants a new computer and wants to learn computer art. I had my eye on a 12-core HP Z800 Workstation for her, but Leo convinced me the 8-core would be a better deal and it’s cheaper. I’ll get that when I get my income taxes back if it’s still there. 
  • We are now reading Book 10 of Dresden Files, Small Favor.

• Tony Hughes
  • Same old same old here in the UK, still in Lock Down so not able to go anywhere so our Valentines meal was a delivery chinese. On a good note I had my first Covid Jab yesterday (Saturday 20th Feb) so I’m halfway to being a little safer.  
  • I have been doing lots of walking during lock down to keep fit and for the last week or so I’m starting to get some distance in with 5 miles a day the last 4 days.
  • Nothing much Linux wise although I did install EndeavourOS to one of my laptops, my remaining Toshiba Z30, I’ve just sold the other one with Windows 10 installed, I had been asked to do a dual boot with Mint, but Windows took over the boot process and I could not get it to boot into the boot selector or bios so that was a no go. Although since then, the guys gave me a way to get to the boot menu by crashing windows several times to confuse it, for future reference if it ever happens again.

• Josh
  • Crowbar Kernel Panic the new official unofficial Linux Mint gaming podcast with hosts Bo and Me (Josh). This mintCast spinoff will dive into the nitty gritty of gaming on Linux. We will test games and launchers to see just how good gaming on Linux has become. 
  • SNOW! No seriously too much snow please stop…
  • Other than snow in my life I have actually switched fully over to Debian as my main server distro of choice. There are a few reasons for this. 

1. It’s not controlled by one entity.
2. It’s extremely static.
3. It’s super flexible with iso’s that even include proprietary firmware.
4. The installer is BETTER than Ubuntu.

• I have also set up a Matrix-synapse with Debian on the backend all running on Linode. I cannot say enough good things about Linode, they are great. [Moss: And if you sign up with Linode and use the code “mintcast”, you will get exactly zero added benefits!]
• My dad finally upgraded his TV woot! He got a 65” LG NANO90 4K TV and it’s so beautiful with some tweaking possibly by the user and possibly by AI. There are some caveats to having a 4K TV that I didn’t even know about till now.

1. On default settings right out of the box the picture quality on 1080p or lower is really really bad.
2. Netflix price gouging.
3. webOS kinda sucks compared to Roku’s UI.
4. Not all 4k or 1080p content is the same even on HD broadcast TV.

• Last but not least, I am turning LMDE4 into a rolling release.

THE NEWS:

• Visual Studio Code comes to Raspberry Pi  – Big flap in the Raspberry Pi Linux community over the fact there is a Microsoft PPA in the new Raspberry Pi OS. Jeff Geerling gives a balanced view in this YouTube video – Is Microsoft Spying on your Raspberry Pi?
• The Microsoft, Azure, Ubuntu Privacy Issue
• The Mars lander helicopter, named Ingenuity, is powered by Linux!
• VLC is going to the Moon! As part of it’s 20th anniversary VLC will send a time capsule shaped like a traffic cone to the moon. The time capsule will be filled with 1TB MicroSD cards containing user videos and classic films – [Moss: They’re just trying to reserve a parking space.]
• The 2020 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards voting is over. We did great! There was a 3-way tie for Best Linux/OpenSource Podcast. The winners – Bad Voltage, GNU World Order, and Command Line Heroes – had 14 votes each, 4th place had FLOSS Weekly tied with Late Nite Linux with 10 votes each, and mintCast was alone in 6th place with 9 votes. Linux Action News had 8, and then Ubuntu Podcast with 6. There were 21 podcasts nominated. mintCast has done better each of the past 3 years, starting in the middle of the pack.
• Pine64 has chosen Manjaro ARM + KDE Plasma UI for future PinePhones. Of course, you are welcome to install whatever you would like, but this is the new default.
• Linus releases Linux kernel 5.11. Non LTS kernel, first release of 2021. Support for Wifi 6 added, new HWE for Intel and AMD, and Syscall User Dispatch for running modern Windows games with Proton or Wine.
• System76 Making an Open Source Keyboard

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• Patch your stuff!
• Brave Leaks DNS!

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on March 7, 2021.

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, other blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, moss@mintcast.org, @zaivala@hostux.social on Mastodon, zaivalananda@protonmail.ch for quick response, Sponsus! 
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com 
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites.
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News. Buy me a coffee!

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!>

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

• Mike
  • Finished reading 2 Mitnick books recently (Ghost in the Wires and The Art of Invisibility)
  • Bought a new guitar (Fender Newporter Special)

• Leo
  • Path of Exile runs 95% as good as Windows via Proton Experimental
  • Played with Trinity Desktop Environment for a month

• Joe
  • It has been cold in Texas which tends to slow me down because it hurts.
  • I did get a new 8 Tb hard drive for my server.  Transferred all the data from my 2 Tb onto it but I still need to swap it into the PC instead of the external enclosure.  Then I will be changing the name to match the 2 Tb drive and after I restart it should work fine with my Plex auto detecting.
  • Picked up 5 Raspberry Pi Picos for future projects but I have not found the right project for me yet
    1. Plus as of yet you can use Thonny which gives you an environment for micropython but I am waiting for arduino to get their UI up and running for it which they say they are doing so that I can more easily use c/c++ and more easily convert some of the pro micro code over.
    2. This will make things easier to build a usb controller although I think I will try  a few other projects first
  • I have spent a lot of time cooking and looking up recipes.  Mostly cause if I’m cooking in the kitchen that means that it is warm in the kitchen
    1. Got an air fryer / toaster oven combo that I have been using quite a bit to make healthier fish and chips.  
    2. Also made another batch of protein bars.  This time it was the caramel chocolate version instead of the Skor bar.  It does not firm up as much as I would like in the freezer but is still very tasty and the silicone dish that I used was very helpful as was adding a bit of nonstick to the wax paper.
    3. The burrito skillet was a big hit and I am looking for other recipes to add to my favorites list
  • Work was a little rough here in Texas with the record cold and snowfall
    1. For most places the cold and the snow that we got would not be a problem.  But because this area never gets that we are not prepared for such a thing.  We don’t have snow plows and salt on standby so things got a little crazy here
    2. Millions of people without power for extended periods of time.  Schools closed even though the majority of students are SFH right now anyway.  Road and business closures
    3. I was lucky in that my power was very stable at my house.  Because of this I also ended up working a lot more because most of my team was unavailable.  Lots of 14 hour days and lots of getting called back into work after hours because everyone else had lost connection
    4. While this was going on I also had a water pipe burst due to freezing.  It was fun.  The pipe actually burst in 2 places so the first fix didn’t work.  Thankfully I was able to get a plumber out pretty quick to get the work done.  Which is surprising considering how many people had the same problem including the local post office.
    5. The drain for the washing machine is also frozen so I will not be able to run clothes for a few days and I will need to remember how to do drywall soon after I am satisfied that the wall is dry
  • Been playing a lot of Borderlands 3 to pass the cold Texas days.  I am still liking it.  Also playing some Victor Vran on occasion.  
    1. Someone on Telegram mentioned that a redone version of Diablo 2 is supposed to be coming out.  I have to wonder if it will be playable on linux.  I know that you can easily get the old one to play on linux but Blizzard and Steam don’t have any kind of deal and probably never will.

• Moss
  • There are updates taking OpenMandriva Lx to version 4.2. If you run them as upgrades and don’t read the blog posts first, you will have issues. I’ll talk more about that in Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 020, which we should be recording this week. I have a clean install on the FuzZ400 but have issues with the upgrade on my Kudu, all reported to the OMA Forum.  Distrohoppers’ Digest will also feature a brand new segment, Beautiful Failures. We will talk about the distros we *almost* got to review and what happened. Our most-downloaded episode, 018, has stalled out just below 700 downloads.
  • Listener Dylan Burger has been added to the growing team at It’s MOSS, and added a new feature: Distro Madness 2021. This features head-to-head choices between distros, with a winner emerging. We haven’t had many visitors to the site on a daily basis, so Dylan came up with this idea. The first round of voting is nearly over, so get your votes in now. We intend to have the voting for each round end on the Friday following each whole-numbered episode of mintCast.
  • I have a new sponsor on Sponsus. Every little bit helps, and I am grateful for the support.
  • My other project, All Women Housed, is taking some big steps forward. We are currently in the “almost” phase: almost on the shelves in two southern California grocery chains and in negotiations with a monster chain in Florida most of you have heard of. We have almost completed negotiations for online sales of produce and other products as well. I should have something to actually announce by next episode, don’t wanna jinx it. 
  • My mother’s estate should be settled in 60 days or less, and that will help a lot. She will finally be laid to rest on Friday, February 26th.
  • My wife wants a new computer and wants to learn computer art. I had my eye on a 12-core HP Z800 Workstation for her, but Leo convinced me the 8-core would be a better deal and it’s cheaper. I’ll get that when I get my income taxes back if it’s still there. 
  • We are now reading Book 10 of Dresden Files, Small Favor.

• Tony Hughes
  • Same old same old here in the UK, still in Lock Down so not able to go anywhere so our Valentines meal was a delivery chinese. On a good note I had my first Covid Jab yesterday (Saturday 20th Feb) so I’m halfway to being a little safer.  
  • I have been doing lots of walking during lock down to keep fit and for the last week or so I’m starting to get some distance in with 5 miles a day the last 4 days.
  • Nothing much Linux wise although I did install EndeavourOS to one of my laptops, my remaining Toshiba Z30, I’ve just sold the other one with Windows 10 installed, I had been asked to do a dual boot with Mint, but Windows took over the boot process and I could not get it to boot into the boot selector or bios so that was a no go. Although since then, the guys gave me a way to get to the boot menu by crashing windows several times to confuse it, for future reference if it ever happens again.

• Josh
  • Crowbar Kernel Panic the new official unofficial Linux Mint gaming podcast with hosts Bo and Me (Josh). This mintCast spinoff will dive into the nitty gritty of gaming on Linux. We will test games and launchers to see just how good gaming on Linux has become. 
  • SNOW! No seriously too much snow please stop…
  • Other than snow in my life I have actually switched fully over to Debian as my main server distro of choice. There are a few reasons for this. 

1. It’s not controlled by one entity.
2. It’s extremely static.
3. It’s super flexible with iso’s that even include proprietary firmware.
4. The installer is BETTER than Ubuntu.

• I have also set up a Matrix-synapse with Debian on the backend all running on Linode. I cannot say enough good things about Linode, they are great. [Moss: And if you sign up with Linode and use the code “mintcast”, you will get exactly zero added benefits!]
• My dad finally upgraded his TV woot! He got a 65” LG NANO90 4K TV and it’s so beautiful with some tweaking possibly by the user and possibly by AI. There are some caveats to having a 4K TV that I didn’t even know about till now.

1. On default settings right out of the box the picture quality on 1080p or lower is really really bad.
2. Netflix price gouging.
3. webOS kinda sucks compared to Roku’s UI.
4. Not all 4k or 1080p content is the same even on HD broadcast TV.

• Last but not least, I am turning LMDE4 into a rolling release.

THE NEWS:

• Visual Studio Code comes to Raspberry Pi  – Big flap in the Raspberry Pi Linux community over the fact there is a Microsoft PPA in the new Raspberry Pi OS. Jeff Geerling gives a balanced view in this YouTube video – Is Microsoft Spying on your Raspberry Pi?
• The Microsoft, Azure, Ubuntu Privacy Issue
• The Mars lander helicopter, named Ingenuity, is powered by Linux!
• VLC is going to the Moon! As part of it’s 20th anniversary VLC will send a time capsule shaped like a traffic cone to the moon. The time capsule will be filled with 1TB MicroSD cards containing user videos and classic films – [Moss: They’re just trying to reserve a parking space.]
• The 2020 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards voting is over. We did great! There was a 3-way tie for Best Linux/OpenSource Podcast. The winners – Bad Voltage, GNU World Order, and Command Line Heroes – had 14 votes each, 4th place had FLOSS Weekly tied with Late Nite Linux with 10 votes each, and mintCast was alone in 6th place with 9 votes. Linux Action News had 8, and then Ubuntu Podcast with 6. There were 21 podcasts nominated. mintCast has done better each of the past 3 years, starting in the middle of the pack.
• Pine64 has chosen Manjaro ARM + KDE Plasma UI for future PinePhones. Of course, you are welcome to install whatever you would like, but this is the new default.
• Linus releases Linux kernel 5.11. Non LTS kernel, first release of 2021. Support for Wifi 6 added, new HWE for Intel and AMD, and Syscall User Dispatch for running modern Windows games with Proton or Wine.
• System76 Making an Open Source Keyboard

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• Patch your stuff!
• Brave Leaks DNS!

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on March 7, 2021.

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, other blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, moss@mintcast.org, @zaivala@hostux.social on Mastodon, zaivalananda@protonmail.ch for quick response, Sponsus! 
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com 
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites.
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News. Buy me a coffee!

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!>

More Chromium Talk – Leo

• What do we use?
• Chromium-based? Firefox?
• The monoculture…

What’s My Distro? – Moss

As I was just pressed into service on this topic yesterday, some early bits of this article were borrowed from or inspired by the article, “What Does The Penguin Say?” on LinuxInsider.com,

So Windows gives you “Windows the Windows Way”, Mac gives you “Mac the Mac Way”, and Linux gives you… everything you ever dreamed of — or your worst nightmares — in a user salad of options.

Just look at the desktop paradigms.

• Does the desktop try to capture a “traditional” or revolutionary desktop interface paradigm?
• Does it favor sleekness or no-frills functionality?
• Do the developers strive for constant evolution or stability and consistency?
• Are windows, menus, and settings panels minimalist or information-dense?
• Should users accept the UI as it is, or make it their own?

As founder and co-host of Distrohoppers’ Digest, these and other issues come to the fore. 

• Which installer does it use, or do they write their own? 
  • Ubiquity – most Ubuntu, Mint
  • Calamares – other Ubuntu, Ubuntu forks, GeckoLinux, and others
  • Anaconda – Fedora
  • Debian-Installer
  • YaST

Now that Ubuntu is setting off writing an all-new installer, this issue is even more timely. How will it be better than Ubiquity? Anyone who has used Calamares has a few answers to that one. But can it be better than Calamares? What about flexibility? Some users of OpenSUSE claim their installer is better than Calamares because it has much more and better options, while others, like me, say those options are not the least understood by most users.

… or does the distro provide a pure image (.img) file, and you have to install GRUB or another bootloader yourself? (EasyOS)

• Which package manager do they use, or do they write their own?
  • APT with .deb packages (or .rpm packages, in PCLinuxOS)
  • Portage or Entropy
  • URPM, dnf
  • pacman, pamac
  • YUM
  • YaST, zypper
  • eopkg
  • .pup, .snf, you name it

I guess next would be to discuss families, which mostly boils down to:

• Debian Family
  • Ubuntu sub-family – probably 90-95% of all desktop Linux users
    • Ubuntu
    • Ubuntu wannabes, remixes, respins
    • Linux Mint
    • Indies (Peppermint, FerenOS, Zorin)
  • Independents
• Slackware Family
  • OpenSUSE variants
• Red Hat Family
  • Red Hat variants (Fedora, Scientific, CentOS, Rocky, Clear, Oracle)
  • Mandrake variants (PCLinuxOS, Mageia, OpenMandriva, Rosa)
• Arch Family (Endeavour, Manjaro)
• Gentoo Family (Sabayon, ChromeOS, Mocaccino, Calculate, Redcore)
• LFS and Homebrew Family (SolusOS, Clear Linux OS)

Then there is the topic of Desktop Environments. We’ve discussed this rather extensively in the past on this show. The major choices are:

• Gnome or variants, which includes Cinnamon and Budgie, as well as forks of earlier versions such as MATE
• KDE Plasma, or forks such as Trinity
• Enlightenment, or forks such as Moksha
• XFCE
• LXDE or LXQt
• Independents such as Deepin, Pantheon, and Lumina

So in terms of complete packages of distros, according to statistics seen by Martin Wimpress, mentioned by Martin Wimpress in the past year or so, but not referenced anywhere public, around 85% of all Linux Desktop users run Ubuntu (Gnome), perhaps 5% run Ubuntu MATE, around 4-5% run Linux Mint, and that leaves 5-6% for everything else. What are the other “everything else”s that I would recommend for new users?

Everyone has an opinion. I’m running 9 different distros across 4 machines, with eight on one machine alone.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to just recommend the main version of Ubuntu or Linux Mint, and you’d be right to do so, but there are others I’d also recommend based on the machine and the user. Right now, my list would include UbuntuDDE Remix, Bodhi Linux, Lubuntu, PCLinuxOS, OpenMandriva, KDE neon, Zorin OS, FerenOS, and PeppermintOS. The first two are the most unusual and forward-looking, and the last three are the easiest to make them look or work the most like Windows 7 or 10. You are of course encouraged to try anything Official or unofficial Ubuntu, including Linux Mint and Pop!_OS. On that list, only OpenMandriva and PCLinuxOS are not Ubuntu-based, and what is missing from that list includes Fedora or OpenSUSE or Arch-based distros.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

• Erik Lietz
• Henrik Hemrin
  • wget -O – https://raw.githubusercontent.com/laurent22/joplin/dev/Joplin_install_and_update.sh | bash
  • See the start page for the Installation: https://joplinapp.org/
• John Wallis
  • postfix@-.service:
  • rc-local.service:
  • rescue.service:
  • rsync.service:
  • rsyslog.service:
• Leo’s Response
  • Add the, for example “cramfs”, to this file -> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

CHECK THIS OUT!

• Leo
  • Via Whosy – Ruffle – Rust Flash player 
• Moss
  • Raspberry Pi respin of MX Linux is now in beta, you need to grab a copy of their app “Imager” to install it.
  • Most anticipated distros of 2021 – I don’t know about them, but I’m waiting for Bodhi 6 still and also Slackware 15

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

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

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, other blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, moss@mintcast.org, @zaivala@hostux.social on Mastodon, zaivalananda@protonmail.ch for quick response, Sponsus! 
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com 
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites.
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News. Buy me a coffee!

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!>

More Chromium Talk – Leo

• What do we use?
• Chromium-based? Firefox?
• The monoculture…

What’s My Distro? – Moss

As I was just pressed into service on this topic yesterday, some early bits of this article were borrowed from or inspired by the article, “What Does The Penguin Say?” on LinuxInsider.com,

So Windows gives you “Windows the Windows Way”, Mac gives you “Mac the Mac Way”, and Linux gives you… everything you ever dreamed of — or your worst nightmares — in a user salad of options.

Just look at the desktop paradigms.

• Does the desktop try to capture a “traditional” or revolutionary desktop interface paradigm?
• Does it favor sleekness or no-frills functionality?
• Do the developers strive for constant evolution or stability and consistency?
• Are windows, menus, and settings panels minimalist or information-dense?
• Should users accept the UI as it is, or make it their own?

As founder and co-host of Distrohoppers’ Digest, these and other issues come to the fore. 

• Which installer does it use, or do they write their own? 
  • Ubiquity – most Ubuntu, Mint
  • Calamares – other Ubuntu, Ubuntu forks, GeckoLinux, and others
  • Anaconda – Fedora
  • Debian-Installer
  • YaST

Now that Ubuntu is setting off writing an all-new installer, this issue is even more timely. How will it be better than Ubiquity? Anyone who has used Calamares has a few answers to that one. But can it be better than Calamares? What about flexibility? Some users of OpenSUSE claim their installer is better than Calamares because it has much more and better options, while others, like me, say those options are not the least understood by most users.

… or does the distro provide a pure image (.img) file, and you have to install GRUB or another bootloader yourself? (EasyOS)

• Which package manager do they use, or do they write their own?
  • APT with .deb packages (or .rpm packages, in PCLinuxOS)
  • Portage or Entropy
  • URPM, dnf
  • pacman, pamac
  • YUM
  • YaST, zypper
  • eopkg
  • .pup, .snf, you name it

I guess next would be to discuss families, which mostly boils down to:

• Debian Family
  • Ubuntu sub-family – probably 90-95% of all desktop Linux users
    • Ubuntu
    • Ubuntu wannabes, remixes, respins
    • Linux Mint
    • Indies (Peppermint, FerenOS, Zorin)
  • Independents
• Slackware Family
  • OpenSUSE variants
• Red Hat Family
  • Red Hat variants (Fedora, Scientific, CentOS, Rocky, Clear, Oracle)
  • Mandrake variants (PCLinuxOS, Mageia, OpenMandriva, Rosa)
• Arch Family (Endeavour, Manjaro)
• Gentoo Family (Sabayon, ChromeOS, Mocaccino, Calculate, Redcore)
• LFS and Homebrew Family (SolusOS, Clear Linux OS)

Then there is the topic of Desktop Environments. We’ve discussed this rather extensively in the past on this show. The major choices are:

• Gnome or variants, which includes Cinnamon and Budgie, as well as forks of earlier versions such as MATE
• KDE Plasma, or forks such as Trinity
• Enlightenment, or forks such as Moksha
• XFCE
• LXDE or LXQt
• Independents such as Deepin, Pantheon, and Lumina

So in terms of complete packages of distros, according to statistics seen by Martin Wimpress, mentioned by Martin Wimpress in the past year or so, but not referenced anywhere public, around 85% of all Linux Desktop users run Ubuntu (Gnome), perhaps 5% run Ubuntu MATE, around 4-5% run Linux Mint, and that leaves 5-6% for everything else. What are the other “everything else”s that I would recommend for new users?

Everyone has an opinion. I’m running 9 different distros across 4 machines, with eight on one machine alone.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to just recommend the main version of Ubuntu or Linux Mint, and you’d be right to do so, but there are others I’d also recommend based on the machine and the user. Right now, my list would include UbuntuDDE Remix, Bodhi Linux, Lubuntu, PCLinuxOS, OpenMandriva, KDE neon, Zorin OS, FerenOS, and PeppermintOS. The first two are the most unusual and forward-looking, and the last three are the easiest to make them look or work the most like Windows 7 or 10. You are of course encouraged to try anything Official or unofficial Ubuntu, including Linux Mint and Pop!_OS. On that list, only OpenMandriva and PCLinuxOS are not Ubuntu-based, and what is missing from that list includes Fedora or OpenSUSE or Arch-based distros.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

• Erik Lietz
• Henrik Hemrin
  • wget -O – https://raw.githubusercontent.com/laurent22/joplin/dev/Joplin_install_and_update.sh | bash
  • See the start page for the Installation: https://joplinapp.org/
• John Wallis
  • postfix@-.service:
  • rc-local.service:
  • rescue.service:
  • rsync.service:
  • rsyslog.service:
• Leo’s Response
  • Add the, for example “cramfs”, to this file -> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

CHECK THIS OUT!

• Leo
  • Via Whosy – Ruffle – Rust Flash player 
• Moss
  • Raspberry Pi respin of MX Linux is now in beta, you need to grab a copy of their app “Imager” to install it.
  • Most anticipated distros of 2021 – I don’t know about them, but I’m waiting for Bodhi 6 still and also Slackware 15

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

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

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

• Joe – www.Tllts.org,  www.linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – YouTube Undercast Collective
• Moss – It’s MOSS, MeWe, other blogs, music on Bandcamp and on various YouTube channels, moss@mintcast.org, @zaivala@hostux.social on Mastodon, zaivalananda@protonmail.ch for quick response, Sponsus! 
• Tony Hughes – HPR –  http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338, Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/, Twitter @TonyH1212, th@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com 
• Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band)
• Josh Hawk – joshontech@mintcast.org, @joshontech on Twitter and most other social sites.
• Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, leo@mintcast.org, linuxuserspace.show and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News. Buy me a coffee!

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!>

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

• Leo
  • Having second thoughts about Kubuntu 20.10
  • Doubling down on Brave browser.
    • Found out it is the first to support IPFS
    • Looking at becoming a Brave Creator. This allows me to generate tips in the BAT currency from Brave users.
  • Took a leap of faith and installed the Flatpak PPA to get the latest flatpak so I could test out Chromium which requires 1.8.5 or above. Everything seems to be working. A little apprehensive because mumble is flatpak, and it’s what I use for the YouTube stream audio.

• Joe
  • Ordered some new parts for the Samsung Galaxy S3 Watch so that I could fix the small issues with it because I saw a really good price for a set of parts that would do the job.
    • It works well and the rest of the parts make for almost a whole watch.  I may purchase another battery and put it all together to have another mostly working watch.
    • This new motherboard is actually a cellular version but because of the limitations of the eSIM that is included on the board I cannot get it to work with TMobile.  This is not a big deal for me because I would not use it as a phone anyway it was just something cool to contemplate
  • Also purchased some more neckband headphones to work on since I have not done so in a while. I know that I have 19 or so working headphones but I found some that have active noise cancelling that are not in the LG line that I would like to work on and see if I can do some of the same fixes to that I normally do with the LG’s. So it is the Anker Soundcores that I will be working on and adding the MMCX connections to.  They are also supposed to have a better battery life but it looks like they will be a lot more of a pain to take apart and put back together since I think that it is all glued.  So keeping the parts in usable physical condition may be difficult.  I may also have to look into replacement batteries as I do not know what is wrong with them.
    • The 5 headphones arrived and I have started working on them.  2 of the headsets have bad batteries.  So with the Anker phones that had the bad battery I started taking that apart first as I knew that there would be a learning curve in figuring out how to take the device apart
    • I did get it apart and figure out the best way to do it with minimal breakage but let’s just say that I don’t recommend it for modding purposes or repairability
  • Had some fun with the rename utility.  Bulk renaming of files was super easy and saved me a lot of time.  Wouldn’t mind doing a show on that and SED. 
    • rename ‘s/old-name/new-name/g’ files
    • But i have been told that it is way too nerdy
  • Picked up a fridge for free.  My wife found it on FB and it is a very nice fridge.  Granted it did cost me some money to rent the truck to move it but it was still a lot less than a new fridge (which I was planning on buying my wife this year)  The people that had it were moving and needed it gone as soon as possible.  It is probably the nicest side by side that I have ever owned. I can’t complain, it works and it looks awesome.
    • The only thing is, I was the only person moving the thing and I am super lucky that I did not hurt myself.  The thing was heavy.
  • Because of changes in my insurance, the copay for prescriptions has gone up a lot.  To the point that I don’t know how much money I am going to be able to put towards projects this year.  All this means is that I will be forced to go through my backlog of old projects or almost-projects and get it all up to date.  Maybe do a little bit with software again.
  • My Eldest Child turned 18 this week.  That is weird.  
  • On my VM download server I was still having problems with transmission-rss so I attempted to downgrade the Ruby version so that it would work properly again.  This did not work well.  I made several attempts to downgrade and all failed miserably.
    • Then I realized that the reason I was using transmission-rss initially was because that was available in a docker
    • So I shut down the transmission setup and moved everything over to qbittorrent which allowed me to re-setup all my former automation so that the files automatically go where I want them.  I do like the UI for qbittorrent and it is working well.
    • The rules that you can set up for automatic downloads and for after download moves was perfect for how I had things set up before.

• Moss
  • Joshua Hawk sent me a laptop, a Dell Inspiron 7353 2-in-1 with touchscreen. He had installed Fedora on it, which I soon destroyed, and I’ve run a carousel of distros on it, to Pop!_OS, Bodhi 5.1, back to Fedora, and back to Bodhi. There are interesting touchpad issues: in Fedora, the touchpad right-click sends a left-click (it works fine Bodhi), and in Bodhi it does not load the screen keyboard. This is a great addition to my collection, and as it only has a 128 Gb SSD and a lot of screws keeping me from being brave enough to replace the SSD, this will be my machine to test distros for Distrohoppers’ Digest for the foreseeable future.
  • Speaking of Distrohoppers’ Digest, Episode 19 is out. Episodes 15 through 18 are also in the top 5 of our download numbers. For Episode 19 we actually have Dale in the header and footer readings. We had a great time, I get the idea we could banter a bit more but we’re still getting our team-feet under.
  • My Sponsus account now has 3 monthly sponsors and has also taken in a nice donation. You can hear them named at the end of the current episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
  • My recording and work space is in flux right now. There really was a short on the sound card in the Mini, and contacting that is what blew the power supply a few months ago. It’s not catastrophic but not something I want to have on a system I’m doing sound recording on, and I’ll be moving that along to someone who needs it. Dale has sent me an AMD sound card, which will replace the FX 1800 Nvidia card in the FuzZ400, which will take over as my main machine. Right now I’m recording on my Kudu laptop, still the most powerful machine I have. 
  • School is in and out, depending on the week and the school. I worked 4 days in the last two weeks and got paid for a 5th when they forgot to cancel an assignment.
  • My other business is poised to take off, and we plan to sell a lot of common products and donate 80% of our profits to projects providing housing funds and services to homeless people in America.  I’ll post the link when we are actually doing business.
  • My teeth are not working yet, and I have an appointment for a refitting this week.
  • We are more than halfway through White Night, the 9th book in the Dresden Files series. 
  • I have also been reading Grail and Cosmos: Arthurian Explorations by Alby Stone. Portions of this book were previously published by my friend Bob Trubshaw of Heart of Albion Press. Everything Bob publishes is worth reading if you’re interested in the roots of folklore, and much of it is available as free downloads from his website.
  • My mother has passed, of covid pneumonia which she caught in the rehab facility. She was 91. I miss her. When I come home after having something happen at work I want to talk to her about, I reach for the phone… and remember I can’t call.

• Tony H
  • So as Moss has said, this week we recorded the latest Distrohoppers Digest which I published on Saturday 23rd after doing the edit, including our new intro with Dale as part of the team. Great show if I do say so myself although we continue to strive to get better. 
  • Mint 20.1 is firmly established on my Laptop although I continue with 19.3 as my main driver on the i7 HP Tower which is my main production PC, at some stage I will get around to upgrading although at the moment as I have the IcyDock on this PC I can boot into a Mint 20 install whenever I want to.
  • I have bought some small storage racks with 32 boxes for putting in spares and components for the diecast models I restore, and I have been busy filling them up and labeling them. With the result my workshop is tidier, I can actually find things.
  • On the home front the Covid situation continues to get worse and by the time you hear this we will have passed 100K deaths for C19 here in the UK. It may mean we have even stricter restrictions before this is all over, The Netherlands have just introduced a curfew from 21.00 to 04.30 to try and stop some of the abuses of the current regulations restricting large gatherings indoors. 

• Josh
  • Arch is still working. Now it’s not. I tried to install Linux Mint as a dual boot with arch and quickly found out that was a mistake. I first noticed a problem when I did not see arch as a boot option after hitting f12. When Mint’s grub booted arch was there as an option but when clicking it nothing happens just a black screen forever. I rebooted and then booted into mint and that worked fine. I checked my install of arch and everything looked to be in place; it just won’t boot. Anyways long story short I wiped mint and installed openSUSE tumbleweed cause I wanted to and I am just waiting for a good chunk of time again to try and fix or possibly reinstall my arch install.m
  • Been playing a lot of games while I can before school starts next week and I won’t have much time for them. I won’t go into detail but finally after 7 years I finally got around to beating Dragon Age Inquisition. It was a great story line and I can’t wait for the next chapter in that saga. I have also been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance as well and I have mentioned it before it’s one of my favorite RPG’s and I cannot recommend it enough.
  • Also getting ready for school which starts this week. I am taking a networking class. It’s technically the continuation of another networking class I took 3 semesters ago or so I am hoping it all comes back to me. 
  • I got a new mouse! I had my RedDragon M901 for over 5 years now and I loved that thing but the left mouse click was starting to get a little wonky. I tried to get another RedDragon mouse, the M913 but when I received it the left click was sticking to the point you couldn’t tell when you clicked. I returned that and decided to splurge a little and after a lot more research settled on the Corsair Scimitar Elite. All of the mice I have been talking about have had 12 side buttons but the Scimitar was the first I could set macros on and boy has it changed my gaming experience. Unfortunately there is no way to set the macros and all without windows but there are 3 profiles that save right to the mouse itself so once set you can change between them no matter what OS you’re running.

• Bo
  • Whelp, I got COVID.
  • Raspberry Pi Webcam – https://youtu.be/8fcbP7lEdzY
    • https://thepihut.com/products/mounting-plate-for-high-quality-camera
    • https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera-lens
    • https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-camera-adapter
    • https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera/
    • https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/
    • https://github.com/geerlingguy/pi-webcam
  • A Steam Link Raspberry Pi 4 – https://youtu.be/6WRLlAkTbBY

THE NEWS:

• Tony – The new Raspberry Pi Pico has been launched, this is a $4 microcontroller from the Pi Foundation  
• Someone just ported Android 10 to RISC-V architecture 
• Ubuntu Booting on M1 Mac
  • Asahi Linux will benefit. Their target now is GPU reverse engineering. Specifically this is the work of Alyssa Rosenzweig whose done a lot of work on the Panfrost driver for Mali and Bifrost GPUs
  • The progress is… drawing a triangle on the screen. While it seems small, the impact of this is huge. It was done with all original, open source, code and signifies a big step forward for the platform.
• Flatpak 1.10.0 is released 
  • Downloading the app lists will become much faster
  • The change is helped in big part by not downloading everything, but simply downloading what’s available only for your architecture. In the test Alexander shows in his blog, this resulted in a reduction by almost 2/3
• Ubuntu Making Home Folders Private in 21.04
• Project Lenix from CloudLinux Gets a Name
  • AlmaLinux
• Free RHEL up to 16 licenses per account…
• Valve Will Continue Their Linux Investment
  • Linux – We’re continuing to invest in technology that improves game compatibility and performance through Steam Play. We’re also putting together new ways for prospective users to get into Linux gaming and experience these improvements.
• Chrome Cutting off API Access to Everyone but Themselves. Sync No Longer Available.
  • Fedora mulling over dropping Chromium altogether.

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• IPFS (Interplanetary File System)
  • Originally created back in 2015
  • The purpose is, like Bittorrent, to make file storage distributed to increase the resilience of the web by allowing people that opt into IPFS to store little bits of data they’ve seen to then share it to someone else geographically close to them to make it so that even if the main website goes down, the content can still be accessed.
  • To become one of the IPFS content sharers, enable the Local Node option
  • To simply make use of IPFS, just enable IPFS and ensure you’re using a third-party gateway.
  • The way I see it, Google’s AMP is the main competitor.
• Brave is the first browser to support it
  • It’s as simple as turning a toggle on in Settings.
  • You can easily choose to be a node the first time you access IPFS content. It’s a simple yes or no.
    • Brave asks if you want to enable the IPFS local daemon.

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

• Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on February 7, 2021. 
• Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

• Leo
  • Having second thoughts about Kubuntu 20.10
  • Doubling down on Brave browser.
    • Found out it is the first to support IPFS
    • Looking at becoming a Brave Creator. This allows me to generate tips in the BAT currency from Brave users.
  • Took a leap of faith and installed the Flatpak PPA to get the latest flatpak so I could test out Chromium which requires 1.8.5 or above. Everything seems to be working. A little apprehensive because mumble is flatpak, and it’s what I use for the YouTube stream audio.

• Joe
  • Ordered some new parts for the Samsung Galaxy S3 Watch so that I could fix the small issues with it because I saw a really good price for a set of parts that would do the job.
    • It works well and the rest of the parts make for almost a whole watch.  I may purchase another battery and put it all together to have another mostly working watch.
    • This new motherboard is actually a cellular version but because of the limitations of the eSIM that is included on the board I cannot get it to work with TMobile.  This is not a big deal for me because I would not use it as a phone anyway it was just something cool to contemplate
  • Also purchased some more neckband headphones to work on since I have not done so in a while. I know that I have 19 or so working headphones but I found some that have active noise cancelling that are not in the LG line that I would like to work on and see if I can do some of the same fixes to that I normally do with the LG’s. So it is the Anker Soundcores that I will be working on and adding the MMCX connections to.  They are also supposed to have a better battery life but it looks like they will be a lot more of a pain to take apart and put back together since I think that it is all glued.  So keeping the parts in usable physical condition may be difficult.  I may also have to look into replacement batteries as I do not know what is wrong with them.
    • The 5 headphones arrived and I have started working on them.  2 of the headsets have bad batteries.  So with the Anker phones that had the bad battery I started taking that apart first as I knew that there would be a learning curve in figuring out how to take the device apart
    • I did get it apart and figure out the best way to do it with minimal breakage but let’s just say that I don’t recommend it for modding purposes or repairability
  • Had some fun with the rename utility.  Bulk renaming of files was super easy and saved me a lot of time.  Wouldn’t mind doing a show on that and SED. 
    • rename ‘s/old-name/new-name/g’ files
    • But i have been told that it is way too nerdy
  • Picked up a fridge for free.  My wife found it on FB and it is a very nice fridge.  Granted it did cost me some money to rent the truck to move it but it was still a lot less than a new fridge (which I was planning on buying my wife this year)  The people that had it were moving and needed it gone as soon as possible.  It is probably the nicest side by side that I have ever owned. I can’t complain, it works and it looks awesome.
    • The only thing is, I was the only person moving the thing and I am super lucky that I did not hurt myself.  The thing was heavy.
  • Because of changes in my insurance, the copay for prescriptions has gone up a lot.  To the point that I don’t know how much money I am going to be able to put towards projects this year.  All this means is that I will be forced to go through my backlog of old projects or almost-projects and get it all up to date.  Maybe do a little bit with software again.
  • My Eldest Child turned 18 this week.  That is weird.  
  • On my VM download server I was still having problems with transmission-rss so I attempted to downgrade the Ruby version so that it would work properly again.  This did not work well.  I made several attempts to downgrade and all failed miserably.
    • Then I realized that the reason I was using transmission-rss initially was because that was available in a docker
    • So I shut down the transmission setup and moved everything over to qbittorrent which allowed me to re-setup all my former automation so that the files automatically go where I want them.  I do like the UI for qbittorrent and it is working well.
    • The rules that you can set up for automatic downloads and for after download moves was perfect for how I had things set up before.

• Moss
  • Joshua Hawk sent me a laptop, a Dell Inspiron 7353 2-in-1 with touchscreen. He had installed Fedora on it, which I soon destroyed, and I’ve run a carousel of distros on it, to Pop!_OS, Bodhi 5.1, back to Fedora, and back to Bodhi. There are interesting touchpad issues: in Fedora, the touchpad right-click sends a left-click (it works fine Bodhi), and in Bodhi it does not load the screen keyboard. This is a great addition to my collection, and as it only has a 128 Gb SSD and a lot of screws keeping me from being brave enough to replace the SSD, this will be my machine to test distros for Distrohoppers’ Digest for the foreseeable future.
  • Speaking of Distrohoppers’ Digest, Episode 19 is out. Episodes 15 through 18 are also in the top 5 of our download numbers. For Episode 19 we actually have Dale in the header and footer readings. We had a great time, I get the idea we could banter a bit more but we’re still getting our team-feet under.
  • My Sponsus account now has 3 monthly sponsors and has also taken in a nice donation. You can hear them named at the end of the current episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
  • My recording and work space is in flux right now. There really was a short on the sound card in the Mini, and contacting that is what blew the power supply a few months ago. It’s not catastrophic but not something I want to have on a system I’m doing sound recording on, and I’ll be moving that along to someone who needs it. Dale has sent me an AMD sound card, which will replace the FX 1800 Nvidia card in the FuzZ400, which will take over as my main machine. Right now I’m recording on my Kudu laptop, still the most powerful machine I have. 
  • School is in and out, depending on the week and the school. I worked 4 days in the last two weeks and got paid for a 5th when they forgot to cancel an assignment.
  • My other business is poised to take off, and we plan to sell a lot of common products and donate 80% of our profits to projects providing housing funds and services to homeless people in America.  I’ll post the link when we are actually doing business.
  • My teeth are not working yet, and I have an appointment for a refitting this week.
  • We are more than halfway through White Night, the 9th book in the Dresden Files series. 
  • I have also been reading Grail and Cosmos: Arthurian Explorations by Alby Stone. Portions of this book were previously published by my friend Bob Trubshaw of Heart of Albion Press. Everything Bob publishes is worth reading if you’re interested in the roots of folklore, and much of it is available as free downloads from his website.
  • My mother has passed, of covid pneumonia which she caught in the rehab facility. She was 91. I miss her. When I come home after having something happen at work I want to talk to her about, I reach for the phone… and remember I can’t call.

• Tony H
  • So as Moss has said, this week we recorded the latest Distrohoppers Digest which I published on Saturday 23rd after doing the edit, including our new intro with Dale as part of the team. Great show if I do say so myself although we continue to strive to get better. 
  • Mint 20.1 is firmly established on my Laptop although I continue with 19.3 as my main driver on the i7 HP Tower which is my main production PC, at some stage I will get around to upgrading although at the moment as I have the IcyDock on this PC I can boot into a Mint 20 install whenever I want to.
  • I have bought some small storage racks with 32 boxes for putting in spares and components for the diecast models I restore, and I have been busy filling them up and labeling them. With the result my workshop is tidier, I can actually find things.
  • On the home front the Covid situation continues to get worse and by the time you hear this we will have passed 100K deaths for C19 here in the UK. It may mean we have even stricter restrictions before this is all over, The Netherlands have just introduced a curfew from 21.00 to 04.30 to try and stop some of the abuses of the current regulations restricting large gatherings indoors. 

• Josh
  • Arch is still working. Now it’s not. I tried to install Linux Mint as a dual boot with arch and quickly found out that was a mistake. I first noticed a problem when I did not see arch as a boot option after hitting f12. When Mint’s grub booted arch was there as an option but when clicking it nothing happens just a black screen forever. I rebooted and then booted into mint and that worked fine. I checked my install of arch and everything looked to be in place; it just won’t boot. Anyways long story short I wiped mint and installed openSUSE tumbleweed cause I wanted to and I am just waiting for a good chunk of time again to try and fix or possibly reinstall my arch install.m
  • Been playing a lot of games while I can before school starts next week and I won’t have much time for them. I won’t go into detail but finally after 7 years I finally got around to beating Dragon Age Inquisition. It was a great story line and I can’t wait for the next chapter in that saga. I have also been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance as well and I have mentioned it before it’s one of my favorite RPG’s and I cannot recommend it enough.
  • Also getting ready for school which starts this week. I am taking a networking class. It’s technically the continuation of another networking class I took 3 semesters ago or so I am hoping it all comes back to me. 
  • I got a new mouse! I had my RedDragon M901 for over 5 years now and I loved that thing but the left mouse click was starting to get a little wonky. I tried to get another RedDragon mouse, the M913 but when I received it the left click was sticking to the point you couldn’t tell when you clicked. I returned that and decided to splurge a little and after a lot more research settled on the Corsair Scimitar Elite. All of the mice I have been talking about have had 12 side buttons but the Scimitar was the first I could set macros on and boy has it changed my gaming experience. Unfortunately there is no way to set the macros and all without windows but there are 3 profiles that save right to the mouse itself so once set you can change between them no matter what OS you’re running.

• Bo
  • Whelp, I got COVID.
  • Raspberry Pi Webcam – https://youtu.be/8fcbP7lEdzY
    • https://thepihut.com/products/mounting-plate-for-high-quality-camera
    • https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera-lens
    • https://thepihut.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-camera-adapter
    • https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-high-quality-camera/
    • https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/raspberry-pi-zero-w/
    • https://github.com/geerlingguy/pi-webcam
  • A Steam Link Raspberry Pi 4 – https://youtu.be/6WRLlAkTbBY

THE NEWS:

• Tony – The new Raspberry Pi Pico has been launched, this is a $4 microcontroller from the Pi Foundation  
• Someone just ported Android 10 to RISC-V architecture 
• Ubuntu Booting on M1 Mac
  • Asahi Linux will benefit. Their target now is GPU reverse engineering. Specifically this is the work of Alyssa Rosenzweig whose done a lot of work on the Panfrost driver for Mali and Bifrost GPUs
  • The progress is… drawing a triangle on the screen. While it seems small, the impact of this is huge. It was done with all original, open source, code and signifies a big step forward for the platform.
• Flatpak 1.10.0 is released 
  • Downloading the app lists will become much faster
  • The change is helped in big part by not downloading everything, but simply downloading what’s available only for your architecture. In the test Alexander shows in his blog, this resulted in a reduction by almost 2/3
• Ubuntu Making Home Folders Private in 21.04
• Project Lenix from CloudLinux Gets a Name
  • AlmaLinux
• Free RHEL up to 16 licenses per account…
• Valve Will Continue Their Linux Investment
  • Linux – We’re continuing to invest in technology that improves game compatibility and performance through Steam Play. We’re also putting together new ways for prospective users to get into Linux gaming and experience these improvements.
• Chrome Cutting off API Access to Everyone but Themselves. Sync No Longer Available.
  • Fedora mulling over dropping Chromium altogether.

SECURITY UPDATE: 

• IPFS (Interplanetary File System)
  • Originally created back in 2015
  • The purpose is, like Bittorrent, to make file storage distributed to increase the resilience of the web by allowing people that opt into IPFS to store little bits of data they’ve seen to then share it to someone else geographically close to them to make it so that even if the main website goes down, the content can still be accessed.
  • To become one of the IPFS content sharers, enable the Local Node option
  • To simply make use of IPFS, just enable IPFS and ensure you’re using a third-party gateway.
  • The way I see it, Google’s AMP is the main competitor.
• Brave is the first browser to support it
  • It’s as simple as turning a toggle on in Settings.
  • You can easily choose to be a node the first time you access IPFS content. It’s a simple yes or no.
    • Brave asks if you want to enable the IPFS local daemon.

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

• Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on February 7, 2021. 
• Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • As promised, rebuilt my NAS during the holiday downtime
  • Traded the Pi 4 for the NAS for Nextcloud.
  • Nextcloud storage lives in BTRFS now!
  • Neal Gompa, of Fedora and openSUSE fame, advises a move to the HWE kernel for better btrfs support.
    • openSUSE Election Timeline
    • Neal’s Election info
  • My ESXi server bit the dust… sort of.
    • I was convinced an SSD had died, but it was the OS flash drive
    • Nuked the SSD for testing and realized it was fine…
• Joe
  • Enjoying time off with the kids. Still haven’t killed any of them yet so things must be going ok.
  • My doctor told me my cholesterol was high again so I need to come off the diet that I am on and try something else.  Going to try out calorie restriction and see if coach Greg knows what he is talking about.  High volume, low calorie dense foods, while maintaining a low caloric intake.  He has a new cookbook but I am not paying those prices for it.
  • At this point the PSP’s have paid for themselves including all the replacement parts.  Thanks listener Dustin I hope it is treating you well.
  • I was able to pick up a broken Samsung Gear S3 at a decent price and tried to get it to work.  I was able to get the battery to charge but I was not able to get it to turn on.  I was able to find a temporary replacement motherboard for it on eBay for 15 dollars without the pedometer or the heart rate monitor which will allow me to test the functionality of the screen and make sure that the problem is the motherboard and not the screen.  Either way I used the profit from the PSP’s to get and I have had fun trying out different things to get it working.  I will be keeping my eyes open on ebay for others that look promising.  I have plenty of replacement parts at this point if I can find one that has just a dead battery or a broken back screen.  But I want to get the test board first so that I can make sure I know what the issues are. I should mention that the item was water damaged and I went through the normal process to try and fix that (IPA and a toothbrush).
  • Lots of exercise while on vacation.  Have done a lot of bike riding and weight lifting.
  • Someone got me an Arcade 1Up machine.  The Space Invaders version.  Which is really cool.  It is an expensive gift to have come from someone not family.  Probably one of the cooler gifts that I have ever gotten.  Definitely going to be modding it after a whole lot of research. 
    • I have already built several USB encoders in the past so that will not be much of an issue.  I will probably use a 3B+ or the batocera ThinkPad so that I can easily hook up a keyboard for quick fixes and setup.  May drill a hole in the side for external USB ports.
    • I will order the display adapter and I have not decided how the control setup will be yet because I do want to be able to play the most amount of games on it that I can including fighting games.  Might be hard for games that require shoulder buttons but not impossible. 
    • I will also have a temporary setup that allows the use of a controller and that could also cover for any games that I cannot get the arcade setup for.
    • I am going to see if I can get some boards and some drill bits and make multiple arcade setups.  Well I would like to, it depends on the cost and the time involved.  But the atmegas for the USB encoders are not hard to make and not expensive, the various arcade buttons can be if I go for good ones.
    • But first I am going to put it together stock and play with it like that
• Tony Hughes
  • Enjoying Christmas as much as possible with the restrictions here in the UK we had one guest for Lunch on Christmas day which I cooked. After he went home we went for a Christmas day walk and popped in on a relative of my wife who lives 10 minutes walk away. We were in time to say Hi to some of her cousins and her aunt on a Zoom call, we only stayed 5 minutes or so but it was nice to connect with family on the holiday.
  • For the last week it was mainly planning and preparing for Christmas Day baking traditional mince pies, shopping for and preparing everything for the Christmas meal. I like to prepare all the vegetables ready for cooking the day before saves work on the day and I can relax a little. I also cooked the chicken the night before to give me oven space on the day. Only 2 meat eaters so not a massive bird but plenty for leftovers and our friend to take a doggy bag home for his leftover meal.

• Moss
  • I received some Yule money from Firecat which allowed me to get the computer desk, UPS and monitor I needed to finish setting up my studio space. I need to get a drill bit so I can mount my mic boom and then I’ll be done. 
  • I got a new sponsor on Sponsus! My second…
  • I’ve been hunting for that next great distro to review. I installed Ultimate Edition, which looked really great — like a major media company wanted to make Ubuntu look flashy — but it didn’t write GRUB anywhere it can find. I tried Mageia 8 Beta2, but couldn’t find how to use or install dnfdragora, which is listed as the second choice in package management (it would be my first choice). I tried to install Slax and SolydK, but they refused to install on a UEFI system. So I installed Lubuntu 20.10. I don’t think we’ve reviewed anything with an LX-type desktop yet. I’ve had no issues, and LXQt looks like it has come of age at last.
  • Just prior to yesterday’s team meeting, I decided to reinstall Mint 20 on my desktop and restore it from my latest Timeshift backup. Nope. I then spent several hours trying different things, and the ultimate solution was to nuke the SSD and start over. I installed Linux Mint 20 MATE on it, and was going to leave it there but I just couldn’t, so I split the SSD in half (partitioned, people, I’m not a lunatic), and split the second half ⅔-⅓. I put OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 on the larger partition and Bodhi 5.1 on the smaller. I have those two mostly set up, and as of right now I’m 100% (I think) on the Mint partition being back up to snuff.
  • I’ve had a few promises of articles for It’s Moss dot com, but nothing has yet been submitted. mintCast listeners, this is for you, please submit stuff. I’ve kept up with a couple of blog posts of my own, usually echoed to my blog at LinuxQuestions.org. 
  • Mom is still in the rehab home, and has to pay for her room now as she ran out of days covered by Medicare. But there are other family issues: My uncle and aunt moved from their home in Yakima WA to a senior center in Utah, but my aunt was seriously injured on the trip, had to spend some hospital and rehab time before moving on to Utah, but died shortly after arriving. During this, my uncle went to the hospital with Covid, but he’s back at the center and doing ok (he was back home with his wife before she passed).
  • We have been running out of shows to watch, so we went scanning for old ones we missed. I don’t know how we missed Haven, but it’s on the list now, and we also found Locke & Key (sort of the same thing as Stranger Things but based on a comic) and, to keep things light, Mr. Iglesias, a Welcome-Back-Kotter remake using comedian Gabriel Iglesias and a mostly minority cast taking place in his native Long Beach (which is also where my grandmother lived, so I know some of the places).
  • Dresden-wise, we have started Book 9, White Night.
• Erik Lietz
  • Office on Mint 20 – since the last episode I was part of, we have completed our transition to Mint 20 on all of our production machines. Transition went well and other than our Windows VM – very stable. 
  • Microsoft Office in a Windows VM – I forgot how long it takes to install Microsoft software. 
  • Switching away from AutoCAD – looking at BricsCAD, which is a Linux native CAD program that may replace AutoCAD for 2D drawing work and most of our 3D design work. 
  • Nextcloud on Intel NUC. For the office, we bought a pre-configured Nextcloud setups on an Intel NUC. I love the NUC form factor. This system has a customized version of Arch Linux tuned to run Nextcloud. Now I just need to wrap my head around using Nextcloud. 
  • Intel NUC as automated off-site backup. Seeing the form factor of the Intel NUC (and really liking them) we got 2 of the NUC’s to set up as off-site daily backup machines. I haven’t gotten into these yet but the idea is to use a minimal installation of Ubuntu Server or Debian using Rsync as the transfer system. 
  • https://www.howtogeek.com/116032/how-to-encrypt-your-home-folder-after-installing-ubuntu/ 
  • https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-use-7zip-to-encrypt-files/ 
  • Raspberry Pis for kids workstations. My wife and I are setting up individual computer stations for the kids using Raspberry Pi 4Bs with 4 GB. I’m hoping they will be desktop replacements. Not sure yet if I will use the Raspberry OS or Ubuntu MATE. 
  • PinePhone! I got my PinePhone last week. It’s the Manjaro edition phone with their FOSH operating system. The build quality on the phone is very good, especially for the price. The Manjaro operating system is a little buggy. I haven’t gotten a phone call to go through yet. Some apps like Telegram work just fine. It does have a fully functioning terminal. After some checking online, I think I am going to get an SD card for it and then try a couple of different operating systems. From what I can tell either Sailfish OS or Ubuntu Touch are the two OS’s that are the most polished right now. (Moss: /e/ and Lineage OS are better than Ubuntu Touch, about the same level of polish as Sailfish, and Sailfish doesn’t sell to the US.)

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint 20.1 Beta Available
  • Linux Mint 20.1 Imminent! But not a pre-Christmas present this year
• Moss – KFC makes a gaming console with built-in chicken warmer
• Moss – Odroid Handheld runs Ubuntu
• Gnome 40 ready for GTK4 and brings a lot of changes
  • GTK4 Out
• XFCE 4.16 changes… a lot. More conservative users unhappy.
• Full Circle Magazine #164
• Durden 0.6 (replacement for Wayland, X) released

SECURITY UPDATE:

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

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

Announcements:

• Our next show will be Sunday, January 10, at 2:00pm Central US Time.
• Get the showtime converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • As promised, rebuilt my NAS during the holiday downtime
  • Traded the Pi 4 for the NAS for Nextcloud.
  • Nextcloud storage lives in BTRFS now!
  • Neal Gompa, of Fedora and openSUSE fame, advises a move to the HWE kernel for better btrfs support.
    • openSUSE Election Timeline
    • Neal’s Election info
  • My ESXi server bit the dust… sort of.
    • I was convinced an SSD had died, but it was the OS flash drive
    • Nuked the SSD for testing and realized it was fine…
• Joe
  • Enjoying time off with the kids. Still haven’t killed any of them yet so things must be going ok.
  • My doctor told me my cholesterol was high again so I need to come off the diet that I am on and try something else.  Going to try out calorie restriction and see if coach Greg knows what he is talking about.  High volume, low calorie dense foods, while maintaining a low caloric intake.  He has a new cookbook but I am not paying those prices for it.
  • At this point the PSP’s have paid for themselves including all the replacement parts.  Thanks listener Dustin I hope it is treating you well.
  • I was able to pick up a broken Samsung Gear S3 at a decent price and tried to get it to work.  I was able to get the battery to charge but I was not able to get it to turn on.  I was able to find a temporary replacement motherboard for it on eBay for 15 dollars without the pedometer or the heart rate monitor which will allow me to test the functionality of the screen and make sure that the problem is the motherboard and not the screen.  Either way I used the profit from the PSP’s to get and I have had fun trying out different things to get it working.  I will be keeping my eyes open on ebay for others that look promising.  I have plenty of replacement parts at this point if I can find one that has just a dead battery or a broken back screen.  But I want to get the test board first so that I can make sure I know what the issues are. I should mention that the item was water damaged and I went through the normal process to try and fix that (IPA and a toothbrush).
  • Lots of exercise while on vacation.  Have done a lot of bike riding and weight lifting.
  • Someone got me an Arcade 1Up machine.  The Space Invaders version.  Which is really cool.  It is an expensive gift to have come from someone not family.  Probably one of the cooler gifts that I have ever gotten.  Definitely going to be modding it after a whole lot of research. 
    • I have already built several USB encoders in the past so that will not be much of an issue.  I will probably use a 3B+ or the batocera ThinkPad so that I can easily hook up a keyboard for quick fixes and setup.  May drill a hole in the side for external USB ports.
    • I will order the display adapter and I have not decided how the control setup will be yet because I do want to be able to play the most amount of games on it that I can including fighting games.  Might be hard for games that require shoulder buttons but not impossible. 
    • I will also have a temporary setup that allows the use of a controller and that could also cover for any games that I cannot get the arcade setup for.
    • I am going to see if I can get some boards and some drill bits and make multiple arcade setups.  Well I would like to, it depends on the cost and the time involved.  But the atmegas for the USB encoders are not hard to make and not expensive, the various arcade buttons can be if I go for good ones.
    • But first I am going to put it together stock and play with it like that
• Tony Hughes
  • Enjoying Christmas as much as possible with the restrictions here in the UK we had one guest for Lunch on Christmas day which I cooked. After he went home we went for a Christmas day walk and popped in on a relative of my wife who lives 10 minutes walk away. We were in time to say Hi to some of her cousins and her aunt on a Zoom call, we only stayed 5 minutes or so but it was nice to connect with family on the holiday.
  • For the last week it was mainly planning and preparing for Christmas Day baking traditional mince pies, shopping for and preparing everything for the Christmas meal. I like to prepare all the vegetables ready for cooking the day before saves work on the day and I can relax a little. I also cooked the chicken the night before to give me oven space on the day. Only 2 meat eaters so not a massive bird but plenty for leftovers and our friend to take a doggy bag home for his leftover meal.

• Moss
  • I received some Yule money from Firecat which allowed me to get the computer desk, UPS and monitor I needed to finish setting up my studio space. I need to get a drill bit so I can mount my mic boom and then I’ll be done. 
  • I got a new sponsor on Sponsus! My second…
  • I’ve been hunting for that next great distro to review. I installed Ultimate Edition, which looked really great — like a major media company wanted to make Ubuntu look flashy — but it didn’t write GRUB anywhere it can find. I tried Mageia 8 Beta2, but couldn’t find how to use or install dnfdragora, which is listed as the second choice in package management (it would be my first choice). I tried to install Slax and SolydK, but they refused to install on a UEFI system. So I installed Lubuntu 20.10. I don’t think we’ve reviewed anything with an LX-type desktop yet. I’ve had no issues, and LXQt looks like it has come of age at last.
  • Just prior to yesterday’s team meeting, I decided to reinstall Mint 20 on my desktop and restore it from my latest Timeshift backup. Nope. I then spent several hours trying different things, and the ultimate solution was to nuke the SSD and start over. I installed Linux Mint 20 MATE on it, and was going to leave it there but I just couldn’t, so I split the SSD in half (partitioned, people, I’m not a lunatic), and split the second half ⅔-⅓. I put OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 on the larger partition and Bodhi 5.1 on the smaller. I have those two mostly set up, and as of right now I’m 100% (I think) on the Mint partition being back up to snuff.
  • I’ve had a few promises of articles for It’s Moss dot com, but nothing has yet been submitted. mintCast listeners, this is for you, please submit stuff. I’ve kept up with a couple of blog posts of my own, usually echoed to my blog at LinuxQuestions.org. 
  • Mom is still in the rehab home, and has to pay for her room now as she ran out of days covered by Medicare. But there are other family issues: My uncle and aunt moved from their home in Yakima WA to a senior center in Utah, but my aunt was seriously injured on the trip, had to spend some hospital and rehab time before moving on to Utah, but died shortly after arriving. During this, my uncle went to the hospital with Covid, but he’s back at the center and doing ok (he was back home with his wife before she passed).
  • We have been running out of shows to watch, so we went scanning for old ones we missed. I don’t know how we missed Haven, but it’s on the list now, and we also found Locke & Key (sort of the same thing as Stranger Things but based on a comic) and, to keep things light, Mr. Iglesias, a Welcome-Back-Kotter remake using comedian Gabriel Iglesias and a mostly minority cast taking place in his native Long Beach (which is also where my grandmother lived, so I know some of the places).
  • Dresden-wise, we have started Book 9, White Night.
• Erik Lietz
  • Office on Mint 20 – since the last episode I was part of, we have completed our transition to Mint 20 on all of our production machines. Transition went well and other than our Windows VM – very stable. 
  • Microsoft Office in a Windows VM – I forgot how long it takes to install Microsoft software. 
  • Switching away from AutoCAD – looking at BricsCAD, which is a Linux native CAD program that may replace AutoCAD for 2D drawing work and most of our 3D design work. 
  • Nextcloud on Intel NUC. For the office, we bought a pre-configured Nextcloud setups on an Intel NUC. I love the NUC form factor. This system has a customized version of Arch Linux tuned to run Nextcloud. Now I just need to wrap my head around using Nextcloud. 
  • Intel NUC as automated off-site backup. Seeing the form factor of the Intel NUC (and really liking them) we got 2 of the NUC’s to set up as off-site daily backup machines. I haven’t gotten into these yet but the idea is to use a minimal installation of Ubuntu Server or Debian using Rsync as the transfer system. 
  • https://www.howtogeek.com/116032/how-to-encrypt-your-home-folder-after-installing-ubuntu/ 
  • https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-use-7zip-to-encrypt-files/ 
  • Raspberry Pis for kids workstations. My wife and I are setting up individual computer stations for the kids using Raspberry Pi 4Bs with 4 GB. I’m hoping they will be desktop replacements. Not sure yet if I will use the Raspberry OS or Ubuntu MATE. 
  • PinePhone! I got my PinePhone last week. It’s the Manjaro edition phone with their FOSH operating system. The build quality on the phone is very good, especially for the price. The Manjaro operating system is a little buggy. I haven’t gotten a phone call to go through yet. Some apps like Telegram work just fine. It does have a fully functioning terminal. After some checking online, I think I am going to get an SD card for it and then try a couple of different operating systems. From what I can tell either Sailfish OS or Ubuntu Touch are the two OS’s that are the most polished right now. (Moss: /e/ and Lineage OS are better than Ubuntu Touch, about the same level of polish as Sailfish, and Sailfish doesn’t sell to the US.)

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint 20.1 Beta Available
  • Linux Mint 20.1 Imminent! But not a pre-Christmas present this year
• Moss – KFC makes a gaming console with built-in chicken warmer
• Moss – Odroid Handheld runs Ubuntu
• Gnome 40 ready for GTK4 and brings a lot of changes
  • GTK4 Out
• XFCE 4.16 changes… a lot. More conservative users unhappy.
• Full Circle Magazine #164
• Durden 0.6 (replacement for Wayland, X) released

SECURITY UPDATE:

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

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

Announcements:

• Our next show will be Sunday, January 10, at 2:00pm Central US Time.
• Get the showtime converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Playing with Arco Linux and a Tiling Window Manager.
  • Owen sent me a Pi 3B. Thanks! 
  • Giving Gitea a try. More in the feedback!
• Joe
  •  Have not been doing much of my own stuff in the past 2 weeks.
    • Lots of people on vacation at work so I have been putting in a lot of extra hours doing what would normally be their work and my work and trying to lighten the load for my boss.
  • Have sliced several designs to print but have not had a good time to get those printed and ready to go.  Plus I think I still need to tweak some of the settings.  Maybe try a much slower speed with petg or try a different brand.  The brand I am currently using seems like I get about half way through the roll and it becomes progressively harder to get a good print
  • Edited some audio from last year’s HPR new years show for my daughter so that she can remember it forever.  
  • Picked up a PSP Go for a good price that was listed as for parts only.
    • Have to say that I am both happy and disappointed with my purchase
    • Once again got a low cost device and it works perfectly
    • CFW and a selection of games installed but limited by the internal memory of 16gb
    • The device takes a very proprietary memory module (M2) and there is only one prebuilt adapter available for it that is in Japan but is not currently available due to covid.
    • It is possible to directly solder to this device and convert to memory stick duo but I don’t want to hard mod the device and bring the value down succeed or fail the hardware would no longer be original
    • I was hoping that the backlight was out or the screen needed to be replaced so I could work on a new fix.
    • But I have been using it to play Hydro Thunder 
    • Also sold another of the PSP 1001s so I have just about broken even for all the PSPs and the parts I have purchased
  • Was able to get the VPN Docker instance with Transmission to connect to a VPN from internally but I could not get it to work from startup.  Also getting to work from inside would then cause it to close down. So I am still using the VM to do the heavy lifting.
    • But I was able to find a VPN client Docker instance for which I was able to modify the ovpn file from my provider to get it working.  
    • This has allowed me to set up my Docker version of Chrome with the traffic pushed through the VPN container on all my machines
  • Have started biking in the evenings
    • Forgot how much I enjoy biking.  Have been getting a lot of time in and it seems to be helping a bit with the hip arthritis 
    • But I did get pulled over.  
• Josh
  • Messing around with my new server HP dl380 g5 and laptop Dell XPS P54G.
  • Writing some python.
  • Back on Linux Mint on my main desktop and Dell XPS.

• Tony Hughes
  • Recorded the latest episode of Distrohoppers Digest with Dale, who at the end we inaugurated as a permanent team member. By the time you listen to the edited show, the episode should be available for download.
  • A week and a half ago I had a camera down my throat to check out why I have been unwell recently and have a diagnosis of a Hiatus Hernia, now I know what the issue is, I can now hopefully mitigate some of the unpleasant symptoms with a few lifestyle changes.
  • And I have just recently celebrated my birthday, although I’m only the second oldest of the mintCast team lol. As a present from my wife I got a new toy to help me do my modeling a little safer, a small pedestal drill. It works great and will reduce the risk of me drilling my fingers as I will be able to use a small vice to hold things I’m drilling and it is far more accurate and so far the results I’m getting are fantastic.  

• Moss
  • Last night, I thought I would do my wife a favor and remove Ubuntu Unity from her machine; she wasn’t using it and sometimes booted into it accidentally, causing some freaking out. I thought I did everything right, wrote a new boot on the Mint partition, used GPartEd to remove the partition, and expanded the Mint partition to fill the vacated space. About 90 minutes before showtime today, while talking to my mother about her Medicare running out on her rehab care and she would have to pay $300 a day to stay there while her hip continued to heal, my wife informed me she had a Grub Repair screen. I tried a lot of things I have learned over the years, but eventually had to get my Ventoy stick out and boot to Mint. When I still couldn’t get GRUB restored, and with time running out before the show, I took the easy way out and installed Mint again, and was pleased to see that it allowed me to install alongside the original boot so she still has her original installation to run. There is still a lot of work to do to get it back to a single installation which actually boots. That will happen after the show.
  • I just managed to complete another circuit of the Homestar, and am now 68 years old as measured in this backwards system. As celebrations went, this was not one of my finest, nor was the year itself, but I’m happy to have survived this far and thrilled to be on mintCast team.
  • We will have released Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 018 by the time anyone hears this episode. To date, three episodes have reached or exceeded 600 downloads each, which warms my furry little heart, and Episode 017 is over 500 already.
  • I am set up this episode in my second bedroom, with a TV tray and my laptop. If I get any money over the holidays which is not necessary for my continued existence (bills, food), I will add a smallish desk and a mid-sized TV, say 24-26”, and use my mini-desktop; this also means I will have to get the Pi 4 working as my Kodi server for the living room.
  • Dresden-wise, we’re about 75% through Proven Guilty. Dresden and team have just marched into Mab’s broken-looking stronghold.
• Bo
  •  Learning JS by developing a custom Foundry VTT system
    • Gitlab – https://gitlab.com/boisapunk/sta-foundry-vtt
    • Boilerplate – https://html5boilerplate.com/
    • Handlebars – https://handlebarsjs.com/
    • Tutorial I mentioned – https://youtu.be/gcSN4AQcUzM

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint November News
• Cinnamon 4.8 Hit Github
• Clem Begins Uploading Testing ISOs for 20.1 * thanks to Londoner
• Raspberry Pi OS Gets Updated
  • A switch to the Pulse Audio sound applet makes configuring individual audio stream volumes easier
  • The CUPS service and GUI come preinstalled making it easier to get printers working as well
  • And updates to Orca help those with visual impairments
• Elementary OS Has a Raspberry Pi Pre-Release
• CentOS Is Dead * thanks to Dale
• You can’t stop the signal: CentOS lives again as Rocky Linux
• QT6 is out! All you KDE neon users can start cringing now.
• Guix 1.2 is out with an 8-year anniversary.
• Souk – For Flatpaks in Gnome

SECURITY UPDATE:

• ODOH (Oblivious DNS over HTTPS) * thanks to Londoner
  • FTA: Together, the added encryption and proxying provide the following guarantees:

• The target sees only the query and the proxy’s IP address.
• The proxy has no visibility into the DNS messages, with no ability to identify, read, or modify either the query being sent by the client or the answer being returned by the target.
• Only the intended target can read the content of the query and produce a response.

• Open Source Devs not concerned about security
• Trickbot
  • A banking fraud trojan converted to a full malware-as-a-service solution.
  • While UEFI malware is rare because of the difficulty, Trickbot is changing that.
  • This could open the door to OS agnostic UEFI malware that can persist between OS installs and disk swaps.

Announcements:

• Our next show will be Sunday, December 27, at 2:00pm Central US Time.
• Get the showtime converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Playing with Arco Linux and a Tiling Window Manager.
  • Owen sent me a Pi 3B. Thanks! 
  • Giving Gitea a try. More in the feedback!
• Joe
  •  Have not been doing much of my own stuff in the past 2 weeks.
    • Lots of people on vacation at work so I have been putting in a lot of extra hours doing what would normally be their work and my work and trying to lighten the load for my boss.
  • Have sliced several designs to print but have not had a good time to get those printed and ready to go.  Plus I think I still need to tweak some of the settings.  Maybe try a much slower speed with petg or try a different brand.  The brand I am currently using seems like I get about half way through the roll and it becomes progressively harder to get a good print
  • Edited some audio from last year’s HPR new years show for my daughter so that she can remember it forever.  
  • Picked up a PSP Go for a good price that was listed as for parts only.
    • Have to say that I am both happy and disappointed with my purchase
    • Once again got a low cost device and it works perfectly
    • CFW and a selection of games installed but limited by the internal memory of 16gb
    • The device takes a very proprietary memory module (M2) and there is only one prebuilt adapter available for it that is in Japan but is not currently available due to covid.
    • It is possible to directly solder to this device and convert to memory stick duo but I don’t want to hard mod the device and bring the value down succeed or fail the hardware would no longer be original
    • I was hoping that the backlight was out or the screen needed to be replaced so I could work on a new fix.
    • But I have been using it to play Hydro Thunder 
    • Also sold another of the PSP 1001s so I have just about broken even for all the PSPs and the parts I have purchased
  • Was able to get the VPN Docker instance with Transmission to connect to a VPN from internally but I could not get it to work from startup.  Also getting to work from inside would then cause it to close down. So I am still using the VM to do the heavy lifting.
    • But I was able to find a VPN client Docker instance for which I was able to modify the ovpn file from my provider to get it working.  
    • This has allowed me to set up my Docker version of Chrome with the traffic pushed through the VPN container on all my machines
  • Have started biking in the evenings
    • Forgot how much I enjoy biking.  Have been getting a lot of time in and it seems to be helping a bit with the hip arthritis 
    • But I did get pulled over.  
• Josh
  • Messing around with my new server HP dl380 g5 and laptop Dell XPS P54G.
  • Writing some python.
  • Back on Linux Mint on my main desktop and Dell XPS.

• Tony Hughes
  • Recorded the latest episode of Distrohoppers Digest with Dale, who at the end we inaugurated as a permanent team member. By the time you listen to the edited show, the episode should be available for download.
  • A week and a half ago I had a camera down my throat to check out why I have been unwell recently and have a diagnosis of a Hiatus Hernia, now I know what the issue is, I can now hopefully mitigate some of the unpleasant symptoms with a few lifestyle changes.
  • And I have just recently celebrated my birthday, although I’m only the second oldest of the mintCast team lol. As a present from my wife I got a new toy to help me do my modeling a little safer, a small pedestal drill. It works great and will reduce the risk of me drilling my fingers as I will be able to use a small vice to hold things I’m drilling and it is far more accurate and so far the results I’m getting are fantastic.  

• Moss
  • Last night, I thought I would do my wife a favor and remove Ubuntu Unity from her machine; she wasn’t using it and sometimes booted into it accidentally, causing some freaking out. I thought I did everything right, wrote a new boot on the Mint partition, used GPartEd to remove the partition, and expanded the Mint partition to fill the vacated space. About 90 minutes before showtime today, while talking to my mother about her Medicare running out on her rehab care and she would have to pay $300 a day to stay there while her hip continued to heal, my wife informed me she had a Grub Repair screen. I tried a lot of things I have learned over the years, but eventually had to get my Ventoy stick out and boot to Mint. When I still couldn’t get GRUB restored, and with time running out before the show, I took the easy way out and installed Mint again, and was pleased to see that it allowed me to install alongside the original boot so she still has her original installation to run. There is still a lot of work to do to get it back to a single installation which actually boots. That will happen after the show.
  • I just managed to complete another circuit of the Homestar, and am now 68 years old as measured in this backwards system. As celebrations went, this was not one of my finest, nor was the year itself, but I’m happy to have survived this far and thrilled to be on mintCast team.
  • We will have released Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 018 by the time anyone hears this episode. To date, three episodes have reached or exceeded 600 downloads each, which warms my furry little heart, and Episode 017 is over 500 already.
  • I am set up this episode in my second bedroom, with a TV tray and my laptop. If I get any money over the holidays which is not necessary for my continued existence (bills, food), I will add a smallish desk and a mid-sized TV, say 24-26”, and use my mini-desktop; this also means I will have to get the Pi 4 working as my Kodi server for the living room.
  • Dresden-wise, we’re about 75% through Proven Guilty. Dresden and team have just marched into Mab’s broken-looking stronghold.
• Bo
  •  Learning JS by developing a custom Foundry VTT system
    • Gitlab – https://gitlab.com/boisapunk/sta-foundry-vtt
    • Boilerplate – https://html5boilerplate.com/
    • Handlebars – https://handlebarsjs.com/
    • Tutorial I mentioned – https://youtu.be/gcSN4AQcUzM

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint November News
• Cinnamon 4.8 Hit Github
• Clem Begins Uploading Testing ISOs for 20.1 * thanks to Londoner
• Raspberry Pi OS Gets Updated
  • A switch to the Pulse Audio sound applet makes configuring individual audio stream volumes easier
  • The CUPS service and GUI come preinstalled making it easier to get printers working as well
  • And updates to Orca help those with visual impairments
• Elementary OS Has a Raspberry Pi Pre-Release
• CentOS Is Dead * thanks to Dale
• You can’t stop the signal: CentOS lives again as Rocky Linux
• QT6 is out! All you KDE neon users can start cringing now.
• Guix 1.2 is out with an 8-year anniversary.
• Souk – For Flatpaks in Gnome

SECURITY UPDATE:

• ODOH (Oblivious DNS over HTTPS) * thanks to Londoner
  • FTA: Together, the added encryption and proxying provide the following guarantees:

• The target sees only the query and the proxy’s IP address.
• The proxy has no visibility into the DNS messages, with no ability to identify, read, or modify either the query being sent by the client or the answer being returned by the target.
• Only the intended target can read the content of the query and produce a response.

• Open Source Devs not concerned about security
• Trickbot
  • A banking fraud trojan converted to a full malware-as-a-service solution.
  • While UEFI malware is rare because of the difficulty, Trickbot is changing that.
  • This could open the door to OS agnostic UEFI malware that can persist between OS installs and disk swaps.

Announcements:

• Our next show will be Sunday, December 27, at 2:00pm Central US Time.
• Get the showtime converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

Leo

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

Moss

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

Josh

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

Joe

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

THE NEWS: 

• IPO rumored for SUSE
• November Update for Pine64 – KDE phone, PineTime improvements, and more!
• Fourth major release of Blender in 2020
• Mudita – beautiful, new, open source… feature phone OS? For this phone.
• Everybody gets Ray Tracing on Linux!
• Valve Making OpenGL to Vulkan a Reality

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Microsoft Defender for Linux adds a new feature just for Linux
• Dell is adding webcam and microphone kill switches to the Linux Kernel
• Firefox Enables HTTPS-Only Mode, Go Turn it ON!
• Slipstream
  • Chrome, with the release of 87, now blocks outbound port 5060 and 5061.
  • Firefox is doing the same in Firefox 84.

Announcements:

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

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

Leo

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

Moss

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

Josh

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

Joe

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

THE NEWS: 

• IPO rumored for SUSE
• November Update for Pine64 – KDE phone, PineTime improvements, and more!
• Fourth major release of Blender in 2020
• Mudita – beautiful, new, open source… feature phone OS? For this phone.
• Everybody gets Ray Tracing on Linux!
• Valve Making OpenGL to Vulkan a Reality

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Microsoft Defender for Linux adds a new feature just for Linux
• Dell is adding webcam and microphone kill switches to the Linux Kernel
• Firefox Enables HTTPS-Only Mode, Go Turn it ON!
• Slipstream
  • Chrome, with the release of 87, now blocks outbound port 5060 and 5061.
  • Firefox is doing the same in Firefox 84.

Announcements:

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

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

LINUX INNARDS:

Pi Stuff

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

• Josh 
  • Pi 3 B+ Video Surveillance kinda, using motioneyeOS.
  • Pi 3 B+ Now being used as my pi hole addblocker.
  • Asus Tinkerboard and Lakka retro gaming. Works for most late 90s consoles and earlier.  
  • Batocera

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

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

CHECK THIS OUT! 

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

• • • bash -c  “$(wget -qO- https://git.io/vQgMr)”

• • Finally back on a good cadence at Full Circle Weekly News Podcast again. RSS
  • My video for enabling Snaps in LM 20
• Joe
  • Awesome Linux Terminal eDEX-UI on the Raspberry Pi!!
    • Makes a terminal that looks like tron on your pi

Announcements:

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

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

• 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!>

LINUX INNARDS:

Pi Stuff

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

• Josh 
  • Pi 3 B+ Video Surveillance kinda, using motioneyeOS.
  • Pi 3 B+ Now being used as my pi hole addblocker.
  • Asus Tinkerboard and Lakka retro gaming. Works for most late 90s consoles and earlier.  
  • Batocera

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

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

CHECK THIS OUT! 

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

• • • bash -c  “$(wget -qO- https://git.io/vQgMr)”

• • Finally back on a good cadence at Full Circle Weekly News Podcast again. RSS
  • My video for enabling Snaps in LM 20
• Joe
  • Awesome Linux Terminal eDEX-UI on the Raspberry Pi!!
    • Makes a terminal that looks like tron on your pi

Announcements:

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

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

• 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!>

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Put out a video on my channel that was way overdue.
    • Let’s Enable Snaps on Linux Mint 20
  • A/B testing Nextcloud on my raspberry Pi 4 with an external 1TB USB drive vs. a much more powerful laptop (i7-2630qm, 8GB RAM) running the same thing with 1TB internal USB.
    • Good to know my Nextcloud writeup is still accurate!
  • Doing some surveillance!
  • Changing terminal colors. Fell in love with the Monokai [Dark] Soda theme. I’m testing out the Dracula theme too. They’re duking it out right now for supremacy. I blame bpytop for having such cool themes.

• Josh
  •  I have been messing around with Linux gaming some more. Been testing it against Windows and the results are not good for the most part. I am not a Linux guru so maybe I am doing it all wrong but I am trying. I have not gotten to try the Glorious Egg Roll Proton yet but that’s my next step to see what happens. My Nvidia 1650 Super is actually not even running at it’s max speeds under linux or windows because my Ryzen 2600 is just not up to the task for certain games. Overclocking my cpu does help some stuttering issues but not a whole lot. The main game I am playing right now is Kingdom Come Deliverance and under Linux with low to medium graphics settings I get roughly between 50 and 60 fps in towns. You have to test in towns on that game because when out of towns it runs smooth no matter what settings you have. Unfortunately on Windows though I get between 70 and 80 fps with medium to high settings which is a lot more taxing but it’s still getting that much better on windows. I am chalking it down to the translation layer taking some of the CPU power cause that game is really CPU bound. 

• Tony H
  • Recorded Episode 17 of DHD which is now available on your podcatchers, we have had nearly 300 downloads in a week. I Installed Ubuntu Studio 20.10 on the test machine with mixed results as again I could not get a Dual boot to install. On further investigation I may not have left a big enough partition for the original OS so I will have to have another go.  I did however do a successful inline upgrade to the 20.04 install on one of the drives in my tower, which now has the shiny Plasma DE instead of XFCE.  I suggest you only try this on a test PC or in a VM as unless like the Ubuntu Studio release you need any major changes made.  If you plan on upgrading a production PC in this manner, make sure to back up “ALL” your data, as there is a risk of data loss, and we all know it will happen when you have forgotten to back up.  I have also been playing with the new Beta of GIMP which will eventually be released sometime in 2021 as GIMP 3.0, I’ll talk more about that in the news. 
  • Other than that we successfully navigated our 4 days of shielding and my wife had her hospital procedure without any issues, although it will be another week or so before we get the results of the biopsies they have to test. 

• Joe
  •   Talked last time about ordering a bunch of PSP’s 
    • Got 7 out of 8 of them working, 4 1001s and 3 3001s although one of them has a bad connector for the UMD drive so I will be doing a battery mod on that one to give a much greater battery life.
    • One of them had a bad motherboard and screen and was only good for the other parts
    •   of the 1001s I had spent a lot of time taking it apart and putting it back together because so many of the parts were messed up, the power board, the UMD drive the faceplate and I think it is slightly warped.  But it all is working except for the UMD drive
    • Also have put custom firmware on all of them in order to be able to play retro emulation and to play games without the UMDs which will save space and battery life
    • I have sold one of them as of last night and made back most of my money that I have invested and may hopefully sell another one later today.
  • My transmission docker setup quit working and I had to figure out why.  I went through a lot of iterations of testing thinking that I had messed something up.  Even tried using a different version of the transmission VPN which I use along with docker chrome to change my ip.  I was able to get a different version of transmission working but it was not showing a new ip address.
    • Did my research and it turns out that PIA my vpn provider had turned off a bunch of older servers.  
    • After finding that out it was just a matter of changing all the docker configs on all my machines that use transmission/chrome(which is all of them) and things were working again
    • I also checked the speeds that I was getting on the new servers and it is super fast I know previously I was limited to 30mbps and this was up around 160mbps
  •  Last Saturday I also did several items on my honey due list including rewiring a wall lamp into a hanging lamp with a switch.  Pretending to be an electrician again but I think I did a good job.  Anything to pull out the soldering iron
  •  I also serviced 2 bicycles for my kids to get them back on the road and I have taken the opportunity to go for a couple of rides with them which is fun.  I may need to get a bike of my own.  Because I obviously need another hobby to eat up my time
  • With the end of year stability at work I have been able to binge watch Big Bang Theory.  Man that show ran for a long time
  • Also have been playing the new DLC for Borderlands 3.  I am liking the new skill trees and have not tried the new mode yet.
  • Got a new kitten.  The wife finally convinced me

THE NEWS:

• Raspberry Pi 400
• New GIMP Unstable Build Lets You Test Features Coming in GIMP 3.0
• Elementary OS Dark Mode in Odin

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

Announcements:

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

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

• 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!>

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • Put out a video on my channel that was way overdue.
    • Let’s Enable Snaps on Linux Mint 20
  • A/B testing Nextcloud on my raspberry Pi 4 with an external 1TB USB drive vs. a much more powerful laptop (i7-2630qm, 8GB RAM) running the same thing with 1TB internal USB.
    • Good to know my Nextcloud writeup is still accurate!
  • Doing some surveillance!
  • Changing terminal colors. Fell in love with the Monokai [Dark] Soda theme. I’m testing out the Dracula theme too. They’re duking it out right now for supremacy. I blame bpytop for having such cool themes.

• Josh
  •  I have been messing around with Linux gaming some more. Been testing it against Windows and the results are not good for the most part. I am not a Linux guru so maybe I am doing it all wrong but I am trying. I have not gotten to try the Glorious Egg Roll Proton yet but that’s my next step to see what happens. My Nvidia 1650 Super is actually not even running at it’s max speeds under linux or windows because my Ryzen 2600 is just not up to the task for certain games. Overclocking my cpu does help some stuttering issues but not a whole lot. The main game I am playing right now is Kingdom Come Deliverance and under Linux with low to medium graphics settings I get roughly between 50 and 60 fps in towns. You have to test in towns on that game because when out of towns it runs smooth no matter what settings you have. Unfortunately on Windows though I get between 70 and 80 fps with medium to high settings which is a lot more taxing but it’s still getting that much better on windows. I am chalking it down to the translation layer taking some of the CPU power cause that game is really CPU bound. 

• Tony H
  • Recorded Episode 17 of DHD which is now available on your podcatchers, we have had nearly 300 downloads in a week. I Installed Ubuntu Studio 20.10 on the test machine with mixed results as again I could not get a Dual boot to install. On further investigation I may not have left a big enough partition for the original OS so I will have to have another go.  I did however do a successful inline upgrade to the 20.04 install on one of the drives in my tower, which now has the shiny Plasma DE instead of XFCE.  I suggest you only try this on a test PC or in a VM as unless like the Ubuntu Studio release you need any major changes made.  If you plan on upgrading a production PC in this manner, make sure to back up “ALL” your data, as there is a risk of data loss, and we all know it will happen when you have forgotten to back up.  I have also been playing with the new Beta of GIMP which will eventually be released sometime in 2021 as GIMP 3.0, I’ll talk more about that in the news. 
  • Other than that we successfully navigated our 4 days of shielding and my wife had her hospital procedure without any issues, although it will be another week or so before we get the results of the biopsies they have to test. 

• Joe
  •   Talked last time about ordering a bunch of PSP’s 
    • Got 7 out of 8 of them working, 4 1001s and 3 3001s although one of them has a bad connector for the UMD drive so I will be doing a battery mod on that one to give a much greater battery life.
    • One of them had a bad motherboard and screen and was only good for the other parts
    •   of the 1001s I had spent a lot of time taking it apart and putting it back together because so many of the parts were messed up, the power board, the UMD drive the faceplate and I think it is slightly warped.  But it all is working except for the UMD drive
    • Also have put custom firmware on all of them in order to be able to play retro emulation and to play games without the UMDs which will save space and battery life
    • I have sold one of them as of last night and made back most of my money that I have invested and may hopefully sell another one later today.
  • My transmission docker setup quit working and I had to figure out why.  I went through a lot of iterations of testing thinking that I had messed something up.  Even tried using a different version of the transmission VPN which I use along with docker chrome to change my ip.  I was able to get a different version of transmission working but it was not showing a new ip address.
    • Did my research and it turns out that PIA my vpn provider had turned off a bunch of older servers.  
    • After finding that out it was just a matter of changing all the docker configs on all my machines that use transmission/chrome(which is all of them) and things were working again
    • I also checked the speeds that I was getting on the new servers and it is super fast I know previously I was limited to 30mbps and this was up around 160mbps
  •  Last Saturday I also did several items on my honey due list including rewiring a wall lamp into a hanging lamp with a switch.  Pretending to be an electrician again but I think I did a good job.  Anything to pull out the soldering iron
  •  I also serviced 2 bicycles for my kids to get them back on the road and I have taken the opportunity to go for a couple of rides with them which is fun.  I may need to get a bike of my own.  Because I obviously need another hobby to eat up my time
  • With the end of year stability at work I have been able to binge watch Big Bang Theory.  Man that show ran for a long time
  • Also have been playing the new DLC for Borderlands 3.  I am liking the new skill trees and have not tried the new mode yet.
  • Got a new kitten.  The wife finally convinced me

THE NEWS:

• Raspberry Pi 400
• New GIMP Unstable Build Lets You Test Features Coming in GIMP 3.0
• Elementary OS Dark Mode in Odin

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

Announcements:

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

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • 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
    • Dropped weight so i could get the muscles used to the new movements
    • Watching https://www.youtube.com/c/athleanx to get some ideas on new ways of doing things

• 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: 

• Mint News September 2020
• Debian News: With no travel money being spent, Debian bought two new Lenovo servers (at a discounted price) and is trying to find ways to spend money… Debian is up to offering around 61,071 AMD64 packages and around 31,723 source packages.
• MX Linux releases Plasma edition
• Third Pinephone Community Edition has landed
• Experimental Elementary OS build for Pinebook Pro released
• Dale in Telegram: Virtualbox Adds Kernel 5.8 Support
• Joshua Hawk in Telegram: Warpinator Available via Flatpak!
• RTX 30 series Introducing GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs | NVIDIA   
• Londoner in Telegram: Fossbytes has an interview with Clem
• Joshua Lowe has resigned as a co-host of mintCast. Thank you, Josh, for your hard work, with the website, Mumble hosting, and all the other things you have done for and with us. Good luck in your future endeavors. Josh is not leaving us completely as he will continue to manage the website we use for the show and our mumble server.

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:

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

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

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

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

• Leo
  • 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
    • Dropped weight so i could get the muscles used to the new movements
    • Watching https://www.youtube.com/c/athleanx to get some ideas on new ways of doing things