System76 – mintCast https://mintcast.org The podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux Thu, 16 Jun 2022 18:25:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/cropped-small-logo-32x32.png System76 – mintCast https://mintcast.org 32 32 mintCast false episodic CC-BY-SA 4.0 CC-BY-SA 4.0 podcast System76 – mintCast https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/big-logo-1600.png https://mintcast.org TV-G 164426984 389 – The Out of Memory Daemon is Out of Control https://mintcast.org/389-the-out-of-memory-daemon-is-out-of-control/ Thu, 16 Jun 2022 00:49:43 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5520 In security, Symbiote malware discovered, and Apple M1 chips are found to be flawed;
Then in our Wanderings, Joe is fighting trees, Bill is editing shows from the cab of a truck, Moss is spending Jeff Bezos’ money, Norbert is in a galaxy far far away, and we get to meet our guest, Steve Seguin.
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]]> 2:15 The News
41:07 Security and Privacy
46.05 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:25:24 Housekeeping and Announcements

First up in the news, There are new Regolith and Cinnamon desktops, KDE has new gear, Telegram Premium to launch, Plex has new Linux apps, Atom editor gets nuked, noUbuntu works to tame a daemon, System76 goes to Europe, and Europe is all about the C;

In security, Symbiote malware discovered, and Apple M1 chips are found to be flawed;

Then in our Wanderings, Joe is fighting trees, Bill is editing shows from the cab of a truck, Moss is spending Jeff Bezos’ money, Norbert is in a galaxy far far away, and we get to meet our guest, Steve Seguin

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

The News

Security and Privacy Update

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

  • Norbert 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!
]]> 389 - The Out of Memory Daemon is Out of Control full 1:33:08 5520 380 – Leo makes an appearance https://mintcast.org/380-leo-makes-an-appearance/ Sun, 24 Apr 2022 14:32:21 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5363 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.
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]]> 1:45 The News
33:09 Security Update
57:43 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:30:48 Announcements & Outro

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

Security Update

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

Wrap-up

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

  • Norbert for our audio production
  • Leo for timestamps and publishing
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.Thanks, Clem!
]]> 380 - Leo makes an appearance full 1:35:08 5363 374 – Mounted Archery https://mintcast.org/374-mounted-archery/ Wed, 17 Nov 2021 07:16:41 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5274 In security, A Dutch newspaper gets hacked, Azure is vulnerable, and AMD and Intel have more security flaws
Then in our Wanderings, Joe works on an xbox, Josh remodels a bathroom, Tony got a new phone and Norbert tells us about running arch
Download
]]> 1:49 The News
10:37 Security Update
20:35 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
41:38 Announcements & Outro

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

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

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

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

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

  • 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!>
]]> 374 - Mounted Archery full 45:14 5274 mintCast 355 – Deferred Update (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-355-deferred-update-mp3/ Wed, 24 Feb 2021 06:14:34 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4939 Then, in the News, so much controversy, Linux on Mars, VLC on the moon, Mint and mintCast make the cut, and more
In Security, patch Mint, patch the kernel, patch your browser
Download
]]> Download

2:09 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
59:34 The News
1:28:22 Security
1:40:00 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Mike shreds a new axe, I’m more and more impressed by Proton, Joe has frozen joints, Moss is going to be rich someday, Tony Hughes gets immunities, and Josh panics with a crowbar. 

Then, in the News, so much controversy, Linux on Mars, VLC on the moon, Mint and mintCast make the cut, and more

In Security, patch Mint, patch the kernel, patch your browser

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:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4939 mintCast 355 – Deferred Update https://mintcast.org/mintcast-355-deferred-update/ Wed, 24 Feb 2021 06:04:46 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4933 Then, in the News, so much controversy, Linux on Mars, VLC on the moon, Mint and mintCast make the cut, and more
In Security, patch Mint, patch the kernel, patch your browser
Download
]]> Download

2:09 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
59:34 The News
1:28:22 Security
1:40:00 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Mike shreds a new axe, I’m more and more impressed by Proton, Joe has frozen joints, Moss is going to be rich someday, Tony Hughes gets immunities, and Josh panics with a crowbar. 

Then, in the News, so much controversy, Linux on Mars, VLC on the moon, Mint and mintCast make the cut, and more

In Security, patch Mint, patch the kernel, patch your browser

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:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4933 mintCast 349 – NAT Ain’t A Firewall (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-349-nat-aint-a-firewall-mp3/ Wed, 02 Dec 2020 05:19:55 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4794 Then in the news, OpenSUSE’s going public?, Pine64 feels the Plasma, and Linux gets Ray tracing.
In security, kill switches and a reminder that NAT ain’t a firewall.
Download
]]> Download

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

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

Leo

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

Moss

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

Josh

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

Joe

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

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

Announcements:

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

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

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

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

Leo

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

Moss

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

Josh

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

Joe

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

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

Announcements:

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

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

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4788 mintCast 346 – It’s Not You, It’s Me (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-346-its-not-you-its-me-mp3/ Wed, 21 Oct 2020 04:37:58 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4716 Then, our news lots of releases, a new feature and a birthday
In security, we look at an IoT bug
Download
]]>

Download

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

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

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

In security, we look at an IoT bug

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

      • Three flaws in BlueZ, the Bluetooth controller software in the kernel, could lead to code execution, denial of service and a way to map memory for later exfiltration!
      • Updating to kernel 5.9 seems to be the fix, which is easy enough. This bit is incorrect. Intel made a statement. No fix is available.
      • Ubuntu hasn’t backported the fixes to kernel 5.8 as of yet, but surely it’ll show up soon.
    • Zoom has had a wild history with encryption in the past few months. Things like encryption that wasn’t full encryption, encryption for everyone wasn’t really for everyone, and the ability for internal employees were able to log into supposedly encrypted sessions defeating the entire purpose of encryption.
    • In a four phase approach Zoom is finally rolling out end to end encryption. For now, during phase one, it’ll be opt in only. It’s essentially a beta test.
    • The second phase will roll out in 2021.

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4716 mintCast 346 – It’s Not You, It’s Me https://mintcast.org/mintcast-346-its-not-you-its-me/ Wed, 21 Oct 2020 04:20:17 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4709 Then, our news lots of releases, a new feature and a birthday
In security, we look at an IoT bug
Download
]]>

Download

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

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

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

In security, we look at an IoT bug

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

      • Three flaws in BlueZ, the Bluetooth controller software in the kernel, could lead to code execution, denial of service and a way to map memory for later exfiltration!
      • Updating to kernel 5.9 seems to be the fix, which is easy enough. This bit is incorrect. Intel made a statement. No fix is available.
      • Ubuntu hasn’t backported the fixes to kernel 5.8 as of yet, but surely it’ll show up soon.
    • Zoom has had a wild history with encryption in the past few months. Things like encryption that wasn’t full encryption, encryption for everyone wasn’t really for everyone, and the ability for internal employees were able to log into supposedly encrypted sessions defeating the entire purpose of encryption.
    • In a four phase approach Zoom is finally rolling out end to end encryption. For now, during phase one, it’ll be opt in only. It’s essentially a beta test.
    • The second phase will roll out in 2021.

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4709 mintCast 340 – Unit of Measurement (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-340-unit-of-measurement-mp3/ Wed, 29 Jul 2020 04:57:59 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4552 Then, in our news, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix changes course, Android comes to a real phone, Blender needs blenders, and more
In security, we talk Twitter
Download
]]>

Download

1:41 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
53:01 The News
1:13:28 Security
1:20:12 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Jason prints a masterpiece, I get knee deep in Mint, Tony Hughes becomes a journalist, Moss has new toys, Joe springs a leak, and Tony Watts is rockin’ in the free world.

Then, in our news, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix changes course, Android comes to a real phone, Blender needs blenders, and more

In security, we talk Twitter

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Jason
    • Trying a large life-size-ish 3D print of an old sculpt I made
    • Been going a bit analog recently with carving in wood. I was gifted some large chunks of cherry and walnut, so I’ve been trying to do interesting things with those.
    • Related to carving and 3D printing, I designed (in Blender!) and printed a mount for carving wooden and horn rings. Did that a while ago, but some folks were asking for more information about it, so I recorded an episode about that on my own podcast that I relaunched a month or so ago, the Open Source Creative Podcast (not-so-shameless plug). Got the thing posted up on Thingiverse for anyone interested.
    • Got a pretty cool audio interface for recording, but then realized that my trusty Røde Smartlav+ won’t properly connect to it without chaining a series of adapters, which I’d much rather not do.
    • Been digging a bit into various web technology stuff
      • Flask and all kinds of crazy Python stuff for databases. Plus that also means playing with Javascript and learning what a REST API is and how to make one
      • Self-hosted analytics with Goatcounter
      • Self-hosted mailing list with phpList
      • Migrated all of my websites to static sites generated by Hugo
      • Messing with getting SSL to play nice on subdomains with different hosting
  • Leo
    • Video capture card + some Raspberry Pi goodness. Plan on adding a few videos to the Terminal Tricks channel about Raspberry Pi’s. Not sure yet what I want to do, but now I have the things I need to do it! I’m open to suggestions.
    • Really putting LM20 through its paces. After a few hiccups I mentioned on the last show, stable stable stable.
    • Got a dock for my t450s! It’s great, except… Droidcam dies on me if I use the powered USB port on the dock. Have to go straight to the laptop’s powered port. Easy fix.
    • The BDLL I miss is the BDLL where they talk about my real, actual profession…

 

  • Tony H
    • Around the end of last year beginning of this I started to write a series on podcast production in Linux for Full Circle Magazine and Ronnie accepted it, due to publishing timings the first in this series is to be in the next issue of the magazine. I have written the first 3 installments, and in the process of starting to write the 4th part.   
    • I have been doing little group restorations of some of my Matchbox castings and doing 4 or 5 of the same casting at the same time. This week I did 5 Lamborghini Marzal’s and was quite pleased with the results. 
    • Myself and Moss recorded Episode 015 of Distrohoppers Digest and the show went out on Friday. Apologies to Moss as his audio on the edit did not come out the best it could, but I freely admit to not being a professional sound engineer and don’t always get it completely right on the edits.
    • On Friday night I did a fresh install of Mint 20 Mate on the Distrohoppers Laptop with the intention of this being my review for what will be the September show, as I will be away and not have sufficient bandwidth to record and edit while away from ‘Studio’ A here in Blackpool.  
  • Moss
    • I’m probably reviewing Ubuntu Unity for Episode 016 of Distrohoppers’. I have had a brief but fun conversation with its dev, Rudra Saraswat. I also haven’t yet decided what to burn to SD to run my Pi 4 on, and am waiting for Rudra to port UUR to the Pi, which he is working on, but am still considering Ubuntu MATE and Manjaro RPi versions.
    • We recorded Episode 015 of Distrohoppers’ Digest on this past Wednesday and had a grand time doing it. It should be available now. Episode 012 has gone over 400 downloads, our 8th episode to do so. 
    • I sold a laptop to one of our listeners. From the proceeds of that sale, I purchased a few things: A new microphone, which you should be hearing now. New SSDs for my desktop and laptop (1 Tb for the desktop, 512 Gb for the laptop), which are installed and will give me more room to install even more distros! I still had half the money from the sale to put into savings against my unemployment period or continued savings should I get a job soon.
    • Yes, I now have 200 distros on each of my computers. No, it’s not that bad. I have 6 distro partitions on my laptop, 1 of which is unused at present, and 8 on my desktop, 5 of which are unused. I did things the easy way on my desktop, cloning the old drive to the new one and then adding partitions, and the hard way on the laptop, as Clonezilla refused to load on my laptop, completely partitioning the disk using GPartEd and doing 5 installations in one night. Thanks to USB 3.1 and the magic of SSDs, I did all of that in 5.25 hours, bringing each distro to a complete install and upgrade with a few programs removed and a couple things added, about 85% complete. Since then, I have Mint, Bodhi, and Ubuntu Unity Edition up to about 98%, I got my printer installed but I’m still needing to configure some programs and tweak one or two things. OpenMandriva and Gecko are still pretty much in the 85-90% range of completion due to lack of time.
    • I talked with Rudra Saraswat, dev of Ubuntu Unity Edition, UbuntuEd, and a couple other new distros, and found he didn’t really have a good mirror, so I hooked him up with my old friend and listener Firecat, and now he does. Always good to make connections in the community.
    • We actually did get one or two chapters of Dresden files read since last show, which brings us to Joe.
  • Joe
    • New Dresden Files book Peace Talks came out.  I enjoyed it but it felt incomplete and despite the several years since the last book it still felt like the book was very rushed and incomplete
      • This is likely because the book was split into two and the next book will be out in a couple of months
    • Started reading the full Drizzt collection by Salvatore which is 36 books.  I have attempted to read the whole collection before and I usually only make it about half way through.  But with the completion of the most recent series I really want to give it another go.
    • My freezer out in the garage had an issue.  An operator issue.  It was still full of ice which then melted.  
      • Yeah that sucks but what is worse is that the water that leaked out was absorbed by the box next to the fridge which happened to be one of my double boxes of comic books.  
      • About half of the comics in it were ruined despite being bagged
    • My server gave up the ghost finally after years of limping along so I had to build a new one
      • Ryzen 5 3600 
        • Would have preferred the 3600g but that one is not out yet.  
      • B450m matx motherboard
      • Cube case
      • Rx 560 graphics card
        • It will eventually get upgraded
      • They gave me the incorrect power supply at Micro Center so I had to make do with another one.
        • Still need to get this taken back
      • G.SKILL 16GB 2X8GB DDR4 3200 KIT
      • I was however able to use the old operating system setup from the ssd out of the old system
      • After I reinstalled plex all the old library setup was in place and working 
      • Same with Docker, once it was installed my old images showed up and I was able to pick up everything where it was before
      • Some of the Icons images are not as they should be but it is really not an issue for me. After the upgrade from 18 to 19 to 20
      • Resilio Sync however I had to go through and start from scratch
        • Still some small issues with permissions but I am working on it
      • Have started using psensor to keep track of temperatures
    • Purchased a dock for the 7130 to test out some of the functions because I had read that the HDMI and displayport output did not work on Linux.
      • It worked fine right out of the box.  I thought it may have been displaylink which eats a lot of processor in Linux but in checking it is not installed on my tablet
        • For those that don’t know, Displaylink is the USB-to-video output technology that most adapters and docks and port replicators use
        • Very optimized for Windows and while they do make a driver for Linux it has a lot of overhead
      • So this could very easily serve as a convergence device.  I will be working on a setup for it
      • The dock costs a bit more than I would like but I am looking for ways around that as it is the power supply for it that costs the most.
    • Ordered a lot of as-is ThinkPad USB 3.0 docks for 25 dollars
      • Should have been here before this weekend so I would have something to work on but got delayed
      • I would need to buy power supplies for them separately and those would be about 10 dollars apiece but I don’t want to order any until I know how many I will get fixed
      • Should be able to sell for around 40 dollars each.  Which is less than the local area has been selling hubs and docks and port replicators for
    • I have to install Windows on 3 devices in the next couple of weeks
  • Tony W
    • New (to me) guitar amp!  Boss Katana 100W
      • Built-in amp “modeling” + every guitar effect you can think of 
      • Bought used, 100W version with GA-FC footswitch and EV-30 expression pedal included
      • Boss tone studio software makes this really powerful (but unfortunately Windows only) 
    • Reworked hard drives in studio computer
      • One more new 120GB SSD
      • Total of 3 drives (2 X SSD for “filthy dual booting” + 1 spinning for storage)
      • Used Ventoy for the Windows install
      • Played with a few distros via Ventoy startup USB
        • PopOS, manjaro, others
    • Bought a chromebook (Acer CB-431) for my kid’s school, 
    • Would have been a used thinkpad if it was for me, but seems good for use I got it for (Thinkpad T430/T440/T450/X220/X230 all still plentiful at good prices on ebay) 
      • Linux Beta
        • Linux virtual machine within ChromeOS
        • Turn it on in settings, allocate how many GB.  It installs, drops you in terminal (tony76tfg@penguin)
        • It’s Debian 10 Buster underneath
        • VLC was already installed
    • Music gigs 
      • Had a good streak of about 5 gigs over 6 weeks, slowing down a bit now (only one each in Jul/Aug)
    • Lots of grilling and barbecuing!  
      • New grill, char griller Akorn (similar to big green egg, cheaper)

THE NEWS

SECURITY UPDATE

Announcements:

The next show will be Sunday, the 9th of August at 7PM UTC, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM British Summer Time

Wrap-up:

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

  • Hobstar for his work on the new logo
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we are using to record
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
]]> full 4552 mintCast 340 – Unit of Measurement https://mintcast.org/mintcast-340-unit-of-measurement/ Wed, 29 Jul 2020 04:41:02 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4547 Then, in our news, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix changes course, Android comes to a real phone, Blender needs blenders, and more
In security, we talk Twitter
Download
]]>

Download

1:41 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
53:01 The News
1:13:28 Security
1:20:12 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Jason prints a masterpiece, I get knee deep in Mint, Tony Hughes becomes a journalist, Moss has new toys, Joe springs a leak, and Tony Watts is rockin’ in the free world.

Then, in our news, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix changes course, Android comes to a real phone, Blender needs blenders, and more

In security, we talk Twitter

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Jason
    • Trying a large life-size-ish 3D print of an old sculpt I made
    • Been going a bit analog recently with carving in wood. I was gifted some large chunks of cherry and walnut, so I’ve been trying to do interesting things with those.
    • Related to carving and 3D printing, I designed (in Blender!) and printed a mount for carving wooden and horn rings. Did that a while ago, but some folks were asking for more information about it, so I recorded an episode about that on my own podcast that I relaunched a month or so ago, the Open Source Creative Podcast (not-so-shameless plug). Got the thing posted up on Thingiverse for anyone interested.
    • Got a pretty cool audio interface for recording, but then realized that my trusty Røde Smartlav+ won’t properly connect to it without chaining a series of adapters, which I’d much rather not do.
    • Been digging a bit into various web technology stuff
      • Flask and all kinds of crazy Python stuff for databases. Plus that also means playing with Javascript and learning what a REST API is and how to make one
      • Self-hosted analytics with Goatcounter
      • Self-hosted mailing list with phpList
      • Migrated all of my websites to static sites generated by Hugo
      • Messing with getting SSL to play nice on subdomains with different hosting
  • Leo
    • Video capture card + some Raspberry Pi goodness. Plan on adding a few videos to the Terminal Tricks channel about Raspberry Pi’s. Not sure yet what I want to do, but now I have the things I need to do it! I’m open to suggestions.
    • Really putting LM20 through its paces. After a few hiccups I mentioned on the last show, stable stable stable.
    • Got a dock for my t450s! It’s great, except… Droidcam dies on me if I use the powered USB port on the dock. Have to go straight to the laptop’s powered port. Easy fix.
    • The BDLL I miss is the BDLL where they talk about my real, actual profession…

 

  • Tony H
    • Around the end of last year beginning of this I started to write a series on podcast production in Linux for Full Circle Magazine and Ronnie accepted it, due to publishing timings the first in this series is to be in the next issue of the magazine. I have written the first 3 installments, and in the process of starting to write the 4th part.   
    • I have been doing little group restorations of some of my Matchbox castings and doing 4 or 5 of the same casting at the same time. This week I did 5 Lamborghini Marzal’s and was quite pleased with the results. 
    • Myself and Moss recorded Episode 015 of Distrohoppers Digest and the show went out on Friday. Apologies to Moss as his audio on the edit did not come out the best it could, but I freely admit to not being a professional sound engineer and don’t always get it completely right on the edits.
    • On Friday night I did a fresh install of Mint 20 Mate on the Distrohoppers Laptop with the intention of this being my review for what will be the September show, as I will be away and not have sufficient bandwidth to record and edit while away from ‘Studio’ A here in Blackpool.  
  • Moss
    • I’m probably reviewing Ubuntu Unity for Episode 016 of Distrohoppers’. I have had a brief but fun conversation with its dev, Rudra Saraswat. I also haven’t yet decided what to burn to SD to run my Pi 4 on, and am waiting for Rudra to port UUR to the Pi, which he is working on, but am still considering Ubuntu MATE and Manjaro RPi versions.
    • We recorded Episode 015 of Distrohoppers’ Digest on this past Wednesday and had a grand time doing it. It should be available now. Episode 012 has gone over 400 downloads, our 8th episode to do so. 
    • I sold a laptop to one of our listeners. From the proceeds of that sale, I purchased a few things: A new microphone, which you should be hearing now. New SSDs for my desktop and laptop (1 Tb for the desktop, 512 Gb for the laptop), which are installed and will give me more room to install even more distros! I still had half the money from the sale to put into savings against my unemployment period or continued savings should I get a job soon.
    • Yes, I now have 200 distros on each of my computers. No, it’s not that bad. I have 6 distro partitions on my laptop, 1 of which is unused at present, and 8 on my desktop, 5 of which are unused. I did things the easy way on my desktop, cloning the old drive to the new one and then adding partitions, and the hard way on the laptop, as Clonezilla refused to load on my laptop, completely partitioning the disk using GPartEd and doing 5 installations in one night. Thanks to USB 3.1 and the magic of SSDs, I did all of that in 5.25 hours, bringing each distro to a complete install and upgrade with a few programs removed and a couple things added, about 85% complete. Since then, I have Mint, Bodhi, and Ubuntu Unity Edition up to about 98%, I got my printer installed but I’m still needing to configure some programs and tweak one or two things. OpenMandriva and Gecko are still pretty much in the 85-90% range of completion due to lack of time.
    • I talked with Rudra Saraswat, dev of Ubuntu Unity Edition, UbuntuEd, and a couple other new distros, and found he didn’t really have a good mirror, so I hooked him up with my old friend and listener Firecat, and now he does. Always good to make connections in the community.
    • We actually did get one or two chapters of Dresden files read since last show, which brings us to Joe.
  • Joe
    • New Dresden Files book Peace Talks came out.  I enjoyed it but it felt incomplete and despite the several years since the last book it still felt like the book was very rushed and incomplete
      • This is likely because the book was split into two and the next book will be out in a couple of months
    • Started reading the full Drizzt collection by Salvatore which is 36 books.  I have attempted to read the whole collection before and I usually only make it about half way through.  But with the completion of the most recent series I really want to give it another go.
    • My freezer out in the garage had an issue.  An operator issue.  It was still full of ice which then melted.  
      • Yeah that sucks but what is worse is that the water that leaked out was absorbed by the box next to the fridge which happened to be one of my double boxes of comic books.  
      • About half of the comics in it were ruined despite being bagged
    • My server gave up the ghost finally after years of limping along so I had to build a new one
      • Ryzen 5 3600 
        • Would have preferred the 3600g but that one is not out yet.  
      • B450m matx motherboard
      • Cube case
      • Rx 560 graphics card
        • It will eventually get upgraded
      • They gave me the incorrect power supply at Micro Center so I had to make do with another one.
        • Still need to get this taken back
      • G.SKILL 16GB 2X8GB DDR4 3200 KIT
      • I was however able to use the old operating system setup from the ssd out of the old system
      • After I reinstalled plex all the old library setup was in place and working 
      • Same with Docker, once it was installed my old images showed up and I was able to pick up everything where it was before
      • Some of the Icons images are not as they should be but it is really not an issue for me. After the upgrade from 18 to 19 to 20
      • Resilio Sync however I had to go through and start from scratch
        • Still some small issues with permissions but I am working on it
      • Have started using psensor to keep track of temperatures
    • Purchased a dock for the 7130 to test out some of the functions because I had read that the HDMI and displayport output did not work on Linux.
      • It worked fine right out of the box.  I thought it may have been displaylink which eats a lot of processor in Linux but in checking it is not installed on my tablet
        • For those that don’t know, Displaylink is the USB-to-video output technology that most adapters and docks and port replicators use
        • Very optimized for Windows and while they do make a driver for Linux it has a lot of overhead
      • So this could very easily serve as a convergence device.  I will be working on a setup for it
      • The dock costs a bit more than I would like but I am looking for ways around that as it is the power supply for it that costs the most.
    • Ordered a lot of as-is ThinkPad USB 3.0 docks for 25 dollars
      • Should have been here before this weekend so I would have something to work on but got delayed
      • I would need to buy power supplies for them separately and those would be about 10 dollars apiece but I don’t want to order any until I know how many I will get fixed
      • Should be able to sell for around 40 dollars each.  Which is less than the local area has been selling hubs and docks and port replicators for
    • I have to install Windows on 3 devices in the next couple of weeks
  • Tony W
    • New (to me) guitar amp!  Boss Katana 100W
      • Built-in amp “modeling” + every guitar effect you can think of 
      • Bought used, 100W version with GA-FC footswitch and EV-30 expression pedal included
      • Boss tone studio software makes this really powerful (but unfortunately Windows only) 
    • Reworked hard drives in studio computer
      • One more new 120GB SSD
      • Total of 3 drives (2 X SSD for “filthy dual booting” + 1 spinning for storage)
      • Used Ventoy for the Windows install
      • Played with a few distros via Ventoy startup USB
        • PopOS, manjaro, others
    • Bought a chromebook (Acer CB-431) for my kid’s school, 
    • Would have been a used thinkpad if it was for me, but seems good for use I got it for (Thinkpad T430/T440/T450/X220/X230 all still plentiful at good prices on ebay) 
      • Linux Beta
        • Linux virtual machine within ChromeOS
        • Turn it on in settings, allocate how many GB.  It installs, drops you in terminal (tony76tfg@penguin)
        • It’s Debian 10 Buster underneath
        • VLC was already installed
    • Music gigs 
      • Had a good streak of about 5 gigs over 6 weeks, slowing down a bit now (only one each in Jul/Aug)
    • Lots of grilling and barbecuing!  
      • New grill, char griller Akorn (similar to big green egg, cheaper)

THE NEWS

SECURITY UPDATE

Announcements:

The next show will be Sunday, the 9th of August at 7PM UTC, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM British Summer Time

Wrap-up:

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

  • Hobstar for his work on the new logo
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we are using to record
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
]]> full 4547 mintCast 327 – The Mozilla Thrilla https://mintcast.org/mintcast-327-the-mozilla-thrilla/ Wed, 29 Jan 2020 08:02:54 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4152 Then in our news a new Wine, GParted, Edge and Yaru theme for Ubuntu. The Pinephone ships and Firefox runs into issues.
Finally, in security, we talk password leads and Mozilla addon bans.
Download
]]>

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, I follow in Tony H’s footsteps and paint, Tony H upgrades a laptop and attends another LUG, Josh returns, Moss meets a mintCast listener, Joe listens to more books and learns about Cockpit, and Tony Watts edits video and works on his Studio.

Then in our news a new Wine, GParted, Edge and Yaru theme for Ubuntu. The Pinephone ships and Firefox runs into issues.

Finally, in security, we talk password leads and Mozilla addon bans.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • DnD Mini painting! D:
  • Tony H
    • Upgraded a Windows 8.1 Sony VAIO i5 laptop to Windows 10 and after the upgrade replaced the spinner with a 120Gig SSD and upgraded the RAM from 4 to 6Gb and this now boots in under 10 seconds. Even I was impressed with the performance improvements, I’m sure part of the issue was that over time the Win8 install had built up a load of windows bloat which slowed it down, but the person who asked me to do this will be very happy to have a workable laptop back. Listening to the first part of the HPR new years eve/day marathon event which was released this week, if you want to know what me and Popey talked about, have a listen.   
    • Went to the LUG and talking to a new member who has just moved to the area and we seem to have trod a similar path with Linux, starting with Ubuntu and migrating to Mint with the advent of the Unity DE. Good to see new people coming to the LUG. 
    • Oh and this week at the LUG I got given some sourdough starter which I have christened ‘Fred’ well it is a living organism lol. So this week sometime I will be trying to bake a sourdough loaf, may have to do a little YouTube research beforehand to make sure I’m doing it right. I’ve made many loaves before but this will be the first time making sourdough. Wish me luck.    
    • And I can’t forget the Matchbox cars, had a lucky flea-Bay find and picked up some very nice models that can go straight into the collection for around a £1 each. I’m sure I can get a lot more than that if I ever want to part with them, but for now they will be staying put. Considering having a stall at the next swap meet, to try and move on some of my many repeats either sell or swap.
  • Moss
    • So I missed the Thinkpad Lovefest last episode. I had a great time at GAFilk (as I always do, which is why I keep going year upon year), but the resultant video did not sound great. I’m waiting for better audio to patch in, foretelling my first go with KDEnlive.
    • At least you didn’t decide to replace me permanently with Alan Pope. My first Thinkpad was purchased only 5 or 6 years ago, a X130e, which later I replaced with a T430 and sent the X130e to my fiancee (now wife). After about a year, she decided she wanted a T430, so we sold the X130e and bought her one. She still has hers; I just sold mine to listener Dale Miracle at a price which was definitely to my benefit, and we got dinner along with it. Thanks, Dale!
    • I’ve been playing Musical Distros on my machines, and somehow managed to have Mint Cinnamon and KDE neon on both computers. I need to find some more distros to play with.  I looked at Nitrux but it doesn’t look like you actually install it. 
    • The problem I was having with Feren OS on my Galago Pro 2, which to date has only shown itself when using only with Kmines and KMahjongg, was not a Feren problem, it was something between the Galago video system and KDE. I had the same issue with KDE neon. And while the blocks of video dropout are white in regular mode, they are dark grey in Dark Mode, which is really something. I haven’t tried Kubuntu to further investigate, but the Galago Pro was reported to have been pretty well-used when listener Jackie Moore sent it to me so it could just be wear.
    • To the people in our Telegram group who seem to think I have the record for the most distros on a machine: one of my MeWe friends has 11. And I have done the math: if I allocated a generous 25 Gb for each distro, I could easily fit 50 distros on my Galago Pro 2; however, thinking about having to update all those distros, not to mention navigating the GRUB menu. I think I’ll stick with 7.
    • I’m trying to talk Tony into doing Peppermint 10 Respin for Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 010 on February 5th.  I tried it and was driven bonkers by the peppermint candy icon in the taskbar. I hate doing negative reviews, especially for good distros, so I’ll get Tony to do a positive one, if he’s up for it. I believe I’ll do Feren OS again, it’s a whole new distro with KDE and what he has done is simply amazing. Our episode download numbers keep increasing, with currently 2 episodes over 500 downloads and 3 more over 400 out of 9 episodes. For as niche-y as we are, those are nice numbers.
    • I replaced Ubuntu Budgie 19.10 with Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix, because that’s what we’re doing this episode. I have no need for two versions of Ubuntu 19.10, but I will miss Budgie. 
    • My wife and I have finished reading Storm Front and got a $1.99 deal on Fool Moon (Dresden Files series), so I’m reading that to my wife now. Apparently these books are not in Kindle Unlimited — which beggars the use of the word “unlimited”, but there you have it. Our flying the skies with Temeraire continues to be on hold.
    • The Rehab facility sent my mom home again just yesterday. Hope she can stay there.
  • Josh
    • Back from Australia
    • Problems with Grandad’s PC (He needs a new one)
    • Editing photos
    • EduBlocks draggable video tutorials
    • Much less of me on the show due to exams in 14 weeks
  • Joe
    • Listened to some good books
    • NOS4A2 by Joe Hill who is the son of Stephen King
      • Really good book
      • You can tell that it was heavily influenced by King
      • Lots of references to Kings works
      • Very detailed but still easy to follow. 
      • Highly recommend and I will be trying a few more books from the same author.  Maybe find out if he has written any series
    • Listened to the Avalon Chronicles which are a continuation of the Hellequin novels
      • Well read but complex enough that for the first read through I needed to drop the speed from 3x to 2x
      • I like the following of new characters while still having the cameos from the previous series to tie it all together.
      • Book 2 and 3 jumped around a lot
    • Started the Lost Fleet series so I could get the beginning of the story.
      • Really having read the second series of this I am having trouble getting through because it is so similar that I feel like I have already read it.
      • Don’t know if I will finish the series any time soon but I will keep it in my library
    • Listening to the Daniel Faust novels again
    • Was hoping to listen to the Demon Squad novels but my copy is gone and I have not found a new one yet
    • Also Yancy Lazarous novels but I was able to find another copy.  So it will be next on my list
    • Started using voice aloud reader which was recommended to me by one of my co-hosts on the linux lug cast.
      • I have never before liked text-aloud books, but using one of the online voice reader options it has worked out very well.
      • So far I have read the 6th book from the Garrett P.I. novels and the first book of the Aubry Knight trilogy
        • Both series are available as ebooks but not audiobooks
        • Both are very good books that I always wanted to get in audio
        • It is not perfect but it is much better than it was 10 years ago
    • Haven’t done much with PI’s in a while and all I have left at this time is some Pi 1’s and a couple of zero w’s
      • For a warm up I plan on setting up a zero w as a pi hole
        • Used raspbian lite
      • I would like to order a Pi 4 and I will get around to it
      • Also looking hard at some physical switches on the GPIO to run scripts
      • But I may just use a usb numpad to start off with.
      • Also looking at 7 inch hdmi touch screens for the pi’s 
    • Thanks Popey for coming on the show last time.  Also thanks for the suggestion on cockpit
      • It helped me easily diagnose the problems on my server.  Yes it all could have been found elsewhere but this tool made it easy with everything consolidated.  I was also able to use the interface to find the issue while I was several miles away at the office.  
      • Turns out one of my 4tb hdds has some bad sectors.  Sadly it is the partition that has all my configurations for docker and all my audiobooks.  
      • Which explains the corrupt audiobook files that I have been seeing. 
      • Ordered an 8tb to replace it.  
    • 8Tb HDD was really easy to set up.  Didn’t have to jump through all the large hard drive hoops that I used to have to.
      • Setup in disks and then use rsync to copy everything over 24 hours to copy 4tb of data.  Power down and power back up to make sure the data is still there and the partition is accessible.
      • Use disks again to change the mount name to what the old drive was(one of them the one for docker) and change the mount point on the old drive
      • Restart the machine and make sure that docker is working then point plex to the new drive location.  
      • Do a full shutdown with no power for a few minutes
        • Yes I’m paranoid
      • It is all working.  I now feel comfortable taking the 4Tb out Although I may wait a few days before doing anything with it.  
    • Installed android x86 on the 7140 which may spend some time as my testing machine
      • I did not want to wipe out my hard drive so I attempted to install it to a USB stick
      • I think my powered usb hub or the cable to it was simply not up to the task
      • So I wiped my drive and ran it there.  
      • It was nice being able to play some of the android games on full screen and install all the apps that I usually use on my phone
      • But the sound did not work on either the speakers or the 3.5mm jack but did work over bluetooth so kinda usable 
      • The only issue I had was recovering when it attempted to sleep since the 7140 does not support that.  The touchpad and wifi would both stop working although I could fix the wifi I could not fix the touchpad without a full restart
    • So I wiped the drive again and attempted to install ubuntu cinnamon.  Invalid partition table every time.
      • Will talk about that in the innards but I did get it fixed
    • Also am attempting to install android x86 in virtualbox on my 7130
      • Need to increase the resources for it but it does seem to be working
    • May have to buy a larger/faster drive for the 7140 
    • Dell Venue 8 Pro woes
      • Spent a couple of days trying to get that set back up
      • Couldn’t install anything with cinnamon
      • Ended up install Mint Mate to replace mint xfce
      • Tried all the old audio fixes and could not get the audio working
      • Surprisingly though the Bluetooth is now working
    • Copyq from the going linux podcast
  • Tony W
    • More progress on digitizing 8mm video
      • Located all of the cables for camcorder
      • VLC did capture both audio and video streams, after selecting video camera as source (vs analog TV as used previously per instruction in a reddit or something)
      • Resulting video files from VLC capture are HUGE.  Uncompressed AVI format
      • Essentially the process is to capture audio/video, then convert the raw uncompressed files to MP4 etc (I will use Handbrake for this)
    • I will be doing some work on my home studio in the basement very soon
      • Drywall and insulation, framing around ducts and pipes, carpet…
      • Need permit from county
      • Planning to host band practice at my house for yet another band project
    • Have been enjoying some of the basic features of Plex I had somehow managed to avoid to this point
      • Bought the android app
      • Casting to chromecasts in the house
      • Added user accts for the kids – gives control over BOTH libraries and ratings restriction

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

Announcements:

  • Our Next Episode will be live Feb 9, 2020. 2PM CST, 8PM UTC

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)
]]> full 1:09:00 4152 mintCast 327 – The Mozilla Thrilla (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-327-the-mozilla-thrilla-mp3/ Wed, 29 Jan 2020 07:40:07 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4150 Then in our news a new Wine, GParted, Edge and Yaru theme for Ubuntu. The Pinephone ships and Firefox runs into issues.
Finally, in security, we talk password leads and Mozilla addon bans.
Download
]]>

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, I follow in Tony H’s footsteps and paint, Tony H upgrades a laptop and attends another LUG, Josh returns, Moss meets a mintCast listener, Joe listens to more books and learns about Cockpit, and Tony Watts edits video and works on his Studio.

Then in our news a new Wine, GParted, Edge and Yaru theme for Ubuntu. The Pinephone ships and Firefox runs into issues.

Finally, in security, we talk password leads and Mozilla addon bans.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • DnD Mini painting! D:
  • Tony H
    • Upgraded a Windows 8.1 Sony VAIO i5 laptop to Windows 10 and after the upgrade replaced the spinner with a 120Gig SSD and upgraded the RAM from 4 to 6Gb and this now boots in under 10 seconds. Even I was impressed with the performance improvements, I’m sure part of the issue was that over time the Win8 install had built up a load of windows bloat which slowed it down, but the person who asked me to do this will be very happy to have a workable laptop back. Listening to the first part of the HPR new years eve/day marathon event which was released this week, if you want to know what me and Popey talked about, have a listen.   
    • Went to the LUG and talking to a new member who has just moved to the area and we seem to have trod a similar path with Linux, starting with Ubuntu and migrating to Mint with the advent of the Unity DE. Good to see new people coming to the LUG. 
    • Oh and this week at the LUG I got given some sourdough starter which I have christened ‘Fred’ well it is a living organism lol. So this week sometime I will be trying to bake a sourdough loaf, may have to do a little YouTube research beforehand to make sure I’m doing it right. I’ve made many loaves before but this will be the first time making sourdough. Wish me luck.    
    • And I can’t forget the Matchbox cars, had a lucky flea-Bay find and picked up some very nice models that can go straight into the collection for around a £1 each. I’m sure I can get a lot more than that if I ever want to part with them, but for now they will be staying put. Considering having a stall at the next swap meet, to try and move on some of my many repeats either sell or swap.
  • Moss
    • So I missed the Thinkpad Lovefest last episode. I had a great time at GAFilk (as I always do, which is why I keep going year upon year), but the resultant video did not sound great. I’m waiting for better audio to patch in, foretelling my first go with KDEnlive.
    • At least you didn’t decide to replace me permanently with Alan Pope. My first Thinkpad was purchased only 5 or 6 years ago, a X130e, which later I replaced with a T430 and sent the X130e to my fiancee (now wife). After about a year, she decided she wanted a T430, so we sold the X130e and bought her one. She still has hers; I just sold mine to listener Dale Miracle at a price which was definitely to my benefit, and we got dinner along with it. Thanks, Dale!
    • I’ve been playing Musical Distros on my machines, and somehow managed to have Mint Cinnamon and KDE neon on both computers. I need to find some more distros to play with.  I looked at Nitrux but it doesn’t look like you actually install it. 
    • The problem I was having with Feren OS on my Galago Pro 2, which to date has only shown itself when using only with Kmines and KMahjongg, was not a Feren problem, it was something between the Galago video system and KDE. I had the same issue with KDE neon. And while the blocks of video dropout are white in regular mode, they are dark grey in Dark Mode, which is really something. I haven’t tried Kubuntu to further investigate, but the Galago Pro was reported to have been pretty well-used when listener Jackie Moore sent it to me so it could just be wear.
    • To the people in our Telegram group who seem to think I have the record for the most distros on a machine: one of my MeWe friends has 11. And I have done the math: if I allocated a generous 25 Gb for each distro, I could easily fit 50 distros on my Galago Pro 2; however, thinking about having to update all those distros, not to mention navigating the GRUB menu. I think I’ll stick with 7.
    • I’m trying to talk Tony into doing Peppermint 10 Respin for Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 010 on February 5th.  I tried it and was driven bonkers by the peppermint candy icon in the taskbar. I hate doing negative reviews, especially for good distros, so I’ll get Tony to do a positive one, if he’s up for it. I believe I’ll do Feren OS again, it’s a whole new distro with KDE and what he has done is simply amazing. Our episode download numbers keep increasing, with currently 2 episodes over 500 downloads and 3 more over 400 out of 9 episodes. For as niche-y as we are, those are nice numbers.
    • I replaced Ubuntu Budgie 19.10 with Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix, because that’s what we’re doing this episode. I have no need for two versions of Ubuntu 19.10, but I will miss Budgie. 
    • My wife and I have finished reading Storm Front and got a $1.99 deal on Fool Moon (Dresden Files series), so I’m reading that to my wife now. Apparently these books are not in Kindle Unlimited — which beggars the use of the word “unlimited”, but there you have it. Our flying the skies with Temeraire continues to be on hold.
    • The Rehab facility sent my mom home again just yesterday. Hope she can stay there.
  • Josh
    • Back from Australia
    • Problems with Grandad’s PC (He needs a new one)
    • Editing photos
    • EduBlocks draggable video tutorials
    • Much less of me on the show due to exams in 14 weeks
  • Joe
    • Listened to some good books
    • NOS4A2 by Joe Hill who is the son of Stephen King
      • Really good book
      • You can tell that it was heavily influenced by King
      • Lots of references to Kings works
      • Very detailed but still easy to follow. 
      • Highly recommend and I will be trying a few more books from the same author.  Maybe find out if he has written any series
    • Listened to the Avalon Chronicles which are a continuation of the Hellequin novels
      • Well read but complex enough that for the first read through I needed to drop the speed from 3x to 2x
      • I like the following of new characters while still having the cameos from the previous series to tie it all together.
      • Book 2 and 3 jumped around a lot
    • Started the Lost Fleet series so I could get the beginning of the story.
      • Really having read the second series of this I am having trouble getting through because it is so similar that I feel like I have already read it.
      • Don’t know if I will finish the series any time soon but I will keep it in my library
    • Listening to the Daniel Faust novels again
    • Was hoping to listen to the Demon Squad novels but my copy is gone and I have not found a new one yet
    • Also Yancy Lazarous novels but I was able to find another copy.  So it will be next on my list
    • Started using voice aloud reader which was recommended to me by one of my co-hosts on the linux lug cast.
      • I have never before liked text-aloud books, but using one of the online voice reader options it has worked out very well.
      • So far I have read the 6th book from the Garrett P.I. novels and the first book of the Aubry Knight trilogy
        • Both series are available as ebooks but not audiobooks
        • Both are very good books that I always wanted to get in audio
        • It is not perfect but it is much better than it was 10 years ago
    • Haven’t done much with PI’s in a while and all I have left at this time is some Pi 1’s and a couple of zero w’s
      • For a warm up I plan on setting up a zero w as a pi hole
        • Used raspbian lite
      • I would like to order a Pi 4 and I will get around to it
      • Also looking hard at some physical switches on the GPIO to run scripts
      • But I may just use a usb numpad to start off with.
      • Also looking at 7 inch hdmi touch screens for the pi’s 
    • Thanks Popey for coming on the show last time.  Also thanks for the suggestion on cockpit
      • It helped me easily diagnose the problems on my server.  Yes it all could have been found elsewhere but this tool made it easy with everything consolidated.  I was also able to use the interface to find the issue while I was several miles away at the office.  
      • Turns out one of my 4tb hdds has some bad sectors.  Sadly it is the partition that has all my configurations for docker and all my audiobooks.  
      • Which explains the corrupt audiobook files that I have been seeing. 
      • Ordered an 8tb to replace it.  
    • 8Tb HDD was really easy to set up.  Didn’t have to jump through all the large hard drive hoops that I used to have to.
      • Setup in disks and then use rsync to copy everything over 24 hours to copy 4tb of data.  Power down and power back up to make sure the data is still there and the partition is accessible.
      • Use disks again to change the mount name to what the old drive was(one of them the one for docker) and change the mount point on the old drive
      • Restart the machine and make sure that docker is working then point plex to the new drive location.  
      • Do a full shutdown with no power for a few minutes
        • Yes I’m paranoid
      • It is all working.  I now feel comfortable taking the 4Tb out Although I may wait a few days before doing anything with it.  
    • Installed android x86 on the 7140 which may spend some time as my testing machine
      • I did not want to wipe out my hard drive so I attempted to install it to a USB stick
      • I think my powered usb hub or the cable to it was simply not up to the task
      • So I wiped my drive and ran it there.  
      • It was nice being able to play some of the android games on full screen and install all the apps that I usually use on my phone
      • But the sound did not work on either the speakers or the 3.5mm jack but did work over bluetooth so kinda usable 
      • The only issue I had was recovering when it attempted to sleep since the 7140 does not support that.  The touchpad and wifi would both stop working although I could fix the wifi I could not fix the touchpad without a full restart
    • So I wiped the drive again and attempted to install ubuntu cinnamon.  Invalid partition table every time.
      • Will talk about that in the innards but I did get it fixed
    • Also am attempting to install android x86 in virtualbox on my 7130
      • Need to increase the resources for it but it does seem to be working
    • May have to buy a larger/faster drive for the 7140 
    • Dell Venue 8 Pro woes
      • Spent a couple of days trying to get that set back up
      • Couldn’t install anything with cinnamon
      • Ended up install Mint Mate to replace mint xfce
      • Tried all the old audio fixes and could not get the audio working
      • Surprisingly though the Bluetooth is now working
    • Copyq from the going linux podcast
  • Tony W
    • More progress on digitizing 8mm video
      • Located all of the cables for camcorder
      • VLC did capture both audio and video streams, after selecting video camera as source (vs analog TV as used previously per instruction in a reddit or something)
      • Resulting video files from VLC capture are HUGE.  Uncompressed AVI format
      • Essentially the process is to capture audio/video, then convert the raw uncompressed files to MP4 etc (I will use Handbrake for this)
    • I will be doing some work on my home studio in the basement very soon
      • Drywall and insulation, framing around ducts and pipes, carpet…
      • Need permit from county
      • Planning to host band practice at my house for yet another band project
    • Have been enjoying some of the basic features of Plex I had somehow managed to avoid to this point
      • Bought the android app
      • Casting to chromecasts in the house
      • Added user accts for the kids – gives control over BOTH libraries and ratings restriction

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

Announcements:

  • Our Next Episode will be live Feb 9, 2020. 2PM CST, 8PM UTC

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)
]]> full 1:09:00 4150 mintCast 323 – Ok, Beta https://mintcast.org/mintcast-323-ok-beta/ Wed, 04 Dec 2019 06:42:09 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4038 Then, in our news, Linux Mint has a new update, System76 builds its own laptops, Kali goes undercover, the new 5.4 Kernel, and more!
In security, we talk D-Link remote access.
Download
]]>

Download

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

 

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

 

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

THE NEWS:

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

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

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

WRAP-UP:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 1:15:38 4038 mintCast 323 – Ok, Beta (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-323-ok-beta-mp3/ Wed, 04 Dec 2019 06:35:49 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4036 Then, in our news, Linux Mint has a new update, System76 builds its own laptops, Kali goes undercover, the new 5.4 Kernel, and more!
In security, we talk D-Link remote access.
Download
]]>

Download

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo Goes Upstream, Moss fights frustration by installing Sabayon again, Tony Hughes grapples with Gnome3, Joe fixes some keyboards, and Tony Watts plays on Proton

Then, in our news, Linux Mint has a new update, System76 builds its own laptops, Kali goes undercover, the new 5.4 Kernel, and more!

In security, we talk D-Link remote access.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

 

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

 

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

THE NEWS:

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

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

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

WRAP-UP:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 1:15:38 4036 mintCast 320 – Sudos and Sudon’ts https://mintcast.org/mintcast-320-sudos-and-sudonts/ Wed, 23 Oct 2019 06:06:16 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3980 First up, in our Wanderings, I play with audio, Moss tries out two new System76 laptops, Josh has been oggcamping, Joe’s been headphoning, And Tony has been updating a laptop for a friend.
Then, in our news we talk about Ubuntu, Google’s most disappointing pixel yet (the Pixel 4), Linux Mint’s gaming ability, and the releases of Freespire, Tails and Trident.
Finally, in security, we talk sudo.
Download
]]>

Download

This is the new group’s official 1 year anniversary (apart from Josh :D).

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo plays with audio, Moss tries out two new System76 laptops, Josh has been oggcamping, Joe’s been headphoning, And Tony has been updating a laptop for a friend.

Then, in our news we talk about Ubuntu, Google’s most disappointing pixel yet (the Pixel 4), Linux Mint’s gaming ability, and the releases of Freespire, Tails and Trident.

Finally, in security, we talk sudo.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Spilled water on my laptop right before the show…
    • Playing with my audio setup again.
      • Got a new boom stand. A standalone type like you’d see on stage.
      • Haven’t gotten a chance to set it up yet, but an isolation box for the  mic as well.
        • This is mostly because I can’t afford to dish out the cash needed to fully sound deaden a room, so a box with sound deadening is the next best thing!
      • Linux fixes another flash drive.
        • Have had a 32GB flash drive for about 5 years now (AData S102) and thought it died at work recently.
        • During a write operation, a few hundred files, about 200MB, the drive unmounts and then starts to mount and unmount over and over until unplugged. Thought it died.
        • Came home, plugged it into my Mint desktop and used Disks. Removed partitions, reformatted in exFAT, and poof. Fixed.
  • Moss
    • On Tuesday  on the 8th, one of our listeners, Jackie Moore (who has been quite helpful in that past, as you may remember), informed me to expect a package at work. When it arrived, it was a wonderful, though slightly beaten up, System76 Galago Pro 2. It arrived with Pop!_OS on the SSD, and a forgotten installation of Ubuntu on the 1 Terabyte hard drive. I installed Linux Mint 19.2 on the SSD and just installed Ubuntu MATE 19.10 over the old Ubuntu, plus added a couple more distros. This little beast has a 1 Tb hard drive plus a 256 GB SSD, and while it is short on ports, those include a USB-C/Thunderbolt port and two USB 3.1 ports. 
    • As this computer was not the form factor I was looking for, Jackie offered me a deal on a Kudu3, and we came up with a swap; he got my Sans Digital AccuNAS box I had listed on eBay, I got his Kudu3. I hope he is as ecstatic about the trade as I am! I have always dreamed of owning a System76 but thought they would always be beyond my reach — new ones cost more than I have, and used ones are rare — and now I have two of them. I cannot possibly thank Jackie enough, and need to mention he is a fellow Tennessean.
    • I sold 2 tablets on eBay, one of our Kindle Fires and the LG GTab F. This got me about $26 for household. I still have two network switches for sale, one an 8-port and the other a 24-port.
    • I took the extra 4 Gb RAM out of my T430 and placed it in my wife’s T430, and swapped my 9-cell battery with her 6-cell. I can now sell my T430 and get my IdeaPad 110-15acl ready for sale after next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
    • I continue reading Her Majesty’s Dragon to my wife, and also picked up a copy of Animal Farm, which she had never read, and have gotten through a few chapters of that.
    • My mother was in the hospital for a few days and is now back in the rehab facility. She sounds good, but is 90 years old…
  • Josh
    • Visited Oggcamp and joined the podcast panel
      • Lots of things to see
      • Podcast panel with Joe Ressington
      • It was great fun. We covered young people getting into linux, schools, Microsoft adopting linux and generally had a good laugh.
    • Built EduBlocks offline edition. I removed it when I did the overhaul and people want it back. Decided against using Electron as it’s quite heavy on Raspberry Pi.
    • I’m still sorting out my Pixel3 after 4 weeks without a phone now. They offered a refund but tried talking me into store credit even though they said cash. I should have it resolved this week.
    • I’ve 99% decided on the iPhone 11 (non pro) after going to try both that and the Pixel 4 in store tomorrow but I’ll save my thoughts for the news section.
    • All magazines have now shipped, after having a few issues we’ve learnt lots. We still have about 7 damaged copies (which we got replaced with new ones) of which we’re going to donate to local schools. New issue in a few weeks!
  • Joe
    • Ordered 5 HBS 820’s
      • When it arrived it came with 6 which is cool.  
      • 3 of them were working with no issues, which is kind of weird
        • Not that I am complaining
        • The 3 that don’t work, 2 of them have broken neck bands but work otherwise
        • The last one has one side that doesn’t work
        • I also have one from a previous lot that only has one side working
        • Once again just like with the 810s you can only replace same sides with same sides 
        • That means because of the 3 working and the extra parts from the ones with broken bands along with the 2 ones with one side out i will get 5 working total.
        • One of the ones with one side out i also had to glue the connecter to the band back on.  Seems to be holding together well 
        • The interesting part of these is that the soldering is very easy but you have to replace the whole lower plastic section.  You don’t have to desolder the board but you do have to remove everything else around it because of how the earpiece cable goes through the lower assembly
    • Read  book 2 in the last reaper novels and Alex Verus book 10 as well as 6 of the Harley Merlin novels. All shorter books but very enjoyable. I went through the first 6 of the Harley Merlin books in about 2 days. I wouldn’t say that it is great writing but it was engaging enough to keep me listening. No complaints about audio quality
    • Mostly caught up on podcasts but that might be because I don’t know what book to listen to yet.  Maybe some of the Doctor Who audio dramas?
    • Also read Monster Hunter Guardian and Saga of the forgotten warrior book 2 both by larry correia.  Very good author and well done audios.
    • Also Daniel Faust books 1-8
    • Kevin Mitnick   The art of invisibility
      • “You may have nothing to hide but you have everything to protect”
      • Even if you aren’t paranoid about security you should read this book just so you know how privacy doesn’t work.
    • Started up my python classes with a few friends again.
    • I think i have found my next headphone soldering adventures.
      • MMCX connectors.  I have experimented with them before but only with the whole cables.  Now i am going to use the female connectors on cans to go along with the male cables and i am going to try to use the male connectors on the ends of the retractable LGs that usually break near the earpiece.  You can get a couple of sets of the MMCX earpieces for cheap and then rotate through them on the different headsets.
    • Started playing around with MPSYT, aka mps-youtube
      • It is a command line interface to search and play youtube videos
      • I started looking into it to possibly use in conjunction with a pi zero headless
      • I don’t think it would be something I could automate so it doesn’t match my current use case.
      • I have gotten it to load and play playlists, shuffled but i would need to find a way for it to do that automatically.
    • Wrote an article about travel networking.  It is a broad overview at this point
      • covers networking while visiting family
      • Or while at a hotel
      • Or while traveling down the road
  • Tony W
    • Saw Mudhoney live a couple weeks ago, reluctantly didn’t go to Melvins show
      • Good month for grunge concerts in ATL
    • Upgraded a friend’s Toshiba Satellite A505 laptop
      • 5400 HDD to SSD
      • 4G RAM to 8GB
      • Started with fresh Win10 vs OEM preloaded Windows
      • Not a good fit for recommending Linux unfortunately, he is really stuck on itunes 
    • I hate buying printer ink
      • $60 for ink for a printer that’s on its last legs, hard to justify.  At that cost need to contemplate a new printer every time you run out of ink [Moss: I get some really nice printers for under $60, with cheap ink refills.]
    • Played with Bunsenlabs
      • Continuation of the old Crunchbang
      • Really enjoyed crunchbang ‘back in the day’.  It was the only OS I could get to perform well on really old machines
      • System requirements 256 MB of RAM, recommended 1GB
      • Still have 32 bit iso

THE NEWS:

  • Ubuntu 19.10 Released
    • Mint will get the 5.3 kernel “soon.” 5.0 was available about a month after 18.10 was released.
    • Comes with LZ4 compression for faster boot! (coming from Gzip)
    • ZFS on root (experimental)
    • Gnome 3.34
    • Ubuntu Mate, Budgie, Studio, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu also released
    • Ubuntu Cinnamon may be a brand new flavor in 20.04.
  • Ubuntu 20.04 Named
    • Focal Fossa. At least I can pronounce that one (Leo)
    • As the version number implies, it’ll be released in April 2020
  • Happy 15th Birthday, Ubuntu
    • Linux Mint’s 13th birthday was August 27th 2006.
  • Google Pixel 4, Pixelbook Go & Pixel Buds released
    • Josh is highly disappointed
    • The camera sucks (I’ve tried it). If you want a good camera, buy an iPhone
    • The soli radar thing is, weird
    • It’s nice to have a 90Hz display
    • However, they made the battery smaller than the 3!!!! (which was already bad)
  • The Linux Mint 19.2 Gaming Report
    • Gaming Report essentially assesses how easy it is for a new user to get up and running with Steam and Proton and play games on a given distro
    • Assessment was “Promising but room for improvement”
    • Probably biggest knock was lack of inclusion of Vulcan 32-bit libraries, which are required for running proton on machines with AMD graphics
    • Suggested inclusion of Lutris in software center
    • In the Podcast, Jason did say he found Cinnamon “beautiful” and everything was right where he expected it to be
  • Freespire 5.0 Released
    • I remember when this was Lindows. Then Linspire. Now Freespire. (Freespire is the free edition, Linspire is the professional edition.) Freespire got a new start last year: Wikipedia reports, “Freespire 2.0.8, released on 30 November 2007, and based on Ubuntu 7.04, was the final release until the distribution was revived with 3.0 in January 2018.” Some parts of the community are quite critical of the company, as Linspire and Freespire license several proprietary bits of software and codecs intentionally, in order to get more interoperability with Windows features. They do produce a Freespire OSS edition, with only open-source options.
  • Tails 4.0 Released
  • Project Trident dumps BSD, moves to Void Linux
  • Samsung Kills Linux on Dex

SECURITY UPDATE:

  • Bug in sudo allows privilege escalation!
  • Resolution: Upgrade to sudo version 1.8.28.
  • This seems to only be an issue on boxes that have custom sudo privileges (essentially not ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL)
  • Basically, just run updates.

WRAP-UP:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 1:18:16 3980 mintCast 320 – Sudos and Sudon’ts (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-320-sudos-and-sudonts-mp3/ Wed, 23 Oct 2019 05:57:46 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3978 First up, in our Wanderings, Leo plays with audio, Moss tries out two new System76 laptops, Josh has been oggcamping, Joe’s been headphoning, And Tony has been updating a laptop for a friend.
Then, in our news we talk about Ubuntu, Google’s most disappointing pixel yet (the Pixel 4), Linux Mint’s gaming ability, and the releases of Freespire, Tails and Trident.
Finally, in security, we talk sudo.
Download
]]>

Download

This is the new group’s official 1 year anniversary (apart from Josh :D).

First up, in our Wanderings, Leo plays with audio, Moss tries out two new System76 laptops, Josh has been oggcamping, Joe’s been headphoning, And Tony has been updating a laptop for a friend.

Then, in our news we talk about Ubuntu, Google’s most disappointing pixel yet (the Pixel 4), Linux Mint’s gaming ability, and the releases of Freespire, Tails and Trident.

Finally, in security, we talk sudo.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Spilled water on my laptop right before the show…
    • Playing with my audio setup again.
      • Got a new boom stand. A standalone type like you’d see on stage.
      • Haven’t gotten a chance to set it up yet, but an isolation box for the  mic as well.
        • This is mostly because I can’t afford to dish out the cash needed to fully sound deaden a room, so a box with sound deadening is the next best thing!
      • Linux fixes another flash drive.
        • Have had a 32GB flash drive for about 5 years now (AData S102) and thought it died at work recently.
        • During a write operation, a few hundred files, about 200MB, the drive unmounts and then starts to mount and unmount over and over until unplugged. Thought it died.
        • Came home, plugged it into my Mint desktop and used Disks. Removed partitions, reformatted in exFAT, and poof. Fixed.
  • Moss
    • On Tuesday  on the 8th, one of our listeners, Jackie Moore (who has been quite helpful in that past, as you may remember), informed me to expect a package at work. When it arrived, it was a wonderful, though slightly beaten up, System76 Galago Pro 2. It arrived with Pop!_OS on the SSD, and a forgotten installation of Ubuntu on the 1 Terabyte hard drive. I installed Linux Mint 19.2 on the SSD and just installed Ubuntu MATE 19.10 over the old Ubuntu, plus added a couple more distros. This little beast has a 1 Tb hard drive plus a 256 GB SSD, and while it is short on ports, those include a USB-C/Thunderbolt port and two USB 3.1 ports. 
    • As this computer was not the form factor I was looking for, Jackie offered me a deal on a Kudu3, and we came up with a swap; he got my Sans Digital AccuNAS box I had listed on eBay, I got his Kudu3. I hope he is as ecstatic about the trade as I am! I have always dreamed of owning a System76 but thought they would always be beyond my reach — new ones cost more than I have, and used ones are rare — and now I have two of them. I cannot possibly thank Jackie enough, and need to mention he is a fellow Tennessean.
    • I sold 2 tablets on eBay, one of our Kindle Fires and the LG GTab F. This got me about $26 for household. I still have two network switches for sale, one an 8-port and the other a 24-port.
    • I took the extra 4 Gb RAM out of my T430 and placed it in my wife’s T430, and swapped my 9-cell battery with her 6-cell. I can now sell my T430 and get my IdeaPad 110-15acl ready for sale after next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
    • I continue reading Her Majesty’s Dragon to my wife, and also picked up a copy of Animal Farm, which she had never read, and have gotten through a few chapters of that.
    • My mother was in the hospital for a few days and is now back in the rehab facility. She sounds good, but is 90 years old…
  • Josh
    • Visited Oggcamp and joined the podcast panel
      • Lots of things to see
      • Podcast panel with Joe Ressington
      • It was great fun. We covered young people getting into linux, schools, Microsoft adopting linux and generally had a good laugh.
    • Built EduBlocks offline edition. I removed it when I did the overhaul and people want it back. Decided against using Electron as it’s quite heavy on Raspberry Pi.
    • I’m still sorting out my Pixel3 after 4 weeks without a phone now. They offered a refund but tried talking me into store credit even though they said cash. I should have it resolved this week.
    • I’ve 99% decided on the iPhone 11 (non pro) after going to try both that and the Pixel 4 in store tomorrow but I’ll save my thoughts for the news section.
    • All magazines have now shipped, after having a few issues we’ve learnt lots. We still have about 7 damaged copies (which we got replaced with new ones) of which we’re going to donate to local schools. New issue in a few weeks!
  • Joe
    • Ordered 5 HBS 820’s
      • When it arrived it came with 6 which is cool.  
      • 3 of them were working with no issues, which is kind of weird
        • Not that I am complaining
        • The 3 that don’t work, 2 of them have broken neck bands but work otherwise
        • The last one has one side that doesn’t work
        • I also have one from a previous lot that only has one side working
        • Once again just like with the 810s you can only replace same sides with same sides 
        • That means because of the 3 working and the extra parts from the ones with broken bands along with the 2 ones with one side out i will get 5 working total.
        • One of the ones with one side out i also had to glue the connecter to the band back on.  Seems to be holding together well 
        • The interesting part of these is that the soldering is very easy but you have to replace the whole lower plastic section.  You don’t have to desolder the board but you do have to remove everything else around it because of how the earpiece cable goes through the lower assembly
    • Read  book 2 in the last reaper novels and Alex Verus book 10 as well as 6 of the Harley Merlin novels. All shorter books but very enjoyable. I went through the first 6 of the Harley Merlin books in about 2 days. I wouldn’t say that it is great writing but it was engaging enough to keep me listening. No complaints about audio quality
    • Mostly caught up on podcasts but that might be because I don’t know what book to listen to yet.  Maybe some of the Doctor Who audio dramas?
    • Also read Monster Hunter Guardian and Saga of the forgotten warrior book 2 both by larry correia.  Very good author and well done audios.
    • Also Daniel Faust books 1-8
    • Kevin Mitnick   The art of invisibility
      • “You may have nothing to hide but you have everything to protect”
      • Even if you aren’t paranoid about security you should read this book just so you know how privacy doesn’t work.
    • Started up my python classes with a few friends again.
    • I think i have found my next headphone soldering adventures.
      • MMCX connectors.  I have experimented with them before but only with the whole cables.  Now i am going to use the female connectors on cans to go along with the male cables and i am going to try to use the male connectors on the ends of the retractable LGs that usually break near the earpiece.  You can get a couple of sets of the MMCX earpieces for cheap and then rotate through them on the different headsets.
    • Started playing around with MPSYT, aka mps-youtube
      • It is a command line interface to search and play youtube videos
      • I started looking into it to possibly use in conjunction with a pi zero headless
      • I don’t think it would be something I could automate so it doesn’t match my current use case.
      • I have gotten it to load and play playlists, shuffled but i would need to find a way for it to do that automatically.
    • Wrote an article about travel networking.  It is a broad overview at this point
      • covers networking while visiting family
      • Or while at a hotel
      • Or while traveling down the road
  • Tony W
    • Saw Mudhoney live a couple weeks ago, reluctantly didn’t go to Melvins show
      • Good month for grunge concerts in ATL
    • Upgraded a friend’s Toshiba Satellite A505 laptop
      • 5400 HDD to SSD
      • 4G RAM to 8GB
      • Started with fresh Win10 vs OEM preloaded Windows
      • Not a good fit for recommending Linux unfortunately, he is really stuck on itunes 
    • I hate buying printer ink
      • $60 for ink for a printer that’s on its last legs, hard to justify.  At that cost need to contemplate a new printer every time you run out of ink [Moss: I get some really nice printers for under $60, with cheap ink refills.]
    • Played with Bunsenlabs
      • Continuation of the old Crunchbang
      • Really enjoyed crunchbang ‘back in the day’.  It was the only OS I could get to perform well on really old machines
      • System requirements 256 MB of RAM, recommended 1GB
      • Still have 32 bit iso

THE NEWS:

  • Ubuntu 19.10 Released
    • Mint will get the 5.3 kernel “soon.” 5.0 was available about a month after 18.10 was released.
    • Comes with LZ4 compression for faster boot! (coming from Gzip)
    • ZFS on root (experimental)
    • Gnome 3.34
    • Ubuntu Mate, Budgie, Studio, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu also released
    • Ubuntu Cinnamon may be a brand new flavor in 20.04.
  • Ubuntu 20.04 Named
    • Focal Fossa. At least I can pronounce that one (Leo)
    • As the version number implies, it’ll be released in April 2020
  • Happy 15th Birthday, Ubuntu
    • Linux Mint’s 13th birthday was August 27th 2006.
  • Google Pixel 4, Pixelbook Go & Pixel Buds released
    • Josh is highly disappointed
    • The camera sucks (I’ve tried it). If you want a good camera, buy an iPhone
    • The soli radar thing is, weird
    • It’s nice to have a 90Hz display
    • However, they made the battery smaller than the 3!!!! (which was already bad)
  • The Linux Mint 19.2 Gaming Report
    • Gaming Report essentially assesses how easy it is for a new user to get up and running with Steam and Proton and play games on a given distro
    • Assessment was “Promising but room for improvement”
    • Probably biggest knock was lack of inclusion of Vulcan 32-bit libraries, which are required for running proton on machines with AMD graphics
    • Suggested inclusion of Lutris in software center
    • In the Podcast, Jason did say he found Cinnamon “beautiful” and everything was right where he expected it to be
  • Freespire 5.0 Released
    • I remember when this was Lindows. Then Linspire. Now Freespire. (Freespire is the free edition, Linspire is the professional edition.) Freespire got a new start last year: Wikipedia reports, “Freespire 2.0.8, released on 30 November 2007, and based on Ubuntu 7.04, was the final release until the distribution was revived with 3.0 in January 2018.” Some parts of the community are quite critical of the company, as Linspire and Freespire license several proprietary bits of software and codecs intentionally, in order to get more interoperability with Windows features. They do produce a Freespire OSS edition, with only open-source options.
  • Tails 4.0 Released
  • Project Trident dumps BSD, moves to Void Linux
  • Samsung Kills Linux on Dex

SECURITY UPDATE:

  • Bug in sudo allows privilege escalation!
  • Resolution: Upgrade to sudo version 1.8.28.
  • This seems to only be an issue on boxes that have custom sudo privileges (essentially not ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL)
  • Basically, just run updates.

WRAP-UP:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast)
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 1:23:35 3978