Ubuntu – mintCast https://mintcast.org The podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux Sun, 17 May 2026 17:08:07 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 https://mintcast.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/cropped-small-logo-32x32.png Ubuntu – mintCast https://mintcast.org 32 32 164426984 485 – We’re All Ninjas Now https://mintcast.org/485-were-all-ninjas-now/ Sun, 17 May 2026 16:58:31 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7924 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – April,

In security and privacy: Proton Mail now supports post-quantum encryption,

]]> First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – April,


In security and privacy: Proton Mail now supports post-quantum encryption,

Link To Full Show Notes

The News:


Mint Monthly News – April 2026


NHS to close-source hundreds of GitHub repos over AI, security concerns


After Days of DDoS, Now Ubuntu’s Twitter Account Seems to be Compromised


Linux Kernel 7.0 is Out With Improvements Across the Board for Intel, AMD, and Storage


Linux is Getting a New Default Folder in Your Home Directory


Chrome Silently Installs a 4GB A.I. Model On Your Device Without Consent


Oh No! Now A Federal Bill Wants OS-Level Age Verification for Everyone in the USA


Kids Bypass Age Verification With Fake Moustaches


The Audio Industry Is Grappling With the Rise of ‘Podslop’


Will Euro-Office be using ODF?


Dell and Lenovo Sponsoring LVFS

Security And Privacy:


‘Dirty Frag’ Linux flaw one-ups CopyFail with no patches and public root exploit


Proton Mail now supports post-quantum encryption

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

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

]]> 7924 479 – Bill’s Bash Scripts Bring All The Boys To The Yard https://mintcast.org/479-bills-bash-scripts-bring-all-the-boys-to-the-yard/ Fri, 20 Feb 2026 04:43:40 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7805 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – January 2026,

In security and privacy: Theres an SSH Stalker

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

]]> First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – January 2026,

In security and privacy: Theres an SSH Stalker


And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Link To Full Show Notes

The News:


Mint Monthly News – January 2026


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


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


AppManager offers drag-and-drop AppImage management.


Sony Will Ship Its Final Blu-ray Recorders This Month


The Memory Crisis Is Taking No Prisoners


RaspberyPi goes Dual RAM


Linux 6.19


KDE 6.6 & Gnome 50 Betas out


Ubuntu getting rid of the Software & Updater tool


Libreoffice 26.2 released

Security and Privacy:


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

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 7805 473 – Parental Misguidance https://mintcast.org/473-parental-misguidance/ Sat, 29 Nov 2025 16:40:35 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7726 First up in the news: Theres and initiative in protecting OTA TV from DRM

Then in our Wanderings: Joe does a lot, Bill plays magical video cards, Majid is trying to resist Black Friday, Charles goes to a Linux conference, and Jim eschews the mouse.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

]]>
First up in the news: Theres and initiative in protecting OTA TV from DRM

Then in our Wanderings: Joe does a lot, Bill plays magical video cards, Majid is trying to resist Black Friday, Charles goes to a Linux conference, and Jim eschews the mouse.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Link To Full Show Notes

The News:


FCC Seeks Comment on ATSC 3.0 DRM – Protect OTA TV!

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 7726 472 – New Distros, Old Issues https://mintcast.org/472-new-distros-old-issues/ Fri, 21 Nov 2025 22:34:33 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7713 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – October 2025

Then, new distro news and updates, and more streaming stuff

In security and privacy: don’t trust every PPA!

]]> First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – October 2025

Then, new distro news and updates, and more streaming stuff

In security and privacy: don’t trust every PPA!

Link To Full Show Notes

The News:


Mint Monthly News – October 2025


GNOME 50 Ends the X11 Era After Decades


CachyOS Continues Delivering Leading Performance Over Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora Workstation 43


ElementaryOS Updates


IncusOS: A New Immutable Linux System Built for Running Incus


KDE Plasma 6.6 Introduces QR Code Wi-Fi Connections, Boosts Performance


Ikey Doherty Missing from AerynOS for Six Months


Debian’s APT Package Manager to Integrate Rust Code by May 2026


90% of Windows games now run on Linux; Linux gamers on Steam cross 3% mark


The Internet is Dying. 50% of all traffic is now non-human


The Internet Archive’s legal fight is over but loses 500,000 books from its Open Library in the process


The Internet Archive’s legal fight is over but loses 500,000 books from its Open Library in the process


YouTube TV’s Disney blackout reminds users that they don’t own what they stream

Security And Privacy:


Don’t blindly trust every PPA. FreeRDP installed via this PPA for Winboat may have malware

Check This Out:


Instagram- web site to view videos and photos without an account: https://imginn.com


Firefox- tip to get shorter tab height: about:config change browser.uidensity from 01 to 1 https://leochavez.org/old/firefox-tabs.html


AppImageLauncher v.3.00 beta (.deb file or AppImage, not the old PPA, which is no longer compatible with Noble Numbat and therefore Mint 22.0+) https://github.com/TheAssassin/AppImageLauncher/releases


Load All Reddit Comments: Bookmarklet with keyboard shortcut triggered bykeyword using javascript on Bookmarks Toolbar (CTRL + Shift + B)bookmarklet


IRCCloud allows a persistent connection with the free tier as long as your device stays connected, and allows two network connections, plus is able to connect to same network twice, so one can use two different nicknames on same network.


How to get started with Tailscale in under 10 minutes


Interview with Mark Shuttleworth on LNL

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 7713 470 – Laptop Rescue Service AKA “Send us your stuff!” https://mintcast.org/470-laptop-rescue-service-aka-send-us-your-stuff/ Sun, 12 Oct 2025 21:53:38 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7680 First up in the news: LMDE 7 ‘Gigi” release imminent, Mint Monthly News, Ubuntu 25.10 is out and breaking stuff, Firefox shaking is loved by TIME, Windows 10 is officially dead and lots more!

In security and privacy: Charles has some interesting news on AI and new laws in Spain

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

]]> First up in the news: LMDE 7 ‘Gigi” release imminent, Mint Monthly News, Ubuntu 25.10 is out and breaking stuff, Firefox shaking is loved by TIME, Windows 10 is officially dead and lots more!

In security and privacy: Charles has some interesting news on AI and new laws in Spain

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Link To Full Show Notes

The News:


LMDE 7 Release Imminent


Mint Monthly News – September 2025


Ubuntu 25.10 released, and breaks flatpaks!


Ubuntu Linux 26.04 LTS Officially Named Resolute Raccoon


Cosmic Beta released


Mozilla Firefox is about to add an important feature other browsers have had for years: Profile Management


Mozilla Firefox Shake To Summarize feature gets special mention in TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025


Opera Wants You To Pay $19.90 a Month for Its New AI Browser


Android Security or Vendor Lock-In? Google’s New Sideloading Rules Smell Fishy


Open Source Android Repository F-Droid Says Google’s New Rules Will Shut It Down


Amazon Ditches Android — Launches ‘Linux-Based’ Vega OS for Fire TV


TiVo Exiting Legacy DVR Business


California Law Forces Netflix, Hulu To Turn Down Ad Volumes


Windows 10 support ends on October 14, 2025



PC Sales Explode In Q3 As Windows 11 Deadlines Force Millions To Upgrade


Microsoft Is Plugging More Holes That Let You Use Windows 11 Without an Online Account

Security and Privacy:


AI for America – “A Roadmap to Make AI Work for All Americans, Not Just Big Companies”


Spain’s New age Verification

Check This Out:


Workaround for Flatpaks

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 7680 469 – Bill Loves Windows https://mintcast.org/469-bill-loves-windows/ Sun, 28 Sep 2025 22:45:46 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7666 First up in the news: LMDE 7 ‘Gigi” BETA released

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

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

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

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

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

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

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Link To Full Show Notes

The News:


LMDE 7 ‘Gigi” BETA released


Vivaldi takes a stand: keep browsing human

Security and Privacy


Mississippi’s Age Assurance Law


NPM Packages Security Breach

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 7666 468 – Very Plexable https://mintcast.org/468-very-plexable/ Mon, 15 Sep 2025 21:40:22 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7640 First up in the news: Linux Mint 22.2 “Zara” released, Mint Monthly News – August

In security and privacy: Plex is a problem again

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

]]> First up in the news: Linux Mint 22.2 “Zara” released, Mint Monthly News – August

In security and privacy: Plex is a problem again

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Link To Full Show Notes

The News:


Mint 22.2 ‘Zara’ released


From the Mint blog by Clem


What’s new in Mint 22.2 Zara


Release Notes for Mint 22.2 Zara


How to upgrade from Mint 22.1


LMDE 7 beta expected in Sep. 2025; Mint 22.3 in Dec. 2025


KDE launches its own distribution (again)


Firefox To End 32-bit support in 2026


Run Windows apps in Linux using open source WinBoat


Is Roku Driving the Final Nail in the Coffin of Traditional TV?


Not completely linux related but Borderlands 4 released Sept 12


Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Linux Performance Improving But Short Of AMD Ryzen & Intel Core Ultra

Security and Privacy


Plex User Data Exposed


An (almost) catastrophic OpenZFS bug and the humans that made it (and Rust is here too)

Check This Out


NerdyDayTrips


The Bullshit Machine

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

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

]]> 7640 Round Table 09-06-25 https://mintcast.org/round-table-09-06-25/ Sat, 06 Sep 2025 20:43:29 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7625 A Saturday Livestream about everything and nothing.

]]> A Saturday Livestream about everything and nothing.

]]> 7625 467 – Line Of Sight https://mintcast.org/467-line-of-sight/ Sun, 31 Aug 2025 23:01:30 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7620 First up in the Mint news: Another birthday for Mint!, Mint 22.2 final ISOs now being tested

In security and privacy: Arch is Ddossed and malware abounds

Then in our Wanderings: Joe does a lot, Majid achieves very little, Charles, Bill falls off the ARC and Jim is a photographic genius

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

]]> First up in the Mint news: Another birthday for Mint!, Mint 22.2 final ISOs now being tested

In security and privacy: Arch is Ddossed and malware abounds

Then in our Wanderings: Joe does a lot, Majid achieves very little, Charles, Bill falls off the ARC and Jim is a photographic genius

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Link To Full Show Notes

The News:


Another birthday for Mint!


Mint 22.2 ‘Zara’ final ISOs being tested

Security and Privacy:

Ringreaper Linux Malware


Arch Linux takes a pounding as DDoS attack enters week two

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

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

]]> 7620 Round Table 08-23-25 https://mintcast.org/round-table-08-23-25/ Sat, 23 Aug 2025 22:19:12 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7603 A Saturday Livestream about everything and nothing.

]]> A Saturday Livestream about everything and nothing.

]]> 7603 464 – Ticky Tacky People https://mintcast.org/464-ticky-tacky-people/ Sun, 20 Jul 2025 21:38:16 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7566 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – July 2025

In our Innards section: Let’s talk BASH!

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – July 2025,

In our Innards section: Let’s talk BASH!

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Link To Full Show Notes


Mint Monthly News – July 2025

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

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

]]> 7566 463 – Tacos And TikTok https://mintcast.org/463-tacos-and-tiktok/ Mon, 07 Jul 2025 10:29:03 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7552 First up in the news: Linux hits 5%, Nintendo does what we feared, The orange baby eats a TACO, Steam prefers Proton to Native, Fedora might have killed Bazzite and a new Firefox release

We also welcome Charles as a new co-host!

In security and privacy: more password leakage by big tech

And finally, the Feedback and a couple of suggestions

]]> First up in the news: Linux hits 5%, Nintendo does what we feared, The orange baby eats a TACO, Steam prefers Proton to Native, Fedora might have killed Bazzite and a new Firefox release

We also welcome Charles as a new co-host!

In security and privacy: more password leakage by big tech

And finally, the Feedback and a couple of suggestions

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


Trump extends deadline for US TikTok sale to September


Steam Client Now Enables Proton by Default for Games without Native Linux Builds


Firefox 141 Promises to Use Less Memory on Linux Systems, Beta Out Now


Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share In USA


F44 Change Proposal: Drop i686 support (system wide)


The whole truth about Fedora’s 32-bit proposal w/ Kyle from Bazzite


Nintendo is nuking Switch 2 accounts for using Mig Flash

Security And Privacy


16 billion passwords leaked in Google, Facebook, Apple massive data breach

Check This Out:


WHW03 Mesh Router openwrt


GL.iNet GL-SFT1200

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

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

]]> 7552 461 – Virtualization https://mintcast.org/461-virtualization/ Sat, 17 May 2025 23:45:31 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7511 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News, BackBlaze backups may be in trouble, you can run Arch inside Windows, Linux kernel drops 486 and early 586 support, and a new RaspberryPiOS release, and the end of Windows 10 support brings new opportunities

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

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

In our Innards section: we talk about Virtual Machines

In Bodhi Corner, just a bit about theming

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

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

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

In our Innards section: we talk about Virtual Machines

In Bodhi Corner, just a bit about theming

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


Mint Monthly News


Your Backblaze Backups Might Be in Trouble


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


A new Raspberry Pi OS release


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

Security and Privacy:


openSUSE Removes Deepin Desktop Over Security Policy Violations


Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

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

]]> 7511 458 – The Mobile Generation https://mintcast.org/458-the-mobile-generation/ Sat, 05 Apr 2025 20:19:27 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7458 First up in the news: New GIMP, Debian comes to a RISC-V tablet, Google explains why the are putting Terminal on Android, Asahi Linux loses another top dev, Plex goes for the gold – yours, meet EU OS, Kernel 6.14 is released, Gnome 48 released, new GRUB updates, AerynOS is released with GNOME 48

In security and privacy: “MyTerms” wants to let the user dictate privacy

Then in our Wanderings: Moss plays Musical Tablets, Joe Moxes the Prox, Dale has a burpday, Majid is on holiday and Bill is off truckin’ somewhere...

In our Innards section: Dale takes us through Mobile Networks

In Bodhi Corner, Moss covers new translations and work on the next version.

]]> First up in the news: New GIMP, Debian comes to a RISC-V tablet, Google explains why the are putting Terminal on Android, Asahi Linux loses another top dev, Plex goes for the gold – yours, meet EU OS, Kernel 6.14 is released, Gnome 48 released, new GRUB updates, AerynOS is released with GNOME 48

In security and privacy: “MyTerms” wants to let the user dictate privacy

Then in our Wanderings: Moss plays Musical Tablets, Joe Moxes the Prox, Dale has a burpday, Majid is on holiday and Bill is off truckin’ somewhere…

In our Innards section: Dale takes us through Mobile Networks

In Bodhi Corner, Moss covers new translations and work on the next version.

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


GIMP 3.0 Image Editor Is Now Available for Download


A Debian-Based Distro and Hardware Upgrades Come to the PINE64 RISC-V Tablet


Google Explains Why It Added a Linux VM to Pixel Phones


Asahi Linux loses another prominent dev as GPU guru calls it quits


Plex is cracking down on its version of password sharing, and it’s coming with a price hike


EU OS Is a New Community-Led Linux Alternative for Europe’s Public Sector


Linux Kernel 6.14 Officially Released, This Is What’s New


GNOME 48 lands with performance boosts, new fonts, better accessibility


GRUB Bootloader Received 73 Patches To Fix A Variety Of Recent Security Issues


AerynOS 2025.03 Released with GNOME 48, Mesa 25, and Linux Kernel 6.13.8

Security And Privacy:


“MyTerms” wants to become the new way we dictate our privacy on the web

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

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

]]> 7458 455 – Proxmox https://mintcast.org/455-proxmox/ Wed, 19 Feb 2025 01:59:36 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7402 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – January, Ubuntu 24.04.2 Delayed, Asahi Linux Lead Developer Hector Martin Steps Down As Upstream Apple Silicon Maintainer, Serpent OS Rebrands as AerynOS, OBS Studio Threatens Fedora With Legal Action

Then in our Wanderings: Bill has been busy with work, Joe has been spending some quality time with Proxmox and Portainer, Moss tries to get up to speed with a long overdue update, and Eric has been have a great time with smartwatches and LLMs.

In our Innards section: Joe discusses his Proxmox setup

In our newest feature, Bodhi Corner: Moss discusses what the Bodhi team is working on for current and future versions of Bodhi Linux;

And finally in Check This Out, Eric covers a nice GUI tool named Pods, used to manage Podman containers.

]]> First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – January, Ubuntu 24.04.2 Delayed, Asahi Linux Lead Developer Hector Martin Steps Down As Upstream Apple Silicon Maintainer, Serpent OS Rebrands as AerynOS, OBS Studio Threatens Fedora With Legal Action

Then in our Wanderings: Bill has been busy with work, Joe has been spending some quality time with Proxmox and Portainer, Moss tries to get up to speed with a long overdue update, and Eric has been have a great time with smartwatches and LLMs.

In our Innards section: Joe discusses his Proxmox setup

In our newest feature, Bodhi Corner: Moss discusses what the Bodhi team is working on for current and future versions of Bodhi Linux;

And finally in Check This Out, Eric covers a nice GUI tool named Pods, used to manage Podman containers.

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


Mint Monthly News – January 2025


Ubuntu 24.04.2 Delayed


Asahi Linux Lead Developer Hector Martin Steps Down As Upstream Apple Silicon Maintainer


No More Snakes: Serpent OS Rebrands as AerynOS


OBS Studio Threatens Fedora With Legal Action

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 7402 451.5 – Serves You Right https://mintcast.org/451-5-serves-you-right/ Tue, 17 Dec 2024 05:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7303 In our Innards section: We talk “servers” and mintCast infrastructure

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

]]> In our Innards section: We talk “servers” and mintCast infrastructure

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Full Show Notes Here

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 7303 451 – Cinnamon Toast https://mintcast.org/451-cinnamon-toast/ Tue, 10 Dec 2024 09:49:30 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7301 First up in the news: mintCast turned 16 while we weren’t watching, Mint 22.1 being tested, Cinnamon 6.4 Desktop Environment released, US lawyers pushing Google to divest Chrome, El Capitan takes the lead

In security and privacy: Hackers push fake BitWarden updates, Chinese hackers push Linux-focused WolfsBane, WordPress security flaw gives hackers admin access

Then in our Wanderings: Bill cools the runnings, Joe cools his printer, Moss cools his ereaders, Majid gives in to temptation, and Eric finds value and delight in his secondhand hardware.

]]> First up in the news: mintCast turned 16 while we weren’t watching, Mint 22.1 being tested, Cinnamon 6.4 Desktop Environment released, US lawyers pushing Google to divest Chrome, El Capitan takes the lead

In security and privacy: Hackers push fake BitWarden updates, Chinese hackers push Linux-focused WolfsBane, WordPress security flaw gives hackers admin access,

Then in our Wanderings: Bill cools the runnings, Joe cools his printer, Moss cools his ereaders, Majid gives in to temptation, and Eric finds value and delight in his secondhand hardware.

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


mintCast is 16!


Linux Mint 22.1 ISOs are now being tested


US lawyers will reportedly try to force Google to sell Chrome and unbundle Android


All hail our new leader — AMD-powered El Capitan becomes officially the world’s fastest supercomputer

Security and Privacy:


Hackers pushing fake Bitwarden updates hit thousands of devices with data stealing malware


Chinese hackers target Linux with new WolfsBane malware


Security plugin flaw in millions of WordPress sites gives admin access

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 7301 449.5 – Distrohermits’ Digest https://mintcast.org/449-5-distrohermits-digest/ Fri, 08 Nov 2024 23:34:45 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7261 In our Innards section, we talk a little about distrohopping.

And Finally, The feedback and a couple of suggestions.

]]> In our Innards section, we talk a little about distrohopping.

And Finally, The feedback and a couple of suggestions.

Full Show Notes Here

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 7261 449 – 3D Podcasting https://mintcast.org/449-3d-podcasting/ Thu, 31 Oct 2024 23:50:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7256 First up in the news: Ubuntu 25.04 gets perfect name, WinAmp deletes entire Github code, Ubuntu 24.10 released for Snapdragon X Elite, Arm cancels Qualcomm’s architecture license, Paranoia and Fear inhabit Automattic, Internet Archive breached again, Rand removal of Russian coders spurs debate about Linux kernel’s politics

In security and privacy: Concerns raised over Bitwarden, Fortigate Admins Report Active Zero-Day Exploit

Then in our Wanderings: Joe mods, Moss gets edumacated, and Eric times out

]]> First up in the news: Ubuntu 25.04 gets perfect name, WinAmp deletes entire Github code, Ubuntu 24.10 released for Snapdragon X Elite, Arm cancels Qualcomm’s architecture license, Paranoia and Fear inhabit Automattic, Internet Archive breached again, Rand removal of Russian coders spurs debate about Linux kernel’s politics

In security and privacy: Concerns raised over Bitwarden, Fortigate Admins Report Active Zero-Day Exploit

Then in our Wanderings: Joe mods, Moss gets edumacated, and Eric times out

Full Show Notes

The News:


Ubuntu 25.04 Codename is Revealed – And It’s Pretty Perfect


Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks


Ubuntu 24.10 Developer Preview Released For Snapdragon X1 Elite Laptops


Arm cancels Qualcomm’s architecture license


Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos


Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens


Removal of Russian coders spurs debate about Linux kernel’s politics

Security and Privacy:


Bitwarden Open Source Concerns


Fortigate Admins Report Active Zero-Day Exploit

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 7256 448 – The Archive Is Breached! https://mintcast.org/448-the-archive-is-breached/ Thu, 17 Oct 2024 10:06:37 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7220 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – September, Xfce 4.20 creeps toward Wayland support, Archive.org is breached, Arch and Valve team up, WWWFoundation packs it in, More WordPress news, even MORE WordPress News, and Google adds Linux apps to future Android versions

Then in our Wanderings: Bill connects with the younger generation, Joe is still fixing things, Moss whines, and Majid folds some more

]]> First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – September, Xfce 4.20 creeps toward Wayland support, Archive.org is breached, Arch and Valve team up, WWWFoundation packs it in, More WordPress news, even MORE WordPress News, and Google adds Linux apps to future Android versions

Then in our Wanderings: Bill connects with the younger generation, Joe is still fixing things, Moss whines, and Majid folds some more

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


Mint Monthly News – September, 2024


Xfce 4.20 creeps toward Wayland support


Archive.org, a repository of the history of the Internet, has a data breach


Arch Linux and Valve team up to make Steam gaming even better


WWW Foundation packs it in


159 employees are leaving Automattic as CEO’s fight with WP Engine escalates


WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin


Google is preparing to let you run Linux apps on Android, just like Chrome OS


KDE neon upgrades to 24.04.1 Ubuntu base

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

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

]]> 7220 444 – The News is HUGE! https://mintcast.org/444-the-news-is-huge/ Thu, 22 Aug 2024 00:06:04 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7122 First up in the news: Canonical Moves To Shipping Very Latest Upstream Kernel Code, Google Search is playing Monopoly, Wordstar7 is open sourced, SuSE goes way long, Chrome blocks uBlock, GitLab is on the market and Funtoo is back (sort of)

In security and privacy: Hackers leak 2.7 billion data records with Social Security numbers, and there are lots of zeros attacking Mac and Linux browsers

Then in our Wanderings: Bill is broken down Joe goes virtual, Moss has stopped watching, Majid is in India and will be back next month.

]]>
First up in the news: Canonical Moves To Shipping Very Latest Upstream Kernel Code, Google Search is playing Monopoly, Wordstar7 is open sourced, SuSE goes way long, Chrome blocks uBlock, GitLab is on the market and Funtoo is back (sort of)

In security and privacy: Hackers leak 2.7 billion data records with Social Security numbers, and there are lots of zeros attacking Mac and Linux browsers

Then in our Wanderings: Bill is broken down Joe goes virtual, Moss has stopped watching, Majid is in India and will be back next month.

Full Show Notes Here

The News


Canonical Moves To Shipping Very Latest Upstream Kernel Code For Ubuntu Releases


Google’s online search monopoly is illegal, US judge rules


WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, is re-released for free


Google is discontinuing the Chromecast line


SUSE upgrades its distros with 19 years of support – no other Linux comes close


Google is killing one of Chrome’s biggest ad blockers


GitLab is reportedly up for sale


Robbins Changed His Mind, Funtoo Shifts to “Hobby Mode”

Security and Privacy


Hackers leak 2.7 billion data records with Social Security numbers


0.0.0.0 Day: 18-Year-Old Browser Vulnerability Impacts MacOS and Linux Devices

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 7122 443.5 – Mint 22 – Any Thoughts? https://mintcast.org/443-5-mint-22-any-thoughts/ Thu, 15 Aug 2024 00:19:03 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7096 In our Wanderings: Bill loves the image, Joe works too hard, Moss does upgrades, Majid sells stuff and rants, and Eric wants to becomes one with AI.

In our Innards section: We talk Mint 22

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

]]> In our Wanderings: Bill loves the image, Joe works too hard, Moss does upgrades, Majid sells stuff and rants, and Eric wants to becomes one with AI.

In our Innards section: We talk Mint 22

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Full Show Notes Here

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 7096 443 – Wilma Has Arrived https://mintcast.org/443-wilma-has-arrived/ Wed, 07 Aug 2024 21:38:51 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7089 First up in the news: Linux Mint 22 “Wilma” released, Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source, Intel suffers stock losses, Intel admits to damage on 13th and 14th gen processors, Funtoo calls it quits, and SerpentOS makes its first appearance

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

]]>
First up in the news: Linux Mint 22 “Wilma” released, Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source, Intel suffers stock losses, Intel admits to damage on 13th and 14th gen processors, Funtoo calls it quits, and SerpentOS makes its first appearance

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

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


Linux Mint 22 “Wilma” released


Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source


Intel Suffers Major Stock Loss Due to Workforce Restructuring


Proton Now Has a Bitcoin Wallet


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


Funtoo Calls It Quits


The long-awaited Linux distro Serpent OS is finally here

Secuity and Privacy:


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


New Android malware wipes your device after draining bank accounts


Telegram-Controlled TgRat Attacking Linux Servers to Exfiltrate Data

Contact Info:

Special Thanks:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
]]> 7089 441 – Mint’s Back and Rocking https://mintcast.org/441-mints-back-and-rocking/ Wed, 10 Jul 2024 14:02:04 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=7031 First up in the news: Mint 22 Beta Released, Mint Monthly News – June, Firefox has a Weather tab, Seattle computer collection is being auctioned, Proton adds Docs to Proton Drive, Linux runs on Google Drive

In security and privacy: KDE Plasma Flaw Opens Door to Unauthorized System Access

Then in our Wanderings: Majid has overdosed on Schadenfreude, Bill screams at OnlyOffice, Joe has fun with his 3D printer, Moss makes a mess of things

]]> First up in the news: Mint 22 Beta Released, Mint Monthly News – June, Firefox has a Weather tab, Seattle computer collection is being auctioned, Proton adds Docs to Proton Drive, Linux runs on Google Drive

In security and privacy: KDE Plasma Flaw Opens Door to Unauthorized System Access

Then in our Wanderings: Majid has overdosed on Schadenfreude, Bill screams at OnlyOffice, Joe has fun with his 3D printer, Moss makes a mess of things

Full Show Notes Here

The News:

Linux Mint 22 Betas Released

Mint Monthly News – June 2024

Firefox’s New Weather Tab

Seattle’s Living Computers Museum logs off for good as Paul Allen estate will auction vintage items

Proton launches its own version of Google Docs

Linux Distro Can Run on Google Drive: This Developer Made It Happen

Security and Privacy:

KDE Plasma Flaw Opens Door to Unauthorized System Access

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 7031 440 – Schrödinger’s mintCast https://mintcast.org/440-schrodingers-mintcast/ Wed, 26 Jun 2024 04:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6995 First up in the news: Mint 22 Beta in testing, Cinnamon 6.2 Desktop Environment Released, Linux's New DRM Panic "Blue Screen of Death" In Action, Ubuntu is Finally Adding DEB Installer Support to App Center, AlmaLinux comes to the RPi 5, Proton goes non-profit, and light-based chips are coming

In security and privacy: nada

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

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

In security and privacy: nada

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

Full Show Notes Here

The News

Mint 22 Beta in Testing

Cinnamon 6.2 Desktop Environment Released

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

Ubuntu is Finally Adding DEB Installer Support to App Center

AlmaLinux OS Now Officially Supports the Raspberry Pi 5 Computer

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

Proton is going non-profit

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

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6995 438.5 – Behold the AI Overlords https://mintcast.org/438-5-behold-the-ai-overlords/ Wed, 05 Jun 2024 04:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6944 In our Innards section: We have a free-form discussion on AI utility, privacy and security

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

]]> In our Innards section: We have a free-form discussion on AI utility, privacy and security

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Full Show Notes Here

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6944 438 – Copilot Takeover https://mintcast.org/438-copilot-takeover/ Fri, 31 May 2024 23:26:32 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6940 First up in the news: Mozilla Reveals New Features Coming to Firefox, Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for NVIDIA Users, KDE Plasma 6.1 Beta Released With Wayland Explicit Sync, Input Capture Portal & More, KDE Plasma 6.1 Lands Dynamic Triple Buffering Support, Btrfs Sends In Fixes For Linux 6.10 & Restores "norecovery" Mount Option, Turkey bans Distrowatch

In security and privacy: High-severity GitLab flaw lets attackers take over accounts, Microsoft unveils Copilot+ PCs with generative AI capabilities baked in, including one that is causing concern for a UK-based watchdog group.

Then in our Wanderings: Joe gets his shots, Bill endeavors to dual boot, Majid creates Frankensteins Ubuntu, and Eric dips his toe into the world of digital art pens and illustration as well as honing his Audacity skills.

]]> First up in the news: Mozilla Reveals New Features Coming to Firefox, Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for NVIDIA Users, KDE Plasma 6.1 Beta Released With Wayland Explicit Sync, Input Capture Portal & More, KDE Plasma 6.1 Lands Dynamic Triple Buffering Support, Btrfs Sends In Fixes For Linux 6.10 & Restores “norecovery” Mount Option, Turkey bans Distrowatch

In security and privacy: High-severity GitLab flaw lets attackers take over accounts, Microsoft unveils Copilot+ PCs with generative AI capabilities baked in, including one that is causing concern for a UK-based watchdog group.

Then in our Wanderings: Joe gets his shots, Bill endeavors to dual boot, Majid creates Frankensteins Ubuntu, and Eric dips his toe into the world of digital art pens and illustration as well as honing his Audacity skills.

Full Show Notes Here

The News

Mozilla Reveals New Features Coming to Firefox

Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for NVIDIA Users

KDE Plasma 6.1 Beta Released With Wayland Explicit Sync, Input Capture Portal & More

KDE Plasma 6.1 Lands Dynamic Triple Buffering Support

Btrfs Sends In Fixes For Linux 6.10 & Restores “norecovery” Mount Option

Turkey bans Distrowatch

Security and Privacy

High-severity GitLab flaw lets attackers take over accounts

The next two articles will actually be discussed during the innards (next episode) but we’ve linked them here anyway.

Microsoft unveils Copilot+ PCs with generative AI capabilities baked in

UK watchdog looking into Microsoft AI taking screenshots

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6940 437 – X-citing News! https://mintcast.org/437-x-citing-news/ Wed, 15 May 2024 04:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6909 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News for April, Ubuntu 24.04 released, Ubuntu 24.10 Codename Revealed, systemd introduces run0, Google threatens RISC-V support for Android, RISC-V OS arrives, and BitWarden launches MFA for Android & iOS

In security and privacy: a new ransomware threat is found, and a GitLab maximum security flaw is found

Then in our Wanderings: Majid Endeavours to Fail, Bill Endeavours to succeed, and Joe gets skimmed

]]> First up in the news: Mint Monthly News for April, Ubuntu 24.04 released, Ubuntu 24.10 Codename Revealed, systemd introduces run0, Google threatens RISC-V support for Android, RISC-V OS arrives, and BitWarden launches MFA for Android & iOS

In security and privacy: a new ransomware threat is found, and a GitLab maximum security flaw is found

Then in our Wanderings: Majid Endeavours to Fail, Bill Endeavours to succeed, and Joe gets skimmed

Full Show Notes Here

The News

Mint Monthly News – April 2024

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) released

Ubuntu 24.10 Codename Revealed as Development Begins

Systemd v256 Introduces run0: A Safer Alternative to sudo

RISC-V support in Android just got a big setback

RISC-V OS V5.30 arrives – with RPi Wi-Fi support

Bitwarden launches new MFA Authenticator app for iOS, Android

Security and Privacy

Cybersecurity researchers spotlight a new ransomware threat – be careful where you upload files

GitLab flaw allowing account hijacking under active exploitation

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6909 436.5 – Popey’s Groupies https://mintcast.org/436-5-popeys-groupies/ Wed, 08 May 2024 04:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6876 In our Innards section: We interview Alan Pope

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

]]> In our Innards section: We interview Alan Pope

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Full Show Notes Here

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6876 436 – Upgrade At Your Peril https://mintcast.org/436-upgrade-at-your-peril/ Wed, 01 May 2024 04:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6874 First up in the news: AlmaLinux restores some deprecated stuff, Nouveau dev joins the bigs, Linux runs cars, Microsoft sneaks MS-DOS 4.0 into their open source portfolio, Ubuntu 24.04 is out…. And you shouldn’t upgrade your system yet

In security and privacy: nope, nada

Then in our Wanderings: Joe preps for zombies, Bill migrates, Majid is starstruck, Moss is car swapping, Popey is job swapping

]]> First up in the news: AlmaLinux restores some deprecated stuff, Nouveau dev joins the bigs, Linux runs cars, Microsoft sneaks MS-DOS 4.0 into their open source portfolio, Ubuntu 24.04 is out…. And you shouldn’t upgrade your system yet

In security and privacy: nope, nada

Then in our Wanderings: Joe preps for zombies, Bill migrates, Majid is starstruck, Moss is car swapping, Popey is job swapping

Full Show Notes Here

The News

AlmaLinux 9.4 Beta Restores Support For Some Hardware Deprecated By RHEL

Former Nouveau Lead Developer Joins NVIDIA, Continues Working On Open-Source Driver

Linux can finally run your car’s safety systems and driver-assistance features

Microsoft adds MS-DOS 4.0 to their Open-Source Github page

Ubuntu 24.04 Official Flavours Available to Download

Why You Shouldn’t Upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Yet

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6874 432.5 – Ears Deep https://mintcast.org/432-5-ears-deep/ Wed, 13 Mar 2024 04:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6738 In our Innards section we have an impromptu discussion about audio editing - some things to think about when editing for a podcast.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

]]> In our Innards section we have an impromptu discussion about audio editing – some things to think about when editing for a podcast.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Full Show Notes Here

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6738 432 – “Podcasts Are Better” https://mintcast.org/432-podcasts-are-better/ Wed, 06 Mar 2024 04:53:59 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6736 First up in the news: KDE MegaRelease 6, No open source HDMI 2.1 driver

In security and privacy: New Wi-Fi Vulnerabilities Expose Android and Linux Devices to Hackers

Then in our Wanderings: Bill stops rolling, Joe surprises people by fixing things, Majid needs audio files to become an audiophile

Right Click Here To Download
]]> First up in the news: KDE MegaRelease 6, No open source HDMI 2.1 driver

In security and privacy: New Wi-Fi Vulnerabilities Expose Android and Linux Devices to Hackers,

Then in our Wanderings: Bill stops rolling, Joe surprises people by fixing things, Majid needs audio files to become an audiophile

Full Show Notes Here

The News

KDE MegaRelease 6

HDMI Forum to AMD: No, you can’t make an open source HDMI 2.1 driver

LibreOffice 24.2.1 Office Suite Is Out with More Than 100 Bug Fixes

GParted 1.6 Open-Source Partition Editor Improves exFAT Support and Fixes Bugs – 9to5Linux

Nintendo Sues Yuzu Emulator Developers for Facilitating Switch Piracy

Security And Privacy

New Wi-Fi Vulnerabilities Expose Android and Linux Devices to Hackers

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6736 430 – Darn Small(er) Linux https://mintcast.org/430-darn-smaller-linux/ Wed, 07 Feb 2024 05:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6637 First up in the news: Mint 21.3 "Edge" is out, Ubuntu taking heat over Pro packages, Bazzite 2.2 is out, BunsenLabs Boron is out, Parrot 6.0 is out, we say Goodbye to Ginny, RPi Compute Module 5 is in the works, Say Hello to Wilma, RH causes issues for CentOS, and DSL Linux makes a resurgence

In security and privacy: Ring will stop giving video to police, and AnyDesk responds to a major hack

Then in our Wanderings: Bill is moving gear around, Joe upgrades, Moss takes a new tablet, and Majid is drinking the Samsung Kool-Aid

Download
]]> First up in the news: Mint 21.3 “Edge” is out, Ubuntu taking heat over Pro packages, Bazzite 2.2 is out, BunsenLabs Boron is out, Parrot 6.0 is out, we say Goodbye to Ginny, RPi Compute Module 5 is in the works, Say Hello to Wilma, RH causes issues for CentOS, and DSL Linux makes a resurgence

In security and privacy: Ring will stop giving video to police, and AnyDesk responds to a major hack

Then in our Wanderings: Bill is moving gear around, Joe upgrades, Moss takes a new tablet, and Majid is drinking the Samsung Kool-Aid

  1. [skipto time=”00:00:00″] – Intro
  2. [skipto time=”00:01:36″] – News
  3. [skipto time=”00:45:45″] – Security And Privacy
  4. [skipto time=”00:56:50″] – Bi-Weekly Wanderings
  5. [skipto time=”01:34:03″] – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
  6. [skipto time=”01:34:48″] – Wrap Up
  7. [skipto time=”01:37:45″] – Outro
Full Show Notes Here

The News

21.3 “Edge” ISO Now Available

Ubuntu Pro Packages in ‘Software Updater’ Garner Criticism

SteamOS alternative Bazzite v2.2 out now with lots of enhancements

Lightweight Distro BunsenLabs Linux Boron Is Here Based on Debian Bookworm

Ethical Hacking Distro Parrot OS 6.0 Brings Linux 6.5, Raspberry Pi 5 Support

After Three Years on Mars, NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter Mission Ends

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 is official and expected to launch sometime in 2024

LM 22 Announced

RHEL’s Source Code Access Change Is Causing Issues For CentOS SIGs

DamnSmallLinux is Back!

Security and Privacy

Ring Announces It Will No Longer Facilitate Police Requests for Footage from Users

AnyDesk says hackers breached its production servers, reset passwords

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6637 428.5 – 2024 Predictions https://mintcast.org/428-5-2024-predictions/ Wed, 17 Jan 2024 05:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6561 In our Innards section: Predictions: 2023 mistakes and 2024 attempts

In "Check This Out" Bill Talks a little about Ventoy - again

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions.

Download
]]> In our Innards section: Predictions: 2023 mistakes and 2024 attempts

In “Check This Out” Bill Talks a little about Ventoy – again

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

  1. [skipto time=”00:00:00″] – Intro
  2. [skipto time=”00:01:13″] – Innards
  3. [skipto time=”00:40:48″] – Vibrations From The Ether
  4. [skipto time=”00:48:08″] – Check This Out
  5. [skipto time=”00:52:42″] – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
  6. [skipto time=”00:53:30″] – Wrap Up
  7. [skipto time=”00:56:03″] – Outro
Full Show Notes Here

Contact Info

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6561 427.5 – Free Form or Free Fall https://mintcast.org/427-5-free-form-or-free-fall/ Wed, 20 Dec 2023 05:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6510 In our Innards section: We're a bit all over the place - a "free form" if you will.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions. No, really – we've got feedback this time!

Download
]]> In our Innards section: We’re a bit all over the place – a “free form” if you will.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions. No, really – we’ve got feedback this time!

  1. [skipto time=”00:00:00″] – Hacker Public Radio New Years Eve Promo
  2. [skipto time=”00:00:56″] – Intro
  3. [skipto time=”00:02:00″] – Innards
  4. [skipto time=”00:57:36″] – Vibrations From The Ether
  5. [skipto time=”01:11:18″] – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
  6. [skipto time=”01:12:28″] – Special Thanks
  7. [skipto time=”01:17:02″] – Outro
Full Show Notes Here

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6510 427 – “Virginia is For Lovers.” https://mintcast.org/427-virginia-is-for-lovers/ Wed, 13 Dec 2023 03:32:20 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6506 First up in the news: Linux Mint 21.3 “Virginia” – BETAs released, Mint Monthly News – November 2023, Gnome shell updates on Ubuntu 23.10; Zorin has a new desktop; Calibre offers new formats; KDE fixes bugs ahead of Plasma 6; Intel does some driver code clean up; Canonical ports Multipass to Qt6; Linux 6.8 is Dropping Support For Very Old Graphics Drivers.

In security and privacy: Stealthy Linux rootkit found in the wild after going undetected for 2 years

Then in our Wanderings: Bill is mumbling for a week straight; Joe is droning on

Download
]]> First up in the news: Linux Mint 21.3 “Virginia” – BETAs released, Mint Monthly News – November 2023, Gnome shell updates on Ubuntu 23.10; Zorin has a new desktop; Calibre offers new formats; KDE fixes bugs ahead of Plasma 6; Intel does some driver code clean up; Canonical ports Multipass to Qt6; Linux 6.8 is Dropping Support For Very Old Graphics Drivers.

In security and privacy: Stealthy Linux rootkit found in the wild after going undetected for 2 years

Then in our Wanderings: Bill is mumbling for a week straight; Joe is droning on

  1. [skipto time=”00:00:00″] – Intro
  2. [skipto time=”00:01:37″] – News
  3. [skipto time=”00:33:05″] – Security And Privacy
  4. [skipto time=”00:43:53″] – Bi-Weekly Wanderings
  5. [skipto time=”00:58:22″] – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
  6. [skipto time=”00:59:20″] – Wrap Up
  7. [skipto time=”01:03:09″] – Special Thanks
  8. [skipto time=”01:03:53″] – Outro
Full Show Notes Here!

The News

Linux Mint 21.3 “Virginia” – BETAs released

Mint Monthly News – November 2023

GNOME Shell 45.2 Update Rolling out to Ubuntu 23.10

Zorin OS 17 Beta Includes New ‘Spatial Desktop’ Features

Calibre eBook App Now Supports Audio ePubs & Custom Notes

KDE Developers Continue On Bug Fixing Spree Ahead Of Plasma 6.0

Intel Striving To Overhaul Their Multiple Ethernet Linux Drivers: “The Great Code De-dup”

Canonical Releases Multipass 1.13 RC With Snapshots Support, Migrated To Qt6

Linux 6.8 Dropping Support For Very Old Graphics Drivers

Security and Privacy

Stealthy Linux rootkit found in the wild after going undetected for 2 years

Feds Warn Health Sector to Watch for Open-Source Threats

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6506 426.5 – Cry “Havoc!” and Bring Forth The Tablets of War. https://mintcast.org/426-5-cry-havoc-and-bring-forth-the-tablets-of-war/ Wed, 06 Dec 2023 05:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6490 In our Innards section: Tablets. Linux tablets.

In "Check This Out": Ubuntu Touch OTA, PineTab 2, and Enter Shikari - Anaesthetist

Download
]]> In our Innards section: Tablets. Linux tablets.

In “Check This Out”: Ubuntu Touch OTA, PineTab 2, and Enter Shikari – Anaesthetist

  1. [skipto time=”00:00:00″] – Hacker Public Radio New Years Eve Promo
  2. [skipto time=”00:00:56″] – Intro
  3. [skipto time=”00:02:07″] – Innards
  4. [skipto time=”00:41:18″] – Vibrations From The Ether
  5. [skipto time=”00:42:27″] – Special Thanks
  6. [skipto time=”00:42:47″] – Check This Out
  7. [skipto time=”00:44:39″] – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
  8. [skipto time=”00:45:43″] – Wrap Up
  9. [skipto time=”00:49:12″] – Outro
Full Show Notes

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Someone (probably Bill) for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6490 426 – Happy Birthday, mintCast! https://mintcast.org/426-happy-birthday-mintcast/ Thu, 30 Nov 2023 04:34:37 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6485 First up in the news: mintCast has a birthday, Mint 21.3 is named, Amazon works on a Linux fork for their devices, Ubuntu commits to Netplan, Firefox attempts Wayland, FreeBSD 14 is out, Endeavour releases Galileo, Vivaldi comes to Flathub, Google kills magazine content, OpenMandriva releases Rock 5.0, Pipewire reaches 1.0.0

In security and privacy: Google Chrome’s Privacy Washing

Then in our Wanderings: Bill may just be losing his mind, (there are doubts?), Joe prints everything but money, Majid does VR, Moss hangs on, and Eric spends more quality time with his Linux tablet.

Download
]]> First up in the news: mintCast has a birthday, Mint 21.3 is named, Amazon works on a Linux fork for their devices, Ubuntu commits to Netplan, Firefox attempts Wayland, FreeBSD 14 is out, Endeavour releases Galileo, Vivaldi comes to Flathub, Google kills magazine content, OpenMandriva releases Rock 5.0, Pipewire reaches 1.0.0

In security and privacy: Google Chrome’s Privacy Washing

Then in our Wanderings: Bill may just be losing his mind, (there are doubts?), Joe prints everything but money, Majid does VR, Moss hangs on, and Eric spends more quality time with his Linux tablet.

  1. [skipto time=”00:00:00″] – Hacker Public Radio New Years Eve Promo
  2. [skipto time=”00:00:56″] – Intro
  3. [skipto time=”00:01:23″] – New Intro Music
  4. [skipto time=”00:02:41″] – News
  5. [skipto time=”00:54:13″] – Security And Privacy
  6. [skipto time=”01:04:49″] – Bi-Weekly Wanderings
  7. [skipto time=”01:58:35″] – Housekeeping and Announcements
  8. [skipto time=”01:59:43″] – Wrap Up
  9. [skipto time=”02:02:24″] – Special Thanks
  10. [skipto time=”02:03:10″] – New Outro Music

The News

mintCast Turns 15

Linux Mint 21.3 has been named

Amazon moves from Android Fork to Linux

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Committing Fully To Netplan For Network Configuration

Firefox is going to try to ship Wayland as default

FreeBSD 14 Released

EndeavourOS Releases Galileo Desktop

Vivaldi comes to Flathub

Google News is shutting down purchased magazine content, offering refunds

OpenMandriva LX 5 released

Pipewire reaches 1.0.0

Security and Privacy

Google Chrome’s IP Protection is privacy washing

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Someone (probably Bill) for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6485 425.5 – Infinitely Galactic, The Interview https://mintcast.org/425-5-infinitely-galactic-the-interview/ Wed, 22 Nov 2023 05:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6464 In our innards section we have a wonderful interview with Blaine, AKA Infinity Galactic; a YouTuber who's been making videos about Linux. Recently, he's made a couple of awesome videos about Linux Mint.

Download
]]> In our innards section we have a wonderful interview with Blaine, AKA Infinity Galactic; a YouTuber who’s been making videos about Linux. Recently, he’s made a couple of awesome videos about Linux Mint.

  1. [skipto time=”00:00:00″] – Intro
  2. [skipto time=”00:01:11″] – Innards
  3. [skipto time=”00:58:44″] – Housekeeping and Announcemnts
  4. [skipto time=”00:59:32″] – Wrap Up
  5. [skipto time=”01:01:25″] – Special Thanks

Some Links for IG:

YouTube

Facebook

Twitter (X)

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6464 425 – Firefox Down https://mintcast.org/425-firefox-down/ Sun, 19 Nov 2023 03:17:20 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6460 First up in the news: Ubuntu 24.04 gets a name, Mozilla Doubles Down on Firefox DEB Package, Discord is now official on Flathub, scrcpy gets an update, LXQt 1.4.0 is released, Firefox Accounts gets a Mozilla rename, Brave launches an AI, there is a new Audacity, OpenELA forms to preserve RHEL access, Element gets a new license, Proton has a new app, Fedora 39 is released, and OBS Studio 30 is out

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

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

In security and privacy: we got nothing

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

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

The News

Ubuntu 24.04 gets a name

Mozilla Doubles Down on Firefox DEB Package

Discord is now Verified on Flathub

scrcpy v2.2

LXQt 1.4.0 Released

Why ‘Firefox accounts’ are becoming ‘Mozilla accounts’

Brave launches Leo AI

Audacity 3.4 Released with New Music Workflows, Time Stretch Tool

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

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

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

Fedora Linux 39 is officially here!

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

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6460 424 – Meh Snap https://mintcast.org/424-meh-snap/ Thu, 02 Nov 2023 05:27:30 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6430 First up in the news: Mint Monthly News; Ubuntu 23.10 re-released; GNOME gets new CEO; new RaspPi Imager released; Plasma 6 Release Dates released; Matrix reaches 115 Million users; Bodhi Linux 7.0 AppPack released

In security and privacy: BlackCat ransomware attacks Linux and VMs; 1Password Breach – no harm, no foul; new vulnerabilities found and patched in XWayland, X.org

Then in our Wanderings: Bill shuffles cards; Joe tests more things; Moss keeps busy

Then in our Innards section: We discuss containerized package systems

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Download
]]> First up in the news: Mint Monthly News; Ubuntu 23.10 re-released; GNOME gets new CEO; new RaspPi Imager released; Plasma 6 Release Dates released; Matrix reaches 115 Million users; Bodhi Linux 7.0 AppPack released

In security and privacy: BlackCat ransomware attacks Linux and VMs; 1Password Breach – no harm, no foul; new vulnerabilities found and patched in XWayland, X.org

Then in our Wanderings: Bill shuffles cards; Joe tests more things; Moss keeps busy

Then in our Innards section: We discuss containerized package systems

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

  1. [skipto time=”00:00:00″] – Intro
  2. [skipto time=”00:01:36″] – News
  3. [skipto time=”00:24:26″] – Security And Privacy
  4. [skipto time=”00:29:56″] – Wanderings
  5. [skipto time=”00:45:57″] – Innards
  6. [skipto time=”01:11:52″] – Vibrations From The Ether
  7. [skipto time=”01:15:30″] – Check This Out
  8. [skipto time=”01:20:45″] – Housekeeping and Announcemtns
  9. [skipto time=”01:21:28″] – Wrap Up

The News

Mint Monthly News – October 2023

Ubuntu 23.10 Desktop ISOs Re-Released Following Translation Snafu

GNOME Foundation Welcomes Holly Million as Executive Director

Raspberry Pi Imager Gets New Tabbed OS Customization UI, Raspberry Pi 5 Support

KDE Plasma 6.0 Release Date Revealed

Raspberry Pi 5 Available Now

Decentralized Matrix messaging network says it now has 115M users

Bodhi 7.0 64-bit AppPack Released

Security and Privacy

BlackCat ransomware uses new ‘Munchkin’ Linux VM in stealthy attacks

Okta Support System incident and 1Password

XWayland & X.Org Server See New Releases Due To Three More Security Vulnerabilities

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6430 423.5 – It’s Elementary Or Nothing! https://mintcast.org/423-5-its-elementary-or-nothing/ Wed, 25 Oct 2023 04:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6412 In our Innards section, we speak to Danielle Fore´ of Elementary OS about the 7.1 release,

In "Check This Out" we share a video by "Explaining Computers" about some Tips and Tricks for Linux Mint.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Download
]]> In our Innards section, we speak to Danielle Fore´ of Elementary OS about the 7.1 release.

In “Check This Out” we share a video by “Explaining Computers” about some Tips and Tricks for Linux Mint.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6412 423 – Lay Down A *buntu https://mintcast.org/423-lay-down-a-buntu/ Sat, 21 Oct 2023 21:27:36 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6410 First up in the news: Mint 21.2 Cinnamon EDGE released, new version of Raspberry Pi OS released, new Ubuntu 23.10+flavours

In security and privacy: Curl patches 'worst' security flaw in ages, Encrypted Client Hello

Then in our Wanderings: Joe prints the D-handle, Moss tries out a new chair, Bill spends more money, Majid is finally Apple-free and Eric manages to stay alive for days without a smartphone.

Download
]]> First up in the news: Mint 21.2 Cinnamon EDGE released, new version of Raspberry Pi OS released, new Ubuntu 23.10+flavours

In security and privacy: Curl patches ‘worst’ security flaw in ages, Encrypted Client Hello

Then in our Wanderings: Joe prints the D-handle, Moss tries out a new chair, Bill spends more money, Majid is finally Apple-free and Eric manages to stay alive for days without a smartphone.

The News

Mint 21.2 Cinnamon EDGE released

Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic Minotaur Released (along with the flavours)

New version of Raspberry Pi OS released

Security and Privacy

Curl patches ‘worst’ security flaw in ages

Encrypted Client Hello

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6410 421 – Fun and Feckless https://mintcast.org/421-fun-and-feckless/ Wed, 20 Sep 2023 04:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6377 First up in the news: LMDE 6 “Faye” BETA Released, Fedora and Asahi Linux revamp installation process, Plasma 6 release date is set, IBM raises cloud prices, Manjaro 23 released, Mozilla rushes out patches, and ZFS returns to Ubuntu

In security and privacy, a huge security breach affects all browsers, and Google does user tracking

Then in our Wanderings, Majid has been a busy bunny, Joe is having troubles with 3D, Dale has been driven crazy, Bill gears up for public education, and Eric hates computers.

Download
]]> First up in the news: LMDE 6 “Faye” BETA Released, Fedora and Asahi Linux revamp installation process, Plasma 6 release date is set, IBM raises cloud prices, Manjaro 23 released, Mozilla rushes out patches, and ZFS returns to Ubuntu

In security and privacy, a huge security breach affects all browsers, and Google does user tracking

Then in our Wanderings, Majid has been a busy bunny, Joe is having troubles with 3D, Dale has been driven crazy, Bill gears up for public education, and Eric hates computers.

The News

LMDE 6 “Faye” – BETA Released

Fedora and Asahi Linux revamp installation process

Plasma 6 will be released in February 2024

Price shock: IBM to increase cloud costs by up to 26% in 2024

Manjaro 23.0 Uranos released

Mozilla patches Firefox, Thunderbird against zero-day exploited in attacks

Ubuntu 23.10 Restores ZFS File-System Support In Its Installer

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6377 417.5 – Pick Me! Pick Me! https://mintcast.org/417-5-pick-me-pick-me/ Wed, 02 Aug 2023 05:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6287 In our Innards section, we talk “ethical telemetry”

And finally, the feedback

In "Check This Out" Check out the new version and tell us what you think!

Download
]]> In our Innards section, we talk “ethical telemetry”

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

In “Check This Out”

Check out the new version and tell us what you think!

https://linuxmint.com/download.php

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6287 417 – All Hail Avrecon https://mintcast.org/417-all-hail-avrecon/ Sat, 29 Jul 2023 02:23:02 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6284 First up in the news: Mint 21.2 Victoria released, Canonical’s Leading LXD Engineer Quits, Ubuntu Plans to Ditch its ‘Minimal’ Install Option, a new BlendOS v3, SUSE forks Red Hat

In security and privacy, Avrecon malware affects 70,000 Linux servers, turns them into a botnet, and we meet RCE Flaw and PyLoose Malware

Then in our Wanderings Joe has a bad reaction, Moss forgot to write something here, Bill more of the same, Majid pretends to be a socialist

Download
]]> First up in the news: Mint 21.2 Victoria released, Canonical’s Leading LXD Engineer Quits, Ubuntu Plans to Ditch its ‘Minimal’ Install Option, a new BlendOS v3, SUSE forks Red Hat

In security and privacy, Avrecon malware affects 70,000 Linux servers, turns them into a botnet, and we meet RCE Flaw and PyLoose Malware

Then in our Wanderings Joe has a bad reaction, Moss forgot to write something here, Bill more of the same, Majid pretends to be a socialist

The News

Mint 21.2 Victoria released

Canonical’s Leading LXD Engineer Quits

Ubuntu Plans to Ditch its ‘Minimal’ Install Option

Blend OS v3 Bhatura released

In a Blow to IBM, SUSE is Forking Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Security and Privacy

Avrecon infects 70,000 Linux Servers, turns them into a botnet

OpenSSH Agent RCE Flaw Let Attackers Execute Arbitrary Commands

PyLoose Linux Malware Mines Crypto Directly From Memory

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

Special Thanks To:

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6284 416.5 – Browser Arousal https://mintcast.org/416-5-browser-arousal/ Wed, 19 Jul 2023 05:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6268 In our Innards section we talk browsers

And finally, the feedback

In "Check This Out" a link to a cool project and a YouTube video worth giving a look

Download
]]> In our Innards section we talk browsers

And finally, the feedback

In “Check This Out”

A link to a cool project and a YouTube video worth giving a look.

https://openscad.org/downloads.html

https://youtu.be/KyADkmRVe0U

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

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

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6268 414 – Salt and Battery https://mintcast.org/414-salt-and-battery/ Wed, 14 Jun 2023 04:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6222 First up in the news, Mint Monthly News, All-Snap Ubuntu Desktop Will Be Available Next Year, Red Hat Stops Packaging LibreOffice as RPM for RHEL & Fedora, Mozilla Thunderbird’s Next Big Update Is Now in Beta, Windows XP activation algorithm cracked - keygen now works on Linux

In security and privacy, we meet Blacksuit

Then in our Wanderings, Bill chases burning trucks, Moss is feeling the pressure, and Majid needs to stop spending money

In our Innards section, we discuss laptop battery life

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Download
]]> First up in the news, Mint Monthly News, All-Snap Ubuntu Desktop Will Be Available Next Year, Red Hat Stops Packaging LibreOffice as RPM for RHEL & Fedora, Mozilla Thunderbird’s Next Big Update Is Now in Beta, Windows XP activation algorithm cracked – keygen now works on Linux;

In security and privacy, we meet Blacksuit;

Then in our Wanderings, Bill chases burning trucks, Moss is feeling the pressure, and Majid needs to stop spending money

In our Innards section, we discuss laptop battery life;

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

The News

Mint Monthly News – May 2023

All-Snap Ubuntu Desktop Will Be Available Next Year

Red Hat Will Stop Packaging LibreOffice as RPM for RHEL, Fedora

Mozilla Thunderbird’s Next Big Update Is Now in Beta

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked – keygen now works on Linux

Security and Privacy

New Linux Ransomware “Blacksuit”, looks like “Royal”

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

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

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and other valuable contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6222 413 – Flying Wigs https://mintcast.org/413-flying-wigs/ Wed, 31 May 2023 05:00:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6198 First up in the news, Arch migrates Git, Ubuntu changes PPAs, Fedora Onyx is approved, Google to remove old accounts, Debian re-imposes a moratorium, Proton goes Family, Red Hat unveils a new Desktop, Fedora plans to drop X11, Thunderbird gets a new logo

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

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

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


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

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

The News

Arch Migrates Git

Ubuntu Makes “Significant Changes” to PPAs for 23.10

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

Google To Start Removing Inactive Accounts After 2 Years

Google Chrome’s 2023 UI Refresh on Ubuntu

Debian Votes to Reinstate Merged-usr File Movement Moratorium

Proton Unveils Family Plan

Red Hat Reveals Podman Desktop 1.0

Fedora Intends To Completely Drop X11 in Plasma 6

Thunderbird Gets a Brand New Logo

Security And Privacy

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

Full Show Notes Can Be Found Here

Wrap Up

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

  • Bill Houser for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time syncs and various other contribution
  • Bill Houser for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
]]> 6198 408 – Ffmpegged https://mintcast.org/408-ffmpegged/ Wed, 22 Mar 2023 09:03:22 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=6016 First up in the news: Meet Ubuntu Flatpak Remix, KDE Plasma 6 Begins, No Peeking, Vanilla goes to Debian, LibreOffice 7.4.6, Nitrux goes “sh”, Elementary updates, DuckDuckGo goes AI on Wikipedia, Debian gets new APT, Proton joins the fight against censorship, Firefox 111 features, Kali 2023.1 released, and Wine 8.4 with old Wayland released.

In security and privacy, Brave needs no permission to do Google, NordVPN open sources code;

Then in our Wanderings, we are posting no Bills this episode,

In our Innards section, Joe talks ffmpeg

Download ]]> First up in the news: Meet Ubuntu Flatpak Remix, KDE Plasma 6 Begins, No Peeking, Vanilla goes to Debian, LibreOffice 7.4.6, Nitrux goes “sh”, Elementary updates, DuckDuckGo goes AI on Wikipedia, Debian gets new APT, Proton joins the fight against censorship, Firefox 111 features, Kali 2023.1 released, and Wine 8.4 with old Wayland released;

In security and privacy, Brave needs no permission to do Google, NordVPN open sources code;

Then in our Wanderings, we are posting no Bills this episode,

In our Innards section, Joe talks ffmpeg;

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

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

Wrap-up

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

Archive.org for hosting our audio files

Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo

Londoner for our time syncs

Bill Houser for hosting the Pi400 which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio

The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about

]]> 6016 404.5 – 2022 Distro Rundown https://mintcast.org/404-5-2022-distro-rundown/ Wed, 01 Feb 2023 22:25:03 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5921 This week in our Innards, We do a rundown of our favorite distros of 2022

In "Check This Out" we talk about a graphical tool Londoner shared that makes light work of scheduling a shutdown or reboot. Moss shares his experience with the Flatpak of a favorite game of his; and we share an article postulating the death of Unix.

Download
]]> This week in our Innards, We do a rundown of our favorite distros of 2022

In “Check This Out” we talk about a graphical tool Londoner shared that makes light work of scheduling a shutdown or reboot. Moss shares his experience with the Flatpak of a favorite game of his; and we share an article postulating the death of Unix.

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

Wrap-up

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

AudioFreak (Riyo) for our audio editing

Archive.org for hosting our audio files

Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo

Londoner for our time syncs

Bill Houser for hosting the Pi400 which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio

The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about

]]> 5921 399 – Lunar Eclipse? No, Lunar Lobster https://mintcast.org/399-lunar-eclipse-no-lunar-lobster/ Wed, 02 Nov 2022 04:45:39 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5712 up in the news: The Kudu is out, with a Lobster on its tail, Fedora 37 is dragging, the next Kernel takes less power from the people, Steam Snap switches stacks, Flatpak gets Meson, and Linus wants to forget about 486; 
In security and privacy: we get the first security update for the Kudu;
Then in our Wanderings: Joe goes to Micro Center, Moss is having a ball, and Bill is clouding around
In our Innards section, we continue our historical journey through Linux distros;
And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

Download
]]> News 1:29
Security and Privacy 18:35
Biweekly Wanderings 20:8
Linux Innards 47:40
Vibrations By The Ether 1hr 25m
Housekeeping and Announcements 1h 32m

First up in the news: The Kudu is out, with a Lobster on its tail, Fedora 37 is dragging, the next Kernel takes less power from the people, Steam Snap switches stacks, Flatpak gets Meson, and Linus wants to forget about 486;

In security and privacy: we get the first security update for the Kudu;

Then in our Wanderings: Joe goes to Micro Center, Moss is having a ball, and Bill is clouding around

In our Innards section, we continue our historical journey through Linux distros;

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

The News

Security and Privacy Update

Check This Out

Wrap-up

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

  • Norbert, Londoner, Tony H, AudioFreak(Riyo) and all others for our audio editing
  • Josh Lowe, and Bill Houser for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Linode for hosting mintcast.org
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.Thanks, Clem!
]]> 5712 396 – Ransomware Goes Wild https://mintcast.org/396-ransomware-goes-wild/ Tue, 04 Oct 2022 21:47:16 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5622 In security and privacy, we have multi-stage malware, website leaks, and shell attacks;
Then in our Wanderings, Norbert is cutting corners, Moss tries a different mint, Joe keeps modding, and Bill fixes a broken Arch …again.
In our Innards section, Ransomware goes to school;
And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions
Download
]]> First up in the news, Stallman goes manual on C, DNF5 arrives in Fedora, LibreOffice gets fumigated, GNOME comes into its Shell, they have put hair in the Blender, Avast buys your cookies, and Intel fogs the processor market;
In security and privacy, we have multi-stage malware, website leaks, and shell attacks;
Then in our Wanderings, Norbert is cutting corners, Moss tries a different mint, Joe keeps modding, and Bill fixes a broken Arch …again.

In our Innards section, Ransomware goes to school;

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

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

The News

Security and Privacy Update

Wrap-up

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

  • Norbert, Londoner, Tony H, and all others for our audio editing
  • Leo for timestamps and publishing
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.Thanks, Clem!
]]> 5622 389.5 – The Martial Arts of Podcasting https://mintcast.org/389-5the-martial-arts-of-podcasting/ Thu, 23 Jun 2022 02:13:39 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5531 Download
]]> 1:04 Linux Innards
55:23 Vibrations from the Ether
58:20 Housekeeping and Announcements

In our Innards section, we interview Steve Seguin, creator of VDO.Ninja

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

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

The Linux Innards

https://vdo.ninja/

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!
]]> 5531 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.
Download
]]> 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!
]]> 5520 388 – Another One Writes the Rust https://mintcast.org/388-another-one-writes-the-rust/ Wed, 15 Jun 2022 23:09:10 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5512 Download
]]> 1:27 The News
12:56 Security and Privacy
21:51 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
40:01 Linux Innards
1:05:52 Announcements & Outro

First up in the news, we have some Gnome news, some new Intel on Linux 5.19, the kernel gets even more Rusty, Ubuntu loses its Pulse, and Proton unifies.

In security and privacy: Facebook has no clue where your data goes.  LinuxFX dumps user data… where? Mozilla fixes a serious vulnerability.

Then in our Wanderings: Joe starts making videos, Moss’ wife starts Cruzeing, and Norbert starts his new laptop.

In our Innards section, we get some thoughts on Ubuntu 22.04.

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

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

Security and Privacy

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!>
]]> 5512 387.5 – If you were to build a distro… https://mintcast.org/387-5-if-you-were-to-build-a-distro/ Wed, 15 Jun 2022 22:02:23 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5506 Download
]]> 00:33 Linux Innards
33:47 Vibrations From the Ether
42:33 Announcements

In our Innards section we discuss how we would build our own distro

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions.

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

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!
]]> 5506 387 – The Curious Case of Debian Downloads https://mintcast.org/387-the-curious-case-of-debian-downloads/ Wed, 15 Jun 2022 12:13:29 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5496 ]]> 2:32 The News
13:25 Security and Privacy
22:10 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:05:28 Announcements

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

In security and privacy: Intel has more microcode

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

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

The News

Security and Privacy Update

Wrap-up

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

  • Norbert and Tony H for our audio production
  • Leo for timestamps and publishing
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logo
  • Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.Thanks, Clem!
]]> 5496 383 – Ubuntu is out-fedoring Fedora https://mintcast.org/383-ubuntu-is-out-fedoring-fedora/ Tue, 07 Jun 2022 15:55:26 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5442 Download
]]> 2:05 The News
20:32 Security and Privacy Update
67:15 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
37:40

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

In security and privacy, a new Spectre has arisen;

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

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

The News

Security 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!
]]> 5442 381 – Mozilla Does Something Meta https://mintcast.org/381-mozilla-does-something-meta/ Wed, 11 May 2022 00:16:50 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5377 Download
]]> 1:44 The News
12:40 Security and Privacy Update
32:30 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:11:35 Announcements & Outro

First up in the news: AMD builds brand new Linux graphics driver support and Ubuntu MATE to add native Flatpak support.

In security and privacy: Arch Linux packages are… outdated? Mozilla does something really Meta, the ‘EARN IT Act’ makes a return, and FLoC was a flop, but Google has some new ideas.

Then in our Wanderings Joe gets another new to me bike, Norbert defeats distro-hopping, Moss goes international, Josh tells us about running Manjaro, and Bill is truckcasting.

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

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

      • Joe got my care package from Moss to work on, which t included 2 sets of headphones and 2 handheld tape recorders. He took some vacation days this last week in order to try and get some campaign stuff done for the school board.
      • Norbert hasn’t distrohopped for a couple of months and thinks he found his perfect distros in Fedora, Arch and Void.
      • Moss was preparing for Episode 030 of Distrohoppers’ Digest and has been making episodes of Full Circle Weekly News. He participated in Eurofilk, a singing and sharing Zoom meeting which happens every couple weeks.
      • Josh T replaced my trusty Debian 11 install and have opted to live in the Manjaro world for a while.
    • Bill has been getting his new podcast up and running.

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!
]]> 5377 380.5 – Master and Apprentice (LPIC-1) https://mintcast.org/381-master-and-apprentice/ Sat, 30 Apr 2022 19:16:30 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5368 Download
]]> 1:16 Linux Innards
30:18 Vibrations From the Ether
35:26 Check This Out
37:43 Announcements

In our Innards section, we strive to become certified Linux administrators and discuss the LPIC-1 exam.

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

The Linux Innards

  • Budget? Do you like classes? Bootcamps?
    • No budget
    • A tiny budget (~$20)
      • Do everything above and
      • Find a used copy of the Sybex Practice Tests. It’s 1000 questions. Cheapest, by far.
    • A moderate budget (~$100)
      • Sign up for something like CBTNuggets or ITPro.tv for two months and make a commitment to actually use those two months wisely. Professional content and interaction with fellow forum members.
  • These tests are not particularly difficult, but they cover such a wide array of topics you can easily lose track and it’s easy to forget little details.
  • If all you’re interested in is passing, you can probably get by pretty easily in a couple months of 8-10 hours studied per week. Probably less. This approach is really just memorization, though.
  • If you actually want to understand the material, you should spin up some virtual servers and actually use the commands. You can do it all on VMs with lots of small vDisks, multiple NICs, connect them to each other, and the software’s all free.
  • The test is fairly straightforward. Multiple choice and fill in the blank style questions. That’s it. You either know it or you don’t.

Check This Out

10 minutes

  • Extension Manager – a better alternative to the Gnome Extensions app
  • adw-gtk – A GTK3 theme that looks like GTK4/libadwaita

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!
]]> 5368 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.
Download
]]> 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!
]]> 5363 378 – Reaching Enlightenment https://mintcast.org/378-reaching-enlightenment/ Mon, 14 Feb 2022 15:16:27 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5335 In security, Ubuntu Kernel Security Patches, FGKASLR gets closer to mainline, Data stealing malware hides on Linux servers, Go Daddy data breach
In our Wanderings, Joe does some 3d printing, Josh got a new monitor, Norbert switches OS’s, and Clayton looks back
Download
]]> 1:37 The News
23:17 Security Update
26:04 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:05:52 Announcements & Outro

First up in the news, Mint 20.3 Una is released, Pipewire has a new release and Solus co-lead resigns

In security, Ubuntu Kernel update fixes vulnerabilities and Ryzen Mobile CPU’s and Pluton Security

In our Wanderings, Joe talks about the HPR New Year Show, Norbert watched a new series, Bill has been on the grind with cold temperatures, Nishant joined the Serenity OS team and Moss is back

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

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

  • Joe
    • HPR New Year Show, headphones, fixing laptop, CES
  • Norbert
    • Arcane, Gentoo
  • Moss
    • ThinkPad, Distrohoppers’ Digest
  • Bill
    • Setting up a new desktop, Bodhi Linux
  • Nishant
    • Serenity OS, birthday

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!>
]]> 5335 377.5 – Predicting Predicaments https://mintcast.org/377-5-predicting-predicaments/ Sat, 29 Jan 2022 16:46:15 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5324 Download
]]> 1:30 Linux Innards
56:32 Check This Out
57:28 Announcements & Outro

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

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

The Linux Innards

Our predictions for the new year

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

Check This Out

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!>
]]> 5324 377 – Zero Days of Christmas https://mintcast.org/377-zero-days-of-christmas/ Thu, 06 Jan 2022 05:08:48 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5316 In security, a grub update causes problems with Ubuntu and a Log4shell update
Then in our wanderings, Joe's on vacation, Norbert's full of gingerbread, Nishant is surviving the winter, Josh is on Windows, and Bill's just glad to be here
Download
]]> 1:56 The News
21:20 Security Update
32:54 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:20:55 Announcements & Outro

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

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

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

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

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

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

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!>
]]> 5316 376 – Joe, Do You Copy? https://mintcast.org/376-joe-do-you-copy/ Sun, 19 Dec 2021 18:40:05 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5299 In security, Ubuntu Kernel Security Patches, FGKASLR gets closer to mainline, Data stealing malware hides on Linux servers, Go Daddy data breach
In our Wanderings, Joe does some 3d printing, Josh got a new monitor, Norbert switches OS’s, and Clayton looks back
Download
]]> 1:46 The News
16:16 Security Update
23:52 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
52:38 Announcements & Outro

First up in the news, Linux Mint monthly news, Europe embraces open source, Debian has browser issues, Fedora goes all in on Wayland, Firefox helps you fight spam, And the Linux kernel gets rusty

In security, Ubuntu Kernel Security Patches, FGKASLR gets closer to mainline, Data stealing malware hides on Linux servers, Go Daddy data breach

In our Wanderings, Joe does some 3d printing, Josh got a new monitor, Norbert switches OS’s, and Clayton looks back

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

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

  • Joe
    • 3d printing, crypto, food
  • Josh
    • Health, monitors, outdoors
  • Norbert
    • Debian testing, Gnome, Japanese
  • Clayton
    • The old days, SSD’s, printing

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!>
]]> 5299 371.5 – Minus One https://mintcast.org/371-5-minus-one/ Wed, 13 Oct 2021 05:17:33 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5237 And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions
Download
]]> 1:37 Linux Innards
35:41 Vibrations from the Ether
50:04 Check This Out
53:53 Announcements & Outro

In our innards this week the new guys discuss gtk theming

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

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

Linux Innards

Vibrations from the Ether

  • Rob
  • Brad A

Check This Out

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

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

]]> 5237 371 – Rounded Corners https://mintcast.org/371-rounded-corners/ Wed, 06 Oct 2021 05:37:05 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5230 In security, More bugs and more malware
Then in our Wanderings, Joe does vacation, Norbert Listens to the Doctor, Josh tries ventoy, Tony is making ice cream trucks, Leo plays D2
Download
]]> 1:49 The News
28:03 Security Update
38:05 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:19:37 Announcements & Outro

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

In security, More bugs and more malware

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

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

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio production
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logg
  • Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 5230 370.5 – What Got You Into Linux? https://mintcast.org/370-5-what-got-you-into-linux/ Wed, 29 Sep 2021 05:09:39 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5221 And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions
Download
]]> 1:49 Linux Innards
40:47 Vibrations from the Ether
56:22 Check This Out
1:04:09 Announcements & Outro

In our Innards section, an introduction to the new folks that will carry the show with Tony and Joe

And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions

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

Linux Innards

  • What got you into linux?
  • What drove you to say “yes” to being on mintCast?
  • What do you love most about linux?
  • Where do you want mintCast to go in the next 12 months ?
  • What’s your current favorite distro?
  • What’s your current favorite desktop environment?

Vibrations from the Ether

  • Michel C
  • Brad A
  • William T
  • Henrik H

Check This Out

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio production
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logg
  • Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 5221 370 – New Wanderers https://mintcast.org/370-new-wanderers/ Wed, 22 Sep 2021 05:40:56 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5214 In security, no encrypted chats are safe
Then in our Wanderings, we hear from the old AND new crew
Download
]]> 1:35 The News
30:19 Security Update
38:58 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
50:36 Announcements & Outro

First up in the news Linux Mint gets a new website, A new point release, Firefox snaps back, Gnome and Plasma get updates, and much more

In security, no encrypted chats are safe

Then in our Wanderings, we hear from the old AND new crew

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

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio production, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord 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!>
]]> 5214 369 – Cache Flushing https://mintcast.org/369-cache-flushing/ Wed, 08 Sep 2021 06:05:00 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5198 In security cache flushing and Bluetooth flaws
Then in our Wanderings Joe pines a phone with plasma, Tony walks 500 miles, and I search for a keyboard
Download
]]> 1:49 The News
27:48 Security Update
32:18 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:01:28 Announcements & Outro

First up in the news Linux Mint is ready for the facelift, Snaps get an upgrade, Kernel 5.14 is out, and 5.15 is looking good, and Ubuntu gets a release date

In security cache flushing and Bluetooth flaws

Then in our Wanderings Joe pines a phone with plasma, Tony walks 500 miles, and I search for a keyboard

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

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 5198 367 – What’s Old Is New Again https://mintcast.org/367-whats-old-is-new-again/ Wed, 11 Aug 2021 04:07:42 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5169 In security, Open Source Security has a big problem!
Then in our Wanderings, I’ve been arching, Tony has been watching Cricket, Joe has been working on games consoles.
Download
]]> 2:17 The News
27:55 Security Update
42:15 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:05:45 Announcements & Outro

First up in the news, Linux Mint working on the website, more on the SteamDeck, Ubuntu debuts its new installer, and some release dates

In security, Open Source Security has a big problem!

Then in our Wanderings, I’ve been arching, Tony has been watching Cricket, Joe has been working on games consoles.

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit.

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 5169 mintCast 365 – Upgrade Time https://mintcast.org/mintcast-365-upgrade-time/ Wed, 14 Jul 2021 05:57:18 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5137 In security Kaseya and PrintNightmare
Then in our Wanderings, Leo migrates his blog, Joe gets busy, Tony struggles with 5.11, and Mike jumpstarts a MacOS VM.
Download
]]> 2:10 The News
20:42 Security Update
32:02 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:10:09 Announcements & Outro

First up in the news, we realize the Kernel is 30, Ubuntu tweaks its themes, Mint 20.2 is here and Audacity owners are causing a stir in the community again. 

In security Kaseya and PrintNightmare

Then in our Wanderings, Leo migrates his blog, Joe gets busy, Tony struggles with 5.11, and Mike jumpstarts a MacOS VM.

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit.

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 5137 mintCast 362 – The Takeover https://mintcast.org/mintcast-362-the-takeover/ Wed, 02 Jun 2021 06:54:23 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5082 Then in our news, Freenode taken over by Andrew Lee and Ubuntu and Fedora abandon ship, Material Shell for Gnome 40, Fedora 32 is end of life, and more
Download
]]> Download

3:02 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:06:36 The News
1:34:45 Security Update
1:44:36 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I’ve been system building, Joe has been playing with his new 3D printer, Bo has range anxiety and Tony has been learning about creating YouTube videos

Then in our news, Freenode taken over by Andrew Lee and Ubuntu and Fedora abandon ship, Material Shell for Gnome 40, Fedora 32 is end of life, and more

In security, a Linux rootkit that shows its face…fish.

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 5082 mintCast 361.5 – X2Joe https://mintcast.org/mintcast-361-5-x2joe/ Wed, 26 May 2021 03:18:45 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5077 And finally, the feedback and a first look
Download
]]> Download

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

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

And finally, the feedback and a first look

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit.

LINUX INNARDS:

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

  • Brad

CHECK THIS OUT! 

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

  • We’re putting OGG to sleep. Forever.
    • Mp3 has been patentless for more than three years now and that’s free enough for us. It cuts down on back end workload since we do most everything manually when it comes to getting the show out there.
    • No need to change feeds! The mp3 will now come down in the OGG feed. Just don’t look under the covers, and hopefully absolutely nothing noticeable will change.
  • Moss extended hiatus
  • The New Saturday Show (mintNight? mintTalk? No official name yet.)
  • Our next episode will be at 2 pm US Central time on May 30, 2021.
  • Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 5077 mintCast 360 – Uno Reverse Card (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-360-uno-reverse-card-mp3/ Wed, 05 May 2021 05:17:39 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5053 Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu too! Wenty-1.04, everyone’s favorite: NFTs, and more.
In Security, meet the new hacking tools, same as the old hacking tools, a reverse Uno card, QNAP, and the University of Minnesota.
Download
]]> Download

3:11 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
43:58 The News
1:24:58 Security Update
1:41:51 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I fly like an eagle, Joe goes to Florida, Moss is attacked by the trees, Mike wings it.

Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu too! Wenty-1.04, everyone’s favorite: NFTs, and more.

In Security, meet the new hacking tools, same as the old hacking tools, a reverse Uno card, QNAP, and the University of Minnesota.

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 5053 mintCast 360 – Uno Reverse Card https://mintcast.org/mintcast-360-uno-reverse-card/ Wed, 05 May 2021 05:06:59 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5048 Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu too! Wenty-1.04, everyone’s favorite: NFTs, and more.
In Security, meet the new hacking tools, same as the old hacking tools, a reverse Uno card, QNAP, and the University of Minnesota.
Download
]]> Download

3:11 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
43:58 The News
1:24:58 Security Update
1:41:51 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I fly like an eagle, Joe goes to Florida, Moss is attacked by the trees, Mike wings it.

Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu too! Wenty-1.04, everyone’s favorite: NFTs, and more.

In Security, meet the new hacking tools, same as the old hacking tools, a reverse Uno card, QNAP, and the University of Minnesota.

Twitter. Discord. Telegram. Matrix. Reddit.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 5048 mintCast 357 – Surfboard Building Lunch (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-357-surfboard-building-lunch-mp3/ Wed, 24 Mar 2021 04:50:28 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=4983 Then, in the News, new LibreOffice and Audacity, 7zip is native, Calamares can use more butter, and a new kernel is coming
In Security, how easy it is to buy up your information
Download
]]> Download

2:19 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
53:33 The News
1:14:50 Security Update
1:27:13 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I do a little scripting, Joe drops a laptop, Moss is feeling phone-y, Tony walks a thousand miles, Josh visits Piggly Wiggly, Bo battles trolls, Mike gets a new-to-you Q2u

Then, in the News, new LibreOffice and Audacity, 7zip is native, Calamares can use more butter, and a new kernel is coming

In Security, how easy it is to buy up your information

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • I wrote that backup script I promised. It will backup all contents of your home folder, including dot files, into a gz, xz, bz2 or 7z archive.
    • It’s in my personal, local gitea, but I can post it to my public github if there’s interest.
  • Joe
    • One of the 1more headsets the cable has gone bad which is why I have had so many problems with it.  Basically the cable just deteriorated away.  So I took the driver end apart and pulled the cable all the way through and put in another one.  The first one that I tried to replace it with was too thick so I removed some cable from another headset that I had no use for, that was for a side with a mic and used two wires for each connection.  It came out well and I may do it to another of the 1mores where I have had to do a lot of repairs because the wire was falling apart
    • On that 5285 tablet I was not able to get anything working on it despite trying to figure out what needed to be replaced.  I know it is one of the surface mount components but I don’t have the proper tools to remove and replace and while I do know the area I need to start in I don’t have the replacement parts.
      1. So instead I have ordered a replacement motherboard.  It is the i3 version instead of the i5 version but it was 60 dollars and it will still be an improvement over a couple of the other systems that I use
      2. I will eventually get to order another one with the specs I want.  Or maybe a 5290.  My analysis of price to performance leads me to believe that it is the current winner for value when it comes to cpu performance.  The 7000 series does not provide much of a difference in performance for a large price bump and the 5290 has double the performance of the 5285 for a marginal price difference
      3. Also ordered a 2230 ssd for 15 dollars that should add a lot of high performance hard drive space to the tablet for a similar price to the much slower micro sd. I may also throw in whatever micro sd I have sitting around but we shall see, well I will when I get another one anyway
      4. Did get the new motherboard and put it in easy enough but it turns out the creen is bad.  So I have repurposed it along with a usb c adapter to work as a set top box for my living room tv.  The problem is that used screens cost nearly as much as new ones which is in the 150 dollar range
      5. I am thinking about writing a buyer’s guide for Windows tablets that seem to have a good record of running Linux or could be made to work with a little work.  My problem with it is it would not be good for more than a year or two other than the general guidelines because of how technology changes. I would like to know if people would want to read it before I write it though. I suppose that I could write a new guide every year or two.
    • I got wrapped up in the headphone cord that was attached to my laptop.  The laptop ended up on the floor but thankfully I have not been able to find any damage for that.  The cable for my 99 neos however was damaged.  A new cable costs 20 dollars so I am fixing the old one.  I may still buy a new one but I do want to replace the 3.5mm jack anyway.  Cant have too many cables.  It is a 4 pole connector and I have not had much luck getting those to work correctly. But I was able to get some practice recently when I was able to pick up 2 razer kraken pro v2s and an xbox headset for free from FB marketplace.  The last person had tried to do a jack replacement and gotten the cabling wrong.  So far I have been able to get one of the Razers working like new by fixing the work that was already done.
    • I ended up replacing the battery in my bluetooth/wired mechanical keyboard.  The battery that was in it was not holding a charge for very long and that would make the connection very wonky after only a short period of time.  I am hoping that the issue was an aging battery but I did also replace the 750 mAh with 4000 mAh battery. It should not be a problem moving to a larger capacity battery on the lower power charger, it will just take a lot longer to charge.  But slow charging is supposed to be better for batteries anyway.
  • Moss
    • I spent an hour here and an hour there getting the Zia800 up and running. I met with complete success on the 13th, dual-booting Linux Mint 20.1 MATE and Windows 10 Pro. I still need to install and configure Kodi for her, and she still has some configuring to do. She continues to use her T430 exclusively; I have not seen her turn the Zia800 on to this point. She blushes and goes silent when I ask her why not.
    • I have a problem. I have one swap partition on my Kudu, and every time I install a distro, that distro finds it and renames it, so other distros can’t find it anymore. This makes for a really slow boot. With help from Londoner, I tried to delete Mint’s use of the swap partition and install a swapfile. The attempt failed, and I had to do a complete reinstall. Even so, I learned enough to get it right this time. So now I have one fewer distro looking for the swap partition. Seven to go.
    • Here is the info I was using from Londoner:
      • To configure swapfile (as root or using sudo). 2G creates 2 GiB swapfile.
      • sudo swapoff /swapfile
      • sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile
      • sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
      • sudo mkswap /swapfile
      • sudo nano /etc/fstab
    • Delete existing entry for swap partition and replace with
      • /swapfile none swap sw 0 0
      • Save & reboot
    • I got a new phone yesterday, a Google Pixel 3a XL. I charged it up and was going to root it and put Lineage OS on it before using it… but… As soon as I turned it on, it started installing Android 11, which I’ve never gotten close to. I caved. I have moved all my files over, which required the use of my Wavlink toaster as the Pixel does not accommodate SD cards. I will, however, go ahead and put Lineage on my old Moto X4, and will make that available as a business phone for AWH…which still hasn’t taken off but we’re being promised a lot of things.
    • I’ve been keeping neofetch data on every installation I do one every machine I own, and updating it as needed. The file is available on our Telegram and Discord groups. The result shows how much memory is used by the system with nothing running, except Terminal and neofetch, and makes a good baseline for deciding which distro to use according to your system’s amount of memory.
    • We’re getting ready for another exciting episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest, scheduled for March 31st. For the first time since Episode 001, our current episode 020 is our most-viewed episode at 781, with Episode 019 next at 745 and Episode 018 in 3rd at 727! 
    • I have managed to successfully install three distros this month, and instead of reviewing more than one, our Telegram group voted on it and picked Mageia 8, which I had hinted earlier I *might* be reviewing. This means I know what I’m reviewing for April as well, also based on the votes and comments.
    • It’s time to get your votes in on Distro Madness, Round 3; voting will close this Friday before moving on to Round 4. There were some interesting upsets in Round 2. We’re getting a lot of participation in this fun little diversion. We would like to encourage you to become a member of the site; we have some plans in the works for making additional features for members only, and membership is free.
    • Dresden fights on. [Chapter 32 of Small Favors] And we have just been gifted a complete collection of The Expanse novels and shorts, as well as the rest of the Codex Alera collection.
  • Tony Hughes
    • Lots of walking, Monday 8th and Tuesday 9th March, myself and my wife went on 2 long walks. On Monday 8th, we walked 8 Miles and Tuesday 9th, nearly 12 miles. Myself and my Wife also started a virtual walking challenge last Wednesday, “Mizen to Malin Virtual Challenge” which is 360 miles from the North Coast of Ireland to the South coast. My Wife has just completed the Lands End to John O Groats challenge which was 874 miles and now has a T shirt and shiny medal to prove it.   
    • Not talked about it for a while but I have been doing some Diecast restoration work, preparing castings for repaint, it has been quite cold here so painting in my outside workshop was out so I have been busy getting the castings dismantled, paint striped and the posts drilled and tapped out ready for reassembly. I managed to get some prepared castings painted and reassembled this last week as the weather has warmed up enough to make painting possible. 
    • I nearly missed the show this week as I hadn’t been given the heads up about the clocks going forward in the US, ours don’t go forward till next week, so my time is an hour earlier than my usual 8pm. (to echo another podcast) I blame Leo lol. 
  • Josh
    • CKP ep 3 coming to a podcatcher near you soon!
    • Linux Mint is still the champion of Linux gaming!
    • Did some distrohopping going from Mint to openSUSE Tumbleweed to Endeavor back to Mint all in one 3 day period.
    • dd + pigz is going to be my method of backup from now on even though it’s slower.
    • Btrfs send/receive is awesome but I need to learn more about it…
    • Got a new audio interface, the Presonus Audiobox usb96. Also getting a new mic, the Audio Technica AT2020!
  • Bo
    • The 3d printed dice tray heard round the world
    • Valheim server
    • CKP progress
  • Mike
    • I THOUGHT I finally fixed WiFi. New microphone (Samsung Q2u), new headphones (Sony WH1000XM3), work on recording room.
    • Removed my information (People Finder, White Pages, MyLife) [Moss-HOW?]
    • New hardware wallet (Ledger Nano S)

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on April 4th, 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!>
]]> 4983 mintCast 357 – Surfboard Building Lunch https://mintcast.org/mintcast-357-surfboard-building-lunch/ Wed, 24 Mar 2021 04:39:13 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=4979 Then, in the News, new LibreOffice and Audacity, 7zip is native, Calamares can use more butter, and a new kernel is coming
In Security, how easy it is to buy up your information
Download
]]> Download

2:19 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
53:33 The News
1:14:50 Security Update
1:27:13 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I do a little scripting, Joe drops a laptop, Moss is feeling phone-y, Tony walks a thousand miles, Josh visits Piggly Wiggly, Bo battles trolls, Mike gets a new-to-you Q2u

Then, in the News, new LibreOffice and Audacity, 7zip is native, Calamares can use more butter, and a new kernel is coming

In Security, how easy it is to buy up your information

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • I wrote that backup script I promised. It will backup all contents of your home folder, including dot files, into a gz, xz, bz2 or 7z archive.
    • It’s in my personal, local gitea, but I can post it to my public github if there’s interest.
  • Joe
    • One of the 1more headsets the cable has gone bad which is why I have had so many problems with it.  Basically the cable just deteriorated away.  So I took the driver end apart and pulled the cable all the way through and put in another one.  The first one that I tried to replace it with was too thick so I removed some cable from another headset that I had no use for, that was for a side with a mic and used two wires for each connection.  It came out well and I may do it to another of the 1mores where I have had to do a lot of repairs because the wire was falling apart
    • On that 5285 tablet I was not able to get anything working on it despite trying to figure out what needed to be replaced.  I know it is one of the surface mount components but I don’t have the proper tools to remove and replace and while I do know the area I need to start in I don’t have the replacement parts.
      1. So instead I have ordered a replacement motherboard.  It is the i3 version instead of the i5 version but it was 60 dollars and it will still be an improvement over a couple of the other systems that I use
      2. I will eventually get to order another one with the specs I want.  Or maybe a 5290.  My analysis of price to performance leads me to believe that it is the current winner for value when it comes to cpu performance.  The 7000 series does not provide much of a difference in performance for a large price bump and the 5290 has double the performance of the 5285 for a marginal price difference
      3. Also ordered a 2230 ssd for 15 dollars that should add a lot of high performance hard drive space to the tablet for a similar price to the much slower micro sd. I may also throw in whatever micro sd I have sitting around but we shall see, well I will when I get another one anyway
      4. Did get the new motherboard and put it in easy enough but it turns out the creen is bad.  So I have repurposed it along with a usb c adapter to work as a set top box for my living room tv.  The problem is that used screens cost nearly as much as new ones which is in the 150 dollar range
      5. I am thinking about writing a buyer’s guide for Windows tablets that seem to have a good record of running Linux or could be made to work with a little work.  My problem with it is it would not be good for more than a year or two other than the general guidelines because of how technology changes. I would like to know if people would want to read it before I write it though. I suppose that I could write a new guide every year or two.
    • I got wrapped up in the headphone cord that was attached to my laptop.  The laptop ended up on the floor but thankfully I have not been able to find any damage for that.  The cable for my 99 neos however was damaged.  A new cable costs 20 dollars so I am fixing the old one.  I may still buy a new one but I do want to replace the 3.5mm jack anyway.  Cant have too many cables.  It is a 4 pole connector and I have not had much luck getting those to work correctly. But I was able to get some practice recently when I was able to pick up 2 razer kraken pro v2s and an xbox headset for free from FB marketplace.  The last person had tried to do a jack replacement and gotten the cabling wrong.  So far I have been able to get one of the Razers working like new by fixing the work that was already done.
    • I ended up replacing the battery in my bluetooth/wired mechanical keyboard.  The battery that was in it was not holding a charge for very long and that would make the connection very wonky after only a short period of time.  I am hoping that the issue was an aging battery but I did also replace the 750 mAh with 4000 mAh battery. It should not be a problem moving to a larger capacity battery on the lower power charger, it will just take a lot longer to charge.  But slow charging is supposed to be better for batteries anyway.
  • Moss
    • I spent an hour here and an hour there getting the Zia800 up and running. I met with complete success on the 13th, dual-booting Linux Mint 20.1 MATE and Windows 10 Pro. I still need to install and configure Kodi for her, and she still has some configuring to do. She continues to use her T430 exclusively; I have not seen her turn the Zia800 on to this point. She blushes and goes silent when I ask her why not.
    • I have a problem. I have one swap partition on my Kudu, and every time I install a distro, that distro finds it and renames it, so other distros can’t find it anymore. This makes for a really slow boot. With help from Londoner, I tried to delete Mint’s use of the swap partition and install a swapfile. The attempt failed, and I had to do a complete reinstall. Even so, I learned enough to get it right this time. So now I have one fewer distro looking for the swap partition. Seven to go.
    • Here is the info I was using from Londoner:
      • To configure swapfile (as root or using sudo). 2G creates 2 GiB swapfile.
      • sudo swapoff /swapfile
      • sudo fallocate -l 2G /swapfile
      • sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
      • sudo mkswap /swapfile
      • sudo nano /etc/fstab
    • Delete existing entry for swap partition and replace with
      • /swapfile none swap sw 0 0
      • Save & reboot
    • I got a new phone yesterday, a Google Pixel 3a XL. I charged it up and was going to root it and put Lineage OS on it before using it… but… As soon as I turned it on, it started installing Android 11, which I’ve never gotten close to. I caved. I have moved all my files over, which required the use of my Wavlink toaster as the Pixel does not accommodate SD cards. I will, however, go ahead and put Lineage on my old Moto X4, and will make that available as a business phone for AWH…which still hasn’t taken off but we’re being promised a lot of things.
    • I’ve been keeping neofetch data on every installation I do one every machine I own, and updating it as needed. The file is available on our Telegram and Discord groups. The result shows how much memory is used by the system with nothing running, except Terminal and neofetch, and makes a good baseline for deciding which distro to use according to your system’s amount of memory.
    • We’re getting ready for another exciting episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest, scheduled for March 31st. For the first time since Episode 001, our current episode 020 is our most-viewed episode at 781, with Episode 019 next at 745 and Episode 018 in 3rd at 727! 
    • I have managed to successfully install three distros this month, and instead of reviewing more than one, our Telegram group voted on it and picked Mageia 8, which I had hinted earlier I *might* be reviewing. This means I know what I’m reviewing for April as well, also based on the votes and comments.
    • It’s time to get your votes in on Distro Madness, Round 3; voting will close this Friday before moving on to Round 4. There were some interesting upsets in Round 2. We’re getting a lot of participation in this fun little diversion. We would like to encourage you to become a member of the site; we have some plans in the works for making additional features for members only, and membership is free.
    • Dresden fights on. [Chapter 32 of Small Favors] And we have just been gifted a complete collection of The Expanse novels and shorts, as well as the rest of the Codex Alera collection.
  • Tony Hughes
    • Lots of walking, Monday 8th and Tuesday 9th March, myself and my wife went on 2 long walks. On Monday 8th, we walked 8 Miles and Tuesday 9th, nearly 12 miles. Myself and my Wife also started a virtual walking challenge last Wednesday, “Mizen to Malin Virtual Challenge” which is 360 miles from the North Coast of Ireland to the South coast. My Wife has just completed the Lands End to John O Groats challenge which was 874 miles and now has a T shirt and shiny medal to prove it.   
    • Not talked about it for a while but I have been doing some Diecast restoration work, preparing castings for repaint, it has been quite cold here so painting in my outside workshop was out so I have been busy getting the castings dismantled, paint striped and the posts drilled and tapped out ready for reassembly. I managed to get some prepared castings painted and reassembled this last week as the weather has warmed up enough to make painting possible. 
    • I nearly missed the show this week as I hadn’t been given the heads up about the clocks going forward in the US, ours don’t go forward till next week, so my time is an hour earlier than my usual 8pm. (to echo another podcast) I blame Leo lol. 
  • Josh
    • CKP ep 3 coming to a podcatcher near you soon!
    • Linux Mint is still the champion of Linux gaming!
    • Did some distrohopping going from Mint to openSUSE Tumbleweed to Endeavor back to Mint all in one 3 day period.
    • dd + pigz is going to be my method of backup from now on even though it’s slower.
    • Btrfs send/receive is awesome but I need to learn more about it…
    • Got a new audio interface, the Presonus Audiobox usb96. Also getting a new mic, the Audio Technica AT2020!
  • Bo
    • The 3d printed dice tray heard round the world
    • Valheim server
    • CKP progress
  • Mike
    • I THOUGHT I finally fixed WiFi. New microphone (Samsung Q2u), new headphones (Sony WH1000XM3), work on recording room.
    • Removed my information (People Finder, White Pages, MyLife) [Moss-HOW?]
    • New hardware wallet (Ledger Nano S)

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

Our next episode will be at 2 pm Central US time on April 4th, 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!>
]]> 4979 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!>
]]> 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!>
]]> 4933 mintCast 354 – sudo make me an update (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-354-sudo-make-me-an-update-mp3/ Wed, 10 Feb 2021 05:57:09 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4913 Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu loses the lead, Wayland changes, and some new releases
In Security, time to patch… again.
Download
]]> Download

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

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

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

In Security, time to patch… again.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

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

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

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

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4913 mintCast 354 – sudo make me an update https://mintcast.org/mintcast-354-sudo-make-me-an-update/ Wed, 10 Feb 2021 05:46:23 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4909 Then, in the News, a Linux Mint update, Ubuntu loses the lead, Wayland changes, and some new releases
In Security, time to patch… again.
Download
]]> Download

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

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

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

In Security, time to patch… again.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

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

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

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

Get the show time converted to your time zone!

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio editing, Josh Lowe for all his work on the website, Hobstar for our logo, and Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4909 mintCast 353 – Brave New WWW (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-353-brave-new-www-mp3/ Wed, 27 Jan 2021 05:46:48 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4892 Then, our news we talk RPi Pico, Ubuntu’s Booting on an Apple M1, Flatpak is faster, Project Linux turns into Alma Linux, and more
In security, the InterPlanetary File System
Download
]]> Download

1:58 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:01:23 The News
1:29:47 Security Update
1:38:43 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I have second thoughts about Kubuntu, Moss has a new toy, Joe has been playing with watches, Tony has been editing audio, Josh hasn’t broken Arch, Bo survived the pandemic!

Then, our news we talk RPi Pico, Ubuntu’s Booting on an Apple M1, Flatpak is faster, Project Linux turns into Alma Linux, and more

In security, the InterPlanetary File System

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Having second thoughts about Kubuntu 20.10
    • Doubling down on Brave browser.
      • Found out it is the first to support IPFS
      • Looking at becoming a Brave Creator. This allows me to generate tips in the BAT currency from Brave users.
    • Took a leap of faith and installed the Flatpak PPA to get the latest flatpak so I could test out Chromium which requires 1.8.5 or above. Everything seems to be working. A little apprehensive because mumble is flatpak, and it’s what I use for the YouTube stream audio.
  • Joe
    • Ordered some new parts for the Samsung Galaxy S3 Watch so that I could fix the small issues with it because I saw a really good price for a set of parts that would do the job.
      • It works well and the rest of the parts make for almost a whole watch.  I may purchase another battery and put it all together to have another mostly working watch.
      • This new motherboard is actually a cellular version but because of the limitations of the eSIM that is included on the board I cannot get it to work with TMobile.  This is not a big deal for me because I would not use it as a phone anyway it was just something cool to contemplate
    • Also purchased some more neckband headphones to work on since I have not done so in a while. I know that I have 19 or so working headphones but I found some that have active noise cancelling that are not in the LG line that I would like to work on and see if I can do some of the same fixes to that I normally do with the LG’s. So it is the Anker Soundcores that I will be working on and adding the MMCX connections to.  They are also supposed to have a better battery life but it looks like they will be a lot more of a pain to take apart and put back together since I think that it is all glued.  So keeping the parts in usable physical condition may be difficult.  I may also have to look into replacement batteries as I do not know what is wrong with them.
      • The 5 headphones arrived and I have started working on them.  2 of the headsets have bad batteries.  So with the Anker phones that had the bad battery I started taking that apart first as I knew that there would be a learning curve in figuring out how to take the device apart
      • I did get it apart and figure out the best way to do it with minimal breakage but let’s just say that I don’t recommend it for modding purposes or repairability
    • Had some fun with the rename utility.  Bulk renaming of files was super easy and saved me a lot of time.  Wouldn’t mind doing a show on that and SED. 
      • rename ‘s/old-name/new-name/g’ files
      • But i have been told that it is way too nerdy
    • Picked up a fridge for free.  My wife found it on FB and it is a very nice fridge.  Granted it did cost me some money to rent the truck to move it but it was still a lot less than a new fridge (which I was planning on buying my wife this year)  The people that had it were moving and needed it gone as soon as possible.  It is probably the nicest side by side that I have ever owned. I can’t complain, it works and it looks awesome.
      • The only thing is, I was the only person moving the thing and I am super lucky that I did not hurt myself.  The thing was heavy.
    • Because of changes in my insurance, the copay for prescriptions has gone up a lot.  To the point that I don’t know how much money I am going to be able to put towards projects this year.  All this means is that I will be forced to go through my backlog of old projects or almost-projects and get it all up to date.  Maybe do a little bit with software again.
    • My Eldest Child turned 18 this week.  That is weird.  
    • On my VM download server I was still having problems with transmission-rss so I attempted to downgrade the Ruby version so that it would work properly again.  This did not work well.  I made several attempts to downgrade and all failed miserably.
      • Then I realized that the reason I was using transmission-rss initially was because that was available in a docker
      • So I shut down the transmission setup and moved everything over to qbittorrent which allowed me to re-setup all my former automation so that the files automatically go where I want them.  I do like the UI for qbittorrent and it is working well.
      • The rules that you can set up for automatic downloads and for after download moves was perfect for how I had things set up before.
  • Moss
    • Joshua Hawk sent me a laptop, a Dell Inspiron 7353 2-in-1 with touchscreen. He had installed Fedora on it, which I soon destroyed, and I’ve run a carousel of distros on it, to Pop!_OS, Bodhi 5.1, back to Fedora, and back to Bodhi. There are interesting touchpad issues: in Fedora, the touchpad right-click sends a left-click (it works fine Bodhi), and in Bodhi it does not load the screen keyboard. This is a great addition to my collection, and as it only has a 128 Gb SSD and a lot of screws keeping me from being brave enough to replace the SSD, this will be my machine to test distros for Distrohoppers’ Digest for the foreseeable future.
    • Speaking of Distrohoppers’ Digest, Episode 19 is out. Episodes 15 through 18 are also in the top 5 of our download numbers. For Episode 19 we actually have Dale in the header and footer readings. We had a great time, I get the idea we could banter a bit more but we’re still getting our team-feet under.
    • My Sponsus account now has 3 monthly sponsors and has also taken in a nice donation. You can hear them named at the end of the current episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
    • My recording and work space is in flux right now. There really was a short on the sound card in the Mini, and contacting that is what blew the power supply a few months ago. It’s not catastrophic but not something I want to have on a system I’m doing sound recording on, and I’ll be moving that along to someone who needs it. Dale has sent me an AMD sound card, which will replace the FX 1800 Nvidia card in the FuzZ400, which will take over as my main machine. Right now I’m recording on my Kudu laptop, still the most powerful machine I have. 
    • School is in and out, depending on the week and the school. I worked 4 days in the last two weeks and got paid for a 5th when they forgot to cancel an assignment.
    • My other business is poised to take off, and we plan to sell a lot of common products and donate 80% of our profits to projects providing housing funds and services to homeless people in America.  I’ll post the link when we are actually doing business.
    • My teeth are not working yet, and I have an appointment for a refitting this week.
    • We are more than halfway through White Night, the 9th book in the Dresden Files series. 
    • I have also been reading Grail and Cosmos: Arthurian Explorations by Alby Stone. Portions of this book were previously published by my friend Bob Trubshaw of Heart of Albion Press. Everything Bob publishes is worth reading if you’re interested in the roots of folklore, and much of it is available as free downloads from his website.
    • My mother has passed, of covid pneumonia which she caught in the rehab facility. She was 91. I miss her. When I come home after having something happen at work I want to talk to her about, I reach for the phone… and remember I can’t call.
  • Tony H
    • So as Moss has said, this week we recorded the latest Distrohoppers Digest which I published on Saturday 23rd after doing the edit, including our new intro with Dale as part of the team. Great show if I do say so myself although we continue to strive to get better. 
    • Mint 20.1 is firmly established on my Laptop although I continue with 19.3 as my main driver on the i7 HP Tower which is my main production PC, at some stage I will get around to upgrading although at the moment as I have the IcyDock on this PC I can boot into a Mint 20 install whenever I want to.
    • I have bought some small storage racks with 32 boxes for putting in spares and components for the diecast models I restore, and I have been busy filling them up and labeling them. With the result my workshop is tidier, I can actually find things.
    • On the home front the Covid situation continues to get worse and by the time you hear this we will have passed 100K deaths for C19 here in the UK. It may mean we have even stricter restrictions before this is all over, The Netherlands have just introduced a curfew from 21.00 to 04.30 to try and stop some of the abuses of the current regulations restricting large gatherings indoors. 
  • Josh
    • Arch is still working. Now it’s not. I tried to install Linux Mint as a dual boot with arch and quickly found out that was a mistake. I first noticed a problem when I did not see arch as a boot option after hitting f12. When Mint’s grub booted arch was there as an option but when clicking it nothing happens just a black screen forever. I rebooted and then booted into mint and that worked fine. I checked my install of arch and everything looked to be in place; it just won’t boot. Anyways long story short I wiped mint and installed openSUSE tumbleweed cause I wanted to and I am just waiting for a good chunk of time again to try and fix or possibly reinstall my arch install.m
    • Been playing a lot of games while I can before school starts next week and I won’t have much time for them. I won’t go into detail but finally after 7 years I finally got around to beating Dragon Age Inquisition. It was a great story line and I can’t wait for the next chapter in that saga. I have also been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance as well and I have mentioned it before it’s one of my favorite RPG’s and I cannot recommend it enough.
    • Also getting ready for school which starts this week. I am taking a networking class. It’s technically the continuation of another networking class I took 3 semesters ago or so I am hoping it all comes back to me. 
    • I got a new mouse! I had my RedDragon M901 for over 5 years now and I loved that thing but the left mouse click was starting to get a little wonky. I tried to get another RedDragon mouse, the M913 but when I received it the left click was sticking to the point you couldn’t tell when you clicked. I returned that and decided to splurge a little and after a lot more research settled on the Corsair Scimitar Elite. All of the mice I have been talking about have had 12 side buttons but the Scimitar was the first I could set macros on and boy has it changed my gaming experience. Unfortunately there is no way to set the macros and all without windows but there are 3 profiles that save right to the mouse itself so once set you can change between them no matter what OS you’re running.

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

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!>
]]> 4892 mintCast 353 – Brave New WWW https://mintcast.org/mintcast-353-brave-new-www/ Wed, 27 Jan 2021 05:36:39 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4885 Then, our news we talk RPi Pico, Ubuntu’s Booting on an Apple M1, Flatpak is faster, Project Linux turns into Alma Linux, and more
In security, the InterPlanetary File System
Download
]]> Download

1:58 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:01:23 The News
1:29:47 Security Update
1:38:43 Announcements & Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I have second thoughts about Kubuntu, Moss has a new toy, Joe has been playing with watches, Tony has been editing audio, Josh hasn’t broken Arch, Bo survived the pandemic!

Then, our news we talk RPi Pico, Ubuntu’s Booting on an Apple M1, Flatpak is faster, Project Linux turns into Alma Linux, and more

In security, the InterPlanetary File System

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

  • Leo
    • Having second thoughts about Kubuntu 20.10
    • Doubling down on Brave browser.
      • Found out it is the first to support IPFS
      • Looking at becoming a Brave Creator. This allows me to generate tips in the BAT currency from Brave users.
    • Took a leap of faith and installed the Flatpak PPA to get the latest flatpak so I could test out Chromium which requires 1.8.5 or above. Everything seems to be working. A little apprehensive because mumble is flatpak, and it’s what I use for the YouTube stream audio.
  • Joe
    • Ordered some new parts for the Samsung Galaxy S3 Watch so that I could fix the small issues with it because I saw a really good price for a set of parts that would do the job.
      • It works well and the rest of the parts make for almost a whole watch.  I may purchase another battery and put it all together to have another mostly working watch.
      • This new motherboard is actually a cellular version but because of the limitations of the eSIM that is included on the board I cannot get it to work with TMobile.  This is not a big deal for me because I would not use it as a phone anyway it was just something cool to contemplate
    • Also purchased some more neckband headphones to work on since I have not done so in a while. I know that I have 19 or so working headphones but I found some that have active noise cancelling that are not in the LG line that I would like to work on and see if I can do some of the same fixes to that I normally do with the LG’s. So it is the Anker Soundcores that I will be working on and adding the MMCX connections to.  They are also supposed to have a better battery life but it looks like they will be a lot more of a pain to take apart and put back together since I think that it is all glued.  So keeping the parts in usable physical condition may be difficult.  I may also have to look into replacement batteries as I do not know what is wrong with them.
      • The 5 headphones arrived and I have started working on them.  2 of the headsets have bad batteries.  So with the Anker phones that had the bad battery I started taking that apart first as I knew that there would be a learning curve in figuring out how to take the device apart
      • I did get it apart and figure out the best way to do it with minimal breakage but let’s just say that I don’t recommend it for modding purposes or repairability
    • Had some fun with the rename utility.  Bulk renaming of files was super easy and saved me a lot of time.  Wouldn’t mind doing a show on that and SED. 
      • rename ‘s/old-name/new-name/g’ files
      • But i have been told that it is way too nerdy
    • Picked up a fridge for free.  My wife found it on FB and it is a very nice fridge.  Granted it did cost me some money to rent the truck to move it but it was still a lot less than a new fridge (which I was planning on buying my wife this year)  The people that had it were moving and needed it gone as soon as possible.  It is probably the nicest side by side that I have ever owned. I can’t complain, it works and it looks awesome.
      • The only thing is, I was the only person moving the thing and I am super lucky that I did not hurt myself.  The thing was heavy.
    • Because of changes in my insurance, the copay for prescriptions has gone up a lot.  To the point that I don’t know how much money I am going to be able to put towards projects this year.  All this means is that I will be forced to go through my backlog of old projects or almost-projects and get it all up to date.  Maybe do a little bit with software again.
    • My Eldest Child turned 18 this week.  That is weird.  
    • On my VM download server I was still having problems with transmission-rss so I attempted to downgrade the Ruby version so that it would work properly again.  This did not work well.  I made several attempts to downgrade and all failed miserably.
      • Then I realized that the reason I was using transmission-rss initially was because that was available in a docker
      • So I shut down the transmission setup and moved everything over to qbittorrent which allowed me to re-setup all my former automation so that the files automatically go where I want them.  I do like the UI for qbittorrent and it is working well.
      • The rules that you can set up for automatic downloads and for after download moves was perfect for how I had things set up before.
  • Moss
    • Joshua Hawk sent me a laptop, a Dell Inspiron 7353 2-in-1 with touchscreen. He had installed Fedora on it, which I soon destroyed, and I’ve run a carousel of distros on it, to Pop!_OS, Bodhi 5.1, back to Fedora, and back to Bodhi. There are interesting touchpad issues: in Fedora, the touchpad right-click sends a left-click (it works fine Bodhi), and in Bodhi it does not load the screen keyboard. This is a great addition to my collection, and as it only has a 128 Gb SSD and a lot of screws keeping me from being brave enough to replace the SSD, this will be my machine to test distros for Distrohoppers’ Digest for the foreseeable future.
    • Speaking of Distrohoppers’ Digest, Episode 19 is out. Episodes 15 through 18 are also in the top 5 of our download numbers. For Episode 19 we actually have Dale in the header and footer readings. We had a great time, I get the idea we could banter a bit more but we’re still getting our team-feet under.
    • My Sponsus account now has 3 monthly sponsors and has also taken in a nice donation. You can hear them named at the end of the current episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest.
    • My recording and work space is in flux right now. There really was a short on the sound card in the Mini, and contacting that is what blew the power supply a few months ago. It’s not catastrophic but not something I want to have on a system I’m doing sound recording on, and I’ll be moving that along to someone who needs it. Dale has sent me an AMD sound card, which will replace the FX 1800 Nvidia card in the FuzZ400, which will take over as my main machine. Right now I’m recording on my Kudu laptop, still the most powerful machine I have. 
    • School is in and out, depending on the week and the school. I worked 4 days in the last two weeks and got paid for a 5th when they forgot to cancel an assignment.
    • My other business is poised to take off, and we plan to sell a lot of common products and donate 80% of our profits to projects providing housing funds and services to homeless people in America.  I’ll post the link when we are actually doing business.
    • My teeth are not working yet, and I have an appointment for a refitting this week.
    • We are more than halfway through White Night, the 9th book in the Dresden Files series. 
    • I have also been reading Grail and Cosmos: Arthurian Explorations by Alby Stone. Portions of this book were previously published by my friend Bob Trubshaw of Heart of Albion Press. Everything Bob publishes is worth reading if you’re interested in the roots of folklore, and much of it is available as free downloads from his website.
    • My mother has passed, of covid pneumonia which she caught in the rehab facility. She was 91. I miss her. When I come home after having something happen at work I want to talk to her about, I reach for the phone… and remember I can’t call.
  • Tony H
    • So as Moss has said, this week we recorded the latest Distrohoppers Digest which I published on Saturday 23rd after doing the edit, including our new intro with Dale as part of the team. Great show if I do say so myself although we continue to strive to get better. 
    • Mint 20.1 is firmly established on my Laptop although I continue with 19.3 as my main driver on the i7 HP Tower which is my main production PC, at some stage I will get around to upgrading although at the moment as I have the IcyDock on this PC I can boot into a Mint 20 install whenever I want to.
    • I have bought some small storage racks with 32 boxes for putting in spares and components for the diecast models I restore, and I have been busy filling them up and labeling them. With the result my workshop is tidier, I can actually find things.
    • On the home front the Covid situation continues to get worse and by the time you hear this we will have passed 100K deaths for C19 here in the UK. It may mean we have even stricter restrictions before this is all over, The Netherlands have just introduced a curfew from 21.00 to 04.30 to try and stop some of the abuses of the current regulations restricting large gatherings indoors. 
  • Josh
    • Arch is still working. Now it’s not. I tried to install Linux Mint as a dual boot with arch and quickly found out that was a mistake. I first noticed a problem when I did not see arch as a boot option after hitting f12. When Mint’s grub booted arch was there as an option but when clicking it nothing happens just a black screen forever. I rebooted and then booted into mint and that worked fine. I checked my install of arch and everything looked to be in place; it just won’t boot. Anyways long story short I wiped mint and installed openSUSE tumbleweed cause I wanted to and I am just waiting for a good chunk of time again to try and fix or possibly reinstall my arch install.m
    • Been playing a lot of games while I can before school starts next week and I won’t have much time for them. I won’t go into detail but finally after 7 years I finally got around to beating Dragon Age Inquisition. It was a great story line and I can’t wait for the next chapter in that saga. I have also been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance as well and I have mentioned it before it’s one of my favorite RPG’s and I cannot recommend it enough.
    • Also getting ready for school which starts this week. I am taking a networking class. It’s technically the continuation of another networking class I took 3 semesters ago or so I am hoping it all comes back to me. 
    • I got a new mouse! I had my RedDragon M901 for over 5 years now and I loved that thing but the left mouse click was starting to get a little wonky. I tried to get another RedDragon mouse, the M913 but when I received it the left click was sticking to the point you couldn’t tell when you clicked. I returned that and decided to splurge a little and after a lot more research settled on the Corsair Scimitar Elite. All of the mice I have been talking about have had 12 side buttons but the Scimitar was the first I could set macros on and boy has it changed my gaming experience. Unfortunately there is no way to set the macros and all without windows but there are 3 profiles that save right to the mouse itself so once set you can change between them no matter what OS you’re running.

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

ANNOUNCEMENTS: 

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!>
]]> 4885 mintCast 350 – Rocky Road Ahead (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-350-rocky-road-ahead-mp3/ Thu, 17 Dec 2020 05:12:09 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4820 Then in the news, We have the latest Mint newsletter, Cinnamon 4.8 arrives, Elementary OS goes Pi, and much more  
In security, we shed some light on Oblivious DNS over HTTPS
Download
]]> Download

1:14 HPR Spot
2:13 Show Start
3:18 Wanderings
54:52 News
1:18:33 Security
1:30:54 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Joe preps for 3D work and does some Audio editing, Tony gets older and has a new toy to play with, Bo has been educating himself, Moss destroys his wife’s computer by accident, and Josh was a little late.

Then in the news, We have the latest Mint newsletter, Cinnamon 4.8 arrives, Elementary OS goes Pi, and much more  

In security, we shed some light on Oblivious DNS over HTTPS

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Playing with Arco Linux and a Tiling Window Manager.
    • Owen sent me a Pi 3B. Thanks! 
    • Giving Gitea a try. More in the feedback!
  • Joe
    •  Have not been doing much of my own stuff in the past 2 weeks.
      • Lots of people on vacation at work so I have been putting in a lot of extra hours doing what would normally be their work and my work and trying to lighten the load for my boss.
    • Have sliced several designs to print but have not had a good time to get those printed and ready to go.  Plus I think I still need to tweak some of the settings.  Maybe try a much slower speed with petg or try a different brand.  The brand I am currently using seems like I get about half way through the roll and it becomes progressively harder to get a good print
    • Edited some audio from last year’s HPR new years show for my daughter so that she can remember it forever.  
    • Picked up a PSP Go for a good price that was listed as for parts only.
      • Have to say that I am both happy and disappointed with my purchase
      • Once again got a low cost device and it works perfectly
      • CFW and a selection of games installed but limited by the internal memory of 16gb
      • The device takes a very proprietary memory module (M2) and there is only one prebuilt adapter available for it that is in Japan but is not currently available due to covid.
      • It is possible to directly solder to this device and convert to memory stick duo but I don’t want to hard mod the device and bring the value down succeed or fail the hardware would no longer be original
      • I was hoping that the backlight was out or the screen needed to be replaced so I could work on a new fix.
      • But I have been using it to play Hydro Thunder 
      • Also sold another of the PSP 1001s so I have just about broken even for all the PSPs and the parts I have purchased
    • Was able to get the VPN Docker instance with Transmission to connect to a VPN from internally but I could not get it to work from startup.  Also getting to work from inside would then cause it to close down. So I am still using the VM to do the heavy lifting.
      • But I was able to find a VPN client Docker instance for which I was able to modify the ovpn file from my provider to get it working.  
      • This has allowed me to set up my Docker version of Chrome with the traffic pushed through the VPN container on all my machines
    • Have started biking in the evenings
      • Forgot how much I enjoy biking.  Have been getting a lot of time in and it seems to be helping a bit with the hip arthritis 
      • But I did get pulled over.  
  • Josh
    • Messing around with my new server HP dl380 g5 and laptop Dell XPS P54G.
    • Writing some python.
    • Back on Linux Mint on my main desktop and Dell XPS.
  • Tony Hughes
    • Recorded the latest episode of Distrohoppers Digest with Dale, who at the end we inaugurated as a permanent team member. By the time you listen to the edited show, the episode should be available for download.
    • A week and a half ago I had a camera down my throat to check out why I have been unwell recently and have a diagnosis of a Hiatus Hernia, now I know what the issue is, I can now hopefully mitigate some of the unpleasant symptoms with a few lifestyle changes.
    • And I have just recently celebrated my birthday, although I’m only the second oldest of the mintCast team lol. As a present from my wife I got a new toy to help me do my modeling a little safer, a small pedestal drill. It works great and will reduce the risk of me drilling my fingers as I will be able to use a small vice to hold things I’m drilling and it is far more accurate and so far the results I’m getting are fantastic.  
  • Moss
    • Last night, I thought I would do my wife a favor and remove Ubuntu Unity from her machine; she wasn’t using it and sometimes booted into it accidentally, causing some freaking out. I thought I did everything right, wrote a new boot on the Mint partition, used GPartEd to remove the partition, and expanded the Mint partition to fill the vacated space. About 90 minutes before showtime today, while talking to my mother about her Medicare running out on her rehab care and she would have to pay $300 a day to stay there while her hip continued to heal, my wife informed me she had a Grub Repair screen. I tried a lot of things I have learned over the years, but eventually had to get my Ventoy stick out and boot to Mint. When I still couldn’t get GRUB restored, and with time running out before the show, I took the easy way out and installed Mint again, and was pleased to see that it allowed me to install alongside the original boot so she still has her original installation to run. There is still a lot of work to do to get it back to a single installation which actually boots. That will happen after the show.
    • I just managed to complete another circuit of the Homestar, and am now 68 years old as measured in this backwards system. As celebrations went, this was not one of my finest, nor was the year itself, but I’m happy to have survived this far and thrilled to be on mintCast team.
    • We will have released Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 018 by the time anyone hears this episode. To date, three episodes have reached or exceeded 600 downloads each, which warms my furry little heart, and Episode 017 is over 500 already.
    • I am set up this episode in my second bedroom, with a TV tray and my laptop. If I get any money over the holidays which is not necessary for my continued existence (bills, food), I will add a smallish desk and a mid-sized TV, say 24-26”, and use my mini-desktop; this also means I will have to get the Pi 4 working as my Kodi server for the living room.
    • Dresden-wise, we’re about 75% through Proven Guilty. Dresden and team have just marched into Mab’s broken-looking stronghold.
  • Bo

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

  • ODOH (Oblivious DNS over HTTPS) * thanks to Londoner
    • FTA: Together, the added encryption and proxying provide the following guarantees:
  • The target sees only the query and the proxy’s IP address.
  • The proxy has no visibility into the DNS messages, with no ability to identify, read, or modify either the query being sent by the client or the answer being returned by the target.
  • Only the intended target can read the content of the query and produce a response.
  • Open Source Devs not concerned about security
  • Trickbot
    • A banking fraud trojan converted to a full malware-as-a-service solution.
    • While UEFI malware is rare because of the difficulty, Trickbot is changing that.
    • This could open the door to OS agnostic UEFI malware that can persist between OS installs and disk swaps.

Announcements:

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!>
]]> 4820 mintCast 350 – Rocky Road Ahead https://mintcast.org/mintcast-350-rocky-road-ahead/ Thu, 17 Dec 2020 04:57:24 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4814 Then in the news, We have the latest Mint newsletter, Cinnamon 4.8 arrives, Elementary OS goes Pi, and much more  
In security, we shed some light on Oblivious DNS over HTTPS
Download
]]> Download

1:14 HPR Spot
2:13 Show Start
3:18 Wanderings
54:52 News
1:18:33 Security
1:30:54 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, Joe preps for 3D work and does some Audio editing, Tony gets older and has a new toy to play with, Bo has been educating himself, Moss destroys his wife’s computer by accident, and Josh was a little late.

Then in the news, We have the latest Mint newsletter, Cinnamon 4.8 arrives, Elementary OS goes Pi, and much more  

In security, we shed some light on Oblivious DNS over HTTPS

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Playing with Arco Linux and a Tiling Window Manager.
    • Owen sent me a Pi 3B. Thanks! 
    • Giving Gitea a try. More in the feedback!
  • Joe
    •  Have not been doing much of my own stuff in the past 2 weeks.
      • Lots of people on vacation at work so I have been putting in a lot of extra hours doing what would normally be their work and my work and trying to lighten the load for my boss.
    • Have sliced several designs to print but have not had a good time to get those printed and ready to go.  Plus I think I still need to tweak some of the settings.  Maybe try a much slower speed with petg or try a different brand.  The brand I am currently using seems like I get about half way through the roll and it becomes progressively harder to get a good print
    • Edited some audio from last year’s HPR new years show for my daughter so that she can remember it forever.  
    • Picked up a PSP Go for a good price that was listed as for parts only.
      • Have to say that I am both happy and disappointed with my purchase
      • Once again got a low cost device and it works perfectly
      • CFW and a selection of games installed but limited by the internal memory of 16gb
      • The device takes a very proprietary memory module (M2) and there is only one prebuilt adapter available for it that is in Japan but is not currently available due to covid.
      • It is possible to directly solder to this device and convert to memory stick duo but I don’t want to hard mod the device and bring the value down succeed or fail the hardware would no longer be original
      • I was hoping that the backlight was out or the screen needed to be replaced so I could work on a new fix.
      • But I have been using it to play Hydro Thunder 
      • Also sold another of the PSP 1001s so I have just about broken even for all the PSPs and the parts I have purchased
    • Was able to get the VPN Docker instance with Transmission to connect to a VPN from internally but I could not get it to work from startup.  Also getting to work from inside would then cause it to close down. So I am still using the VM to do the heavy lifting.
      • But I was able to find a VPN client Docker instance for which I was able to modify the ovpn file from my provider to get it working.  
      • This has allowed me to set up my Docker version of Chrome with the traffic pushed through the VPN container on all my machines
    • Have started biking in the evenings
      • Forgot how much I enjoy biking.  Have been getting a lot of time in and it seems to be helping a bit with the hip arthritis 
      • But I did get pulled over.  
  • Josh
    • Messing around with my new server HP dl380 g5 and laptop Dell XPS P54G.
    • Writing some python.
    • Back on Linux Mint on my main desktop and Dell XPS.
  • Tony Hughes
    • Recorded the latest episode of Distrohoppers Digest with Dale, who at the end we inaugurated as a permanent team member. By the time you listen to the edited show, the episode should be available for download.
    • A week and a half ago I had a camera down my throat to check out why I have been unwell recently and have a diagnosis of a Hiatus Hernia, now I know what the issue is, I can now hopefully mitigate some of the unpleasant symptoms with a few lifestyle changes.
    • And I have just recently celebrated my birthday, although I’m only the second oldest of the mintCast team lol. As a present from my wife I got a new toy to help me do my modeling a little safer, a small pedestal drill. It works great and will reduce the risk of me drilling my fingers as I will be able to use a small vice to hold things I’m drilling and it is far more accurate and so far the results I’m getting are fantastic.  
  • Moss
    • Last night, I thought I would do my wife a favor and remove Ubuntu Unity from her machine; she wasn’t using it and sometimes booted into it accidentally, causing some freaking out. I thought I did everything right, wrote a new boot on the Mint partition, used GPartEd to remove the partition, and expanded the Mint partition to fill the vacated space. About 90 minutes before showtime today, while talking to my mother about her Medicare running out on her rehab care and she would have to pay $300 a day to stay there while her hip continued to heal, my wife informed me she had a Grub Repair screen. I tried a lot of things I have learned over the years, but eventually had to get my Ventoy stick out and boot to Mint. When I still couldn’t get GRUB restored, and with time running out before the show, I took the easy way out and installed Mint again, and was pleased to see that it allowed me to install alongside the original boot so she still has her original installation to run. There is still a lot of work to do to get it back to a single installation which actually boots. That will happen after the show.
    • I just managed to complete another circuit of the Homestar, and am now 68 years old as measured in this backwards system. As celebrations went, this was not one of my finest, nor was the year itself, but I’m happy to have survived this far and thrilled to be on mintCast team.
    • We will have released Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 018 by the time anyone hears this episode. To date, three episodes have reached or exceeded 600 downloads each, which warms my furry little heart, and Episode 017 is over 500 already.
    • I am set up this episode in my second bedroom, with a TV tray and my laptop. If I get any money over the holidays which is not necessary for my continued existence (bills, food), I will add a smallish desk and a mid-sized TV, say 24-26”, and use my mini-desktop; this also means I will have to get the Pi 4 working as my Kodi server for the living room.
    • Dresden-wise, we’re about 75% through Proven Guilty. Dresden and team have just marched into Mab’s broken-looking stronghold.
  • Bo

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

  • ODOH (Oblivious DNS over HTTPS) * thanks to Londoner
    • FTA: Together, the added encryption and proxying provide the following guarantees:
  • The target sees only the query and the proxy’s IP address.
  • The proxy has no visibility into the DNS messages, with no ability to identify, read, or modify either the query being sent by the client or the answer being returned by the target.
  • Only the intended target can read the content of the query and produce a response.
  • Open Source Devs not concerned about security
  • Trickbot
    • A banking fraud trojan converted to a full malware-as-a-service solution.
    • While UEFI malware is rare because of the difficulty, Trickbot is changing that.
    • This could open the door to OS agnostic UEFI malware that can persist between OS installs and disk swaps.

Announcements:

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!>
]]> 4814 mintCast 348.5 – Shepherding Pis (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-348-5-shepherding-pis-mp3/ Wed, 25 Nov 2020 03:29:24 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4783 And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions

Download
]]> Download

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

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

And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions

LINUX INNARDS:

Pi Stuff

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

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

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

CHECK THIS OUT! 

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

Announcements:

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

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

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4783 mintCast 348.5 – Shepherding Pis https://mintcast.org/mintcast-348-5-shepherding-pis/ Wed, 25 Nov 2020 03:22:35 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4777 And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions
Download
]]> Download

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

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

And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions

LINUX INNARDS:

Pi Stuff

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

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

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

CHECK THIS OUT! 

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

Announcements:

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

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

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4777 mintCast 348 – 400 Raspberry Pies (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-348-400-raspberry-pies-mp3/ Wed, 18 Nov 2020 04:39:51 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4771 Then, in our news, the Raspberry Pi launches a whole new dessert, GIMP is almost ready for GTK3, 
In security, Ubuntu’s GDM3 has a root bug
Download
]]> Download

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

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

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

In security, Ubuntu’s GDM3 has a root bug

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

Announcements:

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

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

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4771 mintCast 348 – 400 Raspberry Pies https://mintcast.org/mintcast-348-400-raspberry-pies/ Wed, 18 Nov 2020 04:19:50 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4765 Then, in our news, the Raspberry Pi launches a whole new dessert, GIMP is almost ready for GTK3, 
In security, Ubuntu’s GDM3 has a root bug
Download
]]> Download

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

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

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

In security, Ubuntu’s GDM3 has a root bug

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE: 

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

Announcements:

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

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

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4765 mintCast 347.5 – Sensational Silverback (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-347-5-sensational-silverback-mp3/ Wed, 11 Nov 2020 05:07:21 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4758 And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions
Download
]]> Download

1:39 Linux Innards
49:14 Vibrations from the Ether
53:30 Check This Out
56:34 Outro

In our Innards section, we cover our experiences with the flavors of Ubuntu 20.10!

And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions

LINUX INNARDS:

  • Ubuntu 20.10 Tinkering
    • Ubuntu Proper
      • Pi Joe
        • Super easy to install.  Used the rpi-imager instead of etcher.  Very quick install 
        • It took a couple of tries to get the screen image to show up on the monitor that i was using but after that it was very much like a standard install of Ubuntu
        • Post initial setup i tried some of my standard application installs.  
          • X2go worked easy
          • Chrome browser did not because it is arm and the old method for getting chromium to work with netflix did not work either
          • Also installed audacity and mumble which seemed to work easy enough
          • I was able to install a docker version of chromium that did work with netflix and video played very smooth after a couple of minutes of dropped frames
        • I have to say that it is not the smoothest os i have seen on the pi but i am able to multitask on it.
        • I am familiar with gnome from the time that i was using fedora and it does work
        • Very standard linux but at least on the pi version it has this issue where it locks the screen at x time even when video is playing so i had to set it to not lock on its own
        • There were some obscure programs that i could not install because there was no arm version also
        • I wouldn’t want to use the pi long term as a desktop but it works well enough as a secondary or backup machine for me.  I was able to do daily tasks and browsing with it and video watching was smooth
        • Gnome did not seem to be a too much of a resource hog which had been a problem in the past.
    • Kubuntu
      • Leo – Just wow. Every time I jump on a Plasma desktop, I fall in love all over again. The more I do this, the more chances there are for it to stick!
      • The biggest downside to Kubuntu is Plasma quickly released a huge update in 5.20 after Kubuntu’s freeze. So Kubuntu folks will have to wait for 21.04 for those fixes and additions or jump on KDE Neon and slap on the HWE kernel and fixes there.
    • Ubuntu Unity 
      • Bo – I’ve been running it all week and…. I kinda like it.
        • The “window dodge” feature is missing
      • Moss – I’ve been running 20.04 all along, so I installed this. It would not install the Nvidia driver — the same driver which installed perfectly in 18.04 and 20.04. I think we’ve identified this as a kernel 5.8 issue, and I’ll talk a bit more about this in the next section.
    • Ubuntu Studio
      • Tony W – 
        • Implementation of ubiquity installer looks slick 
        • Menus look WAY more modern
          • Big change – descriptions added to each application without the need to hover mouse cursor
      • Moss – 
        • I downloaded it and tried it, but I could not get the panel to the bottom. Some things you just don’t have to live with. I’ll just add the tools to another flavor or even Mint.
      • Tony H –
        • I installed it on my Lenovo X230i last night, and it would not connect to my network WiFi, but would tether to the phone. I found out later that any other room in the house is fine but it can not connect to my WiFi network from the studio, so probably a hardware issue as no issue with my other machines. 
        • As for the OS it looks slick and seems very friendly with RAM use at 620Mb at boot and 1.5Gb with FireFox and 3 tabs open. The install and a couple of additional programs not included by default take 13.1Gb of HDD space so it needs at least 16Gb+ in a VM. So I would suggest a 32Gb USB Flash Drive if doing a persistent install to one.  
        • There are a few little annoyances with Plasma, but as an OS aimed at creators I would recommend giving it a go for the included software, it even has Blender pre installed and all the Audio visual and graphics software you could want.
    • Ubuntu Mate 
      • Tony W
        • Available for Rpi, and I would think very usable
        • PERFORMANT on low powered machines (tested w/ Dell 7130)
        • Mate Welcome got a nice cosmetic refresh in 20.04 
        • Mate Tweak remains amazing, and now properly saves changes to each panel config to allow for switching back and forth
        • I love Mate’s Software Boutique
      • Moss – I tried installing this after the failure with the driver in Unity, for the primary purpose of seeing if the driver loaded, and had the same issue, so I didn’t go any further with it.
    • Lubuntu
      • Played with this a little bit. It’s a hard call between this and MATE for any VM that needs a GUI. Of which I have two. They run on Linux Mint Mate for now, but it’s so good to have options.
    • Xubuntu – nobody cares LOL
    • Ubuntu Kylin
      • Tony W – I had a very brief play with the live USB, had never tried Kylin before.  
        • Very friendly for Windows users.  
        • Chinese language remnants even if using English (expected). 
        • Kylin store is interesting
    • Ubuntu Cinnamon remix
      • Josh – I installed 20.04 and upgraded it to 20.10 no issues doing that whatsoever. 
        • Pros – 
          • Upgrade was a breeze
          • Cinnamon desktop is great and just what you would expect.
          • All the comforts of Ubuntu without the Gnome in the garden.
        • Cons – 
          • Theming is a little much with extensive use of orange
          • Not yet an “official” Flavor but is working on it
          • Not a ton of tools preinstalled like Linux Mint has
    • Ubuntu Budgie
      • Josh – Also installed 20.04 and upgraded to 20.10 again went smoothly.
        • Pros –
          • Budgie is a great and simple Desktop Environment
          • Again it is Ubuntu based so it has all the Ubuntu support
          • Great welcome screen with a ton of options!
        • Cons –
          • Weird implementation of the Budgie desktop
          • Theming was very inconsistent 
          • Tried the snap store (I know snaps ewwww) and had a weird transparency to it but still functioned as usual.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

  • John Wallis
  • John Wallis Part 2
  • Werewoelfchen

CHECK THIS OUT! 

Announcements:

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4758 mintCast 347.5 – Sensational Silverback https://mintcast.org/mintcast-347-5-sensational-silverback/ Wed, 11 Nov 2020 04:44:21 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4750 And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions
Download
]]> Download

1:39 Linux Innards
49:14 Vibrations from the Ether
53:30 Check This Out
56:34 Outro

In our Innards section, we cover our experiences with the flavors of Ubuntu 20.10!

And finally, the feedback and a couple suggestions

LINUX INNARDS:

  • Ubuntu 20.10 Tinkering
    • Ubuntu Proper
      • Pi Joe
        • Super easy to install.  Used the rpi-imager instead of etcher.  Very quick install 
        • It took a couple of tries to get the screen image to show up on the monitor that i was using but after that it was very much like a standard install of Ubuntu
        • Post initial setup i tried some of my standard application installs.  
          • X2go worked easy
          • Chrome browser did not because it is arm and the old method for getting chromium to work with netflix did not work either
          • Also installed audacity and mumble which seemed to work easy enough
          • I was able to install a docker version of chromium that did work with netflix and video played very smooth after a couple of minutes of dropped frames
        • I have to say that it is not the smoothest os i have seen on the pi but i am able to multitask on it.
        • I am familiar with gnome from the time that i was using fedora and it does work
        • Very standard linux but at least on the pi version it has this issue where it locks the screen at x time even when video is playing so i had to set it to not lock on its own
        • There were some obscure programs that i could not install because there was no arm version also
        • I wouldn’t want to use the pi long term as a desktop but it works well enough as a secondary or backup machine for me.  I was able to do daily tasks and browsing with it and video watching was smooth
        • Gnome did not seem to be a too much of a resource hog which had been a problem in the past.
    • Kubuntu
      • Leo – Just wow. Every time I jump on a Plasma desktop, I fall in love all over again. The more I do this, the more chances there are for it to stick!
      • The biggest downside to Kubuntu is Plasma quickly released a huge update in 5.20 after Kubuntu’s freeze. So Kubuntu folks will have to wait for 21.04 for those fixes and additions or jump on KDE Neon and slap on the HWE kernel and fixes there.
    • Ubuntu Unity 
      • Bo – I’ve been running it all week and…. I kinda like it.
        • The “window dodge” feature is missing
      • Moss – I’ve been running 20.04 all along, so I installed this. It would not install the Nvidia driver — the same driver which installed perfectly in 18.04 and 20.04. I think we’ve identified this as a kernel 5.8 issue, and I’ll talk a bit more about this in the next section.
    • Ubuntu Studio
      • Tony W – 
        • Implementation of ubiquity installer looks slick 
        • Menus look WAY more modern
          • Big change – descriptions added to each application without the need to hover mouse cursor
      • Moss – 
        • I downloaded it and tried it, but I could not get the panel to the bottom. Some things you just don’t have to live with. I’ll just add the tools to another flavor or even Mint.
      • Tony H –
        • I installed it on my Lenovo X230i last night, and it would not connect to my network WiFi, but would tether to the phone. I found out later that any other room in the house is fine but it can not connect to my WiFi network from the studio, so probably a hardware issue as no issue with my other machines. 
        • As for the OS it looks slick and seems very friendly with RAM use at 620Mb at boot and 1.5Gb with FireFox and 3 tabs open. The install and a couple of additional programs not included by default take 13.1Gb of HDD space so it needs at least 16Gb+ in a VM. So I would suggest a 32Gb USB Flash Drive if doing a persistent install to one.  
        • There are a few little annoyances with Plasma, but as an OS aimed at creators I would recommend giving it a go for the included software, it even has Blender pre installed and all the Audio visual and graphics software you could want.
    • Ubuntu Mate 
      • Tony W
        • Available for Rpi, and I would think very usable
        • PERFORMANT on low powered machines (tested w/ Dell 7130)
        • Mate Welcome got a nice cosmetic refresh in 20.04 
        • Mate Tweak remains amazing, and now properly saves changes to each panel config to allow for switching back and forth
        • I love Mate’s Software Boutique
      • Moss – I tried installing this after the failure with the driver in Unity, for the primary purpose of seeing if the driver loaded, and had the same issue, so I didn’t go any further with it.
    • Lubuntu
      • Played with this a little bit. It’s a hard call between this and MATE for any VM that needs a GUI. Of which I have two. They run on Linux Mint Mate for now, but it’s so good to have options.
    • Xubuntu – nobody cares LOL
    • Ubuntu Kylin
      • Tony W – I had a very brief play with the live USB, had never tried Kylin before.  
        • Very friendly for Windows users.  
        • Chinese language remnants even if using English (expected). 
        • Kylin store is interesting
    • Ubuntu Cinnamon remix
      • Josh – I installed 20.04 and upgraded it to 20.10 no issues doing that whatsoever. 
        • Pros – 
          • Upgrade was a breeze
          • Cinnamon desktop is great and just what you would expect.
          • All the comforts of Ubuntu without the Gnome in the garden.
        • Cons – 
          • Theming is a little much with extensive use of orange
          • Not yet an “official” Flavor but is working on it
          • Not a ton of tools preinstalled like Linux Mint has
    • Ubuntu Budgie
      • Josh – Also installed 20.04 and upgraded to 20.10 again went smoothly.
        • Pros –
          • Budgie is a great and simple Desktop Environment
          • Again it is Ubuntu based so it has all the Ubuntu support
          • Great welcome screen with a ton of options!
        • Cons –
          • Weird implementation of the Budgie desktop
          • Theming was very inconsistent 
          • Tried the snap store (I know snaps ewwww) and had a weird transparency to it but still functioned as usual.

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

  • John Wallis
  • John Wallis Part 2
  • Werewoelfchen

CHECK THIS OUT! 

Announcements:

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4750 mintCast 347 – For the Halibut (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-347-for-the-halibut-mp3/ Wed, 04 Nov 2020 17:46:45 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4743 Then, in our news, Linux Mint gives us an update, Ubuntu and Fedora both get released, XDA has a phone now, and Microsoft Edges into the Linux browser market
In security, Chromium blocks annoyances and fixes a font rendering flaw, and Wordpress fixes some bad ones
Download
]]>

Download

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

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

mv LariLauncher.exe LariLauncher.exe.old

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

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

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

Announcements:

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Londoner for our time zone link
  • Owen Peery for our audio editing
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4743 mintCast 347 – For the Halibut https://mintcast.org/mintcast-347-for-the-halibut/ Wed, 04 Nov 2020 17:10:14 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4737 Then, in our news, Linux Mint gives us an update, Ubuntu and Fedora both get released, XDA has a phone now, and Microsoft Edges into the Linux browser market
In security, Chromium blocks annoyances and fixes a font rendering flaw, and Wordpress fixes some bad ones
Download
]]>

Download

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

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

mv LariLauncher.exe LariLauncher.exe.old

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

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

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

Announcements:

Wrap-up:

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

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

]]> 4737 mintCast 344.5 – “Working” from Home (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-344-5-working-from-home-mp3/ Wed, 30 Sep 2020 04:05:44 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4683 And finally, the feedback
Download
]]>

Download

1:38 Linux Innards
58:33 Vibrations from the Ether
1:17:19 Check This Out!
1:20:44 Outro

In our Innards section, we go over the working from home slash home-office setups we have.

And finally, the feedback

LINUX INNARDS:

“Work from Home” setup

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

Will talk about my basement office/studio setup

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

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

  • Larry Murphy

Hello Leo & All,

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

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

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

  • John Wallis

Hello Leo,

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

Try This GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash pci=noacpi”
  • John Wallis Part 2

Hi Leo,

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

  • Raphaël

You guys MADE MY DAY!!!

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

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

As for the solutions proposed:

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

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

Keep up the good work.

  • Anthony

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

CHECK THIS OUT!

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for audio editing
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4683 mintCast 344.5 – “Working” from Home https://mintcast.org/mintcast-344-5-working-from-home/ Wed, 30 Sep 2020 03:23:49 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4671 And finally, the feedback
Download
]]>

Download

1:38 Linux Innards
58:33 Vibrations from the Ether
1:17:19 Check This Out!
1:20:44 Outro

In our Innards section, we go over the working from home slash home-office setups we have.

And finally, the feedback

LINUX INNARDS:

“Work from Home” setup

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

Will talk about my basement office/studio setup

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

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

  • Larry Murphy

Hello Leo & All,

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

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

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

  • John Wallis

Hello Leo,

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

Try This GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=“quiet splash pci=noacpi”
  • John Wallis Part 2

Hi Leo,

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

  • Raphaël

You guys MADE MY DAY!!!

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

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

As for the solutions proposed:

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

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

Keep up the good work.

  • Anthony

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

CHECK THIS OUT!

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for audio editing
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4671 mintCast 344 – Getting Jacked (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-344-getting-jacked-mp3/ Wed, 23 Sep 2020 04:22:16 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4661 Then, in the news, WSL2 hearts Linux disks, Nvidia grows an ARM, and Gnome Gnews
In security, we finish our conversation Download
]]>

Download

1:49 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
58:14 News
1:16:18 Security
1:28:32 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I fiddle with the Focusrite, Tony Hughes paints it pink, Joe puts a ring on it, Bo gets jacked, Tony Watts reduces, reuses and recycles

Then, in the news, WSL2 hearts Linux disks, Nvidia grows an ARM, and Gnome Gnews

In security, we finish our conversation

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Attempting and being slightly successful with jack.
    • I did actually get some recording done in Ardour. The amount of bells and whistles on that software is mind boggling.
    • Jack is just about as complicated as I had originally expected. This isn’t really a bad thing because there’s just so much to audio production.
    • I really feel like I did way back when I started diving into the world of IT. Everything is new and shiny and every button press leads to a crash.
    • The thing that led me to fiddling with jack, however, was an issue with my Focusrite audio interface. It will pitch shift my audio down (or up depending on the settings) if I do certain things. On my main recording box, that trigger is if I use the interface’s audio out in Linux.
    • Here’s the fix:
    • In /etc/pulse/daemon.conf , edit the following lines to match your interface’s preference, and remove the semicolons at the start of the line

default-sample-rate = 48000

alternate-sample-rate = 48000

  • Tony Hughes
    • So first of sorry for missing last time but I went out on the Sunday morning and as I was bending down at the Cash/ATM machine to see the screen in the bright sunlight my back decided to object and went into spasm, not a major one but it took several days before I can sit for long periods comfortably and last Sunday evening it was impossible. Last saturday evening I joined the BDLL Euro live chat and was reasonably OK!!!!
    • Since I was last on the show I returned from Woodbrooke, I go back again next Sunday for another 2 weeks, and after my return we are both planning to go to Scotland for 5 days, a delayed holiday due to Covid, we should have gone in May. 
    • This last 2 weeks I have been joining in with the diecast ‘Paint it Pink’ challenge to raise awareness of Cancer and I have a couple of videos of my attempts on my YouTube Channel which is linked in the show notes. I plan to record a little of the process and the final results of more of my general restorations in the coming months. 
    • As of yesterday I have been playing with Openshot to do some basic editing on these videos and this allows me to crop and scale to zoom in the video clips making them a slightly better experience for the viewer.
    • Myself and Moss recorded Distrohoppers last Thursday and after a few final tweeks I published it today. Five, yes 5 reviews this month, giving the listeners their money’s worth, oh I forgot they don’t pay for it do they!!!! lol. 
  • Joe
    • Privateer Tales Jamie Mcfarlane
      • 18 book series although some of the books are just short stories
        • On book 17 right now
      • A very interesting space opera and the author is very prolific so I will be 
      • going through the rest of his series of books.
      • A couple of them were listed in the previous show
    • Wizard in a witchy world book 2 and 3
      • Imagine the guy from Unsolved Mysteries (Robert Stack) reading you a book.  Its kinda like that
      • Pretty good
    • Got a ring video doorbell and a ring spotlight camera
      • Easy to setup and install the android app
      • Also easy to integrate with Alexa
      • No Linux installation or access 
      • I chose ring because it is more likely to be accepted by authorities than a roll your own solution
      • My neighborhood has seen several vehicle break ins 
      • Also porch piracy and garage robberies when they are left open.
      • My neighbor’s car got stolen and I would like to help prevent this.  Hopefully my floodlight camera will not be a nuisance for the neighbors 
      • More expensive than a roll your own but like i said it is more likely to be usable by the authorities
      • Nothing set up in the house just outside.
    • My new workout routines are coming along.  
    • Built another macro keyboard.  Much lower profile then the last 
      • Used petg for the first time which should be a bit sturdier
      • For the petg i used rafts because i understand that it has a tendency to be hard to remove and the rafts make it a bit easier
      • Also at the suggestion of Ben Heck in one of his videos I ordered a small roll of multicolored ribbon cable which made the soldering much neater and easier to cable manage.
      • This one is 4×3 instead of the previous 6×2
      • The petg came out very well as did the cable connections
      • I am going to have try writing some different code for it however because what i am using now feels very restrictive 
    • Got a very good price on a mechanical bluetooth keyboard with full num pad
      • 25 dollars for a Logitech g613 which retails at 75
      • Very heavy at 3.2 lbs
      • The only thing wrong with it was the f3 key was broken off.  It uses romer switches instead of cherries so I had to order a couple.
      • It turned out to be a very simple replacement that only took about 10 minutes, It took more time to take the thing apart then it did to do the desoldering and resoldering.  
      • A bit of flux and some solder wick got the old pieces out and the new one popped right into place 
      • It has both a dongle and bluetooth capabilities so I can use it with 2 machines
    • Traded for a new microphone because I wanted to test it out and maybe replace my backup mic
      • Got the Hyperx Quadcast which I traded my old Dell venue 8 pro that I was no longer using and one of the usb 3.0 thinkpad docks.  Think I got a good deal considering what i paid for each
      • I think it makes a better interview mic than it does a solo podcasting mic because of how much it picks up in the room.
      • The guys from the linux lug cast helped me test the settings and it as dialed in as possible
      • Also it did not come with the adapter for an arm mount so i ordered a cheap articulating adapter that looked compatible
      • But it was not so i fabricated an adapter for that mount to the microphone mount
      • Took a couple of drafts to get it right but the adapter is printed in petg and holding up well.  Might do one more iteration to get better articulation
    • Found an interesting configuration change in Linux mint that i find very useful 
      • Make it so that the num lock key does nothing and the num pad is always a num pad.  I don’t need it for directions
      • Under keyboard > Layouts > Numeric Keypad always enters digits
      • Which worked for one of computer but not the other
    • Had to redo both sets of the mmcx modded 1more triple drivers and have a third set I’m getting ready
      • Changed up some of the techniques for what i hope will be better longevity
  • Bo
    • SkiFree
    • Getting Jacked!
    • Playing card games on TTS
  • Tony Watts
    • Music!
      • Recording a couple of test tracks with Echoes to send off for mixing
      • Now have 2 bands active again, one practicing at my house
      • No acoustic gigs on the map but they are out there, just need to put some work into getting booked
      • Still one more music project in the wings to start up when state of the world is in a better place
    • Recycled a bunch of old computers
      • 2 desktops and 4 laptops
      • Decided anything older than core duo had to go
    • Hard drive cloning and replacement on Asus ROG GL551
      • Explain the “why” 
      • Attempted with Clonezilla, Gparted
      • Ended up using macrium
    • Fixed (or at least greatly improved) my phone charging issue with a good port cleaning.  May rock the oneplus 3T a while longer
    • Actually burned some DVDs and CDs recently for the first time in a long time

THE NEWS: 

  •  Bo – WSL2 Adding Linux Disk Support
  •  Nvidia to acquire ARM Joe
    • Unites NVIDIA’s leadership in artificial intelligence with Arm’s vast computing ecosystem to drive innovation for all customers
    • NVIDIA will expand Arm’s R&D presence in Cambridge, UK, by establishing a world-class AI research and education center, and building an Arm/NVIDIA-powered AI supercomputer for groundbreaking research
    • NVIDIA will continue Arm’s open-licensing model and customer neutrality and expand Arm’s IP licensing portfolio with NVIDIA technology
    • Consideration of $40 billion to be met through a combination of NVIDIA shares and cash
  • Next Gnome Version to be 40, not 3.40
  • Gnome Extension Development to Be Made Easier
    • Proper documentation of how extensions work, reasonable expectations to be an extensions developer, participating in the GNOME extensions community.
    • Build CI pipeline (a virtual machine) for extension writers to test their extensions prior to GNOME releases.
    • Centralizing extensions for break testing on the GNOME gitlab space
    • Creating a forum for extension developers and extension writers to work together for the GNOME release cycle
  • Arc Menu Development Leadership Changing hands
  • Ubuntu 20.10 release date and planned features
    • “Groovy Gorilla” Oct 22 release date
    • Ubuntu’s Feature Freeze Means – Tony W?
    • Gnome 3.38
    • Linux Kernel 5.8
      • Linux Mint gets this soon after it hits the streets
    • Features
      • Support for fingerprint 

SECURITY UPDATE:

  •  Tony – Tinfoil Hat!!!
    • This is an interesting topic that you guys discussed on the last show. Personally on my PC I’m not overly paranoid, I usually set up my firewall but do little else in regards to security apart from this and even then it is only the basic setup.
    • As for my Phone i’m more careful, I only allow apps access to things they need, so obviously the camera app will need to access the camera, but if an app requests access to the camera that should not need it this is denied. For some reason a lot of apps request access to your contacts and apart from the phone and messaging there are only a couple of other apps that I’m happy having access to contacts, such as whatsApp but other things get blocked or even deleted.z
    • I do switch off bluetooth and the GPS location on my phone and only use these when absolutely necessary such as my hands free use of the phone when driving, and using google maps to navigate. 
  •  Bo

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for audio editing
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 4661 mintCast 344 – Getting Jacked https://mintcast.org/mintcast-344-getting-jacked/ Wed, 23 Sep 2020 03:51:18 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4655 Then, in the news, WSL2 hearts Linux disks, Nvidia grows an ARM, and Gnome Gnews
In security, we finish our conversation Download
]]>

Download

1:49 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
58:14 News
1:16:18 Security
1:28:32 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I fiddle with the Focusrite, Tony Hughes paints it pink, Joe puts a ring on it, Bo gets jacked, Tony Watts reduces, reuses and recycles

Then, in the news, WSL2 hearts Linux disks, Nvidia grows an ARM, and Gnome Gnews

In security, we finish our conversation

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Attempting and being slightly successful with jack.
    • I did actually get some recording done in Ardour. The amount of bells and whistles on that software is mind boggling.
    • Jack is just about as complicated as I had originally expected. This isn’t really a bad thing because there’s just so much to audio production.
    • I really feel like I did way back when I started diving into the world of IT. Everything is new and shiny and every button press leads to a crash.
    • The thing that led me to fiddling with jack, however, was an issue with my Focusrite audio interface. It will pitch shift my audio down (or up depending on the settings) if I do certain things. On my main recording box, that trigger is if I use the interface’s audio out in Linux.
    • Here’s the fix:
    • In /etc/pulse/daemon.conf , edit the following lines to match your interface’s preference, and remove the semicolons at the start of the line

default-sample-rate = 48000

alternate-sample-rate = 48000

  • Tony Hughes
    • So first of sorry for missing last time but I went out on the Sunday morning and as I was bending down at the Cash/ATM machine to see the screen in the bright sunlight my back decided to object and went into spasm, not a major one but it took several days before I can sit for long periods comfortably and last Sunday evening it was impossible. Last saturday evening I joined the BDLL Euro live chat and was reasonably OK!!!!
    • Since I was last on the show I returned from Woodbrooke, I go back again next Sunday for another 2 weeks, and after my return we are both planning to go to Scotland for 5 days, a delayed holiday due to Covid, we should have gone in May. 
    • This last 2 weeks I have been joining in with the diecast ‘Paint it Pink’ challenge to raise awareness of Cancer and I have a couple of videos of my attempts on my YouTube Channel which is linked in the show notes. I plan to record a little of the process and the final results of more of my general restorations in the coming months. 
    • As of yesterday I have been playing with Openshot to do some basic editing on these videos and this allows me to crop and scale to zoom in the video clips making them a slightly better experience for the viewer.
    • Myself and Moss recorded Distrohoppers last Thursday and after a few final tweeks I published it today. Five, yes 5 reviews this month, giving the listeners their money’s worth, oh I forgot they don’t pay for it do they!!!! lol. 
  • Joe
    • Privateer Tales Jamie Mcfarlane
      • 18 book series although some of the books are just short stories
        • On book 17 right now
      • A very interesting space opera and the author is very prolific so I will be 
      • going through the rest of his series of books.
      • A couple of them were listed in the previous show
    • Wizard in a witchy world book 2 and 3
      • Imagine the guy from Unsolved Mysteries (Robert Stack) reading you a book.  Its kinda like that
      • Pretty good
    • Got a ring video doorbell and a ring spotlight camera
      • Easy to setup and install the android app
      • Also easy to integrate with Alexa
      • No Linux installation or access 
      • I chose ring because it is more likely to be accepted by authorities than a roll your own solution
      • My neighborhood has seen several vehicle break ins 
      • Also porch piracy and garage robberies when they are left open.
      • My neighbor’s car got stolen and I would like to help prevent this.  Hopefully my floodlight camera will not be a nuisance for the neighbors 
      • More expensive than a roll your own but like i said it is more likely to be usable by the authorities
      • Nothing set up in the house just outside.
    • My new workout routines are coming along.  
    • Built another macro keyboard.  Much lower profile then the last 
      • Used petg for the first time which should be a bit sturdier
      • For the petg i used rafts because i understand that it has a tendency to be hard to remove and the rafts make it a bit easier
      • Also at the suggestion of Ben Heck in one of his videos I ordered a small roll of multicolored ribbon cable which made the soldering much neater and easier to cable manage.
      • This one is 4×3 instead of the previous 6×2
      • The petg came out very well as did the cable connections
      • I am going to have try writing some different code for it however because what i am using now feels very restrictive 
    • Got a very good price on a mechanical bluetooth keyboard with full num pad
      • 25 dollars for a Logitech g613 which retails at 75
      • Very heavy at 3.2 lbs
      • The only thing wrong with it was the f3 key was broken off.  It uses romer switches instead of cherries so I had to order a couple.
      • It turned out to be a very simple replacement that only took about 10 minutes, It took more time to take the thing apart then it did to do the desoldering and resoldering.  
      • A bit of flux and some solder wick got the old pieces out and the new one popped right into place 
      • It has both a dongle and bluetooth capabilities so I can use it with 2 machines
    • Traded for a new microphone because I wanted to test it out and maybe replace my backup mic
      • Got the Hyperx Quadcast which I traded my old Dell venue 8 pro that I was no longer using and one of the usb 3.0 thinkpad docks.  Think I got a good deal considering what i paid for each
      • I think it makes a better interview mic than it does a solo podcasting mic because of how much it picks up in the room.
      • The guys from the linux lug cast helped me test the settings and it as dialed in as possible
      • Also it did not come with the adapter for an arm mount so i ordered a cheap articulating adapter that looked compatible
      • But it was not so i fabricated an adapter for that mount to the microphone mount
      • Took a couple of drafts to get it right but the adapter is printed in petg and holding up well.  Might do one more iteration to get better articulation
    • Found an interesting configuration change in Linux mint that i find very useful 
      • Make it so that the num lock key does nothing and the num pad is always a num pad.  I don’t need it for directions
      • Under keyboard > Layouts > Numeric Keypad always enters digits
      • Which worked for one of computer but not the other
    • Had to redo both sets of the mmcx modded 1more triple drivers and have a third set I’m getting ready
      • Changed up some of the techniques for what i hope will be better longevity
  • Bo
    • SkiFree
    • Getting Jacked!
    • Playing card games on TTS
  • Tony Watts
    • Music!
      • Recording a couple of test tracks with Echoes to send off for mixing
      • Now have 2 bands active again, one practicing at my house
      • No acoustic gigs on the map but they are out there, just need to put some work into getting booked
      • Still one more music project in the wings to start up when state of the world is in a better place
    • Recycled a bunch of old computers
      • 2 desktops and 4 laptops
      • Decided anything older than core duo had to go
    • Hard drive cloning and replacement on Asus ROG GL551
      • Explain the “why” 
      • Attempted with Clonezilla, Gparted
      • Ended up using macrium
    • Fixed (or at least greatly improved) my phone charging issue with a good port cleaning.  May rock the oneplus 3T a while longer
    • Actually burned some DVDs and CDs recently for the first time in a long time

THE NEWS: 

  •  Bo – WSL2 Adding Linux Disk Support
  •  Nvidia to acquire ARM Joe
    • Unites NVIDIA’s leadership in artificial intelligence with Arm’s vast computing ecosystem to drive innovation for all customers
    • NVIDIA will expand Arm’s R&D presence in Cambridge, UK, by establishing a world-class AI research and education center, and building an Arm/NVIDIA-powered AI supercomputer for groundbreaking research
    • NVIDIA will continue Arm’s open-licensing model and customer neutrality and expand Arm’s IP licensing portfolio with NVIDIA technology
    • Consideration of $40 billion to be met through a combination of NVIDIA shares and cash
  • Next Gnome Version to be 40, not 3.40
  • Gnome Extension Development to Be Made Easier
    • Proper documentation of how extensions work, reasonable expectations to be an extensions developer, participating in the GNOME extensions community.
    • Build CI pipeline (a virtual machine) for extension writers to test their extensions prior to GNOME releases.
    • Centralizing extensions for break testing on the GNOME gitlab space
    • Creating a forum for extension developers and extension writers to work together for the GNOME release cycle
  • Arc Menu Development Leadership Changing hands
  • Ubuntu 20.10 release date and planned features
    • “Groovy Gorilla” Oct 22 release date
    • Ubuntu’s Feature Freeze Means – Tony W?
    • Gnome 3.38
    • Linux Kernel 5.8
      • Linux Mint gets this soon after it hits the streets
    • Features
      • Support for fingerprint 

SECURITY UPDATE:

  •  Tony – Tinfoil Hat!!!
    • This is an interesting topic that you guys discussed on the last show. Personally on my PC I’m not overly paranoid, I usually set up my firewall but do little else in regards to security apart from this and even then it is only the basic setup.
    • As for my Phone i’m more careful, I only allow apps access to things they need, so obviously the camera app will need to access the camera, but if an app requests access to the camera that should not need it this is denied. For some reason a lot of apps request access to your contacts and apart from the phone and messaging there are only a couple of other apps that I’m happy having access to contacts, such as whatsApp but other things get blocked or even deleted.z
    • I do switch off bluetooth and the GPS location on my phone and only use these when absolutely necessary such as my hands free use of the phone when driving, and using google maps to navigate. 
  •  Bo

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

]]> 4655 mintCast 342 – Security Theater (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-342-security-theater-mp3/ Wed, 26 Aug 2020 04:50:08 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4592 Then, in our news, Pinta, Lutris and Mozilla
In security, we talk security recommendations and the NSA
Download
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We would like to welcome Owen Peery to the team. He’s our new editor!

1:40 Wanderings
46:32 News
1:05:05 Security
1:22:05 Outro

First up, in our Wanderings, I’ve been testing out a new keyboard, Tony Hughes tries to remove a finger (again), Joe has been soldering and reading, Moss has been adding more distros,

Then, in our news, Pinta, Lutris and Mozilla

In security, we talk security recommendations and the NSA

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Digging into some errors I got, last stream on Youtube. It was complaining that I was streaming at only 3500kbps. That was odd as I’ve always streamed at OBS’s default. Turns out, Youtube wants 4500kbps now. So, I cranked the video bitrate up to 6400 in OBS’s Output section. No errors!
    • Kernel 5.8 is smooth as silk
    • Got a new keyboard. A cheap mechanical with OUTEMU Red switches. Cost $35, but also came with a mouse pad and mouse. They’re all RGB of course, except for the mouse pad.
    • Been watching Star Trek Lower Decks. It’s hilarious. It’s a story of about 5 ensigns that work on the starship Cerritos. They’re not high ranking, and only get to do grunt work for the most part, but they find their niche and get their jobs done. I’ve never been much of a Trek fan, but this is seriously something I can see myself watching until the end of the series. It has the feel of Rick and Morty and Futurama fused together. Hijinks obviously ensue.
    • Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 1 Trailer
  • Tony H
    • So I managed to drill my finger in an accident while doing some work on the matchbox cars, it’s not good when a drill bit brakes while you are drilling a post out and you have the model held in your hand, the cut was very sore and the end of the finger is still numb from a little bit of nerve damage as a result. What with that and cutting myself while cooking my wife thinks I have a death wish.
    • As a result of the accident I haven’t been doing much in the way of restoration for the last couple of weeks but I have made some nice eBay buys which have resulted in the collection and spares to the restoration has grown a little larger, although I had to stop bidding on stuff as I wouldn’t have been around for any deliveries that may have arrived after I came away, it has probably saved me a few shekels.
    • For a little light relief I installed Ubuntu Touch on my OnePlus 1 and while it was a fairly painless process unlike trying to update Lineage OS to 17.1 on the same phone which I can’t get it to do, it is definitely NOT ready for prime time yet. All the apps seem to be web based and do not work very well, I was thinking of Using the phone as my Sat Nav for my car but as you need the internet even if it worked well, which it doesn’t then I would need to get a new sim card and data plan as it will not work on the GPS alone as it needs a web connection for the apps to work. I also tried to connect to the WiFi here at Woodbrooke and it will not connect to the login page to finish authorising access to the WiFi.
    • I’m continuing to play with Mint 20 Mate on the DHD laptop with the intention of this being my review for the September show. Given my findings so far It might be a short review as apart from the Snapd issue and a few programs being updated it is pretty much business as usual, so while I am here at Woodbrooke I’m having a look at a distro suggested by a listener, SparkyLinux and while it is based on Debian they do what Mint used to do with the LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) and base one of the spins on the testing branch with a warning that it is not for those wanting a stable system or are new to Linux. Just to note that both iso’s will fit on a 2Gb Flash drive (or less than 1GB if you opt for one of the stable minimal GUI spins). So if you have an old one kicking around you were wondering what to use it for, then maybe SparkyLinux could be an option.    
    • I wrote the 4th in my Full Circle Magazine series on podcast production the first of which was in issue 159 at the end of July. I’m not a natural writer but I have been enjoying sharing what I have learned since starting on mintCast and DHD.
  • Moss
    • I installed Gecko ROLLING to my desktop. So now I have ROLLING on my desktop and STATIC on my laptop (equivalent to openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap, respectively). 
    • On the 15th, I installed KDE neon, also to my desktop. Oddly, the announcement that neon was available based on 20.04 did not mention that you would still be installing the 18.04 version, and then be greeted with the Upgrade button. It took a few more button pushes to get the upgrade started, but it ran beautifully. I then ran updates and installed some of my more common additions, including Stacer 1.10. Stacer ran great, but Discover popped up and said there was an update to it. I ran the update. And now Stacer wouldn’t load, it said “program not found”. So I reinstalled from my .deb package and it worked again… and Discover said there was an update again. I have posted to the KDE neon user forum to report this issue and ask how I can get Discover to ignore the update. Apparently they think an app in the repo is newer than the same app from a .deb file, but why it disables the program to run the update is beyond me. Note to self: Check the repo to see if an application is there before installing saved .deb files.
    • I now have only one free partition each on my desktop and laptop. And I’m starting to have memory issues — not my computer, me, trying to remember what all I have installed. Updating has already gotten beyond the “fun” level.
    • I am tempted to install Releax Linux to my system even though it’s only 0.5beta. This is a fully independent distro out of India, with a new package manager and everything. It sounds really exciting. Maybe I should dig up Tony Hughes’ instructions and learn how to install it in a VM.
    • I posted a new blog to LinuxQuestions.org.
    • I did some performing on Thursday the 20th on Eurofilk, which is now happening every other Thursday. I got to play with Cecilia Eng, first time for me and she’s a legend, and a total of 9 others in the Zoom room, including my friend K.J. Noren. This is the first performing I’ve done since about 2 weeks after my accident. My shoulder hurt a lot more afterward, but I seem to have gained mobility.
    • We’re about ⅔ of the way through Blood Rites, the 6th Dresden Files book. Dresden missed a huge hint when he had a major data download from Thomas; there is no explanation for that miss. We’re enjoying the book, we just wish Dresden could be more successful stopping people from dying.
  • Joe
    • Watched a lot of YouTube and did some soldering
    • Took a break for a few days from reading but still got some in
      • Up to book 20 in Drizzt
      • Demon Accords book 16
      • Big Damn Hero
        • Firefly book, surprisingly good
    • Soldered some headphones
      • New MMCX connectors came in and got them set up on 2 sets of headphones.
      • Only need to redo one of the connections at this point
    • Was informed that I missed the 8th book of the Incarnations of Immortality series by Piers Anthony.  Although I am more than a little disillusioned by his work since he uses it as a platform to push his ideology on age of consent.
      • Also the book does not exist in audio format from what I can see so if I do read it, it will have to be text aloud
    • Attempted to make the macro keyboard, followed the instructions exactly but was not able to get it working.
      • Rechecked my soldering several times but it was solid
      • Only about 6 of the 12 keys would work.  
      • So I took it apart down to the board on the keypad and did continuity tests on the whole thing
      • Bad board and a slightly different pinout than was in the instructions but the different pinout shouldn’t be a concern
      • I could try to solder directly to the board and to the pins but that seems a little crazy even for me.  Although if I get bored enough you never know.
      • I have ordered a couple of different types of keyboards to give another try using different methods
      • Right before the show a test set of 4 mechanical keys showed up and I was able to get them wired in place although I still need to wire the Promicro and I need to 3D-print the case for it
      • Thinking about ordering a set of 90 MX Cherry Blues and 3d printing everything else
  • Tony W
    • Refinishing my basement practice/rehearsal/studio/home office space
      • Installed carpet to cover concrete floor
      • Covered the one concrete wall in this room with drywall/heavy cloth, for now
      • Have insulation and drywall ready to go for remaining walls/ceilings
      • Will most likely get a permit from county before installing drywall over electrical, ductwork etc
      • This involved disassembling all of my tech, my podcast setup, etc and almost did not set back up before today’s podcast
    • Updated to Mint 20
      • Upgrade was fairly seamless, but had a couple minor issues
        • The update did break my Grub.  Reinstalled Grub very easily using MX Linux live USB Boot Repair (courtesy of Ventoy)
        • The version of Mumble installed from Software Manager didn’t work, had to install the Flatpak
      • Installed Linux via Crouton on Acer Chromebook 314
          • Crostini was great, but somewhat useless to me as there is no direct access to hardware (particularly USB audio devices) 
        • Crouton gives you full Linux desktop courtesy of chroot
        • Process to install:
          • Have to turn on Developer mode (which erases local data)
          • Follow instructions to install via crosh (Chrome terminal)
          • Once installed, to enter Linux desktop: Sudo enter-chroot startxfce4 (or sudo startxfce4 as a shortcut)
        • From there, Ctrl/Alt/Shift Forward and Ctrl/Alt/Shift/Back to switch between ChromeOS and XFCE (or desktop of your choice)
        • Default is XFCE but Cinnamon, KDE, e17, LXDE and Unity are also available 
        • IT WORKED!!!  My audio interface works perfectly with XFCE running on the Chromebook. 
          • Audacity, Mumble, OBS studio ready to go
        • Downsides: 
          • Developer Mode
          • Not supported – ChromeOS updates can break it
          • Default install is 16.04.  I believe you can specify 18.04
        • I think I will be using this.  It’s a cheap, light portable device with 12 hour battery life that I can take on the go

THE NEWS

SECURITY UPDATE

  • NSA reveals SOMETHING about Russian hacks
  • Linux Malware and Securing Your System
    • CTT goes in early about preventive measures and turns his nose up at the idea that someone would be running kernels earlier than 3.7 because it was released in 2012. RHEL 6 is still on 2.6… Sure. For a desktop user, it’s probably not likely, but for Enterprise? The NSA and the FBI didn’t put out a report for grandma in her kitchen. They put it out for the military and other institutions that are slow moving. In some cases, RHEL 5 is still in use and in Extended Life Phase.
    • Don’t install untrusted kernel modules or unsigned kernels.
    • SecureBoot
    • CTT offers a script that does:
      • Turning on UFW
      • Limiting SSH (which prevents brute force/dictionary style attacks)
      • Opening 80/443
      • Denying everything else incoming
      • Allowing everything outgoing
    • The script is a little odd. While limiting SSH is good, much thought should be given to just using keys, and disabling password login altogether. Also, why open 80 and 443? You would really only need this if you’re hosting a website of some kind. Most tools use custom ports (i.e., Cockpit uses port 9090).
  • Alexa Can Be Hacked, Instagram Retains Deleted Data, Linux Malware Found By NSA & FBI – ThreatWire

Announcements:

Our next episode will be September 6, 2020 at 2 pm Central US Time, 7 pm UTC, 8 pm British Summer Time – https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

Add Dallas Tx

Wrap-up:

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

  • Londoner for his suggestion to use timeanddate.com
  • 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.
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