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

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

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

In our Innards section: we talk about Virtual Machines

In Bodhi Corner, just a bit about theming

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

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

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

In our Innards section: we talk about Virtual Machines

In Bodhi Corner, just a bit about theming

Full Show Notes Here

The News:


Mint Monthly News


Your Backblaze Backups Might Be in Trouble


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


A new Raspberry Pi OS release


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

Security and Privacy:


openSUSE Removes Deepin Desktop Over Security Policy Violations


Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law

Contact Info:

Special Thanks To:

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

]]> full 2:30:10 7511 371 – Rounded Corners https://mintcast.org/371-rounded-corners/ Wed, 06 Oct 2021 05:37:05 +0000 https://mintcast.org/?p=5230 In security, More bugs and more malware
Then in our Wanderings, Joe does vacation, Norbert Listens to the Doctor, Josh tries ventoy, Tony is making ice cream trucks, Leo plays D2
Download
]]> 1:49 The News
28:03 Security Update
38:05 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
1:19:37 Announcements & Outro

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

In security, More bugs and more malware

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

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

The News

Security Update

Bi-Weekly Wanderings

Announcements

Wrap-up

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

  • Owen Peery for our audio production
  • Josh Lowe for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • initrd for the animated Discord logg
  • Londoner for our time sync
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our backup Mumble room
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> 371 - Rounded Corners full 1:27:49 5230 mintCast 343 – Tinfoil Not Included (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-343-tinfoil-not-included-mp3/ Wed, 09 Sep 2020 04:27:36 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4615 Then, in the news, we have news from Mint, Debian, and  MX Linux. We also say goodbye to a team member.
In security, we take a break from the doom and gloom and just talk tinfoil.
Download
]]>

Download

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

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

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

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

Download

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

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS: 

SECURITY UPDATE:

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

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

  • Owen Peery for audio editing
  • Josh for all his work on the website
  • Hobstar for our logo
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • HPR for our Mumble backup
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem!>
]]> full 4610 mintCast 327.5 – Doppelganger https://mintcast.org/mintcast-327-5-doppelganger/ Wed, 05 Feb 2020 05:27:09 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4200 Some listener feedback and "check this out."
Download
]]>

Download

In our Innards section, we talk Linux Mint’s new Doppelganger with Joshua Peisach (@ItzSwirlz) from Ubuntu Cinnamon (@UbuntuCinnamon).

Some listener feedback and “check this out.”

LINUX INNARDS:

Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix with Josh Peisach

What was your motivation for creating Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix?

Who is working on it with you?

  • Simon Quigly
  • FossFreedom
  • Lubuntu team
  • Moss
    •  I don’t get to lead too many of these things off, but as the resident mad distrohopper, I thought I’d try this one. It installed easily and cleanly; I love Calamares when it works. I have only had one complaint, and that was the color scheme. I don’t often tweak themes, but that Ubuntu Brown and Orange gets pretty tedious and my active tabs in Firefox have an orange bar above them. I’m still not a huge fan of Cinnamon, but am currently using both Mint and Ubuntu Cinnamon (still using Mint Mate as my main distro), and Mint is easier to look at. The missing Mint tools make a difference, and I’m sure Ubuntu users would comment obversely. I definitely need to add Mintstick if I’m going to keep using this. Really, for me the Mint tools are better than the Ubuntu tools, or at least I use them more, so I don’t see why I can’t have a nice minty-green screen.
  • Joe
    • Took a couple of tries and an assist from Moss to get it installed because of an issue with the installer 
    • Very Modern looking and a very nice color scheme
    • Applications ran smooth and startup times were not that long.  All in all, no complaints although I did notice that some of the tools that I use were missing.  Most specifically disks, which i can handle using fstab and i am not sure what ubuntu uses instead also disk usage analyzer.  
    • Rotation works well after I went into settings general and turned it on
    • I went through my usual, installing x2go client and server and the snap of Standard Notes. All are working well. 
    • Going to try Pluma instead of gedit and see how I like it.
    • For some reason sshfs set up but none of my normal scripting/automation stuff worked for it.  If-up and if-down did not seem to function. I am able to make the scripts work when I run them manually but they are ignored by the system
    • The most interesting aspect that I have found in this release is that it includes a 32 bit efi built in.  So I attempted to install it on one of my old 8 inch tablets that had a 32bit efi but a 64 bit processor. It loaded up and i was able to start up the install process but it would lock up everytime it got to the region selection.  It was also very slow on the device. But that is the fault of the device. I also went through the hoops to try and install Linux Mint and got the same issue. Mate worked though. Forgot how much work it was to get one of these set up. 
    • Beyond that, I can say that the OS feels very nice and is responsive, other than the issue with not being able to do a basic install.  
    • Do want to mention that since this is the 7140 I have no way of testing if suspend and resume work properly. 
    • No pinch to zoom.
  • Tony Hughes 
    • Installed to Virtualbox and even in a VM it boots in 10 seconds with 2 cores of my i7 and 4Gb RAM allocated in VB. By default I was happy to find GIMP installed out of the box, but still no Synaptic or Audacity but, as this is Ubuntu under the hood, all these applications are either an ‘sudo apt install’ away or ‘sudo snap install’ if that is your chosen method of installing software. So all the regular tools I use for podcasting such as Mumble and Audacity.
    • As Moss said, it is a nice OS, it was easy to install and I could see this being one of the systems on a drive in the ‘icy dock’ when I finally get around to upgrading my main i7 tower later this spring.    
  • Leo
    • The first thing that struck me was the theme, Kimmo. A bright orange take on Mint-Y, which was, as far as I can tell, forked from the Arc theme.
    • I really enjoy the icon theme itself, but the orange highlighting with the orange icons cause visibility issues on the taskbar. Hovering over the folders especially. I think this is probably why Ubuntu went with a more burnt orange in a lot of cases. But orange is my favorite color, so it’s hard to admit “too much orange” is a thing.
    • My personal preference would be Kimmo-dark everywhere except the icon theme. Go Kimmo-light there and all those issues go away.
    • Seconds counter in the clock!
    • Desktop font is set to “none” in the Font Selection too, but looks like it defaults to Sans Regular. I wonder if the plan is to use the Ubuntu fonts as Linux Mint does, or go with something different?
    • Has the same boot splash as Ubuntu, so I expect lots of new customization in the future.
    • Games like 2048, Sudoku and Chess come pre-installed. Is this the same for all Ubuntu flavors?
    • Of course, Xapps are dropped in favor of their Gnome counterparts. For instance, instead of Pix, you have Gnome-Photos.
    • Oddly, there is no Gnome Disks. Just GParted. This affects the accessibility of disk configurations for the new user.
  • Tony W
    • The ISO download took about an hour
    • Installed in VM
    • Probably the biggest quirks I ran into were Virtualbox itself and not Ubuntu Cinnamon
      • For some reason the ‘launch’ option wasn’t there after installing via Software Manager.  Virtualbox did not appear in my menu in Linux Mint either (required reboot) but had no problem launching it from Terminal
      • ‘Running in software rendering mode’ message
    • I did not readily see an ‘install’ option on desktop from liveUSB; I searched ‘install’ from menu and see the install option is under Administration in menu tree.  
    • Installed Mumble from Software, chose the first Mumble option (of 2) and it was a Snap (mumble 1.3).  Snaps get priority in search results from Software, presumably same behavior as Ubuntu. Mumble was not added to menu until I rebooted
    • I am not a big fan of the color scheme either but it is probably appropriate for this distro, being an Ubuntu spinoff (I am not a big fan of stock Ubuntu color scheme either and I probably like Ubuntu Cinnamon’s better)
  • Josh
    • Super fast on my Ryzen 2600 build
    • Modern theme and I really like it
    • My favourite colour is orange so obviously like the theme
    • Really like the installer, one of the nicest i’ve used next to Deepin
    • For a volunteer effort, it’s a pretty good distro and look forward to the developments
    • I imagine it’s coming in the future, but it’d be nice to have a website to host the distro

How are you dealing with the newfound fame? You’re all over the Linux News sites now!?

What do you think of Flatpak?

What would you say to people that might say that you don’t need Ubuntu Cinnamon because Mint Exists?

Why a new distro, why not just install Cinnamon on the base Ubuntu?

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

CHECK THIS OUT! 

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)
]]> full 1:22:38 4200 mintCast 327.5 – Doppelganger (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-327-5-doppelganger-mp3/ Wed, 05 Feb 2020 05:25:58 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4196 Some listener feedback and "check this out."
Download
]]>

Download

In our Innards section, we talk Linux Mint’s new Doppelganger with Joshua Peisach (@ItzSwirlz) from Ubuntu Cinnamon (@UbuntuCinnamon).

Some listener feedback and “check this out.”

LINUX INNARDS:

Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix with Josh Peisach

What was your motivation for creating Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix?

Who is working on it with you?

  • Simon Quigly
  • FossFreedom
  • Lubuntu team
  • Moss
    •  I don’t get to lead too many of these things off, but as the resident mad distrohopper, I thought I’d try this one. It installed easily and cleanly; I love Calamares when it works. I have only had one complaint, and that was the color scheme. I don’t often tweak themes, but that Ubuntu Brown and Orange gets pretty tedious and my active tabs in Firefox have an orange bar above them. I’m still not a huge fan of Cinnamon, but am currently using both Mint and Ubuntu Cinnamon (still using Mint Mate as my main distro), and Mint is easier to look at. The missing Mint tools make a difference, and I’m sure Ubuntu users would comment obversely. I definitely need to add Mintstick if I’m going to keep using this. Really, for me the Mint tools are better than the Ubuntu tools, or at least I use them more, so I don’t see why I can’t have a nice minty-green screen.
  • Joe
    • Took a couple of tries and an assist from Moss to get it installed because of an issue with the installer 
    • Very Modern looking and a very nice color scheme
    • Applications ran smooth and startup times were not that long.  All in all, no complaints although I did notice that some of the tools that I use were missing.  Most specifically disks, which i can handle using fstab and i am not sure what ubuntu uses instead also disk usage analyzer.  
    • Rotation works well after I went into settings general and turned it on
    • I went through my usual, installing x2go client and server and the snap of Standard Notes. All are working well. 
    • Going to try Pluma instead of gedit and see how I like it.
    • For some reason sshfs set up but none of my normal scripting/automation stuff worked for it.  If-up and if-down did not seem to function. I am able to make the scripts work when I run them manually but they are ignored by the system
    • The most interesting aspect that I have found in this release is that it includes a 32 bit efi built in.  So I attempted to install it on one of my old 8 inch tablets that had a 32bit efi but a 64 bit processor. It loaded up and i was able to start up the install process but it would lock up everytime it got to the region selection.  It was also very slow on the device. But that is the fault of the device. I also went through the hoops to try and install Linux Mint and got the same issue. Mate worked though. Forgot how much work it was to get one of these set up. 
    • Beyond that, I can say that the OS feels very nice and is responsive, other than the issue with not being able to do a basic install.  
    • Do want to mention that since this is the 7140 I have no way of testing if suspend and resume work properly. 
    • No pinch to zoom.
  • Tony Hughes 
    • Installed to Virtualbox and even in a VM it boots in 10 seconds with 2 cores of my i7 and 4Gb RAM allocated in VB. By default I was happy to find GIMP installed out of the box, but still no Synaptic or Audacity but, as this is Ubuntu under the hood, all these applications are either an ‘sudo apt install’ away or ‘sudo snap install’ if that is your chosen method of installing software. So all the regular tools I use for podcasting such as Mumble and Audacity.
    • As Moss said, it is a nice OS, it was easy to install and I could see this being one of the systems on a drive in the ‘icy dock’ when I finally get around to upgrading my main i7 tower later this spring.    
  • Leo
    • The first thing that struck me was the theme, Kimmo. A bright orange take on Mint-Y, which was, as far as I can tell, forked from the Arc theme.
    • I really enjoy the icon theme itself, but the orange highlighting with the orange icons cause visibility issues on the taskbar. Hovering over the folders especially. I think this is probably why Ubuntu went with a more burnt orange in a lot of cases. But orange is my favorite color, so it’s hard to admit “too much orange” is a thing.
    • My personal preference would be Kimmo-dark everywhere except the icon theme. Go Kimmo-light there and all those issues go away.
    • Seconds counter in the clock!
    • Desktop font is set to “none” in the Font Selection too, but looks like it defaults to Sans Regular. I wonder if the plan is to use the Ubuntu fonts as Linux Mint does, or go with something different?
    • Has the same boot splash as Ubuntu, so I expect lots of new customization in the future.
    • Games like 2048, Sudoku and Chess come pre-installed. Is this the same for all Ubuntu flavors?
    • Of course, Xapps are dropped in favor of their Gnome counterparts. For instance, instead of Pix, you have Gnome-Photos.
    • Oddly, there is no Gnome Disks. Just GParted. This affects the accessibility of disk configurations for the new user.
  • Tony W
    • The ISO download took about an hour
    • Installed in VM
    • Probably the biggest quirks I ran into were Virtualbox itself and not Ubuntu Cinnamon
      • For some reason the ‘launch’ option wasn’t there after installing via Software Manager.  Virtualbox did not appear in my menu in Linux Mint either (required reboot) but had no problem launching it from Terminal
      • ‘Running in software rendering mode’ message
    • I did not readily see an ‘install’ option on desktop from liveUSB; I searched ‘install’ from menu and see the install option is under Administration in menu tree.  
    • Installed Mumble from Software, chose the first Mumble option (of 2) and it was a Snap (mumble 1.3).  Snaps get priority in search results from Software, presumably same behavior as Ubuntu. Mumble was not added to menu until I rebooted
    • I am not a big fan of the color scheme either but it is probably appropriate for this distro, being an Ubuntu spinoff (I am not a big fan of stock Ubuntu color scheme either and I probably like Ubuntu Cinnamon’s better)
  • Josh
    • Super fast on my Ryzen 2600 build
    • Modern theme and I really like it
    • My favourite colour is orange so obviously like the theme
    • Really like the installer, one of the nicest i’ve used next to Deepin
    • For a volunteer effort, it’s a pretty good distro and look forward to the developments
    • I imagine it’s coming in the future, but it’d be nice to have a website to host the distro

How are you dealing with the newfound fame? You’re all over the Linux News sites now!?

What do you think of Flatpak?

What would you say to people that might say that you don’t need Ubuntu Cinnamon because Mint Exists?

Why a new distro, why not just install Cinnamon on the base Ubuntu?

VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER: 

CHECK THIS OUT! 

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)
]]> full 1:22:38 4196 mintCast 327 – The Mozilla Thrilla https://mintcast.org/mintcast-327-the-mozilla-thrilla/ Wed, 29 Jan 2020 08:02:54 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=4152 Then in our news a new Wine, GParted, Edge and Yaru theme for Ubuntu. The Pinephone ships and Firefox runs into issues.
Finally, in security, we talk password leads and Mozilla addon bans.
Download
]]>

Download

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

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

Download

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

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

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

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

THE NEWS:

SECURITY UPDATE:

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

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

  • Josh for all his work on the website and the livestream
  • Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about (Thanks, Clem!)
]]> full 1:09:00 4150 mintCast 311 – SSH https://mintcast.org/mintcast-311-ssh/ Wed, 19 Jun 2019 05:12:28 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3644 Download
]]>

Download

Introduction:

  • Welcome to mintCast Episode 311.
  • First up, in our Wanderings, I had to rebuild my network, Moss becomes more reliant on Linux Mint, Joe games on an Atari, Josh gets nominated for awards and installs Deepin, and Tony Hughes gets scammed.
  • Then, in the news, Firefox protects everyone and lots of new releases.
  • In our innards, we talk secure connections.
  • Finally, we wrap up the show with lots of feedback and a couple recommendations

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Got a 64GB SD card (Patriot V30, A1) for Batocera. Gives more room than the 32GB ADATA USB I was using, and fully hides itself within the laptop! And turns out, my HP Stream won’t boot from an SD card, so I had to get a 64GB Sandisk Cruzer Fit. Worked like a charm. Now to find a use for a 64GB SD card.
    • pavucontrol – Pulse Audio Volume Control. Allows me to increase the input volume on the mic on the way in, which allows me to avoid adjusting it within Audacity itself.
    • Arch… a busy week and a dead switch this weekend put my plans on hold
    • Now I’ll be testing out the newish Cisco SG350P and an ERPOE-5.
  • Moss
    • The new job has kept me completely occupied, but I’m listening to more podcasts during drive time. No new money, no new hardware. I did sell the Canon printer at last, and ordered the HDMI cable so I can test those other computers I have.
    • I found that I did not have Mumble or multiple workspaces set up for Ubuntu Budgie 19.04, and ARandR in Bodhi is not that easy compared to Displays, so I will likely continue to use Linux Mint for podcasts for the present. Once again, when you need something to work the first time and every time, Linux Mint for the win.
    • I’ve been polishing my script for the next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest. The last episode could have stood a bit more work on my end, and I will take the learning experience and grow from it.
    • I was hoping to install OpenMandriva Lx 4 on the announced date of June 6, but it is not out yet and the announcement seems to have been pulled. Large parts of the openmandriva.org website were giving 404 or 505 errors but have been revived just this week. Softpedia states that the final version will be out “in summer or early autumn”, with no source quoted.
    • The donation to Linux Mint has been made in the name of mintCast Team, as promised (6/1/19, so it will be in the June numbers). I have spent a lot of time being sad as the Destination Linux Telegram group is exploding with all the wonderfulness of SELF.
  • Josh
    • Finalist in Tech4Good awards and the ARM Young Coder of the Year
    • Revising for mock exams 🙁
    • Installed Deepin on my Dell XPS 13 and it’s great! Screen setup is a pain though. The config window is the worst I’ve ever seen. The installation process is amazing, it’s really graphical and is probably the best installer i’ve ever seen on a distro. Worked straight away with my DSP MST hub (unlike Ubuntu) and I would highly recommend it as a starting distro.
  • Tony H
    • Buying and installing Windows 10 1903, and Mint19.1 mate to another E7440 I picked up on eBay, not only was it a good deal for the advertised specification, it was even better when I got it and it was an i7 as opposed from the i5 in the description on the auction. WIN
    • Well it’s finally happened I fell for an online scam during the week, I couldn’t find my Euro health insurance card (ehic) and went online to order a new one, and got caught out by a dodgy processing website that charges you to do what you can do for free. ALL my fault, not feeling well due to an ear problem and in a rush I didn’t read all the small print on the site. As my wife did it last time I didn’t realize it was an NHS Portal and should have had the NHS logo etc. This has cost me £33 to learn a painful lesson in how not to behave on the web. Made me feel quite vulnerable, and understanding of others that get scammed far more seriously than that.
    • And after a conversation with Ken Fallon, HPR will be airing the first episode of Distrohoppers Digest to give us a little publicity (Thursday 20th June 2019 http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2839)
  • Joe
    • Family in town.  Minimal projects
    • Working on a bluetooth speaker.
      • Had no battery when i received it but a 5v power was hooked directly up to the battery power input.
      • The speaker was also hooked up manually and no solder was used.  The speaker did not work at all until I took it apart and moved the connections
      • I took apart a battery bank and a couple of USB cables so that I could give it external and battery power and soldered all the connections.  Works pretty well now.
      • Drilled a hole in the back so that you can get to the button on the bank and see the lights so you know how much charge it has.
      • Got a hot glue gun to hold the board in the correct position.
    • My dad brought me an Atari 1010
    • Ordered a bunch of broken speakers and headphones to work on, plus I am consolidating a bunch of the old ones that I have for my vacation next week.  Going to do a lot of trouble shooting and soldering. Yes I spend my vacation doing crazy crap
    • Borderlands 2: Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary
      • Doesn’t work on Linux yet.  So far even with proton for me although I see others have it working fine.
      • Going to try Lutris
      • May have to finally go fix my Windows install.

The News:

  1. Firefox has Tracking Protection baked in
  2. E3 2019: games list, news and everything you might have missed
    1. Josh is VERY excited about the new MS Flight sim
  3. Zorin OS 15 release
  4. Deluge 2.0 BitTorrent Client released
  5. OpenProject 9, FOSS alternative to Trello or Jira, released
  6. Unity Editor for games officially available for Linux, supported by CentOS and Ubuntu for now – NOT OPEN SOURCE

Linux Innards:

  • Leo
    • SSH stands for Secure SHell. It’s a remote control protocol that allows you to remotely give commands to another machine.
    • If you’re good at networking, this means that you can touch files or run commands at home, when you’re on the other side of the world!
    • We’ll focus on the local network today
    • Make sure the user account that you want to use is created on the computer you want to connect to. In my case, that’s the Leo account
    • While you’re creating the account on the computer you want to control, also install the package: sudo apt install openssh-server. The ssh server turns on by default, and enables itself on startup. systemctl disable ssh will stop this from starting up on boot.
    • Back on your local machine, use the command ssh $USER@$IP. As long as there isn’t a firewall in the way, it’ll ask if you want to remember this machine. Hit yes and supply your username and password.
    • You can now run any command you would normally run as if you were right in front of the remote computer. Update things, install new packages, whatever you’re comfortable with in the terminal.
    • The real benefit here is the file sharing that’s enabled with this process through SFTP.
    • Open up Nemo or Caja (I believe Thunar has this ability too, but the names might be different), click File, then Connect to Server. Make sure SSH is the protocol and supply the IP address in the Server field, and fill out your username and password. This will log you in and give you access to all the files your user has permission to.

—–

    • To add a large amount of security, you would want to use Public Key Authentication. In short, you create a padlock and a key. The padlock is your public key, and the key to open it is your private key. You can give anybody your public key, but you MUST keep your private key private. Otherwise, the security is gone
    • To create this pair, run ssh-keygen. Your keys get stuck in your home folder within the .ssh directory. The permissions are automatically set on your private key to only allow you to see and change it. No one else on the system has permissions.
    • To place the public key on the remote computer, use the ssh-copy-id command. In my case the command would look like ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub leo@$IP
    • You can now log in via SSH in the terminal, or through Nemo or Caja with no password at all! Your keys are being used and you’re now much harder to hack.
    • The last step would be to disable password authentication entirely. In the terminal run sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Find the line that says PasswordAuthentication no, and remove the hash mark from the beginning of the line.
    • Restart the ssh service with systemctl restart ssh
    • Now, your key is the only key that will work for ssh.
  • Joe
    • I wanted to go a bit further with automating ssh and show something useful that you can do on a daily basis with it
    • So i am going to tell you how to setup sshfs so that you can access all of your files as if they were local.
    • Access times are pretty good.  Even from outside my network i am able to watch movies using VLC
    • So even with a thin device you can have all of your files as if the drives are mounted to the local machine.
    • First make sure that the ssh keys are setup as described by a couple of the others.
    • Next make sure that sshfs is installed.  It might be already installed but it needs to be on the client machine at least.
    • Then you need to create a local folder to mount to.  This should be set to some permissions that you can use.  755 should do it.
    • Test your sshfs
      • sshfs user@remote:/location path/localMount -C
      • The -C allows for compression which is very helpful
      • I usually mount my whole /mnt from my server to whatever folder i setup
    • The next thing to do is setup some alias’ so that your less used mounts are easy to access
    • Then setup a couple of scripts so that you can automount the remote drives whenever you are connected to the internet.  Also to correctly unmount and remove when you lose connection.
    • This is done using tools that are already available to use in linux mint
    • I redid my setup to verify that it works and it is not perfect but it works pretty well
    • There are 2 places that you are going to want to put scripts
      • /etc/network/if-up.d/
        • For when you are connecting to a network
      • And /etc/network/if-down.d/
        • For when you are disconnecting
      • The files that you create should be bash scripts but should not have .sh in the name
      • /etc/network/if-up.d/
        • /etc/network/if-up.d/name
        • #!/bin/sh
        • sleep 5s
        • su user <<‘EOF’
        • sshfs user@server:/mnt /mnt/local -C
        • EOF
        • I want the mount to be owned by the user instead of root but the script needs to be owned and run by root hence the su user
        • I want the network to be fully connected to i am giving a 5 second delay.
        •  etc/network/if-down.d/name
          • #!/bin/sh
          • killall -9 sshfs
          • sudo umount /mnt/local
          • #This will clear the mount so you don’t get conflicts on reconnect
          • This is a very simple setup that works a large portion of the time.  I want to re-write the scripts so that they are always looking to see if the mount is connected and for internet connections in a much more robust manner.  Probably by pinging a website and checking for the mount.
        • My server is overheating under load again.  Which means it is a motherboard problem. So when i can afford it i will need to rebuild.  Not sure what kind of setup i should get.
          • Needs to be pretty fast
          • Lots of ram
          • Space for 5 3.5 inch drives
          • Preferably quiet
          • Not huge
  • Moss – So you want to know how hard it is. Most of our listeners understand that I’m the least technical member on the mintCast team… Well, it works. I may not remember how we got there, but with a lot of help from Leo, I managed to ssh to my wife’s computer. Checked files in Terminal, ran caja, opened her external drive. Whoopee.

Vibrations from the Ether:

[A large number of HP printers still have the printhead on the ink cartridge. Here is a 2.5-year-old list (we could not find an update).]

Check This Out!

  • Tony H
    • If you do need to create an install medium for Windows 10 which now needs a 5Gb disc, and you don’t have a dual layer DVD RW or DLDVD and need to create a bootable USB drive check out this utility, WoeUSB. In the last week I have used it to create the latest Win10 1903 .iso into a number of USB drives for installing to a couple of machines I was preparing for other people. In fact Etcher even suggested using it to create the bootable disk when I tried to use it to do the job, if it doesn’t like the drive you’re using, use GParted to wipe the partition recreate the partition table then format to fat32, after that it should work fine.

Announcements:

  • No Tony H next show as he will be sailing the high seas on Holiday :-))
  • Maybe no Joe

Wrap-Up:

Thanks:

  • Josh for working on redesigning our website, setting up the YouTube and Twitch streams, and providing lots of technical help.
  • Bytemark hosting for providing the new hosting server for the website. (Which will roll out soon, we promise!)
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files.
  • The folks at Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we use to communicate
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
]]> full 3644 mintCast 311 – SSH (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-311-ssh-mp3/ Wed, 19 Jun 2019 05:12:12 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3642 Download
]]>

Download

Introduction:

  • Welcome to mintCast Episode 311.
  • First up, in our Wanderings, I had to rebuild my network, Moss becomes more reliant on Linux Mint, Joe games on an Atari, Josh gets nominated for awards and installs Deepin, and Tony Hughes gets scammed.
  • Then, in the news, Firefox protects everyone and lots of new releases.
  • In our innards, we talk secure connections.
  • Finally, we wrap up the show with lots of feedback and a couple recommendations

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

  • Leo
    • Got a 64GB SD card (Patriot V30, A1) for Batocera. Gives more room than the 32GB ADATA USB I was using, and fully hides itself within the laptop! And turns out, my HP Stream won’t boot from an SD card, so I had to get a 64GB Sandisk Cruzer Fit. Worked like a charm. Now to find a use for a 64GB SD card.
    • pavucontrol – Pulse Audio Volume Control. Allows me to increase the input volume on the mic on the way in, which allows me to avoid adjusting it within Audacity itself.
    • Arch… a busy week and a dead switch this weekend put my plans on hold
    • Now I’ll be testing out the newish Cisco SG350P and an ERPOE-5.
  • Moss
    • The new job has kept me completely occupied, but I’m listening to more podcasts during drive time. No new money, no new hardware. I did sell the Canon printer at last, and ordered the HDMI cable so I can test those other computers I have.
    • I found that I did not have Mumble or multiple workspaces set up for Ubuntu Budgie 19.04, and ARandR in Bodhi is not that easy compared to Displays, so I will likely continue to use Linux Mint for podcasts for the present. Once again, when you need something to work the first time and every time, Linux Mint for the win.
    • I’ve been polishing my script for the next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest. The last episode could have stood a bit more work on my end, and I will take the learning experience and grow from it.
    • I was hoping to install OpenMandriva Lx 4 on the announced date of June 6, but it is not out yet and the announcement seems to have been pulled. Large parts of the openmandriva.org website were giving 404 or 505 errors but have been revived just this week. Softpedia states that the final version will be out “in summer or early autumn”, with no source quoted.
    • The donation to Linux Mint has been made in the name of mintCast Team, as promised (6/1/19, so it will be in the June numbers). I have spent a lot of time being sad as the Destination Linux Telegram group is exploding with all the wonderfulness of SELF.
  • Josh
    • Finalist in Tech4Good awards and the ARM Young Coder of the Year
    • Revising for mock exams 🙁
    • Installed Deepin on my Dell XPS 13 and it’s great! Screen setup is a pain though. The config window is the worst I’ve ever seen. The installation process is amazing, it’s really graphical and is probably the best installer i’ve ever seen on a distro. Worked straight away with my DSP MST hub (unlike Ubuntu) and I would highly recommend it as a starting distro.
  • Tony H
    • Buying and installing Windows 10 1903, and Mint19.1 mate to another E7440 I picked up on eBay, not only was it a good deal for the advertised specification, it was even better when I got it and it was an i7 as opposed from the i5 in the description on the auction. WIN
    • Well it’s finally happened I fell for an online scam during the week, I couldn’t find my Euro health insurance card (ehic) and went online to order a new one, and got caught out by a dodgy processing website that charges you to do what you can do for free. ALL my fault, not feeling well due to an ear problem and in a rush I didn’t read all the small print on the site. As my wife did it last time I didn’t realize it was an NHS Portal and should have had the NHS logo etc. This has cost me £33 to learn a painful lesson in how not to behave on the web. Made me feel quite vulnerable, and understanding of others that get scammed far more seriously than that.
    • And after a conversation with Ken Fallon, HPR will be airing the first episode of Distrohoppers Digest to give us a little publicity (Thursday 20th June 2019 http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2839)
  • Joe
    • Family in town.  Minimal projects
    • Working on a bluetooth speaker.
      • Had no battery when i received it but a 5v power was hooked directly up to the battery power input.
      • The speaker was also hooked up manually and no solder was used.  The speaker did not work at all until I took it apart and moved the connections
      • I took apart a battery bank and a couple of USB cables so that I could give it external and battery power and soldered all the connections.  Works pretty well now.
      • Drilled a hole in the back so that you can get to the button on the bank and see the lights so you know how much charge it has.
      • Got a hot glue gun to hold the board in the correct position.
    • My dad brought me an Atari 1010
    • Ordered a bunch of broken speakers and headphones to work on, plus I am consolidating a bunch of the old ones that I have for my vacation next week.  Going to do a lot of trouble shooting and soldering. Yes I spend my vacation doing crazy crap
    • Borderlands 2: Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary
      • Doesn’t work on Linux yet.  So far even with proton for me although I see others have it working fine.
      • Going to try Lutris
      • May have to finally go fix my Windows install.

The News:

  1. Firefox has Tracking Protection baked in
  2. E3 2019: games list, news and everything you might have missed
    1. Josh is VERY excited about the new MS Flight sim
  3. Zorin OS 15 release
  4. Deluge 2.0 BitTorrent Client released
  5. OpenProject 9, FOSS alternative to Trello or Jira, released
  6. Unity Editor for games officially available for Linux, supported by CentOS and Ubuntu for now – NOT OPEN SOURCE

Linux Innards:

  • Leo
    • SSH stands for Secure SHell. It’s a remote control protocol that allows you to remotely give commands to another machine.
    • If you’re good at networking, this means that you can touch files or run commands at home, when you’re on the other side of the world!
    • We’ll focus on the local network today
    • Make sure the user account that you want to use is created on the computer you want to connect to. In my case, that’s the Leo account
    • While you’re creating the account on the computer you want to control, also install the package: sudo apt install openssh-server. The ssh server turns on by default, and enables itself on startup. systemctl disable ssh will stop this from starting up on boot.
    • Back on your local machine, use the command ssh $USER@$IP. As long as there isn’t a firewall in the way, it’ll ask if you want to remember this machine. Hit yes and supply your username and password.
    • You can now run any command you would normally run as if you were right in front of the remote computer. Update things, install new packages, whatever you’re comfortable with in the terminal.
    • The real benefit here is the file sharing that’s enabled with this process through SFTP.
    • Open up Nemo or Caja (I believe Thunar has this ability too, but the names might be different), click File, then Connect to Server. Make sure SSH is the protocol and supply the IP address in the Server field, and fill out your username and password. This will log you in and give you access to all the files your user has permission to.

—–

    • To add a large amount of security, you would want to use Public Key Authentication. In short, you create a padlock and a key. The padlock is your public key, and the key to open it is your private key. You can give anybody your public key, but you MUST keep your private key private. Otherwise, the security is gone
    • To create this pair, run ssh-keygen. Your keys get stuck in your home folder within the .ssh directory. The permissions are automatically set on your private key to only allow you to see and change it. No one else on the system has permissions.
    • To place the public key on the remote computer, use the ssh-copy-id command. In my case the command would look like ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub leo@$IP
    • You can now log in via SSH in the terminal, or through Nemo or Caja with no password at all! Your keys are being used and you’re now much harder to hack.
    • The last step would be to disable password authentication entirely. In the terminal run sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Find the line that says PasswordAuthentication no, and remove the hash mark from the beginning of the line.
    • Restart the ssh service with systemctl restart ssh
    • Now, your key is the only key that will work for ssh.
  • Joe
    • I wanted to go a bit further with automating ssh and show something useful that you can do on a daily basis with it
    • So i am going to tell you how to setup sshfs so that you can access all of your files as if they were local.
    • Access times are pretty good.  Even from outside my network i am able to watch movies using VLC
    • So even with a thin device you can have all of your files as if the drives are mounted to the local machine.
    • First make sure that the ssh keys are setup as described by a couple of the others.
    • Next make sure that sshfs is installed.  It might be already installed but it needs to be on the client machine at least.
    • Then you need to create a local folder to mount to.  This should be set to some permissions that you can use.  755 should do it.
    • Test your sshfs
      • sshfs user@remote:/location path/localMount -C
      • The -C allows for compression which is very helpful
      • I usually mount my whole /mnt from my server to whatever folder i setup
    • The next thing to do is setup some alias’ so that your less used mounts are easy to access
    • Then setup a couple of scripts so that you can automount the remote drives whenever you are connected to the internet.  Also to correctly unmount and remove when you lose connection.
    • This is done using tools that are already available to use in linux mint
    • I redid my setup to verify that it works and it is not perfect but it works pretty well
    • There are 2 places that you are going to want to put scripts
      • /etc/network/if-up.d/
        • For when you are connecting to a network
      • And /etc/network/if-down.d/
        • For when you are disconnecting
      • The files that you create should be bash scripts but should not have .sh in the name
      • /etc/network/if-up.d/
        • /etc/network/if-up.d/name
        • #!/bin/sh
        • sleep 5s
        • su user <<‘EOF’
        • sshfs user@server:/mnt /mnt/local -C
        • EOF
      • I want the mount to be owned by the user instead of root but the script needs to be owned and run by root hence the su user
      • I want the network to be fully connected to i am giving a 5 second delay.
      • etc/network/if-down.d/name
        • #!/bin/sh
        • killall -9 sshfs
        • sudo umount /mnt/local
        • #This will clear the mount so you don’t get conflicts on reconnect
    • This is a very simple setup that works a large portion of the time.  I want to re-write the scripts so that they are always looking to see if the mount is connected and for internet connections in a much more robust manner.  Probably by pinging a website and checking for the mount.
    • My server is overheating under load again.  Which means it is a motherboard problem. So when i can afford it i will need to rebuild.  Not sure what kind of setup i should get.
      • Needs to be pretty fast
      • Lots of ram
      • Space for 5 3.5 inch drives
      • Preferably quiet
      • Not huge
  • Moss – So you want to know how hard it is. Most of our listeners understand that I’m the least technical member on the mintCast team… Well, it works. I may not remember how we got there, but with a lot of help from Leo, I managed to ssh to my wife’s computer. Checked files in Terminal, ran caja, opened her external drive. Whoopee.

Vibrations from the Ether:

[A large number of HP printers still have the printhead on the ink cartridge. Here is a 2.5-year-old list (we could not find an update).]

Check This Out!

  • Tony H
    • If you do need to create an install medium for Windows 10 which now needs a 5Gb disc, and you don’t have a dual layer DVD RW or DLDVD and need to create a bootable USB drive check out this utility, WoeUSB. In the last week I have used it to create the latest Win10 1903 .iso into a number of USB drives for installing to a couple of machines I was preparing for other people. In fact Etcher even suggested using it to create the bootable disk when I tried to use it to do the job, if it doesn’t like the drive you’re using, use GParted to wipe the partition recreate the partition table then format to fat32, after that it should work fine.

Announcements:

  • No Tony H next show as he will be sailing the high seas on Holiday :-))
  • Maybe no Joe

Wrap-Up:

Thanks:

  • Josh for working on redesigning our website, setting up the YouTube and Twitch streams, and providing lots of technical help.
  • Bytemark hosting for providing the new hosting server for the website. (Which will roll out soon, we promise!)
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files.
  • The folks at Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we use to communicate
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
]]> full 3642 mintCast 310 – Mint https://mintcast.org/mintcast-310-mint/ Wed, 05 Jun 2019 01:50:23 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3634 Download
]]>

Download

Introduction:

    • Welcome to mintCast Episode 310.
    • This is Leo and with me this week are Bo, Joe, Moss, Josh and Tony Hughes, and we’re recording live on Sunday 2nd June 2019.
    • First up, in our Wanderings, I get familiar with Batocera, Bo talks Doom 2016 and automatic Arch, Josh upgrades our live streaming setup and gives a keynote in France, Tony Hughes repairs Firefox and a laptop, Moss fixes a slow bootup thanks to Discord and takes on Bodh, and Joe wades through broken projects but enjoys Texas Linux Fest.
    • In the news, we talk life and death for Linux, some new apps, and what’s going on with Linux Mint
    • In the Innards, we dive into why we use Mint.
    • Finally, we rummage through feedback.BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:
      • Leo
        • Playing with Batocera. The install was super easy. Just a quick Etcher image copy.
          • Boot up is very quick on a 11” HP Stream using a fast-ish flash drive. 80MB/s read. Had to set Legacy boot, but UEFI options were available. Maybe It was just my laptop. More testing required!
          • I realized after booting that a second partition called SHARED showed up. It used up the rest of the empty space on the flash drive. Gave me about 28GB. This is where you’re supposed to store ROMS, or you can easily use a second drive for this.
          • The wife and I tried, Atari 2600, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis (Mega Drive), Gameboy Advance, Playstation 1 and N64.
          • All this using a PS3 controller over USB. Had absolutely no issue setting it up.
      • Josh
        • Went to Lyon, France to give a keynote about Open Source.
        • Also did a Raspberry Jam event to give developers an insight as to what kids are doing with coding in school
        • A more complicated Live streaming setup (MacroDeck, Kauna, Youtube Chat, VoiceMeeter, UniversalSoundboard, OBS & Youtube’s new streaming dashboard, Using Chatv2 (http://chatv2.septapus.com) to change the CSS on the OBS browser overlay)
        • New PCBs arrived after a mess up on the last ones, these ones fit but the LEDs are a nightmare to solder!
      • Tony H
        • Recording and editing the intro and outgoing segments of Distrohoppers Digest to include the music and save a little time editing the final show each month.
        • Repairing my Firefox install which after the update to ff67 broke and would not start, after a suggestion in one of the many community forums we are in I deleted the .mozilla folder from home, restarted Firefox then reinstalled my backup .mozilla folder and all is well again. (wipes brow)
        • Myself and Moss recorded the second episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest last Wednesday and it is now out in the wild for your listening pleasure. We review Fedora 29/30 and Linux Lite 4.4.  The feed is at : http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/jejQf
        • Installing Windows 10 to a Sony Vaio i5 laptop after upgrading it to a 128Gb SSD and 8Gb RAM, this was for a friend as the laptop was dog slow with a load of manufacturer bloatware. The slow spinning HDD didn’t help. After reinstalling and updating to the May 2019 update, the Laptop boots in just over 25s  
        • Buying a Dell E7440 with a 256Gb SSD and 16Gb RAM on eBay and getting what I thought was a good deal at $210 (including delivery)
      • Moss
        • Tony and I had a lovely meeting for the next Distrohoppers’ Digest. As Tony said, recording happened on Wednesday, May 29, and we’re working on our next episode now. The first episode had 135 downloads (6/1). I am still debating what to use for the June show, and am considering cheating and just reviewing Bodhi 5.0.0, since I saved most of the things I had to do to get it installed and I love using it so much. I did check out the latest version of Feren OS, but had problems from installation on and have decided not to go there at this time. I will probably wait until June 6 or so when OpenMandriva Lx 4 gets released and put that on the 4th partition.
        • I had a chat with listener Kat in our Discord group regarding my slow boot times on Bodhi, as I’ve discussed. She helped me fix it, and now my boot time is 1:16 instead of 3:05. Apparently, the swap sector was reformatted and renamed by one of my other installations, and Bodhi was waiting for that sector. We managed to tell the machine the current name of the swap sector. Bodhi has decided that if we’re going to call it by that name, it doesn’t need to load it, so it just marks it “Failed” and continues. As I have 8 Gb RAM, I really don’t need a swap, so no harm. Kat is amazing.
        • I did sign up for the free parts of Librem One, which got me Librem Chat and Librem Social… in other words, Riot and Mastodon. I have one contact in Mastodon, thanks to this show, so it’s not totally useless and it WAS totally free.
        • I will not be going to SELF in June. Only $130 of the $750 goal was reached. I will make efforts to save towards going next year, and I have already sent a $55 donation to Linux Mint (although I had to contact them via email to tell them it was to be credited as being from our team, not me personally.) I will send another $55 to Archive.org soon, and the remaining $20, by designation of the donor, will be kept to help my wife and I with immigration issues.
        • I have a new job. I got a position as an auto parts driver for O’Reilly Auto Parts. using their car or truck, which is a big change from Uber. Not much per hour, and it’s part time; the manager said he could get me hours at other stores, but that will likely take a week or three.  I got a positive response from one of the computer jobs I applied for, but they said their business lags during the summer and they promised they would call me when Autumn approaches.
        • The rehabilitation facility has sent my mother home — not because she’s significantly better, but because her insurance has run out. She will now have to spend her own money to get 24/7 care until she is stronger. The alternative not taken was to consign her healthcare and enter a nursing home, no longer living independently. We all love the US healthcare system.
      • Joe
        • Attempted to install batocera on one of the really old windows tablets that I spoke about a few weeks ago
          • Would not read the USB at boot for some reason.  May have to do with PAE
          • Then I tried to install retroarch but there was a problem with the graphics drivers thank you -vvv
          • So i tried to install a genesis emulator and got the same issue.  
        • I am thinking that my garage computer might have some overheating issues in the dallas weather so i am looking at a way to keep this gigabit brix computer cool enough to run.  
        • Took my t100ta apart again to see if i could re-seat the usb port and the answer is no.  I got out the soldering iron and heated the feet to reflow the solder and it still will not charge.  
        • Seems like a week for broken projects.
        • Woo, I have been watching tronicsfix on youtube and decided to bust out the old xbox one that my former roommate left me when he moved to Arizona.
          • Originally thought it had a bad hard drive because it was having issues when he was using it.
          • It still might have hard drive issues but it turned on and updated and has run several games with no issues
          • Its weird but even though i am not signed into his account i am still able to access all the games he has used on it.  Even the ones that are currently not installed. I uninstalled all the games but i still have access to reinstall them.
          • I assume that he also had files on there that only his user has access to because of how full the HDD still is.  
          • May do a full wipe and sell because I have little use for it
          • May also give it to my daughters and put the 360 they have on a shelf as a backup for the one my wife has because they seem to die quick these days and the xbox one does not play a lot of the games that she likes
        • TLF
          • Loved getting to talk to the Jupiter Broadcasting team
            • Ell and myself had a good conversation about audiobooks and the titles that we enjoy
            • Got to meet 5150
            • Talked to a couple of listeners really enjoyed that
            • Shout out to Mordency, Ed and Danny
          • Got to go to a containerization talk and a couple of ansible talks.

      THE NEWS:

      1. Antergos discontinued, community may pick it up under a different name if enough interest is shown
        1. Endeavour, Antergos community’s next step
      2. Zettler Markdown Editor
      3. Slimbook Battery Optimizer for laptop users running Ubuntu-based distros
      4. Scientific Linux and Antergos are shutting down: It’s time for Linux Mint to go
      5. Linux Mint Monthly News
        1. Wine 4 stable will be backported for easy installation and use.
          1. This work will relieve issues like, obsolete Wine packages, no Vulkan, being forced to launch Windows binaries from the CLI, and non-working controllers.
          2. This will soon be available with the metapackage wine-installer and wine-desktop-files and replaces Wine 3.0 in the Ubuntu repo.
        2. A new look on the old community website. Inactive users and info were purged.
          1. With the removal of features like “friends” and “user scores” the site became much more responsive.
          2. Hint at a new logo
        3. Xed, the default text editor, will soon support toggling comments and comment blocks. This allows you to press Ctrl+/ to comment entire sections of code out!
        4. The settings widget has been rewritten in python-xapp. This reduces 2200 lines of code down to less than 700. This resulted in better performance, a more consistent look, and makes the code much more portable so other projects can take advantage.

      LINUX INNARDS:

      Why Choose Linux? Why Mint?

      • Leo
        • Linux Mint is one of the few distros that keeps the basic desktop paradigm.
        • Timeshift and a version of Ukuu make it one of the easiest distros to get going for new users. It’s no wonder it’s recommended as much as it is.
        • People aren’t gonna work on what you want them to work on if they’re doing it for free. They’ll work on what they want.
        • Ubuntu and Mint’s trajectories are different. One of the biggest examples of this is that Mint ships with Flatpak, not Snap. However, Mint doesn’t prevent you from adding the snapd package yourself. You get the best of both!
        • No matter what fear, uncertainty and doubt gets said, Mint’s not going anywhere.
      • Josh
        • Ubuntu was buggy
        • Tony H recommended it (he’s the UK’s mint promoter!)
        • Nice UI
        • Friendly community
        • Don’t want to get kicked off mintCast 🙂 (near-zero chance of that – Moss)
      • Tony Hughes

      For me the main issue first is why do I choose Linux over those other popular proprietary operating systems. The first issue is the cost of the hardware associated with the Apple ecosystem as far as I am aware MacOS is a very secure and less intrusive OS than Windows and because of its popularity with the creative community it is well served with some of the most popular software not available in Linux, but I feel that the hardware is vastly overpriced for what you get, compared with similar hardware from other manufacturers.

      Windows on the other hand is very intrusive, and although it has become more stable as the years have passed, I personally would not use it for my daily driver despite Microsoft now virtually giving Windows 10 away if you have a Windows 7/8 licence for personal use. Also I refurbish a lot of older PC hardware and the cost of a new licence if you do not have an active one is prohibitive, and often more than the value of the hardware you are reinstalling. Also the process of doing a fresh install of Windows is quite long, and while I can install Linux and have it fully updated within an hour on most hardware from the last 8-9 years and have a fully productive PC with all the most common software needed all ready installed, in Windows (and Mac, as far as I know) I would have to take further time, and if not installing open source software, spend more money to get the productivity software installed before I can use the PC.

      When I first started to use Linux in 2006/7 I started with the then fairly new kid on the block Ubuntu, depending on the hardware this was Gnome or the lighter Xubuntu with the xfce DE which would be usable on a Pentium 2 with 196Mb of RAM. In 2009 Ubuntu with the Gnome 2 DE became my daily driver after I ditched my dual boot setup with Windows XP, having hardly used the Windows partition in almost a year. But it was the Unity DE that lead me to move over to Mint as the workflow of Unity just didn’t work for me on a Desktop PC for what I use it for.

      Over the last 10 years I have tried many Linux distros, mainly of the Debian family. I have delved into the world of RPM as well, but I haven’t found a distribution which has offered me anything that Mint doesn’t and is as easy to use. However I recognise that modern Linux is increasingly becoming more refined, and despite the different DE’s available many of the most popular Linux Distros out there could, once I became familiar with their little differences, do just as good a job of meeting my computing needs as Linux Mint (Mate) does for me. I say this while typing on a PCLinuxOS setup on test for the next DH podcast.  

      • Bo
        • The first time I saw linux – Playing MTG with a guy who had it on his laptop. “Oh, it’s like windows but you can make it how you want it”
        • My first distro – Some version of Ubuntu, I have no idea. My friends and I had a the classic installation party.
        • I quit when Counter Strike wouldn’t work.
        • My second installation – Fedora, dude at GS brought in a Fedora laptop.
        • I sorta became the Free as in Beer, Free as in Speech guy amongst my friends.
        • Decided to start podcasting on Linux. Still gaming on Windows.
        • Though I’ve used many distros and am constantly changing, I switched to Linux Mint when Ubuntu switched to Unity. (although I learned to love Unity eventually)
        • I’ve only just now started ditching Windows all together because of the progress of Proton and DXVK.
        • For the past year I’ve had a job working as a CentOS/RHEL sysadmin.
        • With little more experience than most hobbyists I was and am obnoxiously enthusiastic about Linux

       

     

  • Moss – I’ve been playing with Linux since about 2002, not being a programmer or anything, just curious. I had a dislike of Microsoft for lack of diversity and an inability to control viruses and fragmentation and bloatware and updates, things which still persist to this day.  At that time, I had disks and books for Slackware and Red Hat, and they required more brain cells to install than I had available. Then I got a Mandrake disk, loaded it, and it worked. Still didn’t provide all the experience I needed, but it was fun to play with. After a couple years, the new version of Mandrake would not load to my computer, and I’m not one to keep old software unless it works. I tried SuSE (just before it went to OpenSuSE), and that, too, worked but did not give me a full online experience. So I went dormant for a while, and upgraded from my 486DX to a P-II. Every now and then I would poke my head back into Linux, but I couldn’t seem to get any of my friends to develop a similar interest so it mostly stayed in the background.

  • In 2011, after I stopped being Senior Editor at a tiny publishing company, I once again felt comfortable playing on my computer and installed Ubuntu 10.04 (I had played with 8.04 briefly). Then 12.04 came out with Unity (first used in 10.10, but I only do LTS for the most part), and would not install to my system. Rather than try to figure out how to make it work with another desktop or try another distro, I just went back to XP. I had a couple computers during a bad relationship which ran 8 or 8.1, and hated those. When I moved out, I went back to 7. Then Windows tried to force me to version 10. I resisted for a while, learning about all the security issues, and then went ahead and did the “upgrade”. I looked for the security holes, found them, found I could not close all of them no matter what I did and that much of the “wonderful new” software REQUIRED them, and downgraded back to Windows 7 … only to discover it left the holes open. That was enough for me. For some reason, I had resisted trying Linux Mint previously, seeing it as an example of Sturgeon’s Law (95% of everything is crap), but for some reason, I decided to try it. I went from Windows 7 directly to Linux Mint, and have not gone back since. Linux Mint was everything I had hoped for 5 or 10 years earlier. My office package (Ashampoo Office, made by SoftMaker) had a Linux version, so I didn’t even have to change that.I also noticed that it hardly took up any space on my hard drive, and I had a couple external hard drives, so I moved my personal files to an external hard drive, partitioned my computer drive, and started trying other distros while keeping Linux Mint installed. This gives me the best of both worlds — a stable operating system which does everything I need, and room to play with other distros. My Dell PC died, don’t know why but it was on the motherboard, and I got a Lenovo X130e, room for easily 2 partitions. I have since upgraded to a Lenovo T430, about 3 years ago now. But I keep using Linux Mint as my main driver. Because it does everything, every time, predictably. Might be seen as being a bit boring, but that’s why I play with other distros. My current favorite fun distro is Bodhi 5.0.0, and it’s just not as stable.

    • Joe
      • Not going to have much to add here, basically everything everyone else said.
      • I started using mint when it was the one that provided the non-free codecs
      • But what drew me to it is the way the interface is so much like xp or 95 while still looking new. I can use it without making changes or I can customize it how I want.
      • I have to do less installs out of the box which is always a plus.

    VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

    Hilander

    Brad Alexander

    ixSystems has a couple of articles on beating ransomware:

    https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/defeating-cryptolocker-attacks-with-zfs/

    https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/combating-ransomware/

    CHECK THIS OUT!

    • Joe
      • TronicsFix
        • Youtube channel about fixing electronics

    Next show is live on June 16, 2019 at 2 pm CT.

    Wrap-Up:

               Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/

               Twitter @TonyH1212

        th@mintcast.org

        distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com

    Thanks:

    • Josh for working on redesigning our website, setting up the YouTube stream, and providing lots of technical help.
    • Archive.org for hosting our audio files.
    • The folks at Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we use to communicate
    • Bytemark hosting for providing the new hosting server for the website.
    • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
]]> full 3634 mintCast 310 – Mint (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-310-mint-mp3/ Wed, 05 Jun 2019 01:48:42 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3632 Download
]]>

Download

Introduction:

  • Welcome to mintCast Episode 310.
  • This is Leo and with me this week are Bo, Joe, Moss, Josh and Tony Hughes, and we’re recording live on Sunday 2nd June 2019.
  • First up, in our Wanderings, I get familiar with Batocera, Bo talks Doom 2016 and automatic Arch, Josh upgrades our live streaming setup and gives a keynote in France, Tony Hughes repairs Firefox and a laptop, Moss fixes a slow bootup thanks to Discord and takes on Bodh, and Joe wades through broken projects but enjoys Texas Linux Fest.
  • In the news, we talk life and death for Linux, some new apps, and what’s going on with Linux Mint
  • In the Innards, we dive into why we use Mint.
  • Finally, we rummage through feedback.

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

 

  • Leo
    • Playing with Batocera. The install was super easy. Just a quick Etcher image copy.
      • Boot up is very quick on a 11” HP Stream using a fast-ish flash drive. 80MB/s read. Had to set Legacy boot, but UEFI options were available. Maybe It was just my laptop. More testing required!
      • I realized after booting that a second partition called SHARED showed up. It used up the rest of the empty space on the flash drive. Gave me about 28GB. This is where you’re supposed to store ROMS, or you can easily use a second drive for this.
      • The wife and I tried, Atari 2600, NES, SNES, Sega Genesis (Mega Drive), Gameboy Advance, Playstation 1 and N64.
      • All this using a PS3 controller over USB. Had absolutely no issue setting it up.

 

 

  • Josh
    • Went to Lyon, France to give a keynote about Open Source.
    • Also did a Raspberry Jam event to give developers an insight as to what kids are doing with coding in school
    • A more complicated Live streaming setup (MacroDeck, Kauna, Youtube Chat, VoiceMeeter, UniversalSoundboard, OBS & Youtube’s new streaming dashboard, Using Chatv2 (http://chatv2.septapus.com) to change the CSS on the OBS browser overlay)
    • New PCBs arrived after a mess up on the last ones, these ones fit but the LEDs are a nightmare to solder!

 

  • Tony H
    • Recording and editing the intro and outgoing segments of Distrohoppers Digest to include the music and save a little time editing the final show each month.
    • Repairing my Firefox install which after the update to ff67 broke and would not start, after a suggestion in one of the many community forums we are in I deleted the .mozilla folder from home, restarted Firefox then reinstalled my backup .mozilla folder and all is well again. (wipes brow)
    • Myself and Moss recorded the second episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest last Wednesday and it is now out in the wild for your listening pleasure. We review Fedora 29/30 and Linux Lite 4.4.  The feed is at : http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/jejQf
    • Installing Windows 10 to a Sony Vaio i5 laptop after upgrading it to a 128Gb SSD and 8Gb RAM, this was for a friend as the laptop was dog slow with a load of manufacturer bloatware. The slow spinning HDD didn’t help. After reinstalling and updating to the May 2019 update, the Laptop boots in just over 25s  
    • Buying a Dell E7440 with a 256Gb SSD and 16Gb RAM on eBay and getting what I thought was a good deal at $210 (including delivery)

 

  • Moss
    • Tony and I had a lovely meeting for the next Distrohoppers’ Digest. As Tony said, recording happened on Wednesday, May 29, and we’re working on our next episode now. The first episode had 135 downloads (6/1). I am still debating what to use for the June show, and am considering cheating and just reviewing Bodhi 5.0.0, since I saved most of the things I had to do to get it installed and I love using it so much. I did check out the latest version of Feren OS, but had problems from installation on and have decided not to go there at this time. I will probably wait until June 6 or so when OpenMandriva Lx 4 gets released and put that on the 4th partition.
    • I had a chat with listener Kat in our Discord group regarding my slow boot times on Bodhi, as I’ve discussed. She helped me fix it, and now my boot time is 1:16 instead of 3:05. Apparently, the swap sector was reformatted and renamed by one of my other installations, and Bodhi was waiting for that sector. We managed to tell the machine the current name of the swap sector. Bodhi has decided that if we’re going to call it by that name, it doesn’t need to load it, so it just marks it “Failed” and continues. As I have 8 Gb RAM, I really don’t need a swap, so no harm. Kat is amazing.
    • I did sign up for the free parts of Librem One, which got me Librem Chat and Librem Social… in other words, Riot and Mastodon. I have one contact in Mastodon, thanks to this show, so it’s not totally useless and it WAS totally free.
    • I will not be going to SELF in June. Only $130 of the $750 goal was reached. I will make efforts to save towards going next year, and I have already sent a $55 donation to Linux Mint (although I had to contact them via email to tell them it was to be credited as being from our team, not me personally.) I will send another $55 to Archive.org soon, and the remaining $20, by designation of the donor, will be kept to help my wife and I with immigration issues.
    • I have a new job. I got a position as an auto parts driver for O’Reilly Auto Parts. using their car or truck, which is a big change from Uber. Not much per hour, and it’s part time; the manager said he could get me hours at other stores, but that will likely take a week or three.  I got a positive response from one of the computer jobs I applied for, but they said their business lags during the summer and they promised they would call me when Autumn approaches.
    • The rehabilitation facility has sent my mother home — not because she’s significantly better, but because her insurance has run out. She will now have to spend her own money to get 24/7 care until she is stronger. The alternative not taken was to consign her healthcare and enter a nursing home, no longer living independently. We all love the US healthcare system.
  • Joe
    • Attempted to install batocera on one of the really old windows tablets that I spoke about a few weeks ago
      • Would not read the USB at boot for some reason.  May have to do with PAE
      • Then I tried to install retroarch but there was a problem with the graphics drivers thank you -vvv
      • So i tried to install a genesis emulator and got the same issue.  
    • I am thinking that my garage computer might have some overheating issues in the dallas weather so i am looking at a way to keep this gigabit brix computer cool enough to run.  
    • Took my t100ta apart again to see if i could re-seat the usb port and the answer is no.  I got out the soldering iron and heated the feet to reflow the solder and it still will not charge.  
    • Seems like a week for broken projects.
    • Woo, I have been watching tronicsfix on youtube and decided to bust out the old xbox one that my former roommate left me when he moved to Arizona.
      • Originally thought it had a bad hard drive because it was having issues when he was using it.
      • It still might have hard drive issues but it turned on and updated and has run several games with no issues
      • Its weird but even though i am not signed into his account i am still able to access all the games he has used on it.  Even the ones that are currently not installed. I uninstalled all the games but i still have access to reinstall them.
      • I assume that he also had files on there that only his user has access to because of how full the HDD still is.  
      • May do a full wipe and sell because I have little use for it
      • May also give it to my daughters and put the 360 they have on a shelf as a backup for the one my wife has because they seem to die quick these days and the xbox one does not play a lot of the games that she likes
    • TLF
      • Loved getting to talk to the Jupiter Broadcasting team
        • Ell and myself had a good conversation about audiobooks and the titles that we enjoy
        • Got to meet 5150
        • Talked to a couple of listeners really enjoyed that
        • Shout out to Mordency, Ed and Danny
      • Got to go to a containerization talk and a couple of ansible talks.

 

THE NEWS:

  1. Antergos discontinued, community may pick it up under a different name if enough interest is shown
    1. Endeavour, Antergos community’s next step
  2. Zettler Markdown Editor
  3. Slimbook Battery Optimizer for laptop users running Ubuntu-based distros
  4. Scientific Linux and Antergos are shutting down: It’s time for Linux Mint to go
  5. Linux Mint Monthly News
    1. Wine 4 stable will be backported for easy installation and use.
      1. This work will relieve issues like, obsolete Wine packages, no Vulkan, being forced to launch Windows binaries from the CLI, and non-working controllers.
      2. This will soon be available with the metapackage wine-installer and wine-desktop-files and replaces Wine 3.0 in the Ubuntu repo.
    2. A new look on the old community website. Inactive users and info were purged.
      1. With the removal of features like “friends” and “user scores” the site became much more responsive.
      2. Hint at a new logo
    3. Xed, the default text editor, will soon support toggling comments and comment blocks. This allows you to press Ctrl+/ to comment entire sections of code out!
    4. The settings widget has been rewritten in python-xapp. This reduces 2200 lines of code down to less than 700. This resulted in better performance, a more consistent look, and makes the code much more portable so other projects can take advantage.

 

LINUX INNARDS:

Why Choose Linux? Why Mint?

 

  • Leo
    • Linux Mint is one of the few distros that keeps the basic desktop paradigm.
    • Timeshift and a version of Ukuu make it one of the easiest distros to get going for new users. It’s no wonder it’s recommended as much as it is.
    • People aren’t gonna work on what you want them to work on if they’re doing it for free. They’ll work on what they want.
    • Ubuntu and Mint’s trajectories are different. One of the biggest examples of this is that Mint ships with Flatpak, not Snap. However, Mint doesn’t prevent you from adding the snapd package yourself. You get the best of both!
    • No matter what fear, uncertainty and doubt gets said, Mint’s not going anywhere.

 

  • Josh
    • Ubuntu was buggy
    • Tony H recommended it (he’s the UK’s mint promoter!)
    • Nice UI
    • Friendly community
    • Don’t want to get kicked off mintCast 🙂 (near-zero chance of that – Moss)

 

  • Tony Hughes

For me the main issue first is why do I choose Linux over those other popular proprietary operating systems. The first issue is the cost of the hardware associated with the Apple ecosystem as far as I am aware MacOS is a very secure and less intrusive OS than Windows and because of its popularity with the creative community it is well served with some of the most popular software not available in Linux, but I feel that the hardware is vastly overpriced for what you get, compared with similar hardware from other manufacturers.

 

Windows on the other hand is very intrusive, and although it has become more stable as the years have passed, I personally would not use it for my daily driver despite Microsoft now virtually giving Windows 10 away if you have a Windows 7/8 licence for personal use. Also I refurbish a lot of older PC hardware and the cost of a new licence if you do not have an active one is prohibitive, and often more than the value of the hardware you are reinstalling. Also the process of doing a fresh install of Windows is quite long, and while I can install Linux and have it fully updated within an hour on most hardware from the last 8-9 years and have a fully productive PC with all the most common software needed all ready installed, in Windows (and Mac, as far as I know) I would have to take further time, and if not installing open source software, spend more money to get the productivity software installed before I can use the PC.

 

When I first started to use Linux in 2006/7 I started with the then fairly new kid on the block Ubuntu, depending on the hardware this was Gnome or the lighter Xubuntu with the xfce DE which would be usable on a Pentium 2 with 196Mb of RAM. In 2009 Ubuntu with the Gnome 2 DE became my daily driver after I ditched my dual boot setup with Windows XP, having hardly used the Windows partition in almost a year. But it was the Unity DE that lead me to move over to Mint as the workflow of Unity just didn’t work for me on a Desktop PC for what I use it for.

 

Over the last 10 years I have tried many Linux distros, mainly of the Debian family. I have delved into the world of RPM as well, but I haven’t found a distribution which has offered me anything that Mint doesn’t and is as easy to use. However I recognise that modern Linux is increasingly becoming more refined, and despite the different DE’s available many of the most popular Linux Distros out there could, once I became familiar with their little differences, do just as good a job of meeting my computing needs as Linux Mint (Mate) does for me. I say this while typing on a PCLinuxOS setup on test for the next DH podcast.  

 

  • Bo
    • The first time I saw linux – Playing MTG with a guy who had it on his laptop. “Oh, it’s like windows but you can make it how you want it”
    • My first distro – Some version of Ubuntu, I have no idea. My friends and I had a the classic installation party.
    • I quit when Counter Strike wouldn’t work.
    • My second installation – Fedora, dude at GS brought in a Fedora laptop.
    • I sorta became the Free as in Beer, Free as in Speech guy amongst my friends.
    • Decided to start podcasting on Linux. Still gaming on Windows.
    • Though I’ve used many distros and am constantly changing, I switched to Linux Mint when Ubuntu switched to Unity. (although I learned to love Unity eventually)
    • I’ve only just now started ditching Windows all together because of the progress of Proton and DXVK.
    • For the past year I’ve had a job working as a CentOS/RHEL sysadmin.
    • With little more experience than most hobbyists I was and am obnoxiously enthusiastic about Linux

 

  • Moss – I’ve been playing with Linux since about 2002, not being a programmer or anything, just curious. I had a dislike of Microsoft for lack of diversity and an inability to control viruses and fragmentation and bloatware and updates, things which still persist to this day.  At that time, I had disks and books for Slackware and Red Hat, and they required more brain cells to install than I had available. Then I got a Mandrake disk, loaded it, and it worked. Still didn’t provide all the experience I needed, but it was fun to play with. After a couple years, the new version of Mandrake would not load to my computer, and I’m not one to keep old software unless it works. I tried SuSE (just before it went to OpenSuSE), and that, too, worked but did not give me a full online experience. So I went dormant for a while, and upgraded from my 486DX to a P-II. Every now and then I would poke my head back into Linux, but I couldn’t seem to get any of my friends to develop a similar interest so it mostly stayed in the background.

  • In 2011, after I stopped being Senior Editor at a tiny publishing company, I once again felt comfortable playing on my computer and installed Ubuntu 10.04 (I had played with 8.04 briefly). Then 12.04 came out with Unity (first used in 10.10, but I only do LTS for the most part), and would not install to my system. Rather than try to figure out how to make it work with another desktop or try another distro, I just went back to XP. I had a couple computers during a bad relationship which ran 8 or 8.1, and hated those. When I moved out, I went back to 7. Then Windows tried to force me to version 10. I resisted for a while, learning about all the security issues, and then went ahead and did the “upgrade”. I looked for the security holes, found them, found I could not close all of them no matter what I did and that much of the “wonderful new” software REQUIRED them, and downgraded back to Windows 7 … only to discover it left the holes open. That was enough for me. For some reason, I had resisted trying Linux Mint previously, seeing it as an example of Sturgeon’s Law (95% of everything is crap), but for some reason, I decided to try it. I went from Windows 7 directly to Linux Mint, and have not gone back since. Linux Mint was everything I had hoped for 5 or 10 years earlier. My office package (Ashampoo Office, made by SoftMaker) had a Linux version, so I didn’t even have to change that.I also noticed that it hardly took up any space on my hard drive, and I had a couple external hard drives, so I moved my personal files to an external hard drive, partitioned my computer drive, and started trying other distros while keeping Linux Mint installed. This gives me the best of both worlds — a stable operating system which does everything I need, and room to play with other distros. My Dell PC died, don’t know why but it was on the motherboard, and I got a Lenovo X130e, room for easily 2 partitions. I have since upgraded to a Lenovo T430, about 3 years ago now. But I keep using Linux Mint as my main driver. Because it does everything, every time, predictably. Might be seen as being a bit boring, but that’s why I play with other distros. My current favorite fun distro is Bodhi 5.0.0, and it’s just not as stable.

    • Joe
      • Not going to have much to add here, basically everything everyone else said.
      • I started using mint when it was the one that provided the non-free codecs
      • But what drew me to it is the way the interface is so much like xp or 95 while still looking new. I can use it without making changes or I can customize it how I want.
      • I have to do less installs out of the box which is always a plus.

    VIBRATIONS FROM THE ETHER:

    Hilander

    Brad Alexander

    ixSystems has a couple of articles on beating ransomware:

    https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/defeating-cryptolocker-attacks-with-zfs/

    https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/combating-ransomware/

    CHECK THIS OUT!

    • Joe
      • TronicsFix
        • Youtube channel about fixing electronics

    Next show is live on June 16, 2019 at 2 pm CT.

    Wrap-Up:

               Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/

               Twitter @TonyH1212

        th@mintcast.org

        distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com

    Thanks:

    • Josh for working on redesigning our website, setting up the YouTube stream, and providing lots of technical help.
    • Archive.org for hosting our audio files.
    • The folks at Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we use to communicate
    • Bytemark hosting for providing the new hosting server for the website.
    • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
]]> full 3632 mintCast 309 – Virtualization https://mintcast.org/mintcast-309-virtualization/ Wed, 22 May 2019 04:59:18 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3624 Download
]]>

Download

Introduction:

  • This is Leo, Joe, Josh, Tony Watts, Tony Hughes and Moss!
  • First up, in our Wanderings, I get some new gear and upgrade kernels, Tony Hughes is back home and LUGging again, Moss gets a new printer and some recording gear, Josh is jetsetting to France next week, Joe’s gaming more and heading to Texas Linux Fest on the 31st of this month, and Tony Watts is looking for a cheap server and trying RetroPie ports.
  • Then, in the news, we have lots of releases like RHEL 8, and plenty of vulnerabilities
  • In our Innards section, we talk virtualization
  • And finally, plenty of feedback and LOTS of check this out
    • [0:00] Theme
    • [1:03] Introduction
    • [2:17] Bi-Weekly Wanderings
    • [38:04] News
    • [1:01:15] Innards
    • [1:34:14] Vibrations
    • [1:40:48] Check This Out!
    • [1:50:27] Wrap Up & Thanks

Introduction:

  • This is Leo, Joe, Josh, Tony Watts, Tony Hughes and Moss!
  • First up, in our Wanderings, I get some new gear and upgrade kernels, Tony Hughes is back home and LUGging again, Moss gets a new printer and some recording gear, Josh is jetsetting to France next week, Joe’s gaming more and heading to Texas Linux Fest on the 31st of this month, and Tony Watts is looking for a cheap server and trying RetroPie ports.
  • Then, in the news, we have lots of releases like RHEL 8, and plenty of vulnerabilities
  • In our Innards section, we talk virtualization
  • And finally, plenty of feedback and LOTS of check this out
    • [0:00] Theme
    • [1:03] Introduction
    • [2:17] Bi-Weekly Wanderings
    • [38:04] News
    • [1:01:15] Innards
    • [1:34:14] Vibrations
    • [1:40:48] Check This Out!
    • [1:50:27] Wrap Up & Thanks

Bi-Weekly Wanderings:

  • Leo
    • Got some new recording gear. MXL 990 and a Beringher UM-2. I’m still getting everything calibrated.
    • I spent some time this last week getting the 3 Mint boxes I used upgraded to kernel 5.0.0. My laptop is the only one that really needed it for the battery improvements, but I figured I’d try out everything.
  • Tony H
    • I’ve returned home Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre and getting back into day to day living.
    • Still playing with Linux, at the LUG yesterday morning I installed Fedora 29 on a 10 year Old Dell 15” laptop that was one of our members Expensive Desktop replacement 10 years ago, Core 2 Duo with a whopping 4Gig of Ram 🙂 my install iso for mint 19.1 was corrupt and would not install so I used my Fedora 29 Matѐ spin and after installing a 128 Gig SSD the install went great. On reboot the laptop boots in 50 seconds from pressing the power button to it being connected to the internet and applications being available to use, which is not bad for a 10 year old machine.
    • Installed Kernel 5.0.0.xx on my desktop Mint 19.1 install and broke the Nvidia driver, had to return to the open source driver.
  • Moss
    • As you know, it’s Printer Week. After a lot of advice, I got a Canon Pixma TS9210. And I could not get it installed. I made some headway, hit a brick wall, got some help, hit another brick wall, got more advice which didn’t help… so I called Amazon. What with the ink already installed, they told me to keep the printer and gave me a full refund, so I ordered a Brother MFC-J491DW. It is up and running on all 4 of my distros as well as my wife’s, easy peasy once you know how to do Brother installation (requires the use of a Terminal). I did get a LOT of people recommending HP printers, despite my pleas for them to not do so. Bottom line, be careful before you buy a new PIXMA, and Brother Is Best. (Boy, I wish I could get paid for all these sponsor-like comments!)
    • I did get a new boom and pop filter to aid in my podcasting. It was quite inexpensive…and maybe a bit small and maybe not the best quality gooseneck but seems to be working.  If you’re on a budget like I am, I would recommend this setup… got it on eBay, company is Neewer.
    • I’ve been working on my review of Linux Lite 4.4 for Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 2, to be recorded at the end of May.  Next month: Clear Linux OS? Sabayon?
    • I’ve only gotten 3 donations to date in the fundraiser to get me to SELF. This fundraiser was started by a listener, Jackie Moore, and I am very grateful that a few listeners understood my need and responded. Getting to SELF would help me promote mintCast and perhaps make some inroads into a career in computers. Only about $125 has been raised to date, including one donation through PayPal, and unless I get at least $500 I simply can’t go. But here’s a problem: GoFundMe disburses donations every week (if any), and it’s my job to manage the funds. There is no way to send refunds (especially to anonymous donors). So I had to decide what to do with the money if I don’t get enough to go. After much discussion with my wife and the mintCast team, any money not used (including if we have unused funds after going) will be sent as a donation from mintCast, divided between Linux Mint and Archive.org.  I will make the decision to go or not on May 31, as that’s about the latest I could get good rates on hotel rooms for June 14-16.
  • Josh
    • Working on talk for a conference in france. I’ll be giving a talk on building an open source project. I’ll cover GitHub, Licensing, Publishing, Packaging, Community and Monetization (Patreon)
    • Playing around with ByteMark hosting (thanks to them) and a wordpress server to migrate our website
    • Working on a website redesign for mintcast
    • Playing with the adafruit PyPortal, internet connected python display. Made a eurovision countdown timer.
    • Photography setup
  • Joe
    • Helped someone at my lug with their install of VirtualBox on Fedora
    • Tested out the xbox one controller on linux and it is working much better than before.  But not as well as the 360 controller which has vibration working.
    • After much searching for the connectors/cables needed for the Earforce z2 i discovered that the connector exactly matches the old ps2 connectors.  So i spent a couple of dollars on female to female connectors so that they will match up with the other turtle beach 3.5mm connectors that i ordered.  This will also allow me to get creative with the other connector that i have. Replace the 3 pin 3.5 for the mic or cut the cable short and put on a new 4 pin jack.
    • Received the adapter and it works perfect.  Mic and audio both.
    • Did a lot of work with OBS and Icecast but have not got them to play well together yet.  Can’t find the right settings to get to actually stream. I have gotten it to recognize the ‘mount’ for OBS and i can see it trying to load on the page but then nothing.
    • Going to TLF  Before the next show.  Let me know if there is anything that i can find out for you to bring to the show.
  • Tony W
    • Listening to MintCast!
    • Home repairs, music gig last weekend
    • OnePlus repair SAGA –
    • Switched to T Mobile
    • Bought phone for the kid, Moto E5 Play for $80 [Swappa has the X4 for $115]
    • Google Family Link is great – we need something like this in Librem or other non proprietary solution, someday
    • Kindle Fire Launcher Hijack was blocked – got it working using one that was repackaged: https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=79434906&postcount=395
    • Exploring options for a *very cheap* server

The News:

  • RHEL 8 Released
    • The headline feature is support and focus on containers after their acquisition of CoreOS
    • Running kernel 4.18 and has Python 3 as the default version
    • If your enterprise has money to burn, can support up to 4PB of RAM. Up from 64TB in RHEL 7.
  • Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 Released
    • This comes two months after the release of OTA-8
    • Supported on devices like the Fairphone 2 and Nexus 5
    • Little quality of life improvements like “Paste and Go”
  • Kernel 5.1 Released with performance improvements
    • Improvements in the Linux Security Model found in SELinux and Apparmor. A major feature here is the SafeSetID. It essentially prevents unprivileged users from giving themselves too much permission in the filesystem.
    • Brings support for NVDIMM persistent memory, which is just a fancy way of saying using flash memory in addition or as a replacement to RAM. Think Intel Optane.
    • Improvement in Live Patching
  • OpenMandriva 4 RC released May 12, last step before stable
  • Microsoft Announces WSL2
    • Up to 20x faster than WSL1
    • Uses a REAL LIVE 4.19 kernel
    • Can be compiled on Windows from git if you’re excited to try it
  • Tilix (terminal) needs a new project maintainer
  • South Korea and the Indian State of Kerala Convert to Linux
  • Zombieload Attack on Almost Every Intel Chip in Existence
    • This vulnerability affects Intel processors. From first-gen Core i-series to the current 9000 series, only chips without hyper-threading are immune from.
    • Like Meltdown, Spectre, Speculative Store Bypass, Foreshadow before it, Zombieload is a way for threads on a CPU to reach out a read data from other threads.
    • This attack essentially allows the reading of encryption keys, history, etc.
    • Red Hat’s 3 minute video explanation
  • Vulnerabilities in Kernels up to 5.0.8
    • A semi-dangerous vulnerability, but a bit complex to exploit. It clocks in with a exploitability score of 2.2. It results from a specially crafted TCP packet, and can lead to remote code execution!
    • https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-11815
  • Whatsapp vulnerability allows hackers to infect phones
    • Install the update now
    • This happened when a malicious call came in to the app. Users didn’t even have to pick the call up to be compromised! So, even if you didn’t notice the missed call, it can infect your phone..

Linux Innards:

    • Joe
      • VirtualBox
        • I don’t have as much experience with this as others
        • Two ways to install
          • Grab the deb from the virtualbox website
          • Sudo apt install virtualbox-qt
        • I do use the occasional VM but i prefer barebones or Docker
        • I like the functionality of being able to run a VM off of a disk drive pulled from another machine
        • I attempted this with my hanging Windows partition but it did not work because Virtualbox seems to have a problem with UEFI
        • I have a 32gb msata drive and an adapter that i will be testing with
        • I picked up a centos course from UDEMY and will be installing a VM of that
          • Did install
        • Was successful in getting one of the msata drives from the 7130 to work in a VM
          • Sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename “/root/VirtualBox VMs/linux/tablet.vmdk” -rawdisk /dev/sdb1
          • Worked perfect
          • Will need to run virtualbox as root in order to run a VM of a disk image.
        • But that is boring so batocera got installed in a vm
          • Didn’t work, efi
        • The difference between installing the deb and installing from repo
          • The repo updates and the deb is static.
        • https://www.howtoforge.com/converting-a-vmware-image-to-a-physical-machine
          • Use clonezilla cd, add to vm
          • Add physical disk to vm
          • Make sure boot order is cd first
          • Clone image to physical drive
          • fsck -y
          • Go into /etc/udev/rules.d and delete the file 70-persistent-net.rules then reboot
    • Leo
      • I don’t have a lot of experience here on the desktop either. However I’ve run it quite often headless to run other headless servers.
      • In the past, it was quite difficult to get all the packages gathered and installed without the use of tasksel. But while testing, there’s a quick way.
        • sudo apt install gnome-boxes virt-manager
        • virtual-manager is being deprecated in favor of the web interface Cockpit.
      • The biggest reason to use KVM on the desktop is GPU passthrough. All other desktop host features are done simpler, or just plain better by other hypervisors. However, for headless VMs, there’s almost nothing better.
      • AMD GPU passthrough
      • Nvidia GPU passthrough
    • Tony H
      • As part of this dive into virtual computing I checked out Gnome Boxes, while this is a simpler way to boot qemu-kvm virtual PC’s I found issues with it not working properly with local .iso/.img files. However I did manage to download and install Debian 9 through the app and was surprised how well it worked with the allocated 1Gig of RAM. I also managed to download and install Ubuntu 18.10 which runs OK although I couldn’t access the terminal in the VM for some reason.
    • Tony W – tried out Gnome Boxes as well
      • Options to download RHEL, FEDORA, etc from Boxes is great
      • Very simple menus
      • Had to install in Ubuntu 19.04, wasn’t installed by default

 

  • Leo – Installed on Ubuntu 18.04 and it never allowed me to start a VM.

 

    • Josh
      • ESXI server
      • VCloud Director

 

  • Leo – This is what I use instead of KVM now. But with Cockpit, I’m reconsidering that, too!

 

Vibrations from the Ether:

  • KWisher requested that I post a picture of my hard drive, showing which distro is on which partitions. It is being removed from the show notes so as to not cause your podcaster apps to hiccup. But you can find it in the mintCast MeWe group, and also in the Distrohoppers’ Digest MeWe group. Leo is seeing to posting it to the Telegram group.
  • Followup from Brad A.

Moz: I apologize if I wasn’t clear. Bitwarden runs as a plugin for whatever browser you run. You can access it simultaneously from any and all devices that are running the add-on. For example, I have the add-on on my personal laptop, my desktop, and my work laptop, and have been simultaneously logged in on all three devices. For non-web passwords, I use the keepassx/keepassxc app. The nice thing about that app is that it stores all of the information in an encrypted database, which you can share around to all of your devices.

Leo: Since your OpenMediaVault installation is on the fritz, can I suggest a FreeNAS installation? It is based on FreeBSD, but is effectively an appliance. And ZFS protects your data better than ext4 or even btrfs.

Joe: Feel free to ping me if you want more info on setting up encryption with /boot on a thumb drive. I have been doing this for many years on Debian.

  • Suggestion from Highlander

Regardless of whether you are using windows or linux, everyone should

create offline backups of your most critical data.

Here’s why:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/10/politics/ransomware-attacks-us-cities/index.html

Fixed media might be your best choice for data you think is critical

or irreplaceable.

  • Christopher P.

To add a podcast to Spotify all you have to do is add the rss feed Spotify podcast at https://podcasters.spotify.com/submit

Check This Out!

Announcements:

  • Next episode on June 2nd, 2019

Wrap-Up:

 

 

Thanks:

  • Josh for working on redesigning our website, setting up the YouTube stream, and providing lots of technical help.
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files.
  • The folks at Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we use to communicate
  • Bytemark hosting for providing the new hosting server for the website.
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
]]> full 3624 mintCast 309 – Virtualization (mp3) https://mintcast.org/mintcast-309-virtualization-mp3/ Wed, 22 May 2019 04:59:04 +0000 http://mintcast.org/?p=3622 Download
]]>

Download

Introduction:

  • This is Leo, Joe, Josh, Tony Watts, Tony Hughes and Moss!
  • First up, in our Wanderings, I get some new gear and upgrade kernels, Tony Hughes is back home and LUGging again, Moss gets a new printer and some recording gear, Josh is jetsetting to France next week, Joe’s gaming more and heading to Texas Linux Fest on the 31st of this month, and Tony Watts is looking for a cheap server and trying RetroPie ports.
  • Then, in the news, we have lots of releases like RHEL 8, and plenty of vulnerabilities
  • In our Innards section, we talk virtualization
  • And finally, plenty of feedback and LOTS of check this out
    • [0:00] Theme
    • [1:03] Introduction
    • [2:17] Bi-Weekly Wanderings
    • [38:04] News
    • [1:01:15] Innards
    • [1:34:14] Vibrations
    • [1:40:48] Check This Out!
    • [1:50:27] Wrap Up & Thanks

Bi-Weekly Wanderings:

  • Leo
    • Got some new recording gear. MXL 990 and a Beringher UM-2. I’m still getting everything calibrated.
    • I spent some time this last week getting the 3 Mint boxes I used upgraded to kernel 5.0.0. My laptop is the only one that really needed it for the battery improvements, but I figured I’d try out everything.
  • Tony H
    • I’ve returned home Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre and getting back into day to day living.
    • Still playing with Linux, at the LUG yesterday morning I installed Fedora 29 on a 10 year Old Dell 15” laptop that was one of our members Expensive Desktop replacement 10 years ago, Core 2 Duo with a whopping 4Gig of Ram 🙂 my install iso for mint 19.1 was corrupt and would not install so I used my Fedora 29 Matѐ spin and after installing a 128 Gig SSD the install went great. On reboot the laptop boots in 50 seconds from pressing the power button to it being connected to the internet and applications being available to use, which is not bad for a 10 year old machine.
    • Installed Kernel 5.0.0.xx on my desktop Mint 19.1 install and broke the Nvidia driver, had to return to the open source driver.
  • Moss
    • As you know, it’s Printer Week. After a lot of advice, I got a Canon Pixma TS9210. And I could not get it installed. I made some headway, hit a brick wall, got some help, hit another brick wall, got more advice which didn’t help… so I called Amazon. What with the ink already installed, they told me to keep the printer and gave me a full refund, so I ordered a Brother MFC-J491DW. It is up and running on all 4 of my distros as well as my wife’s, easy peasy once you know how to do Brother installation (requires the use of a Terminal). I did get a LOT of people recommending HP printers, despite my pleas for them to not do so. Bottom line, be careful before you buy a new PIXMA, and Brother Is Best. (Boy, I wish I could get paid for all these sponsor-like comments!)
    • I did get a new boom and pop filter to aid in my podcasting. It was quite inexpensive…and maybe a bit small and maybe not the best quality gooseneck but seems to be working.  If you’re on a budget like I am, I would recommend this setup… got it on eBay, company is Neewer.
    • I’ve been working on my review of Linux Lite 4.4 for Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 2, to be recorded at the end of May.  Next month: Clear Linux OS? Sabayon?
    • I’ve only gotten 3 donations to date in the fundraiser to get me to SELF. This fundraiser was started by a listener, Jackie Moore, and I am very grateful that a few listeners understood my need and responded. Getting to SELF would help me promote mintCast and perhaps make some inroads into a career in computers. Only about $125 has been raised to date, including one donation through PayPal, and unless I get at least $500 I simply can’t go. But here’s a problem: GoFundMe disburses donations every week (if any), and it’s my job to manage the funds. There is no way to send refunds (especially to anonymous donors). So I had to decide what to do with the money if I don’t get enough to go. After much discussion with my wife and the mintCast team, any money not used (including if we have unused funds after going) will be sent as a donation from mintCast, divided between Linux Mint and Archive.org.  I will make the decision to go or not on May 31, as that’s about the latest I could get good rates on hotel rooms for June 14-16.
  • Josh
    • Working on talk for a conference in france. I’ll be giving a talk on building an open source project. I’ll cover GitHub, Licensing, Publishing, Packaging, Community and Monetization (Patreon)
    • Playing around with ByteMark hosting (thanks to them) and a wordpress server to migrate our website
    • Working on a website redesign for mintcast
    • Playing with the adafruit PyPortal, internet connected python display. Made a eurovision countdown timer.
    • Photography setup
  • Joe
    • Helped someone at my lug with their install of VirtualBox on Fedora
    • Tested out the xbox one controller on linux and it is working much better than before.  But not as well as the 360 controller which has vibration working.
    • After much searching for the connectors/cables needed for the Earforce z2 i discovered that the connector exactly matches the old ps2 connectors.  So i spent a couple of dollars on female to female connectors so that they will match up with the other turtle beach 3.5mm connectors that i ordered.  This will also allow me to get creative with the other connector that i have. Replace the 3 pin 3.5 for the mic or cut the cable short and put on a new 4 pin jack.
    • Received the adapter and it works perfect.  Mic and audio both.
    • Did a lot of work with OBS and Icecast but have not got them to play well together yet.  Can’t find the right settings to get to actually stream. I have gotten it to recognize the ‘mount’ for OBS and i can see it trying to load on the page but then nothing.
    • Going to TLF  Before the next show.  Let me know if there is anything that i can find out for you to bring to the show.
  • Tony W
    • Listening to MintCast!
    • Home repairs, music gig last weekend
    • OnePlus repair SAGA –
    • Switched to T Mobile
    • Bought phone for the kid, Moto E5 Play for $80 [Swappa has the X4 for $115]
    • Google Family Link is great – we need something like this in Librem or other non proprietary solution, someday
    • Kindle Fire Launcher Hijack was blocked – got it working using one that was repackaged: https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=79434906&postcount=395
    • Exploring options for a *very cheap* server

The News:

  • RHEL 8 Released
    • The headline feature is support and focus on containers after their acquisition of CoreOS
    • Running kernel 4.18 and has Python 3 as the default version
    • If your enterprise has money to burn, can support up to 4PB of RAM. Up from 64TB in RHEL 7.
  • Ubuntu Touch OTA-9 Released
    • This comes two months after the release of OTA-8
    • Supported on devices like the Fairphone 2 and Nexus 5
    • Little quality of life improvements like “Paste and Go”
  • Kernel 5.1 Released with performance improvements
    • Improvements in the Linux Security Model found in SELinux and Apparmor. A major feature here is the SafeSetID. It essentially prevents unprivileged users from giving themselves too much permission in the filesystem.
    • Brings support for NVDIMM persistent memory, which is just a fancy way of saying using flash memory in addition or as a replacement to RAM. Think Intel Optane.
    • Improvement in Live Patching
  • OpenMandriva 4 RC released May 12, last step before stable
  • Microsoft Announces WSL2
    • Up to 20x faster than WSL1
    • Uses a REAL LIVE 4.19 kernel
    • Can be compiled on Windows from git if you’re excited to try it
  • Tilix (terminal) needs a new project maintainer
  • South Korea and the Indian State of Kerala Convert to Linux
  • Zombieload Attack on Almost Every Intel Chip in Existence
    • This vulnerability affects Intel processors. From first-gen Core i-series to the current 9000 series, only chips without hyper-threading are immune from.
    • Like Meltdown, Spectre, Speculative Store Bypass, Foreshadow before it, Zombieload is a way for threads on a CPU to reach out a read data from other threads.
    • This attack essentially allows the reading of encryption keys, history, etc.
    • Red Hat’s 3 minute video explanation
  • Vulnerabilities in Kernels up to 5.0.8
    • A semi-dangerous vulnerability, but a bit complex to exploit. It clocks in with a exploitability score of 2.2. It results from a specially crafted TCP packet, and can lead to remote code execution!
    • https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2019-11815
  • Whatsapp vulnerability allows hackers to infect phones
    • Install the update now
    • This happened when a malicious call came in to the app. Users didn’t even have to pick the call up to be compromised! So, even if you didn’t notice the missed call, it can infect your phone..

Linux Innards:

    • Joe
      • VirtualBox
        • I don’t have as much experience with this as others
        • Two ways to install
          • Grab the deb from the virtualbox website
          • Sudo apt install virtualbox-qt
        • I do use the occasional VM but i prefer barebones or Docker
        • I like the functionality of being able to run a VM off of a disk drive pulled from another machine
        • I attempted this with my hanging Windows partition but it did not work because Virtualbox seems to have a problem with UEFI
        • I have a 32gb msata drive and an adapter that i will be testing with
        • I picked up a centos course from UDEMY and will be installing a VM of that
          • Did install
        • Was successful in getting one of the msata drives from the 7130 to work in a VM
          • Sudo VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename “/root/VirtualBox VMs/linux/tablet.vmdk” -rawdisk /dev/sdb1
          • Worked perfect
          • Will need to run virtualbox as root in order to run a VM of a disk image.
        • But that is boring so batocera got installed in a vm
          • Didn’t work, efi
        • The difference between installing the deb and installing from repo
          • The repo updates and the deb is static.
        • https://www.howtoforge.com/converting-a-vmware-image-to-a-physical-machine
          • Use clonezilla cd, add to vm
          • Add physical disk to vm
          • Make sure boot order is cd first
          • Clone image to physical drive
          • fsck -y
          • Go into /etc/udev/rules.d and delete the file 70-persistent-net.rules then reboot
    • Leo
      • I don’t have a lot of experience here on the desktop either. However I’ve run it quite often headless to run other headless servers.
      • In the past, it was quite difficult to get all the packages gathered and installed without the use of tasksel. But while testing, there’s a quick way.
        • sudo apt install gnome-boxes virt-manager
        • virtual-manager is being deprecated in favor of the web interface Cockpit.
      • The biggest reason to use KVM on the desktop is GPU passthrough. All other desktop host features are done simpler, or just plain better by other hypervisors. However, for headless VMs, there’s almost nothing better.
      • AMD GPU passthrough
      • Nvidia GPU passthrough
    • Tony H
      • As part of this dive into virtual computing I checked out Gnome Boxes, while this is a simpler way to boot qemu-kvm virtual PC’s I found issues with it not working properly with local .iso/.img files. However I did manage to download and install Debian 9 through the app and was surprised how well it worked with the allocated 1Gig of RAM. I also managed to download and install Ubuntu 18.10 which runs OK although I couldn’t access the terminal in the VM for some reason.
    • Tony W – tried out Gnome Boxes as well
      • Options to download RHEL, FEDORA, etc from Boxes is great
      • Very simple menus
      • Had to install in Ubuntu 19.04, wasn’t installed by default

 

  • Leo – Installed on Ubuntu 18.04 and it never allowed me to start a VM.

 

    • Josh
      • ESXI server
      • VCloud Director

 

  • Leo – This is what I use instead of KVM now. But with Cockpit, I’m reconsidering that, too!

 

Vibrations from the Ether:

  • KWisher requested that I post a picture of my hard drive, showing which distro is on which partitions. It is being removed from the show notes so as to not cause your podcaster apps to hiccup. But you can find it in the mintCast MeWe group, and also in the Distrohoppers’ Digest MeWe group. Leo is seeing to posting it to the Telegram group.
  • Followup from Brad A.

Moz: I apologize if I wasn’t clear. Bitwarden runs as a plugin for whatever browser you run. You can access it simultaneously from any and all devices that are running the add-on. For example, I have the add-on on my personal laptop, my desktop, and my work laptop, and have been simultaneously logged in on all three devices. For non-web passwords, I use the keepassx/keepassxc app. The nice thing about that app is that it stores all of the information in an encrypted database, which you can share around to all of your devices.

Leo: Since your OpenMediaVault installation is on the fritz, can I suggest a FreeNAS installation? It is based on FreeBSD, but is effectively an appliance. And ZFS protects your data better than ext4 or even btrfs.

Joe: Feel free to ping me if you want more info on setting up encryption with /boot on a thumb drive. I have been doing this for many years on Debian.

  • Suggestion from Highlander

Regardless of whether you are using windows or linux, everyone should

create offline backups of your most critical data.

Here’s why:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/10/politics/ransomware-attacks-us-cities/index.html

Fixed media might be your best choice for data you think is critical

or irreplaceable.

  • Christopher P.

To add a podcast to Spotify all you have to do is add the rss feed Spotify podcast at https://podcasters.spotify.com/submit

Check This Out!

Announcements:

  • Next episode on June 2nd, 2019

Wrap-Up:

 

 

Thanks:

  • Josh for working on redesigning our website, setting up the YouTube stream, and providing lots of technical help.
  • Archive.org for hosting our audio files.
  • The folks at Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we use to communicate
  • Bytemark hosting for providing the new hosting server for the website.
  • The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.
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