The podcast by the Linux Mint community for all users of Linux
Rank #1: mintCast 320 – Sudos and Sudon’ts (mp3).
Download This is the new group’s official 1 year anniversary (apart from Josh :D). First up, in our Wanderings, Leo plays with audio, Moss tries out two new System76 laptops, Josh has been oggcamping, Joe’s been headphoning, And Tony has been updating a laptop for a friend. Then, in our news we talk about Ubuntu, Google’s most disappointing pixel yet (the Pixel 4), Linux Mint’s gaming ability, and the releases of Freespire, Tails and Trident. Finally, in security, we talk sudo. BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: Leo Spilled water on my laptop right before the show… Playing with my audio setup again. Got a new boom stand. A standalone type like you’d see on stage. Haven’t gotten a chance to set it up yet, but an isolation box for the mic as well. This is mostly because I can’t afford to dish out the cash needed to fully sound deaden a room, so a box with sound deadening is the next best thing! Linux fixes another flash drive. Have had a 32GB flash drive for about 5 years now (AData S102) and thought it died at work recently. During a write operation, a few hundred files, about 200MB, the drive unmounts and then starts to mount and unmount over and over until unplugged. Thought it died. Came home, plugged it into my Mint desktop and used Disks. Removed partitions, reformatted in exFAT, and poof. Fixed. Moss On Tuesday on the 8th, one of our listeners, Jackie Moore (who has been quite helpful in that past, as you may remember), informed me to expect a package at work. When it arrived, it was a wonderful, though slightly beaten up, System76 Galago Pro 2. It arrived with Pop!_OS on the SSD, and a forgotten installation of Ubuntu on the 1 Terabyte hard drive. I installed Linux Mint 19.2 on the SSD and just installed Ubuntu MATE 19.10 over the old Ubuntu, plus added a couple more distros. This little beast has a 1 Tb hard drive plus a 256 GB SSD, and while it is short on ports, those include a USB-C/Thunderbolt port and two USB 3.1 ports. As this computer was not the form factor I was looking for, Jackie offered me a deal on a Kudu3, and we came up with a swap; he got my Sans Digital AccuNAS box I had listed on eBay, I got his Kudu3. I hope he is as ecstatic about the trade as I am! I have always dreamed of owning a System76 but thought they would always be beyond my reach — new ones cost more than I have, and used ones are rare — and now I have two of them. I cannot possibly thank Jackie enough, and need to mention he is a fellow Tennessean. I sold 2 tablets on eBay, one of our Kindle Fires and the LG GTab F. This got me about $26 for household. I still have two network switches for sale, one an 8-port and the other a 24-port. I took the extra 4 Gb RAM out of my T430 and placed it in my wife’s T430, and swapped my 9-cell battery with her 6-cell. I can now sell my T430 and get my IdeaPad 110-15acl ready for sale after next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest. I continue reading Her Majesty’s Dragon to my wife, and also picked up a copy of Animal Farm, which she had never read, and have gotten through a few chapters of that. My mother was in the hospital for a few days and is now back in the rehab facility. She sounds good, but is 90 years old… Josh Visited Oggcamp and joined the podcast panel Lots of things to see Podcast panel with Joe Ressington It was great fun. We covered young people getting into linux, schools, Microsoft adopting linux and generally had a good laugh. Built EduBlocks offline edition. I removed it when I did the overhaul and people want it back. Decided against using Electron as it’s quite heavy on Raspberry Pi. I’m still sorting out my Pixel3 after 4 weeks without a phone now. They offered a refund but tried talking me into store credit even though they said cash. I should have it resolved this week. I’ve 99% decided on the iPhone 11 (non pro) after going to try both that and the Pixel 4 in store tomorrow but I’ll save my thoughts for the news section. All magazines have now shipped, after having a few issues we’ve learnt lots. We still have about 7 damaged copies (which we got replaced with new ones) of which we’re going to donate to local schools. New issue in a few weeks! Joe Ordered 5 HBS 820’s When it arrived it came with 6 which is cool. 3 of them were working with no issues, which is kind of weird Not that I am complaining The 3 that don’t work, 2 of them have broken neck bands but work otherwise The last one has one side that doesn’t work I also have one from a previous lot that only has one side working Once again just like with the 810s you can only replace same sides with same sides That means because of the 3 working and the extra parts from the ones with broken bands along with the 2 ones with one side out i will get 5 working total. One of the ones with one side out i also had to glue the connecter to the band back on. Seems to be holding together well The interesting part of these is that the soldering is very easy but you have to replace the whole lower plastic section. You don’t have to desolder the board but you do have to remove everything else around it because of how the earpiece cable goes through the lower assembly Read book 2 in the last reaper novels and Alex Verus book 10 as well as 6 of the Harley Merlin novels. All shorter books but very enjoyable. I went through the first 6 of the Harley Merlin books in about 2 days. I wouldn’t say that it is great writing but it was engaging enough to keep me listening. No complaints about audio quality Mostly caught up on podcasts but that might be because I don’t know what book to listen to yet. Maybe some of the Doctor Who audio dramas? Also read Monster Hunter Guardian and Saga of the forgotten warrior book 2 both by larry correia. Very good author and well done audios. Also Daniel Faust books 1-8 Kevin Mitnick The art of invisibility “You may have nothing to hide but you have everything to protect” Even if you aren’t paranoid about security you should read this book just so you know how privacy doesn’t work. Started up my python classes with a few friends again. We are starting by refreshing with: https://automatetheboringstuff.com/chapter0/ We are also going to go over some of the red hat courses I think i have found my next headphone soldering adventures. MMCX connectors. I have experimented with them before but only with the whole cables. Now i am going to use the female connectors on cans to go along with the male cables and i am going to try to use the male connectors on the ends of the retractable LGs that usually break near the earpiece. You can get a couple of sets of the MMCX earpieces for cheap and then rotate through them on the different headsets. Started playing around with MPSYT, aka mps-youtube It is a command line interface to search and play youtube videos I started looking into it to possibly use in conjunction with a pi zero headless I don’t think it would be something I could automate so it doesn’t match my current use case. I have gotten it to load and play playlists, shuffled but i would need to find a way for it to do that automatically. Wrote an article about travel networking. It is a broad overview at this point covers networking while visiting family Or while at a hotel Or while traveling down the road Tony W Saw Mudhoney live a couple weeks ago, reluctantly didn’t go to Melvins show Good month for grunge concerts in ATL Upgraded a friend’s Toshiba Satellite A505 laptop 5400 HDD to SSD 4G RAM to 8GB Started with fresh Win10 vs OEM preloaded Windows Not a good fit for recommending Linux unfortunately, he is really stuck on itunes I hate buying printer ink $60 for ink for a printer that’s on its last legs, hard to justify. At that cost need to contemplate a new printer every time you run out of ink [Moss: I get some really nice printers for under $60, with cheap ink refills.] Played with Bunsenlabs Continuation of the old Crunchbang Really enjoyed crunchbang ‘back in the day’. It was the only OS I could get to perform well on really old machines System requirements 256 MB of RAM, recommended 1GB Still have 32 bit iso THE NEWS: Ubuntu 19.10 Released Mint will get the 5.3 kernel “soon.” 5.0 was available about a month after 18.10 was released. Comes with LZ4 compression for faster boot! (coming from Gzip) ZFS on root (experimental) Gnome 3.34 Ubuntu Mate, Budgie, Studio, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu also released Ubuntu Cinnamon may be a brand new flavor in 20.04. Ubuntu 20.04 Named Focal Fossa. At least I can pronounce that one (Leo) As the version number implies, it’ll be released in April 2020 Happy 15th Birthday, Ubuntu Linux Mint’s 13th birthday was August 27th 2006. Google Pixel 4, Pixelbook Go & Pixel Buds released Josh is highly disappointed The camera sucks (I’ve tried it). If you want a good camera, buy an iPhone The soli radar thing is, weird It’s nice to have a 90Hz display However, they made the battery smaller than the 3!!!! (which was already bad) The Linux Mint 19.2 Gaming Report Gaming Report essentially assesses how easy it is for a new user to get up and running with Steam and Proton and play games on a given distro Assessment was “Promising but room for improvement” Probably biggest knock was lack of inclusion of Vulcan 32-bit libraries, which are required for running proton on machines with AMD graphics Suggested inclusion of Lutris in software center In the Podcast, Jason did say he found Cinnamon “beautiful” and everything was right where he expected it to be Freespire 5.0 Released I remember when this was Lindows. Then Linspire. Now Freespire. (Freespire is the free edition, Linspire is the professional edition.) Freespire got a new start last year: Wikipedia reports, “Freespire 2.0.8, released on 30 November 2007, and based on Ubuntu 7.04, was the final release until the distribution was revived with 3.0 in January 2018.” Some parts of the community are quite critical of the company, as Linspire and Freespire license several proprietary bits of software and codecs intentionally, in order to get more interoperability with Windows features. They do produce a Freespire OSS edition, with only open-source options. Tails 4.0 Released Project Trident dumps BSD, moves to Void Linux Samsung Kills Linux on Dex SECURITY UPDATE: Bug in sudo allows privilege escalation! Resolution: Upgrade to sudo version 1.8.28. This seems to only be an issue on boxes that have custom sudo privileges (essentially not ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL) Basically, just run updates. WRAP-UP: Joe – www.Tllts.org www.linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org Bo – undercastnetwork.com Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and all over YouTube (search for Moss Bliss, ignore the young black South African gospel singer), moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338 Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/ Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band) Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and Full Circle Weekly News Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible … Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast) Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server Archive.org for hosting our audio files The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about The post mintCast 320 – Sudos and Sudon’ts (mp3) appeared first on mintCast.
Rank #2: mintCast 318.5 – Syncing Files (mp3).
Download In our Innards section, we cover backups like Rsync, Nextcloud and some underlying storage. And finally, community feedback! INNARDS: Joe Rsync Used as the back end for most backup systems works on most operating systems It has been around for 23 years! Comes stock on nearly every linux operating system I have used it in production on several systems for back ups or syncing data on request fairly standard setup for the command rsync [options] from to what makes it great is the way that it will remember where you left off with a broken or partial sync. so if you lose your connection you can run the same command again and pick up where you left off especially if you use -P which will allow you to watch the progress and continue from where you left off even if it is mid file The -a flag is great as it preserves symbolic links so you will not get stuck in a loop the way that it was possible to do with scp Plus for backups it will only move files that it can verify have changed which makes it faster and use less data. It will check file sizes and time stamps to see if it needs to sync a new file You can set it to instead check hashes for differences which is much slower but it will find all the changes –checksum is the option to add for this Great to mix with cron for automating backups on your own timing can be a small issue if your backup runs long so don’t set it up to run every minute Resilio sync/btsync/bittorrent sync Does not use rsync uses the bittorrent protocol Started out as bittorrent sync but everyone called it btsync and then when they tried to switch to a paid model they changed to resilio sync The setup is very similar to other syncing programs. Install the software and setup the user permissions and the places that it will have access to After setup you pick the folders that you want to share then you choose to share it and either a link a code or a qr code is generated you add this to resilio sync on another machine or multiple machines you can choose to limit this by making a single use code or a code that expires after a few days or by leaving it open you can also choose if the other clients will have write permissions on the data or just read you can limit it further on systems by controlling the user permissions and or setting up resilio under its own user Works across multiple OS’s including android The more nodes that you have setup with the data that you are syncing the faster it will be synced across devices. it is self hosted so your data will only be on your computers as for the bittorrent protocol here is how it works Files within the set shared space are broken into small parts then shared then reassembled on the “client side” when all portions are received the smaller files are easier to send then larger files would be so you could be downloading multiple small portions from separate locations at the same time which greatly increases speed based on how many nodes that you have Much like with torrents it is possible for none of the nodes to have a complete copy and still to get a complete copy on all the systems by the end as long as all portions are distributed. it is possible to backup an entire system with resilio sync if you give the group or user enough permissions or run it as root. better for files that you want to backup but there are pitfalls if you have write permissions on all the nodes then if one of them gets corrupt it will copy across all the systems and all will be corrupt Great to run commands on your home system very tinkery tool when used this way just as an example, set up a cron script to execute a bash script every minute, this bash script looks for a file within the btsync location. If it is there then you run the commands placed within this file and rename the file with a date stamp so that it is not picked up again(you can also get creative with the output if you want) it is seriously a one line command ‘bash -i /path/to/filename >> filename2’ to execute commands and record output and then mv the filename to doneFilename then echo filename2 >> doneFilename and rm filename2 Leo The Nextcloud setup was too easy! (For someone that tinkers all the time) sudo snap install nextcloud sudo nextcloud.manual-install leo password sudo nextcloud.occ config:system:set trusted_domains 1 –value=domainname sudo nextcloud.enable-https self-signed If you’re storing your files on external storage like myself, you’ll need to install a removable media plugin. sudo snap connect nextcloud:removable-media The config file lives at sudo nano /var/snap/nextcloud/current/nextcloud/config/config.php Finally, move your data to the new place sudo mv /var/snap/nextcloud/common/nextcloud/data /media/nextcloud/data Nextcloud auto backups In the settings, there is an Auto Upload Photos/Videos toggle. Underneath, define where you want the folder to live, then turn the toggle on. Like magic, Nextcloud starts to suck up all of the files you specify! I haven’t tried the feature with anything other than Photos and Videos, but for a phone, those are typically the types of files you’re trying to backup. For the desktop, the sync is similar. For every device I’ve installed the Nextcloud client on, I have the Desktop directory synced across all the devices. This is fantastic for me since that’s where all my working files go. I just have to ensure that the client is on to do the sync and my files are there, updated, and ready to be edited. Thoughts Overall, the setup is easy if you’ve played with stuff like this before. But, compared to a traditional setup with a manual install of a database, php and webserver, it was extremely easy. The best part of the entire setup is that I’m bad at remembering to do manually backup files with a drag and drop. So, as long as they’re in the right place, I don’t have to do anything! Tony W DISCLAIMER before beginning: This is from a beginner’s perspective. RAID, ZFS Z pools Reasons to use: Allow data redundancy across multiple drives/partitions Can simply mirror a drive Windows has a version of this Use multiple drives/partitions as one volume Typically used for server but can be used for home machines Still recommend backup to other machine or drive RAID RAID can be hardware or software RAID Hardware RAID is a bit legacy Ubuntu offers mdadm for software RAID management RAID 0 (Disk striping): RAID 0 splits data across any number of disks allowing higher data throughput. … RAID 1 (Disk Mirroring): … RAID 5 (Striping with parity): … RAID 6 (Striping with double parity): … RAID 10 (Striping + Mirroring): Doesn’t seem to be much reason to use software RAID mdadm over ZFS? Windows offers mirrored volume, similar to RAID 1 ZFS Supported natively in Ubuntu 18.04 FREENAS uses ZFS ZFS Pools are equivalent of RAID levels VIBRATIONS: Tony – Peter Jones on Telegram writes Really sorry, but didn’t enjoy this episode (317.5). Toyam spoke very passionately, but didn’t seem the right kind of distro to get a guest on about based on the MintCast audience. Anyway. I’m sure others loved it. And I can’t enjoy every episode! I responded [In reply to Peter Jones] I can see where you are coming from on the type of distro that Void is, but I think that the interview does highlight that it is possible to get involved with Linux projects, and the amount of work that the maintainers of Distros and the software we use on a day to day basis do so we get to use fantastic software. Mint might be an easier distro for a beginner to use but the work that has gone into it is as much if not more. Also it highlights that many of these distros and software development projects are running on very few people making it all happen. My feeling is even if you are not a coder is that there are many ways you can support, from beta testing and reporting bugs, to getting involved with documentation or creating wallpapers. If you feel that’s not possible then send the project a couple of dollars to help the cause and show your appreciation, or if you can’t even afford that, just send a message to say thank you for the work they are doing. Peter replied Hi, running a website and forum I understand the small team thing. Thanks for reading my feedback though and you make fair comments. Stephen Heckler also commented on this episode: I agree with Peter on this one, Void is pretty niche, and Toyam’s take on it even more so due to being a maintainer. mintCast has always been pretty broad within the Linux world and approachable Leo – A discussion about Gentoo and compiling in Telegram Londoner writes: BTW, after I did Gentoo I installed Plasma base and some other packages. Compiling the Falkon browser (or rather qtwebengine) took 4 days on my i7 desktop! Thought it would never finish Leo The Juno Computer Gemini was finally reviewed by Oliver Kelly! Oliver writes: I reached out to them asked if I can help promote them as a company and write about them, they then offered to loan a laptop to review. They paid for shipping the laptop and collection. No pressure to write a positive review, to be fair I should have stated, but genuinely was a really nice laptop but £770 is steep for me for how it feels compared to my works xps , like I said , that’s the only other laptop I have to compare quality and feel to. Writeup Link: https://0lzi.tk/episode-009-gemini15/ Tony H – Stan R – From tonight’s chat room The new web page has really improved since the last show. It seemed that nothing was working. This time around things on web page seem much more usable to me. Me – Yes Josh has put a lot of work in to get it working right Stan – I had sent a number of complaining messages, then within a few hours it was either fixed or I realized what I was doing wrong. Stan has also asked if it would be possible to put the show timer on the main page of the site. CHECK THIS OUT: Leo – My Nextcloud writeup! tldr – a terminal based help system. It can be used in place of “man” or “info” and provides mostly examples on how to use commands. Joe Mac? PC? You don’t have to choose.. RHKVM Tony – Keeping up with developments in the Linux podcast community, Destination Linux which is a great podcast has now morphed into the Destination Linux Network and includes all the current teams other work on YouTube and the recently started Linux for everyone podcast. They have a community forum and are planning to have a regular ‘Charity’ related to the open source movement where they will support others in our community. Check out their site for more information How to Install Ubuntu Inside Windows 10 Using WUBI With UEFI Support Bo – https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/09/rclone-browser-fork-with-fixes-and.html ANNOUNCEMENTS: Next episode will be Sunday October 6th, 2PM CDT, 7PM UTC WRAP-UP: Joe – www.Tllts.org www.linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org Bo – undercastnetwork.com Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and all over YouTube (search for Moss Bliss, ignore the young black South African gospel singer), moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com Tony Hughes – HPR – http://hackerpublicradio.org/correspondents.php?hostid=338 Occasional Blog https://tony-hughes.blogspot.com/ Twitter @TonyH1212, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com th@mintcast.org Tony Watts – tw@mintcast.org, Echoes of Savages (band) Josh – josh@mintcast.org, josh@edublocks.org, edublocks.org and @all_about_code on Twitter Leo – leochavez.org and @leochavez on Twitter, and Full Circle Weekly News Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible … Josh Lowe for all his work on the website and the livestream (We’ve had over 60 listeners today on the backup mixer platform and brought on some new listeners who’ve never heard of the podcast) Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server Archive.org for hosting our audio files The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about The post mintCast 318.5 – Syncing Files (mp3) appeared first on mintCast.
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