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 319 – New Mumble (mp3).
Download First up, in our Wanderings, I talk Dynamic DNS, Tony is writing articles, Moss test drives EndeavourOS, Josh visited Media City, and Joe relaxes with fiction. Then, our news: CentOS 8 and Mumble 1.3 are released, Ubuntu 19.10 is almost here, the GNOME Foundation and Docker navigate rough seas, and more. In security, we talk Exim. WANDERINGS: Leo Dynamic DNS – Finally got this setup with a lot of personal resistance. Took inspiration from Telegram. Quite a few people were setting up Dynamic DNS a couple of months ago, and I was resistant because my IP address hardly changed. Seems like my address is changing all the time now. Not quite sure if my router is handling it correctly (ER-POE-5) even though I have it configured as the Ubiquity forums suggest. So as a backup, I’m running a cron job once every 6 hours on my Pi-Hole to update the IP address. Used afraid.org. Very simple setup once you dig into it. To update, you basically have to visit a URL. Installed two new packages that are supposed to give better battery statistics and life. sudo apt install tp-smapi-dkms acpi-call-dkms I’m not testing this scientifically, but these packages should help calibrate my Thinkpad batteries properly. I’ve only gone through one charge cycle, so it’s hard to tell if things have changed. Tony H Starting to write a series of articles on Getting started in podcasting, for Full Circle Magazine, I have written the first 2 articles so check out the October magazine as you may see me in print. Continuing to use MX 19 beta 2.1 – beta 3 was released yesterday I have downloaded the iso and will install as just updating may miss some bug fixes. Got a reply to my bug notification about dropping into the login screen when rebooting, as it’s not a critical bug it is on the to do list as they want to fix it but at the moment they are not sure how to do it. Moss Distrohoppers’ Digest Episode 006 was a rollicking good time, I hope our listeners enjoy it as much as we did. I installed Endeavour OS on my T430. A few issues, easily solved, and everything else installed. I had everything except Mumble & Audacity. Then I noticed it kept creating copies of boot records — my boot was a mass of multiple selections of the same distros. I used Grub Customizer to clean them up, and at next boot it created more. I reported the issue. It has now come off my T430. I still wanted to have something to review for October, and so decided to try a SINGLE INSTALL (what a concept!) on the IdeaPad. I attempted to install OpenMandriva, but got nowhere, it failed to create a partition. I got my GPartEd disk out and redid the disk, with a small Swap partition and a large Primary. I installed OpenMandriva Lx 4 just fine, and rebooted. No boot. It didn’t write Grub properly or whatever, I’ve had this issue before. So I tried Manjaro, and it wouldn’t even find my wifi. I’m using SuperGrub2 on a CD to boot, then going into OM4. There is supposed to be a way to use SuperGrub2 to write Grub but it isn’t obvious, got more reading to do. I have some items for sale from my earlier inheritance. See my eBay listings (moss23) and talk to me if you’re interested in any of them. I did sell the Hackintosh, did not really get fair value for it. I now have $95 saved up towards the new laptop; eBay sales go towards that as well. I have also started a Sponsus for Distrohoppers, but you’re all welcome to join in. http://sponsus.org/zaivala My job has gone sideways. I still have it, and finally am working part time, but my wonderful manager got demoted and moved for no reason, and the new manager just isn’t the same. I had wanted 4 days per week, I’m getting 3. I’m looking for work again. Some employees have not stopped crying about the change, and it was 3 weeks ago. Another result of the change is I’m making even less income. As this show is turning into Readers’ Corner, I should note that I finished reading the Nightside series by Simon R. Green to my wife, and have started in on Temeraire by Naomi Novik. Unlike Joe, I don’t get audiobooks, I *am* the audiobook reader. Joe I need to solder something. Don’t know what yet Ordered a small set of HBS 820’s Haven’t worked on those before but i am willing to give them a try My CPAP machine is dying. Makes getting sleep difficult. Which makes motivation to do projects even more difficult I pulled out one of the spare CPAPs that i have and reprogrammed it to match my other one. I think i got everything right and i am sleeping a little better Have to wait for my referral to go through with the VA and it is taking longer than it should so that i can get the right one refurbished or replaced. Finished up the Wheel of time series again. I love the book series. Very well done audiobook series. Still think they should have split the last book in two. Very long I will be listening to the new Alex Verus novel as well as the second book in the last reaper series. Alex Verus is still very good as a series. It may have slowed a bit but it is still enjoyable The last reaper series is fun. Not necessarily great writing but a bit of mindless action and adventure. I am also waiting to pick up the new M.D. Massey novels books 7 and 8 of the junkyard druid series I am acting manager at work for most of the month, That should be fun Picked up some usb cables with switches in the middle. Needed one for the wireless phone charger in my car since my accessory port does not turn off with the vehicle and i don‘t want to run down the battery or wear out the connectors on the cable or the charger. Works very well. Thinking of replacing the power supply with something a bit more powerful. Then maybe work on some cable management. Josh Visited the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) for micro:bit Live, the first ever micro:bit conference! Some big announcements regarding micropython and other micro:bit classroom tools Did a talk, Panel Discussion and did a stand for the magazine. No updates on the phone situation. Still waiting for them to send a replacement. NEWS: Linux Mint September Update Fixed the invisible Update Manager tray icon bug from back in August Date Format will better respect locale in 19.3. More progress on XAppStatusIcon introduced last month. System Reports gets versioning information — it’ll now tell you when upgrades are available, and of course, tell you about system information and crashes as always. The logo is almost official! Work continues on the MintBox 3. Mumble 1.3.0 Released CentOS 8 Released EPEL is released, but I’m not sure if it has all the software users might expect. Need to test! CentOS Stream! – A semi-rolling release of CentOS 8. Stream will live between the ultra stable RHEL/CentOS and the forward thinking Fedora. Ubuntu 19.10 Beta Available Firefox Updates to 69.0.2 Looking Ahead to Kernel 5.4 Pi 4 Gets Better Raspian Support Pine64 October Update GNOME Foundation is Being Sued Because of Shotwell Photo Manager Docker is in deep trouble SECURITY UPDATE: Exim had a bad September Lilocked (Lilu), a Ransomware Targeting Linux-based Servers (Sept 6ish) Early reports suspected Exim, but later was confirmed. Lilocked encrypts user files and drops a Readme file on the system with instructions on how to pay the .03BTC ransom. Millions of Exim Servers Vulnerable to Root-Granting Exploit (Sept 7ish) Servers running 4.80 to 4.92.1 are susceptible to a remote code execution flaw An attacker can exploit this with a specially crafted handshake. The temporary fix is to disable TLS… just no. New Critical Exim Flaw Exposes Servers to Remote Attacks (Sept 30ish) Servers running 4.92.2 and earlier are susceptible to DoS and remote code execution. Patch up to version 4.92.3! This version is available in Ubuntu, Arch, Debian, and Fedora as of Sept 30. Regular email users should take steps to backup their data at the very least. 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 319 – New Mumble (mp3) appeared first on mintCast.
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