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

The News:

Mint Monthly News – April 2026

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

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

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

Linux is Getting a New Default Folder in Your Home Directory

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

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

Kids Bypass Age Verification With Fake Moustaches

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

Will Euro-Office be using ODF?

Dell and Lenovo Sponsoring LVFS

Security And Privacy:

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

Proton Mail now supports post-quantum encryption

Contact Info:

• Joe – Tllts.org,  linuxlugcast.com, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, moss@bodhilinux.com, Mastodon @zaivala@hostux.social, occasionally on HPR
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, Bill_H on Discord, @wchouser3@fosstodon.org on Mastodon, also checkout the other podcast I am on, Linux OTC (with Eric, Majid & Charlie).
• Majid – drmajid@mintcast.org, AtypicalDoctor on Discord, and The Atypical Doctor Podcast and also Linux OTC and Distrohoppers Digest.
• Eric – I can be reached by email at eric@mintcast.org.
• Charles – charles@mintcast.org, Mr PDX on Discord
• Jim– jim@mintcast.org, GNU2Linux on Discord, The Linux Shortcut on YouTube
• Charlie– ImmutableCharlie on Discord, charlie@mintcast.org

Special Thanks To:

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

First up in the news, NTFS is orphaned, a hare-brained C alternative, and some new Pop!

In security and privacy, Microsoft found it, and Musk open sources

Then in our Wanderings, Jorge is steaming right along, Joe is destroying more stuff, Norbert had a little too much linux, Moss is redoing EVERYTHING, and Bill is pulling his hair out.

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

The News

• Microsoft finds Linux desktop Flaw that Gives Root to Untrusted Users
• Elon Musk Wants to ‘Open Source’ Twitter’s Algorithms

Wrap-up

• Joe – Tllts.org, linuxlugcast.com, MeWe, jb@mintcast.org, Buy Joe a coffee
• Norbert – norbert@mintcast.org
• Josh T – jt@mintcast.org, Josh Thacker on Discord, and @Metal_FOSS on Twitter
• Nishant – nishant@mintcast.org,riconghost on instagram, riconghost@Github, Ghost.Ricon on DIscord, maverick00783 @ Steam
• Moss – bardmoss@pm.me, you can hear me on Distrohoppers’ Digest and Full Circle Weekly News, and you can find more contact information for me on It’s MOSS.
• Bill – bill@mintcast.org, @wchouser3 on Twitter,and Bill_H on Discord

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

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

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

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

THE NEWS

• Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix Shifts Focus
  • No more new features for a while. The focus is on becoming an official flavor.
  • Sit tight, Cinnamon remixers, progress is being made.
• Android 10 Coming to Pinephone
• Blender Foundation is hiring
• Treasurer changes in the Manjaro Project
• Gecko STATIC 152 is out – openSUSE 15.2 reskinned and easy to install
• Via Dale Miracle: System76 Embraces Coreboot
  • They’ve already come out with a new AMD lineup, now it’s time to open it up for freedom.
• Debian Apt pinning instructions for Chromium

SECURITY UPDATE

• Twitter “Hacked”
  • More

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

• Jason – monsterjavaguns.com, Open Source Creative, Blender For Dummies, 4th edition, @monsterjavaguns just about everywhere on social media
• Joe – www.Tllts.org  linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com
• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!
• 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, linuxuserspace.show and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

• Hobstar for his work on the new logo
• Josh for all his work on the website
• Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we are using to record
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

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

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

THE NEWS

• Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix Shifts Focus
  • No more new features for a while. The focus is on becoming an official flavor.
  • Sit tight, Cinnamon remixers, progress is being made.
• Android 10 Coming to Pinephone
• Blender Foundation is hiring
• Treasurer changes in the Manjaro Project
• Gecko STATIC 152 is out – openSUSE 15.2 reskinned and easy to install
• Via Dale Miracle: System76 Embraces Coreboot
  • They’ve already come out with a new AMD lineup, now it’s time to open it up for freedom.
• Debian Apt pinning instructions for Chromium

SECURITY UPDATE

• Twitter “Hacked”
  • More

Announcements:

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

Wrap-up:

• Jason – monsterjavaguns.com, Open Source Creative, Blender For Dummies, 4th edition, @monsterjavaguns just about everywhere on social media
• Joe – www.Tllts.org  linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – undercastnetwork.com
• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!
• 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, linuxuserspace.show and you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

• Hobstar for his work on the new logo
• Josh for all his work on the website
• Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we are using to record
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

• Dale
  • I started out two weeks ago in Calexico, California.  I drove to Piedmont, South Carolina.  Then drove to Mountain City, TN.  From there I drove to Charlotte, NC.  I left Charlotte and headed for  Kingsport, TN.  I then drove to Nashville, TN.  From Nashville, TN I drove to Groveport, OH.  From there I drove to where I parked my truck.  Then I took an Uber home.
  • This past week I took my car to the dealer for service.  My friend called me after she walked out of work and found her car was making a grinding noise.  I helped her get it towed to a local shop.  Ironically she had an appointment for her car the next day.  I hung out with her the next day so she wouldn’t have to sit in the waiting room for many hours.  They finished her car and took her to pick it up.
  • The remainder of the week.  I spent doing research on Window Managers for my appearance on mintCast.  I watched YouTube on my Roku and chatted on Telegram.  I also installed my usual month of updates on my Solus Plasma, two Debian servers and Linux Mint on my spare laptop.
• Dann
  • Varnish and varnish testing: https://varnish-cache.org/
  • Migrations to new GKE clusters
  • Much cooking
  • Proof Bread YouTube channel
• Leo
  • Updated to kernel 5.7 on my desktop the day after release.
    • Didn’t notice much of a difference in performance. Maybe a slight improvement in games but I don’t have numbers or anything.
  • Updated to 5.4 on my laptop now that it’s officially available in Mint 19.
    • The battery improvements I felt while testing out Ubuntu and Kubuntu 20.04 are back! My aging battery cells appreciate it.
  • Waited patiently as the ISO images were syncing to the mirrors. Grabbed it the first minute it was out.
    • Wanted to figure out to what extent snapd was disabled.
    • My fix was picked up by OMGUbuntu.
  • Staying home. More.
• Tony H
  • I have been doing much the same as I said last show, the weeks since lockdown are starting to merge into each other and repeating each week.  
  • Trying to help out family, I sent a distant cousin who has learning difficulties as a result of a brain tumor when he was 18 months old, his mom told me that he loves cars and will love to see my collection when he can visit after this is all over, so I sent him a couple of models to add to his collection in the meanwhile, his mum said he was delighted to get a personal package and to find the cars inside, she sent me a picture of him playing with them with his other models. 
  • Making my own Elderflower herbal infusion, we have many wild elder trees within walking distance of our house so I picked a bag full during the week and did the infusion, with a little ginger extract this is delicious. 
  • I joined the BDLL Euro meeting last night, and as Leo was being talked about managed to get him to come and join in the meeting.
  • Today my personal hairdresser cut my hair, (my wife) I trimmed my beard myself a couple of weeks ago but I hadn’t had a hair cut since before christmas and missed the opportunity before lockdown so I was well overdue.
• Moss
  • Been spending a fair bit of time in the Linux Mint Telegram group, run ably by J Arun Mani. I opened my mouth, as I often do, on the topic of not being able to fit more than one distro on a USB stick… and they gave me a solution. So I’ve been playing with that solution quite a bit… and you’re going to have to wait until Check This Out to find out what it is.
  • I’m so much ready for the next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest that I’m doing two distros. My reviews have been fairly short anyhow, and KDE neon did not give me a lot of unexpected positives to report on. 
  • We had a power outage on the 10th, which showed that one of our little APC UPS units is in need of replacement. Another $50 out the door!
  • My wife’s M570 Logitech trackball started dying on her. I had promised to send a used M570 to a cousin who is poorer than us for over a year, and we’re doing OK now, so I bought one for him and one for my wife. It took less time for my cousin to get his by about 4 days even though they were ordered within minutes of each other.
  • I’ve been playing with Pearl OS 9, a name change from the previous version, Pearl Desktop 8… it’s based on Ubuntu 20.04, with a few Mint tools thrown in and some links I’d rather do without. It’s kind of odd, they want it to look exactly like old MacOS, and they pull that off rather well, but then have a base wallpaper that looks like it was made from a kid’s block drawing program. But the extra wallpapers fix that easily. 
  • I went to order a PineTab, and my wife didn’t understand what I was ordering and said we didn’t have the money. Next day she okayed the purchase — and the site had closed the order window. Whine.
  • I enrolled in an online class to learn HTML5 and CSS. I can do the class for free, *if* I complete it by July 31; if I want a certificate, I’ll have to pay for it, but they gave me a 15% off coupon…
  • My wife received her Permanent Resident Green Card. So she doesn’t have to recertify for 10 years. Due to Covid-19 and mass defections and firings at INS, we didn’t have to go in to a center for an interview, the nearest such center being Memphis, a 5-hour drive. And in The Dresden Files, we’re deep into the 5th book.

• Joe
  • Read the Iron Druid series again
    • Takes about a week for me to get through but there was also a lot of music and podcasts during that time frame
    • The series really starts out well and then slides slowly down hill in quality
    • I stopped at the last book
  • Codex Alera by Jim Butcher
    • A good series that seems to get more complex as it goes on in much the same way as wheel of time
  • Hardware fun all around
    • Think I had mentioned last time around that I traded a pair of the Crushers for a HP TouchSmart with a broken screen
      • Well when Dustin was getting it ready for shipment another issue came up.
      • I did get the laptop but it would not power on.  No light when it was plugged in.
      • I took it all the way apart and removed the CMOS battery and reseated the power port. Then put it all back together
      • It still did not power on but I was getting a capslock blink code which indicates a bad motherboard
      • There was soda on the motherboard and I did go through with IPA and cleaned the whole thing up.  It looked pretty good and I had high hopes for it working. But no such luck
      • Also swapped the RAM so I could verify that it was not something simple
      • So with a bad motherboard and a shattered screen the cost of fixing it comes out to about the same as it would cost me to buy another one used.
      • So the best thing to do is use it for parts 
    • I had also commented last show about the low quality of my in-ear drivers and that I wanted to try a couple of things out while maintaining MMCX modularity
      • I ordered 2 possible solutions and both have worked out pretty well and sound quality is very improved.
      • Solution 1 was TIN Audio T2 HiFi 2DD Double Dynamic Drive MMCX in ears. A ready to go solution that I did not mind spending 50 dollars on because of how much time I spend with earbuds in
      • The quality is better but even with a good seal it was not that much of an improvement
      • The 2nd solution was a bit more custom.  I did my research to find some well-rated in-ear headphones and the 1more triple drivers kept coming up and I was able to find some broken ones on eBay for 15 dollars.
      • Also ordered a couple of different mmcx conversion solutions but I ended up using the CIEM-to-MMCX converters and some 3D printed end caps and tension relievers.  The CIEM connecters are basically two short prongs which were somewhat easy to add wires to but not many of the potential solutions I saw had any type of tension relief and I am hard on headphones so I designed my own.  It worked really well
      • The sound quality is incredible for in-ears.  On par if not better than the cans that I have
      • Very happy with the end caps that I designed and the modularity of the device
      • So happy with the overall quality that I purchased 1more triple driver bluetooth neckbands on eBay also broken for 18 dollars.
      • These would not turn on but came with all the accessories for the headset.
      • Wanted to try and do the battery fix but impossible to take apart without damaging.
      • Tested out a different adapter.  This was made for flush mounting on the earpieces but that means getting it right the first time and having no room for mistakes.
      • Instead I printed a tension relief adapter and cover and soldered onto the cable
      • Incredibly tiny solder points about 1mm apart
    • Also troubleshot and worked on a balance issue on the custom built XB700s more details available on the linux lugcast podcast if you want to hear about that process.
      • I am thinking there is some board damage or water damage that I have not found
      • Because there is also some issues with mic, even after doing a full swap
    • Never buy Insignia headphones.  I don’t care how good the price is.  They are going to suck and fall apart and be impossible to work on.
  • Worked some on my Raspberry Pi 4 to get it working properly again.
    • Was having a bit of trouble with the unifying receiver but it turned out to be an overheating issue so a usb extender fixed that problem
    • 3D-printed some stackers for the 2.5 inch drives that I have so that they could be put together and still allow for air flow.
    • I have a 7-port powered hub that I was using to power them but it did not have enough power throughput to keep all of them running so I am using the ThinkPad docking station that I have that has a very robust power supply.
  • Have been having trouble getting CURA to see my 3D printer when it is hooked up by USB.  A mostly new control board for the printer along with a new USB cable
    • lsusb sees the serial device and I have added the group permissions for dialout group.  
    • I am able to see the output from the printer using the Arduino IDE but CURA does not see it all. 
    • Someone mentioned that I could run Octopi from the Pi zero, so I may get that set up as I have a couple of them just sitting around.
  • Found some non optimized scripts on my server that was causing it to crash in the middle of the night so i can put off purchasing a new machine for a while longer.
  • De-oxite

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint 20 Beta is out
  • What’s new?
  • Yellow folders! But the other colors were muted before release.
  • Linux Mint 20 will receive security updates until 2025.
  • Until 2022, future versions of Linux Mint will use the same package base as Linux Mint 20, making it trivial for people to upgrade.
  • Until 2022, the development team won’t start working on a new base and will be fully focused on this one.
• Linux Mint dumps Ubuntu Snapd
  • The catalyst for the current snapd issue
  • Want snaps? Or here.
  • If you want Chromium without snap, see this for some alternative options.
• Kernel 5.4 Available in Linux Mint 19
• Ubuntu will be certified for Lenovo laptops and servers 
• <Moss>Microsoft gives AppGet dev credit after the fact 
• SpaceX sends astronauts to ISS using Linux (ISS already has switched to Linux)

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Brave Browser autocompleting websites with referral codes
  • … and whitelists Facebook and Twitter trackers… (older news)
    • Brave’s response
• Facebook helped the FBI exploit a vulnerability in Tails.

Announcements:

The next show will be Sunday, the 28th of June at 7PM UTC, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM British Summer Time

Wrap-up:

• Dale – dmiracle74@gmail.com and Dale_CDL on Telegram
• Dann – tllts.org, http://tllts.org/dannw.php dann@thelinuxlink.net
• Joe – www.Tllts.org  linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – ecnradio.com
• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!
• 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 you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

• Hobstar for his work on the new logo
• Josh for all his work on the website
• Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we are using to record
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.

Download

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS: 

• Dale
  • I started out two weeks ago in Calexico, California.  I drove to Piedmont, South Carolina.  Then drove to Mountain City, TN.  From there I drove to Charlotte, NC.  I left Charlotte and headed for  Kingsport, TN.  I then drove to Nashville, TN.  From Nashville, TN I drove to Groveport, OH.  From there I drove to where I parked my truck.  Then I took an Uber home.
  • This past week I took my car to the dealer for service.  My friend called me after she walked out of work and found her car was making a grinding noise.  I helped her get it towed to a local shop.  Ironically she had an appointment for her car the next day.  I hung out with her the next day so she wouldn’t have to sit in the waiting room for many hours.  They finished her car and took her to pick it up.
  • The remainder of the week.  I spent doing research on Window Managers for my appearance on mintCast.  I watched YouTube on my Roku and chatted on Telegram.  I also installed my usual month of updates on my Solus Plasma, two Debian servers and Linux Mint on my spare laptop.
• Dann
  • Varnish and varnish testing: https://varnish-cache.org/
  • Migrations to new GKE clusters
  • Much cooking
  • Proof Bread YouTube channel
• Leo
  • Updated to kernel 5.7 on my desktop the day after release.
    • Didn’t notice much of a difference in performance. Maybe a slight improvement in games but I don’t have numbers or anything.
  • Updated to 5.4 on my laptop now that it’s officially available in Mint 19.
    • The battery improvements I felt while testing out Ubuntu and Kubuntu 20.04 are back! My aging battery cells appreciate it.
  • Waited patiently as the ISO images were syncing to the mirrors. Grabbed it the first minute it was out.
    • Wanted to figure out to what extent snapd was disabled.
    • My fix was picked up by OMGUbuntu.
  • Staying home. More.
• Tony H
  • I have been doing much the same as I said last show, the weeks since lockdown are starting to merge into each other and repeating each week.  
  • Trying to help out family, I sent a distant cousin who has learning difficulties as a result of a brain tumor when he was 18 months old, his mom told me that he loves cars and will love to see my collection when he can visit after this is all over, so I sent him a couple of models to add to his collection in the meanwhile, his mum said he was delighted to get a personal package and to find the cars inside, she sent me a picture of him playing with them with his other models. 
  • Making my own Elderflower herbal infusion, we have many wild elder trees within walking distance of our house so I picked a bag full during the week and did the infusion, with a little ginger extract this is delicious. 
  • I joined the BDLL Euro meeting last night, and as Leo was being talked about managed to get him to come and join in the meeting.
  • Today my personal hairdresser cut my hair, (my wife) I trimmed my beard myself a couple of weeks ago but I hadn’t had a hair cut since before christmas and missed the opportunity before lockdown so I was well overdue.
• Moss
  • Been spending a fair bit of time in the Linux Mint Telegram group, run ably by J Arun Mani. I opened my mouth, as I often do, on the topic of not being able to fit more than one distro on a USB stick… and they gave me a solution. So I’ve been playing with that solution quite a bit… and you’re going to have to wait until Check This Out to find out what it is.
  • I’m so much ready for the next episode of Distrohoppers’ Digest that I’m doing two distros. My reviews have been fairly short anyhow, and KDE neon did not give me a lot of unexpected positives to report on. 
  • We had a power outage on the 10th, which showed that one of our little APC UPS units is in need of replacement. Another $50 out the door!
  • My wife’s M570 Logitech trackball started dying on her. I had promised to send a used M570 to a cousin who is poorer than us for over a year, and we’re doing OK now, so I bought one for him and one for my wife. It took less time for my cousin to get his by about 4 days even though they were ordered within minutes of each other.
  • I’ve been playing with Pearl OS 9, a name change from the previous version, Pearl Desktop 8… it’s based on Ubuntu 20.04, with a few Mint tools thrown in and some links I’d rather do without. It’s kind of odd, they want it to look exactly like old MacOS, and they pull that off rather well, but then have a base wallpaper that looks like it was made from a kid’s block drawing program. But the extra wallpapers fix that easily. 
  • I went to order a PineTab, and my wife didn’t understand what I was ordering and said we didn’t have the money. Next day she okayed the purchase — and the site had closed the order window. Whine.
  • I enrolled in an online class to learn HTML5 and CSS. I can do the class for free, *if* I complete it by July 31; if I want a certificate, I’ll have to pay for it, but they gave me a 15% off coupon…
  • My wife received her Permanent Resident Green Card. So she doesn’t have to recertify for 10 years. Due to Covid-19 and mass defections and firings at INS, we didn’t have to go in to a center for an interview, the nearest such center being Memphis, a 5-hour drive. And in The Dresden Files, we’re deep into the 5th book.

• Joe
  • Read the Iron Druid series again
    • Takes about a week for me to get through but there was also a lot of music and podcasts during that time frame
    • The series really starts out well and then slides slowly down hill in quality
    • I stopped at the last book
  • Codex Alera by Jim Butcher
    • A good series that seems to get more complex as it goes on in much the same way as wheel of time
  • Hardware fun all around
    • Think I had mentioned last time around that I traded a pair of the Crushers for a HP TouchSmart with a broken screen
      • Well when Dustin was getting it ready for shipment another issue came up.
      • I did get the laptop but it would not power on.  No light when it was plugged in.
      • I took it all the way apart and removed the CMOS battery and reseated the power port. Then put it all back together
      • It still did not power on but I was getting a capslock blink code which indicates a bad motherboard
      • There was soda on the motherboard and I did go through with IPA and cleaned the whole thing up.  It looked pretty good and I had high hopes for it working. But no such luck
      • Also swapped the RAM so I could verify that it was not something simple
      • So with a bad motherboard and a shattered screen the cost of fixing it comes out to about the same as it would cost me to buy another one used.
      • So the best thing to do is use it for parts 
    • I had also commented last show about the low quality of my in-ear drivers and that I wanted to try a couple of things out while maintaining MMCX modularity
      • I ordered 2 possible solutions and both have worked out pretty well and sound quality is very improved.
      • Solution 1 was TIN Audio T2 HiFi 2DD Double Dynamic Drive MMCX in ears. A ready to go solution that I did not mind spending 50 dollars on because of how much time I spend with earbuds in
      • The quality is better but even with a good seal it was not that much of an improvement
      • The 2nd solution was a bit more custom.  I did my research to find some well-rated in-ear headphones and the 1more triple drivers kept coming up and I was able to find some broken ones on eBay for 15 dollars.
      • Also ordered a couple of different mmcx conversion solutions but I ended up using the CIEM-to-MMCX converters and some 3D printed end caps and tension relievers.  The CIEM connecters are basically two short prongs which were somewhat easy to add wires to but not many of the potential solutions I saw had any type of tension relief and I am hard on headphones so I designed my own.  It worked really well
      • The sound quality is incredible for in-ears.  On par if not better than the cans that I have
      • Very happy with the end caps that I designed and the modularity of the device
      • So happy with the overall quality that I purchased 1more triple driver bluetooth neckbands on eBay also broken for 18 dollars.
      • These would not turn on but came with all the accessories for the headset.
      • Wanted to try and do the battery fix but impossible to take apart without damaging.
      • Tested out a different adapter.  This was made for flush mounting on the earpieces but that means getting it right the first time and having no room for mistakes.
      • Instead I printed a tension relief adapter and cover and soldered onto the cable
      • Incredibly tiny solder points about 1mm apart
    • Also troubleshot and worked on a balance issue on the custom built XB700s more details available on the linux lugcast podcast if you want to hear about that process.
      • I am thinking there is some board damage or water damage that I have not found
      • Because there is also some issues with mic, even after doing a full swap
    • Never buy Insignia headphones.  I don’t care how good the price is.  They are going to suck and fall apart and be impossible to work on.
  • Worked some on my Raspberry Pi 4 to get it working properly again.
    • Was having a bit of trouble with the unifying receiver but it turned out to be an overheating issue so a usb extender fixed that problem
    • 3D-printed some stackers for the 2.5 inch drives that I have so that they could be put together and still allow for air flow.
    • I have a 7-port powered hub that I was using to power them but it did not have enough power throughput to keep all of them running so I am using the ThinkPad docking station that I have that has a very robust power supply.
  • Have been having trouble getting CURA to see my 3D printer when it is hooked up by USB.  A mostly new control board for the printer along with a new USB cable
    • lsusb sees the serial device and I have added the group permissions for dialout group.  
    • I am able to see the output from the printer using the Arduino IDE but CURA does not see it all. 
    • Someone mentioned that I could run Octopi from the Pi zero, so I may get that set up as I have a couple of them just sitting around.
  • Found some non optimized scripts on my server that was causing it to crash in the middle of the night so i can put off purchasing a new machine for a while longer.
  • De-oxite

THE NEWS: 

• Linux Mint 20 Beta is out
  • What’s new?
  • Yellow folders! But the other colors were muted before release.
  • Linux Mint 20 will receive security updates until 2025.
  • Until 2022, future versions of Linux Mint will use the same package base as Linux Mint 20, making it trivial for people to upgrade.
  • Until 2022, the development team won’t start working on a new base and will be fully focused on this one.
• Linux Mint dumps Ubuntu Snapd
  • The catalyst for the current snapd issue
  • Want snaps? Or here.
  • If you want Chromium without snap, see this for some alternative options.
• Kernel 5.4 Available in Linux Mint 19
• Ubuntu will be certified for Lenovo laptops and servers 
• <Moss>Microsoft gives AppGet dev credit after the fact 
• SpaceX sends astronauts to ISS using Linux (ISS already has switched to Linux)

SECURITY UPDATE:

• Brave Browser autocompleting websites with referral codes
  • … and whitelists Facebook and Twitter trackers… (older news)
    • Brave’s response
• Facebook helped the FBI exploit a vulnerability in Tails.

Announcements:

The next show will be Sunday, the 28th of June at 7PM UTC, 2PM US Central Time, 8PM British Summer Time

Wrap-up:

• Dale – dmiracle74@gmail.com and Dale_CDL on Telegram
• Dann – tllts.org, http://tllts.org/dannw.php dann@thelinuxlink.net
• Joe – www.Tllts.org  linuxlugcast.com MeWe jb@mintcast.org 
• Bo – ecnradio.com
• Moss – Triad Bardic College, Peaceful Hippo, MeWe, music on Bandcamp and Moss Bliss’ YouTube channel or Robert Warren’s channel, I should have my ReverbNation site back soon, moss@mintcast.org, distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com, Sponsus (Now with Tiers, and a Donate Button!)!
• 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 you can get your five minute news digest at Full Circle Weekly News

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

• Hobstar for his work on the new logo
• Josh for all his work on the website
• Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we are using to record
• Bytemark Hosting for hosting mintcast.org and our Mumble server
• Archive.org for hosting our audio files
• The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about.

Main Topic: Python, Twitter, and the Raspberry Pi

• Python (python.org) is a programming language that lets you work more quickly and integrate your systems more effectively. You can learn to use Python and see almost immediate gains in productivity and lower maintenance costs.
• Twitter: Developer (dev.twitter.com); Manage Apps (dev.twitter.com/apps); Create a new App (dev.twitter.com/apps/new)
• NLTK (nltk.org) is a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data.
• WordNet® (wordnet.princeton.edu) is a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept.
• @braynebuddy is where the results will eventually appear, and you can follow the development process on Rob’s webwords blog.

Websites:

Tips:

Podcast Announcements:

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