mintCast 303 – New Users, Start Here pt2 (mp3)

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And now, here’s the show:

Welcome to mintCast Episode 303.

This is Leo and this week with me are Moss (not last this week) and Tony Hughes and Tony Watts and Joe and Bo (sorta) and we’re recording live on February 24th, 2019.

First up, in our wanderings, more security vulnerabilities, some OpenMandriva news, another LUG, the return of the Dell 7130, and more distro hopping

In the news, we have some updates, some goodbyes

In the innards, we hit more new user help with tons of pointers

And finally, plenty of listener feedback to chat about

BI-WEEKLY WANDERINGS:

Leo

Writing again at leochavez.org

Documenting my GUI setup in Mint

Trackpad issue on t450s

Flatpak vulnerability

snapd vulnerability (Dirty Sock)

Moss

I spent several hours getting OpenMandriva 3.03 installed (almost 1400 updates, plus all my usual stuff). My system includes 4 distros on separate partitions. They have played together well. OM played with others better than any distro I’ve seen. And then… my Ubuntu Studio 18.10 installation updated its Grub, which, without asking permission, rewrote the whole Grub on the system. Now my three Ubuntu-based distros work, but OpenMandriva goes into a kernel panic at Step 2. I decided to blow away the offender (Ubuntu Studio 18.10) first. I heard there was a MATE flavor of MX. I found that was not true, but found some very confusing instructions on installing MATE DE on MX. Not being as stoopid as I used to be, I managed it. So I found and installed OpenMandriva 4 beta. Went smoothly. Everything seems to work, although it’s still beta. But now, MX is not booting, returning a 32-bit error. At this point, only my LM 19.1 MATE install is fully configured; I just have to troubleshoot the printer function in Bodhi 5 and finish configuring Kodi (not easy) to get that up and running. OM 4 is missing some files which would get Mullvad running, other things to follow. And I need to reinstall MX or find something else for Partition #4.

Update on Life: My mother is finally in the rehabilitation facility she should have been in a month ago, but is not optimistic about ever leaving. And my soggy car is still the same, ServPro said they can fix it for $500-700, everyone else tells me to “total” the car and get my insurance money. BTW, the rain has been so bad in this area that a rockslide has closed Interstate 40 on the North Carolina side of the mountains going from here to Asheville and large portions of Knoxville were so flooded I could not drive Uber last night.

Joe

Ordered Controller Board for 3d printer

Received

Got an enclosure for the 3d printer in the hopes that it will prevent that from happening again and maybe improve my prints

Modified.

Had fun at the local lug

Helped set up virtual box using an already existing hard drive with Windows

Then helped set up x2go on the same machine so that someone could remote into linux and launch the vm of windows

Reading up on pi hole docker

Need to rebuild my server. Gotta decide what to do

Purchased a mic stand extension.

Tony Watts

Upgraded Dell 7130 wifi card – thanks Craig!

Updating my arcade cabinet

Swap out tower for either a lower power (and heat) or maybe a pi

Must update OS

Looking at Lakka, Retropie, Recalbox.

Tony Hughes

Using a ‘Fake’ USB3 Flash drive I bought on Ebay as a Multiboot drive as it is still useful for this despite not being much better than USB2, I did get my money refunded from the place I bought them from so it ended up being free (as in Beer)

Installing Mint 19.1 to an old Vista era Sony VAIO laptop with a Pentium dual core processor and 2Gig RAM. For an old machine it runs well despite the fact it kicks out almost as much heat as a small power station. The Aspire 5720 didn’t go quite as well and I ended up having to install Mint 18 as 19 just kept crashing during the install, some kernel issues but I did end up with a working laptop. These have now been passed onto a charity working with the homeless community.

Playing with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed in VirtualBox and on one of my Dell 6220’s so far it looks quite nice with the Plasma DE, I couldn’t face GNOME and it didn’t have the option of a MATE DE install.

Got the ota update to Android 9 for my Nokia 6, first impressions are good as I only got it first thing yesterday morning so only had about 36 hours to get a feel of it. It does have at least one bug on this phone, I can’t change the wallpaper for the home screen, but it left my previous one so not too worried. I also upgraded the phone to a 64Gb micro SD card into my phone to expand the 32Gb internal storage. The new card is far faster than the previous 16Gig and I have noticed a difference in the speed of podcast downloads which are stored to the card.

NEWS:

LibreOffice 6.2 – will be the last version with 32-bit support

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release will be reaching end of life in less than two months

[Moss] LinuxQuestions.org 2018 Best Of Award Winners – GNU World Order won in the Podcast category with 20% of votes (9 votes). (Voting Results here)

Riot, open-source Slack alternative, is out of beta

INNARDS:

Leo

Checking your disk health

[Gnome] Disks is a utility that covers:

Partition creation/resizing

Partition checking [fsck] and maintenance

Partition backup and restore (a compliment to Timeshift)

Disk SMART attributes

Disk Benchmarking

Tony H

Office suite – LibreOffice, Calligra Suite, GNOME office suite, GNU Cash,

Tony W: Office compatibility

Libreoffice first. If there are compatibility issues in LibreOffice:

Word online – it’s free

Office365 (paid, more features)

MS Office in Wine – older versions typically work

Moss – Not Free: SoftMaker Office (FreeOffice is SMO old edition)

Don’t be afraid to use software you need to pay for, and don’t be afraid to pay for “free software”. Any time you complain they don’t have “x” software for Linux, and then refuse to pay for the software you’re using, you are perpetuating the issue. I use SoftMaker Office, as I’ve said on many occasions, because it is completely M$ compatible, much more so than ODF office packages like LibreOffice. It’s $79.95 first time, $39.95 upgrades. (If you use that other OS we won’t mention, you can find SoftMaker sold as Ashampoo Office, often at hefty discounts.)

Video and Audio playback – VLC, Media player, Rhythmbox, Kodi, Spotify,

Internet – Firefox, Chrome/chromium/etc., iceweasel, Midori, Seamonkey, Web

Audio Editing – Audacity, Ardour, Frinika,

VOIP – Skype, Discord, Mumble….

Video Editing – OpenShot, Handbrake, KDEnlive, Shotcut, Cinelarra….

Photo editing – GIMP, InkScape, Pinta, Darktable, Krita (similar to manga studio), Raw Therapee ….

Mobile file transfer and file sync – KDE connect, GNOME Connect, DropBox, Box, Google Drive

Joe

Calibre

Ebook reader

Mcomix

A comic book reader

Chrome

Everyone should know about this

Extensions do a lot

Vysor

Flash downloader

Ebook readers

Onetab

Video downloader

Https everywhere

Dark mode

PIA

Ublock origin

BTsync/resilio sync

Dropbox

Good tool for automation

Server

Plex

Libresonic

Sshfs

X2go

Pi hole docker

ALL For gaming

Proton, DXVK and Wine

http://170.187.156.171/2018/10/23/mintcast-294-linux-gaming-is-alive-again/

Emulation

PCSXR for Playstation

Nestopia for NES

Snes9x for SNES

Desmume for Nintendo DS

Fuze for ZX Spectrum

Links from the Aether:

AWX Ansible

multibootUSB http://multibootusb.org

Linux in Easy Steps 6th edition (illustrated using Linux Mint) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1840788089/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_CP-yCb40RV8QZ

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

Next episode will air at 2PM Central Time on Sunday 10th March 3pm EST/8pmUTC

mintCast MeWe group: https://mewe.com/join/mintcast

Wrap-Up:

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

KWisher for the “PiCaster”, a Raspberry Pi that streams each episode as we record it

The folks at Hacker Public Radio for the Mumble server we use to communicate

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

— Play Closing Music and Standard Outro —