Series 6 Episode 6 – We welcome back Mark from a short break, the Binary Times Audiocast has joined the Other Side Podcast Network. In this episode Mark has been distro hopping like crazy, Wayne is having issues with KVM on the desktop, we speak about apt vs apt-get, more under the hood tips and another epic Irish saying. Enjoy.

01:29 Mark welcomes us to Series 6 Episode 6 of the Binary Times and dedicates the show to Jimmy Beacons. The weather looks like it’s going to be nice in both Kilkishen and Bristol. Wayne thinks they’re getting good enough to be weather reporters, Mark is not so sure.

02:58 The guys announce that they are now part of the Other Side Podcast Network. They’ve joined other such august free and creative commons shows such as CCJam, Crivins, the Duffercast, Tea, Earl Grey, Hot!, The Bugcast, TuxJam and Twine Radio.

05:41 Wayne tells us what he’s been up to. Wayne’s a fan of KVM for running Virtual Machines. He used to use Virtual Box and found some of the setting up involved easier with that. He’s been having problems with bridging between KVM and Ubuntu MATE. If anyone listening has any ideas as to how to fix these problems he’d be more than happy to hear from them. Wayne feels limited knowledge about things like the Linux networking stack and the Linux Audio subsystem are holding him back. Mark agrees and says that is why he relies on specialist distributions like AVLinux to have Pulse Audio and JACK set up properly. This leads to a discussion around to distro hop or not. Wayne also tells us that he’s starting up an IT support business and trying to help a customer choose the right laptop is proving tricky.

16:07 Mark tells us about his adventures in distro hopping. Mark has an old Core 2 Duo that he’s been trying a bunch of different distros on, namely Clear Linux, Devuan, Haiku, Lubuntu 19.04, KDE neon and OpnSUSE Tumbleweed.

Clear Linux wouldn’t install, as it complained that the hardware wasn’t 64 bit. Users in the Dublin Linux Telegram group suggested that it could be due to using an EFI ISO, Mark didn’t investigate that further though. He also mentions that the Dublin Linux Community are holding a Clear Linux event in November.

Mark thinks Devuan is quite cool. He also found out that Devuan is part of the Dyne foundation.

Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by <a href=https://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/_english/bs-beos.htm”>the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful.

Lubuntu 19.04 uses LXQt as its default desktop environment. Mark noted it only used 270MB RAM at startup. While very usable, it was a bit too basic for his wants.

Mark notes that KDE Neon only uses 370MB RAM at startup and questions the widely held belief that KDE Plasma is a heavy desktop environment.

OpenSuse Tumbleweed with the KDE Plasma desktop only uses 400MB of RAM at startup and that is the distribution that is currently on the machine.

The guys follow this up with a discussion on the real utility of old hardware in today’s web intensive, resource hungry computing, and then discuss laptops with discrete graphics cards.

34:35 Wayne wants to talk about signatures in Thunderbird. He wants to set up a signature for his new business and found the best way to do that was to create a new email, set up the signature as he wanted it, save it as an html file, then check a box to attach that file for the signature. It surprised him that it was done that way. He used a lifewire article to help him in completing this task.

37:49 Mark tells us about the latest humble bundles to catch his eye, including the humble RPG bundle, the IT Security by Taylor and Francis bundle, Become a Game Developer bundle and Level up your Python bundle.

41:12 Wayne moves the topic onto apt vs apt-get. Wayne lists out various apt commands and their apt-get / apt-cache equivalents.

• apt install where the equivalent command in apt-get is apt-get install
• apt remove where the equivalent command in apt-get apt-get remove
• apt autoremove where the equivalent command in apt-get apt-get autoremove
• apt search where the equivalent command in apt-cache apt-cache search
• apt show where the equivalent command in apt-cache apt-cache show
• apt update where the equivalent command in apt-get apt-get update
• apt upgrade where the equivalent command in apt-getapt-get upgrade
• apt full-upgrade where the equivalent command in apt-get apt-get dist-upgrade
• apt edit-sources where the equivalent command in apt-get nano /etc/apt/sources.list

apt dist-upgrade is an alias for apt full-upgrade

46:35 Mark talks about zypper, the equivalent of apt in SUSE land, and talks about a cheat sheet that’s available to help you use zypper. The conversation moves onto OpenSUSE itself and YaST. Mark recommends reading the documentation before using OpenSUSE.

51:31 Under the Hood – Wayne’s under the hood is how HTTPS works. Thanks Ben! He also talks about Stacer, an open source system utility.

Mark mentions the videos available on xiph providing insight on digital media as a worthwhile watch. Thanks once again Ben!

54:51 Irish saying of the show: “An líonra taobh eile” or the other side network.

Thanks for listening, we hope you enjoy the show as much as we did making it and of course all feedback welcome!

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