Series 7 Episode 10 – In this episode Mark has been testing the various Ubuntu distros for newcomers, he’s also installed FreeBSD, Wayne speaks about his upgrade to Mate 20.04 and tweaks he’s used to tailor things to his liking, more under the hood tips and another epic Irish saying. Enjoy.
00:24 Wayne welcomes us to Series 07 Episode 10 of the Binary Times. It’s warming up in Bristol. Mark tells us he and his family went for a darkness into light walk this morning. At the time it was foggy, then sunny, and now foggy again. Mark mentions knowing the feeling of Paul Dellegatto’s dog Brody interrupting the weather forecasting. Mark tells us he loves living in Kilkishen.
04:46 Mark tells us he’s been carrying on his quest to find the best new-comer distribution. He takes his hat off to the Ubuntu family of distributions. While he was seriously considering Kubuntu 20.04, especially considering Ubuntu Studio is moving to KDE, he’s settled on Ubuntu-MATE 20.04 with the Cupertino panel.
Mark goes on to tell us that he’s installed FreeBSD on his “studio PC”. He plans to install the Lumina Desktop on top of Xorg. He wanted to brush up on his vim by running through the vim-tutor again, to do that on Ubuntu you need to install both vim-runtime and vim-gui-common. The guys go on to discuss vim and the likes of vifm and ranger. The conversation moves on to managing files in One Drive and Mark’s credibility.
22:15 Wayne tells us about the fun he had upgrading to Ubuntu MATE 20.04. It didn’t go well because it messed up his audio installation. There are also a number of steps Wayne needs to make to get MATE to how he likes it. First off he installs dconf-editor and ensures that the show-date option is on and that hide window thumbnails is selected. Wayne also tells us that his Timeshift backup didn’t work, which led Wayne to just Nuke and Pave back to 18.04. Once this was done, he reduced the size of the icons on the desktop, and got rid of the ‘Menu’ word next to the MATE icon by going into gsettings and setting com.solus-project.brisk-menu label-visible to false. The guys discuss hi-DPI and then discuss Bill Hicks view on marketers and other matters. There’s one slight thing left that he hasn’t been able to fix and that is his guitarix plugins. This leads Wayne to talk about all his IT having niggling problems. Mark mentions Goran Mekić’s IT feels like a constant Failure blog post, which he came across while looking up FreeBSD as a DAW. Wayne talks about software development complexity, before contemplating life away from a screen. This leads Mark to mention that he is getting the Lego ISS set. Wayne’s conclusion to the whole thing is he loves IT apart from the niggles.
Wayne goes on to tell us about two Libreplanet talks that stood out for him. The first is the keynote by FSF executive director John Sullivan on our current crisis in communication freedom. The second was Rented future: The dangerous rise of life as a service by Lucy Ingham, in which she discusses how we are entering a post ownership age and the dangers and opportunities life as a service presents. Wayne also metions Dave’s contribution to the chat with regard to the FSF’s guide to free telecommunications. He goes on to tell us that he’s also started looking into Vagrant and Ansible. Mark mentions that the AdminAdmin podcast is now part of the Otherside Network.
50:44 Under the Hood – Wayne kicks off his Under the Hood by recommending the two Libreplanet talks he spoke about and also recommending the Definitive Guides to all things Programming by O’Reilly bundle from Humble Bundle, which leads to a discussion about SQL databases and dBase III Plus.
Wayne’s final under the hood is the Witty Pi 3, a HAT to provide a real time clock and power management for the Raspberry Pi.
For Mark’s Under the Hood he mentions that there are a number of articles on the Industrial Ethernet Book of interest this month, being How Industrial Linux enables distributed IIoT applications, 5G in Manufacturing Will Reach $10.8 Billion by 2030, International IEC 63171-6 standard for Single Pair Ethernet and Industrial 5G technology offers potential wireless standard.
57:47 Irish Saying of the show is “Lá breá inniu” or it’s a fine day today.
We hope you enjoy the show as much as we did making it!
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