Series 3 Episode 10 – In this episode Mark installs KXStudio, Wayne chats about GIMP 2.10, more Ubuntu MATE tips, a frontend for youtube that strips away the clutter, more amazing under the hood tips and an Irish saying in this fortnights episode, have a listen…
00:24 Wayne welcomes us to Season 3 Episode 10 from a slightly cloudy Bristol. The morning has been lovely in Kilkishen. A difference of opinion over the weather almost leads to Mark being fired.
01:22 Mark has been up to all kinds of crazy stuff over the last two weeks. One of those things is installing KXStudio. Mark mentions that they are looking for donations and suggests that people donate. Mark decided to put the distribution on a spare hard drive as the KXStudio applications use QT4 rather than QT5 on his existing Kubuntu 18.04 and also just to see what the distribution looks like. Mark decides not to take the bet that Wayne offers that he will stick with it as a distribution. The guys discuss getting serious in the podcast. Note: If Mark had checked the news section of KXStudio he would have known that an 18.04 release will soon be ready.
06:56 Mark discusses the woes of supporting a Windows 10 gaming machine. Let’s just say he’s not impressed. It bores Wayne too. Mark is waiting for the day when Windows 11 DE is based off of a Linux kernel.
11:15 Wayne moves our Linux podcast on to reveal that he has installed Gimp 2.10 as a ppa. Wayne says it’s also available as a flatpak, and Mark discovers it’s also available as a snap. Wayne’s not a fan of the new dark theme and thinks it may just be that he doesn’t like change. He tells us all about the new features of Gimp 2.10.
18:09 Wayne updated his work laptop to Ubuntu MATE 18.04 and it was a breeze. Wayne tells us the Ubuntu MATE Welcome application, Software Boutique and Pulsemixer are all snaps now. You install these as follows:
snap install ubuntu-mate-welcome –classic
snap install software-boutique –classic
snap install pulsemixer
Wayne asks Mark to do a df -h on his existing Ubuntu MATE 16.04 and then the same on a new 18.04 install to see how much bigger 18.04 is compared to 16.04, and also to check the boot up time. Wayne questions whether Ubuntu MATE is a good distribution for older hardware, Mark decides not to share his opinion and Wayne installs Crunchbang plus plus on older hardware.
24:42 Wayne moves the conversation onto Arch, i3 and Firefox. Firefox pulled in another 500MB of software, which the guys marvel over. Wayne suggests Midori as a lightweight browser, while also promising to do more browsing from the terminal, using the likes of w3m and lynx. Wayne says the binary times is brilliant in a terminal browser. Mark suggests Falkon web browser as a lightweight browser, which he says he is going to try. The guys discuss software bloat.
31:40 Wayne introduces us to tube, a lightweight youtube browser. Mark tries it out and is impressed by the minimal nature and the speed of the application.
35:37 Mark starts off the Under the Hood section with:
sudo apt -f install
to install dependancies when a dpkg -i [filename].deb fails
37:30 Wayne asks us if we know that you can use Telegram as a cli app. Mark says that he knew that but didn’t see the utility. Wayne tells us all the features that are available. Mark is impressed, Wayne’s effort has brought him around to seeing the utility of a cli Telegram.
41:48 Wayne’s second under the hood is a nice and simple little one to find out whether you are running a 32bit or 64bit OS, and it is this: getconf LONG_BIT
43:00 Before the Irish Saying of the Podcast, Mark tells us that he’s redesigned the binary times t-shirt, they both agree that it looks really cool.
44:48 Irish saying of the podcast “Nach bhfuil tú ag éisteach” or You’re not listening!
On that note, thanks for listening and we hoped you enjoyed it as much as we did making it!
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