Series 3 Episode 5 – In this episode we discuss more exciting raspberry pi projects, VPNs, Marks fun with updating Kubuntu with the latest Nvidia drivers, another under the hood and another epic Irish saying, have a listen…
00:24 Wayne introduces Series 3 Episode 5 of the ice cold binary times. Don’t worry listeners if you’re having trouble understanding Mark due to his poor audio, he’s also speaking Irish!
01:42 Mark tells us about his trials and tribulations with recent nvidia updates on his Kubuntu 18.04 set up. Mark also mentions that Ubuntu 18.04 went into feature freeze on 1st March, and the first betas should be released on the 8th March.
07:12 Mark’s dying to hear what Wayne has been at since he’s been keeping it top secret. Wayne’s back on the Raspberry Pi train! Wayne tells us about ways to manage the manage the memory split between CPU and GPU,
and he does this by running the raspi-config utility (you do this by entering sudo raspi-config at the command line), choosing option “7. Advanced Options”, then choosing “A3 Memory Split” and then slide the amount of memory in MBs you wish to allocate to the GPU, in Wayne’s case he uses 16. More information on the raspi-config utility can be found here.
You can also update the firmware on your Raspberry Pi to keep your Raspberry Pi up to date. You can also choose not to, Wayne’s gut is telling him that he should. You do this by typing the following: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y and sudo apt install -y rpi-update and
sudo rpi-update.
11:47 Wayne tells us he vehemently dislikes ads and tells us about Pi-Hole, a “black hole for internet advertisements”. He goes on to tell us about PiVPN, a project to provide a simple openvpn setup for the Raspberry Pi. Mark goes on to mention the host file available from Dan Pollack’s website and the guys expand on their attitudes around advertising. Wayne also mentions dnscrypt, which he wasn’t able to get working.
23:37 Mark mentions the Dublin Linux User Group’s new telegram group and their existing social media presence in Meetup and Facebook (as well as discord and refers back to their interview with Squid and how he is using proprietary platforms to promote open source software and culture. The guys then talk about their take on social media.
27:16 Wayne brings it back to Linux with some chat on Ubuntu MATE and the renaming ability in Caja leaves Wayne desiring simple file renaming as found in Windows. Mark decides to ramble on about the differences between MATE and Cinnamon and wonders whether the two projects would be better off merging development resources though he’s not so sure how practical that would be. This leads to a discussion on MATE panels and changing them via the MATE tweak tool.
35:08 Mark moves the conversation on with a question put to Wayne, asking him about his opinions on KDE Neon. Wayne has only installed it on a VM, he quite likes it, but thinks there are too many options and is not sure if he would change it to be his daily desktop. Time will tell as Wayne is a slow burn.
38:37 Mark contemplates installing Chakra Linux OS on his laptop rather than Kubuntu 18.04, and tells us of some of the recent changes Chakra have made in their distribution.
41:26 Wayne introduces Under the Hood, and Mark kicks it off with two, the first being:
ubuntu-drivers -devices, a command to see what devices on your machine may benefit from proprietary drivers.
Mark feels like Linus Torvalds in his attitude to NVidia and wishes they could be more open in their attitude to open source software. He’s hoping to go with AMD more in the coming years as they are turning towards open source tools.
Mark’s second Under the Hood tip is ubuntu-bug [package] and he mentions an Ubuntu Community website as a good place to start to report bugs.
45:20 Wayne’s under the hood is a command line tool to read metadata from image files. Install using sudo apt install libimage-exiftool-perl and in use type exiftool [name_of_image]
46:22 Irish saying of the podcast – Mark goes off on a mad one with loadsa Gaeilge! Any way you want to describe the weather:
Tá sé fuar – it is cold
Tá sé an-fhuar – it is very cold
Tá sé te – it is hot or warm (we don’t really do hot in Ireland!)
Tá sé fliuch – it is wet
Tá sé tirim – it is dry
Tá sé dorcha – it is dark
Tá sé geal – it is bright
We hoped you enjoyed the podcast!
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