Series 7 Episode 3 – In this episode The Binary Times guys are upgrading OS’s for family and testing, Mark has been working with Linux Mint, Wayne has been knee deep in Mikrotik’s RouterOS , more under the hood tips and another epic Irish saying. Enjoy.
00:27 Wayne welcomes us to Season 7 Episode 3 from a wet and windy Bristol. It’s wet and windy in Kilkishen too, as Mark relates that the wttr app is reporting much the same weather as he can see outside. It’s a momentous day on the day they’re recording, with many new beginnings happening, like it being the first day of spring and the first day of FOSDEM 2020. The guys plan a short show so they can watch the live streams.
03:11 Mark tells us what he’s been up to. He tells us that his parents’ PC was displaying a “system problem detected” error message that turned out to be nothing more than a prompt to upgrade from Linux Mint 19.2 to Linux Mint 19.3. Mark did the upgrade and it went very well, everything was plain sailing, but he voices his concerns regarding the fact that error messages like this are unnecessarily worrying for new or inexperienced users.
Mark goes on to talk about the upgrade of his parents’ laptop from Linux Mint 18.3 to Linux Mint 19.3. This was a more involved process which first involved changing the display manager from mdm to lightdm, as Linux Mint changed display managers . He did this with these commands:
sudo apt install lightdm lightdm-settings slick-greeter
sudo apt remove --purge mdm mint-mdm-themes*
sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
Reboot your machine, and once back at a terminal, input:
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
Once fully updated, install Linux Mint’s upgrade tool to upgrade from the older LTS to the newer LTS. You can do this as follows:
sudo apt install mintupgrade – to install the tool
mintupgrade check – to simulate an upgrade and check for any possible breakages.
mintupgrade download – to download the upgrade
mintupgrade upgrade – to do the upgrade
The guys discuss the number of steps involved in upgrading between LTSs.
Mark goes on to discuss how he put Zorin OS on a SSD for a colleague’s parents’ PC.
Wayne goes on to tell us how he’s been upgrading all of his work’s PCs to Windows 10 while also installing Ubuntu MATE on a few laptops.
14:40 Wayne goes on to tell us that Mike Saunders has upgraded MikeOS and provided a link to MikeOS playing “Stand By Me”!
15:53 Wayne goes on to thank Paul for a Vostro 3550 Laptop. In the spirit of paying it forward, which is Paul want, Wayne decided to try out some new distributions on the laptop to report back to everyone how it went. The first distro he tried was Pop!_OS (which he didn’t really get on with) at which point Mark suggests Wayne should try Kubuntu 2020 next, which is Mark’s re branding of Kubuntu 20.04.
Wayne goes on to tell us he also tried Regolith, a Free and Open Source Distribution based on Ubuntu 18.04 with the i3 Window Manager. He really likes it. He’ll play around with it some more and recommends it if you want to give i3 a go.
23:59 The guys go on talk about the concept of “Pay it forward”.
26:27 Wayne tells us about his MikroTik adventures. The guys talk about Network Security, and quickly lose their “pay it forward” feelings towards their fellows, not wanting to be the slowest in the hurd.
Wayne provides some of the links to the topics he’s been covering with MikroTik, and these are as follows:
iptables: Packet Processing
iptables: Tables and Chains
MikroTik VLAN and Bridge Configuration
MikroTik VLAN Routing Configuration with Manageable Switch
Mark mentions the Ubuntu Security Podcast as a good one to listen to as of late they cover other topics besides patches for security vulnerabilities like how to get into InfoSec
38:30 Wayne talks about Shotcut, a free and open source, cross-platform video editor.
40:37 Under the Hood – Mark tells us about Gardiner Bryan’s attempt to create a Free and Open Source Game based on his frustration of Rocket League being discontinued for Linux. Mark plans to become a first rate games developer over the next couple of days and help create the best Open Source game EVA!!! There’s no lack of ambition on this show!
44:21 Wayne’s more understated Under the Hoods are as follows:
Use reader mode in Firefox!
Wayne’s second under the hood is CTRL-L to clear the screen in a terminal
Wayne’s gem of an under the hood is ip -c a which colourizes the command’s output. He’s even aliased ip to ip -c
49:48 Irish Saying of the Show is “Is maith liom ag caint le mo chairde” or I like to talk with my friends!
We hope you enjoy the show as much as we did making it!
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