LINUX Unplugged - 290: Proper Pi Pedigree

Episode Date: February 27, 2019

We head to the Raspberry Pi corner and pick the very best open source home automation system. Plus some great news for Gnome users, OBS studio has a new funding model, and a nostalgic chat with our study buddy Kenny. Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, and Martin Wimpress.

I was walking into the studio yesterday, and I look over at Wes Payne's screen, and I don't know, maybe I saw 600 icons on that man's desktop. And I just look, and I said, Wes, what kind of mess is this? Okay, okay, don't judge me. I don't normally have desktop icons. So it was actually showing my home directory. It does occasionally get a little bit untidy, let's say. You mean all of those files are in the root flat of your home directory?

Well, I was doing some tests and I had shared them in a container already. So it was just simpler that way. All right. Normally, towards the end of the week, I clean things up and mostly doesn't really affect because all my serious work is already sorted in subdirectories in a hierarchy, right? Now, unfortunately, I must have tweaked something, or, you know, I am on Neon here, so maybe something tweaked upstream. Suddenly, desktop

icons. And I'll admit, I'm still learning my way around Plasma. I mean, I've come a long way here, but no expert. Yeah, you could throw me under the bus, too. We both looked at it and were like, how do we turn these icons off? Because I thought it was like a plasmoid that was showing desktop icons.

That was the assumption I made. And so we were trying to figure out, well, how do we turn that plasmoid off? How do we kill it? Like, where is this setting at? And it took both of us standing there looking at this thing and going, I don't know, Wes. Yeah, so actually, you do go to configure your desktop, which is kind of where I thought. But it's called the view. So you can do folder view or desktop view. And desktop view is pretty much just a wallpaper. Oh, OK. That's called the view. So you can do folder view or desktop view.

And desktop view is pretty much just a wallpaper. Oh, okay. That's good to know. But you know what's funny about that, though, is you and I have been using Plasma Desktop now for a while. Seven months, eight months, nonstop. And it took us that long. Well, it really took you that long to find that. I love Plasma.

This is Linux Unplugged, episode 290 for February 26, 2019. Hello there and welcome into Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's building a Pi stack. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello Wes, we have a great episode, as we always try to do. We're going to start things off with some great news for you GNOME users. OBS Studio has a new funding model. And then we'll head into the Raspberry Pi corner and pick the very best open source home automation system.

Plus, speaking of Raspberry Pi, we'll cover some Ubuntu updates coming that way. We got a few picks, a few quick picks, a nostalgic chat with our study buddy, Kenny. But before we go any further, we have to bring in that mumble room. Time appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug. Hello. Hello. Hello, Virtual Lug. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Hello. Hello. Hello. Why, look at that. Brent, you slipped in under the wire during the intro. Good job. That must have been some fast driving. I assume following all posted speed laws, though, of course.

Brent was on the road right before the show started. So good to see you, Brent. Hello, Bruce, CubicleNake, Demchuk, Foursquare, Mr. Badger back again, MiniMech, Sevia Machinia. I wonder what that is. Turth is in there as well. And the one, the only, Mr. Martin Wimpress. Hello, Wimpy.

Good to have you here tonight too. Good evening. Well, now, let's talk about those DOME Shell performance improvements that I'm very excited about. While Plasma Desktop's been working great, my eye has been over on the GNOME Desktop since the start of the year. Oh, you don't say. Oh, yes, I know that was your prediction.

I think I still have, like, 20 days to, like, pull the eject lever and rob you of your prediction. I think I... So we'll see. Well, that makes me more happy to see the news today. Yeah, I know, right? Jack Lever and rob you of your prediction. I think. So we'll see. Well, that makes me more happy to see the news today. Yeah, I know, right?

Because they're pulling me in. Yeah, that's right. There's more improvements coming to GNOME, specifically around Mutter, too, and latency reductions over the course of GNOME 3.2 that's nearly complete, as well as GNOME 3.0, really. There's been a lot of measurable performance fixes and enhancements to improve the fluidity of the Gnome desktop, as well as addressing latency issues that we've complained about here and there on the show before. And of course, some areas make a huge difference. Other areas are minor improvements.

And it seems like one of the developers leading the charge is a canonical bloke, Wes. Yeah, that's right. Canonical's Daniel Van Vert. I don't know how to say that, but that's my attempt. And while he's already made some great strides in fixing some issues himself, reviewing, collaborating on patches, the job isn't done. There's really some big-ticket work pending, as he called it. In particular, while there's a bit of NVIDIA proprietary driver issue that he's been working on to resolve as it, well, it causes X.Org to use 100% CPU and significantly

lag during simple work like GLX gears. And yeah, that is simple. Yeah. Now, did you get the number right there? Because that 100% CPU usage, is that what you said? Ideally, I would like, I mean, a few spare percentages if you can, NVIDIA. They thought it might be fixed by the recent 4.18.30 driver release, but turns out that this issue is still affecting some users. We speculated when Canonical made the announcement of switching from Unity 7 to Gnome Shell for their desktop. We speculated then that perhaps Gnome would see a pretty nice improvement because they'd have the development resources of Canonical now. And I think that very much has bared out. Specifically on the Ubuntu front too,

Daniel has released a fix for Disco Dingo as well. So you'll get it in the new 19.04 release, but it looks like, although I think it's still in testing, they're also looking at backporting some of the fixes to 18.04 as well. So 18.04 users may get some of these fixes. I think specifically around

screen refresh rates and whatnot. Definitely some of those patches are going to make their way back to 18.04. Yeah, Wes, between this and the overall polish that the GNOME desktop has been seeing, the work that's going into 1904 and the new Fedora, it's going to be really hard for me not to run GNOME for the rest of 2019, I think. We'll see. Well, I'm happy for you because, you know,

just because you get to enjoy a first-class free desktop and no other reason. Either way, right? Either way. I'm like, that's actually a pretty good position to be in, where in the past I was leaping from GNOME to Plasma to sort of have a stable island of desktop Linux. And now, at least so far on Intel graphics, with the later versions of GNOME, I have not been able to reproduce some of the same issues. I'm very, very happy. I'm remaining cautious because I am aware that sometimes after something's been installed for a while or some weirdo extension gets added that things can start to go south. So it's with some caution, but I think so far it's going pretty well. Speaking of going well, I mean, it was like two, three years ago now,

the studio, Jupiter Broadcasting Studio, switched over to OBS Studio for broadcasting our live stream and recording videos, and it's been great. It's been great. We switched from the proprietary Wirecast application, which is also very nice. It's gotten better over the years, but OBS just keeps getting great. And now fans like us have even more to celebrate with version 23.0 releasing yesterday,

as we record this, with Linux Mac OS and Windows releases. And some nice acceleration stuff in there, Wes. Yeah, I mean, do we really care about those other operating systems here on Linux Unplugged? No! The Linux version of OBS, well, now has support for the VA API interface to allow for GPU-based video acceleration. And while you might not always love the quality you get out of those sorts of things, it seems like a nice application for live streaming where you might just want to go fast and make sure you have no delays,

even on a lower-end system that might not have the fastest CPU. You'll also find a bunch of new audio filters, remuxing support, and multi-track audio. Yeah, that is really nice. I'm starting to get a little worried. I'm reading through how OBS is doing fundraising now, and there's positives and negatives to it. So the first approach they're doing, aside from just straight-up direct donations via PayPal or Bitcoin, is this open collective platform where they write, a group of people can raise money for a shared purpose in an open and transparent way,

even if the group may not have a formal organization body. The open collective uses a practice called fiscal sponsorship, where a host organization provides facilities and services that allow the group to accept payments. They have launched a sponsorship program through the Open Collective to sponsor the OBS project. And there's a contributor page where you can contribute money, and then you get your logo on there, and Games Done Quick has done that recently, so they can get their name on that page. So that's one approach, but it's convoluted.

It's even kind of hard to explain. The other approach, which is a little more traditional, but I think is suffering from Patreon fatigue, is they've launched a Patreon campaign to help fund OBS development. Now, OBS is one of the big desktop open source applications now. It's big. It's really, really big.

It basically, Twitch is powered by OBS. Now, most of those are probably on Windows, but it's huge. It's just even a great way if you just want to do screen caps. You know, like,

it's a really, really solid application. Yeah, if you're not streaming it at all, it's still perfectly useful to do screen caps. You know, like it's a really, really solid application. Yeah, if you're not streaming at all, it's still perfectly useful. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's great for streaming or not. So right now, they have 93 patrons total. There's probably, as we record the show, thousands of people, and we're one of them, streaming to the internet with OBS at this very moment.

They have 93 patrons. Now I got to say that's up from yesterday. Yesterday was 88 patrons. So it is slowly going up. They're making $1,000. Now you got to remember that number that Patreon posts right there. It's bullshit. So they're probably making $800, $700 a month after credit cards fail to go through and you take out about 10% of processing fees, 5% to Patreon, 5% to the payment processor, you end up with a number that's lower than what gets posted on Patreon's page there.

That's a best-case scenario number, $1,000. That doesn't seem sustainable. Weren't they sponsored by NVIDIA just recently, though? Didn't NVIDIA contract them to add support for the 20 series graphics cards and the new way the NVIDIA encoder works there? So on their contribute page, they have several sponsors listed there. Most of them are individuals and then there's different tiers you can get in. They don't have Nvidia listed there. Uh, Games Done Quick is the only one at their gold tier, which is 20,000 per year to OBS. There are several at the 250 level.

So I'm not sure if they did, it wasn't through this, uh, they may have sponsored them in the non-traditional sense. I think it was like contracted to do work. I saw, uh, Jensen Young, you know, on stage saying how they'd, you know, asked the OBS developers to add this specific feature. Yeah, as they say, we have collaborated with OBS, the industry-leading streaming application, to help

them release a new version with improved support for NVIDIA GPUs. That's from NVIDIA. So they're clearly not going to go out of business. They're not going to go away. I think where I was going to go, though, with this is part of me would really like it if they just sold a $300 professional enterprise version of OBS. I don't even know what they could do to make it that. Maybe a service contract. I don't know.

But I guess I've lost so many really, really great high-end applications that require a ton of work like this over the years, that there is this part of me that goes, please take my money. Please make a way for us to pay you so that way you don't go away. I feel that same way about Reaper, Wes. Yeah, right. I mean, these are tools that we want to be able to depend on. So whatever method that can be to ensure that that will continue, I want to support, whether that's trying to find ways to contribute, develop a healthy community, or financial support. So this is probably a completely different angle,

but you pay for Final Cut, and that's kind of changed its goals significantly, and you pay for Adobe Premiere, and paying isn't necessarily a guarantee that it will stay around forever. But I do agree that a few hundred dollars support is probably not enough for something that's used by all of Twitch. You think there'd be some sort of partnership they could have more with more streaming services? Like, you know, we're here, we're open, we'll make sure that people are there to use

your services. I think they actually have, if you follow their Twitter, it does look like they've been talking about a little of that. They're not super good about advertising on their website, but on their Twitter feed 24 hours ago, they were talking about new Twitch mixer integrations and stuff like that. And I think that's based on like direct working with, with mixer. I don't know. I think that's happening more and more. I don't know. I think that's happening more and more. And I'm not trying to like even try to scare them on the green side like OBS is screwed. It's going away. It's being taken advantage of. I'm just noticing in myself this tendency to start to get a little worried when they don't directly take money for exchange of the product.

I feel maybe it's me that's feeling like a Patreon fatigue. But I feel like if I go throw in another number there, like it's such a small way of helping. I'd much rather, I don't know, maybe the way to do it is just a direct donation. Maybe that's the way I should do it. Right. We want to feel like there will be others who contribute and that the whole thing could be sustainable that way. But it feels like you're kind of burned out. It works for a couple applications. It's not to say that that can't be done, but there's so many projects that have fallen by the wayside where there just wasn't enough support. Is there a feature in OBS that you're missing at the moment, Chris?

The only thing that I would say its commercial competitor Wirecast does that would be extremely nice to have OBS do is probably two things. The first one is they have this rendezvous. I've never used it. I'm not intimately familiar with it. I have seen it in use though. It's called rendezvous and it is a peer-to-peer video calling service where each host gets a HD, they get a URL, they click it. It sets up an HD video session and in Wirecast, it gives them a dedicated video shot and their own audio track.

And it automatically sets them up as a video shot. So they get their own camera source in the application. They all have their own independent audio. They get program playback directly from Wirecast sent back to them automatically. That sounds incredible. Like that sounds like that's the best thing ever. That would have been so amazing

when we were doing Linux Action Show. And the other thing they have, they've had for a long time, is Desktop Presenter, which is a little tiny application that captures your screen. And I think it encodes it as H.264. I don't know what it does.

It's using hardware acceleration, if it is, and sends that over the network as another camera source. So any computer on your network, you can screen cap. And it shows up automatically using DNS discovery as a camera shot in the Wirecast application. That would be great, because it would even do like 30 frames per second or so. If you're on Ethernet, it could even do more than that.

So you could actually capture video gameplay and video playback. Wow. It's so cool. Yeah. And, you know, there's cool things that OBS has too, like network sound card support and NDI support and all that kind of stuff. That's totally killer. But I would love to see those couple of features come to OBS.

Not necessary for what we do. So if you're looking for of features come to OBS. Not necessary for what we do. So if you're looking for some significant features in OBS, then perhaps the way to go is to find out what it would cost for the OBS developers to add the features that you want. And instead of just dropping a random amount of money on the project, invest some money in the project to add the features that you want to see. And then you get both things. You get the features you want and you get to support the project. So I would say I am 100% on board, something we've actually

considered on a couple of occasions and have found a bit of a pushback. And maybe it was the route it was taken. I'm not sure. I'd have to dig into the history of it. But the project is very established and has a very clear direction they want to go. Additionally, Windows seems to be a pretty clear priority for the project. And so when you come along and say, hey, we'll even hire the developer and have the developer do the work,

or we could contribute to the project, and the answer is kind of like, eh, we're not really going to upstream it even if you do do the work, so don't bother, really. It's not what's in our plan right now. So sometimes you get that, and sometimes you get acceptance. It just kind of depends on what the topic is in the project. But I agree, Wimpy, that's a great way to go. I think it's a cool project, and I'm really glad to see that they added Hardware Accelerated Video support, even more.

There's already been some, but I'm glad to see more. So that's nice. That is nice. But enough talking about that stuff. Enough talking about the OBS project. I think it's pretty cool, though. It's one of those, I think one of the things that I love about OBS Studio,

I know I said I was just done, but I just got to bring this up, now that I was talking about Wirecast. It lets you do stuff on Linux that when I started this thing, oh my gosh, I had to build crazy ass, horrible Hackintoshes and run Wirecast. And I had to, I had to buy Wirecast a thousand dollars and I bought it several times. I did not like, did not like spending that money. And I did not like building Hackintoshes and I did not like having Hackintoshes in production. Yeah, it really does stuff that otherwise on Linux, you would have had to do some like arcane GStreamer magic

to get anywhere close to this. Yeah, and they just keep adding new stuff in. Like, great, great. Just a little while ago, they added in support for doing video playlists, which makes like doing reruns and pre-played videos and stuff really nice. It's just super great. And the guys that run the live stream here at Linux Academy have ended up using OBS in totally different ways than we use it.

They took that setup that I built for them back around Texas Linux Fest, and they've added switchers and controllers and remote audio, and they've got a preview station, and they've added like switchers and controllers and remote audio. And they've got a preview station and they've got a director. They've really taken it to the next level. It's so cool to see what you can do with it. It's all in that same Linux box I built for them last June. So it's pretty cool. Speaking of which, we have a lot coming up.

The most we've ever ran at one time on our meetup page right now. So this is our housekeeping section of the show. And I want to take this moment to mention meetup.com slash Jupiter broadcasting next Tuesday, March 5th. We have our study group, the Linux operating system fundamentals.

Then Saturday, March 9th, we have dinner at scale Saturday night. And then Saturday, March 9th, we have dinner at scale, Saturday night. And then Saturday, April 27th, it's the LinuxFest Northwest parking lot barbecue, where we always have a good time. So there's a lot going on. Meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting. To get all of that, because we'll be adding to that and growing that over time.

It's kind of nice because when we travel, Meetup's a pretty well-established platform. And when we travel places, we can drop a Meetup in there and it alerts people that are on the Meetup service in that area that we're there and that we're doing a thing. Yeah, people already have accounts for various Meetups that are happening in their city so it's not a one-off thing you have to do for us. Just come find us and make it easy to meet up. I still have friends that we talk to regularly from Texas Linux Fest last summer. So it's not just a short-term thing.

You know, Elle, who's on our team now, she met Anthony, the CEO of Linux Academy, at Texas Linux Fest. That's how she started working here. I mean, a lot happened at that Texas Linux Fest. And it's not even that huge of a fest, but there's so many ripple effects when people get together like that.

And that's kind of even why we try to replicate it on a smaller scale here with the virtual lug. It's not the same thing, but it gives us sort of like echoes of that, which is pretty great. And we will have our study group next Tuesday. It just follows Linux Unplugged live here on the stream. The mumble room will be open.

We'll be taking your questions. Kenny, the training architect who put together this course, which is the Linux Operating Systems Fundamentals, is a great guy, and we sat down, and we're talking to him about stuff and kind of preparing, trying to have our ducks in a row, as they say, and of course, we couldn't preparing, trying to have our ducks in a row, as they say. And, of course, we couldn't help ourselves.

We started talking about Linux. Hello, listener. Welcome to, like, one day ago, actually, about 24 hours ago. We're sitting here in the studio having a little chat with Kenny Armstrong. He's a training architect over at Linux Academy. He'll be joining us next week for the study group after the show, the little thing we've been doing for the community. Oh, I'm looking forward to it.

And we're doing the Linux essentials, and we were strategizing about what we should talk about. And as always happens, after we got done talking about the business, we started talking about desktop Linux. That just sneaks in. So I started by asking Kenny, I'm like, all right, alright hold on save it for the show

I want to know what you're using as your daily driver so my daily driver for the last I'd say probably about 10 to 12 years or so has been Fedora I'm currently running the latest and greatest Fedora I don't do rawhide because I like to use my

machine on a daily basis I just recently had a go at it. What, at Rawhide? Yeah. I've done it before in the past, but I have enough experience with Rawhide to know that if I got schoolwork or something to get done that night, then no, we're going to stick with stable

and we're going to roll with it. But yeah, so I use Fedora on a ThinkPad. That's my main machine. At home, I run BSD firewalls, and I have a CentOS server that I use for a database server and file storage. And I also have two other Fedora server additions that I use for front-end bastion hosting for a web proxy and my GitLab personal server and media server

that I use for various tools. What kind of media server? Are you talking Plex here? I run Plex, but I've actually gotten into MB a lot more lately. Is that right? Yes. I have found that MB suits my needs far better than Plex has done. And I know a lot of people shy away from MB from the whole, oh, but it's written in.NET. Well, here's the deal. They used to run

the mono.NET, which would be problematic trying to run it with an Apache server. But with Microsoft giving all kinds of love to the Linux world, they decided to release their.NET core for free. And along with that, they run it on all the other platforms,

certain components they can actually pull down the source code to. So when that happened, people found that it operated so much smoother. It was a lot easier to work with. It didn't go haywire like Mono would sometimes do. And the Envy project ported their core code over to the actual.NET SDK from Microsoft. And I got to say, it runs like a champ. I've got far less crashes and far less issues

out of MB running on.NET than I do with Plex, even though its core is Python. Is that what drove you to switch to MB? Was there stability? Well, the stability, the feature set that came with MB out of the gate, as opposed to what you had to pay the extra Premiere features for with Plex. There are certain features out of NB that I get more out of.

So how long have you been using Linux on the desktop? Linux on the desktop, I have used it nonstop since, I'd say 2005 is when I first started using it like every single day. You're a veteran for sure. It's not bad. Yeah, yeah. I used it off and on before then.

I tried Mandrake and OpenSUSE. What about, do you dabble in the land of Debian at all? Yes, I have. I have a soft spot in my heart for Debian as a Debian itself. Ubuntu, you know, I get it. I've used Ubuntu for a while. Oh yeah, we all get it. Yeah, we all get it. But

when you're a sys engineer by trade and a hardcore, I just like to really tinker with things. You can either do Arch if you want to build it up from scratch on your own, or if you still need to get stuff done, but you still want to tinker, then to me, Fedora is a nice, lovely fit.

And I was on the Red Hat bandwagon for a long time, working for my RHCE and everything. And pretty much everywhere I've worked at, it's always been, everything is RHEL-based. So it was a lot easier to translate the skill sets from Fedora to the RHEL environment. And the cool thing is when people would ask about, hey, what's coming up in RHEL? You already know because you ran Fedora.

That's true. I do like that. So desktop since 2005, did you use Linux in other capacities before the desktop? Or did you start with the desktop and then get into server stuff and get into furthers from there? No, when I very first started out, I actually started out in Solaris Unix back when I was in the army. When I very first started out, I actually started out in Solaris Unix back when I was in the Army. I was a missile systems technician, and some of our equipment ran on a very... I don't want to badmouth it, but it was a... It was very interesting how they put together a slimmed-down version of Solaris Unix. So I cut my teeth on that.

And when I got home, I was all like, And so I cut my teeth on that. And when I got home, I was all like, you know, hey, I found that. This is back when they used to sell Linux box sets on the shelves at stores. Sure. In Walmart. Yep.

In South Carolina. In the backwater of South Carolina, of all places. Those were the days. They were. Yeah. I cobbled together 30 bucks and bought a box of Linux Mandrake off the shelf, took it home, ran it.

I was like, hey, this is, you know, the core utilities are essentially the same. There are some minor differences. So I dabbled with it for quite a while. And then when I went to go work for an internet service provider in South Carolina,

everything was done on Red Hat Linux in the background. But then, of course, we had to use PuTTY from Windows machine to get in. Mm-hmm. Been there. And I was like, ugh, okay.

You know what? So bad. So when I went home, I was like, I got okay. You know what? So bad. So when I went home, I was like, I got rid of Windows. I got tired of dealing with Windows. I threw,

back when it was Fedora Core, I threw that on the desktop and I didn't look back. Wow. That was, I've been there ever since. Hmm. Well, I got to say,

when I was going through your course, I took your course. Kenny's got a course that we're going to be doing like a snapshot of in our study group coming up. The part that I enjoyed the most was the history stuff, even though I've kind of been here since the 90s. And I wondered if that was the part you put together that you enjoyed the

most creating. Absolutely. As I said previously, I'm a history major. So anything delving into the history is something that I enjoy. That's going to spark my passion, and it's really difficult to get me to shut up once I get started on it. Well, thank you, Kenny. As somebody who's been appreciating history a lot more recently, I really enjoyed that part. I look forward to the study group next week. It's March 5th, right after Linux Unplugged. All the details are over at the Meetup page, meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting. Kenny, thank you. If you can't make it to the study group next Tuesday, I've got good news. As the VP of community, I have the lever on the free content. And in March, I'm releasing

Kenny's course, the Linux Operating Systems Fundamentals, as free to all community users at Linux Academy. So if you're not a free community user yet, linuxacademy.com slash join, sign up for the free account. And then March, when I pull that lever, we're going to release the full course that Kenny put together. It's about two hours of video content, as well as some other information in there. I took it. I thought it was great. But speaking of freeing all the things, we need to free up the Internet of Things in the studio, Mr. Payne. I know, right? How can we let proprietary software so deep into the heart of JB? Yeah, you know, things like random things that run Linux or things that integrate with other things. And it's all functional, actually. So far, I've got to say, that's been nice. But we've always wanted to move it over to something that was free and controlled by

our own systems. And so Wes and I have been trying to put together a segment to talk about this for a while. And we realized where we were getting hung up on was an area that we thought maybe some of you are getting hung up on. And so we thought we'd put together some tests and figure this thing out. And Ironic Badger, Alex, in the Mumble room also has a active deployment, and we'll chat with him about his setup in a minute. So to sort of preface it, I've been really hung up on which solution to use, Wes, because there's like a few of them. As is so often the case in open source,

we have too many options to choose from. And that's everything from like a framework in Python that would let you talk to these things at a low level and roll your own solution to Home Assistant, which is kind of the does everything, discovers your devices and presents a shiny GUI. So it can be hard to know like how deep do you want to go and how much control do you actually need? Yeah. And then there's also what devices do you need to talk to? Because there's other products out there, not products, but I guess projects would be the way to put it,

that like Homebridge that can manage a whole other range of devices that can fit in with some systems or can be standalone. It's very confusing, Wes. So how did you even kind of wrap your head around it and break it down? Yeah, that's a good question. Well, first, I spent just like a lot of time reading, surveying, talking to some of my friends and coworkers and people I know who played with automation, smart things in general. And it seemed like there was kind of a couple general classes. Obviously, like lighting comes into play and smart switches. Hues is a particular one. And then maybe controlling a couple other things

on the network. Then you have sound applications, things like Sonos. Maybe you're interfacing with a Chromecast or DLNA on the network. And maybe you're using Z-Wave. I, in particular, have like some window and door sensors that I've got set up.

Or you've already bought into MQTT. There's so many different little communities that you might actually want support in. So I just tried to get enough, a roughly representative sample going on my own home network. And then I picked the ones that I thought were both the most interesting to me and seemed like they had kind of the most momentum. And that looked like Home Assistant, OpenHAB, and Dometics. All right. Home Assistant, OpenHAB, and the other one that I'm not as familiar with is, is it Dometics, you said?

Dometics. Yeah, exactly. All three open source? All three open source. Yeah. Now, they're all relatively simple to get started with. I installed all of them on Raspberry Pis, on my laptop, on a server machine, on a desktop. All pretty simple. But I got to say, Home Assistant is by far the easiest. Both OpenHAB and Home Assistant provide Raspberry Pi images that are good to go. And OpenHAB in particular has fantastic documentation really just throughout. But Home Assistant also has VM images.

It's got it really easy to just install using Python if you've already got pip going there. And of course, more advanced instructions for Linux, Raspberry Pi setups, basically whatever you want. So it sounds like out of the two of them, Home Assistant is a little easier to get going on an existing Linux install that you might already have on a LAN. Now, if you get Demotic set up,

you'll kind of understand what's going on, but they didn't have a first-party Docker image that I could find, so it took a little bit more to get involved. That said, they have this really great long PDF. I know, I know, it's long, but it's just this great documentation that they've got that really covers exactly what's going on. And it made me start to feel that Demotic is almost like, if I can make like a really terrible distro analogy here, Domonics is sort of FreeBSD, where it doesn't have quite as much plugin support, and it has its kind of own style of getting configuration done. Maybe moves a little slower. And then in the middle, you've got OpenHAB, which is maybe Manjaro. It's Arch-like, but they're trying to

get easier. You can do a lot more in the GUI these days, but it has tons of flexibility, but you might have to dig in a little bit. And then way at the front over here, you've got Home Assistant, which is maybe elementary. They do things for you. Like I just showed up in the studio, right? I was running here on my laptop, and I've already discovered like half the stuff that's running here.

It just presented it. It didn't ask anything to me, so I can control the TV. I can control the shield. Just done. You can control the TV. I can control the shield. Just done. You can control the TV. I was wondering about that. That would be really nice. So it kind of depends on where you think you might want to fall in that spectrum.

And when I'm looking at our show notes here, it looks like, Alex, you landed on Home Assistant as well. Was it for ease of use for you? What compelled you to choose Home Assistant out of maybe the other most common one that I see emailed into the show would be OpenHAB? Yeah. So a friend of mine, he, before Christmas, wanted to automate his Christmas tree lights. And he found a video on YouTube, had an ESP8266 NodeMCU LED light strip thing that was based around an Arduino kit and he used Home Assistant

to control that to turn his Christmas tree lights on and off and I thought hmm, that looks pretty fun let's give that a go and there's been a few things that have really impressed me about Home Assistant in particular I must admit I can't comment on OpenHAB at all, but Home Assistant is so good that I don't feel the need at this point to look around. And, you know, for me in particular, the community really is fantastic.

There's an extremely active Discord channel that you can join. And just last night, actually, I was trying to debug some lights in my house that are running on an MQTT protocol. And every time I restarted the Docker container that was running Home Assistant, the lights would go off, which was getting really annoying when you're tinkering and you're restarting things all the time. The lights would go off every two or three minutes and wife did not like that and et cetera. And I jumped into Discord and 10 minutes later, they'd helped me rewrite the firmware that was running on the ESPH266s that I have, the NodeMCUs, helped me rewrite the

firmware to get rid of that issue. So now when I restart the container, nothing goes wrong. So yeah, community's's brilliant the documentation also for home assistant is extremely good um they have an unbelievably high number of different device integrations um as wes said a lot of it is self-discovered but for things that aren't like google assistant for example is. You can just read the documentation and within 10 minutes be a quote-unquote expert on the topic. The other thing that I like is I try to drive everything through automation and, where possible, Ansible and config files.

So for me, I've written an Ansible role, which it just installs the config does a config check on the server and then I can store the whole thing in git so it lowers that barrier to entry like you say when you want to nuke and pave a machine or a server or whatever you don't really want to spend days resetting up the automation for your house. And so for me, I can store all of that stuff in Git and never have to worry about it. So that's great as well. The projects that you can do with this stuff is really cool.

So the house we've moved into in America has a washing machine that's in the garage, which is out away from our main living area. Now in England, a washing washing machine we used to walk past it and see the cycle had finished and be like right okay time to take the clothes out but here the the laundry area is out of sight therefore out of mind so what i've done is i flashed um a smart plug with an open source firmware it monitors the current draw of the washing machine and once it dips below a certain threshold for a certain period of time,

it then says, hey, I think your laundry's done. Go check. And it will post to a telegram bot, which I have to reply to that says, yes, I've emptied the laundry before it will get rid of that. And it will keep reminding me every 30 minutes until I do that. Wow. Okay. That is a clever solution. That's pretty cool. I really like that. I, I have been thinking

after the studio, I want to expand this to measure all kinds of stuff and voltages and tank levels and positions of, of, of gear in the RV. And I think I also want to have something set up here in the studio in Texas. So I'm really excited by both. Wes, you seem to like Home Assistant. Alex, you've been using it for a while. You've got a GitHub repo that we'll link. It looks like, is this for using Ansible with Home Assistant? Is that what you've got here in your repo?

Yeah. So I wanted to be able to develop my configuration on my laptop and then push it to my server instead of having to use Vim over SSH all the time. So I just use Ansible to literally copy the files from one place to another. You can do that however you want, but I love Ansible, so that's what I did. I was about to say, looking at it, audience members, don't be put away by the Ansible, even if you don't use it. There's some YAML and then some regular config files, so it's all very readable.

So Wes, your takeaway from using Home Assistant and the others is that we're going to set one up in the studio. It sounds like Home Assistant would be a pretty good way to go. Is there anything we're really missing out on that you could tell from your initial looks? A couple of things. It seemed like OpenHAB is super capable. I really don't want to sell OpenHAB short because I was super impressed. It probably has the most plugins, at least, I don't know about the most, like if you weighted them by relevancy,

but just going on bare number, so many different plugins, and it seems like they've got a really robust model. You can model your whole house and kind of put like, have it understand which devices are in which rooms. They've got home bridge integration. They've got integration

with cloud services. So even if you're not using a smart assistant or something, you can still use the cloud APIs to convert speech to text. Super robust, but you don't quite get the same level of first use ease. When I first set up Home Assistant, it prompts you to create a new user, When I first set up Home Assistant, it prompts you to create a new user, get logged in. OpenHAB was easy too, but you're presented with like three different UI choices. It's not clear where the default is or what you should do. And while that's been improving a lot, the UI that they're building still doesn't expose everything the configuration file does. So either way, you're stuck learning and going into the deep end.

So I'm going to be giving a talk on Home Assistant at LinuxFest Northwest. Thanks, Chris. And one of the other things that I haven't mentioned about Home Assistant is that they do offer a cloud-based hosting of Home Assistant with hass.io. So you can self-host it, which is what I do, because I prefer to keep everything on my LAN that I possibly can. But they do also offer a hosted service, which is super-duper-duper easy to use. Can I ask you really quick then?

One thing, I'd been using Home Assistant in the past and sort of came back to it, rebuilt my install, which was all very easy. And I was surprised to see how much more stuff can be configured in the GUI than when I last used it. But what I was disappointed by is the app I'd been previously using no longer worked. I guess at some point they changed their authentication flow. Have you run into those problems or do you have an app that you like that has just kept working? I just use the browser. So this is something that's changed fairly recently. Their default UI has changed to something called lovelace and this is this is based around the concept of cards and you can do pretty much whatever you can conceive of with a card you could

have a map of your house on an ipad on the wall for example and just tap this part of the screen you want to turn the lights or the climate control on or off in. I interact primarily though with my Haas through the UI on my computer, but also through the telegram bot that I mentioned. So if I want to set the heating, I'll just send a telegram message or I will use Google Assistant. You know, I very, very rarely actually use the interface, I must be honest. Oh, interesting. See, one of the things I really enjoyed, I remember sitting in bed at one point in a previous home and couldn't quite yell at my assistant enough to do what I wanted. And having home assistant right there where it turns on or

off my light over the land with no reliance on any cloud service, that was really nice. Yeah. So for that, you could build a very simple MQTT button that publishes to a topic. Cool. You press the button that's on your night stand and then that just sets the bedtime routine going. So in my house, for example, I just say it's bedtime and 20 minutes later, all my lights fade out and it's very slow, gradual process. And then one minute before the lights go out. So I know to put my phone down, the lights do a little blip and then they go off completely.

so I know to put my phone down, the lights do a little blip, and then they go off completely. That's pretty great. That's pretty great. I like all of the effort putting in re-implementing a button and a switch, but worth it. That's pretty good.

Well, last week after the show, I bought a Raspberry Pi rack that was recommended to me on Twitter. It's like an acrylic four-wire Raspberry Pi stand. Yeah, what do you think? Can you set it up? You think it'd work on there? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, oh, there's so many services we can get deployed. All right. That'll be our next project now is the Raspberry Pi JB1 server farm. I was really waiting to see which way that went. I didn't want to sway your vote, so I didn't mention this before. But I did do an interview with the, I believe the founder of Home Assistant, and I'll have a link to that in the show notes way back. And it was just a great chat. So if you want to watch a little bit of additional Home Assistant content, link in the show notes.

Hey, let's talk a little Raspberry Pi. We have some updates for you Raspbian users out there. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is finally rolling out the 4.19 kernel, which is a nice improvement because the last version was based on 4.14, like a CentOS user. And now going to 4.19, you'll get a lot of nice improvements with that. And you might be wondering, friends, well, geez, with these faster kernels and updates to 1804, is there changes coming down the road for Ubuntu Mate on the Raspberry Pi?

So we went to the one, the only, Martin Wimpers, and we said, Wimpy, what's going on in the land of Raspberry Pi and Ubuntu Mate, sir? Yeah, we're making new images at the moment. I say we, me. I'm making new images for the Raspberry Pi 2 2 3 and 3 plus uh for ubuntu mate but um this is really um a bean work that's delayed and there's been some background goings on i've been aware of at work so um i'm uh standing on the shoulders of giants here in december we decided to double down on the raspberry pi canonical and with the 1804.2 release which came out two weeks ago i think now you can get

um full-blooded cloud unit enabled ubuntu server images for the raspberry pi 2, 3, and 3 Plus for 18.04.2, both the ARM 32-bit and ARM 64-bit for the Pi 3 boards. So what that means is we've shined off the rough edges that existed in the Raspberry Pi implementation, and those are legit images now that are being regularly produced alongside all of the rest of the build images. Does Canonical see like a server workload here, like Raspberry Pis in production type thing? Well, yes, we see Raspberry Pis in production all the time,

not just the Raspberry Pi, but also the compute module boards. But in a server capacity, like running services? Not in the server sense that you're thinking of. So we've obviously got Ubuntu Core, which has had reference images for the Pi since day one. And those have improved as a result of this work as well. So there are new images of those. But there are some customers that are working on iot stuff and they want to use snaps for all of the reasons why snaps were you know designed for iot and a good for iot but they don't

want to make the full paradigm shift to ubuntu core just yet so they want a classic ubuntu system on which they can deploy their snaps so we're're seeing this as a bridge to getting people, you know, using snaps in the Ubuntu ecosystem. And also, increasingly, people want to develop and test snaps on ARM platforms, and the Raspberry Pi is ubiquitous. So by having 32-bit and 64-bit images of the Pi, then pretty much anyone for a low barrier of entry can create snaps, test snaps, and do development

and target ARM on that platform. And then as a spin-off, now that work has completed and that finished a couple of weeks ago. I've been wanting to update the ubuntu mate images for the raspberry pi um since 1804 came out but i knew all of this work was going on and i wanted to base the next images of ubuntu mate on a proper ubuntu kernel in the, I took a kernel from the Raspberry Pi Foundation and side ported that and was using that as a mean. So it's basically the Raspberry Pi Foundation kernel with Ubuntu user space. So technically, it's not really Ubuntu. You know, there's a bunch of stuff that

doesn't work there as a result. These new images use the Ubuntu kernel that's maintained by the Ubuntu kernel team and the Ubuntu security team, and they're on the same release and security patch cadence as the other kernels we produce. So I'm much happier about that. A proper pedigree. Yeah, that does sound like great news, Wimpy. And that's all for 1804, though. This isn't even work for 1904. Does it pay it forward? Yeah, these images, obviously, will be recreated for the 20 series. But for the pie images, we're just targeting the LTSs.

Oh, okay. And then there's some other work going on as well. So I've spoken about this in the past, is that the thing that makes the Raspberry Pi so successful, or one of the things that makes the Raspberry Pi so successful, is there is this software ecosystem that you can buy into. And there is hardware components, there hats and all all manner of goodies and then the software to enable and utilize all of these add-on peripherals and devices all exists in the raspbian archives and that's what makes it a you know really compelling platform because all the

tools are there to build whatever you want to make so So there's a guy at Canonical now called Dave Jones. He's a longtime Raspberry Pi community member and contributor, and he's working on bringing that whole ecosystem of software over to Ubuntu. So all of that stuff that's packaged up in the Raspbian archives and only exists there, he is working on packaged up in the raspbian archives and only exists there he is working on bringing it to the ubuntu archives and all of that work or at least most of that work is going to get um siu'd to 1804 and dave is also one of the lead contributors to a project called pi wheels which is a whole bunch of pre-compiled python modules specifically for

the raspberry pi and he's going to be standing up infrastructure on ubuntu which is a rebuild of all of that software archive available for ubuntu because you know there are differences in the library versions between debbian and Raspbian and Ubuntu, and he's taking care of all of that. So there's quite a lot of work going on there. It's an exciting time, and it was the right time to reboot the Ubuntu Mate images for the Pi. That is delighting to hear. I just don't know what my problem is, but I just bought myself another Raspberry Pi. I was listening to Choose Linux and the guys were talking about Raspberry Pis and I was like, you know, I'm getting another one. So Wimpy, I have one quick question. All of that was really interesting.

What's SRU'd? What does that mean? Oh, right. Okay. It's the name of the process of taking a new or updated piece of software and bringing it back to the LTS or a past release. So if it needs significant patching in some respect, then it gets patched and then it gets brought back into the, in this case, the 1804 archive. And in some cases that can just be simply adding a patch to the Debian package, or in some cases, you know just be simply adding a patch to the Debian package. Or in some cases, you know, not many people realize this, but sometimes software actually gets revved up to a newer version. So sometimes it's non-trivial to apply all of the necessary security patches. And if there's no ABI or compatibility breakage, then a potential option is to just bring a newer version of the package to the archive.

So an SRUing is the means by which we manage that. Yeah, it is something you read when you see a news article about the GNOME performance fixes we were talking about earlier. You read at the bottom of Michael Larable's post, he talks about how it's getting sru'd for 1804 or 1810 i think he might have said right um and you look at that and you go what does that mean well that's that's it right there and it's something that is just sort of a i i don't i don't think canonical is the only company that uses that term but i i don't really see it used anywhere else

yeah it stands for stable release update okay is that something you guys created it feels like it's is it an interesting term or is it a canonical term? The acronym predates me. I don't know if this is a Debianism that Ubuntu has inherited, or if this is an Ubuntuism. It's just the term that I know. You know, I guess I wish I am just so tempted right now.

If this wasn't a live show, I would take, I'm trying to do it as I talk, I would take the 30 seconds and I would go Google this because I want to know now. But let's see. Yeah, okay. That's what I get when I Google it.

Not enough. Well, thank you, Wimpy. Thank you very much. Why don't we get my attention back by talking about some great picks? I found one and Wes found one. Let's start with Mr. Payne's. It's called SubSync.

Oh, I bet I can guess what this is, Wes. This is for keeping all of your submarines in sync. Oh, yes. I mean, it's very dangerous when you've got those thermonuclear warheads on board. You got to make sure you're in sync. No, no. Think language agnostic automatic synchronization of subtitles to video. What?

Yeah, I know, right? I'm sure you've all been there. You got this subtitle file. Some generous soul on the internet bothered to go write out all the subtitles for something, but it's not quite working with the version that you have. So here we go. Is this watching the video,

watching their lips and figuring out how to sync the video, or is it using like a time code? It's in the subtitles. How does that work? How much magic is involved? They don't talk too much about how they're doing it. No, they don't. But they even talk about you can actually even send the results right to VLC.

Of course you can. Of course you can. I tested it a little bit, and it did seem to work. Yeah, so, okay. They're looking at a 10-millisecond window of time to determine if that window contains speech. They look at that, and they say we have two binary strings,

one for the subtitles and one for the video. We try to align these strings by matching the zeros with the zeros and the ones with the ones. We score these alignments as matching digits or mismatched digits. The best scoring alignments determines how offset the subtitles in time,

how to offset them, and how to properly sync them with the video. This is great, Wes. This is so cool, Wes. Yeah, the other nice part, too, is, I mean, it's written in Python. It's easy to get going, and it's really not that long.

So I think I'll be giving it a read after the show. Now, my pick is, it's on topic for me. This is something that I'm pretty passionate about, and that's making it easier read after the show. Now, my pick is, it's on topic for me. This is something that I'm pretty passionate about, and that's making it easier for people to podcast. We've been releasing tools on our Jupyter Broadcasting GitHub to sort of enable some of that, and this is in that vein. It's called Podcast Generator at podcastgenerator.net. It's an open-source podcast publishing solution. It promises, now, I will admit I do not use this, but I just think it's an open source podcast publishing solution. It promises. Now, I will admit I do not use this, but I just think it's such a neat initiative.

And I love that it's open source. So I wanted to make you all aware of it. Because surprise, surprise, I'm not willing to migrate our entire infrastructure over to this project just to try it out for the show. If we had not already found a solution, this would be really worth looking into. Yeah. I mean, we are thrilled with our solution, so we're good. But it's obviously something we're keeping an eye on, and we wanted to let you know about it.

They offer a kind of a click-and-go sort of setup. It basically works on any web host that has PHP and gives you a nice intuitive web interface to publish audio and video podcasts. Yeah, that's the part. Like, think of this as a CMS system that helps, like, once you've got your your finished edited show, where do you put it? How do you submit it to stores? Where do your tags go in your descriptions and how do they get the MP3? Podcast generators for that. Yeah, you know, and maybe you want to do a podcast and you're not a web developer and you want something that looks great on mobile where people can get links and stuff like that. Check it out.

Link will be in the show notes, which is in your mobile player, or you can go to linuxunplugged.com slash 290 for SubSync and Podcast Generator. Okay, well, that'll bring us to the end of this week's show, so I'm going to just take a moment and say, go over to linuxunplugged.com slash contact and send us your screenshot of your.files. How bad is that? We have a reckoning coming.

We have a reckoning coming. We're keeping that soapbox fresh and ready to go. So let us know, linuxunplugged.com slash contact. You can like post it up on Imgur or something and send us the link, or you can tweet me at Chris LAS and attach a screenshot of it. We're collecting the evidence now

because I suspect it's real bad. It's real bad. Let us know. At Chris Elias for me, he's at Wes Payne. Go find Wimpy over at the Ubuntu podcast, ubuntupodcast.org. Mr. Wimpress, since you're on holiday over there on the show, is there anything else

you want to give a little plug-ski for this week? How about user error? I've really been enjoying that recently. Yeah, yeah. How about user error? I agree. I agree. That show is so great. It is absolutely one of my, as soon as it's out, I go down, I download and listen to it. Even if it's super early in the morning, error.show, Popey, Joe, and Daniel Foray just really have meshed, just made that show so great. So great plug. All right. There you have it.

Links to everything we talked about, including Alex's Ansible repo. Links to the stories. All of that. Linuxunplugged.com slash 290 or in your podcast player of choice. Also, take a look at those chapter markers. If you're not in a podcast player

that supports chapter markers, consider an upgrade. If there's a segment you want to hear again or something you want to skip, chapter markers make if you're not in a podcast player that supports chapter markers, consider an upgrade. If there's a segment you want to hear again or something you want to skip, chapter markers make that really easy. Or if you're trying to go back and find something we talked about, they make a really easy jump right to that spot. I'm a big

fan. I'd love to hear from you at ChrisLAS. Join our Telegram group, jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram, and meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. See you next Tuesday. All right, let's go pick our title. JBtitles.com. Let's go see if we can find something. Yeah, Brent, did you do your job today?

Oh yeah, let's see how Brent did. I mean, he's I believe he's under the wire. I know, I know. I saw he was IRC-ing, so there's no excuse. Yeah, I'm here. Wes, I think you took one of my titles here. I think you, well, you won up

my title. I think you deserve this one. That is, you're right. So Brent submitted a proper pedigree and Wes came in one minute later with proper Pi pedigree, which is a little better. It's got more P's in it. Maximum alliteration, right?

Isn't that the rule? Yeah, I was literally typing that out when I saw him submit it. You should submit it and we should give it to you then. Oh, come on, Wes. We can share. I keep picking Coda Radio titles, so it's going to my head. That is one of our moves

on Coda Radio is to have the alliteration like that. Wes, was there like a small package at the studio when you got there today? Oh, yeah. Oh, man. You would be doing me the biggest solid if you'd break that thing open and put one of those little discs in the fish tank for me.

That's their long-lasting food. And it didn't arrive before I left, and I've been worried the fish weren't going to get fed. Yeah, absolutely. No problem. Joe was right. Joe was right about the fish tank. That's so funny to hear on air, guys. You know, it's these baggies.

Oh, yeah. Can you do the dishes, too? Oh, actually, I do need to take the garbage out. I can handle that, too.