LINUX Unplugged - 347: Arm is Here

Episode Date: April 1, 2020

We discover a few simple Raspberry Pi tricks that unlock incredible performance and make us re-think the capabilities of Arm systems. Plus we celebrate Wireguard finally landing in Linux, catch up on feedback, and check out the new Manjaro laptop. Special Guests: Brent Gervais and Philip Muller.

I think I've made an interesting discovery regarding the Raspberry Pi 4 that I haven't seen a lot of people talking about. You know how they announced at the launch of the Pi 4 that it didn't yet support USB direct boot? Right, a lot of people have been waiting for that. Turns out it appears to be just a Raspbian kernel issue. It's not actually a hardware issue with the Raspberry Pi 4. No. Yeah, I just got Ubuntu 20.04 flashed to a USB SSD and I have the SD card in there

simply for boot and I have the SD card, I have the SSD still plugged in and it's now booting and running entirely, the entire OS, from the SSD. I think I have to leave

the SD card in there for boot. I should try pulling it out and see what happens. We've got some homework. Yeah, yeah, but it's been really interesting because I was going through this entire process of trying to figure out how to get the Pi 4 to run off of an external disk because the SD cards are so slow. So slow. So slow.

And so I was looking at this and I started thinking, reading between the lines of what these people are talking about in these patches, it seems like I could just reboot and try it. And so I changed a couple of disk labels, reboot, and boom, there I was, running the whole thing off of a USB disk. And I found a form thread where somebody else had announced that they had the same revelation that I just had, because, you know, people are coming across this. And in there, they say, yeah, it's just a Raspbian kernel bug. I haven't found verification of that, but they say it's actually totally capable of doing it hardware-wise.

I had no idea! Hello, friends, and welcome in to Linux Unplugged, episode 347. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. Hello! Looking sharp today,ged episode 347. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello Wes. Hello. Looking sharp today. Nice to see you. I like that hat. You know, you got to try to dress up when you have the chance during quarantine.

That's right. Now listen, we have a show for you that has been many, many, many years in the making. I am very excited about today's community news. Plus, we have another batch of fantastic community feedback, as well as some early adventures in Ubuntu 2004 LTS on the Raspberry Pi 4 running from an actual proper SSD. Performance glory. I'll tell you about that in a little bit. But before we go any further, we got to say a big hearty hello to Mr. Bacon. Hey, Cheesy. Hey, Chris West and the Antinets. How y'all doing?

Oh, we're doing all right. You holding in down there? Oh, I'm holding in, man. Just hanging out. I just picture you just like chilling, really. Anybody's going to handle this is going to be Mr. Bacon. Well, the only thing I'm missing is like actually being able to buy a brisket to smoke one. Yes.

You know? Yeah, I agree. But other than that, I'm holding in pretty good. As long as you are stocked up on them brats. Also, a big, time-appropriate greetings to a massive virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room.

Happy Tuesday! Happy Tuesday! Is this a record? I think we're breaking a record right now. We have 40 people in the Mumble Room. It's absolutely bananas. I would sit here and give a shout out to everybody, but I think that would take too long.

I just want to make a specific mention that I think it's so awesome that those of you who can are showing up. It's such a huge sign of direct report, and I want to say a special shout out to Philip from Manjaro, who we'll be chatting with a little bit more. Hello, Philip. Good to have you here today. Hello. I'm happy to be here as well. I am happy to talk about your news in just a short bit. So before we get to that, I want

to mention my adventures with the Raspberry Pi 4. I have decided to yet again purchase another Raspberry Pi 4. I think this is my fourth now. That's fitting. I'm very happy with them. It's just enough machine. I really like the fact that I have three of them running and collectively I think they take like 50 watts of

power, collectively maybe. And that's with the switch and the router on the same meter. It's like all of it with the full networking infrastructure. It's wonderful. And for me, running off battery, that really matters. And so I just kind of scale out horizontally with these Raspberry Pis

instead of getting one really big powerful box. But the key thing that has really driven me crazy is SD card performance. And then there's another thing that I have lived with but not have been thrilled about. Can you guess what that might be? You know me. What's my key? What am I complaining about with my Raspberry Pi 4 right now? Raspbian.

Yeah. I mean, I love the project. I'm very grateful for it. It's just different enough, right? It doesn't always fit with your sysadmin instincts. Exactly. It kind of feels, I don't know, consumer-grade mean cheese? Is that the wrong way to put it?

It just doesn't seem like it's a server OS. No, I don't feel that it is. But I feel that it's supposed to be an entry-level OS. You know, I think in, in with the Raspberry Pi, you know, from their conception, they've been kind of entry-level devices for tinkers. And, and I think that the, the OS they ship is, is what we should expect them to ship, you know, and they've done a great job with it, but it is, it is quite different, you know, uh, their own config tool, which is nice, helps out a lot with a lot of things, but yeah, it definitely feels consumer-y to me. And I had some weird breakage recently,

where it's complaining that my time zone data file has missing lines and that my Linux image packages are empty. I have done nothing with this device. It is a minimal Raspbian install that I've just kept up to date about once a month, and then everything else is in containers. There's nothing installed on the base OS, and it broke on me. I mean, it just sort of suggests some of the problems

from running a smaller distribution, sort of customizing things versus just, you know, one of the big ones that's really well tested. And perhaps it is something at some point I did, maybe experimenting with WireGuard or something. And that is also why it's maybe not the best OS for me because those are not the mistakes I might make on Ubuntu. I wouldn't make that mistake necessarily on Arch.

But because I'm just not as familiar with a Debian base these days, I'm more familiar with Arch and to some lesser extent Ubuntu. Right, you're not installing Raspbian or Debian on any of your other systems. Right, exactly, exactly. And so when the opportunity came around, when Canonical made the announcement that they were making the Raspberry Pi

like a full-featured platform, I was like, all right, well, when 2004 gets close, I'm going to give it a go. And so... I think we should emphasize that because you're migrating away from a custom-built operating system for the hardware that should be like a great match to a LTS release that hasn't even been released yet. Yeah. I mean, I'm not throwing this in production yet, but I probably will if it all goes well.

And so I downloaded the Raspberry Pi image, the current daily, used GNOME disk to your and Wimpy's suggestion to restore it, quote-unquote. It works pretty darn well now. It does. And I like seeing the transfer speed, and it's nice not having to install anything extra. It's just right there. And I popped that SD card into the Raspberry Pi 4, and it was about what I expected because I've actually tried to get other versions of Ubuntu on the Pi 4 working before although everything works all the hardware works

everything's detected that's wonderful the only problem was it was on that dang SD card and I want it on something much faster there's a lot of ways you could

you can crack this including hats that give you SATA interfaces oh neat yeah I don't know if they're over USB or not I assume and You can crack this, including hats that give you SATA interfaces. Oh, neat. Yeah. I don't know if they're over USB or not, I assume.

And as well as USB 3.0 adapters that plug directly into an NVMe drive. So it's just like raw NVMe or whatever into a USB port. It looks ridiculous, but I mean, it must work well. But I like to have my Raspberry Pis nice and tidy. I got them in flirt cases. They're Velcroed to the inside wall of my booth seat. Like, it's all nice and tidy. I have everything labeled. You know, it's like my one space where I've been able to really have a little craftsmanship.

And so I got one of those Samsung SSDs that must be just an MVME in the little enclosure. And it's just a USB-C port, no power, that goes to a USB 3 port on the Raspberry Pi. I wrote the same image that I wrote to the SD card. I wrote that same image to the SSD. I booted off the SD card first, checked things out, didn't update anything, but I did change the default password, generated an SSH key. I eventually changed the host name as a test. Then I plugged in the SSD that I had just written the same image file to,

changed a disk label. I'll put the link to that in the show notes. Rebooted the box, and the Raspberry Pi 4, from that point forward, runs off of the SSD. And it's fantastic. I mean, every operation's faster. Yes, it's USB 3, but that is something, a limitation, because of the type of workload these things are doing,

I'm willing to take. Mostly the applications I run, they load up in RAM, and then they only write to disk when they're logging. I mean, you could tell immediately just SSHing onto the box that, all right, this feels like a regular system. Yeah, like an x86 box. That was my first thought. Oh, this feels like an x86 machine, which

is probably old thinking now, obviously is. But it's incredible when you look at the size of these things, the power draw. The only part it really fell down is, I tried to go next level and I know this was a risk. I didn't even know if it would be possible. So I'm not disappointed that it didn't work out, but

I thought to myself, okay, the ultimate setup, I'll run my home assistant appliance in a VM on a Raspberry Pi 4. Because this thing's fast. You know, it's fast. It's legitimately fast. So we could do that. Right, it's got KVM on there. Why not? Yeah, you got KVM for ARM. Raspberry Pi CPUs are designed

in a modern era. Surely they must have some VT and VTD type analogy, and they're built into their CPU that makes virtualization so damn great on the Intel platform. This should be a no-brainer. Get KVM installed. I even get a remote vert manager from my laptop connected to it. I'm setting up VMs. I'm importing disk files. It's looking really good. Power it up. And it is unbearably slow. Things that when you're running off a native disk would happen so

fast you could barely see them go across the screen were happening at, what would you say, like a minute or two? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Even though we weren't trying to emulate x86, we were just trying to run an ARM OS in an ARM VM. Still was so slow. I don't know, maybe I set something up wrong.

You can tell it's kind of on the edge here. We had to hunt for some solutions of other people actually trying to do the same thing, and you've got to carefully select a lot of the virtual machine parameters so that it's actually going to start booting correctly. Yeah, don't make it a SATA CD-ROM. Make sure it's a SCSI CD-ROM. Otherwise, it won't boot. And don't try to make it

a SPICE remote viewer if you're using Virtual Manager because then it won't boot. In fact, don't even bother with graphics. You just want the serial console. Just go serial console or it's not going to work. If you follow these things, you will get a ARM Ubuntu VM inside KVM running on the Raspberry Pi 4.

It will just be so slow that it's unusable. And maybe I did something wrong, but I had you take a look at it too, and you didn't see anything. It was a very good reminder of just all the little differences when you're running on a totally different platform. So, and the reason why I wanted to do this is I was only going to run a single

VM. I just wanted to have that snapshot capability so I could have several layers of protection and also make it crazy super portable. It's just nice to have, right? It's a pattern that's worked well over an x86 world. And these Pi 4s are just so cookie cutter the same that

I could just move it over to another one power it up and everything's the same. It's even simpler than like from I could probably buy a Raspberry Pi 4 in five or six years even. Because look how long some of the older Pis are around. You can't say that for like a Dell mini form factor PC or a NUC unless you go maybe on eBay, maybe get lucky. But these are like exactly.

Ready to go. Yeah. Right. You have your little Raspberry Pi VM image available. Gosh. That was the dream. So instead, I will just dedicate the entire pie to the task which means I will

continue to scale out horizontally I'm curious though if anyone in the audience has maybe given it to try and know some things we're missing yeah

I will say that Canonical is making a smart decision doing this because it is a first class experience now

on the Pi 4 and it's it's great I think I'm as much as I appreciate Raspbian I think think I'm probably done with it, and I'm just for my comfort level and my knowledge level, and just because I actually, for some crazy reason, have decided to use these as servers and not necessarily as desktop devices or devices, I'm not trying to configure the GPIO pins, and I'm not trying to do all the

things that RaspiConfig does. I just want something to run containers, And so it does that for me. So I'll just put LTS on there. I could maybe do home assistant and container, but I kind of want experience with the whole stack. Right, you want the whole stack.

Alex has been talking me into that on self-hosted. So that's how I got down this hole. You're just trying to find the laziest way to run containers that you can. That's the real answer. He convinced me

that I got to try out the whole stack because I'm missing out on part of the overall thing. And he's right. He made his whole case and it's self-hosted. And I was like,

I thought maybe it was wrong. So then I listened back to the episode and I was like, damn it. He's right. This is the ARM64 version of Ubuntu, right?

Yeah, 64-bit. 64-bit. It was really nice seeing it over on their, you know, CD image server and daily pre-installed. Yeah.

And here are these ready-to-go daily images for the Raspberry Pi 4. Yeah, that's great. Chris, I was wondering about the hardware. If you feel like you have enough personal experience now to speak to what you think might be the longevity of these boards. I know some of the older ones just keep kicking, but do you feel like you have heard enough in the community or have enough experience to speak to that at all?

I don't think I've heard of many failing. I'm sure it happens. I have at least three running 24-7. I'm trying to think, maybe I even have, yeah, I think it's just three right now running 24-7. It definitely helps there's like no moving parts, right? Yeah, and two of them are under pretty consistent high load. I have one home assistant Pi that's also running four or five other containers,

including ones that are constantly doing network diagnostics and logging that and visualizing that logging. And then I have another Pi that's running Shinobi full-time, and that's bringing in four or five camera streams into Shinobi as RTMP and then recording those, pass-through recording, but recording those to a USB disk simultaneously. And then I have another one that's just a network appliance that does my DNS, my DHCP and runs Pi hole. And that one's probably my lowest usage, but all three of them are required for my home network to function properly.

But all three of them are required for my home network to function properly. And I never have to mess with them. I mean, they just run 24-7 inside that little seat. You know what I'm talking about, the dinette there, where it's just an enclosed seat and it opens up and it's hollow. And I've put them in there so it's not even vented properly. And it seems to be working great. And part of the really nice thing for me is they're really low power. And eventually, I'll be able to power them entirely off of DC. So there's other advantages. There may be more robust hardware. In fact, there's even more robust ARM hardware. Cheese has just talked me into getting the Pine Rock 64 Pro. Oh, that's exciting. I don't know anything about that thing, really, other than just what we read in the news.

I've never run one in production either, but it sounds like it's a hell of a board. And so putting that into production too soon. I'm trying other stuff, but part of the thing I love about it is they're so swappable. Right, and we talked a little bit about the value of having an operating system that's sort of standardized across things. And now you've got a standard platform too. So you just have the fewest number of variables that you can.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to try it out, run it for a while, and then I'll do my final thoughts in our Ubuntu 2004 review as part of that. Can I make a little late impromptu prediction here? Yeah. I think you get two more pies before the end of the year. I love them. I really do.

In fact, I want another one just for tinkering since all the ones I do have I end up putting in production. So I want one just to mess around too, you know? All right, well, let's get into the community news. We just have a couple of items and they're both just super, super great news. We start this week with the announcement of Linux kernel 5.6,

which includes WireGuard 1.00 in the kernel. I love that sound clip. That's great. I am so elated to announce this. Wes and I have been explaining, covering, and introducing WireGuard over and over again since June of 2016, if you can believe it. That's how long we've been talking about it on this show.

Some of these things are really just long processes. Some things get integrated really fast. But I think it's great that we've been following it for that long because we've really documented the entire history of this project, really. Wasn't that one of your predictions as well? Oh, it must have been. I believe having WireGuard in the't that one of your predictions as well? Oh, it must have been. I believe having a wire guard in the kernel was one of your predictions, too.

This is so great. It's so great. So you can check it out if you want to hear our early, early coverage. I actually did listen to it. I meant to before the show started. It's linuxunplugged.com slash 151. And here we are at episode 347. And it's almost like a new beginning now, you know?

Now that it's in the kernel, it's going to be deployed. Future embedded devices can start to take advantage of it. There's other things in here, though, that are pretty neat. You did a little bit of a West deep dive and found a few things, I imagine, that popped out at you. I noticed one of the things I noticed was some nice performance improvements for ButterFS for those that are using it,

including a smarter way to handle SSD trim. Yeah, right before that was totally synchronous. So you're writing and then you have to wait for the trim operation, if you've enabled it, of course, to succeed. Now that's asynchronous and gets handled in the background, which should speed things up. And I noticed it came from Facebook, so it looks like they're still using ButterFS over there.

Huh. And that wasn't the only file system to get some improvements. F2FS, that flash-focused file system, that's getting an experimental compression support, which should speed things up and help improve the longevity of the SSDs. And our favorite, EXT4, is even getting some performance work to improve things like database workloads, which is really nice to see. And it seems even XFS got a few 32-bit fixes. Yeah, it was kind of the laggard there.

I know we like to talk a good XFS game here, but it's finally ready for the future. Oh, man. And it seems there's some networking stuff in there as well, right? Yeah, multi-path TCP support is finally making its way mainstream. There's been out-of-tree support for a long time.

Oh, it's actually in? Yeah, I don't know if it's everything, but it's sort of the first batch of stuff that's going to make it really start to work, which is good because that iOS platform has had it for ages. Yeah, yeah, so you'll see that as a user-facing feature on iOS, it's implemented as supplementing bad Wi-Fi with LTE, something the phone will prompt you,

hey, you know, I can use both connections. Right, and it's just protocol support, built right into the protocol so that all of this makes sense. You don't have, you know, janky reconnections. It's all understood. Yeah, some stuff we're a little slow on, but some stuff we're like ahead of the curve on. Yeah, there's some new changes, a new scheduler, so to help fight that buffer problem. So you see stuff for devices as well as servers, which really speaks to all the crazy ways that Linux is used. One thing I note, even though I don't use this very much, you know, VirtualBox, that Oracle product,

if you've ever used run a Linux VM inside, one of the first things you have to go do is go get the extension CD so it has all the nice support and features. The tools or whatever. Right, and go to the Oracle website and download it, and they make you sign, you know, agree to some license and all this horrible stuff. There's now open source versions of that in the kernel,

which would make running Linux VMs on VirtualBox a lot simpler. Yeah, especially setting up those shared folders, it looks like. So that's really nice. And before you get too excited, no, this work was not contributed by Oracle. You can thank the community for this. No, why am I not surprised? I was surprised to see USB 4 support landing in kernel 5.6.

I can't believe how far, I don't know of any USB 4 device on the market yet. Yeah, they're coming soon. There's a couple of things in the works I've been able to find, but the specification was finalized, I think, back in September 2019. So it does help that it's basically

just Thunderbolt 3 turned into a USB standard. Ah, sure. But it has come along with some nice cleanup too for the existing Thunderbolt code in the kernel. So that's good. Huh. You know what else we're getting as well? XFAT, native in the kernel.

This is the release? This is the release. And it's not the Samsung-written XFAT driver, but it is XFAT. So, Brent, another hallelujah. We can actually read SD cards from cameras now. That's great. I love it. You know, that's only a Canon problem. I don't have trouble with that on my Nikon camera.

Oh, listen to this guy. Listen to this guy. I literally solved this problem for my brother like three days ago. Wow. It feels like the XFAT. It's funny. So that's an example. WireGuard since 2016.

XFAT feels like it was what? Like middle of last year we talked about that and boom. It's already there. It looks like actually, it looks like it'll be in 5.7. Oh, so it's not quite there yet? It's not quite there, but it has been merged into the VFS Next repository. So it's coming. So there could be, huh.

Okay, so it could be very soon. Okay, all right. Well, you know what? Don't get my hopes up, geez. Don't get my hopes up. Well, that's a pretty solid release. The only thing that is like kind of a aww about this release is that

I just deployed Ubuntu 20.04 and it's using kernel 5.4 which is fine, it's fine, and they're backporting WireGuard right? that's a thing yeah, backported to 20.04 and then Debian Buster and then there's also a different backport to 5.4 LTS release, so it's all over the place.

You don't have an excuse not to be running WireGuard, frankly. I think it's pretty freaking fantastic that it's 2020 and there's still things landing in the Linux kernel that we get excited about. This is something that you don't get on Windows and macOS. We know about features sometimes years in advance.

You can plan for that. You can start to build for that. And you and I are already using WireGuard nearly on the daily. And it's something that because we were able to follow this, you're able to see the state of the technology, you're able to read the mailing list, sometimes you can get started ahead of the curve. And it just gives you such an advantage

that proprietary platforms don't have because, yeah, it's handy for a couple of podcasters here, sure, but imagine if you were building this at scale for an enterprise and you could maybe already have a year, two years experience with this tool as it lands. And I just can't emphasize how freaking grateful we should be for that insight. It is, I think, maybe reflective too

of how things tend to get done in Linux. It's definitely not always ready for everything, right? There are still a lot of enterprise use cases where by the nature of WireGuard, you're going to have to roll some of the stuff like user and key management by yourself. But that's also a great thing because it means you can totally take this rock-solid, minimal, secure

technology in the kernel and build it into whatever you need. And we're seeing tools almost every week now to help manage WireGuard. I just saw some crazy one that sets up a whole home or small office network with an intranet and a WireGuard page that generates the keys for you and gives you the QR codes to make it super easy for users to just scan with their iPhone or Android phone and set up WireGuard. And I think now that it's actually mainline, we'll probably see even more of those. Yeah.

All right, well, let's shift gears and talk about some big news coming out of Manjaro. Phil, welcome back to the show. It sounds like we're going to see some new hardware very soon preloaded with Manjaro on it. What's the details? Exactly. We launched our Intel laptop now with our partner, Tuxedo.

And yeah, the new laptop is pretty slick. Yeah. Congratulations, first of all. And I, the new laptop is pretty slick. Yeah. Congratulations, first of all. And I noticed you said it's Intel for now. So it sounds like an AMD version is also in Tux? Yes, I can even give you some details for that later on. No problem with that. Oh, interesting.

So I'm looking at it right now, the Manjaro InfinityBook Pro 15. It's got a really, really slick, I guess, back to the top of the screen. Talk a little bit about that. Did you guys work with them to design this thing from, like, colors and logos and stuff like that? Well, the logos and colors we designed together. So, yes, the red version we already saw at the last expo they did.

So we choose that model because red pops. Yeah, it does. And yes, we decided to make it like the logo from us and logo from them and join them together. And decided also that we have the Manjaro SuperKey and so on. So it's really designed for the laptop, the OS, and the other way around as well. Wow, yeah, that sounds like a real partnership. Yeah, so tell me kind of big picture here.

Is this kind of like a premier Manjaro experience? If I get this, it's kind of like maybe going to be eventually or is already like the best of the best? Well, Juxedo has their own deployment system called FAY, full automated installer, and we managed to get Manjaro into that. And yes, we have the special wallpaper for it and the logos and the battery life and so on is optimized by Manjaro.

We have patched the kernel a little bit to make this machine really good working with it. So yeah, you will have a premier Manchero feeling when you have it. And you can load it up with pretty Premiere hardware, too, up to 64 gigabytes of RAM. You can get it with a Core i7 that has eight threads and up to 4.9 gigahertz per core. Oh, boy. Oh, my gosh. That's amazing.

I want more. Yeah, and a really nice-looking machine. So about how big and heavy is this thing? That's kind of hard to tell here on the site. It doesn't look like it's too thick, though. It looks fairly thin. Yeah, it's fairly thin. It's 1.6 kilograms heavy, and it has a 15.6-inch monitor, and it's matte, no glare.

So you can even use it in the sun. And look at all those ports on the side. I even see Ethernet there. I see Ethernet. Yeah, we have Ethernet. We have also the new Thunderbolt 3, including DisplayPort. And you can even hook up an external graphics card if you fancy for that. Oh, I do fancy.

I do fancy that. So you must have one of these, right? You must have gotten a test unit or got to try one out for a little bit or maybe even keep one. Tell me about that. Bernd has one. I have a different machine. I have the AMD machine, so he's doing the Intel.

I'm doing the other one, so we have to split it up. Of course. Somebody's got to take the AMD one. I understand. So what's next then? So next is to watch for the AMD release. Do we have kind of like a rough expectation

to set for that? It would be May if everything works at best based on the current situations and so on. Well, congratulations. I think this is not only kind of like a milestone for the project, but it's also such a great service for new fans of the distribution, especially people that are already in the market

for a laptop. They've heard so much about Manjaro. Maybe they've even seen something from Linus Tech Tips or something like that, and they can get a complete package like this. And it just looks like a great, I mean, I just love the design of it. It just looks like a great combination and a great partnership. So congratulations, Philip. It's great. I just think it's wonderful. And maybe a desktop someday in the future, hint, hint, hint. We're working with a different partner on that as well, so let's see what the future brings. I find that fascinating.

I really do. I mean, I wonder if we'll see other distributions taking this up too. Also, I seem to notice that there was an announcement around Manjaro ARM. Is there a new update to that? I see now, too, that there's 80-plus mirrors worldwide for the project. That's fantastic. Yeah, we bumped it up because with the next Pinebook Pro, we will be stock image, so we need some coverage.

So we decided to move our distribution from their infrastructure to our infrastructure. And the sad news for the 32-bit versions, it's now a third-party distribution from Manchero. We have to find a new home for that. So if people still fancy about 30-bit versions, we can help us out to form the new team

if it's still something we should go for. Yeah, that seems fair. You got to be careful where you spend your resources. I think I'm getting myself a Pinebook Pro, and I think I'm putting Manjaro on there.

I think that's the thing that's going to happen. You should, definitely. And I will say that I recently updated my mirrors list on my Pinebook, which is running Manjaro already. And thankfully, we have a nice group of listeners that directed me to that as soon as it happened. So I was able to jump on that and get my mirrors fixed on my Pinebook. Oh, good. I want one with Manjaro preloaded.

Talk about the easiest way to run Arch, right? Just like ready to go. You've got Manjaro going. You've got this great ecosystem of available and up-to-date software. I don't know if I ever thought I'd see it, especially at the price points. That's what's, I mean, with the Pinebook Pro,

that's what's so mind-blowing is the price points. Well, and from my understanding, all of the packages that are in the Manjaro repositories are also compiled for ARM64, so it makes it really easy to grab, like you said, all the cutting-edge software that you could want. It's already there.

Well, those are really maturing. It's just, what a good day to be a Linux user. It is. It's nice to see. So, Philip, thank you for joining us. Keep up the great work, and I look forward to seeing that AMD laptop land It is. It's nice to see. So, Philip, thank you for joining us. Keep up the great work and I look forward to seeing that AMD laptop land, too. Oh, boy.

That's going to be great. Do you want some details for that machine or not? Yeah, if you got it, if you're ready to share it. Of course. I wasn't sure if you meant off air

or you wanted to tell me off air, but yeah, if you want to tell me on air, absolutely. So, we have it for a business line, so it has a really great

battery life. So, Vincent from Tuxedo even popped it out to 25 hours in working with it. What? That's insane. Yeah, it has a great 91 watts per hour battery in it. So it's more like the laptop is more battery than the laptop. That's what you want, though. How big is the screen?

It's 15.6 inch, so it's similar to the Intel-based one, and you have a Ryzen 5 3500U and a Vega 8, and you can pop in up to 32 gigabyte of RAM. So, yeah. Ooh. Dang. Ooh. And probably no early word on rough price range at this point.

Oh, yes. It's under $850. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. No. Yeah. Oh, boy.

Oh, boy. See, 2020 is going to get better. It's going to get better, everybody. You hear this right here. It's going to get better. Oh, man. Hmm. going to get better, everybody. You hear this right here. It's going to get better. Oh, man. Man, that's really great. I'm really excited about that.

I kind of feel like that might be a perfect machine for me. Yeah, it's more for business. So if you want to casual gaming or something, Doom runs well and other games as well because Vega Graphics 8 is also good for gaming and it's more for the business because it's that price range but I think with that price range and the horsepower

it has, it works also for gaming and coding and stuff like that so we will see how we go with that. Very cool. Well there you go Wes. Got your next laptop picked out for you. No kidding. You're welcome. Mine too, probably. I have a Pinebook for my lightweight Chrome OS type tests.

And I have myself a nice Manjaro AMD laptop. Maybe we better go in for a bulk order. We should. Yeah, that'd be great. Kill me. Well, when it lands, Philip, you have a standing invitation to come on the show and tell us all about it, okay? Sure, I will do. And maybe ship out some test samples out to you so I can have it firsthand and test it out.

Would love to do that. Would love to run through the paces and give it a good review. Well, I mean, a good review in terms of— An honest review. Yeah. Give it a full go on the review. Because I'll tell you what, it's got to be in that sweet spot for folks. Really, I mean, I just saw a video recently just going over some of the benefits of the new AMD laptop platform,

and the battery life is mind-blowing. The performance is far beyond what you're getting on the Intel chips. It's like AMD is finally there on the laptop in a big way. So I'm very looking forward to laptops based around that platform. I think it's going to be fantastic. So very good. All right, Phil. Well, we'd love to get a review. Love to give it a

good go and let everybody know what we think. And in the meantime, let's do ourselves a little housekeeping here on the old show. Now, Mr. Payne, we've got a couple of things we need to announce. Number one, haven't mentioned user error for a long time. Error.show slash 88. They go

over the details that the guys think make a distro great. Things that make them wince, which, oh man, I was driving when Popey was describing what makes him wince and I was like twisting

and turning in my seat. And there's a bunch of other great things in there too, like they discuss imposter syndrome, taking great photos, etc. User error is my favorite show

to listen to when I'm on my way to work. It just makes me smile my whole way in. I get here, I'm just in a great mood. Plus, they don't mention that thing that everyone else is talking about. So it's perfect entertainment right now. There's that too, which you didn't say. Also, did you know we're live? Because a lot of people are here.

And they're here rocking it live. That's so awesome. The virtual lug has never been bigger. It's huge. And we'd love to have you here too. You don't have to be even in the mobile room. You can just watch live or join us in the chat room. It's a great way to get some extra show.

Now, if you want to know when we're going to be live, you can get it converted to your local time via robots at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. We stream at jblive.tv. Pow. Pow. Also, I think we should get that Telegram group over 2,000. We can do it.

We're around 1,700 now. You can do it. But I think we should do it because now is the great opportunity because Telegram just enabled folders, at least on mobile. So you can put a lot of these group chats into folders, and then you can just dip in when it's time to do that. So between pinned chats and folders, Telegram's arrived for me now. So they can have some more notifications. I won't say that, actually. They can have some notification stuff they can clean up.

They can clean that up. But now with folders, it makes it so much cleaner to just jump in to get just what you want. So why not celebrate that by going to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash Telegram? Join us in the chat. It goes all the time. It's persistent. There's always fascinating stuff going on. I mean, a little bit too much.

Sometimes I can't keep up with it, but it's amazing. I mean, here's the reality. There's a universe that is going all the time that you're not a participant of. Now, I think you owe it to yourself and the entire human race to participate in every universe you can participate in. I mean, I think that's just,

it just behooves you to do that. I can't come up with any other reason. JupiterBroadcasting.com slash Telegram. We miss you. Come join us. Yes. Now, apparently, Cheese, we got Telegram. Oh, great.

So I just made that big pitch for Telegram, and now apparently there's been some Telegram spam. Now, listen. You got folders. Don't mind the spammers. Cheese is doing a great job of being on top of that, though. That's true. You got folders. Don't mind the spammers. Don't mind the spammers. Cheese is doing a great job of being on top of that, though. That's true.

And we got a bot in that thing now, which everybody else has now for some reason. Anyways, it's great. JupyterBroadcasting.com slash Telegram. If you get a weird, sketchy-looking Telegram that maybe is from just pretend like it's not. Internet rules apply. The profile picture is a pretty lady or something like that. Yeah, just watch out. Watch out.

Let us know and we'll deal with them. There you go. There you go. That's a good idea. Cheese will bring down the Kraken. Chief telegram enforcer. I will personally remove that. Cheese and Kraken.

It's a cheese and Kraken. All right. Thank you, Cheese. I appreciate it. I appreciate you bringing the Kraken. All right. Thank you, cheese. Appreciate it. I appreciate you bringing the Kraken. All right. That's it. That's all we got for you today.

I felt like there was something else in the housekeeping, so I was stalling a little bit there at the end, but I just got nothing. I just got nothing. Let's do some feedback. We got a bunch of that we should get into here. We wanted to pick it up from last week. some feedback. We got a bunch of that we should get into here. We wanted to pick it up from last week. By the way, links to the Ubuntu

2004 LTS daily build for the Raspberry Pi 4 will be linked in the show notes. I should have mentioned that earlier. I don't know why that was. That's just difficult for me to find, so I'm glad to have found it. Yeah. Now let's talk about switching from Arch to FreeBSD. This comes from John. Think about this, Wes. Get ready to noodle

on this. I just wanted to throw my two cents in for your Arch server. I would be interested to see it replaced by a FreeBSD server. I have heard some solid things about FreeBSD, including positive reviews you all provided at the BSD event you all attended. Wow, that was like three years ago, John. Dang. He says, I myself have really not made any sort of exploration into FreeBSD yet.

But I would be interested to hear and learn about the side of the OS familiarities. It may be a solid discussion for an episode of the relationship between Linux and BSD communities as well. Now, I had like two waves of thoughts. There's a lot going on with this one.

Now, one of the reasons we went from FreeNAS to Linux was intentionally to move our server environment to something we're more familiar with, which is exactly what I'm doing again with the Raspberry Pis. I'm a more efficient admin, and if it's not a detriment to move to that platform for me, if it's both a good platform and I'm better at using it. That sounds like a win.

However, when I first read that, that wasn't my line of thinking. My line of thinking was free BSD on a Linux show? What the? And I realized why not. In fact, then I started thinking, now we're not doing this, but I started thinking, should I even be open to the idea of putting Windows Server on there? Like that never even crossed your mind, did it?

No. But like how far do you go with this? And to be a legitimate critic of Linux, we have to be willing to have an open mind about trying other things so that way

we can genuinely compare the two things, right? Otherwise, we're just going off things we read on the internet or comments or assumptions or old things we've tried years ago

that maybe aren't current anymore. It's no good pretending Linux is the best if it's not. So then when I went down that line of thinking, I thought, well, then maybe switching to FreeBSD on the old server isn't so crazy. I mean, we know it has a great ZFS support and it's a use case, right? It's a server operating system.

We're running it as a server. And that hardware was specifically purchased to run FreeNAS. We know it runs, yeah. And to do that, I checked running it as a server. And that hardware was specifically purchased to run FreeNAS. And to do that, I checked it against BSD compatibility. So we know it's a totally BSD compatible box. I think it would be a really interesting experiment.

And I think it would be unique because part of the additional problems with running FreeNAS was that we didn't, not understanding BSD that well and not understanding FreeNAS that well. Frankly, we didn't know how those systems were interacting and what we could tweak on the command line on the system level versus the GUI in the app level. So if we started from scratch

and used the excellent handbook, that might be a way to actually understand the system better and feel a little more comfortable managing it. The only thing about it is, I don't feel like we're done with the Arch experiment yet. Like part of what makes it a valid test is a prolonged use of Arch as a server platform. Because anybody could do it for six months. Yeah, I think we're actually due for some updates.

Yeah, I think we are too. I know. But I think we're good now, right? Yeah, it'll be fine. It should. And so, what I almost feel like the answer to there should be is like, the next time we need to stand something up,

maybe we should do it on FreeBSD. But these days, what we would end up doing is, well, can you run, you can't run a Linux container on FreeBSD, can you? Well, that's kind of boring. Well, they do it in FreeNAS, but they do it using

Beehive, which is their virtualizer. That'd be fun to play with. Yeah. I don't know. If it doesn't run Linux containers, I'm kind of out. That might be it. I mean, I actually wouldn't mind. Actually, if we really had all the time in the world, what I'd

like to do is stand up the entire infrastructure, but do it with VMs or do it the non-container route, whatever we determine that be. And then compare and contrast the management, the time. Well, we could start playing with some jails, you know? Yeah. That just sounds like something that would be limited return on results.

Like at the end of the day, are all of us going to switch to BSD? No. But I do like the angle of, you know, we appreciate a lot of open source technology and FreeBSD is out there doing a lot of good for the world.

Very true. And I think it is worth trying. I think it's worth staying current, both from a skill standpoint, but also just as somebody who's into technology. Well, and I kind of think of it as the way with ZFS, too.

You know, it pays to investigate. The less popular tools are not always a win, but sometimes you discover, like ZFS, some real gems that outperform a lot of the more mainstream options. So if FreeBSD works really well for your use case, it might be a step up against your competitors or against doing it another way. Okay. All right. ArtsfulLodger in the chat room is linking a wiki page for FreeBSD

about running Docker on FreeBSD. It seems like it's possible. However, it currently says Docker is currently broken. We're working on a fix. And then they link the bug. But it says its limits are 64-bit Linux compatibility subsystem will impact some Linux ABI containers. So it has to be, okay.

It seems like it actually, when they get the bug fixed, whatever that bug, I suppose it depends on what that bug is. I'm looking at the bug right now. But it does look like they want to integrate Docker into FreeBSD. Well, that's kind of wild. That's kind of wild, right? But great. Great.

I mean, I was kind of joking, but that is actually kind of a consideration is being able to run your applications that you've... Right. I mean, they were first with the containerization technology in many ways. Yeah. And to their credit, way before WSL, they had their own version of it running Linux programs, right? You said it.

That's amazing. They really were kind of ahead on that. A lot of things. A lot of things. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it is worth experimenting. I don't know if it's worth...

Or like what we're doing with Arch, right? All the work we did to set up those ZFS snapshots and stuff. Mm-hmm. Easy peasy in BSD world. Mm-hmm. I don't think it's worth throwing out the Arch experiment

because I think we need to continue it for a little bit longer. The fact that we haven't updated it in a little bit is a good thing because that's going to happen every now and then. So I think we've got to live that for a little bit longer, but I wouldn't be opposed to a future project using BSD as the host. Maybe you'll be running it on one of your Raspberry Pis. It would be a good excuse to talk Alamo coming back on the show. Paul writes in and has some good news about the Raspberry Pi 4.

He says, even though I bought my Raspberry Pi 4 after Christmas, because I didn't get one as a gift, I believe it has the USB-C fix that everyone is just now talking about. Remember when it originally shipped, there was a bit of a problem where if you had one of them eUSB-C chargers that's a little bit smarter,

it would actually not properly charge. I think it would get detected as a display adapter or something. Right. They used some non-standard setup in the USB port that needed to get fixed on the Pi board side. Yeah. But Paul says it looks like the fix is in, Wes.

He says when you cat proc CPU info, it comes back with what appears to be an updated revision, and he has a picture of the old one, and it looks like he's right. They moved the voltage switch location. Yeah. I've got a link in the show notes if you want to go picture of the old one, and it looks like he's right. They moved the voltage switch location. Yeah, I've got a link in the show notes if you want to go see what the difference is,

what they look like on the actual physical board. And I think this matters because we'd already heard that it had been fixed upstream, but with, you know, supply lines, how long does that take

to filter down into what you're going to buy on the shelf today? And it sounds like if you go get a Pi, you'll get the new one. Hmm, I wonder if mine is. They're the one

that we were playing with today. I just ordered that from Amazon last week. So it could be. I just bought, when I buy a Raspberry Pi, because I buy a lot of them, I just buy it with a dedicated power adapter because I like my Raspberry Pis to have a power switch. So my power adapters that I buy on Amazon for the Raspberry Pi

include a little interrupt power switch. So that power adapters that I buy on Amazon for the Raspberry Pi include a little interrupt power switch. So that's how I prefer to do it. But that's... Well, this one's one revision behind. So maybe there's...

Oh, you just... Dang it. See, that's what I thought is I thought that they would probably... They would probably have a whole stock wherever I bought it from.

I... I don't mind. I bought it with a dedicated power adapter. But I would like to see it fixed. Speaking of the Pi 4, Jason writes in. He says, I've been playing with the Pi and I just wanted to share with you my recent project. Based on the recent Pi 4 discussions, I've purchased the following GeekWorm X2, or I'm sorry, X828 for my Pi 4. I don't know what an X288 is. Do you know, Wes? Do you want to Google that? He says, I had some, oh. The next line gives us some context.

I had some spare SSDs laying around. This is a backup ZFS node for my main ZFS server. That's brilliant. Brilliant. Especially now with the dedicated bus for Ethernet instead of BPM. To replicate the ZFS data stores and snapshots, I'm using Jim's S-noid, Sync-noid, or however you pronounce it. S-noid and Sync-noid. Okay, thank pronounce it. S-noid and Sink-noid.

Okay, thank you. You would know. Jim from TechSnap and Ars Technica. It says it works wonders, very fast, and that's just it. It's simple

and it's reliable. I can very easily fail over to this and keep serving my VMs while I repair my main ZFS server. I have a stack of this Pi 4, four 512 gigabyte SSDs,

two mirrored, and a terabyte total storage all in. It's great. It says I run Ubuntu 19.10 across the board. On my Edge device is Debian. And my Edge device is VyOS? Yeah, the network-focused. Which is based on Debian.

Exactly. So that's awesome. You put a link to that X828 adapter in the show notes, so thank you for doing that. One other pleasant little note, Jim's Sanoid tool has now been packaged in Debian, so it's easier than ever to get. Can we just stop for a second and talk about that?

So you buy this $30 computer, and this is if you want to do it fancy, you buy this $37 Raspberry Pi NAS SATA adapter stack, which has one, two, three, four SATA ports on it that you then stack, and it comes with all the parts. I literally stack it and screw it down to the top of Raspberry Pi 4,

and then you load it with this Debian-based OS, and this little sub-$100 setup can be a full ZFS replication node that can keep a VM cluster online. Wow. Guess ARM's really here. The thing is, obviously the hardware is a

fundamental enabler here, but that hardware would be nowhere without the free software that makes all this possible. There is a thousand different free software projects coming together to make something like that happen. And there are thousands of people all over the world that are super hyper-focused on their one area of open source, maybe an area that doesn't even get that much recognition, doesn't get that much attention, and they're all just sitting there working away year after year, and now here we are where something like this is possible.

Where a consumer board for 40 bucks and then a stack add-on board for another 40 bucks can run an enterprise-grade OS and keep a VM system online. It's just, it's really remarkable. So we'll put links to that stuff. Woof! Woo!

If you have some other Raspberry Pi projects you want to get started, I talk about a lot of the different containers I run on my Raspberry Pi, like Ranteo or Ranteo. It's an open source, simple markdown knowledge base for home. You just save markdown files in a directory

and then it renders them nice on a website. Yeah, I've been meaning to set that up for myself. So that's how I do my home documentation. I love Smokeping. There are different projects that replace it, but I think nothing's as good as Smokeping. That's something I run from a Raspberry Pi. I have a bunch of others that I cover in self-hosted three.

Really early in the show's run, I just went through a lot of this. All of that stuff that I talked about in October of 2019, I'm still using and still happy with. So the setup is still valid. I've just added to it, which I'll cover at some point. Selfhosted.show slash three for that episode. I also just realized that in there I talk about my favorite travel router that supports WireGuard. So speaking of WireGuard, boom, spilled right into there.

That was a good email. I like talking. I'm enjoying the Raspberry Pi chat these days, as you can probably tell. Jason finishes with some thoughts on network performance. He says, I have to say, in my initial testing of the Pi 4, the dedicated 1 gigabit NIC is well worth the upgrade. I initially had 6 terabyte drive connected and moved over five terabytes in 13 hours. It cranks and it saturated that connection at 1.5 gigabits at time. My main

server runs on a 10 gigabit back end, and I've spent the past three weeks converting away from VMware to KVM. I've been a longtime VMware user and a user of VMware at work, but since running KVM, I am much happier, and it seems much faster. I won't be going back at this time. Open vSwitch is next on my to-do list. Oh, yeah. Open vSwitch would be really cool. Write in, Jason, when you do that.

Let us know how that goes. Yeah, sounds like Jason's having a lot of fun with his home web. I love it. Now, there's a follow-up. Is this a follow-up to a conversation we had about the downsides of JSON in the shell? Do you want to take this one? Yeah, EZ writes in about episode 341 where we talked about that tool I was really fond of called JC, which wraps existing shell commands and converts their output to JSON.

There was also a follow-on blog that sort of described that we need to bring the Unix philosophy to the 21st century. We talk a lot about PowerShell in reference to how it has, you know, fancy objects and not just raw unstructured text. And that blog sort of explored the idea of, well, maybe, maybe JSON is something that Linux could start adopting. He's not sure that that's really the right way. He writes about the bringing the Unix philosophy to the 21st Century blog and the JSON tool from the last podcast. I posted a reply to the blog with, I like the JC tool very much and it makes sense for JSON usage. But remember, Unix tools have been tested time and time again. JSON's great for REST API calls, but in a shell environment, I worry it could provide some challenges.

Text format is fundamental for any file system, and the ability to read and write data in text requires very little. The text weight does not require additional tooling or programs, and just about anything can read or write. I agree that having an additional output for JSON will increase the flexibility, but I also think it will introduce complexity to the technology. Isn't all data in the form of text anyway? Wouldn't JSON create complexity to edit?

Is read more critical than writing or editing files? Don't get me wrong, I do believe there should be improvements, but the questions of moving forward are more significant than just converting data to JSON. I think the fact that we just got a machine running over a text serial console this morning may be coloring my perspective

on this, but I kind of see where it's coming from. It's like text is just so simple and universal. Although, I mean, JSON's really just text. Right, I mean, I think it's pretty easy to edit and work with. There's a lot of tooling around that.

I will say, so for the PowerShell, for instance, that's got the whole.NET system backing it. It has much richer objects, and this JSON support, it's sort of just ad hoc without schemas and specifications and all kinds of relationships. Yeah, it's a bigger ecosystem on the PowerShell side. It's born of that. Right, designed in.

I will say, however, I don't support changing things, right? We should do this in a non-breaking way where we add JSON support. And that, I think, just, there's not that much overhead to it, right? If suddenly there's a flag or an additional text file sitting under proc that has the JSON version, what's the harm?

I think that's it. That's it right there. That should be pretty low overhead. Right, and that's probably where maybe JC, the tool, will find a sweet spot because it's sort of just at the very end of the stack where it's got parsers

for a lot of, you know, core utils and other programs. So if we maintain a large program of that or there's some way to sort of work that into the project eventually, maybe we'll just end up

with JSON in all the places we need it. Did you see Wimpy wrote this massive bash script? Oh, yeah. That's, I mean, that's like peak bash script right there. Isn't that? It's nice to see, I mean, that's like peak bash script right there. Isn't that?

It's nice to see. I mean, it looks like some well-written bash. It immediately reminded me of why I would never want to write a tool that large with bash. That's pretty cool. The Ubuntu podcast is back, mentioned for those guys. They're back. We were editing it for them, but I think they've got a new guy now, and they launched a new season.

That's exciting. I know. As somebody who feels like my week isn't quite right without the Ubuntu podcast in there, I've been failing and been trying to find something for the end of my week content. When there's not a user and there's not a tech snap to listen to, what is a guy to do?

I think it sounds like a good week to get some curry and put on the podcast. So let's talk about my favorite topic, bulletproof Linux, which always seems to really resonate with the audience. And we have tried to build a bulletproof Arch server, and so it reignited the conversation. And George wrote in on thoughts on episode 341 of the program where we talked about time shift.

He says, time shift is great. It also shows that the Linux Mint team is focused on adding important user-facing features. It's worth noting that TimeShift is donationware. I don't know if Mint is paying developer Tony George, but I didn't hear you guys recommending donating. I have donated. Good point.

Something we should probably keep an eye out for more. I don't think we've made a good habit of that. So I think George makes a good point there. He says, testing time shift. I tested it, but I have not yet had the kind of system failure from which it would provide a critical restore. Perhaps you guys could try it on something important like that Arch server. Or where we have it implemented in a graphical way is here on our Reaper machine. It's just such an important machine, so we put it on there, but it's just been running.

We did do a little bit of testing, although we removed some non-critical files rather than critical files. Yeah, that's true. That's true. So as long as it just functions the same way in the test, it should be working. I love the people writing. I love getting people's feedback and ideas on how they bulletproof their Linux install, different snapshot techniques, or like I was trying with a VM, like what are your solutions? That is a topic. There's something there about getting a server, but also I think just as important, a workstation that is guaranteed. Dialed in, ready to go. Every time you sit down at the machine, you move the mouse cursor, the screen comes on,

it functions every single time, every time, always. I love that. And you have a very clear rescue path if for some reason it doesn't function like that. I'd love people's ideas on that. Linuxunplug.com slash contact. Cameron wrote in about Timeshift as well, and he had Timeshift save his bacon.

To preface this, I am a novice and was monkeying around trying to create a script that resulted in me messing with permissions I shouldn't have. Hey, we've all been there. That's kind of the fun of Linux, right? And I accidentally deleted slash bin. So I used Timeshift and it restored without issue. So maybe that gives you a little bit of some clarification. stored without issue. So maybe that gives you a little bit of some clarification. Cameron does run into some problems here, though, because you can use it to back up the system and you can have it include user directory stuff if you want to. But there's no mechanism for separating those out

at the time you want to go and roll it back. So Cameron was kind of wondering, are there ways to run two instances of time shift? I'm not sure. I've not tried that, but that probably wouldn't be the route I would go. I think I would leave TimeShift just for the system stuff and then use some other backup tools for your user data. Man, all of this changes with 2004. This entire conversation is different now in just weeks. Like every time I install a package on my ThinkPad, I have a snapshot of my system.

I have tons of snapshots. I don't do anything. It's there. I can revert. We've tried it. It works. It really changes the game on how to get these systems more bulletproof. Our new answer is just install 2004 on ZFS and there you go.

It's not there yet, right? Because first of all, one copy is no copy. But second of all, there's other pieces that need to be done. It's not a complete implementation yet. But we are getting to a point where between universal package formats, snapshots, and tools like Butterfest and ZFS, yeah, there will be a time where maybe all you have to do is just install the dang distro and you're bulletproof. You're not there yet. So there's still some wiggle room. But if the baseline is your OS has built-in snapshots and every major change invokes a snapshot,

pretty good baseline, pretty good. And I'd love to see other distributions start doing that. I know OpenSUSE does, I know. Yeah, why did it take us so long? Yeah. All right, so Ryan says, well, forget all that stuff. For the love of Linus, will you please try out NixOS? I don't know if you've ever heard it.

I don't think I've heard you guys discuss NixOS. I imagine Wes would be particularly interested in this distro as it uses a completely functional declarative build language for configuration. All of the configuration is done in a single file or in a set of files you import into a single file. And then the configuration is run through a build system to determine what packages, users, et cetera, files, and other configuration should be generated

to match the configuration that you've declared. Then a new snapshot of the OS is generated and can be switched into immediately for testing or just set up to boot in the Grub menu the next time you reboot. All previous configurations sit in Grub until purged. There's something very cool about having my entire configuration all contained in a single file. I don't have to do less and grep to get my way around Etsy. I don't have to remember which format, if it was a YAML, was it JSON.

I just, I think that is a fairly, like all that stuff is ticking my box. He says there is far more to NixOS than just that. It looks like they have their own container management system, but also they have robust support for Docker as well. It's definitely a strong contender for any future servers I might deploy. All right, Ryan, I admit that actually has me more interested than FreeBSD. I started this thinking, oh, FreeBSD. Yeah, I started this thinking we should try than FreeBSD. I started this thinking, you should try out FreeBSD,

but you know, behind the scenes, you and I have been talking about this for over a year. It just hasn't really come up, and I don't think we've had the perfect use case, although the way Ryan just described it, it does seem like it'd be a good server. Right, it also sounds like backups will be super simple on the one file.

Anybody in the Mumba room, a NixOS user, or tried it out? Yeah, Iumba room, a NixOS user, or tried it out? Yeah, I just set up a NixOS server running on DigitalOcean. There's a NixOS infect script out there that just puts NixOS on any DigitalOcean droplet, and I'm currently running a ton of things on it. Mumble, I'm running my own matrix server.

It's really great. Sounds like there's a lot of things really that are pretty nice about it. But what do you think is probably like the greatest thing that made you say, all right, I'm running an unsupported OS because I love it this much. What was that thing?

Main thing is I can basically just blow away my entire droplet and have it back up with the same configuration in a few minutes. Yeah, that declarative configuration where everything, users, everything. And it's nice to see it integrated, right? I mean, people are already doing that

with configuration things like Ansible or Chef, but you have to hack it on top, right? You got to go then like basically compiles down to a bunch of apt commands that you do or writes out all these files. Having it at the OS sounds pretty clean. Seems like it'd be really great for hosting providers. You'd have, like, different Nix-based, you know, one-click deployments.

Oh, right. Just easy to document and store. Hmm. You know, there's also, like, a new project has Geeks, I believe it's pronounced, G-U-I-X, which is inspired by Nix, but uses Scheme, which is a Lisp variant, instead of the NixOS language that it uses, which, hey, that interests me a lot. Anybody got NixOS working on a Raspberry Pi 4?

Because, I mean, how does this not seem like a, especially if you're doing everything in containers, like you really just want a super solid base OS and something that, I love this idea that you could actually jump into a test snapshot before you reboot. That blows my mind. I mean, what kind of, what are they doing?

K exec magic there? Like, how is that possible? How can they do that? Blows my mind. Like, that's solid. And the idea that I just do the configuration one spot and then I just save that and back that up somewhere and then just use that to deploy a new system

piques my interest. It really does. I do see an open over on GitHub, open issue for Raspberry Pi 4 support. And on their wiki, they mentioned the Raspberry Pi 3. So maybe it's just a matter of time. Huh. We should put this on our list of semi-to-do soons.

I think right now we're deep in 2004 land, but as that, and then we'll probably have a new Fedora pretty close after that, but as that kind of cycle fades... Maybe there'll be a summer lull in distribution releases and this'll be the, yeah. Oh, I like it. Some fun summer projects with NixOS. When we do it, we should really go all out,

because we've been wanting to do it for a long time. And maybe by then they'll have Raspberry Pi 4 support, too. Yeah, it looks like it's just starting to come online. It's supported by the packaging system. It's just sort of experimental, maybe not well tested just yet. Sounds like it has good potential though. So summer might just be perfect. I think we have to do it.

Let's try to remember that because I think that'd be really great. Well, thank you everybody for sending that stuff in. I like that we started at FreeBSD and we ended at NixOS. It doesn't take FreeBSD off the table. It just means we have multiple fun projects now. We found something even more niche to play with. All right. We'd love to have you hang out live.

We do it every single Tuesday over at jblive.tv. It starts at noon Pacific, but you can get it converted at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Check out my personal site, chrislass.com, for my new projects and ways to get a hold of me. Get more Westpain at techsnap.systems and also at Wes Payne. At Wes Payne? I don't know why. It's too easy, that's why.

Well, honestly, because if I was you, I'd lead with the last name. Or the middle name with the last name. Just the middle name, last name, lead with that. You know that? I do use that, and it was taken on Twitter. Oh. I know.

Okay. Okay, yeah. That's fair play, then. That's fair play. What are you going to do, right? Anyways, thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the Unplugged program. And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. So So So

So So So So So So So So

So So So Something we didn't sneak into the conversation there, but Cheese was telling me about last week is Armbian. Yeah, Armbian's great, man. If you got another board that may not be a Raspberry Pi because I don't think any of the Pis are supported, so an Orange Pi, a Pine board, Odroid, et cetera, et cetera, check out Armbian.

Armbian's freaking awesome. I think that's what I'll do when I get the new pine board. I'll put Armbian on there. Armbian. Yeah, well, and then, you know, you got to think, too, you're going to have a PCIe slot with that pine board. That's so cool. You know, because your bottleneck right now really is

the USB 3.0 right on the Pi. I know. You're going to wreck everything for me. You know this. I'm going to realize the extreme performance difference and the minimal power increase and I'm going to just redo the whole thing now on pine boards. Well, maybe you just put your little personal NAS Shinobi storage or something on a pine board

and then keep the Pis around for other things. Yeah, maybe. Or we'll just have to go to your eBay page right here. eBay page. pass Shinobi storage or something on a pine board and then keep the pies around for other things. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Or we'll just have to go to your eBay page right here. Previously loved Raspberry Pi 4. You can sign them, maybe. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, you would want it.

I think that would decrease the value. But if I do it, I'll do it with those silver paint markers. It would be real fancy.