LINUX Unplugged - 370: PipeWire Progress

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

We get an update from PipeWire developer Wim Taymans on the status of Linux's new audio and video subsystem. Plus Alexi Pol joins us for two big updates from the KDE community. Chapters: 0:00 Pre-Show 1:30 Intro 1:49 SPONSOR: A Cloud Guru 2:56 Linux Action News Returns! 4:17 Ubuntu 20.10 Embraces Active Directory 7:26 DebConf 2020 12:58 Pipewire Progress with Wim Tayman 23:26 SPONSOR: Linode 25:28 Akademy 2020 33:41 Housekeeping 36:19 SPONSOR: Unplugged Core Contributors 38:08 Jono Bacon's Book Club 39:05 Feedback: Alpine Server Challenge 40:15 Feedback: Remote Office 44:05 Picks: SC-IM 45:11 Picks: Present 47:30 Outro 48:49 Post-Show Special Guests: Aleix Pol, Brent Gervais, Drew DeVore, Neal Gompa, and Wim Taymans.

Yara IO? What do you think, Wes? Yara IO! What? No, you're... No. But this does look pretty cool, and it's yet another Raspberry Pi handheld device. This one takes advantage of the Raspberry Pi OS. It just uses their OS. It's a handheld that I'd say harkens back to the Game Boy 3DS flip-style device, but it has a full-c corded keyboard and a trackpad.

So it's slightly larger. Let's just say rugged and durable. Yeah, it does have very much like you could take this to a construction site kind of look to it. It's got a five inch resistive touchscreen that runs at 800 by 480. And they say the display actually has pretty decent color representation.

With the keyboard on there, you know, you could type out into an SSH session. You can run XFCE on this thing. You get access to the Pi's GPIO connection, so you could hook it up to devices on the go. And it's kind of neat how they've wired it all together. It looks, when you open it up, the way they've integrated the battery and the wiring and all of that, it really looks like a legit consumer product.

Yeah, right. And at the same time, they've spent a bunch of work on hackability, They've integrated the battery and the wiring and all of that. It really looks like a legit consumer product. Yeah, right. And at the same time, they've spent a bunch of work on hackability, making sure that you can actually source every single component, no custom PCBs, and just a bit of soldering required, which that's pretty cool. A little bit of soldering, maybe 15 hours of labor. That's all it takes. Hello, friends, and welcome to 370 of your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. Wes, I love it when we hit the 10 mark, you know, when we click over. Love it. Just feels right. It feels like we did something, even though it's totally arbitrary. Thanks, Matt. Also, I want to say thank you to a cloud guru for sponsoring this episode of Unplugged. So many career possibilities in the cloud, so little time.

ACG's learning paths help you take the right courses to prepare for architects or developer security jobs and many other high-paying cloud jobs. Get hired, get certified, get learning at cloud.guru. Also, hello there to Drew. Welcome back in. Hello, hello. Hi, Drew. Did you finish up the sausage or are you still munching on that over there? Eh, no, I'm done with it for now. Did you bring enough for the class?

Just under the wire. Too bad you guys aren't here in person today, because I'm rocking a blazer today. A blazer. I can hear how fancy you sound just in the voice. Right? It's the shoulder pads. I think they do something for the acoustics. Classy Chris.

All right, before we go any further, let's also bring in the virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Howdy. Good morning. Hello, all 32 of you. We also have a couple of special guests who will be joining us in just a couple of minutes to give us the story directly from the source. So we'll get to them in a moment. But we start out with some news that I bet a lot of you, if you follow the last couple of episodes,

are maybe aware of, I hope. But I'm very excited to say that Linux Action News is back with episode 153. It has a special place in my heart, that show. But also, I arrogantly thought, oh, we'll pick up a lot of the slack here in Linux Unplugged and cover all of the news, and it'll be fine. And it didn't really pan out. It just didn't really – it was too much of a lift. There's too much news. That's right. And it deserves its own show.

But also, you know, there's an analysis aspect to Linux Action News. We do our homework for that show. And we try to do the research and often reach out for contacts and try to get the story from people and then incorporate that into the commentary. And it's just the sole focus of that show. And that's what makes it special. And that often means it's less than 30 minutes. linuxactionnews.com go grab that and you know as these new shows start back up because we just also relaunched coder radio as we bring things back the best place to really stay in the loop is the all shows feed because as we launch relaunch these

shows or bring a new show on that's one of the first places it'll show up is the Jupyter Broadcasting all-shows feed. So you might search for that in your podcatcher or go grab it from the website, because that's really your best solution. But do check out both those. Coder Radio and Linux Action News is back. This first story that's not about us

brings me back to the old days of me trying to use Linux in a corporate environment, an all Windows corporate environment. Oh, gosh. I couldn't imagine news like this, but it appears just under the wire, even actually after the feature freeze, Ubuntu 2010's Ubiquiti installer,

which is used by the Ubuntu desktop version, is going to see active directory integration. The feature freeze exception was sought and granted for adding this optional Active Directory support to the Ubuntu desktop installer. How is this actually going to work? Well, during user setup in Ubiquiti, there'll be a little checkbox for enabling Active Directory logins. Once it's checked, a user can log into an Active Directory configuration on their network

while, and this is probably key for some people out there, still creating a local Ubuntu account for administration purposes. The installer will then allow specifying the domain, the administrator, the password, and a nice little test configuration to go test to make sure that your domain connection is actually up and running. This is great to see. This is really wonderful. I'll tell you, the first time I ever saw this, and it's always been hit and miss over the years, although I imagine now it's gotten nailed down pretty well. First time I ever saw this was baked into Yast, and Yast also had the option to launch an Active Directory server itself. And there were a couple of cracks at this with Mandriva and Zandros as well. And one of the reasons I even used Zandros for a little while, which is based on Debian, was because it promised really good Active Directory support with a back then what was called a KDE desktop.

Now, this is looking like a pretty good release. 2010 is going to have OpenZFS improvements. It's going to have kernel 5.8 and GNOME 3.3.8 as well as what Wes just talked about and a bunch of other package updates. Something to look forward to. Isn't it? Isn't it nice to see that kind of stuff landing? And it really helps Linux be a first-class citizen in a corporate environment.

Right. That's kind of what stuck in my mind is, you know, clearly Canonical has seen this, has talked to folks out in the field who are trying to use this awesome Linux desktop, but still have, you know, some classic legacy administrators out there. And once you've got this, you know, big active directory setup, you're not just going to toss that by the side. you're still going to use it. It's got all of this information in it. So if we can just play nice, all the easier to slip Linux on it. Yeah. And it's not just about the authentication for logins, which we talk about a lot,

but in an established active directory environment, those user IDs are tied to groups that may be very possibly your email distribution groups are based off of. Certainly the file rights on the company shares are based off of these Active Directory accounts. Lots of applications for enterprise integrate with Active Directory. So you can even manage security key card access via Active Directory account status. The list goes on and on and on. And so when you get access to that, you become part of that ecosystem because that means also now the Linux system that you're using will understand that this group ID on the file server translates

to this actual group. And yes, you are a member of that and you can get access to it. You can change file permissions and you can actually participate in this broader ecosystem. So it has a lot of knock-on effects. There's always a lot of knock-on effects when Debian makes changes, talking about Ubuntu. And there is some news out of DebConf 20, which concluded last week. Debian project leader Jonathan Carter gave his talk at the event as well as an overview of where the project is today and some of the problems that he believes they are facing. Debian's finances are sitting around a healthy $896,000. Thanks to COVID-19, actually, there was less travel and conference expenses.

I wouldn't call it a surplus, but they haven't spent as much as they expected. Carter also noted as part of their fund, Debian is in the process of acquiring two new Lenovo servers. They were able to obtain a discount, it appears, to help in their efforts. As for the health of their archive, well, Debian is up to offering around 61,000 AMD64 packages. Oh my! And around 31,000 source packages. Another exciting item moving forward is the possibility of Lenovo, or other OEMs, offering a Debian preloaded system. But before that can happen, there are still some support concerns and other technical issues to work through.

Now, that's interesting, huh? Because we're seeing that Fedora has launched on the X1 Carbon, and we know that Ubuntu, not too far behind, and now it sounds like maybe Lenovo's even open to the idea of straight-up Debian. Now, the other thing they talked about, and this always gets in my craw, is needing to improve quote-unquote marketing. They say it's an issue common to many open-source projects, but Debian especially, often saying it's an unsung hero underneath the likes of Ubuntu and SteamOS. Now, I'm not going to get on my whole soapbox about this. We have too much to get into

today but i really hate when we do this to ourselves i think it's a lack of perception and perspective of where linux is and its role in the marketplace and the type of consumer that's drawn to it i think it is a lack of understanding the dynamics of the wider ecosystem it's a good comparative to understand this too, would be Android. No one who buys an Android device, quote unquote, no one, going by the numbers, knows that Android is using Linux under the hood, right?

But we all do. Just like everyone listening and you all in the mumble room, you all know that Ubuntu is based on Debian. This slice of the market knows that. And that, as a technical project, is your best chance of who you're going to market to. You're not going to... I wonder, though, maybe that's, is that what they're getting at here, though? You know, because I feel like maybe there is, I agree on the larger part, like marketing, you know, the Debian, the nitty gritty to the wider user experience. But maybe even amongst

the, you know, Linux in the know, sort of take Debian for granted. We forget about it. I mean, how much do we even talk about it here on the show? I think you could argue there's reasons beyond marketing for that. There seems to be certain areas that the project doesn't engage in and other areas that they seem to engage in. And they seem to spend a lot of time spinning internally and a lot of energy spent doing that. I think they do have a perception problem, but none of this is actually marketing. So marketing implies that if you could buy a page in a magazine or buy some banner ads on a website, that people would be flocking to your distribution and give it more respect

for what it does. But that's even when I just verbalize what they're implying, it sounds ludicrous. Well, that's like a general conception of marketing. But couldn't it also mean just having more resources spent at, you know, well, once we're doing that again, at meetups, at mentioning all the things that Debian's used for, at better integration with partners that are using Debian, better representation in cloud marketplaces, perhaps?

Yeah, I think that is an area they will invest in, and that is totally an area that makes sense. But if you think about who you're reaching there, you're reaching probably, you know, that kind of tier of the market that I was talking about. People that already know about Debian, but maybe just don't think about it a lot. Right. That could be a good way to go. When I look at Debian as like an outside observer, I see something that I have a deep appreciation and respect for, you know, borderline love fest for really. You know, there's a few things out there that have been with us for so long. And so for me, Debian, Debian was the distribution when I used it, I realized, oh,

I can switch to Linux. Like I had used Red Hat, which was, you know, the good old bad days of RPMs and manually solving RPM dependencies. Like we're going way back here, right? And then I switched over to Debian and Apt came along and it changed my mind of how a computer can help me manage it. I have a deep appreciation for Debian. But when I try to think of what they're doing in the space that gets people to talk about them, I can't really enumerate much. I don't see anybody at Debian pioneering arm development and champion that. I haven't heard about any big OEM deals with Debian. And I'm not saying these things are necessary.

I haven't heard about any big OEM deals with Debian. And I'm not saying these things are necessary. But if you do want chatter, if you want buzz, you kind of have to do something that people will talk about. Yeah, that's a good point. And maybe we should note, too, that Carter believes that they need two to three times their current volunteer levels to accomplish all of their goals. He also feels Debian is too lacking in the area of diversity and not catching up fast enough. Partially the blame there is, you know, large regions of the world not being represented in the people making and maintaining Debian, and maybe failing to put together a timely message regarding Black Lives Matter and other recent concerns.

That kind of raises off the mark to me. If that's what they think is not driving contributions, again, I don't think they're properly assessing the market. But I may be wrong. What do I know? I'm just some dumb podcaster in the Seattle area, so don't listen to me. It's fascinating in either case that we sort of get to watch this discussion going on, right? That's true. And at least it's happening. There's that as well. So that I appreciate. I want to talk about Pipewire. It's been a little while since we've done an update on Pipewire, and it looks like over the late summer and before, there has been some significant developments.

Pipewire is increasingly getting ready for more user testing. And if you recall, this is the Red Hat project for better audio and video stream management on Linux, and it's increasingly getting close to shipping time. Yeah, Pipewire lead developer Wim Tamens feels that the code is at a state where Pulse Audio, Jack, and also backends are usable. I mean, if not 100% feature complete. And actually, it's in good enough shape that he and others at the Red Hat desktop team are hoping to see more user testing happen with the latest Pipewire code. It now has a fully functioning session manager with Wire

Plumber, human readable handling of audio devices. Hey, that's pretty important. Support for creating audio sync devices with Jack. Heyo! And support for creating devices with GStreamer, among a bunch of other great improvements. Well, to talk about all of this is the lead developer, Wim. He joins us now. It's been a little while, Wim. Welcome back to the show. Hi. Hello, everybody. Hello, and congratulations on the continued work with Pipewire.

It sounds like we're getting pretty close to production ready. Is that right? Well, pretty close is a lot to say, but it's ready for testing. Okay. I expect at least six months of testing. You know, I was looking back.

You were on the show in October of 2018. And one of the things that we focused on a lot in that conversation was the need for a session manager. In fact, I think it was maybe the bulk of our discussion. Would you mind explaining what a session manager is and what we have now with Pipewire? That's an interesting thing. So if you look at Pipewire itself, it's kind of like a blank canvas, basically, where you can put like devices and stuff like that and link them together. But in itself, there's nothing there. So you need to have a session manager that puts things on the canvas like

for example creating all the devices based on on also what is detected with udef or like bluetooth devices that appear or things like that so the session manager it basically like presents all of the devices to Pipewire. So Pipewire is basically the IPC, the apps that connect to Pipewire, see the graph of all these devices, but they're basically managed by the session manager. So the session manager as well,

it looks at, for example, when a new app appears, it looks, oh, what does it do? What is its role? And things like that. And then it tries to find out where to, it looks, oh, what does it do? What is its role? And things like that. And then it tries to find out where to link it to. And it manages the links. If a device is removed, it relinks it to another device. And all of that logic is done by a session manager. It's Wireplumber, right?

That's the name of it. Pretty clever. Yeah, we're not exactly using Wireplumber yet. It's on the to-do list for soon. Currently, it's like an experimental internal session manager, but basically all of that code is moved into a nicer code base that is Wire Plumber. This has been a project a long time in the works,

the announcement about starting, I think you made in 2017, if I recall correctly correctly and it sounds like we're at the point where if someone's willing to take a little risk they could turn this on say if they're on fedora 33 and start using this as their sound system yes i've been running it for a while as my main desktop for today with the with the mumble session I did in there too, there was some weird bugs still. But otherwise, it sort of works for regular desktop use.

There are some things that need fixing and we will fix them. But you can use it for basic things like watching YouTube and playing movies. So exciting. What is the more challenging desktop application? Is it web browsers?

Like what is it that is vexing you? It's mostly the Pulse Audio API. So I actually need to emulate all of the Pulse Audio API with all of its timings and all of that thing for apps to actually work well. Because a lot of apps are programmed in a way I do this and then I set the time of that. And it's very specific to how Pulse Audio does things. Because a lot of apps are programmed in a way I do this and then I set the time of that.

And it's very specific to how Pulse Audio does things. So I need to emulate all of that. So that is currently the biggest problem. Like, for example, if you look at Jack apps, they are much more, that's a much more simpler API. And they work a lot better out of the box. And so last time we spoke, I believe that was the plan is to essentially implement the Jack API. And so if I'm a Jack user, which we are here in the studio, am I in a better position? It has more chance of working well, yes. Like, for example, if you run RDoor or something, it works fine. Hey, lucky me. Yeah, I actually did some testing myself just a couple of days ago to see kind of where it's at.

And I did find a couple of bugs like Carla, when a device would disappear, Carla wouldn't, you know, reflow the canvas and I'd end up having to close it and reopen it. But I think that's actually a Carla bug and not a Pipeware bug. But that said, the Jack implementation is working really, really, really well. You know, you do have to go into a config file to change like the sampling rate or something like that. But everything I threw at it really just worked with the exception of Flatpak, which I know is not yet supported. So I'm really impressed. So far, it's looking really, really good. Wim, I'm kind of curious, when we talk to you about this a lot, we're primarily talking about Fedora because we kind of know it's going to be there.

And Fedora has been very aggressive on getting to Wayland and creating solutions that work well with contained applications and whatnot, which Pipewire checks all those boxes. What is adoption outside of Fedora looking like right now? I think it's being important in distributions. Well, mainly Pipewire is used for the screen sharing. So I think that's on top of Wayland. That's basically the de facto standard.

So once the version gets updated to 3.10, the audio bits are there too, and you can basically use the audio bits there too. But yes, I think everybody is watching a bit to see how it goes in Fedora first, and we can't really enable it by default yet. I guess that makes sense. But you are taking a pretty sensible approach. Nice and slow and steady.

I hope so. I hope so. I hope so, too. It's a very big undertaking. It's three APIs that need to be moved to something new. Also, Jack and Paul saw you. That's a huge undertaking. I mean, you're kind of redoing, in a sense, or reformulating how the entire media scape on the Linux desktop works.

Yes. He says with a big sigh, yeah. And we're very grateful. I'll tell you what I'm really looking forward to is when Fedora Jam and Pipewire are both working in sync and we finally have like a low latency kernel available for Fedora and it becomes sort of the go-to for multimedia production. That really is my dream of where I want Fedora to go. Seeing the work that's going into Pipewire, it feels closer than ever. Thank you very much, Wim. You're welcome. So Wim, as a takeaway for the audience that runs

Linux on the desktop, in a year or two, as these things stabilize and adoption increases, what's the primary benefit do you think end users will notice? Well, we will have enabled audio in a secure way in apps, but that's not exactly user-friendly.

Right, it's good for them, but it's not something they... Hopefully they never notice. It just works like they expect. So I just hope that we will be able to do new things. Like, for example, in GNOME, I have a panel where you can put filters for your syncs or make more configuration panels for doing stuff with your audio, like what you have in Core Audio.

Oh, yeah. And then there's, for example, you'll be able to run Ardour, which is not exactly for average users, but at least you can run it and it runs out of the box, like something that you actually should expect from an operating system, that it runs these pro apps out of the box. Right. In a way, it's the groundwork to enable a more powerful generation of production applications on Linux.

Yeah. And for what it's worth, even some proprietary stuff, like I threw Reaper at it, and I encountered zero bugs using Reaper with Pipewire. Wow. That's good news. Boy, we're looking good. We may be early Pipewire adopters right here. You know, I am curious, though, one of the big things about Pipewire when we last talked to you about it, Wim,

was that audio and video, at least in the back end, weren't too different. I'm curious how video support's coming along. Just in, you know, the current Zoom-dominated world, I've seen a lot of folks messing around with loopback video devices and getting OBS things set up, all sorts of stuff that the Pipewire model might make a lot easier. Yeah, we're not there yet. So you can capture from a camera, but that's about it. There is an internal format for doing video filters, but there is no example. I have a Vulkan source, but that's it. And the synchronization with audio is not really worked out yet. It should all be internally there, but it's up in the air.

Still got to tie it all together. Yeah. Well, we're going to send you beer and Red Bull, and you can pick which one you want until this thing's done. Well, Wim, thank you for coming on and giving us an update. You could tell it's a project we follow with a lot of passion, and we thought it has been too long since we've done an update, and it seems like it's relatively simple in later versions of Fedora to flip on and start testing. Yeah, should try it.

I think we might try it in our bugathon on the live stream later today. Well, Wim, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. Linode is simple cloud infrastructure with lots of options, block storage, object storage, and they have a really easy interface to use it or plug it in with a wider orchestration system like Kubernetes or Terraform, which is something we've been playing with. They have shared plans starting as low as $5.

Go for it. I mean, with $100 credit, go for it. They have dedicated GPU compute plans. Or if you're like us and you just want a decently priced system to mess around with, like we did something, I think, mid-ish tier for the Matrix server, and it's fantastic. The thing runs like a champ. And with 11 data centers all over the world,

there's probably something close to you that works. They also have a really fast next-generation network, 40 gigabit connections to the machines. I mean, it's super fast. With industry-leading CPUs, a revamped cloud manager, and root access to your server, along with their API that is super cool if you'd use nothing else but the Linode command line application.

That's what I use on my rig. And Wes, you should check this out too, because it's great for show notes. You know how we'll sometimes use the object storage to embed audio in our show notes for like a clip? Oh, yeah. Well, with the Linode command line application, once you get things like your account set up and your API key in there, you just point it at a file and tell it to just upload it to the object storage and flag it as public and return the URL. Just all one command. It uploads

the file, puts it in object storage, makes it public, and gives you a shareable URL to embed on a website or something. That sounds so easy. It's super great. The command line app is actually one of my favorite things about Linode, although the web UI is fantastic too. So linode.com slash unplugged. Get a $100 credit for 60 days on a new account. That's linode.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linode for sponsoring the Unplugged program. So Academy 2020 is rolling on right now. It runs from Friday 4th, the 4th to September 11th, which is just a little bit after we record this episode. And Alys joins us.

He is the president of the board of directors at KDEV and the co-founder of the Linux App Summit and also a bruncher. He did brunch with Brent on March 27th, which I'll have a link in the show notes. Alish, welcome to Unplugged. Hi, thanks for having me here. Hey, thanks for joining us. And how's Academy going? Well, it's going good. Like everything in 2020, it's a bit special, right? But first, Virtual Academy, it went really well. No big technical problems that would have rendered it impossible. I think that everybody who wanted to participate could and still can. We will be having sessions over the week. So still ongoing.

So what we do is on the weekend, we have talks that would be more, well, what you expect from a conference kind of talks. And those are done. Actually, you can find them on the internet, I guess, that we can put the URL somewhere later

if somebody wants to take a look. Everything is online. Actually, this year was easier because, I mean, everything was recorded because it had to bridge. And it was streamed, of course. Or you recorded them as you did them. Yeah, we were using something called BigBlueButton,

which is a conferencing tool. And one of the features that you have right there, like you have chat, but you have a button to record because, I mean, the stream is going through it, right? Right. That's nice. So my question with that is, do you think this is a format you'll adopt long term? Because I imagine they made it possible for a lot more people to attend that couldn't. Or do you feel like the lower bandwidth aspect isn't really long term sustainable?

I think that there's definitely goods and pros in making it available on the internet. I'm not going to be here the one to convince people that, well, offering contents on the internet makes them less available or something. There's a big component into a conference, though, the social component that is kind of lacking. And I don't know if like, we're gonna just, let's always do virtual conferences and forget about meeting at all, right? Yeah. Maybe a mix.

Yeah. Hackers, we are already known for being not all that sociable if you remove the conferences. It's your only time to get out. That's my problem. Exactly. Yeah, but RSI is so bad because I'm not going to events this year. That's what I'll blame it on. Well, so before Academy is even over yet, you're already talking about the Linux App Summit. And I believe the call for papers ends pretty soon.

So it's probably the time to get the word out. Yeah, that's right. I mean, we've been working on the LIS 2020 since last year. And it will happen in November, like you said, I think. Code for Papers ends in the 1st of October. This week, we're going to announce the first keynoters, which are quite special. So stay tuned if you're interested in talking about applications,

which I think is something that is actually quite close to end users. I think that it's a good forum to do it. It will also be the first time that we do it online and strictly virtual format. Right. I've always wanted to attend. You always should have. I know, I know, but it always conflicted with something else. There's also, you have a name conflict.

I have LAS in my name. People are going to think I'm Chris Libre Application Summit or Linux Application Summit, but maybe this is the year I can make it. So maybe I will. That's pretty great. So we'll have a link if you want to submit papers

or if you have an idea. And what kind of things are you looking for for the summit? For one, we want to encourage all kinds of organizations to create applications and contents in the end that are consumable

for people using Linux. Actually, the concept was started by GNOME, and they called it the LibreApp Summit. And when we started doing it together with Katie, we decided to like, let's talk about Linux specifically, and let's do it in a way so that when organizations come, they know what we're talking about exactly, right? And why it's about having a free and open source operating system. What we want is that all of the content that people expect to have on their devices are available to them. And we don't want technical reasons or communication reasons to be why these aren't happening.

So we invite the different organizations to reach out to us and hear from the people who have been developing the operating system. I think that was a nice transition when it moved from something that was for the GNOME folks to something that's for Linux users, Plasma Desktop, GNOME Desktop, i3, whatever it might be. We want applications for Linux, and I think that's a good focus. In the broader case, does that mean more standards? Does that mean coming together and deciding to do things as a desktop standard? Or what do you think ultimately will be action from something like this? Well, in general, to find what solution you need for a problem,

you need to get people together and agree, right? Right, right. Absolutely. That's why we needed a space where to have this kind of conversation. And it's definitely part of that. Something also that is kind of related, but not exactly like we're talking about developers talking, but on LAS, we also believe that you need to have a lot different kind of profiles to approach the Linux community that goes beyond just the hackers themselves. And we want to find ways to make sure that they find the space to collaborate on the different projects.

And we want to, if you look at the different topics that we're suggesting people to talk about, you will see things like legal or promotion. People need to be able to know how these are going to work on on linux on the on the long run right besides well the apis that people are using which in the end i mean if you're a developer you will be able to find the apis that you need to use somewhere on the internet right but is all of the content really available for people to consume well let's make sure it is and that's what las is all about i think it available for people to consume? Well, let's make sure it is. And that's what LAS is all about.

I think it's a great idea from the concept of a place to send developers who are Linux curious and they don't have all the answers. They don't even know maybe where to look or what the language is to speak. And this is something they could attend and get a pretty good sense of the lay of the ground and maybe get an idea of how to start developing for Linux. Yes, for sure.

That's a good way to come from. Also if you're coming from a region that is not very represented on the different communities, it's a good way to get introduced into the whole concept. Most free software communities that i know about are very western world kind of centric and it's something that i think that las also can can help a bit to to solve by not targeting everyone into a solution which myself as a kd person i would be happy with like getting everything implemented but just having this common space where people can approach and see like, how can we bring the Linux things you're creating into my language, into my locale? The world is much more complex than many of us think sometimes, like there's lots of scripts,

there's lots of different perspectives that we need to make sure that are taken care of. And we need to have places that they need to feel like they're not excluding anyone. They just want solutions. And we are offering a space for there on LAS. Absolutely. Well, let's keep up the great work. Thank you for updating us

when you're in the middle of conferences and doing all of that. Don't work yourself too hard. And here's to a successful Linux App Summit. Thank you very much. Thanks for joining us. We'll also, if you wanted to catch the platform, it's big blue button.

We'll have a link to that as well in the show notes. Those are at linuxunplugged.com slash 370. We'll have a link to the stuff we talked about as well as the call for papers. And now it is time for a spot of housekeeping. Long overdue. You know, it's been getting a spot of housekeeping. Long overdue. You know, it's been getting a little dirty, Wes. You know, you didn't show up, so I didn't bother cleaning because you're doing it remote today.

So I thought, oh, I can just let it go. No, no. Housekeeping must go on. You're right. It is my fault. I was trying to make it your fault, but I just couldn't. I couldn't work the angle. Now, listen here.

It's important. This is important. We're moving the recording schedule for one week next week. We're going on Sunday, this Sunday, coming up, big change. I don't know why I'm saying it weird. What I'm trying to say is Sunday the 13th, we're pre-recording for the episode that would normally be live on the 15th. I'm taking that week off, trying to do a little downtime, trying not to do the old burnout thing. And so we're going to record on Sunday around 3 p.m. Pacific, which that means 6 p.m. Eastern. We'd love to have you there.

Show up, hang out in the Lep Lug at noon, and then just stretch that thing out. Now, tonight as we record, we're doing the Bugathon for Fedora 33. We want to explore this idea further and maybe see if we can't take it to future projects. I don't know. I mean, we'll probably talk about it tonight, actually. But I'd like to call on the community in the meantime to keep joining the Bugathon room on our Matrix server. I want to make a persistent space where developers can reach out to willing and able testers in the Bugathon room, essentially a spot where they can search for it. It's a beautiful thing in Matrix, and they can find it, and they can go in there, and boom, a group of people willing to help them test

something. Imagine just even that as a resource for developers, where they can reach users when they need another set of eyes. Also taking future projects that we could do as a bug-a-thon in that room, so that'll be the place to stay up to date on future developments. We'd love to hear from open source project leaders or developers who have any ideas on how we could utilize this community powered bug testing better. All that. You can either email me, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com or join the Bugathon room on our matrix server and chat with us about it in there.

Because I think this is something I've got a lot of big ideas, but I want to do it the right way. Measure twice, cut once, and do something that truly makes a difference. And I think I'll also just plug, while we're wrapping it up, Wes joined us on Coder Radio this week. So check out Coder Radio. They'll be releasing just like a day or so after we publish this episode. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. Yeah, thanks for doing that. That's what Wes spent his Labor Day doing.

Podcasting. I can't think of anything better than debating the merits of C++ with you and Mike. That's exactly what we did. So check out Coder.show for that. Thank you to our Unplugged core contributors who are making these shows possible, really. This is our core. This is the foundation of the show that makes it possible to continue production

if we lose sponsorships or help us offset the need for sponsors. And it keeps us independent. So I really want to say thank you to the Core contributors, unpluggedcore.com, if you're interested in signing up. You get access to two feeds. Feed one is the ad-free or maybe more appropriate,

limited ad-free feed, because there are some ads that are short but contractually obligated to be in there. But there's otherwise, it's the fully produced show, fully mixed, and just less ads. We cut what we can. Yeah. And you get the clean audio. So if we have somebody on, you know, Drew works on spicing that stuff up and making it sweet. That's all in there. But if you rather have just the bootleg copy of the entire stream, which is often much longer and has lots of interesting conversations that are a little more of the off-air variety, that's feed two, the full live stream. All our screw ups, the stuff that never really makes it into the show, that's all in that

feed. So you get feed one or feed two. and that's available when you become a Unplugged Core contributor as a thank you. And that's at unpluggedcore.com. The real question is, do you want the Drew magic or do you want all the mess-ups? Yeah, you know, or do the A-B thing, which would actually be a really, I think it would help people appreciate the work that goes into it, is subscribe, get the live version feed, and then compare it to the version published on the website. And I think you'll see quite the difference. Also still taking input for Linux Prepper. I should mention that, too. But I wanted to get into our feedback because we've gotten some good ones recently, and we wanted to get through at least a batch of these and then maybe hold another batch so we can also do picks.

Let's start with a mention with a community book club. Yes, a community book club. The group will do a read of Jono Bacon's People Powered book with a discussion on Slack and a weekly Q&A session with Jono. The book club, which takes place entirely online, is free and will run from October 6th to December 15th. So you do the math on that. Q&A calls every Tuesday at 9 a.m. Pacific time. which takes place entirely online, is free and will run from October 6th to December 15th. So you do the math on that. Q&A calls every Tuesday at 9 a.m. Pacific time. Wow, that's quite the day. You do your book club Q&A, then you do your unplugged live. Sign-ups are open until October 2nd, and further information like the Slack group and stuff will be emailed to participants closer to when the Q&A starts. But if you're interested in community

and making your existing community better, Jono's kind of become the Q&A starts. But if you're interested in community and making your existing community better, Jono's kind of become the source on this stuff. So I'll have a link to that in the show notes. And I guess it's a freebie way to listen to the book, right? Yeah, and I mean, like, talk to folks that are interested in other people working at building and maintaining communities. Sounds like a good resource.

Yeah, and troll Jono. So that's totally worth it, really, if you think about it. Well, that's why you'll be there. All right, our first email comes in from Jake, and troll Jono. So that's totally worth it, really, if you think about it. Well, that's why you'll be there. All right. Our first email comes in from Jake, and he says, Hey, guys, congratulations on becoming independent again. Whoop, whoop. Whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop.

He says, I was curious if you've ever considered trying Alpine on the garage server. It has Docker and ZFS availability natively. And he says, thanks for hanging through what must have been some trying times, Jake. Jake says we should use Alpine. What do you think of that? Ooh, you know, I didn't realize that it had ZFS easily available. That's never a bad thing, is it?

I didn't realize that either. Now, that would be taking things to the next minimal level, I think. Certainly, you know, we've used tons of containers powered by Alpine. As a full-fledged server, I don't know, maybe it's worth a shot. Well, it doesn't have that same kind of, you know, doing 85 on a motorcycle down the freeway with no helmet on kind of feel that our Arch server does. Right. Well, and the other thing too is, you know, using Arch, you got to piece it together,

but we often fall back on that there Arch wiki, which is a huge resource. I could see it though, especially for something like a Raspberry Pi or a really low end NUC that is just an appliance that could be the OS to go with. I could definitely see it making sense. Daniel writes in with questions about remote office. He says, sorry to advance for being a noob. On one of your shows, you talked about how you linked your RV to the studio's office network. I have looked for more info on this, and I'm hitting a brick wall. I have satellite internet at both my office and home, and I'd like to get SSH access to my work computer and access some shared drives. Both my desktop and my laptop run Pop! OS, and I've never looked back. Without going any longer

into my background, this is all to say I have a pretty good understanding of basic programming and networking from about the mid-90s, but I've been a little out of touch. So my question is, if I have a droplet that's running a mail server, could I use that for this project? I know I haven't given you a lot of information,

but maybe you guys can help. Well, Wes, I think he's just about onto it. I think you just need to connect the dots for Daniel on this one. Yeah, right? I mean, we're doing a couple of things. Probably primarily would be leveraging WireGuard, which is just sort of our VPN of choice these days. And then also something you and Alex talked about in self-hosted episode 24 would be that handy little remote forwarding SSH where you forward the SSH port from one of your pies in your mobile RV up to a droplet that we've got running, and then you can access that from anywhere.

That's really the trick. And I love it so much that now I've set it up on my son's computer. I just put on everything now, and I just have it right there as another port. And I just change ports, and one port number equals this machine in my head, one port number equals my other machine in my head. And it works so well that I use it on the regular for SSH. Now, WireGuard ultimately would be the simpler solution if that would work with your satellite internet provider, because then you could talk to the machine with, you know, just with anything, like if you wanted to do SFTP or if you wanted to

do Samba, you know, you could do any kind of file transfer. So WireGuard might be the preferred solution, but you could totally do it with SSH jump hosts. Yeah, and if it wasn't clear, that's what we're doing here. I would definitely argue for a virtual private network myself. I mean, that's what they're for. Yeah, that'll give you full, you know, it's like you've actually joined the networks together. You're on the same network.

The SSH thing is really just sort of a convenient little hack when all you need is remote SSH access, and you've already got a public VPS somewhere. I mean, you could also do a little port forwarding. You could do some things. But yeah, WireGuard really would be the way to go. Check the show notes too. Wes is dropping in a link to a secure SSH tunnel as a systemd unit, which the trick there is when your system comes up, it just automatically establishes that

tunnel for you on the back end and leaves it persistently connected. And if your network goes out, it can also help reconnect that automatically without you having to do anything. So Daniel, when you're looking for that remote office solution, do check out that link Wes just dropped in there. Yeah, you know, it's also pretty handy for remote support. Maybe you don't need to establish a full VPN tunnel, but you've got a family member whose laptop's running Linux and you need, you know, occasionally you got to jump in there to do some troubleshooting. That's a handy way to do it too.

Yeah, I think it was just a month or five ago that, oh yeah, it was a little bit ago. But my son was preparing for school from home and he needed a dependency to install some app they use. It might've even been Zoom. And I just didn't really feel like walking him through the process of app installing when his mom's standing there over the computer. They want it done.

The teacher's waiting. I just fired off the SSH connection through that tunnel, jumped on his box, pseudo-app installed the package, got it all going for him in seconds, and they were able to just launch the app. It was really a quick resolution. And that's just a high level of support you can offer with Linux if you use the tools. Like it doesn't have remote desktop RDP. I couldn't RDP into it, but I sure solved the problem awful quick.

All right. Well, thank you for going to linuxunplugged.com slash contact and sending those in. We have a couple of more for next episode. Since we're doing a prerecord, we're saving a couple. So if you didn't hear yours answered, stay tuned. But you do get a taco either way. All right. pre-recorded. We're saving a couple, so if you didn't hear yours answered, stay tuned, but you do get a taco either way. Alright, why don't we do a few picks before we go? Because everyone needs this

first pick, and I think it's kind of an essential service to the community that we call this one out. Because I know this is what you've been waiting for. A spreadsheet program that's end curses. Yeah, right? Who doesn't want that? Tired of loading up a bloated GUI all the time?

You just need to calculate a few rows here and there? No longer, at least with SCIM. You really got a good pitch down for that. They should contact you. Tired of those bloated graphical spreadsheet programs? Go back to the days of Lotus. Well, I mean, you know, a spreadsheet's just like a 2D interface anyway. For sure. Just a bunch of columns of text and numbers. That's kind of perfect.

And don't we always love a good end curses pick? Yes, always. We should have an end curses jingle, actually. We love it so much. Now, you might laugh, but you should stay around. Check this pick out just enough to see their charting support, because that kind of blew me away. Oh, you're right. That's legitimately rad. All right. Well, you'll have to check the link in the show notes to see that one because while we're talking about things that you always are going to want to do on the command line, obviously, that would be presentations, of course. You want to present on the command line. And that's where this next pick comes in. It's simply called present. And, well, I mean, it supports Asciimatic, so you could have some animations, I think.

Yeah, I mean, it's got colors. It's got effects. It's honestly one of the best. I've been looking around for a, quote-unquote, full-featured, at least as far as you can get, presentation tool for the command line. You know, sometimes you've got to demo stuff. you're making some changes, you've got a new project you're trying to show off. If you're going to be doing that stuff in the terminal anyway, why have to switch back and forth between, like, you know, whatever you're using, the Google services, or maybe you've got the Libre

Office presentation suite installed. Nah, none of that. This is just a simple Python app, pip install present, and away you go. You know what, Wes? It is no less ridiculous than all of your core applications being different tabs in a web browser. No, exactly. And I mean, it's powered by Markdown, right? So if you're already familiar with writing stuff in Markdown, that's kind of how I plan out my notes for presentations anyway. And if I can just leverage that without having to copy that and reformat it, drag boxes around in a GUI and just have a basic presentation. No, it won't work for everything, but for just simple internal facing presentations

with a bunch of other nerds, I think it might actually be useful. So everyone on this Zoom call, I am using Wayland, so I can't share my screen. So please SSH in and join my TMUX session, and we will look at this presentation together. There's only one organization I think that would fly in, and it would be JB. That would be the only place we'd be like, oh yeah, cool, no problem. That's really neat. How are you doing that? Am I dating us, Brent, by talking about Lotus? You know, the good old days? Yeah, I think a little bit, but many of us, well, I say that. I'm just trying to make myself feel better. One of the first, first applications I ever used was a spreadsheet program on the command line with Commodore 64 stuff. My father tracked our allowance when we were kids in there and we had to use it. Otherwise we didn't get it. So that was quite nostalgic.

Wow. You know, I kind of remember something similar back in the day as my dad tracked the family finances in a DOS based spreadsheet. It just, it all looked like wizardry to me. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Well, this would normally be the point where I'd plug the live stream next week, but I'm heading off into the woods or maybe the coast. I'm not sure yet. Taking a little downtime.

So we're pre-recording, like I mentioned, on this coming Sunday. But if you're subscribed, like 98%, 99% of you that listen, almost making it not even worth me mentioning right now, nothing will really change for you. It's pretty much going to be the same. So linuxunplugged.com slash 370 to go get more of that. Thank you to Drew and Wes, and thank you to the Mumble Room. Thank you to Elish and Wim for joining us as well. And thank you to our core contributors who are helping make this show possible. And thanks to all of you for listening. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday! So

so I wanted to get the virtual lugs take on a blog post over at HawaiiGentech.com about why I, this is the author, why I linked to the Wayback Machine instead of the original site. They write, when linking to a page for the purposes of reference, like we do in the show notes all the time, it seems better to me to link to an archived version of a given page rather than to the original site itself. This ensures that after some years have gone by, my article is guaranteed to be consistent. Due to the changing nature of the web,

there is a chance that after some years, the link could lead to a 404 not found, changed or edited content or entirely replaced, content that has been due to a rise in popularity is now shielded behind a paywall, demanding a user account or even pay for it. Whereas linking to the archive is probably more authoritative

than linking to dynamic, changeable web content. And then the author sites where some new sites on all sides have made changes after the fact with no notice of updates or anything. And then it made their article irrelevant. They're referencing to and archive.org is a great way to just kind of link to an official always will work version of a website. Think about in the context of our podcast. Yeah, think about it in the context of our podcast. So instead of linking to Pharonix or OMG Ubuntu or LWN,

we would link to archive.org's Wayback Machine version of their thing. I've used Wayback Machine a couple of times, but it doesn't capture all dates, right? Can you manually trigger to capture a website? Yeah, I think there is a way to submit something to the Wayback Machine and it grabs a capture of it that day. Okay, yeah, right. Then I would agree with you that linking to a Wayback Link indeed is more secure. I've had oftentimes, I remember now for school, we were using an API framework called Loopback.

And we had to push it to IBMm cloud and they also used that from documentation on a different website and when you were googling for instructions or something was going wrong and you were googling for stuff to help you out it would link it to a forum and when you click on that forum they were mentioning oh this is the old link we've moved to this forum but all the old posts were archived they no longer exist on that new forum and having a way back way back machine link would have been handier in that case yeah i'm a big fan of the way back machine i mean it's been around forever but in my experience every time i go to use it there's you know there's some text there and some basic images and stuff

i remember looking at one of poppy's old websites with cats on it, but a lot of the usability kind of goes away. There's some fancy features in, you know, modern web that don't always translate it. And I think maybe that would be a bad user experience in some cases when, you know, some websites were looking to have some pretty neat stuff going on. I just wanted you to know that I did catch that you're using the Wayback Machine to look at Popey's cats. I did catch that. All right. All right. Good.