LINUX Unplugged - 414: Linux's Awkward News Phase

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

Have you noticed the Linux news has gotten a little weird? Michael Tunnell joins us to break down the changes we've observed over the last year. Plus, we set up private and secure location tracking and tell you how and why. Special Guest: Michael Tunnell.

NASA has announced they are mapping out plans for bigger, stronger, more capable Linux copters for future trips into space. One concept is the Mars Science Helicopter, advocated as a way to greatly expand the exploration zone on the red planet. Man. Including possibly deep dives into some caves? This is so great, and I think it clearly means Linux on Mars was a success, and I think that also means that obviously Linux is going to take over the solar system. take over the solar system. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show.

My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. Are you applying for those Mars sysadmin jobs right now? Yeah, we'll see. Working on the old resume anyway. I mean, that's either the ultimate work from home job or the ultimate work on location job. I'm not sure.

This episode is brought to you by the all-new A Cloud Guru, the leader in learning for the cloud, Linux, and other modern tech skills. They have hundreds of courses and thousands of hands-on labs. So go get certified. Get hired. Get learning at acloudguru.com. All right. Well, so coming up on 4.14, we've got a lot. First of all, we've been building a new server, something that we're putting together for the road trip.

It's a tracker. We've wanted to do this for a while, and we've done it with some commercial software in the past. This time we wanted to build it with all free software. A safe and secure open source self-tracking tool that you could use for yourself and your family and your friends, or we're going to use so you can find us on our JB reunion road trip. It has lots of features, including social groups and stuff like that. But we're using OwnTrax to do something a little specific to build something. And we'll tell you about what we're creating and how we deployed it all and why we think that OwnTrax is a safe and secure way to track your location and control

your data if you would like. On top of that, an old friend joins us on the show today to chat about how we handle things in the Linux news when they get a little awkward. Welcome back to the show, Michael. Thanks for having me. It's been a while. It has. It's been like years. So we're glad to have you here because in the last couple of weeks, there's been some weird things in the news. And we thought maybe we'd go a little meta this week and talk about why we cover it and how we cover it. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm so excited about that.

It's a little dicey this week. Past couple of weeks, really, if you think about it, because there's been a couple of these in a row. in a row. So it seems to actually have cranked up quite recently in the past year where we know we had, there's times we have downtime of drama for a year, none at all. And then all of a sudden now it doesn't seem like it's stopping. Ebbs and flows. It just comes, it comes in these big waves of it. So we're going to dig into that today. But before we do that, I want to bring in our virtual lug to help us go through all of this. Time-appropriate greetings, virtual lug. Hello. Hello, everybody. Good to have you in there today. Neil, in honor of our conversation in the post show, which is the post show for the members, I'm installing Fedora Rawhide KDE Spin live during the show today. I don't know how to respond to this, Chris, except for what?

You know, I had Deepin on here, and I have some follow-up thoughts on Deepin that I want to share in the feedback. And I recently had Windows 11 on this laptop. I just feel like this laptop needs a real good purge. It needs a clean slate. And so I'm going KDE Spin, Fedora, Rawhide on this ThinkPad X1. I'm going to see how it does. And you've got Neil signed up as your personal assistant. Should anything go wrong? Well, last week you told me it's going to be perfect and flawless. That's not what I said.

I'm pretty sure. Yeah, I'm pretty sure those are what you said. So by the end of the episode, I should... We'll find out, won't we? I just kicked off the installation. It's at 18% right now. Also, just because I apparently like the chaos, I'm running on battery, too, because everybody knows. What? Yeah, everybody knows.

When you install your OS, you want to run on battery. That's what they tell you right at the start of the installation, right? What could go wrong? Chris, you just invited everything to go wrong. Yeah, I know. I know. I got good news. Yeah, I know. I know. I got good news. We've been chatting with friends in the Denver area, and we're locking in what could potentially be a very awesome meetup location in Denver, which I will update LadyJupes is going. And if we're in your area, you can reach out to me on Telegram and maybe we can just meet up impromptu, just do a

little mini meetup. But we'll get into that. It's all coming together this week. I'm really excited. It's all finally coming together. And the technology to make it possible is all running on Linux. And we'll tell you about that. But let's talk about this situation with the news. It really came up when the hoopla around Audacity broke out into the public, starting back around in May when the Muse group awkwardly announced that they had acquired Audacity, as you can in the open-source world by essentially acquiring the IP rights and the copyright

and paying off the developers. That had snowballed into a series of miscommunications and mishandling with Audacity's most passionate community over issues like the privacy policy, their CLA, their contributor agreement, and other things around metric tracking that always strike a chord with people. They all came up relatively quickly when you consider that this all just kind of went down two months ago and these things have been revealed since then. And it can be awkward for us to cover some of these stories because there's a lot of drama that gets spun up in all of this, especially when you have forks that launch and then 4chan gets involved and starts trolling people. And then not long before that, there was the Freenode situation, which was immensely complex and an important story

with nuggets of information at the core of it that you need to know, but just draped in drama, completely wrapped in drama. And so we thought this week, maybe we'd have a little meta conversation with you, the listener, about how we view these types of stories, how and why we cover them, and maybe a little bit of the logic behind what we hope to convey to our audience when we actually kind of go into these stories that seem, at least on the surface, like they're loaded with a lot of personal feuding. And so that's why it was great to have Michael join us, because those of you who used to listen to the show, you know Michael's been on the show before. Because those of you who used to listen to the show, you know Michael's been on the show before. But Michael also runs his own weekly news podcast, This Week in Linux, and, of course, is a co-host on the Destination Linux podcast and has been following these stories. And he's had to consider how he wants to present this information to his audience.

And he's had to go through, is this a story worth covering, and make that call and make that decision. And I'm sure there's been times, Michael, where you're like, I'd just rather not talk about any of this because it's just so dramatic. There have been. There's sometimes over the years that these things have come out, there have been a couple of times where I say, how important is this to cover? And if it is not important, if it's just drama that is for the sake of drama, well, then I do my best to not talk about it. But if there's cases like the free note thing or the audacity thing, you kind of have to consider the fact that there's no way you can't talk about it. So, how do you handle that sort of topic becomes the issue on those weeks. And the audacity one is a really interesting one in this space because there's some validity to both sides

and both arguments. And you kind of need to balance how you present both sides without trying to... And also, I give my opinion as well. So, I want to make sure that my coverage is as balanced as possible while also providing my opinion and trying to express the overall, like, you know, the encapsulation of the topic without overdoing it overboard. And this particular audacity topic, I've covered it a couple of times on my show. And this past episode, when I said I wanted to do it in a very concise way and try to cover all the bases and as quickly as possible.

And that turned out to be 20 minutes. So that didn't really happen. You know what else I was thinking about while you were saying that that's gotten trickier in the last few years? More social angles and social issues are working their way into free software news stories. Like I think of Linus or RMS. Like these are stories that have like a technical angle to them, but they also have a social angle to them. And that, you know,

it's not exactly why we got into tech in the first place to cover social stuff. Right. That's a good point. I think that we wanted to talk about the technology and the innovations that are happening. And that happens a lot. And it's really fun to talk about these things and the innovations that are happening. And that happens a lot. And it's really fun to talk about these things and also try to find new and exciting things that you might not have heard as an audience and present that to them. So, you know, trying to follow all of these things. But there are times where the social aspect comes in and you kind of have to deal with it.

And sometimes I've dealt with it well. Sometimes maybe not so much. I guess it depends. It does add a, like an aspect that you have to dig through. Like something that Wes and I will find that we're doing a lot for Linux Action News is just trying to read through threads of people going back and forth

that are having a conversation. You know, somebody's yelling at somebody. The University of Minnesota kernel patch hole. that are having a conversation. Somebody's yelling at somebody. The University of Minnesota Colonel Patchhole kerfuffle is a great example of going back and forth, mailing list, and trying to build out a timeline of what's going on. Well, and some of these facts you're getting, or maybe facts with quotes around them, they're coming from individual players who have their own agendas

in whatever story you're trying to cover. And so you've got to kind of build your own model of how these actors view events so you can really try to understand at least what they're saying and what position they're coming from. Yeah, it seems to me there's also an inclination for certain outlets to go hard on the drama and really focus on that and turn it up to 11. focus on that and turn it up to 11. And people have figured out how to game that in social media and with blogs and GitHub and all these ways that you can get your message out there. And I think of like the Freenode situation. Clearly, it's a really complex issue. But something that we noticed and doesn't, I think, factors in is the folks that launched LiberaChat were unusually organized. They clearly had a lot of premeditated maneuvers before they broke off from Freenode. Were they right in doing so? It seems in retrospect, yes, likely. But I felt

like that needed to the audience needed to know that it seemed like the Libera chat folks had essentially pre-organized and were ready to go. And one of the most clear demonstrations of that was that they all had public statements and they all linked to each other's public statements and they created this cross-reference of public statements that just blasted the narrative out there and really got their take on the situation miles out ahead of what the remaining Freenode staff could communicate. And that is an interesting element to a story that while it doesn't really change the facts on the ground, perhaps is still worth knowing. And it's like trying to dig those nuggets out and trying to identify that stuff. I think in the open source world,

matters just a little bit more because I think it creates these lasting stories that we tell ourselves. We tell our, like the story of what happened to Freenode and the story of what happened to Audacity will be spread around in comment sections and on podcasts now forever, for hereforth, right? And so while that stuff is developing,

I kind of feel like maybe we have a shot, and I'm curious to know your thoughts on this, Michael. It's like, I feel like maybe we have a shot on trying to participate in that initial conversation and try to get some of the initial history right. Oh, yeah, definitely. I think that's very interesting, especially when you're talking about the Freenode one and you're talking about the kernel ban situation with the University of Minnesota. Those were topics that were very volatile very quickly know, we're trying to balance the topics, whereas the audacity has been happening over the course of a few, a couple months. So it's kind of

built up and you can kind of, you have more time to dig in. Whereas the Freenode one was so quick and there was a, like, as you mentioned, it's really interesting that they had everything prepared to go in that sense, as well as the, all the server stuff was in, you know, like two days of the potential announcement coming out, all of a sudden everything's ready to go in that sense, as well as all the server stuff was in, you know, like two days of the potential announcement coming out, all of a sudden everything's ready to go. So that does kind of create a, well, do we talk about it now? Or do we wait until we have time from the other people involved to see if, you know, do we have all the information or do we want to jump ahead of it? do we have all the information and, or do we want to jump ahead of it? And with the case of Freenode, there was a, I think there was like a four or five day delay for them to give a reaction.

And that kind of created a situation of like, I don't want to talk about it until I have both sides because then I don't, because then otherwise it seems like I'm just pushing one agenda or one opinion. And that is a position that I don't ever want to be in because I want to be the reporter. My job and what that I've chosen to do is provide the information, provide the news. dramatic news or a social kind of inflammatory news, then I want to cover it on as many sides as possible to make sure that at least it's a fair coverage. And then also, I'm going to put my opinion in there as well, because it's not just reporting. It's also like, you know, content in an entertainment fashion, too. So when you do these kinds of topics, you kind of have to balance it. So I'm not sure exactly which one, one of these topics I waited until more information came out. And some topics in the past, I have chosen to jump ahead of it. And then that backfired before. So you kind of have to test the waters, so to speak. And it's made me a lot more

cautious in terms of how I want to handle it every time I've done it. And it seems to be getting more and more frequent, which is an interesting kind of turn of events in the past year and a half, two years of what used to be very rare. Now it seems to be quite often. So I guess on the bright side, I get more practice for the shows. Yeah. What do you suppose has caused that to just like the heat's been turned up on these stories? People have more time to, you know, see what's happening versus the previous issues where, like, you know, the whole working from home thing and the quarantine of last year and those things having, you know, people having more time to pay attention. And I think that people are digging in more as well

and finding these different things. I mean, some of these topics would not have been found likely in a previous time period because they were, you know, pull requests or mailing list posts or something like that, that not a lot of people are paying attention to. But because more people have more time to pay attention, they can dig in a little bit more. Something Wes and I talk about sometimes, and I'd like to know your thoughts on it too, is there's two audience in a sense out there. There is the audience that knows open source, they're free software users, they're Linux users, they understand this stuff, and they have a different set of priorities around privacy and like metric collection. Like let's take this

Muse group stuff, for example. You could argue that if say like an Apple news podcast was covering what the Muse group was doing with Audacity, they'd think it was great because now Audacity could be listed in the Mac app Store. They think all these things that Audacity is happening to Audacity are great. And I'm curious how that impacts how you think about this stuff, because you've got Linux users and then you've got new people that are just kind of discovering this ecosystem that might have a different perspective on these stories. Yeah, that's an interesting point. I think when it comes to these other communities looking into it, they're going to be looking at it from a much different light, as you said. And with the reactions that we have in this kind of this

community and the open source community and those sorts of things, I think that there is a balance that we need to consider more often. And I think that when it comes to these kind of reactions that are so, you know, bombastic of like, how dare you even consider the possibility of telemetry? Like I've gone on record before that I think that telemetry is not bad automatically

just to exist. So you can do it properly. You can do it in an ethical way. You can do it. You can even do opt out in an ethical way. It depends on what kind of data you collect, how you collect it and how you present it and whether or not you ask permissions. And yeah, there's, there's some people in the community who see any form of telemetry whatsoever, even if it is the most minimal amount you can possibly get. And that is too much. And I think that we see sometimes these topics in the case of Audacity or Muse Group,

where they react so harshly, so quickly that it kind of puts a negative bubble around it for the people in different communities. They see it as like, oh, these people don't want to even consider, they don't want to be open-minded. Right. And a lot of times that's how the business unit on the other end of that reaction, like I've had several, I've had several guests that I've kept in touch with after they've announced a Linux product and then like they didn't package it right or they didn't build it against the right library or whatever and they get a lot of negative reaction and they don't take it well yeah they don't try to like listen for the signal in the noise and figure out what they need to address

instead they just sort of take it as an attack and a front kind of like the witcher 2 like they had a massive backlash because they had the audacity to use wine. How could they dare ship it? And of course, it was a fully tuned. Yeah, exactly. Fully tuned and, you know, they had tested it. Like they wasn't just like a general random ass build of wine. Yeah.

And what's such an ironic turn of events is that The Witcher 2 does this and they get so much backlash. Valve says, you know what? We're going to make a better wine. Yeah. Yay. it's so much backlash. Valve says, you know what? We're going to make a better wine.

Yeah. Yay. Now all these games run on the platform in the same way that The Witcher 2 did. And the perception is so different, which I mean, I was thankful for The Witcher 2 work being done in the first place and also with the work for Proton,

just to be clear. This is not a comparison to saying these are both bad. They're both great. Yeah. Whatever support you want to make Linux have support for Linux, continue to do so. The other thing that is kind of funny to see, I see this a lot in the written press the most, is when projects announce that Flatpak is the future of software distribution, it's hailed as a remarkable achievement that should have happened already. future of software distribution. It's hailed as a remarkable achievement that should have happened already. And then when Canonical announces that snaps are the future of software distribution,

it's considered like, how could they? It's an overreach. It's Canonical trying to control the Linux landscape and application deployments on Linux, which maybe some of that's true. But it's just funny the different kind of reactions you see depending on the stories and how it sort of sets the tone for conversation in the community. I think that's very interesting as a point as well, because there's the case of the way that they are perceived is very different. But my favorite part about that particular thing, the flat pack versus snap, is when I've seen people say, how could Canonical do this when we already have flat packs? And then I have to point out, like, the first release of Snaps was a few weeks prior to flat packs.

So, that's not a thing that matters. And it doesn't really work out the way that a lot of people want to present it of saying they're doing a non-adventure here. It's like, well, they were kind of first. But flat packs have a different policy and if you want to say, I like the policy

system that flat packs handles better, fair enough. But, you know, that's not typically what is described in that particular situation. more than happy to say welcome to the community and welcome to the ecosystem. And other companies are picking Flatpak. And I'm actually kind of ecstatic when they choose Flatpaks. I think that there's a lot of value to the Flatpaks. And my preference is Flatpak. But personally, as long as it's on Linux, we're good. Yeah, that's exactly how I feel. Entirely agreed. I'm curious, Michael, you know, like looking to the future, I know when Chris and I are putting together Linux Action News, there are repeatedly a similar set of written outlets that are doing a lot of the grunt work,

covering things first, scraping through mail server logs, checking on discussions in GitHub and figuring out what's going on out there. And there are people like Michael Larable in particular, Pharonix, who are spending a lot of time to do this that enables a lot of great work on top of it that you and I and Chris are all doing. It seems like, I don't know how tenable that is.

We're all depending on advertising revenue, and much like in regular journalism, I'm not sure they get enough credit. Oh, absolutely. That's why I started, every time I talk about a source that is a critical piece, I always promote the source or I at least have a visual element saying this is where it's from. Or in some cases, like the last episode of Twill, I talked about some stuff that OMG Ubuntu found, you know, from their forums and, you know, digging into that thing. So I'm going to absolutely say that's where it comes from.

And I do think that a lot of times, even on other blogs where they don't really give credit or sometimes they'll give credit with the word source and a link. And I think that's the least you can do. But I think it is something that they should get a lot more credit than they do. And especially like a high five to Pharonix, because there's a lot of great content on that website. Yeah, I think he gets a hard time, you know, everybody, oh, Pharonix, and they roll their eyes.

But man, that guy is publishing seven days a week. He's doing a lot of this stuff hands on himself. I think he might be a machine. Yeah. I look at my list of, you know, RSS feeds, right? Because we're already going to subscribe to stuff. And you go like, okay, there's one from this website for this week, five from this website from this week. And you look at Pharonix, okay, five from this day.

Yep. And every other day. Yeah. And that can be Saturday and Sunday sometimes. It just doesn't matter. And so, you know, there are those resources. I've been thinking more about it too. Like what could we do, you know, and, you know, what could we do putting all of our resources together too, to help

generate new original reporting, you know, and in a way we do it by interviewing projects and stuff like that. Like we both do our part, but I feel like there's probably even more. I don't have an answer, but it's something that has been on my mind. It feels like with the whole lockdown COVID stuff, it was like a year and change to kind of rethink about events and what events to go to and what events I miss covering. And I kind of have, you know, maybe I'm kind of working out a new model of what events I might go to. Have you given thought to that? Yes, I have. In fact, when I previously did events, I would go to events and think, you know, can I justify the cost of going to these events and all these other things? And then, you know, when you have the case of the COVID thing happening, which is unprecedented

experience that everybody has no expectations to what's going to happen. I had no forethought to think I'm going to miss conferences. Right. So now when it starts back up, I mean, absolutely next year, I can guarantee you that my plan, at least maybe I can't promise it, but my plan is to be at every single one of the conferences I could physically go to. Hopefully we'll see you there. I mean, completely agreed, right? Yeah, just get back in the game again for sure. Oh, yeah. Well, what do you say we continue this fun on Destination Linux?

That sounds like a great idea. So how about this weekend? I'm in. I'll be there. So I'll be there on Sunday and you guys stream it live at dylanlive.com. And of course, we'll have links to This Week in Linux and Destination Linux and Michael's profile in the show notes. Check that out. And Michael's hang out and stick around with us if he can. And we'll just keep chatting on stuff and feel free to jump in as we go through some of this.

Yeah, for sure. I'll stick around. All right. Thanks for making it. Linode.com for making it. it on Linode. And I actually really enjoy that process because it's a chance for Wes and I to talk about like, well, what's this thing going to do? And do we want to deploy it on an existing Linode? Because we have some of these application servers that we've built that we'll just deploy containers on. Or do we want to have a dedicated system? And what I really appreciate about Linode is the pricing works such that whatever your style is, it's going to work for you. And it ranges 30 to 50% cheaper than what the other

cloud providers are offering. And they have 11 data centers worldwide you can choose from. And every single service, even if it's just like one $5 a month rig. But if you've got like, we have a lot now, they back it by the best customer service out there. They're just like winning awards all the time. It's impressive. And they're available by phone or ticket. Every step of the way, Linode has focused on building a really good experience

around running applications on Linux in the cloud. If it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode. In fact, I've even seen people run Windows on Linode because they give you that level of access to the metal if you want it, but they wrap it in a simple, clean, easy to use dashboard. So if you're not a pro or you've never set up a server in the cloud before, you're not going to get lost. You know, a few months ago, I set up a sync thing server in the cloud. I was just talking to Joe about this this morning and I opted to go with a $5 a month Linode

just because I figured like, why not just throw a machine out that I can connect to a lot of disks? And so I did just that. I set up that machine and I just added it to my sync thing network. So I share all of my shares with that. And then from that,

I share it with the additional systems and they all sync with each other. And it kind of creates a peer-to-peer sync system that is much faster than just one server to one server. And I love that because what it means is during the day, I can have something here at the studio that syncs up to my Linode system. And then when I bring my system online in LadyJupes, the files are coming both from the Studio server now and from the Linode server, and it loads up super, super fast. And because my cellular system in the RV is multi-network, I can actually saturate multiple cellular provider connections simultaneously.

And Linode can send as much as I can take. And so I can move files and data around using SyncThing transparently with just one Linode up in the cloud. And there's all kinds of things you can experiment with. You can learn, you can test, and you can deploy in production. So go get that $100 in 60-day credit at linode.com slash unplug. Try this stuff out for yourself. Learn something, build something, and support the show. linode.com slash unplugged.

Now we do have a few things to clean up around here. Come on, Chris, you leave the studio like this. I know, I know. I don't know what that plate of wings is doing over there. I think it's still safe to eat. Oh good, because I've had a few. Good. They were delicious. In the meantime, I want to remind you about our meetup page because it's back. We're beginning to actually try to schedule things again. We'll see. But go to meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting for that. Also, if you

want to contact the show, you got some feedback or something you'd like us to cover, we'd love that. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact. And also, I invite you to join our virtual lug. It happens every Sunday at noon Pacific. You can find your exact time at jupiterbroadcasting.com calendar. It just happens in our mumble room in the lobby,

people hanging out, talking about Linux, or maybe you're outside grilling and you just want to jump on with some like-minded geeks. We invite you to join them and And details for that Mumble server, they're over at linuxunplugged.com slash mumble. That's all going down every single dang Sunday. So join them and hang out and get geeky in our Virtual Lugs Sunday meeting.

Now we decided to set up a tracker and we didn't want something that was running on a commercial service or routed through Google Maps. We wanted something that used free software that we could self-host. And OwnTracks has been on our list to try for a while. We've taken a couple of passes at it. It allows you to track your own location and you can keep that completely private if you want and never share it with anyone and just use it for yourself. An example of why you might want to do that is automations.

You can have things like lighting and whatnot respond to your location on own tracks. And what it does is it runs on your smartphone in most cases. There's an app that's in the Play Store, in the Apple App Store. And every time your phone moves what they call a significant distance, it connects to the server via whatever connectivity you have available and checks in with your location. And there's a couple of ways you can do that. One of them is MQTT. You can send it over MQTT or another one is HTTP, which you can probably guess what we went with and describe the setup that we decided to go with Wes with own tracks and the method and how we're hosting it. Yeah, well, of course, we're using Docker because what we always do at this point,

and we're using a component of OwnTracks called the recorder application. And it's really lightweight and easy to get started with, which I like because, I mean, the idea of having this data seems really nice. I'm one of the people that enjoyed knowing where I'd been in the past, just sort of reminiscing or keeping tracks or checking when was I there. But I don't love the idea of Google having all of that. But if I have to stand up yet another database, well, I don't know. That's one more hurdle. So it was nice to see that this own tracks recorder, you don't really need much. There's a Docker compose file that you can get started with and then tweak to your needs. Stands up and it does have options for both MQTT and HTTP.

And one nice thing about it is it can be an HTTP to MQTT bridge application. And we'll get to that. But we basically got this started, exposed the port to the internet. We're using traffic to proxy it and slap on some SSL, what you get out of the box is a nice little application that you can post updates over HTTP to. It just sends some JSON. I think it's actually the same JSON payload that you would be sending over MQTT, but you just sort of configure which endpoint you send in your Android or iOS application, and then it's going to record it all locally and to boot, serve up some GeoJSON

or even render some OpenStreetMap for you to track where you've been. So that GeoJSON lets you pull that into other applications like Home Assistant or let you generate your own map if you maybe wanted to have something embedded on a website with a live tracker and you wanted to have a map that really was unique and fit the theme of your website, you could use this to generate the data for it. Or like Wes said, it'll build one for you

using OpenStreetMaps. And honestly, they look pretty good. Yeah, I think that's like more than enough for our purposes. But then, of course, you know, if you want to go above and beyond, you've got the raw data, which is great. Yeah. And you can save it and just use it for, I don't know, building charts and graphs of your travels. Or you could use it to do what we want to accomplish, which is make a public tracker available that you can check in on. And here's what I'm thinking. And we're close to it, but we're not all the way there. And I'd love advice if anybody in the mumble room has any tips or ideas or anybody listening that would like to write in and give me some advice, linuxunplugged.com slash contact. But I want to play with Hugo. I could use something

else, but I've been thinking I should play with Hugo. I was picturing a small Hugo site that has this live tracker built into it. And on that page would also be information about the road trip and the meetup locations and maybe like a picture feed from pictures we've taken from the road trip. Something kind of simple. Oh, like a one-stop shop sort of site that's all about this upcoming trip. I got the perfect domain for it. Are you ready? Oh, what did you get? ColonyTracker.live. Oh, so I'm thinking like future trips and stuff, you know, track, track, ColonyTracker. I'm, I'm, Wes, I've been thinking more about it. You know, I've been thinking like, I feel like we should talk more about decent community

interaction and, and how to be a good citizen in the Linux community and how to foster an environment of collaboration and turn down the heat. Help create the community we want to be a part of. I like it. Right. And I've been thinking the people that want to do that with us can be colony members. And so I've been just brewing on this idea. And so I like this idea of the colony tracker because I think a big part of this is going to be,

a big part of it, I should say, to be specific, of turning down the dial on just the heat of conversation and just the tone, of turning down the dial on just the heat of conversation and just the tone, I think will be when we get back in meet space and we have IRL bandwidth to interact with each other, I feel like there's going to be a pretty major shift because one of the main experiences I have had, and I know this is probably true for both Michael and Wes, is interacting with people in person, they become a friend for life. Interacting with people over the internet, I can be friends with them.

It's nice. You know, I can like them a lot. I won't even think about that. I won't consider it like a relationship that lacks depth. But people I meet in person, I could end up being friends with for the rest of my life. We create really strong bonds. That's a really interesting point

because I've had conversations and stuff. I've met people on IRC, met people on, you know, Mumble or Zoom or all kinds of places. But in person, there is a lot more to it. And it's interesting because the reason I earlier said that I wanted to go to every conference is because the interaction of going to a lug and then like moving that lug to a virtual one because you have to. The vibe is so different that even though just the simplest, it's the same people. But for some reason, that is such a different experience so drastically that I agree that when you're doing it in person, you can build a bond that's much deeper. And you can build a bond that's much deeper. An in-person event, an in-person meeting, you know, even if it's just something simple, going out and having lunch, that's like a good, rich beer, like a really tasty beer like the CNX Tuesday.

And online events are like an O'Doul's, like an alcohol-free beer. It's like you get the essence of beer, you get the idea of beer, but it's not a beer. It doesn't taste like a beer quite right, and you don't get buzzed. It's better than nothing, but it's not really mean you need. And so the idea with this live tracker is not everybody can make it to Salt Lake City or Denver, but there is a lot of people in between those two locations. I'm leaving from the Seattle area and working my way out. And my experience has always been people always want to know where you're at, what route you're taking. And of course, it's always changing when you're anybody who does a lot of road trips, you know, things change. And so the live tracker, it sort of solves that problem. It gives people real time idea of where I'm at. And then we can just do these micro meetups and

just have in real life connections. Correct me if I'm wrong, but when I used to be a part of JB, I remember there was a part where you had something like this before. Is this like a similar thing you're going to do? And if so, is there like an experience between like the software you use then versus now and like how it's interacted since the, you know, since the previous time? Yeah, right. Great question, because the previous iteration was based on this commercial truck tracking system called. This was the Rover Tracker. Yeah, yeah. It was called like Land, Sea and Air. And it's really designed for shipping companies who want to track their trucks. And so the nice thing about that is there's a hardware device that has its own cellular connection.

that has its own cellular connection. Of course, it's a crappy cellular connection, but they have its own, and you can just stick it on your dash, and it just runs, and it just updates their maps. The problem is, as you would expect, it's some old, clunky commercial product that has an expensive subscription, and the map is antiquated,

and you can't really do much with it, and you can't self-host it. And so those were like, those are just like all the things that just kind of, I never liked about it, but it solved the core problem of, of location tracking in an embeddable map. But we wanted something this time around, like if we're going to build it again, we wanted to self-host it.

We wanted to have no monthly subscription. And then what's really nice about own tracks is it, it gives a lot of different types of data output that we can use to automate and use for different things. So it provides like a very rich set of API options for you to pull information out of. And it's all controllable by what information gets shared and how it gets shared. And it's something that we can run privately. Like, I don't mind if Wes sees all of my location data, right? But I wouldn't necessarily want that in maybe some commercial cloud service anymore.

Like my preference has changed there. And then I like the idea too of using that data to drive automations here at the studio. You turn on lights when I arrive, just even cycle the fans, because of course I've geeked out all the cooling I bought for the summer is all on smart plugs that are controlled by Home Assistant. And all of that stuff could be automated when Home Assistant knows my location.

Yeah, and that's where it's neat. The recorder app can act as like you can send HTTP updates from your phone, and then it can publish those updates to an MQTT topic that then Home Assistant can be configured, or OpenHAB, A lot of these systems can be configured to read from and then pull in those updates. So we haven't actually tried that yet, but it seems promising.

It's very interesting. It sounds like you could take this and because it's with Home Assistant, you could do all sorts of stuff with this data. Like when you just get somewhat close to your house, you could be like setting it up

so that your thermostat turns on and make sure it's the pristine, perfect temperature or whatever, like those kinds of things. And it does seem like a very, I'm looking forward to seeing how it works out for you. I mean, I probably wouldn't do it myself because of effort, but it does sound very interesting. Yeah. Well, you know, a lot of this, I made Wes do, I always have to disclaim that, that, you know, a lot of the heavy lifting was done by Wes. And, you know, he's got a lot of other stuff going on, too. It's not the only thing he's doing, and he still gets it done. I just like seeing you turn your home into an experiment, and then I get to see when it goes well, and we all get to hear about when it goes very poorly.

Fair, fair. So if anyone out in the community would like to help me build this colony tracker dot live page, I'd love to do it in Hugo and I'd love to work with somebody on that and mentor me. But if you want to build it with anything you want, as long as I don't care, I don't have to be involved either way. But I'd love either some mentorship on building a site for this or if somebody has a passion that they could just crank something out and wants to help us create a page with some information, we could put some branding on there, you if somebody has a passion that they could just crank something out and wants to help us create a page with some information, we could put some branding on there, you know,

get a little information out there for everybody. Please contact me, chris at jupiterbroadcasting.com or use our contact page. Because I think that could be something really fun. And, you know, it doesn't have to be Hugo. Wes knows behind the scenes for about six months. I keep trying to work Hugo into just about every episode. We've snuck it into a few places

here and there, but I don't think you've quite got it out of your system yet. No. And it's not a bad thing to plug in because Hugo is a very nice CMS. I think it's quite a good static site gen. The fact that you can do so much of it at the command line, like, you know, that really got me. It's like, I love that, that you generate it at the command line and all of that. And there's a lot of great themes out there.

It just seems like it's a pretty solid, well, like you said, CMS, and then it regenerates super fast pages. Yeah, it's a static site generating CMS. And there's other things that do very similar stuff. I'd say it's probably in, out of all of the hundreds that exist, I would put it maybe in the top three. I'm also very picky about these things. So I don't want to be like, oh, it's the best. So it's I'm just saying it's definitely up there for sure. But I think that there is a question that everybody is going to have to ask you about this data that you're doing with the colony tracker. And that is how much of it is going to Muse Group?

Yeah, I have to sign a CLA too. I don't understand why. Wes was just really, really adamant that I signed the CLA. He didn't read it too closely. I'm glad of that. No, I just signed it. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I feel like the trick will be to turn it off

when I don't want to be tracked. I'll have to remember to do that. But I was thinking the nice thing about having it on the Android phone is if we get this working, I could put my pixel in my pocket and go to the meetup. And then if people want to know where the meetup is, they just check the colony tracker and go there. You've got your personal device and then your I want to be tracked device.

I like it. Yeah, and I'll probably often just leave it in the RV and you can track us as we go and telegram me and we can set up something. But I figured if I wanted to go out to lunch and was totally cool with people showing up, I'd just take it with me and maybe just tweet or I don't know. I haven't figured that part out yet. Honestly, this is where YouTube would be a lot easier. Like if I was doing YouTube videos or something,

I could just pop on my channel and say, hey, I'm doing this. I've thought about that, but that's a lot of work. That's a lot of work. Wes, get on it. Yeah, Wes. Uh-oh. Seems like a good idea lot of work. Wes, get on it. Yeah, Wes. Uh-oh. Seems like a good idea. All right, well, you're going to have to give me remote camera access.

Linux.entropy.works. Use promo code LUP13 and save 15%. You know, Entropy is an industry-leading mobile and web development studio based out of the UK. And they contacted me because they're listeners of the show. And they have been building out clients around the world, including Mars Wrigley, Walmart, Mediacom, the Financial Times. And they want to reach out to community members. It's not just about the big companies.

They want to reach out to everyone and build a brand. They want to be known for building Flutter applications and developing applications for Linux, for the Mac, for Windows, and even for the web. You know, they run their whole shop on Linux. There are a bunch of Linux hardware geeks in particular. They love, love playing around with that kind of stuff. And some of their team, some of their team, I've been told they hang out, they've got their distros of choice, and that's where they stay there. But there is absolutely like a distro hopper contingent on the team that's constantly jumping around and trying out the different distros. So they have a longstanding connection back to the Linux community.

A lot of their tooling is built around Ruby and, of course, Flutter for mobile and the desktop. They really are emphasizing when their clients come to them that, yes, we build for the Linux desktop. Would you like to build an app for the Linux desktop? And I love hearing that. You know, somebody has to push that forward. And they've pioneered some of the most complex Flutter apps that have ever really been built, including Flutter apps that have image recognition and machine learning built into them. And Entropy can rapidly build an app for iOS, Android, and Windows, and macOS, and yes, of course, the Linux desktop in essentially no time. They're already one of the global leaders in Flutter development with dozens

of deployments in just the last year alone. I think we all see where this is going. It gives us an opportunity to find something that's better than Electron. It still delivers on that multi-platform delivery promise. And thankfully, it puts Linux right there at the front of the line with Canonical and Google backing that. There's a good shot that's going to be around for a while and that's going to go places. And I think Entropy sees that and they're ready to start building apps for people. Wes and I had an app idea for a Flutter app that takes advantage of Pipewire that just like can list the process IDs. You select the process ID and it can grab the audio using Pipewire that you could build that out in Flutter. It'd be a great app. In fact, Entropy

would love to discuss any ideas you might have and just chat with you about the Linux desktop in general, regardless if it moves forward into a project, they just love to get in touch and chat. That'd be a, you know be an opportunity to geek out. So get started by going to linux.entropy.works. Fill out the contact form and use the promo code LUP13. You'll also save a little money when you do that if you do end up starting a project. There's never any pressure.

They're always just happy to chat and discuss Linux and chat about Goofy Chris on the Unplugged program. They'll do that too. So go check them out and use promo code LOVE13. Linux.entropy.works. Well, we've got some feedback. Michael Staggs over on Twitter tagged you wondering about the security of Deepin.

He writes that, I know in the current political climate, China and security are both hot-button issues, but I don't feel we can give Deepin a pass on security. It's so bad that the OpenSUSE audit team won't even audit their stuff anymore. Yeah, that's a shame. You know, so Michael, he tweeted me a couple of links

to some bugs that are pretty concerning in Deepin. However, they're from 2019 and they're bugs on OpenSUSE's bug tracker, not on Deepin's. So it's entirely possible that that code isn't even being used or has been replaced. It's hard to say. But it is an interesting, you know, consideration. It's kind of off on its own island, and it could have its own particular security ramifications when you are creating your own new apps. I really, really, really wanted it to be like the distro I could recommend to new users, because it's fresh, and it's clean, and it asks some great questions when you're setting it up that are simple and, I think, great questions to ask.

And I thought, boy, wouldn't this be great, especially if they add Android app compatibility. But it is just too different. It's like running some crazy-ass esoteric distro on your server and then walking away and expecting somebody else to pick it up. I just can't in good faith say, go for new users, deploy this, unless you yourself are a Deepin user and you're helping them with it. Right. I mean, the farther away you step

out of the mainstream, the more of that support burden you got to take on yourself. And especially if you're a new user, that's not really something you're capable of. I think what they're building over there is really neat, but it's probably not the first distribution to recommend to new users. I spent about a week and a half with it, and so I decided now to wipe it

off here, and I have put Fedora 34 on here. Let's see. I'm doing a first boot right here. Let's log in, see if Fedora Rawhide. So I guess this is technically, I guess this is technically what? Fedora 35, going to be Fedora 35 eventually. And I'm happy to report it looks like everything went good. The ThinkPad is now running Rawhide with Plasma.

I want to see what version it is, though, because that's obviously all that matters here. That's the whole point of why you're doing this, right? It wasn't just for the freshest nano you could get. That's always a consideration, but I'll build it from source if I have to. Whatever it takes to get the freshest nano. Whatever it takes. All right. So survey says I am on Plasma 5223.

I'm happy with that. That's great. And I'm running, I'm on Wayland. Plasma 5.2.2.3. I'm happy with that. That's great. And I'm running, I'm on Wayland, and it looks really good. It looks smooth. I think this is not a bad default to start with, at least. All right, well, you just check back in after a couple of DNF updates. Yeah, let's see how it goes. What could go wrong running Rawhide on my laptop, right?

One of the things I loved about when I switched to Fedora is that you can get the latest and greatest Plasma without having to wait for the next release. It's not necessarily that that's coming to 35. That also might just come to 34 stable as soon as they're ready to take it out of Rawhide. Generally, yes. However, the timing of things has worked out that the latest Plasma isn't, right? I mean, that was the whole thing that Neil convinced me of last week, is that's where it all went sideways is the way the release windows are working out. It's going to be a long period of time. And so if you want freshest Plasma, I knew it. Neil was to blame. Oh, it's totally Neil's fault with 523. I know there's gonna be

a little bit of a little bit of delay, but that, you know, I'm on 522.2 and i'm like i i'm i'm okay with that yeah yeah yeah to be fair here right like it's not like you're going to experience a huge gap because 523 itself doesn't even get branched from the development trees in plasma upstream until after fedora linux 35 is branched downstream so like the final release of Plasma 5.23 doesn't happen until like, I think it's a week or two weeks before Fedora Linux 35's GA, which is just too close to pull it in right away.

And that just means that it'll get pulled in post GA and update like within two weeks or so afterwards. But if you're really feeling compelled to want the absolute latest and greatest, then Fedora Rawhide does in fact have it and will get it right away. But you take everything that goes with that, right? And that's really the core of it.

Or you can use the Copper repos I mentioned earlier. One of our SIG members actually rebuilds everything from Rawhide for Plasma for stable releases. And you can activate those and do that. Man, you could have mentioned that before I installed Rawhide. I'm just saying. Well, Chris, I tried to tell you. I tried. But you were on the kick. I was like, oh, yeah. So is Rawhide any good? You know me i can't help it either something wrong with me dude it's what drove me to gen 2 years ago it's still there well you know i i have machines that

run rawhide because as as a fedora developer like it makes some sense for me to at least have one or two that do it and it's it's totally fine like i i generally don't have issues with it these days which sometimes can be kind of a disappointment. Yeah. Where's the fun in that? Right. But it works pretty well. Like the major advantage of running Rawhide, at least from my perspective, as someone who likes to help make the ecosystem better, is that you get the absolute latest Linux kernel in Mesa as they are coming. And you can like before they're released. And so you can see how well it's working for your hardware.

You can give feedback to the developers and they can actually do something useful about it to hopefully make it better sooner because like by the time a release is out, like those merge windows have passed. And so it's, it takes longer for fixes to come out. But if you're testing it as the get snapshots are landing in, in Fedora or the RCs are landing in Fedora Rawhide, then you have an opportunity to make sure that those things are fixed very quickly. Yeah. It sounds like something I want to play with as well at this point now.

I'm not typically the one who wants the bleeding edge kind of thing, but I do now. I do now. Just don't do it on your production machine. That's what I figured. Yeah. I'm not crazy enough to suggest that. Yeah, meanwhile, my production systems are all on Ubuntu 18.04. It's pretty boring. I know, I know. All right, but with that. The cone of silence.

Hey, Wes, come here for a second. Get in here. Is that you? The smell? I mean, ugh. Yeah, I'm sorry about that. I'm surprised that hat fits in here. Jesus.

Anyways, I wanted to let you know, and I don't tell anybody else, but I know you've been wanting to up your credentials game. I know you. You talk about this all the time. You always want the latest certs. And our friends over at CloudGuru have a course on Linux file sharing that helps you prepare for the LPIC 2 engineer exam. And in that course, they cover the basics,

but also advanced configuration options for Samba and NFS. So I wanted to give you the link to this. I'll just put it in the show notes. I don't want to say it in the show because I don't want everybody to go get the certification and then, you know, take your job. Well, and it's a little embarrassing how bad I am at Samba configs. Right. I mean, yeah, because you can't just do test parm and get all the details. Anyways, I just thought you should maybe have the link. So I'll put it in the show notes is what I'll do. I'll put like in a CloudGuru link in the show notes, and then that'll take you to this Linux file sharing. Thank you.

You're welcome. Just let's not mention it on the show. The cone of silence. All right. Well, that does bring us to the end of this week's episode. We'd love to hear from you. You can tweet us at linuxunplugged or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. The whole network is at Jupyterugged or go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact. The whole network is at Jupyter Signal over there.

We do announcements, live streams, that kind of stuff. It's really kind of like our blowhorn, but you can also send feedback at the Jupyter Signal and we receive it there. Of course, there's lots of fantastic podcasts, including our sister show, Linux Action News, and the self-hosted podcast over at jupyterbroadcasting.com. Check out Linux Action News if you haven't. We've been discussing the Audacity story from the very beginning over there. And last but not least, we'd love to have you join us live. We do this here podcast on a Tuesday. Join us at 12 p.m. Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern.

See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Yes, make it a Linux Tuesday. Why not join the mumble room? Then you get a low latency audio stream. And the fun thing about that is if you're on Linux and you connect using Mumble, the entire stack end-to-end is free software.

Because we're doing it right here on Linux too, using Mumble. You connect, you get low latency real-time audio, and you're doing it all with free software. And it's also one of the best sounding ways to catch the show. That is at linuxunplugged.com slash mumble, and you just join us and hang out, and then you're ready for the look plug, too. It's kind of great. It's like a power move for the show.

Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. We're not going to see you here tomorrow. We won't see you the next day, but we will see you next Tuesday! I was enjoying a nice see you this Tuesday, see you next Tuesday. I won beer and I'm just totally scrambled now. It's like that thing really hits. We'll see you every Tuesday. See you next Tuesday. I won beer and I'm just totally scrambled now. It's like that thing really hits. We'll see you every Tuesday. Yeah, that's true. That's what I should say.

You know, I still have that burn from the steam valve. No, no. Man, you know, I kind of expected this Rawhide thing to be kind of a train wreck. But, man, you know, the default Plasma setup, after all, because I've just tried so many different desktop environments recently from Windows 11 to Deepin to Cosmic. And now to just throw Plasma on Rawhide on here, it's so simple and straightforward now. It's like Plasma has become the just simple, obvious, straightforward UI. It's weird. Welcome to my side.

This reminds me of a conversation we had like seven years ago or something. It's weird. Welcome to my side. This reminds me of a conversation we had like seven years ago or something. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, you know, 40, 40 was compelling for a while, especially on a laptop. I really like where they're going. But then I read this, I read this great piece that Joey wrote for OMG Ubuntu about where the gnome sees its future going. And I just looked at that and I thought, yeah, okay, that settles it for me. Plasma is the desktop environment for me. I am definitely and clearly, and now it has been explained to me in multiple ways,

I am not the target user for that desktop environment, and that's okay.