LINUX Unplugged - 416: Server Meltdown

Episode Date: July 28, 2021

We try to pull off a show while recovering from an epic server crash. Then we build the ultimate remote Linux desktop—in the cloud!

Well, I found something I'm going to be staring at for a little while. It's a live tracker of Starlink satellites. Have you seen this, Wes? Satellitemap.space. Talk about a new distraction I did not need. And it's not only Starlink. There's OneWeb on here, too. They're just flying all over the place.

They're above us right now. Like, I'm looking at these two here, and wait a minute. Are they about to— Oh, no! Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes.

Brush off all that Starlink debris. We have a show to do, would you? This episode is brought to you by the all-new Cloud Guru, the leader in learning for the cloud, Linux, and other modern tech skills. Hundreds of courses, thousands of hands-on labs. Get certified, get hired, get learning at acloudguru.com. Well, coming up on the show today, can you self-host your own shells.com-like alternative? Obviously at a different scale,

but is it possible to take a desktop environment and put it in a container and then access it remotely? Well, not only is it possible thanks to a really cool open source project, but it really kicks the llama's ass. In fact, you can do it with just about any modern web browser and you'll probably be able to get it set up in about 15 minutes or so. We'll tell you all about our experiments

with WebTop on the show and how it's going to solve a major problem during our Jupiter Colony reunion road trip. It's going to be like our hero tool, potentially. That is if I can get the server up and running for any continuous moment. It's been crashing all morning, Wes, and I'm a mess right now. This is going to be a bad show. I'm just going to warn you. Normally, I say it's going to be a great episode. Got a real big show. We have a terrible show today. It's going to be awful because of me. I'd like to point out that we didn't just do an Arch update. I'm not to blame. No, you are not to blame. It is, I think,

the heat. The server is locking up and it's behaving very much in a hardware failure kind of way. I got in this morning and I went to connect to our beloved Arch server and my web dashboard for this thing I'm working on for the road trip didn't load. And the server has been so dang reliable, I thought to myself, oh, it must be my workstation. So let me check network manager. Oh, it says I'm connected. Let me see if I can ping other stuff.

Yep, hmm. Well, all right, I'll go to the console. So I go down to the garage slash server room and I access the console and it's just dead. No response, nothing. I type in nothing, no blinking cursor, nothing, Wes. Nothing on the console. So this is not just a network problem.

It's not the NIC going out. This thing's dead. The server is so reliable that it did cross my mind that it might actually be a bad keyboard. So I swapped out the keyboard. Because I thought, no way the server's locked up. It's never locked up. The server has actually never crashed on us unless we screw up an update.

It's been a rock. No, that's been it, yeah. Sometimes we did stuff and, you know, ZFS didn't build right and our root file system wouldn't mount. But that was on us, not the server. And honestly, every time we learned a lesson, and it's been really solid. And so I swap out the keyboard, still not working. I do a hard reset, power it off, power it back on.

And I'm watching the console output, like a Hawk at this point, you know, every BIOS post message when grub loads, then system D like I'm watching every single thing. The console loads up. I type on it. I get logged in. I can ping stuff. Okay. I i go back to my desk the web dashboards load few things need to be cleaned up a couple of the applications crap themselves but i fix all that up good to go so i come down to the studio i jump on the stream and i'm kvetching about how our how our server crashed this morning but i think everything's okay and i go check on it and it doesn't respond and again i go out to the console and it's totally locked up. And this was what, Wes?

Like 20 minutes ago, 15 minutes ago, maybe at the most? Yeah, pretty much. Right before we get on the air. My baby, Wes. My baby. And I think it's dying. I think the heat here in the Pacific Northwest has just crushed it. It has been too much.

And the worst part is it's about to get hotter over the next few days. Right. You won't be here to manage it. You do your best at the studio, as I've seen, trying to manage airflow, cool it off when you can, which isn't always possible. And then not only is this a valuable archival resource for us at the studio, it's a backdoor into the studio

with WireGuard as our server there, and I know it hosts a bunch of personal stuff in some of your media collection, which you probably want if you're about to go on the road. Not only that, but it's going to be an environment where I can run this webtop application that we're about to talk about and have a remotely accessible machine on the studio LAN.

And that, to me, is going to be extremely valuable when I am in limited compute and limited mobility with LTE connectivity. Having a rock-solid rock solid always on workstation that can do a lot of my heavy lifting was going to be a key part of my on the road strategy. I think now I'm going to move that off to Linode because I just can't count on this local server. I'm just going to have to deploy this on Linode and run it there.

And they're going to have plenty of compute and plenty of networking. But it's unfortunate it's going this way. It's an old box too. You know, we bought it from Unixplus Used, I think in 2017, 2018. I can't remember exactly when. So that means it's been through a couple of winters and a couple of summers. It's got an Intel Xeon L5 640 24-core CPU. So it's got quite a bit of cores for what we need. And it's got 56 gigs of RAM. I can't remember exactly how we got there, but it's got 56 gigs of RAM in it. And it's done a really great job for us, but now it doesn't seem to be able to stay up more than 20, 25 minutes. And I am legit going through an emotional process. I am grieving the loss of our server right now, especially because I'm six days out from the road trip. So I can't even get anything to replace it, even if I had the money to replace

it right now. There's just not the time to get it in place. No, I mean, you really don't appreciate these things and how reliable and how much you depend on them until you start questioning it. Yeah, when I realized what a rocket had been and what and, and what it feels like now, it's like a, it's like I'm losing a friend. Um, but, uh, the, the road show goes on in theory and our first meetup is scheduled for August 7th, which really is not that far away in Salt Lake city. Our second meetup that is scheduled is in Denver, August 20th. Plus we will have the micro meetup link available where you can submit a request to me with, I just have a few questions in there for you and we'll have a route with a live tracker. Our own tracks installation is still up

and running because that's up on a Linode box. And so we'll have the live map that'll give you my location as we go around. But we have a lot to get into today, despite the state of my server. So before we go any further, we've got to bring in our virtual lug. Time, appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello, Chris. Hello, everybody. About 22 of you on the Mumble server today. LinuxUnplugged.com slash Mumble if you'd ever like to join us. We have a quiet listening area and an on-air area.

It's a great way to just listen to the show in real time. Talk about a low latency way to do it. But the other thing that's just kind of cool is it's all free software. If you join like on a Linux box, or I suppose a BSD machine, and run Mumble, we're running this entire stack in the studio on Linux. Mumble is free software, so you can listen to the show in real time with low latency, high quality Opus audio when you connect it on Mumble. And then if you ever want to join us on air to jump in on something, you can. Like the Framework laptop, which is our first community news item this week,

we've all been waiting for the reviews to land for this ultimate right-to-repair machine. And it seems like overall, the reviews have been a lot more positive than I think probably either one of us expected. Yeah, really. I mean, the biggest negative that seems to have popped up, and unfortunately more than a few times at this point, is the battery life. Yeah. But maybe we can take the Verge's review as a bit of a case study. They took a look at a model, came with, let's see the configuration here, display 13.5 inch, 3.2 aspect ratio. Yeah, 3-by-2 aspect ratio is kind of unique. I like that. It's your only option, but I like it. Yeah, 2256 by 1504 and not a touchscreen before you ask. It comes with an

Intel Core i5-1135G7 and only 8 gigs of RAM on this model, but don't worry, you can get more if you're building this for yourself. And that price, I think for configured, as configured like that, is just under $1,000 or basically $1,000 at $999. But the notes about the battery struck me as potentially solvable because the whole idea about the framework is that so many parts are replaceable, swappable, and the battery is absolutely one of those. So many parts are replaceable, swappable, and the battery is absolutely one of those. And so if this thing was successful, it'd be pretty easy for a third party or for Framework themselves to build a higher capacity battery that you fit in there, assuming they could have around the same form factor. That's one of the weird things about talking about this laptop is I think, especially at this point, we're so used to just everything being soldered in and sort of, you know, having to optimize what am I buying right now because I can't change it and it has to last. And it's a little bit of you have to unlearn that when you're configuring this thing. True. And ByteBitten, it looks like there may be a touchscreen in the future, possibly. Yes. So what some other channels showed was there is on the motherboard a connector for touchscreen. So when you use it in the framework chassis,

or if you, because you can take out the motherboard and create a small form factor design with it, and you put then a touchscreen on it, it's all possible. Yeah, I'd love to see that kind of thing take off where other people start building parts for it too, but you'd really have to have some mass user adoption. I mean, I think that's kind of the whole elephant in the room about the Framework laptop is how it ends up playing out

is going to depend on how successful it is because they're not going to make all of these additional modules and there's not going to be a bunch of upgrade components and multiple iterations on the motherboard and CPU that fit in the same chassis unless this thing sells like crazy. It seems like that's the other part of this that has to be successful. Yeah, I mean, I think thankfully

it seems like a decent laptop anyway. So like if it doesn't take off, it still could be a fine machine to just get work done and run Linux on. But you're right. If it does take off, the value proposition could really be a lot more. You know, you could easily get this thing repaired.

You could find spare parts. You could swap things out, upgrade it as time went on, change out the ports as, you know, things got fancier. That would be pretty exciting. If you look at the Venn diagram of customers for the Framework laptop, Linux user and right to repair users, I think they overlap a lot in this diagram. And depending on where you fall down on the right to repair issue and how important to

you a machine like this is, I think pushes you over the edge if you want to order this or not. And it's been really interesting because I've gotten a lot of notes from people that definitely fall into that. I believe in right to repair and I want a system that can run Linux. I like this idea and they're pulling the trigger. And I know you've been on the fence, Wes, and I think at the core of your indecision is where you stand on right to repair. And not so much as like, of course, you want it to exist. Everybody wants right to repair to be a thing. But I'm curious how important you feel it is to you personally. You know, that's a tough one.

I do think it's really important, but I feel like I've been a little burned, skeptical, just sort of maybe it's just too pessimistic. Honestly, at the end of the day, it's been hard to be able to engage as a consumer who wants sort of the maybe it's just too pessimistic, honestly, at the end of the day. It's been hard to be able to engage as a consumer who wants sort of the higher end of things, you know, who really does care about computing, likes nice computers, uses nice computers, not just, you know, for sport, but for work and for getting stuff done. And up until now, it's been hard. You know, you do have some of that stuff maybe in the ThinkPad line, especially, but basically everywhere else, this isn't really a choice you've gotten to make.

Unfortunately, it seems like there's a bit of a barrier or an activation potential for me emotionally to sort of be willing to believe in this potential again, even though I really do want to. Carl, it sounds like it does match up for you. You ordered one. Yes, sir. I'm looking forward to getting it. I'm going to be in batch two, which is supposed to ship in August. I'm guessing you probably went with the DIY edition. So it's OS free.

Absolutely. Yeah, I didn't get any storage RAM or OS for it. So I'll handle those whenever I get it. In fact, I just placed a Newegg order for RAM and storage today. And I placed the preorder for the laptop a week or two ago. I miss the idea of just ordering the components I want for my laptop from Newegg. That's what a concept. That's crazy, Carl.

Like you can do that. Wow. Yeah, it's exciting. What's going to be tricky, though, is what Linux you decide to put on there, because you're going to need something with a pretty new kernel. Seems like 5.11, maybe the bare minimum, ideally kernel 5.12. And so like Jim Salter had a hard time getting Ubuntu 20.04 working on it,

obviously because it has such an older kernel. And even 21.04 wasn't perfect. And I think if I'm just remembering off the top of my head, I think 21.04 ships with 5.11. You'd want a distro that ships with 5.11 or 5.12. I've been looking on the framework laptop form, and they actually have a whole Linux section, which I'll link to in the show notes for just getting Linux on the DIY edition. And I would say probably what seems to be the most popular distro reading through there is Fedora. Although there's a poll that was

conducted just two days ago, or no, a few, no longer than that, but the last vote was two days ago. And Ubuntu was the largest in the poll. So people are also probably doing Ubuntu then maybe with the kernel PPA backport, possibly. That might work. But if I were going to get a framework, I would probably try to run Fedora or an Arch-based distro on there. Just that way you get all that new kernel goodness. Because not only is it an 11th-gen Intel, but there's also just a lot of new components in there.

It's a lot of USB 3.0 stuff. I would go with a newer kernel. Yes. I mean, this is just not in the category of off-the-shelf laptop in any way yet. So if you are getting, you know, you're interested in this, you should probably be prepared to do some tinkering. Should we talk a little BSD in our Linux podcast, Wes? Oh, it's been too long, but our friends over at FreeBSD are working on some interesting stuff,

including a new installer. Although this one has a bit of a twist. This new experimental installer is web-based, with the interface running from a web browser either locally on the machine you're installing FreeBSD on or it can actually run on a remote system. What a cool idea. And I don't think this is absolutely the first time I've ever seen this executed.

I feel like an early Debian installer prototype did this too, but the idea that the whole installer is web-based and you either just do it in a web browser on a live session on the box or you do it on a remote system, seems actually kind of like a compelling idea for FreeBSD, especially since most of them, probably a lot of them are being deployed headless. What do you think of a web-based installer? Okay, it seems really practical, but the troll in me just wants to say,

this is one step away from an Electron installer, right? I mean, yeah. Like, why not ship it as an Electron app on the desktop? What's the difference at that point? I mean, I don't know, though. It could probably be a pretty simple, well, maybe not. It could be a monster of a web application. That could be its Achilles heel, I suppose, is to create a competent web installer. It may have to be an absolute monster, especially because you're probably going to want some abstraction in there at various levels. And that's probably going to be tricky to even wrap your head around. They're also working on improvements to their Linux

compatibility layer, which I think is based on Linux 5.7 right now. And it looks like they're focusing a lot on AMD Radeon and newer Intel GPU support to get those fancied up. Also nice to see is that the Hello System project, which we talked about a little bit ago on the show, the FreeBSD-powered desktop OS, well, that's been steadily progressing. They had a recent release, and they're making great progress towards their next one. Wes, that's the project being worked on by the AppImage founder, right?

Indeed it is. Hello System is one to keep your eye on. It's not for those of you who are offended by things that try to look like macOS because they're just leaning hard into that whole UI paradigm and workflow and just trying to create a BSD-based system. Michael Larble, though, has a pretty good write-up over at Pharonix from the free BSD community, so go check that out. If you like yourself the BSD news.

But we wanted to sneak in just a real quick deck update. There's some interesting technical details that we learned about the Steam Deck's Linux implementation. Not only will the Steam Deck be using Wayland, but it seems like once again they've decided to take on the hard problem of building their own compositor. Building their own compositor, yes, that's right. It appears Valve's Pierre-Louis Graffet has developed GameScope

as a follow-up to the Steam Comp Manager, which was previously used for this role on the original Debian-based SteamOS. He tweeted a short video of a game being played on the deck, and it had a crosshair cursor, which people noticed and then asked him about. Nerds. Yeah, exactly, right? He replied, yes, this is SteamOS on the deck, and it uses GameScope. The cursor is drawn by XWayland.

Huh. GameScope is the new compositor, eh? GameScope is the new compositor, and there's some bits in there too that suggest maybe SteamOS 3.0 is powered by Vulkan. That wouldn't surprise me at all. I think it would require Vulkan just for Proton to work completely. I noticed that Neil, who's not here today, has submitted a proposal to create a spin of Fedora

targeted at the Steam Deck that would be Fedora for game developers and players. And you wonder what would the advantage of that be? But one advantage would be that then it could be essentially a meta package of sorts that you could DNF install

and get all of that stuff you need to create and develop games on Linux. So that actually could be a pretty slick solution. But right now, we're just kind of in a wait and see.

We haven't seen the release of SteamOS 3.0, and we're getting a trickle feed of information. I'm hoping I'd love for one day to be able to chat with somebody at Valve about the Linux implementation

because we just love to geek out about that kind of stuff. We'll see. Maybe one day. If you're listening at Valve, linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Let us know. We can come to you.

No problem. That's right. All right, well, one more community news item before we go. You know, we deployed a matrix server. It continues to grow. The information is at linuxunplugged.com. And it's a project that we watch with a lot of interest. And it seems that Element,

the creators of the Element chat client, and they also work on the core matrix protocol, just raised a significant chunk of money. Yeah, they've just raised $30 million of Series B funding in order to further accelerate matrix development and improve Element, the chat client. It's a little confusing because Element's both the name of the client and the name of the startup.

Yeah, I wasn't really sure how to explain that. You're right, it is. And they also work on the core matrix protocol as well. They're like some of the startup. Yeah, I wasn't really sure how to explain that. You're right, it is. And they also work on the core matrix protocol as well. They're like some of the core contributors. The people that are throwing in the money this time is led by Protocol Labs and MetaPlanet. That's a fund that was established by the co-founder of Skype and Kazaa.

And both Protocol Labs and MetaPlanet are big fans and have publicly supported decentralized communication in the past. So it does seem likely that this is a great source of funding, that their visions of how they want to see communications and where Element is taking things line up. Because, you know, when you see funding like this, you wonder, like, OK, what's their agenda? But it seems early days here, but it seems like things are lining up it has led some folks to wonder that since protocol labs is involved might there be some overlap between ipfs and matrix and at least in this initial announcement it sounds like yeah where the tech makes sense

anyway the teams are looking to work more closely together linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in credit for 60 days on a new account. And you support the show by going to linode.com slash unplugged. Linode is our hosting provider for everything that we've built

in the last couple of years. And we just doubled down when we went independent. I was using them for about two years before we made the switch for the JB infrastructure. When we got the keys back to the kingdom, we went independent again. We went this direction and we've just

gone all in. Their infrastructure is super solid. It's flexible and it's fast. You can focus on your project and not your infrastructure. And while I'm here right now dealing with a server outage on our LAN, my first thought is there's no way I can get a replacement server in six days before I leave or get one set up. I'm going to look through the services we're running on our LAN, my first thought is there's no way I can get a replacement server in six days before I leave or get one set up. I'm going to look through the services we're running on our local host here, and I'm going to spin them up on Linode. And that's just going to be the quickest and most reliable solution for a lot of this stuff. They have 11 data centers to choose from, so I'll probably pick something centralized for where I'll be traveling. Every service level they have is backed by the best customer support in the business. And when that matters, it really, really matters. And what

Linode has done is they have honed and crafted a fine product. They've been doing this for 18 years and they've really focused on just making it better over all of those years. And they have remained independent the entire time. Wow. I have so much respect for that. Imagine the headwinds they were facing when some of the larger hyperscalers launched, like when AWS came around, and then when VC-funded competitors came that could basically just burn money

and they just brought on another VC anytime they needed more money. They had to remain competitive, and they had to make their product more appealing than people that essentially had endless money on either side of them. And they did it. They made their product more competitive. And I watched them do it. I watched them and they won me over. I didn't have to choose Linode. I chose to come over to Linode after watching them respond to the market and build something better, but stay true to their original vision about making cloud computing accessible and affordable for just

darn near everybody. Their prices are 30 to 50% less than other providers and their systems are just screamers. They continually invest in the hardware. They know what they have to do to remain competitive and they're all about it. You know, it's not like one of the many businesses that they run, or it's not like one of the many businesses that they run, or it's not like one of the very, very many businesses that their VC is funding. It's not part of their business, right? This is what they do.

It is totally all about the best experience of running stuff on Linux. And they've got a ton of distros for you to choose from. They've got bare metal machines in the works right now. I just recently set up a box to just hold some data for me up in the cloud, and I have a system here where I select what now. I just recently set up a box to just hold some data for me up in the cloud. And I have a system here where I select what data sets I want to go up and it uploads it up to a little box on the back end. I have my file system mounted to their

object storage. So it just expands as I need it. It's so flexible, so powerful. And now I am really appreciating how reliable it is, but I'd love you to try it out. Maybe it's part of a multi-cloud strategy. Maybe you want to performance test your system, or maybe you need a backup server like I do. So go to linode.com slash unplug, get that $100 for your new account, and just try this stuff out. Go build something, or maybe learn something,

and you support the show while you're doing it. There are a lot of ways and a lot of companies that let you host stuff. I mean, there's just an unbelievable amount now. But none of them, none of them check all the boxes like Linode. When it comes to the performance, when it comes to the customer support, when it comes to the reliability, the clean dashboard, the API, which I don't talk about enough, the command line client, which I also don't talk about, the whole picture with Linode. And it's just one of those things you have to experience for yourself. Linode.com slash unplugged. During our upcoming Jupiter Colony reunion road trip, I suspect there will definitely be some

moments when bandwidth and resources are a little constrained. But that can't stop the shows. They must go on. That's what led us on our quest to build a powerful workstation in the cloud. That could be our steady state, a system to rely on, a system we can jump back onto anytime we need a lot of compute, a lot of bandwidth,

need to download a lot of resources and we don't want to use maybe a constrained mobile connection or whatever sketchy coffee shop Wi-Fi we can find at the time. But we needed a way to do that and ideally like a full graphical workstation because some of our tools we might be rendering audio, we might be streaming something. We don't want to be constrained just by a console. Nope. And so we decided to give WebTop a try. We had heard this lets you do this and we thought maybe eventually we could turn this into

like a remote rendering system. Because when Wes and I do Linux Action News on Sunday, it's gotten to the point now where the export of our audio is one-to-one almost with the length of the audio. Because we're doing a new workflow where we're doing the effects in a new way. And it's a super cool learning experience. And it's both really impressed Wes and I, I think, with what you can do on Linux now with audio, even when it requires like a Windows plugin or something like that. But it also has cost us a lot in render time. And so we thought after the road trip, this is probably something we'd keep around. I initially was thinking we could use the NAS here in the studio because it has 24

cores we could use for rendering. But then later, like 20 minutes ago, 15 minutes ago, I started thinking, maybe we want to do this on like a big old powerful Linode. And I know, Wes, you jumped in there last night and tried to mess around with Reaper and try to get it running. Before we get into WebTop and all of that, I'm just curious how far you're able to push it as a desktop. I mean, pretty far. I ultimately ran into some issues getting some of the weirder wine apps to run, but I suspect some of those issues

might have been the host system that I happened to pick. I picked one of our servers running on Linode to try this out. Probably should have spun up something dedicated, but, you know, I was trying to be quick here. And that was a pretty old kernel. So I think some of the issues might have been related, but besides the few kind of out there wine applications, everything was working surprisingly well. I mean, I got Reaper up and running. I even restreamed the Coder Radio live stream yesterday with OBS running in WebTop on the server, doing a video capture out of the browser,

and it worked. That's impressive. So the technology here is WebTop. You get an Alpine or Ubuntu-based container that has a full desktop environment, and you access it using RDP. They bundle it with Guacamole, which is a XRDP web embedded client. So the end

product, the way you consume it is at a URL. It just spins up a URL. I think it's like port 3000. You get a login prompt, you provide the user credentials, which is like ABC by default, and you're in. You get a desktop, and you pick which kind you want. I think by default, it's Alpine with Ubuntu if you don't specify a tag. But if you specify the tag, like we did, you can get Ubuntu with Plasma. And their version is based on Ubuntu 20.04, which is pretty reasonable.

That's the LTS. It makes a pretty good workstation. But it is a little funky, like Wes just hinted at, because it's a container. It's not a VM. It seems like a simple concept to wrap your noggin around when I say it. But when you're using it,

you immediately forget you're inside a container. You really do. You really do. Yeah, and you just don't have any clue like until you do a U name and you see like some weird kernel version that doesn't ship in 2004 and like that's when it all like dawned on me.

Oh yeah, right, there's a host system under this. So that would be a tip of mine, and I think Wes's it sounds like, is maybe deploy this with a host OS that has a more modern kernel, so that way any applications you might need in the container that take advantage of modern kernel features have

that, because we did run into that. Yeah, it's like an upside and a downside I think of easy containerization, right? And this is one area where virtualization and containerization can go hand in hand, really. The whole setup process is really pretty straightforward if you're using Docker Compose, right? Oh yeah, I mean this is a

great release from Linux Server IO because they've just thought of a lot of stuff and they hit on it here. They admit it kind of goes against the Docker grain because you're running a whole bunch of services in a single container. And as it's set up by default, you should be aware that it's a weird kind of hodgepodge

in between the way a lot of the Docker tooling is meant to work, but it's not really a VM, but it's somewhere in the middle. So by default, I think it's set up so everything in your home directory stays, but if you blow the container away and spin it back up, well, you're going to have to reconfigure the operating system. The performance is surprisingly good because like I mentioned, it's not using VNC or Spice,

it's using RDP. And the XRDP project has actually gotten some love in the last few years. So it stayed pretty performant. And I experienced a totally usable session of Plasma. I did turn the effects to instant just because I wanted to, to make it maybe feel a little faster. We're trying to be generous here. Yeah, and why waste the bandwidth trying to transmit and render a fade in and fade out of a menu when it can just be an instant pop-up, you know? So that was my thinking.

But I was able to use that kind of configuration of Plasma on an iPad over LTE. That was like my ultimate edge case is could I turn an iPad into a Linux desktop that has its own dedicated connection so I'm not stealing from my limited LAN bandwidth when I'm on the road. worked. It freaking worked. And it was totally usable. And they have this nice little menu that expands out from the left-hand side. They have a little arrow and you tap that arrow or click it and a little drawer slides out. And in there, they have the ability to kick off a keyboard overlay if you need it. They have a clipboard so you can copy and paste contents between your remote desktop and your local desktop. Super handy. So like there you can kind of copy out whatever's in the clipboard. And if you paste something in, that becomes the new clipboard contents in the container. That's so great.

And I needed that almost immediately. Yeah, exactly. I was like, how do I? Oh, my gosh. I don't want to. Okay. Honestly, the first time I just used Netcat to get some data in there, that was before I discovered the handy clipboard support. Amazing, amazing.

And I love how you're playing like it was Netcat when you and I both know it was Magic Wormhole. I used both, okay. I just got tired of having to hop onto the host system to use Netcat. So, yeah, okay, Magic Wormhole's handy too. Yeah, they're both good. There is something really that sparks my fancy about this because in my old IT days, I deployed a lot of thin clients and terminal services. I did Linux terminal services and Windows terminal services. And you could just use this to really kind of accomplish the same dang thing. I mean, I think if I was going to use it for a really extended period of time, there's a few modifications I might like to make to it.

The whole thing right now is kind of based around the ABC user. And I think things get a little hairy if you want to change that, and I do not like that. So that's something I'd want to spelunk into a little bit. What are your thoughts on changing the username? Because it looks like by their docs they don't recommend it. Yeah, they do mention that, but they do have some decent docs in here for developers

if you want to build your own image. So I think it's possible with a little consideration. It is, ABC is not the best username and it would be nice to be able to customize this. I think maybe too, we might want a version based on Arch perhaps. Maybe that would be kind of cool. I could make 2004 work for a while though. It's not the end of the world.

As long as it's Plasma, that's the main thing. Really, the whole idea is to have this system that's running that you can reconnect to and disconnect, and it has all the tools up and ready to go. It's an always-on state, and we experimented with this. You can join and reattach to sessions and leave things running from different web browsers, from different IP addresses. It's all based around the user credentials. So that means that we can leave things. Wes could stage something for me. I could leave something staged for Wes. He can pop in and

finish it. That kind of back and forth collaboration ability while we're remote and on the go and with limited connectivity. Jeez, man, this is just going to be a lifesaver. You know, it's not as flexible as something like shells.com that lets you run a whole bunch of different distros and all that kind of stuff. It's one distro, one desktop environment, really meant for one user. The way Wes and I are going to use it, it's really for two users.

And it's not really meant for like a whole suite of users and stuff like that. But if you need something for yourself, if you want a full desktop environment that runs in your web browser with really good support and pixel perfect resolution rendering, if you resize your web browser, your desktop environment sees that as a screen resize and adjusts to accommodate it pretty quickly. Yeah, it really is impressive. And, you know, I got to just have a lot of respect for the work, the folks behind this implementation, you know, it's relying on a lot of different open source software,

but I think the Linux server folks have really done a good job of taking it to the next level and combining all of those pieces in a thoughtful way that just works really nicely. Like by default, one of the example compose files they have, it actually even mounts the Docker socket in there. Now, security wise, you should be careful with this, of course. But if you're doing this in a controlled environment where you want to use this as an admin machine for the whole VM, now in your remote desktop, you can launch up other containers on that server. It's

really cool the amount of possibilities that you have and sort of serverizes and deploys the power of the Linux desktop in a way that might be a lot more difficult with a proprietary desktop. But for us, it's just install Plasma in a Docker container. Go for it. Yep, yep, that's such a great point.

ByteBit, it sounds like you were thinking about doing this with a Raspberry Pi. Yeah, so I like working with a graphical user interface, but with the Raspberry Pi, you want to save as much resources as possible. So I install the headless version, install Docker,

install WebTop, and when I need a desktop, I launch WebTop. When I'm done, I shut the container down and put it up when I need it. But I have the resources available to me without a full desktop. Yeah, and all of the packages it would require to be installed on the host system to support the desktop, even when you're not running it. Oh, good point, yeah. Nice little optimization right there. Yeah, that's something I might want to try in the future. I think that's the part that's nice about this,

is some of the extra flexibility, too. Like, you know, one of the things we were highlighting is running it on Linode, which is great because they have super fast bandwidth and we can get fast processing and fast disk and connection wherever we need. But you might also want it, like you were mentioning, on a server somewhere that's super beefy or has local access to some data that you might need to run experiments on or to do analysis on or just to have a really powerful server to offload some rendering to.

Yep, yep. And something else you and I were talking about off-air for our use case, we have a system here in the studio that records our shows. And it also does tons of really great jack audio routing for remote hosts and guests and the mumble room and brings it all together independently, digitally into our specific tracks in Reaper for us. And it's just, it's such an awesome machine. I hate to even touch it, but it is old. It's got eight gigs of RAM.

It's got like super old processors, old disks. It's got 8 gigs of RAM. It's got like super old processors, old disks. It's in a bad way. And I do want to replace it, but I don't want to replace it with like a $5,000 system, which is what we would need to get enough CPU cores and memory to do the rendering we want in a reasonable

time. And so my thought was is perhaps this is an opportunity to offload this work to a server. We do their core recording on this machine. We stage everything. We export the project out, load it up in this web top instance up on Linode with a dedicated CPU machine. And then we just let it go to town for a while. And then we only have to deal with it just as a recorder. And it keeps our costs down, it keeps the noise of the machine down here in the studio.

So that might be something we do, or I may end up now having to replace the server in the garage, and maybe there we go with something that has a lot of extra horsepower, and we offload some of the processing job using WebTop. We move the project file over, we log into WebTop, fire up Reaper, and begin rendering the project. And what's so neat, too, is you've got both sides of it in that if it's something

you need to go in and futz with in the UI, you have a graphical UI. But in the same sense, it's just a Linux install. So you can have SSH in there if you need, or whatever backdoor access

to go in, kick off the script that way or with automation, and then check on it visually. Yep. And like everything the Linux Server I.O. guys put out, it's really, really well done. The Docker Compose file is easy to read.

It's easy to understand. And then they have some great documentation that explains it all that we will have linked in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 416. Go check it out. I think they've done a fantastic job. And I'd love to know other ways you particularly solve this problem.

Let us know at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Linux.entropy.works. Use promo code LEP13 and save 15%. This is a member of our community and I love watching them go. They're an industry-leading mobile and web development studio based in the UK. And Entropy has global clients including Mars Wrigley, Walmart, MediaCom, The Financial Times.

They're trusted by some of the biggest names in media content, but it's not just about the big names. No, they want to work with everybody. They love working with smaller companies, startups, people that are just getting into it. They just love building mobile desktop and web applications. And because they're on our show, probably not a huge surprise to you,

but I love seeing this, Entropy runs on Linux. They are open source hounds. They have a team of distro hoppers and Linux hardware nerds, and everything they do really goes back to their love for the Linux community. They're listeners of the show, and they thought, you know what? Like I preach often, let's spend locally.

And I think that's a great way to go. And some of their key tools involve Ruby on Rails, of course. That's huge. But they're really moving into Flutter. Flutter for mobile and desktop, and Flutter for the Linux desktop. They've pioneered some of the most complex Flutter apps ever built with full machine learning integration. They can rapidly build apps for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and yes,

Linux, of course. In fact, they can pretty much do it in no time. That's how they've become one of the global leaders in Flutter development with dozens of deployments in the last year alone. So if you're thinking about taking the plunge into Flutter for the Linux desktop or maybe another platform, or maybe you're a small or large business, maybe you're just an independent dude or dudette trying to get into the app game, well, Entropy is always ready to chat. They'd love to discuss your ideas and give you some opinions, some thoughts, some input. Regardless if you want to move forward or not, they just love to chat. So get in touch, chat mobile, chat Flutter,

or discuss your favorite Linux podcasts to help you get started and to help incentivize you a little bit. They're offering Linux unplugged listeners 15% off their first project. Mobile app, web app, maybe a Linux app. If I could vote, build a Linux app that makes recording pipewire sources super easy and build it around Flutter. Go talk to Entropy about that. I'd buy it. So go to linux.entropy.works, fill out their contact form, use promo code LUP13, they'll get in touch,

get you started. There's never any pressure. They're always happy just to chat and discuss your project and help any way they can. So that's linux.entropy.works and use promo code LUP13. Well, I think it's time for some feedback. What do you say, Chris? Indeed, Mr. Payne,

you want to read us Nicholas's email because he's got something that, well, it's one of those elephants in the room. Hey, guys, huge fan of the show. I've been waiting the last couple episodes to hear what you think of this. It's a tablet built for Linux. Not sure if you've heard about it, or maybe you've had some skepticism. But I hope you guys keep doing what you do either way. And he's talking about here the Jing OS tablet. Uh-huh. Yeah, we haven't talked about this, have we? No, it's been out there. I mean, I think a lot of our audience out there has probably seen it on Twitter

or been written about in some of the Linux news out there. Nicholas tries to sweeten the pot a bit, noting that the developer says it's not locked to Jing OS, the actual hardware, he means. You're supposed to be able to boot any ARM Linux on the device, although, of course, the hardware is coming with Jing OS, which is designed for the tablet experience. I don't know, though.

The note about skepticism in here rang true for me. I mean, not just about Linux tablets, but kind of non-iPad tablets at all, if I'm honest. Yeah, that must be part of it. I know the reason why we haven't talked about it is because Wes and I are becoming so skeptical about all of these types of things. And this one seems particularly tricky

because you've got the JingPad, which is a hardware device, and then you've got Jing OS. And the ask here from the Jing folks is for us to believe that both of those things, the OS and the hardware, will be in some kind of production state that it's worth dropping 600 bucks on. And it's a great price when you consider it 600 bucks, and that includes the keyboard, which Apple charges like $300 just for the keyboard. And the tablet's like a thousand bucks on top of that. Right. But you're right. It's not only are we just skeptical of these kinds of devices now, you know, I was on late night Linux this week and we talked about grifters and open source and free software, and we've just seen so many grifters now that it is hard to believe anything's going to actually succeed. And so part of us just sits here and goes, well, when you ship, we'll believe you. Like the framework laptop.

I think that same skepticism was applied to the framework laptop. Yeah, really. However, the downside to that is that sometimes we miss cool things really early in the stage. You know, it's like we've gotten old and bitter and we're missing the new stuff. We don't want to be that cynical, right? Like we should still have hope. I think that's essential. And we want to support projects that have a reasonable chance of working out. Right, right.

However, I have seen some videos of the JingPad running JingOS. And it's early days still, but it looks surprisingly good. To say it's been heavily inspired by iPadOS would be an understatement. But to say it's been heavily inspired by iPadOS would be an understatement. But it has taken a lot of the elements that work well in iPadOS and applied them to a Linux environment. And this is once again offering that idea that you could have something that works in a tablet mode and also can be switched to a desktop mode for greater productivity. Convergence! Yeah, convergence.

I've never heard that one before. And these kinds of things, they just check a skepticism box. So something that looks like iPadOS but isn't means that it's never going to quite be as good as the thing it's attempting to emulate. Something that offers convergence but so new and doesn't have super high-end hardware leaves me skeptical. I think you're hitting on it right there, is that it's not that they're not saying the right things.

It's not that these aren't good goals. but we've seen so many folks have these goals. And then it's not even that they didn't get part of the way, but the claim and the competition on the market is executing on such a level and with the amount of polish that when you just sort of casually imply that's what you're building to, and then it doesn't hold up, you really start doubting, like, does our community even get why people like these other proprietary solutions? Yep. Well said. Now, it seems conceivable, Wes, that as time goes on, technology improves, software projects

continue to get iterated on, hardware gets better and better, display technology and CPUs in particular have just really just gotten better and better. I mean, maybe at some point those things converge in a way that makes it possible for a promise like this to actually be met. And we'll be over here on the skepticism sidelines thinking it's never going to happen. And we've missed this convergence of timing and hardware and software and something great does come from it. But what we try to do is we try to talk about things on the show that we know are likely going to produce and they're going to result in something and if we talk about it and you go spend your money you're not going to get scammed because you know like i'm still waiting

on my damn atari vcs and it was a lot of those types of things back in that era that just sort of burned me out on this and now i want i want to see proof i want to see a product and i want to see it really starting to ship at least to reviewers before we really go in on it. But it's not to say we're not at least keeping our eye on it. And I do wonder if maybe we missed the boat on this and maybe we should have talked about it earlier or not. But I still stand by that core principle of I don't want the audience getting scammed. That's one area maybe where some of the Pine stuff has been a little more successful, or at least, you know, they've had an approach of not setting expectations too high. That's where it really gets dangerous to my mind. Right. Is setting those expectations too

high and then being unable to ever really achieve the initial promise? Yeah. Because I want us to play. I want us to try these things, but we just need to be honest if like we're still working out a lot of the kinks. I like their progress. I'm happy to see this landing in reviewers' hands, and I think it's time to start taking it more seriously. And I may end up having to reevaluate my stance on these types of projects. If both the Framework laptop and the JingPad end up actually being really solid products that deliver on their promises, well, then that means it's time for Chris to reconsider this line and figure out where that line should lie i suspect well watch i actually do really hope that i have reason to re-evaluate the skepticism that has brewed inside me we'll see also i'd like to make a call out on the podcast

we're looking to chat with someone at bedrock linux please email me chris at jupiter broadcasting dot com it's on our minds and we'd like to chat with you. Well, like I mentioned, I was on Late Night Linux this week. Go check out Late Night Linux for that. We chatted about SyncThing, which my SyncThing install just recently hit the two-year mark. It's been running really solid, and the guys had me on to chat about that,

grifters in the open-source community, and a little Fedora Silverblue. So that was late night Linux episode 135, where I joined the boys. It was a good time. So go check that out. We'd love to have you join our telegram group. I posted the most adorable picture of Levi in there this morning. I don't do it often, but every now and then like the really good ones, I drop them in there at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram. And if you join, like, while this podcast is out, it's probably not too far back in there. Or you could just look at all the photos, I suppose. You can do that.

So jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram. And maybe as a bonus, there's like a little bit of Linux chat sometimes, but mostly dog pics. It's mostly Linux chat. It is. But, I mean, you saw the picture. It's very cute. It was adorable. Meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting.

And last but not least, we'd love to hear from you. Linuxunplugged.com slash contact. That goes into an inbox that both Wes and I can check and read. And we try to read every single one of them, even if we don't respond. And they don't all make it into the show. We try to read every email every week. That's Linuxunplugged.com slash contact. I imagine I'll be worse at that practice while I'm on the road, but when I get back, I'll try to get that back in. It's something I, it's a goal of mine

recently because I asked you to send the email in. The least I could do is read it. So it is actually a personal goal of mine to read each one of them that comes in. It may be a little sketchy while I'm on the road, but we do try. And last, but absolutely not least, actually, I need to mention the Luplug. They get together every Sunday, noon Pacific in our Mumble room at linuxunplug.com slash mumble. You can get the details and then you join

and you're good to go. You hang out and chat with some like-minded folks. Get the info, linuxunplug.com slash mumble. When we were fooling around with our cloud Linux desktop, you came across a pretty neat trick. Yeah, this is by a gentleman named Scotty Hardy on GitHub. It's called Docker Wine, and it's a Docker image that includes wine and wine tricks. But not only that, it's pre-configured with a handy little helper script that's ready to

set things up locally with X11 forwarding if you've got an X server running and, you know, just want to run the app in the container. Or it's got RDP built in if you want to run this wine app on a remote server. Which means it also supports audio redirection. It'll play sounds through Pulse Audio on your Linux box using this whole setup. So Windows applications in a container that you're connecting to over RDP with sound support. And the name is cleverly Docker Wine. We'll have a link to this in the show notes. This is great. This is so neat because you sometimes need to crap up your system to get all this wine stuff working.

Yeah, no one wants to install all these weird janky Windows programs, right? That's the perfect use case for a container. It really is. Like, just one wants to install all these weird, janky Windows programs, right? That's the perfect use case for a container. It really is. Just go crap up a container, and then when you're done with it, you throw it away. And what's so nice about this project is that as somebody who does weird things with containers and plays with it, there can be some arcane tricks

between user permissions, between mounting all the right pulls and X11 stuff, let alone configuring the RDP connection to be easy. So it's just nice that a lot of that knowledge and trickery is distilled in one handy little script you can run. Well, I'm going to check on the server. It looks like it's still up, Wes.

Huh, I wonder why it would have crashed so soon after last time, and this time it's remained up. What's the difference, right? Something tells me we're going to stop pinging it and stop paying attention to it after the show, and then it's going to crash immediately. Oh boy, we got to get this fixed. This is going to, I think job one really is while

it's up, offload as much config as I can, right? That's job one. Because the data is okay. I would rather honestly have some hardware component on the motherboard or the CPU fail than any of the disks fail. Even though we've got them in a ZFS RAID, at least all of the disks are fine. We can ultimately move those. Time to check our backups. No kidding. In the meantime, go follow the show on Twitter for news announcements or schedule changes, which I don't expect there will be, or other kinds of things like that. At Linux Unplugged, the whole network is at Jupyter Signal because, yes, there are an entire

network of fantastic podcasts, including the self-hosted podcasts, Encoder Radio, and of course, the companion to this show, Linux Action News, every Monday morning, Wes and I break down everything that mattered in the week of Linux and open source. And you got to catch that. If you're not catching Linux Action News, you're like missing half of this show practically, but it's just the news segment, just the news you need to know. It's great too if you're in the industry. In fact, if you know anybody in the industry that should stay up to date on this stuff as part of their job,

send them a link to your favorite episode of Linux Action News. It's a great way for people in the industry to stay informed. As for us, one more show in the studio before we head out. It's literally the last thing I do before I hit the road.

So join us for that. It'll be the last Linux I do before I hit the road. So join us for that. It'll be the last Linux Unplugged from the studio for a while next Tuesday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bat time, same bat station. Indeed, links to everything we talked about today, how to contact, how to join the Mumble Room, the Matrix server, all of it.

What we've done is put it all together on a webpage at linuxunplugged.com. I'd like you to check it out. Also there, you'll find links to everything we've talked about for previous episodes, the entire bat catalog. It's incredible. We're still working on a gopher version, though. It'll happen, and maybe a Usenet version as well.

Great way to download the show. Anyways, as for us, thanks for joining us on this week's episode. We'll see you back here next Tuesday! All right, go vote, jbtitles.com. We got through it. It was rough. I am off my game, you know, because I was already getting a little rough. One of my data plans just got canceled on me,

which has kind of sent me into a panic about the road trip. And then to have this server failure happening right now. I think you're a one-legged stool right now.