LINUX Unplugged - 417: Run Every Distro At Once

Episode Date: August 4, 2021

Yabba Dabba Distro! Run every major distribution on one native host. How we hijacked a Fedora install and turned it into the ultimate meta Linux box. Plus Valve and AMD team up to improve Linux performance and the duct-tape solution holding our server together. Special Guests: Brent Gervais and paradigm.

It is our last episode for a bit from the studio, for a long bit, actually. I wonder how that's going to be. And it's kind of perfect because Brent's here. Hello, Brent. Well, hi. And he made us brunch. He sure did. Oops.

It was great. We had, what is it, like an egg? Is it a frittata? Is that what it's called? You know, I typically like to make a frittata here, but I was on the hurries. So it's a modified frittata. Maybe it's like a Nelly frittata. Well, see, you keep that nice cast iron pan and the cover that goes with it here for me.

So I just kind of created a micro oven in the cast iron and it did all right. Nice. And then he also utilized the new air fryer to make some fried potato sides for us. Already a convert. That's the first time I use that, and I must say I'm impressed. I realize this is why there's kind of like in JB, inside JB, there's kind of like resource contention over Brent. Like when Brent's coming to the studio, Alex telegrams me like, oh, you got Brent time?

That's no fair. I want Brent time. This is why. Because he's in there cooking breakfast and stuff for everybody. He brings snacks. He does. He brings snacks. Guys does. He brings snacks. Guys, guys, you can share.

You can share. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. Hello. Are you full and satisfied? Not quite, but I've got the beer at the ready.

He did also bring beer, too, which we did not mention. I know how to win hearts. You do. This episode is brought to you by a Cloud Guru, the leader in learning for 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, today on the show, we're going to tell you how to run every single Linux distribution,

well, nearly, at once. And I'm not talking about VMs. I'm not talking about containers. I'm talking native on one box. Simultaneously, you pick the host distro, and then you hijack it, and we'll chat with the developer of this mind-boggling tool. Plus, we got the community news.

We got some feedback. But first, we have to say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual tool. Plus, we got the community news. We got some feedback. But first, we have to say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello. Greetings. Hello. Namaskaram.

They are at full power today. We have 27 of them in there. We have some in the on-air and some in the quiet listening, and it's awesome. And the Mumble Room is going to be the trickiest piece while we're on the road, so I'm glad everybody made it for this one at least. Oh, but yeah. So Brent got in last night.

Sure did. After a day of travel for you, and what felt like a day of commuting for me to get down to the airport. And so Brent is joining us here in Seattle, and then he's going to board Lady Joops tonight, I think, or tomorrow morning, but probably tonight, and then we head out tomorrow morning. Me, Brent, Hadiyah, my three kids, and the dog all in Lady Jupes.

It's like a little land cruise you've got going here. Yeah, it's a land yacht, but it's going to, are you crazy, Brent? Are you just crazy? I think I am, but I'm strangely okay with it. Okay. Yeah, we are going to have a chase vehicle, as they call it. So Brent will often probably be in the chase vehicle. And then I imagine what will end up happening is Brent and I will essentially become co-drivers. So there will be times where he'll have eyes on something I don't have eyes on,

and we're going to have two-way radios. Oh, that's just adorable. Hey there, Brent, you know. Good, Chris. I think you're going to need some cute like radio nicknames too, right? Call signs? Yeah, okay. I could call, well, maybe he could be Brunch.

Seems appropriate. Yeah. And so we'll, like something that Hedi and I do is sometimes if I need to get over, she can move over earlier and kind of create a hole in traffic for me. Name and presence. Yeah, exactly. Or sometimes scoot ahead and check out a gas station or a rest stop and that kind of thing. And it also gives you a chance to have your own space,

listen to something or make phone calls or whatever. You know, do business while you're going down the road, as one does. You get your own podcast playlist, I'm sure. But on top of that, Brad's going to be working with me to record content during the trip, including chats with team members and information and just anecdotes from the trip and all that stuff. So we could see some fresh brunches for everybody. Oh, now that is exciting.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So pretty excited about that. And totally feel unprepared. Like, I don't have any of the production gear packed yet because I didn't want to break anything down until we're done with the show. We need it here, yeah. I've taken a couple of things out of the studio early, like my mute pedal and a couple of cables and stuff.

It's funny, too. I mean, it's not like you haven't been preparing. You've been thinking about this. You've been churning through it for, I mean, months now at this point. Yeah. And you remember last week we had a server lockup, and it locked up twice in one morning. It was looking real bad. It was just after a Pacific Northwest heat wave.

And I was literally going into panic mode because this server is a critical component of production because I need to get in and administer the mixer. And I do that via a WireGuard tunnel that comes in through that server. So if I didn't get access to the NextCloud instance on there, if I couldn't get access to the media that's stored on there, if I couldn't get access to the archive, if one thing I need WireGuard, I need to get access to the mixer so I can control the studio. That's a critical role that server fulfills. And it's designed around that, right? It's our big ZFS-powered

redundant server in the... No, turns out. It was locking up. It was locking up. And so, Wes and I were wracking our brains, like, nothing has changed.

So we were thinking maybe it's hardware failure, right? Because when you, in the absence of software change, you start to suspect something changed in hardware. And it's an older used machine that, as we put it through, it's paces, you know? It's literally sitting in an oven. software change, you start to suspect something changed in hardware. And it's an older used machine that as we put it through, it's paces.

It's literally sitting in an oven. I mean, sometimes it gets so hot out there, you could slow cook pork ribs. It's bad. So we thought that must be what it is. Then it dawned on us like, I don't know, maybe after the show. I can't remember when we thought about it. But we thought, you know, there is one change. And I don't know if this is what it is.

But the one change we made is I reinstalled NetData, a really handy tool that we recommended before, and I installed the LM sensors package. And those are the only two changes I made. But maybe something is there. So I did a system CTL disable NetData, turned it off, and stopped it. And ever since I did that, it's been solid. The system hasn't locked up once, and it's still gotten hot a few times. The other thing I've done, I've started setting up fans to vent the garage into the house. It heats up the rest of the house, but then I have a series of fans that kind of push it out the back door.

And so it means the downstairs gets warmer, but the garage area drops like 10, 15 degrees. It's a significant improvement. I like this sort of readjusting the entire climate control of the studio. Poor that poor little server. And then what we've done is we've sealed off the actual studio, the production part of the studio where we record, and we've installed an air conditioner there to climate control the specific studio. Now, if you're interested, we are selling very sketchy colo.

So don't worry, discount rates. Great prices. Average uptime. Yeah. Great prices. Okay. Uptime. Jupiter garage hosting. I love it. So hopefully everything's going to be okay. And it'll last through the road trip. I haven't touched it since because I don't want to introduce any state change at all. I mean, we'd like to eventually be able to try re-enabling NetData, for instance. Yeah, we want to validate this. Not right now. So my thought is when we get back, I'll probably flip NetData back on and see if we get lockups.

I'm hopeful that everything will be fine. And that's just one less thing to worry about right now. And if it doesn't, I should be able to tuck and roll fairly easily into spinning everything up that's essential, with the exception of the mixer. That's still tricky, because it's on the physical LAN here at the studio, and I need a way to remotely

connect it while I'm on the road. And the solution I have now is so perfect, and so I don't know, maybe in a pinch we could set up another system in here and act as a wire guard system or something. Yeah, we'll get some back doors going. The one thing we have going for us is Wes flies out later.

So you'll be here a little bit after I'm gone. There will be a critical window still, but like if it fails before then, we've got some time. Yeah. So that's hopefully it. The meetups are coming soon. The first meetup will be in Salt Lake City on August 7th and the second meetup will be in Denver on

August 20th. The Denver one will have our friends from Linode there. Linux gamer Garnet will be there. We'll be giving away some Raspberry Pis. They're going to be giving away some big dollar amount Linode credits. They're going to have all kinds of stuff they're doing there. And we're also going to have drinks and snacks

and so it's going to be a big meetup. And we're also going to bring on board for the Salt Lake City meetup, we're going to have all kinds of stuff they're doing there. And we're also going to have drinks and snacks. And so it's going to be a big meetup. And we're also going to bring on board for the Salt Lake City meetup, we're going to have swag on board to give out to folks that make it to the Salt Lake City meetup as well. So hopefully that all goes smoothly. But what do you say? Maybe we should do a little community news. Yeah, we better get through it.

We've covered some of the possible downsides to the Linux ecosystem with the Steam Deck, specifically around focusing more on Proton development and less on Linux native games. But there's clear positives as well. And I thought maybe we'd focus on those today. So along with some of the optimizations that you're going to see just throughout the Linux stack with the Steam Deck, the one we wanted to talk about is AMD's work. They've been working with Valve on CPU frequency and power scaling

improvements to enhance the Steam Play gaming experience on the modern AMD platforms that are in our laptops, desktops, and also the Steam Deck. Yeah. Now, historically, AMD hasn't really worked on the Linux CPU frequency scaling stuff, especially in the kernel as much as Intel has.

And actually, that kind of goes for other areas of power management as well. But going by a recent job posting and now some patches, it seems AMD is ramping up efforts in those areas, including some specific stuff around the scheduler, and we know how important that is. Yeah, and I was looking. I couldn't find the job postings anymore,

but Michael Larble over at Pharonix kind of implied that it might be like multiple job postings that AMD had to work on this stuff. Now, AMD and Valve are working together to improve the performance and power efficiency for modern AMD platforms running on Proton. They've also spearheaded the ACPI CPU frequency driver. The focus on Proton still remains.

That's interesting, but I... Of course. I kind of, I mean, we'll see. We're going to hear more about this at XDC. It seems AMD will be presenting some information, and it's quite possible that some of this is based around some effort that we've already seen for a previously proposed driver. We'll see.

Something that AMD actually suggested back in 2019. Michael Larble is on it like a bonnet over at Pharonix, though, so keep checking over there for more information. And also related to just like Steam Deck, perhaps the hype bubble, it seems like it's driving a few more people into Linux gaming than we've seen recently. Liam over at Gaming on Linux reports that Linux is seeing a bit of a surge right now, and it's flirting with that 1% user share on Steam. Say it ain't so.

Yeah. You know, if we do the math here, take the number of monthly active users Steam says, 120 million, that would give us like 1,204,000 monthly active Linux users on Steam. 1.2 mil monthly? That's a real demographic.

It is. I mean, 1% seems really small, but then you consider like everyone uses Steam who, you know, plays games at all. So, wow. And why is it surging right now? What's changed? It's the deck, right?

It's got to be the news of the deck. And maybe people are like, well, if Valve's taking it this seriously, maybe I should look at it again. I mean, I admit it got me to reopen up Steam again and poke around a little bit. I will say just casually, it does seem that there's some general acceptance

among the Linux curious, you know, folks that maybe just, they're not running Linux on the desktop, but they use it for work or whatever. I've noticed more of them hearing about Proton and hearing good experience reports. So I wonder too, if there's just a sort of slow build of,

Proton's just been good for a while now. And getting better. And it's getting better. One question I have is, do you think this is any different than when they first sort of jumped all in on Linux? It sounds familiar to me. Maybe a few years ago, they kind of did the same thing. With the deck, you mean, how is it different?

Yeah. I think this time, the deck is an accumulation of all of their mistakes that they wish they would have done a little bit differently and kind of all in on this one. In fact, the Steam Controller itself, the original Steam Controller, initially started with a screen in it, and then Valve transitioned everything to touchpads over time. Don't call it a Dreamcast. Yeah, and they've kind of been working through this. The sound system in the deck is basically an upgraded version

of what's in the index that they've already been making. So that kind of stuff, I think, at each kind of phase, since they announced Steam Machines, they've learned lessons there. And for better or for worse, I think that's also what's driving them to push Proton so much part of that whole thing. And I just saw a Hacker News conversation thread today that was I think it's great. And this guy had all of these reasons for why he thinks it's great that Valve is pushing Proton and that should be the go forward strategy forever and all this kind of stuff and i don't know about that but i sit here and i look at this and i i see it as it's a real multi-spectral issue the and part of it to your question brent is even if this sort of is not much different than their original announcement and kind of peters out the interim enhancements that we're getting, like with AMD contributing to the CPU scaling code and the intermediate stacks for the video drivers and the audio stuff is getting so much work and improvement to prepare for this that we've kind of already benefited.

Yeah, it seems like they've learned a lot since the whole Steam machine thing. Not only is it more focused in the hardware sense, so we are seeing some specific improvements coming in, right? But also, they've just had this experience of working with various contractors and online and proton improvements and getting more stuff targeted towards the kernel. So it seems like they're just leaving a lot of good stuff

in their wake, whatever they're doing. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And, you know, for me, Linux has never been a really big gaming platform because I've kind of decided that Linux is, when I want to play on my computer, I play with Linux or, you know, a desktop environment, but you know, something in that stack. And when I want to play a video game, I play on my Switch. And I hope that the deck

might replace the Switch for that, where like, then I'm still on Linux and I'm still playing the games I've already bought and I could move to the PC. And the other thing that's so exciting about that is I could be on the deck and the kids could be on a PC or they could be on the deck and I can be on a PC and we can all play together. I think that's going to be something that the other consoles don't offer right now. And that is going to be a huge selling point to me. We'll see where it goes. As a dad, I like it a lot. As a gamer myself, I think, I don't know, because for me, the Switch offers the Nintendo franchise games like Mario, like Zelda, like Metroid. And that's always going to be a draw to me. Does that just show your age, Chris?

Yeah, maybe, maybe. Let's talk about Ingenuity. What an amazing accomplishment. You guys remember the Linux copter on Mars? How could we forget? Oh man, has it been something to watch this thing go. And in a brand new video, which we'll have linked in the show notes, you can see Ingenuity make its highest and most complex flight to date. And they're now

taken into an area that sounds treacherous. It's called Raised Ridges. Watch out, little copter! Yeah. Now, during this trip, which is its 10th flight on Mars, Ingenuity covered a distance of 310 feet, or 95 meters for you metric folk, soared to a record altitude for it of 40 feet or 12 meters high. And remember, that's in the crazy thin atmosphere over there.

Combined with the distances traveled throughout all of its prior flights, Ingenuity has now flown for more than a mile. Arbitrary milestone maybe, but I mean, that's some serious performance. It's amazing. It was originally designed to only perform four flights. So we're talking 10 flights now? This has been since April, too. Not only is that just an incredible accomplishment on its own, but it has essentially submitted this type of Linux-powered device as a go-to must-have secondary piece of equipment when

exploring another planet. What? Can we just like soak that in for a second? From like, we've never done this before, we're not sure if it's going to work or if it's up to the task to, no, we need these. We need to bring these along.

Right, and oh, and it's when we're exploring other planets. It's the stability of Linux that really makes it appropriate. It's crazy, man. It is so, so crazy. I am so excited to watch the development of this thing, and it's going to continue on, too. Yeah, right? I mean, it's not done yet, and as we've seen, I think JPL and

NASA have a pretty good record of getting all they can out of our little adventure buddies over on the Red Planet. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in credit for 60 days on your new account, and you support the show. Linode is our hosting provider for everything we've built

in the last couple of years. Since we went independent, we've built everything on Linode. The infrastructure is solid, it's flexible, and of course it performs. And you can focus on your project, not on your infrastructure issues. And you get 11 data centers to choose from all around the world, and every service level is backed by the best customer support in the business.

And they've been around since 2003, which means they've been doing this now for 18 years. And every step of the way, they've had to kind of innovate and stay competitive and watch out for different players to come in the market and offer different packages and different dashboards. Linode's got all that, and they've really honed in something special. You know, a few months ago, I set up a $5 Linode, and I just use it for simple passing data between home and the studio.

It's like an intermediary that adds just additional bandwidth. And then once I had it going, I was like, well, gosh, you know, I could set up an SSH jump post on that. Oh, you know, I could put some quick documentation up there that I could SSH into and read real quick. Oh, hey, you know what would be nice is if I put a status page up there that could check on the connections remotely that I could go, oh, you know what else I could do? And from on and on and on. And it's all just on a $5 Linode. It's so impressive. You really can just kind of push

it beyond what you'd expect. And the value is there because they're always investing in the hardware. And they're 30 to 50% cheaper than some of the big hyperscalers out there. And I could sit here and tell you about this all day long, but you really got to go see it for yourself. And this $100, it's really going to let you test it. So head over to linode.com slash unplugged. Get $100 for your new account. Try this stuff out.

Build something, learn something, and support the show. You know, we are just almost to one year since we've gone independent. Just, you know, a few of us sitting here working our hearts out to make content. And the reason we can do this, and the reason why we can take this as seriously as we do and invest the energy and effort we do, is because people out there take advantage of our sponsor offers and let them know that it's worth their money. It's worth our sponsors' time. They get value out of our shows. And it's such a

nice system because they're offering you something great. I mean, I enthusiastically endorse Linode. I have zero reservations about that. And $100 is real value. Like they're meeting you there with $100. So go try it out and support the show. Linode.com slash unplugged. So we teased this earlier, but it is true.

You can actually run every Linux distro at once. Now, this is something that we've been taking a pass at. No kidding. I mean, it's a little bit of a dream, right? You love Arch. You want all the stuff in the AUR, but sometimes it just doesn't make sense for that system. Yeah. And honestly, we thought maybe we could solve this with Toolbox, you know, that great handy Fedora tool.

Yeah. And it got me part of the way there. I. And it got me part of the way there. I will admit it got me part of the way there, but it wasn't all that I wanted. I wanted something that was truly like multiple distro package managers. I didn't really want something that was in a VM that wasn't on my local system.

That's just it, right? Sometimes you really do want that. Like it's just you're using this application for a specific use case or only at certain times or something, or it's just you don't want it as part of your system. You want that, like it's just, you're using this application for a specific use case or only at certain times or something or it's just, you don't want it as part of your system, you want to play with it and try it out. And Toolbox really does work, or containers

of all kinds. But you're right, like if you're setting up a battle station, you're going to be using this, you know, maybe a video editor or you need something in the background, a tool that your distro doesn't have, you're going to be always fighting that you've containerized it when you want it to be integrated. And then, once you've figured all of this out, you don't want to create some shitstorm problem

that you have to manage all the time that is just spewing crap all over your box and making things break left and right. You don't want that either. Oh, right, I had to compile it this way with a custom patch to get it to work, and how did I do that again? Yeah, you could see how you could really crap up a box quick, right? I do that again? Yeah, it's just, I mean, you could see how you could really crap up a box quick, right? And it really is the case that there is such a, there is a type of solution here that

is quintessentially free software. And we, seven years ago, chatted with Paradigm, the developer of Bedrock Linux, which is a meta Linux distribution, which allows users to mix and match components from other distributions, typically incompatible distributions. Bedrock integrates all of these components into one largely cohesive system. So you could have a Debian stable host distribution with an Arch kernel or other packages from the Arch repo. In my case, I set up a Fedora 34 workstation, and then I hijacked that into a Bedrock install. Nice.

Because I thought that'd make for a pretty decent base. But this is why I say it's quintessentially free software, is Paradigm has been working on this now for about just over 10 years. Seven years we talked to Paradigm. And I thought, is Bedrock gone? Is it dead? Is it still alive?

It's just such an unfortunate but common story, right? Like someone has a great idea, but it just never takes off, they move on with their life. It was a passion project and, you know, things change. But that decade is a long time. Yeah, especially for something that is ambitious as this, when the Linux ecosystem moves as fast as it does, when there's the number of distributions out there that there are. Right. I mean, not to diminish any projects, but this isn't just like a respin of a distro with some customizations or a different DE, right? This is a meta distribution. Yeah, you pick the distro you start with and then you convert it into this. And it's incredible. So what we wanted to do was call up Paradigm and check in on how he's doing

and how the project is going. Paradigm, welcome back to the show. It's been seven years since we chatted last. I'm happy to be back. So long, in fact, that I didn't recall our conversation until you embarrassingly reminded me and then it all came flooding back. So thank you for making it. And I think this marks like nine years or so that you've officially been making, creating, running Bedrock. The first public release was nine years ago,

but there was definitely some preliminary work maybe two or three years before that. So yeah, it's been a while. Yeah, and then along with all of that, you're also, I see you in the IRC room answering questions often. We talked a lot back in the day about this concept and about taking up disk space and how there was multiple libraries sometimes and all of that.

And I look back at this conversation now and I go, it's so funny because it feels like Flatpak and Snap sort of just settled that conversation. And I wonder, where do you see Bedrock fitting in now all these years later when there are things like Flatpak and Snaps out there? Do you feel like there's a shift for Bedrock or does Bedrock's core mission continue? I'd say Bedrock's core mission still continues. Things like Flatpak and Snap do solve a problem that Bedrock could have helped with before they came around, but they don't completely overlap with Bedrock,

since they're a lot of independent things that you still need Bedrock for if you're interested in them. So they end up being largely orthogonal. Right. I had a fun experience hijacking a Fedora 34 install and creating a Bedrock install out of it. And then on top of that, I layered on Alpine and Void Linux and pretty soon it just became its own hybrid monster in like the greatest way possible. I could pick and choose which packages from which distro I want

and I had all of the package managers all of a sudden. So I'm curious now, like nine years or so, at least since we chatted, seven years, what problems are you solving now that you weren't solving back when we first chatted? I think when we first chatted, one of the limitations you brought up, which was very correct at the time, was Bedrock was pretty rough to install. It was comparable to something like Linux from scratch. Did you have Bedrock to get features from other distros, not just packages, but anything in the abstract.

This includes things like the installation process. And so at the time, the installer was kind of a placeholder until I figured out how to get an installer from another distro. And as you mentioned, it's pretty easy now. You got fedoras without thinking about it too much. So that's definitely one thing that I did not have solved seven years ago that I do today. I also recall during our chat that we were really consternating

over what you were going to do about systemd and just init systems in general. Oh, yes. At the time, for the same reason, BetterEc had a placeholder init until I figured out how to get ints from other distros. And today, you can get almost every major init. I think, in fact, we're probably going to get S6,

maybe the latest one I'm working on getting to work. It'll probably work here in the next point update. But yeah, SystemD, OpenRC, RunIt, even Upstart, I'd still test against old ISOs, and that works as well. Wow, that's impressive. I mean, what's the process like of onboarding a new init system? I kind of solved most of the work in a

very generalized fashion. Bedrock has a menu when you put the system, kind of like after the boot order menu where you pick your OS and kernel, Bedrock adds an init selection menu to select your init and does some generalized bootstrap work there. And then for each specific init, there's often

quirks I have to go work on. And so for example, for systemd, I had to make some unit files to go change things after it started. But that's generally how it goes. Well, obviously the goal here with Bedrock is getting a lot of nice abilities, features, superpowers, you might say, from all the various Linux distributions that you have support for. But when you do that, are there some downsides of hijacking your system? The predominant one is complexity. A Bedrock system is fundamentally more complex

than a traditional distro, largely because it has all the complexity of traditional distros with Bedrock on top and possibly multiple distros, or normally multiple. And so as long as things are working, it's fine, but as soon as something goes wrong, it's a lot more effort to debug. You thought just having to figure out the problems

with one package manager was a problem. Well, add a few more. Yes. Well, I do remember when we were chatting last time, you had a goal of like a meta package manager that would, in theory, run updates and whatnot across all of the various package managers you might have installed on a

Bedrock system. How's that work gone? Happily, that's available. It works great today. We call it the Package Manager Manager. I think that was just like a shorthand for it, just a placeholder name when I first came up with it, and it then ended up sticking. You can use it for the obvious use case of upgrading the whole system, but there's also, I found, some workflows on Bedrock that need to take multiple package managers into consideration that you might not think about if you're not on Bedrock. For example, if I want a specific package, I might want to check if one distro has it.

If it doesn't, then check if another does. If that doesn't, check if a third does. You should install whatever the first one has. And so PMM can do that pretty trivially. So for a concrete example, actually, I use Escron as my preferred cron program and Void Linux is the only distro I knew that actually provides it.

And I figured that out by typing PMM install Escron and I did that. Void was mostly low on my priority list and I did scan quite a few. Wow, interesting. Is it recommended to use PMM, or is it still fine to just use the individual ones and you won't really miss out on much?

You're welcome to use the individual commands if you want, but after using Bedrock for a while and you find enough cross-package manager operations that you want to do, it starts becoming more pleasant. An additional feature of PMM I should mention while we're on that I'm somewhat proud of is the idea behind Bedrock is to get

features from other distros. I wanted to see if I could get the package manager user interface from other distros as well. Because I know people have a lot of muscle memory for how to use one package manager. I found some people new to Bedrock will type things like pacman install or apt-s

just from confusing their muscle memory there. And so you can configure PMM to mimic the user interface of different distros. Whatever muscle memory you have, it can continue with, and you can use that across all the distros on your system. Well, it's that kind of polish that makes me think we should also make sure we hit more on that interactive tutorial. I know Chris and I both tried it, and just, wow. I mean, it was really useful, it was fun, it was easy,

and it just felt like it was quite polished. And I'm curious, what's the story there? How did that come about, and how does it all work? The story there, it starts with difficulty expressing what Bedrock is to other people. People don't like to read dry documentation, and it's difficult to summarize within people's own attention span

everything needed for Bedrock. So someone else came up with the idea, so I can't take it full credit, of an interactive tutorial, hoping that the interactive nature will help keep it more engaging and help things sink in more. First try was just essentially documentation in a terminal, which didn't work too well. I started adding some

scripting to it, so it'll detect your environment and see what you're doing interactively to kind of actually force you to run the commands. I found that made a big difference. Yeah, that really stood out to me. It felt like it wasn't just a static thing, but the tutorial actually asked you to cat some files, to use

T to pipe stuff around. Not only does it actually show you the output in a way that you get to feel like, oh, I see that. That's actually on my system. I don't just have to trust the man page, but it also just meant that it felt a little bit like a video game. Yeah, it requires you to complete the task before you can move forward in some cases. Yeah. So I have a couple of questions about the future.

On the top of mind of listeners last time was, what about graphical apps? And I'm curious how the transition to Wayland affects Bedrock and the state of graphical applications using, say, Bedrock. Like in my case, I have a Fedora 34 hijack system, and perhaps I wanted to load Arch on there or something and pull something in from one of those repositories. Could I successfully get a Wayland application working that way? In fact, I did zero effort for Wayland. It just worked with the kind of infrastructure we had before that became a thing. So yeah, that should be fine. That's great. And then I had kind of like another looking forward kind of question

is with everything we see with container technology, cgroups and namespaces and just stuff that's just built into Linux now, do you ever look at that and think maybe there's a future there for Bedrock to take advantage of some of that tech? People ask that a lot, but I strongly disagree. The issue there is all those are designed around segregating things and keeping them separate, whereas the whole point of Bedrock is the opposite, is to make everything work together. So I've tried to do my due diligence to understand those technologies and to experiment with it and to see something,

but I really couldn't actually find anything with anything along those lines that would be useful for Bedrock. I like that answer. I think I completely agree. It's like, this is what Bedrock's mission is, is to really kind of create one meta Linux distribution. And by separating it off into containers, it sort of would defeat the purpose of what you're trying to accomplish with.

But I did see the question come in quite a bit. So I did want to get it out there. And then the last question, and I know it's one that you get a lot, Paradigm, is where do you get off calling this thing a meta distribution? So if you define a 1X distribution as a project that distributes a 1X-based operating system, called a distro for short,

there are a number of things that kind of fit in the broader distro space that aren't really distros. They don't fit that definition. What they tend to do is distribute some means that you can use to get a Linux-based operating system, even if they don't distribute the operating system itself. Gentoo is a good example here where it distributes kind of like a framework to build your own distro. In fact, I didn't coin the term meta distribution. I found that on Gentoo's website. Another good example is Linux from

scratch, where they just distribute documentation. They don't even distribute any tooling to help you build your own Linux-based operating system. And so Bedrock kind of fits that pattern where we're not actually distributing the operating system, we're distributing tooling to kind of build one yourself. Just unlike those other projects where when you use the packages and parts of other distros to do that. Very good. Well, keep up the good work. You have remained dedicated to this project for years. And even today, before we got on the horn here, you were in your IRC room answering questions.

And people aren't even all that polite always, which they should be. But sometimes they're a little frustrated and you're still in there. That's really impressive. So keep up the great work. And I think now with how simple it is to get going and hijack an existing install, this is probably going to be one of my go-to tools. So thanks for all the great work, Paradigm. You're very welcome.

And I'm happy to hear it. And what might be the most impressive thing about Bedrock is it doesn't feel like a hacky solution. No, it really doesn't. I mean, I do all kinds of weird stuff I shouldn't with containers and VMs and mounting stuff places. It did not feel like that. I mean, a lot of it's wrapped up in the burl on our Bedrock Linux. I don't know what you would call it, BRL is like the little command line tool

to actually manage everything. And that's where you can see the delicate balance Bedrock has to strike between keeping things kind of isolated off on their own so that you can have an Arch system over here in the corner, but also making sure that Arch's package manager doesn't step on Debian's package manager. But if you're using a Debian tool,

well, you might want to know about the themes or the fonts or be able to access the newest version of JQ that you installed over in Arch world. And that takes a lot to get right and to make it feel actually useful. Do you think we'll see this propagated a little bit more generally into some other distributions in the future? I know maybe it seems early

now. I mean, it's been around for a while though, and it hasn't really, you know, you've seen solutions that kind of solve the problem Bedrock solves in their own sort of focused way. And I don't think it's really appealing to some distro makers. They want to own the whole thing.

It really does feel like there's definitely some shared spirit with things like Nix, I think. But Bedrock strikes me as something that has a somewhat limited audience, not in a bad way, but it's like a power user feature. It's made for us folks

who love having a Linux system, who want to play with it, or who just, you know, I'm not someone who installs Ubuntu, doesn't configure it, and just runs. That's great that we can do that, but if you want something custom and really to be able to make your Linux desktop super useful, Bedrock seems like a tool for you. And it does seem like it's attempting to

solve a fundamental compromise you often have to make. Maybe you prefer DistroX, but it doesn't have everything in its package repository that another distribution has. And you're kind of being offered a way to mix and match that. And I think the trickiest thing about adopting Bedrock is it has its own vernacular. You know, you have these stratas,

which are kind of really like a collection of files and processes. And you have like these different languages, different terms for things that you have to learn. And so that is probably the biggest learning curve is not managing it, not even setting it up because it has a really fantastic tutorial. So the biggest learning curve is just learning what the different terms mean.

And there's four or five key terms you really have to figure out. And, you know, I think that's fair because Bedrock's doing stuff that like no one else is doing, right? I mean, it's one of the first meta distributions out there in this sense, at least. And so you got to come up with some new names. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. And Paradigm right now, I just checked during the chat, he's in his chat room over there right now answering questions and chatting with people. So he's on Libera chat,

and it's just pound bedrock or hashtag. I will say, I think bedrock's going to stick around on at least some of my systems. The hijacking went pretty smoothly. I didn't feel a big, you know, I wasn't worried about that. And at least, you know, maybe start with a couple workstations that aren't in the critical path. But if I can just get all the AUR stuff but still have it easy to install, you know, random devs I might need for work.

Yeah, this could be the final piece that makes something like Fedora 34 stick for me, or CentOS Stream 9 in the future. Right. Think about just, even if we just did CentOS Stream 9 in the studio, and just a handful, a couple of packages that weren't available to us in CentOS's repo or in Flatpak

or something, we could use Bedrock, and we could close that gap and use it in audio production. I mean, it has serious potential, and if could close that gap and use it in audio production. I mean, it has serious potential. And if you don't go crazy with it, I don't see why it wouldn't be sustainable. So yeah, it's a tool that we're definitely going to be using for a long time. Sorry, Paradigm, you might just see us in your IRC room more often pretty soon. I wanted to mention we have stickers for all of the active shows now. And how cool is this? Based on popular demand i get to say that because it's true people love the stickers you know it was me being a dummy

really i drug my feet at first because it felt like it was like a low effort thing to do to take the vector art for the mp3 albums and turn that into a sticker i'm like i can do better than that it's not a custom new design or anything. Right. I didn't commission somebody to create, you know, it's like, I can't do that. And then when Self-Hosted 50 landed, I realized, wait a minute, that's 50 releases of this album art. It's actually kind of awesome to have that as a sticker. And then because I have it as a vector, we can do like cool high resolution, different sizes. So I busted out sticker artwork for all the active shows now. I realized that was the way to go and they're awesome

I think it's actually perfect and so they're all up at jupitergarage.com as well as some new exclusive merch to celebrate self-hosted 50 and as always our core contributors

get a discount so check the limited ad feed or live show feed for a note from me on your promo code or you can just go to the members download area and get the note so you can use the promo code and take some money off when you go over to jupitergarage.com and get them stickers. I think they turned out great. And one of the

stickers, there's a special plea from Wes Payne in there, but I won't say which one. You'll just have to go check the stickers and find out. I have been kidnapped. All right. All right. And with that, let's do a little bit of feedback. You want to take this one? Roxodus from Linux Server IO writes in, just listen to LEP 416, and I'd like to clarify some things regarding web top. First, I just want to say that you brought up an interesting use case, and that's awesome. So, hey, look at us continuing to abuse software. That's right. That's our thing.

Regarding flavors, we also have Fedora variants. Nice. Mostly the same VMs. Arch may also be in the works. Oh. That would be killer. That would. Either one would be great.

You remember WebTop is that project from Linux Server that lets you run a Linux desktop in a container. You connect it remotely with your web browser. Yeah, exactly. And we had a lot of fun playing with it, but did definitely have some questions because it's a lot of components that are all integrated together.

And one thing we were wondering was, well, Chris, you noticed that the default user was named ABC, and I don't think you loved that. You just wanted it to be called Chris, I assume. Yeah. Well, as for ABC, unfortunately, at the the moment it's fairly relied on as it's

kind of the only constant they have when trying to manage permissions in there. And I will say they're doing good work here as Linux

Server always does to try to make things secure, not just leave it a big old security hole. So I get that you probably want to set some user

permissions. What they're doing is really tricky, and that is the compromise you have to make. And so that's why I think my thought

was put it behind WireGuard, or put it behind a VPN. Don't just put it right out on the net. Yeah, definitely a consideration you want to make when running software like this. And just a moment to say thank you to our friends at A Cloud Guru. They have a SystemD management course for Linux. This course is designed to give you a deep dive into the topic of SystemD, you know, the most widely used service management scheme in Linux out there.

The course is really just going to help you demystify systemd and go beyond just kind of muddling through it and getting things done to actually understanding how all the different components work together, how to configure, manage, and monitor and troubleshoot systemd. We'll have a link in the show notes for this course, or you can go to cloudguru.com. Well, let's do a little bit of housekeeping around here. It has gotten awfully filthy.

Probably Brent's fault. Hey, now. I want to mention you can join the conversation and check in with the team over on our Telegram channel. That's at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram. And we are always looking for your feedback, your ideas, suggestions, anything you want to send us for the show, linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Our meetups, which include the Denver and Salt Lake City meetups, are at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash meetup. And we do have the Loveblog I want to mention. And Minimac, it sounds like there's a lot going on these days.

Yeah, thank you, Chris. So all I can tell you that the Loveblog community is doing fine every Sunday on Mumble. And it's really great to see a lot of people from all over the world. I can tell you, we had new listeners or new participants joining us from the Philippines and Australia. And you have to imagine, for them, it's early in the morning. So it's also nice, by the way, to see where's Poppy or you from time to time. So thank you all.

The cool thing is in Loblog, everything can happen. Like last Sunday, we had like an online tutorial for user Colonel on his PinePhone. And that ended up in the git commit for the J package on Manjaro. But as Colonel is here, he can talk about this story, Colonel.

Yeah, so I've been playing with the PinePhone with the Manjaro base image with Plasma Mobile on top. And I wanted to install something that wasn't in the Manjaro ARM repos, which then, of course, means AUR. Yay is the default Arch Helper installed for Manjaro ARM. However, when you install it, it didn't install the development packages, which is required for AUR. Well, one of the maintainers for the Manjaro ARM repo was there in Leplug, and he made that a dependency. And now when you install YAY, it automatically installs that.

Well, that sounds fascinating. Sounds like if you tune in at Leplug on Sundays, there always could be some geeky stuff going down. We have the time at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar and the mumble info at linuxunplugged.com slash mumble. So as I hit the road, I will be tracking my trip at colonytracker.live and I invite you to follow me there. And if you are on the road in my area, if you're in that neck of the woods, we're going to have a link that you can click on at colonytracker.live to start a meetup with me. A little micro meetup, even if it's just you. You want to hang out? Maybe we'll talk about Linux. I don't know. Micro meetup. Do you have any preferred micro meetup location types? Easy to accommodate a large vehicle. So I created this forum for people to fill out so I can kind of like try to suss that information out.

So that way we have like a landing spot for Jupes. Chris also doesn't mind proximity to chicken wings. No, that's true. And then what I'll do is I'll send Brent in to suss him out, you know, like he'll head in first. I'm really looking for lakeside or even rivers will do. Sure, yeah. Anywhere that's got drinks would be nice too. Why not?

Mr. Payne, we have a last minute pick coming into the show. I'm being told by the control room that this could be really useful for people that maybe have duplicate images. Yes, indeed. I thought we might have something visual inspired since, you know, we've got photographer Brent in the house over here. Right, right. Okay, so it's pretty easy. There's lots of great Linux command line tools out there, or not command line even, to go filter duplicates if it's just the same hash of the file, right? That makes sense. It's pretty easy to go find an actual duplicate.

But what if you are someone doing a lot of visual things? Maybe, honestly, this comes up for me because I'm using Photopea and downloading a bunch of copies where I've made modifications, or just recently I was making a GIF to embarrass a friend, and so I had a whole bunch of similar files. I didn't need all of them, right? But they weren't exactly the same. They were saved different times, exported different JPEG resolutions or something.

That is where image dupes come in because it can find near duplicate images based on a perceptual hash. So it uses Python and some, you know, some machine learning type algorithms to try to give a score perceptually based on what the image looks like, not just the bits in the file. Boy, it gives a whole new meaning to perceptual hash, doesn't it?

Wow, that's awesome. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. I could see that. It could be really useful just to run over my library. I wonder if we would find slight crop variations and stuff. That's a good question. We'll just have to try. We'll have to try and find out.

Yeah, it was a late, last-minute addition to the show, and we thought that'd be a good one to mention because, like Wes said, that photographer guy is here. Hey, you know what, though? Even though we're on the road, the show is still going to be live. Somehow, I suspect, you can always follow at Linux Unplugged or at Jupyter Signal to get, like, live information, or go to the calendar

page at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. In fact, the entire slate of shows is going to continue on. We're going to attempt to produce all of them from the road, I say, with some trepidation. And you, dear audience, get to find out how that goes right along with us. Oh, oh, oh, oh, Linux Action News episode 200 just landed this week. It sure did, didn't it? And this was a fun one because through a series of like rabbit holes that Wes and I found ourselves going into researching news items,

through a series of rabbit holes that Wes and I found ourselves going into researching news items, we came into this story about how big hyperscaler companies are building and loading and buying out international cable links. And the scale of it is unbelievable. Just hundreds of terabits of information flowing per second. Yeah, and so we report on what we found in Linux Action News 200. So if you haven't heard that one yet, it's a great time to jump in on LAN or send it to a friend. That's linuxactionnews.com slash 200.

Brent, thank you for joining us for a special episode. Are you ready to get crammed into Lady Jupes? Well, I like small spaces, so I think we'll be okay. But who knows? We're going to have to see how it goes. You're already helping me organize, though. Brent has me, like, every piece of production equipment that's got to go, it goes right now on the coffee table in the studio. Everything that's got to go goes on the table.

At least once an hour since I've landed here, we've noticed, like, oh, we've got to remember to bring this. Oh, we've got to remember to bring this. Yeah, let's put this on the table. If it's not plugged in right now and making this show happen, then it's on the table. That's pretty much it. Then we will be live on Tuesday at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern over at jblive.tv.

See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And links to everything we talked about today, that's over at Linux Unplugged. Dah! Slash 417. Dah! That's my dot com.

That's how I say dot com now. It's kind of pirate-like. It's very efficient. Yeah, I think as I get older, I want to go more towards the pirate direction, just in general. Less prospector, more pirate now? Yeah, yeah.

I've done the prospector thing. I think pirate's where it's at. Next step, peg leg. Yar! Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the Unplugged program. We'd love to hear from you, linuxunplugged.com slash contact, but either that or not,

even if you don't go there, if you just listen, you know what? We appreciate it. We appreciate it. We'll see you next Tuesday. Yes, it is hammer time. Feels actually like dance time. I see all of us grooving in the studio here.

We are. It doesn't matter how many times we hear it. We still groove to it. So how have I, how the mighty have fallen? I have gone from the guy that could record four or five beers tasties in a row to I have one Canadian six and a half ABV and I can barely get through the outro. It's that Canadian water they brew with. Is that what it is? Jeez.

Fresh from the Canadian Rockies. Tell you what, it is actually. Oh man, we're going to be going over the Rockies. I know, it seemed appropriate. And the damn Cascades. No, Chris, you know what? It's because you're not used to hanging out with people anymore and it tired you out. And it's hot. During the interview, we had

the air conditioner going, but it's like you get like five minutes of reprieve and then it's hot out. And it's hot. During the interview, we had the air conditioner going, but it's like you get like five minutes of reprieve and then it's hot again. Hot studio, cold beer. And it's only going to get worse because I'm driving into the heat. So it's only going to get worse.