LINUX Unplugged - 420: Real People Are Out There

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

We share some stories from our Denver meetup, the strange reason we found ourselves at a golf course, and some news you should know. Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

You know, some weeks, I mean, most of the time, really, let's be honest, but some weeks, it really feels good to be a Linux user. And on its 30th birthday, it's kind of one of those weeks. Did you hear about this Razer mouse driver issue? I did not hear about this. All right. Well, Brent, say that you need local admin on a Windows box and you have physical access, but of course, you weren't given the admin password.

Don't ask why you need this on a Windows box. Don't ask why it's a Windows box. But all you have to do, get yourself a Razer mouse or even just the dongle. Windows Update, the second you plug that sucker in, will helpfully download and execute the Razer installer

to get those drivers going for you. Sounds great until you realize that program downloaded from the internet, yeah, that's run as system, which is like super root on Windows. And because it's Windows, well, you get to choose where you install some stuff and that opens up an explorer window. If you right click in there, you can open PowerShell, which inherits root privileges. root privileges. Oh, this is Unplugged 420, a sophisticated episode that will be making no pot jokes,

no references, none at all. Hello and welcome into your weekly Linux talk show, a sophisticated program this week that is brought to you by our friends at A Cloud Guru, the leader in learning for the cloud Linux and other modern tech skills. Hundreds of courses and thousands of hands-on labs get certified, get hired, get learning at acloudguru.com. Today we are riding high on a community rush in the Mile High City this week and sharing some of our meetup adventures, featuring some great emails that have come into the show recently and a spot of Linux news for you all that you can use. So we'll tell you about that and we'll tell you about the time we recorded a Linux podcast from a golf course. But we have a special arrangement today. Wes is back home in the Seattle area. Hello, Wes. Hello.

I hate to tell you this, but it's mid-70s and very cool today. You do just exactly how to needle me at the very beginning of the show. It's well done. That's well done. And Brent has joined me in Colorado Springs. So we're just down a couple hours from Denver in the lovely Colorado Springs. Hello, Brent. Welcome back.

Hello, Chris. It's nice to have you here. It's like an ongoing adventure. And you were there for a lot of what went down. We had the meetup. We had our big Denver meetup. Hello, Chris. you're staying here in Colorado Springs for a while. Also, the kids flew home. It's real quiet here. I don't even see a Levi today. No, Hadiyah and Levi, the wife and the dog, are out with a friend visiting Boulder. They're going to be back probably some point during the show.

But yeah, I had the whole place. I went from like this place being packed and we were off grid for eight days and we had the slides in for eight days. We had all slides in. So it was really cramped in here. Now we're down to the KOA in Colorado Springs. I got full hookups with water. I got air conditioning. My slides are out and I got the entire RV to myself. It's, it feels like luxurious. And so I'm like, let's, let's get some Linux podcasting done. And then after this, we are moving on.

But before we leave the Colorado Springs area, we are going to do a micro meetup. If you're listening live today, if you're in the Colorado Springs area, Tuesday, August 24th, 2021, join us at 4.30 local time at the View House in Colorado Springs. There's several of the View Houses. We're going to the one in Colorado Springs right off 25. And then we'll have a dinner. We'll say goodbye to our friends in Colorado Springs. And then we head off to Tucson. Tucson. That sounds exciting. Also going to be hot, I'm sure. I'm sad to say I'm not going to be joining you. I know. I know we're going to have to say our goodbyes at that point. Who's going to make you brunch? Maybe you could make me a few brunches and I could like seal them up pre-brunches yeah and i can heat them up you know

you just leave me a little instructions all right don't forget them because they get nasty in that fridge that's what hadia does when she leaves she leaves me little sticky notes that tell me like this goes with this you combine these things she leaves me a little map it's like and i'm putting like ikea furniture together you're totally an adult. Totally. Yeah, no, totally. So then after that, yeah, so we're going to Tucson because there is a shop down there, a Vroom slide system that Colonel in our mumble room found, and it's experimental. I can't find anybody that's done it before, anybody that has a testimony except for the guy that did it to his own rig. But it looks solid, but it's a risky move for sure. So we're going to be working out a recording schedule for next week.

It's probably not going to be live. It's probably going to be prerecorded next week, but we'll still have a show for you. But it's just going to be kind of all up in the air. Well, yeah. I mean, if we did it live, you'd just be a nervous wreck fretting about your slides. We don't want that. Yeah.

I also think every know, I think every now and then Wes has got to be let out of his house. He's got to get outside. You know, you got to walk your Wes from time to time. Yeah, that's right. Really. It's my fault. I'm going on a camping trip. Well, and I'm using that opportunity to, to get in there and get some slide work done. So it's a win win for sure. Now let's get into a little community news and the story that we've been trying to figure out when to kind of fit it in that we just haven't gotten to yet is one that kind of underscores the entire reason why we like to talk about ButterFS here on this show. And obviously, we recognize it's a multi-file system world. I mean, you're talking to a guy right now that's got XFS, ButterFS, and ZFS on one system.

It's a multi-file system world out there. But we've argued for a while now that ButterFS should be taken seriously in the workstation context, especially in the single SSD laptop kind of situation or like your desktop workstation. There's a lot of features there that make it a real competitive file system compared to what commercial desktops

offer now on Mac and Windows. Yeah, we definitely love ButterFS, but there's an interesting kernel feature that just landed with Linux 5.12. And up till recently, ButterFS, well, it was missing out. My name is Christian. I'm one of the organizers of the container step room. I'm also one of the maintainers of the Lexi and Lexi projects and mostly work on the kernel side of things, on the low-level stuff.

And today I want to talk about something that we've been working on for quite a while, namely the IDMap mounts concept. IDMaps are a fascinating idea. They allow for different mounts to expose the same file or directory with different ownership. It makes it possible to easily share files between multiple users or multiple machines, especially in some complex scenarios.

I can imagine, Wes, too, this is probably pretty critical in a container workload, right? Maybe I could even see a use case in this for something like Flatpak as well. Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, even if you've just got multiple OSs on your machine, you know, if you've installed, say, Pop! OS in one area and Fedora on another, maybe you've got multiple users involved and the UIDs and GIDs don't map up. We've all been there,

right? You mount something, you want to go grab some files from the other file system and, oh, I've kind of elevated to root privileges because I'm a different user and I don't own these files. And then when you add in containers, it just gets way more complicated because, of course, containers often use user namespaces, which is a way of mapping different UIDs and GIDs inside that process. You can have a whole new set of users isolated in that container that map to real users on the host system. Maybe you've run into this where you, you know, you're doing some stuff in a container, maybe you've got it downloading files or doing backups, and you've also got to deal with these darn permissions. Now, a lot of people come in contact with this if they're using some of those

great Linux server IO images, because they've done some stuff where you can specify P UID, P GID stuff to customize what UIDs and GIDs get handled in the container. And that works, but it takes a lot of planning. You kind of got to orchestrate it. You got to have a consistent set of IDs. And that just doesn't work for everything, let alone fancier use cases like systemd-homed, which has some ideas about decoupling these like hard-coded UIDs and GIDs from the actual user identity.

We just can't do that today. Yeah, and so practically speaking, say you're running a Plex app or MB or something like that, Jellyfin, in a container, and you add a bunch of files as one user to your file system, but that UID doesn't match up with what the user is inside that container. And so you just get a permissions error, your files don't show up. I think this is a super common problem for new users that are hosting their files or people that are trying to execute applications that have to interact with the host file system in some crazy, scary way. This is going to be a no-brainer, but I thought we would let Christian explain sort of why it matters. And this is hopefully going to be pretty useful for the container use case when you want to share

the same RudaFest between different containers when you want to share with different ID mappings, when you want to share data between privileged and unprivileged containers, so containers making use of username spaces and containers not making use of username spaces, or you want to have something that SystemD has been working on, portable home directories, where you can expose the same USB stick with different UID and GID to multiple owners, basically decoupling file ownership, making it more flexible, and you don't need to have a fixed UID or GID when you log into a system anymore. While we are on the subject of containers,

Fedora not too long ago made the move to C Groups version 2, which has been around forever. And it appears 2110 will also be making that transition and they'll be setting C Groups version 2 as enabled by default in Ubuntu 21.10. It should make a lot of these complicated container scenarios a lot easier to deal with. ID map mounts came with support for ext4, xfs, and fat32 by default, but butterfs, well, it just wasn't in there because they've already made the changes to the bfs layer in the kernel,

They've already made the changes to the BFS layer in the kernel, but you also needed changes per file system. So finally, coming soon, full IDMAP mount support for ButterFS. Yes, and it looks like in Linux 5.15 is probably when we can expect that. So that's great to see. Fedora 35 has added a nice feature that I'm kind of surprised wasn't in there, actually. In Fedora35, user services will be restarted on package upgrades now. I mean, that's nice because it's going to allow user services like Pipewire to seamlessly restart when upgrading rather than needing to reboot the entire box. And I always wondered why Fedora seemed like the most insistent distro on rebooting after an update.

I mean, I figured it was good hygiene. I never even stopped to think about it was a service level thing. Now, Fedora currently allows restarting system services automatically when upgrading the packages for those services. But that's only at the system level. There really hasn't been that capability for stuff that runs at the user level, like Pulse or Pipewire or anything that's not running in the system instance of SystemD. Why did this support take so long? Well, Fedora wanted to have it, but the technical details behind the scenes are not trivial

because when you're running these upgrades as root, you've got to reach from that privileged context way down into the unprivileged user-managed instances of SystemD. That finally got added upstream in SystemD, and so Fedora can do this in a non-hacky manner. That's kind of the key thing. And when I think about what I like when I use Fedora, and when people ask me about Fedora,

I have a hard time putting my finger on it. I can say, oh, they have leading-edge packages, but it's actually this stuff. When they want to do something like this, they build it in at the system level. Like one route would be to just do some sort of hacky postscript, right, that you execute and maybe you ask a user to put their pseudo password in or something like that. And you could get it done with something like that. the route of going all the way upstream so that it's baked into the system now. And that's going to be maintainable. That's going to be supportable. It's going to be obvious to other developers. And you're right. Like this is exactly the kind of correctness thing. DNF might be slower than I'd like sometimes, but it really makes me happy that I feel confident I can do an upgrade,

maybe even like a full, you know, a new release of Fedora type upgrade and all this stuff. It's been thought of, taken care of very carefully. This is something that's been really wanted for a really long time because some years ago we decided to start migrating the GNOME user session from running in its own privileged context then it would do its own user session management to using systemduser. This actually also happened with Fedora Linux 34 for KDE Plasma as well. And that change means that when you do upgrades of the desktop environment,

we actually can't do anything to make sure services get restarted in an orderly fashion, especially desktop services. And even with all of these changes that have been now, it's still not entirely the best, because again, we're reaching down from root down into individual users. And while the logic is very good, it is not perfect. The whole idea of doing an offline updates and those kinds of things is basically to guarantee as much as we can, um, consistency between, uh,

transition states of software, because then we're not running the user services when we're doing the, the offline update, because we only go up to just enough to start package kit in Plymouth to print out the output. And then when it's done, we start back up again. And this even includes like not bringing up network during offline upgrades. So a lot of like sensitive, finicky things

that tend to break when you're doing an online upgrade are just simply aren't running. And while this does definitely improve, like some of the individual cases, like if you're just doing a DNF upgrade, you know, when you're running in your desktop, a lot of those services will start up correct restart correctly. It's still not perfect. And we're probably not going to roll back using offline updates by default, because we want to provide a consistent usable experience rather than kind of crossing our fingers and hoping that we play whack-a-mole properly. Right, right. Yeah, it's nice to see it landing. And it's a great example of some of the thought and care and intentionality that goes into Fedora and how that stuff lands upstream. And then it's how it is done. And that's what I like about being a Fedora user. $100 in credit for 60 days on your new account, and you go there to support the show. Linode is how we host everything these days. Everything we've built in the last couple of years, Linode.

And this episode right here marks our one-year anniversary of going independent. And Linode was one of the very first companies that jumped in to make it possible, and they are still here with us one year later, and they helped make the meetup possible. This is a special company and I've had a chance now to work with them on a business level. I've had a chance to meet them individually here in town and I had a chance to put on a party with them. But also they've been there supporting us as we've grown now over this last year, now that we're independent. And a huge part of that is you participating in this by going to linode.com slash unplugged or by linking somebody to that when they need to sign up,

taking advantage of our sponsors' offer and telling them there's value here in supporting these guys. Every step of the way since 2003, Linode has been dedicated to building awesome, awesome cloud hosting. Really, if it runs on Linux, you can run it on Linode. Recently, we started experimenting with just offloading just build jobs. When I say build jobs, I don't mean software, like I'm building some sort of software project.

Although I could see doing that, actually. I mean, our projects, like our production projects. We will upload as a team. We'll put all of our clips for the day up on object storage. So we've done that on this trip, is use Linode S3 compatible object storage as a way to stash stuff and exchange files around it.

Because there was a point in time where we were mixing cameras and mics with the Linode guys who were down here capturing some stuff for their YouTube channel. And it just made sense to just put it all up on Linode object storage. And it's a quick, easy way to collaborate. And they really have made their dashboard

simple and easy to understand. So if you've been using server stuff like forever, you're going to be fine. Like, you're going to love it. But if you're brand new, don't feel intimidated. It's actually really approachable. And they've got great guides, and they have fantastic, well, really the best customer support in the business by phone or by ticket. And long timers like us, we can tell that the people that build this product,

they're Linux enthusiasts. You know how you can kind of just like suss that out by using something? Yeah, Linode's one of those things. And so go see how much you can do with a $5 a month rig, or go see how much you can do with one of their fancy AMD Epic dedicated CPU systems. Because you're going to get $100 to kick the tires. You can really try this thing out. You can really put it to the test at really no cost to you.

And it's a great way to support the show. So that's linode.com slash unplugged. Go there, sign up, get $100 in 60-day credit, and you support the show. linode.com slash unplugged. Well, we did all get together here in Denver, and it was a great time. And we wanted to share a little bit of that experience with you. Because, I don't know, it felt like after something monumental like that happened, we needed a way to convey it to the audience and share it a little bit. It was an unbelievable time, I've got to say. The number of people we met, the broad range of people that we met, I guess is one way to put it. That is true.

Like a lot of characters, and you know what's funny too, Brent, is like some people just wanted to only talk about Linux and other people are like, I'm not talking about Linux at all while I'm here tonight. It's true. It's very true. You and I were kind of bouncing around with the rest of the team, which was super fun.

But yeah, you never really knew what to expect when you would kind of lock eyes with someone and be like, hey, we haven't quite met yet. How are you? You know, it's funny. I think there's an element that, you know, we all know we're nerds, like we're here, you know, we were at that meetup for a reason, following Linux, open source, didn't really matter your experience level. I think just knowing you have that common base makes the rest of just interacting with people easier. Yeah, it's totally it. It's sort of like, you have the shows to go to, you have the hosts you could like, you know, have a laugh about, or you have Linux you could talk about. So there's a lot of, it's really easy to get a conversation going, even for people who aren't great at getting a conversation going. So before we tell you the

story of the meetup, I want to tell you a story that took place eight days before the meetup ish. And we had left Cheyenne, Wyoming, but we ended up with like an extra day in our schedule and we weren't ready to get down into Denver because of the noise and the parking situation and, you know, tank capacity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And our campground reservations in Cheyenne were over and we weren't going to spend any more money at this campground. We were done. So we thought, let's be bold. Let's set off. We will find some place along the way to camp and to record Linux action news. And so we did just that. We got about 20 miles down the road and then we stopped at a rest stop and Brent and I broke off into the car and we went and did some reconnaissance searching at a popular camping area, which was totally packed. Packed and kind of off-road.

Yeah, it was a little rough. I mean, it was nice. It was like a choice spot in Nebraska, but it just wasn't going to work for us. And so we were a little concerned because what you've got to do is you've got to get a nice mix of solar. We have to have a decent spot to record, so it needs to be quiet, ideally quieter than we're at right now. And we have to have good cell signal because we're doing some of this stuff live, and you need enough bandwidth to be able to live stream. And so it was looking pretty rough. We weren't finding anything in western Nebraska, and we just didn't want to admit that we were getting pretty desperate.

But we're totally desperate now. to admit that we were getting pretty desperate. But we're totally desperate now. We are just kind of driving down the road, scouting for places to pull off, or anything that's clever. I'm looking at every dirt patch we can find. We're going to go look at the next town.

We're just desperate to find a quiet area. And Brent's a man on a mission. Hi. I'm trying my best to make things better, but I can't will these spots to just appear and he's also rolling the tunes for us he's our tune master so I'm curious what was going through your head as we're not finding anything

and we're driving the empty roads of flat Nebraska did you think we were screwed? well it was gorgeous out there, I got to say. I think my job is to try to calm you down in those situations. Well, you're managing me? Amazing. And so I was secretly thinking, oh, man, this is like how much further are we going to drive? This just doesn't make any sense.

Hadiyah was checking us on the find my friends thing. And she said, she was like, where are you going? Why are you guys still going? You're going the wrong direction. We're just going. Bye, Hadiyah was checking us on the Find My Friends thing, and she said, where are you going? Why are you guys still going? You're going the wrong direction. We're just going. Bye, Hadiyah. And I'm like, I know we're going to find something. I know we're going to find something. And actually, we got lucky.

We found a golf course. And it looks like they allow RVs to park here and camp here. It's quiet. It's beautiful. And that's a cell tower right there. Sure. It's like 200 feet that way. So hopefully we're walking in right now. We're going to go ask them if they're cool with us parking here. So Lady Jupes wasn't there yet. So we were in the reconnaissance car just trying to figure out if it's okay. And normally I don't like just go walking into some like golf course that I've never been to and ask them if I could park my RV there, but

I had Harvest Host in my pocket. Oh, man, this would be a good sponsorship opportunity. But I just am a big fan. Hey, there. Hey, guys. I'm a Harvest Host member, and I saw that you guys are part of that program. Yeah.

I've got a rig. I wouldn't mind parking here. I just wanted to check with you first. Yeah, of course. See what the deal is. So can I get a name. Yeah, of course. See what the deal is. So, can I get a name? Yeah, Chris Fisher. F-I-S-A-G-R.

That's a good phone number. Give me my wife's, because that's probably true. Which you'd think I'd have memorized. So, with the rig, there's this truck parking. Yeah, we saw that pulling in. Yeah, just anywhere in that lot you can park. Awesome. Looks like a beautiful place.

Our rig is just a little bit down the road, and we thought we'd just head out and just check it out. It looks great. All right, we'll be back in just a little bit. Thanks, guys. Have a good one, guys. Well, I think that's going to work freaking perfect. Just when I thought we were out of luck.

I know. This is actually fabulous. It was just we were going down the road, and I'm like, you know what, I'm going to going to work freaking perfect. Just when I thought we were out of luck. I know. This is actually fabulous. It was just we were going down the road, and I'm like, you know what, I'm going to open up the Harvest Host app and check our location and just see what pops up. And it was five minutes down the road from where we were at almost the point of just giving up. That's perfect.

Yeah, this is going to work, though. And it's going to be quiet. We should be able to record land, no problem. Look at us solving problems. Four. What was that? Oh, that's just a golf ball hidden juice it turned out to be a really nice spot it was hot but that first night i mean how would you describe that first night it was like it was like nebraska was giving us a show yeah i didn't quite know what to expect from nebraska but we parked and it was a little, you know, it was early

enough that we could just relax without needing to get to, you know, setting everything up. And then that amazing sunset, we just, yeah, turned into the sunset and it turned out it was like nothing I've ever seen. And then it turned into a thunder and lightning storm that sort of formed a U shape around us. And, but it was far enough away we couldn't hear the thunder. So we just saw lightning all night long in a U-shape around us. And then where the clouds were not, there was the sky. And it was so bright you could easily, just easily see the Milky Way. And we saw several shooting stars.

The moon was out as well and uh i think we even spotted jupiter yeah that's right yeah i forgot about that yeah that was sort of symbolic in a way it was jupiter was bright it was unbelievably bright in the sky it was so bright we brought out the apps to double check actually what we were seeing it was like it was uh jupiter was shining down on us. It was a really, really nice time. We spent a night there. We spent a day there working. Brent and I did.

Dia took the kids back to Cheyenne to entertain them while Brent and I got some work done. And then it was time to wrap up so we could get into Denver. I just had to take one more walk to just soak in this Nebraskan view. You know, online people have been mocking Nebraska for being flat, but I'd say it's kind of roly-poly where we're at lots of hills it's beautiful and in the evenings it's just incredible i mean the temperatures today were were harsh i think it may have gotten up to 120 degrees in my front cab where i was recording linux action news today but uh it's so much better now and we're packing up to head into Denver. I could have waited an extra day here in our golf course,

but we do have to press on. We have much to do. Denver is going to be very busy, and Brent has a lady he'd like to see, and I think it's been hard waiting here in Nebraska, and he's ready to get in there. So we're going to pull together and do an evening drive as a crew. It'll probably be dark by the time we get to Denver,

but it might mean the roads are clear. Oh, man, they were clear, but those were some rough roads. Yeah, we had nice sailing for the first maybe quarter of the drive and then it just got worse and worse and worse yeah it got it got really really really really bad i think we took some damage to our slide that's already damaged now what was it about the roads chris it's the cement and it's the way the cement the cement sort of settles down and then the snow plows come and because the cement is settled the plow hits that bit of cement that's sticking up. And bam, creates a huge, huge rivet in the road that my tires hit.

Not that I've been listening to the Idaho Road podcast or anything. But we got down there to System 76's office at like uh 11 o'clock at night 11 30 noon brent took off and it was just the kids and hadia and i and it was toasty but we woke up that morning to hugs from the system 76 crew we got the cheese tour then i did coda radio and it was just a blur we we spent some time at emma's which was amazing. Emma is an incredible hostess. Really made everybody feel like they were at home. And her home was everyone's home, which was amazing, especially when we've been in a small RV for a few weeks. That was really just great to see her too.

And the whole System76 crew. And it went by, it felt like two days. I didn't even spend a single night at the Airbnb. The rest of the crew did. I know you had the intention, but it was just, there was so much going on and balancing all the things. Well, and Wes and I have that feud going. Yeah, I mean, it's hard for us to be in the same room for very long

without awkwardness coming up. You guys got to solve that. Yeah, I know, I know. But in the meantime, you know, I just stayed in the RV. But Denver's real kind of treat for it. Well, there was two things actually, I think I have to give a special shout out to listener Mike who took as many of the crew up in his Cessna that would, that asked to go. And we got an aerial tour of Denver from listener Mike. And he was so chill about the whole

thing. He just, Oh yeah. Next crew, bring them up. There's a storm coming. No problem. Let's bring up another crew. Yeah. Yeah. And I got to go up with Dylan, you know, for a wait, we, he only did two of us at a time. So it took a, took a few times cause a lot of us wanted to go. And so I got to go up with my boy and, uh, we, we, and I, we just have a great memory of that now. And then I think the other great memory for my son and my daughters as well, actually was, uh, Carl, Carl was shot from system 76, took him for a spin around the block in his Tesla. And that was son and my daughters as well, actually, was Carl. Carl was shot from System 76, took him for a spin around the block in his Tesla. And that was Dylan's first Tesla experience.

And, you know, I still haven't had one. So he's beat me to it. I got the full demo. I got the self-driving demo and everything. I heard there's a Rainbow Road mode. There is a Rainbow Road mode. There's also a whoopee cushion mode. What?

Dylan wouldn't be interested in that. No, no, no. They just found it immediately. But but really it was about friday that's why we were there right it was friday after work we had a meetup at pindistry and we didn't really know what to expect i think there was like 50 ish on the meetup page maybe and you know with delta variant and stuff we just i know some people are concerned and they were worried about that and especially in the denver area people are a little more concerned about that right now. And it wasn't like super well structured. It was a little bit like walking in and just not knowing what you're going to hit.

But what did you walk into, Chris? Well, like the rock stars that we accidentally were, we showed up late. We sure did. To our own party because we were the ones getting the donuts and we had to get 150 voodoo donuts and it takes a while to get 150 donuts we just don't know about the traffic oh my god it was so bad and you know uh oh and then there was of course the the situation where they couldn't find our order even though there was a stack of 150 donuts right there on the counter how many giant orders do you have today? I mean, come on. Right? But we got that sorted.

We showed up, and holy crap, was it a party. Linode and our crew that was there got cracking immediately on getting all the swag set up and getting the pizza deployed. And Linode picked up drinks, and so people were getting their orders brought to them and just like, who do I pay for this? And we're like, Linode paid. They were great. Yeah, and it was just, it was a blast. I think Emma counted somewhere between 80 and 90 people that showed up. Wow.

That's impressive. Yeah. Very, very impressive. And thankfully, the way the pinistry is laid out, they have those big garage doors that opened up into an outside seating area with a DJ. So we could kind of sprawl and that worked out really well. Yeah. What I loved is that anywhere you looked, there was a crew of just our kind talking. So you could just sort of move on to the next conversation, see what's happening over there. It was really nice. My favorite moments. Well, there's a couple of them. favorite moments are when people I meet people and then it clicks with them that they should probably tell me

what their online handle is and then they tell me like their IRC or their telegram or whatever and then it's like oh I know you oh hey like I got to meet Optimus Grey yeah that was great and he's like hi I'm John I'm like okay

he's like oh Optimus you know, I'm John. I'm like, okay. He's like, oh, Optimus Grand. I'm like, oh, hey, man. And so those are some of my, but my favorite moments on this one, because this just, it kind of happened a few times, is I would meet somebody and they would be very, you know, very nice. And we'd have our exchanges. And I kind of have like a series of questions that I've been asking people so I could kind of collect some anecdotal data in my head. And then after that gets all done, they say, have you seen Wes or have you seen Brent? And it's, you know, then I go over to one of them and be like, there's somebody over there who would like to see you. And it's so neat that people are like, I want to meet Brent. I want to meet Wes. And then I would come back like 15 minutes later

and Wes would still be talking to them. I was like, wow, you really stuck there, Wes. You know, that's the thing is you just get trapped in a great way in these amazing conversations. And with 80 or 90 people, there's just too many to meet. I got to say, though, that really stands out to me because everyone is really respectful. You know, like people value that you're caught in a conversation and are really polite about coming up and also wanting to say hi. Yeah, indeed. and are really polite about coming up and also wanting to say hi. Yeah, indeed.

I guess my favorite moment, and I think you guys are probably going to agree because it's really hard to top this, is Listener Jose came out. Listener Jose, which we're going to have more on him in the future. Brent did an interview with him. He has started a company that focuses on accessibility development for Linux. Yeah, his business is Blind Penguin, which I thought was kind of clever. And he's working really hard to try to make, you know, his own little dream possible, which is to improve accessibility on Linux, which for him is essential. And he flat out said is kind of in bad shape and needs a lot of attention.

Yeah, and Jose himself is blind, and he flew up by himself from Puerto Rico to the meetup. He came to Denver for the meetup. I still can't believe that. That's amazing. Thank you, Jose. And so I'm glad we had a chance to chat with him, but the other thing that happened that was just perfect is that Linode brought three Raspberry 4 kind of kits that include everything from the case to the keyboard to the power, everything, right? And they had three to give away.

And Jose won the first kit. And it was kind of a special moment because I think, Wes, you read it for him, didn't you? I didn't see it go down, but I think you were involved with Jose actually finding out that he was the winner because he couldn't tell because he couldn't read the ticket. Yeah, I had the privilege of already being, you know, chatting with Jose there when the raffle started. And yeah, it was absolutely my honor. Sure, I was a little disappointed I didn't win, but this is almost as good. Not as disappointed as Cheese was. He was like one number off. But yeah, so Wes reads it for Jose, and yeah, sure enough, Jose won the first kit. So here he is. He travels from Puerto Rico,

and he does it blind. I don't think I could do it myself. I mean, I would want somebody to fly with me just for companionship and managing that travel. Then he wins the Raspberry Pi. But then also what was really special is Emma had hosted an after party for some of us. And Jose was invited to the after party. And he just really, he just kind of came to life there. And he became the life of the party.

He was hilarious. He was making jokes in four different languages. I don't know if it was four, but it felt like four. And he was switching between them like a polished comedian. Such a wonderful guy. If everybody gets to meet him, I hope that you take the time to do so. He's just wonderful. And then did you guys make sure he got home?

Is that how that went down? Well, you know, Heather and I and Wes, we were all getting in the car together. And Jose got there with us and we thought it only responsible to get him back to where he was going. And, uh, and so we drove him back all the way downtown to his hotel and had some amazing conversations. Really? I kind of, you know, it was late night, but I didn't want that right to end. Amen. So the meetup itself was fantastic and we wanted to share a couple of conversations, just a couple, but there will be more in the future. We're going to have some content from the road.

That'll be exclusive stuff we have soon. But in the meantime, I wanted to share two chats. The first is with Canonical's community manager, and Brent, you had a chance to pull her aside and chat with her about creating friendships for life. Yeah, this is Monica Madden. And she, well, I met her in our JB Telegram chat and she's been in there for a long time. I know she's a massive foodie and a big, huge friend of many of ours. And I got to sort of meet her and have a conversation. We met at System76 and shared like some glances. And then at the meetup, she was like, oh, your brand, giant hugs and everything, which was really great.

But she was kind enough to get on the microphone with me. Well, hi, Monica. Here we are at the Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup in Denver, and I know you've come quite a ways to be here. Tell me, well, first introduce yourself and tell us where you're from. I'm Monica Madden. I am the, in my day job, I'm the Ubuntu community representative at Canonical.

And in everyday life, just a Linux fan, thanks to my husband who is here with me, but is pool sharking the Linode guys as we speak. We came from Atlanta. We flew out to Kansas City, though, where we met up with Tyler Brown. And we had a rather epic road trip yesterday.

It took us about eight hours to get here, but it's been an incredible day. And I got to meet one of my new co-workers at Canonical, who lives in the Springs, and she drove up.

So it's been... This has been my first Linux meetup in person. And the energy and the excitement and just the genuine friendship and care, I see why people miss these things so much and do them. Yeah, there's this real passion

and care that you get out of everybody here. Everyone has this project they're passionate about or this community they're passionate about or some people they're passionate about meeting which I find super contagious and I have to say I find your energy super contagious in terms of community stuff. So thank you for doing all of that.

You're welcome. One thing I wanted to ask was how is it meeting folks in person versus, because I know you've built these rich relationships online through Jupiter Broadcasting's Telegram, for instance. You've built these rich sort of relationships, and yet now you're getting to sort of blend those into faces. How's that? Well, I think a lot of the interactions we've had today have just shown that those relationships aren't just superficial

and aren't just online. Today, Cheese invited us to System 76 for a tour. And we walk in the building and everyone's like, okay, hi. And we're like, hey, we're here for Cheese. And he came out and we just hugged like we had known each other in person for years instead of online for years. And when we were doing the tour, we went to the little beer garden area, and there all of you were.

And as soon as we heard your voices, it's like we – and it's funny because I think I asked you all to talk so I could identify you by your voices. I could tell Chris, you're exactly like I thought you would be. And I'm like, you know what? You and cheese are, and you, you're exactly what I thought you would be. Unless you're living some duplicitous life and you're hiding it really well. Well, that's so wonderful to hear. And thank you so much for making the trek out here. It's been a real pleasure meeting you in person.

And I'm sure all of these relationships will just continue and get richer. So thanks for being a part of all this. All right. Well, thank you. And thank you for putting this all together. It's wonderful. We're not even really done yet. We still have another micro meetup to do here in Colorado Springs.

I'm curious how you bumped into Derek and discovered the little device you brought with him. Well, you know, I hadn't discovered that little device yet, but when I walked in, he was the guy with the biggest smile in the room. And so for me, that's like, oh, this person's got to be pretty interesting. So I walked up to him and had a great little conversation. I was like, wait, wait, wait, stop. We got to get this on the microphone. And it just so happened you were there too. So we are here at the meetup. Tell me your name and where you're from. I'm Derek Parks. I'm from Denver, Colorado. Great. And then I see you have this wonderful gadget in your hands that you're super excited to tell us about. Go ahead. Tell us all about it.

So as part of the pandemic, you know, stuck in home, I've been working on my current sensor. So it's an ESP01 and it runs ESP Home. It's got completely assembled boards. I have no affiliation with these fabs out of China, but it is amazing what they will make and send to your house in three weeks now. So I won't say their name, but I will post all of this at some point. And it's pretty crazy. So it has a clamp current sensor. I put it on the hot tub.

I put it on the dryer and on my desktop. It all comes into Home Assistant and MQTT, all of that. So then you can show the wife how much power that the hot tub is using. And she says it's worth it, you know. So Chris, I see you getting very excited about this. Tell me what's going through your head. I mean, what's going through my head is monitoring my solar generation using a clamp system like this. This is something Alex and I have been talking about for weeks. And I've been missing the piece of like what piece of technology to use to actually monitor it. I knew it'd be a clamp of some form and uh how long did it take you to kind of dream

this up and make it all happen so it's been it was probably only actually a couple weeks maybe a month of dev um I wrote a ton of software on my own and then I was like oh ESPM does it way better than i ever did and everything so that's kind of like the whole route or whatever um but yeah i need to post it all and make it so that other people can use it i told my wife was like you need to sell these things and i was like i'll make tens of dollars uh this must be uh scratching your own itch kind of project. So what solution did you solve? So this was more just like trying to figure out, I have solar at home too,

and trying to figure out where the power is going. And like, okay, you know, is it the hot tub or is it the AC? What are we doing? It's both, yes. It's all of the above. So yeah, it's very much scratching your own itch and also learning so just like learning how to use keycat how to kai cat i don't know how to say it whatever one just like learning learning you know scratching your own itch and then learning how to get stuff made and it's crazy what they will assemble and send to your home for you and so if if you had

to sort of describe physically what we're looking at for the listeners could you yeah so it is an esp01 um which is like a standard uh esp8266 board that you can get wherever, and it has headers coming out of it, going into a board that I had fabbed in China that has a USB header on it and an ADC thing and a clamp sensor plugged into it. And so tell me a little bit about what was the motivation to come here today, to the meetup, and what you're getting out of it. So I've been listening to Chris in my ears while I'm writing code for, I don't know, 10 or 15 years now. And it was just like so weird and kind of crazy of like, oh, I've known this person in my ears for 15 years. And I feel like I know so much about him but he's never

met me before it's kind of a weird feeling but it's so nice to actually meet him in person and he's such a great guy so happy and like lively in person it's just a really great experience Chris you're uh blushing over here he's standing in front of my kid it's embarrassing and so uh I would imagine you're getting to meet a bunch of other great people as well is that feeling nice yeah it's so great to like just show up somewhere and get to meet people you know I walked in a little bit early and it was like oh okay that person I know that's a JV person and just like go up and you have kind of this shared background and relationship you just start a conversation with somebody, and it's really fun.

Yeah, that to me feels like a relief for the last year or two that we've had. It's so nice to see people in person and be able to put faces to the names and voices, and so thank you so, so much for making your way out here. We really appreciate it. Cheers. It was really amazing to meet you too, Brent, and so fun.

As we were listening to that, I was just reliving the whole thing. It was really nice. Yeah, you can hear the music going in the background, the band's there. There is a bunch of tables where people are just sitting out chatting, eating pizza or stuffing their faces with donuts. And then there was a glass balcony area up above that did a rooftop area. And you could watch the fricking gorgeous sunset as it set behind the Rockies. I mean, it was like, it was just a lot of us had to go upstairs and just watch it for a bit.

Yeah. Colorado certainly has some of those and they're breathtaking. No camera ever makes it the same as just standing there, taking it in. Yep, for sure. And everybody was really great. Everybody was really nice. It was a great meetup. And the journey does continue. The colony tracker will stay up for a bit longer.

In fact, I'm going to make my way down to Tucson, then back up to Colorado is the plan now for a bit. And then I'll start making my way home. And knowing me, I'll probably end up swinging through Montana because I just love it there. So the colonytracker.live is where you want to go. Colonytracker.live, that's where you can find the map and the micro meetup link if you want to grab lunch, breakfast, or dinner at some point. I'm not exactly sure what I'll be doing while I'm in Tucson. I might, I don't know, I guess I'll have a car. I'll have a car.

So you never know. I guess we could probably make something work. If you'd like to email the show, contact us at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. And the conversation is always rolling at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash telegram. That is our telegram community. You can go there, join us. And a lot of our hosts are in there popping in all the time. And then don't forget about the love blog.

If you're feeling like you could use a community connection right now, this Sunday and every Sunday, noon Pacific in our mumble room, you can get details at linuxunplugged.com slash mumble. It's the love plug and it happens every single Sunday. And it's a great way to connect with people. And then you never know, you may actually end up meeting them in person one day when I finally convince you to come out to one of these crazy meetups. Well, it's time for some feedback. Our friend Squirrely Dave is tiling Plasma. Hey, Chris and Wes, I know Chris has occasionally mentioned that he does

kind of like KDE Plasma as a desktop environment. You know, just from time to time. Who, me? as a desktop environment. You know, just from time to time. Who, me? I'm with you, Chris. I do, however, wish Plasma had native tiling functions built in. Just because I prefer using a single, very large display over multiple smaller ones. And I know Chris has mentioned something in the past that,

you know, Pop!OS has really introduced this sort of casual, easy tiling. I'd like that on Plasma. Well, in my hunt for a solution, I came across a KWin script that allows for basic tiling. And while it's not as robust or comprehensive as something like Awesome or i3,

it gets the job done and doesn't require giving up Plasma or breaking up all the nifty little things that work together to make Plasma such an awesome experience. I thought I'd share it with you just in case you haven't come across it yet. It's over on GitHub under kwin-scripts at kwin-tyling. You know, these kwin scripts sometimes actually make their way into genuine features, like

we're seeing that happen right now with the new overview functionality, so you never know. I actually checked this out back in 2019, and I didn't end up sticking with it. And I was looking at the GitHub and it looks like the last release was on July 29th, 2020. There were some commits eight months ago, but nothing too substantial. So I'm not sure how active it is anymore, but here's what I want, Wes. You ready? Because like Papa has got me so close. I've now, I have recognized there is a place in my life and in my heart for tiling. And maybe in your studio? Definitely.

And definitely when I'm on the road too. I mean, I tell you what, on every single machine I use, if this one thing were possible, I got to have this one thing. I got to have it. And it's tiling, but on a specific virtual desktop. So desktop two and three have tiling, but desktop one and four are free floating. I got to have it that way. And if I could get tiling just on desktop like two and three or whatever, whatever it is, and have free floating on other windows, perfection. of free floating on other windows. Perfection.

And I feel like it's going to happen on Plasma first, or I just say this over and over again, that maybe the guys over at System76 will just build it into their tiling. Yeah, you know, we need like a letter writing campaign or something. Yeah, like a safe Star Trek style letter writing campaign to get tiling on one specific virtual desktop at a time, or a couple at a time.

I think you know some people there. Maybe you can like expedite some features. I'm just sending good vibes to Jeremy. specific virtual desktop at a time or a couple at a time i think you know some people there maybe you can like expedite some features i'm just sending good vibes to jeremy i'm just sending good vibes look i'll buy a whole bunch of launches if i can get this one feature oh oh i i could almost i can almost hear it now a mini mac i bet l i bet you're gonna tell me enlightenment can do this aren't you as far as i know enlightenment can do it i never tried't you as far as i know enlightenment can do it i never tried it but as far as i know enlightenment can do you can yeah desktop and monitor independent you can decide which desktop and that should work and you can with the key press you can do it

answer is always enlightenment with you yeah just give it a try. All right. I really should. If anybody else knows a way to do it with Plasma, do let me know. Otherwise, our next email comes in.

Hey, guys. Seems the road show is going well. I'm writing from across the pond. I think his name was Chris, if I recall.

And I wanted to inquire as to your thoughts on the topic of careers in Linux and cloud admin. Have you in the past, or will you consider in the future making this a topic on a JB podcast? I'm specifically considering a rather late career change,

transitioning from mostly network telecom and project management over to Linux and cloud service administrations, AKA maybe an SRE. I have some trepidation at 50 years plus making such a leap, but I need a change for nothing more than my own sanity. And I liked this question a lot because I think this is a really hard thing to do. I made the transition from my IT career in my 30s, and I can only imagine how stressful it must be to try to do it in your 50s. So I have a lot of respect for our listener attempting to do this. And Wes, I wanted to kind of bounce it to you because you, as a bit of a hobby, just are always kind of monitoring the job postings.

You're always kind of looking at job requirements as just sort of a point of interest. And I'm curious what you think about where somebody might want to focus if they've got some project management background, if they know a little bit of Linux, but they want to transition more into, you know, cloud services or maybe some sort of Linux job where they're doing site reliability stuff. Do you have any tips from what you've been seeing in the postings and whatnot? You know, it is definitely tough. There is certainly some ageism in the tech community, right? And if you're not in your 20s and willing to work 70 hours a week, there's this impression that it can be hard to get the right job out there. But I think our listener has a lot of

things going for them. You know, if you've got project management experience, you've got experience, you know, being able to manage yourself, you know how to run these things, which means you can get work done, maybe not day one, but you know, week one, an independent operator, that's super useful. And in the era of the cloud, those networking skills are pretty much invaluable. I mean, you're going to be using a VPC, you're going to have to be dealing with load balancers and firewalls and IAM permissions. So, you know, pick some cloud technologies, definitely get familiar with stuff like Terraform, throw in something like Ansible if you're curious about configuration management. And then, yeah, just stress the skills that you do have now. You can pick up

all the little Linux details as you go. Yeah, I agree. I think there's a differentiator between somebody, if you primarily are working with cloud services, there's a differentiator between somebody who understands and appreciates the Linux fundamentals and doesn't. Like, that's one of the things I really like about Wes is he's very current on what a lot of the cloud platforms are doing and how to interact with them and how to build services on top of them.

But Wes also has a deep understanding of the Linux fundamentals. And so that kind of makes him a special kind of unicorn because he's kind of more rounded. But I think what you have to do is, and I sent you an email in this regard, is I think you need to focus on some certain areas in training, which you and I already talked about via email, and pursue those. And then like Wes said, fill in those details, like listen to the show when we talk about something like WireGuard or when we talk about Nebula soon, tune into that kind of stuff and build something

off of that and go use that as a learning opportunity. We're kind of there with you to do it. You can kind of write in and tell us about your experience and we can be there to kind of cheer you along. So, consider that as well. It's a great way to learn. And maybe if you come up with some ideas, some areas you want to play with that you haven't heard us talk about,

suggest it and maybe we'll feature it on an upcoming show. You never know. Yeah, very much so, very much so. I just wanted to mention we do have stickers up on the jupitergarage.com. We made stickers from the, what do you call it? What is that high-resolution vector stuff called? SVG. That.

I thought Brent would know. He's a graphics guy, after all. Well, photo guy. It's rasters versus vectors here. Come on. Well, we took them vectors and we said, hey, you know what we could do is we could make some real nice stickers with them. And so we took the album art for the shows and we went and made stickers up at jupitergarage.com and it's great. I at first was like, no, that's dumb. We shouldn't do that. We should come up with brand new stickers, which we still will. But then I thought, well, why not? I mean,

this has been published on every episode. Now you can have a sticker of it. It's a pretty great way to go, jupitergarage.com. You can find our friends. We're at A Cloud Guru on social media. They're pretty much just slash A Cloud Guru anywhere. Like the YouTubes, the Twitters, the Facebooks. Like if it's a social platform, they're probably there.

It's slash A Cloud Guru. You can go find them there. Brent, where would you like people to find you? Oh, I think Twitter is a good place to find me. I'm at Brent Jerva. And what about you, Wes Payne? I'm at Wes Payne. Don't worry if you can't spell Brent's last name.

We'll have a link in the show notes. That's true. That is true. I'm over there. I'm at Chris LAS. Mostly I just tweet sparingly. I'm not going to muck your timeline up, but I'm also not just 100% AFK. You know, you tweet at me,

I might do you the honor of a reply. Especially if it's a Rust pic. Boy, they're all over me these days with the Rust pics. I tell you what, no, I love them, actually. It's a great way to send them in, because then I can sneak them to Wes, although he often reads my Twitter feed, so I can't always sneak it past him.

But you never know. I might be able to sneak it past him. But you never know. I might be able to sneak it past him if you send it to me at Chris Elias. The network is at Jupiter Signal. And this year podcast is at Linux Unplugged. But I got a pro tip for you. You could join us live. We do this show on Tuesdays at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bat time, same bat station. And man, here's the thing. Here's the thing. If you're not catching Linux Action News, you're missing. You're missing what's going on. You're missing on the news. You're missing out on stuff that impacts your gerb. Come on, stay informed.

Jeez. LinuxActionNews.com for that. But as for us, LinuxUnplugged.com is where you can find links to what we talked about today. This is episode 420. You can also find our subscribe link over there, that contact page. We'd love to hear from you. And our Matrix server info. I don't mention that enough, but the community is still growing over on our Matrix, and we'd love to have you there. Seems like Element's going in

a good direction. Why not come join the party? Maybe leave a voice message. Maybe. Eh, maybe not. Either way, see you back here next Tuesday! so I don't want to tear down my setup, you know, because, like, every time I record on this road trip, we've been moving, and the kids need to sleep here, and so I've had to tear down my setup after every single episode.

And so yesterday's Coder was the first time I did a show and didn't have to tear down afterwards. And now I have to tear down again because we're moving on soon. And I don't want to. I want to build a permanent setup in the RV for podcasting so bad. You know, I hear Brent's pretty handy. That's true. You can take advantage of me for another two weeks.

Yeah. Yeah. I did hear when you were at System76 you were starting to dream a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I did hear when you were at system 76, you were starting to dream a little bit. Yeah. Possibilities. I actually think one of my genuine mistakes on this road trip was I should have ordered one of their little BB Thalios, you know, those tiny little Thalios. I should have ordered one of those, like when we were days out of Denver and then on the last day, see if they could have given it to me. Like if they could have, if they could have built it that fast, I'm not saying they could have, but if they could have, I could have just taken it with me.

I, what I really kind of want though is I want something I can mount to the wall. So it has to be really kind of probably even smaller than the baby Thaleo. And then I want a screen that folds down and I want a mounting spot for a microphone. And I don't ever want to have to tear down and set up a laptop and a mixer and the tablet screen and the microphone stand and all the cables. I feel like you also need one of those, you know, feeders they have in like a rat cage, but there's just beer in it.