LINUX Unplugged - 445: Brent's Betrayal

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Linux is the master of small computers, and this week it’s going to the next level. We chat with the creator of the $15 Linux box and share some significant updates for the Raspberry Pi. Special Guest: Brian Benchoff.

I'm just saying we might have an opportunity here because I guess the situation with the Raspberry Pi availability in stores is so bad that the Raspberry Pi Locator has been launched. It's rpilocator.com. Have you seen this, Wes? No, I have not. Yeah. So it's, I mean, it's as current as of like a few minutes ago. Oh, yeah. Last updated two minutes.

Okay. Adafruit. That makes sense. And I guess it's just been so tricky. It's getting a little bit better now, but really, with the chip shortage and everything, people are having a hell of a time finding some of these Raspberry Pis. I mean, you can see, like, the Pi Zero's sold

out. Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 gigs of RAM is totally sold out. 4 gigs of RAM is totally sold out. Some of these prices are kind of all over the place, too. And, you know, what's weird is the Raspberry Pi store just hit three years old a week ago, and now they're launching three pop-up stores where they'll be selling the Raspberry Pi 4. But I'm looking at the inventory tracker here, and it says none are available. So how did the store get the Raspberry Pis?

But you know what I'm thinking? It's a business opportunity here for us. I mean, you've got a few in your own back stock here. Right? We'll mark up the price, preload them with some desktop OS. We'll call it Jupyter OS. It'll make millions. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show.

My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, you two. Thanks for joining me today. We have something a lot of fun coming up, I guess. I don't know. I think so.

Linux has really mastered the purpose-built computer. And this week, we're going to chat with the creator of the $15 Linux box and really just kind of celebrate some of our favorite small little Linux computers. It's an area where Linux is the absolute powerhouse, and there is a new device in the works that looks so neat. And then we'll round out the show with some great emails our picks and more so before we go any further let's bring in our virtual lug hello mumble room hello hello everybody you know i gotta say 16 on super bowl sunday is not bad good work team am i allowed to say that well Well, you just did, so.

Yeah. I hope we don't get in trouble for that. But yeah, thank you guys for being here. You joined us on a Sunday when we're doing the show live. We start around noon Pacific. That's right. JBLive.tv. I was just trying to think, like, should I do all the math?

Should I try to go through the. You know, you thought about this in the past, and you actually set up a website that helps people figure that out for themselves. A website. Yeah. And it does the calculation. Robots or something. I don't know how it works.

Huh. We should set that up at like jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar or something like that. Yeah, we'll get Brent to do it after the show. I'm a little out of sorts because I did like a last minute slam and try on my Raspberry Pi 400. That's a technical term we use all the time at the show. I downloaded the just recently released, get ready for this, Ubuntu Unity Remix for the Raspberry Pi 4. Whoa.

2204 edition. Okay. Yeah. So it's basically a beta of 2204 and it's been rebuilt to run on the Pi, and it's the Unity remix. And you'll probably recall, Wes, that Unity actually started life as the Netbook edition. Ah, yes. I even tried that Netbook edition way back in the day. Hell yeah. Yeah, it was great. It was just wild on those tiny screens. It does make me curious, though. though i mean how did it perform well i have to say the potential is there but i don't think it's fully 3d accelerated i think it maybe is using some sort of lvl vm pipe type acceleration

and that kind of kills unity so it's not super smooth but it's as good as any other desktop for the most part that i have had on there. And there are aspects about Unity that hold up. I really like that when I hit the super key and the app launcher comes up, I really like that it doesn't take up the whole screen. Oh, yeah. It's just a classy looking window that comes up and it memorizes which ones you use the most often. Yeah.

The other thing is they make it super easy to have the menu, like your file edit view menu. They make it super easy to either have that be global up in the top bar or to have it attached to each application if you want it displayed or not. And what ends up happening with this 2204 remix is you get like the latest, some of the latest GNOME apps from like the 42 release

but they have like menu bars and they just kind of operate like they did maybe a couple of releases years ago yeah that's a trip it was a nice mix and i could see it really working well if it had a fully 3d accelerated experience like right now i hit the super key and the launcher is kind of a pop, pop, pop. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that great? But once it's up and going, you've got a nice mix of a really nostalgic retro Linux workflow that actually like the dock. That Unity dock is great.

I have to say. I mean, they really got that right. They did. From the get go. And you get that kind of stuff, but you get all the latest GNOME apps. I mean, I kind of liked it. You're getting weird with things, but I like what's happening. You know, the other thing that kind of kills the Raspberry Pi is I'm using USB storage.

Yeah, sure. It's a little bit better on the compute module if you can use eMMC, but the storage is still kind of a pain point for that stuff, too. But I liked it. I like it enough that I'm leaving it on there for now. And maybe I can experiment with the 3D acceleration. But there's a new way coming out for the Raspberry Pi, still in beta, to flash your storage. So like traditionally, I don't know how you do it, but traditionally I download an image. And I will use either Etcher or DD.

Even in the past, I used DD Rescue. Sure. And I'll write that image to a USB drive. Not a SD card, but like a USB 3 SSD. And then I boot my Pi with that. But I think most people write it to an SD card or something like that. Well, I mean, right, there was whole times where the USB boot didn't quite work without the shim anyway. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, it has gotten so much nicer. And now they have an official Raspberry Pi image flash, or they've had it for a while. But they're taking things to the next level. And if you go get a new beta bootloader, which you have to flash the firmware on your Raspberry Pi, but you go get this, and it's only, I think, for the 4 and 400. I've not tried this yet.

But you get that new firmware installed on the Raspberry Pi and you connect it to Ethernet in a monitor in power, and if you press and hold down shift and then spacebar at the prompt, that Raspberry Pi will now do a network boot. Oh, wow. Huge, dude.

That is a big change and I think something a lot of folks who deployed, you know, like yourself, who are deploying many Pis, that's killer. Huge. And you can then boot up to a network version of the Pi Imager app. It'll host that. Oh. And then sitting physically at the Raspberry Pi, you can choose the OS you want it to flash to

the storage, and you choose the storage medium. And then it sits there and flashes it and then reboots, and you're choose the OS you want it to flash to the storage, and you choose the storage medium. And then it sits there and flashes it and then reboots, and you're in the OS. And depending on the OS you choose, like if you choose their OS, you can set things like the Wi-Fi network to join to at reboot. You can set SSH, change the root password before it ever boots up.

That's really nice. I like, too, that maybe for someone, assuming this gets out of beta, that was a little easier to access. I like the idea that someone who hasn't purchased a pre-installed setup, you know, just like plugs in their storage medium, plugs in a, you know, gets their network going and then they get this kind of nice setup to pick an OS and move forward. Yeah, I know. And what I always like to do with these Raspberry Pi stories is do like a little thought experiment and say, okay, so that's interesting. But what does this mean five years down the road when the raspberry pie is even more powerful and it has

even better storage and it's still around this price point? You know, let's say it's around $60 on average. What does that mean for a school? You could have a lab full of these $60 computers and now you could have a TA go around and reload the OSs or you could probably even automate it. And so it's not just for guys like me who are doing home server stuff with our Raspberry Pis,

but I will think about like wide scale, like library deployments. Imagine a computer lab at a library with $60 computers. That doesn't take millions of dollars of funding to accomplish. And when you make it as easy as, you know, hold down shift and then press the space bar, like, that's pretty amazing. Like, that makes it accessible to even just the library staff if they just had a checklist

of steps to follow. And they could reload the machines. Super exciting. Yeah, it does seem like a nice amount of polish. Do we know if you can customize the Netboot stuff yet? I don't know the details. I should try it. So I think it's doing Netboot,

but I don't know if it's just like straight up TFTP and taking DHCP, or if it's only talking to the Raspberry Pi imager app. So that would be something I would have to try. Yeah, this should be fun to play with. Yeah, it could be really great. Could be the way I flash a lot of things going forward. So people out there have tried it, let us know at linuxonplug.com slash contact.

And then last week, we saw the Raspberry Pi folks release the 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS. We talked about a little bit in Linux Action News. I can't effing believe it took this long. So long. But, you know, it happened. I guess what, they had some reasons around, we don't want to confuse

the customers, but also just compatibility, I guess, you know, because some of the older boards aren't a 64-bit architecture and such, but all the new stuff, all the pies people are excited about and talking about. Yeah, you remember how, like, just a little while ago, they released a new version of their desktop

where they completely ported it to like a new version of GTK and didn't say anything to anybody really and there's just like surprise. I do remember that. They don't operate the way most people playing

the Linux ecosystem operate. No, that's a good point. And they don't move at the speed of open source. They move at the speed of the Raspberry Pi. Yeah, it's a different type of organization.

They have a slightly different type of agenda. I mean, I'm seriously like two years maybe into running Ubuntu 64-bit. Yeah. And they're just now getting their OS out. It's strange too, because like if you dig around in there now, it no longer shows up as a Raspberry Pi OS, but it shows up as Debian 11. It's got Linux 5.10. Oh, interesting. So, question. Do you suspect that by switching Raspberry Pi OS to 64-bit, the performance improved on the Raspberry Pi or was degraded?

Because you've got to remember, only a few even have 4 gigs of RAM or greater. Yeah. It's not like it's the most robust system ever. Brent, do you have a guess? Did the Raspberry Pi get faster or slower when they switched the OS to 64-bit? Well, my initial reaction is to say that surely they've run the 32-bit version forever and optimized it for, you know, years. So I would expect the code for the 64-bit stuff to be a little newer, maybe not optimized as much. So I would want to say the

32-bit one for now is a little bit faster. But I don't know. I hesitate with that because obviously 64-bit is probably going to be way better and there's a reason they're doing it. So mixed. I mean, it's just more numbers. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be faster. What do you think, Wes? It's just more numbers. Yeah, I mean, I think there could be, there are probably some cases where maybe the 32-bit version has an edge but i i would bet just with the way things have gone in the underlying kernel you know for the past few years that the 64-bit ends up being the winner well you guys are too clever so michael arbel did the

benchmarks ah very nice and uh you're right wes in some small instances the 32-bit version was faster at a few things like like Brent implied. It's probably because that's where it's been heavily optimized. But on average, Laravel said 48% faster on the 64-bit version. That's huge. Sort of makes it worse that they've waited

so long. I know. And it's because, you know, the 64-bit code I think is in better shape. I think there's some efficiencies that were gained. I don't know ARM very well, but I think there's like a difference, and I'm sure somebody's going to now give us a book, but I think there's a difference between like they went from ARM 7 to ARM 9, which brings in like a whole raft of efficiencies,

but I have no damn idea what I'm talking about. But I can imagine that plays a little bit in there. So, okay, cards on the table now, Brent. You told us before the show that you had a bit in there um so okay cards on the table now Brent you told us before the show that you had a bit of a raspberry pie confession that you wanted to tell us and we don't know what it is no idea we've been waiting to find out yeah I specifically didn't tell you because I don't think you're gonna believe me but here's my confession I have never run or booted or played with a Raspberry Pi, period. What?

Like, at all? Not even played with one? No, not at all. I've certainly held a lot and seen you guys playing with them all the time. You, like, lived in the RV. It ran the RV. Oh, I know what they're capable of. I certainly know what they're capable of.

But in terms of, like, in my own little home lab, you know, and diving in and seeing what I can get out of it. No, never done that. I don't even have one in my place, which seems like I shouldn't even, why am I even in this room with you guys talking about this? It doesn't make any sense, right? Well, I feel like this is just a tremendous opportunity for the show. We're going to have to capture Brent's first Raspberry Pi experience.

I'm going to think about this. Can we start him on the one just so he gets the whole thing? Oh my gosh. I have one sitting in my home. Is there still software for the one? You could probably get at least something running on there. I do feel like that'd be such a great way to appreciate the growth that this tiny little $35 computers had.

And Grant, you were about to talk about a $15 computer in a moment. Do you have any confessions, Wes, that you want to get about Raspberry Pi? I'm not running one now. I do. I have played with them. I have probably three or four sitting around my home in boxes that have been deployed before, but it's probably been, I don't know, two years

since I really had one that was actually running anything significant. I noticed, Wes, you have one sitting in your entrance at your place, just kind of on the shelf there. Yeah, that's the one. At one point I was trying to buy something, and I obviously bought this at like 2 in the morning or something, and bought the one and forgot to return it. So now it's just, yeah, now it's a display piece.

And now it has a point. It turns out it was an investment. You can sell it for a premium. You just didn't know. All right, so that's actually pretty understandable because really it took until the Pi 4 before I changed the way i view the raspberry pi everything until the 4 i just played with it was a toy to just see what can you do with something

this cheap and this small yeah hey look that's the same linux running over there cool why would i use this but you know as time has gone on and the pi has gotten better and better but also at the same time the network effect has grown. That's a huge factor for the Pi. There's so many great small board computers for Linux, but nothing has a network effect like the Pi. It almost creates a Macintosh effect for Linux because everybody is targeting a common piece of hardware. If I tell you I have a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 gigs of RAM. You know exactly what that is.

You know what video card it has. You know what network chip it has. You know what GPU it has. It's as close as we get. It's like a defragment to the Linux, micro Linux ecosystem. And you could see the advantage of that as they get better and better. What they've done now with the compute module. Oh, I meant to bring it into the studio just so we could look at it while we're talking about it,

is so awesome. It's such an impressive amount of compute on something that's so small. It's smaller than a credit card. It's smaller than the Raspberry Pi computer is normally. Yeah. And then I can put it on these boards and have all of this I.O., including PCI cards and all kinds of stuff. I'm testing one right now. It's dual gigabit NICs on a Pi compute module. boards that have all of this IO, including PCI cards and all kinds of stuff. I have,

I'm testing one right now. It's dual gigabit Nix on a Pi compute module. What? And it's on the PCI bus. It's really awesome. And so what I realized is, number one, most people that are going to use a Raspberry Pi are going to use it for something practical, a job, a project. Not many people are going to use it for something practical, a job, a project. Not many people are going to use it as a desktop, right? Not yet. Right.

Because, as you mentioned, the network effect, right? There's a lot of these pre-built images of stuff. You want to try some hardware. They're like, oh, just flash this thing. Now you've got a purpose-built Pi that's just running whatever you're trying to play with. And there's so many projects out there that are building self-hosted stuff that just has a Pi image ready to go. projects out there that are building self-hosted stuff that just has a pie image ready to go and that's it's maybe one of the most important things that happened in linux ever because it's so accessible the price point is so accessible and it works so well with linux both because linux is free but also because of its capabilities its scalability unique design. It's such a perfect marriage.

It both like showcases and makes, you know, like it's a great place for Linux to run, but it also kind of nicely hides the Linux bits, you know, because some of those other boards, they've gotten better,

but a lot of those are like, okay, we'll go figure out the what, how do you get the software? Do you have to build something? Do you have to have the right kernel that works with this? Or make sure you do this in Grub so that initializes this device correctly.

And it's like, what? I'm doing what? Okay. Which is interesting to me. But it's hard to learn on. And these days it's getting to the point now where a lot of distributions are just releasing an ARM ISO. Not an image, not a pre-built image, but an ISO that you just go grab and do the regular install. And it just works on the Raspberry Pi.

Between that, you know, USB boot support, this network boot, like these are becoming way closer to what we're used to thinking of as like an x86 PC. Exactly. And I think it makes, at least for most people, just such a perfect home server. And there's things out there

like Home Assistant that will turn it into an application platform where you have a marketplace of apps. They call it a marketplace. They're all free. Or projects like Umbral, which turn a Raspberry Pi into a Bitcoin node and has a bunch of really high quality apps. And these projects, they're like sound. They're Linux based.

They're using containers in a clever way to manage and update and secure and separate the applications. The user experience is getting unbelievably good UI-wise. And it's amazing what this little Pi can do. My Raspberry Pi at home, and I'll link to a couple episodes in Self-Hosted where I go into more detail, specifically Home Network under $200. And also I would check out Crouching Pie Hidden Server. Great titles. Where what I do is currently I've had more, but currently I have two Raspberry Pi fours running in my RV with some USB storage. That's all ButterFS. And Home Assistant's probably the number one application. And there's probably 300 different

devices feeding into Home Assistant in this RV. I mean, we're talking it's a lot. And then there's a series of automations that control lighting, heating, propane, things that are just sort of like outside, so like lights, noisemakers, these kinds of things, cameras, that kind of motion sensors, temperature sensors, humidity sensors, vibration sensors, all kinds of stuff, right? Then the damn thing also runs Plex. So while it's managing and automating all of that stuff. While it's running your life, it also.

It streams our Plex videos for us. The other one, the other Pi is managing cameras and also runs a Pi hole in a container and does DNS, DHCP, ad blocking for the network. And I run those on two pies. I can run that whole rig off of solar because they just sip the power doing all of that for me. And honestly, it would be a little faster. Home assistant, when I run it on faster hardware, I notice a difference. Yeah, sure.

Sometimes I compromise a little bit, but for me, the appliance nature of it, the low power use of it, and now the horsepower at the Pi 4, it's a pretty good compromise for me. It really hits a sweet spot. And I think most people would be surprised they don't need a huge x86 box in their house. Yeah, you can get away with a lot on those things.

And that's where I think maybe it would be interesting to see what Brent does, because Brent, I mean, you know, you're mobile, you don't always have full access to infrastructure. That's where these things can shine. Yeah, I've certainly been using laptops that I've found, you know, in the landfill to do very similar things. Surprising what people throw out. I've always kind of been like, oh, a Pi would be a perfect thing if only I had one, et cetera, et cetera. Chris, one thing I'm curious about is what do you hope the Pi 5 has that the 4 doesn't

have currently? I always would like more CPU power, more GPU power, and more RAM always, obviously. But for me, it's... 32 gig Pi. Oh, God. I'd use it. I would. Yeah. But for me, it's definitely at this point, disk IO. That'd be the killer. I'd love to not have my entire setup running on USB storage. It's better with the compute module now. And with the compute module, you can use built-in eMMC storage. It's only about 112 megabytes a second, so it's not the fastest storage. But that's pretty usable for your OS disk. And then I use the USB storage for like home or media content.

But I'd love to see some more options around that. SATA would be incredible. I'd love to see some more options around that. SATA would be incredible. I'd love to know what people have done to address that. I could see the compute module in a carrier board that has a PCI slot that I then put a SATA controller into. Because the beautiful thing is, is once you get that compute module into one of these carrier boards,

and there's several out there. Yeah. It's not what's compatible with the Raspberry Pi, really. It's more of, well, what works with Linux? Because it's just a Linux box. And so if there's a kernel driver for it, I can go get a SATA controller now, plug that in, and use it with a Raspberry Pi. It's so cool. I say it's kind of like the Macintosh-ing of Linux boxes, except for you also have all the upsides that it's Linux.

You can put any distro you want on there. You're not restricted to one OS. They don't lock it down to just Raspberry Pi OS. And you get the power of the Linux kernel, which is tremendously more powerful than macOS. It's just such a great solution for our community. And as it gets more powerful, I could really see people building laptops around these compute modules and you get something

like a framework laptop housing and then you put your own compute module into it. I'd love something like that. Right? It makes it super simple to get started. You just swap it up.

Yeah. A carrier board in a laptop with a replaceable compute module so every couple of years, even if you can only do it for a little while, but yeah,

you pop out the compute module, you pop in a new one. That's an attractive idea. I don't know how practical it while, but yeah, you pop out the compute module, you pop in a new one. That's an attractive idea. I don't know how practical it is, but boy, that would be cool. Oh, I totally love it. Linode.com slash unplugged. Is it unplugged?

Is that right? Is that right? We can check it for me real quick, Wes. Will you go there? It's linode.com slash unplugged. We got to make sure it's working. Maybe everybody should check it real quick. You probably should check it.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Hey, welcome Linux Unplugged listeners. So that's all you had to do to support the show? That's it. Oh. Well, you know, while you're there, you might want to sign up because you get $100 in 60-day credit on a new account.

And then you can really kick the tires with that. That's some horsepower, Wes, to really try it for a while and form a genuine opinion on it. And, you know, they got 11 data centers around the world. So when you become a traveling man again, you can pick a data center that's going to be near you regardless, really. Yeah, spin up a little personal VPN setup, get some local infrastructure to back up your photos while you're traveling.

You know, they take extra care to make sure that they remain VPN friendly. And like that is such a great use case for Nebula too, to connect you to between your machines or something like tail scale in there. Yeah. Oh man, it's so nice. And you know, Linode systems are crazy fast. Years ago, they became their own ISP. Like how do you even do that?

I mean, I know it's a thing companies do, but it's not something like Jupyter Broadcasting is doing anytime. No, right? I mean, that means you have to really know your stuff and have competent staff who can manage all that infrastructure. Yeah. Early on, we were using Lidnode pretty typically.

We were spinning up systems. We were really just doing traditional storage, and that worked really well. And the pricing's great. The performance is great. But then as time went on, we kind of started doing like, okay, well, this is going to be a compute system,

and the backend storage is actually going to be S3 object storage because they've got S3 compatible object storage. And we started taking advantage of their different setups, just experimented over time because it's really simple to experiment. And we really kind of, I kind of feel like we're Linode pros now, you know, and we just, we just go right to it. Everybody knows how to use it. It's, I mean, part of that is we just like to go root around in the dashboard and see what's new, see all the stuff that they can do for us. I mean, there's always something interesting to play with.

Yeah. I was talking to our friends at Linode just recently, and they're working on a new service that I will be able to tell you about soon. Ah, not yet. But there's just so much good stuff they're working on all the time. So what was it again?

It was linode.com slash unplugged? Slash unplugged. And you just did that real quick? Oh, in any browser, actually. Huh. Well, how about that? Even if you're not on Linux. We should all do that.

Maybe get $100 too. Sign up and go try them out. And thanks to Linode for sponsoring the program. It's linode.com slash unplugged. All right. Well, we were just waxing poetic

about our love for the Raspberry Pi, but really, I mean, between the modern Pis, between some of the stuff that's come out from the Pine folks, there's a huge amount of really neat, powerful, cheap hardware out there. I mean, at least as long as you're not trying to buy a GPU or anything. But this week, something new caught our attention. The portable, minimum viable computer. It's linux box for 15 and chris had a chance to sit down with the creator to find out how it works well brian thank you for coming on uh because you know when

i saw minimum viable computer that piqued my interest but then like like some kind of headline title ninja you managed to throw in there or a Linux box for $15. And my mind was just completely scrambled. I had to stop and read this. Headlines are an art. They are, man. You nailed it. The New York Post is absolutely awful, but the headlines. Right. So it was a calculated move, but I think you must have gotten a lot of interest because this showed up in so many different like feeds that I have and whatnot. I think the idea resonates with people, a $15 usable Linux box. I mean, yeah, it's not going to be amazing.

Tell me a little bit about your idea here. As far as the why, I can't answer that. But what is the cheapest thing? The minimal viable computer. So I wrote for Hackaday. I know everybody that's doing electronic projects. What is the minimal viable computer. So I wrote for Hackaday, I know everybody that's doing electronic projects. What is the minimal computer? You can run doom.

You can theoretically run doom on a bunch of lights. A smart bulb. Yeah. You want memory? Well, you can make that out of a five, five, five. Those are really computers like,

like, yeah, they compute, but I mean, nobody's actually doing work on an Apple two now. So for the entire superset of modern things that we do with computers, what is it? That's the question. And I came down with the idea.

OK, it runs Linux, just command line. You don't need it. You don't need a graphical interface. Right. It's minimum viable. Yeah, you can do all the computing that you usually do, except for graphics and audio and whatever and gaming, with just a command line. Okay. Well, you need a keyboard, too.

Okay. And let's see. You need a small screen. It doesn't need to be high resolution. There's plenty of screens there. You can just plug that into a spy port and it's fine. Okay, a battery. That's it. You know, put a USB port in there so you can plug in a wireless thing and you've got Wi-Fi, you've got Ethernet, you've got

a real keyboard. That's it. That's all you need. So that's the question. How do you design this? That's all you need. So that's the question. How do you design this? You need a Linux SOC. Yeah, all winners got one. It's like 70 cents. Yep.

Okay, let's play around with this. And then keyboard, which is the tripping point in any small computer thing. Well, I did something with like like silicone membrane keyboards like in a remote control as an aside how they make those they take the silicone sheet they cnc basically a waffle iron they run this silicone sheet through this waffle iron close it and it vulcanizes or something and you get buttons like a remote control. So I actually built one of those for an earlier project. And it's like, this is actually a workable keyboard for a handheld thing. And you don't need hundreds of tiny little parts like you wouldn't a

Blackberry keyboard. It's like, okay, well, you can run that off like some GPIOs off a low winter chip. It's got USB already. And you just get a spy display. And that's it.

That's the hardware. I mean, yeah, you're talking a 320 by 240 resolution on the display. You're talking, you know, 533 megahertz CPU. But again, if you're just doing the command line and using this to connect to devices or something like that, send out some pings. Yeah. You know what? You've got several versions of Linux to choose from, too. It may even be possible to run like, well, not mainline, but, you know, five point whatever that we're up to now. Yeah. And so you think you think, you know, you look at the material, 15 bucks, but then there's also time to put it together. So maybe it's, how much really do you think it would cost to actually build this?

Break down the bomb would be 15 bucks. That includes the battery. That includes basically all the parts. I don't know if we're doing nickel metal hydride or lithium yet, because if you do the math on that, it kind of balances out. In terms of price or capacity? In terms of price with lithium, you get way better capacity. And you're basically trading ease of shipping for vastly increased battery life. I see. Okay. So that's the entire bomb. Plus time to assemble.

Well, I would not assemble a thousand of these. So you're thinking a kit, maybe? Not a kit. I would have it assembled. I know a few people, a few board houses that would put this together. And then after the board is done, it's just popping two batteries and plugging in the screen and shoving it in a case. board is done. It's just popping two batteries and plugging in the screen and shoving it at a case.

So that might be $5 to $7 to assemble everything. All the parts, all the boards, you throw those through a machine and that adds like $5 to $7. So, okay, now we're up to 20 and you get the margin on that plus shipping. If you do it in quantity, it could be like 35, 45. That's that's low, but it is a realistic number for what that could be. I mean, it sounds like you've gotten a lot of people interested. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's there's still people pinging me on Twitter trying to throw money at me.

What do people, do they suggest what they would use it for? Or you must have heard some people what they think they would use it for. That's actually a very good question. No, I haven't. Oh, okay. Which is really kind of weird. I look at it and I say, this could be an awesome diagnostics machine. Like, you know, if you're a tech, you bring this on with you to a job site.

Or I look at this and think this could be a great way to do network diagnostics because the thing could just fits in your pocket. Yeah, I'd want several. Have them all around the house. What I kind of want to do is like the packaging is always a thing. Like, do you do a box? Do you just throw it in a bag? Whatever. I want to do like a blister pack.

There you go. Yeah. Like your go bag computer right like just something that's like emergency computer good to go sealed up ready for you whenever you need it no it's something it's something that you would find on on just on a wall in the electronics department of a kmart i can totally see it just like in the electronics section it's up there in some sort of packaging where it's on the hook you pick it up you pop some batteries in and now you've got yourself a linux computer for 30 bucks i love it so how how real is this going to be like is this uh is this happening it's uh i got some more boards coming from dhl it should be here well they just landed in la so they might be here tomorrow or the next day but But got to get the circuit done.

Then you go for funding, which I'm not sure if I'm going to do a crowdfunding campaign. Really? Yeah. Pre-sales? What are you thinking? My hope is that the next time you hear about this, they're for sale. Uh-huh. That would be refreshing.

That sounds hard, though. Oh, it's not hard. It's just expensive. Oh, okay. I would be refreshing. That sounds hard, though. Oh, it's not hard. It's just expensive. Oh, okay. I guess money solves many things, right? Yeah. But I mean, with the interest I've got, like, yeah, I can get rid of 5,000 of these pretty quick.

I bet. Yeah. That doesn't surprise me. Yeah. Okay. So you'll have to let me know so that we can put the word out. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Well, Brian, it's pretty rad. We'll have a link in the notes. So if people are interested in where this goes, is following you on Twitter one of the better places to stay in the loop? Yeah, just follow me on Twitter. All right. Well, we'll send people that way. Thanks, Brian. All right.

That was great. A couple of things to clean up around here before we get out of here. Thank you, members. This is your moment in the show where I say thank you. UnpluggedCore.com. You get some of our best bits in the live stream, or you can have a shorter, tighter, Joe-produced, ad-free version of the show. They're both good.

Yeah, the Joe one's probably a little better, though. Let's be honest. Certainly we sound better in it. It's you and me screwing around most of the time, or you and me and Brent screwing around in the pre-show and the post-show and chatting with the members, but that can be good too. A lot of things do come up. You can also support this show and all

the shows by going to jupiter.party. That's all over there. You get them in the feeds. Hey, we like your feedback, your ideas. We're trying to read them more and more, trying to read every single message, so send them in. LinuxUnplugged.com slash contact. Also, the love plug goes on Sunday before the show and Tuesdays when the show used to be could.

I mean, really, just stop in any time. Check it, you know? Get the details at Linuxunplugged.com slash mumble. And for those of you who have been supporting the show with the value for value option in the new podcast apps at newpodcastapps.com, we're going to do a live stream soon where we read your boosts. So if you want to support the show and send us a message,

you can do with the new value for value feature. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go get a new podcast app that supports value at newpodcastapps.com. Well, we got some great feedback this week. Thank you, everyone. Some was about rats. Oh, boy. Thanks for that.

And mostly about Ubuntu, which we talked in depth about. Linux unplugged episode number 444. Jimmy wrote in and said, the Linux desktop is just one part of what makes Ubuntu, but it's solid enough it doesn't need to be so edgy to attract users. My guess is that Ubuntu realized this and puts focused where demand is strong and where it can better allocate its development resources. That matches up with my own anecdotes working for a university where I see Ubuntu excelling in research, robotics, AI, machine learning,

and in my own world of systems and networking engineer, where a lot of FOSS projects have strong support for Ubuntu. Just look at Ubuntu's Twitter feed to get a sense of what they're trying to market. And so I did have a look at their Twitter feed and guys, it's true. Post number one was mentioned something about FIPS compliant Ubuntu servers. Number two was like infrastructure automation with a secure on-premises OpenStack cloud. Why Ubuntu's the leading choice to replace CentOS

for Finserve? So I think he's sort of suggesting that maybe we missed a little slice of it. What do you think? I don't think what he's saying

takes away from what we were saying. I think it supports. I think we agree with it. Yeah. I think that's an accurate assessment but more of that is

I guess the one part is how much they should or want to be or we want them to be focusing on the desktop, right? He's basically saying, oh, there's all this other stuff they're doing. And we're saying, well, yeah, there's all this other stuff they're doing. Feels like they've taken their eye off the desktop. Right, and here's the results. Whether or not you care about that, that's where I think it comes down to opinion. Well, and I think the other thing that I walked away from that episode thinking more about it and I do have the

sense that Canonical is doing something about it. Like, documentation, investing in documentation is a very public-facing thing. And it's a very, I think it supports the industries that just listed off. Well, and especially for something that's, you know, such a dominant product at the moment and where people are, you know,

you already have some of that feeling of like, oh, when I search for a problem on Linux, I'm going to get like Ubuntu help and answers for it. And so the docs are also really good. Yeah. And this, I think this focus is paying off dividends in some ways too. Like they have some of the best Raspberry Pi support of the distros, of the desktop distros out there. You know,

it made that Ubuntu Unity great because they've worked on that. They've made that a great experience. I walked away from the episode hoping that maybe we're seeing some signs, though, that they're also going to expand that focus to include making the desktop a little more compelling. I don't know, but that's my sense of it.

There's, like, something in the works. But, yeah, I think that was actually a very astute analysis, Jimmy. I suppose there is also the element of, you know, we see the wider range of what's out there as well. So if you just, for those folks that Ubuntu works and you stick with it, I mean, I don't think what we were trying to say is taking away from that it's not a good experience or like meets those use cases. It's just that there's a lot of other interesting things going on. Both Dave and Mike wrote in with similar ideas that maybe might be interesting to us.

Mike wrote in with similar ideas that maybe might be interesting to us. Dave writes, the enthusiast base seems to want something akin to the Windows Insider program or Arch for Ubuntu, perhaps. The latest features as fast as possible. I know I want that, but I also know that waiting six months for an interim release of Ubuntu is really what I need. And so Mike wrote something similar. need. And so Mike wrote something similar. He just says, maybe canonical spin-offs of Fedora-like versions of Ubuntu with newer stuff, perhaps an Ubuntu enterprise and Ubuntu desktop

to come down the road. Well, you kind of have that, right? You have the interim releases and then you have the LTS releases. And Dave touches on it too. People like really fresh stuff. There have been different goes at like rolling Ubuntu based on the dailies. Oh, yeah. but they don't really seem to last those

projects unless i'm wrong i think they've all kind of faded away but you could in theory go get the latest dev builds and just install all the updates from do that and then write in uh and let us know how it goes i'll tell you it can't be any worse than rawhide oh every time i try rawhide it just blows up in my face. What are the chances, right? What are the chances? I'm sure it works great for everybody else. And for another last quick one, Advait wrote in and said,

I'm a newbie using Ubuntu 21.10, and it's great. It does everything I want my OS to do. I can easily set up my workflows just the way I want. What's not to love? The Ubuntu communities are great. I get lots of support when I need it. And unless I'm wrong, Ubuntu has the widest range of quality repos. That's very important to me. So clearly a lot of people are really happy. I think what I got out of the feedback mostly was that some of what we've noticed Ubuntu doing in the last, I don't know, several years, we could explain

in words. And some of it was just kind of this feeling that Ubuntu's changing a little bit. Was that the feeling you guys got? No, I mean, I think I could quantify it pretty easily. I mean, we saw them recently slip behind in the GNOME desktop in GTK when, you know, the whole thing about going back to GNOME seemed like they were going to be shipping upstream GNOME. And I know they had issues getting the theme ready or the community did. And so that was the reason we were given it.

There was, he wasn't ready for the Ubuntu experience, but that's just another way of saying they didn't have enough engineering time. And I think we've also seen it just in the way recently the community has begun sort of talking about everything but Ubuntu. I think that was the big red flag for me is more and more Ubuntu isn't even a suggestion for a distro for people to run. And I can't believe that we have seen a shift to Arch-based distros getting recommended to new users. I, you know, a year and a half ago sat here and said, nobody's doing that. And then here we are, people are doing it. And it's unbelievable how fast things have shifted in the last two years. It seems to be an accelerating situation.

But also, it seems the canonicals putting their foot on the pedal a little more. I also do want to acknowledge, yeah, it works great still. We have three Ubuntu systems in this room. They work great. Like, I acknowledge that. Yeah, I run Kubuntu every day on my system as well. And I got to say, for the most part, it runs great. So we are huge fans, I think. Yeah, I think it's more about the discontent you're seeing

around snaps and the way that's been deployed. It's more about the adoption stats you're seeing, like for the Linux gamers that we saw on the Steam stats and on the Proton stats that clearly show that Arch-based distros are eating away at Ubuntu's market share at a just trend line that is continuing to only go in one direction. And then you also see it in our T stats when people voted Ubuntu struggled to be represented in any category where other distributions like Fedora dominated

pretty strongly and that's a huge flip for our community I can't really overstate that point this show was even for a time possibly described as anti-Fedora I mean that's kind of putting it harsh but you know early on it was very critical of things that I felt weren't for a time possibly described as anti-Fedora. I mean, that's kind of putting it harsh. But, you know, early on, I was very critical of things that I felt weren't fully baked.

But my opinion was not static. I mean, I changed it as the distribution changed. And I think it's reflected in the community overall. And I think when you look at who is driving the most important initiatives in the Linux desktop specifically from a development standpoint a lot of that not all of it but a lot of it's coming from Red Hat

especially lately yeah the past year and a half or whatever I mean you know we saw a lot of ass kicking when Canonical announced they were switching over to Gnome and then all of a sudden boom Ninja Patch boom Ninja Patch boom Ninja Patch it seems like that period of low hanging fruit or whatever you want to call it has passed. And that's been very beneficial.

It's really helped GNOME be a much better project. Yeah, definitely. But when you're looking at things like Pipewire or other significant innovations that are enabling things like NVIDIA to use Wayland or HDR support or high resolution, high frame rate support. Like that stuff's coming either from Collabra or from Red Hat or, you know, from a few other outlets, but Canonical's name isn't on there a lot. Yeah, that's it, right?

Like there are exciting developments in the Linux desktop experience and space. And it feels like maybe Canonical's not necessarily keeping up, you know, so it's not saying an absolute thing. It's just like, we're paying attention to rates of change here and noticing Ubuntu seems to be slowing down a bit. Right. But if we shift the conversation to, okay, let's look at the Raspberry Pi.

Well, I would say, well, Fedora is catching up to where Ubuntu is on the Raspberry Pi. Right. Or just depending on your focus. And that is, I think, what we were noting because it used to be such a strong player in that, in that space. There are, as you say, there are things right. Like the, the hiring about, about games, the documentation. I know people have mixed opinions, but I honestly think that their interesting investment in

Flutter is at least a sign of them mixing things up and pursuing a direction. So there's at least some thought involved. Yeah. I feel like that's a mixed bag example though, because it doesn't really benefit anyone else. Like, if they were, like, if they came out and said, we're rewriting our installer, and we're doing the whole thing in GTK4, it's going to be a Wayland native installer,

how exciting would that be for us? That'd be very exciting. And I guess, though, I'm excited about the prospect of them being invested in making Flutter a better experience. Because I don't see, I guess I feel like there might be more future interesting apps in that way than on the GTK4 side. I would agree with you if a few years down the road we start seeing a lot of must-have apps that are Flutter-based. Yeah, that's fair. And if the investments Canonical made in Flutter make it a better experience on Linux desktop,

then I completely agree with you. But if we don't see that future, and it's just a few Canonical apps that are Flutter-based, nothing beyond the Ubuntu experience has been gained. And the problem is that we can look back now at a history of Canonical, and we can see they don't stick with everything forever. This is true.

They have reasons, reasonable reasons. But it means that when an innovation is limited to their ecosystem, it's also limited to the lifetime that Canonical wishes to invest into it. And that has proved long term not to be the best thing for me to invest into. You know what I'm saying? Like kind of one of the reasons why I've kind of given in and everything's a flat pack now, even on Ubuntu systems. Everything's a flat pack now. But I guess that to me speaks of a longer term issue.

That's been the story of Canonical over the past decade, not just the past one and a half years. So I guess I'm saying there's a return in that activity, but I think maybe the window where they were really on board with Gnome again, like that was more the exception perhaps. Maybe. I see what you're saying there.

And I could still see Flutter being a pretty smart investment on their standpoint because Google is obviously heavily invested in that. But you're right. It is kind of a long card. Who knows? It could very well end up being we tried two trial apps and then abandoned them. Yeah, maybe. Or they only ever ship on Ubuntu for as long as they're choosing to ship them. But anyways, we love the conversation. Thanks for getting us thinking.

Linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Send them in for next week. This is a pick out there for a lot of the mom and dads or people that are not mom and dads, I guess. But this is a way to get Minecraft easily working on Linux. And I say mom and dads because this is, well, Dylan's actually been taking this over from me. It's kind of proud, but this has been my job, right? Dad helps them, helps all the kids get Minecraft working on their computers. And one

of the problems with Minecraft is there is this whole world of mods and terms. And so your kid starts because their friends have them. So your kid starts asking you and you're like, I don't even know what you're talking about. This app helps manage all of that for you. And it's a brand new one, because some of the other ones have begun to fade. It's got kind of a, it's got not a great name. It's called RPM Launcher. Yeah, I mean, you know what I thought this was going to be.

Yeah, me too, actually. But no, it's a better Minecraft launcher that supports the multiple platforms, like if you need certain mods and mod packs with certain versions of whatever, they have all these names. It'll grab all that stuff for you. It'll get the right version of Java. It'll get the right version of Minecraft. It supports your Mojang or Xbox account if you already converted it.

Oh, dang, wow. It's all in. And it's also available as a flat pack. So it's pretty easy to get set up on just about any freaking Linux box you want. And you know what else? Did you notice? I just did.

All right, tell the people. It's written in Flutter. You see how it all gets tied together? It sure does. There you go. Isn't that great? And so as a result, it is also available as an app image,

a portable binary. It's in the AUR, and it's available for Windows and Mac and Snaps. Wow. You can get this thing anywhere. That's great. So that is pretty nice. So there you go.

For any of you out there that are struggling with Minecraft or even like for me, I went deep and it turns out that time paid off. You're like a certified Minecraft administrator now? Hey man, I can do mods. I can even help modify textures. Whoa. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you know what? I've converted multiple Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts now because you gotta. They're like forcing you to do it. Let me tell you what. But the one thing that kind of sucks that died off is there was

a launcher for Minecraft's Bedrock, which is like the Windows only. Right, the newer one that makes something. And they made it available for Android. So some brilliant person out there made this whole Android VM wrapper that downloads, you have to pay for it, because it's legit, but if you have it, it downloads the Minecraft launcher

and runs it in an Android VM totally transparently. Wow. But the guy burned out, or they burned out. So if anybody knows of a way to do that, let us know at linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Because that's the one thing that's missing now. Next level, yeah. And he's like, Dad, is it okay if I boot into Windows to play Minecraft Bedrock?

My friends are, you know that story? My friends are doing it. They're all playing Bedrock tonight. I'm like, oh, all right. It's hard out there. It's hard out there. Hey, if you want more show, if you're missing some of the news, if you're in the industry, go to linuxactionctionNews.com Wes and I are breaking down all the major stories

In a concise, easy to consume way We're not trying to get any hype No click baiting Just what you need to know in the world of Linux and open source Every single week at LinuxActionNews.com Yeah you're busy, we get it We'll break things down for you We got you

As for this show, we'll be back on Sunday at noon Pacific. You can join us then or get it anytime you like at linuxunplugged.com slash subscribe. Links at linuxunplugged.com slash 445. And we'll see you right back here next Sunday. Thank you. All right, let's go boat. Let's go pick a title here for this show. JBTitles.com. Hey, so what do you guys think about Discord and open source? I know this is a third rail conversation we've touched on before, but it's come up again recently in our community that perhaps we should consider consolidating our chat platforms.

And maybe Telegram isn't the right platform anymore. And something like Discord that has individual channels is. And the nice thing about Discord is we could also pretty easily bridge it to our matrix system. Just a couple of rooms like the general chat. It's usually a pretty good experience. I have heard that is one of the better bridges. I've not tried it myself. So a reminder, Chris, that Discord is breaking bridges.

Oh, really? What? We discussed this before. I completely forgot. Well, that's so there you go. You know, this is the problem is there's a lot of there's a lot of community pressure to use discord. But then these kinds of things happen. It's like how many times do we have to go through the lesson of a hosted platform that's not run by us always inevitably bites us in the butt. you're not allowed to interact or interface with the Discord system through not a Discord client. Man.

Yeah. So it's always been a little bit of a... Gray area or looking the other way. Yeah. They basically broke that by saying, this API is going away in the beginning of April. All of your bridges are going to, all your bots are going to break. I'm surprised to see Discord still going so strong in the open source community. It really it does seem like it's gained picked up a lot of traction is continuing to pick up traction.

It depends on the subculture, really. Like if they're if they're closer oriented towards gamers and entertainment and things like that, then, yeah, they tend to use Discord. But outside of that space, I've generally been seeing a shift towards using Matrix. Definitely. Seen more of that. Yep. It's frustrating how, I mean, this is a problem in many things, right? Like so many open source projects, at least for a while, that seems to be getting a little better by like using Slack,

for instance, and having these closed effects. It's the network effect, right? Because you're already in Slack or you're already in Discord. Yeah. So you can just join one more so easily. But boy, for the outsiders, it's not a great experience. I know I've seen a couple, like I wanted to watch someone who's doing a live podcast recording, but they're only streaming on Discord.

It's like, I'm not signing in for that. Same thing, same thing. I went, eh, nah, nah, nah, thanks. Yeah, I just want it on a webpage. Discord has a lot of specific features that make it nice for content creators, especially around the pivot streaming feature that allows them to do things like attach tooling to do,

you know, when they do live streams to their YouTube or Twitch or even inside of discord, they can do the reaction stuff. They can trigger animations based on speech and other reacts, reaction type stuff. It's they're good too, about like integrating with things like Patreon and doing perks.

Yeah. I don't really have any complaints about the actual once you're in there experience. There is an open source project that you can put on a webpage where you load the webpage and you can just start chatting. Something Wes and I have been talking about off air about something playing with Soon and then it's really going to be what do we do with the IRC room after that? Well, the IRC room, if we have people who want our, you know, diehard IRC people, if you were to move that to, you know, Libera chat or somewhere else, then we can bridge that. And so it wouldn't matter if they're on IRC or if they're on Matrix.

It's for people who like to mess with computers.