LINUX Unplugged - 508: The Worst Distro Ever

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Two listeners race to set up a web server on Suicide Linux. One slip-up and it's all gone. Who will survive?

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, gentlemen. Well, coming up on this week's episode, how fast could you build a web server and get it online from an absolutely bare bones,

minimal Linux install? Well, we're going to find out this week, but there is just one big catch. We're going to use a distribution that will self-destruct when you make a single typo, one little typo, and you lose everything.

And we'll share some stories from our recent linux spring meetup and we're going to round out the show with some great boosts and all the other things like the feedbacks and a lot more so let's say good morning to our friends at tailscale tailscale.com it's a mesh vpn protected by wire guard now up to 100 devices for free it's incredible they just recently expanded the free program better than than ever. We love it. Go try it out. And then if you get a chance, tell them the Linux Unplugged program

sent you at tailscale.com. And now, before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Good morning, Mumble Room. Hello.

Good evening, guys. How are you, guys? Aloha. Hello. That's a showing. It is great, isn't it? Impressive. It's really nice thank you everybody

for being here our mumble room is open during the live show which is at noon pacific 3pm eastern jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar

for your local time zone so we're all back and together it's only been a few hours since we were hanging out we were at the Boston Harbor

in Olympia Washington yes it's the Boston Harbor in Olympia, Washington. Yes, it's the Boston Harbor in Olympia, Washington. But a gem of a place, a real local gem. Local listener Olympia Mike suggested the venue to us and said it's one of his favorite unknown little venues. That wasn't totally unknown. No.

It was enough room for sure. And right down on the water on what has so far been our most beautiful day in the Pacific Northwest this year. Timing couldn't have been better, really. We haven't had a day this nice since last summer. It's 78 degrees, clear skies, and we were on a covered deck on the water. Just what a location, right? And then 30 feet away, brews on tap, brews in can, and your standard snack-type foods like your fish and chips and your burgers and whatnot. Ice cream cones.

Lots of four-leggeds running around, too. And the doggos were welcome, too. And the beach and the mountains in the view. Yeah, and the Olympics were in the distance. Sailboats. I don't think you could have like designed a better location one of our more scenic meetups today definitely i would do this location again i we must have had more than 30 ish we had 32 on the meetup but at one point we basically took over the whole the

whole deck uh i tell you was a lot of fun was being in line chatting with folks you know getting a getting a beer getting some fish and chips and And just having Levi, my dog, run by. Hey, that's my dog. Just running by. That's so great. You know, because it's just a super dog-friendly place. And the owner's dogs are there doing the same thing. And some listeners brought their dogs, which is great. It's now the second time I've got to meet some of these dogs, which is so funny.

Yeah, I know. We're like just a big family now. Human friends, animal friends. So on our way down to olympia brent hadia and myself went down pretty early in the morning and before we got to the meetup we met up with olympia mike for his birthday and we got some pizza at vick's pizzeria and brent said that he got one of his best pizzas of all time well i didn't say all time i said this year well okay but pretty high on the all-time ranking.

I put it there. Wow. I mean, what do you call it? You got a list? Well, I, yeah. Next episode, produce that list. I mean, I added the pizzeria to my Olympia list, which I created on the spot because I didn't have an Olympia list, but now I do.

I see. You know, that's the important stuff in life. You're saying Vix is putting Olympia on the map. At least on my map. Yeah. Made him, made him create a node. That's a big deal, right?

So we got there and got some pizza in our system. We drove around to show Brent the Capitol. Had to show him the fancy buildings.

Oh, excellent. You know, give him a real sense. I'm sad I missed that. Some Washington flavor. Listener Mike also toured me around and

I got to spot his new property, which is actually really close to the venue that we were at and right near the water. And I see the game he's playing. Maybe,

maybe a future lady juice parking spot too. They're building this piece of property up from, from scratch, right near down the water, beautiful little place for him and his family. When they get all done, it's going to be really special. It's pretty neat.

Yeah. I got, I got to just hook my peepers on it for like a few seconds as we drove by, but I took a lot of it in. I am good at scanning like parking and camping spots that's like so i just take the whole thing and then i analyze it you know really hook my peepers into it and then just process it so that was nice though it's nice to do all that and we got when we got to the meetup it was perfect people started showing up right away We even got there a little early and people start showing up. Just getting to reconnect with some people that we met at the last meetup.

It was great to chat with listener Paul. He and I are scheming for some really tasty pulled pork tacos at LinuxFest Northwest. I like these plans. Yeah, he's going to bring, he's going to, and this thing's like 300 pounds. He's going to bring his big green egg. Wow. The night before. And I'm going to bring jupes up there to act as like,

you know, operational support. And we're going to get this pork cooking. So by the time people show up on Saturday, it has been slow cooked and ready to go. I love how like neither of us have put our talks into Linux Festival with us yet, but we've got the food figured out. Priorities, Brent.

I'm still planning a food plan. It's great. Yeah, so that's really nice. It was nice to catch up with folks like that. Another one, you know, so many people to talk with, but just a personal, really kind of incredible standout moment was privately for a couple of weeks, we've been expanding our garden at home.

And recently I came to the realization that based on the way we water now, which is, you know, you stand out through the hose and your water stuff. Right. We could be looking at hundreds of dollars a month in water bills because I decided to put a little gallon meter on the hose and I went and watered the garden and it was like 30 gallons of water in like five or 10 minutes. I was, I just thought, wow, when we multiply this, this is going to get ridiculous. I think you also didn't consider how much time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't mind doing a little bit out in the morning or something, but yeah. So you're not, so you, okay. You've got got we know about jb of course but you're also running a small repair car repair business yeah and i guess a farm i'm just repairing our stuff the jb crew stuff the fleet yeah the fleet basically

the farm thing is just an opportunity that came up because some family land was available and uh they were like well we're not going to sell it if you want to farm on it. And it's connected to the piece of property that we're on now. So it's just right there. Okay. Yeah. That's hard to turn down. Yeah. And so I got so caught up in the opportunity that I didn't even think about the watering aspect of it. And so then I started thinking, well, maybe I could build like something that's home assistant controlled. So if anybody has any working like water sensors for dryness of the soil and smart things that turn the faucet on and off please let me know because i i do want to build out some sort of automated system that i can

track with home assistant a listener dominic and his brother own a business called the sprinkler geeks no way and i chatted with him and i knew about his business but it just wasn't at the forefront of my mind i chatted with him at the meetup we had for LEP 500 and he showed up for the spring meetup and we just started getting into it right away because he's, you know, what an opportunity to have somebody who's a wealth of knowledge on the subject. And he started giving me ideas for something I've been quietly freaking out about because I thought our garden plans were doomed. I thought, you know, we had all these big plans and they're dead on arrival, essentially. Like some other great value for value legends in our community out there. Dominic has offered to come up to Joops this Friday, this coming Friday, and help us figure out and deploy a water saving irrigation system.

Just like amazing. And Brent and I are going to be there. We're going to cook up a storm. Yeah, he's a vegetarian, I believe, maybe even a vegan. And I think we're going to take over the grill. It's your wheelhouse. So he's going to be taken care of a vegan and i think we're gonna take over the grill it's your wheelhouse so he's gonna be taken care of i know that oh oh unbelievable kind of uh value for value opportunity because it's not like it's it's not even something you could really pay for i couldn't you know it's just it's uh huge relief it was like this huge weight had been lifting like

oh we're not gonna have to cancel all these plans. Right. You know, I just get reminded every single meetup, no matter if it's on this continent or that other one I was on recently, that we have listeners who are experts in all sorts of things. And I'm always amazed at every meetup to learn what people are really passionate about. And sometimes they even have the opportunity to help us out with some of these things. It's great. It's yeah. Thank you, everyone. Wes, you ended up giving Sir L, Sir Lurks a lot, a ride home. It was pretty cool. A frequent booster here on the show and community member. And he made the long journey to make the meetup and he just kind of just put faith in the community that he would be able to get to the meetup and make it home. That's pretty cool. And, uh, he hung, he hung out with us, stuck around till the very end. And so as we're packing up,

we're like, well, okay, we got to get you home now. And Wes is like, I'll do it. Yeah, of course.

I mean, you make a, you make a kind of journey like that. That's the least we can do. Yeah. It was, it was pretty neat to see everybody. There's so many people really to mention,

but I thought maybe we'd zoom out. And I think you guys probably noticed some of these trends that I noted in the, in the doc. Uh, there's Nick's OS t-shirts there and even, even more so a lot of Nick's OS talk. A lot of people talking about Nick's now. Also,

did you guys notice that like, if it wasn't Nick's, it was pretty much like pop or Debian was another like super common one. I don't know that I heard too much Debbie and myself, but pop for sure floating around. Yeah. I heard a lot of, I heard a lot of pop for friends and family too much Debian myself, but Pop for sure floating around. Yeah, I heard a lot of Pop for friends and family and Debian for myself,

if not something else. And some Arch, and people say it defensively now, like, oh, I know, I'm still using Arch. Yeah. Like, wow. I know, I was surprised.

Like, it's crazy how at these meetups we can take the temperature of the Linux enthusiasts and see what it's like out there. You know, also, I have to give a shout out to a few individuals who were just really brutally honest with me

that they had to get over really crippling social anxiety to make it to the trip. And they made it to the meetup. They did it. You know, they conquered that. It was wonderful to have them. One individual, I won't share their name, but I thought it was a really touching story.

They shared with me that they almost met us at LinuxFest one year and they went out to lunch where we were all headed because we kind of announced ahead of time and went back to go get their wallet because they didn't take cards there and we all showed up

as that individual was leaving and when they got in their car, they couldn't get the courage to go back in and say hi to us again. And so I think they kind of regretted it for years because it's been a few years. And so they made it good on this meetup and showed up. That got over that, which is not an easy thing to do. Because I think if I was on their side, I would have a hard time doing that. I mean, yeah, that can be super scary.

A bunch of people you've never met before. You don't really know anything about them. But I know I've been consistently surprised both how welcoming and friendly the JB audiences in general, and just how quick having that common, I mean the show content, Linux, open source,

you'll find something to talk about pretty quick. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there right now to get a hundred dollars and 60 day credit on a new account. And it's a great way to support the show while you are checking out fast, reliable cloud hosting with the best support in the business. They got real humans all day, every day, 365 y'all. I mean, it's really nice when you get stuck. And of course the performance is remarkable and the pricing 30 to 50% cheaper than the hyperscalers out there that have really rigid platforms with rigid rules,

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you can make that claim if you're in this, you must have some technical background. It's a nice, easy read. It's an ebook you can download from Linode. No signup required, no email address required. You can just download the ebook and it's from 451 Research and they just give simple analogies to understand the role of containers and Kubernetes in cloud infrastructure. That can be really great for other members of your team or maybe friends that are trying to learn too. But support the show by starting at linode.com slash unplugged. That gets you the $100. It's a way of supporting the show.

And with that $100, you can really kick the tires. You can go build something. You can go learn something. You can try it for yourself while you're supporting the show and see why we love it so much and why so many in our community keep signing up for Linode. Try it out today and get that $100 at linode.com slash unplugged. That's linode.com slash unplugged. Well, not only did we do a meetup, but we also did a bit of a challenge this time at the meetup.

Well, not only did we do a meetup, but we also did a bit of a challenge this time at the meetup. And this is a bit of an experience that we wanted to try. I think a few days before the meetup, we weren't sure if this was going to work. I think a few minutes before we did it, we weren't sure if it was going to work. Wes hustled to get it all up and running. And Chris, you hustled to like, I don't know, figure out how it was going to work. Hey, I sacrificed my personal laptops for this. Laptops, several.

It's true. But Wes had to pay the ultimate price, quite literally, because there was no cell signal that we could use and we needed internet connection. So Wes, even though he probably has an account, had to buy like the day's worth of Xfinity Wi-Fi access. Hey, I've got the whole month now, so. Okay. So we could tether off his phone to complete the challenge.

Which, I mean, hey, props to Giraffine OS and easy tethering and it all worked. Many wins. Yeah. Good point. Good old Giraffine pulling through. So this is a particularly great and fun kind of challenge, but we do want to make a disclaimer before we get into it that we're not insensitive about this particular topic. It is a tricky one to talk about because it involves using the term suicide a lot because the distribution we're talking about today is suicide linux and it is designed to be pretty brutal and the reason it's called that besides to get attention is because when you make any mistakes at all the entire entire system RMRFs itself and completely self-implodes. And so it

just essentially goes kamikaze when you make a mistake. And you can go find Suicide Linux in the show notes. We'll have a link to the distro itself, or you can use the tool we were using for this challenge, which puts it inside a Docker container. So I brought my Dev1 and my ThinkPad X1 with Docker setup. And inside there, we spun up the Suicide Linux container. And Wes, you kind of looked around at like the viability of this. I think you kind of got an idea of the basic setup there.

So did we do anything to the base Suicide Linux image or was it completely stocked? No, just stock. All we did was set up a little quick script to launch it and forward a port. So we just had a standardized setup and it'd be easy for when a contestant did, you know, eventually break everything, you could just start from the beginning again. And we laid a few ground rules out. We said, okay, you can blow your system up as many times as you want. The goal is to be the first person to get the Jupiter Broadcasting Hugo website built and running locally inside the container, inside that self-destructing container. Whoever gets our Hugo site up and running first wins 100,000 Satoshis.

They get basically a baller boost. And we asked for some volunteers and two brave souls stepped up olympia mike who helped organize this and it was his birthday and listener sean and we set them off and got them started to kind of help them feel out things we we gave them a little tour of everything gave them a little bit of the outline of the rules and then we began. Here they go! Let's do this! Alright, boys. Good luck. There's no rules other than just get there first. Can we break your computer?

Don't do not wreck my local install, dude. That's my personal laptop, bro. Both of them. But otherwise, outside of that, go crazy. Alright, are you ready, Brent? In three, in two begin suicide linux installed okay i love that it says warning suicide linux installed and of course like you know mike and sean got down to it immediately because whoever wins gets 100,000 sats. And listener Sean gets bit by the suicide Linux first.

The system is weird. I can't even LS on root. What? Like on, like, slash. I don't know where I'm supposed to be. If LS is failing, you may have triggered suicide. Oh, already? Because it will just silently

RMRF everything. The very first command I typed is darkerps-a to see if I had Docker and Docker enabled. So actually everything after that. That's why nothing has worked so far. I've been screwed from the beginning. So Wes, how does he get a fresh system mode? I just need to go out and back in.

Just control D, exit, whatever, and then rerun go.sh. Okay. Try number two. Docker is not installed. Chris, you're dying over here. This is so great. I love the destructive aspect of this. This makes it so much fun. One of my favorite parts was it's not always immediately

obvious when it's self-destructed. So sometimes they're working in futility there for a bit. And so Wes created this little go.sh, but it's a bare min Linux environment. Wes, how are they doing? I saw you poking over some shoulders there. Well, it's a really barren environment. So a lot of the tools you think you have, you don't actually have.

Oh, really? I didn't realize that. And you tested this. Is this actually possible? Oh, it's possible, all right. It's just annoyingly difficult. So what is in this? It's a Debian bullseye? Yeah, it's actually pretty standard. It's a Debian bullseye Docker image with a modified Bash RC setup.

So that's what implements the logic that if you make a mistake, it kind of silently does an RMRF no preserve route in the background. I was toying with the idea of making it a little more verbose. So you'd see all the files it's deleting, scrolling past your system, which is a bit more dramatic. But I kind of like the way it ended up where you had to be paying attention to notice that you actually worked things. Yeah. Yeah, it could be a bit. That was really funny.

And you could see like the pressure starts to build for these guys, because if you lose the system, you have to start all over again. And just like that on the back of your mind while you're trying to basically get NGINX and Hugo going and all of that, it provided some serious pressure. okay do i just pull this down wherever or do i need to go home i feel like i'm gonna screw up if i just go oh no oh no i blew it up i blew it up that was terrible oh i did i mistyped clear that's the worst mistake ever that's pretty great what was a lot of fun about this is we probably couldn't have picked two better contestants because olympia mike went off on the path of get the stabian system up and going install things the traditional way use the local tooling and sean went the route of completely put all that to the side and build a nick system and get all of this up and going with nicks as fast as possible inside debian two totally

different routes and so sean a lot of his work was like a ton of investment up front and then deploy and in theory he'd be there huzzah what's going on over here? I am simultaneously installing Nix and looking for Hugo. Oh, there's no Hugo anywhere in the Nix packages. We're doing it, we're doing it. That's not true, it's right here. But there's no options here. But I have the derivation, so I'm just going to figure it out myself.

Do you feel like the pressure of being here slows you down like no i'm like a really anti-competitive person so i like kind of like not winning which is not exactly true but not exactly false i don't know i'm i'm sorry so then we checked in with listener mike to see how the traditional route was going mike what, what's with this look on your face? Well, I have just cloned. Okay, I have updated Debian. I have installed Hugo. And I have cloned jupiterbroadcasting.com from Git down to the home directory here.

Tread lightly, my friend. But this is where I don't want to mess this up now. I got to make sure to dot my I's and cross my T's here. There are instructions. I know, I know. I'm reading. I'm doing something terrible. I'm reading the documentation.

I've never done this before. I've never read documentation. So this is really hard. Maybe I should leave you to it. Olympia Mike decides, I don't want to make a mistake. It's time to phone a friend. Mike is using his phone to do research with the laptop because he's afraid to use the laptop. I am afraid to use the laptop.

I'm asking chat GPT right now on my phone. Okay. Docker dash dash version. No! No! Chat GPT, why would you do that to me? I thought we were good.

Oh! And that may have proved to be a fatal mistake because while listener Mike, Olympia Mike, was recovering from the chat GPT inspired air. That's a chat jippity to you? Right, thank you. I don't want to get

that wrong. That's embarrassing. From the chat jippity inspired bad advice air, while Sean managed to swoop in at the last moment. It does take a minute to build on these laptops from, you know, the full thing. Web server is available at localhost 1313.

Oh, it feels like you might be close. The connection was reset. The container. Oh, yeah, right. This is in a container, so I need to... If you pop over to the... If you alt-tab, there should be a Firefox already open. Oh, yeah, you may need the right, dash dash bind might be your friend.

Okay. Does it work? It's loading. Hey! Jeez. Well done, Sean. Sean, well done. That was way more difficult than I thought it would be.

Now, Sean, could you summarize for us what path eventually worked for you? Yeah, so I had tried the dev file from the Hugo install GitHub, and that took forever for some reason. And so I abandoned that I went to install Hugo directly from the Debian repos. And then that seemed to work until I tried to run it. And I was getting obscure errors, at which point I found that the version of Hugo was too old. So then I went back and Chris had said something earlier around something along the lines of, you know, it's just a binary. It's just a binary. I'm like, what do you mean it's just a binary? So, like, where's this binary?

I'm like, oh, there's also a tar.gz. So that means there must be a single binary. I can just take and move around. Put it in a user local bin, right? So I downloaded that, made sure to carefully type in the tar command off of Google to not mess that up because I always get it wrong every single time. Somehow I still don't have that memorized after 20 plus years. Ran that. And I still got errors, which I eventually figured out on my own with a

little bit of help from behind me. It meant that I had the wrong version of the updated Hugo. I needed the extended version for transpiling CSS junk. Went and got that, and voila. Bob's your uncle. Hey, a round of applause, everybody. That was a blast. Bob's your uncle. Hey, round of applause, everybody. That was a blast. That was a blast.

And Sean did indeed win the 100,000 sats. And then he immediately turned around and sent them in as a live boost. And his boost message was, let's have a Knicks corner on the show more often, which we're going to consider. I like that idea. let's have a Knicks corner on the show more often, which we're going to consider. I like that idea. So it seemed like a lot of the struggles was,

A, trying to figure out the right path to get Nginx and Hugo and all that's dependencies going. And not forgetting that you don't have things like curl and get. So get them first. And if you start checking things before you're, yeah. You have to get into a different mindset. And of course, Debian had a slightly older version packaged. Yeah, it worked out well in that the JB website has a handy-dandy make-fail setup to just run with a Docker setup, build the site for you, get it all working. But since we were in Docker already, that didn't just work.

So you're going to have to come up with some stuff yourself, which meant finding a way to get Hugo. It was then doubly great that the one that was packaged just worked out that the pull-side version does not work to build our website right now. And then, yeah, we're taking advantage of the Hugo extended version, which is the one they recommend on their site. If you happen to know that you can just go get Hugo, you know, as a

if you have the supported platform anyway, from a release on GitHub or their website or whatever, then it's pretty simple. But there's a lot of little landmines to trick you up along the way. That is for sure. And then it's a little tricky too. It worked out kind of neat that we had two Nix forward individuals competing. And then it's kind of tricky, I guess,

to get Nix sometimes installed in Docker if you're not starting with a Nix image. The determinant systems installer does totally work, but it'll fail by default. And then in a high pressure environment, you might not notice that it's telling you how to modify it. You've got to tell it, don't bother to try to set up systemd because that container didn't have

systemd set up or running. And if you skip that, you can then get Nix going, and it does work out the Nix version of Hugo also totally builds our website fine. I wonder if that's how Olympia Mike ended up getting it. Cause he got home later and then tweeted me that he could get it working. He used the, you know,

Nick shell function to pull down stuff and start, start up that way. And I wonder, that's really neat though, that, you know, we saw these different approaches and I think, you know,

both were valid. Chat GPT gave some bad advice. Chat Chela? Chippity. Right. Sorry about that. I mean, I think it's neat, both were valid. ChatGPT gave some bad advice. ChatToa? Chippity, right. Sorry about that. I mean, I think it's neat to just be in that weird environment where you, you know, you just have to think a lot more carefully. You're kind of used to a shell that is designed to be friendly, right? With autocomplete and you might have stuff that recommends like, oh, did you mean this command?

Or, oh, you're looking for this package, but you don't yet have. Suicide Linux is really the opposite. You know, I loved exploring how there were so many different ways to accomplish this one. Like, I think one of mine might have been to install FishShell or something. And I didn't know how Suicide Linux worked under the hood until you just mentioned it earlier there, Wes. But just because it's a tool I love. And I think that actually might have gotten around the whole functionality of wiping the system. But there's so many different ways to attack it. And that was really fun to see. I think the other kind of thing that we all felt afterwards is that was

actually a fantastic training tool. You know, it's a great way to test yourself. High stakes. I could see us doing something similar at Linux Fest Northwest. You know, something at the booth where, you know, we schedule it, people come by and we do that kind of thing. And I think we'd, I think we'd have a ton of fun. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Head there right now to get started for free. Try it for yourself as an individual. It's also great for teams and enterprise users. it for yourself as an individual. It's also great for teams and enterprise users. Bitwarden, simply put, is the easiest way for yourself or a business or an open source team to share and sync sensitive data. And Bitwarden's vaults, they're end-to-end encrypted with zero knowledge encryption. And of course, the thing that gives all of us a peace of mind, Bitwarden itself is open source. It's

trusted by millions out there. It's one of the trusted apps in our local community. It's used by teams all over the world and organizations for secure password and data sharing. Sensitive things like passwords, of course, but maybe billing information, maybe a recovery phrase you need for certain apps, maybe two-factor codes. It's just all kinds of things that you need to store in a central repository. And you can build up a lot over time as well. And Bitwarden has a guide to create device specific subsets of your credentials. How cool is this idea? So if you have like a personal device and a work device, you can create device specific subsets of your credentials. I love this idea. And I was just browsing through the Bitwarden docs when I saw this and I thought, oh my gosh, this is perfect for what I've been

experimenting with recently. Migrating to Bitwarden is so simple too. I did it in about, I mean, under five minutes, probably. It's just bitwarden.com slash migrate. And I think you'll wonder why you didn't do it sooner. Do us a favor, though, by starting at bitwarden.com slash Linux. It's what Wes and I use to manage our passwords. It has so many nice features, and they're always improving it as well. And of course, there's lots of eyes on that code, so it gives you some peace of mind. Go check it out today. Get the best password manager and secrets manager in the biz, and maybe recommend it

to friends or family and help them improve their online hygiene as well the journey starts for all of us at bitwarden.com slash linux go try it out today bitwarden.com slash linux feedback thank you everyone for sending some in this week linux unplugged.com slash contact if you want to send us a note or three. Dom C sent in some really great information. He says, hey, on Linux Unplugged, there was a brief discussion about downloading podcasts to have a personal archive and then be able to serve those to your own device using RSS. I do this exact thing. I have about 15 podcasts I automatically download and archive using Podgrab on my home server. Podgrab is a simple Docker container that makes it easy to

add podcasts to downloads and store them for archiving. It has a web interface for managing all the feeds too. Once they're downloaded, I personally use Audiobookshelf to serve them on my local network as an RSS feed. And I can add them to any podcatcher I want. I think we've got a couple of other suggestions about audio bookshelf, and it seems like it's working for multiple people. And you guys ever have one of these like apps or something like you hear about, you're like,

Oh, I got to check that out. And then like keeps coming up over and over again. Alex has been in my ear about audio bookshelf. I was going to say, Devin, you talked about it on Self Hosted. I just, I can feel it.

I'm just kind of at a point where I'm like, I got enough. Can I just do it in the next cloud somehow? But no, I think I should give it a try because I hear so many

positive things and both the wife and my son are, I am too, but those two are just audiobook fiends. So it's, right now,

probably something I could do for them could i think secretly actually your wife is using it i think yeah she's using set her up with yeah yeah and so uh i mean about time you catch up there chris that's fair so thank you to gene bean and purple dog who both boosted in with rows of ducks to uh say hey i use audiobook Ido Bookshelf too, and it's great. Ah, a little positive signal there. Thanks, guys. That is another notch in the Chris should try it.

Well, let's get into the boosts. And speaking of boosts, we got a baller boost from Rotten Mood, who sent 30,000 sats. I hoard that which all kind covet. Can we get a meetup in 60622 it's a zip code and survey says chicago illinois yeah that needs to happen chicago needs to midwest meet up i i am i i fantasize about a long route road trip where we hit chicago the way. Oh, I'd love that. I'd love that. A listener.

Jeff comes in with 29,000, 292 sats. Sent in from the podcast index. Jeff writes, I wanted to send a birthday boost, but I have a goldfish memory. So I think you guys hit twos and nines. I wonder what that WestBot's age really is.

Forever 29. Done right. Right. For both vanity and operational security. That's right. Yeah. Why would I reveal my real age? Splint comes in with 20,443 very secure s and uh he sent us i didn't even know it was possible

to send a boost this long actually i've never seen that before that's how is that i thought there was a limit but god bless him he said anyways uh he mentions that he's been a spotify subscriber for something like 10 plus years. And when they rolled out Spotify premium, he's like, all right, I'll do it. If it means no ads, I'll take that. And here he is over, you know, spying on what his wife listens to and notices that she's getting ads. She's getting ads, even though he's paying the family plan for all of them to get covered. Oh, gosh.

I hate that. Yeah, it's one of those dynamic podcast ads. So he's unsubscribed from Spotify, and he's going to switch to Tidal, which Tidal's known for having fantastic audio quality. I'd like to know how it goes. I'd also like to know if there's ways to plug Tidal into things to archive them offline so you don't have to stream and all of that. And, Wes, you think maybe we got a hint on that location too i see it's 9220 yeah that seems to be a postal code in uh alborg denmark i did try asking the ai on this one just to see if you know try to check my work yeah it suggested argentina and uh bangladesh i'm betting more on Denmark. So tell us who's right.

Is it Westbot or is it the AI splint? What was the postal code? 9-2-2-0. Yeah, sounds Danish. It says all Borg. I noticed Borg in there. So I think maybe the AI might be playing with you there. Resistance is futile.

Root is God boosts in with 5,000 sats. A good place to store the If I Die document could be notes on a password manager. I share one with my wife so I can guarantee that she'll have access, and the content is also sensitive and should be protected. Win-win. That is actually a pretty solid idea, or maybe if it's not the full document maybe it's instructions on where the document is stored

or how to unlock the document or huh that might be the most actionable tip on the where to store that kind of thing that we've gotten so far another good reason to

try to you know push this past adventure on the your friends and family true that's true although you better trust your spouse whoa can you do that laugh again I don't know why that's like the you don't trust your spouse laugh

why do we have one of those you have a bad relationship zach attack boosts in with 10 000 sets real question fedora 38 kde spin or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE? I mean, why choose? Have several systems and go for it. I have an opinion if you want to hear it. I mean, I... We do. I've run both on different systems in my own little cabin north of this here border. And Tumbleweed has just played way nicer for me.

I mean, bug finding Brent. It's been super solid and really great. And the new features in KD have been amazing. So I will strongly suggest that. I mean, Fedora 38, I don't have that much time on it. So maybe, I don't know,

it's worth looking at again, but that would be my inclination. I will say, I think Plasma works really well on a rolling distro. In fact, this is something I was chatting about listeners with at the meetup last night, is when you do an update and Plasma breaks, generally it's a component of Plasma.

You know, like I've actually, I've literally had my background not rendered after one of the updates and then another update, it fixed it. Or some applet crashes, right? Lock screen, something happens. Maybe, yeah. Yeah, didn't I like hack your laptop and just like smash on your keyboard the other day and it bypassed your lock screen?

No, that was mine. Oh, yours. And then it like received the input into the terminal and screwed a whole bunch of stuff up. But I've had that happen before. Unfortunately, that was Tumblewee with KD. Yeah. I don't know.

But my point is, a lot of times when Genome Shell gets an update and something crashes, it can take out the session or it can fundamentally alter an extension so it doesn't work and make it incompatible and that might screw up your workflow and so i have found that in a way because plasma is so many individual components you can have an individual component fail and you can still use the desktop and so it doesn't like it's not like it fails all the time but that does make it seemingly more robust on a rolling distro also i think plasma is really good about preserving user settings so if you change something and they you know they change that setting but they'll

they'll maintain your your preference which i think is another reason it's nice and then on tumbleweed they're pretty good about getting the new releases so uh you know the way with fedora right is you would get if you want the next version of plasma when plasma 6 comes out you would upgrade to the fedora that ships with that and that's that's also pretty great i mean this is sort of your preference i like the smaller updates more frequently model myself but fedora does a lot of those too so you're not going to go wrong either way as a human neural network it'd be inappropriate for me to tell you which mcclang boosts in in an ongoing confusion series boost with 7182 cents okay coming in hot with the booth so like we're old men or something or i'm old like people are gonna have to like break this down for us west what's going on here well we're just really not sure or have not been getting it right where McClang is boosting in.

Us? That doesn't sound right. I mean, McClang has sent some fun little puzzles along the way, so you had to do some math or, you know, kind of figure it out. But we've been messing it up. So, can I get a harp sound effect? get a harp sound effect in 507 mclang sent in 17k sets saying not even close no cigar maybe my hint was a bit vague this boost is again a quarter of my postcode in a land where linus was born ah yes i remember this yeah linus had a capital s at the end and I think we saw that as Linus S and thought Linus Sebastian. I see where this is going.

We were looking around for a zip code or a postal code in Canada last time and not finding it. So this time McClang boosts in, Sebastian, really? Well, you got a good laugh out of me with that. Part of the blame is on me, though. Uppercase S was an accident. But I thought the hint was an obvious one, meaning who started it all

around 1991. Well, I think that's where we went first, but the capital S kind of was like, okay, well, obviously it's not the obvious one. We're going to go with the slightly lesser obvious one. The capital S threw the entire thing off. But with the S, could it also be the country at this point?

Okay, no. So now we've got another hint here. This time, though, I need to scale down the stats to a tenth. So, Clank sent in 7,182. This adds up with the puzzle a quarter from last time. So, we're looking at 71,820

or 7, 1,820. Looking that that up it appears to be somewhere in finland oh that's where the s comes in uh apparently translates literally according to wikipedia didn't double check this at all because it's too cute as hedgehogs lake i love it so are we right we finally got there we're are we finally they're really hopeful so let us know let us know hasn't it boosted in with 5100 sets simply saying eggs did you pull that forward just because you loved it so much no it was included legitimately

in the report and then Because it's part of this double set. Okay, I see, I see. And then followed up with 5,000 sets. Hey, JB listeners, since around late 2019, I listen to hours of podcasts each week, but I almost never email any of them. But for some reason,

I'm giving boosts a go. Anyway, have you heard of Nala? It's an alternative package manager frontend for Debian-based distros. It uses the Python libapp bindings to give you a more friendly and fancy-looking experience than apt. We used it for a while, and on Ubuntu, it's been great. Yeah, it kind of aims, I was looking over, I've never tried it, but it sounds interesting. It aims to improve apt by kind of not showing some redundant messages,

formatting stuff a little better, using color to show specifically what will happen with the package. Parallel downloads. Yeah, parallel downloads. It also has a feature kind of like Arch will do, where you can go speed test to different repositories and sort of set the ones that are fastest for you. That's built in. And then it also kind of emulates what DNF does and it keeps a history of everything it does.

So each install, removal, or upgrade gets stored in a JSON, basically a big JSON list with a unique ID number so you can just ask it to print the history and see all the stuff you've done. And then because you can never have too many package managers, Wes has also put a link into Packstall, which I do think we've mentioned on the show forever ago. But if you're a little fuzzy on it like I am,

it brings the AUR to Ubuntu-ish. They bill it as the AUR Ubuntu never had. I just like this world where you're building, you know, you got an AUR on there. You got a better package manager situation going. It's just too much, dude. That's how I'd set it up if I was going to make you do an Ubuntu system for a while.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, could you imagine an Ubuntu system where I'm using Nala, Flatpak, Snap, Pakstall, and Nix? And then, by the way, Apt and Deb. Let's get that going. I bet people out there are doing it, the crazy SOBs out there doing it the crazy sobs you could probably just write a script to update all those at once well maybe god what a nightmare

though jupiter mattress it's better than the clouds it is space after all call 1-800-JUPITER and experience our patented zero gravity sleep. I'm on board with that. Unfunded, boosted in a row of ducks just to share us a new ad for the network. Yeah, all right. I think it's a good idea. Again, if anybody out there wants to work with us to make patented JB zero-gravity sleep beds

with cooling touch foam. We're looking to invest. Yeah. Yeah, let us know. We have some sats uh user 72 22 comes in with 500 sats and uh says straight up right now throwing down i think i don't have enough sats for a postcode but the reason i ultimately left log sack to deadron was retrieval log seek is great for inputting, getting ideas out of your head,

but once you need to do a complex search, open multiple windows, or search based on a timeframe, etc., it all falls apart. Also, who knows Clojure? Clojure. Chris should give Dedrin a go. It is a more natural file-based setup.

I feel like that's a personal attack. Nobody does closure. No, I mean, you know, I do happen to. That's one of the things that drew me to LogSeek. I'd like to be transparent about that. One of the reasons that drew you to LogSeek? One of the reasons, Wes? How about the reason, Wes? I was interested in the model as well.

It was just kind of a nice side benefit. Totally. But I think we've mentioned Dendron before. At least we've talked about it off air. Have you tried it? It's like VS Code based already, which seems like it fit into your workflow. That is nice. That is nice.

You know what doesn't seem to work for my noodle is the linking all the things. I don't need to link everything. You know, I get it. That does seem like, you know, basically Emacs org mode seems brilliant. But my stupid noodle doesn't work that way.

I just need folders and categories. I need basically a file folder structure inside the app. And that's, I just think in folders and subfolders. So I've never really been taken to.

Does it sound like maybe Dendron supports more of that workflow? All right. I mean, I should give it a go. I mean, really been taken to sound like maybe Dendron supports more of that workflow. All right. I mean, I should give it a go. I mean, I don't want to be a Dendron hater,

but I'm just looking at the, you know, I haven't tried it though. Actually, it looks nice. I mean, there's like, it's got mermaid support math with,

uh, yeah, be careful. Be careful with those mermaids, dude. They pull you in with their song and you're stuck. All right. All right. Thanks. User seven, two, two, two, five, one, eight, zero, eight. They pull you in with their song, and then you're stuck. All right.

All right. Thanks, user 7222518088245402. We'll give that a go. Faraday Fedora comes in with 1701 sats. Good customers are as rare as latinum. Treasure them. Says, I gotta say, I haven't been the biggest fan of the goofy pronunciations. I don't know what you're talking about. I think it's pronunciations.

Okay, alright. Since this is the place I often hear about new projects for the first time. Whoops. But, Jippity just fits so well. I wonder if this might evolve

into some kind of helper when using my computer. Maybe some kind of office stationary persona. A paperclip. Yeah, so it's a meta-commentary. The whole mispronunciation thing is sort of it's it's a real funny thing we've done in our community and i'm not just talking linux i'm

talking like the tech community where we've created or we've co-opted these words and then we say them privately we only read them ever and then we speak them out loud and we realize we don't actually know these words at all and we we all say them differently, and I just find that to be hilarious. Humans. Yeah. I think Microsoft just recently came out with Bing Clippity, right? Yeah. Have you tried it?

Yeah. I like the Chat Jippity a little more, but the Bing Clippity, it's got some spice to it. And, you know, Wes has been trying the bards, too. That's right. I like it. It's a sing to me. Thank you, everybody.

Everybody who boosted in this week, even if we didn't get to your message on air, we've been saving them in the doc. So even if it's not read on air, it is preserved in this week's episode show doc for history. So thank you very much. And your support is greatly appreciated. I think there's probably a future where we consider just how far we can take it with

boosts. I don't know exactly how things are shaping out, but if you don't have your boost plumbing set up yet and you've been considering it, please do, because it could become perhaps a matter of survival down the road for the podcast. Now, there's a couple of ways you can do that. You can get a brand new podcast app and ride the new podcasting 2.0 wave at newpodcastapps.com. And then you grab one of those. And the nice thing is once you get them topped off, the boost button is just like right there in the player. So when we say something you wanted to comment on, you just hit the button

right as you're listening. And I think it's changed the game for so many long-time listeners. They've never reached out. And every episode we hear from multiple first-time long timers we love that i think that button being there in the player makes all the difference but maybe you really like your podcast app you don't want to switch just get albie get albie.com you can top it off directly in the app or with something like the cash app or strike or whatever and then you can boost from the podcast index web page you don't have to switch your app you just boost from their web page right there at the lin Unplugged entry. And then send your message in

and support the show. I don't mind it one bit. And your memberships out there are also supported. The memberships are a key support mechanism for the show that really helps us kind of budget long-term on how much we can afford

to do production and edit and this and that. And it's just kind of like a foundational thing. So shout out to our members, unpluggedcore..com you get an ad-free version of the show or you can get all the jb shows ad-free at jupiter.party and support all the shows and it's a it's a great way to do uh ongoing support using your fiat fund coupons and not messing with them sets now if you'd like to hear our thoughts on the new Ubuntu release and everything else going on in the world of Linux and open source, go get more Wes Payne

and me at LinuxActionNews.com LinuxActionNews You know what? I heard from several people at the meetup listening to the Linux Action News. I'm always surprised. I don't know why. I love that. We work hard on that show, so I'm glad to hear it.

People do listen, you know. We don't always get as much kernel hype I think in Linux Unplugged as a result. I love that we work hard on that show so I'm glad to hear it people do listen you know yeah especially you want you know we don't always get as much kernel hype I think in Linux Unplugged as a result but over there yeah

we're always digging into the latest kernel releases and telling you what's great and for ButterFS users out there you're not wanting to miss this because the last few releases have been solid

except for last release there was a regression which has just been fixed last week which is all in linux action news along with all the other analysis so check that out and then join us live on sundays at noon pacific 3 p.m eastern over at jblive.tv see you next week same bad time same bad station and of course all the links for the things we talked about today including the crazy distros that blow up on themselves. Those are over at linuxunplugged.com slash 508 and a bunch of great JB shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com.

Lots of good podcasts to go listen to. So go give them a good sniff and then join us back here every single Sunday. We appreciate you listening. And if you get an opportunity to share the show with a friend, maybe you had some fun this episode, share with somebody. We love geeking out and word of mouth is the absolute best marketing out there for any podcast. So we always appreciate that. It's a great way to contribute some value back to you. Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of The Unplugged Program, and we'll see you next time. Thank you. you