LINUX Unplugged - 513: There Is No Distro

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

We attempt to swap Linux distributions live on our production server, to prove that new tooling makes the Linux distro model obsolete.

Over the weekend, Red Hat announced they're dropping support for LibreOffice. It'll be dropped from future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases, and the future of support in Fedora is unclear as well. It seems the initiative is really being spearheaded by Red Hat Display Systems team, who's just fed up with trying to support some of these legacy applications. And reading through it, it appears that the team has spent nearly two years of their time trying to get this right with LibreOffice. Two years of their time that they could have been focusing on Wayland, they could have been focusing on HDR, they could have

been focusing on the things that are actually blocking people from using Linux but instead they spent their energy and effort repackaging up LibreOffice when there's flat packs out there there's other ways to get it I mean I love LibreOffice but I don't understand what took them so long why does every single distribution in the world need to repackage Firefox and LibreOffice and every single app that we all use? Do they really all need to be burning precious man hours and woman hours, burning up CPU cycles, sucking down power to just repackage the same open source software over and over again? I mean, if it's just repackaging, but some of this too, right, is fitting it into the system, making it feel smooth, making it feel at home, making it not feel like a third party app that you just flat pack installed that knows nothing about your system or has access to everything properly.

Yeah, but who are we solving that problem for? Because if you look at Microsoft Office, it's it doesn't I mean, it's its own design. It's its own thing. You put it on, especially if you run on Mac OS. It doesn't fit the rest of the system. I mean, you know, just works properly as well, integrated. It's interesting to me that we're now at a place where we think HDR and color management is more important to quote unquote professionals than an office suite. Maybe that's true.

But what professionals exactly are we aiming for? What does this tell us about the target audience that Red Hat's concerned about? I don't know if I agree with your read. I think it is, we have four or five people at Red Hat that can work on these projects and having them repackage LibreOffice when it's already available as a flat pack is silly when they could be spending their time on more substantial features

that would open up the desktop to maybe like a different production industry or something like that. I'm not really sure why is this team doing it? I think it tells you how tight things might be at Red Hat. That was the read I got. Like if you're starting to make these cuts and you're making these decisions,

I think there's less people working on this stuff than we'd like. And I have to conclude that if they have this limited amount of time and resources, it probably isn't the best use of their time packaging up all these things that are being packaged up in a hundred different ways. I think it's time to move on. 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, there's no going back this week. The role of the distro, as we've known it, is definitely changing. In today's episode, we're going to demonstrate live a tool that makes the traditional distro just seem a little obsolete, a tool that makes the traditional distro just seem a little obsolete as Westpain is going to live convert from one distribution to another with a

production server that is up and running right now as we record and we don't want to lose. So that'd be really great. And then we'll round out the show with some boosts and some picks and some more. So let's say good morning to our friends over at tail scale. Tail scale is a match VPN protected by wire guard. Go build your own private flat network it's all yours it's like your own little distributed network of just

your nodes that can talk directly to each other protected by the noise protocol go try it out it'll change your game tailscale.com try it for free for up to 100 devices and tell them the unplugged program sent you if you get the opportunity. Tailscale.com. Now, before we go any further, let's say time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello, Chris. Hello, Wes. Hello, and special shout out to Dom, who is joining us

in studio this week. Hello, Dom. Hello, everyone. Everybody might remember you, Dominic, because it was a few weeks ago we talked about you coming up to our little farm and helping us get our irrigation system in working order. And now the doctor is checking in to see how the patient is doing, making a few modifications. We're going to have a big old cookout. Invited Wes up, too.

And we're going to get up there and do some cooking and some gardening. Give Wes a tour of the property. I'm excited to see it. Yeah. Levi is going to be so excited. Levi's going to love seeing you there. It's a big week. It's a big week. It's a big week, so we have a lot of fun in the show and after the show.

And it's also a big week for Nix. First of all, let's start with the NixOS Foundation's call for a little bit of funding. Their long-term storage costs are getting up there, nearly $10,000 a month now. And they're asking for some funding to help. They've had a sponsor that's been there for multiple years, but I think maybe that sponsor is scaling back as so many of them are. Yeah, they got acquired by a different company, and it seems like they're doing it very well above board, saying, look, we can't do this anymore, but given some good lead time to the next project to, you know, get their stuff in order. So that's at least nice to see. It is. That runway is probably makes or breaks it for them. And whenever a project comes out and says, we've got X amount of dollars in cloud storage costs per month, like every Linux user comes out with their solution.

Well, what you could do is you could get yourself a physical box down here in this data center I know about and you rack yourself up a 3U with a detached storage. You cut that cost in half every month. That's the first thing I start seeing people do online. But these people know their job and they know what works for them and they know what they need to do to focus on the project. And if they say that funding would probably be the best route, I tend to believe them. So we'll put a link in the show notes for that because I think even if you don't use NixOS, you will eventually be using the Nix Package Manager.

Trust me on that one. And, you know, having all those handy cached binary builds is a really nice feature. And yeah, that costs money if you want it, you know, quick, fast, and ready to download for you. It's, they can save the day. It's like having a superpower to be able to call upon your favorite Linux utility at any moment and instantly have it on your system and then have it vanish.

It's it's like you're playing a video game. Also, just a shout out to them over at Nix OS because version 2305 was released on May 31st. It's a nice, nice release. No doubt about it. Some important changes in there. But I am the most excited about it because now Pl 517 dot something 527 right yes i guess you're right i'm an old man now i you were we were waiting on multiple machines one of which was uh the obs machine we're using right now did you happen to get that upgraded oh you think yeah well i have to say um

wes and i yolo with this obs machine like we never would have in the past. Like just to give you a little context, the live broadcast machine, it is it's like a temple. Right. You don't violate the temple. It's working and you leave it. And when we had Ubuntu 18.04 on there, that's exactly what we did. But now with NixOS, we have snapshots and we know they work and so we will just yolo break the system to see if we can do something let's see if we can get this accelerated let's see if we can use this new driver let's see if this new beta version of obs solves the problem and we know it'll break stuff and it does we have broke plasma horribly we've

made the system completely lose all video acceleration we've made it so it can't even start the graphical desktop. And we just nope right out with the snapshots. Reboot, rollback, no problem. No problem. And so to go from like, oh, don't touch it. We only upgrade it once every few months and when we do the upgrade, we're all here just in case

anything goes wrong. Now we're just yoloing like crazy. So it's fantastic to see 2305 with Plasma 527 dot whatever in there and it's really worth checking out the release notes because i mean there's a lot of good stuff there's a lot of new services that have been added this time around big release yeah more packages than ever uh 1867 individual contributors who authored 36,566 commits since the previous release.

And I'm here for it. I'm looking forward to upgrade. So let's talk about NixOS Anywhere. What a fun and yet powerful tool. Imagine, dear listener, for a moment, perhaps you've got an old Red Hat box that's past its prime. Maybe a Debian system that missed the upgrade window, something that's been deployed in a way you wouldn't do things anymore,

but it's out there now. It's provisioned. Maybe it's a cloud VPS. Maybe it's a rig. Maybe it's a physical rig. Maybe it's a VM. It's a system you've already provisioned, and you do things a little differently now.

Well, back in the day, in the era of the Linux distribution, you were sort of restricted to however that distro maker built that system. And you would generally, if you wanted to upgrade, you would have to upgrade to their next release. That's not how things work in Linux anymore. Now you can reload a system to a different OS, completely take it over. and that's what we're going to do today on a production box i have a system that operates as a remote production server for jupe so when i'm on the road or whenever i need something that requires high speed bandwidth or large data storage and i can't do that work over cellular or over Starlink, I have this intermediary Linode that does that work.

It's also the box that's responsible for doing data transfers between the studio and my RV, LadyJupes. And the way I do that is things upload to this support box, and then when, like, say, the bandwidth windows allow for or signal allows for in Jupes, it then transfers from the cloud storage down to jupes and then jupes batches up whatever i have to send back and sends it back up and this happens all day every day so it's a it's a remote support system it also runs a few gaming systems for my kids oh yeah so it's our family production system wait you're gonna

have me break the games for your kids? Yeah. Yeah. And you got to go see him tonight, too. You're going to be seeing the kids tonight. Don't lose this Starbound world. He's got a great Starbound world on there. So tell us about NixOS Anywhere, Wes, and kind of what it enables us to do here. Well, yeah. OK, so you'll say you want to use NixOS. You've listened to the show. You're kind of sold on Nix is great, NixOS. I want to start playing with it. But if you're using a provider, maybe it's a VBS system, a lot of places do have NixOS these days, but a lot of places don't. Or as Chris says, maybe you've got some legacy servers you want.

Maybe you've got physical servers. Maybe you're renting, you know, like a physical box in a data center or a colo somewhere. There's a lot of providers that just don't offer NixOS as a choice, too, when you're spinning up a system. And it's just a thing. Yeah, it's definitely a thing. And then if you think about it, like getting an unsupported OS set up in an environment can be a little bit complicated.

I mean, you probably have to reboot into some sort of recovery environment because you've got a system running on there, but you probably want to reformat. You need to overwrite everything. A lot of places do provide recovery environments that you can kind a system running on there, but you probably want to reformat. You need to overwrite everything. A lot of places do provide recovery environments that you can kind of go in on, but then you're going to have to bootstrap everything yourself. You got to either doing it over some sort of like VNC terminal that you might luckily have access to,

or you got to reset up SSH in this recovery environment, which is going to be its own bespoke system, and then get in there and then try to overwrite whatever is on the actual disk. Plus you got to format them and make them work. Oh, a live boost. Not that we've ever done any of that before, right? We've never, we've never had to do any of that. So NixOS Anywhere is a set of tools that takes advantage of a number of different Nix utilities out in the ecosystem and Nix features itself. The pitch is basically you set everything up as configuration

as nix you specify using the disco tool which we'll talk about in a sec okay you specify your disk configuration then you write like a nix os configuration like you you know you're used to doing and then nix os anywhere does the rest so you tell it what host you want and you give it documentation on how you want that host to be configured, you hit go. And the sales pitch here is it's going to do everything else. Specifically, it's going to connect to the remote server over SSH. So you just need to be able to SSH into it somehow. It's going to detect whether a NixOS installer is already present. If so, let's say you have a NixOS recovery environment or you can just reboot into the ISO on a USB drive or drive or something it doesn't need to do extra steps you can just use that to do the

bootstrapping but if you don't have nixos present it's going to use k exec to boot into the nixos there it is there it is attaboy but it's also going to set it up so you can ssh back into it once it's k exact yeah so then the tool is going to keep going. It's going to detect once that KExec happened. It's going to SSH into that KExec environment. It's going to use Disco to partition and format your hard drive. So watch out. That's where it, you know, wipes everything. You could lose data. Yeah.

Then it's going to install NixOS, optionally install any Nix packages and other configuration that you've specified. You can also have it copy files over the new machine if you want. And then it's going to reboot it. And if it all worked, it's Nix. It's Nix.

So you're telling me, okay, so I deployed this box back in April of 2020. It was probably the last Ubuntu server I've deployed. It's been a great server, but now my standard for my home systems is all Nix.

And so using this tool, assuming we have SSH and root access access we can just tell it to go and it will from that moment forward do everything it needs to on that remote system to live swap it from ubuntu 2004 or 2204 i think it is to nix os yeah you walk away you come back in five or ten minutes you ssh back into into that box, and it should be up. It should, you know, have whatever keys you've configured on there, and it should just work. And this is only part one of what's going to blow our minds this week.

There is a part two, but you'll have to stay tuned for that. Do you want to try it? Should we try it live? Yeah, I will say, you know, it's also useful just in a variety of environments. Like if you do, let's say in the studio we wanted to set things up. If we had a standard base studio install or something, you could just, you know, you could boot into the recovery or into the installer on one of these boxes from the ISO or USB or whatever, and then still point this guy at that environment. So you can use it piecemeal. You can have it go in and just do the formatting and stop there to let you go configure it manually. And then it's like a box from scratch. Yes. Or you could have it pull in everything you might want and kind of set it up and have it ready to go.

Exactly. All right. So for those of us that are watching live, we can see Wes's terminal here. So I'll provide some commentary. Wes Payne, let's do this. Let's convert this live support system. He's now logged into the system. I just figured we'd double check.

So some things you might want is either allow root SSH access. Ideally still, I mean, you're going to wipe it, so I guess whatever. But, you know, be secure. Sure. Use keys and all that. Or if you don't want to do the root route, it will prompt you for passwords. But to make it more standalone, you probably want to set up, like, no password sudo for the user you're going to use to wipe. Just little things like that. Copy your key over so you don't have to provide a password to log into the box. So I'm just going to check that really quick.

All right. Yeah, we got sudo. We see here we're on an Ubuntu 2204.2 LTS. Okay. All up to date. Good old jammy jellyfish. Not much going on here other than a couple of containers. It's a pretty base Ubuntu install. So I'm hoping it's rather problem-free. I mean, I guess it doesn't really matter on the complexity of the Ubuntu install. It's just going to be gone.

Right. A lot of this feels a bit like malware. It's essentially like taking over a box and then repurposing it for its own needs. Okay, so the first thing you're going to need is to make yourself a little flake. And there's an example flake that NixOS Anywhere provides for you.

And kind of standard stuff, you've got to provide some inputs. So you tell it like, hey, I want to use this Nix packages version. You tell it where to get Disco, which is a standalone tool that does the disk partitioning. And then you kind of go through and configure your outputs. In this case, your output is going to be a NixOS configuration. And that's where you can add you know extra modules if you got specific modules you need to add including the the disco module you can add stuff to make sure it plays nicely if it's inside a virtual machine and you can configure the stuff you want as part of your nix os configuration like so could we say set up tail

scale or something on absolutely yeah um so you can you can give it like ssh keys tell it to open ssh which you definitely want in this case I figured I'd try to see since it was running sync thing I'd set sync thing to be enabled

it doesn't have all the configuration it would likely need so we'll see if that works right I could set up I could set up pretty quick though

but then it'd be using the Nix managed version of sync thing yes right yeah right from Nix but yeah so you can totally in here you can specify

and that's what I was doing for my test environment I was using a similar tool to Tailscale called NetBird just to try it out. So it would set up a mesh network and then once this thing finished, the new NixOS environment would just pop right onto the mesh network. It boots up in its first boot and it attaches to the mesh network. You can even do the whole thing over the mesh network. It doesn't need public SSH as long as you've got a

working way to get into it. Right. So the freaking rad. Yeah. So then you're also going to need the disco configuration, which is probably a little more new to a lot of folks, but it's a neat project. And if you just think of it as sort of like a glorified JSON config, like a lot of NICs for how you want to lay out your disk. Like if you look at here, it's sort of, you know, you specify the device, you tell it's a disk, you say, I want, you know, a GPT partition table. Here's the partitions I want. I want a boot drive. I want to, you know, ESP partition for EFI. I want a root partition.

And the Disco projects has got a bunch of different examples. They've got a pcachefs example. It supports CFS. It supports ButterFS. It's really pretty neat, and you could use it in a lot of different environments besides just with NixOS anywhere. So, because Disco is sort of universal, so what you're doing here is you're creating a config file for your disk layout. And that sounds

weird to make a config file for your disk layout, but when you actually see it all filled out here, this seems simpler than some of the partitioning tools I've used. And what I like about this is if I saved this file, I could just reproduce this exact partition scheme again and again. And I actually have a rig upstairs I've been rebuilding, and I cannot remember how I had the partition scheme laid out at all.

And I've been trying different ones, and I'm like, oh, that's not it. So it's funny, this is actually, this disco right here, that tool alone, I think, could be really handy for what I'm doing right now. As part of the test, you know, I had my own virtual machine that I was like wiping and then resetting up so I could wipe it again as I was learning the ins and outs of the tooling. And I was doing that manually with stuff like part clone and I was using SF disk to sort of capture the partition layout. But those are all bespoke, especially for that part. That was a bespoke text format that, yeah, you can dump it to a file and pipe it back into the tool and it'll, you know, go format things.

But this is like real data structures here written in Nix. You can parse it, you can tweak it, you can modify it, you can load it in and then, you know, modify it from there. It's a lot more flexible. So this is going to tell the system how to do the disk layout. It will be formatting everything. Yes. I assume, what, Butterfest we're going with? What are we going with here?

I think this is just, well, it does set up, we could change that. This sets up a... Oh, an LVM. Mm-hmm. It's got a little RAID array, and it's got LVM. What a mess. This is going to be a mess. Let's see if it works, huh? Yeah, I don't know. If anything, this is going to be the part that breaks, Wes. It could be. We could try to pick a different example.

They've got a bunch of examples, which we've got linked in the show notes. But you've tested some of them. This is the one I tested locally, yeah. Of course, you didn't test it on an Ubuntu box or a Linode VPS, right? Or was it a Linode VPS? No? Nope. All right, cool.

This should be, yeah. All right. Well, then, what is our next step now that we know what our disk layout's going to be? And we're using Disco to do that layout. You do need to know what the, you know, what disks you've got. So you probably got to do some inspection,

figure things out. Now if you've got like standard disks or you're using this on known systems or whatever, you'll know that. But in this case, I was checking it out. We've got a dev SDA that we're looking at on this load. All right, nice and easy.

And then all you're next going to need to do is actually run the tool. And to do that, we're going to use Nix Flakes. What's really neat about Flakes, and this has been a great excuse for me to like kind of dive in a little bit more and get my head around Flakes a little bit better, is because NixOS Anywhere has a Flake for it, you can just tell Nix to run it directly from GitHub. You don't have to download it. You don't have to configure it. If you've got Nix set up and installed, you're good to go. Wow. So you pull this down, you get in the directory, and then you just point this Go file, this Go shell script at the URL on GitHub?

Yeah. So you say nixrun, and then you say GitHub, and then you reference the repo, which in this case is numtide slash nixos anywhere, and that's it. And then you can do the old double hyphen thing to say, like, the following things are commands for the stuff you're running, and then you just pass it. I mean, it's just like running it locally at that point. And nix will do all the stuff to go pull it down, build it. Exactly. Do we do sudo go.sh? You don't even need sudo.

Oh, okay. Really? No, because it's not doing anything on this machine. All right. Are you ready, Wes Payne? Let's try it. Here we go. All right.

So Wes has given me a button here. We have it all set up now, and it just runs the go.sh shell script, which will kick off that SSH and log into our box and begin the process. I see you've given me the button to press because I assume you're worried about data loss. Yes, that's right. I did here just show you two before. We've got a Debian bullseye box that will soon become MixOS. Yeah. Yeah. So we've tried this on Ubuntu and you will run into problems if you have Secure Boot enabled and things like that. This Debian box is a test machine that we're going to try it on, and we're connected over NetBird, which is a mesh VPN solution using WireGuard. Yeah, the idea here is you don't necessarily have to expose your server

to the public SSH. I mean, you totally can do it that way, but we've configured things here so that this host is on the NetBird network. The NetBird network, it's going to reboot into a Kexec system, which will also be on the NetBird network. And if it all goes to plan, the final NixOS setup will join that too. We'll see. I'm going to hit it.

So let's find out. Here we go. It's off to the races. And it is already pulling down something pretty large. Is this the KXX image or is this something else? Oh, that's a Nix environments pulling down. Oh yeah, I did reboot. So it's resetting up NixOS anywhere

because we're using the flake. It's just going to pull the flake right off GitHub and get it all set up for us. And then, from that moment, does it then start pulling the KegZak image? No, so first things first, it's getting so we're getting the NixOS Anywhere binary set up, which just finished.

Once that's done, it can SSH into the host, which just happened, and now it's pulling the KegZak image over NetBird from my laptop. So it stands up. What you're telling me is it stands up its own working environment before it even gets going. Oh yeah. You don't have to have anything but Nix to make this start happening. And now it's KXX the system. It's getting

that ready. It's got a KXX image on there. It's creating an SSH key. It's getting SSH set up in that KXX environment before it reboots. Right now we're loading the KXX image into RAM. And we're also watching the console. So we can get an idea when it starts to reboot. Okay.

Machine will boot into NixOS in six seconds. All right. This is it, isn't it? This is a nice trick where it logs into a separate session in the background, which does the KXX. That way the front, the main session you SSH into can log out cleanly, which lets the script gain control back, and then it's going to keep trying to SSH in,

waiting for that NixOS environment to come up. Here we go. We've got NixOS running. And we're in! I see it. Nix is up on the console, and the SSH session is back in action. It's reconnected, and it's now getting disco set up, which is going to slice up our disk

based on the parameters that Wes set up earlier. I think we're going to go with a pretty basic disk setup just for the purposes of a live test. Formatting hard drive with disco. Here we go. You can see it calling parted. Yep. All right, that is done.

The disk has been wiped, and we're now extended for with a boot partition, it looks like, as well. Is that what I'm seeing? A mount boot? I see slash root. Yeah, we've actually got a RAID array set up for boot, and then we've got an LVM set up for the root. None of that's super necessary, but it's the example configuration that MixOS Anywhere came from, and it's kind of neat to see what you can actually do with Disco. Okay, so now we're still in the Kexec environment, but our disk is blank. And it looks like we're pulling down a whole bunch of packages, a couple of gigs worth of packages now.

Yes. So we've got everything formatted. The disks are ready to receive all of our new files. They're partitioned. They're formatted. Next step is to actually go build the NixOS system because we need some files to write to the disks. That's what's happening right now. It's actually grabbing the Linux system

image. This will take a little bit depending on your internet connection, of course. And the speed of your environment you're working in. Okay, we're in the next and hopefully final stages before we have our entire environment, right?

Where it looks like just a couple of megabytes away from all of the packages pulling down. That's right. We've erased the disks. We're working on building our system closure. Oh, got to get those man pages. You need to get all the man pages installed. You have to have those. 77 megabytes of man pages.

Got to go on there, of course. 331 megabytes of packages total. So it's actually not that big of an environment. 330 megabytes. it's pretty reasonable. Yeah, I suppose this is the part where it takes a little bit of time as it actually builds and, you know, does some work. What's great is this is Nix,

so I can just pull, easily get HTOP going on the KExec environment if we want to watch along. Or whatever, you know, your favorite top that's baggage in Nix. Here we go. want to watch along. Or whatever, you know, your favorite top that's baggage and nicks. Here we go. Back to the building. If you want, HTOP is on the console

for the other screen now. Yeah, you can see Nick's store taking up a lot of CPU here as we get our Nick's environment set up. That number on the left there, out of 239 or whatever, that's kind of our rough progress bar. Not that they're all equal steps, of course, but...

In my earlier testing, this took about five minutes or so. But the load average on the VM hasn't even cracked one. Okay, the system closure's built. We're now loading the final stuff into the store. Getting close to the moment of truth. No errors reported. Installation finished, Wes Payne. VM should be rebooting any minute.

Here we go, rebooting. So now the script is saying it's waiting for the machine to become reachable again. This is so slick that you don't drop session while this goes. So this box is being reworked into a NixOS machine right now. Switch over to the... Do we have it? Do we have it? Just missed a NixOS machine right now. Switch over to the... Do we have it? Do we have it?

Just missed the NixOS bootloader. Oh, it's coming up right now, Wes! Look at it go! Is it working? All right. Hey, we got it! Wait, that's the wrong one. Do we have it?

Is it working? Yeah, for the final test, I'll let you SSH in. Okay. And what am I SSH? What's my IP? SSH root at debian.netbird.cloud. I would log in as root. I would, Wes, right? I'm in. And there you go.

All right, I'm in the box. I don't have anything set up. Let's go look at your NixOS config. There's nothing in there right now. So now you can drop your own NixOS. I got a blank system to work with here. But it is running SyncThing. I think if you do a system CTL status, or PS, you should see a SyncThing running there for you.

All right, let's check a process check. We'll see if SyncThing's on there. And survey says there it is. Yes, We'll see if SyncThing's on there. And survey says, there it is. Yes, it did start up SyncThing. I don't know if it has any config. It does not. Yeah, but SyncThing is running on the box. Well done.

I think that is a winner. Woo! Now, how long until we can run this on all our remaining systems up in the cloud and just get them all on Nix? Yeah, I think we do need to do a little work to iron out what kind of config you need to make it work on a particular VPS provider or environment.

You know, you still have to take into account the particulars of the machine and the place that you're working. But once you've got that ironed out, once you've figured out what disks you have, yeah. Especially if you've got a lot of the same system. Maybe we're deploying a whole bunch of machines here in the studio. Or in Linode or on AWS. Once you've got it ironed out, like a lot of this stuff,

it's fiddly at first, you know, like writing an Ansible playbook. You do it a whole bunch of times to get all the little quirks out. But once it's solid, you got it. It's solid.

And it'll just work over and over again until you have a machine that's slightly different. You tweak it for that machine, get it working again. And if you already have a NixOS config written,

like, you know, the two parts of this were the config you want to build and the disk config. So like they're separate pieces. You can copy them. You could have like a common disk config for types of machines. You could have different NixOS configs for like the roles that they're playing.

Makes a match at your pleasure. Linode.com slash unplugged. Go there to get $100 in 60 day credit on a new account. It's a great way to support the show. And you can check out the exciting news. Linode is leveling up. They're now part of Akamai. All the tools that we love, like their cloud manager that's beautiful for newbies or for long-timers, the API that's well-documented, lots of libraries, the command line tool that makes it easy to manage, take snapshots, upload to S3, object storage, all that kind of stuff

is still there. They're investing bigger and going even better. And now they're combined with the power and global reach of Akamai. They're expanding their services to offer more resources and tooling while still giving you that reliable, affordable, and scalable solution for yourself or a business of any size. And as part of Akamai's global network of offerings, data centers are expanding worldwide. They're spinning up a whole bunch of new regions. They're going to give you access to even more resources to help you grow your project or your business, to serve your users, your customers, your friends, your family, whatever it might be. So don't wait. Go experience the power of Linode now, Akamai.

Go to linode.com slash unplugged. Get that $100 in 60-day credit and learn how Linode, now Akamai, can help scale your applications and your projects from the cloud all the way out to the very, very edge. It's linode.com slash unplugged. Get the $100 and support the show. linode.com slash unplugged get the 100 and support the show linode.com slash unplugged now nix portable is something we wanted to talk about specifically outside of all this because it is a static permissionless and installation free environment that you could get up and running

without root access on any linux system And you could bring a whole environment with you, Wes. Is Nix portable being used for what we just did here? Yeah, I didn't use any of the traditional Nix installers for anything that we just did today. So Nix isn't installed properly on my laptop here, and it's not installed properly on the VM. But pretty much every tool we used came from Nix packages. Now this, to me, feels like an insanely powerful Swiss army knife that you could take with you to an Archbox, a Relbox, Debian. You could in a Docker container. You now essentially have this Nix environment that you can stand up anywhere you want and then pull in Nix packages and tooling on any distribution.

And look what you can do with it. The power of it is you can replace a machine in place. Yeah, that's right. Well, I think what's so neat about Nix Portable, there are some other things like their competitors, Nix user to root. Actually, as of Nix 2.10 on Linux, if Nix doesn't, if the slash Nix store doesn't exist and you can't create it because you're not root, Nix will automatically use a local store under.local. But, you know, you're still kind of installing Nix, you're using the standard Nix. Where NixOS Portable really shines is it just tries to ensure that Nix works out of the box.

It comes with flakes and the other experimental features like Nix commands enabled for you. So it's kind of like a, it's like a self-extracting archive that has a default configured Nix that is kind of probably what you might want, at least for like a basic setup, that's just going to work. Um, and it comes with various, it uses bubble wrap or P root. Uh, it's got a couple of different tools to kind of set things up so that it looks like a normal Nix setup to everything running inside of it, which is crucial because you got to have that. It has to think there's a slash Nix. If you're going to reuse all those binary builds from the cache which you probably do want to so what's great about it is you can just bootstrap yourself not only can you build any package in nix packages including

nix itself but you could also build yourself a custom version of nix portable if you want like if they don't have a version that works on the particular architecture that you're trying to use or if you want to update the version of Nix packages that it's using internally. This seems to me like the perfect kind of environment too for somebody who's trying to create internal scripts. Say you work at an organization, you've got a bunch of different distributions

or maybe even operating systems you're trying to support, and you want a common environment on all of them. And this thing, because it can kind of stand itself up you can drop it on a box and have it create its own environment and have every dependency and everything you might need all right there in that one directory yeah it's a 60 meg binary or something like that that's it you just download that you got all the power of nix and then in this new world of flakes where you can just reference a flake output with like we're doing for nix nixos anywhere that means like anything that has a flake output with like we're doing for nix nixos anywhere

that means like anything that has a flake or anything in nix packages once you've got nix portable you can do it so like we were using netbird to get access to the nixos anywhere right so when we were doing when we're doing this whole thing uh we talked about using tail scale but we thought let's throw netbird on there just as a fun experiment it uses a it uses a kernel module instead of user space, and that's kind of an interesting idea. Let's see what that's like. And you're just incorporating there, is that a flake? Is that how you pull it in? Yeah, and it is packaged in Nix packages. Yeah, sure, sure. And of course, you know, NetBird is written in Go, and you could just

download the Go binary and do it all that way. But I just thought it'd be fun to see how far you could take this, like a Nix forward approach. And so on the VM, I just downloaded Nix Portable and then told it to install NetBird and we were done. So the way I internalize this is this is a great solution for tech debt. Now, I know you're looking at it more from like deployments and building things and common application environments, but I look at this and think, I've got all these old Ubuntu boxes, I've got old CentOS boxes. And before we came across this tool, I was just planning to stand up an entirely new system, build that from scratch with Nix, and then migrate everything over. But with these tools, we could essentially reuse the same box. What we did in this case is detach the storage for the stuff that is actually vital and you don't want to lose it. So detach that storage.

Rebuild the box in place with NixOS using NixOS and portable Nix. And then reattach the storage. And it's in production. I didn't have to create a new VPS or I didn't have to migrate anything. The data is right there because it's just remounted. And you don't have to get like a complicated environment set up on your local machine to go trigger NixOS anywhere. If you get Nix portable, that's enough. And you don't even necessarily have to use NixOS, right? That's what's so mind-blowing to me, is that it's cross-distro compatible for the

portability stuff. I mean, you could have Arch, so you could have the AUR and the Nix tooling all on one system. Yeah, that's what's so powerful is I think Nix Portable just sort of takes the, like, you can rely on Nix. If you've got a setup in Nix, you can just bring that with you and you know it'll work. It takes that to the next level because you don't have to worry

or fuss about the like getting Nix installed on your system. Now, on a real machine that I was like, I was committed to using as a workstation for a long time or something. Sure, I'd probably just install Nix

probably with the determinant systems installer. Well, you'd probably also have root. And yeah, exactly. But for a lot of environments, maybe it's a work machine. Maybe you're borrowing someone's laptop over the weekend to just get some quick stuff done. Nix Portable is there as a nice escape hatch. Yeah, man. Or maybe it's a school machine. There's a lot there. And so when you bring all of this together, when you look at

all of the options we have for software that is either flat packed or app imaged or snapped, and then you bring in the power of something like Nix Portable, Portable Nix, I don't think the distro package manager matters at all at this point. Like it doesn't, I don't need it for any of my day-to-day packages. The very basic stuff. Getting the OS installed. Yeah, maybe Vim.

You know, a couple of base packages that are easy, you know, you don't care about a particular version, you don't need the latest one. Sure. Okay, great. But yeah, a couple of base packages that are easy. You know, you don't care about a particular version. You don't need the latest one. Sure. Okay, great. But yeah, for anything else, anything custom, anything you really care about. I can't help but think about all these hours that are being burned by these distro makers to do a job that I'm not even using them for anymore. That's pretty wild.

And I know a lot of people initially were really hesitant about flat packs. pretty wild um and i i know a lot of people initially were really hesitant about flat packs but the thing that i have come to really appreciate about them is i can have a nice solid base and i can have essentially rolling user land applications uh that works so well for me especially especially on nix with the nix os release model you know i i really like because then i can i can make one big change and that'll change out my desktop environment version. But my applications are fresh all the time. When there's a new version of Elementor Telegram, I have it that day. And you combine it now with something like Nix Portable, where you could be on Seuss,

you could be on Fedora, you could be on Debian, and you're just dropping this thing in a folder. You don't even have to have root, right? It goes beyond just the fact that you can install the Nix package manager. You can just all have it working out of this one directory and the power of it to like pull in a flake and do NixOS anywhere and just reload a system through kexec. Like the power of it is remarkable.

It's neat too, because there's a flake interface now for like the set of Nix packages. So like if it's packaged that way, you can just do Nix run, Nix packages, hashtag, and then the package name. So on if it's, if it's packaged that way, you can just do Nix run, Nix packages, hashtag, and then the package name. So,

uh, on the last self hosted, you were talking about, uh, do a CLI, right? The nice little, uh,

NC do alternative written in rust. Well, I wanted to give that a try and I wanted to do some cleanup on my hard drive before I was playing around with all this. Boom. Nix pack, you know, Nix, Nix portable,

Nix run, Nix packages, hashtag DUA. Done. Ha. Ha. boom next pack you know next next portable next run next packages hashtag dua done bitwarden.com slash linux go to bitwarden.com slash linux to get started with a free trial for yourself or if you're an enterprise or a team just go there right now and see why bitwarden is the easiest way for yourself or a business to store, share, and sync sensitive data. It's what Wes and I use to manage our passwords, our two-factor information, payment things, tokens, all kinds of little bits of details that you might want to store away in there. My wife and I also have a shared vault.

It works great for those shared family type logins, site services, and for RV. God, do we have a lot of them? And so like I had to have something. And it was a couple of years ago. It was at that moment I was like, I don't want to use anything else with my family. Bitwarden is open source, so I can trust it. And I know that it's trusted by millions of individuals and teams out there. And I know Wes has been using it for a while at that point, so I knew he liked it. But then now that I've been a user for a while, because I went to bitwarden.com slash migrate, I've really appreciated just the kind of long-term incremental updates that have just made it better and easier and more realistic for larger and

larger groups of users to use a password manager, a secrets manager like Bitwarden. And I think it's just the best on mobile too. So go try it out. It's really low hanging fruit. Even if you've already got something and maybe you don't want to switch or maybe you're not ready. I bet you know a friend, a family member,

or maybe your workplace that could use this. So send them all over to bitwarden.com slash Linux. workplace that could use this. So send them all over to bitwarden.com slash Linux. Now we have a bit of housekeeping this week. Coming up next week, we're doing a double Linux unplugged recording on our regular time on Sunday. So if you want to join for an exciting live episode, that would be the time to do it. And then later in the week, we're doing another pre-record. That is, Chris, you're going on a trip. So we're doing these pre-recordings so that you can just like take the day, well, the week off really, right? Yeah, hopefully, at least to some degree. I think we might live record the boost segment from the road. So that

way when folks send in boosts, we can cover those live. We have never done anything like that before, but that might still happen. Yeah, I'm going to take a little family road trip. Wes is going to do a little traveling too. And we're going to try to talk you into taking some travel time too. So we'll all kind of be away, getting some fresh air and some vitamin D for a little bit. And then we'll return back to our regularly scheduled program. Of course, we try to put all of it out at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. And if you just subscribe to the RSS feed, you'll just get it when we release it like regular, you don't have to worry about it. Members, you might get it a little early in your member feed. So that's something to watch for. So we'll do the double recording on June 11th and that'll come out

for the RSS feed listeners just at the regular scheduled time. And for you livers, that means we won't have any live episodes on the 18th or the 25th. And now it is time for the boost. And our baller boost this week comes in from listener Woody, who sent in a total of 206,612 sats. Woody, who sent in a total of 206,612 sats. I've been an unplugged listener since 2019. Since then, I've ditched Macs and I've built Arch desktops. I made a website with Linode. I started a Git-based note-taking workflow. I started using Butterfest snapshots. I created my own secure boot keys. I began self-hosting Photoprism jellyfin and more and it's all connected using tailscale i ditched ios for giraffe in os and now dabbling in next cloud

all these things were ideas after the episodes tinkering is fun and i learned a lot thanks guys and here's a big thumbs up for ham radio uh okay all right and he's got a he's got a zip code snuck in there too in the last four numbers there wes yeah stay tuned on the ham radio stuff he says i have an idea it'd be cool to walk through the basics of using SDR and Linux and then try to send and receive SSTV images from another listener. Wow, that'd be cool. He suggests a photo of Levi. I love it. That seems to be somewhere in near Canberra, Australia. Ah, you could discuss the tooling and different approaches. So this is where I want to start with ham radio, is I want to figure out where the crossover

is between Linux and ham radio. And I know it's likely going to be with software-defined radio. So I want to learn too. Thank you very much for the boost. Howdy from down under there. That's great. Rotted mood boosts in

with 103,000 hats. I hoard that which your kind covet. Starting out with happy late birthday to Brent. Oh, thanks. Hope it was great. It was. Also, the ham radio challenge sounds awesome. Don't know if I'll make it to Linux Fest like I want to,

but I'd be willing to join the crew and go after a ham license. Something I've wanted to do for a long time. And then Rotted Mood came in for a third boost, just to say, another boost to help you get to that one million mark this week. Thanks, Rotted Mood. I will put you down as interested in the ham shenanigans. Splint boosted in three boosts for a total of 41,999 Satoshis. Ooh, I like that number. Kind of just rolls right off the old tongue, doesn't it? Hey, Rich Lobster!

He says, how is Chris's living situation? We hear about the studio, the RV, his neighbor, the Cottonwood disaster, but does he live in a house? In the RV? What types of buildings? I simply can't figure it out is the rv big enough to fit everyone in the fisher family really no no no and yet you cram a brent in there too sometimes sometimes i'm gonna try to cram you in there tonight um you know that's funny i some i think sometimes i'm intentionally a little vague for just operational security i think i sometimes just keep it a little loose and I figure the people who listen closely kind of put it together.

Dom, you're you're you're a new outsider. You've been brought inside the Komodo recently. Apologize for no underwear. What do you notice? Right. The studio is a townhouse. That's got to be a little odd. Not what you expect. Well, right away, I noticed that no underwear. So that was the first thing that I noticed. How could you not? It's hot in here. Yeah. But actually, I would say over the years of listening, it matches what I had in my head.

You know, like the studio space is here in the townhouse. And I've been out to the RV and to the farm. Like, I don't think there's any surprises. And I live in a house with a ton of people, too. Even though I have a house, I have like seven people that all live in there. So I'm used to like, hey, you cram things in where you can. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you do have a big family.

Yeah. So I, you know, a lifetime ago when I was a young lad and house prices were at a different place than they are today. It sounds so privileged to say this, but I was in my early twenties and bought a house because it was cheaper than paying for rent. Now I could not, I could probably could not afford to buy the studio. It's so funny how things have changed. So I bought this over a decade ago and rented it out for, lived in it for a while, rented it out for a while. Inevitably, when the last batch of renters was done with their lease, we decided this is probably around 2014 timeline, 2015, maybe 2017. Actually, we decided to move into the studio and convert the downstairs area into kind of like

a production area and the upstairs area into like an office area. I then discovered that for my mental health, I cannot live where I work. I wanted to be that guy because it's so economical and it just makes so much sense with podcasting, but I only will work. I will work until 10 p.m. I'll wake up at 530 a.m. and I'll immediately begin working and I'll do it every day, seven days a week and I won't stop. And the RV really provides this great opportunity to change it up, go places that kind of get me out of a funk or change up the scenery. It is tricky with a family of five, but they also live with their mom. It's shared custody, so it's manageable. It does get tight, but we have a big yard now, so they're able to get out and go play around. I hope that answers the question, right? I think I answered the question.

get out and go play around um i hope that answers the question right i think i answered the question yeah so i like a maniac i guess i should just to connect it all seven eight years ago decided to get an rv for road tripping and doing the shows on the road i wanted to i wanted to have a stable solid production setup and then on that road trip i was like i could live in this this is fine this is what's the big deal. I turned out, I don't need a big house and then just decided to keep going that way. And so far that's what I've done. I imagine one day I might find a piece of land and build a little house on it,

but you know, I'm in the same spot as you as I bought a house 2008 ish in a little town outside of Olympia. The cost that I'm blown away constantly that that house is worth how much it is now versus what I paid for and how fast those things change. And my oldest is 20. And I look at her walking into the current economy and how she's going to get started and where she can find a place to rent or find a job that even can afford what rents are.

And I'm talking about in my little mountain town that's 30 miles outside of Olympia. I know it just wouldn't be doable today so i'm really grateful that we do have this space because you know when i do the shows on the road then i come back and it's so nice to just have like the mixer set up and everything's wired and the computers all have their job and they have the software installed and it's all routed correctly and it just works and the internet isn't based on cellular or space internet you know so it's really great to have a physical spot plus i can get into work mode and where i have jupes parked up at the farm is like 25 minutes away so it's not a big commute for me just enough time to listen to about a podcast once a day splint continues by uh sharing a little story of their own. This week at work in a Microsoft shop, I did my compulsive Pac-Man SYU and my laptop froze.

I rebooted it and the boot image wasn't found. Luckily for me, I had my magic USB with me, so I managed to fix it by removing and installing the kernel again. I mention this with a little laugh to the guy next to me who just hit back, that's what you get for running Linux. The install is a basic gnome, nothing fancy. I'm a professional developer, and the other guy, though, is a senior. He has nearly every Azure certification, and maybe, or maybe not, the Microsoft logo tattooed above his heart.

This week was a difficult one. Oh, yeah, man. Boy, that used to be the way it went all the difficult one. Oh yeah, man. Boy, that used to be the way it went all the time. The Mac guys too. The Mac guys. You know, when you're at a conference,

you're trying to hook up your Linux laptop to the projector. It doesn't work. The Mac guys are always laughing. Of course, now we get to rib them about dongles. So, yeah, this is...

This sucks because obviously you could flip that around on the microsoft guy and be like well it takes you 10 seconds to download the wrong thing and get a virus on your computer that's gotta suck too right like i get it i i understand everybody's got their confirmation biases that's really what's at play there but you know when you reboot your system and then you can't get in your meeting because you're doing windows updates oh man what's really happening on arch yeah like the like you go to just you just want to shut down because you're running late you're trying to man. That doesn't really happen on Arch. Yeah, like you go to just, you just want to shut down because you're running late

and you're trying to leave and then Windows wants to automatically install some updates. Or what about the fact that you can't buy a machine these days without having it preloaded with tons of crap that runs 16 different installers

that all automatically update and want to auto-download stuff? How do you like that? Because guess what? Linux doesn't do that. And the Mac does, too. So it just really depends on, you know, where your pain is at.

The nice thing is, you know, with Linux is that's a fixable solution, right? You have a lot of different paths. You'd have to know how to do it, but you have a lot of different paths to resolve that problem. With Windows, you're pretty much just going to nuke and pave when that kind of thing happens. I don't love having to fix a troubleshoot grub. But I don't want to touch the Windows boot setup. Oh, my God. 10-foot pole. The repair mode in the installer, it's so bad.

I mean, I've probably done it a grand total of three times in as many years. And every time I'm like, this is from one of the largest software companies in the world. They just get to do this with one of the largest desktop platforms in the world? They can get away with this and nobody says anything? Like, it's crazy. And anything's wrong wrong you get a blue screen no helpful error messages yeah man we feel you though thanks for boosting and sharing the pain uh we'll commiserate with you splint vtelnet comes in with 14,038 sats and just is a great show greetings from chile awesome great to know you're out there true grits boosts in with 18 000 cents

hey grits referring to episode 512 the sound of rust excellent episode really enjoyed the bitcoin dad hope he comes back on love in the future i also really enjoy being a jupiter party member since during my phases where i don't have the mental capacity to boost i don't have to worry too much that my favorite podcast network is going to start running underwear ads. But if you got some great underwear with tux on them, let us know. We could talk about that. Yeah, we got the Bitcoin dad set up with Pipewire after the show, and he was using that setup for the last episode we recorded. It's wonderful. It's working good. Real quick, Defective Phoenix came in with 2,500 zats, but no message provided.

We appreciate it all the same. We got a boost this week from Linux Teamster, 5,000 sats. Thank you. Have you checked out ko-fi.com as a possible addition to Memberful? I don't mean to criticize, but the Memberful site is not what I would call intuitive. So if you would ultimately get a similar or larger cut of the memberships than you would with Memberful, then maybe it's worth considering. If you do decide to test it out, you could first mention it maybe on office hours and ask some of us to beta test it for you. And I'm sure we would love to do that as some potentially new supporters.

As always, love you all. I haven't looked into it. I will check it out. You know, Memberful, the site isn't perhaps great, but they do have, like, you could build your own site and then embed the stuff. Right. That's something to consider. But thank you for the information. I will check out.

Go find. Mars X-Ray comes in with 5,000 sats. This is my last batch of sats via Fountain. I'm heading back to AntennaPod, and until AntennaPod gets sats, my future sats to you guys will be via Albi. Keep up the great work. Yeah, I think Fountain had a rough update because I have heard from probably a dozen people that are bailing on Fountain, which is a shame because I heard from Oscar that they're shipping an update on Tuesday. That's a massive improvement for Android.

But, you know, they're moving so fast. I think what happens is they have regressions, and then they fix those regressions super fast. But that week in between updates is killer for some people. Especially if you don't care that much. You're just kind of dabbling in the 2.0 stuff, and then your podcasts stop working. I get it. I'm hooked on the activity feed and on earning sats.

I love looking up and being like, I just earned 200 sats listening to that podcast. I can't help it. I like it. On iOS, Fountain is rock solid too. So that also makes it annoying that it's kind of buggy on Android. But if you think about it,

that streaming sats stuff, that's probably not super easy. Nobody else is doing that. It's probably using a little bit more resources. They're probably really trying to get that refined. So I'd say come back in six months if you're curious. Loomer comes in with 2,000 sats

and just proposes a new name for our buddy Giraffine OS. How about Giraffine OS for drama or what? You know, I mean, I hate to go there. I have a lot of respect for what the project has done

and I know that people involved are sensitive, but that's funny. That's good. I think it's in good hands now. I feel like it's in good hands. Scott comes in with 4,321 sets. Thank you, Wes, for telling me about Lapsi. Even though it is in pre-alpha according to the website, this already feels exactly like what I wanted from VS Code, but that it always has been a little bit bloated still need to daily drive for like a week to see if that will stick but this is giving me a permanent favorite editor feels oh i'm glad to hear that also you guys

should definitely try to get a system set up for using pre-episode value tags, if you plan to bring guests on more often, just add it to the list of podcasting 2.0 features to play with. In the future, when we roll our own RSS feeds, we will do per-episode splits. So when we have a guest on, they will be included in the split for that. Right now, we can only apply at the entire feed level, not at the per-episode level. So we don't have that yet, but it'll be coming. I'll round us out. Bearded maniac comes in wishing Brent a happy birthday from Morocco. Oh,

wow. Thank you. Thousand sats. Yeah. We have a CB, AC, Benedict, AC Bennett dev.

I bet. Right. Something like that comes in with 12,000 sats saying, thanks for an awesome community and helping me connect to the tech world. I'm a lifelong musician turned software engineer. Your pods really help make that transition. Feels like hanging with friends. Well, thank you for the value. Faraday Fedora

comes in with 6,500 sats to round us out. Uh-oh, he's also leaving Fedora and he's sending us the sats on the way out. Leaving Fountain. Oh yeah, Fountain, right. Thank you. Fedora on the brain though, I suppose, because he's Faraday Fedora. Yeah, Peterson the teacher also boosted in saying

I'm done with Fountain. I hereby bequeath you all my sats, which was 4,000. So thank you. That's very generous. You know, you could move them to the next app. Totally. It's an open network. But we will take them and use them wisely. And let us know how it goes. Check back in. Remember if you're not happy with the app

because it sounds like there was a bug that definitely got out. You can just get Albie. Get Albie.com. Then you just boost from the podcast index. You're using the Podverse player. Castomatic has recently introduced Albie support and AntennaPod, I believe one day will also have Albie support if they can get somebody to step up and write the code. So you can get Albie.com. You can top it off directly in the app. You don't have to switch podcast apps. But if you do, newpodcastapps.com to try them out. Real quick shout out to a user 4939 blah, blah, blah, who sent us 1980 cents, a little

below our normal cutoff. But sounds like 1980 is their birth year. And they had to switch their podcast app, get Bitcoin, get a wallet and do a lot of learning. But they think it was all worth it. You know, I really, I really do want to say thank you when people take the time to do that, because that is the hardest part of the process. Once you have it set up, it's so simple. I love it. Like I, I just, I mean, it's like, it's a, it's a well-worn path for me now.

So I'm, I'm beyond the point where I remember setting it up. But I, when I look at the journey, some people go down what, depending on which pathway you go, it can be tricky. If you just follow the path, I say, which is get Albie and then go to the podcast index. It's pretty straightforward, but I understand not everybody listens to me. Hey, we're Linux users, Chris. We like to find our own way with an exportable, you know? Yeah.

And you know, the other good news is to be honest with you it's getting easier every single month and so as people try it and if it doesn't work for them if you come back in a little bit and try it it should work for you i know it's a weird thing but we had a grand total of 430 450 sats 25 total boosts and 16 boosters involved including folks behind the scenes streaming just as I was setting up this morning. Somebody was listening

to the show and streaming sets. I love that. It's so great. So thank you, everybody who boosted in. We really do appreciate it. And of course,

we really appreciate our members too. This is a value for value production and our goal here is to make the audience our largest customer. So we're always thinking

about the audience first when we're making strategies and plans about what we want to talk about and what's incentivizing us to create these shows. We always want it to be to make our biggest customer happy. That's just good business. And that's why we want our biggest customer to be the audience. Now, not one, but two picks for you before we get out of here. We were talking about mesh networks earlier today. You guys know I'm a big tail scale fan, but there's not really a great tail scale ui for the plasma desktop until today it's called k-tail control and it's a plasma ui

to manage your tail scale network and you can get your stats in there you can change settings like subnet routing of course you can get the ip of all your individual nodes and then you can minimize it down to your tray down to your system tray it's your track oh this looks great yeah and it's being actively updated it's like five megabytes in size it's available on flat hub and you can get up and running in just seconds so we'll put a link to k tail ctl and then if you're not a tail scale user i'm going to just mention another pick i don't think i want to say what it does you either know or you don't know but sab nzbd is now a flat pack whoa the entire sab nzb download to give that a try yeah you can just install it as a flat pack now you don't have to set it up as a server or anything like that

and i can do all the work for you that is a nice little win and we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well and um i'm sorry the first rule about usenet is i can't talk about usenet so i cannot tell you what that's for well boys we got ourselves one more nix os server now yeah now just to do the rest just a few more to go right but we've got the tools. I think I know what we're doing this evening. So don't forget, we are doing that double recording next Sunday. We'd love to have you join us at jblive.tv.

The time should be at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar in your local time math. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. If you want a little more podcast, go check out Linux Action News, linuxactionnews.com. Wes and I are breaking down the events in Linux and open source, the stuff you really need to know about. And we try to get you in and out, lean, mean, information machine, linuxactionnews.com. Maybe you are worried about that XFS bug. We have the details.

Yeah, we got the deets on that. Also, an attack that the archive.org was just under recently, changes that Canonical's got going, end of life's on Ubuntu, I mean, all sorts of stuff in linuxactionnews.com. As for us, links to what we talked about today will be at linuxunplugged.com slash 513. Find or subscribe on our contact page over there. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks so much for joining us. And see you right back here next Sunday! Yeah! Thank you. you