LINUX Unplugged - 544: Half the Bits, Double the Pain

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

This challenge gets ugly as we slowly realize we've just become zombie slayers. We load Linux on three barely alive systems, and it takes a turn we didn't expect.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brett. Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show, the challenge gets ugly this week as we have slowly realized we actually became zombie slayers, not Linux users. Yes, we loaded Linux on three barely alive systems, and it took a turn we didn't expect.

We spent the last week plus living on 32-bit systems. We'll share the results of our challenge and why this might be the last chance to try this yourself. We'll also hear how it went for some in our audience, and we'll round it out with some great boosts, some picks, and a lot more. So let's go, all of us, right now, say good morning to our friends at Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. Networking that is programmable and takes it to the next level.

I've got no inbound firewall ports, and now, my friends, I'm not kidding you, I've got no reverse proxy. It's all just right on Tailscale. It's unbelievable the way you can build your own personal network go to tailscale.com slash linux unplugged for 100 devices and if you work out there in the enterprise this makes enterprise vpn solutions look like old historic dinosaurs it's so much smoother and it'll integrate with your existing authentication system and groups and privileges and all of that. Tailscale.com

slash Linux Unplugged. And before we go any further, a big time appropriate greeting to our Mumble room. Hello, Virtual Lug. Welcome back. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. We missed you guys.

That's a lot of people. It's been a while. Too long. It's nice to have you back. As we took some time off, we pre-recorded a little bit like we try to do. We thought, well, we'll have a little extra time. We could do a little challenge over the holiday break. We thought, how hard could it be?

Hard could it be? But it turns out that in, well, now 2024, trying to use 32-bit hardware was a bit more challenging than we expected. It all started with a boost, as these things so often do these days, from our friend deleted. A 32-bit challenge. You know, at first, I thought it'd be fun. A little quirky. I haven't used 32-bit hardware in years, but, you know, come on.

We were all kind of just using it. Yeah, how hard could it be? But it seems like we all kind of got an early start. Yeah. And as we got further and further along, it seemed like we might be hitting the last actually useful days. Like, if we had done this challenge in a couple of years, I think it could have only gone worse. Oh my gosh. I don't know how you guys feel, but I really firmly got the impression that we are now at the point in Linux's development where we as a community considerably have better

support for ARM64 hardware than we do for 32-bit x86 hardware. Yeah, and especially at least for, you know, the modern apps. Oh, yeah. You know, I'd be curious to see if you actually, like, went and looked at repo sizes and that kind of thing. But for anything that's sort of in vogue or the silly Linux hipsters that we are that you want to use and you go to the release page or whatever and you look for your architecture,

yeah, AR64 is doing pretty well. Yeah. Yeah, no. no like almost everything now is packaged for arm not everything but almost everything is packaged for arm 64 and definitely for x86 64 that is not the same for 32-bit and it's getting smaller and smaller it was that that made it um a lot more challenging so just to remind everybody, the goal was to A, build a fully functional 32-bit Linux-based desktop system, get a general desktop workflow for your day-to-day work going, keep track of any apps you had to swap out, keep track of your system resources overall,

just so we can talk about how loaded the system was, any kind of like tricks you had to come up with to make this work, that sort of stuff. We did allow for hardware upgrades. So, for example, if you could, we allowed you to swap out spinning rust for an SSD. If you could put more RAM in, you were welcome to. The requirements were you had to use the system for one week before the challenge wrapped, for one five-day work week straight. You had to get your work done and your casual stuff done on a 32-bit system. If you failed to reach that simple goal, which turned out to be very tricky, there was a bailout punishment.

If you can't stick with your 32-bit system, you're allowed to bail, but you need to get a free BSD desktop system working. Could be a VM. Some would just call this an alternate challenge and maybe not even a punishment. It was definitely a punishment and it definitely was an alternate challenge. Brantley, how did the 32-bit challenge go for you? I should start with the hardware. Let's describe this hardware. So I've got it here in my hands. I think my version is a little less clunky than yours. I came across this little netbook from a friend of mine by accident. She is not a technical user and said, Hey, Brent, this like old computer that I have, I want to extract some information off of it. I was like, Oh yeah, I can probably help with that.

And this was when the 32 bit challenge idea was just beginning to come to fruition. And I thought it would be pretty easy to extract information off this laptop. And it turned out my USB keys that I have ready, you know, at the ready at all times, complained about an architecture mismatch when I was trying to boot Linux on here. So I thought, aha, I've got my machine. So it turns out this thing's actually pretty slick. It's small, portable. It's a netbook.

I've never owned a netbook. I always wanted to. This one's been in my cabin now for a couple of months. So it's been, I don't know, a throwback in a way. This thing's an Atom N2600 1.6 gigahertz, which feels really old. The model is an HP Mini 110, I guess 4100. This particular one is only available in Canada. Oh, fancy you.

And I misplanned a little bit because this thing has one gig of RAM. Uh-oh. It can accept two, and I never thought to even order an upgrade or try to find some old RAM around. Oh, Brent, one gig oh yeah when came the time to actually spend time on it i had upgraded the solid state drive just for this purpose but then i realized i'd really miss the boat here with the with the ram and also without time to upgrade it so um one gig of ram was my lifestyle for the last little bit. Holy, and I'm complaining about two. Now I feel fancy.

Insane. Insane. Luckily, my laptop is circa like 2012. So it's not on the older side of 32-bit stuff. It's on the, I guess, modern, if you will, side of 32-bit things. But the very first approach I took was just going for a dive into all of the various distros that we might throw in here. I really came into this thinking I would find a new favorite esoteric distro. You know, trying the Debian's might seem too easy, maybe,

or the Nix's. So I thought, I'm going to find something a little unusual and that's kind of going to be the fun of it. It turns out there are many options, but it took me a long time to find one that worked. So I, you know, looked at slacks and Rhino and puppy and I burble. I don't know if you guys did all of this,

but I, my downloads folder for distros is now quite a bit larger than it used to be. Yeah. I did do a little distro shopping for sure. And I also a couple of times downloaded an ISO thinking it was a 32-bit ISO and then realized it wasn't. Oh, no. Did you only realize it after you put it on USB drive? Yeah.

Oh, the worst way. Yeah. So I kind of did a similar thing, although I didn't try some of the same distros you tried. So that's interesting. That's great, though. I'm glad we got a little cross exposure. uh and i ended up landing on crunch bang plus plus which is the sort of spiritual successor to crunch bang i don't know if either of you have investigated crunch bang back when it was i'll i'll say in its heyday i mean it stopped being developed in 2015 but um i kind of fell in love with it in around 2010 when i was first getting into Linux full-time. And I don't know what it is about it. It's maybe the dark mode or the simplicity, and I just always loved it. So learning that CrunchBang++ exists, I thought this is going to be the one for me. So for those who don't know it,

it's Debian-based, which is handy. Now, in this case, Debian 12. So fairly new, which is handy. Now, in this case, Debian 12, so fairly new, which means Linux 6.1 and GTK 4.0. So like modern, right? I thought this is going to be a good start. That was one of my concerns going into this is that I would end up with some old kernel or old packages and I would feel like I was compromising.

So that's really great to hear you got some nice modern stuff. Yeah, and I feel kind of lucky because the processor on this thing isn't, you know, super, super old. Um, so it could handle, I guess what you can call a more modern, you know, libraries and system and stuff. Now at CrunchBang plus plus uses open box for his desktop environment. So it's pretty darn lightweight. And I ended up learning to love it. Like right on the desktop has Konky. Do you remember Konky? Oh, yeah, of course.

So it's sort of showing constantly the system resources. But also, which I really appreciated, right on your desktop wallpaper, just a giant list of keyboard shortcuts. Ah, smart. Even though it's very minimal, so you might not even realize that there's a menu because there isn't. Well, there isn't

until you right-click. There's just a bunch of keyboard shortcuts that instantly are discoverable, which is really, really nice. As far as performance goes, a fresh boot on this thing, 560 megs of RAM is used up,

which is exactly, well, slightly over half of what I had available. which is worrisome. Konky itself, just sitting there, took 4% of the CPU. So some really basic programs are eating up considerable chunks of the hardware. And I would imagine you both and everyone who tried this challenge felt the exact same way. Now, unfortunately, I had some issues on my very first update of the system. The update failed in a catastrophic way, which was not a good start.

Of course this happened to you. So in it, RAMFS just could not complete, which is, as we know, kind of quite bad. kind of quite bad. Now it's for a strange reason, the error message included that the Raspberry Pi firmware was missing where it could be installed, which is very odd. So I just removed that Raspberry Pi firmware because I was thinking, well, I'm definitely not on a Raspberry Pi. And sure enough, everything got fixed. So that was fairly straightforward, but not a good start. got fixed. So that was fairly straightforward, but not a good start. But I did notice that it was complaining of the processor a little bit. And so I thought I'd look into it and I ran an old LS CPU and it turns out that my processor is indeed 64-bit compatible, despite being an i686. Really?

Yeah. compatible despite being an i686 really yeah oh no so you're on a 64-bit system by accident so i was like setting up this machine and everything and like totally diving into this but were you running so so we could do 32 and 64 so were you just running like a 32-bit os on your 64-bit hardware you know people did that for a while-bit OS on your 64-bit hardware? You know, people did that for a while. Remember that was a way 64-bit systems came for quite a while? Well, and so this was a crushing moment because I thought, geez, I've just ruined the whole thing. But the way I even came to including this computer in part of this challenge was that running an AMD 64 version of like Ubuntu on this thing complains about an architecture mismatch. And the reason is, it is an i686 processor, but it's a 64-bit version of an i686, which I think only existed, from what I'm hearing, for like a year or so,

right at the end of the transition between the processors. So I was deceived and uneducated and ended up by default failing our challenge. Man, so did you do the right thing? Well. Did you go into FreeBSD territory? Did you? I thought about it for a really long time about what I should do. And I thought about it for a really long time about what I should do because I had this hardware still that was in the spirit of running, you know, these older machines on limited resources.

You were running the 32-bit install. So it's a technicality. Right. But then I thought I need to also be transparent about the fact that I'm not actually running the right hardware. So at that point, I decided, yeah, okay, the right thing to do is to throw myself into the BSDs. And that was also a struggle. I am BSD uninitiated. Now we have some friends who are definitely steeped in BSD and love it for some reason or another. So I kind of switched my hats and thought, okay, well, I'm just going to dive into BSD and this is going to be my adventure.

But I did not want to just dive into the build your own BSD because I thought I would probably fail miserably at that. So I went out looking for pre-built desktop versions of the BSDs. It turns out there are a few ghost bsds one we know about hello systems as well uh it turns out none of those have 32-bit versions because i still wanted to try to stay on the 32-bit versions of the software well i needed to do what i could do to like redeem myself here yeah i feel there is some redemption there uh it turns out none of those well only one of those pre-made ones i could find actually had an i386 version

which was midnight bsd but it looked pretty cool like it's a an xfc desktop and you're basically installing free bsd the way it typically does and then on your first boot, there's a script that runs that just sort of automates the installation desktop components for you. I thought this is exactly what I need. I can like go through a text-based installation and make a few decisions there, but I did not feel comfortable even after reading the BSD handbook of doing my own graphics stack. So it was great. The install went great. And then I did a boot and never got a desktop environment. Oh.

Despite trying three, four times to go through the process. So that failed miserably as well. Oh, Brent, I'm sorry. It hurts. It hurts. I suppose this is how we should have expected it would would go for you right well and this is across days and days of tinkering on this so i certainly came out with many lessons but i don't feel like i ever got to the point where i

actually could accomplish work on this system so many many a distro has come across this thing. And I did try FreeBSD like vanilla and attempted to go through that process and failed miserably as well. So I apologize, but I failed our challenge miserably. What, what speed USB ports does that thing have? This version of the CPU can handle three three but they didn't even bother with that so this thing has three usb 2 yeah uh usb and it also has vga only uh i guess yes then it could do hdmi but they decided no who needs it why no one has those cables yeah there's nothing like good old usb 2 or even one when you're trying a bunch of different distros. You forget just like how sluggish those live environments are.

Oh, it hurts. Just for the windows to come up. And with the number of iterations of installation processes I went through, it's just like hours of my life are gone now. But I got to say, I did sort of still end up falling in love with a few distributions, which was the point or at least one of my goals. So in the BSDs, I did discover GhostBSD, which seems pretty great. It's got a Mate desktop and it's made in Canada.

So I feel like I might actually dive much deeper into that and give it a shot at some point. Maybe not on this hardware. Oh, chief BSD correspondent. Well, I'm not promising anything, but also CrunchBang++, I got to say, like, it was amazing. I really enjoyed it. It was nostalgic. It was very responsive on this hardware and it might be something that I want to stick around. So in that way, I really enjoyed this challenge and it was a lot of fun. I would say also CrunchBang++ looks like a great candidate for a cloud desktop.

I was thinking maybe a Notes PC. Oh, okay. All right, well. Stay a while and listen. Let me tell you a bit about the hardware Wes and I used for our 32-bit challenge. It was a Dell Inspiron 6400, described by one reviewer as, quote, back in the day, a low-priced, durable office notebook.

It is particularly interesting for a businessman, but also for private uses. I don't know which one I'm more excited about. The 6400 was released on August 31st, 2007, which, my friends, is 16 years ago. This laptop is older than all of my children. That's considerably older than the one I was using. Ouch.

It was very generously bought. They both were, two identical units mostly, were boxed up and sent into the show by Spazzy C. Thank you. Thank you, sir. They have the Intel T2300 with two cores running at 1.6 gigahertz yeah none of those you know fancy hyper threads or anything

just two cores and they feel it you really appreciate how multi-threaded a lot of things are now like Linux is good at throwing a lot of the back end things on the cores yeah this thing was at 64 nanometers of an architecture it's a big boy

the rockin Intel 945GM embedded graphics in this one as well, which you're not getting any desktop compositing with that. It's just basically all on the CPU. My rig, unfortunately, had a dim slot die, so I had 2,002 megabytes of RAM. Wes's rig had 300. I like that you changed it. I got the accurate text.

Wes's rig had 4 gigs of RAM. He had 4 gigs of RAM. It makes a difference. Resolution of 1280 by 800. Not the best screen. Not exactly great off-access viewing. And, you know, it's got a pretty wobbly – it was like Brent's HP. Yes, yes.

A wobbly screen setup. So you kind of got to keep retilting it if you want the colors to look normal. Yes. So this was our hardware. And, Wes, how did your 32-bit challenge go? Honestly, a lot better than I feel like it had any right to, at least compared with Brent's experience. I did do a little bit of distro shopping,

because you kind of have to with 32-bit. We also, you know, Debian had been suggested a bunch, so I think we all knew one of us was going to have to go down that road. I guess Brent kind of tried. I thought it'd go a little more interesting. So I tried Magia 9. Oh, very good. Okay.

Magia. I'm very glad you did, actually. I'm glad one of us got to Magia. Good. Yeah, well, it kept coming up on the list. I did consider Alpine. Sure. Because I've been meaning to try Alpine as a desktop just because some folks seem to like it.

I think both Brent and I were betting you'd do NixOS. Yeah. I was thinking about it. You'd been doing some early experimenting to like it. I think both Brent and I were betting you'd do NixOS. Yeah. I was thinking about it. You'd been doing some early experimenting with Gentoo. Right. And that kind of informed me for what building all of your software might be like. And I had done some reading and it seems like the default

pre-built binaries you can take advantage of with Nix from Hydra and the CI systems. Well, they stopped supporting 32-bit. So, you know, stuff that you could totally build with Nix, no problem if it CI systems, well, they stopped supporting 32-bit. So, you know, stuff that you could totally build with Nix, no problem if it supports 32-bit in the code. But it's basically... You're going to be building it.

Yeah, you're going to be building. Now, you know, down the line, I think if we were doing this longer or had intention to actually support this machine, then I would consider maybe trying to do, like, a build system or something like a VM or, like, set up for cross-building. I want to mention, I think both of us would consider that.

It wasn't viable for the five day challenge to build a build server that did a 32 bit build environment, like in a container on a 64 bit system or something, but, or VM even, I don't know. But if we were actually going to put these into production, I think that is a route you both, you both of us would go. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like a lot of fun to set up. I used to do it.

I used to do it. All right. So, uh, Mageia nine, uh, I mean, it sounds like a lot of fun to set up. I used to do it. I used to do it. All right. So, Mageia 9. What's the desktop environment there? Well, if you go with the 64-bit version, then you can choose between GNOME, KDE, or XFCE. If you're going 32-bit, they only offer a pre-built ISO with XFCE. So, I'm going with XFCE 4.18, in fact. But Mageia 9, it was just

released in August of 2023, and it's pretty gosh darn modern. I mean, you've got a 6.5 kernel on there. Oh, nice. Yeah. It has a ton of packages that you're going to want. Let's see. I wrote down the number here. 26,876

packages. And, you know, it doesn't have everything for 32-bit because there's a lot of stuff that doesn't support it, but by and large, when I needed a random tool or just something, it was there. And it's got DNF, which is a great package manager that I really don't mind using. So I was kind of surprised, like,

I felt like I almost cheated in a way because it felt so nice and modern. Jeez, DNF? Yes. Linux 6.5? Ah. Now, Magia was kind of interesting because it was a little more of like a Cadillac distro. You know, like it includes a lot in there.

It's got its own control center that pops up. Yes. I was surprised. I've never used it before. And it felt comfy right from the get-go. They've got a nice wiki going. There's a lot of sort of guides written with the intention to get you set up.

It explains the different repositories they've got available. They've got a lot of backports and updates. They have a nice guide for like the various ways you can install software. So they tell you about AppImage. They tell you about Flatpak. They do mention that if things offer support for RPM,

you can just download that if it's the kind of package that's going to provide its own dependencies. They did recommend if you needed to get kind of random stuff working, Fedora was your best bet compatibility-wise. But besides the 32-bit specific challenges, I was a happy little desktop user. Yeah, I mean, it really sounds nice.

I'm afraid to say I think you may have had the best experience, not to give away mine, but a bit. Yeah, so software availability wasn't a huge problem, except Electron doesn't really support 32-bit. Yeah.

I think sometime in 2019 or 2020 that was dropped. So I'll be honest, I did have to port a fair amount of things to the web app. Now I had a nice modern Firefox, so that was easy.

But things like Bitwarden, Slack, Telegram, Element, at times that was all happening in tabs in my web browser, which, I don't know, I kind of end up doing on my work machine and on things that aren't my main rig often anyway. So I'm used to that. It's really not the ideal workflow but uh i could make it work wait wait i got a question about that wes you're you were able to have more than one tab open in your web browser yeah you know actually i was doing pretty good on ram but most of the time i got down to like maybe 15 um sort of available uh you know you know you know what you know what

i get so mad i get so mad. I get so mad. You got so lucky with the four gigs of Ram West. Like, it was a luck of the draw. We pulled them out, and I took machine one, you took machine two. I had a sense, though, because yours had, like, all the cool stickers. Yes, it did. I got the Pimptown version, and I love it. So then I imagine, other than having to swap out some some apps you were able to get work done on this machine?

I was, yeah. I even tried to get a dev environment set up. I mean I wasn't going to be doing my day job on it but for you know after hours projects. Magia already had a modern Python and Java installed Clojure was even packaged so that was great. The main issue was the editor. I've been using VS

Code a bunch lately. Sure. Mostly just because of some of the really nice plugins. Yeah, again, another Electron app. So I actually went with Emacs. Been a while since I used the old girl, but it's a nice editor. It's a good swap. That is a decent one.

I, for my solution there, is I already had a VS Code web instance. Oh, nice. And so I just made that a little bit easier to get access to and pinned it. Oh, that's a nice idea. I did think, you know, for a lot of these things, like with Telegram, there's CLI options out there. In theory, it's open source.

Someone has an Ubuntu PPA with a 32-bit build. You know, the Telegram web clients kind of recently got an update, though, and it's really not bad. Yeah, true. It's serviceable. So I was thinking, it's like you kind of got a few different options, right? You got, update, though, and it's really not bad. Yeah, true. It's serviceable. So I was thinking, it's like you kind of got a few different options, right? You got, like, can you build it yourself?

Is there a web version you can sort of host? Or you got to pick something else? I did try LAPS, that Rust sort of VS Code-like editor we tried a little while ago. No pre-built 32-bit version, but it was packaged in Nix. And you know who does provide a 32-bit version? Nix? The determinant installer. Oh, okay. So I ran that.

I got Nix installed. That worked. That's great. To do a little test, I noticed Jeff in our, we had a little 32-bit chat going, and Jeff had been talking about Tailscale. That was one thing not pre-packaged in Machia, but I know that's packaged in Nix, of course. So I went and gave a sample build, and it worked. It took like 20 minutes because it first had to build Go,

and then it could build Tailscale. But after that, it worked just fine. So I thought after getting that to work, I was like, okay, try this editor thing, build it. It's a Rust app. It got Rust going, but LAPS failed to build. I don't know what was happening. It said something like maybe

this was caused by disk space but it didn't actually seem to be disk space doing those builds definitely made me feel the age of the system you know it was nice that i could get tail scale to work good i think what i'd be hesitant to do nix os proper without like a build farm support yeah but just doing nix it was a little more tolerable um just because it's like you could you leverage all the binary stuff you can find in your distro to start with, and then if there's a few apps that you absolutely need and you don't mind paying the build time cost,

and maybe they don't update that often or you're willing to update on an every-so-often sort of schedule. Well, and it's not a this or that either because at that point you're combining the Nix repository with your distro's native repositories as well. So you can check, is this packaged by my distro? Is this packaged by Nix? It gives you a lot.

I mean, that's pretty good odds, at least. Yeah. Now, of course, there are a bunch of stuff in Nix where they just download the package from upstream on GitHub, so there's not one of those. And it seems to say that there's a lot of things that even if they could, like the codes move beyond 32-bit support, too.

So you still actually have to have support in the upstream project, you know, even if you're going to be building it yourself, which can be tricky. Well, I think that's been a big theme is it's extremely tricky. It's an area I don't even think is on most of their radars. No, because who's asking for these anymore? Right, right. That was the big realization I had. I did try using containers. I figured, like, how is that going to go?

But Docker and Podman were packaged in Magia, so that was super easy to get going. You run into a similar problem where, you know, anything that's pre-built, you're using a pre-built container, no one's publishing 32-bit container images. Right, I got a couple. And it'll pull them down. There'll be no error when it's pulling them down. It won't say, hey, you're pulling down a 32-bit container images. Right. I got a couple. And it'll pull them down. There'll be no error when it's pulling them down.

It won't say, hey, you're pulling down a 64-bit image. It'll just fail to execute, which we discovered. We'll get to that in a little bit. But if you got something where you're comfortable building itself and you found some 32-bit base images you can use, then, yeah, I mean, containers can work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, containers can work. Yeah, yeah.

You can't, like, use the lazy script on Docker's website to install Docker if you do that because they don't make it available for 32-bit x86. It is available for ARM, but not – but Debian packaged it for 32-bit, and I was able to get it that way. So how I ended up on Debian, how I went from Gen 2 to Debian, though, is quite the story, and we'll get there. But first, we have a few items that we need to take care of because there's big events coming up just around the corner. Scale and NixCon North America, the very first, March 14th and the 15th, are up first. We are on our way. We are really doing well on our goal to cover the first NixCon in North America

and then hang out at scale. We have a goal of 8 million sats because we're sending the crew into California. We're going to get an Airbnb. We're driving there. We got to pay for gas. Gas is outrageous in California. It's actually kind of ambitious overall because we're trying to completely audience fund this trip. So we came up with the idea of 8 million sats-ish. And so far, we have raised 3.7 million sats, and we're at 47% of our goal of 8 million sats. That's probably 48 now because we got a few late boosts that I didn't get time to update in that exact count yet.

So even slightly higher. Great. We're halfway there now. So I think we're almost to maybe Mount Shasta, maybe. Oh, that's a fun one. Weed, California. I don't know why. Maybe we're just in Weed, California.

Come meet us there if we run out of gas. We are trying. We would love a boost. I now also have added a scale-specific boost sound effect. If you boost it with a scale boost, we'll play that as a thank you. And we're really looking forward to hanging out with everybody. It's been far too long. Then just a little bit down the road, if you will,

April 26th through the 28th, it is LinuxFest Northwest. We're, of course, going to be there. It's our biggest event of the year. It'll be probably our last event that is planned of the year. I'm sure there'll be others, but it's our last planned event. And just before LinuxFest Northwest, Texas LinuxFest, April 12th through the 13th. We're going to be there. I'm not really sure more than the details of that, but I know I'm feeling at this point

we're pretty confident we're going to be there. Hopefully there for the Eclipse 2 is what the plan is. So we have back-to-back events, really. March, and then 2 in April. First is Texas LinuxFest, the 12th and the 13th. And then April 26th and the 28th is LinuxFest Northwest.

If you're listening, call for papers for LinuxFest Northwest. It's January 9th. It ends at midnight. I'd love to see some Nix topics in there, some self-hosting topics. We know you're working on cool projects, audience. Tell us about it. They want a wide range of topics. Anything's really welcome. So go over there

and submit your talks. It's a bunch of events we have coming up, and we don't really know what the budget looks like for the rest of the year. We don't really know how anything's looking for the rest of the year, really beyond this. So we're not really committing to anything beyond these three events right now. So if you can make it to one of those, we would really, really love to see you. Collide.com slash unplugged. If you're in IT, if you deal with security and user support,

you've got to hear this. This would have changed my career. And I know you've noticed there's a reoccurring pattern, pretty much all recent data breaches and security compromises and leaks. And it's often employees of the company play a role. Unpatched software, maybe out of compliance, antivirus, data mining slash ransomware, compromise slash phished credentials. It's kind of just a never-ending list, and it's not really the end user's fault, is it? I mean, if we're honest, really, the technology has failed them. We need to do better and give them more adequate preventative measures. That's where Collide comes in. It is really a solution to this challenge that has been really just getting, I mean, in a way worse since the

Bring Your Own Device initiative. Not that it's been all bad, I mean, in a way worse since the bring your own device initiative. Not that it's been all bad, but it hasn't been all great for IT security. And some places, you know, they've tried to go really hard on this. Collide really just kind of, I think, strikes the perfect balance because it's all about preventative. So when the user goes to connect to your cloud app, that's when they get checked. Are they compliant with antivirus? Are they using credentials that have been phished? And before they're allowed to log in, before

they're allowed to even compromise your network or your app, they have to fix it. And they get messaged on your communication platform with messaging that just makes sense. It's clear. It works with your processes and your standards. And it helps them like, okay, go get this antivirus. Go change this password. Stuff that would have required a ticket that then would have had to have someone in IT respond to, and it just would have taken way longer and burned IT time and resources. Clyde just cleans all that up. It's really a slick solution.

And I think if I would have had something like this, I would have probably, I mean, who knows? But I probably wouldn't have burned out. Or maybe I could have lasted longer. You know, it's really a cool tool. And it empowers employees to look at all of their fleet from a single dashboard. For Linux, Mac, or Windows, all a single pane of glass. You can run reports, make sure everything's good to go. And it gives employees the power to fix their own systems

without burdening IT. Go experience this solution. Go to collide.com slash unplugged. That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. Go get a demo into how seamless this is. It's a great way to support the show and just get an idea of how magical this is. If you work in security, if you deal with IT's tickets or support,

if you're in IT, if your company has Okta, you've got some kind of solution now that isn't doing it for you, go see the difference. K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. Well, Chris, you hinted at your challenge, and it feels like maybe Wes was doing a different challenge than the rest of us. But I'm curious how your challenge went. Oh, it went slow.

It was slow and brutal. Just like here's an example. For this system to log in, it takes as long as my desktop, which isn't a very nice system. It takes as long as my desktop does to actually power up, post, boot, and log in. In that amount of time for my desktop, I can get just logged in to the desktop on my laptop. It's real slow. The two gigs of RAM is one thing. The other issue is the Wi-Fi chip is a little bogus in this guy.

Oh, my Wi-Fi worked. No problem. I mean, I'm using it at the studio today. Yeah, I know. Sometimes I can see networks on it sometimes. Most of the time, not. So no problem. Went on the old Amazon and ordered myself one of them little Linux-compatible dongles.

You know, just a little bitty, bitty guy. Problem solved, right? Put that guy in there. Well, first of all, these things are so small. They don't get the best reception. So there's that. And then I don't know if these side ports are usb 1 or usb 2.0 either way they're definitely not usb 3 they're definitely

slower than my wi-fi and internet connection and i was getting like 300 kilobits a second on my transfer oh man brutes so when i set the machine up i used ethernet but very slow overall so i realized pretty quickly i need to make this thing feel like home i gotta make this comfortable because i'm in this to win it and if free bsd is looming out there i'm gonna do whatever it takes to prevent me going down the free bsd route so i need to get i gotta get myself at home right so that way i'm in it for the long haul i learned this from from alone. You know what? I realized the participants in the, in the reality show alone, they do the best that they really build a great home. So that way they're comfortable when it rains and it's stormy and they can stay dry and get good rest. So I took this survivor

mentality and I applied it to the laptop. And so I wanted modern software. I didn't want to feel like I was compromising, so I wanted to get the latest kernel, the latest user land tools, and the latest lean mean desktop I could get. Yeah, this sounds like you. Right. And along the way, I'll have super optimizations. This feels like the sweet spot for Gen 2.

And I used to run Gen 2 on systems basically this speed. How hard could it be? Something tells me that was a whole Chris ago. Yeah. Well, I've learned now. I have learned now. So first thing I did, I busted out one of my old really nice heavy-duty laptop stands. And I put this thing up on a laptop stand.

Put it up there at eye level. So I'm sitting there and I'm looking right at it like I would one of my big screens. I get myself the launch keyboard. I want it to feel real good. Plug it in. Oh, launch keyboard's USB 3. So that's not going to work. Unplug the launch keyboard.

I go find myself like an old USB 1 keyboard, but okay, whatever. I get myself a mouse, an old mouse with a wire. Get myself the keyboard. Because I was trying to Logitech first, whatever. I get myself a mouse, an old mouse with a wire, get myself the keyboard. And so I was trying to logitech first, like a logitech wireless mouse. I'm like one out of every three clicks would register. And I was like, is the machine lagging?

Am I out of memory? Like what's going on here? No, no. It's just like for some reason incompatibility with the USB port. So I went and got like literally the Amazon Basics wired USB mouse

that I had around here yeah plug that in and it's working and then I went out to set up the right environment my first choice out of the gate

for the reasons I stated was Gen 2 and I've done this before I figured what a great hack 2023 2024 to have the latest

and greatest Linux software on a 16 year old rig that's only a story you could tell in the free software world and then i had a realization that when you want to build software like wes mentioned you have to download the dependencies and that in today's world when you download just the build dependencies that they'll just actually throw away when you're done it is an unbelievable amount of downloading. And when you combine the fact that, A, half of this challenge I was out in the woods, and I didn't have very good connectivity for some reason this time. So, like, the downloads were horrible anyways. And then when I got here to the studio, it was no much better practically.

I started running the clock out of time with Gentoo, and I started to panic. I started running the clock out of time with Gen 2, and I started to panic because I was spending my whole time, like, tweaking Gen 2, trying to get to just a usable state and then downloading build dependencies. And then building the build dependencies. Yeah. Oh, gosh. Oh, man. Oh, man. And I realized I need to get five days in at least consecutively. So I pivoted, and I pivoted to good old Debian 12 and I really worked at it. I wanted

it to feel like home and God bless Debian's 32-bit support. Jeez, it was like a breath of fresh air. I mean, if it supports it, right, like the Debian archives, there's some software and then so many things that, you know, work with Debian. Yeah. Yeah, so many guides. And because it's just the Debian community culture, there's still a fair amount of 32-bit users out there. So you can actually find 32-bit relevant discussions. Wow. Yeah, I was actually never really stranded with any kind of guides or how-to or information I needed to look up when I was on Debian 32-bit. It just, I kept tweaking at it, trying to get it right, trying to get it right, trying to get it right.

And I became aware of the fact that I wasn't actually working on this system. I was just tweaking the system. And then you came in literally on like day six or seven, where I had like five or six days left. And you said, are any of us trying Linux Mint Debian Edition? They have a 32-bit release. And I thought, you know, I'm never a Mint guy. No.

But this might be my moment because what I'm looking for is an opinionated take on the desktop. Because if you just kind of go in Debian, you're getting a pretty plain. Yeah. And if I were going to use this as a long-term work machine,

that might be the way to go. I wanted to use this as a long-term work machine, that might be the way to go. I wanted to use this for five days. You just needed it to work. You needed it to be. If I click on the Windows share in the file manager, I want to see the Windows network. I don't want to go, oh, crap, right, I got to go install SMB and SMB client. I got to go set that. Oh, right. I don't want any of that. I just want to get to work.

I have five days now because I've run the clock out. And I wanted a nice file manager. I want all this kind of stuff. The Mint just brings in there. So I put Linux Mint Debian Edition on there. And first of all, really nice. Second of all, went with Cinnamon at first because I thought I can lean and mean this thing down. I still like it after all these years.

And even after all the leaning and meaning and turning off the compositing and all of that, it just never really got responsive enough for me to use it. So I bailed and I did like one of those Debian moves where you have like the task cell selector and I went full XFCE mode. Hey, all right. Yeah, buddy. But it was nice because it was XFCE basic, but with all of like the mint apps and stuff, that was a nice combination. And I tweaked XFCE a little bit to just kind of help me understand like where my memory was at and my swap pressure was at and all that kind of stuff. And pretty quickly after that, Linux Mint Debian Edition with XFCE, that combination, I pretty quickly settled right in and got to work. It just sort of clicked for me. just sort of clicked for me so then i had to start a strategy of reducing disk io and memory usage as fast as possible because look mint worked great for me but it's not the leanest distribution out

there like sometimes just the update manager in the background is like taking 240 megs of at least virtual so i had to get to work so i I set up ZSwap, and I disabled completely my traditional disk-based swap, and then I experimented with a swappiness around 80 to even over 100 sometimes. And ZSwap is a kernel feature that really provides a compressed write-back cache inside your RAM. So it takes your swap, allocates some of your RAM dynamically, and it basically makes a RAM disk for your swap file that is, and you set the compression type. I think I did, you know, was Z, whatever, the Z.

Z standard, I think? Yeah, I did that because there's a couple of different options, and that's sort of like the mid-range for speed and compression. And so you get a compressed space in your RAM that you can swap to. So you sort of reduce the penalty for swapping. Again, now keep in mind I turned off my disk space swap. Right, yeah. So when you do swap, it's only to this special memory.

In RAM. And then I tell the system with the swappiness variable, ramp up your preference to swap. Ah, that way most stuff is going to get compressed. Yeah. So only really my active applications are in system RAM. And then everything else essentially ends up inside ZSwap. And it's pretty straightforward to get going. There's a couple of different ways you can get at it, but there is one package you'll recognize.

It's like ZSwap configure. And if you install that, that's the more kind of walks you through it approach so i'd recommend that and then inside firefox you can actually go to about colon memory and tell it to free up tab memory and get it to dump and reduce memory and i had to do that that's a nice trick yeah yeah that was one method just close firefox when i needed to open up another app was another method and then i wonder what you think of this approach, Wes. I went for a specialized out of memory killer and I might've gotten in over my head cause this is not a

territory that like I'm very well versed in, but I went for this no hang memory killer. Ooh, fun. I don't think I've tried that one. No, I hadn't either. But it does a couple of things I like that for me felt logical in a low memorymemory system. So this out-of-memory killer, it's watching your system. And as your system starts to run out of RAM, it'll start looking at applications it can kill. This is a situation I would find myself in frequently. And what I liked about NoHang is it's pretty easy to say – I don't like the terminology, but basically it's got a victims list,

and you give it a victims list, and these are the first things you start killing. Ah, that way you can come just like, I know this app is fine, I can reload it, it saves automatically, whatever. Right. You can do all kinds of different things in there, including it'll support cgroups,

certain environment variables, regular expressions, so you can get pretty fancy, fancier than I got. The other thing it supports is it communicates with me via my desktop notifications. So I get a notification of the app that was killed. So I'm not just in the dark. Yeah, okay. Doesn't disappear out from under you.

Which has been my experience with all the other out-of-memory killers. Right. Like, oh, I guess that got killed. And again, this is a condition I find myself in a lot. It also starts giving me low memory warnings before it starts killing, so I can close a tab. Or I can go do the about colon memory and dump some memory.

It supports ZRAM as well. So it's ZRAM aware. So I wanted something that worked with ZRAM. And it supports that semi-recent kernel pressure stall information the PSI support. Oh yeah, didn't Facebook help add that? Yeah. So it's getting that data signalrecent kernel pressure stall information, the PSI support. Oh, yeah. Didn't Facebook help add that? Yeah. So it's getting that data signal from the kernel

to better understand how bad the situation is. And it's also super easy to set up, too. It's really nice. So that kind of kept me at a situation where I couldn't multitask, but I could easily dual-task. Like, if I wanted to use, say, a Matrix chat client, which I'll talk about here in a second, I would generally close Firefox first.

Yeah, I was feeling the same. You know, two cores, two tasks. That's kind of what you do. And like you said, you got to swap out the Electron apps. I went for Slack for the places where I have to use that. I went with a pinned Firefox tab. I swapped out Neko for Element Chat, N-H-E-K-O. Oh, I tried that a little bit too.

It was packaged in Mageia. Yeah, it's my new favorite Matrix chat client right there, straight up. This is sort of a pick too. Walk away, even on 64-bit systems, I'm going to be using this. It's Qt-based and C++. And you have an option right there at the login screen, which I think is vital on these systems to reduce animation. Oh, nice.

And again, it's not Electron. And it's seemingly very, very well-featured. It doesn't have everything. I think it's missing threads and polls. Did you just get it from the Debian repo? Yes. Nice. Yes. It's so nice that it's missing threads and polls uh did you just get it from the debian repo or yes nice yes it's so nice that it's in the debian repo because flat hub has all this but flat hub doesn't have any 32-bit gosh no uh i'll also i'll give a plug though for neo chat may maybe slightly less memory usage also cute based so that's nice but Debian really was the MVP here

FlatHub had nothing for us a lot of websites have nothing for us but Debian had it in the repo almost every time like Docker for example both NeoChat and Necco were available in Debian, lots of stuff was in the Debian package repo it was kind of a nice little reminder about

you know, on these modern Linux systems we're so happy side loaded and getting all kinds of other places. But it was a stark reminder of the value that some of these, you know, the distribution maintainers and packagers really do. It was a total mind shift because we are so often like rolling distros now, current packages, flat pack, developers updating directly. This is a complete flip back to the old paradigm. And where I have sort of been like, we don't need the maintainers anymore. I want the flat pack directly or whatever.

I want to just download it from GitHub. This process made me deeply grateful. Yeah, I mean, if it's not packaged there, you're probably not getting it, at least without probably a little more work. Yeah, I mean, the viability of my system was dependent on these maintainers. Deeply grateful for their work.

And also for the people that are doing the work to package the 32-bit software, which you know there's not a lot of users for. I really came away from this reminded how grateful I am for that system and how it is still so viable all these years later. And, wow, man, I don't know. I just really, really thought Debian was the MVP. I kept Mint. Mint came in clutch, as my kids would say. these years later and wow man i don't know i just really really thought debian was the mvp i kept mint um mint came in clutch as my kids would say it does kind of use more memory it's definitely not as lean as just going debian wood so i would if you're really trying to eke the most performance out i'd probably go stock debian because it's got that deep deep repo and there's so many different

guides out there still i just really really really thankful for their hard work just for that. And the Linux Mint Debian edition is actually really nice. It's really nice. So painful, though. So, so slow. When I came down here to fire all this stuff up, it was like, geez, man, it's just a whole other level. Really appreciative of how far we've come now.

You know, I didn't have the memory constraints you did, but I was really feeling that CPU. Oh, yeah. Anything that was using a lot of JavaScript, like, you know, we use HedgeDocs for our show notes

and doing a long doc trying to make edits real quick in there is painful. Oh, no. I mean, it worked, right? Like, I could get my work done,

but a lot of that, like, right, okay, I type and wait and I gotta be a little more flexible with my expectations here. Yeah. Jeff, I know you were playing along at home with the 32-bit challenge game. Do you want to give us an idea how it went for you?

Oh, it didn't really go. I just tried a lot of stuff. I've got a couple of netbooks similar to Brent's, but a bit older. One's got an N280. It's a single core with hyper-threading and the other is a 270, same single core hyper-threading. They're very, very close to each other, about 1.6 gigahertz and both had a gig of RAM DDR2. Okay. Okay. One gig, huh? Yeah. So I went with that. One of them, it just, there's something up with the system. It kept

stalling out on me. No matter what I did, it would just stall out. I tried to run like an NES ROM, and it would just stall out. I couldn't even do that. Hardware issue? I took it apart to repaste it. I kind of wonder if putting it back together screwed with something, but it wasn't overheating. So I don't know.

Yeah, weird. But this other one, slightly slower, the N270 Atom, it's running fine. I'm talking to you right now via Mumble with it. Wow. But I'm a pleb, you know, compared to you guys. I don't use Linux to make money. I don't use it for a living, right? This is fun for me.

So finding things to do was kind of the hard part. And just distro hopping was just kind of the fun of it, right? Yeah. What all did you end up running? Yeah, I started with Magia, just like you did. Mandriva was my first Linux love. That was my first Linux desktop. Oh, neat. So when I saw that was 32-bit, you know, kind of a spiritual successor, I tried that and it didn't go. It didn't go well at all. Way too much RAM on boot. And

I just had to move on quick i tried different desktop environments even window maker just it just wouldn't work so distro hopped for a while and one of the real standout distros for me was slith has very very lightweight very fast but very limited secure Secure and high performance. Yeah, secure, sure. That's what they brand themselves. How are they running? Yeah.

Booting up with Slitaz, on this machine, I started with around 40, 45 megs of RAM. So, gives me lots of headroom to play. Yeah. The desktop environment or, you know, the window manager, rather. Very, very fast. Midori on that thing really flew, but that's kind of where I hit a wall. I couldn't run Firefox on that system,

and I couldn't get a browser that would render anything. And there's really nothing packaged for it, right? It's more of that, it's a little bit, I think, a little bit more versatile than, say, Puppy or DSL, but it's still in that realm. Looks like it's actively updated, too. Here's a post today talking about a 5.0 rolling release, weekly? I don't know.

Yeah, it is rolling, but not much is packaged for it. And I'm, you know, like I said, I'm a pleb, right? I'm not going to go through and try to compile every damn thing. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. So I found myself on Antixics which is where i'm at now and it is debian based so a bit more i've got firefox on here it's a bit slow the kernel's quite out of date but you know i'm talking to you i got a couple things open and it's sitting at 230 megs of ram and i can run up to snes games on this sucker that is impressive

all right all right. Ben, you gave it a go. How'd it go for you? Yeah, it was pretty rough. Oh, I'm sorry. So I actually had kind of the same journey as Brent and Chris. I started off, I had an old Dell netbook, but ended up having the same kind of Intel Atom

that ended up being 64-bit so i know i couldn't use that and then i realized i had a kind of unconventional system an imac g3 power pc from i think 1999 256 megabytes of ram ended up being the real pain point there. No doubt. Wow. Would you do command line only? Yeah, I got XFCE running, but I couldn't really do all that much in it. An old IDE hard drive, so I couldn't do much swap if it would be painfully slow. Shout out to Lynx and GoMux.

Web browser and matrix client in the command line really got me through. Also the Mutt email client as well. Yes. I was hoping somebody used Mutt. Nice, Ben. Well done. Well done. You didn't have to do free BSC.

That's what matters. Yeah. Isn't that it? I think that's the takeaway, right? Well done. You didn't have to do free BSC. That's what matters. Yeah. That's right. Isn't that it? I think that's the takeaway, right? I mean, my final thought is I'm really glad we did this when we did this. I feel like I probably won't ever use a 32-bit system again, an x86 32-bit system. And this was a nice send-off.

The Magia approach, sorry, seems like maybe one of the easier approaches. I think Wes got a winner there. Followed by, if you have the RAM, I think Linux Mint Debit Edition was really solid. And it sounds like, Brent, you found a winner in CrunchBang++. So we all came away with some new distro favorites, at least. That's not so bad. So finding this whole challenge to be quite fun, thinking back at these systems. Like, man, you know, we used that when I was a teenager, right? That was only 10 years ago, right?

Wait, no, no, no. That was 20 years ago, guys. 64-bit CPUs have been around a lot longer than we think. And then I was actually looking up, trying to remember what I ran back then. And even those systems, though they were running 32-bit Windows, they were 64-bit CPUs. So finding hardware to even run it on, you know, Intel Atoms are kind

of like the last 32-bit systems that they kept producing. And they're just, you know, crap. But it was a lot longer than I remembered, that's for sure. Well, thank you to our Unplugged Core members. You guys guys are awesome and if you're not a member yet or if you've been a member want to resign you can get double the content and support the production directly if you use the promo code 2024 it'll take three dollars off a month forever it's a limited time offer i'm going to make 50 redemptions possible, which is not very many. Promo code 2024. Also, you can use the link in the show notes.

It'll take you directly there. It applies to get an Unplugged Core membership, or if you want to get the Jupiter Signal membership and support all the shows and take $3 a month off of that, you can. Again, limited to 50 people. New purchases, existing members can apply this as well as a thank you, or if you're reactivating an expired subscription, or if you want to upgrade from your unplugged core membership to the party membership, just use promo code 2024 to direct support us with your fiat fund coupons. And we really appreciate it.

We no longer have Linode as a sponsor. Totally okay with that because, I mean, while we're sad to see them go, they were fantastic. They were great, great to work with, and just a great sponsor in general, and worked with us for a nice long time, helped us go independent. So supremely grateful to them, and if we ever get a chance, we'd love to work with them again. But in the meantime, we're probably just going to look for new sponsorship opportunities. Hopefully somebody out there, maybe somebody in the audience is even interested in sponsoring. But for now, we'll just say go become a member

and help support us directly. Maybe we won't even need to fill this spot. Wouldn't that be nice? Yeah, wouldn't that be? Unpluggedcore.com or link in the show notes to go directly to the $3 off forever. Use promo code 2024. 50 signups only, though.

It's not going to last long. Now, many of you took the challenge with us, the 32-bit challenge. If you'd like to share your experience, you can share that with us, linuxunplugged.com slash contact, or even in our matrix room. We have a special 32-bit matrix room with about 20 people who did the challenge with us. So we'd love to hear your experience. Let us know, I don't know, how you conquered your memory challenges. Or didn't, that's okay too. Fair enough. Or maybe even with some of these tips, you want to take the challenge over again. I don't know, maybe you're crazy. But one thing we did talk about along with this challenge was setting up a BBS. So if you'd like to set up a BBS, which we didn't quite get to, we would love that. So we're asking if anyone wants to run an official BBS, you can be the official unplugged program BBS.

So it's a bit of a challenge within a challenge. If you boost in with your stood-up BBS that you think might handle a little bit of our traffic, you might just become the official unplugged BBS. So stand one up. Let us know. We would love that. It's something we didn't get to. We played around with it a little bit. We wanted to run it on 32-bit hardware. When we talked about containers that we'll pull down and just try to execute but then fail, That's an example of one of them that we tried. Yeah.

But, you know, now that the challenge is over, we thought it would be fun to have a BBS, maybe have the official Linux Unplugged BBS. Kind of whoever claims it first, as long as it can work and has some things to do on it. It'd be really neat if anybody's interested. Maybe. Are there any matrix bridges for BBS? Oh, maybe.

Probably. The challenge deepens. Well, our olympia mike also took the challenge along with us and even wrote in about it happy 2024 i realize that i've been a jupiter party member for well over a year at this point and love it thank you mike for anyone out there that wants to support the show directly but can't wrap their head around Boost, I highly recommend becoming a member. Well, Mike took on the 32-bit challenge over the Christmas break using a Dell D820 with a Centrino processor,

three gigs of RAM, and a spinning rust drive. He's really taking it. Yeah. After failing to set up Peppermint, the 32-bit version, and NixOS 32-bit, ouch, Mike landed on Debian 32-bit with XFCE. I'm sensing a common path here, huh? And despite some challenges and limitations to do things like lack of chromium and Electron,

Mike managed to set up a PHP, MySQL, and Nginx stack, and even managed to use the system for coding and production work for six days. Well done, sir. Well done. He also mentioned that just using the web was kind of hit and miss, especially because a lot of sites with a lot of JavaScript just crawled. Yeah, amen there. Yeah, yeah. Wraps up by saying, it was so fun.

I ended up writing an article about my experience too. Thanks again for a fun thing to do over the holidays while my wife shook her head and wondered why anyone would do this to themselves. Yeah, she's not wrong. I wondered that too. Thank you, Mike. I will link to his blog posts. He had a great one about his experiences. I'll put that in there.

It was kind of fun. I did make that joke to a couple people because I had the laptop out. I was like, oh, yeah, did you check out my new laptop? Just to confuse them. You know, it's got these nice media control buttons right here on the front. Yeah. You know, I had half considered taking mine to Berlin with me on my international trip. Because mine is pretty small compared to yours.

True. In the end, I decided probably that was a bad idea and it stayed home in the cabin. And now it is time for Le Boost. Yes, it is. And the Dude Abides comes in as our first baller of the year with a lead old baller boost of 133,700 sats. Using the new fountain, he just comes in and says, happy new year. Thank you, dude. Yeah, thank you very much, dude.

Eric boosts in with 100,000 sats. Nixcon, North America, let's go. Yeah. I'm not sure if I can make it, but would love to hear y'all cover it. Okay. Yes, sir. And I'm with you on the importance of skip intro. And it's kind of a bummer with it really missing on Jellyfin.

Yeah, I have been, even through the holiday, you know we're watching shows and stuff and catching up on for all mankind oh nice hard recommend uh but it's got a long intro boys it's got a long one and man so i'm sitting there doing the manual fast forward and scrubbing on the timeline and try oh god i miss it there's plugins but it's not at the level of plex no plex makes it nice and smooth i really can't comprehend why people give you flack for it. Well, you know what? They don't understand

because they're not trying to watch Star Trek Enterprise or For All Mankind, Eric. I feel seen, though. I feel seen. You know, I recently got into Mythbusters again, and their intro is like a minute 30, and it kind of gives away the episode, so I always want to skip it.

It's been painful. Yeah, Eric continued, my wife knows that internally I'm annoyed whenever the skip intro button doesn't come up in Jellyfin. Now this part's very interesting. On a different note, services.postgresqlbackup on NixOS saved me. I was upgrading image and going through the motion of upgrading

when I upgraded to a two-new version of pgvector.rs, and it broke image. Uh-oh. Combined with services.borg backup, I was easily able to fetch an older version of my database, restore it, downgrade, and was back up and running. What a neat little success story. And also, I'm sorry I had to go through that,

but thank you for sharing. Sounds like services.postgrass sequel backup is something we need to look into, Wes Payne. I think so. Chris is editing his config as we speak. I was looking it up right then. I'm going to take a look at this. I'm running the image.

I just got a load full of photos. Load it. Jagbert boosted in earlier today with 100,000 Satoshis. Thank you very much. That's my very first boost. I've been listening for over a decade and I'm looking forward to MixCon and scale content. Wow, J3, thank you.

I am amazed we're still hearing from long timers and I always want to say thank you. I know the initial setup process. It's not necessarily obvious. There's not a great guide out there. It is a bit of a hike. We really, really, really appreciate you doing that hike. Welcome. It's all downhill from here, though. Well, not downhill in terms of content. Downhill in terms of how much effort it takes. Yeah, I should come up with a better analogy. We look forward to your continued boost. We're talking with you. Boost you back later. Yeah, you've got a better take on that. Boost that in.

I need to do a better job. Goose comes in with 60,000 saff. Use some breeze. Says, Merry Christmas. I'm looking forward to meeting you in Austin. Oh, right on, Goose. Oh, nice. Right on. Well, I'm looking forward to meeting you in Austin. Oh, right on, Goose. Oh, nice. Right on.

Well, I'm looking forward to that as well. Thought Criminal comes in with 48,240 sats. Scale! California, yeah! Yes. On with the show. Thank you, Thought Criminal. Well, Hybrid Sarcasm came in with 42,000 sats via Castamat.

The answer to the ultimate question. Inspired by the 2023 boosties, here's the first of many boosts to make sure I'm on the leaderboard for the 2024 boosties. He's got a plan. I like it. Nice and steady. And just to help you along your journey, I did add a brand new 42 soundbite. The answer to the ultimate question. So we've got a scale soundbite. If you boost in for a little scale love.

California love. And a 42. Make it so. So, boost in. Mentat comes in with 22,301 sats using Podverse. Mentat comes in with 22,301 sets using Podverse. Postal codes with letters are awkward, but there's half of mine. If the first two and the last two digits represent letters, it should at least point to half my town.

Hope to see you guys at LinuxFest Northwest. Yes, yes. Mentat. All right. So, geez, Wes, that's a hard one. I mean, you got, how good you brought the map. Yeah, it doesn't have a translator in it, though. Okay, so if the first two and the last two digits represent letters,

could it be something like CC3AB if you have zero as A? Or does it mean that, like that you have to pair them up? They're not individual ones, so is it something like 22301? Oh, Brantley's got a converter over there. I have a theory. Okay. Here's one we can try to decode.

So if you take the first two digits, which are 2, 2, is that maybe the position in the alphabet? And then the 3 and 01 being a, for instance. So I'm just, I'm, I'm using postal codes as in, maybe it's Canadian or something that a system I'm familiar with. It's letter, number, letter. So that's my theory. I think you're onto something. Cause, uh, cause, uh, what we've got 22,

uh, that's V. So is it v3a um if we plug that in well google says it's a postal code in british columbia which would make sense if they're going to come down for linux fest northwest boys think you solved it maybe uh langley is that your town let us know in a tap thank you for boosting in. We really appreciate it. Thanks for the assist, Brent. Yeah. Yeah. Nice job, Brentley. Go team. Woodcarver boosts in with 22,222 cents. Hey, that's a row of McDucks.

Things are looking up for old McDuck. For the 32-bit challenge, the only machine I had laying around was my Amiga 1200. Okay. Okay. All right. Okay. It actually sports a Motorola 680... 68020 processor.

Yeah, buddy. Yeah, the old Motorola 6800 series. The first 32-bit 68K CPU. Yeah, I used to have one in a Mac, though. Today I used it to write a document, and then I played some Stunt Car Racer. That's as far as I'll get on this challenge, though. Well done.

Wow. Well done. Neat. I don't know why, but I have nostalgia for those 68K CPUs. That was the first computer I ever got to 16 megabytes of RAM. It came from the factory with two. I slowly got it to four, and then I maxed it at 16 megabytes. That must have been luxurious.

And even back then I was using RAM compression. You're a monster. Now, the open source account had boosted in two boosts for a total of 3,500 sats using Fountain. I got my I Voted sticker from the Golden Dragon shop, and I wanted to say thank you tob for connecting me with my new non-profits sticker vendor oh very good you're definitely going to have to do some accounting on the transfer of assets related to boosts yeah oh yeah that's definitely a thing um but you know it's a thing like uh like for all things i can business you know i thought about this if i were to do say transactions where we just took it, the money,

we would still have to, A, do the transaction fees on that and do the same accounting for the revenue on that. So as far as a business accounting, it's just a different style. Faraday Fedora comes in with Rho Ducks. Merry Christmas, you guys. It was an awesome year. I'm not going to do the 32-bit challenge because you're braver men than I. Well, we'll take the boost, Faraday.

Thank you very much. Or more foolish. Something. Yeah. Batvin123 comes in with 5,500 sets. Cal goes boost. Boost! And Merry Christmas.

Now, Tom's dad boosted in 5,000 sets, saying, Here's a video from an excellent YouTuber about how to control your max air fan. Enjoy. Yes, I did. Tom's dad. Well, so that basically confirmed everything I suspected. It is a lot of work, but it is exactly kind of the work that I conceptualized. So I think I could do it, but you're taking the thing apart and whatnot still.

So and they're brand new fans. it do it but you're taking the thing apart and whatnot still so and they're brand new fans so i'll do it when we service them at some point or when the board dies from moisture and i have to replace a new board i'll wire this up yeah i am so all in on automation though it is game changing for comfort and quality of life game changing and i i think i don't know how on board the kids are i don't They don't know life otherwise. But the wife's on board. So that's what matters. So are the mice. I do catch the mice.

I do. Storm Clouds comes in with 7,000 sats using Fountain. Says, I tried Fountain off and on. I'm going back to AntennaPod, which I hear that a lot. And you know what I thought was really awesome? Is Oscar, the core developer of F of fountain actually reached out to storm clouds and started talking to them trying to figure out what's not working for them because they have a brand new 1.0 release it's it's tricky because antenna pods at a different part of its life

it's sort of at not the tail end but the mature end of a cycle it's been around for a while whereas fountain was just kind of going from startup now to kind of, it's just reached 1.0 and it's brilliant. And now they're kind of entering the early stage of refinement. But it's going to be still a few years of that early stage. But the stuff they're adding is so great. Especially if you want to try out some of these new music podcasts. Something really

special happening over in the music value for value podcasts while the rest of the podcasting quote unquote industry is collapsing yives comes in with 3 000 sets thanks for the great show guys happy holidays zach attack also comes in with 5 000 sets wow i didn't realize i'd boosted it in that much over the year thank you for the great commentary reviews and news i look forward to listening through 2024 and west you see that mr casavirsa right there with a row of ducks.

Don't distro hop and didn't feel well-informed enough to weigh in on a desktop. That's why I abstained from a desktop vote. Fair enough. Yeah, we asked for that feedback and appreciate it. Yeah. And there's a lot of folks that just don't hop around anymore. You just, you know, something's working for you. It's kind of a nice place to be, actually. Yeah, you can get the work done.

We're all tweaking. Now, ambient noise came in with 7,860 sats says, I think some form of preferential voting in the tuxes is required next year. If you want to keep the hall of fame candidates in the race, just a first and second preference would likely do. And in a second boost, I love the predictions episode each year. It's always fun. Here's a few more. I predict that by the end of 2024, we will see the first non-valve handheld running official SteamOS.

That's a good one. I think I should have, I want, after the episode, I was like, oh, dang it. Okay, good for you. Well done. I like that one. And a second prediction. I predict that by the end of 2024, a local large language model AI will be integrated into at least one service or app to passively monitor open mic or user type text to get a better context for ad targeting. Therefore, bypassing privacy laws as it's not passing direct recording or transcriptions back to that ad company. Oh, okay. I say no, but I like that prediction. I just think – I sure hope not. You know how many of the normies out there are convinced their phone is constantly listening to them?

It's a totally normal thing now. They're like, Google, I went on Google and knew exactly that I was looking for socks or I went on Facebook. It's like, yeah, dude. They've been monitoring you for a decade. They've basically modeled your personality. You think these things have endless battery life and bandwidth to just monitor you and stream that back to their servers constantly? Can you imagine the scale of that?

So I'm not convinced we're going to see AI local spying just because of the resources required. AI local spying just because of the resources required. Where I thought you were going to go, and I do think this is going to happen, is Google Voice or Google Meet, I should say, or Zoom will probably use some kind of AI monitoring to live filter out mic noise and typing. So you know how they already do kind of like background suppression and echo reduction? I think we're going to see an expansion where it's literally watching for words. And you could even have it,

oh man, I would love this. You could, especially in the Zoom setup where it's all server side, if you had a transcription, if it was doing real-time transcription and say you dropped out, you dropped packets like say Brent is doing today. Hey now.

Well, if it has a transcription of everything before and after and has a few milliseconds to figure it out, it could pretty quickly infer and then generate words to fill the drop packets. That's a fun idea. Can we get the other version where we got the kind of crappy background filters? Can I just be like a digital puppet for a version of me? Yes, that's going to be.

I think you can do it on the Apple platforms. Oh. But those are really good, Ambient. Thank you for boosting in, too. Appreciate that. I'm going to say Jack Ryan comes in with, oh my gosh, our first Spaceballs boost of the episode. So the combination

is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life. No message necessarily, but still love the support. Grumpy Linux admin also came in with a Spaceballs boost. One, two, three, four, five. Yes!

That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage! And Grumpy Linux admin writes, I'll take a moment to express my gratitude for the countless hours of entertainment, education, and inspiration you all provided. Aw, jeez. Thank you for all your hard work, passion for creating a platform that continues to enrich the lives of Linux enthusiasts like myself. Gosh.

I'm looking forward to all the future content you'll all produce and the impact it will undoubtedly have on the Linux community. Wishing everyone in the JB team a continued success for 2024 and beyond. I'm not sure how useful this episode will be for people's modern computing needs. I'm going to say, for somebody that calls himself grumpy, that was pretty nice. Thank you for that.

Hydrogyrum comes in with one, two, three, four, five cents. We're going to have to go right to ludicrous speed. Thanks in part to your inspiration. I've started studying for a ham technician license,

hoping to take the test in a few weeks. Also proud of Nick Nix for double-topping the tuxes this year. Yeah, that was great to see. Good luck on the test, and hey, you're gonna beat us. We gotta catch up. I know. Do keep us posted, though. It'll inspire us. Good old Gene Bean boosted in two rows of ducks. Double duck. Hey there, Gene Bean. How you doing? For what it's worth, if you're just counting invoices to evaluate app usage, your data will be majorly flawed as every single app batches streaming stats differently. based on particular value versus app B that sends every 30 seconds, regardless of amount, then app A is going to look underrepresented. Even if the same number of episodes were listened to at the same number of sets. Yeah,

that is a fair point. We were kind of going for like a rough shot, but after the show, we talked about ways of refining that down a little bit because really you sort of built the system to figure all that out for the boosties and now we're kind of in we're going to have the year to refine it yeah really we sort of the uh the stats we had not the stats we should on that one yeah incredible stats though regardless yeah yeah it'll be fun to poke more at it i mean there's there's so much value in the in them

their boosts the gene of the continued with, thanks for the great show and being willing to hear the community's thoughts. You're all making this a two-way medium and it's meant so much more fun and interesting as a show. This is a key differentiator for podcasts that have boosts. Right? It is, it's like, we went from essentially emulating radio where it was a one-way medium to a whole other level of integration with the audience in a much more two-way street.

And to that point, we have the live stream. That's another way we can do that. Real-time feedback. You ready for it? You ready for it? They hate it. So we got to get a new sound bite, a new sound drop. Somebody come in with something nice and tight.

I say four seconds or less. Five seconds at max. Four seconds. Four seconds max. With a California sound bite you don't mind hearing. Otherwise, you're going to have to listen to that crap. You're going to have to listen to that crap. This is one way to sort of.

I know, right? God, source. I know. Master Reboot comes in with 5,000 sets using Fountain. It's his first time booster but long time listener. Hello. Thank you. Thank you.

We really appreciate that. That is a long hill to climb at first. So I just want to say thank you for your quick response on Telegram about setting up a Bitcoin node and wallet. I also want to say thank you to the Bitcoin dad. It was his very first episode that got me into Bitcoin. And I want to thank the JB community and specifically the Bearded Tech and DPG who are always quick to help. One of these days I hope to attend a meetup

sending good vibes from Ohio. P.S. I've got five years of boosting to catch up on, so stay tuned. Yeah! Right on! Congratulations to you on getting all that set up. It's so fun to get it all self-hosted. Self-hosted open source money It's been quite a ride these last couple of years And we're glad you're on board Magnolia Mayhem comes in with 10,101 sats

I'm not going to play it If you don't like it, I'm not going to play the scale boost I'm not going to play it Let's make that trip happen Thank you Appreciate it, Magnolia This is really something To be able to do this Let's make that trip happen. Thank you. Yeah. Appreciate it, Magnolia. Yes. This is really something.

This is really something to be able to do this because I don't know how this year we were going to ever make this trip. And we haven't been to scale since before COVID. I'm going to have NixCon there, too. Do we have like a binary boost? Because I could, you know, got zeros and ones here. Yeah. Beep, beep, boop, beep, beep, boop, boop. I got started.

How about this? I am programmed in multiple techniques. All there you go okay you need a better sound i just i i gotta say i've never been to scale can you believe that let's get print this is this is a milestone for a lot of reasons all right speed round torp comes in with 11,101 sets using Podverse. I thought this might make for an interesting boost, but why doesn't Cubes OS get any love on the show? What's wrong with us? It's not 32-bit. We could go back to Cubes OS.

I think we've done it. I don't find it to be particularly practical except for certain edge scenarios. I think like Tails on a disposable system is probably a lot more practical for most use cases where people use cubes, but I do respect it as a project and a technique. Kind of fun to do like a little, see how we could make it work, maybe set up a Bitcoin node on it or something.

A post-show idea on that. Andre2k comes in with Spaceballs boost one, two, three, four, five sets. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five sats. So the culmination is one, two, three, four, five.

Happy New Year. That's the stupidest culmination I ever heard in my life. And don't burn down your houses, he says. Hey, mission succeeded over here. I almost did earlier. Really? Right before the show. I left my stove on while we were doing the pre-show.

Don't do that. Brent, he's referring to fireworks. Oh, right. Fireworks. We had a downpour so uh i had sparklers and a couple of ground things so nothing too scary for the dog but i was like having a hard time even getting them to light out in the woods we're out in the probably good thing because we're in the woods we're in the woods probably a good thing but um it was still enjoyable shy fox comes in with 2000 sats from the podcast index.

Here's the first 2,000 sats from my IPFS node. Oh, okay. So a quick little side note. IPFS podcasting is a thing where IPFS is the CDN to distribute the podcast. And instead of having that weird file file coin involved there is a split where when you boost if the file's been hosted on ipfs podcasts a split can go to the person hosting the file shy fox here's been doing that and they just sent 2 000 sats from that nuts that's crazy thank you also sent their config on how they're doing it on nextxOS. Wow. I'll be taking a look at that. I know that we were

getting kind of excited about it. I kind of pulled back for a bit, but it sounds like there's going to be a solution for having your own gateway, essentially. Oh, neat. So I think once that gets solved, where we can have our own redirect and not dependent on somebody else's redirect, we can host our own infrastructure, I think then that's pretty much the last

piece for us. But thank you, everybody who boosted in in i think that's all the boosts below the cutoff it was really nice seeing those come in over the holidays we had 37 boosters for this episode and we stacked 659 959 sats thank you everybody that is fantastic and we'll put that we're putting that whole bounty towards uh our scale goal that's what we're doing with these with these first batch until we get to scale so thank you everyone that helped us get there we're putting that right to work if you're looking for an excuse to boost in the topics that we're really really pushing for right now because we just like to hear from you is tell us your struggles with getting linux on low-end hardware the reality is doesn't really matter if it's 32-bit or not.

Misery just loves company. We'd love to know your stories. Share those on air because it is something really unique to free software. Even though it can be a struggle, let us know. And, of course, we're putting all those boosts towards scale. We have 67 days until scale. That means we have 11 episodes of Linux Unplugged left until we need to be on the road driving. So we'd love to get there.

We're more than halfway there, but we're not all the way to scale yet. So please do boost in. I think it's time to try out Fountain. Fountain 1.0 is a killer release, Fountain.fm. They make it very easy. It integrates with Strike now, so you can top off your boost balance super easy with the Strike app. Strike's available in 36 countries. It's run by a great set of individuals.

Solid company that's based on open source tech. So it's a really nice stack and you can boost right in very easily and support the show or you can stream those sats. That's also just very appreciated and it's something you can just set and forget. Shout out to our sat streamers who just set that, lay back, and enjoy

the content and support while they listen. That's all really appreciated as well as our members at unpluggedcore.com. Now we do have a pick before we run, boys. Are you ready for what I found? Oh, surprise pick. Linux Terminal Tools from Terminal Trove. So Terminal Trove curates and tries to showcase, and they're growing, but they're working on trying to make terminal apps better known and showcase what they're great at. And I have linked us to

the Linux terminal tools because honestly, the terminal was a really nice go-to solution in a pinch. And there's a lot more on this list than you probably have heard. Some of these you'll know, no doubt about it. But there's some that you probably haven't heard of yet. You can find it just by going

to terminaltrove.com. But I've linked specifically to the Linux category in there. I'm going to try out Frogmouth, a markdown browser for your terminal. Okay. I'd like to see that, actually. That seems kind of neat. That seems kind of neat. Thank you, everybody, for listening, too.

We always just appreciate you tuning in and catching us every single week and spend a little bit of your time with us. It's always just fantastic. We can always take you to the next level. You could listen live. We're back on our Sunday time slot. Sunday is at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. You get a little bit more show there. You can always join the Mumble Room and get that low-latency Opus feed.

And if you're a member, you get double the content. You get that whole live stream. You don't miss anything. And that LUP plug is in that Mumble room. You can hang out with them too. It's just a nice experience. Just, it's kind of fun for all of us and it gives the show a nice live energy.

But we'll put links to everything we talked about so you can always just listen on demand and get links. That'll be at linuxunplugged.com slash 544. Thank you so much for being here. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station don't

forget there's a network of shows over jupiterbroadcasting.com mike just got the most baller workstation and he's uh all in on the workstation lifestyle we get into that on coda radio and then alex and i went through our top apps and services for our home lab throughout all of 2023 and rounded them up for a major episode. And Brentley joins us. And that is a big one. That and more over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Thank you, everyone. Really appreciate you.

Share the show. Send some love. Spread the word. And we'll see you right back here next Sunday. Thank you.