LINUX Unplugged - 560: Linux Festivus For the Rest of Us

Episode Date: April 29, 2024

The first LinuxFest is back and better than ever. We share stories and friends from one of the best Linux gatherings of the year: LinuxFest Northwest.Sponsored By:Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!Kolide: Kolide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps.Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMLinuxFest Northwest 2024 — An annual open-source event co-produced by Bellingham Linux Users Group, the Information Technology department at BTC, Cascade STEAM, and Jupiter Broadcasting.Bellingham Technical College — At BTC, we're here to help you access the hands-on education that can give you an advantage in today's job market.Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Downloads Now Available — Ubuntu 24.04 is an exciting Long Term Support (LTS) update with this new Linux distribution release being powered by the Linux 6.8 kernel, making use of Netplan for networking on the desktop, features the modernized desktop OS installer, various performance optimizations, and a ton of new features.x32-proxy — UDP and Web Socket proxy server for Behringer and Midas digital mixer control.LinuxFest Northwest YouTubePeyton's GitHubElectromagnetic Field — A non-profit camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers.completenoob's NixOS ZFS on Root Setup — Install NixOS with ZFS on root on a ThinkPad T470 with 24gb Ram and a 1TB nvme ssd.radio-browser.info — This is a community driven effort (like wikipedia) with the aim of collecting as many internet radio and TV stations as possible. Any help is appreciated!Pick: Playlifin — A tool to convert a Youtube Music playlist to a Jellyfin playlists.Pick: Playlifin Voyager — Playlifin Voyager is a tool to export and import playlists from and to your Jellyfin Server.

So it is LinuxFest 2024. We're here live at LinuxFest, and we're in room like DMC 118. And the big, big, okay, maybe not the big buzz, but some of the buzz is that Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is now available. And we've got it on a couple of machines here. And Wes, you also gave it a go. I sure did. And then immediately destroyed it for five minutes. Yeah, I did. I must NixOS everything. But that means I got quite acquainted with that new Flutter installer. Yes.

Yes, I got a couple of goes with that myself. They're also – so they're touting this as more performing, but they're also touting it as like a more security-focused. They've tinkered around with unprivileged user namespaces to enhance the restrictions there. They've done binary hardening to fortify source. And AppArmor 4 ships in this. They're also disabling TLS 1.0 and 1.1. And they're shipping a new upstream kernel feature in 6.8. They now have the Intel Shadow Stack Support. So I don't know what a Shadow Stack Support is, but I think I probably want it.

Sounds like a superhero to me. Considering how you maintain your systems, you probably need it. Well, hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. My name is Brent. And we're joined by a very handsome Alex. Hello.

And Noah. Hey there. Hey there, Noah. How's it joined by a very handsome Alex. Hello. And Noah. Hey there. Hey there, Noah. How's it going? He's rushing to the microphone. Like a true broadcast pro. We are here at LinuxFest Northwest, and we have stories to share, barbecue tales, no doubt. And of course, we will have the boosts, the picks, the feedback, and a whole bunch more.

So that's all coming up today. So I want to say good morning to our friends over at Tailscale. That's right, tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. Get yourself a hundred devices for free. It's like a whole mesh network and it's protected by WireGuard. That's right. Everybody in the room, give the listeners back at home a big

hello and a round of applause for yourselves and for them. Linux Fest, let's hear it. Hello. hello and a round of applause for yourselves and for them linux fest let's hear it hello we're finally back we're finally doing it after what seems like 124 years of a break i i wasn't even sure if we'd have more than 15 people show up um especially after they heard the stories about how west likes to party i thought we'd scared everybody away how are you enjoying linux fest 2020 so far? It does feel like we're getting back into it.

We're also in some of the older rooms that we used to be way back in the day, so it kind of feels a little nostalgic that way, too, because that's just what's available, because there's still construction going on here. And we did it the traditional style by bringing LadyJupes, my RV, up to LinuxFest Northwest. Brent got in town early and helped me get her ready to go. I actually never left town from Texas LinuxFest. I just kind of stuck around here.

You're caught with me. Fest season continues. So I put him to work. You know, that's what you do with a good Brent when he's in town. You put him to work. So we washed the RV and got her all nice and shiny and pretty. So that way it wasn't embarrassing to bring to LinuxFest. And then it proceeded to rain every single day since we washed her.

So it kind of washed twice. Yeah, yeah, right. Just a little rain wash on her. Parked out in camping in the parking lot, we set the trend. Because all of the other food trucks, like the food trucks came, they parked around Jupes. Really? That wasn't planned? No, she's the boss.

Jupes was the boss. And so we've got a couple of food trucks here. I've been sleeping with the kids in the RV every single night here in the parking lot. It's like old times. You know, it doesn't hurt to have that food truck right outside when you need a snack. No, and it's great to have Lady JOOPS to sneak back into and grab a beer ski or work on

the show or something like that. So it actually works out really good. And then a new era has begun as well for LinuxFest Northwest. It is the all-hardware version of our live stream and mixing setup. Here on this table that we're sitting at, we've essentially replicated,

in a rough style, our entire studio, including the mixer setup, the remote broadcast setup, and maybe not a complete version of it, but we're getting really, really close. And I think this is going to be our best remote setup. You know, maybe not a complete version of it, but we're getting really, really close. And I think this is going to be our best remote setup. You know, if hardware had alpha versions, this would be Studio V2 alpha.

Yeah. And yesterday was pre-alpha even because yesterday we had a lot of little glitches and things like that to sort out. This was a dream that started, I think, on our Denver trip three years ago. We were dreaming about this very setup because we ran into maybe a few, a lot of problems doing it other ways. And we've iterated and iterated and decided we're going to do it this way, do it the real way. It was the perfect kind of setup once we started getting into it because it took advantage of our of our multiple stacks and skill sets. So for example, for the first couple of days, Brent and I were assembling various things like, okay, we know we're going to need a soundboard.

We know we're going to need this. And then on Wednesday, Noah arrived in town and then things really kicked up. When Noah's in town, it always does. And it kicked up and he built us a test studio bench in the garage at the studio where we sorted out the majority of the problems and just made sure everything worked.

While doing a radio show. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So I wasn't going to mention that unless you wanted me to. So I arrive at the studio at like, I don't know, 8.30 a.m. And, you know, Noah's been there probably since, what, 5 a.m.? Yeah. Yeah.

Doing a radio show in the studio. And in between commercial breaks or during commercial breaks, I should say, Noah ran out and built the test garage studio and they would run back in and do the radio show and then the commercial break would come and he would run back in. Time for another mic. It's probably worth pointing out we needed that because, I mean, at the end of the last Linux Unplugged, some of this stuff was still in the box brand new.

Yes. Yeah, it was still in the box. So not only have we not really configured it for this fest or this operation we hadn't configured it at all and we knew we needed to do like the full nine so we did like we did a whole mock setup including mock networking just to make sure we're on a separate network and we could do the remote connectivity stuff and then tore it down and brought it into the house to make sure that it would survive a decommission recommission and then packed it up and brought it to the house to make sure that it would survive a decommission, recommission, and then packed it up and brought it to the fest. Man.

And then we got it set up at the booth, which was a little hectic, but you guys got it done. You guys did great. Then we had to tear it all down again. And move it into this room. How long did it take to set this version up? 24 minutes. I think that's pretty good. Down from an hour.

Yeah. Down from two and a half hours. Down from four. Down from three days. Yeah. It was really something, I'll tell you what. But it's all awesome because the whole stack, so we're obviously Linux on the laptops,

but the mixer runs in embedded Linux, and our barracks encoder runs in really old embedded Linux. So even though we're doing it all hardware now instead of with software and Jack, it's all still using Linux under the hood. It's hard to be a physical slider sometimes hey yeah it is can we put one of the the noah stickers on something yeah yeah you can put it on the mixer yeah yeah put no switch to the linux yeah there you go just make sure you put the alt to speed support number right yeah right now the first thing i'm gonna do is get ubuntu off all

these machines no i'm just kidding it's fine it fine. Did you end up reloading the remote machine? Oh, my gosh. You let him talk you into that? Well, the discussion went like this. So he goes, they're going to kill me if I take NixOS off this. And I said, hold on. Chris put Ubuntu 24.4 on that machine. And then he told me to put 24.4 on that machine.

So it would be weird if we didn't put 24.4 on that machine. That was for the weekend, Noah. It was for the fest. We can reload all three of them with Nix if you like. You know, you got your going to town distro, you got your introducing it to the family distro, and you got your LinuxFest in distro. So at LinuxFest, I saw this great talk by this guy

by the name of Wes Payne, and he actually took an Ubuntu 24-4 box. An existing? Yes. He switched it to NixOS. So maybe we can throw that guy a brisky or 10 bucks. He'll just convert them for us. I've got homework after the show.

You did have a great talk, Wes. Oh, thank you. It was fun because not only did you do a live swap, but you went the full, like, I'll reboot and make sure it goes in there. And you did it the hard way. You know, you didn't use, like, the NixOS Anywhere script stuff. Like, you did it hand by hand, which isn't, I mean, an astronomical amount of work, but it's a fair amount of work for a talk. You know, if you really want to understand something, you got to do it the dumb way. Did you end up going through that a couple of times last night?

Yeah, last night on the drive up today. My lovely girlfriend, Jen, was gracious enough to drive so I could make sure that I had things dialed in. Oh, that's very good. That's very good. That's down to the wire, Wes. I like it. That's how you knew when you were coming in it was going to be really fresh on the tips of your fingers because you'd just done it. That's right. Practice makes, well, not perfect, but something like that. Yeah, well, putting it off to the last minute means that you were fresh and ready to go.

You basically rehearsed. Well, I didn't want, I wanted the late, I was using unstable. I wanted the latest and greatest Nix packages in there. But, you know, I wasn't the only one with a talk this time around. No, Alex gave a talk, too. In fact, Alex, he kind of opened up LinuxFest, one of the very first presentations. How did it go? Yeah, I did the shakedown in Texas two weeks ago.

So the good people of Seattle, well, Bellingham, got the rehearsed version. So that was nice. Talked about accessing self-hosted services remotely, why doing port forwarding is dangerous, all that kind of stuff. So it was a good time. I saw V1, and I really liked the talk. Yeah, definitely. And I mean, if you're not already using Tailscale and the power of mesh networking, it's the only reason any of the stuff we're doing today is working.

So it's useful all over the place. We should mention that. One of the things that has been extremely awesome, and I was about to get into this, and then I got distracted like I do, is all of this stuff is network-based. Even the sliders that control the mixer are doing it over IP. And how do you do that when you're going from a garage to a booth to a room where you keep all the IPs the same? You do it with tail scale. So we've actually set up our own mini network here at the booth or at the table or in the garage,

and then the machines have Tailscale running on them. And then, in fact, Wes, you even came across a cool little proxy utility. Oh, yeah, it's like a Node.js app that's designed to proxy to these specific line of mixers. So while you guys were all testing in the studio, I had day job stuff to do, so I was at home in Seattle, but I was still able to connect remotely through your laptop over tail scale and then live adjust the mixer.

So we'd be like, hey, Wes, can you send this channel to output number two? And then, OK, it's all done. And he's not even in the room, right? Or, you know, these are motorized sliders, too. So Wes will make an adjustment. I'll see the sliders move. Oh, Wes is in there. Whoops.

There's a ghost in the machine. Exactly what it feels like. I hope you let me in for a walk sometimes. Yeah, you got to walk your Wes. But it was pretty neat. And being able to connect all of that together and even for our – Brent has a little remote setup with a Pyzelle 7 and a microphone and a little USB-C audio interface running Sonobus. And Brent walks around and he can chat with the peoples. And we're doing that over tail scale because, again, you want to be able to direct connect back to the machine to stream audio as reliably as possible.

Well, if this machine is on one Wi-Fi network and Brent's on cellular, like how do you make a direct connection happen? Well, the other thing is walking around the fest, I would jump between networks, right? I'm in one building where we have all of our booth and everything, and that's on one network. I walk outside. All of a sudden, I'm on the cell network. Walk into this building. I'm on a completely different network again, and everything, and that's on one network. I walk outside. All of a sudden, I'm on the cell network. Walk into this building. I'm on a completely different network again, and everything just seems smooth.

So last night after day one, there was some after parties. Did you guys have any interesting conversations or meet anybody that was doing anything interesting at work? I had so many interesting conversations, I kind of forgot to eat or drink anything. Yeah, double guilty on that one. I didn't eat all day, accidentally. And we left.

There were appetizers provided at the social, but i think we all left before or just as those were arriving unfortunately i went all day i went all day and did not eat and then but people just kept handing me drinks what am i going to say no to a free drink i'm not an animal of course i got to be although i do know some animals that said no to a free drink but i did learn that your queuing buffer is full though yeah yeah yeah yeah well that got burned out at terry blacks in texas because we queued twice texas sized queue and i've got about a 45 minute queue per year tolerance in me and we blew it out like we doubled it at terry blacks and so when we got to dinner and there was a long queue i just had to bail i went back and i tried to make myself do it i couldn't do it that might have been one of

the reasons i didn't get to eat is the queuing tolerance was a little too low. I was in line like two positions ahead of you both and waited the queue because I'm a patient Canadian. We're having actually excellent discussions in the queue.

It's like the hallway track but for food. I finally got there and I decided I'm going to buy these guys a drink. They're behind me. They don't have a chance to buy a drink yet, so I could do a nice thing for my guys. We were gone? Well, they had two types of ciders. They had a pineapple one.

I know you like a pineapple cider, and a hazy IPA for Wes is kind of his style, right? Oh, thanks. And so I'm juggling drinks like my meal tickets and stuff. And I turn around and the place is like there's no Wes, there's no Chris. They've left. Yeah, we bailed. Well, I had – I mean I thought I had a very effective anti-queue sales pitch. And I was really trying to just bring people into the anti-queue sphere so that way I could just bring as many people with me as possible.

But speaking of great beers, also listen to Jet Brought is this incredibly spicy beer. I mean, it is, it has a little bit of heat on the back end. It's got like some pepper in there. And it, boy, I tell you what, I thought, well, you know, I'll just crack a little bit open. I'll have this with breakfast and eggs the other day. It was a little bit too much. I had a nice chat with a gentleman who does um photolithography for intel really based out of portland and does you know microchip manufacturing in the states i was under the incorrect impression

from the chips act you know stuff you see in the news that america wasn't making microchips but that's not true yeah i think the takeaway i got from that conversation was maybe not like the 3-nanometer and 5-nanometer stuff, but a lot of industry auto appliances, probably even things like our mixer, they don't need 3-nanometer CPUs in them. And those larger, older, if you allow, style are be manufactured in the States. I learned also that a lot of the prototyping happens here and then goes elsewhere for kind of the mass production. So that was fascinating.

Yeah, I guess you'd have to, right? Designed by Apple in California. Designed by Intel in California. I mean, I think it holds true. Like we go to these fests and there's a lot to like and the audience is almost always the highlight because somehow, invariably, the audience is up to way cooler stuff

than we could ever imagine. Well, they're not doing podcasts they're doing real stuff yeah they got time to do real work right that was the universal truth both here and in texas right the hallway track is why you should come to these things yeah you lot you people in front of us you are great yeah i think the reality is we get as much from being at the fest from you that you hopefully get from us at these fests. So, huge thank you to everyone. Yeah, absolutely. Collide.com slash

unplugged. You've probably heard me talk about Collide before. I think it's one of those tools that if it was around when I was in IT, I would have stuck around for a little bit longer. But did you hear that Collide was just recently acquired by 1Password? It's a big deal. It's a big deal because it's advancing their mission to make user-focused security the norm, not the exception.

For over a year, Collide Device Trust has helped companies with Okta ensure that only known and secure devices can access your data. That means it checks for phished credentials or makes sure that a system is compliant before it can connect to your network. And they're still doing that, but now they're doing it as part of 1Password. So if you got Okta and you've been meaning to check out Collide, now's a great time. Collide comes with a library of pre-built device posture checks, and when things come up, and they do come up, you can write your own custom checks for just about anything. And you can use Collide on devices that don't have MDM software installed. So your Linux fleet, And they do come up. You can write your own custom checks for just about anything. And you can use Collide on devices that don't have MDM software installed. So your Linux fleet, yep, you can manage it along with your Windows and your Macs,

all from one dashboard. But it also means contractor devices or every BYOD device somebody can think of, and I have seen all kinds. Collide is an end-to-end solution. And now, well, now it's part of 1Password, and they're only going to get better. So go support the show and check out Collide. See if it'll work for you. Go to K-O-L-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged.

Go learn how Collide works. You can watch the demo, support the show, and perhaps improve your personal user experience. It makes it great for your end users, too. Collide's the end-to-end solution we recommend. Go to K-O-L-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. Collide dot com slash unplugged. And so indeed we did fest and we had the booth set up. I mean, for almost all day yesterday, we were chatting with people as they came and as they went.

And System76 is here, and they're making big noise about Cosmic. I think it's getting really, really close, and it sounds like it's like the final stuff, but there might have been one feature that was kind of missed on their radar until the LinuxFest Northwest presentation was looming. We're getting there with Cosmic, and it's getting to the point where we're close to releasing it, so it's the most exciting time of project it's the most stressful time of project but um it's also the time when you're pulling everything together and finally start to show everyone what you what you've been working on for this long you know i didn't get to make it to the

talk unfortunately i'm looking forward to listening back but did you did you present from Cosmic? Yes, yes we did. Ah, there you go. Amazing. The dog food. Fun story about that. We landed display cloning on Thursday. You might need that. I don't know why. And it worked beautifully. Good.

It was good. Nothing like a nice production test. Right. Yeah, I didn't realize this. I gave a Cosmic presentation at our factory six months ago before we had cloning. And I asked Victoria, who works on the compositor, I asked her, how do I clone my displays? Oh, well, we haven't done that yet. So I've got to tell you what Cosmic D entails.

I've got to tell you what Cosmic D entails. It's not taking GNOME or KDE or even Qt or GTK or an existing compositor. Everything is Rust from scratch. Every widget, every switch, the compositor. That is a lot of code to write. I mean, great programming language or not yeah the the workspaces the application library the the uh we call them applets that's uh all the applications you can add to panels things like that so the whole thing is built from scratch

in rust and so when you're building something like that where a window spawns when you open the window is a decision a design decision that you need to make. Where the next one spawns on top of it is a design decision, all to the granular level. So we didn't have cloning six months ago, and I go to do a presentation. And I did not realize how difficult it is to give a presentation when you don't have cloning. And you have a mic in front of you, a have cloning. And you have a mic in front of you, a screen behind you, and your display in front of you,

and you have to somehow put all that together. But thankfully we landed it Thursday. Just in time. And yeah, they're building it, was it Iced West? Is that what they're using? Yeah, I think they forked Iced and then made LibCosmic. So if you want to start building on top of it, LibCosmic is the thing to look out for.

So can I ask a stupid question at this point? I'd love a stupid question. Cosmic is, does it, so where does it fit in the stack? Like, is Wayland in there? Like, is it completely from the metal up? They've got their own implementation of a Wayland compositor, also in Rust. Yeah, I mean, they are doing a ton of the lift, though. It's quite a lift, eh?

Yeah, I asked Carl, like, so are you concerned at all about the Mintification, if you will, of some of your apps? Like, Mint has a ton of X apps that don't really get used on other distributions. Are you going to go create all these apps and nobody's going to use them? And Carl said, well, then we haven't done our job. Our job is to make applications

that people will want to run on other distributions. And they're going to try to build those in a way that it's easy to move them around to other distros. I think the Rust helps there, right? I mean, it's good at packaging everything up and do a single binary or a couple things that you can run. I mean, System76's Aaron Honeycutt has been working hard to package that kind of

stuff in Nix already. So, hey, you get it on Nix, that probably means it's not too far away from other distros. Yeah, I think I also heard one of their staff is working on Fedora. Wow. So they're actively trying to make sure that it'll run on Fedora and on Nix. And then, of course, it's an Ubuntu base, so it'll run on Ubuntu as well. Yeah, there's a PPA out there if you want to try it there.

What I thought was interesting is, you know the infotainment in our Volkswagens is running cute underneath. in our Volkswagens is running Qt underneath. One of the use cases Carl talked about for Cosmic was automotive UIs or sort of embedded industrial applications, which I thought was pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, I didn't realize that's how broad they were thinking until I chatted with them. It also sounds like they have been spending time, including Carl, the CEO,

going hands-on with immutable Linux distributions and trying to figure out where immutable distributions might fit in for System76 customers. And Carl did himself a 30-day NixOS challenge. And he ran NixOS for 30 days just to try to get an idea of what's great and what's not great and what they might want to implement. And he thinks there's a way, you know, to kind of get a lot of what you get from an immutable system, snapshots and sort of that, you know, you build, you specify it determinately, and then it builds, and either it bails the build or

it passes, without necessarily having to go the route of Nix or even something like OS Tree. You know, I think it shows, right? Like, System76 is one of those few companies. The other big OSs, which we won't name, maybe, but they've got the advantage of, like, they have support teams. They interface with customers. They know they know like what the customer thinks. But a lot of the Linux stuff, it's developed by open source people. But a lot of that ends up being like developing it for

ourselves, right? And there's not a direct channel to like my mom, Katie on her desktop or something. But System76 has both of that. So I'm curious to see what their take of like, well, here's the actual real problems that our customer base is solving and here's how we think some of the techniques from nixos or fedora atomic can actually solve their problems yeah yeah it's gonna be i think it'll be a bit of a journey but i mean they're they're actively researching that so they're i think they're really looking at building something pretty unique as far as like a workstation os that everybody could use or power users could use uh i'm pretty excited because I think it's really close. I think the Cosmic release is probably the next couple of months or so.

I think we're like in the final, final throws of version 1.0. I bet we'll be trying it a little bit before it's actually here. It was? No. No, of course not. We had the barbecue here at LinuxFest Northwest as well, and my wife and Emma from System76 really came to the rescue to get all that put together. It, of course, was pouring like crazy. You get one or two things at the end of April in the Pacific Northwest. Beautiful weather that makes everybody want to move here or torrential rains that makes everybody want to stay away. So we got the second one this

time. We did have some tents, though, thanks to Olympia Mike and others that brought tents and got things set up really, really quick. And we were live at the booth. They got everything over there going and just kind of we showed up and we were ready to go. And we had to get started fast. I was impressed. Even though Brent's not necessarily one of the meat eaters, he jumped in and started grilling. The barbecue has just begun. We have a bunch of lava on one side of the barbecue. I don't know what I'm doing, actually. I figure what we should do is probably assign the vegetarian to actually barbecue. And you know what, Brent? You did pretty good.

And then Jeff slipped in there, and then right down to the last dog, Alex gets in there. We're Linux-festing right here. Yeah, we are definitely Linux-festing, aren't we? Yeah. Yeah. I love it. We're out of hot dogs in the coo there. Is this the last pack?

Yeah, open wide, Jeff. Oh, yeah. Is that the last dog, dude? Yeah, these are the last dogs. Down to the last dog. And then when that last dog finished getting grilled, I hold my hand up to the air and I swear, it completely stopped raining. To the second.

Yeah, to the second. To the point where I turned to Emma and said, it stopped raining. She stuck her hand out of the tent and went, oh, can you believe it? Emma, who was by that time entirely soaked. She was very soaked. Emma and Hadiyah were very damp. Yeah. Levi was running around.

The Levi, the RV dog, was running around like trying to avoid the rain but also very much wanted to be in the action. This is one of his favorite things to do too. Well, what if food spills on the ground? Someone's got to clean that up. It's so funny though because it was a massive tranche of a barbecue and one side of that thing was like 800 degrees. And so if you were standing in front of the barbecue long enough, it would just dry your

clothes. How's your arm hair, listener Jeff? Yeah, I think Jeff lost a little bit of hair serving up hot dogs. That thing was hot. Yeah, that chunk charcoal barbecue gets really, really hot. Nobody tell the health department, all right? Yeah, the hair is... Okay.

Jeff says he had fire pants on, so he was good. It was just his top we would have to worry about. But it's so much fun. And I'm very grateful that this time I mostly just showed up and got to eat hot dogs and didn't have to do all of the grilling. That was really nice. And it meant that we could focus on the live stream and do the booth stuff and work out the kink still and do that kind of thing. I was impressed with the folks showing up. I mean, you know, coming out in the rain, standing, people brought rain gear gear it didn't stop any of the great conversations it was a little party out in the

park i know we were yakking it up and you know what when you're from the pacific northwest you just you get used to it you have to say yeah i'm getting a hair wash it's totally fine you know there was some pretty wet rain that though it was wasn't it it was coming down hard and fast i know uh but it was still fun. We have been asking people this week what their very first Linux box experience was. And one of the audience members, Brian, also known as Boy in the Matrix chat, has joined us. Brian, hello. Welcome to the show. Hey, thanks.

So tell us about your very first Linux box. You remember what it was? Yeah, it was some kind of one of those wall wart server things. That's unique. Yep, I know. Wow. Yeah. So I used a Mac. I was really into Apple.

And I had never heard of SSH, but I SSH'd in and kind of found instructions online and poked around. So that was the start. And then I had a Mac tie tie book so i installed ubuntu on that and then i was like i i want to get a thinkpad so i've found a used uh t61 which i still have and love i i get thinkpads all the time now you can get them cheap used anyway but i switched away from from apple and uh kind of got interested in low-powered servers and and things like that so anyway i share that passion uh my ears really lit up when you said t61 primarily because my parents my father used a t61 for like years to do just you know work stuff and these days it's running like their home server

and that thing just keeps trucking. It's like bulletproof. And I'm curious for your T61, is it still doing stuff? No, I mean, I fire it up occasionally, but no, but I can't bear to get rid of it. Nostalgic computers. I totally understand that. What's your daily driver these days?

It's a ThinkPad. I can't remember. You became a ThinkPad, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Is it the Linux compatibility that drove you there? I think so.

They're easy to fix. You know, they're easy to upgrade, take apart. So I've got two kids and I buy them used ThinkPads. That's such a great way to go. Yeah, it is. Well, Brian, thank you for sharing that with us. All right. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Morgan stepped up to the booth. And Morgan, I'd love to hear about your very first Linux PC. Oh, well, it was a home-built 486. Oh, my. I installed Slackware 3.1, I think it was at the time. That must have been a process. It was.

A number of floppies. How did you even get your hands on the floppies? Did you download them and write them all? Yes, I did, actually. I downloaded the images on my Windows machine and made the floppies and turned around and reformatted it. Man, that is a level of dedication that you just don't have to put into today. It just doesn't require that. It was a process, yes.

And then once you get it installed, you never want to reinstall again. Yeah, no, it was mostly recompiling the kernel after that and getting a window manager up and running. Isn't that the funny thing, though? Today, if you mess a system up, you'll try to fix it for a little bit. But if you've got to reload, it's not a big deal. But back then, that would have been a whole day to reinstall. It was, yeah.

I spent a lot of time just troubleshooting and fixing the problems as I went along. Wow. Good for you. An old 486, did it even have a CPU fan on it? It did, actually. Oh, it did? It did. Yeah, yeah, it did.

Must have had a turbo button on that sucker. Yeah, it did indeed, yes. Well, I assume it's not still kicking, right? No, no. It's long gone. What are you using these days? Oh, at the moment, I'm using a MacBook Pro. All right, all right.

You know, you could put Nix on that, and then we wouldn't have any problems. Definitely. Make us feel better. The thought has occurred to me. Well, Morgan, thank you very much. All right. Thank you. That's a great story.

Another brave soul joins us up at the booth. Alcocet is here. And Alcocet, tell me about your first Linux box. I'm pretty sure it was in NEC Pentium 2 in 1999, which is the only brand new computer I've ever had. Really? But anyway, in 1999, my girlfriend at the time was reading in a newspaper, and she

discovered Linux. She told me and said, you might be interested in this. So that was really cool. She knew you. Yeah. It's funny, remember when NEC and all those different companies back then were making PCs? There were so many PC manufacturers. Yes, a lot, yeah.

Yeah, I didn't realize NEC had hung on actually quite that long. Do you remember anything about the box? Yeah, I still have it, but I haven't touched it for a few years. Oh, I love that you still have it. Yeah, the last time I used it was probably seven years ago, and it was still functional. You ever think about firing it back up again? Maybe. I know, there's a lot of things to do. Are we we gonna have to do a second round of the 32-bit challenge yeah sounds like a good contender how big is it you said it's a big box is no it was a standard maybe even slightly smaller than a standard desktop size at the time neat yeah what what a collector's piece you should hold on to that forever. Yeah. Well, I tend to do that with everything.

All right. So what's your rig these days? A MacBook? A ThinkPad? Oh, yeah. So I have a lot of old ThinkPads. The newest one is a T420, which is pretty cool. Let's see. I also have an old Chromebook.

Actually, I have a few old Chromebooks. If we need a spare rig, I think we know who to turn to. Right, yeah. Yeah, definitely. Can I ask you, you seem to have a love for used machines or refurbishing them. I'm curious, why go that route? Because I have feelings about this, but I'm curious about yours. So I find that reuse is usually better than recycling

and definitely better than landfill for e-waste. I used to volunteer at an organization called Free Geek in Portland. We even tried to start one in Seattle. There's actually still some in Canada that I think still are running the Free Geeks. Oh, good. And with the Free Geek, basically, people could come and donate their old computer hardware and other hardware. Sorry, other electronic hardware. and donate their old computer hardware and other hardware.

Sorry, other electronic hardware. And what we can't refurbish and build ourselves, the volunteers, into usable PCs with running Linux, we recycle in the United States without sending it to a poor country. It usually happens with e-waste. So that's kind of my main thing. So I'm really happy to hear that you're still using the... The old Sputnik here? Yeah.

Yeah, it's still hanging on. The port's maybe a little loose, but it's hanging on. Back at the Jupiter Broadcasting Studio, there's a bit of a computer museum, as you might... That is true. It's an unintentional computer museum, but it is certainly one. Are you throwing shade right now? No, they're there to use if we need

them. Or part out, yeah. Or maybe put on the walls as decoration someday. Oh, how cool would that be? Especially if it was like it exploded, you know, just all of the parts on a board. Well, thank you. Thank you. Fascinating story. Really appreciate that. And we have yet another brave

soul over there. Tell us your name. My name is Tristan. Hello, Tristan. And what was your first Linux box? So it was, I think it was, yeah, Dell Precision 8400. Was that one of their very first Ubuntu machines? It was actually running XP, but in the middle of eighth grade, while everyone's learning to type in IT class,

my buddy passes me a CD. Oh. And I look at this. Hey, man, you should check this out. Yeah. And I look at his computer, and I was like, I don't recognize that OS. Because I run Mac OS at home, and this guy has Ubuntu 606. And so in the middle of our computer lab, just boot up on 606.

Awesome. You know, one of my very first Linux experiences was in a computer lab, too. It was, hey, what are you running over there? That's not Windows. And I think it was some very old version of GNOME or something like that. It looked so cool and so different than Windows at the time. Yeah, just completely different window manager. Yeah.

I then went and proceeded to delete my entire file system, and that was one of my first experiences with Linux. Yeah, yeah. You know, it expanded to an ex-girlfriend and having to recover files, and the only system that could aptly recover files was Photorec. Yeah.

And suddenly I'm nose-deep in the command line, 14 years old, trying to recover this girl's flip phone. Yes, of course. Oh, gosh, man. But you know what? That's how you learn, right? Oh, yeah.

Did you actually get the files? Oh, I did. Oh, you did? Oh, great. Yeah, absolutely. And now it's just another tool in the wheelhouse there. Absolutely. Well, thank you. That's a great story. Appreciate it. Thank you in the wheelhouse there. Absolutely. Well, thank you.

That's a great story. Appreciate it. Thank you. Appreciate it, Chris. Thanks. And another brave soul joins us here. Brian, welcome. And tell us about your very first Linux machine.

Actually, my first Linux machine is sitting right over by my seat right now. It's my school laptop. Okay. So you're a new Linux user? Fairly new. Yeah, about two years now. Tell us about the machine. I mean, it's an old Windows, let's see, it was a Windows 7 laptop. It's a Dell Aspire 5530 something or whatever. Nice.

Yeah. It was reaching the end of its life as a Windows machine, and I needed a laptop for school. What distro did you put on there? Ubuntu 2004, I think it is. New 2404 is out. Might be time for an upgrade.

Once I get through school, then I can actually safely delete everything from it. This is a person with sense of humor. You should learn something. You don't upgrade before an important day? I thought that's the move. I don't know. I feel like the important time to upgrade is finals week, right?

Yeah, right. Right during finals week. When things get really busy. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you very much. Thanks, guys. Great to hear.

Last one. Anybody else? Last one. Anybody else? Last one. And our last brave soul this week joins us here at the booth. Mark, tell me about your first Linux PC. So when I started my Linux journey, it was in early high school. But I didn't have a broadband internet was just becoming a thing. But I lived in the middle of nowhere.

I had dial-up internet. So this is around early Ubuntu stages when they're shipping CDs. was just becoming a thing. But I lived in the middle of nowhere. I had dial-up internet. So this is around early Ubuntu stages when they're shipping CDs. So I remember ordering a bunch of Ubuntu CDs, and I wiped my family computer out. Oh, how'd they take that? They didn't like that. So eventually, I got some hand-me-down computer.

We've got to give this kid his own machine. So we did that for a while. But then I started learning about other things like Gen 2 and stuff. So I have a fond memory of three days of trying to compile the kernel for Gen 2 on a Pentium 3.

And I came into the room and it actually just failed on the compile and I gave up. So that was my last Gen 2 experience. Does it still take three days? I think it does. I mean if you do it wrong. Yeah, on a Pentium Does it still take three days? I think it does, right? I mean, if you do it wrong. Yeah. On a Pentium 3, it probably does.

With a CRT screen, too, right? So you've got to make the call. Do I leave this super high energy using screen on so I can keep checking? Do I come back and clunk and turn it on and off to check on it? Don't even get me started on trying to build the Plasma desktop. That just took forever, too. That one still does. Yeah, that's true. That just took forever, too. So, yeah. That one still does.

Yeah, that's true. You get the kernel, and then that finally gets working. Then you've got to build Plasma. So tell me about your current Linux box. Well, all my boxes are Linux, basically. So I run a mixture of Arch and NixOS and across custom computers, mostly custom desktops. But my current laptop is a T4 ADS, and I have a, like probably many of us, have a museum wall of old ThinkPads

and other devices of various eras. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one. Yeah, this is making me feel better about our choices. We should do it more often. Well, thank you, sir. That's a great story. I really appreciate it. All right, all right, all right.

Let's see over here. So I've got Jose here in the crowd, and I think those who know Linux Unplugged might recognize Jose. Jose, you have come a little ways to get here. Can you introduce yourself for those who might not know you and where you came from? Sure.

My name is Jose Banez. I came here from Puerto Rico, flew out here with my company, my small business, Blind Penguin. I'm blind, so I named my business Blind Penguin. I'm here with my wife, the brains of the company, and my business partner, who's also in some of the talks, and just came here to networking or sponsoring some of the event because we really wanted to do it. And just here to network and have some fun. Amazing. And can you give us a sense of what you do in your business? Yes. We're a software development company.

Right now we do a lot of work with the local government and the U.S. federal government. Basically, backend, web app development, APIs, database management, and a lot of cloud infrastructure like Azure and AWS. And we also have some private clients where we do some mobile development. And we are starting our adventure now into the open source uh sphere and let's see how it goes for us now last night we met at the social event and you were mentioning a project that you're working on that i think you're quite excited about yeah um i'm a super fan of movies i love movies i love sitting down and having the cinema experience.

And I've always ran like a Jellyfin or a Plex client at home and bought the Blu-rays and read them. And there's always been some features that I wanted. So I decided to build my own. It's like a little dream that I have. And so I started building my own from scratch with features that I wish Jellyfin or Plex had. And especially for me as a blind person who wants to play movies and music for his family, the other clients for the other servers are not very good with screen readers.

So sometimes I'm like, okay, so let's, my family goes like, let's watch this movie. And then I'm like, and then the screen reader is still reading like the previous menu. And I'm like, I'm almost there. Just a bit. You're there. Click.

And I'm like, oh, okay, sure. So I love it. And this will be a, the name of the app is Igloo because Blind Penguin lives and watches movies on an igloo. And that was my wife's idea. And I'm hoping to release it in about a month or so. And I'll be sure to let you guys know it will be available for Android. It'll have a web client, all native.

And yeah, that's my passion project. Amazing. And if someone feels inspired by that, where can they go to get in touch with you? I have a GitHub account. It's a Spanish name. Jabon is 74. But we also have our website, blindpenguincoder.com. You can go there and get in touch with us, and we'll be sure to answer you as soon as possible.

How are you both doing? Introduce yourselves first and where you came from. I'm Peyton. I'm from Cloverdale, BC. And this is my dad. And he's also from Cloverdale, BC. Hi, dad. What's your name?

Peyton's dad. No, my name's Jared. Yeah, I'm the driver. I've been two days of listening. And I don't really know. I really enjoyed the pizza. The barbecue was awesome yesterday. I've been enjoying watching my son smile and learn and get excited and looking at me for more money to buy more stuff, to do more things.

Well, I'm curious then, like, what has you interested in being here? How did you hear about this? Well, I got into Linux on the Chromebook with the Linux development environment because I wanted to run Blender. And then I found Jupyter Broadcasting because I got more interested in Linux. I installed it on a bunch of different systems. And then I heard you guys talk about this and I really wanted to come and see the community because you guys sounded so excited about all of it. And I'm so happy I found it. It's so much fun. Nice. And when did you first kind of take that journey? How long ago was that? It was about two years ago. I was with one of my friends. We were making a game in Unity

and he wanted a 3D character. So I wanted to install Blender, but the Chromebook wouldn't do it. So I got a Linux environment going and then i wiped all my reinstalled linux because i was like why would i have chrome os that's amazing and how did that process go because uh it used to be a little bit more difficult but i've heard recently uh even here this weekend that it's getting easier and easier yeah the um built-in linux development environment on chrome os is really amazing really really great. Just got updated to Debian 12 Bookworm, so that's great. And then I installed it, Pop! OS, on an old Mac Mini that we had that we were using as a media center.

And now it's running NixOS, and I've got a flake running, and that's controlling all my systems. Okay, well, now I feel inadequate. So, Dad, how does it feel to have Linux begin to infect the home? How's that feeling? What's the thing where you took over all my switches? Yeah, I had all my houses all wired up, and then all of a sudden my son jokes one day, and he's like, Dad, check this out.

And I look at him, he's like, got all our security cameras, all the switches, the fireplace. And I'm like, oh boy, here we go. Right. So I was no longer the boss of the home automation system. I was just shocked. He didn't even need a password or nothing to do it. He just did it on the site. That sounds really exciting.

And now it is time for Le Boost. And now it is time for the boost. And Bear454 is our baller booster this week with 98,225 stats. Hey, rich lobster! Bear is the key organizer of LinuxFest Northwest, and this was his last year. And so he wanted to send in this note, I think. And he said, so happy to have you all here at LinuxFest Northwest 2024. Special thanks to our partners, Bellingham Technical College, Cascade Steam, and Jupiter Broadcasting. And, of course, the title sponsor of LinuxFest Northwest, Tailscale.

Now, I got bad news for you, Wes Payne. I got bad news for you. I don't know if you brought your map. I don't know if you brought your map. I don't know if I brought your map. Well, I brought the mobile version. You did? Okay, good. Get that out, because it is, in fact, a zip code boost. Oh, right in the eye, Wes.

Watch out. I thought you said it was mobile. We're supposed to have our safety glasses on for this part. Ugh, jeez. Okay, well, we got 98,225 sats, which is actually the zip code right here in Bellingham, Washington. Oh, that was an easy one, Bear. I could have figured that out.

Why did you unfold the map so much? You've lived here, right? I think you just wanted to hit me in the eyeball. That's right. You know, I should have looked at that and recognized that was a Washington. Yeah, the 9-8 kind of gives it away. Yeah, it does. It does.

You know, I've been enjoying all weekend is that the abbreviation for Bellingham Technical College. BTC. BTC. Every time I'm like, oh, no. Right. Right. And outside, there is a sign that says BTC Moose Center. No.

Are you serious? Almost. It says more something. Oh, Moose Center. Walking past it with Brent, it says Moose. We'll bring our own sign next year. Yeah, I can see that. Eric D boosted in with 50,000 sets.

Boost! First time joining a live stream. Sounds like you guys are having fun. Oh, hey, thank you, Eric. Thank you very much. Accurate, we were. Yeah, he was hanging out with us on day one, and we appreciate that boost. Now, we got a boost from, I think, a new booster here.

Listener Jeff, it says. 23,222 Satoshis over two boosts. And one of those is a row of McDucks. Thank you kindly. Now there are two messages here. The first one says, live ducks from LinuxFest Northwest. I think that's from one of our streams yesterday.

Thank you, Jeff. And the other one simply says, Chris's kids are crazy. Yeah. The trolls of LinuxFest Northwest. You know, you bring your kids here for basically their entire life. They basically know the place. They start to think they're running the place.

I gotta, like, you know, lock them down in the RV or something like that. I mean, someday if we're lucky, they will be. Oh, maybe they will be. Yeah, that's true. Maybe that's how it starts. Nginx? Kind of feels like it's Nginx, but with an E-N and an S. How about N-syn-nix? Oh, there's a nix in there. I like it's N-Zinnex, but with an E-N and an S. How about Ensignix? Oh, there's a nix in there.

I think it's Ensignix, yeah. Oh, come on. Can we just, can we get consensus here? Can we just get consensus? They send in a row of McDucks. Thank you kindly. And they say,

if I lived in the U.S., I'd be very interested in a camping event. In the U.K., we have EMF Camp at emfcamp.org. It's more of a temporary town than a group of friends camping together, but you got to start somewhere, right?

Interesting. Have you heard of this? Like a temporary town that people camp at? I have heard in Germany of CCC Camp, I believe it is, that happens every four years. I think it happened just this last year. And I was invited to go because I was there and I missed it by a day because of cross Atlantic flights and all. But this concept is really attractive. It's almost like

Burning Man for nerds. Yeah. Maybe you could have some talks. Make it into an event. I like it. But we need internet. Oh no, no. They set up an entire local internet for the entire city, you know, quote unquote. Yeah.

And it's this whole production. They've got it all figured out. They know what we want. Really? Okay. He also gives us a shout out for our fest coverage and says he hopes he can make it. And then Craig says plus one for Deep Space Nine being the best Star Trek series, by the way. Cool.

See what I'm saying about our smart audience? Wow. Okay. We got some agreement in the audience. You think so over TNG, though? I mean, could there even be a Deep Space Nine if there wasn't a TNG? Obviously the answer is no. So therefore, does that make TNG better?

I think it's up for debate. But can't argue with the generous booster. Which season one is worse? I'm not sure. Oh, probably TNG. Probably TNG. Complete Noobs boosts in with $21,233. Coming in hot with the boosts. Across a couple of boosts, but the first one here, I managed to install NixOS with ZFS and encryption on root.

Nice. And then noobs links us to a blog post about how they did it. We'll have that in the show notes. Now I just kind of finished working out how to dual boot with FreeBSD with encryption on root for both. This is something I want to check out. So the same file system being accessed by FreeBSD and NixOS at different times?

What could go wrong? I'd love to see NixOS Anywhere do this with an encrypted partition. NixOS Anywhere converting a FreeBSD box. That I want to see. Okay, stay tuned. That's pretty great. Good job, noobs. Thanks for the link, too. Appreciate it.

Now we've got a boost from the open source accountant. Across two boosts, 2,250 Satoshis. I'm plus one for the camping. Hey, good to know. I'm starting to like where this is headed because I'm in the plus one category as well. Good, good.

In case you missed it, we are tossing around the idea of a JB camping meetup. So if you out there, like Open Source Accountant, are interested, keep boosting in because we're trying to see

if there's a critical mass for it. Right. And, you know, if we had enough people, I'd even kind of entertain the idea of maybe a couple of talks to share skills and things like that. I mean, it just depends on how big it gets.

Open Source Accountant was going to be here and to be here and saying hi to us all, but the car broke down on the way up here. Such a bummer. Our thoughts are with you. Some Westpang guy boosted in with 4,714 sats. Look at you boosting your own show. Hey, I got to use the sats somehow, right? Keep them flowing.

Yeah, it's a good way to test too, right? It's very true. MSC 0135 comes in with a total of 2,500 sats. Coming in hot with the boost. And they were responding to a couple of different things. I'm curious why VS Code has become so popular on Linux, especially when you got VM and Emacs out there. In particular, Emacs seems to have all the features people like in VS Code and more. Alex, you were getting pretty heavy into Emacs there for a while.

Yeah, Emacs was my COVID hobby. Some people did bread making, some people did meat smoking. Well, you did a little of that. I did Emacs for a while. And I think it comes down to closing that last 10% usability. VS Code and VS Codium by extension are defined by their extension databases, the add-ons that you can get,

and it's just one click to add a GitHub copilot thing in there or a YAML interpreter or whatever. And Emacs is great. It really is. And once you sort of get into the flow and get the things under your fingers, you can move at light speed. And then you think, I'm on the bus, and I just want to do this one thing, and it just doesn't quite. Also, I think what adds a lot of pressure is the network effect

around the releases of things that are now almost VS Code exclusive. There are several things that are just designed to just plug into VS Code, and they don't even release their own main application. You've got to use VS Code as the front end. I've stopped using Git on the command line almost entirely now. I just do all my Git workflows in the VS Code plugin that's right there. Also Remote SSH is amazing.

Well there you go Massey. I think that maybe answers it. They do point out that you can do some of the Remote SSH stuff with Emacs and I think that's part of it is you can make each of them kind of work like the other. They're super flexible but Emacs you kind of learn. You kind of look. There are. They're super flexible. But, you know, Emacs, you kind of got to learn. You got to look.

There are distributions of Emacs now that make it really easy and simple to get started with, but VS Code is just that way out of the box. Another nice thing about VS Code as well is you can run it in a container or something as a server, like VS Code server. Yeah, or a web version. I can have it on any box available in a browser too.

And on GitHub, if you're logged in and you press the full stop key, the period key, it will bring up VS Code of the repo you're looking at. Microsoft have done an amazing job with that piece of software. The one thing I'll give to Emacs is it's a great excuse to learn Lisp. There you go.

The other thing with VS Code is it allows you not to have to leave the application, right? So there's an extension for everything. Like you want to see the PDF, that's an extension. You want to generate the PDF, that's an extension. And so you get to this part where it almost becomes like a pseudo operating system. Like I have the one application to do all the things. Yeah, absolutely.

Although I swear that's what the Emacs guys used to say too. There it is. Finally, I'll get a good text editor someday. Urza CC comes in with $2,674. Fun will now commence. Actually, that's two rounds of Leap Boost, so that's fun. The first one's just a wave, but the second one, warming up to start with NixOS by listening to your podcast.

That I discovered by searching for NixOS. Whoa, that's how you know we're probably talking about it too much. Currently, I do everything by Ubuntu Server and Docker Compose, but I do like the idea of a declarative operating system. You know, you might check out Olympia Mike's talk on the LinuxFest YouTube channel, and then after that, watch Wes's talk, because Olympia Mike will set you up with some of the primers for NixOS, and then Wes comes in and shows you how to convert any system.

Why not both, though? Docker Compose on top of NixOS. For sure. NixOS is a great place to run containers. I agree. And Mr. Pibb boosted in with a total of 4,444 sets, and I think that's two rows of ducks. Oh, you did the math. Double ducks?

You did the math. I can do the earth content. Good thinking. Good thinking. I was doing it, and I was actually thinking it was a ludicrous boost, but I think you're right. I mean, I'll give them one. Boom, a little bit of ducks.

Now they're responding to our ask for the top five Linux first installed applications, and here they say, number one, Tailscale. Tailscale. Yeah, yeah. Number two, ProtonVPN. Number three, Nextcloud. Hey. Number four, VS Codium.

And number five, Phish. Look at that. They covered us both. Yeah, I'm loving Phish, obviously NextCloud, but Tailscale and ProtonVPN? What are we doubling up on the VPN there for? You got places to go. I assume one of those, I mean, they must not be using the old Moldad integration or whatnot. I assume Proton is for securing the stuff and just being the exit node, or maybe you need to appear in that integration or whatnot. Soon proton is for like, you know,

securing the stuff and just being the exit node or maybe you need to appear in other countries or something. Exactly. They want to appear like they're far away.

Now I learned recently that one of us sitting at this here table, uh, from that episode gave fish ago. Oh really? Uh huh.

From the top five. Oh yeah. That's true. It's me. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh, I,

I, I installed it in about 10 minutes, I'm afraid. Oh, I like this. I couldn't get it integrated with my Nix config properly, and I was about to get on a plane, so I just reverted to ZSH on macOS. It was a bit of a pain, I'm afraid, with Nix Darwin. Sometimes you got to go with what you know.

Sometimes you do. He also says he's looking forward to the Cosmic Showcase from System76. They had a booth there with several laptops ready to go. Brandon L. comes in with 3,337 sats. We're going to have to go right to ludicrous speed. I feel like being ludicrous. My first Linux box was a 386, 33 megahertz system with probably 4 megabytes of RAM.

What was great is that it was mine. It was a hand-me-down from my uncle, so I couldn't break the 486 of the family. Yeah, yep. What was awful is pretty much everything. I remember loading Slackware from a couple of... Is this another Slackware user, or is this the same person?

Is this... Wow, okay. Well, all three of them have written in at some point. Well, and I yell three of them. Actually, if you're going to also go that far back, there's only so many distributions you could have possibly used. Do you remember, though, seriously, being in this situation where you've got one, maybe two computers in the house,

and that's the internet, and you have to go to school the next day and print out the instructions and bring them home and figure out what you screwed up? Do you think we could install, like, can we install 2404 from Floppy? If we really try? Can we get, like, a challenge going? I mean, how many floppies, Wes? How big is the ISO now? 600 floppies. We'll have to also get, like, a USB

floppy drive, because I don't have one. Compression has come a long way, Chris. So I'll do a little XZ compression, perhaps. Maybe we'll try Alpine, something small. Oh, now you're going to Alpine, huh? The Ubuntu desktop ISO is 5.7 gigs now. Okay. All right.

That's ludicrous. That's big. That is pretty big. You know, they're celebrating 20 years. They're going big. You know, he says it was a life-changing experience leading to an IT career and building a company and learning Linux and open source. That's pretty cool.

Isn't that a story? It's just so, I mean, we hear it, but it's wonderful every time. I mean, a little bit of tinkering here and then the whole career out of it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you start something, you think it's going to be small, and you go so far with it. Our buddy Jordan Bravo moves in with 10,101 Satoshis. It's over 9,000! Back in 2017, I'd been running Windows for many years,

and I was fed up with constantly jumping through hoops to take back even a shred of privacy Back in 2017, I'd been running Windows for many years, and I was fed up with constantly jumping through hoops to take back even a shred of privacy from my operating system. People in the privacy community had been recommending Linux, so I finally took the plunge. I installed Ubuntu 2016.04 onto my clunky HP laptop, and I've been using Linux ever since. Although these days, I'm running NixOS, of course. By the way, would you actually like to know how many floppy disks?

You did the math. 4,000. You did the math? 4,000 disks. 4,166. Okay, so we'll get the floppies for that. We can try it, and then we'll ship them out to the audience. We'll ship them out, yeah.

Nine months later. I'm just thinking, like, you get 4 get the floppies for that. We can try it, and then we'll ship them out to the audience. We'll ship them out, yeah. Nine months later. I'm just thinking, like, you get 4,000 floppies. Probably 100 of those are bad. And what if you get them out of older? Oh, my gosh. Yeah. It's just dropping. It goes everywhere.

We're going to need a robot or maybe, like, a 3D-printed caddy, something to keep it all straight. Can we get, like, a higher-speed floppy disk reader, too? Something that could read that at more than, like, you know, 10 kilobytes a second or whatever it was. Fine, fine. We'll use Blu-ray discs. Our dear Zack Attack boosted in with 2,543, which to me sounds like a Spaceballs boost.

Oh, look at you doing all of the Spaceballs math. So the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard in my life. I've been experimenting with Fedora over the last couple months since my Nix experiment didn't pan out. I'm running the KDE Spin and Kinoite on different machines. The Fedora 40 update will kind of be its final test on how long it sticks around. will kind of be its final test on how long it sticks around. I'm hoping Fedora can give me better updates and some control over Ubuntu desktop in case it drops the ball.

And I'm liking Kinoite over Nix as it gets out of the way and still lets me install RPMs when needed. Here's hoping the update goes okay. They always do, one way or another. They always do. It is nice to be able to install RPMs on there. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of good options these days in immutable distros. Though you will have to pry nix-shell-p out of my cold, dead hands.

Right. It's the best thing ever. It's so useful to be able to just install a package on demand like that and then blow it away when I'm done. Just need it for 15 minutes. I don't need it for the rest of that Linux process. Wait, what's the blowing away part? Because I've just been, I don't know, shutting things down.

Okay, good. Brent doesn't collect this garbage. Yeah, you do the blowing away part? Because I've just been, I don't know, shutting things down. Okay, good. Brent doesn't collect this garbage. Yeah, you do eventually. You should collect garbage eventually. There is that. There is that. It'll eat hard drive space eventually. We did talk a little bit about the next shell

in Olympia Mike's talk and how it's just basically a temporary addition to the symlink tree. And then when you come out of that environment, it's like a miniature root, basically. That is pretty neat, isn't it? Vake comes in with 2,000 sats. This is the way.

And he's mentioning that we got a shout-out on what Bitcoin did in the episode when Oscar Mary, the founder of Fountain FM, was interviewed. Great episode, by the way. What Bitcoin did. And look for Oscar Mary. And we got a couple of shout-outs in that episode. So that's pretty cool. Thank you, Oscar.

Doing good things. It's pretty cool. Yeah, reverse shout-outs in that episode. So that's pretty cool. Thank you, Oscar. I'm doing good things. It's pretty cool. Yeah, reverse shout-out to Oscar because, I mean, it's been great working with the team over at Fountain as we've explored more podcasting 2.0 features, especially our live setup these days. Yeah, and I'm still meeting with them on the regular, too, to go over things that the listeners have sent in.

We've extended that weekly meeting, and we're just kind of continuing to just work through that and add new stuff as well. There's just a new update for Fountain FM that came out that improves a lot of little things in the UI that people sent in about. So that feedback is making a difference still. It's really great to see. Leaky Canoe boosts in with 15,000 cents.

Oh, via the podcast index. Hey-o. Okay, you Nix gurus. Uh-oh. Please explain like I'm five how the process works to upgrade between releases of NixOS. Can I just update my configuration.nix and rebuild? Thanks for the great content. Wes, what do you think?

It sounds like maybe he needs to go familiar himself with the channels concept, right? Yeah. If you're not using Flakes, then channels is what you want. You'll be on the channel for the old release. There's instructions in the manual to go add the channel for the old release. There's instructions in the manual to go add the channel for the new release, and then you can rebuild. If you're doing the flake approach, then you just need to update your

flake.log file. Yeah, you got your stable and your unstable channels, you know, and that is so there are releases in Nix. People talk about it as a rolling distro, and I suppose in a sense, but you do, after a release, need to go and update your channel and essentially tune in to the next one. It's basically a one line command.

It's not. You just add Nick's channel dash dash add and then like the URL of the channel and then that'll automatically replace whatever your current channel is. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. You'll find it's pretty easy. A hybrid sarcasm boosted in one, two, three, four, five Satoshis. So the combination is one, two, 3, 4, 5.

That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life. A Spaceballs boost as a Star Trek follow-up. I like the link here. Deep Space Nine is the best Trek for the following reasons. Number one, Cisco punched Q. Number two, the two best villains ever in Dekat and Kai Wynn. Number three, the Dominion War. And number four, in the pale moonlight.

And lastly, number five, the most significant on-screen exploration of Klingon culture. All right. I mean, that's a very compelling argument. I would say, hmm, that's tricky. I mean, we explored Vulcans and especially Spock's father in Star Trek The Next Generation. You had Q was created in Star Trek The Next Generation and went head to head with Captain Picard on multiple occasions. And then I would argue one of the best villains in Star Trek ever would be the Borg. And that also was created in star trek the next generation and i would argue that um best of both worlds is a fantastic two-parter also um do you remember the one where he uh you know gets

zapped by the probe and learns to play the flute what's that one called wes oh i'm totally blanking that's a great episode that's a great and also the episode after best of both worlds where picard goes back and sees his brother. Great episode, man. The inner light. The inner light is what I'm trying to think of. The inner light. I will point out that only in Star Trek Voyager do we really explore the complex society of the Talaxians, though.

Yeah, that's true. They got you there. I also think today is a good day to boost. I think you're, you know what, Hybrid? I think you've made the most compelling case yet, though. It was a real surprise about Anakin though wasn't it

oh dang it well Hybrid continues here one last thing ironically the foundation for Deep Space Nine Bajor was the least

interesting part of the entire saga ironically yeah sounds like a beautiful world to visit though it does it does seem like

there's a lot there doesn't there Autobrain comes in thank you by the way, hybrid, very thought provoking. Otterbrain comes in with a row of ducks, 2,222 sass. Cheers from the opposite corner of the country over here in Maine.

Well, cheers to you. I hear they have maple syrup. We should make it over there and find out, but you could test it for us. Yeah. The last time you asked me to test maple syrup, you think they have mayonnaise?

Probably on like a lobster roll. I'd like to see Brent try that. The last time I made Brent try maple syrup, it was more like a maple product, but I don't think it contained any maple. Somehow you convinced me that I should, because I was like, this isn't, there's in this kind of, it was like this super dingy diner. We were in a like place in, oh yeah. Listener Jeff's favorite diner you mean? Listener Jeff suggested it. Oof. That's embarrassing.

I love that diner. I mean, I'm not saying dingy is a bad thing, but it was like, I mean, I've, I'm a maple syrup snob, but it was served in a cup, like a plastic, I don't know, single-use cup. That alone is an indicator. And then, but somehow, Chris, you convinced me that this was actually going to be real maple syrup. Well, you know, it was really just a matter of pretending. I call it acting. And so I just poured it on the pancakes and cut the pancakes up and made it look real good.

Oh, it really goes so good with the pancakes, Brent. You got to try this. It must have been like pre-food because I can usually tell just by the pour whether it's like authentic or not. This is something he does do. When we go to a restaurant, he will look at the pour of the maple syrup and critique the pour. The pour matters.

It's so funny, though. And as you can probably guess, almost nothing ever meets Brent's standards when it comes to maple syrup. Well, Jitty comes in with 5,000 cents just to say, hope you're having fun at the fest. Thank you, Jitty. Appreciate that. We are having fun at the fest. Really appreciate that boost. Tomato comes in with a boost here.

It says 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Satoshis. I think that's tomato. So the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life! Also, shout out there for doing the math. This is actually two boosts, so you had to figure out how to

add that up to the boost. He did. He got it. That's quite impressive. Usually we have to figure that out. I'm also noting that I think they're using their client in the French language. So just a tip hat there. My first Linux install was Slackware on a PC I built with my brother.

It started life as a 286 with exactly one meg of RAM, 20 megs of hard drive, and Hercules graphics. Hercules, huh? I remember them. It had been upgraded to a 386SX. Ooh.

And EGA graphics by the time we first put Slack on it, and it ended its life with Super VGA and 200 meg hard drives. Big upgrades. Nice. It did spend most of its time in DOS, though. Oh. My first full-time LinuxOS, though. Oh. Oh.

My first full-time Linux PC, though, was terrible. A Compact Presario 2200, quote-unquote, media PC I picked up for about a song. Nothing was upgradable except the hard drive, and it had a weird Citrix 686 in it? and it had a weird Citrix 686 in it. Still, it ran Slack, then Red Hat, and was the machine where I accidentally killed the Windows 95 partition when updating the Red Hat install. I had Enlightenment and Sound working, so I kept it that way.

Oh, of course. Once you get it working, right? Tomato, that's a great old story. Can you imagine starting a machine with one megabyte of RAM and finally bringing it all the way up, you know, to like four megabytes and two 100 megabyte hard drives from a 20 megabyte hard drive? I mean, does your next config even fit on one meg? One of my very first computers also had a 20 megabyte hard drive. And I think it had two megabytes of RAM as well. And then I got then I was given an old used Mac for a while

that had like an 80 megahertz processor and four megabytes of RAM that I eventually took up to 16 megabytes of RAM. And now you complain with anything less than 64 gig. That is actually really true. That is, it's like, well, you know, the software changed a little bit too there, Wes. The software did change.

Now, normally we cut things off just for time in the show at 2,000 sats, but don't worry, we see and read all of them and we leave them in our show notes for posterity. I did want to elevate a boost here, 100 sats from Daver98, because we talked about how Shortwave has our jblive.fm audio stream in it, and it sounds like daver98, well, hey, Chris, I added the stream for jblive.fm to radiobowser.info, which is the backend database

that Shortwave uses way back in probably 2018 or 2019. Thank you. I think at that point, I may still have been using Gradio, the precursor to Shortwave. I've been using the stream for years, but I was very happy to discover

it works with the new live item tag infrastructure, too. Keep it up. Thank you very much for doing that. Yeah, the great thing about the live item stuff that we do with the podcasting 2.0 clients, it's all standards-based. Nothing proprietary in there at all, so the old plumbing still works, and I really appreciate you setting us up with that. We also got 10,000 sats while we were live from Trom. It says, bummed I couldn't make it due to a work migration, but I'm another Slackware on my first device user. All right.

Way back in 94, a fellow grad student introduced me to Slack, and I started using it for my math modeling in C instead of waiting for the room on one of the sun boxes. Yeah, I remember. Yep, Linux has been my primary ever since then, and now I'm on Nix and absolutely loving it. Looking at moving my Podman containers into my homeland now, too. Thanks for all the great shows. Keep on rocking.

Oh, we also got 1,004 cents from 412 Linux. That was a live boost, who reports that their Sputnik laptop is also still running strong. I've replaced the battery and fans. It's my remote rig. You know, I do need to replace the battery. That is the one thing that's really the worst in this thing. I think I get like 10 minutes of battery life right now. I'm not sure because I, you know, it's like, it just constantly tells me it's about to,

it's about to shut down. It's about to shut down. And then like, I'm 10 minutes go by and it's still going, but I don't know. I'll plug it in. Can you even imagine trying to run like a modern Windows on that? Well, I mean, 11 just wouldn't support it, but like, yeah, what a dog it'd be.

Yeah, it would be such a dog. Also got 5000 live stats from Otterbrain, who says his first box was a dual booting Mac Power PC circa 1998 with Yellow Dog Linux. So scary, though. Blessing the Mac OS 9 system from the bootloader. Yeah, that felt really sketch. Yellow Dog Linux was a special distro because it was also the first Linux that let me get Linux working on a Mac. And that was massive for me. And it's also, if anybody cares, you know, the genesis of Yum, the package manager, the Yellow Dog update manager, which eventually moved to Fedora. And now we have DNF. So we actually have Yellow Dog Linux, which was designed for PowerPC Max way

back in the day, like in the late 90s, is semi-responsible for how fantastic DNF is on our Fedora systems today. Isn't that neat? I'm feeling like I really missed out on this Slackware stuff and Yellow Dog stuff. Maybe I'll go back. I want to say thank you, everybody

who did boost in. Like Wes said, we do have the 2,000-sat cutoff for time purposes but we had well we had over 24 probably nearly 30 boosters when you include the live boosters it's not in that number there but it was a very good showing right there and we stacked well over 300,000 sats

I mean probably 300 and a couple 320 we've got like 20k live here yeah it's in the range though so thank you everybody it's a fantastic showing, though. So thank you, everybody. It's a fantastic showing. We absolutely appreciate it. Let's give them a round of applause, everybody. Would you give them?

Yeah! Thank you very much. We appreciate the support. If you would like to boost in, get a new podcast up, try some of the new standards, like you could be listening to this live stream from LinuxFest Northwest right now in your podcast app, and it would just tell you when it's going to be live. We really appreciate it. It's great hearing your messages too.

Podcastapps.com for that. And before we get out of here, I have a little pick. You know, our conversation with Jose had me thinking about this, and I actually heard from several other listeners who are Jellyfin fans, but also want to keep their options open. And I found this really neat app this week that seems like maybe just a great idea, even if you never plan to go anywhere with Jellyfin. It's called Playfin. And Playfin allows you to convert YouTube music playlists into Jellyfin. And then they have Playfin Voyager. It's two different apps. Playfin Voyager allows you to export all of your Jellyfin playlists into text files or import Jellyfin playlists into Jellyfin from text files.

Wow. Two separate apps. So you got Playfin, which manages YouTube music playlists. And that's Play. So it's Play-la-fin or something. It's Play. You're doing great. Play-

Can you help? I-F-I-N. Yeah. Give it a crack. It must bein or something. It's Play. You're doing great. Play. Can you help? I-F-I-N. Yeah, give it a crack. It must be French or something, right? Right. Playlifin? Ah, Playlifin. And you have Playlifin Voyager as well.

They're both as flat packs, and they're from the same developer, so they'll be pretty easy to find. And this, to me, just seems like good insurance. Look at that. Isn't that a nice little UI, too? Uh-huh. It's neat to see, slowly but surely, there's really an ecosystem developing of, like, supported apps and extra apps and extensions around Jellyfin. Yeah.

Something has happened in the last year or two where people, I think, have had enough of the plexes, you know, and these bigger projects doing rug pulls, and people are assembling around the Jellyfins, around the images, around all these things. And they are getting to the point now where it's good enough. They're good enough. I agree.

Tools like this really make the difference. It feels like we have reached a critical mass now where the previous years it would have been everybody just uses Plex. And if they have any kind of home media set up, it's just Plex. And I don't, I mean, I know it's out there, but I don't think anybody I talked to said, oh yeah, I'm a Plex user. Everybody was using jellyfin that I talked to. I've even met people who hadn't even heard of Plex, but had been using, I mean, I know it's out there, but I don't think anybody I talked to said, oh yeah, I'm a Plex user. Everybody was using Jellyfin that I talked to. I've even met people who hadn't even heard of Plex, but had been using

Jellyfin. How about that? That's an indicator, isn't it? Yeah, I think that there is a, what do you call that, a sea change? The wind is blowing in a different direction. That's that moment where you're abandoned, you're on your fourth or fifth album, you look out in the crowd, and everybody's half your age. Harsh, Alex, harsh. Alright, well, I think that's going to wrap us up.

We'll have links to everything we talked about in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 560. We'd love to have you join us next Sunday. We'll be back in the studio at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Don't forget, we love your boosts. You can also become a member at linuxunplugged.com slash membership. Support the show directly every single month or hit that contact page at linuxunplugged.com slash membership. Support the show directly every single month

or hit that contact page, linuxunplugged.com slash contact. Thank you so much for being here this week. We'll see you right back here next week. Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo!

Woo! Thank you. you