LINUX Unplugged - 562: Red Hat Knows How to Party

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

Three revelations from Red Hat Summit. Our on-the-ground report will separate fact from hype.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.Core Contributor Membership: Save $3 a month on your membership, and get the Bootleg and ad-free version of the show. Code: MAYSupport LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMIntroducing image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux — Image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a new deployment method that takes a container-native approach to deliver the OS as a bootc container image.Image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OverviewImage mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux YouTube Examplepodman-desktop-extension-bootc — Support for bootable OS containers (bootc) and generating disk images.bootc Introduction — Transactional, in-place operating system updates using OCI/Docker container images. bootc is the key component in a broader mission of bootable containers.Show HN: Convert your Containerfile to a bootable OSWhat is InstructLab? — InstructLab is an open source project for enhancing large language models (LLMs) used in generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) applications.InstructLab — InstructLab is a model-agnostic open source AI project that facilitates contributions to Large Language Models (LLMs).instructlab CLI — Command-line interface. Use this to chat with the model or train the model (training consumes the taxonomy data).IBM's Granite code model family is going open source — We're releasing a series of decoder-only Granite code models for code generative tasks, trained with code written in 116 programming languages. The Granite code models family consists of models ranging in size from 3 to 34 billion parameters, in both a base model and instruction-following model variants.ibm-granite/granite-code-models — A Family of Open Foundation Models for Code Intelligence.Getting Started with Fedora/CentOS bootc — The Fedora/CentOS bootc project generates reference base images that are designed for use with the bootc project. Its goal is to provide a host system easily configurable via container tooling, usable as a container host, but also to allow non-containerized deployments with applications bound to the host context.CentOS/centos-bootc — Create and maintain base bootable container images from Fedora ELN and CentOS Stream packages.LAB Paper: Large-Scale Alignment for ChatBotsSpring Membership Discount — $3 off forever.psitransfer — Simple open source self-hosted file sharing solution. It's an alternative to paid services like Dropbox, WeTransfer.bhh32's food-journal — Command line tool and web application to keep track of my food intake.Pick: URL to PNG — A URL to PNG generator over HTTP with a fairly simple API accessed via query params passed to the server.Bonus Pick: Telegraph — Telegraph is a simple Morse translator, start typing your message to see the resulting Morse code and vice versa.

Well, it's actually happening. After all the travel and planning, after four long years, we are back at Red Hat Summit. We just entered the Denver Convention Center, and we're making our way over to the keynote. And we've been talking about how much Red Hat has changed in the last four years, and definitely wondering what the next four years look like for Red Hat. And I have a feeling we're about to get a really strong sense of that. And I think I have one big overall question that I've been asking myself. How hard are we going to watch Red Hat lean into AI? Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show.

My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Always nice to be joined with you. And it's exceptionally nice to be joined by our very own editor, Drew. Hello, Drew. Hey, guys.

Hey, Drew. Nice to have you joining us. Drew and his day job crew attended Red Hat Summit as well. and he has his own unique perspective on Red Hat's big event, so he'll help us break that down. Coming up in the show, we did spend the last week at Red Hat Summit, and now we're going to separate the signal from the noise and get you up to date on the three or four announcements you really need to know about. Plus, I have a killer app pick this week, and then we'll round the show out with some great boosts, picks, and more. So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to that mumble room. Hello, Virtual Lug.

Hello, Chris A. West. Hello, guys. Hello, Brent. Hello. Thank you for joining us. It's so nice to have you guys here. Got a big crowd up there in the quiet listening this week as well. Shout out to all of you up there. And a good morning to our friends at Tailscale. Tailscale.com slash Linux Unplugged. Go over there and get

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Also, a special happy Mother's Day. We're recording this, and I just wanted to give a shout out to all the mom units out there and all the special mom units in our lives. Nothing like a mom. You know, my mom uses Linux. Really? Uh-huh. Oh, yeah.

She's a Linux desktop aficionado. Well, that's a bit, that's probably a little far, but she's been using it for years, loves it. My mom's absolutely tried it at times, a time or two,

but she, her day trade is all in Photoshop. Oh, right. Oh, boy. Fair enough. She could teach a class on Photoshop.

Really, it's something else. To watch somebody that really, like, you know how people, there's some people that just like live in an application? Oh, yeah. And they just know that universe? Yeah, that's...

It's how they get everything done, right? So they've had to learn how to do everything. You got Mom on Linux? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know. I knew that. But in fact, haven't you been considering an upgrade for Mom?

Oh, yeah. I think a new laptop is in order and probably a new OS. I don't know. It's a Montemonte right now, which has has been just fine so clearly it's time to go to nix maybe yeah now i'm open to the pitch you do auto update uh no i kind of do it like on the quarterly schedule i mean so i think i should let her do it and then she just tells me if something broke i got the two kids still running nix os as their daily drivers and one of them I've set to do the daily auto update. And what that really means is if the computer's online at the right time, it'll update.

So it's like she updates every few days, really. Rock solid. That's great. I'm still endorsing NixOS for family. I know it's crazy. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. No, we're here to talk about Red Hat's annual summit, which is now 20 years old. The first one was announced September 15th, 2004. Wow.

Held in New Orleans on June 1st to the 3rd, 2005. And it cost $999 to attend. 2004 money, huh? 2004 money, huh? Yeah. That's a decent chunk of change in 2004. It's a decent chunk of change today, but it costs a bit more. I don't know, Drew, do you have any insight on what it costs for you or your team to go to Red Hat Summit? Oh, we were comped.

Oh, yeah. A lot of people do get comped. That is part of this. It's a business event and sales are involved. So a lot of people that are partners or customers that matter to the Red Hat organization, they get to come to Summit. So maybe that's why some tickets are ridiculously expensive. I tried to find them online. Are you looking right now? Yeah.

Did you find anything? Not yet. It seems like maybe if they were there, they're gone. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm going to say $1,500. What do you think? Probably a low ball, but I'm going to say $1,500.

But I really don't know if that sounds about right and keep in mind there were also buy-ups for uh stuff earlier in the week that weren't covered with the price of the ticket so all the all the power sessions and all of that stuff was even more expensive yeah oh okay yeah it's it's an expensive event to attend, no matter how you slice it. But in probably all cases, just about, it's an event that work or your business is sending you to. It's not Red Hat Linux Fest. Yeah, not really an obvious sort of thing. Right.

And it is, though, a networking opportunity, so many people in the business actually get to finally see each other at red hat summit so there is absolutely a a large social aspect to this event we just you know get to catch up with drew and cheese bacon but you see tons of groups of people talking and i think a lot of people trying to do networking actively and meet new people yeah yeah So the last summit that Wes and I went to was in 2019, which was the pre-IBM days. Yeah. Only just, but. And it was also the summit where I think RHEL 8 came out, perhaps. It was, anyway, there was a RHEL release at the summit, which is rare and a big deal. So we really weren't sure what to expect this year. It's been long long four years ibm's involved now ai is all the craze and going there i thought well red hat's either gonna really hunker down and focus on things that people are struggling with right now in production today or are they going to plant

some sort of flag in the ground and try to like you know stake this new territory of ai and speak to the future customer so that's i wanted to figure that out i know you also along with me want to just kind of observe the mood of things yeah totally and kind of see besides ai where had things shifted you know i think uh the last summer we were at hybrid cloud was still a big buzzword i think i mean open shift had existed for a while but it was you know it didn't have quite the tenure it has now so those things were a big deal alongside the Realm release. I want to see how that compared with the other, you know, the non-AI priorities this time.

Yeah. And then just also just to get like, I don't know, is there any sense of people are feeling down or maybe like, you know, there isn't like the energy anymore. Like, have things shifted? Just wanted to get a feel for that. There's about 6,500 attendees is what they emailed us after the event. So it gives you kind of an idea of the scale. So that's what Wes and I were trying to get out of the event. Brent couldn't make it because he was in Berlin, but Drew was there as part of his day job. And I'm kind of curious, Drew, what you or maybe some of your team's expectations were for what you might learn or what you wanted to get out of Red Hat Summit.

Well, so we meet with Red Hat, with our technical account managers, our TAMs, fairly regularly. So I had pretty good expectations of what was coming. And in some cases, I had advanced warnings of what was going to be announced. So there weren't a ton of surprises for me, announced. So there weren't a ton of surprises for me, except for the fact that it was more about AI than I really anticipated. But overall, it's, you know, new rel, new rel image mode and the various things. I knew about a lot of that stuff beforehand, and it was just the actual announcement of it that I was getting to witness. It sounds like Drew's getting the inside information that we don't get. Like, how do we get the tie-in?

He's got the scoop. Yeah, I mean, that's what they should be doing, though, right? For people like Drew and their deployments, they've got to start planning this stuff way ahead of time. And so for people like us, we're coming in kind of fresh to this stuff. So you heard him tease it there. There's some announcements in there that they are trying to prepare people about because Red Hat does consider them to be pretty big deals. And we're going to break them down and explain those to you because there is, like Drew said, a lot of AI stuff. And I think there's some noise in here. So our job this

week is to sort of separate the signal from the noise. I think Red Hat has a goalpost that's pretty far out into the future, but they are trying to maybe, maybe, corral the industry into distributing critical software in a new way on RHEL. We'll talk about that. And then we'll just try to give you some color of the event itself.

So it won't be just the facts, ma'am. We'll also give you some of the flavor of, like, say, the partying. Oh, sure. Strawberry white wine? Yeah, the partying. Oh, sure. Strawberry white wine? Yeah, absolutely. Cheers. Cheers, Wes.

Cheers. Okay, so the block party is quite the party. We're at one of many venues. It's quite busy. They're just going around giving away booze, too. We have to do our duty. Collide.com slash unplugged. You've probably heard me talk about Collide because I think it's a tool that would have changed the trajectory of my career.

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and see how the magic of Collide could work for you. K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash unplugged. That's collide.com slash unplugged. Well, as we discussed, Red Hat Summit is definitely a business event, which means things like kicking the event off first thing in the morning. Really early. You know, like 8 a.m. for the keynote. Yeah, which is fine, except we've been out socializing.

Not so fine. So, of course, you know, we wanted to go. So we got up early, pre-gamed some caffeine, and set off to go see Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks. The fog machines are going. The light effects are in full swing. And Wes and I have center seats at the Red Hat Summit keynote. I don't know. I think we're, I would describe this as almost a concert venue, not a keynote venue, but a concert venue.

Oh, definitely. I mean, there's a DJ with a Red Hat fedora on playing beats while we wait for the thing to get started. Yeah, we have an actual DJ up there playing beats. He's got the Red Fedora and people are filtering in. I mean, you could easily fit thousands of people in this room. We'll see. I don't think we're going to learn anything new necessarily, but I kind of wanted to just get the vibe of where Red Hat's at, what they want to talk about. And I have a suspicion this keynote is going to focus on AI. We'll see. Yeah. And focus on AI it did, didn't it? You could say that. Yeah, you definitely could.

It's quite the show. You know, it's a big, dramatic entrance. There's a live performance there on stage that kicked off the keynote. I want to just play it for you for a moment. I won't do this again. But I just, for the audience that didn't get to attend, I want you to have a sense of what the production is like. So right before the CEO comes out on stage, they bring a live band up. Like there's a smoke effect, the lights come on, and all of a sudden there's a band up on stage and they introduce the CEO. Oh, my God. Субтитры создавал DimaTorzok Thank you. Please welcome Red Hat President and Chief Executive Officer, Matt Hicks. What a fantastic way to kick off Summit.

I think for most of us, we come here to change the world every year, and I don't think there could have been a better way to start that. Let's give the band another hand real quick. Now, this year's summit is going to hone in on the intersection of open source and AI and the incredible impact that happens when we combine those two. So there is a flavor of the production. And, you know, this is all matched with lights that fill the building, smoke effects, and screens everywhere that are all coordinated and change color depending on what's going on or change imagery. Very well done.

Oh, yeah. I mean, produced to a T. So let's get into the actual announcements you need to know about. And Matt starts with InstructLab, which is one of the things that is probably one of the top stories that came out of Red Hat Summit. And they almost went with it right out of the gate. And today, I am very proud to announce that Red Hat is going to add the next link in this chain of open source contributions. We believe in the power of open to drive innovation. That means open licensing, open data, and open contributions. And as much progress as we've made in the ecosystem here, the ability to contribute to a model has yet to be solved. I mean, you can get a model from Hugging Face and fine-tune it

today, but your work can't really be combined with the person sitting next to you. can't really be combined with the person sitting next. Also, open source has always thrived with a very broad pool of contributors willing to contribute their knowledge. But the barriers to doing a fine tune of Mistral or Lama 2 without a background of data science have been too high. We hope to change that. Today, we're announcing the open sourcing of InstructLab. Now, InstructLab is a new technology to make it simple for anyone,

not just data scientists, to contribute to and train large language models. Why is this so important? We believe that to unlock the real potential of AI in your business, you have to be able to close the gap in that last mile of knowledge of your use case. So InstructLab is their tool to take an LLM and retrain it and remodify it, I suppose. Like say they showed a demo where they're trying to train it on a insurance claim case for a small business. And they want to retrain it on their local information. You can use InstructLab to essentially do that. I think it's one of their top announcements because they're hoping it's going to get people, like he said, instead of just having a bunch of copies

of an LLM to actually start collaborating on improving that, maybe one LLM or something like that, or at least they all can get contributed back up. Yeah, that's an interesting aspect I hadn't quite expected. I guess at the root, it all stems from a paper published by researchers at IBM called Lab Large Scale Alignment for Chatbots. And yeah, as you say, it's like, they're basically trying to overcome how much human-annotated data that you have in this. And so they develop ways to use synthetic generated data and kind of the scheme that you can learn if you do InstructLab.

And then from that, engineers at IBM and Red Hat built the InstructLab project and infrastructure in Tulip. The other kind of big news that we got near the top of the keynote, I believe the next presenter came on stage, and maybe it might have still been Matt Hicks. And they announced, in fact, I think it was Matt, he announced that Granite's AI models that from IBM are also going open source. And if anyone hadn't noticed, GPUs can be a bit hard to get right now. can be a bit hard to get right now.

To help address this challenge, I'm excited to announce that IBM Research and Red Hat are open sourcing the Granite family of language and code models under an Apache license. I actually think that got a pretty decent surprise from the crowd. People did not expect that. Yeah, I think we ran into a few folks that all independently mentioned, like, wow, they got IBM

to release that. Yeah, they actually did it. Yeah, I mean, that was one of the surprises at the event. And then, so they're stacking all of this stuff. So you have InstructLab, you got the Granite AI models, and then they announced RHEL AI. We are incredibly excited to introduce RHEL AI. We are incredibly excited to introduce RHEL AI.

RHEL AI is an easy button for getting started with AI and building Gen AI applications. We all know RHEL as the world's leading enterprise Linux platform and the trusted foundation of open hybrid cloud. And now it's getting AI superpowers. Ooh. Linux admins should be applauding right about now. Ha. And I leave some of that in there so you get a sense of how Red Hat communicates

and how they're kind of still trying to bring the hybrid cloud into all of this. So they have RHEL AI, which is a, well, I'll let them explain. It's like an AI optimized version of RHEL. What does that mean? RHEL AI brings together the open source Granite language code models, a supported distribution of InstructLab, open source AI tooling, and an AI optimized Linux instance that can run on your laptop or single server. It provides an easy starting point for anyone to build Gen-A applications with highly capable LLMs, fully supported and indemnified by Red Hat.

And it sounds like you deploy software using this image mode that Drew talked about earlier. And image mode is also probably one of the top announcements from red hat summit really i starts with packages from enterprise linux using our new deployment method called image mode image mode delivers the platform as a container image supporting the need to move more quickly when it comes to building testing and deploying ai applications we're going to get into image mode more because the way they talk about in the keynote, it sounds like you're just deploying software in containers. There's no change there. When in reality, there's fundamental new functionality and it could inevitably be a new way to distribute software that needs to be flexible, I was told, on RHEL. We'll get to that,

but I want to keep up with the announcements first, just so then we'll analyze some of this. One of the next things they talked about was Podman AI Lab. RHEL AI has tight integration with the newly announced Podman AI Lab, a dedicated extension for Podman Desktop that allows developers to build, test, and run Gen AI-powered applications in containers. So they've added more features to Podman Desktop and they've integrated Podman AI Lab. Are you keeping up with all this stuff so far? Our heads were spinning, so that's why we wanted to kind of do a wrap up there on site while it was all fresh. All right, we just wrapped up the keynote. And I think going into it, we were wondering how hard would they AI? And the answer is they are AI-ing very, very hard. I don't think any

presentation talked about anything else but AI, which I suppose is appropriate for the season. And we also saw the announcement of Red Hat AI. And that's making news right now as we were sitting in there. I saw headlines. Were you, I don't know, taking anything away? Were you impressed? Were you not impressed? What were your thoughts, Wes Payne? I was a little impressed, I think, with just how well packaged it seems. Sure. I mean, this is announcement day, so time will tell. But, you know, we got a demo that had VS Code and Podman. But they also kind of stressed the integration with partners like Intel and NVIDIA, of course,

and that they've got access to indemnified models. So I think, right, there's the pitches. AI seems hard to adopt unless you hire data scientists, but, you know, RHEL and the platform around it now have tools to help you tune these things for your actual data without having to have a whole team of staff to do it. Yeah, and there's lots of sessions where you can go, you know,

learn about everything they have to offer. Speaking of Podman, I did think it was interesting how hard they leaned into Podman. And they talked about creating bootable images that you test and verify everything at build time. Yeah, bootable containers and a new rel image mode. So it sounds like you can build a container, add the kernel, add the necessary files to get it to boot. And then you publish that up to a regular old container image repository, and then you can put RHEL in a mode where it's going to go fetch those and reboot into the next version that you published.

The bootable containers was one of the things that's getting the most interest at the event. We have more audio on that coming up. So we have really three or four things here. InstructLab, Granite AI models going open source, RHEL AI, and Image Mode are like the four, I think, tentpole announcements that came out of

Red Hat Summit. And they just hit them back to back to back in that keynote. It is interesting you kind of see how they fit together, right? So there's RHEL AI as maybe the cohesive part, and then there's all these underlying components that help make all of that possible, the image mode stuff that, you know, changes the model of how you distribute it,

especially because, you know, in their other efforts here with InstructLab and the general packaging of, like, the open-source AI things, there's already, they've already got all the resources for you to build AI, you know, containers that can train models or run models. So then you bring that all under one, plus a new methodology with InstructLab on how to sort of get the most out of whatever model. I guess it's supposed to be model agnostic. And then to make

sure that you don't have to figure that out, then you also get Granite, which is like a default model that you could use with InstructLab. Yeah, it's a lot, but it's great. It's a nice, tidy little package that they've managed to put together. It's a comprehensive, complete story that makes sense from beginning to end with stuff that's almost, I think, actually kind of becoming available right now as we talk. I think 9.4 is actually hitting. So it's, you know, unlike some companies, they're actually shipping and they have code to show for it. So there's that. show for it. So there's that. Then, okay, so there's the keynote and the announcements and the news angle of something like Red Hat Summit. And then there's things like the Expo Hall. And Red Hat Summit Expo Halls aren't like LinuxFest Expo Halls. You could probably fit 500 LinuxFests in one Red Hat Expo Hall. I'm trying to come up with words to put the scale of the Expo Hall into something that is conveyable and understandable, and I can't really. I could tell you they have two theaters

in here and a studio. They have Red Hat Studios. It's actually pretty fancy. How would you try to convey the scale of the Expo Hall, the size of it? I think you can only really see, I mean, you know, maybe 10 sort of booths around you. So if that's your understandable section of the floor, there's definitely not quadrants of that size. I mean, eight, there's 12 sections like that. More? Yeah, maybe. I think you're right. We're about halfway through right now. And it's been, it's been a while. If my family doesn't see me again, I was somewhere near the Red Hat Studios when I last made contact with civilization.

I did kind of come up with a shorthand way to kind of convey the size of it, although it still doesn't really do the job. Okay, here's a way you could convey how big it is. It's large enough that they have a pickleball court. They have a pickleball court, and that's only a small portion of the expo hall. So that kind of puts it in perspective.

And I still haven't even gotten to the burger place yet. I know larger expo halls have existed at events, especially things like CES and some of the events from back in the day. But for a Linux event, it's pretty swanky. I mean, there's got to be a few million spent just on the boost and everything in there. Oh, for sure. pretty swanky i mean there's got to be a few million spent just on the boost and everything in there oh for sure um and then a lot of the displays you know brand new macbooks and stuff that look like pretty high-end equipment i mean red hat had this sort of uh you know generative

ai powered wall projector yeah fancy setup i don't even know how it could do they have like an ai avatar thing that just didn't work well for, but it was kind of fun to play with. And just about every vendor you could think of that's in the Red Hat space from Intel, Microsoft, Lenovo, even Oracle has a presence at Red Hat Summit. And they have private little meeting areas that these vendors can go off on the expo floor and like close a deal. We were taking a peek just to see what was back there and sure got some stink eyes. Yeah, I guess they didn't like us just wandering through with the large microphone. Not that we did. We would never do that, but they wouldn't like it if we had.

Speaking of spending money on high-end MacBooks, it really was constantly, constantly impressive to me just like how far Red Hat went to make this a event that was, I guess, felt like it was worth the admission price. On day two, it was really put into perspective for us. We had our eye on one lab that we had to attend. And we went to go sign up thinking no one would sign up for this lab because we're at Red Hat Summit. And to our dismay, it was completely booked.

That lab is the Windows Automation Lab at Red Hat Summit. Day two in the first talk we're attending is getting started with Windows Automation at Red Hat Summit. And we thought, well, this isn't going to be very busy, so we tried to book it through their app. And it's completely booked out. It's actually a very popular session. So we're going to go poke our heads in there and see what Windows Automation at a Red Hat Summit is all about. Yeah, there was no seats. There was lots of MacBooks. Well, the waitlist was full, but we managed to poke our heads in the room.

And what did we find? Hundreds of MacBooks. Yeah, it's Windows Automation with, I will say, new MacBooks and not the first huge batch of MacBooks we've seen. They're all like stock, basic macOS install, the darker of them. And somehow they're going to do Windows automation at Red Hat Summit on the MacBooks. You know, hybrid cloud really is multi-platform. That sure is. That's as multi-platform as it gets right there. So we struck out there. We struck out there, but we did have a lead on a source where we could get some more technical details. Well, after kind of striking out with the Windows Automation Lab,

we decided to go back to the Expo Hall and we got a technical deep dive on how one of the big announcements here is working. There's been maybe three big announcements, if you were really to distill it all down, and RHEL images or image-based RHEL, I guess, is one of them. But it's really, it's like a souped-up version of Podman containers. Yeah, kind of during the keynote, we got the idea that this would be how you deploy AI. You know, they walked you through the whole pipeline and how you're now building these container images that have stuff baked in ready to host your model. container images that have stuff baked in ready to host your model.

But actually, it seems like what you've got is BootC, which is a new spec sitting on top of OCI images, where you have the right files that know how to make a bootable partition as part of it. And then you've got support in, or at least support coming in Anaconda. So when you're going to install RHEL, you can put it into this new image mode. You basically tell Anaconda, here's my repository. And instead of telling you what packages to install, I'm going to tell you what bootable container image to pull down. So obviously, this will work to deploy AI. But it also seems like maybe this could be a big new future way that rel actually gets deployed. Yeah, one of

the creators of the technology when he was giving us a demonstration was like anything that changes, you might want to just use this for it's not just AI. It's like anything that you touch kind of frequently or anything that you want to have a good solid update. It was one of the more popular technologies too. There was a decent sized crowd there trying to get the technical details on just how you make a container bootable and how it all works. And I think there's a lot of energy behind it. I think they're hoping it becomes one of the standard ways to deploy software on RHEL in the future. It sounds like we won't start seeing it until Red Hat Linux 9.4. And so you can imagine the first version ships in 9.4, maybe a more complete version ships in 9.5. So this is a little bit out, but they're working

on it and they're showing it and it seems to be fully functional at this stage, if still early. They're working on it and they're showing it and it seems to be fully functional at this stage, if still early. So they're putting the boot parts in a container and they've got something new called Boot Seat. What is going on, Wes? Why is it even a container anymore? Cats and dogs? Well, you know, now there's a whole infrastructure and ecosystem around shipping containers, scanning them for vulnerabilities, blessing them as, you know, the thing deployed in this environment, move them around, hosting them in registries. Layered updates. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So, you know, there's like robust deployment models, CICD pipelines that integrate containers throughout. This sort of lets you piggyback on that infrastructure to then also deliver the bootloader bits, as you're talking about there. And nothing makes this, I guess, inherently Red Hat-specific. No, I think right now there's some reliance on OS tree, but that isn't necessarily inherent.

It's more of an implementation detail so far. Yeah, I mean, anybody could do that, but maybe it doesn't mean it works immediately on Nix. Right. Yeah. You might have to play with it and see. I haven't had a chance to yet, but of course there's open source. The boot C is just sort of a spec on top of. Right. Yeah. You might have to play with it and see. I haven't had a chance to yet, but of course there's open

source. The boot C is just sort of a spec on top of OCI, and you can play with this in Fedora and CentOS now, I think, or at least soon. So have at it if you're curious. It does seem like the basic idea is you make sure that inside the container you now have the sufficient files to sort of generate

all the stuff you would need, or to like make an MBR-type setup. Or if it's EFI, then just make sure you have the EFI executables and the config files and stuff. And then there's also additional tooling that kind of links that up with the bootloader that's actually running the system. And then you can get it to just go right to the bootable setup from the container.

If you're listening to this and you have a use case for something like this, boost it and tell me why, what you'd use it for. But they're very excited about it. And Drew, I don't know what your sense of image mode was, if it's something that you would ever consider in production. That's one of the things that we are absolutely very excited about and really want to look at. You know, there's a whole sense of, well, these containers are so easy to upgrade, and if there's a failure, you know, there's a whole sense of,

well, these containers are so easy to upgrade, and if there's a failure, you can roll back, and they've got greater security because they're immutable. That's all very desirable stuff in the enterprise. I'm really glad to hear that. I'm really glad to hear that you guys are excited about it. I think it would be a massive, massive improvement for the whole RHEL ecosystem if a lot of people got on board with this. I mean, it seems like a hard, complex way to go about trying to get to what they're getting to.

But at the same time, like Wes said, it's building on top of what we've just spent a decade training RHEL admins how to manage containers. And this just sort of builds on top of that foundational knowledge now. Yeah, a lot of the same sort of end goals end up being things that really reminded us of, you know, our fun with NixOS. But, you know, where Nix and NixOS kind of went further back to the drawing board to design around this, this is kind of leveraging technology that's already been added on top, combining it in the right way to produce very similar end results. Right, because you're getting, you're building it. You can do a full like DevOps workflow where maybe it's actually like a GitHub action and a CICD pipeline that's actually building these images for you and then deploying them. And you're updating them like containers, and that's fitting into your existing workflow, but it's actually the entire system now.

And it boots even. And it's a lot easier to do that than it is to build something in, say, like CoreOS. With CoreOS, I mean, you've got to create like this ignition file and you've got to build a whole system from the ground up. Compared to the method that you build a container, it's a lot more complex. So the iteration, the generation of a golden image, that sort of thing takes a lot more work with the older style of immutability. Whereas moving to a container based operation makes everything a lot more easy, makes it more quickly to iterate on. Then, you know, you tie that in with the Ansible automation platform by Red Hat

and you're off to the races. You just, you're sending systems all around like they're just container images. So you go, you know, depending on your, depending on the audience, it's either stuff maybe you already knew about, or for us,

maybe some of it doesn't quite land and some of it lands quite a bit, but Red Hat, make sure that everybody ends up feeling pretty great because they throw one hell of a party. How do you end an event that is as lustrous and extravagant as red hat summit with a block party and where are we standing right now west right next to the mechanical bowl yeah the mechanical bowl it's a pretty good it's pretty fun actually it's a pretty good time and this the block party they've actually taken over a portion

of the road and they've set up various areas, four or five different places that are just absolutely slammed with people. The drinks, the food, all complimentary. So are the mechanical bull rides. It's a good party. Everybody seems to be having a good time. What a way to kind of cap it off, right? And really kind of make sure you polish everybody's experience. Yeah, maybe you were disappointed.

You didn't get the answers you want. Some things were left uncertain. Maybe forget about that tonight. As you can hear, it was absolutely slammed. I mean, just packed with people and they took over a whole block area, brought them over on luxury buses

and dropped them off. With free booze all around. Yeah, and essentially the restaurants on the block that participate, Red Hat just buys them out. Entire venue. It was really something. And to me, just, I don't know, you touched on it, Wes. I don't remember exactly the words you used. So maybe if I can remind you when I say this, please jump in.

But yeah, there really is these two worlds that we absolutely do need in free software. And one of them just has so much more money than the other, but they're both just absolutely critical, right? You have that business layer, and then you have the people that are just scratching their itch. And it's weird that we don't very often exist in that business one, but it's massive.

Yeah, I was trying to, you know, as we first were getting to the event, I had like a sort of countdown in my head to like when am I first going to hear like the word Linux said. There's like a lot of top, I feel like open, open source, but then like just open is one

that's already kind of wrangled its way into a lot of different contexts. But Linux itself, it wasn't too bad. And I think, you know, we had some run-ins with folks who had never heard of the podcast, you know, or were more on the like the sales or the management side of things. And I think even them, you know, I was pretty surprised how technical and at least aware that, like, you know, Linux is part of this business.

Yeah, it's a different kind of crowd. There's, like, you know, you can tell there's some folks that are in IT operations. Some folks are probably more in sales.'s some folks that are in it operations some folks are probably more in sales and some folks that are more in management and they're all kind of in the biz and they're all talking the biz i had imagined for some of them it's extremely valuable networking and we had some several just kind of off-the-cuff conversations and i thought they were yeah everybody seemed really well informed it's i suppose if if you're there you know it's expensive to be there so um you probably, it's expensive to be there. So it's probably going to be worth it, I suppose.

Drew, do you have any parting thoughts on your time at Red Hat Summit? I learned a lot. So I do a lot with automation as well as OpenShift for work. And there are a lot of very interesting things coming for both of those platforms that I'm very, very excited about. So all in all, I think it was a really, really good conference for me to attend, especially since it was walking distance from my apartment, which certainly did not hurt. And yeah, there's a lot of good stuff coming. Not all of it dealing with AI.

Very true. Yeah, in fact, the stuff that I'm the most excited about is image mode. And it'll be used to help deliver AI applications, but it's going to be used to help deliver all kinds of stuff. If I were to boil it all down, it's image mode that I'm the most excited about out of Red Hat Summit. I also think it was a good move having it in Denver. Nice central venue like that.

I think that seemed pretty doable. Denver was a good move having it in Denver. Nice central venue like that. I think that seemed pretty doable. Denver was a nice town. They had banners all around Denver for the event. So it really felt like, I don't know, like Denver was embracing Red Hat Summit because there was posters everywhere. I think I was kind of pleased. I mean, obviously it was more AI than maybe we expected and a ton of it. Yeah. But with just the overall environment.

Yeah, that's what it is. It would be very surprising if that wasn't the case. I think I'm kind of pleased or surprised or, I mean, maybe I'm not totally sold on exactly how useful,

you know, how useful does Grand turn out to be? How far does Instruct Lab go? But both the, you know, the approach in doing it and trying those things

is nice to see. And then also, maybe you don't have to have AI in your business. Maybe that, you know, maybe that part isn't really what's going to nice to see. And then also, maybe you don't have to have AI in your business. Maybe that, you know, maybe that part isn't really what's going to come to be. But if you do want to ship those things, it does seem like real AI could be a pretty nice, you know, way to kind of have a controlled environment, execute on it without having to learn every piece of it from scratch. And they're building tooling to deploy lots of open and free LLMs at scale.

So you could have lots of different types of specialized LLMs and manage it all with their software. So they're building for a future where we have lots of open source AI and not necessarily building for a future where it all goes to an API at open AI. And so if I were going to subscribe to any commercial company's vision of how AI should be deployed, I think Red Hat probably has the most reasonable one there. You're right. I feel the same way. It's a little overwhelming at the same time. This is my ask to the audience. Boosted and tell me, isn't this how they make it a reality?

Like all the companies kind of have to go in and plant a flag, don't they? And they all have to kind of say this is the direction we're going and then build to it to actually make it a reality. Like is this not the definition of fake it until you make it? And at least with the case of Red Hat, there's code actually shipping in the upstream distributions and repositories right now. And it's all open source. And it's all about deploying open source LLMs at scale. So if you're going to do it, I can't find a fault there other than it just gets a little tiring at this point because it feels like we're in a hype train right now. Yeah, and I guess we'll see, right?

I mean, if some of the image mode stuff isn't a little released down the road. Of course, you got to start training and try things out. So it'll be a little while yet before we really see if this makes it a success. Linuxunplugged.com slash membership. and a big thank you to our core contributors. We really do appreciate you. And I set the redemption level too low. I messed up on that last one. So I've added another possible 24 redemptions to the promo code may that takes $3 off a month forever. You can do it for renewals. You can do it to upgrade an existing, or if you want to get the full membership, there's just 24 redemptions possible for the promo code MAY.

Get that spring membership discount. Then you're supporting the show directly, and you get access to two different feeds. The nice, lean, mean, ad-free version, fully produced that Drew puts together, or the long, double-the-content, bootleg version of the show, which has a ton of stuff,

and I think you're going to love it. Two different feeds for you to choose from. And right now, when you use the promo code may, you can take $3 off the price forever, every single month to become an unplugged core member. Your direct support, not only sustains us during the ad winter,

but lets us be picky and choosy about the advertisers. We do opt to work with. And another way to support the show in each individual production is by a boost. We appreciate those boosts and love those messages. Just get a new podcast app at podcastapps.com and start boosting away. Well, on my side of things, I'm lucky enough to report that I was able to throw another Berlin meetup. I'm here for NextCloud All Hands. I was able to throw another Berlin meetup. I'm here for Nextcloud All Hands. And as is tradition, we held a JB meetup and it was a fabulous time as always. We ended up at Seabase this time around, which we did last time. And it's just such a little all over showcasing gadgets. I mean, there were familiar faces, there were new faces.

So I wanted to just, for you gentlemen, run through a little list of kind of the things that stood out for me. So I did see a brand new, in the box, still sealed RS-36S made an appearance. So we're changing people's gaming habits here on this side of the pond as well. Of course, Byte Bitton showed up. Byte, thanks for showing up again. That is always meaningful. And as promised, I brought a bunch of gadgets to showcase, including a few TPUs that were used as a giveaway. And so some other JB listeners who attended were able to get some of those to play with once they get home.

Now, we had a few folks show up from the Netherlands, so there were strupeflauffles that were strewn about everywhere for folks to enjoy. I want to say thanks to Staz, who brought me a special gluten-free beer. Now, if you haven't been to Germany, you realize you could just drink beer anywhere. You drink beer on the train, drink beer in the streets. So Stas has like a database of 2,500 different beers that he's rated along with his friends over the years. And so Staz, thanks for thinking of me and bringing a few beers that everyone can try. Now, of course, Kenji also joined us. You

might remember Kenji, who helped me personally with a bunch of NixOS stuff. He's sort of my Berlin NixOS aficionado. And I caught him, as always, playing the part of helping someone with their NixOS install solving some strange issue they're having or introducing a new concept to them. And I heard the word flakes thrown around quite often. I also did see another listener brought a framework that hadn't even been blessed with an OS yet. And you gentlemen, can you guess which OS started getting installed on this thing at Seabase?

You know, I'm going to just kind of go out here on a limb and say NixOS. Oh, I was going to go with Classic Debian. Yeah, definitely NixOS. And the beautiful thing about this crowd is they're like, oh, what should you put on this? Yeah, try NixOS. And the, the beautiful thing about this crowd is they're like, Oh, what should you put on this? Yeah. Try NixOS. Okay. Sure. Sure. Sure. Uh, does everyone, anyone have a thumb drive with NixOS? I need to like four hands raise and everyone, you know, I had two NixOS thumb drives and there were like four others in the crowd too. So that was never a problem and they were updated images. So not, not bad at In the end, as is always a thing at Seabase, you know, this is a crashed spaceship hacker space.

So, of course, you need to get a tour. So about 10 people who had never been there before got a tour of Seabase. And they're just so lovely there. So if you're ever in Berlin and you're looking for a really cool place to just have an experience, I would say drop into Seabase. And a huge thank you to them for hosting us as always. And we had some amazing weather, so we hung out outside on the patios and everything. It was just a lovely experience. Oh, did you get to see the Urboyals?

What? Urboyals. Did you get to see the Urboyals? That's how we say it over here you can see the you know chris we were so um enthralled with the things that were happening on site and we're also in the middle of you know quite a large city that uh no we didn't see the uh what you call it yeah but um you know we were thinking of it that's cool happens all the time i imagine where you're from so yeah it's fine actually it does, where you're from. Yeah, it's fine. Actually, it does.

It actually does. No, sure, it's fine. It's fine. There were a few standout other really memorable GIFs experiences. So Nick came to the meetup and introduced the Linux unplugged phone number. So this is a phone number in the Netherlands that you can call. And when you call this, you get a Linux Unplugged episode right into your ear. So I don't know if you're on a trip or something and you don't have your regular podcasting

and you just, you know, need a hit. You just give this phone number a call. I thought that was a really sweet little project. Nick filled us in on some of the details, which are fascinating. Okay, so tell me what you made and how it works. Sure. So I made a phone number where you can call in and listen to the latest

Linux Unplugged episode. I'm already running Asterisk and my phone numbers are connected to there, so that part is really easy to do. And then I just downloaded the MP3, converted it into something that Asterisk likes, which is 8 kilohertz, single channel. And then just write a little itty bitty dial plan that says, if you get a call for this number, then play back this audio file.

And that's all there is to it. It's really easy. If you know Asterisk, then it's really easy. If you don't do a lot with telephony, then I guess this sounds like voodoo. But I've done multiple workshops and talks about how to get started with Asterisk. So I can send you some links if you want to get started with that. Totally. It's a cool world.

Definitely. And so what inspired you to even make that? Because you had to have some motive of some sort. It's just too easy to do. It's just a fun thing to talk about, I guess. Right now it's not automated yet, but I could very easily write a script that just checks the RSS feed

and then downloads the MP3 and converts it to a WAV file. I have a bunch of phone numbers that are unused and I have to do something with them. I can just grab any of these phone numbers and do something with it. It's really no big deal. So everyone that's listening can call in. I'll give you the number and just go nuts. Sweet. And can you give us a demo?

Can you pull out your phone again and dial the phone number? It was such a weird experience to hear my own voice coming out of your phone. So I call this number and then his call. Put it on speaker. Keep the top of the labs. The groovy show that comes to you live from our TV studio.

And here for the first time since last week. Lovely. Thank you so much. Yeah, no problem. You know, there's something perfect about that particular intro over the phone speaker as well. It just sounds so incredible. It's very classic. Now, I shared this with you gentlemen like about 30 seconds after I recorded that little clip.

And, Wes, you seem to know Asterix. And can you provide us a little insights of what's going on in the background here? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's an open source PBX and probably a whole lot more. But it lets you, you know, if you want to have your own little private branch exchange, you want to have your own office phone setup,

Asterix can make that possible. But of course, once you've linked it out to the outside world, either via direct SIP or, you know, something like the regular old telephone network, you can do a whole lot of fun stuff like that. Basically lets you, you know, as calls come in, uh, you can route them how you need via dial plans and similar. It just reminds me of how we have the best community, you know, coming up with all these projects and just having fun with it all. It's really inspiring. For those who would like to call in, and I wonder if we'll have some kind of love effect here and break some things. It's a phone number in the Netherlands. So plus 31532401207.

So go have some fun. Now I am happy to say that's not the only amazing thing that happened at this meetup. And I couldn't mention all of it. But another little something stood out to me. Listener Moram brought some Linux unplugged floppy disks to give away at the meetup. So we have Linux unplugged five,6.1. Part one is on one floppy disk, and part two is on the other floppy disk. And he mentioned that he chose 5.6.1 specifically because it was one of our shorter episodes recently, and that just made things much easier.

And there was a third floppy disk as well, Linux 1.0. Oh, cool! Wow, both these, the phone and the floppy disk, are so exceptionally geeky cool. I am very impressed. And I can feel the floppy disk energy building. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's getting there. That's really great, Brent.

Yeah, it's super fun. So as you gentlemen were having fun in your little corner of the world, so was I, which is, you know, I think we're super lucky. corner of the world so was i uh which is you know i think we're we're super lucky and i want to say huge thanks to everyone who traveled to be at the meetup and also the locals who i you know have seen time and time again here in berlin when i'm lucky enough to be here uh we are all going to try to convince you boys to join us so uh darnier is looking into renting maybe a boat that we can take so it'd be a JB boat party. So we'll see what, you're going to go pick us up at the Seattle Harbor.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That should be pretty cheap.

So I just want to say a huge thank you. Like these Berlin meetups are now just such a quintessential experience for my time here and it's just complete tradition. So they'll, they'll be happening. There's another one scheduled in September. So if you want to go to meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting, you can find that meetup scheduled there. And please come join us.

It's a lot of fun. And now it is time for Le Boost. And Venimax comes in with our baller boost of Vemax. I don't know why I get Veni in there. I only catch it because Wesi in there. I know. I only catch it because Wes laughs at me. Off mic. Yes, but you still laugh at me, which is fine.

I deserve it. I deserve it. With 123,456 sats. Hey, Rich Lobster! And if I'm not mistaken, doesn't that seem like maybe he's just going like right to ludicrous speed? We're going to have to go right to ludicrous speed. And Vamax writes, I'm firmly in favor of having you folks covered the present Nick situation. I found both the technical and social summary of your XE coverage valuable. Speaking of which, I landed a new job a few weeks ago and XE came up during the interview, passing a little value back your way.

Oh, wow. And thank you. Thank you. So I would like to do it this episode, but I think we're probably running too long. We've got the Red Hat stuff. So I think that's our episode next week. So I would like to get people's thoughts on it, too. And that's probably good to give us one more week because there's forks now developing that I need to probably wrap my head around a little bit.

So we're going to go to school on that. We'll get back to you. Thank you, Vamex, for passing along that value you got from the podcast. We really appreciate it. This here is a Value for Value production, and it's even more appreciated on an episode where we worked, Art took us off.

So thank you very much, sir. Eric of the Art Podcast boosts in with 97,000 cents. I hoard that which your kind covets. Via the podcast index. Hello, JB. With my beloved Dell XPS 13 to 7390 finally showing

signs of hardware failure, I'm in the market for a new Linux-powered laptop. I read that System76 is about to release a new Darter Pro that looks very tempting. Do you recommend another 13 or 14-inch laptop that's light enough to bring with me as I go, but would still have enough power to run NexOS like a champ? Thanks, as always, for the show. That is a great question.

I have been thinking my next machine is going to be 13 or 14 inch because there are so many other ways now to get larger screens when I need them. And if I'm going to kind of buy a machine that I want to last for a while, I think something that ends up being portable and light, I just – I think I end up keeping those around so much longer than I keep the really big heavy laptops. It just – I don't know. You get sort of burnt out on them. I just – that's – and so that's where like I love 16 inch on a laptop. I love the really big heavy laptops. It just, I don't know. You get sort of burned out on them. I just, that's, you know, and so that's where like,

I'd love 16 inch on a laptop. I'd love like a 16 inch screen carrying that every single day. If you are carrying the laptop gets old, if it's like a desktop replacement and it's on the desk, most of the time, it's not such a big deal. So I definitely would recommend a 13 or 14 inch laptop. I don't know which one right now.

I am also, I've been trying to build a list of like the top three or four laptops I would recommend. Maybe the boosters can help us with this one. Yeah. I don't know which one right now. I've been trying to build a list of the top three or four laptops I would recommend. Maybe the boosters can help us with this one. Yeah, I don't have a lot of experience, so I'd like to source this one from the audience, because all of my laptops are getting kind of long in the old tooth skis. Obviously, Brent knows the framework. It's that size, at least the 13-inch model, and seems to run NixOS like a champ, right? Yeah, it sure does. I mean, there's that hardware It seems to run NixOS like a champ, right?

Yeah, it sure does. I mean, there's that hardware repository that community run for NixOS that is solving a lot of the little tiny issues on the framework and just doing some optimizations around the hardware. That's really super useful and available for other laptops as well. One thing I would say is like the framework is built super well. It's nice to travel with from a size perspective. And also the monitor being a two by three is such a treat. I didn't know if I would like that. But now when I move to anything sort of on the widescreen end of things, it's just not the same. So that's a really nice aspect.

But I have to be honest, like I've been struggling with sleep issues and battery sort of longevity issues. I do have one of the older motherboards, not one of the newer ones. It's not an AMD one either. So newer models might vary and probably are a big improvement in that end, but I should mention it just as something to look into for your particular use case. Oh, here's a little PS from Eric. I'll be in the Seattle area for the first time in August for a big industry data science conference I'll be in the Seattle area for the first time in August for a big industry data science conference.

Perhaps that's the best chance that I can actually meet you all in person? Yeah, we should totally do that. For some reason, Eric, I thought we had met up at some point on a road trip. Maybe because we've been talking

for so long back and forth. Yeah, I feel like I know him. I do. Yeah, we should totally make that happen. When that flyover friend boosted in 52,240 sats via fountain. I hoard that which your kind covet.

Long-time listener and a first-time booster. Hey! I devour all the JB shows as soon as they drop. Heck, I'd probably enjoy listening to you guys read the phone book. I can do that for you if you need to. Or maybe man pages to keep things Linux-y, if that works. Thanks for everything you do. Also, this might just be a zip code boost.

Uh-oh, Wes. Gotcha. Surprise zip code. Oh, you brought the map. I always do. I keep it in my back pocket. Flyover friend, I thought you had him. Okay, 52240.

That looks to be a postal code in Johnson County, Iowa, with cities like Iowa City, Morse, Midway, and Newport. Well, hello. Oh, you say Iowa? Is that what you said? Uh-huh. Iowa City, Morse, Midway. That's a pretty big range, Wes. It's a pretty big range.

Hey, blame the post office, not me. Okay. Flyover friend, thank you for taking the journey to become a booster, and we're happy to have you on board. Thank you very much for the long time listening, too. Demoa comes in with 48,210 sats and says, Christ is risen. Amen to that.

Although I thought they were talking about me, and I was like, how did they know? But then I realized. Wake up boost. Yeah, yeah. Hybrid sarcasm boosts in $22,222. This old duck still got it. I don't remember my first Linux box, but I do remember my first Gen 2 experience.

I printed out the entire Gen 2 manual and set about running a fully optimized stage one build of Gnome Lite on an HP Pavilion DV1600 with far too little RAM and very loud fans. Wait a minute. That was a fun week. Was the DV1600 the one that had like a Pentium 4 desktop processor in it or something? There was a line of these HPs that had like a very hot Pentium 4 in them. I don't know if this was one of them. Well, on CNET from 2006, there's a 0 out of 10 rating. 0 out of 10?

Oh, man. Man, you know, that sounds like a fun actual episode, is going to find the worst reviewed old computers and try to get them to run Linux. The DV1600 should be on that list. Somebody keep track of that. That could be a fun episode. Now, Gene Bean got quite inspired this week and boosted it nine times in total. 1600 should be on that list. Somebody keep track of that. That could be a fun episode.

Now, Gene Bean got quite inspired this week and boosted it nine times in total for a total of 21,578 Satoshis. Boost! There's a couple rows of ducks here. One of them starts with, uh... I know I'm a few weeks behind, but one thing to consider with the idea of Fedora changing to Plasma is that what's been in commercial products like the steam deck lately there might be some serious industry drive behind this idea hmm yeah i like that bacon gene but i got some inside scoop bacon at red hat summit and

that's in the members version of the show now it continues with another row of ducks uh i'm a few weeks behind but um happy belated birthday wes and brent has one coming up too it's so exciting i think it was last week wasn't it yeah yeah happy birthday by the way thank you it is coming up another 5 000 sats to say um you dirty rotten double crossing bleepity bleeps you teased me at the beginning of the show with a gen 2 week and then there didn't seem to be anything related to it at all i thought for a moment it was finally actually gen 2 day on the show and uh well that was pretty dirty i don't know what he's talking about yeah i don't recall this actually no i'm not sure what he's referring to uh he did mention his first Linux box.

He said it was a custom computer built around an AMD processor. Yeah, the Athlon, buddy. Uh-huh. Yes. I think it was also, mine was like the K6. So that was pre-Athlon, but I was also an early AMD user. That's the one that sounds like a TOS space station. Yes, yeah, you're right.

I had a K6 as well. Yeah, those were great. They were great. They were fantastic. Gene Bean did some Gen 2 on there. Ran some of the old OpenSUSE installs on there as well. Thank you, Gene Bean. Appreciate that. He also wanted to mention PSI Transfer for file transfer and sharing,

which follows up with one of our picks recently. That's PSI Transfer. Thank you, Gene Bean. No accounts, no logins, mobile-friendly interface. We are Gen 2 fans as well. You should check our back catalog. We recently had Gen 2 week on the show. 40 Deuce came in with 6,363 sats to say

I would definitely appreciate some of the next drama coverage, especially if it would impact the future of Knicks. I'll probably check into it a bit on my own, too, but I would appreciate you guys' take and your analysis. Thank you. All right. That is our to-do list for next week. We will try to do our best gerb.

A vape comes in with 5,000 sats. Linux Fest. Is this a celebration of Linus Torvalds' birth from a virgin mother? Yeah. We kind of recreate a semi-messy Portland home office where we stage Linus Torvalds and we have a Linus Torvalds doll working on Linux and we all gather around and eat salmon. And then he says mean stuff to us about our code. Yeah, and our salmon. Well, the same cat boosted in 10,000

sats with some feedback on the members feed. Thank you very much. And also says a great job guys. Well, thank you the members feed. Thank you very much. And also says a great job guys. Well, thank you. The same cat. Appreciate that. Curtis Peterson comes in with 10,000 sets. It's over 9,000. I have my kids tablet set up with a folder joined with syncing to their folder on my server.

The morning before we leave, I have them pick media they want on the trip. I haven't had to remove an SD card or flash in two years. It's just a pain-free option ah so you like pre-set up like a sync thing or whatever you want to use that's so brilliant that is a really good idea i will say the tiny file manager really did come in super useful for downloading the video files because i don't really have a workflow for getting files on and off of an iPad. Ah. Yeah. And that tiny file manager really was great for that.

Red 5D boosts in with a row of ducks. Combination Slackware week plus first Linux machine boost. My first Linux distro was a Slackware-based distro called Vector Linux. Cool name. Yeah, I remember Vector Linux. Cool name. Yeah, I remember Vector Linux. I first ran it on a machine built from old spare parts with a 650 megahertz Pentium something or other processor, about 256 megs of RAM, and one 5 gigabyte hard drive, and then another 10 gigabyte IDE hard drive.

Ooh, and I bet they were fast. And by fast, I mean slow. That's a serious setup. Thanks for sharing. Yeah, so Slackware week. That's a serious setup. Thanks for sharing. Yeah, so Slackware week. That's something we got to do next week. We got to do Slackware next week. I know we said we were going to do it this week, but then Red Hat Summit came. So I apologize, Red 5, you're ahead. We appreciate it. Night 62 boosted in another row of ducks. Hey, two things. First, a while back, someone talked about the problem of forgetting to look

into something interesting they heard about on the show while listening in the car. Well, I use my phone's built-in assistant to remind me later of an item on the show that I want to look up. I say something like, hey, Google or Siri, remind me of that cool new Rust app that Chris talked about in Linux Unplugged. And the second thing is that I would really like to hear your perspective on the next drama in the main show. I think you guys do a good job at explaining some of these community drama situations, but in a balanced and non-clickbaity way. It is something I appreciate about how you report on things. Well, I really appreciate you saying that. Thank you, Knights.

That is a kind thing to say. And I regret that we weren't able to fit it into this episode. We had a lot going on. There's a lot going on these days. VT52 came in with 6,666 sats, because that's several rows. Odux, he had a Pentium 150 overclocked to 166 megahertz with 32 megabytes of RAM running Slackware. Installed sometime in 1995. Oh, man. You couldn't ICMP nuke someone on IRC using Windows 95.

They had no raw socket support. So you had to get Slackware. What a reason to change. I love it. Helicopter is a collection of expensive parts flying in close formation. Slackware is a collection of Linux binaries located on the same partition. That's a good way to look at it. Amazing.

For Slackware week, please consider compiling your own X11 and kernel oh oh now now we're making a lot of work uh regarding the nexo nexo s drama i don't know if i care much about it at least not any of the sponsorship stuff but the argument around the lack of clarity and elko's position resonated with me all right if he's the benevolent dictator so be it but spell it out if he can counterman the foundation that's fine but it needs to be written down. Otherwise, we end up where the foundation says one thing, he says another, and there's no clear leadership. Alright, so we have gotten some clarity around that, so we'll have

to follow up with that. Thank you very much for that. That is, VT, that is a great boost. Thank you. Brandon L. comes in with 9001 Satoshis. It's over 9000! Thanks for the mention last week about self it'll be my first linux fest and i'm leading a couple of birds of a feather sessions and giving a talk on how to run

a business on foss i'm looking for at least eight people to talk to ahead of time to try and get some feedback please reach out to me on the jb matrix or my new mastodon account at bwl at tech hub not social if anyone is interested. It's a great idea to try to get that feedback. So there you go, at BW at techhub.social. So it sounds like maybe if you're running a business on FOSS, yeah, talk to Brandon. Now, Lumor sent 5,000 sats in as a little word of warning. NixOS situation sure is newsworthy, but tread lightly.

Good advice. Yeah. And NixOS situation sure is newsworthy, but tread lightly. Good advice. Yeah. BHH32 came in with 5,000 sats. I think you made a comment in the show, Chris, about making a food journal. Check out. And he links me to food-journal on GitHub. And it is exactly that, a command line tool.

Yes, a command line tool to keep track of your food intake. A command line way to do it. It's pretty fun, BHH. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. And our final boost from ZackAttack, 5,000 sats. Thought I would pass along two things. One, I found a nice program called Gear Level for managing my app images. I've been looking for a placement to app image launcher, and so far it's been

pretty slick. Also, update on my Fedora test, I'm really, really liking Fedora Atomic Kinoid. Stays updated, and the jump from 39 to 40 was smooth. Good to know. Was wondering your thoughts on these atomic desktops. I feel like we often get pushback when we talk about atomic desktops, but then we hear from folks that have found a use case for them and it clearly works. So more and more I'm coming around to, I think as time goes on, we'll see more and more use cases where an atomic desktop makes sense as they just solve more and more edge cases. Yeah. And I think, you know, more composability is being built in. Things like Bluefin are exploring this. So, you know, you have your atomic base, but we're seeing a lot easier access to things

by adding additional layers on top. So usability has seen a big increase, I think. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Thank you, everybody. Lots of boosts in there. Lots of good boosts in there, too. Thank you, everybody. We had 26 boosters, and we stacked 434,830 sats. So thank you very much. That's a great week.

With all of us out there pounding the pavement, I really appreciate that value coming back into the show. If you'd like to get in on the boosting fun, go get a new podcast app at podcastapps.com. We are now a podcasting 2.0 feed, which means we are live and lit in the podcast app. You subscribe with a podcasting 2.0 app to Linux Unplugged, and you will see when we are scheduled to go live,

when we actually go live, you can just tap and listen, and when the final version gets all niced up by Drew and published. Right there in the Podcasting 2.0 app within 90 seconds, it was publishing it as well. And you can boost in and get in all the fun.

Podverse is great. Fountain is getting better every single week, and we've been working on your feedback. And you can also boost from the Fountain FM website as well. Thank you everybody who takes a minute to support the individual production of the show. It really means a lot to us as we look at a longer and prolonged ad winter and not necessarily any stronger prospects going forward. It is really reassuring to know that you're out there returning the value that you get from the show. Thank you very much.

Now, please do fasten your seatbelts as we are coming in for a landing here on the show. But before we pull up to the gate, I have got a banger of a pick, boys. This could have been the whole episode. That's how you know we had too much to get to this week. It's so stupid simple, but so useful every now and then. URL to PNG.

As a service? Yep. So simple little container. Actually, you can get fairly complicated. Like you could throw CouchDB behind it or S3 object storage behind it. Like you can get pretty deep. Or it's like just a one-line Docker run, and you just give

it a URL, and it makes a PNG from that URL. And you can customize the image dimensions and viewport size with just URL parameters that you tack on to the end of the URL. And it could send... You could do the same thing like you tack on a parameter, and it'll send a

mobile agent string to the remote site. And then you can send a desktop agent string and you can get screenshots for both types if you want. It is so slick for like just grabbing something or testing something or documenting and preserving something. You just drop the URL, boom, you get the PNG. URL to PNG, it's really simple. And I'll put a link to the project site in the show notes. Come on, tell me you like this. I do. All it needs is a flake.

Prometheus Metrics Endpoint? That's cool. Yeah. Do I got you now? Oh no, I think I'm interested. My one question is, can you add stuff like cookies or other headers? Because sometimes I want this functionality, but for maybe's like maybe a non-public site. I don't know 100%. I was wondering that too.

Yeah. I just started playing it. I'm not sure. I do have kind of a bonus pick, if you will, a bony pick I was going to say, but I don't think that's right. Because this is stupid and fun, you know what's neat? And I never get to use it? Morse code. Sure. I mean, if you go by the movies it comes up handy sometimes oh man or like in star trek how often do they just happen to use morse code right and then like people listening just happen to know

morse code you're trapped in some sort of situation yeah how else are you going to communicate exactly well telegraph not telegram telegraph has you covered. It is a simple Morse code translator. You just type your message in there and it will produce the following Morse code. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Will it just like blink my flashlight on my phone? Is that the idea? No, you get the text. Looks like here's some dots and dashes. Ah, the dots and dashes. Yeah. You got to make the noises with your mouth, but you could just follow some dots and dashes. Ah, the dots and dashes. Yeah. You gotta

make the noises with your mouth. But you could just follow the dots and dashes. Right? Now I'm curious to know what Linux Unplugged sounds like. Right. Hmm. Probably a bit like that. Drew, it was great having you here. Thank you for joining us. It was great to be here. It was nice to see you.

And I hope we don't have to wait again until next summit. Right. To do the same. You know? It's been way too long. Way too long. Way too long. Appreciate your insights on Summit as well. And, you know, maybe we'll check back in with you if you use something like Image Mode in production and get your thoughts on it. Good luck with your

AI playbooks. Yeah, thank you. Also, I'd love to know, just randomly, if you'd boost it and tell me what speed you'd listen to the show. Because we've been chatting with folks in person, and a surprising amount of you tell me that you'd listen at like 1.5 and faster. At 1.5 or faster. I think you're maniacs. We must sound super stressed out at 1.5.

So please do boost it and tell me right in. What speed do you listen to the show? I'd just like to know anecdotally what that is. So don't know maybe in my mental model i know what i'm planning for how to imagine like the music must suck we work so hard on that music i know i know right by the way we are live we'd love to have you join us we'll be here next sunday at noon pacific 3 p.m eastern see you next week same bad bad time, same bad station. You can go get everything we talked about today at linuxunplugged.com slash 562, including those new Red Hat announcements.

You'll find our RSS feed there, links to our membership or to support our sponsor, Collide, any of that stuff. linuxunplugged.com slash 562. There's a whole network of shows over at Jupiter Broadcasting, like the fantastic self-hosted podcast This Week in Bitcoin or Coder Radio over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday. Thank you.