LINUX Unplugged - 582: On the CUPS of Disaster

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

We explain the one-packet attack on CUPS and discuss its real-world implications. Plus, a Meshtastic update and more.Sponsored By:Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices! 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management 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.FMAttacking UNIX Systems via CUPS — A remote unauthenticated attacker can silently replace existing printers’ (or install new ones) IPP urls with a malicious one, resulting in arbitrary command execution (on the computer) when a print job is started (from that computer).Marcus Hutchins Scan finds 107,287 servers responding to the UDP port 631 — Instead of relying on Shodan data, I performed my own internet-wide scan using a distributed network of servers. This resulted in discovering drastically more exposed cups-browsed instances, causing my total count to rise from 13,289 to 107,287.Shodan on X: 75,000 exposed CUPS daemons on the InternetAnnual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!nodeboard — Your Ultimate Digital Inventory ManagerLightning Payactivate-linux — The "Activate Windows" watermark ported to LinuxInstall Frog on Linux | Flathub — Extract text from images, websites, videos, and QR codes by taking a picture of the source.Clapgrep — Ever had a folder full of PDF files, where you knew, somewhere in there, is what you're looking for. But you did not know in which file. So you had to search each of them at a time...

Well, boys, I'm thrilled to say I finally got the dot matrix printer set up here in the studio since I stole the notes machine out of the garage. Would you believe I didn't have cups installed on this old Ubuntu box? So I just did the right thing. I just installed all the things, turned it all on, made sure I had all the cup services going, and then I just plugged her in. Chris, I think I've got some bad news. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes.

And my name is Brent. Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, we're going to take a look at this CUPS vulnerability that claims it can take down your Linux system with one UDP packet. For that system you forgot you even had. Plus, then we have a few follow-up items from last week's episode, great boosts, picks, and more. So all of that's coming up. But before we get to that, I have to do the right thing and say time-appropriate greetings to our mumble room. Hello, virtual lug.

Hello. Hello. Hello. say time appropriate greetings to our mumble room hello virtual love hello you'll excuse me i'm a little sleepy because we got started extra early this morning but we still have a pretty strong showing um so look at that we got a good little group in that mumble room including some old friends up there in quiet listening and i also want to say good morning to our friends at tail scale tailscale.com slash unplugged it's the easiest way to connect devices and services directly to each other, wherever they are,

whatever network they are on, whatever platform it might be. You can get it for free on 100 devices when you go to Tailscale.com slash unplugged. Build out a simple network across a complex infrastructure protected by WireGuard. That's right. It uses WireGuard, and it is really fast,

and it is really simple to get started. Great way to support the show, and it's 100 devices for as long as you want at tailscale.com slash unplugged. All right, so let's dig into this cup's remote vulnerability flaw. That's really the primary reason we're gathered here today. We were playing around on the live stream before the show seeing if we could exploit my Cup system. And I want to just take a moment and say a lot of people are kind of just giving the Cups project a hard time, you know, bad code.

People are going on with all these examples. I have a soft spot for Cups. You know, it was truly one of the killer applications on Linux that got my workplace back in the day to adopt Linux. applications on Linux that got my workplace back in the day to adopt Linux. And then when you combined it with Samba, it could provide printing services for Windows workstations that Windows servers couldn't even do. Like, they just couldn't handle it. And you could normalize terminal service drivers with the generic PostScript driver that talked to the CUP server, and then the CUP server did all the actual rendering to the particular

driver. And this is, you know, we're talking early aughts of Linux adoption here. It was a massive change from how Linux, which previously used a system that was really designed for just printing through the parallel port, where CUPS was designed to be printing to your devices over the internet. And that's, in fact, they created the internet printing protocol, IPP, which is printing over HTTP. And so this is, you know, CUPS development first begins in the late 90s. The first betas are in 99. Linux distributions start adopting in the early aughts.

That's one of the reasons I went to Gen 2 early on is because I could just opt into CUPS. And, you know, in that context, it's also not very surprising then that this is, you know, a child of that era. Exactly. Of the internet where networks were friendly. You weren't worried about as many of that era of the internet where networks were friendly. You weren't worried about as many of the kinds of things. And coding practices and the availability of memory-safe techniques, also not as good. I am almost positive that I did a few internet print jobs

from my home to a laser printer at school using cups. Totally. The idea was great. And there are a lot of systems just weren't even behind firewalls or even on that they were just straight up on ipv4 on the internet directly there was this dream you're going to be printing over the internet from like your home to your office or something i don't know didn't google have google cloud print

for yeah yeah yeah that was around for yeah yeah so i just i just want to remind everyone, too, that printing is a cursed demonic activity. So it's also not surprising that, you know, there might be some bad code around just given the – I mean, it's crazy it works at all. It's no dream over on the Windows. It's really no dream on any platform. Yeah. And, you know, it's been passed around as a project a little bit, you know, went through Apple's hands. And I think it's kind of been semi-forked. And there's the open printing system that manages it now. And it's a large code base

that's been around for a long time and it solves problems that I think we take for granted now. And part of CUPS's sort of user-friendly nature, and you may be seeing this, is it can discover the printers on your network and automatically add them to your Linux box. And for my wife, that's just a great feature. She sits down, she gets on a Wi-Fi network, she can see her office printer. I never had to set it up for her. She never had to set it up.

She uses that all the time. Yeah, it's the kind of thing that scales really nicely for a sole admin on a small network where you're not trying to maintain some policy that automatically installs the right printers for all of her machines that she happens to be using you need to kind of just work and so that little that little feature where it discovers the printers on your network is really how this well he's not really he wouldn't call himself a security researcher but he obviously is he found it it goes by evil I think his real name is Simone. Got himself a new system.

Turned it on. Noticed that new printers got auto-added. Hey, how did that happen? I don't remember clicking yes to anything. And, you know, we all have thought this at one point. How safe could that be? That doesn't seem like a great idea. But as you're kind of alluding to earlier, oftentimes that's mixed with the feeling of like, oh, it's working.

Look, I see the printer. Yeah. So, you know, mixed feeling. I don't have to engage with this thing. Right. So, of course, Evil Socket, they decided to do some digging. And within a couple of hours found some pretty serious zero-day vulnerabilities. And one of the things that seems to be the key issue here is that CUPS is listening on port 631.

And on a local LAN, it's looking for like that Asahi DNS broadcast traffic that a printer puts out. But if you're on that LAN, you could, well, you don't have to. I mean, I guess if this is open to the Internet. But if you can get a connection to port 631, you can send essentially arbitrary commands that exploit a vulnerability in CUPS. Yeah, in particular, in this case, you can send a UDP packet or take advantage of a similar crafted message via the Vahi side and basically get the CUPS processor, CUPS BrowseD anyway, the CUPS system to reach back out to a URL that you put in your

little payload, right? So you send like a zero and a three and then a URL and then some like names of your printer and stuff. And that will trigger the CUPS daemon to send a request to that URL that you put in that message. It's just like an HTTP request over IPP as you're talking about, which includes leaking stuff like the CUPS version and the Linux kernel version in the header of the user agent.

But then it's also going to go reach out and try to install the printer that you told it about in your little crafted message. Yeah. And so that we'll come back to that because that's an interesting bit. But you said something there pretty quick that I just want to make sure is clear is that you could send a packet directly to this port, you know, IP port 631, or you could just be on the LAN and use the Avahi broadcast stuff. So you could kind of reach out to every cup server on the LAN. And I've worked at places where we've had multiple cup servers on one LAN and take over all of them. So it reaches out,

take over all of them. So it reaches out, it gets this printer information, which is malicious information from Wes the attacker, and it installs a new printer on the user's computer. Nothing else happens at this point until the user selects that printer and chooses to send a print job. Now, in a scenario at at home or especially with a savvy user, this is where this kind of gets to be, okay, you got to be on my LAN and you've got to be able to talk to that port and you got to be able to have me print to this printer. So we're starting to have a lot of requirements before you can actually exploit this thing. In an office environment, it wouldn't be too hard to say HP printer and then just make an HP printer underscore one.

And when a user has a problem printing to one of them, they could just select the other one. They always do this. I've seen this all the time. They'll print to any printer if they're having problems. And then you pop their box. Maybe it sits a while, but you eventually pop their box. It also sounds like, and I haven't tested this or exactly verified,

but it sounds like you might be able to replace an existing printer as well. Yeah. Yeah, that would also, and if they don't have a printer, it will become the default printer, the one that you add. So there's that element as well. It doesn't seem like anybody should be really worried, but this is a vector to get into somebody's box and get root level privileges. this is a vector to get into somebody's box and get root level privileges. Yeah. And so when under the hood,

what's happening is, you know, you send that UDP packet or the DNS SD stuff and it goes and reaches out to your malicious IPP server and then installs a printer and like the quote unquote driver for that printer into cups. And then within that, it's got some filters defined. And one of those filters runs a command that due to a separate issue, driver for that printer into CUPS. And then within that, it's got some filters defined. And one of those filters runs a command that due to a separate issue, one of the named numbered CVEs associated with this thing, that allows command injection.

And so you've set up a specifically crafted payload for like this filter that's configured, which is going to go run a command as part of its filter process and because of poor escaping practices and similar issues uh that come that can run whatever command that you happen to stick in there and then if say your systemd service that's running cups or cups browse d is running as root then now you've got root running whatever command you want which historically has been kind of common on a lot of popular desktops except for maybe just more recently. I think that some of that's getting changed not to run as root anymore. Yeah, at least for Cups BrowsD, it looks like Ubuntu is just making changes now in the repo to change the system vService.

Okay. Yeah, and so, again, this is serious in the sense that in an office environment, in a LAN environment, yeah, it's kind of awful. For your home use case, it's not so bad. But if you see a strange printer show up on your machine, you may have a problem. You know, it's worth remembering, as you're kind of saying here, that, you know, it ends up being chains, right, that often are what happens. Or island hopping. Yeah, and that's both true in terms of, you know, network discovery, but it's also true in terms of, like, the individual exploit, right? true in terms of network discovery, but it's also true in terms of the individual exploit, right?

Like, this is made up of four or more individual pieces that are considered bugs and security issues on their own, but, you know, the issue of having a malformed command that can cause command execution becomes much worse when you can arbitrarily install printers without authentication into people's systems remotely. So lots of small stuff really does add up to some serious problems sometimes. There's also just the fact that there's multiple now proof of concepts,

including some really kind of easy to just run and use tools to just exploit this. So that also kind of raises the, okay, it's a little more concerning. I'm not really hyper concerned, but it just adds to that. And obviously like the, the network factor, that was a big part, and we can maybe talk more about some of the, you know, the hype around it before it was released and what we think of it now. All right, let's go there really quick, briefly, and then we'll come back to this because I do think this is important. We weren't supposed to know about this yet.

And it started coming out on Twitter that Linux was going to have a CVE 9.9 remote execute code vulnerability impacting basically all Linux systems. Brace yourselves. And then you started to see this pick up. And then a day later, somehow, the actual disclosure leaked online. I think it leaked onto GitHub. And then it got started linked all over social media

before the vendors even necessarily had a chance to get their patches out. And then very quickly after that, proof of concept started coming out. And then we just started discovering a lot more about this entire process, about how it's been brewing for about 22 days. Just on the leaks and all of that, Wes, what is your first reactions there? Because we don't know a lot at this point. Yeah, it seems like maybe there's been some difficult communications between the researcher and the CUPS folks and the team. And then I think just the amount of attention given to the flaw. And I think in particular, some people construed an implication that this was the type of zero-day where you didn't have to do anything.

Or like, no click, I could own your box. As we've talked about, in reality, it does require some action. Yeah, I have to at least print the printer. In many environments, maybe that's a common thing. It's not a big deal, but I don't think that part was super necessarily appreciated at the start, which gave people some, I think, a bad taste in their mouth when more of the details came out. And then it was like, you told me this was like, you could own my box just by it sitting on the internet. And now you're telling me. I think there's two things in there,

Wes. So, and I think we could talk about both of them. So the one thing is, let's start here, is the 9.9 CVE. That's what the researcher was told it was going to be. So it's kind of understandable that when they started talking about it,

they talked about it in that context. And I think what we've seen is kind of now an overreaction. Well, it's not a 9.9. Ha-ha! This isn't really a big deal. When actually, you know, you can get halfway into somebody's box with a single UDP packet, and then if we can somehow get them to print, you're in with root-level privileges. And when we look at how many of these might potentially be on the Internet,

it seems like there might be plenty. An independent scan shows perhaps as many as 107 000 linux boxes that specifically respond to port 631 connections and try to reach back out with that request it's also worth you know there's also the local vector too like maybe you've got cups running on your laptop i'm sitting on your laptop and yeah you know that demon's running his route i don't have your password but if i i can print from your account with off yeah and now i've got root on your box. of the background to this leak and why it took 22 days of kind of disorganization. When you look through this, it does seem like he really got run through the ringer, I guess. Is that right?

You know, Evil Socket really didn't seem to get much of engagement from the CUP's community. One of them directly dismissed it, said, quote, from a generic security point of view, a whole Linux system, system as it is nowadays is just an endless and hopeless mess of security holes waiting to be exploited i mean there was like justifications for why this is just fine it's it's fine we don't really need it with this people people don't really expect this like to work i mean there was all these kinds of weird comments in there that was just sort of pushing back on the fact this is kind of a serious issue so you you have both the online conversation, which has been around the CVE score, and then you have the behind-the-scenes conversation where for like, it took him two hours

to find the vulnerability, and it took him 22 days to get people to do something about it. I do think it's fair pointing out, you know, they did work with Red Hat to get the score. I think Red Hat didn't do a great job in terms of how that happened. And beyond just touting the score,

I think the researcher did... I can understand, I think, some of the language, like if you read the report now, there's some stuff talking about just like the awful code. Like there's a kind of hyperbole that you can understand how that might make the CUPs folks... Defensive. More defensive.

Yeah, I agree. It doesn't excuse their responses or the quality of the code, but those kinds of things, I think, you've got amplification on one side and downplane on the other, and that makes it especially hard to work together and to see clearly into, like, okay, what is the actual, you know, this is a real issue, and just in what ways? And the reality is I get kind of the implication

there could be a whole plethora of other vulnerabilities in there too. You know, because a lot of this comes down to code sanitization. Also, the FOMATIC RIP filter has a history of being used for exploitation. So there's probably more there. Yeah, that's the filter in particular that has the ability to execute a command on your system and gets what is what finally does the last bit in the exploit chain. So there's probably more to be looked at there. It's a reminder, right?

That like no one really thinks about printing. That's part of the issues here, right? Like it's not a super modern system. It hasn't gotten a lot of love. And you from the admin side may not even think about it that much, which is why like stuff like system D services are still running its route. It does also sort of concern me that when we hear about these stories, we often hear about the projects involved kind of pushing back. You know, we see this with the Wayland project right now and what's happening with some of the improvements that Valve wants to make. We see this with this Cups project in this particular scenario

where somebody new comes along. They have to spend an inordinate amount of time proving their merit and their worth and why they should even be taken seriously. And then once they get past that stage, they argue about what color the bike shed is for 20 days, roughly. I mean, I think it's probably a shorter time because they moved along. But this seems to be a repeat story,

and it almost all feels like just developer burnout and people that have just gotten really skeptical, people that just want to stop by and, hey, I'm new to CUPS and I'm here to fix it. I think that's a real common problem in free software, and probably I would imagine most of those are probably not the case. They're probably more trouble than they're worth. Well, I think as we've seen from Linux's adventures with CVE reporting,

lots of bugs can be security issues depending on the context and how you use them. And so you're also going to get a lot of reports that some are super valid and some you're like, you really have to go out of your way to cause an issue with that. Does it matter? Do you care? Is it just a configuration? You know, like where is it on the spectrum? So I think there's probably a fair amount of noise too, which adds to the burnout.

Yeah. spectrum so i think there's probably a fair amount of noise too which adds to the burnout yeah yeah and i think it adds to not taking people really seriously uh when you do have somebody who's actually very serious about it and it's a shame when like we need to is it you know as engineers as the community as folks invested in technology work together and you know if we can get to the place where we can understand that, you know, on net, even language aside, ultimately this is an action that improves the CUPS project. That, what you said there is important. Like we, we got to be able to get over the language, you know, because you have to have

empathy on both ends because evil sockets coming in hot because they've discovered this horrible thing that's been around forever. And they're just the first one to get curious about it. And the CUPS project is going to come in hot when someone comes in with certain kinds of language. But here's what Evil Socket wrote on their blog, which we'll link to in the show notes, but I just thought this is at the core of what I was talking about. He writes, I will only say that to my personal experience, the responsible disclosure process is broken. That is a lot of expected and taken for granted from the security researchers by triagers

that behave like you have to, quote, prove to be worth listening to, end quote, while in reality they barely care to process and understand what you're saying, only to realize that you were right all along, three weeks later, if at all. Two days for the research, 249 lines of text for the fully working exploit, 22 days of arguments, condensation, several gaslighting attempts. The things I've read these days, he says, you'd have no idea. And more or less subtle personal attacks, dozens of emails and messages,

and more than 100 pages of text in total. Hours and hours and hours and hours and effing hours, not to mention somehow being judged by a big chunk of the infosec community with a tendency of taking and judging situations they simply don't know he's of course referring to the cve thing there right so he's out he's like yeah even if i find stuff i don't think i'm thinking i don't think i'm going to do anything about it yeah i mean this is kind of a it's it's

the open source side of it but i mean it just makes me think of all the you know times we've heard of folks that ended up getting sued or have can't find anyone at a company to contact. If we have a bunch of friction on the side of reporting these things, then they're not going to go reported. And we know, you know, if someone just needs to look under the covers a little bit, then motivated parties certainly are. It makes me think, too, about, you know, if I were going to harden a Linux desktop, not excessively so, but if I were going to seriously try to harden a Linux desktop, I think turning cups off would be something I'd want to consider. And I wonder if there isn't a way to, I don't know, could you lock it down? Here's what I'm thinking, Wes. Would there be some way to have this thing only listening on local host so your applications still see the printer and everything like that

and just you know just don't have it talk to anything on the land at all that might you would lose those discovery and yeah yeah um but yeah i mean you can you could totally turn off any of the dns sd evahi stuff i'm pretty sure you can go into the cups configuration i know we only looked at it for like 10 minutes but we were digging around in the cups configuration and i'm pretty sure you can go into the CUPS configuration. I know we only looked at it for like 10 minutes, but we were digging around in the CUPS configuration, and I'm pretty sure in there you can restrict it to just the local 127.0.0.1 network or something. There's like an IP range restriction. I think you can do. Yeah, so if you

discount the DNS SD, then by default, at least on your box, at least on your box, it was just listening. Okay, good. So I had to even be able to start my exploit. I had to go modify your CUPS configuration both to enable CUPS browse D to accept stuff on port 631

and then to have CUPS even listen not just on localhost. So even before you patch, that could be a quick fix. Check your CUPS configuration. Make sure it's only listening local. Make sure you don't have CUPS browse D running. If you don't want the automatic stuff. If you do, well, because I guess like if you've been using it and you turn off cups browse d does the printer go i don't think so i don't think the printer goes away so i think

it'd be all right if anything you discovered would remain yeah on testing on some other systems some some systems don't even turn on cups browseD unless you have Avahi enabled on your system. 107,000 boxes. Marcus Hutchinson, he did his own scan because Shodan reports 75,000, but his scan, 107,000 boxes. Yeah, so there's that too, right? If you are going to use these features, then network security becomes pretty important. And yet don't, why are you running a cup server? Don't run your cup server public. Do some scans on your stuff if you are running anything publicly or you're sure that you're

not. And stop it. Go get Tailscale or something. You know, what you should do is you open an RDP port and then you can cups that way. 1password.com slash unplug. Yeah, that's the number one. Password.com slash unplug. Head on over there because I think this could be really great. It's a tool I would use today if I worked in IT. Because here's a simple question for you. Do your end users always, and I mean always without exception, work on company-owned devices and only use IT-approved apps? No,

of course not. Even in the best of days, that was never really a thing. And of course, it just keeps getting worse, at least from an IT perspective. And it creates friction between the IT department and the end users who just want to get their work done. So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting in all these unmanaged apps and devices? Well, 1Password has the answer to this problem. It's extended access management. 1Password extended access management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device. It solves the problems traditional IAMs and NDMs just don't touch, and it fixes it at the application level. It's security for the way we work today.

And it's generally available today for companies that have Okta or Microsoft Entra, and it's in beta for Google Workspace customers. So really go check it out. It's a great way to support the show and see more information about such a cool and yet seemingly completely underserved area of the market where they really have something special here. It feels like it would have saved me a lot of stress and frustration, not just for me, but for end users as well. So check it out. Support the show. OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That's the number one password.com slash unplugged.

Now, very soon, we are preparing to go all out on Meshtastic, an open source, off-grid, decentralized mesh network built to run an affordable, low-power devices. And well, instead of talking about it, we're going to actually learn the thing. Listener Jeff has been building various devices for us to get us started. And, Chris, I think you even sent one your way. Oh, yeah. Jeff has loaded me up with a couple of different devices, and he's been experimenting with several at his place. And I have a few updates I want to tell everybody about.

We're early, so i don't even know if he's out of bed yet he probably is but uh this week he discovered that some of the lithium batteries he's been using in one of the devices works really good until you have a really sunny day and this it is hitting that solar panel and the batteries behind it get too hot and they have like a built-in cutoff so he's going to swap it out to a different type of battery that works better in those environments at higher temperatures and stuff. But it's like just a great example of all these little things and different types of options you have that you have to test. Because with MeshTastic, you can build your own setups. It can be solar powered or it can be plugged into the wall or it can portable battery pack.

I was just thinking, see, this is why we need Jeff with us. I know. I know. I know. I mean, he's, and he's been really experimenting with all of that and he's been doing it for weeks. I think a couple of things we should talk about before we move on.

First, some back of house business, if you boys will allow it. I think it's fair to say that listener Jeff has been producing content at this point. He's producing right now. Right. Would you agree?

Yeah. So I think we should officially upgrade him from Listener Jeff to Producer Jeff. Yeah? Cool. Ratified. All right. Here we go. That's so Jeff-tastic.

There you go. We now have Producer Jeff. So that's number one. Second thing I wanted to update everybody on is uh we've raised about 145 000 sats for pj uh to get up to the studio for the next phase of this uh and so our goal is if you can help it's about to raise around 700 000 sats total to cover his travel expenses so just like our scale and nixcon coverage that was sponsored made possible by our listeners directly our hope is that the mesh tastic coverage can be as well. It feels like the right kind of project to do this. And I think it gives

us as a show and as hosts an opportunity to do things that are a little bit bigger from time to time, little mini moonshots for the podcast that can be fun for us and you. But I also hope that when we're done, we're going to create something that the community can get involved with and possibly build out. And so I'd also like to know, please reach out if you're in the Pacific Northwest. We have a small window of time when Jeff would be up here. But I think we should consider doing a locals meetup. And you give you time to order a Meshtastic device. You could bring it to the meetup and Jeff could help you get it working.

We could all get communicating and find each other and build out our local network here in the Pacific Northwest. Or, you know, if you want to fly in. So let me know because it's a tight, tight window of time where he's here. And so I want to make sure there's actual interest before we do that. But I think that could be a great way to sort of see the local Meshtastic network. Yeah, and try things out. Know that your setup is working, your device is working before you go try it in your more local area.

And then we had a follow-up that we just had to share on the show. We talked about Haiku last week and how it's a great desktop-focused OS and their recent release has come a long ways. And the one thing that you should never do is use Haiku as a server because it's meant to be a digital workstation. So, of course, we turned it into a server. And we copied and ran the Jupyter Broadcasting Hugo website on there. And Wes even set it up at haiku.jupyterbroadcasting.com. That's right. We got a TLS and everything.

And it worked really well. And people got to bang on it throughout the week and during the live show. And we kept it up, you know, just so people had a chance to try it. And then wouldn't you know it, we ended up having a problem with our main site. Yeah, we ran into some deploy pipeline issues, which are all resolved now, but we had a little bit where we had some shows that were out that we couldn't easily publish. So what did we do? Went with Haiku.

Yep, we set up a redirect to the Haiku box and started sending the production JupyterBroadcasting.com traffic to the Haiku server. It sounds insane. What are you doing it probably is i mean it worked pretty well yeah honestly uh so in full disclosure it did crash on us twice okay um but you know that that was over a span of more than a few days um one time was a total hard lockup this oh the second time i think it might have just been one of like the networking processes or threads in the backend because I went to the VNC and the, you know, the desktop was still super responsive and working. It was just, I couldn't SSH it anymore.

But the nice thing about it is it was only using, you know, like 400 megs of memory, even when it was up and serving stuff. So super lightweight and it reboots so darn fast fast boots up so darn fast that like i just kind of you know hit hit reboot and it was back up and running it's funny i think it's actually good i think it's one of those os's where to be good at a lot of things um because of just the way it's so well architected uh wonder why it crashed though i'd love to know why did you get any sense of what caused the crash i mean it does it doesn't surprise me in that it seems like networking has been one of the things they've been working on, right?

Like just in this most recent beta we were talking about, like they got TCP speeds up a lot, especially on local hosts. So that's, like you said, it's not really meant for that. It's coming along. And of course that job is doing

a lot of network communications. Yeah, right. Yeah, we're running a full proper web server. It's exposed to the public internet. Yeah. I mean exposed to the public internet. Yeah. I mean, just the chances, though, that we had this parallel server running the website that was current because Wes was doing manual build. So the pipeline issue didn't affect the Haiku server. So we were able to just hot swap in seconds.

And then, I don't know, a day and a half maybe? Is that how long? Two days? Yeah, two days maybe. Amazing. It's up for a little while longer if you how long? Two days? Yeah, two days maybe. Amazing. It's up for a little while longer if you want to try it probably in the next week or so. At haiku.jupiterbroadcasting.com. Would you ever use it as a server for anything else?

As it is right now, no. With a little more stability and a couple of tooling improvements, I think I could consider it. If you want it a super lightweight server, it is super lightweight, especially if you just run it in a VM or something, you are using it to serve static resources. Or maybe you have some sort of haiku related thing where you want to,

you know, you're serving some stuff, but you also want to run some haiku app that is doing something. I could see definitely using it there. I did have to rig up some of my own, I don't know, maybe there is good service management,

but I don't know how to use that in Haiku, right? There's no systemd. So I kind of had to rig that up myself. So I'd want something there, and then, I don't know, can someone port Nix already? Yeah, that would have been handy, right? But, I mean, the ports tree is really good. We were impressed with that.

Yeah. I could tell you the use case for a quasi-server. If for some reason we had to have a render box that rendered projects or video and that software was compatible with Haiku, I could honestly see a dedicated, you know, media render box running Haiku. Something in there. I mean, you could even see, like, if Reaper worked on Haiku, it might be worth, like, the Reaper box. Oh, that could be snappy. Yeah. It'd be nice to have a few more tools, but they're adding that kind of stuff. So I'd

say don't just skip right past Haiku. When you got a weekend, if you can put it on hardware, it doesn't have to be great hardware and give it a try because it really came in clutch, as the kids say for us. Linuxunplugged.com slash membership. Well, I don't really need to get into the spiel.

I think you guys know it. I feel really grateful for everybody who supports us on the Autopilot membership program. You are our core contributors. And I do have that new annual membership plan because I've gotten enough feedback saying, Chris, do it. So I created a new plan. It's for the Jupiter party. So that gets you all the show's special features like self-hosted post show, the Coderly for Coder Radio. Of course, you get the bootleg or the ad-free version of this here show and kind of special editions that we do for our members or discounts. Those all go to the Jupiter Party. And there's also the straight up Linux Unplugged membership. So we have those options. The annual membership's new. It's in the show notes. I don't really have it linked anywhere else. But if annual is your game and you want to get access to all the shows, let me know. But otherwise, I guess I'll just take this moment to say thank you.

Thank you for anybody who supports the show, either monetarily or with time or with your talent. I mean, here we are. We're still going. It's pretty awesome. So every week here on the show, we have a show doc that we use to kind of guide ourselves through the episode. And this week in the feedback section, there's something really interesting. It says, did anyone manage to stick a note on Brent's back? Yeah.

And I have no idea. So I think maybe the answer might be yes. Oh, yeah, because you wouldn't know, would you? You wouldn't know. Well, spin around. Well, we were just. Show us that backside. We were complaining.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There you go. Although it's not written in English. I actually don't know what it says. Well, spin around. Well, we were just. Show us that backside. We were complaining. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There you go. Although it's not written in English. I actually don't know what it says. Oh, no.

Yeah. We were just. We were, I guess, not complaining, but we were observing that you took the mailbag with you when you were gone last week. Oh, that was by mistake. Yeah. I wasn't planning on not being there. And then.

But there's so much good stuff in there. So I just, you know. You sound, you still sound a little sick. Yeah, it's true. I'm recovering. Last week, I really wanted to be there. It, last minute, as you know, was really sad to say, guys, I can hardly speak. So I'm going to need to drop on this one.

So thanks for doing the show. It happens. You did an amazing job. We missed you. As always. But I'm glad you're feeling a little bit better. Thank you.

You know, you, of course, I suppose it's hard too when you're traveling, your sleep's a little off. It's just extra time. It's just, oh, it's a hard time. It's a hard time. And now it is time for Le Boost.

It's almost always when I get sick. Yeah, we got some great boosts here. Retro Gear comes in as our baller booster this week with $105,000. Hey, Rich Lobster! Lads, I just made the switch to NixOS Gnome for the media PC from Windows. Whoa! Skipped a few steps there.

I changed and added about three lines in the config, and bam! It's working. Spouse approval is a 10 out of 10 as well. Wow. Nice. That is a double win. This is pretty happy with the performance on the old AMD Phenom. How do you say those? Phenom? Phenom X6. It says it boots up fast and

seems to handle all the media types at 4K. Nice. The 5.1 surround works on the analog output and Bluetooth for mouse even seems to be working just fine out of the box. Thumbs up on the map work last week. Bakers Hill, Western Australia was correct. You got it, Wes. Hey, all right. Yeah, that map is big, but it's got everything.

It says, I think I have the username set correct now in Fountain. Jupyter Broadcasting shows have been revitalizing my interest in Linux and self-hosting, so thanks to the team. Really appreciate it. Cheers. Retrogear. Well, thank you, Retrogear. And congrats on the media server setup. When you get to a 10 out of 10 setup, it's really,

really, really rewarding. And I have been through so many iterations of media boxes and setups, so I know that feel. I know that. He also wanted to send a little support in for Jeff. He's keen to hear what he's learned about in Meshtastic. He's going to set up his own network soon. Hey, joining us. Excellent.

He wants us also to get in Ham Radio. He's been doing it for about 15 years. Well, Ham reporting in. Okay. Yeah, we got to do that. We do have to do that. I know. It's not off our list. It's definitely not off our list. He's just keen to hear more about your plans. Cheers. Yeah, we definitely will get to that eventually, probably, yes, maybe, hopefully.

By getting our toes interested. It's a step-by-step process. Fantastic, I guess. Enmeshed. Maple Penguin comes in with 85,000 sets. I hoard that which all kind

covet. Boosting to support JB and Wireguard. Keep up the great work. Gwen comes in with 85,000 sats. I hoard that which your kind covets. Boosting to support JB and WireGuard. Keep up the great work. Also, what happened to the Linux Action Show? Sometimes I only have time for straight to the point, and last was awesome for that. Oh, I wonder if they mean LAN. I bet they mean LAN.

Yeah, probably. Yeah. Thank you. That boost went to 580, which we have a split off to openSAS to support WireGuard there. Oh, and this was from New West. Oh. Nice to hear from you.

New West. Nice to know you're still out there. Good to hear from you. I wonder if you'd come to a Meshtastic meetup. Heck yeah. Also, thank you for that great boost. Yeah, so the truth is that we just couldn't find any sponsors for it, and the show takes two days of work, so it kind of has to pay for itself. And because it is short and tight, it doesn't really lend itself particularly well to the Boost model.

It's even hard to do membership shout-outs in a really tight show like that. So what we've kind of done is we've just sort of pivoted to taking the biggest and the best stories of the week and putting them in luck when it makes sense like the cup story this week but you know I miss it too I do hear from folks from time to time it's also the Linux news is just a little different now as well there's not as many things that are kind of like breaking news

right there have been some big ones this happened though yeah every now and then I say that and then some big stuff happens go figure well Hank Hoddle sent in I've been, though, yeah. Every now and then I say that, and then some big stuff happens. Go figure. Well, Hank Hoddle sent in 66,333 Satoshis. Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too. Hey, gents, you should put React OS, the Rust-based OS, on your list to try. Oh.

Yeah. Hank is right. Huh. Yeah, you know, I think you can run Cosmic Desktop on there, too. Boom. Done. Let's do it. I'd be interested to know if I could run React OS, like, on my B-Link and stuff.

I'd have to look into that, but I'd be willing to try it. Notes PC? Interesting. Notepad PC? Yeah. Notepad.exe PC? Brent, are you willing, when you get settled, to try out React OS? Bring it.

Yeah. I'm so tired of having like a stable laptop. Yeah, right. Willing to break while traveling. So, yeah, yeah. When we get home, let's do it. Okay. It won't break.

It's rust. Yeah. I mean, it should just run perfectly forever, right? I guess. All right. We will try out React OS. Thank you, Hank. And Hank continues and flips over in a baller category with another 65,333 sats.

Hey, Rich Lobster! How to reach more pros. Guys like you need to go to their events. Maybe have a booth showing off a few Linux laptops and desktops. This is a response to how do we get more DHH-style web dev, those types of users adopting Linux. Not the proverbially just totally new Linux user, but somebody who's actually a power user already, who already has custom setups on macOS or Windows,

particularly I'm looking at you, macOS. How do we bring those people to Linux? Go to their events. I guess we always go to our own community events. I don't usually go to like a Rails event. What if we run like a workshop at dev events where you can bring your Linux laptop over over neither will convert you know you convert your laptop to linux or we'll help you tweak your issues get your dev setup are there wes are there closure events oh yeah

oh we should do that we should that would be if there's like a semi-local closure event we should do that that is not a horrible idea thank you hank Hank. Appreciate that. Coffee or Death boosts in with $56,789. The traders love the ball. Oh, that's across two boosts. The first one is a McDuck. Excited for Mesh Jeff-tastic. Jeff-tastic.

Here's some road trip and healthcare value. And then a second boost to up the boost support for the Jeff effort. I'm really looking forward to hearing more about Meshtastic and what some community nodes relays could do. Thank you, Coffee.

Appreciate that. User 76 something something boosted in with a total of 50,000 sets. This is the way. A few quick things. Number one, love the network. Number two, LexD is amazing. CloudInit and perfect environments every single time. Number three, SMB business boost. Nodeboard.io, my biased impressions. It's the best simple tech asset

management tool ever. Number four. I think this is in response to Chris's ask for folks to tell us about their small business. Nodeboard.io. All right. Your ultimate digital inventory manager. And number four, more mesh testing.

All right. Yeah, I'm getting pretty excited myself. Can't wait. Well, that's a great boost. Maybe you're going to need Nodeboard to keep track of your mesh testing devices

after Jeff's done with you. Yeah. I'll have to check out more NodeBoard. Appreciate that. Bamham182 comes in with 50,000 sats. You like that one, don't you? I do. Super interested in hearing more about Meshtastic.

Keep up the good work. P.S. Thanks to the booster who noted you have to use the non-member feeds to boost. I know. I'm sorry. Wes was failing to send my sats for a while now. Yeah, so it's with Fountain and the member feed. If you're on Castomatic or a different podcast app, you can boost the member feed.

But with Fountain, it tries to look up all our value block information from the public podcast index, and the member feeds are not public on the index. So that lookup fails. So thus thus it does not let you boost unfortunately it pains us too don't worry planet ace comes in with 23 345 cents boost oh this first one's a space balls boost oh all right very good the culmination is one two three four five Uh-huh.

This is in lieu of the upcoming Meshtastic project and help to get things set up. In New Zealand, I found app.lightningpay.nz to be fast and easy. Plus, it connects easily to New Zealand banks. I hope this can encourage fellow New Zealanders to get involved. I think this smaller country has a big Linux presence. Oh, yeah, it looks like a quick way to get sats in New Zealand. Oh, excellent. Yeah, we were asking about that.

Yeah, app.lightningpay.nz. That's pretty cool. Oh, and I guess last time we asked about how to pronounce Planet Ace, and yeah, it's Planet Ace. We hit the nail on the head. That's rare. This was originally the name of a ship I used to see a lot in Littleton when I was younger.

It became my theme when I started geocaching. Neat. Okay. Well, thanks, Ace. The Muso boosted in 23,133 Satoshis. Yes, sir! Sir-dy, sir, sir, sir! Thank you, thank you, thank you for the annual membership.

Another Australian here. Take the first number from the front of the boost amount and you have my postcode okay well thank you for getting the annual membership and thank you for boosting in the muso oh good you brought the map he always does doesn't he he always does you don't let me into the studio without it these days it's getting getting bigger all the time i think yeah and i think he's i think he added mars i'm not sure and he keeps the pins from every episode in it i don't know how you fold it with that well let me tell you something but they don't always stay in because i got one in the old foot the other night so oh i step on that you know the first thing you say i say yes that's what i say okay so let's

just review here so we had this was a boost for 22 133. Take the first number from the front of the boost. So it's 2133. Yeah, you got it. Okay. You got this. There's an ad. Get out of here, ad. Oh, no.

I need to see my zips. Okay. So I do see two candidates here. Crodon Park or Enfield South in Australia? Crodon Park? Yeah. That's from the postal code DB over there, so I don't know, but let's validate.

What do you mean your map? Brent, don't you think it's weird that his map has ads on it? What kind of crap is that? It's a digital map. Oh, well then why is it in paper form? Well, it's like one of those Kindles. Oh, I see. It's a paper-white fold-out edition.

Yeah, haven't you seen the Samsung folding screens? I just didn't think it'd be so big and so paper-sounding. Oh, well, I added sound effect. All right, so you got it sorted out? Yeah, I think that's right. You're happy with that? Let's go to Croton Park. All right, thank you.

Nice to hear from you, the Muso, and thank you for the membership. All right, okay, all right, come on, get it together, boys, get it together. So the Muso actually thank you for the membership um all right okay all right come on get it together boys get it together so the muso actually finished finishes out here uh he says uh looking forward to diving into the members feed both past and future and if i ever switch away from firefox it will be to something using servo a web browser engine written in rust ah yeah let me know how that goes i am curious how that turns out hybrid sarcasm comes in with a row of McDucks. This old duck still got it. 22,222 sats. I noticed that the, quote,

Activate Linux project has a NixOS flake. They're popping up everywhere. Oh, this is amazing. Yeah, so that way you can have the Activate Windows watermark on your desktop? Yeah. Okay, well, I'm going to have to try this. Yeah, so, you know, don't ask watermark on your desktop? Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm going to have to try this. Yeah.

So, you know, don't ask why. Ask why not have this. And I have a use case for this. My home desktop is Plasma with a retro Windows 7 classic theme. So if you looked at it, if you walked up to my computer, you might be forgiven for thinking it is actually Windows 7. And so if I could just overlay the activate Windows thing on there, which I don't think you had that in 7, but I think it would just really still sell it. Or what if you want this as like a fake OS?

You know, you're doing one of those like, oh, I got my hidden Linux OS and then I got like, you know, when the TSA boots up my laptop, what are they going to find? Yeah, well, they'd really throw them for a loop. You devious, Wes. You devious. Odyssey, Westra comes in with 20,000 sats. Hey-o! That's not possible.

Nothing can do that. Hello, Odyssey. Yes, oh yes, about MishTastic. Okay. Here's my help with getting Jeff up there to talk and experiment more with it. When I get the chance to stack more sats, I'll be sending them your way. Thank you. Yeah, we have a couple of weeks. Our goal is to get him out here

for the October 13th episode of the show. And we're just going to try to stack until we can get him here. And it's all going directly to his wallet. So he has his own wallet that we set up in the splits for that. Small update over here. I did, yes, blindly paste and copy the nix run command for the Activate Linux project. And I now have a watermark as you can verify nice i like that it's over all your windows yeah that's great that's that's where

you want it my burmo boosted in 20 000 cents what was that my burmo okay all right sure the traders love the ball it's not your burmo yeah brent's burmo yeah it's his bromo it's my bromo long time listener first time booster sorry it's taken me so long but meshtastic it's sounding extremely exciting hey thank you for getting it set up i know it can be a journey for that first setup but hopefully now you've got it we'd love hearing from you appreciate everybody who takes that effort for that first time. User Eric the Red comes in with 20,000 sats. Follow up on the multi-boot tips from a few months ago. Wes's tip on using EFI entries has been working great. Each distro has a Lux encrypted main partition and a boot partition setup. The switching part does require a trip to the BIOS, but updates on each distro have not caused any issues. The main reason for the multiboot setup

was to learn more about Nix. I'm still confused about the best way to split my config files for version control, but overall it's working great. So plus one for the Nix coverage. We don't use it at work, but it's been a lot of fun to learn about. We moved from 98029 to 6475,

so keep us posted on an East coast meetup. Well, user Eric, I'm glad you're giving Nix a try. And I'd love to hear people's opinions on how they split out their configuration because I, you know, I started with one really large config file because I liked having everything in one place. But then as you know, my machine start doing various different things and I want to have a config, I can move between my machines, I start wanting to split things out and do include files and whatnot. So I'm always interested to hear how people split that stuff out.

Yeah. And I think, you know, depending on your setup and the tools you're using, it can be kind of personal. So it's always interesting to hear about. Kaspielen comes in with 2,000 sats and says boost. Thank you, Kasp. Nice to hear from you. And Withers comes in with 15,000 sats and says, boost! Pew! Thank you, Kost. Nice to hear from you. And Withers comes in with 15,000 sats. It's a Jeff-tastic boost.

Coming in hot with the boost! That's right. Extra Jeff on this one. Yeah. I like it, because it's match-tastic. People really, they got to that. We've also got Gene Bean with 7,690 sats across four boosts. Hey, Gene. Everything's under control. Let's get Jeff onto the show.

I do have a question, though. Chris mentioned an AirTag alternative. What options are there in this regard? And is there an easy way to see this alternative's location on a map? So I don't know if I have all the answers yet, but I have seen people attempt this. And your mesh-tastic node is however you build it, and you can include a GPS chip in there that gets location.

And then in my rough, like how I kind of conceptualized it, it would be a device that is reporting back over the mesh-tastic network using MQTT to your machine that's then logging all that information. And then you'd have something on your end that displays it on a map. But I would not be too surprised if somebody hasn't already built something like this because I'm not the first person to have thought of this. It is a fun idea to kind of think of like mesh-tastic AirTag alternatives for a farm or for some of your own devices. If you really just want the network to be working around your home and your yard, there's a lot of ways you could use it that don't really have anything to do with like

communicating with other humans. It looks like he's also been using the zero water pitcher. So that's a plus one for that. And he says, there's an open PR for NextCloud 30. And he says, I'm itching for some new exciting features. And he says, if you want to change the perception of Linux, we have to get younger people or influencers of younger people to talk openly about non-niche topics and how they personally prefer using Linux to do them. Hmm. Do you think, talking just in very large generalities that a person should never speak in, do you think that the Zoomers are, on average, about as competent with computers as Boomers are, noting that there are Boomers that are very good with computers and Zoomers, right?

I'm not trying to be ageist. I'm just simply saying I feel like the bell curve of learning about technology was really kind of the Generation X millennial era where we were growing up with the Internet and computers and building them. And so we fundamentally like actually assembled them and then people became developers and really understood how it works at a code level but then we kind of now have like ipad generation and iphone generation and they use them very much at that higher level it's going to say it depends right like it what is the interface and the computer and the stuff you care about right they're really good at tying together those things.

I just don't know if the operating system is much of a – it's how do you reach somebody that – like, we as computer people, we like that we learn more about how the computer works by using Linux. That's one of the things that's great about using Linux is we understand the system better. But there's no appetite for that necessarily. It's some ends of the different spectrums. I don't know. I'm just wondering if other people have made this observation that we almost seem to be coming back around to when I first got into tech and people didn't really know how any of this stuff works. We now seem to be kind of coming back around to that again. It's not a great observation, so I hope I'm wrong. Oppie 1984 comes in with 4,000 sets and says, here's a small little boost for the long, fast drive to and from Washington.

Coming in hot with the boost. I got you. I follow you now. I follow you now. Andersbergland comes in with a row of ducks. First time booster now with an Albie Hub setup in Stockholm, Sweden. Whoa! Nice! That is a pretty pro setup for a first timer. Thank you, Anders, for getting that all set up. And it's nice to hear from you. And congrats on the Albie Hub.

Jordan Bravo sends in 5,555 sets. Tough little ship. Little. Boosting for Jeff and Meshtastic. I hope someday it'll be possible to send Bitcoin transactions over a mesh network. Well, there's a will, there's a way. That is a cool idea. Yeah.

You never know, right? You never know. Hold my beer. I got to go scrape some boosts off the mesh. CB comes in with 7,466 sats. Good, good. I finally did it. I got my sats in Canada.

The Bitcoin well was very helpful, but it turns out my main issue was that my Albi extension had invalid cash login. Well, that would make it harder, wouldn't it? Best thing is that once I got that, I found out that I had some pocket sats in a bunch of wallets that I'd used over the years, including NiceHash. So I ended up with a few extra thousand sats

than I thought I had. Ultimately, I'm using now a self-hosted Albi hub. Hey-o! Nice! With AlbiGo on Android. Yeah, so albie go connects to the hub and you can just use that as a lightning wallet um and i'm also using bitcoin well to buy the sats by the way the sats amount is jb in decibel format seven four six six huh fun will now commence that's fun thanks cb congr Congrats on getting that working and getting the whole self-hosted setup going. AlbieHub's a really

cool piece of software that just really puts a lot of the pieces together. Yeah, bridges the gap. Bob comes in with some double ducks. Oh, is that what's going on there? You know, that might be Ah, fuck! Yeah. Just some sats.

Yeah, no message. Just some sats. Nice to hear from you. Yeah, but that's actually a message that says no message. Just some sats. Yeah, no message. Just some sats. Nice to hear from you. Yeah, but that's actually a message that says, no message, just some sats. Oh, what are you doing? You're going to melt my noodle. Getting meta, Bob. Mm-hmm. Now, Zenzilla did send in 18,500 sats.

Hey-oh! Now, that is fun, isn't it? Fun will now commence. Here's a little support for listener Jeff and the Meshtastic content. You guys never disappoint. This pod is truly 10 out of 10. You know what? That boost is a 10 out of 10.

Thanks, 94. Nice to hear from you. DexSword comes in with 2,345 sats. I saw this headline on PC Gamer, and I couldn't resist sharing it. Hacking Wizard gets Linux to run on a 1971 processor, though it takes almost five days to boot the kernel. Imagine to be four days into that and you get a kernel panic. Something isn't working right.

Oh, you forgot to define that variable. And the confidence that you can keep going. The real magic is that the chip has to emulate another old chip. So you run an emulator for a different chip on your ancient chip but then the new slightly newer emulated chip can support linux geez that's got to be slow oh man dex that is really fascinating thank you for sending that in can you run cups on it and if you can make sure it's only listening to local interfaces okay bear 45 4 comes in with 5 000 sats you're supposed regarding photos i use the Android phone to take

photos, and I have it at the highest quality possible and the highest resolution. Then I upload to a Google Photos account using the saver quality. This is a separate account that I use just for photos. Both my wife and I sync our photos to this account. If I want to keep them in high quality, I pull the file from my phone

and store that selectively on my NextCloud server. But most photos and videos that we just want to see later, we just use the saver size. Just my two cents. Or it's two sats is the case maybe. That sounds like really not a bad setup. Yeah, my fall down would be, and I could probably do it most of the time, is like the manual

grab of the favorites. Are you taking time to review and pull the ones that you want to? But I thought that kind of the neat trick is using a dedicated account. At least you're limiting your risk. And then having the spouse use that same account, that's not bad.

He also says, Chris, you've got to give that Atari VCS another go as a replacement for your B-Link. Just turn off secure boot and install Nix on the 32 gig drive and then use the other M2. slot for extra storage. It'll go up to 32 gigs of RAM, 4 terabytes of M drive and then use the other M.2.0 slot for extra storage. It'll go up to 32 gigs of RAM, 4 terabytes of M.2.0, and a Radeon acceleration. Well, I was in the process of rebuilding the VCS for my new Notes PC setup, but you do make a good point.

It may be a little faster than the B-Link. I don't know. A race. Let's get some Pharonix test suite in there. Oh, my goodness. All right. Thank you, Bear. Good to hear from you.

Trosso 19 comes in with 2,368 sats. B-O-O-S-T. Meshtastic boost for listener Jeff. Yes. We need more nodes south of Boston. Sent from my Alpehub. Wow. Look at all these hub folks shouting out. This is great.

That is great. That is really cool. Thamato boosted in three rows of ducks looking forward to the mesh tastic content coming up i'm thinking of trying to set up a node myself now all right do it they continue here i have a question for the jb community as a whole does anyone have any recommendations for ai powered ocr i have some old journal articles i'd like I do wonder, are there requirements? Because obviously there's lots of AI services. Are you specifically looking for like a FOSS tool that you can run locally? Oh, yeah, right.

Because I do think some of the AI assistants have gotten pretty good. I was testing using Cloud the other day to scan some math notes, and I took a picture of it and then asked it to convert it to LaTeX for me, and it was surprisingly good at it. But unless you want to pay for that, that kind of thing is not going to work at scale. So you're just casually writing out hand math and then converting that to LaTeX with AI? Yeah. I was surprised by how well it worked. I might have to try to use that workflow more yeah doing that over breakfast yeah you know i think i

vaguely remember seeing something like this exact project like a tesseract based ai verification system like that layered on top of tesseract passed by hacker news like i don't know six months ago so worth doing a deep search if if you can muster the energy to do that. You know, there's a pic we had on the show a while back called Frog, and I don't know exactly how great it is because I've only used it maybe once or twice. But Frog is a really simple GTK app.

If you're looking for something basic on your local machine and you throw an image in it and then Frog extracts all the text from that image. So if you had a PDF or a JPEG or a PNG of this, you could try Frog. Okay, Tomato finishes here with one last little message. I enjoyed the dive into Haiku. My realistic Linux escape hatch is probably less exciting, though,

as it certainly would be me going back to FreeBSD if I had to give up Linux for some reason. FreeBSD? I don't think anybody else has to FreeBSD if I had to give up Linux for some reason. FreeBSD? I don't think anybody else has said FreeBSD. Wow, that is quite the escape hatch. Could you make that work, Wes? Do you think you could do FreeBSD? I think I just saw an article about FreeBSD

getting an investment about FreeBSD to see better laptop support with investment backed by AMD, Dell, and Frameworks. Whoa. You know? Good for them. investment about FreeBSD to see better laptop support with investment backed by AMD, Dell, and Frameworks. Whoa. You know? Good for them. Yeah.

Maybe there's some better FreeBSD coming soon. I mean, we already know it's rock solid on the server, so. Yeah. Hey, Citizen++ comes in with 6,969 sats. Testing my new channel to the Jupiter 01 node. Also, we have no audio in Mumble at the moment. Of course, we got that fixed. Congrats, HeyCitizen.

Is that an AlbieHub node as well? Yes. Another one! Another one! That's so cool. Well, thank you for the boost, and thanks for being in the Mumble room. It runs on Arch, by the way. Oh, nice.

Beautiful. Good job. Well done. Well done. Kongroo Paradox boosts in with 12,345 sets. Yes. That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage.

A listener for two years, first-time booster. Hey! From Podverse, too. Nice. Congratulations. I got on the Value for Value wagon with Albie about six months ago and I've been streaming sets regularly ever since. But just wanted to let you

know how much I enjoy the JB shows, especially love and self-hosted. Keep up the hard work. And I run NixOS, by the way. Thanks to you. Very nice. Very nice. Maybe we'll get a bit more of that in future boosts, it sounds like. Well, Kongaroo, thank you very much for the streaming and for boosting in.

It's really nice to hear from you. You know, he low-key set it up and then just set the streaming on. That's pretty great. Also boosting our live stream. These last ones here are all live boosts. Ah, okay. All right. Well, okay.

Autobrain comes in with, guess what? Spaceball's boost, 12,345 sats. The hell was that? Spaceball won. They've gone to plaid. Enjoying the shows, I leveled up my nicks by learning how to use a flake to allow me to install some packages from unstable on otherwise stable version. It is really cool, isn't it?

Feels like a superpower. And then Mr. Pibb, or Mr. Plibb. No, it's Pibb. It's just with two Bs. Mr. Pibb comes in with. Plibb. No, it's Pibb. It's just with two Bs. Mr. Pibb comes in with 10,000 sats, which, boys, that's over 9,000. It's over 9,000! Boosting for Jeff. Surely great content forthcoming.

Now, you said we had some live boosts in there too, Wes? Oh, those were them. Those last ones. Oh, yeah. You slipped them in real quick. Look at you on the DL. Yeah, sneaky, sneaky. And that brings us to the end. Thank you, everybody who boosted in. We had

43 SatStreamers, and they sent collectively 34,245 Sats as they were just listening to the show. So when you combine that with the 35 boosters we had, we stacked a grand total of 768,545 Sats. That's a great show. That's a great showing. Nearly 150,000 of those have gone to listen to Jeff directly,

and we really appreciate that support. Here we are, building towards a bright, community-funded future. If you'd like to boost in, you can use something like Fountain FM or Podverse or Castomatic, or you can even set up Albie and boost from the podcast index. There's lots of options out there because it's an open peer-to-peer network, and we just appreciate your support. Of course, you can put your support on autopilot at linuxunplugged.com slash membership. Thank you, everybody who takes the time to set that up. Send your notes in.

It's one of our absolute favorite parts of the show. It's a great motivator, too. And it's a great way to send a little bit of value back to the show if you've gotten some value from it. We have a pick this week and this is kind of maybe like a cousin to OCR. It's a way to scan through a whole directory of PDF files or other text files. You know you got something in there somewhere, but you don't know which file it's in. This would be very useful for, like, I might have a directory full of manuals

for the RV and for the cars, for example. And I think you found this, Wes. This is called ClapGrep. Yeah, that's right. ClapGrep. Written in Rust as well as some Python in here. Oh, my goodness. Are you serious?

And I do believe it is powered by the beauty of ripgrap under the hood uh so i thought this is kind of a way of you know you're always telling folks on the command line to do ripgrap or grab sure half of them never get around to install on this custom tool you want to use but what about if you had it available in you know a nice little gooey package clapgrap yeah it's got it does have a nice goo. It's a modern-looking GTK application with some nice options down the left-hand side and your results in the right side. I mean, for somebody that has a directory full of manuals or old text that you want to scan through really quick, it's going to do it for you. They want to search through all kinds of stuff, they say, coming.

But currently it searches text files, PDFs, and Office documents, but with more to come. And it looks like it's being pretty actively updated. Version 1.0 came out 20 days ago, and it was built and deployed to Flathub five days ago. So it's a pretty new app. We found a new one there, but it looks like a good one, Wes. It seems like it has some promise. I've only used it a little bit so far,

but if you got a bunch of docs to go through it could be handy i have to find like a usb cd rom because i got a off of ebay i bought the mechanics manuals for all of the ford models from like 2003 to 2014 because that covers a couple of my cars and it's all of the vehicles including the trucks and everything they made in there and it's i think it's like maybe a flash app that sits on top of hundreds of pdfs so you can see a tool like this could be really useful did you say flash app i think it's i think it's a flash app oh gosh it's really old it's bad um it's definitely it's definitely a windows executable if nothing else and. And it expects, I think, to be auto-run too,

which that ain't happening. Remember auto-run on Windows days? Yeah. This thing's a real flashback. Just really reminds me of how things used to be. And, you know. It's worse than cups. So then here I am, right? I'm going and I'm pulling and extracting all the PDFs for the stuff

that I think is relevant, but now I just have a directory full of them. So this is going to be great. I'm glad you found this. Brentley, are you going to be back home for the next episode? Yeah, I'm headed home in two days. Whoa! The strangest thing is I leave here and then I arrive an hour later. Yeah.

But on the other side of the planet, it's really weird. You're a time traveler. I was thinking our members that listen to the bootleg version are also time travelers. Because they're getting the live thing, but they're listening at a different time. That is a good point. But it's like you're there live. Some sort of a time-shifting VCR sort of ability. Hmm.

Somebody should come up with that and then make it available in a feed on demand. We will be live next week at our regular time, which is Sunday, noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern, right? Yeah. Yeah, just check the pending item in the feed. There you go. You got a podcasting 2.0 app. It just shows up as pending at our regular bat time. See you next week.

Same bat time, same bat station. And if you made it this far into the show, I really, really want to hear your ideas for the questions that we should include in the tuxes. So if you're looking for an excuse to boost in and support us, you can do that. Let us know what we should ask in the Tuxies this year. And, of course, go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact if you want to email it in. I know, Wes. It's time again.

The first mention. There it is. The first mention. But if they've listened this long, I think they have a piece to say. Links to what we talked about today at linuxunplugged.com slash 582. Lots of great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Go check them out like self-hosted encoded radio. Thank you so much for joining us on this here program.

And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday. අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි Thank you. you