LINUX Unplugged - 588: Clearing out the Tumbleweeds

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

We go back in time to revisit our favorite classic SUSE release and then fix Brent's broken box the hard way.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.FMTest openSUSE Tumbleweed GNOME onlineFountain 1.1.6 is now live on iOS and Android — Our latest release contains more bug fixes than ever before - plus we have improved navigation by making the bottom nav bar persistent across all pages.Planet Nix — CFP Submission Deadline: December 9th, 2024LINUX Unplugged 432: Three Tumbleweed TemptationsLINUX Unplugged 461: Deep in the Tumbleweedsnix-community/nixos-images — netboot and kexec images for NixOSAnnual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!bees: Best-Effort Extent-Same, a btrfs dedupe agent — bees is a block-oriented userspace deduplication agent designed for large btrfs filesystems. It is an offline dedupe combined with an incremental data scan capability to minimize time data spends on disk from write to dedupe.markfasheh/duperemove: Tools for deduping file systems — Duperemove is a simple tool for finding duplicated extents and submitting them for deduplication. When given a list of files it will hash their contents on an extent by extent basis and compare those hashes to each other, finding and categorizing extents that match each other.MicroMirror CDN: Mirroring FOSS as a Managed Appliance :: SeaGL 2024Minisforum UM790 Pro 7940HS Mini PCBeelink open sources the design of the Beelink EX GPU dockBeelink Multi-Functional EX Docking Stationtmate • Instant terminal sharingNixOS Manual - Installing From Another DistroDocumentation for lustrating does not actually work as it is · Issue #49520 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHubnixos-anywhere: install nixos everywhere via sshownCloud becomes part of Kiteworksopen-webui: User-friendly AI InterfaceThe Trouble With Tumbleweed - YouTubeOCIS

Have either of you boys ever tried out distrosea.com? Distrosea? Yeah, like the ocean. Distrosea.com. Oh, it's like a sea of distros or something? Oh, no, I had not. I see. Ha ha ha.

Here's their official description. We provide an online platform that allows you to test 50-plus operating systems with 500 different versions. We want you to be able to test various Linux distros easily in your web browser without even having to make a live USB or installing on your personal computer. So I was playing around with this before the show, and they have SUSE on here, OpenSUSE. And they have Tumbleweed on here. And so I decided, well, since it's kind of like, you know, it takes to cost me nothing, not even a download, I'm going to click the XFCE version and just see what the Tumbleweed XFCE version looks like. And then you wait in a queue, and it's not too busy, so I had to wait like a minute.

And then it starts a VM on the back end, and it's like a web VNC session, and it fills my web browser, and the XFCE desktop started. And my first reaction was like, this is the best-looking XFCE desktop I have ever seen. In fact, Wes, if you walked into the room right now cold, wouldn't you kind of think if I were to tell you this is Cinnamon, you would kind of think, oh, yeah, I believe that's Cinnamon desktop. Oh, yeah.

It looks really good. And it's such a neat way to, as we talk about distros, there's a lot of them on here. And you can play around with them. We're going to be digging into Tumbleweed today and talking about Tumbleweed. Why not go over to DistroC, play around, see what they got? Okay, I only have one question. All right. What cryptocurrency miner did you decide to run?

Oh, there you go. Yeah, it better be something that can run on the CPU. you. 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. Today, we're going back in time to revisit one of my absolute favorite classic Seuss releases.

And then we're going to set off to fix Brent's broken box live on the show. And then we'll round it out with some great boosts, some picks, and a lot more. So before we get into all of that, and there is a lot to get into, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hey, Mumble Room. Hello, Brent. Hi. Nice. We had some feeling Room. Hey, Mumble Room. Hi. Nice. We had some feeling out there at the last minute before we started. A little bit before we got going, I was like, oh, we got a small Mumble Room attendance.

But nice to see you all in there getting the live feed right off the board, which is always cool. And a big good morning to our friends at Tailscale, tailscale.com slash unplugged. Go get it for free on 100 devices and up to three user accounts and build out a mesh network, connect devices directly to each other

wherever they are, powered by Wago. You know it. Go say good morning, support the show, try it for free on 100 devices.

I have no inbound ports on my firewall because I have been using Tailscale for over a year and I still love it. Tailscale.com slash unplugged. Just a few items we'd like you to be aware of

before we get into the big show. The first one, I'm a little bit of a proud papa. Fountain 1.1.6 just came out, and this release incorporates numerous bug fixes that were reported by the Jupiter Broadcasting audience. A lot of them now have been incorporated in there. I am still on a biweekly call with Fountain, and we're still going over some of these, but the vast majority have now been incorporated into Fountain 1.1.6, and I would invite you

to try it out, if you haven't for a a while and report back. I'd love to do another round of bug boosts. The Fountain team will be monitoring our boosts for the next couple of weeks and if you have some problems you can mention it in there. They will put it on their list and then when I have my bi-weekly meeting with them I will follow up. Very exciting to see that and a big shout out to the Fountain team who has been working so super hard on incorporating all of that. And then we also have some great news about Planet Nix. The call for proposals are open and the deadline is December 9th. Got any ideas?

I feel like I should. I know. Now that you're asking me right here on air, no. We're going to be busy. Actually, I did see some folks suggested some ideas in Matrix, so we should check that. Okay. And maybe do a brainstorming session. I think we're going to be running around doing interviews

and talking to people. I don't think we're going to have time. And we've got eating to do. We've got a lot of good eating to do. And then last but not least, the Tuxes are just around the corner, and we would really like to hear what should be in the tuxes this year. I think it's a great year to refresh them a little bit.

So please boost in or mail in your suggestions for new categories or what you might just also include in the tuxes besides new categories. We'd love to have that feedback and incorporate it as we're starting to put it all together. So please boost your feedback or send it in, and we'll start working on that. Well, basically, next week. So last week, well, a week before that maybe, we asked everybody to boost in or send in their favorite versions of Seuss. Remember this? I do. And we got some good ones.

We had 9.3 sent in, which I'll touch on in a little bit here. Definitely a healthy contingent of lizards out there in the audience, I think. In fact, Seuss 9.3 was suggested, and I'll just underscore that right now, the first version of Seuss to ship with Linux 3. And it also featured a brand new KDE desktop theme created for SUSE that was really cool. You're still talking about a KDE theme. Well, it was a big deal. So many years later. I know.

That's telling. I remember these releases. So we had one vote for SUSE 9.3. We had, I believe, a grand total of three votes for SUSE Tumbleweed as the community's favorite. Aeon got one vote and Leap got one vote. So now I wanted to throw my vote in here. So thank you, everybody. And we have some more fresh ones coming up later in the show. But I wanted to talk about for a moment, my favorite version of SUSE, because it just reminds me of such a unique time in Linux's history. And it is actually hard to pick one. But if I had to,

I would pick SUSE 9.1. Not 9.3. 9.3 is great. But 9.1 was really something special. It was released Friday, April 23rd, 2004. And there was a lot

writing on SUSE Linux 9.1. It was the first release of SUSE Linux after Novell on SUSE Linux 9.1. It was the first release of SUSE Linux after Novell bought SUSE in January. Oh, so this was sort of, they had a lot to prove. Yeah. And back then they came in these big boxes, and I had bought every box since the 7 version at least, maybe even 6 version. And so I wasn't a for sure lock on this purchase because of the Novell situation.

I just had some pause there. But like a pattern that continues to repeat to this day, they got me with the features. So 9.1 was the first distribution to ship with Linux 2.6. And it's funny because it took a hit for this in the reviews at the time because it was slower. But it was clearly the future. Also, 9.1 was personally big for me because it was the first major distribution to ship with Samba 3.0. And that meant active directory support, early active directory support. It also meant a better version of Samba encryption, which was required by our auditors.

And for some special systems, you could get this new thing called the AMD64 version. Whoa. Yeah, or the Intel Extended Memory 64 version. But, okay, so, like, this release was, like, unlocking things, new things you could do, like, at scale in production with Linux. And I was in an environment where we were transitioning to Active Directory. And all of a sudden, all my Samba 2 boxes were getting left behind. Yeah, that's embarrassing. It was bad.

And the other thing about SUSE 9.1 is it served as the base for the next enterprise release of SUSE. So I could start to get familiar with it right now. And we were deploying SUSE Enterprise. And then here's another reason. And I swear to God, 9.1 defaulted to riserFS for its file system. And riserFS, while now removed from the Linux kernel, back in the day was a really fantastic file system, especially if you had a lot of small files. And I had a lot of small files. Check images. JPEG images of the front and back of a check. Hundreds of thousands of them in directories. It was a mess.

And it also supported extended attributes well before most file systems on Linux did. So that meant it was compatible with NT permissions for Samba shares. So I got Active Directory support. I got RiserFS. I got Linux 2.6. And I could even support these fancy new 64-bit systems. And it had a heavily themed KDE 3.2 and GNOME 3.4. So it was like a banger of a release.

And, Brent, you'll appreciate this, I think, because you've experimented with laptops over the years, it was also the first SUSE release, while not enabled by default, it finally brought suspend to RAM and suspend to disk functionality. That's a big deal. That's a huge big deal. And you had to go in and edit your Etsy powersave.conf and turn it on. Of course. And then it like didn't work 80% of the time. But you know, if you had a big clunker laptop like I did, that was a big deal back then.

And 9.1 brought that. And then, of course, since it was the base of Enterprise 9 server, it meant that I could just take all of those skills and bring them right to bear once we deployed SLES. once we deployed SLES. And then, you know, back then, it also came with a couple of books, like two big books, documents that were like manuals and multi-hundred pages books. It was a real purchase in a big box. Dead trees to go with your Linux.

Yeah. And, you know, most of the time, you're installing via CD-ROM, not DVD. There is a 9.1, I believe, is where they start making a DVD edition available or it's somewhere right in there. And you can find that on archive.org. But traditionally, the way you installed SUSE 9.1

is with six CDs. And so it had this folding thing with all these discs in it, like an album, like a best of hits of your favorite artist or something that has multiple albums. You'd open this thing up and you'd start and you'd boot off the first CD and you'd start like the installation. But then it would stop and it would reboot and start back up into the installer. And then it would ask you for four more CDs. It's kind of a lot to, you know, script out in the installer if you think about it.

Yeah. And each CD got its own individual progress bar and you had the overall OS installation progress. So you knew like, okay, I got to go fetch disc five next, you know. I find it fascinating as a history lesson too that like, you know, we started off with, you know, six floppies that you needed or more. And then even after we gained like two orders of magnitude more in storage with the CD, we then recreated that problem. And then only in the DVD era did we kind of escape it, but not because of DVDs. If we were using DVDs today, some distros would need to, but we just, you know,

switched to better technology finally. And the other thing you got to consider is they needed to make it available for folks that didn't have consistent internet connections to be able to install packages. And so by default, when you installed from the CD, your package manager was then configured to install future packages from the CD. So you weren't really worried about package like cache updates. No, right. You had your own physical cache ready to go. Yeah. And if you wanted to, back in the day, start using the internet repos, you had to go set that up manually and then like either remove the CD sources or what a lot of people would do is you could prioritize it. So first you try the Internet. And if my Internet connection isn't isn't up and you can't get to that FTP server, then fall back to the CD and ask me to insert, you know, and it would tell you which disk to put in just a different time. And that's why you needed those manuals too

for the same problem and that's what they were trying to solve and you know what struck me when we got 9.1 going again is that it has a real style boys like from the boot it starts with this before you even have the grub selection screen it starts with this SUSE splash screen that has like SUSE and all these different languages and the logo and a nice elegant green background that fills the screen and doesn't look low res. It looks good. Which then transitions into a fully graphical framed box where all of the boot output is framed inside this transparent box with a nice background behind it. Yeah. I mean, if anything, it's as good or better than what you get with like a standard distro installed in 2024. At least until you get to the desktop. Yeah.

And the branding begins at the Grub Splash and goes all the way up to the desktop. It really has the SUSE feel. And the interface is big. And it's using the legendary crystal icon set in KDE, which is just like, you know what everything is. You know, it looks a little silly, but you know what every icon means, and they're big. It looks a little silly, but you know what every icon means, and they're big. I mean, you were reflecting on this when we were checking it out, just like, this would be great for, you know, folks who are getting older, who are not great with computers. Like, it was just a very, it had style, but the style was there to serve sort of using the machine. Yeah.

Yeah, they were not really looking for a minimal clean theme. Yeah. Yeah. They were not really looking for a minimal clean theme. And there was no consideration to making things also possibly touch targets. It was just 100 percent a desktop interface. And maybe your screen was 1024 by 768, maybe a little bit bigger. 800 by 600 if you weren't so lucky. It was. I mean, that's what it defaults to it's pretty funny oh man and the tooling the tooling to manage your x resolution didn't that take you back oh yeah i mean yas does a really good job of holding your hand through this stuff and you really needed that back then but like the tooling is really something like just trying to like set the right resolution

and all of that is a multi-app process with probably six or seven different dialogues involved it's really not like built into the desktop environment all it's completely handled by separate tooling kde has no idea what i'm doing it's completely unaware yeah right but it was either that or i, configure some text files by yourself and run some commands. Get back in the old Xorg, buddy. Uh-huh. So, yeah, wasn't doing that. And the tooling worked well enough. You know, looking back at it, it really set a lot into motion.

And it was later succeeded by SUSE Linux 9.2. So 9.1 was discontinued on June 30th of 2006. And I think I was sort of shocked at some bits that held up, like the boot sequence. Or just, like, from a practical standpoint, how usable KDE was. It just was very straightforward in the 3 series. And not that it's not now, but I was like, wow, it's really, there's a lot that is continued today. A lot brought forward. Right. I mean, you could get a lot of the continued today. A lot brought forward. Right.

I mean, you could get a lot of the same things done, right? Like they might not have all as fancy features, definitely not a bunch of AI stuff crammed in there. But the core part of sort of like office work, a desktop environment, just like day-to-day use of a computer, the analogies are the same, the metaphors there. You know, like besides a slightly outdated look is pretty usable. Functional. I mean, it's very snappy too. It comes with open office. So then, you know, there's the stuff that doesn't hold up to actually get it to boot

in our VM. We had to disable hot plug support. Yes. That took a little, I mean, probably four or five boots to figure out. Yeah, because you look it up and we were just, because when it's booting, it's starting PCMCIA card support, which if you remember, those are those big cards you can slide into laptops and it kind of locks up at that spot. But that's not really what's causing it to freeze up.

That's just the last thing that was printed to the screen. So at first we tried, well, we'll just disable PCM CIA card support, obviously. And you could do that with a kernel parameter. That didn't do it. We then had to track it all the way back down to hot plug. And we're trying to figure out what kernel parameter options exist for this ancient Zeus release. But yeah, so just disable hot plug. No hot plug equals one or something like that.

Those were such consequential releases back in the day like when i was using 9-1 i felt like every release was so massive and then when 9-2 came out it was sort of an interim release but then when 9-3 came out again massively controversial uh really enjoyed i did not get a chance to boot to swap over to old gnome 2 i think that would have been a lot of fun to play around with GNOME in the old days. But I was really I was a KDE desktop user back then, so I didn't really

I mean, I tried GNOME out from time to time. Now, I believe you were able to just boot a live environment to play with, but Brantley went through the whole install process and I think never really used this release proper. I'm curious what you thought, Brent. Well, let's just say I went through some of the install process. I was really impressed that you can find a bunch of these old releases on archive.org

really easily. So if you want to dive in and see what 20 years ago looked like, you can definitely do that. So I downloaded, I think it was like a 700 meg personal version of this susan 9.1 so not the i think chris you were running like the the whole shebang which was what three and a half gigs something like that so maybe i had a more minimal experience but i was able to at least run into the live uh area where you do get a sense of computing 20 years ago and the fonts that were in KDE and the whole like let's say design choices that were made back then which was pretty nostalgic but I thought what the heck oh I got this running just in like known boxes so you guys were doing a bunch of like command line trickery to get it all working and i just yeah we were doing qmu 386 mode because yeah you know we were doing 32-bit

yeah i uh so i just booted it up just to see like can i do as minimal amount of work as possible to just try to see what's going on sure enough yeah it did complain that i was about to install this thing this 32-bit system on a 64-bit system but i was like yeah go for it and i was about to install this thing, this 32-bit system on a 64-bit system, but I was like, yeah, go for it. And I was able to get through like, I don't know, 50% of the installation process and it failed halfway through, but it gave a really good idea of surprisingly how a lot of these installers haven't really changed in the last 20 years. Like it's still the like scrolling of different features going by with the scroll bar in the bottom and like you can expand it to see what else is going on and none of that has really changed much so uh that was a neat

experience i i would suggest if anyone's even like mildly interested in this just go grab an iso and run it for a couple minutes it was really fun. And if you can get it booting, like a whole install, then let us know in our Matrix rooms how you got it to work because I would love to, I don't know, spend an hour or two in some of these. So I do remember my very first Linux experiences was when I was like crazy young, probably 15, something like that. And my brother shared, he had some of these like multi CD editions.

And so that was some of my first experiences was ruining my personal computer with just trying to get Linux on it and then getting it all booted and stuff. And then realizing I didn't know what else to do or where else to go. But I remember my earliest Linux experiences were seeing a lot of those KDE design choices and icons and stuff. So it even brought me back. So thank you for all that. It was super, super fun,

even if you run it just for a couple of minutes. Yeah, I agree. I enjoyed it so much more than I thought I would. And then all of these memories came flooding back to me about this release. It was really something. So let's now talk about today. You are running Tumbleweed on your podcasting machine.

And it turns out we deployed it on your system, what, almost exactly three years ago to this episode? Yeah, I remember we did a bit of a Tumbleweed challenge, which happened in episode 432, for anyone who remembers that far away, called Three Tumbleweed Temptations. And I think we all kind of ran tumbleweed a different way. Wes, I think you ran... Do I remember? No, of course I don't remember. It wasn't there, like, immutable, but it has a funny name. It must have been. Right. It must have been there, immutable. Micro S? No. Anyways, we were trying a bunch of crazy stuff. And I did not expect in that episode to be tempted by Tumbleweed. That's where the title came from.

But that install ended up staying on this machine, the Dev1, for, well, since then, which is almost exactly three years ago to the day. It was on November 16th. And I don't know. I guess I kind of fell in love back then with some of the features. I remember one of the main features that really grabbed me was ButterFS by default with a bunch of rollback support. Yeah. And that has been sweet. It's the kind of feature that you don't use very often, but when you need to use it, it sure is nice. don't use very often, but when you need to use it, it sure is nice. And I've been looking for that as like a must have default on all of my other systems ever since. So it really changed

the way that I look at the standard. Yeah. And that's the reason I kept it was it changed the way I looked at how operating systems could be installed on my laptops. So well, that makes me almost a little sad for what's about to happen because I kind of love when we distro hop and try distros all the time for the show. I kind of love when one of them ends up sticking for a bit. Every now and then it happens and it's pretty great. But Brent has been having a lot of issues really for a long time, and it's really time that his buddy sat down and just took a look at what's going on.

Yeah, we've been negligent, actually. We hear him suffering. We even documented it in the show. We may even tease him from time to time. No. And I guess after all that teasing, it meant it was time for us to actually step in. And we just had a great opportunity to hang out and fix some problems. 1password.com slash unplugged.

The number one password.com slash unplugged. The number one password.com slash unplugged. Go there to support the show and learn more about extended access management. It solves something that so far has really eluded traditional MDMs and IDMs. It is adapting for the way people work today with devices and services and applications that they actually use today. Most traditional systems are only designed for IT-approved apps and devices, but 1Password Extended Access Management finally gives you that control over the actual application level so the end user can use whichever device they want, and it gives you a centralized place to manage and organize all of that.

It ensures that only strong passwords, healthy devices, and systems that you approve can connect to your data and your network. 1Password Extended Access Management is security for the way we work today, and it is generally available for companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra, and it's in beta for Google Workspace customers too. Lots of opportunity there to make things easier on your IT and on your end users. So go check it out, support the show. You go to 1password.com slash unplugged. That's the number 1password.com slash unplugged. Well, if you've been listening closely over the last few weeks,

you might have caught, well, the boys giving me a hard time about this particular machine my broken sousa box so we got together earlier this week and we hung out and well i watched while the boys worked hard and uh well tried to fix my issues okay so before we get into this kind of tell us the machine we're working with we know it runs tumbleweed is it a laptop give me more details okay well you should you too should be pretty intimate with this particular machine because uh this is the the dev one the hp dev one so this machine has been unfortunately relegated to my like main podcasting machine, basically

because it's super performant. I really like this thing. However, I did run into an issue with the hinges on the monitor, which I have not solved. I tried to solve it by taking it all apart. That didn't go so well. And so it's not a great travel machine because of that. And I haven't, uh, had any success repairing it. So it's been my podcasting sort of appliance super stays in the same place all of the time. It's nice and quiet when we do recordings, uh, unlike my framework.

Um, and so that's been its use for the last couple of years. And it's been, if you remember, we did a tumbleweed challenge and I kept tumbleweed on there for probably the last couple of years. I think we should look into when we installed this thing. That would be interesting. But it's OK. So that's the same install. All right. I remember this. OK, you say it's been pretty solid, but it sounds like you've had problems.

Every few weeks on the show or the pre-show, we're talking about something that went wrong. Yeah, haven't you not been happy for weeks? Well, months. No, I think, yeah, it's interesting, right? So I clearly have mixed feelings about this thing. So it's been solid in the sense that it's been around a long time, and for the most part, it's been good. But I would say for the last six months, it's been at that place, you know, when you get a Linux distribution and you've had it for a while and it just kind of gets super crazy crufty. And so now I'm running into issues where every time I go to try to do updates, I run into errors and errors that I can't easily fix. Now there's more red on the screen than anything. I'm at the point where I can't easily fix. Now there's more red on the screen than anything. I'm at the point

where I can't even install anything. So, um, I think there are a variety of reasons for that. One of them is way back. I added a few extra repos cause I was looking to get a bunch of software that just wasn't in the default repos. And from what I'm reading, this is super standard. So, um, so I tried to choose repositories that were super popular to avoid this exact thing from happening. But here we are. How long ago was that? That couldn't have been more than a year ago, right? So they lasted about a year to be two at least. Okay. I think it's two years, two years, but I think we should try to find that out. That would be an interesting little statistic. When you described the laptop situation, it kind of made

me think of that kid's story about the steam shovel. You know, kind of builds itself into the building and now it can't get out. And this little laptop, it lost its ability to travel and now it's sort of relegated to a desk machine. It can't install apps. We were going to have Brent do a fast fetch or a Neo fetch to get the exact specs. And, of course, can't install fast fetch. Yeah, it can't actually install anything, which is a bit of a problem. So it's time we do something here.

It's, I think, time we intervene and we save you from this. And we've got to do the right thing. And instead of fixing your package manager, I think we just hot swap this thing to Nix. What do you think, Wes? Yeah, replace the package manager with, you know, one that works. And so we've done this before with VPSs. I don't know if we've ever done it with somebody's crusty old install that's been around for, like, two years. Yeah, with, on the works. And so we've done this before with VPSs. I don't know if we've ever done it with somebody's crusty old install

that's been around for like two years. Yeah, with data on the line. I did do backups, so I think we're in a good place. And I made some extra space this morning for you boys to like play around with. So I think we're in good shape. Okay, so I think our first step is for something like this,

it's pretty handy to use an old app pick that we've had on the show ages ago called Teammate. And Teammate lets you share your terminal session over the web or through other SSH connections. And so we can all three cooperatively share a terminal. And so we'll get in there and we'll start digging at it. And then we'll report back. When are we going to get Zmate? You know, ZellageMate? Oh, yeah.

That should be the next thing. You know, they could wrap a cloud service around that. I'm sure we'd pay for that. Alright, we are in Brent's system now. And looking pretty good. We have a shell. It's been up for 110 days. A laptop.

Brent! Don't you have any empathy for the machine? I'm afraid. I'm just at the point where I'm afraid. Oh, you don't think it'd come back? Oh, I don't know. The last time, so I tried to update it and it failed miserably. I did not try to reboot because I've been there. And yeah, okay, ButterFS has rollbacks and stuff, but just leave it on. This is fine. I think our first thing to figure out is, do you want to keep the disk layout as it is? I don't know what the disk layout is. I think it's a ButterFS partition for most of the data, which would be perfectly fine for me. So I'm assuming it's going to be great, but we should find out because I

don't know. That's where we'll start. Okay. Now we've been doing a little bit of exploring here. This is a couple of minutes forward in time, and it looks like we have got a Lux encrypted root partition and a Lux encrypted swap partition and an EFI partition. Yeah. I forgot to mention that part. Okay. A little extra work. All right. Well, we can blow away the Lux encrypted swap. That'll be fine. But the Lux encrypted root partition, we probably need to have a conversation around that, don't we? I think so.

Do we need the cone, I think? Oh, yeah. Is there some confidential information in here? Well, it's presumably all confidential. The cone of silence. So do we have data in here that we need to save? Are we looking? It's mounted at the moment, right?

So we have access to the data right now. Yeah. We could put this, we could copy it to the NAS we just built, some of this. I don't know. What are we looking at that needs to be saved here? Okay. Well, great news. I already did a. What are we looking at that needs to be saved here? Okay, well, great news. I already did a backup

of all of the data overnight, so I think we're in good shape there because I was thinking we might come to this point. So all good to wipe everything on this machine. Okay. Okay, all right.

Well, then. That said, it would be handy. No, we're good. No, we're good. Yeah, you said wipe it, Brent. We said wipe it. We said wipe it. We're going with it, dude.

It's just easier that way. It's so much easier. I think it would be possible if we like set up the new Nix. Right. Somewhere else and then mounted it. I mean, there's got to be a way to do it, right? I mean, it's just who wants to spend the time? Yeah, right.

Well, and I think I would care more if this was a laptop I was traveling with because that's like something I definitely want. But this thing's now just staying in my cabin that nobody knows where it is. So all good there. All good. Yeah, I did. My wife's NixOS laptop does use Lux encryption for the root for that very reason. She takes it out and about. I got BcacheFS encryption going on this guy.

Oh, yeah, that's right, you madman. Oh, fancy. Okay, so you just have one big root partition, it looks like, and we could probably pretty easily just take that over with ButterFS or something. Yeah, totally. I mean, we still got to get the, we got to wipe it off, get the Lux off there. Yeah. Get back to pure block device.

Yeah. But. I think the mission is clear, though. And ButterFS, is that Brent's file system root. Yeah. Get back to pure block device. Yeah. But. I think the mission is clear though. And ButterFS, is that Brent's file system root? Yeah. What do you want to do on your root? Well, I've been cozying up to the idea of having ButterFS pretty much everywhere. Mainly one, because I want to learn it.

And we just threw it on the NAS that we built together for me this week. So I think I have incentive to learn it really well. And the ability to, you know, send ButterFS-based snapshots back and forth between my backups seems like something I could want potentially. So I don't see why we would take that away. And then the other question is,

if I don't choose ButterFS, what the heck would I choose? Like, it doesn't seem there's anything more appropriate. There is BcacheFS, but it's going to be outside the kernel now. Or our old favorite, XFS. That's true. If you don't need the copy on write stuff. That's true. That's true.

A little faster than ButterFS in many cases. That's also very true. And a little more, you know, a little bit around a little longer, so a little more mature. So XFS is a really good contender. There is a pro there, I think, more mature. So XFS is a really good contender. There is a pro there, I think, to learning ButterFS in both places, so you're just kind of a little bit more familiar with working with it. I kind of do think that kind of, in my opinion, puts ButterFS a little bit forward. And it does give you a lot of features that you have that will just be waiting for you

if you do want to take advantage of them with XFS is not as flexible. Can't even shrink the darn thing. Yeah. Well, I say let's go with the butter. All right. Big decision. You know, boys, I think we might have an opportunity to involve our old friend K-Exec here. Oh, I'm liking this.

What are you thinking, Wes? Well, you know, there's a lot of different ways to get nicks on a machine. One of the common ways is Lustrate, where you can kind of like take over an existing partition. And I was kind of betting we might go that route before I found out about our little Lux curveball. Yes. So if we want to wipe the thing.

Yeah. Using K exec would get us to an in-memory situation. So the disk would be unencumbered and we could have, you know, we'd have to worry about something running off there. We'd have a spot to work from. Yeah. We could pull down tools we need. Yep.

And then get the thing going. And then just take over the disk and not worry about messing with our working environment at all. And then Brent gets to launch his machine K exec. Well, this just get the thing going. And then just take over the disk and not worry about messing with our working environment at all. And then Brent gets to launch his machine Kexec. Well, this justifies it right there. So I think the question is, though, what are we going to Kexec into? Because we don't have a lot of options here. I don't think we have, like, another ISO or something.

Yeah, so one option is the Nix Communities NixOS Images project. Ah-ha. They have Kexec tarballs that are ready to go. And this is actually what NixOS Anywhere uses under the hood. Oh, okay. And what's kind of nice about doing it this way, I mean, Nix is pretty easy to get to KExec. There's stuff in the standard lib to just build a little tarball.

But they've gone a little above and beyond here. It reuses SSH host keys to try to keep SSH working. It'll read them from various places, tries to pull them out of the existing stuff before it K execs. It also restores static IP addresses and routes after reboot. Jeez, just the keeping your SSH keys and hosts and the IP is super handy.

Yeah, and they do like a little background K exec so that your shell doesn't sort of get terminated in a sloppy way. Yeah, there's some nice thought put into it. Okay, I can't wait to try this. This is really cool. And so they make a little image we can pull down and boot into. Or actually, what we're going to do is we're going to load it

into RAM. Yeah, so you just curl down this tarball and then extract it, and it comes with a little script that's going to do the KXX for us. Jeez, that couldn't be really any easier. So do you have to do anything particular? Do you essentially DD it into a RAM disk? A PRAM disk? No, it's all taken care of in the init RAMFS. So it's just, all you got to do anything particular? Do you essentially DD it into a RAM disk, a PRAM disk?

No, it's all taken care of in the initRAMFS. So it's just, all you got to do is load the NixOS kernel and the NixOS initRAMFS. initRAMFS and all that. At that point, we'll create the RAM disk and load the system into RAM? Yeah, well, the initRAMFS gets, when the kernel boots, one of the first things it does is makes this initRAMFS area. Okay. It's basically your first root file system before you pivot root into whatever

your real file system is. So this basically just handles setting up TempFS things and filling it out. And it's already kind of a fat AntRamFS. They just build it out to make sure it has a bunch of the installer tooling in there. Obedient lizard that you are, Mr. Brantley, you've blindly

curled the thing I suggested that you curl and extracted it. And you're hovering with your finger over the button to start this king's egg. Are you ready? I'm ready, but I think that's just because I blindly trust you. So I'm ready to go here. Are you ready? Yeah, let's do it. I say hit that button and then tell us what happens.

All right. Three, two, enter. So many, many things happen. It looks like it's pulling in a bunch of keys. That's super sweet, which is what you promised, SSH keys. And it looks like, I guess, I'm in. Success? No error messages.

Wow. It's been a while since this machine has had no error messages. It feels nice. So we're not in the new environment yet, though. No, it should be rebooting, is it? My monitor went black. Okay, great. Good, good.

It may take a second. I'm guessing that's a sign of success. Yep, yep. Okay, this is a little tense. This is the moment. This is the moment of truth, really. We see where it goes. Will his laptop explode?

Hopefully not. This is the moment. This is the moment of truth, really. We see where it goes. Will his laptop explode? Hopefully not. So what will I see if there's a Sun in 6X here? I mean, you should eventually.

You should start seeing a boot. Yeah, right. Like a Linux kernel boot. Eventually a text console. I'll tell you when I stop seeing. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Sometimes kegs X go wrong. It does happen.

Yeah. It's all right. We can pivot. We can always do a manual keg X. Maybe not use the script. Yeah. That's all right. We can pivot. We could always do a manual K exec. Maybe not use the script. Yeah. Yeah, and we can also build a custom image, like if we're missing some drivers or something we need that this Internet Ramifest didn't have.

I think it's getting close to being time to call it. Yeah. I think... Normally the screen should be... Still a blank screen. ...over here. Oh! Oh, yeah.

The keyboard's lit up, though. Okay. Is it doing anything anything it looks like it might have panicked you know sometimes you'll see uh like the caps lock key flashing the monitor is complete like off there's nothing not even backlit so like the gpu never even got lit up or anything yeah uh the keys are lit up though and uh i can can... If you hit Control-Alt-Delete six times real fast, that'll at least tell us if the kernel started. Yeah, rapid smack that. Control-Alt-Delete six times.

I did ten times, just in case. Oh, look at him going ten times, Wes. He's an overachiever. Yeah, you could, if you have another machine, you could try to SSH to it. Yeah, that's true. It might have the same info it had before. Okay, so I think we have success. What?

Because I, well, I control deleted like that 10 times and then I just started mashing keys. Okay. But I've got enter a passphrase for that hard drive. Oh, maybe that's not successful. That means we're going back to SUSE. Yeah. Yeah. But that's okay.

Well, would you like to go back to SUSE? Let's go back to SUSE and I think we'll revisit our K exec strategy. What do you think? Yeah. All right. We've got a little work to do, boys. Let that's okay. Well, would you like to go back to SUSE? Yeah, let's go back to SUSE, and I think we'll revisit our K-Exec strategy. What do you think? Yeah. All right, we've got a little work to do, boys. Let's get back to work. Well, when your first image doesn't succeed, try, try again. So we went back and we grabbed one release older of this Nix K-Exec image, and it seems like it solved it.

One of the things we did as a test is we tried the same image just as a sidebar really quickly on Wes's laptop, and it had the same booting issues we were having with Brent's. And we realized, maybe it's not a hardware problem. Maybe there's just an issue with this release. Turns out, that's exactly what was wrong. So now we have a kexect NixOS environment running on Brent's dev1. We did have to come up with one little workaround, though, for the SSH login. Yeah.

Well, so we still haven't gotten graphics going. I imagine we're just missing some AMD GPU drivers or similar in this guy. Who needs it? We're doing it all on the terminal. That's right. We were going to do a terminal anyway. Yeah, so we had to get root set up. The script with the Kexec image is pretty neat. It'll go

try to scan the system for SSH keys, but it doesn't know what users you might have, so by default it just looks under slash root. So we got Brent to copy over some keys. That way, once it had rebooted, restored the IP address it previously had, reloaded those cached SSH keys, we could SSH in. Our theory was it was up, it was responding on the network. We just needed the right key to get in.

Yeah, so we don't have, what Wes is saying is we don't have any graphics on the actual console of the laptop at the moment. So this is truly get it. Yeah. So we don't have, what Wes is saying is we don't have any graphics on the actual console of the laptop at the moment. So this is truly a headless installation. But we are up and running in a unique environment separate from that Lux encrypted installation. We did also for a brief moment consider just adopting that Lux install. That would be something that is optional. But we also kind of want to start fresh on that file system. So there's less incentive to do that.

So now that we're in and we've Kexect, what do we do? Do we just start nuking his partition? I think so. Get to work? That's right. Who wants to do that? Look at that. Nice and clean.

All right, we've wiped it. It looks good. We have ourselves just a beautiful disk ready to go. This laptop is no longer bootable. We've just officially killed this laptop. So there is no turning back, boys. Now to build it up again. Yeah, now we've got to build it up.

We have reached a critical decision phase. We've copied over a config from Brent's previous machine and modified it, so we're going to have a really good starting base, but we have a question ahead of us. Do we make this a channels-based install or a flake-based install? And, of course, Wes and I are leaning towards flake install, but, Brenton, you got a couple of questions, so I thought let's work this out and figure out which path we want to take. Well, I'm thinking I should lean toward flakes, even though I don't feel that comfortable with them at this point. But if you saw the NixOS community survey, something like 80% of users are using Flakes. So I wouldn't call that very experimental anymore.

So I think we should do the Flake thing. But I don't completely understand how it works at this point. Like there are differences from using channels. I'm used to doing, you know, channels are nice because they feel kind of like apt in the way that you have to update them. And then it feels a bit like a repository, you know, like a repo. So I agree. So for moving towards NixOS, that felt, I don't know, homely, but I'm ready to move off of that, that feel good stuff and embrace the future. But how would you i don't know very quickly give insights into what's different about flix yeah okay so from the end user operation standpoint the first thing you'll notice is you no longer need to update your channel list or like switch

which channel you're subscribed to for major version updates or that kind of thing um you also can't use the dash dash upgrade part of NixOS rebuild, which just does the channel update for you. Because the whole part of flakes is it manages your inputs for you, including Nix packages. So your your flake has a pin for Nix packages. And that determines what version of Nix packages you get. So to do updates, you have to update your flake. Then that changes the flake.lock file. And then when you do a NixOS rebuild switch,

it'll use the updated. It'll pull from that updated source. I think flakes are a good fit for you too, just because what that changes is instead of having the state of the channel determine where your packages come from, which is some other separate thing on the system, it's controlled and locked in the same repo that you have. So if you pair that with Git and you commit the changes to your

lock file, just by going backwards through your commits, you can go back to any version of your system config and have it a lot more reproducible. And I know you are a big Git fan these days, so you're in a position to take advantage of it. I do have a question. So I often install only a single package. You know, often I'm in a situation where my internet connectivity is a little bit limited, let's say. And so I often install just one package that I'm trying to use. But so will Flakes, if I'm doing that, will Flakes just pull in everything that's new whenever I'm trying to do a switch?

No. So it'll only pull in new stuff if you update your Flake. So if all you did was add an additional packages to your package list for your user or whatever and then do a rebuild switch. No, it'll just pull from the same commit from Nix packages that you were using before. Ah, nice. Okay. Well, great.

I don't see any reasons why I shouldn't do this unless you have come up with some. I think we're going flakes. Let's do it. All right. Some time's passed. It's actually been pretty flawless. We've had the system building.

We've copied a bunch of files over, a bunch of files because, you know, we built a few extra things. We had an old config. I mean,. We've copied a bunch of files over, a bunch of files, because, you know, we built a few extra things. We had an old config. I mean, we had to disable a bunch of Brent's packages just to keep it reasonable. And then we had to set user and passwords for root and Brent's user account. So if my math's right, I think we got it all right. We're done with this phase. Yeah, that means it's time to reboot. All right, Brent, kick it off. Do I dare?

Yeah, let's see. Okay, here we go. But if this doesn't work, then we have to go back and redo a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah, probably come up with a plan C at this point. Oh, gosh. Okay, I'll do it. Yeah.

Are you ready? I want to know if it's going to work. Here we go. I got a good feeling. It just... Okay. Hey, we've now dropped out, so we can't monitor the system anymore. Oh, but we do have a

shell on Brent's personal computer. Don't tell him about that. Oh. So the hardware is rebooted. Oh, the monitor came on. Okay, that's better than we've gotten so far. And I'm seeing a NixOS boot. I like that.

Okay, so the bootloader's working. NixOS stage one. Stage two. Uh-oh, uh-oh. Oh, it's creating the swap file. We're pinging it. We're not getting a reply yet. It may have a different address, too.

I'm just pinging what it was last. But this is my first time on Brent's network. Come on, Brent. What's happening? Is it working? It's initializing the swap device, and we made it rather large. Oh, no. initializing the swap device, and we made it rather large. Oh, oh, oh.

Okay, okay, good. Good, good, good. And we have login. Oh, congratulations. I think that's a good sign, boys. I'm going to officially say we have successfully overtaken Brent's system with a fresh, fully flaked Seuss installation. Seuss installation? I'm getting loopy. Nick's installation.

What is that, right? The only Seuss left is in your brain. Where am I? Yeah, very well done, boys. It was actually... Now, we should check, did it take his login? Yeah, okay, good. I mean, for us, in real time, it was kind of long

because we had our first route didn't work out because the next image might have a bug. We're going to have to look more into that. Then we didn't expect a Lux encrypted hard drive, so we couldn't do a direct takeover. And we considered building out a RAM environment with Ubuntu, but then before we went crazy down that path, Wes had the very reasonable idea to just try the previous

release of that Nix K exec image. That got us to a spot where we could then pretty quickly take over the system. Yeah, I mean, once you've got a booted system with Nix on it, all we had to do was build the configuration that Brent wanted on the box, and then run the Nix on it. All we had to do was, you know, build the configuration that Brent wanted on the box and then run the NixOS install command, which handles setting up a new Nix store, copying all the files to it, and then tying up like all the bootloader stuff. Now it's just a matter of making sure the install is good and adding the packages Brent wants.

And then I'm taking a nap. Well, I've logged in and all of that's working and it looks like a completely fresh system. So I think we're in great shape. Ha-ha! The annual membership is here, and of course the monthly membership for just this show is available at linuxunplugged.com slash membership. I just want to take a moment and reflect on Linux media of past that is really no longer around. From a bunch of unique websites that were around in the early days of Linux to some of the pillars of our information ecosystem back in the day.

The Linux magazines where distributions would come with the magazine and you, you know, with poor dial up Internet and just pouring it in general. That was such a boom. But the advertising world, while it's still around, it moved on from Linux magazines. And now we really have nothing. I fear that is happening for Linux podcasts now. And I don't think we're there yet, but I think we're about two years into it. I think it could take a little bit longer, but this year isn't looking much better. And we have an opportunity because of just the technology around podcasting between memberships and booths to keep these

things going. These valuable aspects to, I think, the discussion and the information ecosystem, which is absolutely vital in a free software community where everything's open. So the discussion should be open and should be informed by its listeners. So that's why I am so grateful that now in 2024, we have our members and we have our boosters. We could still use more, but we have something that the Linux magazines didn't really have. They even with advertising, even with membership prices going up, they just couldn't make it work. There's too many dynamics that shifted. And it's funny because if you're old enough, you'll remember what pillars of the community these things were, what absolute powerhouses they were, and just the mass amounts of money they printed from advertising where they could

send their writers on luxurious trips to tech events and put them up in the nicest hotels, cover all their costs. They were raking in the money for a period of time, just like podcasting was for some podcasts, at least none about us, but for some podcasts just two years ago. So thank you if you've ever supported the show, if you're considering supporting the show with a boost or a membership, it means a lot to us and it gives us an opportunity to build a new path, to build a new model. And that's Value for Value. Well, I'm happy to report that we are doing this very episode from this new system.

So everything seems well and in place and fresh feeling, got to say. And it even updates. So thank you, gentlemen, for helping me out to do that the hard way, it seems. Before we get to the boosts this week, we did want to check out on the boosty leaderboard. Wes, take it away. All right. Starting with those set streamers, the folks that sent us the most streams, starting with number five, our friend Forward Humor.

Then we've got Digital Apnea, Cospeeland, Dano's Celti, and current leader, Gene Bean. Gene Bean! Yes, that is the folks that sent us the most saps via streaming. Well, that's the most, doing the most streaming. Oh, the most streams. Oh, I see. The most in number of streams.

Need a zesty drink. Regardless of the value, you're clearly listening to the shows and that matters. Yeah. Thank you. But, you know, those stream saps come with saps, of course. Number five there is Cronrad. Then number four, Forward Humor. So boosting a lot both ways.

Thank you, sir. Number three, Squared Triangle. That's hard to do. Hello. Yes. Very tricky. Well done. Number two, Rotted Mood.

Not surprised. And in number one here as well, Gene Beam. Live long and prosper. Okay, now moving to the boost side of things. The pure number of boosts, how many times we've heard from you. Number five, Anonymous. Maybe I need to filter that one out for the future. Okay.

Because it's probably grouping a lot of different Anonymous folks. Sure, sure. Number four, PJ. Hey, Producer Jeff. Thank you. Number three, VT52. the future okay uh because it's probably grouping a lot of different anonymous folks sure sure uh number four pj hey producer jeff thank you number three vt 52 hello vt number two hybrid sarcasm of course and number one again it's gene bean oh wow and that's impressive we haven't heard from him for a minute superior ability breeds superior ambition gene put in some really good work in the first half of the year, that's for sure. Yeah, for sure. Thank you, Gene. Okay, and arguably the most important category, are sat champions in the standing so far?

So folks who have sent in the most total sats. Number five, Rotted Mood. All right, thank you, Rotted Mood. At 527,000 sats. Then we've got number four, No Second Best, at 633,000. Number three, The Dude Abides, abiding at 929,000 sats. And now we cross. So close to one mil.

So close, The Dude. We cross that mark for number two deleted coming in with 2.1 million sats wow all right and not to be outdone our current sat champion number one hybrid sarcasm hey thank you hybrid sarc. With nearly 2.7 million sets. That's just this year. That's just this year. That's incredible. All of this is incredible.

Hey, Rich Lobster! I am programmed in multiple techniques. Wow, that is really great. Thank you. I think Hybrid has pretty much the leaderboard close to lock. Deleted with one big boost, though, could come up to position one. And the Dude Abides with a couple of big boosts could also take position one. So it's all close.

But thank you, everybody, who has been sending those boosts in there. That's an update on the leaderboard. So, you know, when we get to the boosties later in the year, kind of where it all fits and now to the boost that came in fresh this week we have our baller booster uh mr turd ferguson at 67 796 s it's a pretty good price for the baller uh spot and we really appreciate it uh and they write uh this is an episode 588 boost to claim VS Code as the show's official text editor. Oh, throw in down there, Turd. Turd, first of all, that is a, I mean, that's a pretty discounted price to set the official text editor. How do you feel about this, Wes?

Yeah. It's a Microsoft text editor as our official editor. If we're going to do this, we should probably say, like, you need to cross 100K to get the next one just because this was kind of a cheap buy right yeah or something like that well what if somebody sends in enough sats to get this booster cost a hundred thousand does that count for vs code you know what i mean like is it just a hundred thousand sats total because right now it's like that's yeah i don't know how i feel about that it's not even like vs codium right you know so yeah maybe either way if you want to send in a bunch of sats to like Right now, I don't know how I feel about that. It's not even like VS Code-ium. Right. So yeah, maybe either way.

If you want to send in a bunch of stats to not have VS Code enshrined, this semi-proprietary text editor, or if you do love VS Code, then boost in some support, I guess. Yeah, I guess that could be it. You could put it further in the lead, too, I suppose. I'm completely expecting the Windows notepad to come in here with the new AI features. I think that's really going to take the cake. That's my prediction. Okay. All right. We'll see about that. Chimad 777 boosts in with 47,333 saps. Boy, they are doing a lot with Mayo these days. As a Mate desktop user, I find the segments about new releases and desktops motivating to finally upgrade my old install.

Plus one. Oh, good. Yeah, same here. Good. Yeah, we were asking, and the question's still out there. We're happy to take your answer for weeks, even if you get behind. Do you find the review of the current desktop environments and modern desktop distro releases valuable or not? Even if you don't switch immediately, do you still find them valuable?

Thank you, Shmad. We got a couple of boos from Jordan Bravo for a total of $16,665. Oh, this is Cajun Spice. I'm willing to help organize a meetup in the Atlanta area if there's any interest. Could y'all send up a bat signal? Consider it sent.

Okay. There you go, Atlanta area. We're going to probably need to put all these together at some point in the future, but Atlanta area, you have been put on notice. Second boost here, casting my vote for Aeon as the favorite version of OpenSUSE. I put her on a laptop, gave it to my wife, installed some Flatpak apps for her, and it's been running flawlessly ever since.

That's good to hear. Well done. Oh, also looks like they've been a Nextcloud fan. Yeah. They say, I've been using Nextcloud for years, and I recently came across OwnCloud Infinite Scale, which is a rewrite of OwnCloud in Go. Haven't tried it yet. The word on the internet is that the Infinite Scale is faster than NextCloud, but less mature. So it has fewer extensions and features.

What are your thoughts? A rewrite sounds like a whole new project. That doesn't sound like a rewrite or a fork. That sounds like a whole new project, just basically re-implementing the functionality. Unless there's some way to go from PHP to Go that I don't know about, that's got to be something. Chris, AI just does all the conversions, right? Oh, there you go. I can give a tiny bit of context here, but with a huge, massive disclaimer.

So as the disclaimer, I am employed by NetCloud. So I have a particular interest here, I suppose, you need to know about. But just a little bit of information. OwnCloud was recently sold about a year ago at the end of 2023 to US company Kiteworks. Take that as you will. I don't know what that means, but they have committed to keeping at least that part of OwnCloud open source, they say. But who knows? That's good to know. Well, thank you, Mr. Bravo. Appreciate the boost.

Crashmaster comes in with a row of duck. That's 2,222 sats. Hey, Brent. I, too, am using the Framework 13 Intel DIY 11th Gen. And I have an HP DevLock. Oh, come on. Twins. Aw. With Tumbleweed Gnome. Oh, come on. Twins. Aw.

With tumbleweed gnome, and I'm using ButterFS Snapshot. Come on. I've had no issues except for Intel Wi-Fi drivers once. Thank you, Snapshots. But I do update every week with my fiber internet. Oh. Yeah. And I have limited extensions.

I haven't daily drove the Plasma version in a long time. Well, you managed to really kind of have an issue because of the repos and whatnot. So you start having zipper problems, and then it kind of goes sideways at that point. Yeah, I suspect I could have done the Jeff thing and spent a week trying to solve the package manager. I have tried that in the past. If you remember, we did an episode about that. And so I was just tired of doing that, to be honest. And I could have simplified my repos, but they were providing some essential packages for some media stuff that we do. So I was just

at a point where, despite having had a good experience it was time to part you know some relationships just they don't work out yeah but thank you glad to hear it's working out well for you yes and of course thank you crash master for the boost so ham g boosts in with 5 555 sets oh my god this drawer is filled with Froot Loops! Uh, re-Fedora Atomic. I did a deep dive some time ago, but the ecosystem is just way too confusing. At least, coming from an Emacs user. Okay.

There's Fedora Atomic, Fedora Core OS, and Fedora Bootsy, which are all, quote-unquote, same but different. And then there's OS Tree, RPM OS tree, and Bootsy, which are different but currently only work with each other. Frankly, this is an open Zeus-level naming situation. Well, thrown shade. Thrown shade. You know, I mean, it sounds like you got it, though. It's kind of something you've got to figure out.

I know they did just spend some time and effort trying to make it somewhat more consistent in terms of at least on like the immutable spin side. You know, like it's like the Sway version instead of some custom name. So maybe improving over time. Yeah, I think it actually will. And I think it'll make sense where these components are like building blocks and which ones are the output of those building blocks but it's not necessarily relevant yet and it doesn't need to be right yet but it will and there's a lot in flux and in the works and i think it's something we could take on as a challenge to help sort it all out talk about where what fits and whatnot so that's something that we'll uh

we'll take on so thank you mr so appreciate that a little bit cryptic sent in a 4096 sat boost everything's under control i happen to see this episode come up in fountain as quote unquote live so i started listening i really tried guys but i just couldn't do it after listening to you all at 1.5 times speed for the last few months the live real-time experience sounded like you're all heavily sedated and not your usual selves so today i'll listen and enjoy at 1.5 times caffeine addition i'm used to keep up the great work hey i'm offended by that hey you know young chris did get a little offended like how dare you abuse my art? Sometimes we play music. But now I'm just like, thank you for listening.

However you get through the show, I'm grateful. Also, even though it didn't stick, the live stuff working, that's great to see. Yeah, yeah. Thank you, BitCryptic. Nice for the report from the field. It's good to hear from you. Now, Marcel's coming in with 10,000 sats. Just pump the brakes right there.

He says, you'll think I'm crazy, but my longest distro has been Arch. I've used it on everything for about eight years. My desktop, my laptops, my home servers, my mom's desktop, my mom's laptop. I've even flirted with Pop for a bit, but now I'm back on Arch. I am getting NixOS curious, but I haven't found the time, or more importantly,

a spare machine to actually try it. Then again, I have bounced off the Nix package manager about three times. Don't worry, that's normal. Yeah. It took us probably three times, really, if we're honest. Yeah, at least.

I do think that there are the most similarities between Arch and NixOS, I would say, because the number of packages you can find in the repos is very similar, and the way that you can, I guess, take the repos and very similar and the way that you can I guess take the repos and make them your own. And go very minimal too. That's true. So I would say

for an Arch based person, XOS feels just right, but everyone's different. Amorphous Phage boosts in with 5,000 sets. You supposed! This is regarding the coverage of new releases like Fedora 41, Ubuntu 2410, or even the Cosmic Desktop a while back. I absolutely love your talk about it.

This is one of my favorite segments on the show. I unfortunately can't take time to take a look at all of these on my own in the extent that y'all do. So your discussions are very valuable. Well, thank you. That's good to know. Yeah, we tried so you don't have to as well. I know people out there are very busy. You don't have time to give this stuff a go. There's still a lot of distro releases in a year.

And we have worked out a workflow around this kind of stuff too. So we'll happily do it for you. Yeah, that's why I have 12 partitions on my machine. Thank you, Amor. Appreciate that. We received a boost from user 39480448. Let's hear it, good buddy. Of 7,000 sets.

Thanks for the Fedora coverage. As someone whose dev environment is much trickier on NixOS, I find Fedora to strike the right balance for my needs. I'm hoping to buy my first Linux desktop soon and wanted to see if y'all had any suggestions, tips, or wisdom to share. This will be primarily for dev and personal work,

maybe some light gaming, and I like the idea of being able to play around with AI as well. I've built a gaming PC before, so I'm open to that, but pre-built could also sound alluring.

Well, is 39 not exactly where I've been for the last few months? Is that not exactly the system I've described? Like a little bit of gaming, a little bit of AI. Yep. Wanted to be a good, solid Linux box. And I'm not really sure where I'm going yet.

I've been kind of looking at PC Part Picker and trying to build a system because I'm not opposed to taking the existing desktop I have now, ripping out the motherboard, the power supply, and the GPU and RAM. Build two, sell one to use the 39, done deal. There you go. But when I start to put the GPU on there, it's pretty, pretty bad. Have you considered a used GPU? I would say I would consider a used GPU.

I haven't gone that route yet, but it does seem a lot more economical. Of course, you don't know what they've done with that GPU. But I would say also, if somebody out course, you don't know what they've done with that GPU, but I would say also, if somebody out there has a great Linux build that they've done at a reasonable budget and you've got a PC part picker list for it, boost that in. I'd love to see some suggestions for home-built machines.

Of course, our friends over at System76 always will get you a great Linux box. No kickback for us saying that. It's just how we feel. Yeah, Nathalia looks nice to boot. There's that. I think I have a crazy suggestion. Go for it. I have

recently fallen in love with little tiny mini PCs. Got myself one. Oh yeah? But as a stronger workload, I think something like the Minis Forum UM790 Pro might be really interesting teeny tiny little machine it is surprisingly performant and really quite quiet and so if if a little light gaming

is on your list this thing can do that no problem if you're just dabbling with ai i think as well that would be totally fine unless you're you know trying to do some crazy stuff but you said just just getting your feet wet so that is a suggestion i would say to look into uh chris what do you think you know we talked about a couple of weeks ago in the members feed we talked about the b-link higher end pcs that they just open sourced the spec for their docking station that is designed so you take their little kind of knUC Mac mini sized PC and you put it on its side in a docking station and it's a PCI link. And then you can put a full fledged PC graphics card in a port, in a PCI Express port. And it passes that through to the B-Link as a GPU. Yeah. Or if you want to add like a PCI floppy disk.

You know, that's good. That's good for that, too. You never know as a GPU. Yeah, or if you want to add like a PCI floppy disk, you know, situation. That's good. That's good for that, too. You never know. You might. You just might. Let us know what you do. And if you do put a machine together, please update us, 39.

And thank you for the boost. Kent Runner comes in with 5,001 sats. This is a tasty burger. After using Ubuntu with GnOME for eight or so happy years, I switched to Plasma a couple of months back after you guys discussed it on the show. Well, and now this show, this week's show has me wondering if I should switch again. Keep up the great work. Yeah, I've been there. You know, Plasma puts out a great release and then GNOME puts out a great release.

And it's, you know what, too many good choices. So what boosts in with RhoDux. Ubuntu on the desktop for about 20 years now. Heck yeah. And Debian on servers for even longer. Man, SWAT, there's a serenity to that. You must know that system like the back of your hand. Yep.

You know the problems. You know the quirks. Yeah. You've done it all a thousand times. SWAT, do you feel like, you know, with some of our coverage, that was our question last week, with some of our coverage of all these new distributions, doing new crazy things,

especially with some of the immutable stuff, do you feel like you're missing out on some of these newfangled features? Or do you just, are you the kind of person who wants to wait for them to be extremely stable and trickle down to some of these, you know, Ubuntu's and Debian's. I'd be curious.

What are you talking about? SWAT's running BcacheFS, right? Of course. Yeah. Maybe ZFS. Could be. Could be. You never know.

Appreciate that boost. Thank you, SWAT. Well, Zanzilla sent us 19,000 SATs. That's a spicy meatball! A little late to send this boost in, but I needed to shout out this content. This is for episode 583, Nick's in Easy Mode. Building a development environment has always been a pain for me.

I've used pip, poetry, Nick's shells. Just as I was running into issues with my latest environment, you guys dropped this episode about DevEnv. This has solved the issue I was running into, so thank environment, you guys dropped this episode about DevEnv. This has solved the issue I was running into, so thank you, you guys. Also, DevEnv is so convenient, I can't imagine using anything else going forward. Thank you for the technical content

as always. The new Kexec episode was fascinating. Oh, that's great to hear. Yeah, glad it's useful. Absolutely, that's what we go for. And thanks for sending that value in and letting us know. Zenzilla, that's a good signal. Appreciate that. Martin DeBier is in with 11,823 sats.

Hi, Chris, Wes, and Brent. My favorite version of OpenSUSE is Tumbleweed. There it is. I knew we'd get one more vote at least in the show. Marking that down. Tumbleweed with Pl it is. I knew we'd get one more vote at least in the show. Marking that down. Tumbleweed with Plasma 6.2. It's my current system. I started with OpenSUSE 11.1.

Bought the cardboard box and the DVD version. Nice. Highlights of 12.2 was KDE 4.8. Then 13.1 has KDE 4.11. Leap 42.1 has Plasma 5. Leap 42.2 brought in 5.8 of Plasma. Oh, 5.8, yeah. Leap 15.2 got us to KDE 5.18 LTS,

and now Leap 15.5 has KDE 5.27 LTS. These were all good Plasmas. Very good. Yeah, it's nice when you can match a great Plasma with a great LTS base too. When they had that 5.8, I think it was, LTS release, and then you could get it on an LTS distro, that was a little bit of plasma magic for a while. Thanks for memory lane, Martin.

Appreciate the boost. Producer Jeff boosts in with a Spaceballs boost. One, two, three, four, five sats. So the culmination is one, two, three, four, five. To those who are thinking about learning to boost, MySplit has officially paid for the Meshtastic project trip, at least even before the recent price jump. Hey, that's great to hear. I'm glad to hear that. The podcasting 2.0 tech that allows value for value is pretty incredible and truly helps make things happen. No tech that allows value for value is pretty incredible and truly helps make things happen.

Thank you all again. Mm hmm. Ding to that. And now PJ keeps going. Also happy to host a meetup for episode 600. Looking forward to another slug meetup anyways. OK, we've got a handful brewing here, so it's time to kick it up. I will take that very seriously.

He's hosting meetups. He's producing segments for us. It's pretty great. Thank you, PJ. And I agree. We've been doing the boost now for a couple of years and we've been able to hold on to the majority

of those stats unless we were trying to do a special project and that means those stats continue to go to work. Your boosts continue to go to work for this network

and we are extremely, extremely grateful for it and also very grateful for Producer Jeff. High Five Connoisseur sent us three boosts which happen to be identical for a total of 15 000 sets for an lm front end i use and like open web ui works great with my self-hosted olama instance and to brent's question about new release coverage and usage i don't usually jump on the new releases, but your coverage sways me to give new things a try.

Oh, that's good to know. That's good to know. Very much. Thank you. High five. So I saw your boost come in live because I had the dashboard up, and I went and grabbed OpenWebUI. Wes, you got to check this thing out. Holy crap.

There's a lot going on here, but it does plug into multiple different backend APIs. Plus you can run your own local Lama instance, but then it has like this plugin system. It looks like one of them even allows you to like call in to your LLM and speak to it. And then it speaks the answers back to you. It's all wild. So it's a lot. It looks like a lot. So I was hoping to find something not quite as much. However, nothing I've come across that is a self-hosted LLM chat UI has support for both local LLMs and Claude. A lot of them have Anthropic, like, I mean, not Anthropic. They don't have Anthropic because that's what I'm looking for. But they have like OpenAI or they'll have Perplexity or they'll have Grok or whatever. But they don't have Anthropic's cloud stuff in there generally.

I think I might have looked at this way back when like Olam and friends were just kind of coming out. But it seems like it. Yeah. Oh, it's changed and grown and there's a whole lot more. There's so much. It's amazing what this does. So even if you just use the commercial stuff or you run your own self-hosted, the OpenWeb UI is an amazing project, and it's just blowing my mind what they've been able to pull off. I had to just sit down there.

I spent like a couple hours just going through it. Started to get an instance going. I'm like, I want something not quite as much. But I really appreciated that recommendation, Mr. Connoisseur. Zack Attack came in with 18,999 cents. Okay, let's see if I can boost in again. I wanted to thank you guys for the Meshtastic episode. I started playing with that back in September, and it's been pretty fun.

Second, my longest-running distro has been Linux Mint before taking the journey to Manjaro, and now I'm on Fedora. As for OpenSUSE, I was running Tumbleweed when I started listening to the show on my laptop. I got off due to some updates that just seemed to be breaking my web browser. I got really weird. It got really weird really quick. But thank you for putting on an awesome show.

Well, Zach Attack, thank you. It's great to hear from you. You might try a wipe and install Nix procedure. Yeah, yeah. You could do it the way we did it or maybe not. You could also just boot off a USB live session. Emondo's boosts in with 10,000 sets. Impressed with your map skills, Wes? Spot on last week. Oh, I will take it. That's not always how it goes. Good. OpenSUSE

was my favorite distro in the 2005 to 2015 period. That's a decade. Wow. Nice. Even when my colleagues preferred Ubuntu. I liked Zipper and Yast, and KDE is a first-class citizen. Enjoyed SUSE Studio for building custom distros. No favorite version, though.

But I did move on to Kubuntu for better font rendering and media support by default. Still using that as my daily driver. Something stick. That's a great rundown. Thank you, Mr. Dawes. Appreciate that. B double H 32 came in with a 4,000 sat boost. The traders love the ball.

Long time member here. I wanted to thank you for all of the value that this network and community give me. I appreciate everything that you do and your ability to stick to your core values. Thank you for giving me a community to share my projects and have people who are interested in the things that I am, Linux and open source in general. Here's a little value that I can spare to give back. Well, thank you. You know, at BHA, your boots always make me smile. Every single time.

Aren't we all grateful for that? You know, just the fellow nerd your boosts always make me smile. Every single time. Aren't we all grateful for that? You know, just the fellow nerds who care about this wacky stuff that we do. I know. We all care about this weird thing called Linux and the open source software around it. And not a lot of people do. It's a small group of us. And we're very lucky to have you. Yes, thank you very much.

And hybrid sarcasm rounds us out with 10,000 sats. Banks or Ponzi schemes run by morons. Sending in a live boost. He forgot until the show went live. Hey, you got your homework in on time. That absolutely counts. Clearly trying to make sure that number one spot continues to be there. Well, very savvy.

Thank you, everybody who boosted in. That's all our above 2,000 sats boosts. We did get a few more under that cutoff, but we stopped there for just basically time on air. But we really appreciate 2000 sat boosts we did get a few more under that cutoff but we stopped there for just basically time on air but we really appreciate everybody who boosts in or if you stream while you listen this last episode we had 37 of you just streaming those sats and together you collectively stacked 37 294 sets not bad at. And then when you bring it in with those who boosted, together, you all stack 200, no, I'm sorry, 313, 165 sats with 55 unique senders participating

in the direct value for value system this week. If you'd like to try it out, go try out Fountain, boost any problems or observations you have, or tell us what you think about the show. Or if you have any suggestions for the tuxes, just get the podcast apps at podcastapps.com. Ones like Fountain. And thank you, everybody, who takes a little bit of time to set those boosts up and send them in. Keep the show going. And, of course, a big shout-out to our members who are extremely valuable. They set their support on autopilot.

And as a thank you, they get an ad-free version of the show or they get the full bootleg, which right now is clocking at almost two hours worth of episode, news and stuff that just doesn't fit in the show. So thank you to our members and thank you to our boosters. And now we move right along. So this week's pick is a little bit on theme. We were talking about ButterFS quite a bit when we were working on Brent's system.

And when you're moving data around and you're backing things up and you've got multiple devices, it's pretty easy to end up with duplicates. And so was it you, Wes, that found bees? B-E-S? I think it might have been linked. One of the options, there's a few, linked from the ButterFS docs. Oh, straight from the documentation. It is a ButterFS dedupe agent. It describes itself as a block-oriented user space deduplication agent designed for large ButterFS file systems.

It is an offline dedupe combined with an incremental data scan capability to minimize time data spent on disk from write to dedupe. I should run this on my home server, you know? Space-efficient hash table and matching algorithms. Works with ButterFS compression. It can dedupe any combination of compressed or uncompressed files, so that's neat. Man, we should run this on fake NAS,

except for it's using ZFS. Whole file system dedupe, including snapshots. Now, the downside there is there's no include, exclude, no file list you can feed it. So it's going to do the whole darn thing. But it does see snapshots and stuff, which is neat. Brent, you got a new NAS you could run this on now, a new ButterFS NAS, you know? Now, just let it go crazy, too, and just let it delete stuff. Just let it go crazy, Brent.

I thought that... So explain this to me. I thought ButterFS kind of did this under the hood just natively, but it sounds like you've got to go in and run this thing. So explain that to me. Yeah, so with the copy on write nature of ButterFS, if you do like online actions to the existing file system, right? So like if you have a photo on disk and then you make a copy of it,

you can have that be a ref link. And, you know, it's just a little soft pointer. It doesn't have to copy the entire file. But if you are just bringing in from a different file system these two photos that are there, ButterFS is not going to see that. Now, there are some options like ZFS has deduplication support that you can do.

They've even been working on improving the performance of it recently, so that could be another option. But ButterFS has, basically it has some of the low-level hooks that you'd need implemented in the kernel in the file system and then supports different user space programs that you can deploy to take advantage of that. It's like the API or framework

is there. Cool. Yeah. Another one that I saw actually just recommended this weekend by someone giving an excellent talk at Siegel was Dupe Remover, so I'll add that to the list. Yes. A couple of different options there. Something to think about. Might as well have the computer do the work

so you don't have to. You heard Wes mention the links. You'll find that for this episode at linuxunplugged.com slash 588. Just a reminder, the deadline for the call for proposals for Planet Nix is December 9th, 2024. We're going to be at Planet Nix,

which is going to be running alongside Scale, and we'd love to see you there. LinuxFest Northwest is brewing as well, so we'll be telling you about that in the future. And then we're also looking for your suggestions on how we can improve the tuxes, maybe add a new category or other things you think we could do to kind of spice it all up.

See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And you're always welcome to join us. We do this on a Tuesday, as in Sunday, at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern, over at jblive.tv. If you have one of those new podcasting 2.0 apps, we're live in your app, and you'll see our pending episode, and you'll see us when we go live.

You can also just point your favorite IceCast client at jblive.fm and pull the audio in that way or join us in Mumble. We'll have all that information at jupiterbroadcasting.com. And of course, we're super grateful for you listening or maybe telling a friend about this show. That matters a lot to us as well as we round the corner to episode 600.

But in the meantime, thank you so much for tuning this week's episode of your Unplugged program. We'll see you next Tuesday, as in Sunday! So so Clearing tumbleweed isn't just painful, but also infuriating. A tumbleweed drift is both bouncy and sticky. You're going to have to fork them one at a time. Tedious at best, Sisyphusian at worst.