LINUX Unplugged - 595: Network 'n Burning Bonanza

Episode Date: December 29, 2024

We tested out the OpenWRT One and tried it in a unique use case. Then, Wes goes back to 1999 to solve a problem.Sponsored By: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.FMLinuxFest Northwest 2025: Call for Speakers — Call closes at 11:59 PM PST on 2025-01-10. Conference is 2025-04-25 through 2025-04-27.Qobuz — Buy your favourite albums in CD or Hi-Res quality and enjoy them forever.Los Machucambos In Phase 4, Los Machucambos - QobuzLos Machucambos – In Phase 4 – Vinyl (LP, Album, Stereo), 1961 [r5061780] | DiscogsLos Machucambos - Wikipediacdrdao: cdrdao is a free and open source utility software application for authoring and ripping of audio and data CD-ROMscdrdao-pled: Portable Linux x86_64 pre-built download of the open source CD burning/ripping utility cdrdao that works on all modern Linux distros.freac.org: fre:ac is a free audio converter and CD ripper with support for various popular formats and encodersk3b: Full-featured CD/DVD/Blu-ray burning and ripping applicationCD writing using cdrecordxfburnjlesage/docker-xfburn: Docker container for XfburnOpenWrt OneOpenWrt One IntroductionBanana Pi OpenWrt OneBanana Pi OpenWrt One PCBA Router BoardAnnual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!mjvc's 2014 nix configincus gpu docsveyman's immich-frame configGitHub - LACT: Linux GPU Configuration Toolexislow/tidal-dl-ng: Multithreaded TIDAL Media Downloader Next Generation! Up to HiRes Lossless / TIDAL MAX 24-bit, 192 kHz.ebb-earl-co/tidal-wave: Waving at the TIDAL music serviceDXX-Rebirth — DXX-Rebirth is a modern port of the Descent game engine, based on the late D1X and D2X source ports (which, in turn, were based on the original Descent source release and LDescent). The Rebirth Team has spent a lot of time working to improve the source code by fixing old bugs and adding some improvements, while always staying true to our philosophy: Keep it Descent!Descent on GOG.COMdxx-rebirth on GitHub

Obviously, I'm looking forward to talking about the open WRT one. I'm holding it right here in my hot little hands. But I will say after going through all of this setup, you know, and dealing with the mobile phone company to get data, which I'll talk more about in the show, you know, and their prices and all of that, I do think Starlink looks like a pretty good value proposition. If you can make it work. Oh, do you mean as like a backup or as a primary? Well, I'll get more into it in the show,

but this is using cellular. And when you look at your options, the cost of this, the cost of the cellular program, you pay a bit more upfront for the Starlink hardware, but you get a dish and a router that kind of is running a fork of open WRT, I believe anyways. Okay.

And then you also have the internet service and it all just kind of gets connected out of the box and works, and it's a nice little decent router with decent WiFi, so I couldn't go that route, but I want to acknowledge before I get into this that, you know, depending on your situation, that may just be a better way to go. But of course, if you're looking for something

that runs OpenWRT natively like a champ, this is the box. It's something I've been looking forward to having, just trying for a long time, and it's finally, finally a real product. 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 boys, coming up on the show today, yes we will be taking a look at the OpenWrt1,

a device built and born to run OpenWrt natively. Then we'll also hear from Wes who traveled back to the 1990s to solve a problem that none of us have really had to think about for a long time, but turns out Linux can still lick. And of course we'll round it out with some boosts, a really great pick, and a lot more. So before I go any further, let's say time appropriate greetings to our virtual log. Hello Mumble Room. Happy holidays. Hey Wes.

Hey Wes. Hello Brian. We have a particularly festive Mumble Room today. Happy birthday. Hey, Wes. Hello, Brian. We have a particularly festive Mumble Room. I know. I didn't. I didn't realize that you guys had all handed out Santa hats. That's adorable. You look great over there. We'll be dressed up, of course, for our predictions episode coming up soon. But for this week, it's our last traditional episode of the year.

And before we jump into all of that, I just want to take a moment and say good morning to our friends at Tailscale, Tailscale dot com slash unplugged. They are the easiest way to connect devices and services to each other directly, wherever they are, regardless of the device. It's a modern networking solution for connecting your devices securely. It's great for companies. And I can attest it's great for self-hosters. I really started using it for myself hosting.

Now we use it for tons of JB stuff. It's secure. It's protected by wire gold. And you can get it for free for up to 100 devices and three users. No credit card required, not a limited time trial. And it supports the show. You go to tailscale.com slash unplugged. The call for speakers is officially open for Linux Fest Northwest 2025. We have an official date, April 25th through the 27th, which is often when the

Pacific Northwest is turning from horrible winter to beautiful. So we'll find out. Yeah. Last year was a little rainy, but we still made it work, like champs, actually. And Linux Fest is calling for all presentations and presenters to celebrate 25 years of community excellence. Wow.

Coming back April 25th through the 27th at the Bellingham Technical College in beautiful Bellingham, Washington. Of course, Linux Fest is one of the longest running free to attend open source events in America, completely community organized. And it is a great conference to attend because it's large enough that you'll get reach and impact, but not so largely get lost in the noise. And if you've been looking to do a talk or so and your employer will send you, it's definitely one worth attending because they don't have to pay a big

expensive tickets or anything like that. It's really just, you know, you're lodging. And then, of course, you get to hang out with your buddies because, you know, we're going to be there making a big stink out of it. It's always a good time. And I'm sure live streaming it and all of that. So we're going to be getting our plans together as the New Year dawns. Also speaking of the New Year, we would love to hear your boost predictions for 2025.

Boost! What do you think is going to happen in the world of Linux and open source? Send us your predictions. You can also email them in and we'll be collating them for our future episode. And then one other thing we're looking for feedback is I'd love to sort of say goodbye to the Raspberry Pi 4 with a classic Pi project. I've got a couple of Pi 4s around. I don't use them as much anymore,

and I'd love some project ideas so you could boost those in as well. We may also want to mention that we're doing a double record on the fifths if folks want to join us live. Absolutely, get double all up, and I think that's when we'll be doing our predictions for 2025.

Yeah, so maybe join live and see how we did and make some yourself. Okay, Wes. So you need to burn a CD for some reason? I do, yeah. Like an audio CD, a data CD? Give me the story. I don't know, in one version maybe an MP3 CD would do,

but no, I'm going for like classic Red Book audio CD. Yeah, okay, nice. Which I see you prepared some history. I don't know if you... Oh, I did, I thought this was just funny, I did. So the CD-R that we could burn to, the compact disc that you could record, was developed in 1988.

Did you know that? Wow. That is crazy. CDs generally are surprisingly old. Yeah, but they didn't get real mainstream traction until the 90s. And then in the late 90s, CD writing software became available.

And often like the early ones, the very first ones that I ever saw were SCSI based. Oh yeah. And I don't know if you remember, but there was a bunch of CDR standards, CDR RAM or whatever it was. Yeah, RW and R that was only. Plus and minus.

Yes. And they were SCSI and they were 2X and they were so, so slow. But of course, into the early aughts, it became kind of a cultural phenomenon. Laptops started coming with CD burners built to them and there was lots of different software to mix your own music CDs and data CDs.

And Linux kind of early on was a little bit left out in this party. Right, of course all the fancy best, you know. Because like the drive could do it, but there was always, you know, if you wanted really nice results, it was kind of like you needed fancy software that knew how to like do it safely,

and you know, simulate things first, and enable all the right advanced features to get the best burn. And we were still ATA back then. So that's why the SCSI ones were a little bit more, like the higher end ones were SCSI. And then later on, of course, we got SATA, but just compatibility and drivers

and the variations and implementations, it took Linux a while to wrap its head around that. But then we started getting pretty good apps. like, Brent, did you ever use K3b? I did. It was not my preferred burning method, though, I gotta say. What did you use? What was your preferred?

Geez, they're starting to fade in memory here, but I think it's... I know, right? It's a real phenomenon. Hmm. As part of this? Oh gosh, I can't believe it's not there. I remember exactly what I used to rip with because I did a lot of that.

What was that? Well, there was this little application. I was always looking for, you know, given my nature, always looking for the most precise rip. I didn't care about speed. I wanted precision and to make sure that like any errors or anything were caught. that like any errors or anything were caught. And so I ended up using something called Ruby Ripper, which did a bunch of stuff like comparing your rip to a big catalog of rips, similar to some of the I'm sure producer Jeff has a lot to say on this topic, but very similar to what some of the more let's say proprietary

pieces of software we're doing. Yeah. Like Nero, remember Nero on windows. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, so I found Ruby Ripper to be pretty excellent, although it is now, of course, not maintained or anything.

So you can still use it quite successfully, but starting to get old. Brasaro. Yeah. That's another one I use. Still out there. Yep. Still going. But I get the sense that these are not tools you used,

Wes, so. Well, some of them, some of them. Okay, so we have an Operation Burn audio CD. Sounds like maybe, is this a holiday gift? Yeah, okay, so while sharing songs and stuff over the holidays with my dad over the Thanksgiving, we stumbled onto an album that he hadn't heard for years. And I was able to find it on the streaming service

and, like, play it for him and stuff. And so throwback to when he was a kid. This is like the reel-to-reel and vinyl era, right? And you couldn't just stream any old song any old time, right? You had to know someone who had the song. And maybe you could find it at a local store. Maybe you couldn't. So, you know, kind of imagine a friend brings over this album,

and it's recorded in fancy Phase Four stereo. So my dad and his siblings were kind of mesmerized, and we actually got a little sample. little sample. Now, if you're like producer Jeff and you're only listening with one earbud, this track plays with stereo in a really fun way. I could see why this would stick out in their memory, especially back then when stereo was so big and they had quadraphonic stereo. Yes, this was a recording phase for I guess was a recording technique developed by Deco Records in the UK in 1961,

which is when this album came out. So it might have been one of the first albums to like come from this new technique, which, I guess it was primarily designed to get very wide and dramatic stereo image. You can hear it in there. That's great. And you ripped that. No, so I'll tell you about the story, how I got it. Okay, let's hear the story Wes. And what it was, this is Los Machucambos in phase four, a record from 1961, DECA. They're a music band formed in Paris in 1959 with two guitar players, so they have influences from Spain and Italy as well as Costa Rica and Peru. Okay. So you get a lot of, that was La Bamba, but there's a lot of like traditional folk music and

more popular songs going. I love it. So over the years, the siblings got like the album, they bought it. They all, I mean, all of them, but several of them had it. But as so often happens, lost, sold, damaged. So no one has it anymore. My dad doesn't have it anymore. And then add on top of this, one of his siblings is dealing with health issues. So my dad just thought it'd be fun to sort of re-share this album.

And just given their age, CDs are a technology they're all familiar with. So the goal was to try to get this music and put it on CD so he could give it to his sips. I can appreciate that. So my wife has a Ford and it has the Microsoft Sync system in it. And it's one of the earlier versions,

like the second version. And it's one of the earlier versions, like the second version. And it just completely stopped talking to her phone over Bluetooth one day. And I had to eventually like pull the fuse and fully reset the system before we could talk to her phone again. But in the meantime, she's like, you know, for a couple of weeks where it wasn't working, she just grabbed a CD collection that she had like in storage. And and it was kind of delightful as we were going down the road. You do all of the thinking ahead of time in a way.

You'd look at the CD and you're like, okay, this is my choice. And then you put it in and you just listen to it. There's no futson with connecting Bluetooth. No phone, no screen. Worry about LTE. And it shows a little track date and stuff. So there's actually something still,

I think, very attractive to CDs, and they sound great. Yeah, right? And like you said, for parents and their family members, or for maybe folks that are in a hospital, or something like that, a CD can be sort of like this universal thing that almost anybody can still play, for at least a little while longer.

Exactly. But is the tooling up to snuff? Yeah, right, okay, so I kinda needed a lot of things. I haven't burnt a CD. I used to be, you know, I used to do it back in the day. I even made some of those video CDs before, like, I got into DVD burning. I had those spindles with just stacks

of, like, this rosite burned. Yeah. And, you know, like, you'd just buy them at, like, Costco or something. You'd get a whole pack. But I don't know exactly the last time, but it must be a decade plus since I've had to do this, right?

So first thing, I needed to get some new CDRs, because I didn't actually have any anymore. Thankfully I threw them away. They've got some fancy ones now with like vinyl look alike on the top surface. Yeah, you sent us a picture and I thought they were little eight, like the eight millimeter vinyls or something. That's what they look like. They look like these old small vinyls,

but of course they're CD. It's a lot of fun. I love how you're mashing two ancient technologies together. And then I got some cheaper ones just because I knew I was going to, you know, mess some things up. CD. It's a lot of fun. I love how you're mashing two ancient technologies together. And then I got some cheaper ones just because I knew I was going to, you know, mess some things up. Okay, so that arrived pretty quick from Amazon. And, you know, I think my dad was worried about that just because he still buys a lot of stuff in stores and, you know, like Best Buy's and stuff have kind of stopped stocking them because no one really needs

them. But they're still very, you know, I don't know, you could buy them in bulk or as I was doing, I just bought, they're more expensive, but ones that just came with jewel cases because we weren't making that many of them. So those are all still plenty available, which is great. I also needed a working drive. I was wondering about that. Yeah. So there were several candidates in my, you know, slowly decaying hardware collection. And actually my mom and I think my brother still have laptops floating around. Well, we've replaced my mom's with the framework,

but her older one, which is still working, an older Dell, that has a drive. And my brother's got an HP laptop that has a drive. So that was gonna be an option, but I kind of wanted to make sure I had this solved on my own. And then I had a realization. You know what we did in 2024?

The 32-bit challenge. And you know what definitely has the CD-D, CD-D? That machine you used. Because I remembered noting that at the time. So I got out the old 32-bit rig, Dell Inspiron 6400, I think. So I figured, great, right? I left this in a working state.

We got it going for the show. So like, oh, okay, this should be easy. I'll just get up, maybe do some updates, install a couple of tools. There's probably in the repos, right? These are all old software. I had forgotten that later on in the year, we reviewed Haiku.

And I put Haiku on that machine. Oh, no. Oh, no. Boot it right up, though. Haiku is running great. You find out right away. Sadly, it did not have CD-burning software. I actually am kind of surprised. I thought it might, yeah. Would you have just gone for it if you did? I would have. Sadly, it did not have CD burning software. I actually am kind of surprised.

I thought it might, yeah. Would you have just gone for it if you did? I would have. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, I had to wipe IKU. I ended up going with MX Linux. Oh yeah, okay. Why MX?

Well, I actually decided to ask JetJipity, and I was like, hey, I've got this 32-bit machine. I'm trying to burn CDs. What's a good distro that's gonna make this super simple and easy with good availability for old software? Yeah, MX is good. Yeah. MX, I was like, oh yeah, I haven't done that for a while. So that was nice, you know, Debian based and Debian archives are huge.

Yep. Got an install base going to text the drive. It's an NEC drive, totally fine. And then I needed some software. And after kind of like reading up on a bunch of old forums from like 2006 and 2011, which are like a gold mine for this kind of thing. Still up. That's amazing. For now, right?

Like for how much longer? Who knows? I ended up because I was able to go so. All right, we'll talk more about tools in a sec. Because first we should talk about getting the audio, because it was never released on CD as far as I can tell. Okay, there were vinyls of it, and you could buy them, but it was a wide range of prices on eBay,

and something tells me that probably the more expensive ones were the ones without a bunch of scratches on them. Yeah, and then you've got to come up with a decent way to capture vinyl. Right, which I don't have. Yeah. So I was searching around, and YouTube Music does have it. That's not great.

I think we were looking at one point, Tidal does have it. But I also found Kobuz? Q-O-B-U-Z. Which is, I advertise this self, One point title does have it, but I also found co buzz Qo buz Which is advertised itself has more than 100 million tracks and the best sound quality available for streaming So it's kind of like title where it prioritizes like audio files and people who really want high quality stuff But okay, they also say buy your favorite albums in CD or high-res quality and enjoy them forever And while I was searching for this album,

which is older and a little harder to find, it popped up in their store for just downloading as a one-off. Oh, that's nice. So I was able to just pay $4.95 or something and get CD-quality flax right from them, which had metadata and even had a little JPEG for the CD cover.

Okay, we'll put a link to that, because it's kind of a weird one, Q-O-B-U-Z. So you don't have to have the membership to just buy the one-off Nope, okay Well, you can pay for their streaming plan, but I just made a quick account which was really easy And I was able to use my credit card or PayPal to yeah, that's so handy They even warn you like, you know, hey, we can't control the licensing so like download it now to make sure you get it because if

The licensing goes away later. You might not be able to download it again, which I appreciated that being upfront Yeah, that's the that's the nature of the biz right now if the licensing goes away later, you might not be able to download it again. Which I appreciated that being up front anyway. That's the nature of the biz right now. So I was kind of interested because I was going above and beyond. I could have just done K3B, which I got installed right away because I also had used it back in the day.

And I could have just dragged the flax in there, it would have handled everything. But I kind of wanted to get the gapless playback if I could. Oh yeah, make it a nice experience. Yes, and I was like, I want to make sure all the titles and stuff were gonna show up without me having to put them all in. So I remembered, and I'd seen some advice for a freak

or FreeAC, which I guess maybe is also an audio ripper, but it can do processing. And it's really good with metadata. So I was able to pop all the flags in, which had metadata, and then it was able to output a single WAV file or multiple tracks, which kind of confused me at first and sent me down a few bad paths but a single wave file ultimately and a cue sheet for it so and that I knew like it had got all the wave stuff right and in gapless order and then the cue sheet had

everything sort of like figured out with the metadata it knew it could put in there I was like okay this seems like the the easiest bet to get the highest quality experience I can and I think this is somewhat more common on Windows, but on Linux it turned out to be weirdly hard, and also because I haven't done this in a thousand years, to like just get that Q and WAV file, or Q and BAN is common too, to actually get onto the disk. Oh, really? Yeah, like, so one of the tools that's available is CDRDAO, which is CDR disk at once, which is a mode of writing. And that's popular.

It's also able to burn pirated PSX disks and stuff. So it's a fancy tool that works well. And in theory, it's supposed to have support for Q files and it automatically converts them to the TOC, the table of contents files that it actually uses. The head units are reading? Yeah. So I don't know if it was, mine was one point release out of date in the Debian archive based on like what?

Next has or on the github. So I don't know if it was that or but it just wouldn't read the queue And then I tried reading and I tried with like Brazil for a bit I tried XF burn which actually came with MX Linux because it was an XFCE desktop and like they kind of got close But they except burn would look like it was gonna do it and then it would eject the drive First thing and not seem to write it. Oh, yeah, I remember those. Yep. Mm-hmm that rings a bell So then I tried woe dim slash CD record on the command line and that I almost got except I at this one had spent a while tinkering and I didn't quite quality control My jippity output well enough so I missed that I needed a flag to specify that it was a cue sheet and not just a file

So I ended up burning two discs with a single cue sheet file on them. Well, this is why I needed a flag to specify that it was a cue sheet and not just a file. So I ended up burning two disks with a single cue sheet file on them. Well, this is why you got a few extras, right? Yes, that is exactly right. I've done that before. And I'd seen people online saying that K3B could understand the cue sheets, but I couldn't get it to work. But what actually ended up needing to happen was I was still having it in audio disk mode

because ultimately that's what I was burning. But I had to put it into its image mode, which isn't in the default, like, project thing. You have to go to, like, a separate menu and, like, burn image. And then when I fed the cue sheet in, when it had a single wave and not multiple track waves, it was able to recognize it.

So you produced one continuous wave file? Yeah, so Freak put out the... took all the flak with its metadata, wrote out the cue sheet and a single wave. Ah, and then you could do the image mode. And metadata, wrote out the cue sheet, and a single wave. Ah, and then you could do the image mode. And then I was able to use image mode in K3B to burn it to the disk.

OK. And then does the head unit see the table of contents? It sure does. Nice. It played the titles. Yeah, I tried it on the car on the drive up, and it was great. Wow. I mean, that totally, totally just brings back

so many memories of exactly what the Burning CD experience was like for so many things is this trial and error process. It's always been like that, even back in the day, this is how it was. And I feel like we are in this sort of window of time where these devices and these tools are still available. And I would also say on the other side, if you think about it,

how much longer are Blu-ray players gonna be available? And Blu-ray players can play Blu-ray, they can play DVDs, they can play CDs. That's a pretty wide range of compatibility and a bunch of other stuff that these things can play, and they're not gonna be available for much longer. Archive your stuff now if you need to, that's also worth mentioning.

Yeah, we're kinda coming to the end of this technology where apparently it still works. I was, that kept surprising me. There's partially two, cause like these days, so much of our stuff is solid state, you know? So like, seeing something like, oh, it has to use like a complicated, precise laser and then spin this disk at high speed.

Yeah. This is nuts. I probably would've just tried to get them to all to use a thumb drive or something. Yeah. Or probably if I thought about it, I probably could've just found a service online that would have printed me CDs and mailed them to me.

Oh, but where's the fun in that? OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That is the number one, password.com slash unplugged. Okay, I have a question for you. I know it's a little uncomfortable, but do your end users always, and I mean always without any exception, work on company approved devices and IT approved apps, things that have been vetted? I don't think so. Not in today's world. It just doesn't really seem possible.

Everybody's going to have their own device. They're going to have services coming at them all the time. There's no way they're sticking to company approved devices and apps. Your employees are using their own phones and tablets and laptops because it makes them more productive, too. So when you try to slow them down, that causes friction. So how do you keep your company's data safe while setting all these unmanaged apps and devices while still keeping everybody productive? When password has figured this out, it's extended access management. One password extended access management helps you secure every sign in for every app on

every device because it solves problems that the traditional IAMs and MDMs just can't touch. It's security for the way we actually work today. And it's generally available for companies with Okta, Microsoft, Entra, and it's in beta for Google Workspace customers. Go try it out. I think this would have been my secret weapon if I was still in IT today. I'd probably I'd probably been able to stick in a lot longer. This would have been like a cold glass of water

to a very thirsty man in the desert. It really makes things better for it, for management and for the end users. Check it out and support the show. Go to one password dot com slash unplugged. That is the number one password dot com slash unplugged. That is the number one, password.com slash unplugged. Well, Chris, it's always an exciting time when you get a new piece of hardware and you recently got the OpenWRT1,

which I was super tempted to also get, but didn't pull the trigger, but you did. Coming in really just before the end of the year, it's based on a MediaTek 802 SoC. It's got Wi-Fi 6 dual band. It has one 2.5 gigabit LAN port and a gigabit LAN port, a gigabyte of DDR RAM, DDR4 RAM, 256 megabyte NAND flash, and a 16 megabyte NOR,

which is the recovery disk. It also has an M.2 SSD slot and a USB-C serial console, and it gets powered over USB-C. And it also has a USB 2.0 port on the front, which I'll be discussing in a little bit. It's $89 to get the completely assembled aluminum enclosure version. That's what you're hearing here,

which is a nice blue machined aluminum. It's $89 on AliExpress. And you can get just the board if you don't need the casing for $68 on AliExpress. That's pretty reasonable. With OpenWRT installed by default, completely 100% supported. No worries about weird hardware glitches

or oh, we can't quite use those radios properly. Right. So I would compare this from my use case, which I'm going to get into, to about like a hundred and ten dollar GLI net, which I like the GLI nets. But this is, you know, ninety bucks. Wes, what's your before I get into the machine, like, what are your what's your impression just holding it here in studio? It feels high quality to to the two ethernet ports are on the back. You know, easy to see.

USB-C, both for power and I guess maybe also data. Yeah. here in studio. It feels high quality. To the two ethernet ports that are on the back, easy to see. USB-C, both for power and I guess maybe also data. Yeah, and a front USB-A port as well, which is nice for the Mi-Fi. Oh yeah, right, of course. It seems like I also like the GLINet, but this feels higher quality. I mean, it's bigger than a lot of the GLINets,

but I like the metal case. It's not quite as portable as a GLINET. But with these more impressive antennas that have better separation, you also get better WiFi. Right. So I think, who's this for? Anybody that's in the market for a new router, like I was, and I'll tell you why here in a moment,

it's a really kind of purpose-built, designed to run open WRT firmware, and that's what it's for. So you wanna be a customer that's looking for that. It saves you time. It ensures compatibility. And they have a feature on here which they call their unbrickable design. And they have a dual flash system. Like I mentioned earlier, the NAND and the NOR.

And there's actually a physical toggle switch on the back where you physically toggle what it's booting from. And so if you bugger up the N, where you physically toggle what it's booting from. And so if you bugger up the NAND, where you run from, you power it off and you get a little like a toothpick or something, paperclip, and you flip the physical toggle on the back to NOR, and then you power it back up and it's in its recovery environment.

And then you can fix the built-in OS, which is really a nice feature for something that's as important as your Edge router. Yes. And it kind of gives you that confidence to do the updates. And you're also buying this because you're hoping updates go really smooth because of that compatibility. It's first party, yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it's just honestly, it's a quicker way to get started with OpenWRT. It's hardware you know, it's pretty decent, the price is decent for most use cases. It does come with the USB-C power brick. It's just stock open WRT.

So it doesn't even come with a quick guide or anything like that in the box. The instructions to set it up are the instructions to set up open WRT. You plug in your ethernet adapter to it. It doesn't have a Wi-Fi AP enabled by default. It issues you an IP. You go to one ninety two one sixty eight one dot one. You log in as root with no password and you go through and set up your password and you go up and set up your networking and you turn on the Wi-Fi if you want it.

And then you can reboot the thing. But it's just like it's like if you flashed open W.R.T. on a link, this or something like that. And for me, it kind of came at just the perfect time, boys. My wife has a clinic and it's been coming along nice for the last few months, but like a bad husband, I have not set her up with a network in her office. So she doesn't have any internet?

No internet. Oh, no. Gosh. So it's probably just using her phone? Yep, using the phone, and she can tether to the phone. Right. So that'll get you by for a while, but you gotta run a business.

She's got a network printer she wants to use. She's got a bunch of lights that could be controlled. And I also would like to throw a home assistant on this land. Supposedly she has a husband and IT. Yeah. I know, I've been daydreaming of how I would set this up for her, and this was sort of the final piece, because the building she's in, she can't use Starlink.

She doesn't have a shot to the sky, but she's also on the bottom floor. She can't just put like the starling out on the ground. And she sort of has moral qualms about doing business with Comcast. She just hates them and does not want Comcast Internet. And that's the only Internet available in her office building. That's of course. And so we thought, well, maybe we could get like a 5G MiFi, hang it off one of our cell plans and hook it up to a router. And I thought, well, I'll get her a GLI net, something like that.

But then this came out and I would actually prefer to just run stock OpenWrt for her. And I just feel like it would give her flexibility and it gives me something I can maintain for years. And I know that you can make OpenWrt work with MI-FI. I just wasn't quite sure on that process. And it turns out the way you do it is, like a pro, you SSH into the thing and it has the OPKG package manager.

Oh yeah. And you just OPKG update, and you can find instructions online, and then it's like one, two, three, four, five, about a half a dozen packages you have to install, basically, USB packages for the system. Ah, sure. To make the USB port live,

which is not all the support is there by default. You need that software installed, which I prefer. Start with a minimal system and then I'll build it up. Probably most people don't ever use those ports. Right. So then once you have the dependencies installed, which I'll try to link to that in the show notes, you connect the MiFi device, and then you will see it show up as a new interface now inside

the OpenWrt goop. Okay, perfect. So once you're there, then you can kind of do all your usual goodness. Exactly. Yep. And you can set up, you know, set it to use DHCP, figure all that out. And it just starts talking to it like it's one of the interfaces physically built into the router.

New upstream, baby. I mean, it took me, the longest thing was figuring out which packages I needed to install. And once I had a guide, I was kind of off to the races. And you can also, if you want, it has traffic shaping options and other things you can do to optimize performance and scheduling things you can do. So really impressed with that. Now, disclaimer, this is all in the lab so far. I wanted to actually have it here in the studio for the review before I go and put it in production.

But over the holiday break, as kind of like one of my gifts to her during the downtime is I'm gonna go work in her office for a bit and get some things going for her. And I just think that this is really the perfect solution for her office and for me as a support person. A lot of times things that are productized, they last for just a couple of years.

This is something that I'm literally gonna mount to the wall and I hope to not take it out until she moves to a different clinic and just keep it running. You forgot, you never even set it up. Yeah, and it just works like a clock, I'm hoping. And Wes, you noticed too, it doesn't get too hot. I had running some traffic through it. You can noticeably notice it's like warm to the touch.

But not unpleasant to hold. Not at all. Honestly, warm my hands up and it's kinda nice. Yeah, cause it's aluminum. So it transfers like the board's heat to the case. And I like the blue color, it looks nice. Yeah, it's very sharp. I mean, it's not the most beautiful piece

of equipment I've ever seen, but you know, compared to a lot of the ugly networking equipment out there that exists. It's totally fine And what I love about this too is you could go just board only like if I was building this as a solution into lady Joops, I would just buy the board or you were you know You wanted to deploy a bunch of them for some particular use case and you're making your own cases for them Yeah, or you're you know, yeah securing them in places that didn't need a case I'm surprised, you know, because it's nice is part of your purchase of this thing

goes to support OpenWRT. I'm surprised we haven't gotten here before. And maybe it just wasn't the right SOC. What do you think? I mean, it seems like this is such a no-brainer for the project. Is it maybe also something of like, on the project side in terms of the right people,

maturity processes, you know? Because like, you gotta, you're still maintaining the whole core part of your thing, and this is almost an ancillary project that you also gotta do. I have to say, if anybody from the OpenWRT project or that was involved with the one is listening, linuxonplug.com slash contact,

we'd love to know the background. I am officially a fan. Because what if this had turned into their coat or robe? Right, God forbid. Nobody wants that to happen. You know, and it's funny because I don't know what I expected, but what I am pleased about is how much it doesn't feel like a custom product from them. It just feels like an open WRT generic system running open WRT really well.

Without you having to flash it or pay some other party that you're not going to use their software. And it doesn't feel like I have something that like requires some sort of proprietary subscription or you know some sort of like value add package on top of it that they have to continue. No it's just it's just the same old thing I'm used to and I know it's going to run forever. So I definitely recommend the one if you're looking for something that's in this kind of this mid-tier category you know it's got like I said the two ports and the 2.5 gig port for your higher speeds and your one gig for maybe your LAN interface or whatever it might be, depending on your setup.

Or, yeah, can you do vice versa? Yeah, you could, you absolutely could. That's actually how I have it set up right now. You know, you got slow upstreams. Yeah, I got slower upstream, and so I have the LAN port on the faster one, just because I figure why not. And then, of course, with the three separate antennas

and Wi-Fi 6, you get some bangin' Wi-Fi, especially for the use cases that she's gonna be using for it because she's just in like one office, you know, one rented office room. So it's gonna work awesome for her. So really congratulations to the team over there and check it out if you're in the market. I wonder, do you think we'll see another one?

Do you think this goes well enough that, you know, as hardware improves, you know, Wi-Fi 7, whatever, they put out additional ones. Maybe they have two, two and a half gig ports on the next one. Or, you know what, if they would have had one that just had a SIM card slot built in, 100% would have bought that. Or, you know, if you want to start competing

with something like the Peplink, you could really put two SIM slots in this thing and then have failover. Failover, yes. Or maybe some kind of combining I mean, you don't want to get crazy, but there's some room There's some room to turn this into a product that could appeal to a lot of different markets the cellular as data for a small business or a family is

Shockingly popular more so than I think it should be and there's a thriving market out there of people that are living in tiny homes and RVs or just live in an area where the cellular option is the better option and there's not really a bunch of great products under $300, $600 to address those markets. Some of them, you know, like the GLI nets get pretty close, and then at the higher end it's like $1,000. But this thing sitting here at 90 bucks US greenbacks really would slide into a nice spot and you could bump that up to 110 120 to supplement the extra capabilities and still be very very competitive and the performance seems to be great I think it could handle it just fine even with the current system but I

bet you as if this is successful the next one comes when the board that it's based on gets a real solid iteration or two. And then it's, you know, you can drop it, you know, something. Yeah. I like it. And if I ever have any failures or if I have to use the recovery mode, I'll report back. This is officially going to turn into a long term review of the open WRT one. So stay tuned for updates on how it's working down the road. Linux Helmplug dot com slash membership. I don't really have anything for this. I just want

to take a moment and tell you how much it means that we've had people sign up, put their support on autopilot and make the show sustainable through this crazy ad winter, which now is an ad apocalypse. I'm hopeful that maybe, you know, in nine months to 10 months, things will turn around, but there's no way we would have survived or made it or even have any chance of surviving to whenever this turns around if it ever does. Maybe we get to a point where we don't ever care. So thank you for your support for our members. As a thank you, we have made two feeds available for you.

You have the no ads version and then you also don't forget to have the bootleg version where you won't hear this, but you might hear an alternative version of this that I'll make up live on the spot. But it has everything else and a lot more. It just doesn't have like the best levels and sound because, you know, that one isn't edited by Drew. But you get two options like the full raw live stream or the nice tight no ads version still edited by Drew. We do that as a thank you to our members. It really means a lot to us.

So you can go to Linux unplugged dot com slash membership if you'd like to sign up. And of course, there is the Jupiter party membership, jupiter.party. If you want to support all the shows and get access to every shows special features, happy holidays and thanks for the support. A feeling festive. We did pluck out a few little feedback items here. Rusman wrote in about the use of the Raspberry Pi in industry. wrote in about the use of the Raspberry Pi in industry. Says, regarding the use of the Raspberry Pi in industry specifically, I work in software but in a small company that also designs our own hardware. One

of the surprising and valuable uses for the Pi is that you can use it as a jig at contract manufacturing facilities. So he goes on to explain how the Pi is widely used for jigs in manufacturing, that companies design new hardware, they have to also provide the manufacturer with a device to flash and test each unit. So as a jig, this serves this purpose, much like a woodworking jig. It's a custom tool to build and test the final products. Since only tens or hundreds of jigs are ever made compared to thousands of end It's a custom tool to build and test the final products.

Since only tens or hundreds of jigs are ever made compared to thousands of end devices that eventually get committed to, the cost and development time are kept to a minimal. Therefore the Pi is ideal for this due to the low price, ample GPIO pins, lots of efficient cost-effective testing without inflating the overall production budget. I mean that makes sense. lots of efficient, cost-effective testing without inflating the overall production budget. I mean, that makes sense. You need kind of a general purpose compute that you could set up and have it do a very specific task.

It's not too expensive. And it makes a lot more sense if you're only gonna produce a handful of them to just use that than some purpose-built computer that would cost probably years to just design and figure that out. And I'm sure there's tons of places you wouldn't deploy a pie,

but I think they've really shown that they're pretty robust. So like, could we get away with saying when we do something rickety, that we're just kind of throwing something together like a pie or a 32 bit system or some old it's just a jig. And then that makes it like a technical term. And it's a tech. It's a it's a it's a form of craft now. Isn't your whole NAS system at home based on that? Yeah, my home lab's a bit of a jig. Isn't your whole old NAS system at home based on that concept? Yeah, my home lab's a bit of a jig.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that's probably fair. MJVC wrote in, a bit late, but I wanted to share my longest running distro. Believe it or not, for the server, it has been Nix OS for 11 years. Whoa. We are way behind the ball here.

Yep, yep. I would love to just hear about all the changes. Can we see the condensed time lapse of your git config? Yeah. Oh, the time lapse of a config would be hilarious. On the desktop, I've bounced back and forth between Arch and NixOS for about as long. I'm trying to remember how long I've been using NixOS and I found an old config from 2014 from the pre-flake days I used in college Been listening since the Lunduk days. So it's so I'm glad to hear you finally have seen the light with NixOS Haha, fair!

I feel like this is one of the listeners who kept like sending notes every six months. Yes to say hey guys We definitely had to continue to folks like you guys really got to try this out for a long time PS folks for AI and ML workloads, what I have found helpful is running Incus, I-N-C-U-S, and Arch and Ubuntu containers per project with a common home directory managed by systemd homed. You can pass the GPU devices in easily and even split the fancier GPUs into virtual GPUs.

Yeah, that's a cool tip. I think Incas is gonna be maybe an episode we should do in 2025. Yeah, okay. All right, let's talk about that. Before we get into the boost this week, we do just have a quick point of housekeeping. That's not possible.

Nothing can do that. We are time traveling right now. We are recording in the future, which is your past as you listen. So if you boosted the Tuxies episode last week, you're not gonna hear it in this week's episode, but we will be reading them in the following week's episode. So we will go back into your timeline around January 5th.

We'll be synced up and once again in the same timeline. And that is the episodes that are produced at that point forward is where you will hear your boost. Does that make sense? No, it doesn't. But you'll find out. It'll all make sense in time. Four score and seven boost ago. We do have some boost to get into, gentlemen. What do you say? Should we start with this baller?

But I think ballers not even the right. This is like the ballers boost of them all. All right. Here we go. Ladies and gentlemen, our baller booster this week is Mr. Hybrid Sarcasm with one million two hundred and thirty four thousand five hundred and sixty seven cents. Hybrid writes, 2004 has been a heck of a year. I deployed image to everyone's phones. I switched from vanilla wire guard to tail scale.

I also switched from PF sense to open sense, which became a tail scale subnet router. I've started daily driving a new framework 13 with plasma six. And I've been, I've begun the transition from Plex to jelly. Finn. That is very impressive hybrid. I submitted, I submitted my very first PR to an open source project, Gatheo, which was accepted. Nice.

Oh, that's great. Hopefully it's probably already in the one we've deployed. Anyways, I started stacking Sats because I've also become a hodler, and I just finished setting up my Albie Hub wallet. Oh my goodness! All of this was made possible thanks to Jupiter Broadcasting,

Linux Unplugged, and Mr. Fisher. No, Hybrid, it's made possible because of your support. Really. That's what keeps us going. Hybrid also went through a lot to get us these sets and getting the Albi Hub set up and troubleshooting and working with us. So we appreciate that real champ because some people could have just been too much. Hybrid says also to celebrate the new year, I am sponsoring a prize for the 20 25 boosties. All right. Listen up, everybody.

This is really awesome. So the person who boosts in with the total largest amount for 2025 will thus be winning the 2025 Boosties and will win a free Jupiter Party membership supplied by Hybrid Sarcasm. So whoever is the top booster for 2025 will automatically win a membership from Hybrid, or if you already have

a membership, you can then gift it, I would assume, to somebody, so that could also be a possibility. He says, if Deleted ends up winning the 2024 Boosties, I'm also gonna gift him an annual party membership too. Oh, nice. And then he also wants to boost in to promote Carl to producer status. Oh, that seems right.

Yeah, that's a good idea. Producer Carl sounds pretty good. I mean, we should let him know. But do we agree? Yeah, obviously the writer refusal. We have a quorum though. Brent, do you agree? I'm in. Easily, yes.

All right. As long as he comes with pocket meat. Yeah, producer pocket meat. Producer pocket meat. PM. We got PJ and PM. I love it. All right, then we release the Eagle of Agreement. Vamax boosts in with 25,000 sats. We got PJ and PM. I love it. All right. Then we release the eagle of agreement. Vamax boosts in with 25,000 sats.

Well, I'll be dipped. Hey, very Merry Christmas to y'all. I have a next question for you. I set up Image Frame, and now I want to turn an old laptop into a little display. I want to configure NixOS so it simply boots into Image Frame without the need for login or interaction. I have my NixOS so it simply boots into ImageFrame without the need for login or interaction. I have my NixOS file linked. I'm having trouble getting it to work. Would appreciate any pointers or suggestions on using NixOS as an appliance. So he wants to auto boot into like, I would imagine an environment that is going to load

a browser because Image, I think if you talk about what I'm using, Image Frame is a way to show and display your photos stored in Image on say like a tablet or another display device in a web browser. That's like a digital photo display thing. And it works really great. This is now what I am using on all of my Home Assistant tablets around the home, and I love it. I think we're talking about the same thing.

I might be talking about Image Kiosk, I'm not sure. Oh, PS is second-booster, I should mention I have auto-login figured out now. It'm not sure. Oh PS is second boost year I should mention I have auto login figured out now It's the system DX host service to try and allow system B to launch a graphical application for me on boot And I'm struggling with also. I highly recommend Albie hub painless dead simple to set up single binary I have connected to Albie to send receive payments and behind tailscale and it's a lot of fun to nice setup Okay, so he got an auto logging in. Well, that's great.

He solved his problem before we could give him that answer. I think there's still some stuff to figure out. So if anyone has, you know, maybe boost in, if you know, go take a look at the config, which we'll have linked. I don't have any advice off the top of my head just because it's not a problem I've solved for myself, but I am curious because now I kind of want one. I'll tell you how I solved it.

I bought like $80 tablets off of Amazon, Android tablets, and put fully kiosk mode browser on there. And then it has a paid app, right? But it's good. Yes, although you can use a lot of it for free. But it is worth paying for, because I think one of the things you get to do is mess around with the screen saver settings,

and then in there you can have it pull up a web browser for a screen saver, which works fantastic. I, this just because Vamex was talking about AlbiHub, um, one trick with AlbiHub if you're set one up out there is which LSP you go with to get your inbound channel. Megalith, megalithic, that's one to try if you're not sure which one to pick. Ah, okay, megalith is a recommend? Because part of hybrid was having problems with maybe was related to the LSP which was flash that, so maybe don't try which one to pick. Ah, okay, Maglith is a record? Because part of hybrid was having problems with, maybe was related to the LSP, which was flash Sats,

so maybe don't try that one. Okay. Well, Todd from Northern VA sent in Super Road Ducks. This is an Albee wallet sunset boost. All Sats must go. Happy holidays to you guys. Well, Todd, I hope you're not out of the boost game because of course you can always use Breeze.

And if you're shutting down an Albee wallet, you can send those stats to Breeze or to a Fountain wallet. You could create a Fountain account using the app. And then you can actually, from that point forward, just boost from the web. And you don't actually need the Fountain app to boost once you have the account created, because we love hearing from you, Todd. Thank you for that boost. Autobrain comes in with 10,000 sets.

I hate building PCs. Boosts, it's my new favorite expression. I am stacking flags. Boosts! Yeah, stacking flags. Gotta stack flags. Like stack flags? Yeah, you gotta stack flags.

No, stack MP3s. You gotta stack flags. Kongaroo Paradox boosts in with 10,101 Satoshis. You're doing a good job. Just a last minute question. What app are you using for navigation? I'm looking to get away from all those Google apps. Oh boy, that's a big one. That's a big question.

A contentious topic. Oh boy. So, you know, I think Magic Earth is kind of my current contender. Yeah, I use that. I still use Google Maps, if I'm honest, but I use Magic Earth as well. Yeah. Then I have like other apps. Like RV Life has one for the RV, and then I also have a Garmin, which is really very nice. I know this sounds crazy, you know, like burning a CD crazy,

but paper? Physical GPSs are kind of great, guys. They're kind of great. Oh, you're not even going full map. You're just going to a different GPS. Yeah, I mean, I only do it in my RV, but man, every time I'm doing it, I'm like, I could do this in the car.

Like it's really nice to have a dedicated device, purpose built, that has a couple extra features, and then your phone is not responsible for that at all. And then you build up an address book and that thing. It's really nice. Just saying, I know I'm old man today, but could be a way to go. And you're listening to your MP3 player

while you're doing it? Yeah, well actually, I actually have a portable CD player and then I have one of those tape adapters. Oh, there you go. Yeah, that's how I do it. Stack Sacker 7 comes in with 2000 sats. Pew, pew, pew! No message though, just sending us some boost value,

and we really appreciate it. C-Mixon boosts in with 13,337 sats. I've been using Xen, Lycorix, and various Xen mod patches regularly for years now. Yeah, buddy. So I was definitely happy to hear you guys discuss the stuff on last episode, particularly with 6.12. I prefer to have zero system lockups in my machine. What what what you better than me? I've had some serious lockup problems with using Zen kernel in a VM workstation Pro

Oh, so I'd recommend not using these kinds of kernels in those environments that makes a lot of sense loved this episode Yeah, only on physical hardware. I think is a good solid caveat for playing around with these kind of more performance optimized kernels. However, if anybody knows of a kernel built out there particularly optimized for VMs, you know, that could be a thing. Let me know. You know, I think actually I ended up, when I rebuilt my machine, I tried to get like,

LiquorX, but it wasn't in the cache, and then it was, so now I'm using that. Oh really? Yeah, it's been good. Any fan spin up extras or anything? No, about the same, I think. Good to know. Oh really? Yeah, it's been good. Any fan spin-up extras or anything? No, about the same I think. Good to know. I should try some audio stuff though.

Amorphous Phage boosted in 9,999 cents total. Boy, they are doing a lot with Mayo these days. Cross-due to boost, the first one says, okay listen, in early 2024 I was like, I like podcasts, I like Linux, are there any podcasts around Linux? And well, that's how I was like, I like podcasts. I like Linux. Are there any podcasts around Linux? And well, that's how I found JB, first Linux Unplugged, and then the other JB podcasts.

One of my first episodes was where you discussed the top five apps to install on a fresh system, and the audience mentioned Tailscale. I was like, yeah, interesting, but I'll probably never be that technical or into it. Well, now I use tail scale. I have my first self-hosted website, Jellyfin. I'm running Melee, Home Assistant, and many more to come.

I've also set up my very own Albie Hub now. And you know what? All of this is your fault. All because of you. You got me addicted. What do you have to say for yourselves? You're welcome. Yeah, I didn't even serve a pat on the back.

And sorry. And sorry about that. In all honesty, they continue. Thank you so much for what you do. Here's to a successful 2025. Please keep being the weekly companion and motivator that you all have been for me. Well, thank you. Also shout out to Nostromo with the Linux town root boost from last week. I grew up five minutes away from there and

I never realized the fact that it's a Linux themed town name. I'm glad to see the Swiss community well represented last week, especially because our government passed the law that their agencies can only use open source software. Hey, hey, how do we talk our government into that? Yeah. That's great to hear. Well thank you Amorph. Really appreciate that boost and great work on all of that. That's some solid self-hosted productivity.

Well done. Runaway comes in with 2000 sats. I've been using Kitty as my terminal on GNOME. OK, Kitty, I would assume that was a KDE one. I have been soliciting great GNOME terminals. They write, it doesn't match the aesthetics, but the performance is worth it. It opens up instantly. It's lightweight and it's hardware accelerated. Scrolling is so smooth on my 240 hertz monitor.

Something the GNOME console just couldn't pull off. You speak in my language. My main screen is like 120 or 160 hertz, so I'm not 240. But I do appreciate it when something can take advantage of that. Thank you, Runaway. All right. I'll look into Kitty. K-I-T-T-Y.

User 62 boosts in 2001, Seth. Pew! Hey, Chris, I have a Mi Forums UM790 with a similar graphics card to your B-Link that also hard-locked with NixOS. Okay. I solved it by installing L-A-C-T and going to the OC tab changed performance level to the lowest clocks. Not ideal for gaming, but the UM790 didn't lock up since. Okay, well I kind of love to know that's even a thing

because I could see when I'm off in the woods running off battery and I generally leave my PC running even then because I'm a maniac, I could see tossing this thing into low power mode and maybe eking out a couple watts. Also just another data point here, the previous owner never had problems in Windows. Ah.

No. No. So I hate hearing that actually. I've already not known that. Yeah. You know, I almost purchased the Minis Forum UM790. It was like top of my list to purchase when I was looking for a little computer

at the coworking space six plus months ago ago maybe at the start of the year. Jeez. And I ultimately did go with the same B-link that you have Chris but I'm so glad to hear that some people in our community have this thing and are well I guess solving problems with it and running it successfully because once you go once you go these mini little computers you get addicted and I feel like any other one. It's so nice, I really do love it. Chatty Mike, Chatty Mike comes in with 4005 Sats. Banks or Ponzi schemes run by morons.

And it's across a few booths. And you know what, you're pointing out Chatty Mike, we should have put a banner on our website for the boosties. Great idea. Or not the boosties, I'm sorry, the tuxies voting. There's so much to do. Also he says, how about a refresh? What about the summer tuxes? Oh, um, I

Could see a version if we were to keep doing the tuxes although still wear the jackets We'll just wear shorts at this point. I'm not I'm not convinced we are But I could see doing it in the summer then releasing it in the winter, right? But then it's it's weird. I don't know Focus on one of three projects getting prizes. Hmm, that could be in other ways, only a few projects get the prizes, but then we have other categories that. Also suggesting some sort of connection

with boosts here and there. Oh, skin in the game. Let's put some skin in the game boost splits for the month. Focus on one to three projects getting prizes. You set the initial list of entries and allow boosting to add new ones. That's interesting. Yeah, I guess that would be a way to signal actual

skin in the game behind something like that. All right, well, there's a lot to think there, Chatty Mike, and I appreciate it. We are definitely still kind of in the reflecting mode, so I value that feedback. Colorado Coder Collin comes in with 8,765 Sats. This is a tasty burger. A longtime title subscriber here for the reasons already mentioned on the show, but also for its Dolby Atmos selection.

Oh yeah. Title media downloader I guess is unmaintained for some time, so title, DLNG, or my project title-wave are all alternatives. Oh yeah, okay. Okay, we'll check those out and get some links. Thank you for telling us that, and I'm gonna definitely check out title-wave. That's cool, man. Well done on that. And it's interesting to hear that we've sort of hit a note with Tidal.

We've been hearing a lot and it just sort of came up organically, I think during the boost at one point. That's great. A less than ****ified service? Great. Yeah. Look at us. Look at us. We're happy. Yes, please. Well, the Arctic Splendor sent in a row of ducks. Longtime listener, way back to the Matt days and well, first time booster. Thank you all for the content and entertainment.

Thank you for going through the long journey of setting up the booths and for listening so gosh darn long. I know we still got that new guy, Wes, on the show. Can you believe it? That's right. Thank you very much, Artic. It's nice to hear from you. Gene Bean boosts in with 10,464 sets.

Gene Bean boosts! Oh, we crossed like seven boosts here. Fun will now commence. All righty, let's try this whole streaming sets and boosting via Albie Hub and Castamatic thing. Nice. Which, hey, we received them. This one was a double boost, but we got both.

Hey, nice. OK, on LUP581, I'm really interested in the immutable arch setup of KDE Linux. Regarding what other distributions provide, one thing is compatibility with third party commercial apps like Slack and Zoom and many others. Well, I think they'll do that through Flatpak. Yeah, that's the easy way to do it.

But you don't get maybe the download the dev RPM. Yeah, yeah, OK, let's's just is that less relevant in 2025 well, I wonder especially as flat hub transitions into more of its own entity and Let's just take a moment and say in two to three years Gnomos and K to eBanana have a respectable amount of users Does that then start encouraging companies like Slack and Discord and all these other groups to package directly to Flatpak and more so?

Does that kind of create the network effect and demand around Flatpaks? Maybe, we'll wait and see. Does anything change with this new FlatHub organization? Right. Can there be more like synergy with the companies? Because it's more vendor independent, perhaps. Yes, yes. I love that he He got I pixie working over HTTP

Gene being you machine lub-591 year of ability for sure yeah, yeah Comes in to say I have to admit. I was kind of surprised that you guys didn't know about Veeam It's the gold standard for backups in a vmware environment. That's probably why I haven't worked in a VM It does ring a bell though. It does. I have heard of them. Yeah, just never used them. And they've got a good native solution for cloud environments. A few years back, they also solved for Kubernetes backups by buying another niche company, they offer free stuff for individual usage too.

It's really good tooling. Well, nice. Thank you for that. That's even better that the Proxmox got a nice support for it then. Gene, thank you. It's good to hear from you. Glad you got a boost in on our last episode of the year. Also, here's a test boost for debugging with me,

which also thank you for doing this. Yeah, those are nice to see. We appreciate it. That was nice. Glad you got a hub going. That's so cool. Well, there's 2,680 sets here from Matqua. This one's through Breeze.

First time boost from Down Under also. Hey! Very well done, thank you. Also, this episode happens to be a postcode boost. Oh Wes, did you, Wes did you? Yes, zip code is a better deal. Bring the map though? Oh, ha ha ha, look at you! He never forgets, it's impressive. You know, he had that big holiday bag.

I gotta flip it upside down. Oh, it's down under the, yeah, the other part. No, right there, yeah. There you go. Careful, careful, careful, careful. Did you get that stain out from last week? No, when would we? When would we?

Okay, watch out, you're gonna rip it. Okay, let's see here. I think, right, 2680. Yep. I's see here. I think right 2680. Yep I think that looks like maybe somewhere around Griffith in New South Wales, Australia. Hello, New South Wales Australia is that my I think it's to the I think it's an Oprah Winfrey, Australia Thank you for the boost. Oh boy. Lieutenant Mirth comes in with 10,000 sets.

Well, uh... I just listened to episode 591, plus one for Tectenium DNS. I used AgGuard home for years until I had an internet outage and hit a bug which caused lookups to time out if the upstream servers were unavailable, even for local domains. That meant that none of my Jellyfin clients could resolve their server host name.

I think we've, just to pause, I think we've all been here at one point. This one thing I didn't realize it was now internet, secretly internet dependent. Yes, I have accidentally done that and there's been times where the only way I discovered is I take the rig out into somewhere where I have no internet and see what breaks.

High uptime problems we have. It is, yeah, it's a rough problem. It's meant that none of my Jellyfin clients could resolve and we can't have that. So I moved my network to Techtenium and I haven't looked back since. As to Chris's question regarding the use cases for the REST API, well, I have a couple examples, simple one.

When I encounter a website that doesn't work quite right, I have a Zigbee button on my desk that triggers a home assistant automation, which calls the Tectidium API to disable DNS blocking for 15 minutes. You need this, Wes. I do. You're right. And I need this. Yep. Let's get it going. All right. 2025 project. This is brilliant. And I need this. Yep, let's get it going. All right, 2025 project. This is brilliant.

That's so good. We should, yeah, I would love to see how this is happening. Like share, share how you're doing this and the community could just take off. Thank you, Lieutenant. That is, that's a great example. I'm gonna do that. I can't wait to just blow up my current DNS system

and replace it and slowly get it working again over time It's gonna be great Simon boosts in with a row of ducks. Oh Chiming in on net boot dot XYZ. Oh, yeah great on your keyring USB thumb drive Especially combined with something like ventoid. Oh, yeah, or just their UEFI binary Which you can drop in any my machines slash boot slash EFI making it selectable when booting if you want I meant to mention that in the episode. That's a great option drop in any machines slash boot slash EFI, making it selectable when booting if you want. I meant to mention that in the episode.

That's a great option. Yeah, that's a great rescue option. Or to replace the OS on something like a boneheaded VPS like Oracle Cloud. Unlimited power! That's a clever idea. We do love a good VPS hot swap. That is, yeah.

You would need like a net boot server on the LAN with the VPS, I suppose. Of course, still want to try to make it work over tailscale Anyways, that's great. Thank you Simon. Very clever Well, Chris you might want to get your soundboard finger ready for this one because we got 3000 sats from the wine eagle Sure sure here you go, you ready or something? Sure, sure. Here you go. You ready?

You ready? I don't know if he's drunk though. Yeah, sounds a little drunk. Keep up the kernel stuff and whatever you do. It's good listening on a well-produced podcast either way. Linux Unplugged has everything. Reviews, tests, suggestions, news, interviews, boosts, and the live mumble input. Best general Linux show.

Oh, thank you. You know what? That should be our slogan right there. Thank you very much. Oh, but he's voting for some BSD love. I've been kind of having the itch too, guys. I've been thinking we should do something. There's a new BSD, a free BSD release out.

I could see us taking a look at it, you know, flirting with it for one week. Perhaps. We could see us taking a look at it, you know, flirting with it for one week. Perhaps we could see. Also, he says he has an open sense route, open sense router and open WRT WAP using Flint to set up. I'd love to hear more about that. That could be right up my alley. Could you expand on that, sir? Also, what you'd like to know from the BSD side, because we're not BSD experts.

So what would you like to hear? Because we would kind of be strangers in a foreign land. I suppose and Before we wrap up we had one last baller boost that came in live just as we were recording it is the dude abides with 200 thousand sats My god this drawer is filled with Froot Loops. They write, hello. Hey, oh, hello.

It's been a long time since I boosted. So here's something combined for the last episodes. I also wanted to be in the top three boosters. I admit gamification is a thing. Next year, maybe even first. Happy holidays, guys. Well, happy holidays to you, the dude. Thank you so much for the live boost.

Appreciate you. We had a great week as we you, the dude. Thank you so much for the live boost. Appreciate you. We had a great week as we round out the year. So let's go through the summary as we wrap up. We had 33 of you stream stats as you listen to the pod. I can't call it that. I'm sorry. As you listen to the podcast, I tried. I get I wanted to try it. I want to try it. I just thought it doesn't work.

And you streamers, you stacked ninety five thousand two hundred and four sets. Thank you. I want to try it. I just thought it doesn't work. And you streamers, you stacked 95,204 sats. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And then we had 22 of you boost in a message. And of course, hybrid sarcasm was our absolute blow, a baller this week. So he weighed very heavily in here. But all of you working together, we stacked an absolutely remarkable one million five hundred and seventy seven thousand two hundred and twelve sets this episode.

I really appreciate it's a great way to round out the year. We're making plans for 2025 to make it great. And your support combined with our members has kept us on the air in an unbelievably hard time for podcasts. Thank you so much and we love your messages. It's one of our absolute favorite parts of the show. It's real easy to boost with Fountain FM

or something like Breeze B-R-E-E-Z. You can get sats with Strike or Cash App or the Bitcoin Well or River. These are all great trusted platforms and services. We'll put some links in the show notes. Thank you, everybody. Who boosts in. We really, really appreciate you. Thanks for keeping us going.

Episode five hundred and ninety five is possible because of you. You'll have to allow some nostalgia. But this is a barn burner pick. If you ever played the Descent games, the Descent one and two games, which took the whole 3D first person player to a whole new level by going into 3D space, you're inside a ship, a spaceship, and you go inside caves, and you fight robots, and like you save scientists. And it has been kind of a pain over the years to get running on Linux

to various degrees of success. One of my all time favorite games as a kid loved Descent one and two. And DXX Rebirth is a project that makes it possible to play Descent one and two games on Linux with pristine compatibility, including all the expansion packs, all the third party levels, full joystick, keyboard, mouse, all used simultaneously, full resolution support, add-on packs, multiplayer via UDP protocols over the LAN.

You can bring over your player files and your save games from the original game and drop them in here. And it works. But you to flee. I was taken back to, you know, just a beautiful moment of nostalgia bliss because you can go get these games on GOG.com for super cheap. I'll put a link in the show notes. Then what you do is you download their EXE,

you use Wine to run through the extractor, and then you just go grab the game files. You drop it in the data directory. The app tells you what data directory to drop them in the first time you use it. You drop the files in the data directory, and then you are playing a Linux native version of the game at its absolute best. It never looked better, never sounded better, never goes better on your screen. It was so great that I had to just sit there and play it for a while because it is a good game and it's one of those games that sticks with you kind of like it's like in the golden eye kind of category

of games that was just groundbreaking and a ton of fun and still a lot of fun to go back to. So it's D X X rebirth of a link in the show notes to flat hub and to get up. And then of course, you got to get the source files. Chris, you are not alone in this nostalgia. I instantly as soon as I brought up the screenshot just got taken right back to sent was a game that me and my brothers absolutely loved. And I guess my brother must be listening to the live stream because I just got a signal message saying, oh my God, descent.

And so I think you might've just said, we have a tradition here of playing video games for like over 24 hours every Christmas. You might've just decided what we're gonna play. Well, you could do one and two. Wouldn't that be fun? Wouldn't that be fun? Bring it. Wouldn't that be fun? And for me, I've tried to play this game on and off

to some degrees of success, to have it all work perfectly and just fit right on my monitor and sound good. Going through the opening animation again, it just brought back so many fond memories. And now I'm thinking, because they've nailed the network play, I never got to do that.

I'm gonna get it working on the kids' computers and I'm doing this. This is one of the things we're doing. Well, Aaron says live here, he's into a network play with you, so I think we gotta set something up. Gotta figure out how to do it over tail scale. Yeah.

Over internet, over space internet. That'll be, we'll see how that goes. Seems appropriate. Yeah, right? Okay, before we wrap up, don't forget, we wanna hear your ideas for a Raspberry Pi 4 project. Kind of our goodbye to the Raspberry Pi 4 as the five is out.

And I've still got a handful of them. I'd like to put them to some good use, so I'd love your ideas. And then, you got some time. Your Linux predictions, but not long. You need to boost in the week this comes out for 2025. What are your Linux predictions? I'm love to see. And like Wes mentioned earlier,

we will be live on January 5th doing a double. And one of those will be our predictions episodes. You could always join us live in the Mumble Room or the chat room or your time to figure out how to get connected. Yeah. Go get found and go get pod verse. Go get an app. You can do it live in the app or just tune into JB live dot FM Sunday at noon Pacific, three p.m. Eastern. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad state.

And of course, links to what we talked about today, you can find those at Linux unplugged dot com slash five ninety five. You also get info for our mumble room, our matrix chat, how to contact us, all of that. It's all linked up on the website. They've got hyperlinks for you. It's great. And then your browser will display it for you.

It'll just render it right up for you right there in your browser. On your end, yeah, it's great. You're going to love that. That's LinuxUnplugged.com. And of course, if you haven't listened to the Tuxes yet, go sure you check out the final 2024 Tuxes. It was a banger. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode and we'll see you back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday, and HAPPY NEW YEAR! So

So Thanks for watching!