LINUX Unplugged - 601: Taming the Demons

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

It's week one of our FreeBSD challenge, and for one of us, that penalty Windows install looks uncomfortably close! Plus, Zach Mitchell joins us to update us on Planet Nix.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.FMLINUX Unplugged - 2025 FreeBSD Challenge Rules.mdRaspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer KitFreeBSD 14.0 on aarch64 Raspberry Pi 4/400 - Download, Install & ConfigureLinuxBoot: Booting FreeBSD from LinuxEuroBSDCon booting FreeBSD using LinuxProvisioning LinuxBoot Images for FreeBSDFreeBSD Handbook: Chapter 1. Bootstrapping and Kernel InitializationFreeBSD Handbook: Chapter 15. The FreeBSD Booting ProcessHow to Manage FreeBSD Boot Process?LinuxBoot: let Linux do it!LinuxBoot IntroductionLinuxBoot on GitHubAnnual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!Planet Nix — March 6th-7th, 2025 in Pasadena, CAZach MitchellLINUX Unplugged 554: SCaLEing NixLINUX Unplugged 538: Surprisingly Smooth TransitionLFNW2025 - April 25 - 27, 2025 • Bellingham Technical CollegePick: GarminDB — Download and parse data from Garmin Connect or a Garmin watch, FitBit CSV, and MS Health CSV files into and analyze data in Sqlite serverless databases with Jupyter notebooks.

The cone of silence. Before we get started today, I have like a little announcement, but I don't want to tell everybody. I just want to tell like you guys and like the really long time listeners. Wednesday morning over at jupiterbroadcasting.com, we're launching something special for the long time community. So go grab yourself the all show feed. Maybe check out Jupiter Broadide Casting during your Wednesday moment of downtime, because we'll have something special for 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. Well hello gentlemen, it is great to be with you. Today we're going to update everyone on how the FreeBSD challenge is progressing and which one of us might be awfully close to installing Windows. Plus a special guest will join us later in the show to talk a bit about Planet Nix and what's going on over there And then we'll round out the show with some great boosts some pics and much more so before we go any further

Let's say time appropriate greetings to that virtual lug. Hello mumble room Always great, it's nice to have everybody in there Thank you for being here. And a big good morning to our friends at Tailscale. You got to go to tailscale.com slash unplugged, support the show and get yourself Tailscale on 100 devices and three accounts for free. Tailscale is the easiest way to connect your devices and services to each other wherever they are.

It is modern networking and it connects all your devices and your applications directly to each other. I have it on my NAS, I have it on my mobile devices, I have it on my home assistant system, I have it on the Apple TV, I have it on the Android TV, I have it everywhere and all of it on

a flat mesh network that is protected by- A while ago. That's right. What else could you ask for? And it's fast, really, really fast. Privacy for every individual and every organization. I started using it with the free plan. In fact, my personal account, I'm still using the 100 free plan, no credit card required. But then after using it for more than a couple of years, I realized, well, we could actually

fundamentally improve the way we do some of the network for JB. And so now we use it as a business too. And so do thousands of other companies. There's lots of ways to just plug it in with your existing infrastructure too, and it's programmable. So you can manage it like a private network, the way you would expect. It's really very powerful. Try it out for yourself.

Go get a free plan, 100 devices, three users, and support the show. Head on over to tailscale.com slash unplugged. The easiest way to connect your devices and services, wherever they are, tailscale.com slash unplugged. Now gentlemen, it is time for us to update everyone on how the BSD Challenge is going. And should we start with a reminder of the rules, Brent? I think that's a good place to start. So if you'd like to join us in the free BSD challenge

I'm not sure why we have subjected ourselves to this but it lasts two weeks So we're just coming up on week one Anniversary and so you have one week left to join us in this challenge. I think you can get it all done Yeah So just a reminder of the free BSD challenge rules here. So number one, you can use hardware or a VM if you can manage to get that working. All good there. So do what pleases you.

Also you have about a week left to join us. And I think you could fit all of these challenges into a week. I think a week you've still got time. So please join us. And importantly, we want to know how it went So there are a few points here You can self score yourself or just tell us and we can just give you bad points and we'll have this linked in the show Notes it's up on our github now if you install BSD and get it online you get two points

For another two points you can record audio of yourself and send it into the show from a working desktop. Of course, a desktop of your choice. Again, for two points, you can get a server or service running that's accessible via the LAN. But you can also petition for some extra credits, five points each, if you want to go this far. So some possible options are getting an app running inside Podman or Jailz, installing and configuring a firewall, get tail scale running on a BSD system.

You can also try out two BSDs, maybe like a NetBSD or GhostBSD, end-free BSD. There's also this project, NyxBSD, which if you're feeling extra adventurous, you can dive into that, or get a non-BSD native video game running. But the other- There is one thing that everyone needs to be aware of if they decide to participate in the challenge, Bradley. There is a caveat. If you so choose to join us in the challenge

and you do not get this working, there are some consequences. So if you bail in the challenge and you do not get this working, there are some consequences. So if you bail from the challenge, you must, and I think Chris is on this route, you must install and run Windows 11 for a week following the challenge and your font system-wide must be Comic Sans. So not only Windows, but Windows with Comic Sans.

It's the double punishment. Wow. Well, you know, I was a little concerned this might be me. I'll be honest with you, because I was surprised at how little it was like riding a bike. Just getting started. Wait, you've BSD'd before, right? I have.

And I was trying to remember when. I mean, it can't be recently, because we haven't really done it on the show. No, yeah, it was before the show. Right, because I remember, I mean, like, you and I were messing around with fake NAS, you know, back when it was actually free BSD. So there was like a tiny bit of that,

but that didn't last that long. I was digging through my kind of like notes from when I was doing some IT contracting. Oh. And I wanna say, just based on the timeline that I was looking at, I was probably experimenting with FreeBSD between FreeBSD 7 and FreeBSD 9. So kind of that era of FreeBSD 7 and FreeBSD 9. So kind of that era of FreeBSD.

So FreeBSD 7, if my research is right, came out in February of 2008. Oh, wow. And we're on FreeBSD 14 now. Yeah. And FreeBSD 8 came out in 2009, and FreeBSD 9 came out in 2012. And I do recall ZFS kind of coming along

right as I was kind of leaving and just going full-time Linux. And I initially had a problem to solve in that I was having real performance issues with a NAS and it was over Samba and the users would connect to it and the throughput was just abysmal and it would cause login delays and all these kinds of problems. And it was kind of a stressful situation because I had convinced upper management to bail on Windows NT because it was having

a similar problem. It was hitting the wall much earlier, but then it turned out the Linux server it while it could go further, this was a Sles, Suus Linux enterprise server, while it could go further and handle more a Sles, Su's Linux Enterprise server, while it could go further and handle more connections, it was also hitting the wall. And I went through everything trying to figure out what is this, what's causing this. And one late night working, bringing in the overtime, I decided, screw it, I'm gonna set up a free BSD server,

I'm not gonna even tell anybody, because I have to get permission for all this stuff and go through a change control committee and all that. I don't have time for that. I need this fixed tomorrow morning. So I set up free BSD, set up Samba, and I also had to have NFS for some other systems. And then I wrote a bash script

to like manage all of the ACLs and permissions because things didn't directly map to like the same UIDs and whatnot. So like all of the company's user data and everything was under totally different UIDs and GIDs that all had to be swatched, swapped over. And I don't remember, I don't think there was a direct one to one to extended attributes either.

It was tricky. And the next morning when the users logged in, it didn't hit a wall at all. There was never a limit. The disk performance was exactly what I expected from the system and expected for. And so I was like, okay, there's something here. Why is FreeBSD so much better?

And I initially, for some stupid reason, expected it was something to do in the networking stack or something like that. So I started looking into the differences in the networking stack thinking maybe BSD has some sort of optimization here. And it's like a it's a connection. It's a TCP connection limit that I'm hitting on Linux. And BSD doesn't have that. And I dug into it. It simply wasn't the case. And what I discovered after about two weeks of kind of coming back to the issue every couple of days trying to figure it out and doing different testing is that it was the Dell SCSI driver and on Linux there was just simply a bug.

And on BSD that version that they wrote for BSD didn't have the bug in the SCSI driver and so it was affecting disk performance. But during that time I had and then I had to go I had it and it was working so I kept it and I left it running. I went through a couple of different upgrade cycles. So I got to manage a free BSD box in production, doing some Samba and NFS file sharing stuff. Nothing too serious, but you know, probably eight, 900 users concurrent. And it was interesting.

And it was a really, really solid system. And it turned out the reason why it was all fast and better wasn't necessarily because of some crazy optimization they'd done, but just the differences in drivers. And inevitably that problem was solved in a patch in Linux. And from that point forward, we just deployed Linux. Given that positive experience, I'm curious why you didn't kind of go down the free BSD road a lot further. You know, part of what we're gonna get into today, I think,

it affected me back then too, and it's still part of the issue. You know, time is precious. But let's get into that. So let's talk a little bit about the hardware you tried FreeBSD on so far and how it's going. Yeah, I, in setting up our little BSD battle station here at the studio, Chris, you and

I just found whatever hardware was around and figured, hey, that's going to be fun to try. Let's try it. Yeah. I ended up trying BSD on a Raspberry Pi 400. This is the little keyboard integrated Pi. And number one, I had never used this thing. So I was excited to use the hardware, but also I thought,

hey, this is going to be an interesting little challenge. And a challenge it was, a challenge it certainly was. You know, I realized how much we were starting at zero because I thought to myself, I don't even know how you get a free BSD image for Raspberry Pi. Is it an image file? Is it an ISO like you can do with some Linux distros?

You know, like with SUSE and others, it can just be like a standard Linux install. But it also depends a lot on like firmware support and which version of the Pi and which version of Linux you're trying to run. It's like confusing enough just in our actual well known domain. But then on top of that, like with Linux distributions, you just assume if it is an ISO with an installer, it's gonna be a graphical installer, but then I realized, well that's not necessarily the case

with FreeBSD at all. And so I said, wow, we're really starting at zero here. So what was the image route? Was it a pre-made image, was it an ISO? Well, they did have two options actually. They had RMISOs that were more generic, but they did have pie-specific images. And so I figured, well, I should probably go down that route.

But I did try the ISOs first on a variety of different. We tried Ventoid. It didn't quite work for me. Yeah, Ventoid gave us like a boot loop. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's my personal experience with Ventoid every time I try it. But we're always trying weird things. That is like a two or three release

behind version of Vento too. Maybe newer versions are better with FreeBSD. Why does everybody always tell me that whenever I'm trying Vento? Anyways, Vento has not worked great for me, although we hear in our community constantly that it's amazing. So Brent hates Vento.

No, it's just the bug feel. I'm gonna have to try Voy with FreeBSD now. Brentoy. But that said, I tried a bunch of those routes and ended up trying the image, which also ended up locking up on boot for me. And I was surprised by that because it specifically said on the image Raspberry Pi 4.

So I figured this would be pretty compatible. So it wasn't a Pi 400 image, but you shouldn't need one. If it's a Pi 4 image, it should work just fine on the 400. Because I ran into this boot lockup, which was a little disappointing, I ended up needing to figure out how to get this thing to work. Because I wasn't going to give up at that point. I was on step one of our challenge. So with FreeBSD, where do you even begin to figure out how to get this thing work. Cause I wasn't going to give up at that point. I was like on step one of our challenge.

So with, with free BSD, where do you even begin to figure out? Did you go like read release notes? Like, what do you do? Well, I ended up reaching out to, um, perplexity to say, Hey, I don't know what I'm doing. Clearly the confidence I came into this thing with is all vanished and I need some help. is all vanished and I need some help. And I did discover just like a few reports that a newer BSD version wasn't working on the Pi 4. Like just in like forms or whatnot you saw this?

Yeah, what I read was that FreeBSD 14 wasn't working and FreeBSD 13 would work. And so I thought, okay, well, I'll give that a shot. So go back one release. A whole release. And I gave that a shot. Sure enough, it booted. OK. So I was making progress.

That said, I was trying 14.2. And there was a 14.1. So then I re-imaged and tried 14.1, and that worked. So it seems like 14.2 for me on the Pi 400 just locked up. But 14.1, sure enough, went through and boot 14.1 and that worked. So it seems like 14.2 for me on the Pi 400 just locked up. But 14.1 sure enough went through and booted and I was able to do an in... I was able to get that working just fine. So it boots.

Do things like graphics work and ethernet and all of the standard stuff on the Pi? Did it all get detected and supported? Mixed bag. Oh really? Mixed bag. Oh, really? Let's say. OK.

So it seems like ethernet worked out of the box. I did have to turn it on and configure it. But I think that's pretty standard for FreeBSD. So that was nice. After that, the graphics were certainly in a safe mode, like massive fonts. Like 640 by 480 or 1024 by 768. I could work with it, but I knew if I

was going to try to run a desktop on this, which I was, that that would likely be an issue. I bet that must have been frame buffer mode. I think FreeBSD just uses frame buffer mode by default. OK. Well, anyways, it got working. And I was excited by this point because I had spent an hour and a half just trying to get the thing to boot.

That said it, I don't have to install it because I'm running an image. So I didn't have to go through that install method. You were bootstrapped. Oh, I'm realizing now that one of the points specifically says install BSE. So maybe I disqualify myself from that set of points. Well, no, you just have to make sure you do it to see what the installer's like. Because one of those things was says install BSD. So maybe I disqualify myself from that. Well, no, you just have to make sure you do it.

Yeah, because one of those things was tried on a Pi. So I feel like we're going to end up with like a giant checklist of all the things we forgot to do and we got to do this week. I'm just going to do them all. So that's what I'm going to try to do. I don't want to run Windows really, really bad. I don't necessarily want to run free BSD either, but I don't want to run Windows even harder.

Yeah, you got to is it worse two weeks of BSD versus one week of Windows? It's complicated. I just I I feel like it haunts even harder. Yeah, you got to, is it worse? Two weeks of BSD versus one week of Windows, it's complicated. I just, I feel like it haunts me, you know? In the distance, I can hear. You know? So sweet. So you also, when you were experimenting with it,

noticed performance was a little lackluster, right? Well, I got some help because I needed it, it seemed, on how to run this on the Pi. And there were a few specifics that seemed to be defaulting, similar to the video, just defaulting to base and get it running, but this is not optimal. And one of those things was the CPU itself.

It was just constrained to 600 megahertz and would just sit in there. That's it. That's all you get. So one of the configurations I had to make, which was fairly easy to do, but if you didn't know about this, then I think you'd feel really disappointed

about the performance of your little Pi 400. So I was able to bump that up to a reasonable CPU frequency, but it was just locked by default to 600 I'm not sure why that was just like add to RC comp exactly. Yeah, you can add a little you know You could just change RC comp and add you know, pretty much triple the CPU frequencies in there One thing that you had a problem with that I have not had a problem with but I think it's because you're on arm Firefox just does not work for you. Well, it installs.

Yeah. And it gives you a warning about a bunch of stuff that doesn't work. I got a massive list of off by default compatibilities. So basically, it said, well, if you're expecting Firefox to be like it is on Linux or Mac OS or Windows. It doesn't support any DRM videos, so there's no Netflix. Yeah, you're actually not going gonna get a bunch of stuff. Obviously there's no Wayland support.

There's a lot of things, honestly, my comment when I saw the list was, oof, it really feels like the world is not building for FreeBSD at all. Well, and to add insult to that, I could really only get it running for 10 seconds and then it would crash, so. Right, wow. Now that I did not.

See, at least for me, I could browse the web and whatnot. I think it might be specific to the Pi itself. Yeah. Maybe the ARM build on FreeBSD just isn't that stable yet. I do realize I'm pushing in a few different directions in this particular case. But no Firefox for me. I might try to solve that one just for fun, see what it is.

But so far. I wonder if you could go to Firefox and get their extended release build for ARM, if they have one that would be for FreeBSD, and try running that and see if that would run better. It does seem like FreeBSD tends to kind of default to older package releases, maybe because these things tend to be better accounted for. to be better accounted for? Yes, I would say my experience at least up to this point on the Pi 400 has been quite mixed.

I'm learning some new things and I'm also realizing a lot of stuff that I expect to just not even be an issue is turning out to be quite an issue and I need to go solve those things. So mixed, very mixed for me. So far. Maybe next week will be better. I'm hoping. You can try it on Intel hardware

or AMD hardware next week. Well, I figured it would probably be a good idea to try my framework, given they've been doing some work on modern laptops, trying to get that all running. So I thought maybe that would be a good place to go next week for me. So I don't think any of us so far have tried FreeBSD with a multi-moderate setup, have we? Have you, Brent? No. No, I haven't think any of us so far have tried FreeBSD with a multi monitor setup, have we?

Have you, Brent? No. No, I haven't either. And I'm wondering, I'd like to know from the audience, Boosted Intel, are you using a multi monitor setup or a single screen? Tell us a little bit about your setup because I kind of want to know what the audience's position

on the monitor setup thing. And if this is something we should be testing or not, I mean, I'd like to know. I remember in Linux, it was a little bit of a problem years ago and has become way better. I don't even think about it now. I didn't even think about it until I was sitting there

thinking, we're all trying these on single screens. But maybe that's what most of the audience would be running it on. So maybe that makes sense to test there. But should they is the question. Yeah. So I mean, we've seen just with Linux developers, right? Like does seem to be the kind of majority cases.

One screen or maybe one, like, you know, laptop screen plus one side monitor. I wonder how our audience queues. So boost in and tell us. So, okay, you're on a good path. You're not totally secured yet from having to run Windows, especially if you have a bad time. I don't know, for extra fun,

you might try it on the Atari VCS. Oh. You know, I don't know. You just want to see me suffer. I do. Now Wes, do I see a Windows desktop in your future? How is your BSD challenge going? You wish. I do very badly actually. No, I feel like I'm a little bit behind you fellows maybe. I had some other adventures this week,

which perhaps we'll talk about in a future show. But no, I've got BSD installed, of course. I just haven't tried much on the desktop side of things. I've been kind of focusing more on, I've started in my path on the server, getting familiar with the base system, and of course I got distracted figuring out how FreeBSD boots,

because it's quite different than Linux. Oh yeah? Well not really, I mean it's quite different than Linux. Oh yeah? Well not really, I mean it's, but you know it doesn't. What piqued your interest? I just, boot loaders, boot time, environments. Yeah that's always, bootstrapping in general is always fascinating to me. I agree, I do.

And so like how do you get from, you know, real mode and like simple computer world all the way up to like a fully functioning modern operating system. Yeah. Plus I happened to stumble into, okay, do you remember at one point we talked about a project called Linux boot.

Yeah. Which doesn't sound very BSD, I know, but. The basic idea was like in the age of UEFI, folks end up having to write drivers and having to try to make them compatible right there. These like early, if you need networking or whatever, early mode UEFI drivers that write against UEFI libraries and stuff.

Depending on what UEFI system exists on like the server thing you're trying to target, it could be different. It's very annoying. So Linux boot was a idea to try to say like, well, how about we just have enough support to get Linux booting, and then we can implement whatever drivers we need in Linux, which it might already have, and it has like, you know, it's just way easier to do it in Linux. And then let Linux boot into whatever the final operating system, which probably most of the time is just going

to be a different Linux, right? You have some like minimal Linux core that has the drivers to get your system bootstrapped, and then it loads your, you know, rel release that you run for production or whatever it is. I haven't tried it. I don't know exactly what state it's in, but there's a talk from EuroBSDcon in 2024, 2023, maybe there's been ongoing developments of getting FreeBSD to work with Linux boot,

which basically means getting FreeBSD to work with KExec. Oh, that's where I thought you were going. I love it. How did you sneak that in? I knew it. I had a sense it was going to get worked in somewhere. I felt it coming. Well, I was curious partially because, like,

the first way I tried it is, I also have a VPS running now, but the first way I was trying it was just a virtual machine running, you know, here locally. And so I was like, well, I often KExec into things I install on a virtual machine. Is that even an option with FreeBSD? Right. So that kind of piqued my interest.

I could imagine. That seems right up your alley. But I have been, unlike Brent, I have been dabbling with the installer. I will say it's nice. They do offer a robust set of images, whether you're running them on some cloud provider, or you just want a QEMU image, either QCal or just a raw image you can download.

It's really nice. My impression of the installer was it felt very utilitarian, what am I trying to say? Utilitarian. Yes, thank you. Like it felt like a professional tool. Like, you know, not really something that's even trying to aim at a brand new user, but a brand new user

who's maybe following some documentation could definitely still work through it. Right. It doesn't necessarily explain everything, but it's a guided install. If you've done a lot of Linux installs or a Debian install, you'll feel right at home. But when I was using this, I was thinking, I bet Wes likes this. Did you like it? Oh, absolutely I do. Yeah. So I was going to say, you can just download a pre-built image for the VM like Brent was doing with the Pi But they also obviously have installer ISO. So that's the path I took it is kind of old-school, but I think it's really well thought out I really like in particular. They've got like a system hardening screen

So you can do stuff like hide you ID you IDs by default from other users hide G ID's you can hide jail processes Options to clean up the temp file system on system startup. I always kind of want that, so I just turn that on. Enable console password prompt. There's just a bunch of stuff that you might not think to go in rc.conf and enable later or whatever that they present to you right here, which I think definitely is what you're talking about, right?

This is ready to go for production. Yeah, I loved it too. I thought, look at this, it's exposing some great options that are just common sense security precautions that you might want to set on a brand new system right there. And I think you probably also noticed ZFS is just front and center. Absolutely. Yeah, right. I mean, guided install automatic, you don't really have to do anything. It creates a whole bunch of different data sets for various partitions on your system. And right, you can tell they've been doing this for a while, which is wonderful. I mean, there's the boot environment stuff, but just also, like, they have the option in the installer. Do you want your home user's dataset to be encrypted with ZFS? I like that. Yeah, that's neat. I also like to the end of the install. I don't know how handy it is,

depending on the system you're doing But they have the option to download the handbook right there Yeah, and that's just great because all as I'm sure we're gonna hit on a bunch the handbook is Not only a great resource on its own, but I think as Brent's found out well indexed by the LMS as well So it's doubly useful. Yeah, I'll have a comment on that too. But before I get to my bit I'm curious if either of you have tried ports yet and installing anything from the ports tree? Yeah, not a ton of stuff, not as wacky and everything, but just a couple packages.

I have to say I like package and ports, just like the package management on FreeBSD, while definitely it's not anything crazy or new or different than what you might expect on Linux. I like the simplicity, the ease of use. I think you would be tempted to say it has like Pac-Man and AUR vibes sort of package imports, but I think really historically it's Arch has BSD vibes. That's really what's going on there.

But like, if you like that style of sort of minimalist, but simple and like once you've learned the basic options you have, it all works very well and it's like. A core set of stuff is in the repo in the native package manager and then AUR equivalent with the ports. And it's also snappy.

There's no bloat. It's integrated nicely. It feels like a. It's nice to have it just on the file system. You can just browse the file system and see your options. Yes, definitely. I did run into issues that I want to mention for anyone trying this.

I did try to just install some stuff and ran into some certificate errors, which ended up being just a time clock synchronization issue for me. It took me a really long time to figure out that was the deal. So I just enabled NTP and got my clock back up and running. Everything worked fine. But I wasted a ton of time on that. That's your PSA in case you run into that.

I will say, once you try the installer, you will see that it offers. They're not selected by default. It offers if you want to enable NTP, and do you want to enable NTP sync on boot. Did I take the hard method? Yeah, because I did that. I turned that on.

Yeah, I did too. I was just saying, I wonder if I would have had a worse time if I didn't. You guys didn't tell me anything about this. I was like, sure, why wouldn't I want? I expected my path to be easy mode. I thought I was taking the easy hack because I took an old Beelink and it's all Intel.

It's like a laptop from years ago. I took an old Beelink and it's all Intel. It's like a laptop from years ago. And I thought, this is gonna be a slam dunk. Intel CPU, old Intel video, Intel NIC. This thing's gonna boot right up. Everything's gonna work out of the box. I'm gonna start checking off and earning points right away. That does seem like a best case scenario to my naive mind.

He gave me the pie for it. So I sat down at the BSD bench with Brent, where he and I have everything set up there, and Brent's nicely... Have we talked about that? Because I came into the studio... You like the bench? There is very much a free BSD bench. It's our battle station bench.

The BSD battle station bench with Brent is what it is. Yeah. And it's great, because have like ethernet ready there with a switch and power so we can hook up different stuff and HDMI and the monitors, just plug a machine and try it. And so the first thing I went to was Easy Mode B-Link. It was a long week and I thought, okay, I just, I wanna win, I wanna win.

And it did boot. It didn't really do much else than that out of the box. I was surprised really how much there was to do. But, you know, so I bailed on the live environment pretty quickly and I just went over to the installer image that boots and I chose the installer option. And I really like U.S. I really do like the installer.

It's really just a nice utility to get the job done. And the options around ZFS integration were really slick. And the options around, like, do you want to start these particular things or secure these types of things? I like that, since it's coming in, I'm coming in fresh. It also felt, I think, looking back on it, sometimes some of those text installers,

there's a lot of screens to click through, depending on what things you're customizing. Often those are sort of like, right, the extra or alternate installer, so that's meant for edge cases. So I liked the balance of there were things to configure, but if you just wanted to hit enter a few times, you could pretty much just get through it real quick.

It felt classical while also still feeling like it's a maintained piece of software. Yeah. Yeah. And I love a good in-curses interface, even if it's not technically in-curses. I feel like you had some muscle memory on this one. I was over your shoulder watching you go through this install process, and you were zooming through it in a way that I...

It is very reminiscent to the installer back in the FreeBSD 7, 8, and 9 era. It just does more stuff and yeah, it was very much like, oh yeah, I've seen this before. And I liked that aspect of it. So I was able to get FreeBSD 14.2 booting because I was going the Intel route, so I didn't have any issues there. So thankfully I was able to go at the latest release.

After it was done installing, I kind of immediately was like, well, what do I do now? What is the first thing you do with a blank BSD system? When you go the free BSD route, you just get a terminal, right? You get a TTY and that's it. There's nothing else going on. So I thought, okay, well, let's go install Plasma.

Well, Plasma 6 not available yet. Or if you want to jump through, I suppose, a bunch of hoops, right? You could get Plasma 6. But Plasma 5 is still where we're at. We're still on Xorg. And you got to install several, I suppose, a bunch of hoops, right? You could get plasma six, but plasma five is still where we're at. We're still on Xorg. And you got to install several tools like they have meta packages, but it doesn't include things like, you know, as DDM and other things like that, that

you kind of actually need to go into a full graphical session. So thankfully it's pretty easy to look that stuff up. So I do the old package install and I install that stuff. And, uh, like a total Linux user, I reboot the system and I just expect it's going to boot into X. Right? Because if I've implicitly installed the meta package and SSD, SDDM or whatever, like probably want that to start properly. And Linux, a Linux package manager, you know, in old like in the BSD parlance, you know, you go from a NIT 3 and you install your graphical desktop

and now you're on a NIT run level five, right? And it just, that's what I expected BSD to do. It does not. It just boots right back to the TTY because then you still have to do quite a bit of manual configuration in, you know, a couple of places like rc.conf to actually start everything, like all the

D bus stuff you need around there. And there's quite a few manual commands I had to run to get all that stuff talking and get those services started. So you very quickly get familiar with the free BSD services command and how to start and stop and how to add things using the, you know, sysrc command or whatever it is to add things to RC.com. And so you go through, you just kind of trial by air, figure out the bits that are missing. And. This is where I noticed a trend around the LLMs that I wanted to follow up with us is.

For getting things going like a graphical desktop environment or jails, an LLM sucks. Because in the Linux world, you can just, you know, install this command and when you install that command, there's a package script or whatever it is and it invokes the service and all those things are done for you and the LLM doesn't need to also tell you by the way you're going to install debuss. You're going to have to run these three B debuss commands. You're going

to have to have this debusservicedrc.com. Then you're going to have to set that thing to start and then oh, by the way, you're probably going to want to start this debuss service, drc.com. Then you're going to set that thing to start. And then, oh, by the way, you probably want to start it right away. The L.M. doesn't tell you any of that stuff where guides that are written by human beings do. But what the L.M. is really good at is specific commands. Like, I want to do X, Y, Z. What's the command on FreeBSD for that? Like getting real narrow specific stuff. Having something like perplexity makes transitioning to FreeBSD so much easier than it would have been a couple of years ago.

It's bonkers. It's just so much better, but it absolutely misses the context around dependencies and all that stuff where how-to guides still really fill a role. Yeah, I agree with that completely in my experience. How was your experience with troubleshooting using LLMs? Pretty decent, you know? I mean, honestly, pretty decent. I think it might be an easier target for LLMs because BSD just doesn't change at the rate Linux does. And so, you know, when these things got locked in a couple of years ago with their base knowledge set, it's

essentially the same stuff. So it's still valid. Where with Linux, sometimes I'm getting stuff for NICs that isn't valid anymore when I try to get it from an LLM or some other system. You know, I don't know if I had the same struggles with the pieces, but maybe it might have been just a prompt thing. I think I might have been asking for the whole, you know, bits and not just the package part?

So it might, I don't know, there might be ways to motivate them to include the additional context and how do you like, oh how do I integrate this into the rest of the system? Yeah, perhaps. It was, maybe I'll talk about this next week, but it was particularly glaringly obvious in trying to get Podman working.

It was really where it became like, oh, this is only giving me a small slice of the picture. I bet that is probably one of the cases where FreeBSD has changed, because that's a relatively new feature. And probably just with the lesser dispersion of guides and blog posts and whatever, less well-indexed.

Yeah, definitely. I think that's interesting. So the other thing I was kind of surprised about is, after you go through the process of installing sound, again, you can have the sound devices show up, but you can't play sound. I didn't expect this. I didn't expect to be able to see the volume levels,

see all the sound devices, but I actually had to go into rc.com and actually say, play sound, before sound would actually work on those devices. I was kind of surprised by that. You wouldn't want rogue sound, would you? I am really glad, though, that I took the FreeBSD route first so I could get the idea of what it's like to build up

a modern plasma desktop and get to a functional plasma desktop before I went and tried GhostBSD. Because I think next week, one of the things I want to do is I want to try what that path is like now with GhostBSD. I'm expecting it to be a lot smoother. So if you're gonna use it as desktop, right? It's obviously the route you would take. But as a server, FreeBSD assumes less is more.

And everything you build up and add on and turn on implicitly. I like that. Yeah, it makes sense. You know, I always liked that about Arch, especially compared to sort of like Debian systems where like, I wanna, especially if you wanna like do things in phases, you're like, I Arch especially compared to sort of like Debian systems We're like I want to especially if you want to like do things in phases like I want to install that but like I was gonna put in my own comp and stuff before you went and started the service

Yeah, yeah what now Apache's listening on my prod server, right? Yeah, there's yeah like some distributions a lot of both Don't go way too far in that direction One password comm slash unplugged that's all lowercase. It's the number one password com slash unplugged. That's all lowercase. It's the number one password dot com slash unplugged. I have a question for you. Do your end users always and I mean always without exception work on company owned devices and IT approved apps?

I don't think so. I don't think it's possible. So I think the next natural question is how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices? Well OnePassword has the answer to this question. It's extended access management. OnePassword extended access management. It helps you secure every sign in for every app on every device.

Because it solves problems that traditional IAMs and MDMs just can't touch. And it's also bundling one password. You know one password. We've all had those situations where we've seen the passwords under the keyboard stuck to the monitor or somebody uses the same password everywhere. You think, God, if they just had a great password manager that would solve all of this. Well, one password's award-winning password manager is trusted by millions of users, 150,000 plus businesses from IBM to Slack, and now they're doing more than just

securing passwords. Now with extended access management, they're taking to the next level. Plus, One Password is ISO 27001 certified, and they have regular third-party audits, and they have the largest bug bounty out there. They just exceed the standards set by everybody else. Secure every app and every identity, even the unmanaged ones. Go to onepassword.com slash unplugged. That's all lowercase. Again, support the show, check it out and try it out. It's onepassword.com slash unplugged. Well, given we're all in the studio together this last week, we have some excitement.

We're quite excited about Planet Nix and do have some things in the works in the background. Yeah, I've been cooking and been talking to the good folks over at FLOX to see if they can make it possible for us to get down to cover Planet Nix and things are lining up. And so I think we're going to be able to take our coverage up to a whole other level this year and it's really because of flock. So I'm going to tell you more about that as we get closer. But we wanted to just get this event in front of you so you know what's going on. So we wanted to bring Zack on

the show. Well, Zack Mitchell is joining us on the show for the third time. He's in a rare guest club, really, and Zach is a software engineer who's building reproducible software at Phlox, and he's here to talk about Planet Nix, like we've mentioned, kicks off March 6th through the 7th in Pasadena, California.

Zach, welcome back. Thank you for having me. I feel honored to be in such a prestigious club of return guests. The third guest tier, yeah. That's pretty great. And the reason why we like having you on is because we're always very excited about big NICS events

and we kind of have a fresh start with Planet NICS. Give me the layout, what's happening? Yeah, so this is a Nix conference. We have a mixture of talks and workshops. This is laid out or spread out over two days. And each day, we're going to have two tracks going. So both days, you're going to have a mix of talks and workshops.

At the end of the first day, we have lightning talks. And I basically ruthlessly limit people to like five minutes to talk about kind of whatever they want. The second day we have an unconference at the end and so if you don't know what that is it's kind of a self-organizing event where at the beginning I just kind of put up a whiteboard and give people markers and you know you can go right up whatever topics you want. And then we have kind of a voting process to see what groups we break out into. And you just kind of do whatever you want in those groups for however long we allow

it. We might split it up into two different sections to just allow time to hit a bunch of different topics. But that's always fun because you get a bunch of nerds who want to talk about one very specific thing and you can kind of congregate and have dedicated time to go talk about that. We'll have some tables set up. How this is exactly going to work is still kind of being figured out, like the details are still being finalized, but we'll have some space for kind of community projects to set up a table, talk to people who want to, you know, either get involved or learn about it, stuff like that. So we'll have a lot of space for

the community to kind of self-organize or talk about whatever they want to talk about in addition to all the talks and workshops and stuff that we have set up. Yeah, so I'm really excited about that. As a Nix user, I have the strong sense that there's a need for a community event like this. I feel like there's a lot of people excited about this idea and being right alongside scale really worked well last year. And tell me a little bit about like,

there's like a combo there that you can do, right? Where you could be like a planet Knicks and go to scale combo pack. Yeah, I believe if you buy a scale pass, that gets you into Planet Nix automatically. There's also, I think, an expo pass, but I think that's a separate thing. So I'd have to get back to you about specifically

whether that's correct. If somebody's just doing Planet Nix, do they need to get an independent Planet Nix pass? I think that's actually just part of the scale pass. Scale, so you just get scale. Okay. Yeah. All right, well then I'll follow up if that's not correct. Okay, well we'll put links in the show notes

if it's otherwise. I don't know, I'm not really even sure exactly what I'm looking forward to. I think it's like meeting people, getting to know people that are doing things and changing things in the NICS community. I looked at some of the presentations. Obviously attending some of those is going to be a big part. Will you have a sense of what you're looking forward to, Wes?

Oh, I just think the NICS, folks drawn to NICS, and especially folks drawn enough to show up to a Nix event, they're always doing something creative, clever, pushing the limits of not only Nix and Linux, but just sort of what you can do with computers. And I'm just thinking last time we were talking with Nix folks, everyone's like running up with their laptop too.

You know, look at how I'm doing this, look at this version. So I think I'm gonna find a bunch of tools to take home with me and I'm excited. Definitely. I feel like too, we're going in knowing we have a little bit different sense of what to expect, I think. Because last year was totally a whole new concept to us.

So we're going to come in, I think, with a bit of an idea of how to hit the ground running and do it right. Zach, I imagine that's just kind of true for Planet Nix in general. There must be some lessons learned that are getting applied to Planet Nix. Yeah, we took a lot of things away from running Nixcon North America last year. One was kind of having more of an idea of what the ground game looks like. Last year, when we set up the tables, there's an issue with printing signs from scale on the scale side, and so we didn't quite have signs set up and so people didn't

quite know where to check in. And there's also a little bit of a shortage of volunteers at the very beginning. So we were just kind of grabbing people and saying, okay, you're helping people check in now. And I think, I think one attendee like brought their girlfriend with them. And I don't think she quite knew what this all was, but she ended up being like one of the people setting up or like checking people in at the tables. Oh, that's great.

So while awesome, I would prefer if we have things a little bit more nailed down. That's one of the things that we've figured out this year. Yeah, the submission process for the program and stuff like that was basically the same. Then I think went pretty smoothly. We doubled the amount of talk and workshop slots. We're doing two tracks over two days this time. Wow. Whenever you make that commitment to have twice the... It's a lot of organizing.

Yeah. So you commit to having twice as many slots to fill, and you wonder, OK, is there going to be enough slots to fill and you kind of wonder like, okay, is there going to be enough interest to fill all these slots? And the answer is unequivocally yes. Good. So like that all, yeah, that all went very smoothly.

I was really happy with it. I'm really happy with our talk lineup. We have a lot of talks and workshops. I'm really excited to see personally some of these talks. And so as one of the organizers, I will like have to force myself to pass the baton to somebody so I can go watch talks and stuff like that. Otherwise, I'd just be in organizer mode the whole time. Yeah, I think last time we just saw you briefly zipping around anytime we would run into you.

Yeah. So you definitely deserve taking some time to enjoy the hard work. I tend to oversubscribe myself, but it's always like kind of for something fun. So like, yeah, last time I was kind of running around like mad, cause like I said, the ground game was not quite as figured out as it will be this year. There's always something, it does get better every year you do it obviously, but there's always something.

And you're always trying something new too, also. Yeah, every time we do this there's a chance to kind of do it better. Well, I think the only last question I have is, can I count on you to give us the hookup on the great after parties and places to go after each day? Can I count on you for that, Zach? You can absolutely count on me for that.

Yeah, last year we had kind of like an offsite karaoke thing. Oh my goodness, really? Yeah, that was pretty fun. If you have any ice rink skating, let Brent know. He'd be there in a second. I'm definitely in. Well, hey, so speaking of ice sports and things that are popular in Canada,

I recently picked up curling. So I've been curling for the last year. Whoa, uh-oh, uh-oh, Brent. Okay, curling, so I've been curling for the last year. Uh-oh, uh-oh, Brad. Okay, well, we can be friends then. Yeah, yeah, we can learn out about that now. That's great. All right, Zach, well, we'll let you go

and see if you can enjoy the rest of your Sunday, but thanks for coming on and giving us the updates. Good to chat with you again. Yeah, really excited to see you all out there, and I'll see all of you friendly Nix people out there as well, thanks for having me. You know we are gonna bring you the best planet all of you friendly Nix people out there as well. Thanks for having me. You know we are going to bring you the best Planet Nix coverage possible.

Thank you again to Zach for joining us. Also keep it on your radar. If you can't make it to Planet Nix, maybe you can make it to Linux Fest Northwest, April 25th through the 27th in the beautiful Bellingham, Washington. Once again, at the Bellingham Technical College, 25 years of Linux Fest Northwest. You know your boys are gonna be there. Whoo! Of course.

So we'd love to see you there, and you can get information at LinuxFestNorthwest.org. Oh, and look at you, Wes Payne, on the website. Oh, yeah. Wes Payne on the website. I'll be giving a talk. Wes Payne on the website. I'll be giving a talk. That's one reason to come.

Really? What's your talk about? Well, if you want to run your very own lightning server, powered by Nyx, maybe you should check it out. I'll say that much. If you want to just come say hi, come check it out. You know what, we always have something going on, and we'll have more plans coming up soon.

But right now, we're gonna get laser focused on Planet Nix. And now it is time for the boost. Well we did receive some amazing boosts last week. Thank you to everyone who boosted episode 600 and we certainly are starting with a baller. That's right our baller booster this week is a maniac and it is... DEMOTOR! Hey rich laster! That's right, our baller booster this week is a maniac, and it is Demetor! Hey, rich laster!

Coming in with 600,000 sats! Wow! Yahoo! Yes! Yes, he wanted to send 600 for episode 600. Thanks for all the shows, and he says, see you at Linux Fest Northwest. Amazing. Yes.

Uh, beers on us. There's on us. Thank you for the boost. Appreciate that dev and really looking forward to seeing you at Linux Fest Northwest and, um, thank you for the, uh, 600 acknowledgement too. It does feel like a big milestone. We're on the other side of it now and feeling good. Feeling really good.

Appreciate that. A Aeron boosted with 50,000 stats. I hoard that which your kind covet. I boosted in a while back saying that I am done with Windows and I'm making the jump to NixOS as a daily driver. Well, here's an update. Since my daily is also my gaming PC, it proved to be, well, a bit more of a challenge.

I ended up moving on to a Kibun 2 since I use a bunch of it at work and I'm quite familiar. However, don't worry, hope is not lost. I'm currently working on migrating my entire home lab to NixOS, at least where it makes sense. OK. I am a Docker and Ansible guy, so the declarative config totally clicked. NixOS only for my servers from here on out. Thanks for the great content.

Thank you for the great boost, A.A. Ron. That's very reasonable. And thanks for the update. We love hearing those. That's true. Thank you. We do. I always love knowing what's going on in the home lab, too. It doesn't have to be Nick's. Well, 40,000 Shotoshis came in from rotted mood. That's not possible. Nothing can do that.

You're not going to make Shotoshis a thing over there. I'll just slip it in and see if it catches on. Some thoughts on the tuxes. Please keep them. I think they're great and I look forward some of the work off y'all's hands is a good idea and I'm happy to help in any way I can. Well, thank you, Rotted Mood. So we are still in discussion. I think it's gonna be back in some form, although we don't have firm, firm commitments on that, but we have everybody who's kind of interested, so.

I couldn't help but notice the end of year comment. I think that was just, I think that was just a good thing. I think that was just a good thing. I think that was just a good thing. in some form, although we don't have firm, firm commitments on that, but we have everybody who's kind of interested, so. I couldn't help but notice the end of year comment. I think that was just one more shootin' down your spring idea. Oh, you're right.

Womp, womp. Good catch, good catch. Rodditt also says, happy late birthday to Chris, and congrats on 600 episodes, and follows that up with six licks, live longs and prospers. You're doing a good job. Thank you. Nice to hear from you, Rodden.

Now fly over friend. Why do I love that so much? I wonder, right? Fly over friend comes in with 22,222 sats. That's an afflac. Congratulations on 600. Here's the 600 more. Concerning the book conversation and the pre-show,

I'll add a big up vote for the Expeditionary Four series, and the reader for the audiobooks is top notch. He's good, I'm having a little hard time falling asleep to him sometimes. Well, it's too exciting, isn't it? And he's got a lot of, you know, he gives a presentation, as I like to say. He gives a presentation.

Can you mimic his presentation? He's just got a range, you know, there's a lot as I like to say he gives a presentation. Can you mimic his presentation? He's just got a range, you know, it's a lot. There's a lot of energy. Oh you wait Yeah versus like a monotonous voice where you can little yeah where you can just sort of tune out. Yeah, okay. Yeah I guess so Derivation dingus moves in with 20,000. Oh, hey, how about that? What do you suppose the 20,000 sad is? We got anything something we haven't used for a while. You want something? How about?

Sometimes my genius is, it's almost frightening. Since Chris asked for feedback on the NixOS analogy, here's my attempt. Traditional Linux distributions are like modifying a car while driving it. Whether it's routine maintenance or you wanna add a fancy turbocharger, you're making changes to your only working vehicle.

If something goes wrong, you might be stuck with a partially working car or even totally stranded. Each modification builds upon previous ones and it becomes increasingly difficult to undo changes or remember exactly how everything was connected originally. By contrast, XOS is like modifying the original plans for the car and then using a replicator to make a new car with the modifications. If something goes wrong,

and you just need to get going again, all you have to do is jump back into the car you started with. That's true, that's good. I love this. That's good, thank you, Dervation. You know, Brett and I were doing an oil change, and I just bought a kit,

because I've always just bought this kit. But this time I got fancier oil, so it was a different kit, and they didn't include all the oil And so we're done. We're wrapping up and we're like, we're still short like at least two liters or something of oil It was bad. Like well now we have a non-functional car and we don't have the oil and of course, it's fancy boy oil So I can't just like go to O'Reilly's Lennox Thank thankfully we had another car, but you know, it's like in a way

I should just have a very prescribed process that I follow. I shouldn't rely on these pre-made kits and I should order the pieces myself. You know you have everything that you need. Yeah, the analogy works. I tell you what. Thanks, Dervation. Appreciate that. Well, the dude is abiding with 20,000 cents. Well, I'll be dipped. I was re-listening to yesterday's live feed and I don't believe anyone mentioned this. The winner title is a reference to a movie. Go watch it if you haven't. Oh, oh, everything everywhere all at once, right.

We didn't mention it, but I think people kind of knew, right? It felt like it was a riff. By the way, I also voted for this one since it was clever, despite the fact that the other title was the one I proposed. I know that you joke about the site speed of 1Password all the time in the live feed, but did you know it's built with Hugo? Oh, I did not know that. At least the support site is, but I think the rest of the site as well.

Oh. No wonder it's so fast. It does pop right up. 1password.com slash unplugged just pops right up. Thank you, the dude abides. I learned a little bit in that boost. Appreciate that. Ham is?

Hamish McClain. Hamish McClain. Clean? Clain. Comes in with 6,666 cents. Devil's donation from the London Gang with love. Oh, that's amazing. Nice. Thank you, London Gang with love. Oh, that's amazing. Nice.

Thank you, London Gang. Thank you. Well, I think that's good, right? Maybe? I don't know. Thank you very much. For you, Bussin with 6,000 sets. Happy 600.

Hey, thank you. We got another one of those from TR Selby, 6000SATS. Testing in production. Congrats on 600. We'd never do that. No, never. Shapirami came in with 2000SATS in total. Chris, you said that it's ironic that now podcasts that are really relevant are being

kidnapped by YouTube. But on the other hand, it does make sense that as some media formats become more relevant, these big platforms want to try to dominate it. I guess that those like you become highly specialized in this format and a niche and somehow suffer the most because of it. I think moving to V for V was the right move. Well, first of all, I really appreciate your insight

and how you really do seem to get it. And that's, I think, a very and how you really do seem to get it. And that's, I think, a very valid point. As these things got more relevant, of course big money would get in. Yeah, victim of world success in a way. And in fact, to that point, it's a well-known fact that YouTube just wrote checks to some podcasters

to move over to YouTube as their primary distribution platform, just like Spotify did several years ago. They just write checks. Well, they do the same thing to go, right? Go make videos on other content, promote that they should go watch it on YouTube. Yeah, it's just how they do it. And I do, I still wanna keep an open ear to the audience that wants to advocate for video.

Like I don't wanna shut it down entirely, but I like our focus on audio because it means we can do multi-track audio. We can try to clean it up. We can do things that we just can't really do with video on a budget that's sustainable. But yeah, he follows up there. Yeah, Shapirame continues here on the topic

of shower thoughts and our crazy wacky methods of trying to record them. I have a glass door on the shower that separates it from the rest of the bathroom, so I decided to try a pen that writes on glass. Thank you for the tip, what a great idea. How many people are solving this out there? I love it.

Yeah. Yeah. I just wonder how do we explore this new niche in the show more? I feel like this is a show swag opportunity because if we could come up with a product, I would buy it. You guys would probably buy it.

Sounds like people in the audience would buy it. This would be a great unplugged product is the shower thoughts accessory. Shower thoughts saver? Yeah, the unplugged shower thought saver. That's really funny. That's really funny. Somebody write that down because I won't remember,

but I think that's, I would own one. The immunologist is here was, thank you for the boost. The immunologist is here with 6,000, 10 sats. He's a good guy. He's a real good guy. No, he's a great guy. Happy 600, stay decentralized. I wanted to try FreeBSD on my Raspberry Pi 4,

but I realized it needs a USB keyboard for that. And I use Bluetooth for everything, even my sound. So no BSD for me this time. Wow, a hard line on the Bluetooth. Interesting. Yeah, we just went real simple wired, just because, even ethernet. Just wanted everything to just work as easily as possible.

I'm not sure why we instinctively started there, but it seemed to work out well for us. Yeah, yeah, I think if we were going Bluetooth it'd be a challenge. Brooke loves you, boost in with 11,000 sets. Well, uh. I hate building PCs. Howdy, AJB, just wanted to say thanks

for keeping me entertained for all these work road trips. Well, howdy. Just wanted to say thanks for keeping me entertained for all these work road trips. Well, howdy. I got my Albie Hub note up and running just for y'all. Oh, wow. Well done. On BSD, right? Also, I think y'all should run a community poll.

Try to see how many people in the audience watch video podcasts or audio exclusively. Might be a useful insight when deciding if that's the way to go. Hmm, I kind of feel like as we've been doing with the people boosting and telling us, we're getting some signal on this. All right. Well, thank you for setting Balbi up. I know you had a split fail. Yeah, just so you know, the way it works with lightning is it could be a problem on our end, like if our node was offline or something,

but it can also just be a problem like not being able to find a route or the routes that you did find not being able to successfully transmit the payment. And in those cases, unfortunately there's not much we can look at because our node never finds out about it. Yeah, yeah. We won't get the stats, but you'll keep the stats.

But the other, we have several nodes in the process, so we will generally, most of them get it. It's very rare, but things change from time to time and we just have to stay on top of it. They are like a Tamagotchi pet. And if you are on the Matrix, feel free to ping me, and we can do some troubleshooting too. Oh, that's nice of you.

Well, Lotum Pax sent in 10,000 Shotoshis. Pew, pew, pew! Happy 600, been a huge fan since around episode 200. Right on. And we'll happily keep tuning in for that next 600 and beyond. Well, thank you, Lodd, nice to hear from you. Thanks for boosting in.

Truegrits is here with 17-0-1-0 Sats. Is that a Star Trek? Sure. I am programmed in multiple techniques. Hello, apologies for missing the past window to make it into 600. Been busy recently, chipping away at some home projects. Oh, that's great.

That's always nice. But I finally pulled the trigger on getting my Sats off the exchange. You can thank the Cash App not supporting Graphene OS for that. Ha ha. And also happy belated birthday to Chris. Cheers to 600.

Thank you, True Grits. It's great to hear from you. Gene Bean boosts in with 3,246 sets. There he is. Hey Gene Bean. I know that many people consume podcasts on YouTube and I have no problem with video, but please don't make me use that platform

or make me feel like I'm getting an inferior product by being audio only on my end. Word, word. I think we sympathize with that. That drives me crazy, especially when you've been listening to an audio podcast and then they go to a YouTube live stream and then they spend so much time

like addressing the YouTube live chat or what they're looking at. And it's like, you were an audio podcast, what happened here? Yeah. Gene Bain also wants to know our process for combining multiple tracks in Whisper. Good question.

We're still working on the actual refining process. We might just do a little bit on it when it's all ready and done. Yeah, right now, yeah, we're manually running them, but we plan to write processes and scripts around that. So it's nothing magical at the moment. It's just hard work. And I don't think we've gotten anybody,

not a single person, said anything about the transcripts. Well, Gene commented a bit. Gene did, Gene. But I mean, outside. And outside of this too, in Matrix. Oh, okay, good, good, good, good. I was like, oh man, we worked hard on that and people said they wanted it.

And then nobody said anything. I think it might just because they're busy listening and enjoying the transcripts. Maybe, just works, right? Just works. Well, Exception boosted in a row of ducks. Hey, look at those ducks. Happy 601, why?

Because it's a prime number. Nice, thank you, Exception. It's nice to hear from you. Hey, Oppie1984 is checking in with 4,000 sats. Let's hear it good, buddy. Related happy 600 boosts. Also, just say no to video. Nice, Oppie, thank you, vote registered.

Sire boosts in with 10,000 sets. Smoke if you got them. Unfortunately, it seems like my computer is allergic to FreeBSD. Oh man. No matter what I do, I cannot get XORG to work. Very sad. So Sire, if you want to take another pass at it, FreeBSD is just going

to use frame buffer by default unless you go into your RC.com and tell it which video driver to load and you got to install those drivers. Like even with my Intel system, I had to go in there and tell it to use the manual and tell the I'd install stuff and then tell it to use the Intel driver and load that. Otherwise, it just won't try. Yes, like DRM dash K mod or something like that. There's a mod and all that. But you find out how to get that working and then you'll be cooking. Right. I'm sorry to hear about the trouble.

I'd love to hear other people's success or trials with free BSD. Next week is the episode to really report in and let us know how it's going. Thank you, everybody who boosts in and supports episode 601. This here a little crazy podcast is made possible by our community, our members and the folks who submit value back to the show, either through time, talent or treasure. And we had 37 of you just stream those sets as you listen to the podcast. And we stacked fifty four thousand seven hundred and twenty three sets through the streamers. Thank you very much.

That streamers, when you combine that with the boosters The show stacked a very reasonable 892 thousand six hundred and forty nine sats Thank you everybody We are planning a long, bright future. And being able to directly support the show means that your value comes into the show. We can manage that in the future to give ourselves runway,

perhaps leverage this to really be able to go on trips or have episodes that don't require sponsorship at all. It's a bright, bright future. And it's made possible by our audience that makes the content sustainable. It's just a beautiful cycle of life there, and we really appreciate it. If you'd like to boost in, you can probably do it the easiest way by getting the Strike app to grab those Sats and then the Fountain app to send a boost. Or if you don't want to try out a different

podcast app, you can do with Breeze, B-R-E-E-Z. And there's a couple of ways to get the Sats into that, including Strike. There's a lot of great podcasting to do apps and you get lots of features in there like our live stream when we're live right now in the app, it would tell you right at this moment that we're live. Additionally, you get the full transcript support and sometimes you get the full dietary transcript version in the podcasting to do apps. It has cloud chapters, which are an improved version of chapters. When the show was released, you get released announcements within 90 seconds.

And then of course, it also supports things like boosts. And there's an entire category of things coming to podcasting to do apps like audio books and more. And all of this, all of this is an open source spec that's just trying to make podcasting competitive with platforms like YouTube and Spotify, but doing it in a decentralized way where the RSS feed is always the source of truth, not a proprietary platform, not some sort of hosting provider. Your XML file is the source of truth and anyone can read that.

That's what Podcasting2.0 is all about and I encourage you to go get a new app at PodcastingApps.com and we appreciate the support. Now, our pick this week is something kind of special because we mentioned a while ago that we've really been enjoying the Garmin watches. Brent tried it and said, guys, you take a look at this. Well, I'd love an Apple watch replacement. Got me a Garmin watch, connected it with my giraffe in OS. Really been loving the health stats, really been liking the functionality. You were using it this weekend while you were rock climbing to kind of keep track of how you're doing and recovering.

But there is this sort of uncomfortableness with it's tied into the Garmin Connect app. I don't know how I would move this to another device in the future or if I ever wanted to leave Garmin. Well, I know you absolutely love having all that history as well. And I recently came across this little project, Garmin DB. It basically downloads and parses data from Garmin Connect or Garmin Watch, but it also does Fitbits and Microsoft Health CSV files. So it goes and grabs all of those and allows you to analyze that data in a SQLite database, basically, through Jupyter

Notebook so you can also visualize all of that data with this project. And it pulls down everything. I mean everything. It's like your heart rates, activities, your climbing, your stress intensity, minutes, all that stuff from the daily summaries page on Garmin if you know that. But it also does all your sleep and weight and basically pulls everything you possibly can get. Yeah, and then the tools to analyze it and visualize it. Well, I imagine, Chris, it's not too much of a stretch

to get this to implement this data into your Home Assistant instance. I would not be surprised if somebody's already working on that, Brent. Maybe we should look into it. Yeah, maybe I don't wanna know though. But, you know, it is nice that it supports other devices too. I didn't realize that.

I'm kind of excited with the potential of the Pebble stuff maybe kind of getting rejuvenated with Google open sourcing all of that. It'd be nice to plug that into this as well. So they could just be one more device you could export your health data from. So it's called GarminDB, but it also, like Brent said, supports a lot of the Fitbits.

And whatever the MS Health file format is, it supports that as well. And it looks really great. And GPL2. Very nice. GPL2. So you got yourself a nice open source app, too. And that's, you know, I gotta say,

one of its killer features over the Apple Watch, there's probably ways to export Apple Watch health data. If anybody knows, I kind of would like to know. I wouldn't mind going to my old health data. But this is just this is the difference right here, right? Is tools like this basically just sitting on top of Python and SQL and CSV files, and it makes it possible. That's pretty cool. Nice. Fine, Brent.

Thanks for sharing it with the class. See you next week. Same bat time, same bat station. We're live at 9 a.m. No, 10 a.m. Pacific. Got to get that right. And of course, you know, I'm going to screw it up. We're live at 10 a.m. Pacific, which what is that, Wes, in the East Coast? Is that plus three? Yeah.

1 p.m. Eastern. Okay. So yeah, we used to be three. So now we're, yeah, it's 1 p.m. Eastern. Right. And we will also be live in your podcasting app. We'll be live in your podcasting app. We'll be live in your podcasting app.

We'll be live in your podcasting app. We'll be live in your podcasting app. We'll be live in your podcasting app. We'll be live in your podcasting app. We'll be live in your podcasting app. We'll be live in your podcasting app. We'll be live in your podcasting app. We'll be live in your podcasting app. We'll be live Okay, so yeah, we used to be three. So now we're, yeah, it's one PM Eastern, right. And we will also be live in your podcasting app

and you can plug jblive.fm, jblive.fm in wherever you're at and listen to the show. We like it when you get in the matrix too and help us title it. And you know, it's like having people in there gives it a nice vibe. So that's all over there. And we'd love it if you'd join us live next week.

Who knows? It's gonna be the end of the free BSD challenge. I know that you're gonna wanna I think so. And you could always pipe in and tell us how it's going to in that mumble room will be running as well. Now links to what we talked about today over at Linux unplugged.com slash 601. You'll also find our contact form, the RSS fade details about the matrix and all that kind of stuff slipping into an accent. I don't know why. You find the details, also the rules for the free BSD challenge. Those are gonna be in our show notes. Just look down in the links. You'll see the rules for the free BSD challenge and we'd love to hear

how it's going for you. Don't forget we also want to hear about your multi monitor setup. Are you using multi monitor, single screen? Tell us your setup! We'd like to know if it's a popular thing in our audience or it's something we don't have to worry about. Anyways, thanks so much for listening. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday. So so Thanks for watching!