LINUX Unplugged - 624: Tiny PC, Huge Problems

Episode Date: July 20, 2025

Everything wrong with our homelabs, and how we're finally fixing them. Plus: two self-hosted apps you didn't know you needed.Sponsored By:Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility. 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. Unraid: A powerful, easy operating system for servers and storage. Maximize your hardware with unmatched flexibility. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMHome Assistant — Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts.ODROID-H4 – ODROID — A powerful and versatile board that supports Intel's latest Alder Lake processors with AVX2 extensions. It features DDR5 memory, 4 SATA ports, dual BIOS, and up to 3 display outputs.Home Assistant YellowUGREEN NASync DXP2800 2-Bay Desktop NASMINISFORUM S100 Mini PC StickGEEKOM Air12 Mini PCNebula Quick StartDebugging with Nebula SSH commandsUsing Experimental Lighthouse DNS with NebulaUpgrading a Nebula network to IPv6 overlay addressesUsing Dedicated Relays for Total Connectivitynebula NixOS Modulenorohind.nebula: — Ansible role to manage nebula vpn hostsdracut-nebula — dracut-nebula integrates the Nebula overlay networking tool (VPN, tunnel) into the initramfsnebula-gen: — Simple script to initialize a CA and quickly sign host keys and certificates for the Nebula VPNAndrewPaglusch/Nebula-Ansible-Role — Nebula VPN Overlay Network Installer With Ansiblenebula-lighthouse-service — This server is a public Nebula VPN Lighthouse Service. You can use it in case you don’t have a publicly accessible server to run your own Nebula Lighthouse.nebula-vpn-helm — Helm chart for managing Nebula VPNvpn-dashboard-react-nebula — This project demonstrates a secure, lightweight, peer-to-peer VPN architecture using the Nebula overlay network integrated with a React-based front-end dashboard.ChrisLAS/bluenix — Build your own custom Universal Blue Image!Linkwarden — ⚡️⚡️⚡️ Self-hosted collaborative bookmark manager to collect, read, annotate, and fully preserve what matters, all in one place.Announcing Linkwarden 2.11Linkwarden Browser Extensionneko — A self hosted virtual browser that runs in docker and uses WebRTC.Soltros-OS — My personal RPM-OStree based OS.Miniflux — Minimalist and Opinionated Feed Readerminiflux/v2 — Minimalist and opinionated feed reader[Bug]: "External link" should point to the audio filefeat(rss): fallback to enclosure URL when entry URL is missing5 Best Reference Management Tools for Linux in 2024Zotero — Your personal research assistantAeon — The Linux Desktop for people who want to "get stuff done"winapps — Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration.

Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Well, coming up on the show today, there might be more than just a couple of things wrong with our home labs, but we do have a plan to fix them up. Today, we'll talk about what needs a fixing

and then what hardware might just do the job. Plus, we have two great self-hosted apps we've come across recently. You didn't even know you needed. And then we're gonna round the show out with some great shout outs and boosts and picks and more. So before we go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello, Mumble Room. Thank you for joining us. Boys, I gotta break format for a second.

The cone of silence. Get in your bread. Come on, squeeze it. What's with the fur? I'm a little nervous. Is that all right? Is it okay? Yeah, it is. It's kind of a big deal. We have something exciting, and I don't know, I don't want to blow it. I don't want to blow it.

You know, because this is something we've been thinking about for a while. We have an opportunity to bring on a new sponsor, and this project was co-created by a listener of the show. It's something we followed for years. And it's tremendously good. And the company is great too. They're building the company the right way.

You know, they're not like hooked on that VC crack, right? They're doing it in a smart, sensible way. And so I'm, I don't know, I'm just, I don't wanna mess it up. You got this. You think so? Uh-huh, just be yourself. All right, I'll give it a go. So let me tell you what is it? Don't forget about the reverse code I believe you got a tip for me. I think what oh, that's it. That's your that's your motivation. You've not royally messed it up

Previously, I know this might be a big deal, but I believe in you. I think you got this. I Feel like it's a big deal too. Cuz we're like the only podcast in the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're at, you know? I know. That is a big deal actually. Okay, now I'm feeling nervous. I know, they're reaching a new stage and it's just super exciting.

All right, okay, thanks guys. You got that. Check out defined.net slash unplugged. Go check out Nebula, and they have managed Nebula from defined networking. It's a decentralized VPN built the right way on the open source Nebula platform that we love and it is optimized for speed and efficiency where the nodes use less network activity, less battery life and it's using industry leading encryption. It's built on top of the noise protocol, which is super cool.

So that's what they're using to exchange keys, do the symmetric encryption. And all of that's open source, independently audited. And unlike traditional VPNs, you can host what are called the lighthouses, if you like, or you can use their managed products. So you are in complete control. what are called the lighthouses, if you like, or you can use their managed products. So you are in complete control. They built this for Slack back in the day.

And it had to be great from the start because Slack has a global infrastructure, as you can imagine. They're across so many different data centers around the world, and they need all of that stuff to be able to communicate, and they're dealing with corporate private information. So the requirements to get it right are astronomical.

Could break the company if they get it wrong kind of stuff. So Nebula has been engineered for scale and performance from day one. Each host connects directly to each other and then it queries Lighthouse nodes for routing information which you can host that yourself. That's a big deal. And these lightweight queries, they hit all available Lighthouses simultaneously, so you have uninterrupted operation. Even if one of your nodes is down,

if you have five other nodes online or two other nodes online, everything continues to hum right along. So if you go over to define.net slash unplugged, you can check out Nebula and manage Nebula for 100 hosts, absolutely free, no credit card required, nothing matches Nebula's level of resilience, speed, and scalability.

I am super thrilled that they're joining the unplugged program because this is a project we've been watching since almost the day it was announced. We very quickly brought the co-creator on to talk about it and have been tracking their progress ever since. I think you're gonna love it. It redefines the VPN experience. Check it out at defined.net slash unplugged. Support the show and it's great too because it's from the community. It's really something special. Defined.net slash unplugged. Do we have any last minute housekeeping?

I know you're gonna be at the Knicks event attached to DefCon. Yeah, that's right, Knicks Vegas. So if you go to DefCon, reach out and see you there. That's coming up real soon, Westpane. That's right, next month. Wow, are you flying? Uh-huh.

You got a hotel? I do. You're already done then. I know, surprisingly organized. Now you just need to get the got a hotel? I do. You're all you're already done then I know surprisingly now you just need to get the presentation done. That's right. Okay. All right. That's it, right? That's all we have for the housekeeping. I think all right All right, let's do a home lab check-in There's a lot that's been going on behind the scenes Brent got his home assistant up and running again in the van and

He's actually been using some of the sensors to test different systems on the van. So I don't know, walk us through, you got the system going again, and how are you using it, Brent? Yeah, we together got the system going, oh, feels like months ago now. And the idea is to have a permanent home assistant set up

in this crazy van that I somehow have in my possession that I'm putting lots of love into. And I wanted to do some testing on the fridge that is from the 90s and is still in this thing. And it's like this bizarre absorption fridge. I don't have any experience with those kinds of things. It can run propane and 12 volts and 120 volts. I just had so many mysteries and I thought, what a perfect use case to use Home Assistant

to track how good this thing is. Like, what does it do with temperatures? Can it get down to the right temperatures? Can it keep it there, et cetera, et cetera? It's worth noting that when you bring sensor data into Home Assistant, like a temperature sensor, it automatically graphs, charts, and logs that for you. So not only do you get real-time information, but you get historical data automatically. So great. And I'm, you know, compared to some who are listening, very

relatively new to Home Assistant. I feel slightly ashamed about that, but I have a project and it's getting me there. And I didn't realize this graphing was just built in. So such a, such a win for me because I could just plug a couple sensors in and just get exactly what I needed right away. I did randomly meet a stranger with almost an identical van who offered to purchase this fridge off me. So I had extra incentive to be like, Hey, this thing works really well but I wanted to make sure that I was tracking this stuff in a way that I don't know I could provide a cool little graph of ambient temperature versus this fridge temperature so having a little project like this is a perfect way to dive into learning home assistant

you know there's I'm probably using 2% of what it can do, maybe less, but it's been super fun to get it up and running again. I feel like the power system in the van can maybe handle it a bit more. I was really quite nervous about that previously. But I think I can say I now have a Home Assistant setup that is going to be on full-time 24 hours a day

unless all my battery's died. So I think that's a big step for me. Yes, welcome to the club. Thank you. That's great. I feel like I have lots to learn. I'm not a long-time member, but I'm just, you know. Yeah, I'm so proud of you both recently getting Home Assistant going.

So that's the good news in the Home Lab. Now, the bad news is you've got this project that stalled out, in part because we ran out of time while I was visiting. And the idea is you want to create an offsite backup server that does essentially server-to-server replication. And I kind of want to hear more about that because I think it's still kind of up in the air exactly how to solve that problem.

So tell us what you're trying to accomplish and then maybe we can kick around a few ideas. Yeah, I have talked about this on the network before on self-hosted. I really just want to provide backups for my family and myself included that have an offsite option. So my parents have a super stable home environment, super stable internet,

and we visit there a couple of times a year. So that's a perfect location, but it's like thousands and thousands of kilometers away or miles, if you will. And so it's a perfect spot for a little like offsite backup, at least for me. And if that's a service I can provide, you know, throw up a machine that isn't an old laptop for their own backups. That would give me peace of mind being their main support people. And so I've had this dream, if you'll put it,

because I haven't quite got there, of having two near identical systems, at least identical from a software perspective. The hardware I thought, oh, having identical would be good too, but I'm just at this point using old parts that I have for the computer on my end, and I bought what I'm hoping is a very stable platform to put on their end. So that

includes an H4, Odroid H4 plus and a couple new hard drives, 20 terabytes that'll be mirrored and the idea is to just be able for my family to back up to the local computers and those to just mirror to each other on a regular basis. It seems simple on the surface. Okay, so you want to mirror your data to that machine, but you also want to back up data from how many computers of your parents? Oh, they've got, you know, one cell phone each

and one laptop each, and I think that's about it. Cell phones. Well, why not? Interesting. Why should you not back up cell phone each and one laptop each. And I think that's about it. Cell phones. Well, why not? Interesting. Why should you not back up cell phone? Like, photos is mostly the thing they care about, photos and videos? Well, what I'm mapping in my head now is three different backup systems. Because you have one to do the server to server replication.

You have one to back up the computers and then a separate one to back up the phones. Right? I'm seeing this is three different systems you'd be managing. Yeah, the dream seems simple until you start implementing and then all of a sudden it's like, oh, wait a second. This is multifaceted, isn't it? I feel like the server to server is probably the easiest because that you could just do like a Butter FS send receive.

True. And for the parents backup, you do have some experience with which backup software was it that you were using? Was it Borg? Yeah, I've got them set up currently with Borg. And I'm using Vorda as the main GUI interface. And they have, well, my father especially, have been pretty cozy with that.

And it's been working well. And I don't think about it until I get on their systems every couple of months. And it just seems to be, and I don't think about it until I get on their systems every couple months, and it just seems to be working, which is great. So could that be just you set up Borg backup on this new server and then reconfigure their clients to use that to back up to this? That is, at least for me at this point,

well tested, well received on their part, and the super stable, simple part of this backup system. Okay, so desktops are solved. What is your thought on backing up? I assume they have two Android devices? Yeah, they have identical Android devices and previously backups have been done manually by my father who's a bit tech savvy and he's using KD Connect to just manually drag files he cares about. He likes to sort all his photos,

like sit down one Sunday morning with a coffee and move photos from both phones onto his laptop and then he just, in Vorda, just goes go. And then that backs up the Android photos that are now on his laptop to the server. So it's, he's doing that manually, but it's happening. Oh, let's pause, let's pause. Let's zoom in, as they say, and double click.

What is it on the Android device they need backed up? Is it just photos? I mean, I think we, in modern times, should have the ability to back up all of our apps on Android. But that is strangely difficult. So if you had a minimal set, then I would say just photos and videos, but why not anything? If you've got notes and contact information

in Nextcloud already, then it's just a matter of the photos. And there, yes, you could use Nextcloud, obviously, but it could be a great opportunity for image. It's pretty straightforward to set up. It does require some updates,. It's pretty straightforward to set up. It does require some updates, but it's pretty straightforward to set up. The experience is really great for the end user because the app is also a photo viewer that's really good

and fast. But then there's also fun things you can do. You could set up an image kiosk and a few other ancillary containers or apps that let you view different albums in image on different devices. So it could just be like on the computer, but it can also be on tablets, it can be on displays. There's fun things you can do with the pictures once you get them in image,

plus it also supports all the location information. They would love that. Yeah, and it just works in the background, right? They take a photo and image uploads it when they're on wifi. Image could totally work. I had SyncThing recommended to me about 100 times to solve this problem. It does seem like it's a popular one in the audience,

but it seems to me kind of like a blunt tool for the job, especially if you have everything else getting synced. I think the easier workflow is you get the new phone, unfortunately you set it up, you sign in or whatever the crap you got to do, and then you just sync your stuff, right? I mean, it's just what, I don't know, it just seems to be. I'd be interested in tips from the audience on utilities that would let you do like an image backup or some kind of full backup. That'd be so nice.

To a Samba share or some kind of local NAS. If the audience knows, boost in or emails and let us know. I find it wild that this is not a standard thing. Wild. Once you get used to Linux computers like come on we don't have this. This I mean it seems if you can get the hardware running it seems like a pretty easy thing to at least get the server to server backup going on your LAN maybe using like some sort of you know like a Nebula VPN or something to make that work.

So they're talking to each other over that VPN on your LAN and then get that syncing while you're, you know, node to node right there. So you do the bulk of the syncing first, then ship it off. But I don't know about the Borg stuff. Like we'd have to talk more about that. But I think that seems pretty achievable if they've already got a workflow. Then later on, it would just be moving them over to image. You could even do that later as a phase two.

Yeah, staged rollout. That might be it. Yeah, I like the image idea. I hadn't even considered that. I think that is a wonderful idea. The hardware is an upgrade to what they're currently using, which is an ancient T61 laptop that my father used to use. That's nice. in, way back.

And yeah, that fan has been replaced several times, but it's still kicking. Are you doing any jelly fin on this thing? Not yet, mostly because the hardware hasn't been up to the task. And that's where I feel like- This H4 is a problem. Yeah, exactly.

That's where image wasn't really an option previously either, but because of the hardware upgrade, I feel like it opens up a whole bunch of new options. So yeah, why not have a Jellyfin server? They have a DVD room. It's like a secret room behind their TV from the previous person who built this house who was a nerd. So they literally, like, you take

what looks like a speaker off the wall, and then they have a room back there and they have just Shelves of DVDs that they bought in the past. So maybe digitizing those would be a great thing for them. Yeah, man Yeah, yeah, so there's lots of possibility for sure Yeah, that could be a great project. Honestly, it's something you could just you know You could set up a workflow and it sounds like your old man could sit there and do the reaction Yeah, hundred percent and then I could benefit. Okay, so let me tell you what's going on in my home lab. I have been very happy with my home assistant,

Yellow, for years until I started hanging around Jeff and Brent. Sorry. No, you know, I actually, it's just over the years, it does more, right? It pulls in camera feeds, it pulls in lots of power metrics from my Victron system. It's You know managing probably 300 devices and pulling all of their metrics and their numbers and stuff like that It's connected to probably half a dozen cloud services. It does a lot plus. I have a bunch of sidecar applications. I've installed and

This thing is built around the Pi 4 compute module. It's got two gigs of RAM, one terabyte of storage, two USB-A ports, and one USB-C port. And then they also build in the Silicon Labs chip that has a ZigBee 3.0 thread, open thread, and matter support in there. Ooh, that is fancy. And it's a nice little machine. It's nice, yeah, for its job. It's worked great.

And it comes in a nice translucent injection mold It's nice. Yeah for its job. It's worked great and it comes in a nice Translucent injection molded case that has their logo on it It's cool because you can see some of the LED shining through I would imagine for you This thing just sips power to right that's important He dude like that's what's really made me stick with this is If it's just sitting there doing nothing, it's like two watts is if it's just sitting there doing nothing, it's like two watts. It's hard to even measure that. You know, and then maybe up to six watts almost,

under load, right? So. Just a monster. Yeah, about as much as a light would pull an LED light or something, a big one. So it's been really nice, but the two gigs of RAM, I'm generally running around 1.5, 1.6 gigs of RAM usage. And so like ESP home builds fail. 2 gigs of RAM, I'm generally running around 1.5, 1.6 gigs of RAM usage.

And so, like, ESP home builds fail. But what's really getting me is as I've built more complicated dashboards, I noticed that the load times. Just pulling them up? Yeah. In the mobile app and on the tablets. It's a ghost scrapes a whole bunch of different data sources. It has to get all the points.

And sometimes I need to get in quick and turn something off or check, are we undervolting the entire rig right now because we just ran all this stuff? And I'm just sitting there waiting for the page to load. So that's the killer for me. And I just think I need to get on more robust hardware. I didn't realize this was an issue because the hardware you

gave me that was just sitting around waiting to be your upgrade that's now in the van is actually super performant and probably the perfect device for you to deploy for yourself. Ironically, yes. Thank you. Yeah. And it's nice too because that's DC straight. But I've been kind of looking around and I found three options.

I don't know what their power draw is. So it'd be like three options that I would buy and test before I deployed. But then of course I'm very interested to see what other folks are doing. I do think I want something x86, although I'm not totally opposed to ARM for Home Assistant OS. I will be using Home Assistant OS. Here's three options. If I use my Home Assistant for more stuff, like also media hosting. You green has this device called the. NAS sync, and it is a tiny two desktop bay all in one Intel and 100 quad core system. Whoa, it's like the size of a book. It's it takes two two point five.

I think they're two point five. You can get up to 76 terabytes of storage in this thing. It takes 2.5, I think they're 2.5. So you can get up to 76 terabytes of storage in this thing. And it's the size of a USB disk enclosure, but it's an entire PC. It's everything you need in there. Up to 76 gigs of RAM, which is nice. It's 12th gen Intel N100.

You know, it's a PC with the stuff. I mean, but if you wanted something that was like a media server, that was a really small, low-power device. I notice it says user-friendly UGOS Pro. I assume you'd be keeping whatever that is. Just on there. I mean, if it's user-friendly, Wes,

if it's user-friendly, why not? I also noticed that it can hold hard drives, so it means you won't have hard drives strapped to the side of your RV dinette cupboard. Right, thank you. So what I do now for storage is I have have hard drives strapped to the side of your RV dinette cupboard? Right. Thank you. So what I do now for storage is I have an Odroid that does have, I think it's just sataports.

But yeah, there's nowhere to put them. So they are, everything's kind of mounted to the inside of a dinette's booth, mounted to the wall. And it would be nice to actually have them in enclosures. That could be nice, because they're just raw drives mounted to the wall. And it would be nice to actually have them in enclosures. That could be nice, because they're just raw drives mounted to the wall. I think this thing claims six watts for TDP. Yeah, I'd want to test on that.

The N100 is a very efficient chip. And around the 12th and 13th gen, they started getting really legit. So that's why I kind of looked in that range. Now this next one wouldn't fit any drives, but it would have about the same footprint as my current Home Assistant, could be mounted on the sidewall, is a 12th gen Alder Lake N100 up to 3.4 GHz, and it's called a mini PC stick. We've seen some of

these before and it's back. This looks more like a USB adapter than it does a PC. Right? Yeah, it looks like a dongle. This is crazy. I know wow it really is something it's eight gigs of RAM in this thing it's got one USB-C output two USB-A's it has an Ethernet port it goes up to 65 watts USB-C PD although I don't think that's it's draw it looks like straws you know around the same as the

other device it can drive a high-res 4K screen. Yeah, dual-screen support. So what I thought, and this thing's $160. So what I thought, if you wanted a Linux media PC, you could just attach this to the back of your television and run it off of USB power. It has an HDMI out. This is the kind of thing now where these are so small you could Velcro it to something and make a display.

Does it feel like we're in the golden age of hardware when these kind of things are available? Because it's super performant, teeny tiny, and it hardly uses any power. So like what else do you really need? Well, and what's great is we're getting into the price range of the Odroids, right? And when you look at these Intel systems, they're really competitive with the ARM boxes now. And the Raspberry Pis.

Yeah, that's what I mean. But they have a lot of really nice features. And compatibility. And compatibility, and they're a little faster. But the one that really kind of won me over for what I think I would use Home Assistant, if I want to build a box that lasts another six years, another five years, whatever it's been, four years. The GeekOM Air 12 mini PC. It's a 13th gen Intel N150, so it's even a little better

on the power usage. 16 gigs of DDR5, 512 gigabyte MVME SSD, so 16 gigs of RAM, 512 gig storage, also has an SD card slot, which actually can be really handy, and has a VESA mount built in. So you could use anything that supports VESA mounts, again, attaching to something. $200 USD, 200 USD.

And 150, huh? Yeah, and with a max of 3.6 gigahertz and 16 gigs of RAM. So I would go from two gigs of RAM to 16 gigs of that. Yeah. And I go from like a quad core 1.4 gigahertz to up to 3.6 at boost, obviously. And it's 200 USD. I kind of feel like you just buy all three. You'll figure out a way to use them all.

Right? I, I Wolf HAA cluster. There is a real revolution happening with these mini PCs and Beelink was really early to it but Beelink is getting fancier and fancier. These manufacturing places in China have built up all this tooling to build these small compact PCs and now they're just going wild. It is incredible what you can find for under $200 if you don't need a crazy GPU, right?

That's essentially the dividing line now. And this thing here, this, you know, I don't know if GeekGo makes good stuff or not, I can't vouch for it. At $200, I could put Home Assistant OS on this and run it until this thing dies. I just, I maybe there's, there's probably even better ideas out there. So I'd be really open to other suggestions. This thing's got, you know, it's got ethernet, it's got Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2. So that's all really handy to have in a Home Assistant box as well. And then to have the N150 processor in there, which is,

you know, on a good day, about 10% faster than the N100 in multi-core performance. I'll take that. That could be a really nice box. But I'd be curious to know if others have a better suggestion, because I'd love something a little cheaper than 200 USD. But for somebody as important as homo system, I'd probably be

willing to do it. So that's sort of my conundrum is, I've got to figure out which hardware to use, then I've got to migrate my Home Assistant installation, which would probably be a backup and a restore. And what I'm really worried about, and wondering how this has worked for others that have tried this,

is the last time I did this, I had to completely like reset up my Z-Wave and Zigbee networks, I think. That sounds rough. Yeah. Yeah, at this point, that's a non-starter. So I would love to know. I mean, at that point, it's like, I'm redoing everything basically. So there's probably a way to manage that. I'd love to hear people's experiences because I know I've read a couple of different guides. But last time it didn't work for me,

I'd love to know what people have done that's worked. Because that's in a, so even once I get the hardware, I think I'm gonna do the backup and restore. I'll install Home Assistant OS clean on the new hardware, and then immediately restore my installation. Have you considered just a crazy raw image copy and see what happens? I do note here that you said that your home assistant Yellow has a special Silicon Labs

module with Zigbee and Thread and OpenThread and Matter built in. Does this mean that anything you buy off the shelf is going to be downgraded in that sense? You're going to have to figure out how to solve that problem? I think I have okay radios there, external ones, but see what a lot of people said is we'll just move your controller to the new unit, but the problem is with the yellow my controller is built in. I can't just move the controller. Right.

Right. I don't know. So that's my conundrum, but I'll figure it out and report back. Wes, you've been taking a little nibble at Nebula, speaking of Nebula. Yeah, that's true. Actually independent of the sponsor change, I've been playing with this for the talk, the mesh networking NixOS module. And I wanted to see about, you know, because we love Nebula, haven't used it in a little

bit, wanted to check in and see if I can get it working with the module and play nice. And for that, I kind of had to re-familiarize myself. So a little Nebula,bula nibble check in perhaps. I like it. Man, now I'm gonna, now I wanna be at the talk. You gonna get it recorded, do you know? I don't know but let's hope so. Okay.

So, what if you, what are you learning Westpain on location? Yeah, well I mean so, you know we now live in a world with a thousand and one different mesh VPNs out, which is pretty great for an end user. But Nebula is especially fun because you kind of get to see how it all works because you run it all yourself. So you start off by making a signing authority, a CA cert and key that establishes your route of trust for what you're doing.

So it's all self-hosted in that sense, right? And there is, again, the managed product, cert and key that establishes your route of trust for what you're doing. So it's all self-hosted in that sense, right? And there is, again, the managed product, but I'm just talking about the open source one for the most part here. And from that, you can start signing for individual hosts. And this is how you add new stuff to your network. So you have to do it yourself. It's not dynamic.

It's not managed by an API in this configuration. So you have to have some signing setup. Obviously you don't want to put the secret key out everywhere. That just lives on wherever you're doing and managing the signing. And then go stamp out the stuff that you need for all the hosts that you have now or you know about. And then if you want to automate this more,

totally can, but kind of on you. There are some projects I've linked. There are various people who have Ansible setups or Helm charts or like Python scripts on top of it. So there's a lot of options there as well. But the nice part is like you're in total control of what things get added and when, and you kind of have to know about it.

And then it's a very simple little, you know, you specify the IP. What's cool is you get to pick the cider. And so it's really like your own internal network and totally up to however you want to manage it, all under your control. You can fit it nicely in with whatever other networks you're commonly on. And then you can also define various groups. And then when you make the established and signed for the host, you configure the groups

for it as well. And this lets you do very nice and simple and easy filtering where you can just say like, oh right, well only the stuff that is in the database group gets to talk to the database server. Oh boy. Right, or like, oh the admin group can talk to all of these, but the user group can talk to these.

Could we use that so like, I could have one Nebula connection and we'd have like the JV stuff where you guys can talk to that and I could have my own stuff. Yeah. I even saw someone wrote a Python script. I'm not recommending this, but they, and I don't know if it's still. I even saw someone wrote a Python script. I'm not recommending this,

but they, and I don't know if it's still running, but they were running a public lighthouse where you could then use the Python script to upload the host you wanted so it would all get set up correctly. And then you would just make sure in your configs you had your own private group, so only your group from all the public stuff

could get into it. So it's pretty flexible. Could we run a JB lighthouse just for the community? Is that like a thing that would be helpful? If you use this sort of wrapper script, then yeah, in theory we could run our own copy of it. That's not something people wanted. I wouldn't be. Yeah, people would want to play with it.

Yeah, exactly. But then after that, you know, it's like a Go app, so it's easy to build or run pretty much anywhere, and then you just need to point it at a config and have all of the key stuff. So usually you make like a little bundle of a tarball or whatever for each host that has all the stuff it needs, which is like the, you know, the base cert from the certificate

authority and then its individual stuff and then like keys for the other host that you want it to trust. And so in your talk, you're going to, you're, you're, you're kind of expanding on this idea of a, of a Nick setup that just automatically installs an application into the mesh network. And so it's just boom, it's when you launch it and get it running, it's on the network. Yeah, it lives in its own network namespace and it talks through the mesh network.

And so this would just allow, you know, I'm working on a version that would allow Nebula to play the same role that already works for Tailscale or NetBird. And then so this would pop up. And then as long as you had all the key infrastructure there, it would pop onto your network and that's what it would know. Boom, that's so cool. But it's fun. So that's like how it works and that's what it would know. That's so cool.

But it's fun, so that's like how it works and has worked for a long time. And then you have lighthouses, right, which are the main thing that sits there and lets people swap information about network addresses. You can do, you know, get bus through NATs and actually establish connections and all that. Right. They've now also added dedicated relays. So if in the tail scale world, you're probably familiar

They look the derp relays, which is a fallback So like if you can't establish a proper peer-to-peer connection, it'll automatically fall back to that Lighthouses can be relays for you already, but That's not really their job. So in like once you get a production network going There's now dedicated relays you can have and you have again. This is an area where you get complete control So like you can put them like on a V where your pain points are in your network Oh, it's there to be the it will tunnel network traffic because it has a public address So, you know where the tough spots are? Yeah

Or if you do at least then you can make sure there's one like geographically at that pop Yeah, your point of presence or in this VPC or whatever you need. I got you. OK, so you can place it. Yeah, and also then you don't really have to worry about somebody else running it and potentially watching what you're doing or potentially getting legal requests to block certain types of traffic or anything like that because you're running it yourself.

It's all going through things you control. That's a nice nibble, Wes. They've also got, let's see, you can SSH into it and get like a debugging console, which is pretty neat. I've only really played with this a little bit. They've also added a very basic, but good enough support, I think, for Lighthouse DNS. So now the host that the Lighthouse knows about,

it can answer DNS requests for us. If you pair that with a DNS server that can like delegate a sub domain or something then you can have Sort of automatic host discovery for the stuff. I want that nebula. I want that I want that there's also I don't know if it's shipped yet, but there's some docs pointing out that they're working on IPv6 support for having Directly on your overlay, so that's pretty neat And then also there's now a NixOS module. So if you want to run it there, it looks like a pretty clean little setup too.

Speaking of that, do you mind if I do an update? Please do. After the show last week, Wes set me aside and said, here's what you need to do and showed me how to clone the repo of the, they have essentially a image builder script you can clone and make your own. Yeah, I think it's called image-template under the uBlueOS repo. I'll link to my version,

because it's pretty simple, that I put up on my GitHub. And so I pulled that down and there's a build.sh file in there that I can modify, like you were talking about last week. And in there I put Nebula and I put Nix. Well actually not Nix did I? I put the creation of slash Nix. Yes and then runtime you use the determinate installer I believe. And the determinate installer is SE Linux aware and OS tree aware. So it goes real smooth as long as you have a slash Nix. It just can't

make that slash Nix on its own. Right so I now have essentially my own tiny, tiny fork of Aurora that has Nebula and slash Nix created and now I have the Nix tooling and I have AUR and I have Ubuntu and I have Brew and I have Flatpak. It's like I'm feeling like the king of the world over here. And with that, when I modify that build sh, anything that's in DNF or in copper, I can just install really quickly at build time. And then you save it, you build the image. And then it's interesting.

You build an image with this script using Ubuild. And then you essentially deploy it with Podman and then use Bootsy to... Bootsy hooks up all the right boot bits for you. And it gives you like options to say, yeah, activate this one and here's your next few images and here's which one's pending and it's a decent, clean, easy to use command. Bootsy is nice. I like it. And then I just say, yeah, bless this one to be my active image. And I reboot and boom, I'm in my own custom image. And I installed the Terminate Nix and I'm off to the races, baby. Yeah. So hopefully, hopefully that means like you've got more packages available. And I

don't know, it's kind of fun to have your own sort of custom image. OnePassword.com slash unplugged. Take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application. Even unmanaged shadow IT. Go learn more at OnePassword.com slash unplugged. This is number one password dot com slash unplugged all lowercase. Okay, if you're a security IT professional, you know this problem already. You have more and more assets to protect as time goes on. More devices, more identities, and more applications, and it becomes a mountain of security risks over time. But fortunately, you can conquer that mountain of security risks with one password, extended access management. The reality is that when surveyed, over half of IT pros say securing their SaaS apps

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protecting every application, even the unmanaged ones. Go find out more and support the show. You go to OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That is the number one password.com slash unplugged. That is the number 1, password.com slash unplugged. While this self-hosted energy has me remembering that you teased, you had a couple app picks that were really interesting. I've been looking for a great way for us to save all the stories that we're all looking at, all three of us, and then be able to collaboratively

mark them up and take notes. We've used a couple of different systems over the years, but we've kind of gone our own separate ways as time has gone on. We each have built our own workflow for this. But in this quest, in this journey, I have come across Linkwarden, a self-hosted collaborative bookmark

manager to collect, read, annotate, and fully preserve what matters all in one place. So think Pocket meets Dego, whatever it is we used to use, meets Notes with highlights. So it's obviously a self-hosted open source bookmark manager, that's the basics of it. But it also, it does snapshots of the site, so it'll take a PDF, an image. It'll do an HTML archive. So it can also archive things. So that way you don't have to suffer from link rot when you go back.

So it saves a copy of all of that in various different formats, which you can then download separately, which is really nice, because it really only takes a couple of years and pretty much our links start to expire. And I think that might sometimes punish us in the Google results because we have so many show notes and then three or four years after a show's been out, an episode's been released, several of the links for a four and that, you know, it just. It also doesn't work for us when we want to go back and recover old information.

No, it's nice to be able to have a snapshot archive stuff. And if it does highlights too, that's? Shared highlights. So yeah, collaborative highlighting and annotating. Moving to this for the next show, right? I know, right? It also, as you would expect, has a reader view. And they've begun integrating local AI tagging.

So you can run a local AI and have it go through. This sounds silly But I use this with I forget the name of it. It's not hoarder anymore But I use that with that application and it works fantastic for just tagging it and sussing out, you know automatic tags It can collaborate on link gathering You can share collections of lists with various people. It has a dashboard where you can pin your favorite stories. It supports full text search and filtering. The design is really nice and responsive.

Of course, it has dark and light mode. It has browser extension so you can bookmark and preserve the page you're looking at. It also supports importing from Pocket and several others, including just some basic export formats. I feel like this is an application I didn't realize that I needed, and just now I'm thinking, hmm, this might rise to the top of the to-do list. It also looks like it is AGPL.

Yeah. Yep, it's free. AGPL 3.0. It has a couple other nice things I think you'd like to print. It has really good sorting, including supporting custom icons for different categories, which just visually helps lay it out. But you can put select RSS feeds into this if you want, and it can auto bookmark and preserve those.

Because remember, it's not just saving it. It's also doing the JPEG snapshot, the PDF snapshot, the full HTML archiving. I hear you saying this might help me with my OpenTabs problem. Maybe, maybe, and if you're on, I don't think they have this for Android yet, but if you're on iOS, there is a shortcut to just save the link you're currently looking at, right to Link Warden as well.

And there's a couple community projects, I think it's called LinkDroid, maybe that's the one that's for Android. Oh. Yeah, okay. And then, yeah, there's a few browser extensions as well. That seems neat. I'd used Buku in the past. Right, OK. And then, yeah, there's a few browser extensions as well. That seems neat. I'd used Buku in the past.

Right, right. But this kind of has some more of the stuff that's targeted like at the, you know, Buku's been pretty decent for like personal, just sort of, you know, keeping, not forgetting things, but for the kind of work we're doing or other kinds of research, maybe generating stuff that you're going to go feed into LLMs to ask about.

This seems great. Track and stories for work, that kind of stuff. Yeah, professional development. The other thing too is the project has some momentum. I mean, they had a release just 15 hours ago. They have a live demo you can check out. They also I think are going to have like a cloud product eventually if you don't want to deploy it yourself.

Also 68 contributors That's often something I look at for projects just to see the health of it and how popular it is Those are important things and like 68 is Respectable. Yeah, and they're doing funding on open collective. So they have all that information up there Which is a great way for projects to go. So I'm very impressed with link warden You know, I've probably used it for a total of 12 hours so far, but it was like one of these, oh I got to tell the world about this. This is better than any of the other ones I've used. Specifically if you have people you want to collaborate with, like a little small

group of people or a team. Just killer. So that's Linkwarden. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. That was my find. Wes, you came across something that to me sounded really useful, but I'm not sure why I would use it. But I feel like one day I will call upon this. Yeah, and it's a bit hard to wrap your head around at first because it's a lot of things, or could be. It's called Neko, a self-hosted virtual browser that runs in Docker and uses WebRTC.

So it's like a browser in browser that you stream, that you stream. So you can interact with it, but like the interface is streamed back to you via WebRTC. Yeah, I guess the end result is it's actually pretty responsive. Yeah, it's kind of surprisingly usable. I mean, you need a system that's hosting it that can keep up, especially. But WebRTC is built to do a lot of this. And they put in a lot of work, I think, to make it fast.

So in a lot of ways, OK, you can do it for a browser. But it can also be, well, it can run anything that the Linux desktop can run, it turns out. So this can also be sort of like a guacamole alternative, perhaps. But you know, it also could just be so much simpler, because you can stream to multiple endpoints. Yes, you can also do RTMP out of this thing, so you can stream to YouTube or Twitch if you want.

And multiple people can connect to it, right? So you can do stuff like a watch party, we could interactively all edit our docs for the show. Yeah, so you could be the technical person in the friend group, you could have them all watch a URL and you go get a video stream going, and now you're all watching, I mean, that sounds awesome, you're all watching it together.

Interactive presentation, sure. It can also be just, yeah, one way too, like if you want a browser that isn't attached to your remote system, spin it up in a IP space. Or you want a full desktop browser on a mobile device for some reason. Sure. Or you want to embed a browser into an application. I mean that's interesting. There is a lot when you think about it, there's a lot of things. There must be some security ways of using this that would, you know, it's kind of like ultimate sandboxing if you think of it that way. Right. Well, because

you can have a remote persistent browser that's in some secure system or some secure data center and then client machines and all the client machines are doing is sending and receiving video data. Yeah. I haven't tried this part yet but apparently there's built-in audio support too so that's pretty great. I mean you need it for the watch party right but like just you could do a lot of stuff with that. Well, there you go who needs X 11 remote applications anymore when you've got Necco Huh, it's interesting so Necco itself has built-in live streaming support

Yeah, that's neat. I mean, I don't know what I would use that for but it could be like a real Session broadcasting broadcast room content using our TM. Yeah, huh? Yeah, you can also record it. There's um You can use stuff like nginx rtmp on top of it to be able to just save that to a file But so because you're streaming video Like video playback is really nice and smooth. Yeah, it's not just as they say, you know, taking, sending images over WebSocket. Right. It's actually like encoding video and then streaming that to you, right? Which is also stuff we've seen for things like what,

Moonlight, like that was another thing that. Yeah, right. But this makes it a little bit easier when it's just WebRTC because that's a web browser and there's so many ways you can ingest on RTMP stream. Built on Go, which has good support for a lot of this stuff. So yeah, you get like the power of web technology Modern browsers good support for this kind of stuff and real video codecs, too

I mean even tutorials like live tutorials. This could be great for even inside of you just a company, right? But screw twitch and YouTube just you got a group of people you're trying to do a training session with it Does have a very prominently cat butt based logo. That is true. So you know, watch out for that. That is true. That maybe makes a little. Mileage may vary.

But it's a cute cat, I think Brent will confirm. Yeah, but there is straight up cat butt right there. You could argue it's an asterisk maybe. It's a bold logo. It's a bold logo. You don't forget it. That's memorable is important. It's a bold logo. You don't forget it. That's a memorable is important The docker compose is 14 lines. I

Mean, this is really simple stuff and I like everything it wants port 880 8080 I mean, you know, they always want 8080. Of course, nothing else is using that And then if there's some UDP ports it opens up for WebRTC as well. Oh interesting And then if there's some UDP ports, it opens up for WebRTC as well. Oh, interesting. You set the resolution of the remote host in the Docker compose file. Yeah, right now I think it configures like an X desktop.

They say in theory anything where they could take like image snapshots that they then encode into the video stream could be supported, but for now that's all future potential. It looks like there's also Niko Rooms, which is a room management software for this. So that's pretty advanced. Yeah, I have not tried that,

but you could build a lot on top of this. And the whole thing is Apache 2.0 licensed. I mean, it's pretty neat. That's really a fun kind of idea. Like you said, other than watch parties, I'm not sure. Maybe a livestream. I mean, I could be sending Brent a live capture of the dock that I'm looking at right now.

He could be seeing my screen, you know? I mean, I am looking at the dock. A guy like you, Brent, you need a persistent web browser. So one ultimate machine, you get a, like, go get a VPS with like 64 gigs of RAM, cause you're gonna need a lot with all your tabs. Maybe even more. But then you could just use this

to pull that down to all the different machines. Right? That would actually be sweet. All right, one ultimate tab browser to rule them all. It does make you think you could also maybe tie it in with things like video ninja or other sort of OBS technologies probably. Oh for sure with OBS yes you could totally pull it into OBS and do screen capture that way. Oh that's a good idea I like that.

Unraid.net slash unplugged go unleash your hardware you know we're big home labbers and self-hosters and Unraid is a powerful easy to use NAS operating system for those of you that want control, flexibility, and efficiency in managing your own data because Unraid allows you to mix and match drives of any size so you can build which system you want with the hardware you have right now with no So you can build which system you want with the hardware you have right now with no restrictions. It also now includes built-in support for tail scales. You can check a box and get on the tail scale network. You can get secure remote access to your systems

using multiple different methods like Cloud Fair Tunnels and of course Nebula as well. And there are thousands of applications you can stack on top of Unraid. And there's an active community that's out there supporting it. But I think you might appreciate some of the more advanced features that Unraid gives you access to without a whole bunch of hassle and time to set it up. And things have really been taken to the next level in the latest OS releases

from Unraid. The big stuff of course is Unraid has always been famous for making it pretty easy to pass through your graphics cards through to a virtual machine. But now with QXL virtual GPU support, Linux VMs can now get a big graphics boost, which is actually usable for gaming now, video editing, and of course just smooth buttery desktop performance. And Unraid 7.1 makes things even easier than ever to get started with virtual machines and templates. And now 7.1 also includes built-in wireless networking, which is great for folks like me who just can't wire up their place. Whether you're a tinker or a power user, or maybe you just want a simpler way to run apps and VMs, check out Unraid.

Unraid 7.1 really gives you the next level 2 with ZFS support. So if you want to import an existing system, like maybe you built an Ubuntu Box or a FreeNAS system or a Proxmox and you just want to migrate that over to Unraid, easy now. Learn more, get started, and support the show by going to Unraid.net slash unplug. Go play with the stuff we talk about nearly almost, I mean unless we're really really early to something, the stuff we talk about nearly almost, I mean, unless we're really, really early to something, almost everything we talk about gets published in that Unraid App Store because that community is just killing it.

Go check it out. Unraid.net slash unplugged. Well, we had a big week this week at the JB community and we wanted to do a few shout outs, specifically new members. Yeah, we ran that bootleg promo recently and we had Ryan Davis sign up, Marcus L and Baddie Morris become new core contributors to the program. So we wanted to give them a shout out.

So we're going to try to do more on the show. And it does look like there are still 17 slots left as of this episode for that bootleg promo code, which takes 15% off the core contributor or the Jupiter.party network membership. And that just keeps going, right? As long as you keep it current. Yep, that is a nice thing about it.

And you can get either the ad free version of the show or the special bootleg version of the show. If do you want less show or more show? You pick and it's just our way of saying thank you. And yeah, so as we record right now, 17 slots left. If you go to Linuxunplug.com slash membership, use the promo code bootleg. It'll take 15% off for the life of your membership.

We also wanted to give a shout out to some folks that are positive contributors in our various community spots. This is tricky because we could name a lot of people. I mean, you know, I mean, there's the folks that show up in the Mumba Room like Mini Mack and Byte and Producer Jeff and Otter Brain and Hybrid and Hawkins and others that show up, Swami and others that show up on the regular and without even just showing up

matters a lot to us and then there's folks that have been in our chat rooms for years or people have been helping moderate but I just wanted to give shout outs this week specifically to bite-bitten hybrid sarcasm and magnolia mayhem because throughout the week I Saw them being helpful in different rooms across the communities, in different places, just answering quick questions, providing interesting content, helping people with questions. Well, caretaker in the room. Yeah, it was really nice. So I just wanted to give you guys a shout out.

Thank you very much. It does not go unnoticed. Listener Soltros reached out to me this week and our talk about customizing our distros inspired him I think to create Sultros OS, which is his personal RPM OS3 based OS, a gaming optimized immutable Linux distribution based on Fedora's Bootsy base image featuring MacBook hardware support, gaming enhancements, cachey OS kernel performance,

and the KDE Plasma desktop environment, and developer friendly tools. This is impressive. Right, and it looks good too. He sent me a screenshot and I love it man, it's looking really good. So he's got a picture of it up on the GitHub too if you wanna check out the link in the show notes.

Inspired by Venos bringing together the best of gaming and productivity. I kinda, it's a weird mix, but it's my mix. It's like primarily productivity machine. And then on the weekends, a little bit of gaming. Well, and, you know, much like in the NixOS world, you could rebase over to SultrisOS and try it out if you wanted to.

Maybe I should. And then rebase back. You know what? I might do that on the Dell laptop because the kid kids been playing Geometry Dash like a madman on there and it it could use a little help a little performance in the kernel could be a nice thing So check out sultros OS looks like a fun project and we have it linked We also got a tip on a feed issue that was impacting some of our members from power six power forty six It was in the Matrix. Yeah, they reached out, Matrix, then via email.

And I guess they were using MiniFlux, which is a cool RSS feed reader. It's got a UI you can use, because I think they like to consume on the desktop as well. So with the ad, ad-free and the bootleg have different back end providers at the moment. And so it works out that there's what's known back-end providers at the moment, and so it works out that there's what's known as a link element in the feed, and that just like provides you

a link you can go to for a specific episode. One provider has it and the other doesn't. So for the AdFree version, in the feed reader, it would let you open up that link, which would have a little webpage and a player that you could play. I see. But the Bootleg feed does not have that. would let you open up that link, which would have a little webpage and a player that you could play. I see. But the bootleg feed does not have that. Separate provider doesn't generate that item in the feed.

Exactly. And so MiniFlux was falling back to just including the whole feed URL as the external link for every episode, which wasn't really working. So I kind of explained some of that and then unfortunately there wasn't a lot we could do. Yeah. But that didn't stop Power46 because they submitted an issue upstream to Miniflux and the project has actually already merged a fix. Yes. So now we'll use the first enclosure link as a fallback if there isn't a link if that enclosure link exists before finally doing what it was already doing so that's great thank you for doing that

power 46 and for reaching out yeah it's a great combination of a great community and open source and now that's fixed for everybody yeah maybe go try mini flux yeah could be worth it maybe you if you want something on the desktop booster Graham and it is also time to shout out our boosters and our baller booster this week is mr. Turd Ferguson And he boosts 65600 sats do you gentlemen know of any open source? Health tracking software ideally something that would work with non-stock Android. Open source.

Wow. I'm surprised we haven't thought about this yet. I've kind of been kicking this around. I've come across a project that I've bookmarked to check out. But Turd, I will include a link if you want to look into it. It's called Endurian, I think. It's a self-hosted fitness tracking service designed to give users full control over their data.

And one of the neat things about it is, first of all, you can just import a GPX file if you want to track a hike. And we've covered an app recently that just runs in the background on Android and just logs to a GPX file. But it also looks like it works with Garmin Connect and a couple of other services,

and it can import from like a Garmin fitness watch. That's pretty handy. Yeah, I haven't tried it, right? You got my ears up. Mm-hmm, it's got a nice UI that gives you like, so if you go on a hike, it gives you a map overview. A lot of what these fitness tracking things give you, but just locally,

designed to give you full control over your data. So it's available as a Docker image. It looks pretty comprehensive. And if you want to give it a shot and report back, or if anybody wants to try it in Darien, I think that's how you say it, let us know, because it is something I've kicked around. And if it's a question, yeah.

If it supports the Garmin stuff, well, we've already got that. It'd be really nice too if it supported the Apple Watch and the wife could use it. you turd appreciate the baller boosts good to hear from you again the dude abide boosts in with 42,000 sets the answer to the ultimate question hello gentlemen I'm a few episodes behind but I saw the matrix notification and I just had to boost oh thank you we appreciate it we do boost I'm currently on vacation

So greetings from somewhere at thirty seven point oh four blah blah blah Oh, hey, yeah, we got some GPS coordinates. Okay, so your your map have this feature There's actually a plug-in module you can add as an overlay to the map. Look at this thing. I'm impressed. Okay, I'm zooming out. I'm zooming out. That's a lot of digits of precision too.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. How do you suppose we say this place? I'm going to say Antiparos? Paradise, perhaps? It looks like paradise to me. It's a tiny island Just off of a set of tiny islands. Oh my gosh. Look at all those little islands incredible So it's really kind of south

East of Greece. Yeah, this looks beautiful. That is really amazing. Holy crap. That must be paradise I think the dude is really abiding right now. Oh my gosh, the dude. Way to live it up. Thanks for thinking of us even on your vacation. Yeah, man, we really appreciate that. Have a great time. Ha ha ha. Well, we have the immunologist here with 5,555 cents. I like you.

You're a hot ticket. I use Aon, which is relatively easy to modify by creating a changed Butterfess image and then booting into it. However, it is specifically a laptop OS. I do enjoy the whole DistroBox Flatpak transitional upgrade system quite a lot. I also feel the pain of those.docx editing with reference software. I use Zotero, specifically in scientific manuscripts.

I strongly believe in publicly funded science, people should actually use publicly funded software. Yeah. Wish LibreOffice would be fully compatible with the whole Word review system. Man, wouldn't that be a change? That would be amazing. That's a solid boost.

Thank you, Immune. I've heard a couple people use Zotero and really love it. I want to just touch on something really quick here. He says he's modifying his AM install by changing a Butterfest image, and then I presume, yeah, he says he's booting into that. That's a whole other way to approach that. Maybe we should go try AM.

It doesn't sound very cloud native to me. No, but maybe that's what makes it fun. Maybe it's copy on write native. It's cow native, you know? Oh my god, that's good, Wes. That's the title. Someone remember that. I'm going to go with Period Logical.

I'm sure I'm getting that wrong, but they came in with 2,000 sats. This is the way. For the listener having an issue with Fountain or others, I had a lot of problems trying to set up Fountain using Gmail address, but then no issues using a different domain. I never saw anything identifying this as a fix, but thought it was worth sharing. I have also heard that. Thank you.

Plus one to that. For folks that were trying to sign up with Fountain, something is going on with Gmail. And I don't know what it is because I use Gmail with my Fountain login and it works fine, but that is something I've Gmail with my fountain login and it works fine But that is something I've heard reports of so good looking out. Thank you very much period and appreciate that boost Thor comes in with 3,000 sets. I Definitely need to give one of those atomic test drops a try now. This is a boost for us x23 50 days of blue For the next episode will there be a segment

on how to build your own Nix-based installation image? So it seems like part joke, but then also Thor goes on, sounds like it's trivial for minor changes to atomic desktops like Blufin, but how easy is it to build of NixOS? Not just configure, but say, make an image to deploy to your family or org. Hmm, okay, so that's an interesting line right there.

If you're looking for something you want to deploy to other people, that's an interesting question. I would actually argue that minor changes are easier with NixOS, right? Because now I've essentially have a fork of Aurora that I need to go and make sure I update from time to time from upstream or

whatever. And so now there's like an extra step in my upgrade process. I don't just do like you just update. I have to go through a whole process now. And if that was just so I could add Nebula and create slash Nix, right? I mean, we're talking pretty significant shift in how I maintain my system just for those two things. But when you're talking about creating something that you would build and then deploy as an

image to multiple people, it would work pretty well for that, I think. Yeah, I mean, you definitely have options, right? You can just do like a stock install and then immediately apply a flake to that system if you want to, or you can totally bake in, you know, you can make your own install. I think a flake would that system if you want to or you can totally bake in you know You can make your own install. I think a flake would be the way to go I think that's really the way to do it right is take the flake approach Then also you know you can you can break things out a little bit Manage system and application separately or update individual applications and not have to update the entire system

There's some other benefits to it too Which you know give you a flexibility that maybe the other systems don't. It doesn't change what gets applied, but if you just want to build the ISO, there is a module in Nix packages that lets you build the installation ISO. You can also totally customize that and presumably set it up to make it really easy to just apply your Flakit first installation if you wanted to. The output could be a VHD file, the output could be an image file, you know, OCI container file.

It's a good question. Let us know if you go down the path. Odyssey Westra boosted in a row of ducks. Hey, would it be possible for you guys to shout out the SAT streamers who've streamed over 2,000 SATs? I don't know how feasible that is, but that would be pretty cool.

My opinion is that Sat streaming will probably be more important for live streaming and podcasts, especially music podcasts. I don't like picking one specific artist to boost. I don't like them all sometimes. That's a great point. And it's also sad to forget it, which is nice. You just know if you're listening,

you're sending back the value. So remembering to boost, you're coming up with a topic, it just happened, you know honestly you send this question at a good time because We have just started kicking around like what kind of metrics do we want to pull to make sure things are working correctly and To do that, you know We have to move things into a database and then we have to write

scripts against that and pull that data and massage that data and one of the things we might be able to do is That type of thing. Yeah. We'd have to talk about like how to build something like that, but we have kind of like the early scripts that we pull for the boosties at the end of the year. So we could probably modify something like that. Yeah, we have a lot of the plumbing actually,

but we don't have it rigged to answer this question just yet. But we'll try to take a look. Yeah. I think it's a great idea. Absolutely. We really appreciate all you sad streamers out there too. Jane Beans back with 8,455 sads. ["Sad Streamers Theme"]

Across five boosts. I know. Excellent boosting. He says, he sends us a reference manager that he likes at techmit.com slash reference dash management dash software. As also for the Word stuff, he says, you could try Only Office and maybe consider the web version of MS Word. I was wondering, I assume that for some reason

they weren't using the web version of MS Word. I wondered if the online Office 365 stuff would work. Web Word, Web Word, I like that. Gene says, I keep my ESP home devices up to date so that my configs are uniform and so that everything plays nice with the latest Home Assistant stuff. I've learned the hard way, like other tools, if you lag behind too long, it can be extra hard to get a current again.

Additionally, I have a voice PE and a couple of those cheap Atom voice things to integrate with Home Assistant and those need updating quite frequently. That's true, I do update my voice PE. For the ESPs You're right in the syntax sense, but one of the nice things is much like a an atomic Linux build It's a transactional update So if the build fails it won't update the ESP device and then you can go back and correct what needs fixed and then build it again, so

In theory gene you could pretty safely leap fairly far ahead, but you're right. I probably don't want to fall too far behind. It's one of the reasons I want to update my Home Assistant to better hardware. It is a good principle, that's for sure. Are people version controlling their ESP? I have all sorts of questions about Home Assistant, I realize, because that would be a handy thing. I suppose you could. I suppose you could.

It says, I want someone to integrate BitChat, Bridgy, we talked about BitChat last week, into the Meshtastic firmware so you could optionally have people on both chatting away, say at a camp out or at a conference. Each participating in a Meshtastic radio would then be able to support nearby people in this theoretical world. Oh, great idea. I do feel like there's a crossover between BitChat and Mes tastic where you have something that can use lora and something that Can use bluetooth and you're taking advantage of both? Maybe one day maxi mesh he says for my laptop

I've loved 95% of nicks, but I'm bouncing to a bunch to for now for compatibility of select applications Wow still love nicks OS. I'm still using it in many places I'm gonna try a normal distribution plus Nick's for my laptop for a bit. Also a great option. Let us know how it goes. See what you think. Might try Bluefin too, he says, and do a little dual boot. Oh yeah. Sology. Keep us updated. We want to know how it goes. Thanks for writing back.

Marcel boosts in with 5,000 cents. The traders love the vol. You asked to boost in on whether we're using immutable OSes. Well, I finally upgraded my 10-year-old Arch laptop to a Framework 16 running NixOS. Nice upgrade. I have a NixOS question for you. Alright. How do you version control your Etsy NixOS slash configuration.nix?

Chris? I have my home manager config in Git, of course, but I've seen different schools of thought on forums for the root config. Some symlink it to their home folder while others run Git as root in slash Etsy. Well, what you do is you do old.configuration.nix, really old.config. Oh, no. Do you append the dates just to keep yourself organized? No, I just trust the file system for that.

All right, what's the right way to do it? What's the right way? Does everything have to be in Git these days, boys? Really? If you want a history of it, and you want to be able to roll back. Oh, all right. I can tell you what I'm doing.

I'm a reasonable man. Do you want a time traveling database? All right, what are you doing, Brent? Well, you know, when I was learning Nix, I had the little, you know, a good Wes on one of my shoulders and a bad Chris on the other shoulder. And it seemed like Wes won out. So I've been linking to the home directory

and doing a similar link there and then doing version control there. So the main reason when I was first starting was so I could just use Kate without needing elevated privileges. And that has worked great. I have to tell you I've rarely used the Git portion of it, but that's the whole point of Git is you hardly ever need it,

but when you do, you really do. So Chris, I feel like maybe you can get on board here at some point. I think the solution is just simply, you do different versions, old,.old,.back, and then you throw sync thing at the entire thing across all your machines, and then just put certain includes that you want,

and you're good to go, what's the problem? I mean, especially if you use Flakes, Git and Flakes are just, you know, they pair so nice, and I'm with Brent, you know, if you, under edc-nixos, you can just put flake.nix, symlink that, wherever you want. I just say I might put it under where I have the rest of my source code.

And then you can have regular get, regular user permissions. And then especially with Flakes, any time you update, you can see it just as a diff. You can immediately roll back if you want to. And then you have a nice little change log from Your commit history of all the stuff that you've done And it sounds very traceable and like you can figure out where things need to be fixed and take action. It's wonderful You know what? I've actually done because I didn't want to post any of my git configs to

Anything public because I figured I would totally screw that up and make myself vulnerable. I actually have symlinked into a Nextcloud directory. So I actually have a NixOS directory on Nextcloud that just has a bunch of machines listed. I know there are better ways of doing this, but I basically have a folder for each of my machines and then configs within there,

and I've symlinked the folder that is on that particular machine. So it's like I do it once. But that way, I can access the configs of all my machines from any machine. And I can remotely deploy if needed for a server or two. I do that, which is really handy. That sounds like a solution that would work for me.

Yeah, it's not too, too bad. You know, add Git in there. But Chris, I figured if you want to stick with your trusted solution, you could just append a hash to your founders. Yeah. Yeah. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

That'd be a better way to do it, wouldn't it? Yeah. Well, we have a boost here from our dear PJ. 12,140 sets. Well, that's very good, buddy. Oh, it's for me. 12,140 sets. Let's hear it good buddy. Oh, it's for me. Brent, almost had it. 12140, that's 12 years, one month, four days prior to the release of Linux

unplugged 6.2.1. 12 years. All right, based on the YouTube published date of Linux Arch show, The Arch Way, published on June 2nd, 2013. Well, there you go. Wow. That was a little bit before PewDiePie. Thank you, PJ.

Nice to hear from you. Appreciate the boost. He's a good guy. He's a real good guy. No, he's a great guy. Doornail comes in with... Doornail, I should say 7887, sorry. Comes in with 2834 SATs. Just pump the brakes right there. Zip code multiplied by 16.

This one shouldn't require too many paper cuts. Also, another OpenShift ping for you as well. Oh, right! Thank you. Thank you for the reminder. We get so caught up in everything we're doing, I think. Yeah, how's that cluster setup going, Chris? Right, we gotta get back to that. Oh, right. Jeez, what was the amount again?

Two, eight, three, four, multiply by 16. Okay, so that's four, five, three, four, four. Okay, so now we just need to translate that in our book here. We gotta go find it in the map, bro. Yeah, so we have a book that tells us zip codes to map coordinates. The decoder, we call it. Put that right there. It's very old. It's got like a I don't know. I don't know what kind of leather binding This is I think it's pleather

Did someone spill coffee on it? Oh, yeah, that was a while ago was that was yes zip code is a better deal Well, let's go with lucky city new Carlyle, Ohio Hello, Ohio. Hello, Ohio! I've seen a lot of ads for Ohio. My kids say the word Ohio ironically a lot. I don't know what that's about. Like Ohio? Ohio, they say. Yeah.

I don't know. I couldn't tell you. A morphed sausage comes in with 5,000 stats. Well he says, unfortunately, my experience with Universal Blue, AKA Bazite, was not good. Oh no. Yeah, he says on initial setup it was fine, but over the first month, boot time increased with every boot to eventually get to about 10 minutes. That's not ideal.

When I checked what takes so long to start, I saw an OSTree or UBLU service, I can't remember the name, taking eight plus minutes. So I switched to Cashe OS and I'm very happy. I got my parents on Cashe too. It kind of went to a disaster. Now they're on Mint. The OSs seem to not suit every PC tower. That OS seems not to suit every PC tower and I don't know why.

But I'd love to give Bazzite another try, but I'm scared about ruining my setup. But I do love the immutable idea. That is a particularly weird problem that I've never heard anybody else report. And I'm wondering if something just went sideways. And how long ago was that? It might be worth another shot. You know, the projects in the last four years have come a long way. I think maybe you give it another try there I'm orphan let us know tell us how the

sausage was made okay and thank you for the boost not a zip code boost in with eight thousand eight hundred and eighty eight sets coming in from pod verse boosting from the only country that has one zip code per building? Oh, I've heard of this. Oh, can I guess, can I guess? Is it on the Mighty Map? Love the recent Red Hat episodes and the Tooie Challenge. Well, thank you.

A couple of weeks back, I fell into the Shes... How do you say it in French? Chesmoi. There we go, thank you. Rabbit Hole, a past show mention. It's a blast once you get it tiled in. Does anyone on the JB crew still use it? I'm also now feeling like Bluefin might be

the next logical step towards the cloud native desktop. Thanks for the great show. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, you guys gotta help me out on this one. Now, the UK actually is known for having zip codes with high level of granularity, but I don't think he's talking. I'm just saying, I'm just saying,

before they write in, I know that. I know Singapore and Hong Kong both use six digit codes that uniquely identify sectors or buildings. So it could be Singapore or Hong Kong. Seems like a long shot. What do you think, Brent? Well, I mean, I think the Japanese get this one right. I think they're super sophisticated and we're just like, you know, 100 years in the past.

Really? Okay, I didn't know the Japanese do this. That's my guess. Okay. I know that the Netherlands has a pretty granular postal code system too, so this could be a few, but per building? One of my old maps seems to maybe say hungry? Hungry?

I'm so hungry. Well, there's a few options here. That's a rare one though. That's pretty neat. The map seems to maybe say hungry? Hungry? I'm so hungry. There's a few options here. That's a rare one though. That's pretty neat. Think about the handiness there. I don't know how to. You know what I mean?

Like. In Zala County maybe? Just the zip code tells you right the building to go to. That's so handy. But I think they should be showing me a specific building then? Wow. Let us know not a zip code. Please do.

Thanks for boosting in. Now I gotta know. I'm in now. I got a note Huh? I gotta get an upgrade on this map kit Adversary 17 came in below the 2000 set cutoff, but we got to give him a shout out He says sorry haven't boosted recently. I have been streaming those sats. I'm getting married next week. So life is hectic I bet Congratulations So life is hectic. I bet. Congratulations. Wonderful. Nice to just hear and have a check in

during the middle of all of that. Wow, that's so neat that we get to hear that kind of stuff. I really appreciate that. It's really cool knowing that. Thanks, adversaries, and congratulations. Thank you, everybody who supported episode 624 of the Unplugged program. We really appreciate it.

You know, the thing is is we work work hard and this segment right here is sort of the reinforcement factor of that. It motivates us, we get good signal from you, the conversations are great, it reminds us of things that we've committed to, like the OpenShift stuff. Gotta get back on that. So it means a lot to us and if you like to send a boost,

of course you can use the Fountain app or you can go down the self-hosting route with something like AlbiHub and Podverse. A shout out to everybody who streamed those sats, 22 of you streamed them as you listen, and collectively you stacked 44,891 sats for the show this week. When you combine that with our boosters, the show stacked a grand total of 210, 139 Sats. Join the fun, grab Fountain FM, they've been making a lot of improvements over there and getting closer and closer to making boosting easier than ever. And also a big thank you to our members who put that support on autopilot and make each episode possible.

We really appreciate you and we do this for you. Check out the links in the show notes for easy ways to boost. We have them all right over there. Okay boys! This is a app that was sent in to us by listener Nick and in the members pre-stream the the bootleg, we were talking about some of the problems that Bottles is facing. And Bottles is an application that makes it really easy to set up individual wine environments to run Windows

applications. And they include some installer scripts for common popular applications. So Nick sent in WinApps. WinApps. And what is neat about it, and it works best with their key supported applications but like what you were talking about back in the day last week, it pops them out.

Oh, I'm going to have to try this. And includes integration with things like Nautilus. So WinApps unified software experience for Linux. Yes, it uses Docker, Podman or Lib, and then it can pop these individual Windows applications out and make them feel on Plasma or Gnome like they're as native as possible. So if you need to be in Windows a lot, this could be a word or something.

This could be a great way to do it. Now, you want to make sure your application's on their going to work for sure list. It doesn't have to be on here for it to work or not, but you know you're gonna have a good time. But look at this list, After Effects, Adobe Audition. I mean, Illustrator, all the Adobe stuff. Wow.

Internet Explorer, the Microsoft Office Suite from OneNote to Word and Outlook and Publisher and Visio and Visual Studio. You could also just do a full Windows RDP session as well. And it could just be a hyper efficient way to run Windows applications. I like that M-I-R-C is on here. Yeah.

But also PowerShell and the command. So this system, it queries Windows for all the installed applications. And then it creates shortcuts for those Windows applications on the GNU Linux OS. And then it uses free RDP on the backend to render the Windows applications on the GNU Linux OS, and then it uses free RDP on the back end to render the Windows applications alongside your GNU Linux applications.

How neat is this? It's so great, and there's an official taskbar widget that enables seamless administration of the Windows subsystem and to launch Windows applications. So, if you wanna add that, you can, which is just so slick. If the whole thing is just so neat,

I didn't even know about it until Nick sent it in. So, and it's using the GNU Aferro General Public License, which is a free copyleft software license for all kinds of work specifically designed to ensure cooperation with the community in the case of network or server software. I'm so regularly blown away that we don't hear about some of these applications. We do a lot of just sleuthing around to find the craziest applications to solve the craziest

problems and this seems like such an obvious one that should have been on our radar sooner. That's a really good one, Nick. Yes, it's fun. It takes me back to too, to the old days of trying to run these apps and using the different technologies. Suddenly I'm excited to go try to run a Windows app. What's going on here?

Could I run the Creative Cloud Suite? If I could, would I? I don't know. I feel, Chris, like this might solve your Bluefin Software Availability Challenge. You could just use the Windows Store. Oh, that's so funny. Well, you could probably run WSL, right?

So. Oh, man. You know what? That would be like some serious disroception right there, Westpain. That's a good one. That just about brings us to the end. If you have any tips for my Home Assistant hardware setup,

Brent's backup ideas for both the server-to-server, the desktops, and really I think the Android. Like what's really ideal on the Android? Say we did want to do a full Android backup. Please boost in or go to Linuxunplug.com slash contact for that. Also, if you want to make the power user move, join us live.

The program is live on Sundays. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. You can get it converted to your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar or if you have a podcasting 2.0 app, we'll publish it ahead of time and it'll just be right in your playlist. And what do we got to tell people every week, Wes?

What do we got to let them know? Chapters and transcripts. Yeah, that's right. Podcasting 2.0 certified over here. We've got transcripts so you can follow along or go search for something if you want. And easy chapter markers to go to your favorite segment. Right back. Listen again or skip it.

Thanks so much for listening on this week's episode of the Unplugged program. And we'll see you right back here next Sunday. Right. Yeah! I'm going to go to the bathroom. you