LINUX Unplugged - 635: The Texas Linux Fest Special

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

Our cross-continent race to Texas Linux Fest culminates into fantastic meat, meetups, and more.Sponsored By:Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love. 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:🤠 Texas Linux Festival Trip Support (Fake Boost)💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMTexas TrackerTexas Linux FestTXLF 2025 Sat Oct 4 - The Design & Implementation of the Darwin Operating SystemTXLF 2025 Sat Oct 4 - Getting Started with Ansible on LinuxTXLF 2025 Sat Oct 4 - Lessons They Don't Teach You in School: A Year in High-Performance ComputingTXLF 2025 Sat Oct 4 - I got Malware, BTW. A quick look at the rising trend of Linux MalwareA Gift for the Open Source Community: Chainguard’s CVE-Free Raspberry Pi Images (Beta)Chainguard for Raspberry PiChainguard's ImagesWes Payne - Mesh Network Sidecars for NixOS Services - Texas Linux Festnoblepayne/meshSidecar: Mesh network sidecars for NixOS ServicesPick: isd — isd (interactive systemd) – a better way to work with systemd units.ISD 0.6 Released For Interactive Systemd Management

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 this show today, we have had one wild week getting to and here at Texas Linux Fest. We'll tell you all about that. Then we're going to round out the show with some great shoutouts.

picks and a lot more. It's a packed episode. We've got a mumble room in listening right now. They're just in listening mode, but shout out to them for making it. And of course, everyone who tuned in over at jblive.tv as we are streaming live from Austin Tejas. Pretty cool. It was a struggle for a few moments, but here we are. Also, a big shout out to define.net slash unplugged our friends at Defined Networking, a decentralized VPN built on the nebula platform. It is really a great platform. It's optimized for speed, simplicity, industry-leading security. You can completely self-host all of the infrastructure yourself

or take advantage of their excellent managed product at Define.net slash unplug. You go there. You can get 100 hosts absolutely free, no credit card required. I think I'm pretty stoked about Nebula because I must have talked to half a dozen people that were building things on top of Nebula. Listener TechDev told me about a really interesting platform

he's been working on that's very close possibly. I don't want to say too much out of respect to our conversation, but it's people are building things on top of Nebula that is just extremely exciting. And Nebula has been built from the very beginning to be industrial grade. It was built to manage Slack's global empire of servers all around the world. But something that I don't know if most people know listening to this show is every Rivian vehicle on the road is using Nebula. Wow. On the go.

I mean, Nebula is in places you don't even realize just to. make networking happen in a secure way that is reliable and low impact on the host system. Nothing else offers Nebula's level of resilience, speed, and scalability. Go try it out 100 hosts absolutely free, no credit card required at Defined.net slash unplugged and support the show at Define.net slash unplugged. Well, we don't have a lot of housekeeping since we are now down here in Texas Linux Fest. We will be returning home, and we'll have more about that. The Texas Tracker is still live for our return trip.

And we still will also have the fake boost, if you'd like to help us with the return effort on gas and food. And kind of along those lines, we got a note from the Darrowich, or as we like to say, the Big D developer. Brentley, tell us about the note we got from the author of the very software we use to track our journey. Yeah, this is so sweet.

Very, very, very cool for us to see. Here's the message. Hi, my name is a very very. Benji, Evgeny. Sorry, I got that wrong. Hi, my name is Evgeny, and I'm the Devarich author. Love what you did with the Devarich API. Awesome job.

FYI, family location sharing is coming soon, although it might not be applicable to your use case, which admittedly is a very strange use case, where everyone has their own Devarich instance, but still, I thought you might be interested. Cheers. I'm very interested in family service. Yeah, I'm very interested in that.

And also props to the great AP. I mean, it was a super useful tool. It was really easy to get the API key and start pulling down the data. So, you know, it was kind of a great thing for us. It made for the perfect tracker for this use case. It didn't require a big lift on our end. We just ran low-end, simple clients on our mobile devices.

And it was so thank you so much for writing into. It was really great to hear from you and for building such a cool project. So having that live tracker was really fun. I mean, it was fun for us. We heard from people at Texas Linux Fest. They enjoyed it. but it really put us into the zone in the headspace of,

oh, we are in a race. What? We were racing? Yeah, well, yeah, because, you know, when we recorded last week, Chris and I, we were still at home, but Brent, you and your cats, aka Team Moose, Cosmo Eminem, and Brent, well, you were already on the road and you'd actually made pretty significant progress.

And our team, Team Bigfoot, we hadn't even started. I mean, I wasn't even fully packed yet. I mean, we got on the road. I woke up, I did one last load of laundry, and met Chris in Olympia. And that was mid-morning on Monday. So we were already feeling the heat. After almost eight hours of driving right on the nose,

we have stopped for our first meal of the day in Pendleton, Oregon. And we're just trying to debate how far we want to get. We're kind of thinking, Boise now, but we'd like to put the fear into Brent. Yeah, we were thinking maybe as far into Utah as we could possibly. we get. But then we remembered we actually do have to sleep. Yeah. Yeah, we don't want to kill ourselves before we get there. So probably Boise. We'll see. It's just the desire to put the fear into Brent is strong. The motivation, even on the first day, because you know, you set the tone,

Brent, with that, like, almost 600 mile journey you did on your first day. Oh, yeah. And we're like, so not only are we two days behind. We have an additional 600 miles on Brent that we have to travel and he's gotten this incredible head start. So it was hard, but we did stop for the night in the Idaho area and rested. But it was one of those, you know, hit your head on the pillow and then wake up in the morning to get right back on the road because the entire time, we know Brent has a key tactical advantage over us. And that is, once you get tired, I just sleep wherever I want to, really. You pull over, you cuddle up with the kitties, and there you go. Rest up, middle of a parking lot, And then additionally, like, when you want to leave, you don't have to pack anything up.

I mean, like, you maybe have some things out, but, like, you don't have to, like, get your luggage and get that back down into the car and check out. Like, you just tidy up and start the engine and driving. You're generally pretty close to the highway. I don't have to talk to anybody. Right. Well, that does mean his engine has to start, but that's a separate matter. That's a separate issue. But for, for Wes and I, it meant at some point we had to decide, are we going to keep going or not?

Okay, if we're not, where are we going to stop? Can we find a place? Can we book it? Is it too expensive? because we're trying to do this on a shoestring budget. And then it's generally off the beaten path a bit to get there. So you're killing 20 minutes driving there. I didn't consider that.

Yeah, we weren't staying in downtown Boise, right? Right. Right, because we're going for budget. Yeah, I was like always 100 feet off of my route. So that was something we had to constantly do the math on and try to decide if it was worth it to stop or not. But we did. We took it easy the first night.

Day two, we made some progress. It's day two. We just stopped for lunch in the festival. fairly cute town of Helper, Utah. We've taken a little stroll by the water. Yeah, they've got a nice little park. They've got an old train on display. It's cute.

What do you think, though? Like, are we having some of the worst driving luck? Just with the storms? We seem to be chasing... We're storm chasers on this trip. We're chasing the storm. Yeah, I mean, I think we've seen more lightning just in the past two days than I've seen in, like, the past year to date.

And it's been mostly just sloppy way. driving oh man it's like one half of the car is in a crick or you know and then like only one half of the car actually has traction on the ground so it was another reason we got off and decided to stop here but now the storm approaches because we got ahead of it sufficiently but now it's catching up again so we can't stop for too long plus we don't want the moose to get that far ahead he's on the road right now yeah we're always checking the tracker when we stop for lunch we're checking the tracker and you can hear in the background there was there was the storm was catching up to us so jay day two for us was day four for brent i hate that still so day two for you because i i couldn't

keep track of where you guys were during all this so was that monday or was that tuesday that would have been tuesday wow yeah okay all right and so you you know at this point you're doing pretty good not that you didn't do great but you're doing pretty good and it's day four and it kicks off for brent he's outside of a hilton um with maybe a little extra time on his hands well just as i was getting the top cover off of the generator. I got that old knock. I guess they weren't too happy with a post-apocalyptic-looking van parked at the Hilton. But that's okay.

So I packed up through the sneaky solar panel back in the van. And I guess we're just going to drive for a bit. There's no, there's like no shade around here. I'm dying. Chris and Wes, I, damn you. Tuesday was not a good first day or a good start of the day for Brent. In that moment, I realized I chose a vehicle to drive to Texas that didn't have any functioning air conditioning while going down the road.

You were very generous to say, hey, Brent, hey, you do have like an air conditioner on there. I know it runs like off AC power, but you also have a generator. Yeah. The generator, you know, you haven't spent any. time trying to fix it and making sure it works before the trip but maybe you could at this point yeah you're at a good spot but you got the knock oh man i thought it was perfect because it was like 11 a m something like that yeah and i had slept there overnight and nobody knocked you're actually you're lucky you made it that far you're lucky you made it to 11 am that's tell you the truth that's a very good point

but when i parked there overnight it was the parking lot was filled with RVs and campers like a bunch of cars and stuff but i might have slept in a little because i had this yeah you're you're a lead on the race and when i was the parking lot was filled on the race and when I woke up, I was one of two cars in the whole party lot, so I don't think that was good for me. You lost your cover. I mean, I don't think it would have been so bad if that was the worst that Tuesday got for you, but it actually, it actually got worse. What are we hearing here? Well, this is me driving on the interstate for about the last 40 seconds

and something breaking on the van as I just accelerate to try to get on the interstate and make some miles finally. And I realized something's very wrong. And that is the sound of something being caught in the cooling fan, and it's just whipping around, hitting everything in the engine bay, and causing havoc. And I realized something's very wrong. This is the very first van breakdown.

Oh, man. We knew it would happen. Well, I mean, but we didn't know where or that didn't last long. We didn't want it to happen. To be clear, we didn't want it to happen. Sure, sure. We knew it would help us. We knew it would help us in the race, but we weren't sure how bad it was.

And Brett, you got right to work. Well, I knew the van would break at some point. So you got, I brought some tools. You brought your tools. I brought coveralls. I brought, I don't know, a sense of I can fix it. I got really lucky, though, because I was at a rest stop. And I took my time.

And I thought, okay, I'm going to get back on the road. And I, you know, looked at one of my belts. And it seemed like it was a little looser than when I started this trip. And I was like, ah, maybe on the next rest stop, I have a look. And maybe I can do something about it. And so I got just on the freeway as I was accelerating, boom. That sound started happening. I was like, oh, I made the wrong decision here.

And I was super lucky because there was an off ramp right there. Oh. It could have been miles of trying to drive or having to stop on the side of the interstate, which is never what you want to be doing. And you weren't even sure what the extent of the damage was. No, not at all. Could be breaking things in there. The alternator could be gone.

Your fan can get cracked. I knew at least I still had steering and brakes, which I guess is all I need to get off the road. But I was very lucky because I was able to take this off ramp and judged like I could drive a couple more hundred feet. And I was able to stop at a fuel station that also just happened to have like a big truck garage tied to it. So I thought, okay, I can I can park. here and try to fix it myself if it's really bad i can try to you know guilt these guys into helping me basically help a guy out please it was just an old man but you pop the hood you got to work okay everything seems okay i'm just tightening the alternator into place getting the belts tight

And then we'll see if it runs okay. The AC fan, the AC belt did run around the fan of a backup belt or a secondary belt. If that's missing, then only the power steering belt goes around the cooling fan. I do not want the cooling fan to stop working. that would be very, very bad for a Texas trip. So we'll see how it goes. Roadside repair Brent, and, you know, he did it. He got it fixed.

And he tried to give her the first start. Okay, here we go. I'm going to start the van for the first time since pulling over. Oh, doesn't want to start. Oh, it's in second gear. There we go. Put it in park. Sounds okay.

Will it start? Oh, come on. Oh! There we go. And... It sounds good in here. No more slapping around of belts and such. Okay.

Okay. I think we can carry on. I'm hungry. that was a big win big win for you i was really lucky because what ended up happening was one of the belts definitely snapped and i tried before going on the strip to replace them all and the mechanic just couldn't find them oh so of course one of them has to break and it ended up being the air conditioning belt which as you know the van has no it has no working air conditioning which uh makes me suffer uh so it wasn't working anyways you may as well just delete on that and uh but when it's

It snapped. It took out one of the alternator belts, too. And so I had to kind of learn how to put that back on. I'd never done that before. But it only took me about 90 minutes. So I was feeling good. I was like, okay, first breakdown. Yep. So I get that out of the way because I knew it was going to happen at some point. And it only took me 90 minutes. That is impressive. I was hungry at that point. But there was this little roadside stop and they had fries and they had 32 ounces of sweet tea for really super cheap. So I figured, well, I needed a break anyway. And then you had. hit the road with some gusto, and I have to say, as your luck improved, our luck took a turn for the worse. And we were, you know, driving for, I don't know, at this point, 13 hours, trying to

find some place to stop. We finally booked an Airbnb that would let us in that night, only to arrive, open the door, and discover someone had stolen it right out from underneath us. It's the second night, and we've arrived at an Airbnb, but something's a bit off. And we don't really know if it's okay. We walked in and somebody else's luggage and bags are here. The bedroom's got luggage in it. There's bags in the living room. But there doesn't seem to be anybody else here. No, totally empty. I mean, not a ton of lights on or anything. No one else parked here. And, you know, the code we got through the app, I mean, it worked. We opened the door. And I've messaged the host, but I haven't heard anything yet. I'm not sure if we can stay here tonight.

but you know we spent a good we got a good amount of miles in today it wasn't our biggest day but it's a good day so this is a good time to stop if we can so we're in new mexico and we're kind of in the outskirts of new mexico so there's like five options to pick from to begin with and what we discover is that somebody else had shown up quickly dropped off all their stuff took a shower and then they headed out for the evening or something like that and then we show up a half hour later and they've showered and the place has been taken over. Unbelievable. And we're exhausted and it's

dark and there's like no lights in this area in New Mexico at all. No street lights. The roads are horrible horrible, horrible roads. And we're trying to communicate with this Airbnb owner on what the F we can do. I mean, we have nowhere to go. There's pretty much no other options to stay

and we're looking at the next town we'd be like Albuquerque, which was hours away at that point and we were tired. Meanwhile, you're having a great time oh yeah well it is end of day four 125 a.m. I think it did okay today. It was an adventurous day oh the belt's coming off and everything actually with the belt off the van sounds really nice I have to say it sounds smoother ride smoother I'm

It might have a little bit more power, although I might just be imagining that. I got a little tired of sleeping in the van near other people, so I went off a small side road off the interstate and found this sweet boondocking spot. Chris, you're going to be jealous. As you can hear, it's like in the middle of the wilderness

on the tiny little side road and is perfect so a nice reward for the end of a good day I hope tomorrow is a little less exciting the man's doing great other than losing a little bit of rubber but well

adventure continues yeah and meanwhile we were back on the road but now we were headed in the wrong direction and back on the road again we go they don't know who is here they've got another Airbnb further away more out of our way further away from country further away from austin that we can go to for the night we've been given the um the name kevin and a phone number in case we get because we have to go onto a ranch where we're going to get lost because it's pitch black out and dark, and we're going to find Kevin and his Airbnb, and we're going to try to stay in there, and hopefully that doesn't have somebody's luggage in it. Jeez.

The darkness, I cannot describe the darkness in this place, and so the owner gives us a tip. When you route, don't use Google Maps. Use Apple Maps. Yeah, it's going to take you all the long way through the ranch. Through the ranch. So Apple Maps did get us to... the driveway, but the driveway, we drove past twice because it was so dark and you couldn't see it. And then once we pulled down, and I have pretty bright headlights. And once you

pull down, we were off-roading. We were in Jeep territory or like raised truck territory. I don't think your car was meant for. Yeah. Think Forest Service road. And so we, we're bump, bump, and we're going through washouts. And I'm not kidding. Like, I'm, like, driving up along the side of a washout. So we're like, we're like at an angle because I'm like driving around. I think that was the one we were like, do we even, do we just ban? in this. We were asking, like, should we just turn around? But you got a bed in the back. We just, no, no. We finally roll up, and the owner, the guy that owns Airbnb, he's got a big

smile on his face. And he says, guys, I'm so sorry. I sent you to the wrong address. You need to go somewhere else on the ranch. Yeah, he sent us his address. His home address. In the confusion. Not the Airbnb address. If I hadn't just experienced this story, I don't know if I would believe it. So, six, seven miles down the road. most of it out of the direction we actually need to go. We get to the ranch, which is almost impossible to see in the dark,

so we had to turn around twice to even pull into the ranch. And the address they gave us was to the wrong house on the ranch. It was a guy that owns the ranch. So then we went up to talk to him for a bit, and then turned around and very slowly crawled down the road because not only is it not paved, it's significantly not paved, right? I mean, it's pretty sizable potholes.

What do you think of the Airbnb? It's okay, right? Yeah. It's a little musty, but it's all right. It's a little musty. The floors are a little soft, but there's a TV, there's a fridge. There's definitely two beds, I think. Okay.

So we will make it work. Honestly, the mood was a bit low because we were still way, way behind, and we'd had now gone off course. And Brent, which really killed us, was on the move as we were going the wrong direction, as we're finding this Airbnb on the ranch, Brent was making really good progress after he had stacked his W fixing his bells And Wes and I had to do some hard math So we're looking at the maps now that we've settled into our Airbnb And to get to Austin

I just saw a shooting star To get to Austin by say 4.30 p.m. tomorrow Which I think would beat Brent We would have to leave our Airbnb at 1.30 a.m. in the morning. It's 9 p.m.ish right now. well then what are we doing recording we should be in bed yeah we this is well this is the thing is do we want to get up at 1 a.m. and beat him and show up a day early with no place to stay or do we let our buddy win and we sleep in i just i'm torn so uh as as we check the tracker right

now he's about a solid day of driving tomorrow and he'll be in austin he's making really good time today we made really good time today too we put down almost 800 miles, more than 800 miles yesterday. We put down over 600 miles today, 10 hours of driving today, 14 hours of driving yesterday. And now we just have to decide if we want to kill ourselves and show up exhausted in Austin, but winners, which would be invigorating. Or we could tell them just to meet us at Terry Blacks. Yeah. Hey, are you here yet, Brent? Are you here yet? We have a table. Oh, God. That'd be so satisfying. But I didn't sleep last night.

And I feel like it would be pretty dumb to get only like three or four hours of sleep tonight after not sleeping and driving so much. You don't want this Texas Linux Fest to be your left. I still have made in my mind yet. I don't know what we're going to do. So we knew that in order for us to win this thing, our buddy Brent was probably going to need to suffer a breakdown. And we didn't want to wish that on him. And we're racking our brains. I mean, we were big picture ideating, as they say, using our...

our imaginary. Like, we thought, could we contact a listener that could go track Brent down and distract him for a while? That worked a couple days early. We thought could we, like, sick PJ on Brent for a bit, and maybe PJ could distract Brent for a while. Come on, guys. I know, right?

There's a lot of solar stuff to talk about. Wes, you were sending me a strange number of delicious restaurants in Memphis. I wanted you to have a good foodie journey. We just knew, like, okay, so we thought, okay, well, if we don't want them to break down, but we would like to beat him. And there's just physically no way we can do it unless we can get you properly distracted. How dare you? So we sent you a message the next morning suggesting since you had such a brilliant lead that perhaps it was a good time to invest in a little bit of generator repair.

Well, and we did. You know, we were concerned about his poor kiddies too. So Brent, on what would be day five for him, I guess that would be Wednesday morning for us. You guys were in New Mexico? I was in Arkansas. Yeah, yeah. We're in New Mexico. A sweet boondocking spot.

Yeah, you did have a nice. It actually was a really great spot to work. Really good. Yeah. I woke up in my little boondocking spot here in Hot Springs, Arkansas. I did better than I even thought last night. This spot is great. I parked under the shade of a tree.

It is beautiful as a river with fish just like, I don't know, 100 meters that way. I got the solar panel out, getting a little bit of solar charging going. The boys escaped for a little bit, but I don't blame them. They just ate some grass and scurried back into the van. Chris and Wes are trying to encourage me to delay my departure to fix the generator. That way I can get air conditioning in the van when we're parked in Austin. and even though I believe this is a delay tactic because I'm still a couple hundred miles ahead of them in the race

I think they're probably right I have a little bit of shade, a good setup no one around to really kick me out of a hotel parking lot so I think I might spend maybe an hour hopefully not two but maybe two just taking the carburetor out of the generator cleaning it up and seeing if I can get the generator

to run a little more smoothly. Maybe I'll jump in the river. You see, what you have to understand is Brent's kind of a galaxy brain and time is relative to perception. Isn't it for you? It was kind of an hour you spent. You kind of spent an hour on it.

It felt like it. Okay, it is 340, much later than I was hoping. But the car was back together. It definitely needed a great cleaning. That is clearly the issue. I had to sacrifice my toothbrush to clean some of the components, so I should make a note to get a new toothbrush in Austin. But everything's back together.

I did find two O-rings that were completely damaged and fell off, and I had to construct my own... my own out of, well I found, I looked around trying to find what I could use. I found an air freshener, which was the perfect thickness, and I could modify it. So I've used that in place of a rubber o-ring, hoping that lasts a few days. But anyhow, I just need to put some of the glass fuses back in for the starter. So let me just do that here, and then we could give it a shot. and see if it actually will start. So I need a screwdriver. There we go. One in, two in.

Okay. Are you ready? Oh, I did check the oil. It's slightly overfilled, but it seems fine. Well, here we go. Three, two. Well, I mean, let's tinker a little bit more. Oh, that's hard to hear, too, because Brent and, so Team Bigfoot, our team, and team and Team Moose, we had a time difference between us, so we could get up a little bit earlier and hit the road before you would even be awake. So while you were fiddling with the generator, we were laying down miles like Mad Men. We are 521 miles into day three.

We just crossed the border into Texas. We've been driving for seven hours and 40 minutes. And we are just about tied right now with our buddy Brent. Maybe he's making a tactical mistake, West Payne. He very well may be. I mean, we're neck and neck at this point. We're both still like six and a half hours outside Austin, but we're each six and a half hours outside of Austin.

I cannot believe we have closed this gap. It's incredible. Last we heard from Brent, because we're kind of slow on updates right now, he was taking time to fix on his generator, specifically the car on that thing. Yeah. We don't know if it went well, if it went terribly. He hasn't said anything, but we've seen no updates. I mean, the tracker's updating, but he's at the same location.

He seems if not moved. Yeah. Is he tricking us? Is he slow playing us? Is he just not take us seriously? Either way, it may have been a fatal mistake because we're catching. up right now. Or he may be tricking us. I don't know. I'm bracing myself for either thing. So as Brent wrapped up the work on the generator, you took a moment to check how we were doing

on the tracker. I don't think it was looking too good. I am now all packed up. Van started, boys tucked in. And I'm about to hit the road for the first time today. It is 444. My map claims I have 466 miles. The Texas tracker claims I have 389. And the boys have 298, so they're 100 miles ahead of me. I am losing the race because I got distracted by generators. Okay, carrying on. I cannot believe that worked.

I cannot believe that actually worked as a strategy. Man. And so, I mean, and to be fair, we were in an area of West Texas where we could just lay down miles like crazy. The speed limit was like 85 miles per hour. We were also deploying other tactics. You know, we were trying to convince Brent that we were not moving as much as we were. Yes, that was a bit of a psychological warfare play. You were really good at that. Yeah, you know, like we tried to convince him we were going to a museum, but we also, I managed to get Gemini to Photoshop you. Like, you were feeling gas, but it kind of looks like you're at a food truck. So I was hoping maybe Brent thought we were stopping for lunch. I thought that was real. I was like, I'm under a van and you guys are getting tacos.

He looked at different. He swapped out because we only did two stops that Texas day. And so there was no time to stop for food trucks. We were in a race. We stopped twice and we stopped for less than 15 minutes. And so then what West is, he took a. picture of me at the gas pump and then while we're on the road he throws that through the lm to make it look like we're at a taco stop to make you think we're taking our time it was

strategic and it worked he's never going to trust me again chris welcome to austin we did it we did it over 13 hours of driving today um i think almost 900 miles i can't believe it we made some good time today and we actually beat brent by about two hours so we're going to set up some star the TV and we're going to order some tacos. And when Brank gets here, we'll have some gluten-free tacos for them and we'll be nice and fed. It feels pretty good. I can't believe we pulled that out. I mean, we started so far behind. There was no way. I mean, we kept doing every possible piece of math. We looked at every possible alternative route. We even pulled up the, like, maintenance database for the various states we were driving through trying to optimize if we could

catch any extra advantage. In over 13 hours of driving today, we only made two stops and each stop was under 15 minutes because we knew we had very little margin of air and so we hustled we grabbed like food we knew we could eat on the so we had gas station food today so that's why we're having nice tacos tonight because we earned it we did and then all there was to do was to wait for our buddy brent to arrive okay just about two hours later and Brent just pulled up to the Airbnb where a day ahead of schedule we all hauled today.

Someone's at the door, Wes. Who is it? Hello. Bradley? Hi. Hi, buddy. Let's come here. Oh, yeah.

Look at you. You famous. Good job. You stayed up for me? You hauled. I did. I stayed up. Are you?

recording i'm recording how's the kiddies doing are they okay yeah i'm probably hungry or whatever but someone happened you know what's funny too is we didn't really talk ahead of time about recording clips we just both did it i know you've trained me with so that was so we talked for way too long about you know the race

and oh this moment oh that moment i couldn't believe how much rain you both got yeah had i got that rain i would have been flooded Yeah, yeah. The van still rains inside. Right. Monsoon levels of rain we went through all the way until we got to Salt Lake City. But it was fun to, like, you know, trade, like moments or, you know, what were you thinking at this time?

Because we were thinking this. Yeah, we only got a few updates, right? We were both kind of being a little secretive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So once we had that all the way, it was time to go out there and do a good peeper scan because I wanted to see Brent's repair job that he had done on the road.

Nice fix. But I'm very lucky because... Yeah. Nothing else got destroyed. Yes. And also, it could have taken out my power steering belt. Probably all these extra zip ties you put in to really hold things together. I didn't do that. My mechanic does this. Oh, really?

I know. Because this is like, cool. Yeah, and it was rubbing. It's a good catch. I like that. I know. I mean, they installed that. Nice cat. But you probably do that. That looks no. OnePassword.com slash unplug.

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slash unplugged you go there you find out the deeds you learn and you support us it's real easy it's one password dot com slash unplugged all lowercase, onepassword.com slash unplugged. So after the long trek down, we actually got here to do what we were intending the entire trip to be about. It wasn't just the race.

It was actually Texas Liddix Fest. Remember that, boys? Oh, that little thing. Right. Like, that's why we're here. Oh, yeah, right. It's a good thing we got here a day early, I think, because we clearly all needed a day off in between.

Oh, yeah. We pushed it hard. We pushed it hard. You collected some stats for us. Oh, yes, I did. Why don't we? Let's cover those before we get to the fest. Just because it's fun.

The numbers are fun. Our boy, Team Moose, over there. Uh-huh. Well, he did pretty good because he had an average velocity of 94.2 kilometers per hour, which he can maybe translate into freedom units. That's over 60 miles per hour, right? Yeah. I had no idea because my speedometer doesn't work, but that feels good.

That's really impressive. And he managed to drive for almost 31. hours. Well done, sir. And this is not, you know, this is like actual time measured when he was in motion from the stats. Right, right. Just in motion time. It is when you can see the day breakdown here. So he started off really well, day won 10.44 hours. But then you kind of see where there was maybe some easier going in the middle. Next day was one hour. Hey, hey, hey, hey, that was Sunday of Linux on plugs. Okay, all right. Okay, okay, fair, fair. Okay, then four hours after that. Yeah, and then the last two days you finish pretty strong. I mean, you know, seven plus on each of us. A seven hour drive day is

No joke. You guys did, like, double that. Well, what did we do, West? Yeah, okay. Well, so we had an average velocity not too much higher than Brent's, 102.5 kilometers per hour. Oh, okay, so we were slightly faster. And, which was good because we had to do a total driving of 36.1 hours. Oh, my gosh.

Wow. And that's almost an entire work week of driving. And there was only three days to do it. So day one, we put in 13.02. That's impressive. Yeah. Day two, we took it a little easier. We did 9.95, just about 10 hours of driving.

And then on that killer critical last day, 13.14. What? Wow. It's a good thing you don't sleep. You just drive the whole time. The good thing I like to drive. It's a good thing. Yeah, yeah, it is.

So we definitely rested. We just, the first, the next day, before the fest started, we didn't even leave the Airbnb. No. We did not get in the car. We didn't go. We just, we just got some food in. We ordered food and rested. You know, kind of planned our fest coverage, too.

So, you know, there were some of that as well. But, oh, my gosh. And I think that was the good move, because we were recharged for Texas Linux Fest day one. And one of the things we always like to go do, once we show up, you get registered, and you go find our buddy Carl, and you get some pocket meat. Oh, yeah. That looks good. That looks really good. Hey, buddy.

How are you? How are you? How's Carl? How's Carl? Yeah. Yeah. Hello, hello. How are you?

You guys made it. Yeah, we did. We sure did. How was it? That's right. Pretty good. Pretty good. It was a hell of a race.

I was following the tracker. Yeah. I thought for sure he happened. I really did. Yeah. Until the last day. Speaking of it. Oh, there it is.

The pocket meat's out. The pocket meat is out. It's almost all worth it just for the pocket meat. That's the only reason I came. Yeah. He even has a variety. Yeah. He does. He does. So we were in the zone once we got our pocket meet. Would you believe it? We all

managed to get up on time and get out the door. Barely. Barely. I mean, there was some edge cases there. Maybe. I won't suggest who might have been a little bit late. But we're here. And we've gotten some of our initial pocket meet. That's been nice. We've been registered. We got to walk the floor a bit. And we popped our head into the Bootsie Room. That was a little busy. Oh, yeah. Packed. I mean, I don't think. We couldn't really stay for more than a few minutes just to get a taste because anywhere we stood, we were blocking somebody's view. I think people are here for the Atomic Distros.

Yeah, they want their containers booting. But Brent came with no intention of seeking tech support, but ended up having an opportunity to get a little direct support from Framework. Tell me about that, Brantley. Well, I decided I probably would like the right side of my ports to work again, so I thought I could chat with the Framework folks, and they were helpful. They had some suggestions. Of course, you can just swap out the entire motherboard and go that way.

But I don't know. I'm going to keep tinkering. See if we can fix it. It did suggest a USBC hub, too, which could potentially at least be a temporary patch. And, of course, already we've seen, I don't know, 10, 12 different listeners, including listener Lee, who set us up with some 3D printed rocket ships. That's true. Yeah, basically, we keep bumping into listeners.

It's pretty great. I think Friday will probably be the smaller of the days, and then I think Saturday is probably going to be the big main day. And mostly, I just have to make sure we get into that VIM mastering room because I want us all to leave this as VIM masters. It's not too late, right? We still have time for the VIM workshop? Yeah, it's high time you kick that disgusting nano habit of yours anyway.

Hey now, hey now. I just want to foster a collaborative environment, so I was willing to go to the VIM workshop. I was willing to sit through. A long VIM workshop, really. So the VIM workshop didn't work out. And I couldn't find the nano workshop. I'm not sure what that was about.

So I think the next best thing to do would be to go get some barbecue, obviously. We got a little crew assembled here. So we've been organizing over BitChat. And we're going to Stiles Barbecue. Stiles Switch barbecue, which is about 10 minutes from the event center. Now, of course, we have to go back to the Airbnb first. Yeah. 10 minutes, the other direction.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We've got to get our car. Got to get that. But then we'll have it and we can transport. And a lot of folks don't have vehicles. They are, like, traveling for the event. And so we may be a little short on cars. So we're going to have one to add to the carpool. That'll be good.

And we'll get our barbecue fix while we're in town. I blame Carl. You know, after he gave us the generous help in the pocket meat, you know, then we saw him wandering around with just like, I don't know if it was a turkey leg or a beef. It was just a stick of meat. Just a big stick of meat. So what were we going to be supposed to do? We were not going to be satisfied with them.

burgers or sandwiches today. So we run back and we get my car and we head towards lunch where the listeners are waiting for us and I get a flat tire along the way. So we had to... Finally you break down. I know. After the race, we were in Austin. And I did have a tire air pump with me so I could put some air in it and get us to lunch.

But it was just go figure. So we showed up a little late to lunch, but very much liked that Stiles barbecue. And we spent the rest of the afternoon kind of doing the networking track. went back for a bit, did a lot of chatting, and settled in for the evening with some Star Trek and got ourselves prepared for day two, which was when the keynote was going to be in like the real big day of the Texas Linux Fest. It's Saturday, and we're maybe a little late. We're rushing right now to make it to the keynote.

We're here. Can we blame Brent for this a little bit? Oh, yeah. Yeah? Oh, definitely. I had a giant breakfast about three minutes before we had to leave, so that's on me. All right. Okay.

Good. Well, that's settled then. Let's get to it. Walk faster. And we did make it to the keynote, indeed. We made it just in time. They have cool space chairs in the auditorium, and it is Dustin Kirkland giving the keynote.

He's the SVP of engineering at ChainGuard now. His name might sound familiar to you because he also used to work at Canonical. And I enjoyed his keynote. I hadn't heard much about Changard, and it's always good to kind of catch up on what Dustin's been doing, because he's been in the industry for quite a long time, doing good stuff. So, also, I get to introduce the keynote speaker, for this conference, which I'm very excited about.

I've known Dustin for longer than probably either of us will want to admit. And now he's working at ChainGuard on securing Linux, and I think that that's something that everyone needs. Thank you, Justin. Ted, thank you so much. All right, good morning, Texas Linux Fest. What an absolute thrill and honor it is to be your speaker,

here this morning in my hometown of Austin, Texas. I've been attending this conference since 2010, and to be on this stage is an honor and a privilege. So thank you to the organizers for the invitation. Very much appreciate the opportunity to spend a few minutes with you here today and talk about software security. This is definitely not my first Texas Linux Fest rodeo.

In 2010 was the original Texas Linux Fest Linux Fest. And as I remember, it was a couple of tables set up in a strip mall, the way I remember it anyway. But it had an incredible spark of energy. The people were passionate. The hallway conversations were all about the early days of cloud and cloud computing. I remember quite a bit of talk about cloud computing and whether it was real or not or an industry shift or not. In any case, it certainly felt like some. something big. And here we are 15 years later, and this conference is still going and thriving and super proud to see this. I really felt like Dustin hit a good tone there. And he brings some historical context to the area. He's familiar with the Linux scene in the area. So after the keynote, we wanted to just grab his ear real quick and kind of get a sense of what is the Linux industry scene if you want to live in Texas? What do you expect? And then obviously we just chatted more from there. The keynote just wrapped up. It was great. And so we had to grab Dustin to chat with him

a bit about it. And I think I wanted to start Dustin with. Could you describe what the Linux scene in general is like, kind of in the Austin and Texas area? Because I know you've been here for a long time. Yeah, I've been in Austin, Texas for 25 years since 2000. I started my career at the IBM Linux Technology Center, which is just across the street from where the conference is here. What's cool about that is that brought about a thousand engineers to Austin in the early 2000s, Linux engineers specifically. A lot of open source passion has flown through here over those years. Of course, I've stayed. Others have moved around. But there's a lot of passion for open source in general.

Austin, just the Austin mindset, the tech mindset, aligns well with open source, the open source ethos. So I love it. There's a bunch of tech companies here, many of which have their security centers or their network centers based around Austin. So, you know, it's a great scene. Okay, so you said something during the keynote that we all went, oh,

and you took a pretty strong stand and said that the best solution really for security in the enterprise, especially for infrastructure like Linux boxes, is maybe a rolling distro. Can you expand on that a little bit? Because I think some people listen to that think the opposite when it comes to enterprise.

Yeah, I think that's largely been the case. You know, the concept of a rolling distro is not new. You can go back to the mid-90s with Debian, Red Hat, Sousa, Ubuntu. Everyone has had a rolling distro. But it's never really been able to or are fitted to run in an enterprise environment. The stability was just not there. And so at Changgar, we've kind of taken the opposite approach. We've said the time is now for rolling distros.

Maybe it wasn't possible when every build, had to be done on a manually booted and installed physical machine. But just with the dawn of cloud native, with containers, with serverless jobs, it's just, it's so much more possible now to build and test and run everything everywhere and crank through those builds and do so in a way that you can maintain the security and the quality of. Are there going to be problems? Yeah, absolutely.

But the problems I would posit with a rolling distro are small. When you're trying to bisect what change between yesterday and, today, that's a problem you can solve in a few minutes to hours. When you're trying to bisect what went wrong between the 2017 release of some Enterprise Linux and the 2025 release, and you're trying to upgrade in between, I mean, everything changed, you know. So, yeah, I'm a huge proponent of rolling distros. I've suffered through the, you know, two decades of that not being ready. I think we're ready now.

I love to hear that. So did Chingard have to create their own distribution to accomplish? that? Are there like special tools in there to make that a safe experience? Yeah, we did actually. So I didn't mention this in the keynote, but I probably should. Every single bit of chain guard is built entirely and bootstrapped entirely from source. We are not a derivative of Alpine, Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, we're Nix. We're not a derivative of anything. We built the compilers, the libraries, every single package, every project from source. we also have built automation that does all of that automatically.

So unlike, and I'm the Debian maintainer for a couple of dozen Debian packages or have been over the years, every Debian package has one or more human name email addresses who are responsible for that package. And that's true for pretty much every other distro. We've taken a different approach. We have build rules checked in in a YAML format, but it's the machine that builds these and does that over and over and determines when there's a regression, even tries to automatically address problems and fix them when possible.

So, yes, we've bootstrapped this entirely from source. Wow. And so if I have a problem, I assume there's mechanisms to roll back? Yeah, so rollback is, maybe this is part of why a rolling distro is possible now. Rollback means stop the container that's not working and start the container that is working. So rollback is just go back to the preview. version, the previous digest of the best known working version. And so, you know, much of that didn't exist 15, 20 years ago, and so this wasn't possible. Now, when we're talking about

VMs and potentially even hardware, we're leaning into some of the containerized mechanisms for doing that. So FS Verity, you know, read-only, overlay file systems, boot C is actually, you know, really interesting here. So treat a container, treat a VM like a container. have that container effectively boot as a read-only immutable mount point for the root file system. And when you update, just download a new container image and reboot and remount. And, you know, there you go. Oh, you need to roll back. Okay, we'll just go to the previous digest of that container.

And you're back to the last known good working version. It does seem like the technologies are finally there to make it all work. So am I picking up, it's a real kind of minimal base OS. and then the applications are all containerized? Yeah, that's right. Minimal Base OS, the applications, we do package them, and we render, think about it as like rendering an image is the minimum set you need,

plus whatever application is you need to run. And if you want to run that as a container, great. If you want to run that as a VM, and there are actually some workloads that just don't containerize well. There's workloads where performance is key, you know, applications that want full access to the CPU memory,

disk, network, I.O., GPU, we can render any of those containers as a VM image, you know, and we can also, there are some workloads that, for security reasons, need to be in its own VM. You know, you run a privileged container. Your pod is kind of compromised, or I would treat it as basically compromise once you're running a privileged container inside of that pod. You know, so all of these are important mechanisms there. But yeah, you run the applications themselves as containers, It drag along all the bits and pieces you need for that application to run and run well and keep it separate from the rest of the system. Okay, last question. We've been talking Enterprise today, but you announced the release of a Raspberry Pi image. Tell me a little about what's that about. Yeah, it's a bit of a fun experiment. So, you know, at Changard, we get to hack on some things in our spare time sometimes. And this was a pet project of mine and a couple of other engineers. We, you know, running home assistance or other things on our Raspberry Pi's, my solar array.

monitor, uh, is running on a raspberry pie. Uh, and I've run Debbie and I've been to on those machines very well and successfully for many years. Uh, but we as a, this was kind of a Christmas project. So way back in December, I started working on could I actually get a chain guard OS to boot and run on a raspberry pie? And I did. And not unexpectedly, because it's all the same bits that we put into our production grade enterprise rolling distro images. I scanned it for vulnerabilities and there were zero not unexpected i mean it's unexpected someone who's never done this before but this is literally the exact same bits as we're putting into our container images so uh yeah that's pretty remarkable frankly so it took us a little while to get it to a point where we're

ready to talk about it and then saved it for a few months for this conference which seems like the right audience to talk about this with well dustin great keynote thanks for answering the questions it's good to chat with you yeah thanks chris appreciate it this is nice to catch up with Dustin again. He had a great keynote, and that will be linked in the show notes. In fact, we've kind of gone through and put the favorite talks of ours that are online on the Texas Linux Fest YouTube channel, and I believe as we are speaking right now, they're probably uploading more. So we'll link to the favorites that are up there so far, plus the channel in general, including Dustin's talk, if you want to go watch, there's some good ones. But we did

the talk thing, and then at lunch on Saturday, it was time to celebrate the 12th birthday for Linux, I'm plugged. Lunch time on Saturday. And that means it's birthday party time. Happy birthday boys. Happy birthday. And I knew we might have trouble because when we arrived and we arrived early, we usually arrived late, but this time we arrived early so we could actually get a bite to eat before the crowd showed up. And so it was just us. It was just the three of us. And we overwhelmed the guy. He told us that he was the only guy there and that because of that they only had one

thing on the menu. They were doing a reduced menu. I knew we were in trouble and then everybody started showing up. This is a little embarrassing. We have completely overrun this poor little facility. They're understaffed today. They're so understaffed. They're doing only one menu item. They have two people working here and I don't know. There's 50 of us. I'm not sure. There's a lot. There's too many of us. Line out the door. line out the door. Multiple times. Yeah.

But we have such a great audience. Everybody was chill. Everybody was cool. And by the end of it, the guy was at ease. Yeah. The staff handled it super well. Yeah. You know, they did a good job of letting people know ahead of time.

We tried to share that info too. Just, you know, you don't have much choice here, but you can come. Yeah, yeah. And it turned into a great little party. And Brent had a chance to chat with some of the attendees. And we just wanted to know a couple of questions. All right. We're here at Texas Linux Fest.

Let me know what's your name, which desktop? Fyuzin and which Gistro. My name's Tyler, Hyperland, NixOS. My name is Justin. I got KDE Plasma on a steam deck. Hey there. I'm Willard Nildjus. I use KDE on Arch Linux. David Fretz. I run Gnom on Red Hat. Carl George. Noam Montfodora. And Derek, no one of Butu.

All right. And how long you've been Linuxing? Around four years. My first was around 2010 with like ZorinOS and whatnot, but it's back and forth. These days it's primarily on the Steam OS. A little over 10 years since about 2014. Late 90s, I don't remember when. 16 years? I just did the math. Almost 10.

Nice, thank you, gentlemen. Wow, wow, wow. And they weren't the only ones. My name is Matthew Broms. I'm using Debian and using No. My name is Prasad. I'm currently using Garuda on my main desktop with KD and on my new one, CashioS on Framework. My name is George. I'm using Fedora and No. Chris, and I'm currently on Fedora, the KDE spin. Hey, I'm Riza. I've been using Gnome on Fedora and I3 on REL. Dave, sway on Fedora all the way.

Very nice, and how long you've been Linuxing? 15 years. 13 years. 20? I'll have to kind of see, but I guess I can date myself with my first Linux distra. It was Yagrosil plug-in-play Linux, so that tells you something. It's got to be at least 25 years. Not really sure.

Maybe 15. Wow. And one more batch. I love this. One more badge. My name's Robbie Calicott. I use Fedora KDE, the best desktop. Jodo Bannon.

Fedora, Nome, I couldn't tell you. 20-ish years, not quite 30. Jonathan Wright, KDE on Fedora, and almost 20 years. A lot of long timers, a lot of long timers, but it was good. I like here in the mix, too. I was asked after, you know, because people are like, Brent's asking all these questions. I was asked if I saw any themes, like,

is there a main desktop or something that's standing out or a distro that most people are running? And as you heard there, there's zero consensus, zero. There's only a consensus on how long people have been running Linux that attend Texas Linux Fest. Yeah, a lot of long timers. Really impressive. Not all of them, but a long of them.

You know about hurting cats, Brett. I think that might be the case here. Lunch was great. We had a really good meetup, great birthday party. But then after that, it was time to get back to work because West Payne had to bring that Nick's energy for his talk that was coming up in just a couple of hours. You could argue the meetup's not really over because Brent's currently giving a tour, brought a few folks back to the Airbnb that really wanted to see the moose. And so Brent's currently giving a tour of the van. And while he's given tours of the van, Mr. West Payne is preparing for his talk, which comes up very soon.

How are you feeling, Wes? I'm feeling good, you know, there's been a lot of good talks here at Texas Linux Fest, but, well, no other Nix talks. So I'm trying to charge myself up to fit the Nix evangelist role, you know, I have inside myself and really try to embody that for everybody. You know, we need some Nix at Texas Lennox Fest. We did, and I think it was a good talk. I may be a bit biased, but I thought it was a good, clean. presentation, Wes, you had a good mix of practical code on the screen, and also lean, mean bullet points when needed, and then some video examples, mixed with some live examples,

and it flowed. The whole thing flowed. It was a good presentation. And the other thing that I think was a good sign is when we talked to people after your presentation, they said that your demonstrations made a few more things click for them that they hadn't got just by listening to the podcast. Hey, that is what I was aiming for. If it could stoke anyone's curiosity, maybe demystify things, maybe make NixOS seem a little more approachable than I think I've succeeded. And I think there's some interest in that whole sidecar module concept, the NICS sidecar. I think there's interest in that. You know, it's a very useful pattern, especially if you're already kind of all in on MASH networks,

as I think three of us are. And then you got the combo, right, of, okay, I can have this directly on my network as a first class entity with the whole curated catalog of NixOS services and modules at your fingertips. Yeah. At least that's the idea. It's pretty powerful. It's pretty powerful. So good fest for you, boys? Oh, yeah. Good fest. Excellent fest. Great fest, right? Yes, great fest. I liked the new venue. Something about a university kind of made it feel a little more community-minded than like a corporate conference center. And then at least for me as a speaker was a great experience. I mean, they had a video setup. They had professional audio stuff. There was a mic ready. They had all kinds of dongles and ports ready to plug your laptop in. And they had like a nice little screen for the speaker so I could see the talk too. Yeah, that is a good setup. And the venue, I think, did work. It wasn't, you know, we're not quite in the heart of Austin, but you're in an area that's still got a lot of Austin flavor, and there's tons of places to go out to and eat, and all the things you want from Austin are in this area, and you're probably, you know, 20 minutes from downtown, depending on traffic.

And, you know, it is a community-run event, so it's, it was neat to see just all the, all the hard work that had gone into it and just the hard work that continues going into, they're, you know, I heard a lot of folks reflecting on, you know, what went right this year, what didn't. kind of thoughts for the future and what might change, so. I'm really grateful the audience made this trip possible. I think we were able to have a little bit more fun with it because it was an audience-funded trip, and that added a whole new element that we would love to do again. In fact, keep your eyes on the Texas Tracker. TexasTracker.jupiterbroadcasting.com because the race begins, where last time it was a race against Team Bigfoot and Team Moose, this time it's a race against time.

we're working together to as fast as possible get up to System 76 in Colorado in Denver so that way they can give us an in-person hands-on tour of the new Cosmic Desktop and its current release status. And then we also have to obviously meet up with editor Drew, maybe treat him to a dinner or something like that while we're in the area. And Brent has some van parts coming in, so we might have to do some quick van fixing on. Then we have to hit the road to make it back to the studio because Canonical's VP of Engineering is going to be joining us for a chat, and we want to get to the studio in time to make it for that conversation. So the trip back to the studio is going to be a real race against time.

We'll have the tracker going. Once we reach Denver, too, we're going to be splitting and going our separate ways. The Moose and Team Bigfoot will be going in opposite directions, and you can keep an eye on us there as well. It should be just as hardcore of a drive as we had on the way down. Hopefully, maybe not quite as hardcore, because we're not racing against each other. But I think we're supposed to tell Brent that we're leaving tonight, right? Right.

Yeah. I was about to say, I hope there's less finagling of, I don't know, my timeline, let's say. Well, let's just say there was a brief conversation last night when someone disappeared, we thought, wouldn't it be hilarious if we loaded up in the car and hit the road to Denver right now? Yeah, you came back and we were gone. I'd be like, sweet. Place to myself. Right. That's true.

But no, we're going to caravan together to Denver. We're looking forward to seeing our friends at System 76. and then, of course, making it back home. We're hoping that it goes pretty smooth. There's no major incidents, and we can make this tight timeline work because if it works out, we're going to have some great content for you when we get back next week. Big shout out to everybody who made it to Texas Linux Fest.

All of you who said hi, are those of you that didn't get a chance to say hi. It's one of our favorite fest, and we always really enjoy, too, just the whole scenery and all of it. Just eternally grateful that you showed up and extremely grateful that the audience made it possible. And don't forget, there are some goodies on that Texas Linux Fest YouTube channel. Unraid.net slash unplugged. Unleash your hardware right now with Unraid. I think the secret is that you can use what you have in your closet right now to get started. You can use the drives you've got. You can use the interest and the passion from a topic we covered. You know, when we talk about things like

ersatz TV, the community makes applications available for UnRate. Because UnRate is a powerful operating system you load on the existing hardware you have. They've been around for over 20 years, and they have proven year after year. They know how to make a great product and maintain it. So if you go to unraid.net slash unplugged, you support the show, but you can also get Unraid, and you can use it 30 days totes free. Just get a sense of the architecture of how the system works and kind of the robust and I'd say bulletproofness of it.

And they're always improving Unraid, too. There's a new version just around the corner and the UI continues to get nicer and nicer with each release. That's an area of focus of theirs. They've also recently introduced an API with applications already getting built around it, and there's easy integration with mesh networking like tailscale. So you can install an application, click a box,

it's on your tailnet. Hardware pass-through? Crazy easy. Unraid has always been the leader in making it super easy to take hardware and pass it through to a VM, but now they've got options to like share your GPUs and all kinds of stuff. And also, this has been out for a minute now, but I love this.

also at the OS level, supports Wi-Fi. So if you don't have Ethernet in your place, I know it sucks, I'm there with you. They just support that right out of the box now. So you've got things like QXL virtual GPU support. You've got the newer, faster Linux kernels. You've got an awesome file system stack. I mean, I'm talking to one of the best EFS implementations you've ever seen

because it can also integrate with or implement and transition from other ZFS systems like Ubuntu or TrueNAS or ProxMox and just move it right over to UnRade. So it works real good. and you don't have to fuss with it. You know, you got what? You got a Saturday to get this working? That's going to do.

And then you're going to have access to all the cool stuff we talk about all the time and be in control of your data. And you can use the existing hardware. If you're a tinker, a power user, or you just want a better way to run your apps, your VMs, whatever it might be applications, Unraid's going to give it to you.

It's really the freedom to build your perfect server. Check it out, support the show. Go to unraid.net slash unplugged. well we got ourselves what do we call them these a fake booms with love fake boosts with love you know very real fake boosts yeah the fake boosts with love we got the first one here from tiny a little tiny 20 usds but everything helps thank you so much coming in hot with the booth thank you tiny thank you for all the amazing shows over the years i found you all during the linux action show days and it's part of the reason i have my dream job today i'd like to show my ansible roles as well Oh, all right. Yeah, let's take a little look. All right. Yeah, there's some nice stuff in here. I got a little sneak peek, and there are a lot of nice roles. I'm looking at the next cloud one right now. I'm looking at the AgGuard one. Clearly very well organized.

Tiny says includes roles for deploying various home lab services and my desktop setup. The most unique thing about it is that it uses Ancible pull and a system D timer to make sure that the latest configuration gets pulled down every night. So when I add a new app or change my shell, it just magically appears in all my boxes in 24 hours or less. That's great. That's big brain right there. System D to pull down the changes in the background overnight so the next time you just go to use the box, it's got all your new settings that you changed on the other machines. Awesome. Tiny.

Maybe Tiny should be admin in your boxes. Yeah, at least the studio boxes. Thank you for the fake boost, too, Tiny. Appreciate it. Well, Mr. Adversary 17 came in with 100,000 sats. Hey, Rich Lobster! Adversaries writes, here's some fake sats for the trip back. Yeah, that is true. It does take gas to get back, too. So thank you for thinking of us.

Thank you. I have to say two adversaries helped me fix my framework. Oh, so the, okay, wait. So let me recap. Last week we found out that on the initial drive down, you burned out one of the sides of your framebook. And did the entire Linux unplugged that week. With a burned outside. Uh-huh. So what was it? Well, I think the charger in the van that I've plugged.

into this laptop a couple times before um you mean that really sweet anchor charger i gave you you got me that that thing's awesome and maybe not so awesome well i don't know i got to do some testing on it but uh it must have misbehaved overnight because i plugged the laptop in overnight to just charge it up for the show as a responsible co-host does uh but it was the computer was dead in the morning and uh none of the ports on the right side which is where it was plugged in uh were working anymore um but i did the show that somehow survived and after the show late at night

we took the whole thing apart because you know framework you can and we were looking we took the motherboard right out and we're looking for like okay did this like something burn on it or like a capacitor

blow could you see like a dark spot or something anything that might give little hints of what the next step might be because I you know you can replace the motherboards but I didn't really want to and the folks here at Texas Linux Fest the framework folks were like, well, at least it's possible and easy to replace the other

point. And to their credit, they're like, since your other side does work, what you could do is take your 11th gen mobile out, put it in a case, uses a media server, and you still get a useful machine out of it. Which is a great idea. Yeah, especially if you threw in something like a USBC doc. Yeah. Yeah.

So, I mean, it wasn't, the worst case isn't that bad, I suppose. But it turns out that we were able to, in the investigation, you know, as responsible, you we unplug the battery before started taking everything else apart good and we plugged the battery back in and all the ports started working again it did it just you didn't do anything else but unplug the battery yeah well no that's not true we unplug the battery took everything out looking you know had the had the motherboard in our hands looking for like some kind of anything that might suggest what we might fix uh because at that point i was like well i i want to learn microsottering i could change this thing which is probably not going to go good.

But it turned out we were like, well, okay, well, I got to use this thing. So I'll just put it back together. And we plugged the battery in. And the framework does like a little pause to do a bunch of hardware diagnostics if the battery's unplugged. And then with a little bit of testing, everything started working again. See, you literally unplug it, plugged it back in again. It just needed a hard reset.

To be fair, in person, it was much more involved, more strategic, much more like we sequenced our like testing. But if it ever happened again, you would just go right to. to plug and unplug the battery, I suppose. The bad thing is that makes me not want to investigate the charger and just kind of like, oh, yeah, next time I just unplug and plug the battery. And that's not probably a good thing. You'd still like to know why it happened. Yeah, what if it happens right before a show?

The conversation we had with the framework folks is like, yeah, we're like actively investigating various USBC charger and USBC cable combos. And they're discovering this anchor one is totally fine. Well, maybe this anchor one isn't finer. E. Green was the other, there was another brand. And they mentioned that, mom, not monster cables, Matt, master? I don't know. I should have took notes.

Yeah, we probably actually, maybe we have it on audio somewhere. But I did also hear at our meetup that one listener was working actively with the framework folks and a kernel developer to work out some of the framework 16 driver issues on, I think it was AMD specifically. And so they're very active in trying to just figure out, hey, is this a framework issue? Is this a Linux driver? issue. How do we get things upstream and make everything work? Yeah. So thank you for the fake boost. We are absolutely still accepting some contributions to get us home. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. If you'd like to send us a fiat fake boost, or you can't actually send sets like adversaries did through the form as well. Thank you to everybody who did that.

And now it is time for the boost. And our first boost comes in from kangaroo or kangaroo paradox with the 153,084 Satteronis. Now, this came in a little late last week, but he says here's a last minute Knicks config submission. I'm looking forward to my roast. All right, we've got to look at that. Well, first off, I mean, just check out this nice little grid of hosts with cool names, but then there's an AMD laptop, an M2 MacBook Air laptop, a Mac Mini M1 server, DNS for the main site, main NAS, backup NAS, DNS for the secondary site, and a VM template using cloud in it. This is cool. All right, that is really awesome, actually. This is really

well done. Also, he said, here's some stats for a few drinks while you're down in Texas. That's really great. Thanks for the Mead. Oh, really? Yeah. Mead, tell us about this. A little half pint of Mead at the meat. We chose a good spot. I had some amazing drinks. Yeah, yeah. So Brent got Mead. I had a diet Pepsi. And Wes had probably something fancy. I don't know. I know you, Wes, though. You do lack yourself a little fancy every now and then. We really appreciate it, Congra. Thank you for being our baller, a booster this week. Here's the best around. Black Coast boots in with 100,000 cents.

Yeah, all right. I hoard that which are kind of covered. That's pretty much baller, too. I say. Thank you, Black Host. No message, though, just the sats. Always appreciate the value. Well, Magnolium, Mayhem sent in a message with 27,468 sats. Mayhem, you say. He's a good guy.

He's a real good guy. He's a great guy, but I think his drawer is full of fruit loops. Oh, my God, this drawer is filled with fruit lobes. Hey, do you all need some gas sats? Better late than never, I guess. Anyway, it's awesome seeing this community come together to help our little literate hosts. Itterate hosts here? I'm not sure.

Wait a second. I'm not sure that's a compliment. So maybe we just skip that. Hey, but they did help. Yeah, that's true. I'm too many states to the east, they say, to help. No, you're helping right now. Oh, yeah.

You can help from anywhere. That's the best part. But if any of you screw up bad enough to find your way to Mississippi, my doors are open. Not sure what you'd be doing here, of course, but I do know some good hiding spots if you're on the run. Pretty much the only reason. I can think of. That could come in handy. You never know.

You never know. I did cross the Mississippi, but I don't think I was anywhere near Mississippi. He also says, you do not. You do not want to see my next config. He might still, though. He's also back on Albi again. Hey, back on the self-hosted train. Well done, buddy.

Oh, yeah, boosting via that podcast index. Very cool. All right, well, Knight 62 is here with a nice boost. 24,203 Sats. Hello, gents. I meant to send this earlier. This is for Texas Linux Fest. I know that for me, the highlight of my trip to scale ear this year was hanging out with the three of you.

And talking open source tech over some good food. Yeah, that tends to be the way we do it. I won't be able to make it to Texas, unfortunately, but I hope this modest amount of Sats is added to everything the community has given to help make sure the others have similar experience in the community. Oh, that's really cool. So sweet. Thank you for cultivating one of the greatest podcasting communities out there. I enjoy getting to know many of the community members like PJ, Carl the Pocket Meat Man, and TechDev and others. Have a great time at Texas Linux Fest, and I hope to see you all at scale next year.

So sweet. That's great. That is really great. It is really something. I mean, we bump into so many people down here, you know, so you really are giving us a chance to reconnect with the audience, and that really is something special. It always energizes us like never before, and so to have Texas Linux Fest happen in the first. fall when most of the other things happen in the spring.

And we've kind of been on a lull for a bit. It's a nice recharge. We needed in the recharge. We did. Yeah. So we drove ourselves exhausted now. Well, Kiwi Bitcoin Guide comes in with 20,000 cents. All right.

Fun will now commence. I think so. Oh, it's a time traveler boost for Texas. We need a time. Somebody make us a time traveler clip. We need that. I'm randomly working through the back catalog to learn things as they come up in my setup. So we're like sort of a, you know, go look it up in Linux Unplugged as

you do it. That's fun. Sure. I just learned the difference between Snap and Flatpacks in episodes 532, 501, and 499. It's evergreen content. So thanks for the work you put into creating these and the passion and the delivery. That's great. I'm so glad. I'm so glad that was useful for you. Thank you very much for the boost. Appreciate the value coming back our way. We sure do. It does mean a lot to us. All right, Brentley, I think you're up. We got ourselves a bite-bitten boosting in here uh one two three four five sats oh so the combination is one two three four five one boost for two people talking i'm three drinks in while boosting for these five next cloud fans that is hilarious one boost for two people i'm three drinks in while boosting four of these five

next cloud fans bite bitten was at i guess the next cloud conference uh as they do and was listening to the live show last week Bight. It's good to hear from you. Thank you for the boost. Oh, I like this name. Tetra Pulse comes in with 16,500 sats. They're real and they're spectacular. It's true. I like that name for some reason. You know, Tetra Pulse. Empting my fountain wallet, enjoy. Thank you. Make it so. Appreciate the sats. Our pal Sutherman comes in with 5,555.

There he is. There's coffee in that nebula. First time I've listened live totally because I thought you might look at my nixkinvig. But your L.M, it must have been drinking. Yeah. I've never even tried SOPS before. But anyway, thanks for the Superkind review. I listen to y'all all the time.

Oh, and the name is pronounced Soudermont. Rhymes with Superman. Superman, I see. Okay, so Souterman? Is that? Suter man, right? You know what happens with those LMs, right? Like, you ask them for something.

They're going to try to give it to you. So we're like, we were like, we're being way too nice to this guy's repo. Give us something to be critical about. And Wes is like, that's not legit. So that's why we're like, we'll put this in the LLM criticism section. It was too damn good. That's right. That was the problem.

It was too damn good. Thank you very much for the boost. Perciated. Well, Jordan Bravo came in with a Rodex. I'm late to the party, but here is the unified Nix config for all of my machines. Oh, boy. Three servers and four workstations. They all use NixOS.

at one workstation, which has Ubuntu with Nix. Oh, man. Jordan Bravo, you madman. There's a lot of interesting stuff. Just looking at the imports, I'm seeing Nix Bitcoin, I'm seeing SOPs, System Manager, too. I wonder if you're using the Ubuntu box.

I was only just recently learning about System Manager. And you know, Jordan's a regular in our Nix Nerds Matrix room, too. So maybe see him there. I'm just kind of noticing the structure here. He's got like a host director, and then he's got a folder for each one. of his host like tucks is his laptop in here and then in there he's got his configuration

dot nix his hardware configuration and his home dot nix of course yeah this is a really solid layout i'd say this is uh this is the top notch layout this is one of the top notch ones i'd say you know you could maybe copies of that i don't i don't just i don't just toss around top notch wheelie nilly that's a top notch configure right there bravo well done i like it a lot goofy ambitions is also here with a row decks that's 2,22 sats this is great segment Keep him coming. And it was the config. Oh, that's our first, that's our one and only vote so far for doing another config confession.

All right. All right. We have one. Thank you, Goofy. That's one. We need more, though. Tech dev. 5521 comes in with 5,000 cents.

Coming in hot with the boost. Been listening to the show since Mike fell in love with Swift on Coder. And Matt was the co-host of last. First-time boost, though. Hey. He heard the boost about the show being international with a listener in China and wanted to flip the role. I've listened to the show from the U.S., Canada, Colombia, England, Spain, the UAE, Holland, Georgia, and Russia. See y'all at Texas Linux Fest.

Yes! And see TechDev, we did indeed, and that was great. It was. It was really great. Thank you, TechDev, for the boost, and thank you for the great conversation. Looking forward to your project, keep us in the loop on how that goes. He knows what I'm talking about. Oh, yeah.

Well, Gene Bean did boost in two boosts, and they're both rows of ducks. Things that are looking up for all but duck. Boost number one, Chris. You got to use the branch and pull request model for working on your next configs. It's so much easier to do than one big commit after lots and lots of work. See, this is great because Gene can say it and then I don't have to... I know. Now you're all giving it to me.

All right. Thank you, Gene. Thanks, Gene. Regarding keeping those fake boosts around, I see Zaprite has an API and can send webhooks. What if you fire a webhook on... payment that triggers a boost CLI or similar for the same amount.

That would get the funds from ZAPrite into the splits and the regular boosting ecosystem. That is, assuming that some kind of Noster... He linked us, yeah, he linked us to that. There isn't another API we could use instead, yeah. Certain Avia doesn't have...

I bet that's an Albi Hub? Does Albi have a Noster ID? That's what I'm thinking it is, yeah. Jeez. Yeah. That's a great idea in a way. I mean, it's kind of a hacky solution, Gene, but it's also kind of a brilliant solution. You know what I mean? Because if you just call them Boosey Island, distributing the sets, you may find that there is even a possible better solution on the horizon. You never know, Gene.

Maybe we know something. Boom, bum, bum. Gene's an idea, man, and I appreciate that. I do. I love hearing from Gene. It doesn't feel like it's in a complete episode if we haven't heard from Gene. I hope we get to see him again next to game. Yeah.

A dude trying stuff came in with 2,222 sets, the road decks. Live boosting from Buckees on the road trip. Oh, jealous. Yes. We haven't even seen a Buckees yet. Oh, clack. glad your map led you faithfully south it was great to meet you all drive safe that's so sweet that's awesome that's a bucky's check-in bobby comes in with a row of ducks boost nice to catch you live

for a change doesn't happen often from the EU even with my sleep schedule ah thank you pabby yeah that was live from today this morning awesome we appreciate it yeah we do we got one last boost here ducky fresh 3,023 sets so you coming in fresh huh oh yeah I enjoy listening to the show. That's a statement. It's a really nice statement. I like it. Doug, you might have been listening live

because that came in this morning, too. Awesome. Thank you, Dougie. Fresh. I love the name. And I appreciate the boost, too. Thank you, everybody who supported the show with the boost. We do have the 2,000 SAT cutoff just for time on air.

And, of course, we also have the membership program. You can become a core contributor or a Jupiter Party member. We really appreciate that. You also, you can just stream them sats. It's one of the really cool things about the sat streaming. technology platform in general is you can do a boost message or you can set in a mountain say this is my budget and just when I play the podcast we send the sats we had 27 of you actually do that and collectively you stacked 69,437 sats not bad right just listen to the show

getting some value sending some sats our way it's going to go right into our gas tank when you combine that with all of our boosters oh this is a cool number actually it's got like a double meaning almost to it I think this is really cool when you when you combine this with all of our boosters, we stacked a really respectable 451,000 and elite 337 sats. It looks like the Canadians are here. Thank you, everybody. I'm assuming those were the Canadian supporters helping Brent make it down the road, right? We really appreciate it.

Gotta get home. It wouldn't have been, you know, it wouldn't have been Texas Linux Fest without Brent, so we really appreciate that. That's right. Thank you, everybody who helped us out. If you'd like to support the show and get in on the boosting fund, you can do it a couple of different ways. Fountain.fm is the easiest one because they host all the stuff for you.

That's like, you know, they take care of it. It's pre-packaged, ready to go. You just got to get connected to a debit card or get some sats in there. But if you want to go the ultimate champion route, you can do an AlbiHub. It's a self-hosted setup from top to bottom that plugs in at the back end of a lot of different apps. So flexible, open infrastructure, and it's a lot of fun. AlbiHub, or if you just want to get started, Fountain.fm. And thank you everyone who supports with the membership over at Jupyter.

or LinuxUplug.com slash membership. So let's talk about our pick this week. Michael Arbel found this one over at Faronics, but we had to include it because we still have such a soft bot for the TUI. It's called ISD, interactive system D, a better way to work with system D units. Yes, ISD is a better deal. And it's a keyboard focused, highly customizable TUI with some really fun features. You can quickly switch between system and user units, which is nice. The graphical interface is sort of split into two segments, making it really easy to read the list, but then

also read the individual unit and what it does. You can install it on your machine. I see you got access to the journal in there you can see dependencies of different unit files yes so not only do you get like the status by default but it's really easy to then go see okay what are the latest logs for that unit and then also there's a cat tab so you can just see what is the actual unit file itself yeah you can do user or system wide and so actually it turns out we had this in a previous episode no we did it was literally the same month it first came out so i think it might have been like a bonus pick as a look we've just seen this kind of being floated out there but since then it's been continued to be developed. They just had released

zero-six-zero. And since then, it's also been packaged to Nick. So it seemed like an appropriate sort of repick to, now that's, I think, really usable. All right, you got the Nick's angle in there. Well done, sir. Yeah, it looks good. And seemingly pretty simple to get going. And did we catch the license? We always try to, yes,

it's, oh, the license is, survey says, GPL, I think, two. They, why don't they listed on the thing? But it's a it's a good new public license. And it is, also mostly written in Python 83% Python that'll get the job done for you so go out forth

try it if you want to send this one you can boost in a pick or you can go to Linuxunplug.com slash contact and send one into us Oh yeah it's GPL3 yeah I thought so yeah we try to check we try to check that's one of the things somebody one time sent in a feedback item to the show

saying hey could you check the licenses for the picks and we try to do it every time we really take your feedback very seriously so it's Linuxunplug.com slash contact or you can send us a boost Assuming our race against time goes okay. Next episode, we should be back in the studio at our regular Sunday, 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern Time. Yeah, getting some latest and greatest updates on what's going on at the Ubuntu desktop in their upcoming release.

Yeah, and also we'll have our experience of checking into a system 76 and getting a hands-on tour of the latest and greatest in cosmic development, too. Should have a lot to report. See you next week. Same bad time. Same bad station. Of course, we have links and all types of things at LinuxUplug.com. It's a website. So there's just like stuff you can put on there.

It's awesome. All the RSS feeds, you're in the all-shows feed if you like that. Yeah. You want links to what we talked about today? That's there, LinuxUmpug.com. You can also find ways to watch and listen to us live over there. Sure. Mumble info is over there too.

Matrix info is over there too. It's just really, it's a resource. But what should they know if they're a pro listener, Wes? Oh, if you're a pro listener with a podcasting 2.0 app or even, you know, these days with antenna pod, well, you get access to our premium podcasting 2.0 cloud chapters, as well as transcripts with speaker diarization. That's right. Speaker diarization in the right app. How fancy is that?

Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode. And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday, as in Sunday. So, I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.