LINUX Unplugged - 641: Something New, Something Old

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

We dig into the biggest Linux hardware news of the year, then fire up our new-to-us 1L PC server.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. CrowdHealth: Discover a Better Way to Pay for Healthcare with Crowdfunded Memberships. Join CrowdHealth to get started today for $99 for your first three months using UNPLUGGED.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.FMDownload DNClient Desktop from Defined NetworkingOLF Conference - Free and Open Software Conference and ExpoRegistration - OLF ConferenceValve reveal the new Steam Frame, Steam Controller and Steam Machine with SteamOSSteam Controller — Steam Controller shares DNA with Steam Deck, with all the inputs to play all the games on Steam, wherever Steam is.Steam Machine — Made for powerful, versatile PC gaming on a big screen; quiet and small enough to fit under your TV, on your desk, or anywhere else you want to game. (It's a roughly 6-inch (160mm) cube!)Steam Frame — Comfortable, wireless, lightweight VR designed to give you a new way to experience your entire Steam library“The Steam machine is equal or better than 70% of what people have at home.”Anti-cheat will still be one of the biggest problems for the new Steam MachineFEX-Emu/FEX: A fast usermode x86 and x86-64 emulator for Arm64 LinuxFEX 2511 Delivers More Performance Improvements For Linux x86 Binaries On ARM64Commits · FEX-Emu/FEX · GitHubPLF10 Smart Plug – Kaufman Home AutomationHome Assistant Connect ZBT-1About Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 — Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 is the new name for Home Assistant SkyConnect. Despite the new name and look, they have the exact same hardware, capability, and support.libvirt: The virtualization APIlibvirt - ArchWiki — Libvirt is a collection of software that provides a convenient way to manage virtual machines and other virtualization functionality, such as storage and network interface management. These software pieces include a long term stable C API, a daemon (libvirtd), and a command line utility (virsh).Category:Virtualization - NixOS WikiVirt-manager - NixOS WikiLibvirt - NixOS WikiPick: easyeffects — Limiter, compressor, convolver, equalizer and auto volume and many other plugins for PipeWire applicationsEasyEffects 8.0 Released In Porting From GTK4 To Qt / QML / KirigamiEasy Effects on FlathubMarcel Repo Email

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, we have something new and something old for you. Valve made some big Linux hardware news this week, so we're going to give you our take and the big things I think everyone's kind of overlooking.

Then we have a souped-up, refurbished one-liter PC that might just work for my home lab. We're going to put the Think Center M-920Q through the tests, and then we'll round out the show with some great boosts, some picks, and a lot more. So before I go any further, let's say time-appropriate greetings to that virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room! Hey, good. You're doing good. You're representing. It's a small on-air crew. We've got some up in the quiet listening.

Everybody's out. Otherwise, I think, having a nice Sunday. Of course, our Mumble Room is live during the show. Show details at chupiterbroadcasting.com slash mobile. Also, be sure to check out defined.net slash unplug and go meet our friends at Defined Networking. They have Managed Nebula, which sits on top of the open source Nebula decentralized VPN platform that we love. Unlike traditional VPN's Nebula's decentralized design keeps your network resilient. If you have a home lab, which is a couple of machines or a global enterprise. From 2017 on this thing had to hit the ground running because it interconnected slacks global.

infrastructure across multiple data centers around the world, and they're moving everybody's data. So it has to work. It has to be confidential. And something I have been negligent to mention, but I wanted to, is at the beginning of summer, they released desktop clients for Nebula. And there's a Linux client in there as well as iOS and Android. Defined networking has managed Nebula, which you can try out for free up to 100 devices and really get a sense of how awesome this platform is. And if you ever just want to take it all yourself, everything is designed to be self-hostable. The bits you want, or you can take advantage of public infrastructure.

This is the kind of thing you want to build your long-term network around. Not something built on another platform that's going in a different direction. And so go check out Nebula, try it out for free, up to 100 devices with the managed product, and go from there and support the show. It's real easy. You go to Defined.net slash unplugged. You deserve a better VPN experience. So go redefine it at Defined.net slash.

Unplugged. We have a spot of housekeeping before we start the show. Ohio Linux Fest is back December 6th, 2025. Brenner, are you going to just pop down, you know, just pop on down for a little... It's only like 10 hours from where I am now, so maybe, maybe. We've got over 10 days, so plenty of time for you. Well, thanks. Yeah, now we know you can do it.

It'll be in downtown Columbus at the Sonesta Hotel. We'll have a link in the show notes. You do need to register. The listener Jonathan will be there giving a talk. He's a sysadmin at Red Hat, and he manages a fleet of laptops. That's neat. Yeah, this talk should explain what to consider when managing Linux workstations for remote or traveling employees, discuss some of the technology used, and how things have changed.

Yeah, that's a non-trivial problem, and you'll love to see it being talked about, because I'm someone who wants to work for employers that provide Linux laptops. So, you know, realistically, that comes with, like, compliance and other things that needs to happen to make it work in the org so you know spread that knowledge i did do the travel math if i was willing to drive 11 hours a day it'd be 3.7 days of driving 3.7 days total of driving to get one way you could totally do it we've done worse it's a bit of a trek i know this is this is one we've been wanting to make for years now yeah it has eluded us tell you i fly in somewhere i'll pick you up and then that'll shorten your drive i like this idea and we still sort of get like an

artificial road trip out of it. You get to ride in the van. Perhaps in our absence, some of you could go and either boost us a little report, emails report, or even better show up in the mumbo room and tell us how Ohio Linux Fest went. Again, it's on December 6. We'll have links to the web page, and you do need to register. So all that information will be in the show notes at Linuxunplug.com slash 641. Well, Valve made some big news.

this week. They announced a whole lineup of hardware. We have a new steam frame, an updated steam controller, and the steam machine is back in a new and revamped way, and they're all running Steam OS. The implications feel pretty big here. The fact that they're all running SteamOS, I think, is the thing that jumps out at me first. This is what we were hoping for in our, was it our predictions? Did someone predict this? But that feels like quite a good thing for the Linux ecosystem. Kind of a doubling down from them, right? Like, we had this first go around.

If this was the usual, like, random government agency switches to Linux, then, like, they would have already cycled back a few times by now. But, like, instead, we're getting Steam Machine Take 2, but they'd spent, like, the last decade building out a whole bunch of cool technology underneath to make it work out, hopefully a lot better this time. Yeah, if it was a movie trailer or something, the subtitle would be, it would be Steam Machine to, and the subtitle would be lessons learned,

right? Because that's the sense I got and I tried to devour all the interviews and that was the sense I got. As they incorporated everything they've learned from Proton and Linux development and Steam Deck and they realized, oh, we would do the Steam Machine way differently now. So Gabe quotes, Gabe said,

quote, we've been super happy with the success of the Steam Deck and PC gamers have continued asking for even more ways to play all the great titles of their Steam libraries. I will admit, I have wanted them to do more with VR. So here's, just to go over it, the 2026 lineup, which they say early 2026, is a updated steam controller. Quite a nice update to it, actually, with magnetic sticks and new track pads and all that. And they're including, which you're going to hear more about

this, a low latency wireless dongle, which is also built in to the steam machine. It doesn't that seem nice? I don't know. I mean, I've only seen a couple of clips, but just The UX around it, the fit and finish, which seemed like a great idea. Brian, I get a sense you're the most excited about the new steam machine, which is a six inch cube aimed for the living room. It's got a Zen 4 processor in it. I guess that's six times they say more powerful than the steam deck.

Wow. So it's a little box, a little steam machine. Considering what some listeners have done with the steam deck and their portability and traveling, I think, yes. This is the kind of machine you and I love, Chris, It's a little tiny thing. You could just plunk anywhere that gets all the work done. And, oh, wait, I said work.

This is a gaming machine. Wait a second. Well, you know, I mean, it probably does make a nice little desktop machine, too. I mean, you do love seeing them. I mean, even Steam, you know, saying that as part of their adverts. Yes. I will know just as, you know, it's getting called the GameCube and as a GameCube fan. The only thing I'm really missing from it is where's the nice little handle?

That does need a handle. You're right. Maybe there'll be 3D, you know, 3D printed aftermarket stuff you can get. People will build them, for sure, for sure. And this, again, made for the living room. So probably people that were Steam Deck or are Steam Deck customers and always leave it hooked up to the TV, which I guess it was 20%. I think that was the number they quoted. Yeah, I'm wondering about that because it does feel like console targeted.

I wonder how you feel about the value to money. You mentioned like a 6x factor or something. But I've seen some people a little unhappy feeling like maybe we don't really know. know the full price details or anything, but just feeling like maybe this isn't going to be long-term competitive? Yeah, that's a good question. That is a good question. I'm a little, yeah, I agree.

I'm a little overwhelmed. I feel like I could build a more powerful system, but we don't know what the price is going to be. Yeah, maybe to your point, they're targeting more casual folks that you just want something that'll work well enough. You're not necessarily nitpicking over AAA frame rates. What I understand is their goal was you could play the majority of the Steam Library at a 4K resolution on a TV with not everything turned up,

but like decent settings. Yeah, okay. And then they're going to release essentially an API that game developers can use so when it loads on one of these steam devices, they know which type of steam device they're on and they can preset the game

video settings to be optimized for that machine. Oh, okay. Yeah. So that's one of the ways they're going to eke a little extra out of what might otherwise be slightly underwhelming specs. But the thing I think that I'm the most

excited about. I'm curious to hear how you guys feel. And this is the part I think I might have predicted. As I think I predicted before we saw the next steam deck, we'd see them do something in VR. And now we have. It's called the steam frame, a lightweight, stand-alone streaming VR headset, powered by a Snapdragon 8 arm processor. It has eye tracking and something that Valve is called foviated streaming. So this thing is really designed to be able to stream games. You can also play games locally, but it's designed around the intention of streaming any game from Steam on your desktop. And the foveated streaming is something that happens after the game has been rendered on the remote PC. So the remote PCs, GPU, works hard. You can have a nice

fancy sucker in there. And it renders the game frames. And then just before the software sends it off to the frame that you have on your face, it spends all the time in the video and all that rendering only the part that you're looking at. Because the frame is tracking your eyes. And so if you were to somehow be able to zoom out and look at the entire picture, only the exact spot you're looking at has all of the resources. And everything else is lower res, lower rendered. And so it's only doing its most computational workload exactly where you are focused. You can't tell because you're not looking anywhere else. So does that mean it's streaming your eye tracking data back to the host rendering platform?

That's what I have to reckon. Yeah. It must be. That kind of data, going back and forth. Very cool and very impressive. The other thing about the frame is it is really going to be quite customizable. The entire machine is just in the front piece, like the little tiny visor piece that pops off. And there is just going to be a world of accessories to make this thing comfortable. And I think the part that people have mentioned, but have maybe glossed over, is this is a full, it is arm, but it is a full steam here. And I think, machine. So that means you can side load software on this thing.

And it also means that you can run Linux desktop mode on the Steamframe, on the VR headset. This is exactly what you've been asking for. Yeah, right? How much time have you spent recreating this in various modes? Wouldn't it be sort of ironic if Valve was the one to bring this to the mainstream? Because, you know, there's devices out there that do this. And so I haven't heard a lot of people talk about this, but it did come up in an engineering chat, and I will link to the full video in the show notes.

But here's the bit relevant to the Linux desktop on the frame. For the microsdicard, it's not just for SteamOS games, but any type of media content also works on that? Or you think of it works extra storage? Media content, it's certainly your computer. So you as a computer owner can do anything you want with that data storage. We tend to think about this as a gaming device first and foremost. So while we don't restrict or limit any media options that is very much not our focus out of the gate. We'll see what people do with it.

Yeah. I mean, I would imagine that a microSD card formatted for SteamOS to read it, if you go to desktop mode, you'd be able to open files in there and then look at it from the file browser. Yeah. Does a headset render in a standard, you know, resolution, and is that configurable? Well, the headset is locked to 2160 by 2160 for a. SteamOS, I guess, Steam VR. Yeah.

Steam VR and Steam OS, it's all dynamic. So even when you launch desktop mode It's less of a mode And more you hit a button And you have a desktop window And it could be a big one or a smaller way That could be really neat It could suck

But if you could bring a little High powered armed face computer And get a Linux desktop A stable plasma Linux desktop That's pretty exciting That can also game Can also stream stuff from your other computers that to me pjr are you feeling what i'm putting down doesn't that feel like a compelling

product from valve like and you and you know how valve leaves these things open so you like emulators you could side load on an sd card this sounds like your device the things i'm feeling are indescribable like this thing has me so fired up uh man the the work they've done and i kind of called this out a while back when we started seeing the rumors oh oh valve is working on arm stuff and x86 translation And I'm like, oh, this is headset. This is definitely headset. They're not going to do X-86 for a headset. And sure enough, we got a headset.

And that right there, the fact that it's running stimulus, it's running Linux, it's not just, this isn't great for gaming. They are making the Apple Waldgarden for gaming using open source. And that is so exciting. Nobody else is doing this. Nobody else is making a full range of hardware and software that works together for a use case, in this case, gaming that all works together really, really well and being empowered by Linux and open source is incredible. And having that compatibility layer, having it on ARM able to run X86 software, we'll see. I don't have very high hopes for that because you never know, but I do have

high hopes that the system's going to work well for what it's intended to do. And I think it's going to overachieve the way the steam deck is like the steam deck isn't the steam deck isn't the most powerful hardware obviously we know that but it still punches way above its its weight class in terms of raw performance and raw power and I think we're going to get the same thing here that foveated streaming it comes with a dedicated dongle as well as something people need to understand everyone's Wi-Fi sucks everybody's Wi-Fi sucks they solve that by giving you a little router have given you a dongle yep yeah that is a good that was a great move and putting everything on six gigahertz that matters having three

different radios all doing different things on the on the frame itself as well man this is exciting i i i've been wanting to get into into a VR for a while i've got a computer for it now you know uh even the index has been on my site but they never never went on sale right so for me it's exciting i'm worried about the wireless factor but i think they've got that covered with the dedicated streaming hardware. The standalone stuff, 16 gigs of RAM, like it's a powerful computer on your face. Rumors to side load APKs for Android. It's armed. So, you know, wageroid, stuff like that. A lot of the VR games are APKs are on Android.

MetaQuest style, but open source, I'm, you're going to be able to load, though. I'm fired up. Yeah. I also feel pretty excited about it. Of course, I'm reserving some judgment based on the price. We know we're going to have two versions. There'll be a 256 gigabyte and a one terabyte version. versions of the frame. The dev program is starting very soon. Kits will start going out mid-November. So probably in the next couple of weeks, you're going to start seeing these kits go out. They claim the price will be lower than the index. So if it's under a grand, man, I'm sold. I'm sold. Like it's still, the quest is still way cheaper, but, you know,

pay for what you get, I guess. This is one of the big, this is one of the big questions. But Valve, I don't know about the price, but I want to go back to something. you said earlier, and that was how the deck seems to punch above its weight. We are watching Valve now having figured out the game, right? Just like we saw with the deck, with Proton,

we're watching them invest in the technology stack way out ahead of time. Getting the infrastructure ready at the open source level way ahead of time. And then when it's ready, bring it into their product and making

something seemingly impossible possible, before it was good Windows gaming on Linux, and now it's Arm on, or X-86 games, on Arm. And this is where Fex comes in, F-E-X. And we've talked about it very briefly on the show. It's a translation layer of sorts, right? Wes, it's kind of like an API translation layer. Yep, Fex allows you to run X-86 applications on Arm-64 Linux devices.

Similar to what you might do with, like, QAMU user or Box 64. and then not only going to do it just in general, but it's also meant to be used alongside things like Wine and Proton, so you can have a chance to play X-86 Windows games on Arm Linux, and then it even has tricks to make that work, like it supports forwarding API calls to host system libraries like OpenGL or Vulcan. So instead of doing sort of like the dumbest layer of just emulate everything,

you can sort of figure out like, oh, I could just directly translate this call without having to go through the layers of emulation, that you can make this work at all, let alone be performant enough to play games enjoyably? Incredible. Yes.

Yeah, really. It's something I've been meaning to try around on my MacBook Pro. I played around with it for like 10 minutes. The part you just touched on there at the end, that it understands if a game is making an OpenGL or a Vulcan call, it doesn't need to emulate that. It can just pass that through natively. Or if it's a direct X call,

it can translate to a Vulcan call, it can do that too. But if the game, if it's a Windows game that's already using OpenGL or Vulcan, it can pass it right through to the native subsystem, which is a similar trick Apple uses

with Rosetta 2 on the ARM MacBooks. You do have to have Arm 8 hardware, but this is where Valve has this long-term thinking, building out these open-source projects. Now they have total control over the OS, the software environment

that makes it possible and the hardware. It, like Jeff was kind of saying, it's almost the Apple ecosystem of gaming hardware in the sense that they can optimize everything in that entire stack.

And even after it ships, they can continue to optimize it like we've seen with the deck. The deck got better after it came out. It got faster after it came out. Games ran better. More games after it came out.

And that was just them issuing software updates. And so they have that whole stack and they have effects to emulate X-86 programs on Arm in a way that isn't miserable. And of course, we'll see. But this to me

is one of the absolute missing pieces because when I run Linux Arm, which I do pretty frequently, everything's a web app for me. So few things are X-86. And if this could be expanded to run other programs down in the future, sort of like you can with wine and proton.

Oh, boy. Because you can use it alongside with wine. And Proton, of course. You have to be able to. It's just very exciting. And to see them kind of put all this in there together, I think the ultimate result down the road will be, it may become too prohibitive for these game vendors

to use this horrible anti-cheat software. Because if 20% of your player base is on Steam hardware at some point in the future, then you're going to have to do something that lets them play, your game on their hardware. Because that's a big customer base at that point. And this is sort of happening in a broader context of the gaming ecosystem where Xbox is kind of pulling back. The consoles are sort of tired. This is a really nice value proposition. And if on top of this, we can build out more and more users running these games on Linux, on Steam hardware, these game manufacturers, they're going to have to respond, right? They're going to

have to. Because anti-cheat to me seems like the biggest problem still for these devices, right? I just totally agree that developers need to get on board. Everybody, there's a lot of news like, oh, Steam, Valve is a monopoly. And Steam's a monopoly in the gaming sphere. It's like, well, there's no competition, you know, step it up, step up your game and actually compete in that aspect. And the anti-cheat stuff is a big part of it. You know, Valve kind of lets the developers do what they want to do in a lot of ways.

And they just lay it out. It's like, hey, do you want to be on our platform? Do you want to play your games on this great selling hardware? then it's got to run on Linux is that you've got to get rid of that anti-cheat. And I'm really, really hoping that game developers step it up and go that way as well, especially now that we have even more hardware

to play those games on. I'm trying to think of who the ideal customer is for this, Brent. Who do you think the ideal customer is? For the Steam machine, not so much for the frame, but for the Steam machine, that kind of console thing. Well, I think it's me and you, to be honest. Like, I hesitate to buy consoles,

because I'm not that much of a gamer. I used to be. There's a nostalgia there, but I just, I don't know. Every time I've tried to, you know, set up a system, it's hoops to jump through. But having a little mini PC that I could use, in place of the mini PC I bought last year, for instance,

but also have it just like be work all the time, 100% of the time for some gaming when I do want to jump in, that could totally convert my sort of the way that I've been a gamer, but I'm no longer a gamer. So this may convert a lot of people into gaming, which for Valve, I would imagine, is a good thing. You know, they're reaching out on the edges of their current customer base and potentially converting new people to gaming, especially gaming on their platforms. I'm tempted for the first time in decades, I have to say. it's it's ideal for people like you and me that either live on laptops or B-links so it's nice to have a but also I was thinking of we hear more and more people that are leaving Windows with Windows 11 frustrations and the end of Windows 10 support and this just seems like another license to leave Windows now you can go get your framework you can go get your MacBook or whatever it is if that's the way you're going and you can still get access to your library of PC games and now you can just let Valve handle it or somebody else right nothing nothing prohibits somebody else from coming along.

But to me, that feels pretty powerful. And I think just as the Steam deck has moved the needle a little bit more for Linux gaming, I think so will the frame and the steam machine. And hopefully the long-term result is these anti-cheats go away. I do have a question for you, Chris. Okay. If on day of release, you know, let's say you decided to buy something, but you had to choose between the frame and the steam machine,

which one would you go for? Oh, 100% the frame. Uh-huh. I was hoping you'd say that. Say more, please. Well, you know, I've always dreamed of, I've dreamed of a decent VR headset that would let me get work done in the RV with essentially either a ginormous screen. And so what, of course, I've just ended up doing is I tried the quest for a while, but the issue there is you have to run this client software and all that, and it can break. And so I just got a, I got an ultra-wide screen, but it's a ridiculously oversized monitor for the space. so what would be great is to have my laptop at home or something and then when I need the big space I put the frame on and if the frame is a computer itself that's pretty awesome that's pretty powerful I don't really want to stream my desktop I mean I might maybe I will like that but I love the idea of a persistent workspace in the frame my local user data is there and I can just pull it up in a window in a space maybe have multiple windows even one day that to me would be probably more useful than a gaming computer, but I know I'm a weird one.

That's just odd. I'd like to actually punt that to the audience. And I'd like to ask you out there, what's your reaction to the Valve news? And are you in the market for one of these in 2026? And what do you think the pricing is going to be for the frame and the steam machine? Boost in and let us know your reaction, if you're going to get one and what you think the pricing will be. Or what your price level is, maybe. Where do you need it to be if you're going to pick one up?

My, yeah, my question is how comfortable would you, and be realistic, you know, because it's never as cheap as we really want. OnePassword.com slash unplug. That's the number one password and unplugged, all lowercase. Take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even the unmanaged stuff. So go to OnePassword.com slash unplugged. Again, that's all lowercase. This is something that I wish I had when I was still in IT because I remember distinctly a moment when I walked in to a campus that was a client of mine and I was just getting to know them and I went to the art department and they were working on promotional material for an unreleased solar product at the time and they had just installed this new thing called Dropbox. IT had no idea and it was just the beginning and then I saw people standing up their own slacks and that is quaint by today's standards. In fact, over half of IT pros say securing SaaS applications is their biggest challenge. There's a real sprawl out there.

That's where Trellica by OnePassword can really help. It'll discover and secure access to all your apps, even the unmanaged one. Yeah, Trellica by One Password inventories every app, even the ones you didn't know about the unmanaged ones, and it has pre-populated app profiles to assess their SaaS risks. So you get an idea of what is going on. It lets you actually manage the access. You can optimize the spend to make sure there isn't redundant. See? How many times have you discovered that end users went and signed up for something that the corporation's already paying for? That is actually really common. And the other thing is really nice is you can enforce best practices across every app that your employees use in a way that is complementary. It's collaborative. It's not hostile to end users. But ultimately, you can really get your hands around that sprawl. You can actually meet your governance goals. Trellica by OnePassword provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance. It's just

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Go learn more, support the show, check out their video. Go to OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That is the number one, thenpassword.com slash unplugged, all lowercase. OnePassword.com slash unplugged. Now with all that talk of hardware, of course, we're constantly working on our own hardware in our home lab setups. I know for a good part of the summer and even into this fall, we were setting up the home assistant in my van. And that has turned out wonderfully.

Jeff, thanks for the hardware again. I don't know why you gave it away. It's great. That said, Chris, we haven't really done any upgrades to your setup, but you in the last few episodes have kind of hinted that you need a new box. And it so turns out, we have amazing listeners. And listener Alex sent a previously loved Lenovo Thinks Center M9. Q, which is a little tiny one-liter PC. We

have to try it out and put it to the task. And, well, wasn't there a note in that box, too, Chris? Ah, there was. Alex included a note in the box. I always really appreciate that. Wait, that sounds like you have the map, then. I think that's the wrong. Similar. It's not quite as big.

Doesn't have all the dynamic tiles that Wes has added, but Alex writes, Hey, Chris, Wes, and Brent. Glad I could help out the show. Inside the box, you're going to find a Lenovo Think So M920Q, it's running 32 gigs of RAM, a 1 terabyte MVME, a 250 gig SSD that might still have windows hanging around on it, and the power brakes in there, too. I decided to add some fun extras from my tinkering. There's a PCI riser card that exposes the PCIE 3.08X slot, so you can drop proper PCIE cards in.

I used it with a gigabit Ethernet card when I was experimenting with the system as a PF Sense box, and then later tried a secondary MVME drive. Both worked well. I even tested the MVME adapter in place of the Wi-Fi card. It was functionalish. He says, while digging through the parts bin, I found an unopened SkyConnect Zigby adapter from when it was first launched.

Chris, I remember your Zigby Adventures. Maybe this one plays nice. I've since moved to POE gear, so it's all yours. And because I can't stand shipping a box with empty space, I tossed in a few Kaffu's smart plugs that work great with the ESP home. I've gone mostly in-wall for my setup, so these need a better home. Oh, and these tiny skeletons I've included, those are left over from our annual Halloween gifts that I 3D printed.

They just felt like they belonged in there. You probably don't see my name pop up in the boost, but I've been a monthly member for a long time. Always in the background, tuning in every week. Monday morning, start with Linux unplugged for me. Anyways, hope you enjoy the hardware or at least some laughs out of the gear. And hey, the ATL is absolutely ripe for a live show. Hey, the ATL is absolutely right for a live show. I appreciate everything you guys do. Thanks, Alex.

Thank you, Alex. This is awesome. These smart plugs are great that he included. I'm going to set a couple aside for you, Wes, so you can play with these two. And they, I think they, I don't know if they came preloaded with, yeah. Yeah, they come preloaded with ESP Home. And it's an ESP 8266 in here. And because of that, it has full energy monitoring, which I love.

That is awesome. And the workflow is dead simple with these. I'll put a link to them in the show notes. You plug them in. They create a little AP. You join that. The first thing that comes up is it has a CAPTCHA, but the CAPTCHA is just select your Wi-Fi,

your real Wi-Fi network. And so you do that, and then it reboots, and it's on your Wi-Fi. And then about two seconds later, Home Assistant Auto-Tet detects it. Excellent. Pulls it in. And I'm off to the races with energy monitoring,

all the stuff. It's just so great. So K-A-U-F. Oh, wow. Yeah, okay. That sounds awesome. Yeah, and they're Wi-Fi-based, but they're not like a proprietary, right? It's ESP homes.

I like that somehow, you know, I think listener Alex is like the secondhand stuff. It's better than plenty of first-hand stuff. Yeah, that's very true. I need a part spin like that. Yeah. Thank you, Alex. Very, very appreciative. And, you know, even knowing how small these boxes are, I was still surprised when I took it out of the box.

and it, you know, it's slightly larger than my hand is really the size of the thing. It's remarkable. It's one liter, Chris. It's in the name. I know. I know. I know.

But still, actually holding it was shocked. Plenty of ports on here. It's got your display ports, your HDMI's. It's got some USB. And, of course, it's got an Ethernet jack, a little Wi-Fi antenna sticking out the back. And then it has a real DC power plug, which I'm very excited about for the future.

And, yeah, there's a little rattle. So I wasn't sure if it maybe got a little damaged in shipping. And once I held it in my little hands, I was like, oh, this is very exciting. This is actually a great idea. Thank you, everybody, who's sent these ideas in. So I hooked it up as fast as I could, and I just booted, like, the latest Ubuntu ISO on here using Ventoy. Wait, wait, wait. You didn't check out the rattling first?

Well, that's how I checked it out. Well done, sir. Well done. It works. Okay, then the rattles not a problem. And no ventoy issues that worked as expected? Yeah. Okay, great.

Thankfully, ventoy works great on there. And it has, on the front, very handy, not only does it have a USBA, but it has a USBC as well. So when you, you know, on that ventoy dongle I have, it's like a little SSD in there. So it's very fast over USBC. You could just use the system that way. So I booted up in Ubuntu and went through just the, you know, the live session. And everything got detected. The Ethernet picked up an IP address just fine.

The disks were in there. And all of that was able to browse the web. So I went ahead and just repartitioned it since G-parted comes on the live session. And I love G-parted. Went through and cleared out the main MVME. Didn't bother with the windows. I figured I could just mess with that disc later. And cleared it all out.

And then, you know, rebooted and started the installation process for a server. And what we ended up with is pretty nice, of course. This little think center is a decent little box in here. It's got a I-5-8500 T and it's got six threads. And like the note mentioned, 32 gigs of RAM in this, which is going to be great. Because ultimately, I'm trying to consolidate a home assistant yellow and maybe a couple of pies or one pie in an odroid down into one machine. So it's going to be a lot of, it's going to be a lot on this machine. And I think I'm going to be running home assistant potentially, although I'm not, 100.

percent locked in inside a VM. So I set up a Nix OS base on this thing and got KVM installed and had West start poking around. We thought about a couple of different ways to virtualize Home Assistant OS, kind of ultimately with KVM LibVirt. Do you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, there's a ton of options, right? We're almost spoiled for options.

I've been keen to try SystemD VM spawn more, although that's very new. And it didn't seem like the USB pass-through. stuff was really as sophisticated as we might want specifically for trying to virtualize something like Home Assistant, Lex D or the Forknow Incas, is another good option. That does have robust pass-through options. But you'd kind of gotten a base config going. Out of the box, in NixOS, it's really quite easy to get, well, KVM going.

We could just use QMU, but if you want a little more affordances, a little more options for like tools to work with stuff that isn't just your own custom QEMU script, well, LibVert's a pretty standard option. It does mean, you know, you kind of got to go and interact with its world, right? Like it has XML files that it wants to make, and you got to like make your VM storage pools and tell it about how you want the networking to work. But the plus side is it's, I mean, it's got all kinds of affordances to do that in a whole bunch of like enterprise complicated ways that are way more than we actually need. And so it meant really, like we were able to use NixOS to create the basic bridge setup we wanted, which in particular

you wanted to have home assistant VM appear as if it was just like another box on your local network so it could really easily talk to all of your devices, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because auto discovery is a huge part of the home assistant setup. You know, a lot of the new home assistant devices that they make, just auto broadcast. So that was something that was definitely needed.

And we had some reports of people that had tried virtualizing it on, I think, proxmox, and they had some issues with the USB pass-through, not always working. Thankfully, Alex included. that SkyConnect angle, so we had something to test right there. I'll also note, it seems like the Home Assistant Blest Path is KVM, LibVirt, if you're going to virtualize Home Assistant OS. All their documentation kind of pushes you down that path. It did feel well supported. It would maybe be another way to put it, right? Like, yeah, the docs make it super simple. They have, like,

QQQQQo images ready to go, which is pretty great. So in that sense, it was a very smooth process, really to get it going and then be able to connect to it and see it and we're able to use the NixOS side for I mean later you might like bake this stuff in with add-ons or whatnot but you know we're able to bootstrap tailscale access and set up some basic sort of port forwarding and stuff so we could get in and talk to the VM either via the land or via a tail scale and it all pretty much worked I mean I don't think we it hasn't really been tried in anger yet it's really a demo setup but I don't know what do you think? Do you have enough confidence to like try it in production? I was pleased to see that I could do a firmware update of the SkyConnect through the virtualized home assistant instance.

That seemed like a good sign there. So that's that's definitely, that's got me feeling more confident. I want to hook up a few more USB devices and like you say, actually try it with a few things. To me, I think I also have to like somehow simulate GPU load. and I need to simulate my load without maybe spending hours moving all of my applications over because I really want to see this thing under kind of sustained

base load what its power draw is. Especially if you're going to load up the host too. And you've got your VM going is that can maintain responsiveness to all the home automation you're doing. And then yeah, right, you haven't even, I think, dabbled yet fully with exactly what even the baseline power dry is.

And that would be my concern is that the home automation stuff or the responsiveness suffers when maybe like, you know, we're doing a big, jellyfin job or something. Before we move too far off of Home Assistant OS, you guys know I love Home Assistant, and I really respect the work they do over there.

But my God, if you want an experience in frustration, I challenge you, listening to this episode, go download the Home Assistant image for KVM Libvert. Go through, go to their webpage. Don't Google it, but go to their Home Assistant web page like a regular user would and try to download the image. and boost in your results. Tell me if you actually, if you got it. I'll zap you back if you actually managed to find it through their website.

That's rough. So that to me was like, I'm not even sure if I'm getting the right thing and all of that. I actually downloaded the wrong image the first time. And then went back and they're like, oh, nope, this is where I get the QCal file. Okay, they have something already set out. I need to grab that. It was a lot of reading to still even end up with the wrong file.

And that's a little disappointing because the experience, if you just buy their hardware where it comes loaded with home assistant is the exact opposite. It's just so smooth. It's so easy. I was surprised by that. So ultimately, I need to figure out a way to test jellyfin and ersatz and the whole RAR stack. Of course, things like NextCloud need to be able to run on there. Audio bookshelf, music assistant.

I mean, I just have a litany. I mean, you can go over the back catalog of the show. I have probably something like 30 applications running on this. But you just have your Nix config. You can move over, right? They're all mostly Docker, you know, because, This is from years ago. Which feels a little, when you have like 30 Docker applications,

that feels kind of just like sprawl. I know where most of the application data is, but probably not about 20% of it would be my guess. Right. Probably a few of them have it just in a folder right there. A few of them are using Docker volumes. Some of them are using bind mounts to a regular spot on your file system. Yes, exactly.

And then a couple other random stuff, who knows. And then to really make it all work, I'd have to move the storage over. And I'm not ready to commit yet, because I'm not sure if all of this under actual, load work. So I'm trying to think of a way to simulate GPU load, simulate disk activity, and moderate CPU load, that I would feel confident that that's a decent estimation, maybe some download. You know what I mean? Like, I need to think of that and then check the

power drop and then determine if it's a same or less than all my other hardware combined. That's where I'm kind of at with it now. But I'm very impressed with these one-liter PCs. If you weren't concerned about the power at all, it's so obvious. Let's just say I was, I never felt like it was flow. I never had, you know, I do sometimes feel like that with the O-Droid, and it definitely with the yellow. Yeah, you and I were both like simultaneously kind of banging away, working on stuff, doing Nix OS builds without even telling each other. And yeah, it was doing just fine. I would imagine this thing as a fan in it, which your other computers don't. So I'm curious about audible levels, because you're going to have this tucked away in the RV somewhere. Are you

worried about that in any way? You know, I never heard it spin up. It would be in the booth, so I don't think it'd be too big of a problem. If it did spin up, I don't think it'd be too bad. Nice. So I'm ultimately dedicating right now the 256 gigabyte SSD that came in there, the separate disk that came in there. I'm dedicating that to the KVM VM storage pool, and I've decided to format it in B-Cash-FS.

And if I put this thing in production, I intend to keep it as B-Cash-F-S. And I feel good about it. I went through, I reviewed like some ideal mount options for a BcashFS file system. Nothing too surprising in there. I did turn compress on because, you know, these are VM images. Some of them have, you know, large sparse sections. I turned on no access time and things like that to just try to improve overall performance.

But I didn't tell you ahead of time that I was going to do that less. No, you did not. I actually first noticed because there was kind of a weird, I think you'd run into some problems as you were trying mount options. So there was like an artifact from some of your vibe coding that left like a system descript that was doing the mount. So one of the first things I got was clean it up and I met it like a regular file system. Well, here's what I wanted was I was researching the mount options. And this is just a great thing because you can go out and do it for me.

But the one I decided to Yolo, because it was like, this is something you could try. And I decided to try to brute force it is B-Cash-FS. not only does it have compress, which is dope, and everybody should use for their NASAs and SSDs and stuff, but it has background compress, which I think is obvious what that does, right? It's when the system isn't as busy, when there's some spare cycles,

then it attends to the compressing. Well, that sounds exactly like what I want, right? Who wants this crazy compress at Rite and read? No, do it in the background. So I went ahead and said, yeah, let's throw that in there. which then I rebooted the system and got the emergency console. It like almost came all the way up

and then I got the emergency console. I'm like, oh, okay. I'm like, okay, all right. So I go in and the solution that the machine came up with because I wanted to keep the background compressed because that's a dope option is I had the machine

try to mount the file system at a different point. So it wouldn't take the system out if it doesn't work. And I use system D to do that. Yeah, okay. But it was still kicking airs when it tried to mount the file system. So ultimately, I wasn't getting a reliable mount.

It just wasn't taking the system out. So I had to capitulate and I took the background and compressed out for now. But it still has compression on. Well, I'm just excited because now you're kind of like keyed in. You'll be following the B-Cash updates that I keep sending you're right. And you can try more of the features as they keep landing. Although, so we're working on this. And, you know, I got it pretty far, but I had to step away for like three or four hours on Saturday for kids stuff.

And I come back. And Wes is like, by the way, I switched it over to the Zen kernel. I'm like, oh, good, good. I figured you'd want that. It crossed my mind. It had crossed my mind. But then I'm like, no, that's too crazy for a server. I'm not going to do that for my server.

I'm not really like, this thing's going to be a VM host. I need to be an adult. Maybe I should even use the LTS kernel I'm thinking to myself, especially if I got BcashFS. And then I come back and was like, yeah, I zend it up, totally latest version, click right on the edge. I'm like, all right, we're going with it. Let's do it. Yeah, that's right. 617-7-Z1.

Why not? It might help with the overall jellyfin performance. We do have NF tables on there for a few things like Wes was talking about, butterFS on the root. so my root file system for the host is not B-Cash. That's just for the VMs. The root is still butter, but I do have automatic scrubbing and weekly trims for the SSD and M-V-Me,

both on B-Cash-F-S and ButterFS. Like West said, we went with KVM and LibVirt, and we bridged the VM to the local network, and just sort of were able to declare all of that in the NixOS config. I would love feedback from the audience on this. Bear in mind, I'm coming from a home assistant yellow, it has like two gigs of RAM and, you know, like a Raspberry Pi 4 processor.

But I'm thinking four gigs of RAM is probably enough, but that's a bit I'd like feedback on and two virtual CPUs. Yeah, I think those values came from their install guide. They had some like default sort of like, oh, run this vert install committee to kind of get started. And so we've started there. But yeah, I wonder, like it sounds like Jeff might be using this. Maybe other audience members have tried it out. And I may have, now I'm thinking about, I think I actually opted to 8 gigs in the actual config. I might have up to 8 gigs.

Excellent. I think I went, 8 gigabytes of RAM, two CPUs dedicated. And I'd like feedback from the audience if that seems to be sufficient for Home Assistant OS, where I'm going to have a handful of that. Well, you know, a dozen add-ons probably and stuff like that and probably 300 devices talking to it. You might be able to flash ESPs now. Congratulations. That's what I'm hoping is I'll have enough memory for ESP home. Oh, we've got to test that. I know.

It's a tight line to walk here because home assistance just one of the many, many things this box would end up doing. And so if this was only doing Home Assistant, I just let it, you know, eat up a lot of the RAM. But I do need to actually, so I don't know if I'm throwing things away with 8 gigs or 4 gigs like Home Assistant recommends is the sweet spot. The problem is at one point they recommended two, and here I am I'm bumping up against that all the time. A little bird in our chat says maybe this machine can actually take 64 gigs despite being advertised. 32 so you you know that might solve your issue here great scott and then i am going to use the sky connect i believe for my zigby and i think i'm going to use the zwa to whatever that that fancy home assistant new z wave adapter is for the z wave stuff oh that makes a lot more work it's a lot

easier if i just move the existing adapters but i may just have to bite that bullet i'm not sure yeah so far it seemed like the USB pass-through work just fine like we definitely saw it in side home assistant saw it and all that we haven't tried it like in terms of actually talking over the radio or anything but hey nope for more flash though for more flash oh yeah right so that's that's a good sign that was good i haven't got a good sense of the power readings that's what i'm going to be spending my time on over the next you know between now and the next episode just kind of getting a sense of what the power usage is the thing that i have to really just underscore for me that's such a big deal is that it does natively have a DC plug on the back so down the road i could just

take the AC adapter out of the picture entirely. And for me, that's a pretty big deal. It could be a nice little savings because inverting that, the way the inverter works is the actual, the less amount that it's inverting, the worst the efficiency is. So when something like that's only drawing 20, 30 watts, I lose like 40% in the inversion.

It's actually really rough. Whereas if I just go straight to DC, I don't, it's all, there's no efficiency loss there. So that's something I'll be thinking about, but I'm very, very impressed with the one liter PC, this little Lenovo and just took Linux like a champ absolutely no problem getting Linux on their total compatibility all the devices work and the performance seems to be really good so this is I'd say best case scenario for me and I'm extremely grateful for Alex for sending this in

we're going to keep building on it and probably not next week but in the future a little bit down the road I'll have an update once I've really tried it and put it through its paces stay tuned for Chris Chris's one leader power pulls Unraid.net slash unplugged. Your system's unleashed are you. The biggest unraid sale of the year is almost here. Mark your calendars. If you're listening to this, when this episode drops,

cyber weekend for Unraid is going to run from November 28th through December 1st. So get ready for 20% off starter licenses, 25% off the Unleashed licenses and your upgrades, of course. Plus, you're also going to get a merch store voucher with every qualifying purchase. So here's what's up. That means you're going to save on even more on, say, a new T or maybe a backpack or a jacket and all the hats, 20% off through December. So if you're going to upgrade your array, maybe, I don't know, you've been experimenting with VMs,

who would be doing that right now? Or building out a massive Docker fleet? I don't know who could have actually done that over time. Well, Cyber Weekend is the best time to expand your server and truly unleash your setup. So mark your calendar, prep your build list, and get ready to save on Unray November 20, 28th through December 1st. Go to unrayed.net slash unplug to kick it all off, support the show. It all starts November 28th, and it goes through December 1st.

Big sales, unraid.net slash unplugged. Join crowdhealth.com and use the promo code unplugged. Making informed decisions about health care is getting tougher and tougher. It's also becoming a political football, which makes it very frustrating. But it is open enrollment season. That's the season where the health insurance companies are going to hope you'll just sign up again and just swallow those overpriced premiums and the confusing fine print. This is where CrowdHealth comes in.

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Welcome to the boost segment. We first have Marcel here, Buller Booster, with 22,44 cents. That's what. Marcel boosted our episode 640, Deuce Configolo, desktop gigolo. Thank you for that. He says, I tried to boost a config confessions related message,

but it was too long. I sent it in via the contact page instead, but I still wanted to send in some value. Thank you, Marcel. I have that tag for the post show because it's kind of in depth. So I don't know if we're going to get into it in the show, but I have it saved for us.

I went and grabbed his email. Thank you, Marcel. Dydrell's here with 3,661 sets. Coming in hot with the boost. Well, I messed up something with Fountain, so sorry about my username, but after a 6-5 on my config, I wanted to say thank you. Also, this is a zip code boost, but it has to be multiplied by 15. Whoa. Oh, boy.

Yeah, get your calculator out and then grab the map there. Does the map even have a calculator module? I don't know if I kept that in. I think the map has Python, so you could just use that. Mm, right. Yeah, definitely has a Python interpreter. So, how could it not? 3661, 3661 times 15. Yes, zip code is a better deal.

That's the post office. Can I leave the equation on there and they'll figure out what zip code I'm talking about? No. Do they have an L.M that'll do that for you? Yeah, as they're scanning, you know, and doing the fingerprint, you know? Okay. We get 54915, and that is a zip code assigned to Appleton, Wisconsin. Hey, hello Wisconsin.

Yeah, it covers areas in a few different counties, including Winnebago. Although apples are our thing, so get out of our thing, Appleton. Don't make us fight about apples. Don't, yeah, you don't want Washington to fight about apples. Thank you, Nigel. Nice to hear from you, and thank you for that boost. BTC is my 401K boost in with $4,590 cents. Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too.

Elevation boosting from my mountain home in Southern California. Oh, fun. Do you get snow up there at 4,5009 to Fait in California? In Southern California, I'm genuinely curious. In Southern California, do you get snow at that elevation? I don't know how the earth works. That's beautiful. That's beautiful.

Hello up there. Thank you for the boost. What is it about the idea of living up in elevation? Sounds so appealing to me. I don't know what that is. Because it's been a while since you've moved to couch. I've lived at sea level for too long. Jeff,

Guy on the floor, do you know if they get snow up there? Yeah, they do. There you go. Depends on where he's at, but yeah, you got Big Bear, you got all those mountainous areas over there. I got snow at about 3,700 feet in a Sparrier, California back in the day.

And that's Jeff with the weather. PJ with the weather. Thank you, PJ. Well, Badu Ha, sent in a boost 2001 sets. Oh my God, this drawer is filled with broolopes. Hey, I was user 75 from last episode. And yes, you guys got that postal code right.

And yes, the weather was pretty nice that day. Yeah. Nice. I like it. We got it right. Also, a little clarification there. Yeah. He says, uh, to Brent's question there on the postal codes.

Brazilian postal codes do have this long but simple format with the dash that can identify an address right down to the street. That is why I didn't send my actual postal code. It's way too precise. Good thinking. And he finishes up here. Looks like I missed my chance for the addition of config confessions, but it was my fault. I did submit it pretty late. I guess I'll wait for next year's config confessions.

Missed it by that much. Sorry about that. Thank you for the boost. So Anonymous comes in with a row of decks, 2,22sats. It was awesome seeing y'all at Texas Linux Fest. I wanted to join in the config confessions. This is my first ever Git repo, and I just recently moved to using Flakes about two months ago.

Things are a bit messy. I'm also currently working on adding my other hosts, and I'll add the host for me to change it when I do. All right, we'll tag that for the post show as well for the members. Thank you, Anonymous, or perhaps Tyfighter. And good job getting your first Git repo going. as Brent will tell you, that's important. Yeah, and working with flakes.

That's true, yeah. Well done. Well, effing done. Jasko comes in with 5,000 sets. This is a tasty burger. With all the fun around the config confessions, I think it would be cool if Lupp hosted a sort of hackathon. Maybe announce a theme or a couple categories a few weeks before the show

and have you guys roast our projects. Maybe in place of the tuxies? It certainly has that same community engagement. aspect anyway. Hey, now you're new one. This is an interesting idea. Especially if we did like a home lab thing where like if people had a home lab project they've been wanting to get done, we could do like a two week sprint.

And then at the end they sent us their setups and we give them a review and tell them how they did. You know, so it's their excuse to finally buckle down and just get something done. I want to know, because I do that. I have like projects. A thing to me. Yeah. Yeah. If that's something people would like, you know, I don't know, we need a name for it.

We need a good name. And if we get a good name, if somebody sends a good name and that's a sign we should do it, I think. Thank you, Jasko. It's a pretty good idea. I like that. I like that. Well, our dear Gene Bean is here with a row of ducks. Hey, y'all, um, pinch flight is awesome.

I know you mentioned it many times, but it's so much nicer than I even realized. As a bonus, integrated the containerized version of jellyfin that comes from Nix packages, and that was pretty straightforward. Any links to, Gene B links to his GitHub repo. Well done, Gene B, and glad you got a chance to try it out. It's pretty great, Gene's links right to the actual pull request and diff that kind of shows like updating the secrets for it and adding a NixOS file that sets up OCI containerization

to declaratively run the container. Nice. I think where it really clicks with Pinch Flat is when you pull it up in jelly, thin, or plex, and it looks equivalent to all your other media, but it's the stuff on YouTube. And now you don't have to go down the YouTube rabbit hole and get sucked into a whole bunch of stuff.

You just go in there, you're playing it locally through your media center where you watch all your other content. And it just integrates with the rest of the stuff you watch. I think it's great. Thank you, Gene. Good to hear from you. Woodland Geeks is here with 4,321, sats.

I like you. You're a hot ticket. Hey, oh, good for you. The Utah app at the end of last show was on point. I have been looking for something like this. We got it working yesterday, and I had a couple of setup glitches. But the creator was Johnny on the spot with the get-up issues. Oh, that's always so great.

And an area where free software can sometimes really shine. You don't want to put expectations on the developer, but just never going to get that from, you know, Microsoft or something. That's great. Love to hear that. Thank you, Woodland. Hodor comes in with 18,500 sats. Good news, everyone.

Hi there, a long-time listener, first-time caller. All right. I wanted to highlight a Linux conference close to my heart, Ohio Linux Fest, happening Saturday, December 6th. I've attended for over a decade, but attendance has dropped the last few years. I'm hoping to boost awareness here in the colony. It's affordable, fun, and I've certainly made new connections there. And maybe with some support, it'll return to the two- or three-day event it once was.

check it out at oldfconference.org And you know what? It was because of your boost. Hoder when I saw this or hotter when this came in earlier, I was like putting that in the housekeeping. So it's something we always like to do, but sometimes it's just not on our radar. And I appreciate you giving it the awareness.

We're going to give it a plug here, and we'll have a link in the show notes for people in the area to go check it out. And maybe, you know, for folks that do report back, let us know how it went, because we wish we could be there. Well, we got a row of ducks from Southern. fried sass frass.

I loved config trek into the desktop. I mean, deuce configulo desktop jiggleo. Well, I know I didn't include it in the boost just to make one of you say it again. I'd never do something like that. In all seriousness, plus one for a part three of the config confessions series at some point. Now, to jump back to the past and catch up on that backlog, I wonder who will end up winning the race to Texas. Don't spoil it.

Don't spoil it. You'll never believe what happened next. The tracker did have a bug in it, just saying. Oh. This is new. This is a very late reported bug, let me just say. Now the bug field kicks in. WH. 20, 2050, comes in with 4,44 sats.

That's a big old McDuck. Quaka, waka, it's a treasure. Yepy! Quick PSA for unread users. Remember to back up your flash drive, not just your data pools. I just upgraded to 7-2, and on reboot, my flash drive died. Oh, man. After way too long, refusing to admit it was dead.

I finally grabbed a new one, only to find my backup was a year old. Fortunately, Unrate is awesome, and all my VMs and containers still load it up and ran. However, any container I set up after the backup didn't have a template, so it would not have done. Luckily, all I had to do was remove the template and reinstall it from the community app, and then it picked right back up with all my data still intact. This is also a time traveler boost. I'm going through the back catalog, so greetings from episode 25. That's a typo, right?

It's fun to listen to all the old stuff with the benefit of hindsight. Yeah, it is. Oh, boy, man, yeah. I love that on Unraid, all that stuff is separate from your data so you can just allocate all your disks. But you got to back. Those flash disks, those flash drives are, I just don't trust them, not long term. But they're thankfully very easy to duplicate, make an image of, et cetera. Right.

So there's that. Thank you for the report. Appreciate it very much, W.H. good to hear from you and hope to hear from you in the future oh and this last one was me we could probably just skip that I should have I was wondering who that was

yeah sorry about that okay all right all right yeah all right okay then that brings us and that is all of the 2000 and above boost for this episode and a shout out to our sat streamers 19 of you streamed and you collectively stack 25,000 466

seven sats to support this here show. When you combine that with all our boosters, we almost, almost broke 100Ksats, 99,94 sats. And when you do the math, that gets split equally between myself, Wes Brent, a bet goes to editor Drew,

a bet goes to the podcast app and the index. That's a pretty low haul. Lower expectation. Although, politely picked up by a live boost by PJ. Although it didn't fire the sound like I wanted. I was hoping for a live boost sound, but credit goes to PJ with one, two, three, four, five sats.

So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. Oh, no, it's true grits. PJ was just saying you want to hear the Pugh sound with 14,000 sats. True grits have the space balls boost. Surprise, surprise. I'm still making my way up to the current episodes. Lesson for everybody, do not ever get behind. There you go.

great advice. And Jeff, Jeff just says, I want to hear the pew sound. So here you go. There you go, Jeff.

Thank you, everybody. Not a fantastic episode, but you know what? We really do appreciate the direct support. This is a wild system.

It's using a free software stack. It's using a peer-to-peer monetary system. But the boosts are on sale right now. So if you've been thinking about it, now it could be a great

time to dip in, best price of the year right now to boost us. And you also have that membership. If you just want to set it and forget it, Linuxunplug.

com slash membership. Thank you to everybody who does support show. This is something that's been going out now for 12 years. It's a bit of an odd phenomenon, if you think about it in the media space. And to have something going for 12 years that's totally aligned to its audience, I think it's something special and it's something we should keep going, and we appreciate everybody who does make it sustainable and does make it possible. Here's your taco. We appreciate you very much.

One little bit before we run is one pick this week. One pick, but it's a good one. We've mentioned this a long time on the show. It's called Easy. effects. It's had other names, but it's a limiter compressor, equalizer, helps with volume in general for your desktop applications or maybe a video or a podcast you're listening to that doesn't have very good levels or the host levels are all over the place. You can turn easy effects on and it's like having a sound technician for your desktop audio. And just recently, and the reason why we're giving it a mention is not only is just a great application that you should have, but with the recent release, the whole application was from GtK4 to a combination of cute QML and the Kirogami frameworks. So it's got a brand new fresh release. It's on FlatHub as well. And it's one of our favorites. It's so good.

It's just, it's so good. It's only gotten better. It's easier to use now. It's more automatic. This is a huge update. So clearly they're like able to keep shipping and iterating. And yeah,

like the think pad I use for show stuff, it has abysmal speakers. Easy Effects is basically the only way that I can really managed to use them at all. I will say no shame, but a lot of the free software events that I watch that are streamed, they always have like really low audio

or a buzz, and you can just, you got Firefox up or whatever you're watching the video stream, you open up easy effects, you turn it on, and you can start moving dials, and you can take something that's barely audible right up to something you can actually manage. It's just fantastic. It works with pipe wire. It's got lots

of little knobs. Honestly, it's the kind of app that Mac users brag about all the time, And it's something we have right here for Linux. It should get more attention. It's got a nice little visualizer, too. So you get the, uh, uh, Hodge Spectrum. Easy Effects 8.0.

You can get it from GitHub or you can get it from Flat Hub. It's a great project. And, uh, I had no idea they were porting it to cute, but, uh, no, me either. But, uh, you know, it's a plasma user. I'm here for it. Suits us just fine. Suits us just fine. Links to that and everything else over at Linuxunplugged.com slash 641.

Now, if you've missed something or you want to jump around, West, you've got a power tip for people. Something they can really take advantage of. The magic of cloud chapters. Yeah, let's write a JSON file magically delivered from us to you that tells your podcast player where to go in the file. And if you need even more specificity, we've got transcripts in SRG and VTT format, so pick your favorite.

Yeah, depending on your player, you may even get the speaker names. And for those of you that are on podcasting 1.0 apps, we will be. bake the chapters in for the applications that support it. And some of them, like Apple Podcasts, now are adding transcript support as well. So some of the 1.0 apps are starting to, and I have to say, those are from the podcasting 2.0 standard, which is really great to see. So the stuff that we've been producing for years now on all of our shows is just immediately available to all Apple podcast users because Apple is implementing the podcasting 2.0 standard.

I don't love that app, but it's really cool to see that happen. Power of open source and open standards. Yeah. It's neat to see it happen in the podcast. space. And if you get one of those 2.0 apps that have all the stuff, you can get them over at new podcast apps.com, then you can tune in live, and you can listen to us on Tuesday on a Sunday. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Yeah, that's right. You can also join our lug. That's another way to listen and get in on the conversation. We get together

every single Sunday at 10 a.m. Pacific. You can find it in your local time at jupiterbricasting.com slash calendar. Thank you to our members. You get the bootleg with everything and more. And of course, thank you for joining us. We wouldn't do this show if you weren't listening. So we appreciate you, too. And let us know your adventures with the one-liter PCs and your thoughts on the Valve hardware announcements. We'd love to read those next week.

Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of your unplug program. See you next Tuesday. As in Sunday. So, I'm going to be able to be. You know,