LINUX Unplugged - 666: Berkeley Suffering Distribution

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

Who survived the install, who made it to the desktop, and who learned the hard way that one little mistake will blow up the entire BSD box.Sponsored By:Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMLinuxFest Northwest 2026 - Back to Root — April 24-26, 2026 - Bellingham, WashingtonTexas Linux Festival 2026 - November 6-7, 2026 Austin, TXTexas Linux Fest 2026 - Call for Papers deadline July 1, 2026Dirty Frag, a new Copy.Fail like vulnerability — The Dirty Frag vulnerability class, first discovered and reported by Hyunwoo Kim, can obtain root privileges on major Linux distributions by chaining the xfrm-ESP Page-Cache Write (CVE-2026-43284) and the RxRPC Page-Cache Write (CVE-2026-43500) vulnerabilities.How to mitigate the "Dirty Frag" CVE-2026-43284 in OpenShift 4 - Red Hat Customer PortalDirty Frag Linux kernel local privilege escalation vulnerability mitigations - UbuntuDirty Frag Explained: Linux Root Exploit, Mitigation & Patching GuideLINUX Unplugged 666 - The BSD Challenge RulesMagnolia Mayhem's BSD Challenge Report — It’s still got that old cowboy feel to it.Magnolia's Sinchflat - GitLab — Anyway, Pinchflat now has a FreeBSD-first competitor.FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Improvements Project — The FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Improvements project aims to deliver a package of improved or new FreeBSD functionality that, together, will ensure that it runs well “out of the box” on a broad range of personal computing devices.nixbsd: An unofficial NixOS fork with a FreeBSD kernelBrent's nixbsd configNomadBSD — Persistent live USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery, for educational purposes, or to test FreeBSD's hardware compatibility.GhostBSD — A simple, elegant desktop BSD Operating Systemgershwin-desktop — Desktop Environment based on GNUstep welcoming to switchersgershwin-on-freebsd live isogershwin-on-debian live isogershwin-on-arch live isoMaintaining the World’s Fastest Content Delivery Network at Netflix on FreeBSD - FreeBSD FoundationPick: kiji-proxy — An intelligent privacy layer for AI APIs. Kiji automatically detects and masks personally identifiable information (PII) in requests to AI services, ensuring your sensitive data never leaves your control.Pick: Portbook — Local Rust web dashboard that auto-discovers and labels HTTP dev services running on localhost ports — with live SSE updates, project-root detection, and live/error/dead classification.Pick: Sylve — Sylve is a lightweight, open-source management platform for FreeBSD. It combines Bhyve virtual machines, FreeBSD Jails, and ZFS storage into a modern web interface designed to deliver a streamlined, Proxmox-like experience tailored for FreeBSD environments.AlchemillaHQ/Sylve — Lightweight GUI for managing Bhyve, Jails, ZFS, networking, and more on FreeBSDFreshPorts: sysutils/sylve

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 coming up on the show today. It's been a full week of Berkeley suffering distribution and today it's our BSD challenge results as the challenge comes to a close. We'll find out who survived the install, who made it to the desktop and who had to learn the hard way that one tiny, innocent mistake could send the whole BSD box straight into the void. I don't know who that could have been. Then we'll round out the show with your boost your picks, and, you know, just a tiny bit more this week. Just a little bit more.

Not too much more. We don't want to overdo it. So before we get there, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hey, Chris, hey, Chris. Hello, Brian. Hello. How you guys?

Congratulations. Six-six-six-six-six. Yay, six-six-six. Thank you, guys. And shout out to you up there and quiet listening to. It is fun. Big. You know, it feels like, I don't know.

It's a milestone in the show, I think. Yeah. Also, good morning to our friends. friends over at Define Networking. Go meet Manage Nebula from Defined Networking. Define.net slash unplugged. It's a decentralized VPN built on the open source Nebula platform that we love.

And Nebula is engineered for scale and performance from day one. Very low CPU usage, minimal network overhead, and the kind of reliability that you actually control yourself. It's decentralized design keeps your network resilient. Whether you're running a home lab or connecting a global fleet, like the size of Slack itself.

There's also the option to self-host lighthouse nodes so you can own critical pieces of the network end to end. It's fast, it's lightweight, secure. It's built to last, no big tech login required. You can get started for free 100 hosts, no credit card required at defined.net.net slash unplugged. Go to Defined.combed.

And redefine your VPN experience and big shout out to Define for supporting the unplug program. Defined.net slash unplugged. Texas Linux Fest 26 call for pay is open. Wow. They're really ahead of it, aren't they? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So the deadline is June 1st, 2026, and then there will be one final deadline, July 1st. But put June 1st in your head. Yeah, get in early. We're going to try to make it. We don't really, of course, have this figured out yet, but November 6 through the 7th is when it's going, Texas Linux Fest.

So stay tuned for more details and maybe go check out that CFP. I will say, as someone who presented last year, it was a great experience. Great to work with the organizers, very easy conference, very friendly. Good, solid community, high signal. Great place to give a tuck. Not a very big event, but that's what I like about it. But a lot of people who are hungry, nerdy Linux folks who want to learn more. Yeah. Also, we did want to make you aware of Dirty Fragg, a new copy, fail like vulnerability,

which we'll have details linked in the show notes. But it's another one of these. If you can get local access to the box, you can escalate privileges. In another page, cash abuse. And there is a proof of concept in the wild. And the responsible disclosure schedule got breached, and so it's out before the patches are. There are some mitigations. We'll have those linked for some of the more commonly shared ones right now.

And we also have more in-depth details in this week's bootleg edition of the unplugged program. But before we get out of housekeeping, I have a personal question I want to ask the audience, so please boost in or email. How are you doing your home router? Specifically, those of you are doing a Linux router for your home networking. I'm setting up something pretty cool at home that does. involves using a Linux router to do failover between production network and backup internet connection and I will tell you more about it's one of it's probably one of the projects I'm the most excited about in years me too from my home network oh I

Wes I can't wait to to get your input on it it's in like the I mean it's past the design phase oh it's bolted to the wall and secured inside a sealed box it's this thing is production great and I'll tell you more about it but the piece I'd like to get more insights on is how people are doing routing in their home network, especially if they have failover networks, not mandatory. And if you're using Linux, I'd like to know about that setup. So boost in a link. Now can BSD routers apply or no? We'll get into that, Wes. We'll get into that. So for episode 666, we thought we'd check in on our Unix cousin once again. It's been well over, well not well,

but just over a year. And a lot can change in that time. This is true. Especially in Linux land, a lot does change. What about in BSD? Have things improved to make switching more viable in one year? I don't know about that. So just a very quick overview, the BSD challenge has four levels to it. The daily driver, the power user, and the bonus round. You know, really, phase one and level one and level two

are really about getting the system up, getting a functional desktop, browser, making some sounds. Then it starts getting to things like in the power level, level three, SSH, starting and stopping services and then if you can get all the way to level four and start a BSD jail and run a service inside it, then, you know, you can start counting up. And everything's been, everything has a total of points to it. If we fail, we do like to add a little bit of stakes to it. So whoever gets the lowest score here on the show, whoever ends up essentially failing the BSD challenge must pay the fail tax. And this year, the failed tax will be becoming our official Red Hat correspondent for the Red Hat Summit for the week.

So next episode, they'll have to report back with what they learned from the Red Hat Summit that's taking place this week. From BSD to Bootsie. That's hard work. It's a lot of on the grounds. It's, it's, that's, uh, that's the hardest thing we could think of. And it's work that needs to be done. So whoever comes, it's basically a second job. There's a lot of corporate details that need to get filtered for the open source folks.

Yeah. So that's, that whoever fails, whoever gets the low score has to become the official Red Hat Summit correspondent over the week. And we'll see where that lands. So before we get into how we did, let's talk about what we did, what we used for our BSD challenge setups. Brentley, tell me about the hardware. Don't give us too much details yet on the results in your score. Just give us a sense of the hardware you used or virtual machines or whatever the stack was for the BSD challenge. Well, I had high hopes.

I had hardware sitting waiting in the wings, and that's where it ended up staying. so that's a little maybe foreshadowing. I don't mean to foreshadow too much. But I had certainly got some success in a virtual machine and I use a, let's say, rather, hmm, rather insane VPS to help me with that challenge. All right, okay. That's a good tease.

Okay, now, Wes, I want to know what your hardware setup was or software setup, whatever the stack was it used for your BSD challenge. Yeah, it was a combo of virtual machines, of course, and then also the old trusty show T480 think pad with an all-intel stack, which is a pretty kind of a cheat code for some of these things, honestly. And then I also put, for server mode,

I got it running on an old knuck I have laying around. TBD needs to be nixified, but needed to get paved anyway, so this seemed like a opportunity. All right, so I had, of course, a couple of VMs where I experimented with a few ideas. and that was just, you know, QMUKVM and remote viewer on my desktop. Which works pretty well, I got to say. It does.

The hardware I decided to go with, I talked about it last week. We revived a Dell precision, like 7,000 series kind of custom R&D machine. And it's a big box, two Zon processors in there. I slapped a new SSD. You were ready to get some BSD work done. Yeah, man, big old screen. It has two different video cards in it, which is a bit of a challenge. but not impossible.

And I just needed one of them to work, right? And then I also, thanks to Olympia Mike, had me a spare Nick's book, which is like a Dell something or other, you know, nice mid-tier Dell laptop from years ago. And had that to test on as well. So I will acknowledge that I think the flaw, perhaps, in some of my approach,

was it was too biased to laptops. I'll get into that later But I also think That's a very modern workflow True It's the most common kind of computer people Buy these days But thinking through this

I think I would have liked to have tossed A nice standard desktop Into the mix It would be maybe worth trying to do something like this Where like you know In the older days of Linux Like we might not have thought it's super fair If you didn't do the steps really

Like what were you being It's fine to test a random thing But like is that what you would do If you were really trying to plan around Doing this long term So yeah, maybe it would be worth trying to think like, if we were trying to build a really nice BSD box, what would be and what would that look like?

Yeah. Although the Dell next book I used, a little spoiler there, but really had full hardware compatibility. So that was nice. Before we get to our results, we had a few people email in. We also have some that boosted in.

We'll get to those as well. And Jeff wrote it. He tried out NetBSD. He's a longtime free BSD home laber, but he's never tried out net BSD. He got through levels 1 through 3 and the stretch goals. He got an NPR firewall going

and QMU Linux VM running on his BSD box. Nice. He set up ZFS snapshots. But he hit a wall at level 4 because Podman Jails would not work on net BSD. Yeah. Fair. Fair.

He also has open BSD on an Orange Pie 5 which he uses as a tail scale end of it. Nice. Yeah. And he sent us a nice detailed write-up. He did have some audio quirks and some Wi-Fi performance issues. And he goes by Tux M.M. in our community. Thank you, TuxMM.

So FreeBSD 15 with XFCE is his desktop on that one. XFCE was pretty popular there. Oh, no, I'm sorry, that wasn't Tux. That was Jeff. TuxMMM was using FD15 with XFCE. Jeff was using that BSD. Sorry. Yeah, Tux MMMM is Cardiology Nurse Practitioner, Linux user, since

2019 points. Hey, nicely done. Installed FreeBSD 15 on an external NVME, got Ethernet and Wi-Fi working. Firefox with online radio and YouTube, VLC, OBS Studio, Libre office, Mega Command, synced backup, EngineX, SSH from a MacBook Air, mounted USB, and wrote a bash script.

System updated via package. FreeBSD15 uses package for base two, yeah, which is a cool new thing in the BSD world. So I'm looking up Mega Command. A command line interactive and scriptable application provides a non-UI access to mega services. Ah, the mega storage. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very nice.

FreeBSD15. That's an impressive setup. Well done on the points, too. Eddie tried out Ghost BSD. Bare metal install would not boot for him, so he moved over to a VM. He got about 20 points, he said. Ghost BSD for him made levels 1 through 2

getting the desktop rolling pretty easy. But level 3, he hit a struggle there. He called BSD-like visiting the early days of Linux and closes with long-lived Linux. Amen, Eddie, amen. Hey, it's good to be reminded of why we do what we do. Do you see here, Joe had a suggestion for you. He says, I think Brent should give Ghost BSD a try of Nix BSD doesn't work.

He mentions ZFS snapshots to another BSD host. And he says, Alan might have a tip for you there. Ooh. I did look at my, well, things were going very bad for me at one point. So I did look at, I promised that I would look at the community's suggestions for what my backup plan should be. And on Matrix, we got the most votes for Dragonfly BSD. So I went and read all sorts of things about Dragonfly BSD, and I decided I should just try harder on Nix BSD. So I did.

Now, Mr. Mayhem sent in a thorough report, Brantley. Did you see this? Oh, yeah. So Mayham, like, jumped the gun and did a full week before the challenge and said, hey, I got the max points. but I was just looking at the nice blog post that they wrote up, and it's worth visiting. We'll have it linked in the show notes. There's an update for week two,

and there's a nice photo here of Mayhem with Mini Mayhem, their son doing all sorts of the challenges that I didn't find success with. So they did some of the stretch goals and got a bunch of stuff going. There's a note here I thought was pretty funny. PF was easy. Just edit the PF.com file to block all those evil Californian IP addresses, and that's it. And there's screenshots of all sorts of, like, gaming on here. There's a cringe shirt that he wants us to ignore.

A good-looking desktop. Yes, yes. Good-looking desktop. And it looks like they spent many hours with this thing, but he has a little bonus point here, weirdest place. they got, here it says, there were bonus points for installing it in a weird place, so I put it in my car. This is a proof of concept so far, and there's a photograph of a proof of concept, let's say. But I actually intend on making this a long-term reality with a smaller screen reflecting off of my windshield. With a smaller screen, this could be a legitimately useful heads-up display for working my mail route.

And there's a little conclusion here. All things considered, the last two weeks have been absolutely horrible. To the degree that I'm surprised my dog didn't die, but this challenge could have been a cherry on that cake, if not for free BSD. It was an absolute dream to get installed and run, and I intend to keep it running. In a world where Linux is constantly becoming more and more mainstream in both good and bad ways, free BSD is a reminder of why I fell in love with Linux almost 20 years ago. It still got that old cowboy feel to it that I remember feeling back in 2009 when I first spun up my garbage Ubuntu laptop at 4.4. Leonard Wood.

I love that. That's I was hoping somebody would find. That's great. There's a lot more in this blog post and I would say dive in.

It's a fun read. I want to call out one thing. And Brent will be quoting from it instead of his own experience. Oh, yes. He tried to give Pinch Flat a go,

which I'm a big fan of. That's how I watch YouTube offline on Jellyfin. And he says it should have been easy to port. It's written an elixir. You know, it's VM power programming language, but he could not get it

running. He could not get it to build. So he switched over to something called cinch flat. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's a simple scriptish rapper

around YouTube DLP. Or maybe? No, that's Pinch Flat. Anyways, I want to look in, I think I've seen the name. Oh, good, he did link to it. So, I'll link, let's link to Cinch Flat in the, uh. Oh, I hadn't thought about Pinch Flat, but yeah. So a BSD first, Pinch Flat alternative.

Look at that. Look at that. Oh, that's so great. You know, the stuff you get through the, thank you for that. That's a lot of effort that went into that blog post, too. Yeah. It was really nice. Put that in the old show.

notes there. There's also, we'll put some links to some resources. I did mention kind of being laptop biased. Well, there is a resource for laptop users that want to try out free BSD, and it's the FreeBSD Foundation's laptop support and usability project that aims to deliver a package for packages for FreeBSD that improves functionality, for that kind of out-of-the-box experience you might want on a broad range of different laptops. Do you think this is what helped you, Chris? Definitely came in clutch for me. Definitely made all the difference. And after this, I had no problems, and I just stacked all the points.

Thank you to our members. If you're not a member yet, use the promo code 666, and you can take 6% off every month's subscription. For the lifetime of the subscription applies to new purchases, reactivations, and upgrades. We just want to say thank you to those of you that are considering becoming a member. You get access to the bootleg or the ad-free version of the show, so you probably wouldn't even be hearing this right now. But also the bootleg is getting more and more valuable these days, I'd say. So there's some good content in there for you. And if you've already a member, just thank you so much for keeping us going.

This year has been completely made possible by our members, starting in January, the first episode of the year. And since then, it's only been possible because of our members. You all are underwriting this. Yeah, you are. LinuxUMPLug.com slash membership or jupiter. party. You can use promo code 666 for either membership, and we do greatly appreciate it. Well, I guess my BSD week was an interesting one.

If you remember, last week I was in studio and feeling pretty good about this challenge, so I gave myself a few extra crazy handicaps. I don't know why I did that. But I decided to try out Nix BSD. We talked about it last week a bit, but it's basically trying to meld the declarative concept of Nix and Nix OS with BSD. And it turns out that's actually a really fun idea. It is also quite an experimental one.

So, yeah, I gave myself that challenge before really reading the project documentation. All right. But tell us your trouble, son. I dove right in. My trouble started when Wes on that episode said, oh, you might have to build a thing or two. And that's Wes's low-key way of suggesting that it may take several hours. It turns out many hours. I decided to try to get it installed. That's the

very first point you can get. Actually, the first two points, I suppose. I spent most of my time here. But I decided to do it the right way and spin up a VPS that has the maximum, you know, performance for building. Yeah. So I decided to offload the build to a VPS that was just like maxed. that it could build it as quickly as possible so that I could just iterate. But that still took, you know, like an hour and a half or two hours or something like that. Because it turns out I'm doing something that's not commonly done. And there is, in the project documentation, a binary cache that is suggesting you can use.

And I was like, that's amazing. Turns out it's 404. Totally gone. Nobody's, you know, used it. So that meant. I spent a great amount of time in this particular stage trying to get my very first two points. But I got it. I got it booting.

And it turned out building on my laptop was just torturing it. So that was totally the way to go. And then once I got an image, most of the building was all done. So if I had to build another thing or two, it wasn't actually that bad to do on the laptop, bring things down. So I learned a lot about Nix OS, which was not at all part of the challenge. but a good exercise to do. Okay. So I got my very first two points, like only a couple days ago.

Congratulations, buddy. Thank you. I would say NixBSD is fascinating. It is really fun to do it in a way that you're not supposed to. It also means I deeply handicapped myself in ways I didn't realize. I still got further down the list. But I did get connection to the internet. So got it running in a VM, got a connection to the internet.

I did install a package because, Well, Ping wasn't installed, so to... Oh, wow, really? Wow. Yeah. That's pretty minimal. Okay. Luckily, it was pretty easy because I have a Nix config, so I was able to just enable PING in the Nix config,

which was like literally a super simple thing. Reading the Man pages, well, I had to read all about jails, because that is also a thing you can enable in the next config, but then... So I got that part very easily, but then... That's great. Didn't know what to do. with it at that point. So enabling jails was very simple, using jails, maybe less so. But here's the

point where I just deeply handicap myself. The Nix BSD project is not really designed to run a desktop, and you would need to, like, do a lot of work that I'm not skilled to doing to port things over to this. So, oh. So level two was a little disappointing for me. This is when I started looking at Dragonfly BSD as a backup because I couldn't get a graphalgoat desktop going. Could not get a web browser going. So that's five points I didn't get right there. Uh-oh. However, I did get my own user account pretty easily because I was able to declare that in the next config.

So that was super simple. Nice. Very, very simple. Mount USB also wasn't able to get to. Audio, well, yeah. So level two is a little depressing for me. So I decided just quickly go to level three, because why not? That's the power user part, right?

And here's where I'm going to start begging for points, I believe. I know that was suggested it might be allowed. So updating packages is an interesting one because I can't use, you know, PKG you would use on free BSD to update your packages. Right. done with Nix. So that's impossible and would just have broken everything. However, I did build the VM by pinning the most recent pin that was available in the Nix BSD project. So would you give me some points for like updating the system before deploying it? Question? Half a point?

Hmm. Half a point? Half a point. Then we got to do for... Okay, well, you can give me a full point. I'm fine with that. I just feel like we give you a pity point. I think that's right. I'm okay with that. Is producer Jeff all right with that? Yeah, you check in with PJ.

PJ, you want to override one pity point for Brent for his half-ass system update there? Yeah, that sounds good to me. I've got half a point, too, but we can get into that later. Okay. All right. So moving through getting services running at boot. I don't know. I'm not going to give myself that point.

You can do it in the next config. I didn't really get it done. Or I didn't, yeah. So, but moving on, jails, I got to create jails really easily because that's a one-liner in the Nix config. Yeah. So in some ways, using Nix BISD. Yeah.

I want that. Yeah. One thing about the Nix config was it made some things really easy and made other things really impossible. So it was a blessed mix blessing, I would say. So it's kind of like NixOS. Do we have a total here? Yeah. So in total, given, you know, tying one hand behind my back the entire time,

I've got about 14 points plus a pity point. So we'll give you 15 points. Okay. I'm going to need you to keep track of mine because my story is very emotional. Oh, okay. And I've been on a journey. And I get a pen here. I couldn't bring myself to tally up my points. So I hated this. I don't mean to go ahead, but I got to go ahead here. I have to talk about this because I got to get through this. I have to be over with this. I cannot wait any longer.

Yep, let's do it. Like yourself, I spent most of the week getting to level two. Okay. Because it doesn't matter what boot medium or hard drive configuration I used, I could not get a BSD to boot on that Dell precision laptop. Couldn't do it. And then when I tried to do in a VM, I hit a bug with the current version of Ghost BSD, prevents X-11 and plasma and all this other stuff from working,

or Mote or X-F-C-E. So I couldn't do it in a VM. Yeah, because they're using Mote on X Libre, I think, in the most recent release. Sure, it's fine. I got, like, I got nothing else to do, right? So then I got to, like, go dig up other hardware. So I find this old Nix book from Olympia, Mike. Well, let me back up.

So first I think, this is the worst part, actually. This was the part. I can't believe I almost skipped this. I start to realize, what if Brent's right? Oh. What if Brent's right? A dangerous thing to think in anything. I know.

Go on. We're all surprised at this one. What if I would banging my head against a ventoy issue all day? Oh. Because I'm using ventoid. Oh. And I'm getting this weird air that Ghost BSD is waiting on the boot medium. That does seem.

And it is the boot medium. Right. It is the boot medium. So I'm thinking to myself after like a day of this. I'm like, because I'm trying different ISOs. I'm trying older versions. I'm trying the community edition, which I'll get to. No way.

Which was a highlight. I'm trying to, because I really wanted to make Ghost BSD work again because that's what I visited before. And I just kind of wanted. to check the delta. So I go dig up an old traditional thumb drive. You know, a classic real thumb drive.

It's probably one of mine that I've left there because you're... Probably 32 gigger, you know? Nope, not mine. I flash it. I flash it with the ghost BSD. Just like a straight flash. No nonsense. Old school like I used to do. And with the old DD and I go over and it starts to boot and I'm like, oh God,

it's something different's happening. And it locks up and it completely different place. Completely different. So progress? I'm like, is there something wrong with this machine? It is a weird machine. So I'm like, maybe it's because it's a blank CD, so, I mean a blank disc.

So I'll just install Windows. Right? Because I'm sure that's a common scenario in the real world. That's how desperate I am. So I install Windows 11 on this Dell and it works perfectly fine. And nothing changes. I'm like, okay, so it's not that. So I redo it and I install Ubuntu 24, whatever. I think it was like

one version back. Works fine, everything works out of the box, 3D acceleration, Wi-Fi, no problems booting. I'm thinking, okay, now there's a file system there. This thing's going to recognize this is a real disk, and whatever problem it's having with loading the boot image, it'll keep going now. And I pop back in my custom-crafted USB thumbstick that I carefully DD, and I pop it in there and GhostBSD boots up, and I put it in Verboast mode. I put it in Safe mode.

I try all these different... God forbid you try no ACPI. If you try no ACPI, it won't even boot at all. But so I try Safe mode, I try a verbose mode, I try all these different modes. it never boots never booted so I pivot free BSD 15

won't boot whoa no way yeah and I go okay it kind of makes sense ghost BSD is based on free BSD yeah it's just interesting because I've had other issues

but not booting free BSD I know and like I can boot everything else from Windows to the Ubuntu's on this thing so I don't so I pivot and I go get the Nix book and uh ghost BSD boots up just fine on the Nix book

and what I decided to do was try out their Gerwish desktop environment. Their what now? Yeah. Say again. Gershwin, it's a Gnusep-like environment. Whoa. Kind of taken from the days before Apple acquired next,

and Apple was working on kind of this new UI design that was called Copeland and all these things that never made it to the light of day. And it comes with a terminal, a text editor, some basic system preferences, file manager, and it's crazy light. The entire desktop environment's under 50 megabytes of storage. Yeah, wow.

This says it can be built in like a few minutes. Lightning fast. It's very early. But you don't have to use Ghost BSD to use it either. Although it's from the Ghost BSD community. They also make a general free BSD live ISO available, a Debian-based live ISO available, and an Arch ISO. And I tried out the Arch one as well.

and it's a little bit more up to date than what comes with GhostBSD right now. It's a very MVP desktop environment, but if you have any nostalgia for that era of computers, it's a lot of fun, and then just the pure speed of it is just a thrill. It's basic, but it's a lot of fun. So that was a highlight, I think, and that's what I used for my GhostBSD desktop stuff.

Next week we're getting VibeGershwin? Can it run on Linux? I like that idea. Well, it runs on arch, right? So it runs on the old Debian. It was really nice. It was like going back in time. So here's what I did.

So let's go through the points. And I'll tell you what I got working and what I didn't get working and where things went sideways. All right. So I think I got through all of level one. That was no problem because I read a man page about Beehive and all that. So that was fine. I had to do lots of pings and test to make sure my network. You installed some packages, yeah.

Yep. In fact, I updated the entire system. I got some audio working. Browser was working. all of that was fine I did have I did stop and start multiple services

but I'll tell you here's where things started to go sideways I made multiple changes to RC.com and nothing went sideways was fine yeah

maybe I got a little complacent after making multiple changes but I decided screw jails oh they oh fancy namespaces ooh caps them

oh okay I wanted beehive I wanted to try out beehive. So I go into rc.com and I add three lines. Like one of them is like enable beehive. The other is to set up bridge networking. And this other line, which I'm reading from a guide online, is like some kind of tunnel. I don't really know. And I look it up. I don't find anything. I'm like, okay, so go and I do a Google search and, you know, okay, here's a guide. And it's like the same exact guide copied from this other. I'm like, okay, all right. It looks like

These instructions are four years old, but whatever. All right. So I add the third line to my RC.com, which when I reboot should give me Beehive. Yeah. With bridge networking. All right? Yep.

I reboot. And what I get is just an endless boot script loop. Just scrolling text forever. Non-stop. System never recovers. It just scrolls and scrolls and scrolls and scrolls. If I hold down the control and I just smash C over and over and over again, I get a completely failed system.

And so that one, like, I'm assuming it's like either a bad, it's either a bad, like, stanz, it's a bad syntax, it's something. And it just reminds me just how fragile this is. And now I would have to go through an entire live session recovery process, take that line out just to recover my system. Now I know that you could set up ZFS boot environments and things like that. But this was just a basic brand new system. I haven't even gotten that far yet.

And I completely took it out just trying to get Beehive working. So that was, that's kind of when I was like, this is, you know, I can see why there's a great market fit. If you have a shop with a lot of storage, you need native ZFS support, you're really deep into the ZFS ecosystem, and you're fine with BSD. That seems like a use case to me. But I have to say, boys, and I don't know why I feel this way, but in the age, that we are in now with all of this crazy LLM generated code and agents and all of the stuff that Red Hat's going to be talking about this week, which is going to be some major announcements around that.

And it just feels like BSD is more irrelevant than ever in these last eight months. Like, I really struggle to understand the genuine market fit. I mean, if you enjoy it, that's great. Like, if you enjoy Land Trek, that's great. I don't like Land Trek. I don't like it. But I'm happy you like it, right? But to me, I don't quite see who the audience is for Land Trek.

Just like I don't quite see who the audience is for free BSD or BSD in general. Because it is, it's like hard mode for computers. It's like ignoring all of the improvements that we are benefiting from and stacking in the last two or three years that are bringing us massive productivity gains and scale. I mean, again, I'm not trying to crap on it as a technical achievement. and if you enjoy it, I think that's great. But it's still solving problems that we were solving 30 years ago.

And I just, I really struggle with why I would want that. I wonder how much of this is BSD versus Nix? And how much would, how much would you compare, say, if you were trying to just run like a stock Debian server versus a stock free BSD? I don't think it changes it much because there's still 20 years of technological innovations that would be in Debian, that are not present in BSD.

And what they've done? Well, take the Beehive, for example. Like, it's a great product in its own. But they're too late, and it's too little. And all they're doing is backfilling functionality that all the other operating systems around them built up. And now they're backfilling. Okay, well, they have it now.

Great. But why would I want it on this small niche weird product? Like, this was a valid argument 30 years ago, right? But 30 years of Linux evolution have taken place. now, and they've only pulled in a few things. Like, ZFS is their strongest feature. That's their strongest thing. But Linux can do that, right? Then the next strongest thing is Jails and capsum. But Linux can do that with namespaces and things like S.E. Linux. And I think then you're just arguing from a default then. Well, I'm arguing for what is, who's the audience?

Who's the customer? Well, I mean, I think you have to consider how much you want to consider the learning a blocker versus just the outcome. Because I would argue you can make a very nice free BSD server that from the outside you would not have any idea. But then you have something that only a small niche of the market can support. That's true, but that's exactly what Linux was. But like I said, we've had 30 years where now there is a free alternative that doesn't have that downside.

Like 20, 30 years ago when they were both at the starting line, that made sense. That argument made sense now. But now we have something that's free. We have something that's widely supported. We have something as a deep expertise base on. We have something that's very flexible that can do all the things that BSD can do in a way that is better supported by an industry, either be something like REL or just at the employment base. There are things that matters for, but that's not everything.

Okay, but what is that? I mean, it's a similar thing like, why would you run NixOS, right? You can't get rail support for NXOS. We're locking ourselves out of this entire support base. That is at least Linux. And I would argue there is still a wider base there. But what I'm trying to say is if you're looking at the two bases and you're going to build like infrastructure for your company, a virtualization infrastructure,

or you're going to build something that runs in containers, or something that runs on the cloud, I don't know why you would choose BSD. And it feels like, just like BSD is kind of sitting out all of the AI stuff, and just like it sat out all of the cloud stuff, it's like it just, once again, is just not relevant in the conversation. I think you're right at a certain scale, but I think there's a certain amount of room and value to the diversity,

especially in a week where we're getting constant vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel. Because the thing about BSD is I think it's simpler and more elegant than living. If you're going to compare, I would think it feels more like a closurey or like a well-crafted ecosystem. And Linux is kind of the node. Linux is JavaScript to that. I would agree. Or I would say BSD feels more intentionally engineered. Yes.

And so I think if you value that and if you have full scope over what you want to operate and you don't need the esoteric features, of Linux, those can be a liability. And the simplicity and the security of the free BSD system, say, where you can do jails and capsicum and things like that, that it's not that Linux can't do it, but Linux has to cluge together multiple systems in a much more complicated way. And so I think for a particular goal that is well fit on both systems, you may have a simpler and easier to reason about setup if you understand both systems well on the BSD side. Couldn't a cynical take be that you're arguing just that, well, it's security through obscurity, basically. No, it's not about

obscurity. It's, it's, there's less going on, so it's easier to get correct. Okay, I dig that. And I think, because this whole thing I'm trending is like, who's the customer, who's the market, who's the audience, who's the user? An embedded firewall device, maybe? Yeah, I think folks

maybe building appliances, right? We've seen a lot of use cases for that kind of stuff. I think you see it, folks use it to run some of like the core DNS infrastructure of the internet. You have situations where you have like a clear goal and you could solve it in a variety of valid ways. And then there can be valued to just having the diversity or a stack that like doesn't have all of that extra stuff that Linux brings in in terms of complexity where that core goal is very well

supported and then you might have it in a very simple, clean, elegant way. Okay. Now where I think the Nix OS side for me, that makes, this makes it more complicated. But if I'm comparing it to something like running the traditional Ubuntu or rel server or something like that, that's where I see that there's a lot of elegance. Like so like think about like encryption and like disk maintenance. We kind of have to like stack all of these pieces together. They don't really know about each other.

You have like the Lux side. You have like the device mapper part of the kernel. On the BSD side, they have GOM and GEOM and Gellie. And it's all one tightly integrated system that understands all of the pieces. It won't let you kind of, you know, abuse it in the same ways. Let me tell you about my iPhone. I mean, you know, it's like, okay, that's great. But you're describing an iPhone.

You're describing a Mac. You're describing the Apple approach. And I like the X-86 ecosystem. I like the Linux and Open ecosystem. And I do prefer putting together my own solutions. Well, it's not that you can't put it together. It's actually in a way it's more composable. It's like composability because it's intentionally designed in that way.

But you're so limited in your options. Yeah, and that's true. So I think the market fit is maybe then where those core things that it does in a rock style, like they thought about that case. And it's kind of like, right, we had a Epole on Linux. They had KQ, which was like better thought out. Now, I.O. Euring, there's been changes, but they just got a better API implemented. Now, maybe fewer things targeted, right?

But for the things that do and target it well, if that's the core of what you need, then maybe that's what you. And that's where it's like you're talking about ZFS is one of those situations. If that's the core of what you're doing, I think there are other sort of services or for a long time networking. There were particular networking use cases that BSD was at. Linux has caught up a lot there. But there can be situations like that. So that would explain really then why the desktop experience is just so god-awful rough. Yeah.

And maybe Drew's going to have to censor this. If you're listening on the bootleg version, you might want to skip ahead a minute here in a second. I'm going to play this clip because I was recording this using Nomad BSD, which is one of the BSDs I try. And I really like it. I think it's actually one of the better ones. It's a live BSD session that has persistent storage. But even what I would consider to be one of the top tier user experiences still has a god-awful user experience. And my mouse was dying.

I was having so many problems. I was really at my limit when I got to the screen. Even the nicest distributions miss the smallest usability thing. Like, I have to choose a keyboard layout. And it starts with user-defined and then Arabic and, like, how many of these users in these countries are even downloading this? And the entire interface is in English right now. So why not just English, right? So then you get to English.

Well, my goodness, how many versions of, okay, all right, there's US. There's a dozen different English options. Okay, well, how many versions of U.S. English keyboards are there? 30. Well, oh, oh, oh, no, not that one. Okay, no, I'm not Dvorak. Macintosh, no, I don't think I'm, am I Norman? Am I symbolic?

I must be international, so I'm not Euro or Workman or whatever. Oh, no, I don't think I'm Russian U.S. Okay. None of them are right. I guess I go with that one? No, no. Why am I doing this? And then look at this.

more keyboard stuff. Why is there so much keyboard stuff? The entire interface is in U.S. English. It doesn't make sense. It's just it's this little stuff that's just and it's everywhere.

I was having a rough time, boys. Let's have it a rough time. I don't say it's a bad anyway. Yeah, so it's just, and it's like, even when you get to the good stuff, it's, and what you're saying, it's, it must be, it must be, it must be The actual use cases are mostly headless. They're mostly in hardware or in file storage or DNS or something.

Specific intentional devices. Yeah, the one that always stuck out with me was, I think, a couple of years ago, Netflix decided to show that they were using BSD for their infrastructure. Right, right. That was interesting. Okay, someone's using it, you know, for something real. And I know a lot of people are. They're just not necessarily as public with it.

But that one always sticks out to me as like. That is always the use case we've heard for the last 10 years. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. Oh, you're right. So I'm guessing Wes must have a great time. So BSD-Eleven

Wes over there. We think we've got to tally up your points here, Chris. Oh, you're right. Sorry, I forgot. Yeah, yeah. I don't want to let you go that easily. I forgot about the Frient points. Okay, let's try to do this in a quick fast way. So level one, I think you got everything. So seven points. Yep. Seven points. It took you all week to boot it. But like me, you got

somewhere else, so that's good. Daily Driver, you got graphics going in a browser, I'm assuming. Yeah. And sound. Wow. Okay, sound going. And did you get, did you mount like a USB or some kind of experimental? I did not. I mean, well, I couldn't verify. It may have mounted, but that was also when I, when the system went into a horrible boot loop and I never got it back out.

Well, it specifically said you had to prove and you can't prove. So I'm taking that one away from you. Did you create your own user? Oh, of course. Okay. Well, I don't know. Now, what did you name the user? Oh, Chris.

Magnolia called his jail poop. He said it was very late at night. jailbreaker would be a good one for a BSDBucks. Okay, you might have moved into the power category then. Yeah, because I did a full OS update. Nice. Full OS update. And I had to install multiple packages.

By the way, EE, not a bad little editor by default. Not a bad little editor. And I also had to stop and start numerous services, including SSH. But were you able to SSH into your system? Yes. I got SSH. And I never, ever used any AI. assistance in this. Never used any

A hand. Nicely done. Nicely done. It was like once I had SSH up I was like, I could. Did you write a shell script and execute it? Okay, so I edited a shell script, but I did not create the shell script, and I think it was already executable, so I'm going to say no. The wording says write a short. Yeah, I'll say no. Okay, no point for you on that one. Yeah.

Bonus round. You ready for this one? Mm-hmm. Did you create and start a B. D-Jail or equivalent, no. No, but your, you know, beehive might have counted. I know, I know. I tried to get Beehive going. But it didn't work.

So you basically get zero in this entire category. Hey, hey, for all we know, it worked for all we know. Okay, well, tell us next week if you can prove it. But for now, I won't give you any of those points. All right. So, whoa, really? He got the pity points, but he don't give pity points. No, no, no, no.

You got to, here's the point where you can ask for some kind of point somewhere. Did you, did you run this anywhere crazy? I mean, I'm going to give you a point because you tried a lot of different BSDs. And so I don't need a pity, it's fine. What is my total? Okay, you got seven points plus five, six, another seven, that's 14 plus another two or is eight. Do this. Plus zero. So, you know.

Yeah. You don't have to say, blah. How do you feel about, uh, oh, 22 points? Oh, I feel pretty good about that. Although I think Wes is going to beat me. Although I think PJ is going to beat all of us, but all right. Wes Payne. Yeah.

Can you beat 22 points? Well, I guess let's find out. So, uh, how did, uh, your experimentation go? Did you get it up and running as a daily driver with a desktop environment web browser? I did. Yes, indeed. Yeah, I got, um, Well, first I played a tiny bit around with Dragonfly and a VM, but it didn't seem like it had been updated super recently.

I was kind of just wanted to play more with Hammer, too, because it's kind of an interesting file system. Yeah, and that's one of the neat things about it is it has Hammer. And they've done a lot of work on their, like, SMP stuff. Yeah. I wanted to give Hello Systems a try. Right. But it doesn't look like they've updated since 2024. Yeah.

So, ultimately, I went back to FreeBSD, and I tried a couple of things. Started out with Awesome, and then switched over to Sway. I think that was probably a good move. Pretty straightforward to get going. Yep. I was going to try plasma, but I just didn't quite get there. I imagine that was on the list. Created a user account?

Oh yeah, I got to have a West user. Did you mount an external disc? Yeah, yeah. Plugged in the USB drive. You keeping track there, Brankley? That worked totally fine. I'm attempting to. I did get audio working.

I think that's all 14 points there. I have a question before you continue. Yeah. At what point in the week was this? Like currently where you are here, getting the audio going? The Wednesday? Yeah, I think he had it going early on because we didn't even know anything. I got awesome going last week in the first week.

You and I didn't even have anything booted by this point, Chris. Yeah, I was able to piggyback on sort of the setup I had because I saved all the comp files when I destroyed the VM that I made the first time and then kind of let that help that bootstrapped that one I installed. That's not fair. All right, so he's got all of level one, including the bonus point. I did also get Duaz going. I don't need a point for that, but I like do as I think it's kind of nice. All right, let's see how you did as a power user, Wes.

Did you update your packages? I did, yes. Did you perform a update installed packages with the native tool and perform a full OS update? Did you do a full OS update? I don't know if I did. I might not have it. That's kind of a weird one because if you're updating the packages. Yeah.

I didn't intentionally try to like, but I did update and I did install a bunch of stuff. Okay. And I did get ports going. Okay. All right. I think that's probably. That's probably. And then yeah, SSH was not a problem.

But services, you know, RC comp. You could just stop there. And then I did make a shell script. Oh. But I was trying out. my hand because they use C-shell by default. And so I was trying my hand to write in a C-shell script, which I'm not very good at. So I did run.

I was able to, you know, print some stuff out and, you know, write it to a file and like that kind of stuff. So I'm not a, not as good as a badge, which I'm also not that great at. But. All right. So I think that's all the points for level three. Well, what about the services? Getting a service to start at boot? Yeah, I got EngineX going. Yeah, okay.

All right. Did you lose points anywhere? Did you go to jail, West? Did you start a jail? Yes, I did get some, I got an EngineX going in a jail as well, because I figured that seemed like a good thing to run in there. Did you try to access the service from a host? Yeah, I was able to expose that to my local home network. Okay.

That's like a... I did not get a VM going, but I did get ZFS boot environments working, which was cool. Well, you're definitely in the Beastie Whisper category with me, but I think it beat me. I feel like you kind of blew it out there. Well, it was easy. easier to track how many points Wes missed, which was only two. So I think he did pretty good. That looks like, I don't know, depending if you think the math on our BSD challenge was correct or not, something like 28 or 29. Yeah, I'm going to say 29. I think that's what I tracked was 29 points for Wes.

That's pretty... A couple questions for you, Wes? Yeah. Did you run anywhere interesting or what surprised you the most? Hmm, no, I just tried it on the, I got the Nuck going with 3BSD. I didn't end up. That's a where I ran EngineX. I didn't really end up doing more on it. I was thinking it could be fun to play with. So I might leave it around with VBSD for a little bit. Oh, no. We'll see. It'll be NixOS before you'll. We've lost him. Lost him. He's gone. We need a new host, everybody, if you're willing. It's interesting to see, I also wanted to try the Linux compatibility, but I didn't quite get there either. So it's interesting to see, sort of see the frequency and the cadence of how

they port over that stuff and what those environments look like and how updated they are or not and their work to port. Like I wasn't lucky because like the I-915 stuff works for this laptop and that is well supported in FreeBST, but not all are. And then you kind of have to learn, you know, oh, where do I go to find out like what was it most recently synced over from the Linux side and like that kind of stuff?

I was surprised to see that like Wayland is in better shape. Not everywhere, not on all graphics tax or any. And it doesn't work very well or at all really in QEMU right now seemingly. Nope. But that was a thing that before this I hadn't even, I just assumed we would all be using X exclusively. Yeah, yeah. So I find.

find it, I know I was coming on as a stand earlier. Like, I don't know if I have a lot of places for it. And I think Nix has made it harder because there's just so much more on top that it's like, like maybe if it was like Nix, BSD would almost be closer. Like at that point, if it was just sort of, it swapped out the underlying implementation and that was fine from the config, then like I, that would make it more likely I would run it because I'm almost, the Linux is now almost an implementation detail. Not really, because it's Linux unplug.

And we love Linux here. But so it's almost like I'm also sort of in your camp where I'm like, I find a lot of it very elegant and appealing and fascinating, but I don't quite know where I would put it. Yeah, yeah. I would like to have a place to put it. I just don't know where that is. That was where I was at the last time we gave it a go.

And this time we gave it a go, it feels even less relevant than it did more than a year ago when we tried it. But that's just my personal opinion. Just because you felt like maybe nothing changed or you didn't notice anything changing in this limited use? It was a collection of things like that. Yeah. Yeah.

It does seem like there has been some more effort. just think they're early. Like, we've seen over the past year or so more foundation work towards the desktop and like some things like that. So did any of you like manually connect to Wi-Fi? Uh, yeah. That was the first time I got Wi-Fi working. It's fine.

It's basically like the process was. Like the WPA supplicant type stuff, right? It was like it's fine, but it's like it was a whole effing, you know, this stuff I definitely feel like. Bring the interface up. This is in this interface. You know, it's like, okay, I remember doing this 15 years ago. And it's fine.

But it's, it just seems like they're. could have at some point in time been tooling created to make, you know, it's like, why acknowledge that Wi-Fi is actually a thing, but they don't. They just assume if you need Wi-Fi, then, I don't know, it's just, that's all of BSD. Well, and that's where you're kind of talking about, right? Like, maybe it would, if it was like a desktop sort of workstation thing, that had Ethernet and there's just on, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or if you're going with something built for the desktop, like your ghost BSD, something like that. They do a much better job with that sort of stuff. But you are right that it kind of, it does, especially on the desktop side,

feel like going back in time on the Linux world. Well done. 29 points is, uh, that's going to be the, that's going to be pretty darn hard to be there, PJ. Did you think you, uh, do you think you scored more than 29 in the old BSD challenge? Well, I don't know how he got 29. The math doesn't add up to me, but we'll go with it. Okay. I'll take BJ score.

If you want to, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was also I would count you while I listened. I was lazy math. No, no, no, it's okay. It's okay. It's okay. We'll give him 29. Let's see. Oh.

I, okay. Oh. Yeah. I can get it. Let's go. Well, see what you guys give me for bonuses. So I added up for myself 25 and a half. Now, the half point, I'm going to consider the USB mounting.

I mounted a BSD-formatted USB drive, but could not mount NTFS, could not mount extended for nothing. So half a point for that one. I love the BSD native part. Yeah, that's fine. Because it didn't say you had to, you know, mount something that wasn't. native. So you get the whole thing. I'll take it. So that puts me to 26 points.

So I did everything on the list. Let's see. I have a full desktop environment, enlightenment, of course. It is accelerated enlightenment, so OpenGL acceleration. Nice. Good choice. Works great. It's super smooth. Let's see. What else did I do?

Installs all of the commands or all of the updates and everything. You got a web browser going. You did system updates, all that good stuff. Yeah, web browser, system updates all ran, but everything was updated because I installed everything through the web as well. Free BSD and web installer technically pulled everything down updated. So all that worked fine. I also got wine working. Oh, cool.

I wanted to. That was all like to do. But did not. So I got wine working, got, you know, we're StarCraft running perfectly fine. Oh, that's fantastic. So StarCraft, Jeff and I had a side deal. Whoever could get StarCraft working first. And definitely Jeff beat me, like, by days and days.

Jeez. So extra point I say for him because I failed. Great. That puts me up to 27. Frank, give him away points. Just hands him out. GTA by city also ran. I also got OBS.

I took OBS, recorded by city footage, and edited it in. in live all. And I did all that. He is just showing up. This is awesome. I, I nuked my install and he's in there editing video. Geez.

Over BNC, by the way. Oh, wow. Okay. I don't know. That's a kind of suffering. You're running your own challenge over there. It was fast. You know, I was very surprised.

Great. Next is a very smooth. Worked really well. Remote desktop. Yeah. All right. Okay. Okay.

S. S. Obviously easy. Good. Good. So SSH, VNC, all of that, no problem. Anything else? Any questions?

You got jail going? Ah, yes, I did. I did go to jail. I got a classic jail running and installed murmur, the Mumble. Oh, no. And connected to it via my land. All right. That's the bonus points.

So 26 is what you're going with. How did we get to 29 for West? I have no idea. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, the math is rough. So that's 27 for me then. 27 plus whatever bonus points you want to give me, I'll take it.

All right, he should get some bonus. Some line bonus. All right, you want to give him a bonus for, I think a bonus for the desktop environment choice and a bonus for the gaming. Hardware acceleration too. Yeah, bump them up to 30. I think that puts him at 30.

Oh my God, PJ. Well done, sir. Well done. I'll take it. 30. Will you keep it around? Oh, God, no. Yeah.

No, I have other thoughts. You know, I really enjoyed free BSD. I tried midnight because I wanted to give California the middle finger, but they went ahead and folded and let California user's user system. I did not like it. I got XFCE running on that. I then switched to Dragonfly, got enlightenment running on that, but ran into other issues. Neither of those systems had the packages I needed. So went to free BSD, everything was way smoother, had all the packages I wanted.

and it reminded me a lot of when I started with Arch. And I know Chris is going to say, oh, old Linux. Yeah. Well, for me, that's how I, Arch was my, like, it reeled me into Linux, right? Medriva was my hook. Arch Linux reeled me in. I loved it. And I used it when it was still using the RCD config, which we're still using on BSD.

So it was familiar in that way. Yeah. And I liked and I still enjoy building my own desktop from scratch. So in those cases, I felt right at home. And if Linux ever does go away, we've asked that question before. I know we're on landing for sure. Yeah, I think, you know, after being hard on it, I will add, if you kind of do have a soft spot for the way the systems used to work

and it works well for you, you could really get somewhere nice with like a GERWish desktop or an XFCE desktop and free BSD. And you could probably just settle in for a long while. And you'd really have a very functional system. As long as you didn't need large-scale compatibility with new and exciting applications. Or hardware. Yeah, or hardware. I did get Linux compatibility mostly working as well.

Nice. I was able to turn into a Linux environment. Well done, sir. Oh, yeah. Did you be able to run anything in there, Linux program-wise? Just basic stuff? The CLI stuff was no problem. I was trying to get a Linux game running, but LibGL issues haven't been able to solve that.

Did you run? Did you run it on some interesting hardware or anywhere interesting? The hardware is not interesting. It's just an HP Prodesk. Nothing fancy there. It's a 6th Jan I-7. But no problems as far as hardware goes. Geez. Zero. Yeah. Zero. Now, if you want to write in or boost in and advocate for why maybe you could beat 30 points.

Or why Brent should get extra bonus points? Yeah, boy, oh boy. You know, we did have someone who, I don't know if we had in our earlier feedback summary who sent us like a detailed PDF. Oh, that was so great. I meant to call that. Yeah, user LKF, I think Lars. Thank you.

This document, you know, it's like, I don't know, 10 pages and very well typeset latex document. Beautiful report. Detailing all of the stuff they did. They have a, their own score they might have. Yeah, that was genuinely, there was some really nice write-ups that came in. We had to pop through them quick for obviously time purposes, but, man. Man.

We were really impressed. So, you know, Brentley, I just want to say, get excited, get ready. It is time, my friend, because this week is Red Hat Summit. Have fun out there. Have fun out there, Brent, Red Hat Summit, 2026. Looking forward to it. As the loser of the BSD challenge, you will be our correspondent. The least winner.

It's an acceptable. Open source. Open source. Connect with other people. A wonderful week. Yeah. And, you know, being that you went last year, you're already kind of up to speed on what the game is, so it should be no problem. Well, thanks, guys. I feel honored.

Congratulations, sir. Thank you. Hey, if you'd like to support the show, you can send us a boost.fountain.fm makes it really easy. There's also AlbiHub, which you can connect to lots of different projects and podcasting apps. And please do boost it and tell us about your router setup. I'm building a new home router, brand new little baby. And it's a very special project, and I'd like to review as many. ideas from the hive mind as possible. So do boost those in. Be a great way to support the show.

And, you know, maybe a great chance to try out a boost if you haven't done it yet. I don't know. Support the show with a boost. Well, we have quite the baller boost here that I am hesitating to read now that I read the first line or two. But it is for a row of Mick Ducks to 22,222 sets. Hey, is that a row of Mick Ducks? Is that what it is? Or is an a flak? Which one would you like? I like that. Aflak every time. Let's do it.

Affleck. There you go. Let's do an aflac for once. But also why not? This old duck still got it. That's what I say. He does too. So our baller booster here is PJ.

And he says BSD me calling it right now. I beat Brent. At least 25.5 points at the time of writing this, excluding bonus points. Install the Linux compact stuff. I couldn't run a game due to LibGL issues. But I was able to charute into an Ubuntu jammy instance. and get nano going. Nice.

I mean, that's worth it right there. Very fancy. Nano. I did not, actually, I was just stuck with EE. Did you try it? No, I didn't actually. Editor, it's not bad.

Yeah, I just. He writes other details about how he beat me in various ways. Yeah, he also got some Zonautic going. Yeah, that's true. Super Tux cart. So, uh, good job, E.J. You win this round. At least he sent a little sugar along for that salt in the world.

Yeah, that's right. I appreciate the boost. Turd Ferguson comes in with 22,222s Tird Ferguson Things are looking up for all the duck The history of 1-800-It's Unix is a fun one. What? BSDI put its Unix on a toll-free number. AT&T took it personally. BSD got

lawsuits into limbo and gave Linux time to take off. 1-800-It's Units. And yeah. Really? No. I guess so. I do remember there being a massive lawsuit that AT&T launched. Yeah, so, okay, here's what Google says. 1-800-I-Uyx was a marketing phone number used by Berkeley System Software Design, BSDI, Inc, in the early 90s to sell their BSD-386 operating system.

It was at the center of a major legal battle between AT&T Unix Systems Laboratories over the trademark infringement, forcing the company to stop using the number. That's like back when lawsuits were fun. Yeah, I don't know. It doesn't sound too fun. Doesn't sound too fun. Yeah, I mean, I suppose we had our own, we've had our own fun of eternal law seats on the Lenox side, haven't we?

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, our dear Odyssey Westraboosin with $5,000. You're doing a good job. Just to say, live meep. Hello, Odyssey. Thank you. Thank you.

Appreciate that. We've got a Moona Night here with, oh, cleverly, 6,666. Sats for episode 6666. But that's not possible. Nothing can do that. Maybe instead of calling Mysterious binary's magic boxes or quote blobs we can call them quote danger zones

danger zone i like that idea yeah yeah it comes with some bundled danger zones it might be too exciting sounding though yeah it's a little edgy i want that i want the danger zone uh yeah right i love me danger zones this is yours have right auto brains here with the space balls boost one two three four five sets so the combination is one, two, three, four, five. Well, we agree with this. I love our community. We have so many diverse perspectives

from around the world. That's our super strength. I'd love it if we could find a way to keep growing. Get more women in STEM on board, give more young people and old people and every age in between, people all sorts of background.

Let's get them all in this awesome E-Tent. Oh, I love that idea. Yeah, the community can always play a role in that. Agreed for sure. Yeah. Wes and I did convert a rather aged gentleman who was very interested in learning about Linux back at Linux Fest Northwest.

That was a great conversation. It really was. And also, I have to say this week, just watching all the BSD challenge conversation happening in our Matrix room was very fun, very entertaining. I probably should have did less of that and more working on my challenge. But here we are. The Brent Vicarious Challenge. Well, WH. 2025 comes in with 5,000 cents. Well, that's here. Good buddy. Here is a plus one to AI segments. I'd like to see some comparisons on all the new stuff coming out, like, say OpenClaw versus Hermes and etc. This is also a time traveler boost going all the way back to 2015.

Kind of funny to hear Chris remarked that he finds the Raspberry Pi interesting but had no idea he would use one along with Bopey saying by episode 600 we'd have a bunch of phones everywhere. 2015 was an optimistic time. Oh yeah. Interesting. Yeah, the shows...

Sample in the back catalog. It shows a bit of a time capsule that way. It is indeed. Thank you, W. Pursi H. Perciate you. Well, we've got bearded zero here with 6,99 cents. Oh my God, this drawer is filled with broolopes. They say last episode should have been titled Control C, Control F. Thanks for all the AI talk and everything else on the show.

Well, Control F would be fined, right? Usually, right? Yeah. Copy fail. You know what I say? Oh, I see. I say never paste. Just fill that copy, that paste, that pinboard up.

Fill it up, fill it up, whatever. Fill it up, never paste. I have an observation about how copy pasting is failing for me recently. I don't know if you guys have experienced this. I've been using open code quite a bit in my workflows. And it just, like, copies anything you highlight. And so I turn that on in all my terminals because, like, I'm not an animal. But now if I use any other program, it's just broken.

I can't copy paste for the level. West knows. Yep. West knows that I be sitting here at the station here in the studio, and I'm sitting there trying to copy. And I highlight stuff and it's not copying. I'm like, what is going on? There's got to be a assumption, right?

We got to find some kind of. I mean, be a gentleman and turn on copy with highlight. Goodness sake. Plug for the kitty terminal. Adverse 317 is here with 8,192 sats. Aversaries like the beginning of last week's member bootleg feed. And he says, one day, one day. I'll make it to Linux Fest Northwest.

We sure hope so. We do. That would be great. Ronnie comes in with 6,666. Just pump the brakes right there. Thanks for all the work. Number of the Beast is here. Hey, for us, it's a good luck.

And I don't know if this was intentional or not, but they also happened to be at six seconds into the podcast. Whoa, come on. Do you think they knew we knew that? Yes, no. But bonus points. Magnolia Mayhem came in with 5,000 sats.

Well, that's here, good, buddy. Maximum points, and he sent us the link to his write-up. Long story short, I got it running in my car and achieved everything but a bird. virtual machine. Crushing it as usual. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Biggest Mac has boosted in with a devil boost, 6,666. Satoche. Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too. Oh, hey, it's Brian from Boise. For this challenge, I used a rescue HP Elite Desk and went with FreeBistee 14.4. I did most of the work over SSH, set up XFC for my GUI, even got the sound working in Firefox. Nice.

I grabbed a couple screenshots and a screen record with. XFCE4 screen shooter. Then I got Bastille set up and decided to try to get PinchFlat working. Took some manual edits to the Elixor Source code to get the SQL playing nice, but it's running incredibly well now. Awesome. Interesting that it got it. And another Pinchflat user out there. Pinchflight users unite.

They continue here. Erlang virtual machine crushing it. Yeah, I guess so. Pinchflat is now serving the Linux unplugged channel via mini-D-LNA. The best part? it's arrived a reboot. After everything was stable, I jumped to 15.0 at 1 a.m. this morning. Everything, jails and all came back up.

I didn't expect to build a snappy YouTube box for the house when I started. But here we are. Not included in my story, I created a small Z-FS status shell script, and I did mount a USB drive. With all that, I think I can say I got around 30 points for this challenge. Yeah, I think so. As FreeBSD likes to say. Oh.

it's cut off. I'm so sorry. It just says, does this loo? Well, yes, it does loo. You did very... I think it lose well. I think it lose very well. I think that's easily a 30 points big. Very impressive. Ha! Well, well, well, some people really crushed it.

I'm very impressed. I'm glad it's sticking for some of you too, and I hope you enjoy it very much. There's some of the audience and users right there. Thank you everybody who supported the show with a boost. We had 17 of you stream them sets. Collectively, you sat streamers. You stack 20,300. Sats for this episode. When you combine that with our boosters,

we squeaked out 128,318,000 Satoshi's. We really do appreciate it very much. In fact, when you boost, a little bit goes to B, a little bit goes to Wes, a little bit goes to editor Drew and Brent and the podcast developer of the app, all of that. So it spreads around a little bit, and it's a great way to support us directly, or, of course, you could just become a member.

And we appreciate that, too. Well, we have too many picks. How did that happen? How does that happen? Let's do the AI-related one first, and then the rest. We'll all click into place. So, of course, one of the problems when using AI services like OpenAI or Anthropic is you might be worried about your sensitive data going to these cloud-based services.

In fact, I know some people avoid cloud AI in general just because they don't want to send their data to it. But, Wes, you have been experimenting with various proxy layers that can be used to, I guess, I don't know, sensor, isolate, remove private data? Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, in a lot of situations, right, maybe the LLM needs to know that there is like an API key there or something like that. If it's really crucial for like a templating thing or a placeholder, you know, you should already have solved that. But if you didn't, and there is a mistake, you still don't want that key ending up in, you know, being cached used for training, all that stuff. And so enter, well, I mean, there's a lot of stuff. I've been playing it with some of my own projects. But there's more than a couple out there sort of a composable ad hoc just kind of do that piece. And one of them, is Kiji proxy, an intelligent privacy layer for AI APIs. It automatically detects and masks personal identifiable information in request to AI services, ensuring your sensitive data never leaves your control. And yeah, I think this one also, it has, so I've, and the ones I've used so far, have mostly been sort of like entropy detection or sort of more standard programming techniques

to look for things like PII or API keys or that kind of stuff. But this one has the ability to use like a small model on its own to try to classify that stuff automatically. Interesting. So you put this between you and the upstream cloud provider. You configure your local client to talk to this and it proxies the request up to say open AI or Anthropic. And during that time, it's looking for personal identifiable information like email address, social security number, credit cards, etc. Exactly. API keys.

There's also, it offers a Chrome extension. So if you're using ChatGPT, Clod, or Gemini in the web, it can also kick in for that as well. There's also a desktop app for the Mac, I think. Comes with a system D service. You can run it in Docker if you want. It's got pretty nice logging. It's all local.

They use a Distilbert transformer model using the Onix front time to sort of do that local ML for the classification side. So, yeah, one way to try and ameliorate some of the downsides and risks of using some of these services. Yeah, and like you said, there's several of these. This one's mostly Python and Go, and it's licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. Yeah, give it a try, maybe you have a use, and let us know how it goes.

Next up, Portbook, which is a local Rust Web dashboard that auto discovers and labels your HTTP services running on local host ports. It does live updates, project route detection, live air, and dead classification. So why spend the time setting up the dashboard when you can have the dashboard, board, auto discover everything, running on your machine, label, setify, classify, blah, blah, do it all for you. And, you know, maybe you got a couple dev environments running. You got a few services. You don't quite remember what's running on that thing.

And, you know, sure, SS or NetsDec can do some of that. Would have been useful this morning when we were trying to hunt down our rogue DHCP server. Yes, it would. So get yourself port book. Yeah. Portbook. And it is MIT license. This feels like one of those tools I didn't realize I needed.

Yeah. I do. Yeah. It's only like a five megabyte. single binary. It does look like it might be pretty new. I think it wasn't created too long ago. So early days, but give it a try.

Maybe you can help shape it. Also, great support for JSON output, all that kind of stuff as well. So if you just want something that reports on the back end doesn't stand up a WebUI, you can have a create like a JSON report. All right. Then our last pick is sleeve, which is what I was hoping to get to, which is what I was building towards so I could talk about a little bit, a little bit, because it looks pretty neat. You could think of it as like ProxMox for Beehive.

It's a management plane for Beehive, a lightweight open source management plane that sits on top of free BSD jails and Beehive and ZFS storage in a modern web interface designed to give you a streamlined UI with all the stuff you would kind of hope and want, at least they're striving for. Yeah, and they've got some cool sort of example deployments in some of their guides like a Technidium DNS server in a jail, jellyfin in a jail, Rocky Linux jail if you want to use that Linux compatibility mode. And then you get sort of this cool management layer on top. And it is a nice UI with resources, you know, overviews, dashboards. Yeah, modern, Svelte JavaScript stuff. Nice, easy, EI, geez, I'm getting sleepy. UI to create virtual machines. And what I think is really great about it is that it's sitting on top of FreeBSD, right?

It's not like its own weird, although I think they do offer an ISO, but like it just runs on top. Right, on top, yeah. You know, Chris, I probably would have got a couple extra points had you linked us Sylvie earlier in the week. So, no thanks. You think it's Sylvie? I like sleeve because it's like it's a sleeve for your VIII. You know, I need to write to them. Silby's been nice to me, so.

Okay, all right. And it is BSD2 licensed. Appropriate. Yeah, as you might expect. As you might expect. We'll have links to all of that in the show notes. Our show notes are over at Linux unplug.com slash 666. Or, of course, you can go to jupiterbroadcasting.com where you'll find this show and all the great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.

If you want more around the show, we do have some really great metadata in multiple ways, West Pay. Yeah, that's right. How about cloud chapters? and how about VTT diarized transcripts. Is that good enough for you? I mean, from that, you can do quite a bit. Those are all in our feed as well as a video version, all in there as part of the podcasting in Tudan0 namespace.

Multiple clients support that. But even if your client doesn't, if you know how to pull up an RSS feed in your browser, you can find the URLs to stuff. You know, it's right there. And of course, we are also live on Sundays. Make it a Linux Tuesday on a Sunday. See you next week.

Same bad time. Same bad Steve. That's right. Join us over at jbblive.tv or jblive.fm. And of course, that mumble room with our virtual lug is going every single episode. And they just give it that live vibe along with our chat room. Shout out to our members who make every single episode this year possible. And don't forget the website, LinuxUMPLug.com, also has our Mumble info, our Matrix info, and a whole lot more. If you can't join us next Sunday, we will see a Tuesday on a Sunday when we release, usually in the evening on Sunday to make it a Tuesday. Right? It's easy. But don't you understand? You can find our live times at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of your unplugged program. We'll see you right back here next Sunday.