LINUX Unplugged - Episode 109: Who Will Build The Builders | LUP 109

Episode Date: September 9, 2015

Debian aims for reproducible builds of all packages. We’ll explain what that means & why other distributions might be jumping onboard with the idea.Plus impressive early performance results under Mir & Gnome’s 3.18’s best features you're not hearing about.

Okay. All right. So I was going to ask if you guys, before we get started, before we get into all the serious Linux discussion, all Linux content all the time, did you see IT, Cards Against IT? That's what it's called, Cards Against IT. I'm such a spaz. Cards Against IT. You're familiar with Cards Against Humanity. dash RF, my rooted phone. And then you go down to, of course, the actual phrases. The new IT director has a sick tattoo of blank. The last consultant was fired over blank. Forgetting the blank in the data center is a firing offense. Nothing transfers data faster than blank. So it's, yeah, blank is a layer eight of the OSI networking model.

We're going to use blank instead of updating to IPv6. Blank is the last stage of our blank rollout. These are good. If you've been in the industry for a while, these are all pretty good. So I recommend if you want to blow off a little steam, you go print this out. We'll have the PDF in the show notes. It's just the same kind of like spirit of Cards Against Humanity, but it's Cards Against IT. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 109 for September 8th, 2015. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that really, really needs a shower.

My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hey, Wes. So I'm sorry if I stink a little bit. I've taken showers recently, but not like today. I'm sorry. I'm going to sit as far away as possible over here. Yeah, that's cool.

You can scoot the mic away. It's all right. Actually, I'll tell you more about that in a little bit, but we have a really great show coming up. Some feedback we've got to start with from the community that touches on a couple of topics we've been following for a couple of weeks. And then I want to jump into this convergence demo of some pretty performance-demanding applications running under XMIR. Yeah. Desktop OpenGPL applications running under MIR. Whoa.

Yes, yes. XMIR being pushed to limit. We're going to talk about that. And then also, did you see this headline, Wes? How Debian is trying to shut down the CIA and make software trustworthy again. I sure did. That's a hell of a title. It sure is.

Dramatic, but important work. Yeah, we're going to talk about what that actually is, why the Debian project wants reproducible builds. If we can say it. If I can reproduce the words. And why other projects are probably going to be picking that up, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and maybe some other Linuxes. We'll be talking about that in just a little bit.

And then towards the end of the show, I'm going to do my darndest to convert Wes back to GNOME because I'm going to tell him what is so badass about GNOME 3.18 that's not even in the release notes. Oh, no. That's right. And we might just get you to switch to GN even in the release notes. Oh, no. That's right. And we might just get you to switch to Gnome by the end of this episode, Wes. I'll be the judge.

Yeah, right. Okay. So why don't we get into a little bit of business, some follow-up and some show-specific stuff before we launch into the rest of the episode. The first thing I want to do right here at the top of the show is give a plug to an old friend of the show, Mr. Matt Hartley, for launching Freedom Penguin, which you can find at freedompenguin.com. And one of the cool things he's doing is he's brought on some friends, other friends of the show. You guys are familiar with Albert Westra, Odyssey Westra, who joins us frequently. And of course, you're also familiar with Jed.

He contributes a lot via email and subreddits and our online community aspects. And also, Joe Collins is writing over there, now working with Matt on Freedom Penguin. FreedomPenguin.com, so that was Matt's project that he was working on for a while, and it's been in the works since he stepped down from Linux Unplugged, and now it is here and kicking, and you can check it out at FreedomPenguin.com. Very exciting. Yeah. Nice to see some new stuff from it.

I bet if you're a solid contributor, too, I bet you he's looking for contributors. I would guess. I would guess. So along that same bit of line of thinking, why don't we also say hello to somebody special? It's for people who like to mess with computers. No, not Mr. Leo Laporte, our new co-host on the show officially, Mr. Wes. Wes, remind me your last name. My last name is Payne, P-A-host on the show officially, Mr. Wes. Wes, remind me of your last name. My last name is Payne, P-A-Y-N-E, Chris.

Oh, yeah. Look at that right there on my screen, right there. It's right there on my screen. You'd think I'd know that. It's just right there. I like that. I remember when I heard Payne, I thought, that's a pretty good last name. Well, thank you.

I would go just for your on-air persona, P-A-I-N. Oh, you're right. Just go for it. I mean, just own it. Pick it up a level. Yeah, really, because it's a DJ name. You've got to have a DJ name. So Wes is going to be joining Linux Unplugged officially as the co-host going forward,

which is great because when I'm on the road trip, Wes will be here in studio, and he'll have local audio, and hopefully I'll have local audio. The show should still sound great even when I'm on the road, but it'll be nice having somebody in here that can physically push the record button and make sure we get the show out and things like that. And we'll hopefully have an editor coming on to another editor to help put it all together when we're on the road but yeah so wes i'm super glad to have you here and congratulations to matt for launching freedom penguin and uh we have a heck of a show to get

into so uh before we go any further why don't we bring in the next critical piece of the show that's our mumble room time appropriate greetings virtual lug hello hello hello hey guys a great Time-appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hey, guys. A great showing. Whoa, whoa. All right. So I wanted to know right off the top, are you guys all ready for a System D killer?

We have a brand new one, ladies and gentlemen. I want to bring it into the show before we go any further right here. It's super important. I present to you. Now, Wes, you help me with the official pronunciation because otherwise I'm going to say System 16? I guess so. System XV1? What do you call this one?

Yeah, yeah. So System 16 is a modern take on service management. It aims to incorporate useful functionality while maintaining a modular design in the Unix tradition. System 16 uses kbuild as used by VirtualBox. There are minimal dependencies you need, like a PROC CPS and a libkq, I'm sorry, in the development formats, and then you just install your distros package for KBuild, and you can run KMK, and you are good to go. It's free

software, it's licensed under GPL 3, and it's here to replace SystemD, and you know what? I'll tell you one thing that's got way better than SystemD. Dat logo. Yeah. SystemD don't got that. No. Colorful, bright. I love it.

Does it have any example configuration files? Yeah. As Corky points out, it's a play on system 5, obviously. But it's pretty – the systemd alternatives, they never end. I dare someone. I challenge someone in the mumble room to run this. Anybody want to take it? Anybody want to try it? Like got a throwaway rig you could try this on um well given the only hit result i find on google for this is a 4chan thread

no probably not damn ah you got me okay all right very good very good moving on to the feedback then so uh actually can i deviate west you, you know, can I? Wes. That's fine. So Wes got here a little early today, and so we went out to lunch. And Wes had to have already heard, unfortunately, quite a bit of this. But I want to share my weekend just really quickly with you guys. So Friday, right after the Linux Action Show wrapped up, I took the trailer out camping, and I went boondocking, quote unquote. Boondocking?

And now boondocking is when you're dry camping. You're off the grid. So all I had was my Dell XPS 13 with me, and I had my S6 with me, and that was pretty solid for two nights. I lived off the camper's batteries, lived off the tanks, the propane, the water tanks, and I was able to get data connectivity using my XPS just tethered to – or actually hotspot – to the Essex. It worked okay. But I wanted to live like a king. And my trailer came as part of the whole deal I got. I inherited a Thousand Trails membership, which I didn't really know anything about that. But it turns out it's like a campsite you can go take advantage of without having to pay anything.

But it turns out it's like a campsite you can go take advantage of without having to pay anything. So for the last couple of nights, I've been hooked up on the beach with water and sewer and power. Look at that spot. It's beautiful. Yeah, it's a very quaint town called La Conner in Washington that I've been living out in the trailer, just getting it ready. And this is – the whole idea is, you know, wrap my head around what it's like because I have to live in this thing for 17 days. But the thing is I don't just have to live in this thing. I have to work in this too. And I need to understand.

Less content. Yeah. And I need to understand like what I'm up against. And I can't be always learning absolutely everything while I'm also working and traveling, right? And wanting to also have some downtime. So I'm spending – I've been spending so far the entire weekend since I got off the air in the rig out there trying different things out. And I'm living like a king right now. I really love it.

And so I'm trying to get my head around the road trip, really excited about how things are coming together. Zach the Penguin writes in. And he said, hi, I was listening to Unplugged today and I figured I'd make some suggestions to name the road show. How about Nation Migration, March of the Penguins, or Roll Your Own? Just a few ideas. Hope it helps. I don't know if any of those are resonating with me specifically, but I thought they were good. So I want to keep the ball rolling. If anybody has any names, we got to name the road trip something. Like today, we're trying to figure out how we're going to do live tracking so you guys can see where I'm at, so we can do meetups and you can suggest where I go and stuff like that. We're going to try to

have live tracking during the trip, but we still don't have a name for it. Can't track until you have a name for it. Gotta say what you're tracking. Very important. So I need ideas. I need ideas for the road show. The Penguinator? I don't know. I don't think so. Not punny enough, really. Yeah. I do like that. Now, it does have a bird on it.

It has a J-bird on it because it's a JCO trailer. And so I was thinking something to do with the bird is in there. There's something there. But I was thinking that might be the name for the trailer, but the trip itself. The show has its own. Because there could be multiple road trips. So we need to be able to differentiate the different road shows. The journey to Jupiter.

Well, because there could be future trips. So we got to. Maybe start with the journey to Mars. No, that doesn't make sense. What happens when I run out of planets? Do I stop taking road trips? We need a bigger solar system. The final destination, well, so for those of you not familiar,

I'm going to Grand Forks, North Dakota. I'm going to do an episode of Linux Action Show at Noah's house, try to get a Last Cribs episode in. This is something we committed to a while ago. And then meander down to Utah and visit a few national parks down there and then make my way back up. Linux Roadshow seems too obvious. Seems too obvious.

Forking Jupiter. Jupiter ascending. Okay, I don't want to get copyright takedowns. All right, so then let's move on to the next email that is maybe a bit more appropriate for feedback. Sean writes in about Jose, who wrote in about his MacBook. He says, I've been running Linux on my MacBook Pro for about four years now. I just switched back to Fedora 22 from OpenSUSE. I've been rocking Sue since 2007,

and my MacBook has never worked better. Now he's on Fedora 22, and he says, he thinks it's because it has kernel 4.1. It's finally given me good hardware support for the keyboard backlight, the thermal fan controls, CPU scaling, and the battery life is better.

One thing that I've done to extend battery life is buy the Fluendo Codex suite and switch to GStreamer-based video player. The Fluendo Codex have much better video acceleration for video decoding, taking the load off of the CPU. Well, that's a good tip. Also, not all GStreamer video players are created equal. Totem is still pretty heavy on the CPU, 24%, when playing a 1080p H.264 video.

But streaming something lightweight like MPV sits around 12%, and this is on a Sandy Bridge i5. Hmm. I haven't tried Arch on here yet, but I imagine getting a similar setup wouldn't be too hard. I wish Jose the best of luck. Don't give up on Linux. Well, that's really cool. Some good tips there. If 4.1 brought in thermal

fan control, holy crap, that's a huge deal. I think MacBooks are definitely one of those areas where you get to see the exciting march of kernel progress in terms of hardware support. Yeah. I'm actually surprised it took this long considering that Linus uses a MacBook Air. You know what I mean? Yeah, that is surprising. Yeah. Yeah.

Alright, so Mumbo, did you guys have any ideas for a roadshow name? Nobody? Come on. Somebody's got to have something very punny and quippy. Well, Chris, you know that there's an Empire Builder train from North Dakota to Washington, so Empire Penguin Builder. Wait, should I just be taking the train? Is that what you're saying? Maybe I'll just take the train next time. Yeah, dubstep Alan. Oh, my God.

If Alan approves it, I almost want to call it that. I almost want to call it that if he approves it. Because it doesn't make any sense, but if you've been around in the chatroom for a while, it's so perfect. Can we print up like a vinyl of his face and stick it on the side? If somebody can politely get Alan's consent without harassing him, chatroom, it's okay to name it. Now, don't tell him it's my idea. I think it should be Corky. I think Corky has been elected for this. He might make us put Beastie on there.

Yeah, or maybe have to name a future roadshow the FreeBSD Trip or something. That's a reasonable compromise. No, I don't think so, actually. Man, I don't think I can do it. Alan Jude types with one finger. He points out with the keyboard, and the keyboard does the rest. Oh, my God. Great.

Legends of Alan. This is how egos are born, ladies and gentlemen. This is how nice guys get egos. All right, so let's get your ego better. How do I say I know, right? How do you do that? I'll tell you how. Learning, making yourself smarter, making yourself more employable.

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And when you turn them on, they match the distribution you've chosen. It's brilliant. Now, you've heard me talk about Linux Academy for a while. Did you know you could actually go work for them too? Linux Academy is hiring, and they're looking for some great new content creators. They're also looking to fill some DevOps professionals and developers. They're looking for anybody that does Linux development

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up some good questions that might be something to check out here's how you can get started email career at linuxacademy.com. And if you want to take advantage of Linux Academy, and I really think you should, this is a great resource, especially if you can get your work to pay for it. Oh, man, that's a real slam dunk. And work, by the way, they have team accounts. That's pretty cool.

So go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, business or personal. You can get our discount. Try it out for a little while with a 33% discount rate, which is nuts, essentially. What a deal. I think like a month of your first quarter is paid for with that. Or even more. It's a really good deal. It's super sweet. It's such a good opportunity to get started, and it's something

where your money is going to a company who's crazy passionate about the ecosystem around it. It's not just a feature checkbox for their online learning platform. It's actually what they do. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged and a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged show, program, talk show, whatever you want to call it. Rethinks.

Experience. Yeah, that's good. We should just call all these shows experiences because you experience it however you want. So Poby was busy this week in making sure that the mere propaganda pumped out to all of the usual presses and made sure that Joey over at OMG Ubuntu wrote up this great article. And I'm totally kidding. But actually, Joey did catch a good spot. Some Canonical employees were at a recent developer sprint, and this video was distributed internally at Canonical to distribute the progress made on X.org compatibility for Mir.

So like X apps running on top of Mir, you know, like X Mir. And I just want to show a little bit of the video, even though you might be listening. It's actually still pretty obvious if you just listen what they're doing here. And it's looking pretty good. So this is at the Sprint. We have our legacy X app icons. So this is Unity 8, and they're showing here like here's like the Chrome icon, the Firefox icon, GIMP, and these are all X applications. Chrome, UM, Firefox, G-Edit, V-Raydit, and XChat Ganon.

My screen isn't touched, so I have to do everything via clickpad. There he launches Firefox. And what's really cool about it is whenever you exit, it thinks it's crashed, but it's okay. So this, my understanding, and if I'm wrong, anybody feel free to correct me, but this instance of Firefox is in its own container, I believe. It's isolated from the rest of the operating system. It's an application running under Mirror right here, using, on the

Unity 8 desktop. Let's restore. Let's do a quick search for some demo aquarium. And let's watch. So now here's the OpenGL demo that actually impressed me. This is WebGL running in Firefox.

And, you know, he has a ton of fish on the screen. Remember, this is under Mirror, but this is Firefox in X application. That's not bad, actually. And then there's 4,000 fish. And that's through X Mirror. And that's not necessarily a very nice laptop either. I was just about to say that, yeah. And a trusty version of Firefox, which is in our container.

Not too bad. Yeah, which is in our container. Not too bad. Yeah, that is pretty good. Now, I don't know much more than what's in this video. Is there any background, Poby, you want to fill in or any details you want to point out that we might have missed? So this was done, the video was taken a couple of weeks ago when we were all in London for a sprint. So we get together now and then in various places around the world where, you know, it's just faster for you to all work sat next to each other. You can have meetings and stuff as well. But, you know, it just worked out quite nicely.

You can, you know, work pretty efficiently and quickly. And Chris Townsend, who's the guy operating the laptop, was just giving a demo to kevin gunn who made the video and kevin was just asking him to just do a demo of the progress that they'd made that week and you're right it is it is all containerized and the reason for that is so that it respects the the architecture we've got for mere applications under mere so all the applications on the phone and on the desktop under mere are are siloed they're containerized so that they you know they can't interfere with each other and stomp on each other's files and so on and we want to allow legacy apps to to run under mir as well but also not be able

to stomp on all the other files and you know don't don't allow firefox to be able to read you know your contacts database or whatever um and so that's And so they've developed this tool called Libertine, which is on Launchpad. You can go to launchpad.net slash Libertine, which is the tool that containerizes all of this and makes it all kind of work, and it's pretty cool. Yeah. So if you wanted to try this,

is this something people could get their hands on yet? Yeah, I mean, you could. Yeah, I know you probably wouldn't want to. I mean, he's got a dedicated – actually, you see on his desk he's got two laptops because the one on the right is the one running Unity 8 and Mir, and he has it set up in a very specific way. It's an Intel machine because of drivers. So it's a little bit you know tricky to get going but once you know

once once it's in a state where it's something we can share um i'm sure more people will use it i mean it's all it's all open source it's all on launchpad so it's not like we're hiding it or anything it's all yeah so available i mean we just haven't like made an image with it in or anything yet it seems like the key thing here is these x-ray applications are actually working pretty well and that's got to be a pretty big point because i would think not i don't know but i would think a large percentage of the applications people are going to be using on a unity 8 mirror desktop is old x apps for a long time especially their most critical ones like Firefox and Chrome

when they're using it on the desktop. Right. There's going to be a few. I mean, there's going to be a few apps that everybody knows. Maybe the majority. If you look down your list of apps that you have open right now, they're X apps, and many of them won't run under Wayland or Mere, right? So yes, we need to provide... I mean, this is the whole part of the strategy of heading towards convergence is we still need to provide, I mean, this is the whole part of the strategy of heading towards convergences. We still need to provide a way for people to run their existing apps. We're not just going to drop everything and say, ha, all that stuff you've built up over the last 15 years, screw that stuff, throw it away.

That's not what we're doing. We're trying to make it possible for people to run those applications that they're familiar with, but in a performant way, but siloed so that they don't stomp all over each other because if we if we go back to having all the applications able to stomp all over each other then we're no better than running under x we might as well just stay with x um so it's it's a it's a nice way to allow people to continue to run the apps they love you know on a new desktop so uh i'm going to ask you wes the apps they love on a new desktop. So I'm going to ask you, Wes, since you're a practical tiling window manager kind of guy.

If you were going to do this, so you're on – like your home rig right now is Mint? My home rig is Arch. Oh, your home rig is Arch. Your work rig is Mint. Yes. So if you were going to upgrade one of these machines, would you look at the apps you're running? Is this at a stage, say in a little while, would you switch to something like Waylander Mirror if almost every single app you're using is X-based? Or is it just one of those things where you would just stay on X? I'm trying to decide from my standpoint, when does it make sense for me to switch over and why?

And I'm looking at it's got to be on, that decision, which could be down the road quite a ways, maybe I don't need to worry about it right now. It seems like that decision is going to be based on the apps I use. What are you going to base

the decision on? Well, you know, obviously if I'm running Arch, I'm interested in new, interesting things. So I do want to give them a try. I'm very interested. The fact that you can just run

your X app sandboxed in Mirror, that's kind of really likable. So you might try just from the experimentation. Yeah, and the fact that they're app sandboxed in mirror that's that's kind of really really likable so you might be could you might try just from the experimentation yeah and the fact that they're already sandboxed is awesome yeah yeah hmm i i'm not sure um now is a good time to switch or anytime like really soon but or even if even if i would you know i i personally i don't think i would switch to this right now and and that's you know because i'm using a lot of debian packages on my debian like style desktop and

you know as we keep saying that's not going away you know everything's baked from those raw ingredients which are the debian packages yeah so you know i i can see people like expert users like you and me and you know many of your listeners are already used to that and will just carry on using that but someone who goes into a store and buys a laptop that has ubuntu pre-installed maybe in a couple of years right that may have unity 8 and mere pre-installed but have a nice button that lets you install x apps that they're familiar with that they've seen before or that some online guide or an expert friend has told them to get so i think probably those are the kind of people who would probably move first but we might experiment like you say where's you know have a look at it have a play with it maybe it won't i

wonder i think so i think i think i think a think a percent of the niche will, but I also wonder if many people, if the threshold is always going to be, well, what are my applications, then I wonder if it's going to be one of those things that just keeps getting delayed and delayed and delayed for the most people. But I'll give Northranger a chance to jump in with visions of if we no longer had to deal with X. Go ahead, Northranger. Yeah. I mean, with your desktop environments like KDE and GNOME on the desktop,

getting much improved support in the last 12 months, and the push from folks like Canonical on the mobile side, I think we might see a switch to these next generation, whether it's Wayland, Mirror, etc., and the various platforms, we'll see that switch happen sooner rather than later because we'll get benefits in performance of the actual desktop environment. On a tablet, you definitely want every last little bit of frame rate, the fewest milliseconds of touch response time where technologies like Mirror are a real benefit.

So as long as your base desktop is running it, even if your apps are containerized and running through the second layer X server, we can live with that. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, if there is quick adoption there, that would be – I could see myself like when I run on a GNOME desktop, I try to run like all GTK applications. And when I run on a GNOME desktop, I try to run, like, all GTK applications. And when I run on a KDE desktop, I try to run all QT applications. I could see

a time where if there's enough applications, I might use one web browser over the other if it was native to Wayland versus an X app. Could you see yourself doing that? I could definitely, yeah. Especially, and if it, you know, if running the X app still works really well, then why not just switch to the back end?

That Firefox WebGL demo was fairly impressive to me. Because that doesn't seem to be much of a – even if there is a performance penalty, if it can do that fairly successful, the performance penalty is not going to be that big to your web browsing session. And so if you're curious what we're talking about, we have the video embedded in the show notes. And I'm glad you guys decided to post that, Popey, because I know it's not the most polished video, but it's really cool to see. It's very interesting, yeah. To really see it. It's nice. I think you're going to see some more of those.

Good. I think that was the first of a trial balloon. I think we want to show off some of this stuff because we get a reputation for sitting in rooms and doing stuff privately. All the code is on Launchpad, but because people don't build it and run it and see it, they think that it doesn't exist when, in fact, it's actively worked on.

And that video is two weeks old. And if you look on Launchpad, there's already loads of changes since then. So this video shows us it is true. You guys are working together in closed rooms, but now you're just showing it to us. Documented closed rooms. No, it's just funny. Because it's cool that you're publishing that. It's a good point. Well taken.

For me, it was like, well, this is... You know, the other thing is, Popey, is the internet's full of lazy cats. Who wants to sit there and build all that stuff when you can just watch a YouTube video of it? One of the things that some of the other desktop projects have going for them is they just have super enthusiastic fans that go and do video production. We're going to talk about when we get to GNOME 3.18,

we're going to talk about some of these videos that show off GNOME 3.18 and some of these write-ups that the GNOME Foundation should be paying these people for it. It's so well done. And so it's good to get your version of it out there too. That's what I say to that. And I like seeing that WebGL demo. I'm not going to admit it. Yeah, very slick.

You know what else is real slick there, Wes? You know what else is super crazy slick? In fact, I love them. I use them all the time. Digital lotion. Heck, yeah, the digital lotion. Where's my – hold on. Here we go.

I got to go – you got to go there now, actually. I was going to say, if you don't know about DigitalOcean, then I got bad news. You have been under a rock, because something really cool has been developing for a long time, and you can get in on it for two months for absolutely free when you use our promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. Go over to DigitalOcean.com

and remember DEOUNPLUGGED, and now I'm going to tell you about them. DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to get your own Linux machine up in the sky. Now, yeah, you could also deploy FreeBSD, but come on. You're listening to Linux Unplugged. And they have CoreOS, which is really cool. They work with the CoreOS folks. And they have Ubuntu on there, and they've got the LTSs, and they've got the 1504.

They even have the latest Fedora. Like, after a couple of weeks after – I mean, I'm not trying to burn you, Corora guys, but come on. DigitalOcean has Fedora 22 up on DigitalOcean for immediate deployment before the Corora project even gets their respin out. Now, come on guys, I know you're busy, but come on.

Come on. Come on, DigitalOcean. I mean, of course, you know what? The problem is they're just super badass. In fact, check out their interface and you can see how it's a priority for them. They've managed to take something complicated like managing servers around the world and make it in a super simple, straightforward interface. In fact, the other thing that's really cool about that interface is they have an API, and that API lets you do all the things you want to do, either automated or through some of the great community apps.

So remember that promo code, DOUnplugged? Here's what I want you to remember. Go over there and use it because you're going to get a $10 credit, and the base rig starts at $5 a month. They'll get you 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20-gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer. Now, the nice thing is if you wanted to do something really beefy, like I decided when I went Minecraft for my son, I wanted to go just kind of a little bit more beefy. The pricing is really straightforward.

It's just $10, you get an even nicer know, $10, you get an even nicer rig. $20, you get an even nicer rig. It's obvious. It's just right there. And then the other thing that's really cool is you want to do some testing or production, load balancing. They have hourly pricing. It's really neat. And then one other thing that they don't really mention a lot on their site, but I think they should.

I think they should put it in here as like a little asterisk is they also have private networking. And you can set up private networking between your different droplets. And then you can have like a front end web server and a back end database server, or a front end X2Go server and a back end NAS server, right? And the transfer over that private networking is free. So you don't have to pay for any data. So if you're doing like backups, that's really nice. In fact, here's what you can go to DigitalOcean. You can read more about it. It's really straightforward to set up. It's a really cool system. And I think it's like we did an episode about remote Linux desktops at the Linux Action Show a couple of months ago. You combine a front-end X2Go server with a couple of back-end droplets. All of these things are like $5 a month, and plus you use the promo code DEOUNPLUGGED, you get the $10 credit.

This is a really cool way to do this. And you can start kind of thinking about things a little differently because you can really build your own private infrastructure up there. All run on top of a Linux KVM server. All SSDs throughout. And the pricing is very straightforward. Go check them out, digitalocean.com, and use the promo code DEOUNPLUGGED.

And a big thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. You guys got a great service. You rock! You rock. Oh man, I wish I could do a good... Can you do any accents, Wes? I can't. I wish I could do a Scottish accent. Oh, I can't. I wish. I can do bad accents. Can you do Canadian? No. Usually all Americans can do

Canadian, Wes. They just don't want to. Alright, so let's move on. Let's talk about how Debian is going to shut down the CIA. Oh, man. I don't know about this. So Motherboard, which, as we were talking about in the pre-show, is a vice company, is really getting into a

nitty-gritty topic in the Linux distro world, and I was kind of surprised to see this. So that was one of the reasons why I actually wanted to cover it in the show today, is this is new territory for Motherboard. And they're obviously trying to drive clicks with that, how Debian is trying to shut down the CIA headline and make software trustworthy again. But the effort is almost worth a grabby headline like that. So this is from a presentation that was given at the Chaos Communications Camp in Germany earlier this month.

I have the full presentation linked in the show notes. And by a Debian developer, Jeremy – oh, I'm not sure how you pronounce it. Babio or something. Babio. B-O-B-B-I-O. B-O-B-B-I-O. I love it, whatever it is. But this I can say.

He's better known online as Lunar. And he told the audience how Linux-based operating systems are working to build, to bring reproducible builds to all of its 22,000 software packages, so all of Debian's packages. So here's a layman's breakdown of what a reproducible build is, if you're not familiar. As the name suggests, it makes it possible for other people to reproduce the build process. The idea is to get a reasonable confidence that a given binary was indeed produced by the source. This is a quote from Lunar's presentation.

We want anyone to be able to produce identical binaries from given source. A software package reproducibility build should be byte for byte identical to the publicly available package. Any difference would be evidence of tampering. Reproducible builds rely in part on David A. Wheeler's solution to this problem

called diverse double compiling. Are you ready for this one, Wes? Let's hear it. Are you excited? I am. Okay, good, good. You do. So, Lunar explains you need two compilers with one that you somehow trust.

Then you build the compiler under test twice, once with each compiler, and then you use the compilers that you just built to build the compiler under test again. If the output is the same, then there are no backdoors. But for this scheme to work, you need to be able to compare that both outputs are the same. And that's exactly what we are enabling with having reproducible builds. According to Lunar, 83% of Debian's packages are now built reproducibly with more that join the party every day. So does this sound kind of like in line with what you've read about reproducible builds? Is this essentially you can take the source and when you build it, it's exactly what the source should be, exactly what the author says?

Yes, and I think one of the big challenges is making sure that you've got a build system set up in such a way that you can easily do that and that other people can easily replicate. Because there is the issue is the compiler compromise. Like if you're really worried about a state actor, the compiler could be the weak link. So that's why you have to – that is a key piece of this. Yeah. So when I see this, I think to myself, well, this seems like, A, from a technical standpoint, an amazing feat to pull off. Okay, so let's read this part again. You need two compilers with one that you trust.

Then you build the compiler under test twice. Once with each compiler. So you build the compiler twice. Once with each compiler. And then you use the compilers that you just built to build the compiler again under test. That's how you verify a compiler. Wow. If the output is the same. That's how you verify a compiler. Wow.

If the output is the same, then that compiler has no backdoors. Wow. Yeah, that just verifies that the compiler doesn't have any backdoors. Right, but you need, yes, right. So the idea is you have to have a verifiable compiler and then you have to have verifiable packages too. Like it's not just one or the other. That's the tricky thing, I think, right?

Am I following this right? That seems like, yeah. It's not that tricky. Even though they say reproducible, you can also say it verifiable or authentic builds because the output will be identical from either compiler. Break it down. So why do you

say authentic? What did you say? Or because you can just hash or verify the output binary. So bit per bit compatible or comparable and exact to what the other compilers put out. So you can have an official version. Right. Yeah.

That makes sense. That's what they mean. Instead of just reproducible builds, they're just using a different name. Verifiable builds are a lot more common. You disagree, Wimpy? No. Yeah, I do. You disagree, Wimpy?

No. Yeah, I do, because the issue here is ensuring that your origin compiler wasn't backdoored at the outset, and therefore everything you compile contains a backdoor that was in that compiler. Right. Like the big boogeyman story is the NSA gets credentials to a repo and replaces FTP or something like that. Or you go back to the very first version, the very first compiler that Richard Stallman used to build the GNU toolchain, and was that backdoored and compromised, and therefore is every GNU compiler since compromised, or rather everything that the GNU compiler creates compromised.

Now this is a real tinfoil hat example, but the issue here is making sure that there isn't a backdoor in the compiler that introduces backdoors into your compiled code. Yeah. That's also why they need to have the same Blipsy in all the libraries that they link to. They have to include them in order to have the reproducible builds. Yeah.

So this is something that is essentially more of a process problem than it is a technology problem for these distros. So essentially what Debian is implementing is a process, right? And so this is something that other distros should probably look at, I would think. Like, shouldn't this be something that Red Hat can claim as well? Wouldn't SUSE want to be able to claim this as well, I would think? It might help their, you know, verifiability or static analysis. So, like, adds one more thing to there.

Yeah, because this is, as the Motherboard article points out, this is a staple of the Bitcoin and Tor project today. They already, obviously, these projects, they need this kind of verifiability. So they already do this. And FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenWRT have announced that they'll also be doing this. So it seems like there's a big movement here to me for people that want to be trusted. So you got to figure it's something that's on a lot of people's minds. And Red Hat has been looking at a lot of this stuff. So I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see an

announcement at some point. Kind of similar to the functional package managers like Nix. Yeah. Because they have like a hash of all the dependencies that go into building. They kind of do this by default. Huh. I don't know if all the implications are there necessarily, but. I'm going to make a prediction right now. Red Hat 8, one of the features on the box, reproducible builds. You watch. You've called it. Yeah. What was it? I know somebody was going to make a prediction right now red hat eight one of the features on

the box reproducible builds you watch you've called it yeah what was it i know somebody's going to say something also they don't even need to just be or built for security reasons building or building for containerization and virtualization and cloud purposes also benefit from this reproducible build stuff. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, there is that aspect to it, just ensuring you're delivering your software completely and things like that. Yeah, I think the reason why we took the bent of the NSA and CIA is because, well, Lunar says, he says, what was the line he said here?

The great thing is that free software is, no, that's not it. This is actually a good quote. So I'll read this anyways. The great thing with free software is that we have the freedom to study the source code, that it does not contain any malware, malicious code, or security. But how, Lunar asked, do we know that the compiler binary was not built from the published source? How do we know the CIA or other malicious attacker has not tampered with the build process? He says we are not discussing a hypothetical attack here. This is a real attack.

We are talking about developers in totally good faith producing software with the binary they would give you. And even if they are of good faith, we could be totally owned still. Reproducible builds already are a staple of Bitcoin and the Tor project. So he argues that it's already a real attack problem. And he's kind of the one I think put the CIA spin on it that then Motherboard took and ran. Well, and it does sound here it looks like the CIA tried to break into Apple, which is –

Oh, yeah. And I also think there's been some questions about the Debian project itself too. So, yeah, I mean, they distribute a lot of software. There was a talk given on this subject at FOSDEM earlier this year. Oh, yeah. And it wasn't just related to this. It was also the auditability and the fact that actually some of the packages in the archive were built not by the builders, builders in the cloud, but actually on developers' local machines.

And what really should happen is all of those bills should move to the server where they can be verified. Because if they're being built on a local machine by a developer, then it makes it even harder to verify that it's not been compromised. Yeah. Yeah, because who knows the state of that developer machine? Oh, you developers. Developer machines are notorious. Developers, developers, developers.

Yeah, interesting. And it's an area that is sort of new to me, but it sounds like actually once you kind of take away some of the – you just change the words you're using, it actually makes a lot of sense. It looks like they've got a link to the full slides and discussion. Yes, sir. I'll put a link to that there in the show notes directly. Now, it is a PDF, but it's his whole presentation that he gave. It looks like a lot of good information.

Yeah. Yeah, and he has some good quotes in there too. He starts out with a really good quote. So it's worth a read if you're fascinated by this topic as I was. I probably will pick it up after the show actually because I don't have very good connectivity out in the trailer. But I can download that to my Instapaper too. There you go. Just read it offline.

I might actually do that. That's a good idea. I have a little bookmark that just sends it right into my queue. Very nice. Yeah, it is nice. All right. So speaking of connectivity, I've got to tell you about my good friends over at the Ting Network. I want you to go there and check them out too, won't you?

Because we have a special $50 promo at linux.ting.com. Linux.ting.com will give you the $50 promo off a device. Or if you have a compatible device already, then they're going to give you $50 of service credit, which is really, really, really, really slick. And this is only going on until the end of September, so I want you to go over there and try them right now. If you're a small business, too, this is a really slick way to get not just good devices, but just constant connectivity and communications that doesn't require an arm and a leg to pay for it. Here's why. No contract, no determination fee, and you only pay for what you use.

$6 is the starting rate, and then it's just your usage on top of that. Now, if you can be really handy with your Wi-Fi usage like we are here at the studio, it's really slick. You can get SIM cards right now as low as $5. So if you've got a device that works with Ting's GSM network, $5 SIM card, and you're on Ting. It's really, really nice. Free shipping right now. Also, they've got some great phones on sale. You can get the Kiyo Saracona for $68. If you just want a great feature phone with a good screen and the battery that lasts forever, like five days, $68. No contract, no early termination fee. Refurbish Samsung Galaxy S3,

$122. Now here's the good one. Samsung Galaxy S6. My baby, my baby. You can get $80 off. Now, it's $568, but you own that phone like you would a laptop or a smart, you know, like a real device. Not a toy, but a real device. That's nice. And then the nice thing is if you ever get stuck, Ting has no hold customer service. You call them at 1-855-TING-FTWs. But even better than that, they have, like, the best dashboard ever to manage all of this. You can do everything from the Ting dashboard. You can get a real easy, like, they best dashboard ever to manage all of this. You can do everything from the Ting dashboard.

You can get a real easy, like, they have this promo picture right here, and you're like, oh, that's a nice mocked-up image of what the Ting, no, that's what the Ting dashboard looks like. It's really what it looks like. It's very, very, very slick. And this video shows you some of it, and it kind of gives you an idea. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Go, Wes. Nice, buddy. That's right. And the nice thing you can do is, so we have several phones on our line, and you just go in there and name them, so I don't have to remember the numbers. It just shows me the name of each device. I can see the usage, so I can see who's taking up all the data. I can set alerts if I need to or want to, but it's not really a big deal since we're

only paying like 40 bucks a month for all three phones at the most. You can also do things like if you want one line that maybe hides caller ID or one line that can't do video messaging or something like that, you can go turn those individual things on and off in the dashboard. All kinds of stuff like that. You can also just disable the line for a little while if you don't need it. So it's pretty cool. And it also all integrates in with the Dash app on the phone.

For iPhone or Android, you can get push notifications if you want them. But I don't really, again, because the ping rates are so low, I don't really care. But you can manage all the aspects of the plan from the device right there if you need to. That's particularly nice if you've got like a teenager or something who's burning through that data watching YouTube. My son is six years old and he's already doing it, so I

feel your pain. I feel your pain, but the nice thing is I can get alerts if I need them, and it works pretty good, and you can also call them at 1-855-TING-FTW anytime between 8am or 8pm, and it works pretty good. And you can also call them at 1-855-TING-FTW anytime between 8 a.m. or 8 p.m., and you can talk to a real human being. Just get started by going to linux.ting.com. They'll take $50 off your first device, or if you've got a compatible device, you can get

$50 of service credit. Now, I'm telling you, I got three phones. Okay? Now, I'm very Wi-Fi savvy, to be honest with you, but I got three phones, and I'm paying like $40 a month. So, if you can get a $50 service credit by bringing a compatible phone, because I got three phones and I'm paying like $40 a month. So if you can get a $50 service credit by bringing a compatible phone because I got CDMA and GSM, that's pretty sweet.

Plus, you know, just checking them out also helps us out. Go to linux.ting.com and try their savings calculator. Maybe it's worth your time. linux.ting.com and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring. Linux unplugged. Okay, Wes. Embrace yourself, my friend.

Are you ready to switch to GNOME? Say no if you're not. Because maybe by the end you will be. Maybe I need a little more convincing. Okay, all right. What are you doing in the back pocket there, Chris? You know, I got to start with a shout out to Worldogoo or WooGoo or whatever. WooGoo.

WooGoo. W-O-G-U-E. And this guy is essentially blogging on Google Plus about features about GNOME. And he just does a really, really, really, really great job. So I want to give him a shout out because a lot of the stuff he's pulling out that are not in the release notes specifically, GNOME is not doing a particularly good job about promoting these features.

So he goes out of his way to put really great videos together that cover all the different cool features of GNOME that you don't see. Like, watch this one here. They have one of the things, okay, Wes, this is going to be one of the first new features I wanted to show you. Oh, hi there, ladies. So here's the... Did those come with the terminal?

No, no. So he has these videos that show, that show the new features of GNOME, and he does a really good job of going through this. But check out this new feature, Wes. One of the first new features that's coming to GNOME 3.18's terminal is they've made the terminal much slicker. He's got a lot of good music going, doesn't he? Oh, yeah.

Okay, Wes, watch this terminal. Watch this terminal. You see that? Okay, hold on. Sorry, he's got his titles in the way, so you can't quite see it. There it goes. All right, so he's got the GNOME terminal up right. Sorry, he's got his titles in the way, so you can't quite see it. There it goes. Alright, so he's got the GNOME terminal up right now, and he's changing one setting in there.

And check this out. You can drag tabs around. See that? Look at that. That's very, look at that. Ooh, very nice. Okay, so the new GNOME terminal, I know, I'm not selling it so well, but I'm starting weak. I'm starting weak, and then I'm building up. The new GNOME terminal has a very much like Firefox tab like thing. You can drag them around.

You drag them off the terminal where they pop up into their own tab, that kind of thing. That's not bad, right? Yeah. You're with me so far? Oh, yeah. Okay, all right. And I honestly already like GNOME Terminal.

It's pretty reliable. Yeah, yeah, but that's not bad. Okay, I'm still getting there. Of course, Northern Ranger, if I don't get to it, then you can announce it. But now here's the next one, Wes. We were talking about Wayland earlier today, and I want to make the case, even though the KWIN project is coming very far on its Wayland support,

I have to say GNOME 3.18 is introducing some impressive Wayland features. The most anticipated feature for me, at least, is somebody that's finally said, so we're really here with Wayland, but we're close. Because NVIDIA doesn't support Wayland yet, so that's a big stopper. But if you can get around the fact that NVIDIA isn't supporting Wayland, the GNOME 3.18 desktop is pretty rock solid now. A bunch of improvements have gone into Mutter specifically, so it's very performant under Wayland. But also, they've set up shared clipboards now, so your X applications and your Wayland applications can copy and paste between each other. It's really good stuff.

each other. It's really good stuff. And so the world of GooGuy or WooGoo or whatever, he has been blogging like a machine about all the different things that are working and not working and problems like that, but it's looking like Wayland Support is looking really good. Almost

good enough for everyday use, especially if you're on Intel now. Starting with GNOME 3.18. Everyday use. Everyday use. Everyday use. Are you ready for this? I might be. You know, I swear, I swear I muted my phone before the show started, and somehow during the show it got unmuted. I do not know how that happened.

All right, so, okay, the next feature. Are you ready for the next feature of GNOME 3.18? Are you ready for the next feature? Let's hear it. All right, the next feature for GNOME 3.18 is going to disable that crappy search in the open dialog box and on network drives, recursive search that kills Nautilus and makes it die and finally fixes that up. What do you think of that one? How do you get nothing? Long overdue.

Yeah, I'm not. I'm not surprising you. About damn time. All right. Okay. Now, you're ready for – of course, I don't know if I'm going to sell you this one, but one of the big features that's making a lot of headlines today, this is the one that everybody's talking about as we record, GNOME 3.18 is going to allow you direct access to Google Drive right in Nautilus.

Yeah. Right in, built right in Nautilus, GNOME, you're going to have access. That's going to amount to kind of like a web drive kind of share, so it's going to be. What is it using in the back end? Probably some kind of web drive. It's not full sync, as far as I know. But North Ranger, was that what you thought the big lead was, was the Google Drive support, or is there something else you're excited about? I was actually excited about the Wayland clipboard support.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's full, like, drag and drop, even. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's real nice work. They've really done it. That's a big improvement. That's awesome. Yeah, it really is.

It's going to make it much easier to coexist with X apps and Wayland apps on the same desktop. So that's a huge deal. But if you're not running Wayland yet, it really is kind of – it's going to make it much easier to coexist with X apps and Wayland apps on the same desktop. So that's a huge deal. But if you're not running Wayland yet, it's not that big. But the fact that they're basically saying we're getting close to everyday use is really, I think, pretty exciting. I think GNOME 3.18 is actually going to look like a really good release, and I didn't really know. One of the things is I started digging around before we started this episode to kind of see, okay, well, here's what the GNOME projects sort of outline about what's really cool. before we started this episode, to kind of see, okay, well,

here's what the GNOME project sort of outlined about what's really cool. But when you actually start digging into, like, some of the release notes and things like that, there's things they're not putting in the release notes that are – there's a lot of little small improvements that they're bringing into GNOME 3.18 that I don't know. I think it's looking like a really great desktop. So if you're on – if you're going to try out Wayland – It seems like the way to do it. It seems like – I think. I think if you're going to try – I don't know how your awesome window manager is going to work,

Wes, but I think if you're going to try, I just love that I don't, I don't want to look at you in your hard time. I think if you're going to try out Wayland, I think you're going to have to try it on 318. I think you're right.

Okay. I mean, Gnome is fast becoming, you know, All right, second prediction of the show, second prediction of the show, Wes switches back to Gnome.

I swear, because right now you've got Awesome and Cinnamon. Yep. And does anybody know what Cinnamon's plan is for Wayland? What's the plans there? Are they working on that right now? I know they're using GTK3.

Yeah, I guess as long as... And what are they using? What's the compositor for? Well, it's called... It's forked from Mutter, and there's... Yeah, that's right. Begins with M M Muffin but when I spoke to

Clem about this a little while ago he's just waiting for Wayland to really get to the point where it's got mass adoption behind it and I think what that really means is that the GPU vendors support it.

Yeah, and he also probably wants to see just where things play out with Mir, too, because if he's based on Ubuntu, that might end up being a way to go, too. So the GNOME 3.18 release, why am I talking about this right now? Because it's supposed to come out by the end of the month, and I might be on the road when it hits. And I don't know if I'm going to have the bandwidth to download it and give it a review. So I just wanted to kind of talk about it right now because I'm going to be jonesing for it. Oh, man. That's going to be rough if GNOME 3.18 hits.

I bet it doesn't hit stable repos. I bet it's not in stable before I get back. I bet. I bet. I bet it won't hit the stable. Can you wait? I don't think I could. If it hits stable repos while I'm on the road, I think I will probably find a spot to get Wi-Fi, and I think I will do the updates.

I have to, man. You kind of have to. I mean I can't go a couple days. Yeah, I'll go to a Starbucks. Exactly. I'll go to a Starbucks XT, and I'll do the update there. Yeah. I will know.

I'm hoping. I haven't got all the details yet, but hopefully Ting's going to be providing connectivity on GSM and CDMA networks for me along the trip. So we'll see. But still, it feels like an abuse of a privilege to update my Archboxes while on the road, because I'm going to have probably two of them, maybe three of them with me on the road, and I don't know if I want to be doing

package updates on three Archboxes because they're all running GNOME. McDonald's? I could totally do it to McDonald's. I could do that. Nice. Alright, so any other Wayland running GNOME. McDonald's? I could totally do it to McDonald's. I could do that. Nice. All right. So any other Wayland or GNOME 3.18 thoughts before I move on? Anything I missed?

There's also other features that they're adding. Those are just ones that I don't think are going to be in the release notes. But I figure we'll all be talking about the ones that are in the release notes when it comes out. Yeah. Okay. Going once, going twice. All right. Well, then I'll just leave with a little mention that as – if you are curious on the state of the whole road trip and where that's going, as I get kind of ramped up to it, I have posted a couple of videos up on our YouTube channel. I think I mentioned this at the end of last week or I guess this week.

Yeah, I did. Oh, no. Actually, that's right. I mentioned at the beginning of last. Boy, I'm an old man. Good. So you probably already know about this, but if you don't, there is a road trip playlist. I've only got two videos up there now.

I'm in progress of making the third, and it's just updates because this is a whole new experience, and there's a surprising connection. There's a maker aspect to it because there's a lot of build and cut and drill and solve, and there's an interesting technology aspect to it too. And, of course, for me, it's also I'm using Linux in a lot of spots. So it's really kind of been a fascinating kind of adventure so far, and it's just starting. So I've documented two of it so far, and I'll have a third probably the next day or so.

Connectivity is limited when I'm staying in the trailer, but I'll get it out eventually. So you can find that at the Jupiter Broadcasting YouTube channel, youtube.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. There is a trailer walkthrough in the second update. It's a quick one. There's a quick trailer walkthrough. When it was

empty, like I had not moved a single thing into it, and I was parked out in the road in front of the studio, and I'm sitting there with my Patreon poll, don't ask, taking a video. So you can find that. It's just on the Jupiter Broadcasting studio. And I'm sitting there with my Patreon poll, don't ask, taking a video. So you can find that. It's just on the Jupyter Broadcasting Channel. And, yeah.

All right. Well, that will wrap us up. So let's see. I am in studio for next week's Linux Unplugged. I'll be here for the 15th. And then I will be on the road for episode 111 and episode 112, for the ones recorded on the 22nd and the 29th. We should be doing that the same regular time, I think, though.

So I think that all is if you listen live. Oh, I could pre-warn you, though. The download might be slightly delayed because the intention is for me to have a local recording on the road so that way my audio quality isn't that much worse when I'm doing the road show. But to do that, the show will have to pass through another set of editing to combine my remote audio track, Wes's local audio track, and the Mumbles audio track and any computer audio that we have. So potentially four or five different tracks may have to be lined up by an editor and then delivered for production into video as well. So during the road trip, there may be an eight-hour delay or so on the release of the show so maybe instead of coming out tuesday night it might come it might come out wednesday morning or wednesday midday or wednesday afternoon

i'm not quite sure we don't know yet because we haven't tried it yet but just as a pre-warning for those of you that might notice that i wanted to get you a couple of weeks heads up because if you're a little bit behind by the time you're catching this that'll be affecting you but hopefully it won't be a big deal and you just grab the rss feed and you'll get them when they come out or be here live for all the fun that's the RSS feed and you'll get them when they come out. Or be here live for all the fun. That's right. That is the fastest way to get it.

And there are clever solutions for recording the live stream too. Yeah, I know people do that. All right, well, that'll wrap us up for this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We'd love to get your feedback. You can go over to linuxactionshow.reddit.com and leave a note in the feedback thread there. Or you can go to jupyterbroadcasting.com

slash contact and where you'll find a contact form for Linux Unplugged specifically. And that's always nice, because then I filter just on the Unplugged show, and I get all that. So that's a good way to send your thoughts into the show. And don't forget, we are live, like Wes just mentioned, over at jblive.tv. We do the show at 2 p.m. Pacific. You can get that converted to your local time at jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Any topics you want to also suggest, that subreddit's also great, linuxactionshow.reddit.com. Those are all the great places to get all the info. And at Jupyter Signal, for any last minute changes during the road trip or things like that,

at Jupyter Signal is the network's news feed. All right, everybody. Well, thank you so much for your time. Oh, wow. Geez. Hang up on me already, why don't you? Thanks for tuning in. See you next week. Another suggestion for GPS tracking coming in right now. Boy, we're all about the GPS tracking right here on the Linux Unplugged program. I tell you what, this is a serious endeavor because I want to make sure you guys know where I'm at so that way you can tell me the cool places to get brews, food, or meet up with me. So this is worth the effort. We've got to spend a little time talking about this.

While we all go vote for titles, jbtitles.com. JBTitles. We've got to get into this. This is kind of neat. So I could use this on the road trip somehow. You can use an APS Droid to connect to the APRS network via different means, either via internet, Wi-Fi, or mobile data connection, audio connection between your radio and your smartphone.

Wow, how about that? Or a Bluetooth serial connection to a TNC. Once connected, your beacon and presence see what stations are around and send and receive APRS messages. So this could be an APRS transmitter itself, it looks like. Here, I'm going to put the QR code

on the screen if you guys want to grab that. I want to grab it too. Where's my phone? I want to get that. Come on, Google. Do I have a QR code reader? Can you just tell Google to open a QR code reader? Yes. Okay, you think so? Let's see. Well, if you have one installed. Alright, let's see if it does it. You ready, Wes?

Let's see. Let's see, Mr. Smarty Pants. Okay, Google. Open the QR code reader. Ah, I don't have one installed. And I like, though, the link it brings up is the QR reader for iPhone on the App Store. Mine brought up like a list of apps. I hate you, Wes! What did you say?

Oh, you got the same thing. I just captured you. Spy. You captured the same exact audio, and you got App Store play results, and look what I got. Now, how the hell is that? I don't know. How did that happen? It should be the same Google Now and you got app store play play results and look what i got now how the hell is that i don't know how did that happen should be the same google now you would think okay google qr reader for android and okay look what it gave me there yeah i got the kindle link too that's unhelpful that's totally unhelpful very hit or miss this is no good this is no good anyways i

gotta i gotta look into this app because you know what? The Play Store should just have a freaking QR code reader built into it. It should, yes. Why doesn't it do that? QR code reader. Didn't get it. Hello? QR code reader.

There we go. There we go. Now I'm in like Flynn. There's so many to get, though. the problem oh i know there's too many there's there's so many lovely qr code readers all right so uh okay has the chat chris lass non-vanilla camera apps have integrated qr code readers yeah i know uh i got okay anybody know if i have to be a ham to use this app that's what i need to know right now because Because this is happening. This is happening. What?

According to a forum posted on the internet, it looks like you do. But does it actually have to? Oh, man. Okay. So it's a $5 app if you get it from the Play Store. Google Rewards. You'll need an APRS passcode for your call sign.

Ah, there you go. There you go. Well, that kills that. That kills that. Anybody else have something else that doesn't require to be a ham, to have a ham license

and have a APRS IS passcode? Because I don't think I'm doing that. Man, you guys got me all excited. All right, there's got to be a way to solve this, though, right? Come on, Wes. You got something on me? I know last week you were looking at the track car.

Yeah, what is that? Remind me about the track car. I should look at that. Someone in Mumble Room linked something, a tutorial based on it, it looks like. Really? Really? The track car. Now, did I...

Yeah, I did. TrackCar. I did save this from last week. TrackCar. TrackCar is an open-source GPS tracking system for GPS tracking devices. It supports more than 80 or so. It's a client that allows you... All right, you know what? I'm desperate enough. I'll give this a shot. Let's give this a go.

XTWV in the IRC linked us to something. Create your own vehicle fleet tracking management system, which also links to TrackCar. That is blowing my face off. All right, I'm putting this. You know what I hate about Google Play? They list my Samsung Edge.

First of all, they use the OEMs, like internal code names for your phones. Oh, yes. I hate that they do that. Hammerhead or whatever. So if I click install here, like for my Edge, instead of saying Samsung Edge, it says US Samsung SMG925T. Very helpful. Yeah, and then it's not even the right picture of my phone. It's a picture of a different model of my phone in a different color.

So it's just super lame. Anyways, okay, so now I'm installing – this is called TrackCar, and it's available for Android. It's – so TrackCar is a free open source server that supports more than 80 different protocols and GPS tracking devices. You can use the application with your own hosted instance of TrackCar. So that might be something I could do is I could put it up on a droplet. Hmm. Well, what do you think? Should I give this a shot, Wes?

Yeah, I think so. It sounds interesting. I kind of, I don't know. I don't know if I feel like sending it to my own server, though. But I think I might try it. If the service setup isn't so bad. Yeah, the app doesn't look so bad. Yeah, okay.

So I have to give it a server to connect to and a port and a frequency. It's in the AUR. Mixed provider. So I can do mixed providers. So I have a mixed source of, it is in the AUR, huh? Yeah. I think in the AUR. Mixed provider, so I can do mixed provider, so I have a mixed source of, it is in the AUR, huh? Yeah. I think it runs on Java, so. This is getting more and more likely, actually.

I gotta look into this. I gotta look into this, because the only problem is, I'm gonna be in, I wonder what it does when I go to areas that don't have tracking. We should check out this Osmand, too, maybe. Oh, Osmand, huh? Just while we haven't invested. Yeah, let's take a look. What's this here?

So this is coming from Mr. Odyssey Westridge over there in Spokane. So this is OZmand. What is this thing here? This looks neat. An automated navigation directions. It is a map and navigation application with access to the free worldwide high-quality OpenStreetMaps data. Yeah. Okay, this is for offline.

But I don't know if it does. It doesn't look like it broadcasts my location though. Right? Yeah. I think it's for track car. See, with track car, I think the way it would work is I could have a page that people could go to and actually watch my trip in real time. Check in with Chris. And they'd be like, hey, I want to meet up with you.

Okay, now I'm talking about this, I'm really getting excited about this. Okay, so here's a Gizmodo article that talks about different options. The Motorola i290, nationwide walkie-talkie, wireless web, GPS enabled, hands-free. What's this? Get a phone. What is this? Insta-mapper. Have you heard of insta mapper wes i have not insta mapper you can stall it over the air it's easy to use accu tracking is another one oh insta mapper connection refused what lame yeah totes lame totes lame i wonder if I have to use Internet Explorer.

I'll try their HTTP. Yeah, Instamapper was a popular GPS tracking location service after nearly five years of operation. It shut down in 2012. Womp, womp. Wow, how old is this article? This article is, oh, my gosh. You guys, chat room, look at the gear they're recommending you use in this. What is that? That's like a Motorola feature phone from 2002 guys well how old is this article

chat room oh check in with chris.com i love it check is that available somebody grab that for me geez uh let's see here high quality low cost gps tracking with accu tracking track gps trackers or cell phones real-time location, history reports, emails, texted alerts. AccuTracking. This might be it. They have starter kits, a pre-configured tracker for you. And what's the price like? I don't know. I'm going to go look on their

Amazon page. But here's what I don't want. This looks like it's for private tracking. You know, to track like a fleet of businesses. Right, whereas you want something that you can easily share. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's neat, though.

Here's what I love about this. I've seen this. Verizon has this, too. This is so cool. This tracker, look at that, Wes. This tracker plugs into your ODB2 port, your diagnostic port, gets power from that, has a SIM card in it and a GPS in it, and it can also do a mic. Oh, dang.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah, pay-as-you-go, no contract, no activation fee. So it's $77 for this off of Amazon. Prepaid SIM card is included. What? Ooh. And what is this?

Real-time 24-7 GPS tracking, vehicle diagnostic data included. Oh, my God, that's cool. That's actually pretty handy. Geofence speed, ignition AC unplug, SOS panic, check engine light on. That's neat. With the DTC code. Detailed tracking reports. You'll never be able to hide from the engine.

Excellent reception with built-in GSM and GPS antenna. So here's the thing, though, is I still don't think it's doing public maps. Right. Would you have to give people your login to their service to be able to see it or whatever? Yeah, that seems like a deal breaker to me. That seems like, that's no good. That's no good. So I'm going to stick with the track car and see how that goes.

I'm a little concerned about that. We will, we'll see. I'm a little concerned.