LINUX Unplugged - Episode 112: Open Source Power Outlets | LUP 112

Episode Date: September 30, 2015

Noah hosts again while Chris is in the land of no service, also known as Utah! We talk about LibreOffice, Ubuntu's new Setup wizard, OpenSUSE's leap & more!

Now, Wes, I know that you, maybe not home automation, so to speak, but you have found a way to do a lot of little things with free and open source technology, right? Like the open source Plex alternative. Are you familiar with anything that you might not think off the bat could be a home automation, but in fact could be? What do you mean? Say that again. So, I think a lot of people wouldn't necessarily consider, you know, Plex to be part of a home automation thing, but I would because it goes into, it goes into the home theater, goes into the living room, goes into the master bedroom, wherever, and then provides essentially automated media, right? I can access my media on

demand. I would consider that part of my automation system. I'm wondering if you know of any other, if you have any other suggestions or any other ideas or anything else that you've tried like that, um, that one could use to free and open sourcely automate one's home. Well, yeah, well, one I was just looking at is a, um, I know many people frown on it, but frequently I'm faced with routers that use UPnP. Yes. Um, and you know, some applications are UPnP aware and they will automatically forward the ports. Um, but some are not. And, you know, some applications are UPnP-aware, and they will automatically forward the ports. But some are not. And sometimes, you know, maybe you're visiting a family member

or who may not even know the admin password to their router. You're in a situation where you don't have the freedom to open ports willy-nilly as you see fit. Right. And for that, I found a nice little UPnP-C, it's called, or UPnP-D. They have a daemon and a client, and it lets you to interact with any UPnP

compliant router to specify ports to forward or delete port forwards as you want, so you can customize it for whatever application you're using. That's awesome. See, I do, as a network security guy, I do have some reservations about using UPnP. You know, and I do as well, but

sometimes you're on a network where it's already enabled and you just have to work with it. Yeah. So I found it useful there. I personally don't use it at home. And it sure is convenient, isn't it? Oh, yeah. It's awesome.

You know, and they also have like the project that's doing it, they have a user space implementation, a lot of the BSD TCP IP stack. And so they also use that to provide the daemon. So if you did want to use UPnP and you didn't have a device that used it, you can use their daemon protocol to run it yourself if you'd like to have it stick it on your PFSense box or anything else. Why you would do that, I don't know, but you can. That's the beauty of free and open source. Why did you say that you think that some people frown on it? Is it just the UPnP aspect? Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people, and I know certainly Alan's talked about it, but just that the idea of people opening ports in your firewall without your express permission, or especially apps, maybe you're running proprietary applications that you don't really have a handle on what it is

they're sending. So that's a big problem that I see, and that's why I don't use it on my own home network. But I know like in my parents house they have a ISP provided router that is UPnP and client and well I do have their admin password sometimes it's just easier if you're not you know I'm not going to be there for a long time I don't need to leave a hole in their firewall I can just open it up while I'm there

sure well that does sound really cool I'll have to check that out maybe we can get a link in the show notes and yes I absolutely have you heard of Icebergs.io? I was just checking that out this morning, actually. Really? So I had not heard of it before, but apparently Icebergs.io, Ubuntu with an XFCE gives a highly productive desktop experience in the browser with a quick and responsive on an all-modern internet connection. Now, they've actually optimized for touch devices,

so you can run it on your phone, for example, and you can access what essentially is a mobile operating system through a web browser. Do I have that right? Yeah, absolutely. You know, I just tried out the free account. They give you two compute hours a month. Okay. And it also won't save.

So anytime you're done with it, whenever you turn it off, it's gone. Whereas if you upgrade to a paid plan, then they'll be persistent. Now, how do they calculate a compute hour? You know, I'm not sure. I haven't looked into that yet. But that will be the sticking point. Because while they do give you the first paid plan, I think, is like $10 a month and they give you two instances. But you're also limited to compute hours there as well.

25 of them, if I'm not mistaken, right? Yes, I believe so. So I think you can have multiple instances running and each of those adds up to your compute hours. But exactly how that gets built, we should check that out. Yeah. I was impressed, though. You know, it took a little bit to start up, but once everything was going, it was surprisingly responsive and pretty easy to use.

Now the, the, the, for nine bucks a month, I could see this being really useful. Now I've, I've actually tried to implement this. I don't know.

Have you played with X to go very much? Yes. Yes, I have. You know, I frequently recommend it to people just because it's so, it's so easy to, to start using and it works, you know, a lot faster than most of the other alternatives.

So, yes. So, I don't think I would. For the price point of icebergs.io, I'm not sure it's there for me yet. Oh, really? Well, that depends. That depends on how willing you are to roll your own solution. Yeah, that's true. That's true. You know, because if you already have the skills or the infrastructure to set up an X2Go server with an environment of your choosing, provided you have enough bandwidth, then that

would probably be my preferred solution. But I am intrigued by the idea of desktop Linux in the browser, you know, at a whim kind of. You know, so there are a couple of things that stand out to me. One is, if you go with the service type solution, you know, so there are a couple of things that stand out to me. One is if you go with the service type solution, you're essentially cloudifying your existence. And in doing so, you're losing control of your data. One of the things I like about my X to go machine is that it physically sits inside of my office. I can go put my hand on it and I know where that hard drive

is at all times. And there are some additional benefits to having that device physically located in a place I can get to it. For example, I have a little SATA hard drive reader that is plugged into my X2Go machine. And so if I have a, a lot of times I'll have a staff member, they'll say, hey boss, you know, we're doing X, Y, Z, and we're having a problem with it. And you know, I can't get this file to open, or I can't get this file to do this, or I can't get these permissions done on this. And I'll say, well well just take the hard drive and stick it into my my drive reader and they can put it into the driver and then from wherever I am I can access that data and then I can you know I can move it over to my laptop so I can work with it locally if I need to or 90%

of the time 99% of the time I can get my work done actually on the x2go machine provided I have a decent internet connection. And that is, that's something that no matter how robust and how cool Icebergs becomes, I'll always be missing that, that functionality. Right. And so it limits my ability to scale, I think a little bit. You know, I would, I would agree. And I think it ties into a lot of what some of our user base, you know, a lot of the Linux

user base has problems with a lot of proprietary software, you know, one for maybe philosophical reasons, but also just because when you hit the edges of things, you know, when you try to stretch something to a little bit different purpose or you need to customize something on a one-off thing, you're met with boundaries. Whereas if you've rolled it yourself, you used free open source software,

time is just the limit for how much you can accomplish. You know, on the thing of it. There's actually something, though, that's interesting. It's kind of like a similar option, but it's more of an app-based thing. It's called RollApp, and it's rollapp.com. And basically it does a server rendering of an application to your web browser. And it also works on your phone too. So in a way, like I've tested it

and you can actually like use LibreOffice on your phone through this service. Wow. Wow, that sounds slick. It's actually like $7 a month or something and you get like unlimited usage or whatever. And it's impressive. Like it works on your phone,

it works on your tablet, it works on your web browser. And it does like all different kinds of apps. Like I think their on your phone. It works on your tablet. It works on your web browser. And it does, like, all different kinds of apps. Like, I think their total count is, like, 200 or something. But I tested with LibreOffice, and it actually is, like, not the most latest version, but it is, like, the next latest. So, like, 5.0.1 or something like that. Sure, sure. So, it actually works quite well, and they have, like, custom features built into the app.

It actually works quite well, and they have custom features built into the app so that you have double tap or two-finger tap the phone to lay out a toolbar and all kinds of stuff. It's pretty impressive. Can you give us an idea or an example of something that you've used with it? I've just used LibreOffice with it so far. Okay. Yeah, but actually even that alone I could see tremendous use case for. Yeah, and it actually supports GIMP too. Oh, wow. Really? You can do image editing and everything. Yeah. Can you imagine the practicality of doing that? Can you imagine the practicality of like modifying this image? Like, especially with like a touchscreen device or something.

I know people already complain about GIMP's UI and now we'll hear no end to it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right? Well, in this case, you could probably, maybe if you had like the single window mode is what is necessary for like desktop stuff, but maybe on the phone, the separate windows would be better because you could like full screen on the phone, each of the windows.

I don't know. It might be a better solution. Yeah. So when Chris was here, we did some electrical upgrades to the RV. I don't know if some of you, if you're if you're your patrons, you got the email from it and they actually actually recorded a video. That's pretty cool. But essentially what we've tried to do is get everything to run off of 12 volts. And the advantage of that DC 12 volt is that one is he can charge on the solar panel.

12 volt is that one is he can charge on the solar panel and two is he can actually run all of his equipment then off of those batteries so he's not reliant upon ac power um i don't know wes or or rotten corpse have you guys had any experience with um self-sufficient powering yourself not myself i have some friends who live on the big island of hawaii and they're working on setting up a hydroelectric electric system oh cool but before that they were kind of reliant on friends use of electricity to charge a lot of the batteries they had so they'd already converted a lot of their infrastructure to dc um when they started playing around with this hydro uh so it was kind of interesting to see you know they had lots of kind of the same kind of modular setup kind of plugging everything every which way uh with those they had the same kind of connectors you were highlighting on the show.

Really? Yeah. The Anderson Power Bowls. Yeah, yeah. They were showing, I didn't remember the name, but when you showed that on the show, I was like, oh, that's exactly what they had going on. You know, I don't mean to go fanboyish, but I absolutely love Anderson Power Bowls. If you're not familiar with them, they are genderless, low voltage connectors. And so essentially they'll handle up

to like 30 amps uh the small ones they have bigger ones that'll handle like up to 250 amps but it's a different it's a it's a bigger version of the of the smaller anderson powerful but the 30 amp guys they you can put them on to uh i've used them on 12 aug wire i've used them on i think i've used them as high as 10 aug wire and as small as 18og wire. You have to fold the 18 over a little bit and use some solder. But the nice thing is they're genderless, so you don't have to decide, is this going to be a power-receiving source or a power-providing source? You can be interchangeable with it, and that's the case when it comes to something like a battery. Sometimes a battery is providing the energy, and other times a battery is receiving the energy from a battery. Sometimes the battery is providing the energy and other times the batteries, uh, is, um, receiving the energy from like a charger. Uh, and so it, it offers a tremendous amount of flexibility and because of the standardization, it will hopefully the idea is that it will give

Chris the freedom to plug things in, uh, willy nilly. If he has to make a change on the fly, that becomes, you know, very, very easy to do. it's interesting that you say that they're using hydroelectric, and that's DC, because if you start with DC, if you generate DC, and then you run it off of DC, you're not losing any energy in a conversion process.

Right, right. I think that's what they were going for. You know, once they've got that running, they'll almost be self-sufficient, except they're still importing a large amount of propane for a lot of their utilities. But other than that, they've almost be self-sufficient except they're still importing a large amount of propane for a lot of their utilities. But other than that,

they've got their own farm going. It's quite the project. Awesome. Anything else we want to cover in the pre-show before we get started? If you want to go back to the icebergs thing, you could mention that there's os.js. Tell me about os.js.

It's a JavaScriptavascript based operating system thing and it's not full-fledged or anything but it is legitimately ran through the browser like dependent on the browser okay and it's it's it's got a few it's got a it's mostly web app based but it has other things too and like you can run stuff the backend and it, uh, you can like put it, uh, you can, you can install it on like a DO droplet or something and have a interesting operating system available at any time. It's not, it's not like X to go or anything,

but it's still interesting. See that anything that anything that I can install on top of a droplet or anything that I can install, um, quickly and then access everywhere has has huge appeal to me because I can think of so many practical places where I could where I could use something like that have you tried it yeah I've tried it I haven't I haven't put it on my own droplet but I've tried their demo and it's it's interesting it actually has like

uh its own custom ui and everything and it runs apps pretty fast. I mean, you have to have a pretty good machine to do it, though. But all I can say is interesting. It's not practical at all right now, but it is fun to play with. You know, the nice thing about having its own UI is I bet it actually runs a little bit more efficiently inside of a web browser than a... Oh, yeah. It actually has like... more efficiently inside of a web browser than a oh yeah it actually has like um i mean i can't really describe the ui but it had like the menu system it uses is similar to like a gnome 2 style wow do you know what the the license is on that i'm pretty sure i know it's open source i'm pretty

sure it's gpl'd that's that's awesome i uh I I'll have to take a look at that there. My problem is when I run into things that like compete with something that is already working so well, I have a hard time prying myself off of my current solution. So for example, in this case, X to go has worked for me so well, and I've been able to get so much done with X to go that I'm having a really hard time. Uh, I would have a really hard time prying myself away from x to go to uh to try something else even if that something else is better and and it wouldn't be the first time that i've gone back and decided oh yeah actually uh you know xyz uh worked a lot better the second time around i just didn't know that it existed yeah okay so this one doesn't have it's not gpl it's a license that

technically would be compatible but it's very limited in the license. It's basically just keep the copyright there and then whatever else, you know, user your own risk type thing. But I wouldn't say that this was better than X2Go. I think X2Go is probably the best solution for someone who wants to roll their own cloud-based servers or desktop, whatever. But I would say that if somebody wants just to kind of run stuff through the web, Roll app is definitely worth looking into, especially considering you'd have LibreOffice on your phone, and you could also roll it out to hundreds of people

and have the same version available to all of them. That's pretty awesome. And you know, the thing is, X2Go, I know that there are extensions that you can run inside of Firefox, version available to all of them. That's pretty awesome. And you know, the thing is X to go, I know that there are extensions that you go run inside of Firefox, but primarily it's designed to be run inside of its own native client app. It's not, you know what I mean? It wasn't really designed to run,

you know, in the browser. So something that is, that is designed from the ground up to run in the browser. I like, again, I would think that would be a little more efficient, maybe have a little bit more pleasant of an experience to it.

This is Linux Unplugged, episode 112 for September 29th, 2015. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux show that's being brought to you today by nothing short of a freaking miracle. My name is Nolan. Joining me from the Seattle studio is Wes. Hey guys, it's Wes. Pleasure to be here. Now, it's my honor and privilege to step in anytime Chris is off exploring somewhere yonder this week, as it turns out in Utah, in the Jupiter Rover, by the way,

did you know that you can get minute by minute updates and follow his adventures over at Jupiter broadcasting.com slash Rover. Some of you might be wondering what I meant when I said that the show is being brought to you today by America. And the answer actually starts back on Saturday at the meetup. So first of all, huge shout out to North Ranger who's in our chat room right now and everyone else that made the meetup on saturday in grand forks uh following chris's arrival and then uh subsequently his departure we were sitting down we're having pizza and we started talking about the what the rest of chris's trip is going

to look like and it is going to be uh he's going through utah and so we laid out a map a route for him to take we're all kind of figuring that out and when you laid a the cellular connectivity over his uh planned route he was not going to have coverage and if he did have coverage he would have to drive like 10 hours in between coda radio and linux unplugged to make both shows work that sounds fun yeah it sounded great right it sounds like a great one. So Sunday, he figured that out. He goes, you know, would you mind stepping up and help and do the show? And I said, yeah, I would love to because Linux Unplugged is one of my favorite shows.

I love the community aspect and I'm friends with a lot of the people in the mumble room. So it's kind of fun that instead of just, you know, you know, chewing the straw off the air, you know, at two in the morning, Now we can all be on air and have, have a productive conversations. Um, but the studio wasn't really set up for that because, uh, when Chris got here, we had reorganized the way the studio was set up to accommodate the, the shows that he wanted to do in the way that he wanted to do them. And then additionally, my studio isn't really set up for hosting shows with music coming in and all of this other stuff. So I ended up buying some more audio interfaces and some new cables and redid everything Monday to make things just more smooth so that we could go on the air and do this today. Tuesday, I wake up and my first trouble call is not from a client. It's from my own office.

And my staff calls me and they're like, hey, boss, guess what? The Internet went out today. And I'm thinking, oh, no, this isn't. Yeah, no, we're an IT company. We can't not have internet. We have no access to emails. We have no access to our phone system. We have no access to our work order system. We can't get to the call center. I have no idea what's going on in my own company. And as I'm trying to sort that headache out, it dawns on me, oh, no, I have luck this afternoon. So I immediately stop what I'm doing. And I'm like, you guys fix the internet. I have to get stuff ready so I can do love in a couple of hours. So I start, I grab extra mixtures and I'm grabbing audio cables and

I'm grabbing cables and microphones and I'm, I have all this stuff in my arms and I'm running down. And Wes, have you ever done this thing where your arms are full and you start trying to like fish your keys out with your pinky and you like, you don't want to drop anything, but you're, you don't, there's no real way to set a clump of stuff down every moment knowing you're going closer and closer to everything on the ground. Yes, yes, exactly. So I'm doing that and I finally fish my keys out and I get the car unlocked and then it dawns on me, where am I going to go?

Where am I going to go? Because I can't go home. My house is for sale and there's an open house today. And even if there wasn't an open house today, people are looking at the house every couple of hours. And even if that weren't the case, I have two kids, two dogs, and one wife, a Learjet taking off is more quiet than my house is. And so I decided I'm going to take over my in-laws house.

I'll just, I'll go over there and I'll set up all of my stuff. And I'll just, I will do the show for my in-laws house, all willy nilly like, and kick them out of their house. That seemed like a good idea. Easy peasy. Yeah. And thank God it didn't actually come to that.

MidContinent, in their infinite wisdom, was able to get the problem resolved very quickly, made a call within one hour. They had our internet back up, and I'm able to safely do the show from my studio, and we seem to have a working internet connection out to Seattle, and so Wes can join me, and thus, this is Linux Unplugged. And we have a cool show, I think, lined up, don't we?

Yes, we do. Oh, man, that is quite the story. It's wonderful to be here with you. And now I know all that. Yeah. So I want to start out first with a little bit of feedback. Our first piece of feedback comes in from Mathis. And he writes in with, hi, DPI versus V VGA and he goes, hi, Wes and Noah in three years, I will still have my VGA ports for

two reasons. One VGA will still be a superior connector and to CRT monitors that will, that I will still be using only have VGA, I think, and RCA appreciate and love all your netcasts. Mathis, I wanted to get your take on that. Do you think that VGA is still going to be a thing in the next five years? Well, we'll see. I didn't think laptops with less than full HD would be a thing three years ago, but it still is. So I can see them still having VGA connectors.

I can too. You know, and it's a decent form factor. It does, you know, it's analog, so it just works, even if it's not, you know, it doesn't have fancy features, you can't really chain it, it doesn't, you know, it doesn't have the kind of resolution that a lot of us would like to see these days. I imagine that at least some section of the hardware market

will still contain VGA. Will I be using it? We'll see. I think so, too. I agree with him when he says that VGA is a superior connector, if only because of the two little knobs on the side oh i love the knobs give me two because then you can securely connect it to the freaking computer so it doesn't get ripped out it makes tons of sense um i don't know why we went away from that you know the same thing could be said about serial

versus usb um the the db9 connector had little screw things and like when you attach one of those puppies to the computer it never crossed your mind if the cable was going to get pulled out or become disconnected. That just wasn't a thing. It worked. If it was connected and it was tied down, it worked. And you could trust that it was basically as secure as having it on the inside of the computer. Unless, of course, somebody tried to climb up the back of the tower or something. You weren't going to break it off.

And these days, even before we started the show, I had to restart my machine because my USB connector came unplugged from the computer. So I agree with you that it's a superior connector. I think that the lack of screen real estate is enough to make me switch. And I think it's going to be enough to make a lot of other people switch. I also find it convenient even just when I'm short on, you know, maybe I don't have splitters or I'm in a different situation. And just having the extra VGA port that a lot of computers do have means I can, you know, have an extra monitor that I might not otherwise get without buying a specialty

piece of hardware. Very good. Over at reddit.com slash r slash Linux action show, you can submit things of interest for this show or for our big show every week, the Linux action show. things of interest for this show or for our big show every week, the Linux action show, um, twist X 77 writes in and he says,

hi, Chris, I've been a list. I've been a Linux tester for more than 10 years, but I've never actually had the possibility to use Linux as my main OS. I have finally done that almost two years ago, and I'm really happy with Ubuntu gnome. Well, I wanted to let you know that all my electronic devices today use an ACE,

uh, that use an AC, have an internal rectifier and a regulator. So they end up using DC. So many times just bypassing the rectifier part, you can hook up 12 volt or 24 volt directly from your RV's DC supply. I guess you guys already know that. Anyway, I'm an electrical engineer. And so if you want to know how to use a soldering iron i could help you bypass those ac devices and use dc when possible so let me know if you need any help with any electronic related problems last but not least thanks for the great

shows i listen to you guys uh when going to work almost every day well thank you so much for writing and we really appreciate it actually i do have an electrical question for you. Oh, perfect. Yeah, that worked out, right? Chris has a compressor gate combo that runs on 9-volt AC, and I want to get it to preferably, eventually I need to get it to 12-volt DC, but I can live with 9-volt DC because I already have a step-down transformer from 12-volt DC to 9-volt DC. You could help me solve that problem. That would be a huge help. volt DC to nine volt DC. You could help me solve that problem. That would be a huge help. Um, jupiterbroadcasting.com, click on the contact link, choose Linux unplugged from the dropdown menu. And if you have a solution for that, or you would like to help me come up with a solution for that, that would be amazing at the moment. That's to my knowledge. That's the only remaining thing that he

has in the camper that he has to have on day-to-day production that isn't running on DC. So that'd be really cool if we could get that solved. Wes, have you been following Chris at the tracker? Yes, I have. You know, it's a weird little voyeurism, but it's very enjoyable just to be able to kind of creep along as he adventures across the West. Did you watch him when he arrived into Grand Forks? Yes, I did. It was awesome.

watching when he arrived into grand fork yes i did it was awesome i uh i uh it's it's been kind of funny because the the tracker is actually in the the truck not in the rv itself and so when he goes to like the market or whatever else um it's kind of funny because like people will come over and like knock on the knock on the door and say oh hey how's it going or they'll come find us or him rather um in fact i had even one of my employees took a selfie with the JB Rover. Oh, wow. That's awesome. Yeah. He was trying to find me and I'd left my phone at home. So he's like, oh, I'll just use a little rover thing and I'll go find Chris. It was pretty neat. You know, I actually I was looking at at the equipment that he was using. Chris was showing me in in detail how that silver cloud thing was working and i actually went over to amazon and i found a box for 35 bucks that um kind of does the same thing where they will update your uh where they'll update your your status but instead

of charging like a monthly like account that you have to put money into in order to get a certain amount of updates essentially you just provide your own GSM card and then it will update. Isn't that kind of cool? Oh, that sounds really neat. Kind of roll your own service and as long as you can reach them, they'll give you updates. Exactly. And I'm thinking I could get the cost down on this. So I'm going to have to run this by Chris. But if someone were to go to linux.ting.com and the SIM cards right now are on sale for five bucks. So you can buy this SIM card for five bucks, but you get $25 of credit.

So you could use the rest of the $20 credit to pay for the first month of service. And with Ting, you're only going to pay for what you use. So in my case, what I'm talking about here is I would only be using data. I would just be updating my locations. I wouldn't be using text messages and I wouldn't be making phone calls.

And so I'm not gonna pay for that service. I'm just gonna pay for the data that I'm using. Of course, if you do plan on sending text messages or making phone calls. And so I'm not going to pay for that service. I'm just going to pay for the data that I'm using. Of course, if you do plan on sending text messages or making phone calls, they're moderately priced. And because it's no contract, you can cancel the service at any time without any penalty. So I'd suggest everyone go over to linux.ting.com, pick yourself out something nice,

and use that $25 we're going to get you for being a listener of the Linux Unplugged show. A huge thanks to Ting for sponsoring the show. And it just goes to show you that the limit of what you can do with those devices is limited only by your imagination. You know, Ting really saved my butt this weekend. I just have to say. Oh, yeah. You know, I was working from home there doing some construction in the office.

Lots of concrete dust everywhere. Nothing we wanted to be a part of. construction in the office, lots of concrete dust everywhere, nothing we wanted to be a part of. And, you know, just as my shift was coming to an end, my ISP's connection, of course, decided to fail. Starts with the letter C. They planned that, you know. Yes, I believe that they did. It was just perfectly timed. But thanks to Ting, tethering, you know, it just uses your data. It's included in your plan. You don't have to worry about it. There's no fuss. So I was able to just spin up my LTE connection on my phone and I was VPN back in in no time. It was perfect.

It saved my butt. That's for sure. Every time I think that I have found the limit of what I can do with Ting, I end up buying another device. When we were out doing the meetup, I still get questions about that little credit card phone. Have I showed you that or have you seen it? Oh yeah, that is so cool. I'm thinking about just getting one. They seem so handy and you can just, you know, just keep it when you need it. And dude, they're $30 freaking dollars. That's amazing. Brand new. Yeah.

You can buy a brand new phone for $30 freaking dollars and you throw that $5 SIM card in there, which by the way, you won't pay for because things going to give it to you for free by going to linux.com and then you have $20 of service credit. And if you're like me, that paid, that paid for my first month of service. And then if even with my wife and me and my son and my dad, all of which are on my plan now, I would still probably get a good chunk of that month paid for. Of course, you can just buy a device. We're going to run over to blog.documentandfoundation.org. And they published an article titled today, Headline, Five Years of LibreOffice. LibreOffice was launched as a fork of OpenOffice.org on

September 28, 2010, by a tiny group of people representing the community in their capacity of community project leaders. At the time, it was a brave, although necessary decision because it was rather clear to everyone that OpenOffice.org was not going to survive for a long time under Oracle stewardship. In fact, the group of 16 founders launched an independent free software project under the stewardship of the Document Foundation to fulfill a promise made by Sun Microsystems 10 years before. At the time of the first announcement of OpenOffice.org, of the independent free software foundation capable of pushing forward the free office suite to the next level. After five years, LibreOffice is acknowledged in the marketplace as the sole Microsoft Office contender based on sheer feature-by-feature comparison and on the

number of successful migrations. Migrating to LibreOffice has never been easier thanks to the migration protocol drafted by the most experienced people at the document foundation, which outlines the best practices adopted by several large projects worldwide. A success confirmed by the future of open source survey in 2015, which has put Libra office amongst the most seven valuable open source projects based on the answers provided by, by over 1300 professionals worldwide. It has been an amazing journey in five years. Libra office developers have not missed a single time-based release

with major announcements in late January and late July and minor announcements on a monthly basis. Thanks to the sustained pace, LibreOffice has reached a richness and feature and a level of interoperability which are second to none. I use Office on a daily basis. How about you, Wes? Yeah, pretty much. Pretty much every day. You know what? I was trained as a Microsoft Office user specialist. So supposedly,

I had these letters after my name that said I was supposed to know something about an Office suite. And as Microsoft Office continued to push newer and newer versions out, i found myself literally getting lost and the most embarrassing thing i think to date that's ever happened to me in an office suite was i was uh i was giving a presentation and the computer the presentation computer had a uh had the newest version of microsoft office and that that was this is when they switched to ribbons right yeah and i couldn't find a core function and i had to look up to a group of, you know, IT professionals and I'm presenting. So supposedly I'm supposed to know something that they don't. I'm supposed to be teaching them something. And I had to ask them to come up and

show me how to use a function of Microsoft Office. And it was about that time when I realized I didn't want to be beholden to Microsoft Office anymore. And I switched to LibreOffice. And ever since then, every client that comes to my company that is looking for help with an Office suite, we move them to LibreOffice as well. Do you use LibreOffice as like as like a daily driver or is it something that you use, you know, just to modify a document or to write a letter or something like that? You know, it's definitely more of the latter. But I kind of started back with OpenOffice. I wasn't really a Linux user then, but to think about it,

back in high school, my high school actually had Linux on a lot of the workstations. I remember getting in trouble for a long-running C program that I left running on the network. But we started with OpenOffice, and then I migrated to Microsoft Office when I was in college. And I, like you, I was also responsible for doing some training of people using those suites. And I have just been continually impressed with what the

Document Foundation and LibreOffice have done. You know, even if you ignore the elephant in the room of, you know, Microsoft Office, they've just been able to create a standards-based, very usable productivity suite that if you use it, especially internally, if it's a consistent deployment, you can pretty much do anything that you would reasonably need to do efficiently, productively,

and in a very pleasant environment. And they seem very responsive as well so that new features get added, compatibility gets improved. It's really like a testament to the open source software in general. You know, Wes, I had a chance to head over to Red Hat. And when I was at Red Hat, I was talking to those guys and I said, how is it that a billion dollar company, a billion dollars, how is it that you guys managed to avoid using microsoft office and he said honestly when it comes down to it the basic stuff that you do in in an office suite is there like all the functionality is there the way you go about doing it sometimes the buttons are in little different

locations yeah exactly a little different layouts a little different but the functionality is there um and so i i think that i think that people that say oh i can't do that in open office or i can't do that in libra office i think those people i think that's just a cop-out and i think that it's it's not that you can't do it in libra office i think that 99 of the time it's people just don't want to do it in libra office yes they don't want to learn that new workflow and you know and that that's a barrier but if you get over it it's a it's a glorious thing on the other side. And the other thing is, too, is what what I see is what you're you are trading the you are trading the comfortability of Microsoft Office for the known future of LibreOffice. I don't know what Microsoft what changes Microsoft is going to make. Only Microsoft knows that if Microsoft

knows that. But when it comes to LibreOff Office, I can have a voice in that conversation. I can reach out to the developers and say, hey, you know what? This is a feature I'm really looking forward to. And I do do that when I bump into those guys and they are at most Linux fests. When I bump into those guys, I tell them, I say, hey, this is the kind of feature I'm looking for. This is the kind of functionality I really need. Is that something that you can accommodate?

And most of the time, the answer is yes. of functionality I really need. Is that something that you can accommodate? And most of the time, the answer is yes. Sometimes the answer is no. And then usually with a yes, they're able to give a time frame of about how long that's going to take before that functionality arrives. How about the mumble room? I kind of want to open it up to you guys. We haven't really even said hello to you guys.

Time appropriate greeting, mumble room. Time appropriates, guys. So, as far as the Libre mean the only thing that it can't do very well is the microsoft office formats and it's still getting those much better uh in the recent releases so i mean as far as like most of the time library office is all you really need yeah i i i guess i suppose i have to backtrack just a little bit um i'll have to eat a couple of my words i suppose if you're doing something very very very um very some very special formula in excel based formula or something like that i guess i could see a couple of times when you're where you're where it would be a lot of

work to use labor office insteadice instead of Microsoft Office. And that didn't really dawn on me until you until you had mentioned the concept of transitioning from one office to another and keeping file consistency. I have done that a couple of times and 99 percent of the time it goes well. But you're right. Every once in a while, if there's a Microsoft Office format and you try and open that up in LibreOffice, something goes a little kitty wonker, and then that causes some problems. How about anyone else?

There's also big companies that have implemented large software solutions which only integrate with Microsoft Office, and there's a big one that most large companies use and that's sap and for a long long long long time and it may still be the case i haven't looked in the last three years but while you're inside your sap system dealing with your customers your hr records your finances your your materials management whatever it is inside sap if you press any button that is export this as a document,

the only thing it will talk to is Microsoft Office. You absolutely cannot integrate with LibreOffice or OpenOffice or any other Office suite. It just doesn't do it because really, if you're implementing SAP, you're a Fortune 500 company and many more, and you could be pretty much guaranteed that the desktops will have Microsoft Windows on them and they will have Microsoft Office. Exactly.

So there's no point in them even implementing that kind of integration. That may well have changed in the last three years, but I seriously doubt it. Now, how about letting that software export to Microsoft Office and then opening it with LibreOffice? Well, it's not just a case of exporting data out it doesn't spit data out as um as like an xls file or a doc this is making reaching into the office install on your machine placing calls into the application so it integrates tightly and it might even embed like you might be sat there looking at a screen in SAP and then you press a button that says, give me a graph. And that reaches into your machine, downloads some stuff to your machine, and then makes some system calls into Microsoft Office.

This is the stuff of nightmares here. Renders that inside the GUI for the application. And SAP is not the only one. It's the one I've got most familiarity with but there are plenty of these office applications which are used by large companies and which there is no way you're going to move these people off of microsoft office because they're dependent upon something which costs them millions and millions in maintenance fees every year they're not just going to switch away from that that's just not going to happen so it's some i mean for small and medium-sized enterprises and

for the people who are doing the basic stuff and home users yes libra office is perfectly fine for education yes perfectly fine but for the very large deployments it's a lot more difficult now do you think those companies are um are not taking into account a certain level of risk by banking on the fact that uh that their software is going to continue to talk to Microsoft and that Microsoft is going to continue to provide Microsoft Office in a way that that software can talk to it. So, for example, look at Office 365. A lot of businesses have switched to Office 365.

I would imagine that that, to some degree, changes the ability of a third-party software being able to talk directly to Microsoft Office, doesn't it? No, not at all. All these large software companies have people who work for Microsoft embedded in the company. They have people who work for Oracle embedded in the company. They have partner status with them, so they get access to this stuff early on, and they will integrate so that in the next release or the next release two release two years down the line remember corporates don't tend to move super fast upgrading their back-end erp systems and these people will um will say you know coming

in the next release or two releases down the line we'll have integration with office 365 and that'll be fine because you know significant numbers of those companies are still running on windows 7 or some of them maybe even on windows xp the the Windows XP. They're not itching to move on to the next release. Well, the reality is with Office 365, it is somewhat operating system independent. I can run Office 365 inside of Ubuntu and it works just fine. Not necessarily recommending anyone should do that. But I wonder how that SAP system would talk in if it can't talk to the operating system i bet that i would that's great it's a it's a prerequisite i mean if you

okay if you were to if you were to try and install the the gui and you try and do something in the gui that requires microsoft office and the client doesn't have microsoft office installed or it's not a microsoft client, then that piece of functionality will fail. And the net result of that is that employee can't do their job. And if that employee can't do their job, then you're not going to migrate away from Windows. So it's a lot more complicated than just what's the most complicated Excel spreadsheet you can think of, does it happen in LibreOffice? Or what's the most cunningly formatted Word document that makes sure it renders correctly inside LibreOffice docs?

Most of those things are covered. Those bases are fine. It's when you're dependent upon Microsoft system calls and things like that that you're screwed. You can't move away. That makes total sense, and I stand corrected. You know, I have obviously very limited experience with very, very large companies,

certainly have even less experience with very large companies that have very large deployments of Windows. And I say that unashamedly. But there are certain things that I don't think Microsoft Office will ever be able to compete with LibreOffice. And one of them is, for example, the Document Freedom Day. And it's this idea that we can celebrate and raise awareness for the concept of open standards. I really wanted to participate in this last year.

I'm really looking forward to participating in it next year. And, Pobi, maybe you have uh have some insight did did you personally or did you at work um uh support or have any involvement with document freedom day so the last time i was involved in this was when it was um before document freedom day when it was software freedom day many many many years ago there was a software freedom day and we decided to take part in the uk and in london uh we had a bunch of cds that were provided by canonical the ubuntu cds and we had some leaflets that we printed out and we went for a walk we all met up in a park in london and we went for a walk through london and

then we met up at a a venue where we gave talks and talked about software freedom and uh you know all the all the kind of topics that you'd expect to hear at a conference or an event about software freedom. And as we walked through London, we were handing CDs. And you know those people who stand in the street who try and thrust something into your hand and you really don't want to make eye contact and you don't want to talk to those people? Well, yeah, that was us.

And in England, I'm sure it's somewhat different, the British reserved personality where you know we'll do absolutely anything to avoid eye contact with you um and we would we were testing like as we walked along different phrases that we could use to get people to take the cd out of our hand like you know would you like some free software and you know free software free culture or free yeah we were trying all kinds of phrases and, uh, some of them work better than others. Um, I hope you documented those. Uh, yeah, well, we, yeah, we wrote up, uh, our, uh, uh, uh, our event, but, uh, one particularly memorable, we were standing outside a store, um, that was like, you know, like a Best Buy,

like fries you would have over there as PC world over here and um it was at a junction where there was some traffic lights and a big red london bus pulled up and uh one of the guys took the opportunity to walk up to the bus driver and handed him one of the cds and said hey would you like some free software and the guy looked at it and said ah is this that replacement for windows and our guy went yes that's exactly what it is but this was like nearly 10 years ago eight years ago and uh you know people some people knew about it back then but um no i haven't been involved in the document freedom day more recently i know some people have but i am i i would love to get more more involved with that and the um the stories that i've heard from people that have participated in it are absolutely outstanding. And you can actually get, um, some funding as I understand

it from the document foundation for, uh, um, from the open document foundation for, uh, uh, putting on a document freedom day in your area. So it's definitely something I'm going to look into. Um, anyone else in the mobile room have any experience with, uh, with LibreOffice or enjoy using LibreOffice or, uh, more to the point experience of switching people from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice? I've worked with several friends and family members that, you know, we just bypass the whole Microsoft Office compatibility issue entirely when you're creating documents for distribution. Just save them as PDFs. Yeah, totally. It's a great option.

PDFs are great. The thing that bothers me about PDFs is if anytime you need to edit something or change something, that becomes kind of problematic. Didn't they have an embedded format where you could embed an open document format in a PDF or maybe it was vice versa? Yeah, that could be.

I'm not personally familiar with it, but North Ranger, how about you? You know, I did not try that, but like the biggest example I had of distribution was resumes. Oh, sure, yeah. The nice thing about resumes is that you can actually download a lot of the templates

for Microsoft Office, open them with LibreOffice, and then go in there and just plug in the information, and it works. And I've actually done that a couple of times, or hope people do it a couple of times. Never really run into a snag doing that. There's also a Linux converter, so that if it's just a command line until you run it,

you can convert a PDF that doesn't have editability or have any text connected to it, and convert it into an editable format that is still PDF, but fundamentally lets you change things. Yeah. I just see on LibreOffice's website here, they have support for hybrid PDF where they do embed an ODF file. So PDF viewers will see the PDF,

but if you open LibreOffice, it's a fully modifiable. And I assume when you save it, then that's updates the PDF. Oh, that's great. Yeah. That's absolutely when you save it, then it updates the PDF. Oh, that's great. Yeah, that's absolutely fantastic. Because the nice thing about that is it requires people that are that the people that want

to monkey with it are going to know how to monkey with it. And the people that don't know how to monkey with it probably aren't the people we want modifying the file anyway, right? Exactly. And there's no there's no excuse with LibreOffice. You know, it's like you sent this document and you do want to edit it. Well, it's free software. You can download it at no cost.

It's available for pretty much every platform. So, you know, perfectly interoperable. Rotten Corpse, you want to jump in there? Well, I was just going to say that there is actually another, there's a cloud. This is not something you'd want to use if you care about, like, privacy of your stuff. But there's this cloud converter system. It's a service called cloudconvert.io

I think. I've tested it in certain cases where you can convert a PDF no matter what kind of weird formatting it has to anything you want. I tried to convert a PDF to an HTML file just to see if it would do it

and it did it perfectly it had all the pages had all the formatting like everything was perfect and it kind of blew my mind how like exact it did it no matter what format i picked that's awesome it's worth saying for everything i've said about microsoft office um libra office is incredibly flexible and over the last couple of years it's being bent into different shapes that you probably wouldn't have expected or that you wouldn't have expected the same co-base from so many years ago that originated you know star office open office and now libra office that that now for example there's a um there's a tool that's part of lireOffice called LibreOffice Kit.

And with LibreOffice Kit, you could take an installation of LibreOffice with no GUI, so you don't actually use LibreOffice on the desktop. You have an install of LibreOffice, say, on a headless server. And with LibreOffice Kit, you can pass it any supported LibreOffice document, and it will give you back a bitmap of what that document looks like. No kidding. That's awesome. It's amazing.

And we're actually using that on the Ubuntu phone. So the document viewer has inside it a copy of LibreOffice. And when you open a document, it throws the document at LibreOffice through LibreOffice Kit. LibreOffice then renders the document, throws it back a bitmap, and we display that on the screen. And you just move that around. So you scrolling the document is you moving a bitmap around the screen.

It's pretty amazing. And it does this all this in real time. Yeah. But you can throw it a bitmap and say, show me this part of the document. So if the user is zoomed in, you might want to show only the top left-hand corner

of the spreadsheet or something. So you tell LibreOfficeKit, here's the document, show only the top left-hand corner of the spreadsheet or something. So you tell LibreOfficeKit, here's the document. Show me the top left-hand corner of that document. And it will throw you back a bitmap only of that bit. And when you page down, it will render only the second page. And when you page down, it only renders the third page. So it's incredibly flexible what you can do with LibreOffice. And in some ways, more flexible than Microsoft Office.

And I think that's a good note to end on. Well, I guess this is another good note to end on. LibreOffice 5.0 launched in early August and has been the most successful major release ever, triggering an unprecedented 8,000 donations in just 30 days. Of course, the success had been reflected in the number of adoptions, which has soared. The icing on the cake has been the announcement

of the Italian defense organization, which will be migrating some 150,000 PCs to LibreOffice starting from October in 2015. You know, I think it was last month or the month before, actually, we went over into a clinic and we migrated their entire clinic over to LibreOffice. We went in and systematically removed Microsoft Office and switched them all over to LibreOffice. We went in and systematically removed Microsoft Office and switched them all over to LibreOffice. And along with LibreOffice, we had to move their

database, their main medical database over. And it had been hosted on a seven-year-old server. And the problem was it was slowing down and it was starting to crash or actually just unexpectedly shut off. And they didn't have the $2,000 plus to purchase a new machine. And even if they did have the money, they didn't have an in-house IT staff, which would have meant that we would have been quoting out either a service contract to come out and replace hard disks when they fail or add memory when it goes off or bring up backup internet when the when the when the fiber line fails and all those good things and we were actually able to solve all of their concerns for just 120 bucks a year over at digital ocean digital ocean if you're not familiar with them they're a vps that does servers linux servers in fact on demand it's kind of you

might say it's like the mcdonald's of fast food in the server world we move dozens of businesses over to digital ocean and just like when we move moved dozens of businesses over to DigitalOcean. And just like when we move a business from Windows over to Linux or move a business from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice, they never look back. In the two years that we've been moving people over to DigitalOcean, I don't think I've ever had a client that has told me they want to go back to buying servers and paying a yearly fee to maintain them. Their intuitive dashboard makes spinning up servers, or as they call them, droplets, super easy and efficient. At least once a week, I try

to spin something up just to play with something. I try to start up a new droplet and try something new just to kind of keep myself fresh and kind of keep myself exploring. I don't have the time to install an operating system on a bare metal box. It just takes too much time. Now, I'll give you a pro tip. If you go over and spin up a DigitalOcean droplet and you use the code DOUnplugged, D-O-U-N-P-L-U-G-D, all one word, all lowercase, you're going to get a $10 credit. That basically means you get the servers that I use all the time for two months for free. That's a $5 droplet with a terabyte of transfer, a 20 gigabyte solid state drive, and

512 megabytes of RAM. You know how to use Linux correctly? That gets you a long, long way. I have EMR databases running on it. I have a Mumble server running on it. I have an Airtime instance. I have my Quasicore running on it. I have the chat server that we were using

back when we were doing the video portion of the Linux Action Show. All of that stuff was running on a $5 droplet. So head over to DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code DOUnplugged. DOUnplugged, all lowercase, all one word. And you'll get $10 credit to spin up your own Linux rig for two months. I want to move on and talk about uh the ubuntu installer now um

things have things have uh things are changing in the ubuntu installer and the installer is called ubiquity uh wes have you seen this uh yeah i've used it i've used it a couple times so they are changing um the uh the the slideshow i understand have you read about this i was just reading about it this morning actually so the one thing that i have noticed is uh the first time i install a new distro or the first time i install uh what would be a new operating system, essentially, I'm paying attention to what's on the screen. I'm looking at how the UI elements are designed. I'm looking at the screen, the screen caps that they share and stuff like that. And I think it makes a lot of sense to

update a lot of the, a lot of the stuff that's inside of the installer, because I think that's the first impression a lot of people are getting with Ubuntu. Would you agree? Oh, yeah. And, you know, it's really that that first impression is so important. You really need to to lay it home that this is a modern operating system. You know, it's uncompromising on on all the kind of stuff that you would expect from it, that it's easy, that it welcomes you and that it's going to create a really good experience really from the get go. Yeah. So I have, a couple months ago, we were redoing the Angela's MacBook

because we were selling it on eBay. And one of the things that I noticed about it was it plays a video when you start up macOS. This is really one of the few times I've ever used macOS. But of all the things I didn't like about the operating system experience, I thought that was kind of cool

that it had like this welcome video and it showed like the hello in a couple different languages and stuff like that oh yeah i'm familiar with that have you seen that yeah it is pretty it is pretty slick you know it makes you makes you feel like you're already using the computer even though you haven't quite finished installing it yet yeah so i i thought that was kind of cool it was kind of like a welcome to your computer sort of a thing exactly since most of us are installing linux the installer and the images that come with the installer are what is greeting us to the operating system and um uh chris had put uh put some of these show notes together so i i'm not exactly sure uh i'm a little confused on a few of the details here, but I think that the graphical interface is really important.

I think it's kind of cool. Popey, do you have anything to add about Ubiquity and feedback that you guys get from it? So this was a surprise to me as well. So the design guys go and they mostly work in London, in the London office, Canonical they're canonical and um if you if you ever go into the london office if you're ever um lucky enough to go in there there's post-it notes all over the walls they're big on post-it notes there's loads of uh prototypes drawings and

mock-ups of you know user interfaces that may be in the future or might have been if we'd gone on a different path. And one of the things about the installer is, I'm not sure I agree with you. I think the installer, it may well be the first impression that people see of the distro. I believe that it shouldn't be because users shouldn't be installing Linux. They should be buying a machine that has Linux pre-installed, and therefore they wouldn't see the install process because it would come pre-installed. That's what happens with Windows. Nobody cares about the install process of Windows.

Nobody cares about the install process of OS X. Most of the time, users see the install process of Windows, or normal users. I'm not talking about your listenership, but your average Joe, the most that they're going to see the installer is looking over the shoulder of someone else doing it and therefore they don't care or um you know if they're being like super techie and someone told them to reinstall because you know their machine's completely hosed and that's the only way out right so i So I'm not sure that the installer is the best thing as the showcase.

However, what you will notice in the blog post that is on design.canonical.com about why the first impression matters, you'll notice that the screens that they've talked about changing are the ones that you see after an OEM install. So it's not the full install. It's not like the partitioning scheme and all that kind of wacky stuff that you and i know all about and can skip

through nice and happily right it's the stuff that an end user would see and the stuff that an end user would see on first run is okay what language do you want what wi-fi connection do you want to connect to what time zone are you in um do you want to set a password and do you want the yeah the system to lock and automatically unlock for you that kind of thing and and so i find it interesting that actually that kind of corroborates my perspective that the first thing that we should be showing people is a great experience out of the box when you buy a machine now i would love to see like a funky video like you say or you know something pretty that we can show a user you know when they first take their thing

out of the box because you know let's face it when people do unboxing videos they love these things when yeah you know when the when the nokia n900 uh prototype phones or early doctor phones were sent out, they came in a special box that had special buttons and you had to send code over a serial cable. And when the box opened, smoke came out. It was amazing. So that unboxing experience, it should feel special to everyone. I'm not saying we should provide smoke and stuff inside every laptop. And somewhat expensive. we should provide like smoke and stuff inside every laptop. Yeah. And Intel did with a NUX.

So you open it, it has a little Intel sound. Yeah. Oh yes. See that. And the exploding kittens card game that was on Kickstarter, that when you open the box, you hear,

you know, beautiful things that you get when you take the thing out of the box means you cherish the thing a little bit more and i think that's one of the factors why people who tend to buy apple products cherish them a lot more is because of that whole out of the box experience it makes you want to love it even more like you know going and picking a kitten up uh for the first time when you when you've like got a kitten from a rescue center or something when you pick it up for the first time you cherish it even more after that first meeting do you know what i mean right yes absolutely especially if it you know sometimes let's face it some people's

first introduction to ubuntu or linux in general is met after several hours of troubleshooting yes very much so right so the worst thing isn't it? It is, because then it is tainted, and the trust for the operating system is almost lost a little bit. So I definitely agree with what you're saying. Even the issues like the Apple thing is a good point, because the Apple boxes, they'll keep the boxes and display them because of just the way they present the out-of-the-box experience you know if there was something like that for the the ui or i don't know before you install something it like maybe they should put like the ubuntu has the demo where you can just like use ubuntu in the browser for a little bit and kind of experience it that way if they put that more give more attention to that well in fact it's

interesting you should say that um in china i think you do actually get that out of the box we there was a there was a government directive i believe that in china many years ago that was you know when you ship a machine you have to provide some kind of tutorial out of the box because a lot of the people who are buying these things are farmers out in the middle of nowhere and they've had net they've never bought a computing device before in their life and they've got no idea what to do when you turn it on and that and that's not unique to ubuntu you know any computer they turn it on and they wouldn't know what to do in the same way that a farmer from the middle of america or middle of uk wouldn't know what to do if they never touched a computer before um but and so we did used to put i don't know if we still do the the web-based tutorial on um machines that

were shipping in china and in fact dell are i think on the xps 13 i don't have one i've never bought one but i'm led to believe there is a funky little video at the start of that and i believe dell made that we didn't we didn't create that and it doesn't ship on the cd and it's not on anyone else's like if you buy a lenovo you don't get that video so there is there is a you know a move towards making that whole out the box experience a little bit better well that's good that's good to hear now i have been automating my home uh for some time and joining us in the Mumba Room, we have a very special guest. Anna is here.

Good afternoon, sir. How are you? Good afternoon. I'm fine. Thank you. So tell me a little bit about CrowdStone. Yeah, so what we created here in Rotterdam, like one of the harbors in Europe, of course,

is a little device that you can plug into a power outlet, which is completely open source. So it can be hacked by anyone who likes a little bit of the firmware hacking. And what it does is actually two kinds of things at the same time. does is actually two kind of things at the same time. Of course, you can dim lights and you can switch devices and things like that, like the usable home automation stuff. But it also has proximity and indoor localization functionality. It does that by knowing how far your phone is. So it measures the distance to your phone. And at the same time, it also has device recognition on board. So if you plug in your TV or something else, it knows what the difference is between those devices using the consumption pattern over the day.

Wow. Wow. That's crazy. It can identify the device, huh? Absolutely. Yeah. So we use multiple ways to do that so one of the first the simple ways is actually just using the power consumption itself of course but you can also see the pattern over time my background is robotics so i i use a lot of algorithms we have been developing over the time and um so over if you use a collection of reclassifiers, they can use all kinds of features, for example, temporal features or other kinds of features. You can collect them and collectively they are able to distinguish a lot of devices. And there is a third way you can use, and that is, say, every device leaves a kind of a signature on the grid. So if you plug in a LED LED light, you will have some signature that is different from if you plug in a normal light bulb.

And you can use that on a single sine wave. You can already see what the difference is between certain devices. Now, I understand that this device can actually recognize a certain form of rudimentary logic. So, for example, if my TV, I don't unplug it. It just sits in the living room and stays there. So if I were to unplug my TV, that would be a bit unusual. How does your device respond? So if I were to unplug my TV, that would be a bit unusual.

How does your device respond? Yeah, so these are the kind of events we want to be able to register. So if you would unplug your TV at night, it's probably the kind of event you want to receive as the owner of the building or of the home or the apartment. If it's your microwave that gets plugged out, you probably don't need to know it. Tell me a little bit about how the child lock feature works. How does it know if there are adults in proximity or not know if adults are in proximity? Oh, yeah, that was a it's a nice feature i was actually uh we had a group of 50

students that were working on our product uh undercover so to say uh in rotterdam and one of those groups were coming up with this feature and i was first like yeah but i don't want to have children carrying phones with them but it was the other way around. So it was really parents that are walking around. And when they are in proximity, certain devices can be turned on. When they are not, they are not turned on. And the proximity detection is just by using the Bluetooth low energy signal strengths that are already on your phone. So basically by measuring kind of, say, between three or five meters, something like that, it should be on.

If it's beyond that, it should be off. Now, I understand that we're kind of in early days here. In fact, you have a kickstarter over crownstone um dot rocks is that correct yeah so if you go there yeah you will uh automatically can go uh you will have one go button and you can go down to the kickstarter tell me uh at some point uh will there be a way that i can integrate this inside of the box because i know one of the things i'm seeing right off the the top of my head is I would be perfectly okay with this.

My wife, however, is not going to appreciate a protruding object from the outlet. If this project takes off, maybe an iteration two or three, would there be a way that we can get this so it actually replaces the wall outlet itself? There is one version that you can actually put behind behind the power outlet so that's awesome yeah yeah yeah so um you should have enough space of course there is a little bit of space required uh in your junction box but uh yeah then for the for the for your wife or so nothing changes you can just turn on and off the lights and you can basically rule it over

kind of by doing it wirelessly and then she will be like, oh, it's not going on, but she will probably flip it another time and then for her, not so much changes. She can still use the physical switch.

That sounds fantastic. Now you said that all of this was designed with open source in mind. Tell me how I can interface to this device. I get the little plug. I assume there's some way that I can program it to tell it, I want you to act as a child locker. I want you to act as a motion detector. I want you to act

in this way or the other. How do I go about actually programming the device? Yeah, we decided to actually put a lot of logic or the other. How do I go about actually programming the device? Yeah, yeah. We decided to actually put a lot of logic onto the smartphone. So first of all, we have open firmware, so you can do everything on the device itself if you want to. But that is a better device, so it's difficult to program for certain people.

It has 16 kilobytes of RAM. It's like the radio takes up 10 kilobytes, so it's very little space you have on a device like that. You won't be able to run JavaScript or something. So our Bluetooth of Energy interface basically is an API that people can use from whatever kind of device they have, a laptop with Python scripts or Raspberry Pi or things like that. But the main advantage is also that we provide libraries on the smartphone, different ones, so Cordova-based and iOS and Android based so they can actually write

applications like they normally do for smart like smartphone apps and they can directly interface with those groundstones from their phones yeah what's also different from normal or different Kickstarters, quite often they stream everything to a server, like for example the Fitbit or something like that. You cannot actually get your own data out except via REST API online. We decided to do it directly on your phone, so you really can get your own data. You don't need to go through a company server or things like that. Oh, that's awesome. So there's no centrally activated service. See, that would be my first line that would rule me out of your product is if you told me,

well, there's a little serial number and you have to go to our website and activate it. And then use our web portal to program it and stuff like that. You're telling me basically if I really wanted to, if I got nitty-gritty, I could actually plug in with a serial cable and program this thing with my laptop. Yeah, we will also add a pledge for developer edition with separate connectors. But in a moment, you will need to do it over the air.

So we have Bluetooth low. Yeah, so we have the amputee, yeah. How does the over-the-air programming work if I want to do it directly on the device? You spoke about being able to do that. Or are the two mutually exclusive? No, so via wires, you need connectors on it. But the default is that you can do it wirelessly. And you can do it via, say, a standard application that's already on the market. Or you can do it actually also via shell scripts, Python scripts.

Now, there's a lot of home automation type equipment that is already prevalent in the market. So, for example, Universal Remote Controls or URC, they have templates on how to talk to other devices either via TCP IP or over RF. I assume because it's an open standard, that should be a pretty simplistic thing. That should be a pretty rudimentary thing for me to tie um your device into uh my remote control is that right yeah absolutely any any kind of hub that exists that has bluetooth low energy and it doesn't even need to have that because there are a lot of switch uh like little dongles available for only a few bucks and then, it's very basic to hook up to other stuff. Absolutely. Wes, do you have any questions about this smart socket?

I'm just really impressed with how open it appears. You know, a lot of the other platforms that we're seeing in this kind of space are so closed off. A lot of them, if you download the SDK, you have to sign an agreement that you won't use it to, you know, create interoperability with other products. So the idea here that we it to, you know, create interoperability with other products. So the idea here that we could just, you know, you could take something that you've already bought or maybe, you know, someone you're installing this for is already has some sunk costs and then just create something to bridge it and, and take advantage of this is awesome.

And I think it's one of the best things going for it. Yeah, absolutely. The fact that it's open really appeals to me. How about our mumble room? Do you guys have any questions, comments, concerns? Yeah, if your laptop has Bluetooth, for example, can you use your laptop to interface with the device? Yeah, absolutely. Your laptop is fine as well. Myself, I'm only using Linux, so I don't know how it works on Windows.

He knows how to get our interest. Yeah, no kidding, man. You just earned yourself 10 character points. Yeah. And as a hobby, I have been actually backing a lot of Kickstarter projects. And most often, if I cannot get to the data, I try to do it myself. So with the Fitbit or or the the maymoto camera thing or whatever um but i find it a pain that they make it so closed so that's why we really wanted to make this product so open it really shows that's that's great i uh if you you really

probably should check out that video uh where we go through the house and go through how everything works. One of the things I demoed is my scene selector in my house where I can hit the bedtime mode and it turns all the lights down so I can kind of wind down at night. One of the things I've done is I used to watch TV. I actually got back into Walker, Texas Ranger, the show from the 90s. And I like that show because it was light. I could watch it. I could wind down for a little bit and I would go to bed. Take for contrast 24. ranger the show from the 90s um and i like that show because it was light like i could i could watch it i could wind down for a little bit and i would go to bed is take for contrast 24 if you watch an episode of 24 you have to watch what happens to jack in the next episode and so what

ends up happening is it's like seven in the morning and you're like oh crap i didn't sleep all night because i sat up all night watching 24 lately i have been winding down with a new hobby and that is i'm learning how to develop apps on Android. Very cool. Yeah, I know. I know. But here's the thing. I know what some people are saying.

The chat room is about to freak out, and the mumble room is about to freak out and say, no, you're not a dev. You're a sysadmin. And I know that. I know that. But with a 33% discount over at linuxacademy.com slash unplugged i can't think of a more cost effective way to relax at night and i've had a blast uh being able to go through those modules and you know i'm a little bit add if you haven't picked up on that yet was uh and so i zone out every once in a while like if i'm listening to somebody talk and i try i mean like bless my wife's heart she is so good at

putting up with this she'll she'll start to me, and I have every intention of listening to all the words that come out of her mouth, and then, like, three minutes into it or five minutes into it, I just, I, like, I fade off, and I just, I go into la-la land, and then it's lost. And with Linux Academy, I can go back and re-watch some of that stuff that I missed.

And, Wes, I gotta tell you, when I first got into IT, I remember how expensive things were, how expensive things were to get trained remember how expensive things were, how expensive things were to get trained, how expensive things were to get certified. Yeah, it's a huge roadblock if you're trying, you know, you're just trying to get started out in this industry. It really is. It really is because you're competing with a bunch of people that are on a different playing field. They're essentially on a different level than you are. And you can do that for pennies on

the dollar over at linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Do you know what opportunity cost is? Opportunity cost is the price that you pay for not getting that job because you didn't have the training and you didn't have the certification because you're not at linuxacademy.com slash unplugged taking advantage of literally a third of the cost reduction.

And the cost isn't even all that expensive to begin with, even at full price. I think with the, I think with the discount, I think my whole month of training for Android worked out to be like 15 bucks or 16 bucks or something. Oh man, that's nothing. Yeah. Yeah. It really isn't. It's really cheap. And even without the discount, it was only like 25 bucks, I think.

Um, so I mean, this is the way if way, if you're listening to the show and you're listening and saying, you know, I really want to do what Noah does. I really like the idea that Noah doesn't ever have to troubleshoot Microsoft Windows. I mean, I just don't do that. If you want to get yourself a career started in Linux or using open source and related technologies, this is the way to do it. First, you have to get current with the technologies and there's no better way to do that by taking a professional online course. You know, you can do the YouTube thing

where Joe Blow in his basement makes a little video with a handy cam and you hear his baby sister crying in the background and his mother calling him up for dinner and the dog is barking. You can do all that, but go spend a couple of dollars and get yourself some professional training and then get certified. And they offer,

they really, really do a good job with someone like the Red Hat certification. So that's a great certification. I know that anytime I have somebody that sits down in my office and when their resume slides across my desk and if I see that Red Hat cert, man, that cert means something to me because I know that they have practical skills. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Take advantage of that 33% discount while you can. Over at ZD article that is looking at OpenSUSE Leap. Have you seen this, Wes? You know, only just a little bit.

So the current stable release of open seuss is 13.2 and that came out on november 4th of 2014 um the next release is scheduled to be available november 4th november excuse me november 4th of 2015 exactly one year later and the new release will not be called 13.3 or 14 dot, you know, whatever. But rather, it's going to be called 42.1. 42.1. And so, appropriately, they're codenaming this Leap. The reason for the name slash number change and the extra attention that this release is getting is that they are making a philosophical change in the development and release strategy.

The reasons for this change and the results of it are discussed on the OpenSUSE Leap wiki page. A lot of the discussion has been focused on OpenSUSE getting merged with SUSE Linux, Enterprise Linux, but I think it's important to note, this is the author speaking, not me, but I think it's important to note that this is more of a two-way street than it is. In fact, as it is explained in the wiki, what happened, what enabled the merge was that SLE sources and maintained updates have been released to the OpenSUSE build service.

Now, in theory, this is ideally what I as a Linux desktop user have been waiting for, a commercial enterprise Linux distro that is centered around the Linux desktop user have been waiting for a commercial enterprise Linux distro that is centered around the Linux desktop. I, I, the, I seem to be stuck on,

on two sides. Either I get bleeding edge and things aren't really ready for enterprise and I have problems or I wind up with really, really old outdated packages and there doesn't seem to be a middle ground and that seems to be what they're aiming to solve here. And I got to say, their desktop experience in the past has been really good. So this gives me a lot of hope. OpenSUSE in the past has been one of those distros

that I know I can just install on someone's machine and they will have all the resources there that they need to use it and to explore and to, you know, in the same way that they could use windows that that they'll be able to solve all the problems to make all the changes they might need you know wes i don't know if you've noticed this either but when i move people over from uh from windows to linux a lot of times um for whatever reason they are very comfortable in open source as opposed to a lot of the other alternative distros out there. And I haven't exactly been able to put my finger on why that is.

I suspect it has a lot to do with KDE, to be honest with you. I think that Windows users kind of gravitate towards having a bar at the bottom where they click on a button that gives them a menu. Yeah, I think there is something there. And YAST goes a ways too. Yeah, and so I think that Yast goes a long ways. Yeah, man, does it ever, especially if you are a former Windows administrator.

I think that's going to go a long ways. But I'm looking at this OpenSUSE Leap, and the screen caps that I'm looking at are absolutely awesome. I am really looking forward to taking a look at some of this and playing with this. In fact, so much so that I've actually dedicated an entire machine to this, and it's going to be my main machine for the rest of the week. And I'm going to take a look and see what it is that Open susan's offering and see if it appeals to me because like i said on paper as i'm reading it this is what i have been waiting for i i mean quite honestly i guess i've kind of been waiting for red hat to do it simply because then i would have um

you know it would be like this nice easy transition right it's your home turf already right right and since i'm already administrating red hat servers and i just it would have been kind of nice but this seems like they are you know they're really cracking down and aiming i am their target audience i feel like i am the person that this is is writing that this is written for and it also seems like they're also targeting uh arm guys which is really really encouraging because you're seeing those arm devices becoming more and more prevalent and lower and lower cost. And I think that's a big deal.

That's a huge deal. You know, it goes with the whole Linux way. If you can get a cheap, easy processor and you know that Linux will just run on it and OpenSUSE has got that huge build service, so you know that they're ready to build any open source software that can be for your platform, then, you know, you can build the whole solution on that. Yeah, that's the promise. Have you used the Open Build service? Yeah, I think it's great.

I've used it to find supported packages. I've used it when I'm using OpenSUSE. And then as well, it seems to support other distributions as well, random projects that use it to supply, to build different packages for all kinds of things. Yeah, it builds for Ubuntu Debs, Debian Debs, RPMs for both SUSE and Fedora and Magia, and it also builds for Arch packages

and a couple other things as well. Yeah, I love that Arch package integration. That's just great. Yeah, I've actually, the only thing is is that it has a custom spec file you have to learn how to use. But so basically you build a script using their spec file and then it will upload your source to their servers and they build out everything for you it's it's pretty awesome and i wish more people would use it

you say it's actually better than i think uh via tubbleweed could you expand on that a little bit yeah what i was saying is that uh people are thinking that it's it's it's more like a work station thing but it's actually a more cohesive sharing structure of what they're going for. So like they're having, SLEE has released all of their stuff for the OBS so that the OpenSUSE can have, they can spend less time on OpenSUSE stable or the regular version and more time on Tumbleweed. And because of this, SUSE has a deal sort of thing structured where OpenSUSE's base is going to be based on SLEE.

Then OpenSUSE is going to do extra stuff on top of that to do more up-to-date packages and provide a more user experience for the average user. But they're also doing Tumbleweed. And Tumbleweed is the rolling release, like the Arch thing. And in certain cases, you know, people always talk about how Arch gets things faster. But Tumbleweed actually is getting stuff faster. I haven't tested for 3.18, but they got GNOME 3.16 in before Arch did,

and like stable and running and everything. And they're doing things that are really impressive in this sense. But another cool thing is that Tumbleweed is going to be the base for SLE in the future. So every three years or so, Tumbleweed is going to be like snapshotted, and then that becomes SLE, which then comes back into the workstation type structure for OpenSUSE for Leap. So you'd get Tumbleweed Snap, Snapshot, then you get SLEE, then you take SLEE stuff, put it into Leap again, and then it keeps this whole cycling structure of OpenSUSE.

Like, just everything is shared between the enterprise version and the workstation and the rolling. In certain cases, for example, every year SLE does a service pack. That will also be instituted into the LEAP packages, so you even get a yearly update as well as just, you know, the whole, you know, stuff sitting on top of it. You're not getting just OpenSUSE editing things and giving you more up-to-date packages. You're also getting SUSE Enterprise updates as well as the OpenSUSE updates and the Tumbleweed updates. That sounds very slick, like a leaner, meaner Debian plus enterprise backend.

Kind of the best of all worlds. That's impressive. It does. It sounds like not only is it the best of all worlds, it sounds like somebody is sitting there going, what does Noah want as a Linux distro? And then that's what they're making. You don't think those people exist, Noah? Come on.

I'd like to believe that they do. I am comfortable in a multitude of different Linux distros. I am comfortable on CentOS. I'm comfortable on Ubuntu. I'm comfortable on Fedora. I'm comfortable on Arch. SUSE and OpenSUSE is maybe the one, one of the, one of the few main distros that I haven't used extensively. And this article is really making me reconsider that, like, big time.

I'm downloading the ISO at home right now. Yeah. There's actually something you should check out. Another thing that's going to, there will be a lot of people don't even know about it, but it's open Sousa built the open RA system. So it's like a automated testing structure and it's that's the, I just put the link in the chat room.

This is a cool thing because they're, they're thing because they're not only just doing leap testing. They're doing tumbleweed testing with this. They're working on slea testing as well. And the coolest thing is that if you look at a test, I'm going to send you a link for that too. If you look at one of the tests, it goes through the process of automating it, and then it shows you a screenshot of every single test and whether it passed it or not. And this is a beta one, so there

are a couple fails, but this is one of the beta builds. And it goes through the entire installation process, the entire setting up GNOME, the running GNOME, testing different applications in GNOME, and it gives you this full automated testing thing, and it shows you where it works and where it doesn't and if that wasn't cool enough they actually made

a video version of it so every single test has a video attached to it you can watch the test just run that seems awesome it really does um i'm gonna have to i'm more of a hands-on learner so i'm i'm following 90 of what you're saying but i think to have to, I'm more of a hands-on learner. So I'm following 90% of what you're saying, but I think to really get the full scale of it, what I'm going to have to do is play with it. And so, like I said, I actually have a laptop that is dedicated to trying all this out as soon as I get home tonight. And so I'm going to be playing with it the rest of the week and I'll have to report back in and tell you what you think. And Wes, you said you're considering doing the same, huh?

Yeah, you know, I've been looking for a replacement. I've been using Linux Mint on my workstation, mostly because that was one of the provided images when I was hired. But it's feeling a little, you know, I've got the distro hop and itch, like many of us do. So I think this would be a great thing to try out and see if I can use it as my day-to-day at work. Yeah.

Anyone else in the mumble room have any thoughts on the OpenSUSE situation, story, release? Anyone else going to try it? I'm already trying it. I've got one machine running, Tumbleweed, and I haven't tried Leap yet, but I do plan on trying Leap

as well. But Tumbleweed is just impressive. And especially with the OBS in conjunction with Tumbleweed, you get, like, it's not really like a PBA. So, like, you know, it's not an alternative to PBA. It's not like the exact same thing. But it is very similar, and you get a lot of packages up to date as well. So it's a really good experience. You should try

both if you're interested in just seeing what SUSE is doing with all this and OpenSUSE is doing. It is really cool. Another cool thing is that they have turned... You should look at their installer. Their installer is

nice it looks great and it's all in curses oh really i love in curses that's awesome it it looks it looks like a real it's like a regular installer like a gui installer and it is presented like a gui but it is all through in curses and it's all like i'm pretty sure it's all based on yast so it's like yes it's handling it all it is really slick and it it is also like super fast and lightweight when it runs and like it's kind of like it's it's kind of so cool it's hard to actually describe it so i'm so excited what seuss is doing yeah it do you uh it is rubbing off yeah and yeah and so Yeah, and so I'm going to have to try it and report back. And like I said, it's a little bit hard to conceptualize all this stuff, especially because

a lot of the associated services with OpenSUSE don't mean a lot to me because I haven't really used it a whole lot. I tried to implement it one time in a commercial setting, And I ran into the first little problem I ran into. I'm not even necessarily blaming OpenSUSE. It was just, it was a dumb little problem that I had. And I just said, just went to Ubuntu. And that was probably a little unfair. And in hindsight, maybe that was a little foolish and short-sighted, but I'm going to give it a real whirl and report back. Now I have a request from the community and from everyone else. We are looking for runs Linux. We are looking for,

for really cool and unique runs Linux. Um, we are looking for a picture or a video of something that runs Linux. Um, we see the things that like in restaurants and stuff and, and that's super cool. And if you see those, please send those in.

But if you have something unique, especially if you are part of a project like the, like the guy that wrote in that did the school bill. Oh, I love that one. Yeah. Wasn't that cool? Super cool. I mean, that is that combines everything that is cool.

It combines open hardware. It combines open software. It combines a maker and you put education, education. You get all this stuff together and you get something really cool out of it. I know that you guys are out there. I know that you guys that are doing cool runs Linux people. I know you guys are out there. I know that you guys that are doing cool runs Linux people. I know you guys are out there. So I want you to upload a video to YouTube or submit a link via the subreddit or email Linux action show at Jupiter broadcasting.com or go to

Jupiter broadcasting.com. Click on the contact link and choose Linux section show from the dropdown menu and let us know about your runs Linux. We really, really want to hear it. Also, the network is could really use your support. Um, patron.com slash today. I want to hear it. Also, the network could really use your support. Patreon.com slash today. I want to make a plea with you guys to think about supporting the network. If you're not supporting the network, I know that there's a wide variety of opinions on the current show lineup and the current way that we're doing the shows. Um, but the way I have always looked at contributing to the network was I pay my cable bill and I pay 80, $90. And, um, I'd flipped through the channels and some of the shows I

liked and some of the shows I didn't like, and some of the episodes of the shows I liked and some of the episodes, the shows I didn't like. And at the end of the day, I still paid my cable bill because it was a flat fee. And right now, the network is in need of you guys to step up and help out. So if you can afford it, we would really appreciate your support. Patreon.com slash today. If you like the content, if you like what you're hearing,

and I assume you do if you're listening to the episode, throw the network a couple dollars. Every dollar goes a long, long way, and we would really appreciate it. And if you get to swag level sponsorship, I just have to tell you, I feel like it's Christmas. The other day, Angela sent me this really cool like Jupiter Broadcasting pin. Oh, I'm jealous already. I know. It's so good. Like I like ding dong, the door rings and I go up to the door and here's the mail guy.

And I'm like, but I didn't order a package. I did not spend any of my hard earned money. Why am I getting this? And I rip it open. And then there's like, there's a little, there's a, there's a little treat in there. And I've gotten, I've gotten mouse pads and I've gotten, I've gotten coffee mugs and there's, there's all sorts of things. And I don't know, you know, I see sometimes some of the cool stuff that they're thinking of sending out or trying to work out sending out. It just it's a cool thing to do. So if you can get to swag level supportership, if that's something that's in the budget for you, I highly recommend it. It's super, super fun. And it's really rewarding to know that for literally half the cost of what it would cost you for direct TV or half the cost of what it would cost you for cable TV, you're supporting a, uh, you know, you're supporting a, a small, a small business.

Plus all that product for Chris's hair. It just doesn't buy itself. No kidding. Right. We got to pay for that as a community. He does. And, and he, and you know, even living in the RV, I was a little worried. I was a little worried, Wes, when he showed up and he was talking about like doing the

dry shampoo. I'm like, what if, what if all his hair fell out? And like he's the network depends. I know it's a huge deal. And so when he stepped out of the camper for the first time, I was holding my breath and I'm like, and I knock and then he opens the door and there's Hairmaster Chris. Patreon.com slash today. Really, really, really would appreciate it if we could get some supporters. Let's do this. Let's open this up in a browser and let's look. Let's see what we can accomplish as a team. How many patrons does he have right now? Right now he has 554. Let's see if we can just get to 560.

I like round numbers. Do you ever do that thing where you go to the gas station and you squirt a little bit of gas into the car and you have to bump it up to the next dollar just so it's a nice even amount? It's like a fun little game. I know. Yeah. So let's see if we can get it to exactly 560. And so Chris wakes up and goes, oh,

that's kind of cool. Look at what the podcast based on the community was able to accomplish. I think that would be super cool. Agreed. And, you know, I always look forward to the next program. You know, it's something that I kind of define my week with is JB Podcasts. And I know a lot of you guys do, too.

So it really doesn't take very much to keep Chris going. No. No, it really doesn't. And like I said, every dollar goes a long, long way. Also, join us Friday for the Linux Action Show. Now, I can't tell you what we're going to talk about. Top secret. Yeah, but I can tell you that in order to pull it off,

we are going to need some Coca-Cola, some beef jerky, a blanket, a USB drive, and I gave Chris a dedicated laptop before he left Grand Forks. So make sure you tune in and you can see what we have planned. It's going to be absolutely awesome. And you can use tune in and you can see what we have planned. It's going to be absolutely awesome. And you can use your imagination and see what you can come up with. Wes, is there anything you want to say

before we get out of here? No, just that it's been a pleasure co-hosting with you, Noah. Yeah, I really appreciate it. We should do this more often. I really think we should. Who needs Chris anyway? Yeah, why I need Chris.

Oh, wait, never mind. But he can go on vacation every once in a while and enjoy himself, and we can hang out. That brings us to the end of this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We should be at our usual time next week. Go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to keep an eye on that. Chris may change a couple things while he's on the road. If you have feedback about the show, jupiterbroadcasting.com,

click on the contact link and choose Linux Unplugged from the drop down menu. Also, if you miss Hairmaster Chris, follow him on Twitter at Chris LAS or go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash rover to see where he is right this second. You can follow me on Twitter at Colonel Linux. Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. A special thank you to our producer, Michael Tunnell, and our Mumble team. We'll see you right back here next week. that's a wrap great show everyone such a pleasure having all these wonderful people.

Oops. I hit the wrong button, Wes. I hit the wrong button. And so then I couldn't hear your voice in my ear hole. What will you do without my beautiful voice, Noah? I know. I know. All right.

Now it's time to go to jbtitles.com. JBTitles. I think I get to pick the title today. I think I do. Oh, what an honor. Yeah. Oh. Yeah.

I know. I know. We're in trouble, gang. That makes me sad when I see things like a title today. I think I do. What an honor. Yeah, I know. We're in trouble, gang. That makes me sad when I see things like a title that says, Who Needs Chris? That's so sad. I would miss the hair master. I would start crying.

If I didn't hear from him for a week, I think it would cry. It would make me sad. Open source power outlets. That's not bad. End user dilemma. Oh, man. We don't have many you know what now i know why chris says bang suggest all the way throughout the episode now i know you gotta go the audience yeah if you don't you get 12 title suggestions and who doesn't want to say bang suggest who doesn't want to say bang suggest? Who doesn't want to say bang suggest? I think we could have a lot of fun with Godmode. This is Noah in Godmode. Bang suggest inside of the chat room to come up with excellent titles that we can vote at jbtitles.com.

Ultimate Linux podcast. In a world where no one has submitted any titles. Why does every single advertisement for a movie always start with in a world? Like, we don't live in other worlds. We all live in the same world. Maybe that's the fantasy draw. Maybe. All right, we need titles, guys.

We need titles. Maybe it's a multi-universe type thing. No one got more to open source your power outlets. Open source your power outlets isn't bad, especially because of the title. Yeah. So do we like open source power outlets or open source your power outlets? Maybe not your just because it's shorter. Okay.

All right. So open source power outlets is winning by 7 votes well by 4 votes total 7 I mean either one I think are great not to say just because I did them but either one unbiased rotten

as always protect the beard I was focusing more moving you guys around than anything else thank you yes thank you very much i really really really appreciate it because um with the way that the setup is if i if i if i if somebody would have talked in the mumble room i would reach over and mute the mumble room but then that would mute west and there's no way for me to separate west unless you put us into our own separate uh our own separate channel don't worry we got this yeah you guys are amazing just

just amazing did you like my thank you to you rotten corpse at the end yeah that was fantastic um all right open source power outlets is the winner i declare it as a winner because it has to be because uh it has the most votes out of everything. Oh, you know what? I'm not going to say it. I'll say it. I'll say it before we get up there, but I won't say it right now. OK, what are we going to talk about for a post show? We're going to talk about the open QA dot open source dot or open Seuss dot org. But I didn't know that we've got there already.

I didn't know that we've got there already i didn't know that was a faux show impressions there oh yeah no it doesn't matter we there's tons of things to talk about what else should we talk about guys uh it's up to you mumble hey uh thanks for the meetup shout out yeah thank you so much all right let's talk well i guess that was kind of the pre-out. Yeah, thank you so much. All right, let's talk. Well, I guess that was kind of the pre-show topic. But yeah, thank you so much for making the time to be at the meetup. It would be really cool to get up and do that every once in a while. I think that should be a thing. Yeah, and since I assume Chris isn't going to hear this part, I'm not going to break it to him that they spelled my name wrong.

They spelled your name wrong? Oh, yeah. The Rover Rambler. I didn't leave a card that says my name is Reed with an I. Oh. Okay, it'll be our secret. It's not like it's going out over the air or anything. So nobody will ever know.

So there's one thing. This is more of an interesting topic more or less, but it's not really – I guess it's perfect for post-show, I guess. But there's some new stuff with the Devil's Canyon stuff and the new hardware stuff for running virtualization pass-through. So you have the hardware acceleration and everything in a virtual machine. So you could use something like KVM or you could use BERT Manager or whatever. And I think even VirtualBox has this. So you can play Windows games inside of a virtual machine with your hardware and everything.

So it feels like a full – you have a full machine. You basically have everything you absolutely need and even like 60 frames per second games and stuff running now. Are they using like KVM passthrough for that? Yeah, there's Kvm pass through and uh well it's pci pass through but you basically get access to your graphics card and you get the full uh processor ability so it limits like your main host but if you're playing a game it doesn't matter but it gives you like the full access to all of your hardware and only like the latest like from haswell and newer has these like these features like pretty solid but you need to have a motherboard and the processor needs to support it.

Right, both need to support it or otherwise it won't work. What is it? Intel? Is it VTD? Yeah, I think so. Yes, VTD. I've always had this crazy idea that I could have one physical machine that sits in my basement and then have like four video cards and then a KVM switch. So I could KVM through my different computers, but they're all physically one machine. I don't know how realistic that is,

but I dream. Maybe not two, definitely possibly three or might be a little bit over the top. Don't push your luck. Noah. Well, I just, it's,

you know, separation is so nice. Like, even things for different tasks, the amount of times that I have thanked myself for having a separate video production computer than everything else, it's not because video production is so, like, it's not like I can multitask doing video production. Either I'm editing video or I'm not, but

the mere fact that it's on a separate machine means that I can slide my chair over, get a little bit of work done, and if I have to do something else, I go to a different machine to do it. Not only am I not interrupting my workflow, but I don't wind up with extra junk on my machine. Like I don't wind up with a Thunderbird with misconfigured email accounts because the password changed, but I hadn't opened it in a year or so that, you know, it just didn't work or something like that. And they don't wind up with, you know, weird files and, and, and my huge long list offox bookmarks on my video editing machine all i have

is resources for editing videos and as we know in your life everything changes pretty much all the time so yes it's probably essential to have some a little firewall where you can say this is this is the purpose and it stays that way and i i change it only when needed wes i call it an add firewall ah perfect it it's a firewall for ADD and helps me separate things out into separate machines. No, no, no. You have a toy machine over there. Don't install that package yet. That's the one with the shiny stuff on it.

Exactly. But yeah, so that has been where I have found that's been hugely helpful to be able to compartmentalize stuff. And if I could, the problem is it's very, very expensive to buy different machines to do multiple different things yeah boy the number of computers you have that's um right brings a tear to my eye yeah well there you know you see you need a kvm switch with a keyboard and mouse shut off so it limits the uh access to that machine well if i had so if i i could pass through so the kvm switch will give me four USB connectors, right? And four video connectors. And so I could plug all four video, I could plug all four, um, KVM connectors into the, the computer. And I'm hoping there would be a way that I could

tell it this USB plug is only passed through to this computer. And this one is only passed to this computer. And I, I don't know, i might end up having to use separate uh like little pci you know cards with a separate usb controller huh to be able to get that to work oh you know what i just saw somebody on youtube that did this um is that logitech has what the heck they call it it's the mouse that has like multiple um bluetooth dongles and a switch on the bottom of the mouse like you can go back and forth oh that is awesome and like you know it's intended to be able you can plug um you can um pair with two different computers but you plug the usb dongle into the same computer and then um pair the usb port thatgle's plugged into your KVM, then you've

got the same mouse that's paired with two different machines on the same physical host. It's like a hardware synergy. You know what's funny? You took the words right out of my mouth. Those are my words now. Yeah, yeah. That's right about what I was going to say. It's like what i look

for with synergy and uh except not in synergy um well that'll be really cool i will have to keep an eye on that it's something that uh it's something that i really think i could put into practice again it's i'm going to run up against that problem of since i have a working solution exactly i'm gonna have i'm gonna have to pry myself away anything else anyone wants to add into the post show before we get out of here? Well, the reason I brought up the hardware thing is because it creates a potential discussion topic

of when Linux adoption is something that's really hard to do right now for forever, basically, because trying to convince them about these certain applications, blah, blah, blah. Do you think it would be better and that Linux would be more likely to kind of take over the world

if, you know, there was prepackaged applications that you could just run instead of having to see, oh, does it support it? It doesn't matter. Your virtual machine has an app. Instead of a Rhine wrapper, we have a virtual machine wrapper, and all you do is install this, and there you go. I've done that on a basic scale for my parents before

where I had a Windows application listening for a file at startup, and I would have a shortcut on the Linux desktop for when my mom, for instance, would need to use Microsoft Office for a certain document once in a while that she could pass it, open it up just like a regular application. It would open the virtual machine. The virtual machine would know to open Word.

So I think there's something there. Long-term solution, maybe not, but it could be a really good you know a wrapper for someone who wants to transition but still requires a certain amount of window specific you know i keep coming back to i just i really hope i'm not wrong on this but i'm really hoping that as we move forward that web-centric applications begin to take more dominance and as that happens the need for a compatibility layer just kind of drops i mean hopefully yeah but the web layer can't really work with the hardware that well yeah that's true

something has to talk to the hardware you're right so there's there's certain things like i don't know it's kind of like the web apps have like i use web apps a lot and they're great in certain cases and they're awful in other cases yeah so they're awful in other cases. Yeah. So stuff like WebGL are making that a lot better, but I think that there's, you know, I don't want web apps to become the norm. I would like them to become a novelty, that it's a very highly used novelty. Yep, yep. I'm right there with you, Rotten Corpse. I really am.

I have seen web apps. I have always looked at them as a necessary evil. I would prefer that my software run locally, but if I have my choice between running the software on Linux in a web browser or running Windows software only, if I have to pick between those two, I'll take the web software every time. Yeah, I would agree with that. Windows users migrate to web software.

Linux will keep our awesome desktop applications. Yeah, exactly. See, now we're on the money. We can agree with that. Windows users migrate to web software. Linux will keep our awesome desktop applications. Yeah, exactly. See, now we're on the money. We can agree on that.