LINUX Unplugged - Episode 127: Sorry, I don't do Windows | LUP 127

Episode Date: January 13, 2016

We react to Remix OS and give it a go on a few of our machines, discuss the surprise feature in KDE 5.6 & chat with some of the folks behind SCALE 14x.Plus how to tell family and friends you're not the Geek Squad, we get our filesystem geek on & using tech support opportunities to be an open source ambassador.

Before we get into the show, I'm glad Wimpy's here because I bet he's noticed this. Wimpy, have you noticed that there is a trend online now to just do a screencast of Linux distros and put some music to it? Have you noticed some of my posts? Here is Exhibit A, Ubuntu Mate 16.04. Here is Exhibit B. Also very Mate 1604. Here is Exhibit B. Also very dramatic, yeah. I like this one. And then, of course, here is C right here.

Here's a good one. Yeah. And, of course, you can put, like, elementary in there. You can put solos in there. You'll see all kinds of stuff come up. Like, this is, like, a thing now. You've missed my favorite genre. Oh, what's that?

Which is the this is the voice synthesized reading oh i have seen some of these site yeah so you get these screen caps with a computer yeah it's yeah and it's bad too it's usually not so good is there an audience for this is this something i should be doing here because i no okay your audience is the people that show up in forums and that's all they've seen yeah i guess so i guess it works the ones with uh music and stuff there is an audience for that and that's if you're wanting to demo something um to an international audience you, where you don't need to say anything,

where what you're doing is obvious. And, you know, why would you put a video up that has no sound at all? So I kind of can see an edge case for that. But they are growing in popularity, and they have got sort of limited value. This is Linux Unplugged episode 127 for January 12th, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux podcast that's got a chicken in the slow cooker for dinner tonight. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hey there, Wes. Guess what?

We have a fun show on episode 127. A couple of topics that we've been fortunate enough to follow here on the Unplugged show. Got some interesting updates this week, so that's where we're going to start. Then we're going to get into feedback about ButterFS as a home file system versus ZFS. Oh, that's kind of nerdy. Interview with the guys behind Scale. There was about a 10-minute interview we ran in the Linux Action Show this Sunday.

Well, an interesting part of that got left out, got cut out from that interview so that we would fit in the show, and we're going to play that part. It's about what's new at Scale and what's big and different about Scale in 2016. We'll play that, and then Wes, brace yourself for Remix OS.

Remix OS for the PC launched today, January 12, 2016. Are you excited? I am excited. No, I don't know if I'm excited. We should try it and see. We're going to try it and see. In fact, we're going to try it and see. We're going to get a demo of it from them at the floor of CES.

I got more curious than excited. Let's say that. Yeah, I guess curious is the way to put it. And you know what, Wes? I got it running right here on the machine. Oh, no way. Running right here on my machine in a virtual machine. We'll do a little walkthrough. I know. I know. And then at the end of the show,

you ever get stuck being tech support with friends, family? How do you get out of that? Or is it our duty? Is it our duty? We're going to do a little debate. Deep questions here. I know, I know. And you know why we can do these deep probing questions, Wes? I think I do. It's because we have

that awesome mumble room. Time-appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug. Hello. Alright, so guess what? We're going to do a little topic update before we get into that whole show. And I love the name. I mean, this is, I think, one of the reasons we're doing it in the show. It's called SnapCraft.

SnapCraft 1.0 is Ubuntu's snappy creator tool, officially released. It's canonical. It's got a tool out there now. And I don't know if anybody in the Mumble room might know any more about this than I do. But it's a new tool to generate, I would assume, custom snappy Ubuntu Linux images. It's pretty cool. SnapCraft 1.0, they're already talking about plans for a new version, which is going to support 16.04, because the current one is based on 15.04.

Nice. Yeah, and I think this is a great way to just let people go out there and make their own snappy-based images. I was wondering how exactly that custom tailoring was going to work from like a, hey, I have an idea, and I want to use snappy to do it. Let's say Ryan was sitting around here, He was talking about doing the MyCraft project and this is down the road. And you just want to go with Ubuntu Snappy.

I was kind of wondering what was that process like? I think this kind of makes sense. What tools do you need? And I like the name, Snapcraft. Yeah, that's fun. Do you have any insights or opinions, Popey, you want to share with the crowd? Yeah, it's kind of moved on pretty quickly.

I don't work directly on Snapcraft or Snappy myself, but I work with people who do, of course. And so it's a tool really to overcome the problem that, you know, we've said we're going to have a different packaging system in the personal desktop, right? And part of the problem there is people say, well, I've got all these applications and I want them to be available to users, but I don't want to have to learn a whole new packaging system. It's hard enough to create RPMs and DEBs and whatever else. I don't want to

have to learn something else. And that's where Snapcraft was born. You create a single YAML file that defines the configuration, runs Snapcraft and boom, out pops appy package. And you chuck it in the store and you're done. That sounds very easy to use. Yeah, that's great. Hard to get simpler than YAML, really. Yeah, yeah. I wonder if you're going to see just this will just be like the obvious choice since there's something here to do now. Like, there's just this.

I make these. Their focus on robot operating system tools is kind of interesting. Just like that term. Yeah, you know, operating systems for robots. Oh, man. Snappy will be the end of us all. So I want to just give a mention. We do have a beverage that Wes brought in.

Look at this. This is the Vertex IPA that we're drinking on the show today with a BA score of 81. That's not super great for Beer Advocate. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not super great. What do you think, though? It's got a 76 IBU. It's alright. I was hoping for more, honestly. Yeah? So you're agreeing with the...

Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's not bad. It's a fine beer. Alright, well, we'll crack open our second one. Let's do it. And we'll be drinking this throughout the show. If you at home want to pause and grab yourself an IPA, you get to play along with our home version of the game. Also, VirtualUg, you're welcome to crack one open. So, did you see the news that KDE Plasma 5.6 has a new feature?

And that feature is support for the Unity launcher? According to a developer, this is over on Softpedia. According to an article over on Softpedia from a developer they're citing the new KDE 5.6 release will focus on being more user friendly by removing any functionality that you the user think stands in your way to accomplish your daily tasks

like maybe removing activities there will be a lot of new features and updated applications in KDE Plasma 5.6 as well. Let's start with the new Unity launcher support, as it would appear that KDE Plasma 5.6 will borrow the Unity API from Canonical's Ubuntu Linux operating system

to implement support for app notifications in the task manager. For example, Chromium web browser without a slip display download progress, Telegram. Yeah, Telegram. Look at that. Yeah. But KDEVs are planning to extend the functionality to a majority of other applications too, like

Dolphin and their task manager and Thunderbird and whatnot. I look forward to better media controls. I mean, I think we've all enjoyed that from Linux Mint and Go. What is going on here exactly? What's going on? I mean, I love it. I'm not disappointed in any sense of the word, but why are we doing this? It seems like a change in style, in direction for the...

Does anybody in the Mumble room have any theories on why all of a sudden the KDE Plasma desktop all of a sudden has an interest this far into the project? Am I missing something? Well, isn't it just functionality they don't already have? They don't have the little progress bar on the icon or the labels in the corner. And so they need

to do it, so they're going with these... I guess it's just a sane API they can borrow. In the same way that we use components out of KDE on Ubuntu. Now imagine if we just did this on a broader scale, okay? Just stop and imagine for a second. You know what jumped out at me though? And I don't really know what this means. And I don't know if anybody

has any insights. It's going to focus on being more user friendly by removing any functionality that you, the user, think stands in your way to accomplish your daily tasks. What the heck does that mean? Sounds like they're going to go gnome 3 on this business. I'm sure that's not that. So is that what... It's kind of confusing. When you read that, were you thinking?

It was a little bit of removing activities. They're going to go gnome 3 up on this business. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Although I'm curious about it. I'm really curious about it. So we'll see. I was reading the blog post of some Linux switchers recently, and they landed on Plasma Desktop. I loved it.

So it appeals. It appeals. It's a good story to hear. Plasma desktop. I loved it. So, it appeals. It's a good story to hear. I really like that they're going with the Unity API, notification API, because a whole crap ton of

stuff already uses that. So, I have gone on the record in the past and talked about ButterFS and my issues with it. And, you know, I think I kind of, you know, it's interesting. You know, apparently, according to the Linux Action Show subreddit, I am just a strong hater of ButterFS. I'm a basher of ButterFS.

According to the subreddit, you hate a lot of things, Chris. I know. It's just mostly my neighbors. It's hard to be around you. No. Do go on. Oh, man. Hey, it's Danica Patrick.

Enjoy this episode and use code Linux. All right. So here's the question. In episode 399, you talked about ZFS as being more designed for the enterprise, while ButterFS is more suited for home use. But you never really said why you think that. Could you explain why you think this? Thanks. Love the show. ButterFS. And so I wanted to give my

background with ButterFS. So I had it on five rigs. I got it still running on two of those rigs. Servers, laptops, desktops, you names it. I've tried it on a bunch of different rigs. For the most part, I didn't have a really great time. However, ButterFS, I think for a little bit of, a little bit simpler, a little bit easier to understand, doesn't have some of the same memory requirements that ZFS has, which is a big one for the home desktop. And I think ButterFS is a little more, like you can work on mounted file systems in a way you can't work on them with ZFS. But the other thing about ZFS, and even huge advocates like Alan will admit this, it truly is a file system designed from the enterprise standpoint from the very beginning, and that includes the budget of an enterprise. So in a lot of times, the best-case scenario is, well, you should do that with two or four drives at a time.

Two or four drives at a time. I can't afford to do two or four drives at a time all the time, right? So ButterFS, if you're working on a tighter budget, you have less RAM. Very flexible. Yeah. Different drive configurations. Maybe you want copy on write. Yeah. Maybe you want copy on write. Maybe you don't want copy on write. There's a lot of things like with ButterFS

that it's going to come built into your Linux distribution. It's going to be right out of the box. It's going to be a little bit easier to set up because you're going to have built-in tools to use it because they're going to be built into the installer. It doesn't require quite the amount of memory that ZFS does if you really want to push it. So there's a lot of things about ButterFS, I think, that are better for home users

just because it's that sort of starting spot for ButterFS, whereas ZFS, especially in 16.04, there's going to be no graphical front-end hookups to it as far as we know at this point. It's all command line to set it up. It's just not really feasible for home users. I think for my next home box I'll build, I think I might do ZFS. Yeah, and if you're a confident administrator, if you want to take the time to really invest, it's great for that.

It performs very well. It's a wonderful file system. But I think you're right. I think what you talked about too with it works very well and ButterFS works very well kind of in the cloud environments for servers that you're going to spin up. You want root snapshots, et cetera. Yeah, yeah.

Wimpy, how long until Ubuntu Mate Edition lets me use ZFS from the install menu? That's a very good question. There's a couple of file systems I'd like to see added to Ubiquiti, and you never know. I've made a few contributions to Ubiquiti in the last year or so, and I might make some more. I'd like to see F2FS in there as well. I do picture myself – I don't know if you listened to Tech Talk today, but we covered the new Skylake NUCs that haven't been announced yet, but Intel was talking about at CES. They're Skylake.

They've got Thunderbolt 3. They've got PCI Express 3.0. So the PCI hard drives are going to just be crazy fast. That's awesome. And you could get a couple of those things in there and maybe an external drive array over Thunderbolt 3 using ZFS. I mean, that could be a really nice Linux rig. I'm definitely excited for the Ubuntu ZFS.

I use LXC for a lot of development stuff and use ZFS for snapshots on the back end. Right now you have to install the PPA and everything, so if it's more integrated. Yeah, so I think that's sort of my thought. Anybody else have thoughts on using ZFS for your home or day-to-day rig as, you know, just maybe

a single hard drive even? It's a great choice if you want integrity. I used to do this all the time. The problem is I wanted to be able to defrag my disk and so i had to go back to butter fs yeah yeah that was really the main thing that pushed you back yeah just getting performance out of it as it pushed me back really even though i did have a lot of ram just having it fragment itself over time was kind of a problem and i mean i could reformat you know every six months or something kind of alleviate the problem. But I felt like ButterFS was just worth it

because I was keeping good backups anyway. I wasn't too worried about my data being silently corrupted. That's not going to happen. It's going to be very loud when it gets corrupted. And so if it did, I would just revert to a backup. I never even had that happen. ButterFS has been rock solid. And it at least tells you pretty consistently.

It's pretty obvious when ButterFS is going to corrupt your data. If it does, and I just haven't had that issue. So as long as you're keeping good backups, I don't see the problem. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So Mr. Kitty, you think it's kind of telling that before ButterFS even got a chance, ZFS is already arriving for Linux.

Yeah. I thought it was really weird, especially, you know, BTRFS being native to Linux, whereas ZFS is something that takes a lot of work to have to port over and all this and that. And it is rather telling that something that was worked on for years is not as ready as something that they had to port over and all that. Well, ZFS has been worked on for years too. They also have quite the open ZFS community.

It's not like B3FS didn't get a chance. It had its opportunity. Yeah, I agree. I think the market is speaking right now saying, you know what, we watched it for a while, and now we know that our customers want something they can trust, and the brand ZFS is just stronger than brand butter FS. And that's why Canonical is willing to shiv it into a LTS using DKMS to make it possible for you.

Because the customer demand there is so strong that that all of a sudden is deemed LTS worthy. Because they need it in a long-term supported distro that people are shipping on their servers because that's where the customer demand is. And I think that right there demonstrates how much demand there must be seen if they're willing to do that. I also think the enterprise requirements are so serious. Like that data really matters in some production environments. And like BSD now, they interviewed Joss Pitzel from IX Systems. And he said like OpenZFS has been around for like 10 years and even now it's still an immature file system. So if that's the case for ZFS,

it makes sense that that would be a better position for this. That is absolutely how enterprises think. Yeah, of course they cover this a lot on BSD now. Yeah, that interview with Josh is great because Josh is out in the field supporting a lot of different people's, I jokingly called him the pool boy, but he's out there supporting a lot of people's

ZFS pools in production. And he's just, you know, he's just seen a huge aggregate of data. And so he's a, I mean, he's a real world expert on it. And so he was over at IX Systems and they let us talk to him. And so, yeah, that was a great episode.

That was just last week's episode of BSD Now too. So go check that out. Yeah. All right. The downtime is expensive. Data recovery is expensive. And RAM and disk are cheap. That's how the enterprise looks at ZFS, and that's why I really, when I say it's an enterprise-grade file system, it's even meant from an enterprise budget. But RFS, I think, still has long-term potential.

Definitely. But I just think its potential is it's not going to be these huge data sets. And I think for some of us who are willing to do the administrative overhead or understand, you know, philosophically what's great about file systems like ZFS that are constantly doing checksumming and things like that, we might choose to go ZFS over ButterFS even though it offers some of the same features. So what will be interesting to see is now that

ZFS is sort of making gains in the Linux world, it will be interesting to see if B3FS just loses appeal at all or if it will be a slow burner and five, ten years from now it will emerge as an alternative. Yeah, it seems to me like... Because it's almost like the pressure's off now.

Yeah, I almost wonder if it won't be like you format your root or your home partitions or var or user, you format those in ButterFS and your slash data or storage partitions are in ZFS. Because I wonder if one of the things that wouldn't push ButterFS forward just for like the OS-based OS is maybe some sort of software deployment that uses ButterFS sub-volumes to deploy software. Sort of like the Mac OS uses sparse volumes, HFS sparse volumes to deploy software. We've talked to Lenart about that, and he says that's entirely possible, that we would mount a ButterFS volume, and you would do a copy from the file system, so you'd have

the entire file system structure, and it would make a lot of sense that you would have ButterFS. You wouldn't have to have ButterFS on your current file system to be able to mount a Butterfest file system, but I could really see it. I could see it integrating with snapshots and all that. It just makes Linux administration easy, and it's built right into the kernel. And I could just see it over the next few years becoming used for that, and then you just run it like that for a decade, and it's going to be a pretty tried and true. I mean, that's really how Extended got its start, and then it's a tried-and-true file system now.

So you don't think it's too early to call ButterFS dead on arrival yet? No. I don't think so. I don't know. No, not for a lot of work cases. I think there might be some workloads where the brand is too tarnished for at least a while. Yeah, I don't think in the next two, three years it'll take over. I think it's kind of unfortunate because Zfs had so much more money poured into it than

butter fs did to start off with yeah yeah like they had it under development for five years at sun before it was released and they were pouring money in via developers at least three at a time yeah whereas butter fs had chris mason for what a couple years on its own yeah a couple people sending in patches it is a totally different. It's still only like four or five people. It's not the same community. And we've also got BcacheFS, which has sort of grown up out of the Bcache initiative, and they've now turned that into a full file system.

So that's going to be another copy-on-write file system. So it'll be interesting to see how that develops over the coming years and uh whether you know is it b3fs could it be cache fs is it going to be zfs but you know those desktop type um scenarios you're looking at where you're doing snapshots of your system by means of um backup for restore for continuity of running your machine i think the jury's still out on that one i think there's several contenders to open that space yeah i agree yeah boy it's the and you know what at the end of the day we just have to remember we're in better shape than the mac right that's all that matters we're in better shape i'm sorry i couldn't help myself. And CFS is better than HFS+. Come on. I know.

I know. You see, I didn't say that. I was like, yeah. Okay. So I want to talk about scale because there's some big changes that have happened. Plus, we have some interview stuff that I think is pretty neat that we didn't get a chance to talk about before. So let's take a moment and tell you about how I'm going to stay connected while I'm going down to scale. And that's Ting.

Go to Linux.Ting.com to support this show and get our discount. Ting is great. It's no contract, and you only pay for what you use. Just your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes, and they have a great dashboard to manage all of it that makes it really easy and obvious as heck where you're at. Linux.ting.com. You'll get a $25 discount off your first device or, Wes. Whoa. Little insider tip. They have GSM and CDMA.

No way. I thought that was impossible. So if you've got a phone compatible with one of their networks, you can bring it over and get $25 of service credit. Just saying. And they have great devices unlocked. You own them outright, or you can bring your own and manage it all with either the Ting dashboard, the Ting mobile app, or Ting's awesome radical customer support. No contracts, no early termination fees. I said no contracts.

Yeah, if you're stuck in a duopoly contract, because they're thinking about dropping those things, they have an ETF relief program. If you want a company that thinks that your internet should just be a dumb pipe, go check out Ting. Go check out Ting. They believe in the dumb pipe. They want you to take their dumb pipe and put it in your device. That's what they want.

You can embrace Ting's pipe. You couldn't refuse Ting, could you? No, no. They got a dumb pipe and they want you to take it. Go to linux.ting.com. Check out their store. Browse around. See what they've got.

And also, if you've been thinking about it, experiment with their savings calculator. That thing is a lot of fun. It's nicely designed. It is. And, you know, you can actually plug it into your existing account if you want and then go get that business. And also, did you see the news that Ting got a great rating from Consumer Reports? It's pretty great. Linux.ting.com.

I think great is an understatement there. Five things you didn't know Google Now could do. They have a great blog, too. They got a Ting tip. You know that Google Now, it does all kinds of things. Look at that. This is really nice. They put all that together.

I'm not going to spoil it for you. Also, did you know that Siri can beatbox? Did you know that Google now, it does all kinds of things. Look at that. This is really nice. They put all that together. I'm not going to spoil it for you. Also, did you know that Siri can beatbox? Did you know that? No, I did not. Yeah, let's try it right now. You ready? Okay. This is live, everyone.

Okay, let's give it a shot. Hey, Siri, beatbox. Here's one. I've been practicing boots and cats and boots and cats and boots and cats and boots and cats and boots. Here we go. I could do this all day. Cats and boots and cats. Yeah, no, we're good. We're good.

You know what? So they got the iOS devices. They got the Android devices. They have the feature phones. All ranging at different prices. No contract. You only pay for what you use. The device is unlocked, including they got the Zing back again, which gives you that

nice screen that tells you exactly how much data you've used. You can manage the Wi-Fi password. It is like, I'll show it to you right now. This is like, you know those really crappy Wi-Fi devices that have their really crappy web interface? You have to wait until their crappy DHCP server finally gets running to get one of their

IP addresses so you can log in. It doesn't register host names. It doesn't do anything. It's awful. No. The Zing is all just right here on the touchscreen. You get to see the Wi-Fi password. You can change the Wi-Fi password. You can see devices connected. I love it. Oh, wow. Devices connected right there.

Yeah. That's great. They offer the Karma, too. If you want to get on that Karma business, go check them out. Linux.ting.com. Great devices, great plans, great people. And big supporters of net neutrality. Linux.ting.com.

And a big thanks to Ting for supporting. Linux unplugged. Linux.ting.com and a big thanks to Ting for supporting. Linux Unplugged. Linux.ting.com. All right. So first up, a couple of things about scale I want to mention. I had to move the time. I had to move the time of our meetup. Yeah.

Yeah. So we go and set up our meeting and then Cory Doctorow, he's like, hey, you know what? That looks like a great time and day. I'm going to schedule my keynote. Yeah. So he scheduled his keynote for that time. So I'm like, well, and you know what I really love is some people in the meetup are like, I'll still come.

I'll skip Cory Doctor's keynote. I'm like, oh my God, that guy is so cool. And the one guy's like, well, I could come for like a little bit and then I could maybe like sneak out. And I'm like, no, here's what we're going to do. We're going to change. We're going to just change it. So that way we can all go see Cory Doctor's keynote. And instead of doing it really early, so a whole bunch of geeks have to get up early after partying at scale,

we're going to do it at lunch. And then you can go recruit other folks at lunch and then bring them to the meetup, and we'll convert them to the Jupiter Broadcasting way. If you're going to be down in Pasadena at scale, go to meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. We've got 21 people going already. We're going to get a power lunch after Cory Doctorow's keynote and stuff. I'm pretty excited about it, Wes. So meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting

if you want to get in on that. You going to be there, Popey? I added you to the event without even asking you. I went to the meetup when you last met me the last time, and I was like, oh, I signed up. I didn't know that. You know what I was like, who do I know that's going to be down there, and I could give them admin access

to this, so that way if they need to do something smart, I'm like, well, I'll add Popey. He's going to be down there. I trust him. He's a heel. So I just tossed you in there already. Like, good. That's taken care of. That's love.

Yeah. You got to spread the love. I'm excited. I hope the lunch works out. I hope maybe we can bring a few extra friends. You guys got to show up. I mean, you're anywhere near there. Yeah, it's going to be a good one.

And I don't know exactly how I'm getting there yet. Any of that's all up in there. So maybe pick Chris up off the side of the road on your way. Right, I'll be hitting. So I want to spend a couple of minutes here and play an interview from a couple of guys behind the scale effort. Now, there's a lot of people behind scale, but Ilyan and Gareth are one of the people that are working very hard on bringing Scale 14x together. And Noah had a chance to talk with him last week. We played a couple of minutes of their interview in Linux Action Show.

And I got a couple of other minutes here I want to play for you about what's new at Scale and what's kind of cool and separating it apart. And I think the context of it is, you know, things like Ubicon. Check it out. So one of the things that's happened with Scale over the years is as we've grown, we've become a bit of a hub for other communities that want to run their events in or around us. So, for example, the Ubuntu community will be running Ubucon, which is going to be their new user and developer conference here at scale this year leading into that.

Similarly, we have events from the Postgres community, the MySQL community, DevOps.LA. So when you come to Scale, really, you're probably getting about 10 events in one, which is one great thing. So in terms of the keynotes that you mentioned, we've got folks like Corey Doctorow will be coming out. Mark Shuttleworth will be a keynote as well,

talking about how open source fits in a world of app stores and embedded devices where we don't necessarily have access to the we don't necessarily have access to the source code as we're downloading from apps and things like that how do we continue to make open source

be important in that sort of environment and then the last keynote will be Sarah Sharp talking about diversity in the open source be important in that sort of an environment. And then the last keynote will be Sarah Sharp, talking about diversity in the open source community. She's a former Linux kernel developer that has a lot of experience with some of the challenges of being involved in our open source communities. Yeah, that's absolutely terrific. And the other thing that I always look forward to,

in addition to the actual keynotes, is a lot of the presentations that are given. You know, they're not necessarily everyone commuting in one big hall for one big presentation by a well-known name, but sometimes there are really cool presentations. I think it was last year, or maybe it was the year before, they had a presentation of 20 Linux commands that you never knew that you needed. But once you find out about them, they should have been included by default in the distribution. And man, have I been able to implement some of that stuff. Are there any particular presentations that you personally, either of you are looking forward to seeing?

Well, I mean, going back to what I said before, when, when we, when we started the conference, um, to, to be a conference that we wanted to attend. Um, I think the ironic thing in that is that most of us never actually get to go to the presentations because we're, we're busy, um, running the conference. Um, and so, but, but one of the things that, um, kind of touching on that, I'm always excited to see is, are those presentations kind of like what you mentioned, where you, it's not a presentation that you necessarily, or a talk that you necessarily think of ahead of time that like, oh yeah, I'd really like to see a presentation on the 20 most commands that I didn't know about. Exactly. I'm excited about the presentations that those types of presentations,

as well as the presentations by speakers that no one has ever heard of. Yeah. Because in my experience, those always end up being really awesome presentations and the speakers end up becoming like really well-known speakers. And it just, it's, it makes me feel really good that they got their start at our event. Yeah, right on. I can't tell you how excited I am to come to the conference. Now, I've been hogging the mic here for a little bit, but Wes, have you ever been to an event like Scale before? Have you gone to any kind of big Linux convention

where there's a lot of people coming in? I went to Scale once. Oh, you did? So I tell you what, I have been avoiding scale. I've mentioned this before. I've been avoiding scale from the very beginning just because it's, you know, some of the events they get too big, and then I feel like I don't want to go to them anymore.

I'm kind of curious to see where they walk the line on this one. But maybe next year. Maybe next year we both go down. That sounds great. Wouldn't that be fun? That would be really cool. And, yeah, so I hope to see you guys there at scale. Next year we both go down. That sounds great. Wouldn't that be fun? That would be really cool. And yeah. So I hope to see you guys there at scale.

Anybody in the mom room? Poppy, anybody have any? I've just had an email from one of the organizers saying that my talk has been accepted. What are you doing a talk on? What are you doing a talk on? A thing that I developed with Stuart Language, a kind of bot thing that we developed. And it's quite cool. And I wanted to talk about it and how we developed it and how we did it in the community. Well, congratulations.

That's awesome. Very nice. Very nice. You know, they rejected that Alan Jude. Yeah, he had a talk. Well, rightly so. Yeah, I know. He probably wanted to talk about BSD.

Free BSD. Get that guy out of here. It's a Linux expo. Get him out of here. They can have a booth. Yeah. Yeah. Here would be my perfect scenario, and I think I'm going to do this at LinuxFest Northwest.

Oh, I'm so excited. It would be to park the rover outside the event and then just have people come out, meet them on the ground, be like, yeah, will you come out to this location in the parking lot at this time and just do the interview there? Cryptic GPS coordinates. It'd be amazing. Yeah. It'd be like a scavenger hunt.

Right. Geocaching kind of thing. Oh man, okay, now we're into it. So if we could do like a scavenger hunt where you could get little clues and they'd walk around the event and then end up at the rover and then do an interview on JB, that would be amazing. Especially if we could have like GoPros mounted in like key locations. Right. Okay, well, maybe in the future one day.

We can dream big, you never know. We dream now, maybe in a few years we can achieve it. These are the seeds of the future. These are the seeds. Okay, so it's time for us to talk about Remix OS. Remix. I'm going to be honest. I didn't think they'd do it.

When I saw the announcement, I didn't even cover it as news because I'm like, oh, come on. This is nothing. They got some crappy ARM-based PC that's too slow, and I'm not interested in that. And then they are going to supposedly release an ISO at some time in the future. When can I actually see this? Okay, yeah. Let me know when the code ships, and then we'll actually talk about it. Well, today the code shipped.

Yeah, and they were at CES. They had a booth. Wow. Giving demos. So we're going to cover all of that. Remix OS is a desktop operating system based on Android. And the idea is to turn Android into a desktop productivity platform. So instead of just content consumption, you can do content creation.

So they're introducing windowing, they're introducing file managers and things like this, a launch bar and a menu, all these. We'll show you more about it. And they're calling it RemixOS. You know, the idea would be it's a serious contender to something like Chrome OS or

even perhaps the Linux desktop itself. So before we get into that, I'm going to mention Linux Academy. contender to something like Chrome OS or even perhaps the Linux desktop itself. Ugh. Itself, yeah. So before we get into that, I'm going to mention Linux Academy. I love Linux Academy. This has been something really fun to watch throughout 2015 is to see them grow. And they're not done in 2016.

In fact, coming up on the 14th, they've got a big event. They've got some announcements you can tune in and find out. Linux Academy is a great platform to learn about all the technologies around Linux and Linux itself. Start by going to LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. That supports the show, keeps us going, lets LinuxAcademy know you heard about it here. They have so much to learn. And even if you've been using Linux forever, there's so much good stuff. Like, not only are you going to appreciate the fact that people are just truly enthusiastic and passionate about this,

are putting together a great system, but as somebody who has, like, a pretty good sense of what's up and coming in the Linux world, I'm pretty damn impressed with what they've been able to turn around into great courseware and content. They have over 2,000 courses with video, instructor help is available, downloadable comprehensive study guides. Distros all up the wazoo you can choose from. And the courseware adjusts to that. Virtual servers you SSH into.

They spin up on demand as part of the courseware. I got to say it again. Instructor help is available when you need it. I really think this is a platform you should check out. I would say, too, like, if you've been stuck in a spot for a while, you need to kind of see what interests you. You want to kind of see what direction you want to go to. This is a safe playground because they have graded server exercises. While you're working on the system, you're going to get real-time information and feedback. That's going to give you a sense of where your strengths are pretty quickly.

We just keep seeing success stories of people who've gotten the job after studying at Linux Academy. You know, there's a lot of interest in this area. If you can show that, you know, through something like Linux Academy that you're a competent Linux user. That is a nice thing, too. As Linux Academy is a rising star, you'll rise with them. And people in the industry know it already.

Yeah. They have some really neat technology. Their scenario-based labs are pretty unique. The fact that they're following the technologies that they are following are great. Their nugget system for when you don't have a lot of time, you just want to deep dive into a single topic, it makes a lot of sense. They had some of the first and best content on OpenStack before anybody else because when that was becoming a huge thing, they're like, well, this is obvious. Same thing with Docker, right? Same thing with a lot of the technologies built around Linux now, and including AWS, that entire infrastructure.

I really like it. And they've got some great stuff coming up just around the corner they're going to announce on the 14th. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. You'll get our discount. That's the big thing. But also you support this show. This is a really solid platform.

And if I worked in a job where my educator paid for a little bit of... Or my employer paid for a little bit of education, oh man. When I worked for somebody else, a lot of times I was just here's the budget for self-education. They could take online courses, I could go to a local

college. But this is a great option. This is a really great option. So linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Stay up to date on current technologies, too. That's what's really cool about it, is you can get all the current stuff, experts who are really passionate about it, instructor help available on demand,

and you support this show. Holy smokes. That's a win-win-win. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. So Remix OS. I've been kicking the tires a little bit. Anybody in the mumble room tried Remix OS? Yep.

All right. Okay. I did so. Oh, look at all of you guys. Look at all of you guys. Installing it right now. Installing it right now. All right.

Well, before we talk about it, let me set up a little bit about Remix OS. And they have a video here to do that for us. So let's do it. What's up? This is at CES. He takes a thumb drive. He plugs it into a Dell PC. We're here at CES 2016, and we're really excited to announce Remix OS for PCs.

It's a collaborative project between Android x86 and ourselves. And on January 12th, it'll be available for free download globally. So let's take a look. This is the guest mode, resident mode selection screen. One saves no data. That's the guest mode. And the other saves all your data in the app. That's the resident mode.

So let's go in and check it out. On the 12th, when you download, you're going to get two files. One is an ISO file. One is an EXE file. You're going to plug in a USB drive to a PC of your choice, and you're going to run the EXE file, load the ISO file into that program, and then install it onto a USB drive.

All right, so we've done that. And, Paul B., what were your first thoughts when you tried it out? And what did you try it on? So I tried it in a VM. I didn't want to dedicate a machine to this yeah that's what i did too i've i've tried android x86 on you know various machines in the past and i thought i'd give this a go but two things kind of threw me uh one uh i'm guessing you've tried this have you read the end user license agreement no i didn't didn't. I've not gotten there.

That's not the first thing I did. Did you? Did you read it? Yeah, I'm guessing most people weren't. You probably want to read it. It's interesting, and some of it is probably copy and pasted from somewhere else, and you can guess where from.

If I read you three lines from the EULA, if that's okay. Yeah. You agree that you irrevocably waive any and all ownership, legal and moral rights to your user content. How's that? That sounds like they got it from Google. Right. Okay.

This one will give you a better clue. You're also not allowed to oppose the basic principles determined in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China, harm its national honor or interest, or undermine its national religious policy, promoting cults and superstitions. What? Wow. Also, you're not allowed to spread rumor, disturb social order, or undermine social

stability. Okay, so that's a little odd. Yep. Wow. Because I like doing all of those things. Those are my favorite things to do. Well, I mean, you're outside China, so good luck, People's Republic republic of china for enforcing those rules on those of us in the free west but if you did any of those things and then you went to china might have a bit of a problem huh don't go to china chris so yeah

because yeah i yeah i definitely can't go to china so you've done all of those just in the last 10 minutes that sounds like a copy pasta though thing right i mean that's gotta be yeah there's other chinese companies that have that the xiaomi phone company have it like right there on their website it's pretty much the same kind of thing um but that yeah that's what you get because they're you know at least part uh chinese company um that side i did try it in a vm and you have to be you know because it's android and it's not a general purpose pcos you have to be very specific about the hardware that you give it. It doesn't work on every PC. It is a general purpose, but there are drivers missing,

so you have to tweak it a little bit in VirtualBox, for example. But it does boot, and it's very unlike Android in that it's got Windows for things like settings. I went to the settings screen and i was expecting to get smacked in the face with the usual full screen android settings thing but no it looked like you know no more solus or something like that it looked like a normal modern desktop operating system and you know i fiddled around with some of the settings and some of it worked some of it didn't i went to get a google play apk uh because it doesn't shit with google play it

doesn't have chrome or anything it's got you know none of the official apps so i went to get the google play uh apk and that wouldn't install uh so it's interesting in their videos they have the play they do have the place to end chrome installed right so they put that on it's not on the iso yeah um i did try installing it but it wouldn't open But I didn't give it a huge amount of time. If I may step in here. Yeah. So I installed it, and there is, in fact, a semi-official version with GApps. And I created a USB stick out of it, and it's running bleeding fast.

Where did you find that? Is that not part of the regular download? I logged into the Freenode Remix OS channel, which is semi-official also. And so there were some leaking images, but on the official server. And there is a version from yesterday that comes with GApps installed. So I made a USB stick out of it and used it on an Acer Chromebook. And I was pretty successful. So it's bleeding fast. I played Star Wars Angry Birds on it. I was watching live TV. So there is some potential in this. Really, there is some potential.

Yeah, there are definitely some Android apps I wouldn't mind having on my desktop. And you know, you've got some other nice, serious applications. So before we go on, they were at CES. And there's also a hardware component to this as well and a little more information about the project, too. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Remix OS CES 2016 booth. For all the people who couldn't make it but really wanted to be here,

I wanted to give you guys an inside look to what our booth looks like and what we're doing at our booth. And actually, when you watch this video, they actually seem like kind of neat people. Yeah, it seems like they're passionate and care about this. So here we are at CES International 2016. It's the Renix OS booth again. And we've got a few of our team members right now showing off our product lines. As you can see, this is the end of the day here at CES, but it's still relatively busy at our booth.

So let's take a look. Yeah, don't mind him. This is Jeff behind the counter right now. And he's actually showing off. This is the mini, which a lot of you already have, know and love. If you don't love it, write us at support. And this is the mini in action right here on this screen. We've been showing it off at the booth.

It's been getting really well reception here at the show. If we move on down the line, this is Owen. Owen works with us on PR. And what you see here is a very exciting project. Let's keep going down and I'm going to show you this project right here.

So here at the show, one of the biggest announcements we're making is this. This is the remix for PC. I like that they're also just being really upfront. We're working with Android x86 to do this. I think that's kind of cool. What it is is we worked in collaboration with the Android x86 team,

put Remix OS on top of Android x86, and allowed Remix OS to boot from any Intel or AMD chip PC, tower, laptops, and about 60% of them out in the market or out in the world will work with this ISO file. And so it's a pretty – 60%? It's a pretty – you basically have to have some legacy USB support and things like that. But I don't know. I think it's interesting that EULA obviously leaves me a little concerned.

But if I could install GApps or GAPs on this thing, and I could have Chrome, and I could have Netflix and Plex, it might be kind of compelling. So when it comes to Chrome, Chrome is working without problems, so at least with the USB stick. And it's easy to create one you just download unit boot in from the repos and then you can create your stick you don't even lose your data on your stick it's just some persistent image files so you get a system image a data image and so on and a persistent image for your data so the rest of the data that you still have on the usb this the old data, stays on the disk. So it's really cool.

Popey, what do you think about the fact that they're essentially promising convergence? They're promising a desktop operating system that works with touch or the keyboard, and they're saying whichever one you want to use. Do you think it's possible to deliver it in this type of windowed system? windowed system? Yeah, you know, it'll be as you'd expect Android to be on a desktop with some modifications. I think one of the problems they'll be is they're constantly

chasing Google because, you know, I.O. has just been announced is going to be in May and they'll be talking about the next version of Android and so Android x86 is always a little way behind upstream and so they're constantly chasing android and part of that means that they've got to keep forward porting all of

their work so if they can keep that momentum going and they have enough contributors to to keep their stuff working then yeah they could they could end up having an interesting converged device there's a lot of android games i mean you know right there this could having an interesting converged device. There's a lot of Android games. I mean, you know, this could be an interesting desktop for some people. I don't know. Yeah, imagine putting that on a Chromebook. Yeah. Yeah.

And imagine doing it maybe at a school. Right. Where you don't want to necessarily be cooked up to Google Apps and Chrome, but you want to take advantage of all of the development and applications and the fact that a lot of people you're hiring are going to know how to write Android apps. I think they're going to have to be a little bit careful. I mean, you can see why they've not put a public URL up there with all the Google apps in there, but, you know, giving it away on IRC and, you know, done it kind of under the table kind of thing so that, you know, Google aren't going to come after them, which, you know, if they started doing that kind of publicly then google would come after them and

that's something they've got to worry about they've got to have a you know or they build a relationship with google and start doing it properly rather than uh you know uh based off of aosp right yeah that'd be a big indicator see what happens huh yeah and uh hopefully they don't go the way of sign engine mod and start and start integrating Microsoft through all the OS. Like, that's been happening lately. But Cortana's our friend. Cortana, and, like, you can now get Microsoft services. It's just all over.

It's just really great. They give a shout-out to Ubuntu on their page, too. So, anyways, if you're out there, tried Remix OS, let us know what you think. LinuxActionShout at Reddit.com. Anybody else in the Mumba room trying it or have any other thoughts they want to share about Remix OS? Remix OS. Let us know what you think. Linux Action Show at reddit.com. Anybody else in the Mumba room trying it or have any other thoughts they want to

share about Remix OS? Remix? Remix OS? Nope. I did happen to just notice that they're already on 2.0 on the latest ones.

Oh. Oh, 2.0. Yeah. And at a booth at CES, that suggests some funding, don't you think? It's a serious project.

Yeah, that's not a cheap thing to pull off. Yeah. And they're also touting the performance. They say, we've benchmarked Remix OS performance using Remix OS for PCs against some of the best Android hardware in the biz. And quite honestly, nothing comes close.

So they show this benchmark here. This is so funny. They show this benchmark here of Remix OS for the PC running on an i7-4790 quad-core up against a Galaxy 5 Note and a Galaxy S6 and it just is just like it's not even in the same dimension.

The i7 is so much faster. Well, yeah, you think? I guess the point is you could run your Android apps on a really fast machine. That would be kind of interesting. But, yeah. I could see installing this for like a grandparent or something if they're already familiar maybe with Android on a tablet. Oh, I see the internet is already beginning to gripe about the EULA. So the issues about the EULA have – yeah, look at that.

You know, I did see the EULA come up first thing when I loaded it. Harming national honor and interest. National honor. This will be played back to you in a chinese court in like three years chris that is a loose definition this day yeah well what do they do about uh security updates i don't know that's a very good question thing about uh android um on your nexus device is getting a regular cadence of security updates uh are we i mean obviously this is an alpha so it's completely unsupported and there will be of security updates. I mean, obviously, this is an alpha, so it's completely unsupported,

and there will be no security updates, which is fair enough, as you'd expect. But I'd be interested to know what the future holds and what their plans are for delivering updates to all those, you know, PC users or USBs. But it sounds like they have the operating system fairly separated out from user data, and so maybe they have something in mind that will be fairly manageable.

I don't know. Have to wait and see. You know, so here we are. We're towards the end of the show and we're towards the end of the second Vertex IPA. And I got to say, I mean, I'm glad you brought it, but I'm not loving the aftertaste. No, I'm not either. It's kind of disappointing. It's a little dank in my mouth right now.

I feel like I'm going to need a couple of glasses of water after this. I would not buy again. Yeah, that's too bad. I liked the top of the can. I mean, the can is nice. Yeah, it's got a good design on there. The dude's got a flag and he's got a nice hat. I like that.

It's very nice. It seemed like it was made with care. Yeah. 6.3%, huh? Where did you pick this up? Hagen. OK. Well, there you go.

You know, Hagen has got a good selection. It was a good try. It was a good solid try. I'll do better next week. I would also pick that one up. I don't think you can really be blamed for that, Wes. OK. Thank you.

Thank you, Chris. All right. Well, so we have an interesting thread that Wes found this week. I think we've got to talk about this on the show. And I actually kind of agree. And I wonder if I want to challenge the premise a little bit too. But before we get to that, we're got to talk about this on the show. And I kind of agree. And I wonder if I want to challenge the premise a little bit, too. But before we get to that, we're going to talk about DigitalOcean.

D-O. The big D-O. And use the promo code D-O unplugged. All one word, lowercase. Guess what? $10 credit. Whoa. Linux rigs up in the cloud, you all. On demand, less than 55 seconds. $5 a month. You get 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer.

A terabyte of transfer over at DigitalOcean.com. And if you use the promo code D01PLUGED, $10 credit, you can try out that $5 rig two months for free. And they've got data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, London, Germany, and... Chillin' with Alan Jude up in Toronto. Hey, hey. Yeah, yeah. I think he just stops in there from time to time. Yeah, I don't know for sure. But really what I like about DigitalOcean, well, I mean, I don't know why nobody else can figure this out, but boy, has DigitalOcean got just a huge head start on everybody. So yeah, they've got SSDs. That's brilliant. They got in on that super early before any other provider out there was willing to spend the money.

So they totally leveraged that. I think they were brilliant in the fact that they jumped on KVM and started building their product around KVM way before other vendors were willing to consider KVM. Now they're just introducing KVM as a feature, right? But they're struggling. They're struggling to keep up. And then they brought it all together with the incredible interface over at DigitalOcean. It's very simple, very intuitive, and very powerful. It lets you destroy machines, deploy machines, one-click application deployments of entire stacks. You want everything from Ubuntu, Apache, and a blogging platform in a single click. Boom, it all gets deployed for you. Or maybe you just want the base operating system. They've got a bunch of great distributions you get to choose from,

Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, CoreOS, and even FreeBSD. One-click applications you can deploy, fantastic tutorials, and incredible prices. Go to digitalocean.com and use the promo code DEOUNPLUGGED and see why I spend my Linux infrastructure on demand whenever I need it. I mean really at $5 a month, there's almost nothing I won't spend up on a DigitalOcean droplet. So I got an idea, Chris. Yeah. Sometimes I just don't have a great route somewhere.

You know, Comcast, everyone's on Comcast. Oh. And I get frustrated. Maybe I'm talking to Europe. It's the worst. You know, maybe Asia. With last Tuesdays, you're having all kinds of issues. All kinds of issues.

Yes. Right? But so what I do, and I'm thinking maybe a script with their API is what we need. You spin up a DO droplet, whatever's closest to you. All right. You know, you can probably figure that out. I do the same for myself. Yeah.

And then SSH. Did you know you can spin up tunnel interfaces? Oh, yeah. And have SSH provide IP transit? Yeah. So you just, you spin that right up. Oh, yeah. And then, bam, you route everything through your new spanking new DigitalOcean platform.

I have legitimately done that when we've had Comcast issues. Yeah. So what if there's a one – Also, but I'm just saying there's other things in like Amsterdam that you might – Yeah, maybe you need your – London, I'm saying there might be a reason why you want to be located in London. I'm not saying what it is. Or if you're in London, all of a sudden it would be really useful to be located in New York or Toronto or maybe San Francisco.

DigitalOcean makes it that easy. It does for $5 a month. And if you use the promo code DLNPLUG, you get it two months for free. So a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. You guys are the rock source. All right. So what do you do when you keep getting the Geek Squad treatment? He says, I'm an IT manager for a website.

I manage developers and perform a lot of hands-on activities at work. I'm not really a hardware tech anymore. However, friends and family rarely make the decision or, I'm sorry, distinction when their tablet or their laptop or their desktop is broken. And they often ask me for help, obviously without any compensation. help, obviously without any compensation. As a matter of gentlemanly discourse, I never ask for technical or professional help from any of my friends or family. If I do, which isn't often, I pay

in exchange for the favor immediately or simply ask for instructions. I also don't intrude on their personal time or expect anything inside a schedule. I call these my golden rules of personal professional exchange. But for some time now, certain family members and close friends have mistakenly begun to treat me like the geek squad, except without paying, and certainly just as

insistent and impolite as one of their customers. I don't mind helping, and I understand their frustration. But it started to chap me a little bit. People get snippy when I don't feel like helping, and they rely on me during outside hours, quote unquote, which cuts into my personal time, and weirdly enough, blame me for their troubles. As if I'm the one getting their pet hair into their desktop, overheating their Ultrabook while gaming from the comfort of their comforter or clicking pop-ups I shouldn't from an insurance browser, from an insecure browser. Or I'm the one who invited their breaking out their phone and breaking their Gorilla Glass.

Do I seem bitter? Maybe. Anyways, here's the question. Has anyone found a polite, quick, sensitive way to immediately shut down friends and family when they ask you to be the Geek Squad? I haven't really found a foolproof rejection, anti-rejection method. And I was wondering, when we look at this, what our Mumble Room and what Wes thinks, because a lot of us probably get called in as the technical support, I imagine, in this audience.

I know I certainly do. In fact, because I know my mom's not going to listen to this, I just call her out. So this last Sunday, after the Linux Action Show, okay, I should back up even further. So about a week ago, my mom messages me and she says, who do you use for hosting? And I respond, DigitalOcean, right?

Right. And I'm like, why does my mom care, right? How is she even asking me that? And then the next day, my mom replies to me, oh, I see they support HTML. And I'm like, oh, my God. Yeah, mom, they support HTML. After you deploy the Linux server, you set up the Apache web server, and then you can, like, or you, like, do the one-click app deployment. But, like, you know, mom's not following exactly what needs to happen here.

And so I'm like, mom, I'm not so sure you understand. So then she messages me, like, a couple of days ago, well, I would like to see you this weekend. When can we get together? And I tell her, well, I have a little bit of time after I'm done with the Linux Action Show on Sunday. But, you know, really, like, I just got done with the show. What I would like to do is relax. Right. I would like to chill out. Like a little bit of time after I'm done with the Linux Action Show on Sunday. But, you know, really, like, I just got done with the show. What I would like to do is relax. Right. I would like to chill out.

Like a little bit of weekend. Yeah. Like I got like a couple hours left on this Sunday. There's a couch over there. Man, that sounds good. So mom wants to come up and she wants to consult with me on her new Business Endeavors website. And it doesn't really, there's not like a lot of discussion about like how busy I've been or the fact that I'm prepping to go to scale, trying to get a new rig.

Running a business. Running my own business. It was my daughter's birthday. It was also an anniversary. And then on top of all of that, like I'm doing the show this weekend. Like there was no consideration. There's not really like – I don't really have a good way to say, sorry, mom. Like I know this is important to you, but I also have a life.

Like I don't really know how to have that. Have you ever been in a position like that? Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, there's just some users that they don't understand. Like because you have the ability, ergo you are obligated to help. Yeah, it's not placing value on your time. And sometimes you just have to tell people that. Marks, do you think it's weird to get into the discussion of monetary exchange for these things?

that uh marks do you think it's weird to get into the discussion of monetary exchange for these things um i'm not sure about monetary exchange when it comes to family but maybe some sort of like for like thing because you know say you've got a family you know say your sister's a nurse you might ask her to you know take a look at your foot when it's if you've got something wrong with it and you wouldn't well i mean obviously your your health system is different of course we wouldn't pay for uh for something like that over here but um you know quiet you if if you've got um if you've got a family member who has a profession and you'd you'd maybe expect them or not necessarily expect them ask them to help you out with something based on their knowledge then yeah sure maybe uh you doing tech support for them for free isn't a big deal. Here is my current excuse, and this is why I couldn't get out of the one with my mom,

because I got a go-to that's pretty solid, because if they are willing to take me up on it, I'm willing to commit. And my go-to is, you know, I switched away from Linux after Windows XP, and I don't really know Windows anymore. I'm a Linux user. And so if you want to switch to Linux, I can help you with that. And if they do it, if they buy it, I'm like, all right, I'll commit to that. Yeah, I don't mind.

But when it comes to server hosting stuff, what do I say? Yeah, well, sorry, Mom. There's no middle ground there. It's not like you give her some tips on server administration. It's like, no, now you're administering her server. Yeah, yeah. Popey, everybody in your family must know you work for a technology company. You must get this. Yeah.

So there's a couple of things. Like my brother is completely non-technical. He's a hairdresser. I can't cut my own hair. He cuts my hair. I sort his computers out. As Mark said, if there's someone in your family who can do something. So that seems reasonable to me.

However, I can't say no to my mom right and i couldn't say no to my mother-in-law in fact while you've been on air my mother-in-law has has pinned me on facebook and said hey that new hard drive has arrived for me to do time machine backups on my mac uh but the box says it needs formatting for a mac and i'm my reply was yeah well that's fine. Do you want me to help? Because she's my mother-in-law, and she will cook me roast dinners. There is that.

There is that. That is an exchange I'm willing to go down with. And the flip side, and also point out, she is your mom, dude. No, I'm helping her. I'm helping her. But I'm telling you, I do feel like I get roped into this stuff. Now, the mom one is a difficult one. But you must have this with the family too, right?

I mean, everybody must be aware of what you do. They must be aware you're a technical guy. Yeah, and Ubuntu Mate was the solution to that problem. So like yourself, you get these questions about, you know. So on my wife's side of the family, all of those got migrated to Ubuntu for 6.6. So a long time ago. And on my side of the family, there have been a little bit more resistance. And I played the same card.

Oh, well, you know, I haven't used Windows for years. You know, I stopped using Windows a long, long time ago. I really don't know how it works. And then on my wife's side of the family, they were still running 1004. That was getting quite out of date. And we tried some things and then Ubuntu Mate sort of got created to sort of support them. So now my solution to this problem is basically you spend 20 years using and learning Linux. You then create a Linux distribution.

You then form a hardware partnership with a local hardware company. And when your family say they need help, you say, go to this website, buy this computer, and it comes pre-installed and I never have to do anything. Unfortunately, the lengths you really have to go to. Yeah. That tells you something. And it sounds sarcastic, but it's true because three of

my family have now bought computers from entroware and i've had them shipped pre-installed with ubuntu mate and i haven't had to be involved i haven't had to go around there it just works so it's paid off yeah unfortunately there's now and didn't you also buy and set up routers for all of your family i did yes, that's a good move. That is a good move. And flush them all with gargoyle. I think that's something I'm going to be doing too. The drawback to this approach is every month there are 10,000 other people

who I don't know on the internet that are now all demanding support. There is that problem. But you could think of them as extended family testers. They're a tester for your family. They're a new group of friends I didn't have a year ago, so it's all good. Yeah. I had, like I think I mentioned a few weeks ago, I had a successful switch over the holidays. I was out.

I went somewhere. I didn't even have an internet connection when I did it, and I had an Ubuntu Mate. This is bragging rights. No internet connection. No internet connection. And I already had it flashed with Thumb Drive because I actually used my laptop bag to pack my clothes in. I is bragging rights. No internet connection. No internet connection. And I already had it flashed with thumb drive because I actually used my laptop bag to pack my clothes in. I took the laptop out

and I put my clothes in there. But I left my front thing that has all my thumb drives loaded because I'm not going to unload all that crap. And so I got there. The guy was having problems with Windows 8.1. He was thinking about getting a Mac and I was like, try this. It worked out pretty good. It was a good success. It was like, hey, I had a Linux Switch story over the holidays. That so it worked out pretty good. It was a good success.

It was like, hey, I had a Linux Switch story over the holidays. That's amazing. Amazing, yeah. So I agree. There is two solutions that I feel pretty good about. When it's your mom or your mother-in-law or if you get them to switch to Linux, those are the conditions in which you should support them. But here's the thing. Remember, we can also be ambassadors.

We can be ambassadors to these people in times of need. So if you have the emotional capacity, I encourage you to- And it's entirely optional. Yeah, I mean, it's all on, you got to check with yourself. You got to ABC,

always be checking before you commit. But I'm just saying, if you can, you could be an ambassador to the open source world. It's an opportunity to switch or at least get them started on maybe moving from Outlook to Thunderbird or from Internet Explorer to Firefox, right? There are so many different ways you can sometimes solve problems.

Like if they're having a malware issue on their Windows box, get them going with Firefox. And that gets them started on the path and then down the road, the switch is a lot easier. I also have to say the article did touch on this. But if you get some sort of beverage or delicious food item in exchange, that sometimes can work out as well. And a bit like you've just said, the other good one is I think the non-technical people in the family are becoming more aware of the security implications of running older Windows operating systems. So what I've started doing is saying, here's a USB stick that boots Linux. When you need to do your online banking or your online shopping,

use this because it's secure and it will forget everything that you've just done when you unplug it ah so it's like linux on training wheels because you're just doing it for a little bit you're just using it for some web browsing stuff and it's for your important stuff to be secure yeah yeah and and that sort of makes them think oh you know this is just like any other computer right this isn't complicated this isn't daunting and it's just a little sort of you know taster that's actually really smart because then later on when they want to move on you'd be like you know that operating system you've been used for all your really important stuff why don't

you just use that all the time right and it's like oh well yeah i trust that yeah i like it oh that is some that is some like level two like psychological switcher stuff right there. I like it. You could even have it already dual boot. Yeah. Pocket Casey in the chat room asked if when I have time, he'd love to see a little coverage of the Tink Talk. That would be really cool. That would be very interesting. So Pocket Casey, if you could tweet me the day of that talk, you could be the ambassador of that talk if you want and remind me while I'm there.

I'll try to do it. But ask me now. There's no way I'm going to remember. But I would like to see that one. Yeah, I would as well. Because I didn't even hear about Tink until Wes came along and started talking about it. I'm still using it. LinuxActionShow.reddit.com, that's the subreddit you go to to submit content to this show or

feedback. Next week, because of scale, Noah will be sitting in for me, so it'll be Wes and Noah in the mumble room. Hey, hey. Yeah. Yeah, that should be a good time, and you guys maybe might want to get the ball rolling earlier in Slack than we normally do. We're pretty quick now. We've got it down.

That's true. We've got it down. But, you know, Noah, that guy's new. That guy, he doesn't, you know, so you've got to watch out for him. So go check it out. We'll make it happen. Thank you very much for being here, everybody. We do the Linux Unplugged show live on Tuesdays over at jblive.tv at 2 p.m.?

Is that right, or 1 p.m.? I believe it's 2, Chris. Yeah? Okay. Hmm. Hmm. Seems really late in the day, Wes. Seems pretty wet.

Huh. You know what? If I got confused, I would just... Well, Linux users sleep late. If I got confused, I would just go to jubilabroadcasting.com slash calendar. That's what I would do. That's perfect. That would converge to my local time zone.

You could show up live, hang out in our virtual lug, hang out in our chowder. But if you can't, just download it. We've got RSS feeds. We appreciate it. LinuxActionShow.reddit.com JupyterBroadcasting.com slash contact to send us feedback. Thanks so much for tuning in

and we'll see you right back here next week. Well, they will. Thank you. Oh, you see that, Wes? Hey there, Wurst. You see that? Marcus is trying out Envy. You enjoyed it? Yeah. So what do you think, Marcus?

Here you go, Wes. I got you. What do you think, Marcus? What do you think of the Envy? Yeah, it's really good. I've got a Kodi box in my living room, and I've been having reasonable success with managing my library on it, but I like having all my music on my server and streaming that.

So I've had Ampachi running on there for a while, which is fairly decent, but it only does music, and I've got my videos on the server too, so it's nice to just have one solution. So I thought I'd stick MB on there and give it a go. And I found it does the video library really well and syncs that to Kodi nicely. It doesn't sync the video library to Kodi so nicely for some reason,

but because it's got the remote control feature you can just um you just go into the web interface or the app on mb and you say send it to kodi and it just starts playing it's brilliant are you using the uh the mb plugin at all for kodi yeah so that's what i i think you you put the mb plugin in and that's what syncs your mute your video library i think and that's what syncs your video library, I think, and it also means that then your other MB apps will recognize it as somewhere that you can send media. It's worked very well, Mike, but you're saying the music part does not work as well?

Well, it works, but only if you use another app to select the playlist or the music. So it doesn't sync the music library to cody's music library for some reason wes wes are you there i am can you hear me where is chris recording yet yes yeah yeah why why what's wrong i've got a question for you chris yeah what's that actually from 15 arrived yet no that is you know what you know what i don't i don't even know what to say because now i'm Especially from 15 arrived yet. No. That is – you know what?

You know what? I don't even know what to say because now I'm going on this trip and I am literally in the position of like – You have a little laptop. I'm like which one of the machines can I sacrifice in the studio and not disrupt the shows that will be going next week? Because the thing is – They're all doing a job. What if I need to do production from the road? Like what if I need to do some production from the road? Can I do it all on my XPS 13?

I don't think so. I need a larger screen machine. Right. So it's just, oh. Oh. Oh. Yeah, I would do anything to have that rig. You're saying you need a big monitor built into the rover.

You know what I would like at this point? Anything, you say. Anything. I would just like, you know what, to be honest with you, at this point, I would just like a refund, I think. And I just need to get something you should contact them and ask them if they come to scale and maybe they could bring your laptop along yeah i should i wonder if they will be at scale i wonder hmm you should drive the rover over to their office and then just camp outside until they give you empty your black tank in their general direction. Wow!

I empty my tank in your direction, sir. Yikes. Yikes. So, you know, the thing is, I've driven a gas vehicle my entire life, and this thing runs on top of basically a diesel chassis, right? It is a diesel. It's more of a diesel truck than it is anything else. It is a diesel. It's more of a diesel truck than it is anything else.

So it's got air brakes and air suspension, and it has glow plugs and a DEF tank to help reduce the diesel emissions. And so it's got all this stuff that I have to learn how to operate. You're scaling up here. Plus it's got a built-in generator with an auto start, so I can set conditions for when the generator automatically kicks in. But, like, I've got to learn how to manage all of these things in, like, well, tomorrow morning, basically. And I don't have a great memory, so I think what it really means is Chris is going to— That's why you should record it. I'm going to be—yes, exactly. That's why I probably will record it.

And I'm going to be Googling while on the road. The good news is diesel is quite a bit cheaper than gasoline fuel right now. So that's the good news. Yeah, that's great. And it's more efficient as well. Yeah. They might look at you a little funny if you show up with a GoPro on a bicycle helmet, though. Yeah.

Well, it is a lot to learn before the trip, but I had to learn everything about the Rover before the last trip, and I managed to pull that off. So? I'm up for the challenge, I think. But it is a lot. It is a lot when I think about it. It is a lot to go through. And then maybe none of it happens. And then maybe I just end up taking the truck and the rover, and then it's whatever.

It's no big deal. Still get to hang out on the rover. Yeah. It's no big deal. Still get to hang out on the rover. Yeah. I found it interesting listening to you talking about the rover and then sort of ending up living in the rover and then enjoying that space.

Yeah. And I can identify with this because my wife's parents have got a barge and I absolutely love living on the barge. This is a narrow boat that goes up and down the canals in the UK. So very thin and long. So not much space. But I kind of like the efficiency of living that you have to adopt when you're living in a small space like that. So what is it about living in the RV that you find attractive?

Yeah, it's definitely an aspect of that. So, like, there's no reason for me to go to a furniture store because I'm not going to be able to buy anything in that furniture store and bring it home. And it's sort of freeing. Like, when we have a really big mess to clean up, it takes 10, 15 minutes, and the entire space is immaculate. And it's so nice.

So there is a lot less need of things and there's a lot less like maintenance and maintaining that a big place comes with. You know, a big place gets cluttered up. There's stuff all over all of the – wherever there's counter space or wherever there's a flat surface, stuff ends up getting stacked on top of it and then they have have yards that have to be maintained, and I don't have time or energy for that. And I also hate my neighbors. Like, I constantly, I look for things, like there's a new guy. There's a new guy who, he's a renter that lives over in the house across over there.

And he's out there, and he's smoking all the time when I'm outside. So, you know, here I am loading, unloading stuff from the back of my truck, you know, grunting and huffing and puffing. And this guy's just sitting out there for like 20 minutes watching me. Like a 20-minute smoke break. Just sitting there staring at me the whole time. And then one time. Doesn't even offer to help.

And then, like two weeks into it, I get out of my truck and I lock it. And I'm walking in and he says, hey, your lights are on. Now, I have been doing this for two weeks since this guy's moved in. And the lights have always automatically turned themselves off. They have since the first time he's seen me show up for two weeks in a row. The lights automatically turn themselves off. And then two weeks into it, he's like, hey, your lights. And I'm like, I just stopped there.

I'm like, well, yeah, they turn the – and it's not even like I have some – it's a 2012. It's not some fancy vehicle, right? The lights just turn themselves off. So anyways, I developed tics about like – and then I can tell you about these guys. Let me tell you about these guys right here. Who are these guys? These guys right here. They're coming and going at the same time I am all the time.

Now, honestly, how long ago did I tell you about this? No, it's true. I've observed the same thing. And I've complained about it. I've even sent you pictures of them coming and going when I'm coming and going. Why are they always coming and going when I'm coming and going? I come and go at weird times. I'm a podcaster. And yet they're coming and going at weird times.

It's suspicious. Maybe they have a podcast. It's almost like they listen to the live stream and then they're coming and going when I'm coming and going. That'd be a great way to spy on your neighbor. Oh, well, he just has this live stream. Yeah. And then this is another one where I think maybe I am, I have some sort of condition.

I'm not very good at. You're sort of viable. So there's the neighbor thing. So I like the ability, I like the ability to pick up and move. So there might be some sort of condition there where I just start to develop tics about the people. You know what it is, is I observe a lot of patterns in people and then when they, when they have bad patterns, I can't help but notice them and then they drive drive me crazy because then like, I have to build the narrative around why they have

such an awful pattern in their life anyways. So it's nice to be able to pick up and move. So that's one plus for the, for the mobile lifestyle. You know, the other thing is, is I really, I really put a lot of my time and energy into the network, like so much so that I'm negligent to other aspects of my life. And it doesn't really matter how important it is. It could be a health issue. It could be taking care of personal insurance. It doesn't really matter what it is.

I'm just not very good at addressing it. And along with that comes things like all of the crap you have to manage and pay. And when I mean manage, I mean even having to go into bill pay and set up payments and send checks to your power company and your water company and your cable company and the garbage company and all of the different organizations or utilities that you have to pay when you own a house. They just drive me crazy. I don't have time to manage that. I don't want to bother with any of it. And so one of the nice things about where I'm staying at is it's all just part of the deal. I pay a flat $35 and it's just all part of the deal. I can use as much power as I want. I use as much water as I want. The garbage is built in.

All of it's just one $35 charge that automatically goes on my card. And I don't have to mail anybody a check, nothing. It's just very simple for me to manage, and it lets me focus on other things. So the smaller space lets me not have to focus on maintaining my house and making it look nice and not having to worry about the yard, and the smaller space keeps it efficient. I don't need to buy a lot. Like if I do get this new rig, along with that new rig is, well, that's also my couch and my dining room table and my oven and my microwave and my refrigerator. And so and my king size bed now, all of it will just be part of like I.

Otherwise, I would have to go out and buy all of those things individually. Like I don't have any of those things anymore. So I would have to go buy a couch. I would have to go buy a dining room table set with chairs and I would have to go buy recliner chairs and I would have to go buy the televisions. I don't have any televisions, right? I don't have to go buy the televisions and the bedding and all of that stuff. When you get a nice rig, it just all is nice and it all just comes with it. And so not only does it check all those other boxes, but it also is mobile, which is great

for me to go do these events and do productions on the road. And it checks all the boxes as far as things you'd have to buy when you get a house that just come with it. Built right in? Yeah. I like it a lot. And on top of all of that, it's pretty damn green because at max, it can only pull 50 amps, which you're never going to pull that much. And the average U.S. house is 200 amps.

So it uses less power. It uses way less water. In fact, we're actually very acutely aware of exactly how much water we use every single week. I know in gallons. When's the last time you knew in gallons exactly how much water you use every single week? Absolutely never. Right. You need to live in the U.K.

Yeah. So, you know, I mean, it's very like – and because also it's a smaller space, we're buying less food. We have less waste. We have less waste. We have less things we're getting that we're not using. So it feels like it's also, as a side effect, a greener way to live. It also gives you a lot more, you know, when you're not having to go shopping for furniture and you're not having to spend so much time tidying and all that kind of stuff. It gives you a lot more time to rant at us online, I think.

And that's good. The real priority.