LINUX Unplugged - Episode 128: Is that a server in your pocket? | LUP 128

Episode Date: January 20, 2016

This week we dive into what the community thinks about putting a server in their pocket, show you some smart tricks with Gimp & some Windows nightmares. Plus some router chat & more!

What I want to start with is this article, opensource.com, that's talking about smart gimp tricks. I'm wondering if anyone in the mumble room or otherwise does a lot with gimp. I know Rotten Corpse, you do a lot of graphic design, but I'm not sure if you use GIMP or not. Maybe Rotten Corpse isn't here. Anyone use GIMP? I use it to crop pictures. And I actually, there's a processing service that we print all of our promotional material from AltaSpeed. So we have our cards and we have flyers and table tents and stuff like that and a lot of that stuff gets sent out over gimp but uh because inkscape will export to to a png and then they want silly little compressed formats that you know that are far

so i use it to to essentially to reprocess image files um and occasionally i'll crop a picture or you know or change something like that but um anyone use GIMP extensively? I don't use it extensively, but I do see a great use for it as that kind of go-to utility. You know, pretty much any Linux install that you have, you have GIMP, you know that you can use it for those base needs. Yeah. Also, sometimes it does the job very well. I've used it a lot to render PDFs before before sending it to a printer kind of sure kind of like what you do yeah yeah yeah for you know and i did see actually it was it was interesting of all places i was watching um a true tv i west you watch true tv do you ever watch like forensic files and the new detectives and stuff like that i have not but it sounds interesting well i tell you what it's a double-edged sword because on one hand i start to think i can get

away with anything because i'm like, oh, you moron. How did you not know about DNA? And then on the other hand, I realize that that's from like 10 years ago. And so, you know, 10 years ago, whatever the technology is that we have today to catch people probably won't become very prevalent for another 10 years. And so, you know, I'm judging people based on their information 10 years ago. But I was watching the other night and gimp actually made an appearance and they were talking about how they were changing the contrast of of this photo to bring out certain elements in it and you know the little announcer guy he's got this you know deep voice and he's like so the photo analysts use the gnu image manipulation

program which is a professional program released for free that has amazing power. And part of me was like, okay, so I actually don't know a lot of, you know, super photo professionals or image professionals that use GIMP. On the other hand, I'm really happy that there's a public perception, at least

in that particular TV show, that it's this very high-powered tool and is available for free. Right. Those shows get so much wrong, it's nice that at least they're getting it wrong in our direction for once. Well, yeah, it was kind of cool. So anyway, I saw the GIMP and then you posted this story and I'm like, maybe I'm a little out of touch. Maybe there are a ton of people that are using GIMP nowadays. And in the chat room, I should point out, in the chat room there's a ton of people that are using GIMP.

Obviously, Odyssey Westrup, he actually – and Odyssey, you should maybe join us if you have the ability to jump and mumble. But Westrup, he's a graphics designer. So he uses does a lot of graphics design and he does all of it in open source. And we've actually had him do a couple of stuff from us for us as a company, AltaSpeed, that is. And I've had him do some personal stuff for me. for us as a company, Altaspeed that is, and I've had him do some personal stuff for me. And I know that he uses all open source software,

GIMP and Inkscape and Krita. And that's actually how he does the majority of his workflow. So, but anyone use any other open source graphics utilities? Has used inkscape i used inkscape oh what do you use it for i used to use it not so much anymore but when i ran my business uh somebody needed uh something done like a brochure or something like that it was great for doing page layouts okay i actually I actually preferred it over Scribus. No kidding. I use Inkscape. One of the Ubuntu phone community developers created a toolkit in Inkscape

for doing user interface design mockups. So it's got all of the kind of elements that you would need to create an application, whatever application you like, as little elements in a giant Inkscape document. And you just drag the bits around, duplicate them, move them around, line them all up, and then design your application that way. It's really, really cool. I tell you what, one of the things that I have come to love about Inkscape itself is because it's a vector graph program, the things that I have come to love about Inkscape itself is because it's a vector graph program, you know, I can start out with a, you know, 500 by 500, 800 by 800, whatever it is, a canvas and design a graphic, you know, asset. And then I can take that graphic asset and I can say, all right, well, I need to blow that up to the size of a banner or a poster or we're going to wrap a car or a service vehicle.

And how are we going to do that? Well, we can take that vector graphic and it scales, you know, essentially indefinitely. And you can combine one graphic art from the other. So I'll give you an example. We actually are launching a cloud-based wi-fi for uh the hospitality industry so essentially they pay us pay us a monthly fee and we bring in a bunch of equipment and set it up and we manage all of that remotely and one of the things is that there is a tent that goes inside of the room and that tent has connection details and um contact information if if they have so if they have trouble with their wi-fi they can call a 1-800

number and somebody will walk them through how to restart their computer and turn on the wise all the stuff that i wouldn't want to do right and then if it exceeds that level then it gets elevated to us and so we we got a a um a free for use um essentially, uh, essentially a wifi, uh, vector graphic. And we were able to bring that into Inkscape and take our existing card that we already had designed and put, and then we had this wifi logo. And because it's, it's a vector graphic, all of the transparency carried over all of the, you know, I could change the color to match the color scheme that we had. I mean, it's just incredible. And, and the fact that I can do all that with open source software is incredible to me.

You know, it changes the way that you can approach a project because I can essentially use the internet and people on the internet that are doing creative things and combine those all for a single purpose. And it's awesome. It is.

I've used it a little bit at work myself, mostly for I'll have a automated tool that will output a graph, maybe of like structure relations and how they're all, you know, foreign key kind of stuff. And Inkscape will just import the PDF and you can modify it before shipping it out or putting it on the wiki for documentation. That's awesome. Yeah. And, you know, we actually, we, I think the, I can't remember the program that we used for our original logo design, the one that everyone comments on. But but we but after that, we took that, imported it. And Inkscape actually has the ability to look at a graphic asset and trace it out and then fill it with a blank color.

And so we essentially stripped all of the, you know, fancy filters and stuff off of it and turn it back into a vector. And then we were able to recolor it and build it back up from there. So that was pretty neat. Yeah, it was pretty cool. Go open source. Yeah, it was awesome. This is Linux Unplugged,

episode 128 for January 19th, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly talk show that's brought to you this week from the sprawling metropolis of the Frozen Tundra. My name is Noah. My name is Wes. Hey, Wes, how are you? I'm doing great. How about yourself well once again the the uh the lovely world of the internet has connected us through ip packets isn't it wonderful

it is and we and we get to chat and talk about linux which is coincidentally my favorite thing to talk about so i want to start out by talking about why it is uh Wes and I are pretending to be Chris this week. And that's because Chris is on his way to scale. He is in J.B. Rover, too, which if you haven't seen, head over to Twitter dot com and check out at Chris L.A.S. It is it is crazy cool. He got a like an amazing RV. Wes, have you seen pictures of this thing? Yeah, it is a beast.

It's incredible it is incredible it it is like a luxury home on wheels and i like anyone who sees it is going to be jealous they're gonna i would live in a camper if that's what my camper looked like that's how cool it is but like a roving jb party bus exactly oh that's good oh that's really good that's a better name than that's a better name than rover 2 the rover party bus not to pitch that to him anyway he's on the road as we speak making his way down to scale and if you're not familiar with what scale is it's a southern california linux expo and um chris is going to be attending this year and hanging out uh and and covering some of the community aspects and and this that and the other and uh some of the community aspects and this, that, and the other.

And because of the way that the time it's going to take him to travel, he's not available on Tuesday. And so he has let Wes and I sit in the big chair and do the show this week. So we are going to talk this week, starting with a Reddit thread, a follow up from the Linux Action Show. And basically, Regia posted in the Linux Action Show subreddit, which is of of course, reddit.com slash r slash Linux Action Show. And he says, Noah hit on something about Unity. And he says, I wish, I think he's quoting me. It says, I wish Ubuntu would just use GNOME and go back to trying to contribute useful bits. And then he links to an imager image of apparently a Star trek episode um now i have a few extensions oh he's

showing his desktop now i have a few extensions installed but the way i use gnome it isn't much different than how somebody else would use unity i keep the dash on at all sides i have those pesky tray apps in the corner and so on this is close to to how I work with Unity and OSX, etc. I'm puzzled to why GNOME gets treated like the redheaded stepchild sometimes. Now I know that once in a while, the GNOME dev team decides to head off the deep and make the file manager work like an old school finder by default. But hey, let's override users' pre-existing settings. That's not very good, is it? But overall, GNOME just keeps getting better and better. Now, Wes, you're the one that actually brought this to my attention. What was your immediate thought when you read this and, you know, when you watched the show and thought about how all that ties together?

Well, you know, I too am a GNOME user. I definitely prefer it. But I can understand why Canonical wants to be developing their own desktop environment, you know, with their plans for convergence with the big move to Unity 8. I think a lot will depend on what that looks like when it's shipped and when everyone's using it. But at the end of the day, I think people do, you know, like yourself, like many desktop users, a lot of people I know at work who sit next to me are using Unity.

And it seems to work for them. And I also think that while that GNOME is different, there does seem to be a significant portion of people who use GNOME not dissimilar to Unity. With the dock on the side, you hit your super key and you're finding applications. It's not that different. So I guess my – I'm one of the few people that actually – and I responded to this in the Reddit too. I'm one of the few people that actually and I responded this in the Reddit, too. I'm one of the few people that actually like Unity. I actually have Unity on the laptop I'm using right now and I have it on the desktop that I'm using to send the stream to Chris.

That becomes particularly evident when you have multi monitors that exceed three. If you have more than three monitors i just think that unity it comes off more polished than gnome does oftentimes and chris would would vehemently disagree with this he would tell you that he would point out a thousand different things that that that um that point to why gnome is a more polished desktop environment but But I see things like, you know, the multi-monitor support, the fact that I can choose a display and only that display has my, you know, launcher bar and activities there.

And I can put that on any of the displays. Doesn't necessarily have to be the quote-unquote primary. I can set up how I want. I can set up because oftentimes the quote-unquote primary monitor is the one that's right in the center of me. And I have two auxiliary monitors off to the left and right, and then three auxiliary monitors up on top. And that's not a, that's not a usual use case,

but it's my use case. And in that instance, I think that unity just shines a little bit. And the other thing is too, is I feel like there are a lot of things that just feel, that make unity feel more cohesive than gnome. And I'll give you an example. So on GWAK, for example, I get weird. I'm not sure it could be a bug, but I get a weird thing where when I bring down GWAK, it doesn't it. The transparency doesn't necessarily go over the the the menu at the side. Do you use Wake, Wes? You know, I have in the past, but I usually just have a terminal open kind of in the corner somewhere anyway, so I don't use it currently. Yeah, so I like to have whatever I'm doing,

and this is the one thing I think that Gnome got right, is have everything in full screen and take up the whole screen. And the exception to that is the terminal because oftentimes the terminal is my connection to another machine. Exactly. And then my screen is whatever I'm doing to that machine. And so I bring the terminal down, I do some work, I put it back up,

I reorganize, figure out what I'm going to do next, bring the terminal back down. And I feel like, I just, I think that GNOME, it does not feel as native to me when I install an app and have, you know, that like that that menu that Guake, for example, come down. It just doesn't feel as native to me as it does in in something like Unity. And I see other little things that just feel like pieces that have been put together. And on one hand, I really appreciate that because that is essentially the heart of Linux, right? Everyone does something very, very well. And we bring all those pieces together and it makes for a cohesive

experience. And for whatever reason, I just, there are, there are, there are a number of little things that just make me think that GNOME is missing. And so I'm actually one of the people that like Unity. That said, there are, there are some, there are some key issues that irritate the heck out of me so i had a client that actually was using ubuntu gnome because that's the first thing everyone's going to say is i don't know why everyone's i don't know why noah's hating on gnome it's available with ubuntu it's a it's a it's a blessed uh you know um i forget the terminology not not a flavor but a um you know a flavor uh the gnome environment and he Ubuntu GNOME. And what would happen was if he would full screen a Flash video in Firefox,

and then un-full screen it, and then go back to re-full screen it, it wouldn't go back into full screen a second time. He'd have to restart his computer or at least log out to make that happen again. Now, some people are going to blame Firefox. Some people are going to blame GNOME. Some people are going to blame Ubuntu. But the problem didn't occur in chrome inside of uh ubuntu gnome and the problem didn't occur in firefox in ubuntu unity and the problem didn't occur in any other distro i can tell you've tried this yeah well yeah well

you troubleshot the heck out of it let me tell you because i and so basically what i came to i came to the conclusion that at least in in inoteric use cases, because Canonical is focusing so much on their own desktop, everything works really, really well in Unity. And so if you're going to use Ubuntu, you're probably your best choice is to go with is to go with Unity because that's their quote unquote default desktop. to go with Unity because that's their quote-unquote default desktop. And so what I think is interesting is we have this illusion of choice that you can pick any desktop, but really you start to have compromises. And the further down the list you go, the less popular of a desktop you choose, the more problems I find that exist. And so, you know, I can't count the number of issues I've had with Cinnamon when I try to install it on Ubuntu. Now, like on Mint, it works just fine.

But you try and install the Cinnamon desktop on top of Ubuntu, and I have all sorts of weird issues that I don't really want to work through. And so, I don't know. And so that was kind of my response on Reddit, and I'm wondering what you think of that response. I think that's fair.

I would like to hear what our Mumble Room has to say. Let's introduce those fine fellows. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Oh, there's tons of people in here. So, Mumble Room, you guys all use Linux, right?

Yes, sir. All right. What's that? Is that a trick question? Linux? GNU slash Linux? Yeah. GNU slash Linux.

So, Wimpy, I'm interested to some degree to get your perception because Ubuntu Mate is one of those distros where I have not, to the best of my knowledge, is one of those distros where I have not, to the best of my knowledge, found a single thing that when using Ubuntu Mate, where it makes me feel like I'm on an alternative desktop from standard Ubuntu. Everything just works. I mean, literally everything just works. In fact, so much so that I actually, all of the production machines that I have here in Grand Forks, with the exception of the one I'm on now, but all the rest of them are actually running Ubuntu Mate because it runs lighter than it does with Unity. And I'm wondering what kind of considerations went into that and how you guys feel about that and how that plays out.

Well, Ubuntu Mate is just Ubuntu. In fact, it is Ubuntu Mate is just Ubuntu in fact it is Ubuntu when you when when when you boil it down you simply I say simply it's taken a year and a half to do you you remove Unity and you put the Mate desktop on top but then you keep all of the Ubuntu tools and integrations that already exist underneath the hood, which is what gives you all of that stability and just works goodness of Ubuntu on a traditional desktop environment. So one of the reasons why Mate is lighter than Unity is that it's based on GNOME 2

with all of the old compatibility stuff from GNOME 1 removed and all of the underpinnings upgraded to the latest versions of all the recent technologies. And it's all written in C, so it's a very lightweight implementation by comparison to what it was when it was GNOME 2 in its sort of last versions. So it's kind of happenstance in some respects that Marte has now come out as a lightweight desktop alternative. Outstanding. outstanding um anyone else have have uh have thoughts or opinions on desktop environments and good i i'm sorry if my audio is terrible i'm in america for scale um uh so there's a few things one whenever anyone says i'm one of the few people who like unity i want to slap them because there are millions of people who use Unity.

Watch out at scale. Watch out at scale, Noah. And, you know, saying I'm one of the few people. What actually is the case is there are a few really negative people who don't like it and who are very vocal. And there's a vast number of people who use it and aren't vocal. So, you know, saying you're one of the few people you should actually say i'm one of the majority who like unity to be fair um so the the original question you know from the guy posted on reddit was about you know why don't we just use no you could use that same argument about every single desktop why don't you will just all pack

up and go home and use something else is effectively what you're saying and every single desktop has their own um niche that they want to fulfill or use cases that they um address that others don't like you know for example elementary have their um uh niche with it's not so much a niche i would like to have a well-designed, pretty, robust, functional desktop. That sounds like a reasonable thing. And so I think it's unreasonable to suggest that people who are working on those things should throw that away and use something else instead. You might just as well say, why don't kde give up and switch to note it may it's a it's a nonsensical argument from my point of view that's fair um so basically and i admit that this is a horrible horrible thing

to uh to base a generalization on but there was i'm admitting that up front but there was there it was a couple months ago maybe even a year ago that we did a poll, a straw poll, and to find out what desktop environment people were using. And I was shocked at how many people didn't vote for Unity and Gnome shot way to the top and Unity was down there. or incorrect or correct um perception that uh that unity just wasn't preferred by a lot of the people that the you know that that are aware of other desktop environments that are out there and i fully admit that you that you know work you know working in the space that you work in you're going to have a much much much more realistic perception you know what actually biased and you should throw away my opinion completely and you should throw away my opinion completely. And you should only listen to people who are outside of this bubble

because their opinion won't be tarnished, you know, potentially is one side of it. But the flip side is any of these polls are deeply flawed, the same way that using DistroWatch is your measure of how important your distro is. It's ridiculous. And people who place any importance on something which is basically a poll, which can be shared amongst a subreddit,

which massively skews the numbers for any one distro, plus or minus, when in fact the actual people who use and like a particular desktop or user interface or application or whatever are ultimately never going to see that poll my mum uses ubuntu and has used ubuntu for years she will never see that poll and never click on anything in that poll saying that's exactly the point i was i was thinking is that however many millions of people in china use the ubuntu desktop they're never gonna see this because the thing's written in english for one

so it's just ludicrous we in particular also are a community of you know linux enthusiasts and people who like customization i think some of unity's strengths is that it can be widely deployed and people it's pretty easy for people to just get it. You know, the icons are right there on the left. You hit the super key, things just work. So it has a lot going for it. Like you said, your mom can use it. My mom uses it.

It's great. Well, and we also have Unity is actually the default desktop on, well, not the default desktop. It's the only desktop on all of our kiosk machines that we deploy. So basically, if you think about the target audience there, it's we're taking people from all walks of the technical spectrum and saying that no matter who walks in, if they sit down and they want to check their email, print a boarding pass, or check the weather, they're going to be able to accomplish those things quickly, easily,

and without complaining to the front desk. Because, of course, if they complain, then we lose the contract. And what we found is that little bar on the side of unity which by the way requires no tweaking and requires no extensions which means we don't have to update anything it becomes is is incredibly useful in a situation like that and so i agree that the average person walking around the street is going to sit down and have no trouble using unity and i think i even started out by saying i phrased it you know poorly but the the gist of the message was it's my personal belief that that unity is a more polished desktop than gnome is um but uh but for whatever

reason and maybe it is just that people are are terribly vocal i guess there is a there is there is a perception from from some people that uh there's a perception from some people that the Unity desktop is inferior, correct or incorrect? Well, that's different. It's like any individual, like any Reddit consumer, is entitled to have their opinion, and it's perfectly fine for someone to say Unity is inferior because of these xyz reasons in the same way that someone might not like enlightenment or someone might not like kde because it doesn't work their workflow or the apps don't look right or you know for whatever reason it's perfectly fine for people to have their opinions you know and like buttholes everyone's got the problem is when you try and

extrapolate from a poll on a random website somewhere and make bold assertive statements about whether something is right or wrong or whether something is good or bad based on a button clicked by a bunch of random people on the internet. It makes no sense whatsoever to me, but that's just me. No, I think that's completely fair. All right, well, I want to talk about a piece of feedback that we got in, and this comes to us from Dukeke. And Dukeke writes in and he says, Greetings, I was hoping that maybe some of the technical savvy people

might be able to help point me in the right direction to resolve my crisis. I may have just made a potentially costly mistake. We nuked and paved a friend's brand new Lenovo Yoga 500 with Linux without booting into Windows to first disable secure boot explicitly. He didn't want to accept the EULA, and so we successfully booted into the USB key. Ubuntu Mate 15.10, Ubuntu with Unity 15.04, so we thought we would just go ahead. We installed both Ubuntu Mate 15.10 and then installed Ubuntu with Unity 14.04. After booting, we were faced with a very plain and daunting boot prompt, and he gives a screenshot. I get a screen with boot options of which the hard drive, if I select any of these, it just reprompts me to the same screen.

I imagine that I need to go into the system that has a Secure Boot signature, that is, find such a distro, install it, disable Secure Boot, then reinstall our preferred system. I thought Ubuntu would be a candidate, but apparently not. Is this the correct way? Which distros would work? We have tried installing into Ubuntu Unity 1504, which is supposed to have the appropriate signature. But after install and reboot, we get the above. Given that Windows has been obliterated at this point, what options do I have? Unfortunately, he's leaving in just over a week. So if the conclusion ends up being install Windows to do this, I'll take it,

but I'd rather not. If anyone has any tips, thanks. Do cake. So I hate, and I use that word strongly, I hate Windows and Secure Boot. It has become a nightmare to get Linux onto machines sometimes. And I had a guy that we actually ended up returning his computer back to Best Buy and he bought a different model because we simply, I fully admit, I'll put this disclaimer out. It's probably because I'm an idiot. I fully admit that there's probably some of you out there that know exactly what buttons to click and exactly how to get it to install, but I couldn't, I couldn't get it to work. And it, uh, it, it drove me nuts. And so I'm curious, is there anyone there? Is there anyone out there that knows how to do this? Because the only way I'm aware of is to actually boot into

windows, go into the troubleshooting menu, reboot into the UEFI settings, and then disable secure boot or turn on legacy boot or whatever they call it. It's different in different manufacturers. But does anyone know of another way to do that? I might have an idea. If it's a Lenovo, then there might be like a little button on the side of the PC. You press that button and it'll ask you if you want your boot options. Go into the BIOS and that's where the secure boot should be located

and just turn it off from there. Yeah. That's what I did in my laptop. I got a Lenovo Y510P laptop that, well, the motherboard fried. But anyway, it came with Windows 8 with Secure Boot, UEFI and all that stuff. So I just pressed that button, went into the BIOS, shut all that off and Linux installed just great. Yeah. And we did the same thing on Angela's Yoga 2. Angela's Yoga 2 as well. We'll say it that way um but she had that little button and yeah that was super slick to get into the boot menu but the thing that was confusing to me is

they're able to get into somewhat of a uefi setting or bio setting because they're able to change the boot order so i would think that there'd be something inside of those uefi settings to to turn it off um it does kind of look like the thing they might want to check as well, just in general, if they want to use Ubuntu. You know, if they got it installed, obviously Secure Boot is working to the point where they could boot into it. And it kind of just looks like the EFI entry didn't get set. There should be like a Linux manager the same way there's a Windows manager.

Exactly. So I can actually answer that for you. Yeah, please. manager the same way there's a windows manager exactly so i can actually answer that for you yeah please okay so depending on what model of computer it is like or sorry not model what make it is like hp lenovo uh etc there's a different key when you're booting up and you get their splash screen that you got to hit uh to get into the uef. And then usually there's a setting in there to disable secure boot, or in some cases you can even go as far as to go into legacy BIOS mode. And then,

uh, that bypasses all the UEFI nonsense. Ah, okay. And, and the chat room is telling us that on Lenovo F1, we'll get us in to make that change. Yeah.

And on Toshiba, uh, it's usually delete, uh, F10 on Toshiba, uh, it's usually delete, uh, F10 on HP and, uh, I can't remember what it is for Asus. All right. Well, that's, that gives him something to try anyway, but, uh, you know, I'll reiterate again. I think it's been a real pain. I I've tried a couple of different times to, uh, you know, it's gotten to the point where I'm almost more likely now to buy a used machine that previously had windows 7 on it and just uh and wipe that off rather than um you know rather than

go with a new machine because it's just such a pain and that's sad really because it it's seriously going to decrease the amount of people that are willing to give linux a shot i am nervous as heck now to recommend that somebody try to install linux whereas before i'd be like well let's try and dual boot it. Worst case scenario, we just uninstall it and redo your partition. Now I'm petrified to do even that. I was just helping my brother with his new laptop, and I walked him through over the phone how to disable Secure Boot.

And even he's fairly technical, but he even asked me like, oh, is it OK that we have this off? You know, just the name scares people to even try to follow that kind of instruction. You know, that's such a good point and they have these stupid idiotic messages that pop up too that say things like you're disabling secure boot your computer may be you may be susceptible to unsigned firmware and cause damage and no no it won't because we've used computers with unsigned with with unsecured bioseses. I hate using that word. For the last 20 years, we've never had a problem.

And in this case, it does also seem like at the same time they rolled out that quick boot where it doesn't always load the keyboard and other drivers right at the start. Exactly. That plays right into it. On its own, secure boot's okay, especially for enterprises and places where you do want that extra key security to only boot your kernel.

But it doesn't work as well in this case. You know, I've worked in a decent amount of enterprises. I mean, they're going to be somewhat limited in Grand Forks, North Dakota. I've never walked into an enterprise that was concerned about which kernel was booting. It just seems like a problem that never existed. And the thing is, like, you're onto something with that. It doesn't recognize keyboard input. Just to load into the BIOS of the UFI menu man you can't even do that anymore you know because it boots so fast with that stupid uh you

know fast boot or whatever where it doesn't completely shut down just a pain um lucas z writes in and he says i heard yesterday about friendos friend os it looks like this and he links us a youtube video yeah so it's an amiga workbench in the browser powered by linux back and they're releasing the public beta as open source this week. It will be able to run on both HTML5 and native applications. And then he links us to their website. I'm wondering if anyone in the chat or in the mumble room has heard about this or played with it. Nobody?

Nobody has played with FriendOS. Well, let's take a look. So it looks actually pretty neat. Anytime you start combining an operating system and a browser, I get excited. Wes, have you seen this? I think you were the one that linked it, actually. Only just a little bit. What do you think? It was kind of interesting. Honestly honestly i wish they had a few more screenshots the video is okay but more screenshots a little bit more it's kind of

a little salesy at this point yeah yeah it really is a lot a lot of a lot of stock uh stock photos and stuff like that well anyway um look at that 3d earth yeah exactly exactly well nonetheless uh it still excites me and the and it would be something that might be neat to get a review on a little bit later but um basically my understanding is um that that uh that you like again you as this is email so do you get an amiga workbench inside the browser and um have you used anything similar to this before no i don't think i have anyone in the mumble room used anything similar to this or have an idea what we could expect if if you know when they when they release their

public beta and we play with it nobody nobody it's quiet in here this isn't popular um well Um, well, um, Hmm. That's no good. So, uh, I guess what we'll do is we'll just, we'll keep our eye on it. And, um, when they released the public beta and we get to play with it, we will, uh, we'll take a look at it and see what we think. And maybe by that time, I guess once, I guess that that is what the, uh, um, what the catalyst of conversation is, right. Is actually getting to play with something. If you can't really see what it is, I suppose.

Um, yes, they had to in a, an article, but it's not in English, so I could not read it. Yeah, I tried to use it. That's another thing, too, is Google Translate has been super crazy. Well, I'll tell you what else is crazy is Chris is on his way to scale. Now, I don't know how many people, I haven't heard what the final numbers of people that bought the, um, the, the, the shirt to support the trip from scale. But at this point, whether you support it or not, you can come visit Chris, hang out with him. He's going to be at scale. I believe he's arriving tomorrow night and you can track him the entire way there.

Jupiter broadcasting.com slash Rover dash two. And he has, um, who he updated it. Oh, that's cool um you can live track him to find out exactly where he is and you can go beat on his door and uh and and and say hello and people did that last time and he actually invited him right onto the air so i don't know if you remember that wes we are sitting here we're doing the show and all of a sudden we have a third person there uh that was joining us um from it was awesome yeah it was it was really cool we got to talk to him and and they got to be on the air and and essentially do the

show and and the chat room is officially renaming unofficially renaming uh chris's rv as the jb party bus i don't know if that's actually going to go over well or not or if he's going to keep it rover 2 but i'm in favor of the jb pb that's I'm down with it. You have to say yes. Yeah, yeah. So we'll talk to him. But you can follow him on jupiterbroadcasting.com. So I think both, do both the links, both Rover and Rover 2 work?

I think they do. I'm going to JB slash Rover, and that seems to still work. So I think that's working. You know, I actually attend all of the major conferences, and I've tried every cell phone vendor out there. Practically, I've had a Verizon phone. I've had an AT&T phone.

And I can tell you without a doubt, the most reliable connection that you're going to get at a conference like scale that's full of congestion is from Ting. Now, Ting is a trendsetter of the of the of the mobile sphere. If you go into any cell phone shop today, you'll see that they have all of these gimmicks for no contract phones and AT&T has done away with their two-year contract and they have all this prepaid stuff. And you know who started all of that? Ting did. With Ting, you're only going to pay for what you use. So we have contract employees that come in here for a week at a time or two weeks for a time or a month at a time. And we have them do things like wiring buildings and pulling cat five and, and, and doing punchdown block tests. And if we're doing a, if we're doing an equipment swap for, you know, a hotel, they have a bunch of new machines. They don't have to have any real

technical skills. They just have to be able to unbox computers, put them in the place of the old ones, and then our techs will go through and actually do the imaging and configure that kind of stuff. So they have to do very basic things. But we need to be able to get a hold of those guys. And the way that we do that is we outfit them with a phone from Ting. Now, because they're working on site in a place that we manage the Wi-Fi, they're on Wi-Fi 100% of the time. We use Telegram for all of our texts, and we use SIP for all of our phone calls. So Wes, the deal is they're not really using any of ting service we need that we needed to fall back to a phone service we needed to fall back to internet in case they're not available or they they you know they go off site for a little bit

but for the most picking up supplies at the store they have a question to ask you got it they've got service you've got it but for the most part we're only paying six bucks a month for those phones now now that alone would be enough for you to get your drop your current provider and come over to ting but because you're a linux unplugged audience they're going to give you 25 off your first device your first month first month of service and all you have to do to get that is visit and i think we can all agree here this is the coolest url on the web. Linux dot ting.com Linux dot ting.com. And you can buy something for yourself.

For me, I actually bought a, a, a unlocked GSM phone off of eBay and was able to use that $25 towards my first month of service. And if you're only using six to $10, you're going to get the first month or two for free. It's not going to cost you anything.

They're going to give you that. So Linux dot ting.com and pick yourself out something nice. And thank you so much to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged. So let's see if this is more popular. It better be. I have had servers on my brain this week and for a number of different reasons. And i i immediately gravitated towards this article um that says the if it loads there we go um ocean the linux web server that fits in your pocket ocean may look like a smartphone but in fact it's a fully functional linux powered web server that fits in your pocket you want a web you want a portable linux powered web server? Look no further than Ocean. Ocean has been designed for the ground up for portability and features integrated battery that allows you to run web and Bluetooth applications in place where direct power is limited.

The device is approximately the size of an iPhone 6 and can easily fit in your pocket. Because it packs the power of the Linux operating system, the default is Debian, but you can install your own. Ocean can be used for a variety of functions, deploying web applications, frameworks such as Node.js, Ruby on Rails, building a custom router, Internet of Things Hub, iBeacon, Eddystone, or prototyping. The device can also act as a battery pack for iPhones and Android devices and holds enough power to recharge an iPhone 6 1.3 times. It has the following specs, a 1 gigahertz ARM processor, Cortex-A7, 1 gigabyte of DDR3, 480 megahertz RAM, 16 gigabytes of an internal microSD storage, 4 gigabytes internal flash chip, 1 USB 2.0 and 3.0 port, 802.11b GN Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. It also supports Qi wireless charging and a 4200 milliamp internal battery, which is good of two days of continuous CPU usage.

And as the chat room is pointing out, it is kind of like a Raspberry Pi. The difference to me is I really like ARM devices, and I think that it's a really competitive alternative platform to x86, but every time I talk to ARM enthusiasts that are interested in all ARM devices, a lot of them seem to rail against the Raspberry Pi, and they say basically it's kind of like a toy. It's really a serious device so i guess the thing that makes us stand out in my mind is it seems like from the ground up it's designed to be a production grade server just a very very limited very very low power uh low power consumption, low resources. But it also has kind of the slick branding in the case, which I could see, you know, helping its marketability.

Like you don't want to buy something with an exposed circuit board and put it together. Exactly. You just want to like drop it in your studio and use it for, you know, recording things when you're working with your friends or whatever. Exactly. And, you know, as and from and again, if taking that marketing perspective, one thing further, when I go into a client and I say if I tell them I want to install something called a Raspberry Pi, they're going to look at me sideways, right? Or expect food. Exactly.

Now, if I tell them I want to install the Ocean micro web server, and then they go to a website and it has flashy little spin around graphics and it has little bullet points that talk about specifications that they don't really understand that kind of stuff impresses people um but the you know i was i was looking around the other day and i was thinking you know we have so many little tiny things you know we have a we have a resource site that our employees go to to and it has um links to the to these incredibly long urls like for example drivers for hp you have to click like seven different links to get deep enough into their site before you can actually type in the model number that you want. It spits out the driver links. Once you find that link, it's not so bad. So we have that hot link to a resource site and we have things like the, another example would be the HPL IP driver.

All of that stuff is linked. It doesn't require a lot of power. I don't even necessarily need, you know, a, you know, an even, you know, a big server would probably be too much and too much overhead. All I really need is a little tiny thing that serves up a tiny little HTML page. And I was actually looking for inexpensive, low powered servers. And then you drop this on me and I'm like, you know what, this is it. This is exactly what I was looking for a couple nights ago. And, um, I can think of a ton of uses. I don't know what, if you had one of these, Wes, what would you be using it for? No, I'm imagining like you could take it with you. You know, maybe you're,

you're out car camping, maybe you're out somewhere else and you want to play like a game with all your friends and you already have kind of like stuff set up. You could use this as a, as a little server that, you know, you host all the download files on, you could host shared files to drag and drop between them as you're working. How about the mumble room? What do you guys have ideas for? I know, Fresso, you can probably think of a thousand things to host on a tiny little web server. Hey, we could start hosting...

I thought it would be nice to use it for a wildlife camera or something, or a surveillance system. Especially if we paired that with a GSM card, unlocked GSM that with a like a like a gsm card unlocked gsm card with a unlocked hotspot from ting you know for five bucks a month or six bucks a month you could have hotspot capability and put that thing online and have it be a cellular server and they both run off a battery right so that would be that would be kind of neat how about uh how about uh fresco are you still here

yeah yep you got any ideas of what you could do with the tiny little pocket website i have tons of ideas actually i could probably use one today to collect some data but here's the thing i am very destructive with this kind of devices. And this is why I love the Raspberry Pi is because I can destroy one and getting a new one costs me just five bucks, right? And I literally just a couple hours ago accidentally shot a Raspberry Pi with a 22. I'm not even joking. Accidentally, you say? I think it's still working. It still sent the data back to

my tablet so I think it's still live but I can do this because a replacement cost me $5 I'm not too worried about it that being said

if I had a $50 server, I would probably not be as willing to experiment with it. Which is a big downside for me. That being said, if you play with a lotot uh stuff and you need a hub this is perfect yeah yeah no it really is um i can think of it good my my first thought when i saw that also on the internet my first thought was i could use a nokia n9 that. He's doing the same thing. Besides, I have no USB port, but the rest, I have it. Okay. Well. It's a rather expensive tool when you look at the prices.

So you can have a much cheaper thing to do the same thing, I think. I don't think price is the only factor i mean there are plenty of people who you know look at how many people buy apple macs right right so the price is not the single factor uh it you know as a geek on a limited budget yeah sure it may be uh how your price range or your budget for whatever like homebrew project but if you're a professional and you want to take along a server to a demo um you know to a to a company that won't let you plug your laptop into their network i've had plenty of those occasions that's a great use case you know want to demo something you just put slap the little server down on the middle of the table turn it on and say right connect your laptops to

that and uh and you can you know i'll show you my my web application demo written in Node or whatever running off that little box. That's a great point. Because so many things run on Windows these days that it might be way more work to try to get your demo running on a Windows laptop that your business provides you than it would be just to stick it on a little Linux box. You don't need load balancing.

You just need an Nginx server. Right. And for me, right now I'm sat in a hotel away from home. It would be ideal for me to have a little server with me here as well. Sometimes there's some things that I want to run on a server rather than having to use the rubbish hotel Wi-Fi to deploy out to the cloud. I could just deploy it on a little local server sat here and having it as a little box that has a battery in it is just nicer. You know, it's not as gnarly as having a Raspberry Pi.

Yeah, okay, I could get a Raspberry Pi in a nice case, but I'd also need a battery and Bluetooth and a wireless dongle. And, you know, adding all those things together, sometimes a pretty box outweighs the hackability of putting a bunch of good values together. And if they support it well, that might be enough, you know, that you know that, well, if this thing breaks, I can reasonably get it replaced or serviced or, you know, rather than, oh, well, it's on me to buy the new hard drive and figure out why the solder joints aren't working.

You know, there are other, you know, out-of-the-box solutions that I use, too. You know, one of the examples is every place that we do work in, we usually try to keep at least one box that we can SSH into so that we can get into the network to do various things. And then from there, we can do, you know, we can, you know, do a skin or ping a specific IP or whatever. We like to have at least one box sitting on the inside. Now, normally, that's not a problem because if they're paying us to come do the network infrastructure, usually they have at least one, at least one, at least one server. I'll say that. I, that, that's not true in every place, especially in the hospitality industry, because a lot of that's cloud-based, but most of the, the, the enterprise networks, we have one server, but this would be a great

place to actually put, you know, like a single device behind the firewall. By the way, I been updated from the field that the name of the, of the new rig is not rover not rover 2 it is lady jupiter whoa yeah yeah lady jupiter that's the name of that beautiful beautiful rv so uh there you go um so yeah so i have had servers on my brain servers on my mind all week this week and all week last week. And I, I actually just got done setting up a couple of the in-house stuff here for all to speed. And one of the things I was doing was I, it was last week or the week before I was working with a client who wanted to set up content hosting. And basically what they were, they wanted to do is they had three different uh three different things that they wanted to run three

different independent servers that they wanted to run and so we were talking about you know we could buy a server and virtualize all three of those little mini servers um and the the price point was going to be three thousand dollars to buy that server and then we started talking about it well here's you have to consider a couple of things one is you're going to be $3,000 to buy that server. And then we started talking about it. Well, here's you have to consider a couple of things. One is you're going to purchase that server and and you're going to, you know, have to front that first $3,000. And then you're going to have to there. They were going to be on a two year upgrade cycle. So every two years they're going to spend another $3,000 and throw the last one away. So basically that means they're paying, you know, one and a half thousand dollars a year to maintain this architecture.

Then there's no redundancy. So if they have to do upgrades, if they have to do, if we have to do repairs, they're going to have to take that server offline for a couple of hours, unless of course we could buy a backup server. But then you're spending another $3,000 on the backup server.

So now we're up to $3,000 a year and repairs and maintenance aren't going to be covered. So now we're up to $3,000 a year and repairs and maintenance aren't going to be covered. So they're going to contract that out to us. Now, the good news for me is we charge $200 a month per server to do that. So I would have been happy. Yeah, I'd have been thrilled if they would have decided to, uh, to buy the server and then pay us a monthly fee to maintain it. Um, but in, but anyway, we broke all that cost down, divided it by, you know, their monthly costs and said, this is what it's going to cost you per month to run a server. And then we looked at what it costs to run that same, to do all the same things they wanted to do on DigitalOcean.

And actually, one other thing I forgot, there was also pricing in there for a backup internet connection because if the fiber line that fed the building ever went down, then they would have a backup connection. That was going to be another 5050 a month, I think. And so we looked at the cost of the DigitalOcean droplet, $480 a year. That's what it was going to cost them for everything all included. They were going to have practically no downtime. They were no longer going to be responsible for the upgrades. There was going to be no ongoing maintenance because it's going to be handled by a professional that lives and sleeps in the data center 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and they eat and breathe this stuff. That's the gremlins, right? Little data center gremlins?

Yeah. Well, they're minions, actually. You know the little yellow minions? Oh, that makes more sense. Basically, after they got done working for the evil henchmen in Despicable Me 2, then they actually went to work for DigitalOcean. They're the ones that actually maintain the servers and the server infrastructures. They do it all day long and they do a fantastic job. Now, because of the complicated setup that we had, it was going to cost us about, you know, roughly $40 a month or so to do all that. But if you're just running a basic web server, kind of like some of the tasks we were talking about on this Ocean server, if you're just running, you

know, a basic web just running a basic web server or a basic database server, man, we switched our entire ticketing system over to a $5 a month droplet on DigitalOcean and it freaking flies. Wow. Yeah, it's far and away better than the system that we were using before

and it runs on a cheaper droplet. We're accomplishing all that for $5 a month. And here's the best part, Wes. Digital Ocean is going to give you $10 credit if you use the promo code DOUnplugged. So you're getting- $10? $10.

And so basically you get the first two months free. And because there's no requirement to keep going, if you decide after the first two months you don't want to use it anymore, you just power the server down and close your account and that's the end of it. But you won't do that because it's an addiction. I- it is my name is noah and i'm an addict i'm addicted to digital ocean droplets i spin them up constantly i spin them i was playing with have you

ever have you ever played with the um i'm probably throwing away a linux action show idea but have you ever played with pong no i think i think it's i think the name is Pong. Let me let me look. But basically, it is a it is a load balancer for Linux. And I'm probably pronouncing that wrong. And everyone is probably everyone that knows it is probably i'm pulling the name up now it is called like it doesn't have the name but the but anyway there is a there is a program i'm gonna i'll look it up and i'll throw it in the show notes and basically it is a very very simple load balancer so you set it up on one digital ocean droplet and basically what happens is anytime your pound that's the name of pound p-o-u-n-d pound is great yeah and so basically you set it up you have three servers and you have your your server and your backup server and then you have your load balance balancing server that has pound running and basically what happens is anytime that uh server one goes down it automatically sends all of the traffic to server two but it

gets even better let's say you had a uh let's say you had one server that had a lot of really good resources, and then you had your other server from a couple of years ago that didn't have so many good resources. You can actually set it up so that you have a weighted key. So out of every 10 users that connect, six of them will go to the good hardware and four of them will go to the poor hardware. And you can set it up like that to distribute the load over, you know, obviously I'm using the example I'm using too, but you could have three or four or five. And we actually set that up on our ticketing system so that if our main ticketing computer ever goes down, it automatically fails back to a back over DigitalOcean droplet. And God forbid anything ever happened to DigitalOcean themselves, it automatically fails back to an onsite backup on

our premise. And God forbid anything happens to both those two at the same time, it'll fail back to a backup of a backup server that sits in my house. Yeah. So this actually, like you said, I probably just blew a perfectly good Linux action show episode talking about that right now. But it is super, super cool. And here's my challenge.

If somebody goes and tries this, they can put this to the test. You can set pound up in 30 seconds. It's that fast. I mean, the configuration file is like 12 lines and you have it up and running and it works and it's absolutely amazing. So if you want something useful to use that $10 DigitalOcean credit for, that's what I would look at. I want to go over to this article that comes to us from RS Technica. And this is about having confidence in Linux to do the things that we have sourced to basically other devices. And the article says, I've noticed lately that rather than replacing a router, every time it literally stops working,

I've needed to act earlier swapping new gear because an old router could no longer keep up with the increasing internet speeds available in the area. And he says, a lot of you are probably muttering to yourself, PF Sense, sure, that might be what you're thinking about, or Smoothwall or Untangled. I've played with all of the firewall distros out there, but I decided to go with a more basic, more old school approach, a plain CLI only install of Ubuntu server that has a few IP tables rules. plain CLI only install of Ubuntu server that has a few IP tables rules. And he talks about basically how he set his Linux box up to act as a firewall slash router. And before I go on with what I think about this, what do you think, Wes? I thought this was a great article. It may not be applicable for everyone. Not everyone wants to learn and write their own IP tables rule set.

But, I mean, there are things like, you know, UFW and other firewall D, things that will help you set your firewall rules. But it's a great example of how you, you know, if you want a good project, you want something just kind of deep dive on, understand networking and routing a little bit better. Here's a really helpful guide. I love the graphs he has here, just kind of outlaying what performance he got. A big one for me is a lot of people want to set up VPNs on their router, but a lot of those little crappy, not even smartphone quality ARM chips in the routers

are not going to be able to do the kind of crypto that you want, but something x86 based probably has a nice instruction set for it. Exactly. Now, anyone in the Mumba room use any sort of Linux firewall distro? Any distro at all does firewalls or routers? Does OpenWRT count? Sure, let's talk about it.

What is it that drew you to OpenWRT? Well, frankly, I was just too scared to leave the stock firmware on there. TP-Link, but, you know, the stock firmware on there, TP-Link. I mean, it's not TP-Link or anything, but still. So I bought the router with the specific intention of throwing an open source software on there. Also happened to be about the same time that BSD was thrown on a TP-Link by Alan. There you go. the model down so what i have what i have

my my basic problem with all of the different firewall distros out there and i've admitted numerous times that i am incredibly happy with router os and it's a it's a it's an operating system that is sold uh by microtech and put onto microtech devices and i am able to get an enterprise grade uh security gateway firewall router for like 40 and they work amazing we have them in production we have the most i've had that i've seen personally is 2 000 users connected at one time and it didn't miss a beat and the nice yeah i mean it's it's an amazing i mean to be fair that wasn't the one. That was a couple hundred dollars. But the operating system is the same on all of them.

It's just that you get a better processor and a little bit more memory and it becomes rack mountable and stuff like that. And you get more interface ports, too. But my basic concern with all of these things is that Linux has been capable for a long, long time at doing a lot of this stuff. And we, for whatever reason, don't have confidence in its ability to do something as simple as IP routing. And there is a company out there called Cumulus Networks. And they basically what they do is they believe that Linux is good enough as a router. So it's basically exactly what these guys have done or what this guy is talking about is using linux to do your routing and and firewall stuff the the problem that they

ran into though and where their solution is that the switching fiber inside of a lot of the a lot of the network cards that you put in to a computer isn't fast enough when you handle very very large networks if you have a lot of traffic going through, the integrated network card or even a PCI network card isn't going to be fast enough. And so they have, you know, and this is well over my head, I admit that, but my understanding is that they have special switching fiber that is on the same level that you would get if you went with something like a Juniper Networks or a Cisco or a Microtech or HP or what have you to do your routing. And but they both the author of this article and Cumulus Network share a belief that I have

subscribed to now since it's been explained to me. And that is that Linux is often more than enough to do a lot of the tasks that we want it to do we just don't trust it because it doesn't have a pretty web ui and you know you know we just talked about in the mumble room about how we don't trust stock firmware on a tp link which is smart by the way um because they're kind of a lower end uh device but what and so basically what he did was he took better open source firmware and put it on, you know, reasonable hardware and got a very usable experience on it.

And my question is, what if we could do that with everything, but instead of using something like OpenWRT that only runs on a specific set of devices, what if we just used an actual operating system? Which I think is kind of what the author is talking about. What do you think? Yeah, I think it has a great, you know, the one thing I like that would work with PFSense

or other things as well is the split between your core routing and firewall and your wireless AP. I think that's very helpful. I think that makes, you can probably upgrade, you know, your wireless AP a couple times where you still have the same server set up to do your routing. Yeah. It also lets you host more. OpenWrt works for this, too.

One thing I do like about OpenWrt is that it has a built-in package manager. Yeah, yeah. So I use it at home, for instance, and I wanted to have two. My work still uses PPTP as a VPN, even though it's broken, even though it's terrible. But I wanted to be able to have two separate connections to work from two separate devices. By default, a lot of routers will not be able to NAT that correctly. Sure. OpenWT, you just install one package and bam, it works perfectly. Really?

So you get that same kind of power. But you can do that. It's just an IP tables module. And if you had, you know, it's like Ubuntu, it's even easier. It's just like a mod probe away, right? So I think that's what you get is like if you want to customize and you really want the power to tune things and understand what's happening, then why not? How about the Mumba Room? Anyone in support or against of using Linux as a router or edge device?

I think it makes the device much more flexible and if you have some spare resources on it that you could use otherwise, you can. Plus, I think tools like PFSense or other routing-specific distros, they come with all this stuff

that you could possibly need for the most complex router you will ever build in your life, right? Whereas if you just use the Ubuntu server and all you need is IP tables, you have this super simple setup for your super simple task, which makes it a lot easier to manage. Hmm.

That's interesting. I guess I started in the networking world in cisco where nothing is easy to manage because everything is in you know the thing is about cisco is it's great hardware it does a great job once you learn how to configure it but the configuration syntax is not similar to anything else because they have their own commands and it's its own syntax and it doesn't work on anything else and so if you start configuring routers that way i guess everything seems like a step up from that at least from a usability standpoint but um you know one of the things that we do i should ask you first anyone else have any other thoughts about about

routers well if you take if you take the fritz, for example, they are running Linux. Or the Asus routers, they are running Linux. And for the Asus routers, there are open source enhancements available. Really? Tell me more about that. I've seen Asus routers at Best Buy. I didn't know that they were running anything open source, though. So I can't tell you what model I have, but I switched. I took an open source replacement of the stock firmware, which is open source too.

And there are some enhancements with it. That's awesome. You know, one of the things that I found is if we let employees take routers home, they do better with them in the field. So, for example, we had a program. Well, I shouldn't say had. We have a program called professional development. Basically, if there's equipment in the shop that's not actively being used or isn't actively assigned to a ticket to go out and to be deployed, they can take that equipment home as long as it's returned in the same condition it went out with and play with it. And it was actually the company I worked for before had a similar program.

program. And it really, really helped me because I wasn't going to be able to put my hands on a $10,000 core router or core switch, but unless the company bought it for a client and then I was able to play with it for a little bit. And so we have let employees do that and take their equipment home. And basically what we're doing is I can teach somebody how to set up IP tables on a router and I can give them written instructions so they can go through and do it. But the biggest thing that they lack is confidence in the field. If they walk out into the field and they go to a client and the client says, I need you to forward, I need you to create this firewall rule that accepts packets from this, or I need you to create this NAT rule that sends packets to this internal IP.

And they can think to themselves and go, I've done that a thousand times at home when I was forwarding my web server or playing with my SSH. And even though that stuff is meaningless in the grand scheme of what we make money off of, it's valuable because they're developing skills. And so I found that to be a really cost-effective way to boost their confidence when they're in the field. So not only do they know what they're doing, but they feel like they know what they're doing. And they know that they know what they're doing. And that's really helpful. And I was talking to an employee yesterday,

and he was talking about how he had some lack of confidence when it came to administrating servers. And so what we ended up doing with him is we signed him up on a website called Linux Academy slash unplugged. And we were able to get the course because we used linuxacademy.com slash unplugged we got the course for a third of the cost and what we ended up it ended up costing us like 15 bucks and we sent him through doing the uh the red hat uh seven so he could learn how to do a lot of the red hat administration and he came back to me a couple days ago and said you know i uh i well he he came to me yesterday is when when he finished and and said to me you know that you know, I, uh, uh, well, he, he came to me yesterday is when, when he finished and, and said to me, you know, the, you know, we signed up for that course and I sat up last night and I

was kind of goofing around with it and playing with it. It was awesome. And I, I now, you know, I kind of had an idea of, of how to do this, that, or the other, but now I have been told by an instructor, an instructor, by somebody of authority that this is the appropriate and acceptable way to do this. And so you don't, you're not embarrassed about, is this the right way to do this? Or is this just kind of the way I've always done it? And so, you know, I can get the job done, but is it technically correct? You know that what you're doing is correct. And, and, and, um, and so for him, he actually signed up for his own subscription. He told me today that he has his own subscription to Linux Academy and he's going to continue on, uh, to learn other

things because he sees it like, like a subscription to Netflix. It's's going to continue on to learn other things because he sees it like like a subscription to Netflix. It's like entertainment. And I'll tell you something about knowledge. Knowledge is the one thing that people can't take away from you. It doesn't matter what doesn't matter what life throws at you. You can get arrested. You can be, you know, everything short of being killed. You can lose a lot of stuff in life, but nobody can ever, ever, ever take away things that you've learned. They can't take away your education. They can't take away your knowledge.

So for 20 bucks a month and actually even less if you use Linux Academy dot com slash unplugged, you can get a course and you can learn things that nobody will ever be able to take away from you. And to me, that just seems like an incredibly valuable way. And it's a huge return on investment and not only that i've learned one of my favorite things to do is i memorize useless trivia facts like i memorize things that are due to you now i do and it's really dumb it's so stupid but it's fun because it's fun to do in a crowd when you sit down in front of a bunch of people and you you quote some esoteric fact and and and then you act as if like everyone should know it or you say it in a way that everyone should know it. And then everyone looks like, man, that guy's really smart. He's that guy's.

How did he know? I see. How did he know that? Yeah. Yeah. If you're ever around me in person and you see me do that, you like don't say anything. Don't you dare ruin it, Wes. But you can never.

OK. But you can know for yourself like that is that that's noah doing his thing that's him uh doing that trivia thing where he does that thing where he pretends that everyone should know but really he knows that nobody else knows and he knows it i think it's a fun game great way to get that trivia is linuxacademy.com slash unplugged if you want to support jupiter broadcasting we could really really use your support you know chris i don't i i don't even know i can't even put into words that from the time the man wakes up in the morning till the time he goes to bed even if he's doing other things in the back of his mind he is thinking about about shows, about content, about what his audience wants and how to. And how do you see you've been around him?

So you understand and what and how to best deliver that. And the problem that he keeps coming up against is to do more things, to do things better requires capital. And the problem is we find all of these little excuses of why we don't want to of why we can't or why we shouldn't support this, that or the other. And that's what I hear from people, you know, from the people. They're saying, well, I'm not contributing because X, Y, Z. And I just, I want to ask people to look at it like you'd look at any other source of entertainment. You don't, maybe you don't agree with everything that's ever said on Netflix, or maybe you don't agree with everything that's ever said on Hulu, but you still contribute to those services because they're providing valuable content to you. And again, we're going back to that whole knowledge is power thing. If, man, if, if I, if I charged the, if I, if I build out the amount of time, the amount of information that I give, uh, that we give we give on Linux Action Show and this week on Linux Unplugged, and if Chris did the same thing and build that out as a consultation service rather than just putting it on the internet for free, man, we'd be rolling in gash.

You should consider that. Yeah, I should. Maybe we've attacked this whole thing the wrong way. Maybe that's what we should do. We should just start doing online. Direct to the paywall. Yeah, online consultation. You call in. We take your credit card card number and then we'll walk you through

all this stuff and i'll start doing how to's and he and chris can uh chris can fix your arch box because i want nothing to do with that and yeah we'd make tons of money but no and we give all that to you for free and and right now we could use your help at at at patreon.com slash today and every person that signs up even if it's just a couple bucks if the more people that sign up every dollar you put towards patreon.com slash slash today is a dollar that says i listen to jupiter broadcasting i find the content that you guys make valuable and i appreciate what you're doing it doesn't have to be a lot of money um you know you can you can divide that up with you know a lot of people if they if if if a bunch of people just contributed a dollar it would it would add up to a ton.

So that's my plea. If there's anyone out there that, especially now that we're getting into tax return time, I don't know if it's possible to do a one-time donation on patreon.com slash today, but you can do that on the Jupiter Broadcasting site. But we would really, really appreciate your support because, honestly, when things like scale come up, But we would really, really appreciate your support because honestly, when things like scale come up, the first wave is excitement of this is going to be amazing. We're going to do this and it's going to be exciting. And then it's immediately followed with a wave of panic of how in the world are we going to pull this off?

And that would help alleviate that. So I want to talk about GNOME defining a clear set of core apps for the desktop. you see this article wes yes i did so of course you did because you posted it but um and so basically um they are talking about how cheese is now a core app and g edit is going to be coming soon as a core app and i think to some degree this goes back to what we were talking about, about having a cohesive desktop experience. Right. And I'm interested in in in what the future holds with that, because I think if app they want. But if we can get to a point where there are some apps that are just, these are the, these are the apps that are going to be installed. These are the apps that are going to work. These are the apps that we're going to understand that are going to be there. And everyone else can understand that are going to be there when people write themes, when people design changes. So for example, take my Gwake example that I used at the beginning of the show. If, if Gwake became a core app for GNOME, what we could do is say that the people that make the

dock on the side would be aware of the fact that this terminal is going to drop down. And how do we make that look nice with the terminal drop down? How do we make that a cohesive experience? And of course, we're not talking about stopping anyone else from adding apps in. We're just talking about having a defined set that these apps are going to be there. These apps are going to be available. And one of the main reasons I use the VI text editor is because I can know without a shadow of a doubt it's going to be available on every machine I ever use. It's everywhere. It is. It's everywhere. And it becomes omnipresent like that. Then you end up using it. What are your thoughts, Wes? Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think, I think GNOME is rapidly becoming one of those desktops,

you know, Unity as well, but where we can just put people in front of them, they look polished, they look like a 21st century desktop. And one thing that people come to expect from the other operating systems is a kind of consistency, internal consistency. And, you know, between when you sit down at one computer, you sit down the next computer, you know, you'll be able to do a certain amount of things. They look this way. It's the same kind of interaction. So hopefully this goes at least some extent

to making GNOME that kind of environment where you're like, oh yeah, well cheese is here. GE edit will be there. Things where you're just like, okay, it works. It's all GNOME. And for the power users, of course, you can still install whatever replacement app you want. It's still Linux,

but hopefully these will be nice and polished. I think like elementary is doing a similar thing with their apps, right? So it's good to see GNOME doing it. For sure. MumbleRoom, what do you guys think? You guys are killing us today. I didn't even know that G-Edit was not a core app.

I mean, I always had it. Yeah, the article is to be believed that G-Edit will be soon. And it's funny because here's how you know g edit is doing it right because it is so entrenched in my mind as a native app to to to gnome there's no it is so much a core app in my head anyway that when i was doing the linux action show a couple weeks ago i i inadvertently said was talking about how i didn't like uh i didn't like like the text editor in KDE

because you had to bring part of the KDE desktop in. And I almost said, well, and G edit, it just, and then it dawned on me, the G and G edit is obviously, you know, and then my brain caught up with my mouth. And it's like, but it is so well integrated and it does so well. And the thing is about something like G edit is that it's such a simple program like what really is there to be done to make it a core app i mean do we all just have to agree that it's a core app and it it's just not that complicated of an app you know anyone else i am glad i am glad to see that the the color app uh color manager will be there because yeah i think that like what we were talking about you know professional graphics

earlier i think professional color management is something you need if you want to have Linux as a production platform. Sure. And Noah, the point you were making earlier in the show about the polish that Unity shows on an Ubuntu desktop or that Cinnamon might show on a Mint desktop. on a mint desktop, I think extending your core apps is a key part of how these desktop environments are going to show more polish. Having a complete settings suite for whether it's GNOME or Unity or KDE

and having good default apps and good baked-in apps is critical to that. Yeah, it's going to become more cohesive, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think going to become more cohesive, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think so. Anyone else before we wrap? I think the GNOME apps, they are awesome.

I very much agree. But I don't know about the speed of development. I think they're really slow in development. All right. Anyone else? Yeah, actually, I think this is where KDE of all desktops shines because they pretty much have a core app for anything that you want to do.

That is true. You know, you're right about that. I'm not – I haven't personally switched to KDE. I've never used it for any extensive amount of time. But you are onto something when you say that they have a core app for almost everything. It does feel like they natively have thought of almost everything, doesn't it? It's a complete whole experience. It is.

It is. That's true. You're right about that. And I don't know what it is. I think basically it comes down to a long, long long time ago um when i was first getting into linux one of the guys that was teaching me about linux was like kde is the desktop that you use if you're not a real power user and gnome is that i know i know it's it's a it's a huge trolly thing it's hugely biased but at the time i was like 12 or 13 years old and i'm like well i want to be the

smart one so i'll use gnome and i just i never really used anything after that peer pressure look what happened yeah i think it made a mark on me. Well, because I'd been using KDE prior to that to kind of play with it because it looked more like Windows and it made me more comfortable. And then my desktop got crapped on and I was like, oh, well, it's not a respected desktop and I want to be a good hacker.

So then I switched to No. Stuck with me ever since. All right, anyone else before I wrap the episode? I just want to say you sounded like a very impressionable teenager. Uh, well, I guess there was that, but not either here or there.

That'll put this episode of the Linux Unplugged in the books. Before we get out of here, let's thank a couple of our producers. Producer RottenCorpse, of course, Blaster, for running the mumble room for us. We really appreciate having Wes thanks Wes for joining us

thank you for being here too Noah it's a pleasure to talk with you it's always fun we'll see you right back here next week guys and hopefully hair will be back Thank you. all right bang suggest bang suggest um so and while we're doing that i want to go as the out uh as the um the post show i want to look at this uh phoenix os um how how deeply have you looked at this wes only briefly yeah so basically this goes back to talking about exactly what i don't like android on the x86 yeah exactly uh but kind of proves me wrong actually as i'm looking at this screenshot you know what this looks like to me wes it looks like an android operating system

that is properly scaled to meet the requirements of a desktop platform it doesn't look that bad actually although they do call it a rom still even for x86 which is a little weird but uh it doesn't look bad yeah uh no it's it it doesn't look bad. Yeah. No, it doesn't look bad. And you know what it really reminds me of? Is it reminds me of like a little bit of a souped up, better looking version of Windows. You know, you've got the two drives and they have space.

And then you have the, you know, the navigation on the side, which I guess to some degree what some of the uh linux file managers look like but yeah it's kind of like windows dome mixed i don't know i gotta tell you west this of all the things i want to install on my computer this is darn near the bottom like i agree yeah i just nothing about this is really i don't know a mumble room if you guys are thinking that any of these are and west said it uh what concerns me about OSs like this is they're managed and developed like Android ROMs and less like a true Linux distro. Mm-hmm.

I mean, do you want to download just one big system image of random bits from the internet, even if some of it's based on Linux? Yeah, this is a zip file, and then you run a program that will create a USB for you. No. I actually don't mind that. I would be willing to trust the developer on that.

I think they would be shooting themselves in the foot if they would include anything malicious in there. So what I see as a bigger issue is that those attempts to make Android work on a desktop kind of come and go. And if I do install something, I want something that I will know will stick around, right? Because I don't feel like reinstalling something six months from now because what I initially installed doesn't have support anymore. I'm assuming it would just update apps separately when it's not a system update as well.

Yeah, it looks like that. Well, it looks like it updates to the Google Play Store, doesn't it? Well, my thing is what what uh fretchell said about uh trusting the developers i mean you know we trusted lenovo not to put spyware on computers by default and that happened yeah yeah it did it's interesting to try to build up from android to a complete desktop rather than take a desktop and try to make it mobile? You know, I think that that has a better chance of working, to be honest with you. I think it might be true, but it's not.

Neither is a good solution, but I think that scaling up is more viable than scaling down. Probably at least for the majority of simple users, not in a disrespectful way, just people who don't, you know, like you need the web, you need your main apps, and that's it. Yeah, I don't know. Nothing about this strikes me as amazing. There's been a ton of attempts to strip Linux down to like something small and lightweight. There was one, Peppermint, I think was one.

Right, yeah. It was mostly browser-based and didn't really have, you know, concept of an app store like Android has it because you still need native apps. Like, no matter how hard Firefox, the Mozilla guys tried to push Firefox as HTML5 and that's all you ever need.

Right now, that's not the case. You know, if I want to play some high-end 3D game, then you need something lower level than hd world 5 you know it's just not ready for that yet right but but i i can see some value in in people pushing the boundaries with android on the desktop um i i don't know i i'm i'm with i don't i think it needs to be someone bigger and someone more committed to do that though because there will always be these little projects that pop up all over the place and then they disappear a few months later or a year later and you've got to wipe it reinstall something else i don't know i mean i'm not i'm not sure i'm following you are

like so linux couldn't get much more stripped down. I mean, you have things like DSL that are like, what, 50 megs? I mean, how much smaller do we really think we want an operating system to get? Well, I personally don't care for that. You know, I'm not, I'm not, what I'm saying is that people have tried to make like, you know, very, very small, lightweight distros that the users then want to add loads of stuff to the box. Right, right, right. But can we agree that it makes more sense to start with almost nothing and add all the junk that you want back on? That is a more viable option than starting with something like Windows XP

and saying, I'm going to find a way to fit this on a phone. There's just too much there to fit into a phone to get down to shave off. Well, that's exactly what we're doing. We're starting with nothing and adding things like Mir and Unity 8 and specific applications. So, yeah, I agree with you that it's better to start from nothing and build up. Totally. Good. and build up totally good well also noah on that friend os um earlier i think cm2 said in um the irc chat that's in closed beta right now so that's why no one was talking about it yeah i here's here

i've learned i've learned uh i've learned a couple of things today i've learned that one uh seven hours is still not enough time to uh to properly a show. I've learned I've learned that everyone will telegram you at the worst possible time, right? When you're trying to do something. And so essentially, you'll get nothing done for the bat of the hour leading up to the show because you'll be putting out random fires. You sound more and more like Chris every day. Being Chris Lachin, the last of it. Is that it? Yeah. No, it's just it's it's funny it's like and the thing is if i

wasn't there if i didn't see it myself i would never ever believe how many like his phone will be silent almost perfectly for like an hour and then right before he goes on here or he'll sit down to do something and the second his his butt hits the seat boom somebody starts telegramming boom the irc goes off boom his phone starts ringing boom the alarm the smoke alarm goes up boom the oven blows up boom his truck blows up like everything happens at the worst possible time and if i hadn't seen it myself and it's and it's it is like clockwork i could set my watch i would i'll know when a show is going to start because everything in the studio will start going wrong but it'll only go wrong right when he sits down after he's done with the show then everything returns to silent normal and it's naturally yeah and it's funny because like for the studio will start going wrong. But it'll only go wrong right when he sits down. After he's done with the show,

then everything returns to silent and normal. And it's funny. Yeah, and it's funny because for the most part, I managed to skirt that, except it must just be a JB thing.