LINUX Unplugged - Episode 133: Apollo Has Landed | LUP 133

Episode Date: February 24, 2016

Entroware’s Apollo laptop has arrived, and we share our first hands on impressions of their ultra Linux laptop, how does it compare to the Purism, and a quick chat with Entroware’s co-founder.Plus we discuss the Mint hack, and solutions we could create as a community to solve the bigger problems, updates from some of our favorite open source projects, and chat about Beep Beep Yarr, and more!

If you got something you want to hide, or you just want to be a baller, like this is it. Silk Guardian is an anti-forensic LKM kill switch that waits for a change on your USB ports, and then wipes your RAM and turns off your computer. Very much inspired by USB Kill. I made this project because I feel that it could be implemented better than it already is. So you make it, you build it. Three reasons why this project exists. In case the Popo or other thugs come busting in.

I like that police are the first threat. You know this guy must be a U.S. citizen. You don't want someone to retrieve documents from your computer via USB. That's true. Or install malware in back doors. Yeah. You don't want malware or back doors. You want to improve the security of your full disk encrypted home computer or server, like maybe a Raspberry Pi.

Actually, that last one's kind of legit. Yeah. So there you go. If you want to just destroy your machine in one go, Silt Guardian. I like that idea. It doesn't wipe the drive, though. It just wipes the RAM. But I'm sure you could customize that.

Heck yeah, you could. Heck yeah, you could. I think that could be brilliant. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 133 for February 23rd, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that might just be swimming in laptops. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello there, Wes. Guess what? We got a great show today.

Yes, we do. I'm really, really looking forward to today's episode. A, we're going to have a chance to talk about something that everybody else in the press is talking about. Everybody. But they're getting it all wrong. They're getting it all wrong. We're going to talk about the big quote-unquote mint hack, the ISO breach that has been getting a lot of attention since Linux Action Show on Sunday. Then later on in the show, I am very excited to share my first hands-on impressions with Entroware's Apollo laptop. Wes, you can attest to this.

The first thing I do when I see people is I shove it in their hands and I say, Yes, that's right. You didn't even have your bag set down yet. Laptop, laptop, laptop. Give me your impressions. I have, in the 24 hours that I have had this laptop in my possession, I have been going around getting people's opinions, asking them what they think.

I've got my opinions. I've set up my desktop the way I like it. I'm going to give you my first thoughts on their ultimate Linux laptop. So that's going to be an interesting comparison from last week's episode. So we're going to talk about the Mint stuff. We also have a whole bunch of follow-ups, including some ZFS things that are actually pretty exciting. A little bit of bumpy news for Ubuntu Touch's new fancy phone and many other good things, including including

some fun news from the community. So, why don't we start there? Let's bring in that community. Time-appropriate greetings, Virtual Log. Hello. What's up, guys? Hello! Okay, so we have a pretty good showing today, and I know

some of you are already drinking your beers in there. I want to be, I want to first, I want to welcome Graham, because he made me think of this. He reminded me. Graham from Linux Voice and from a Kickstarter project we're about to cover. Graham, welcome to Linux Unplugged. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me here. So tell me about the beer you're drinking on the show today.

It's a local beer. It's from Bath. I'm in Wiltshire in the UK. And it used to be called Barnstormer until they were sued by a company in the US who made a cider even with a beer with the same name. So it's now called Barnsy. Barnsy, huh? Yeah. I still call it Barnstormer in the pub. You know, that is funny.

It's pretty appropriate because Wes and I are also drinking a local beer from Washington State, where we're based out of, called Whistling Pig. It's a Hefeweizen. So, yeah, I like it. Ours has got a 5.4% alcohol by volume. And they've avoided litigation, I guess, with that name. Yeah, right, exactly. They have, and it says the Northwest Original German Style Craft Beer. It's kind of a confused name, I think.

Yeah, that's what it says there. But the Northwest original. Since 1992, folks. That's like saying you haven't heard Shakespeare until you've heard it in the original Klingon. Yeah, right. That's kind of like what that statement is. But it's not a bad beer. It took Washington to reinvent the traditional German style.

Yeah, exactly. So, okay. Well, Graham, let's get started with something kind of exciting that you guys have going on, because it's really, we should give it some attention right away. It's only got a few days left, and it's getting close to the finish line. It's beep, beep, yar. What is this? We actually crowdfunded LNX Magazine. Over the last couple of years that we've been doing this, we really wanted to try and experiment with other things. We can because we kind of do this on our own. One of the things we always wanted to do was write books for children.

I've got kids. A couple of us have got kids. And I know this has become a bit of a thing now, but we still don't think that anybody's really tackled, made computing fun and programming fun. And so we've kickstarted, trying to kickstart a project to make a book that hopefully makes programming fun. The book is actually story driven.

It's got pirates and robots in it. And we hope to inadvertently, secretly kind of insert bits of programming law in there without the kids actually having to do any programming in the book itself. A little brainwashing is never a bad thing. In fact, I really love the video. I'm going to play just a minute of it because I believe it's your daughter here. This is super cute.

And I think the best person to introduce this idea is my eight-year-old daughter, Eden. This is Grace and this is Alan. Grace and Alan are just like my best friends. They love to learn. They like to push themselves and this is Alan. Grace and Alan are just like my best friends. They love to learn. They like to push themselves and do cool things. And they aren't afraid to try anything new. This is really cool.

And I also, you know, I remember I was pretty lucky. When I was young-ish, I had a book called How Computers Work. And it was, I don't know if you ever saw these. But it was really well-illustrated books that helped you break it down visually. And just having something that was sort of approachable that when I did have a little bit of curiosity, helped me kind of take it further. I made your fingertips too. Well, that's it.

I had those books with the source code in. Do you remember? They were like in the 80s and you spent the whole summer typing in some basics. That's where else were you going to get it from? Of course. Was that input magazine by any chance? I had, Acorn user had them as like barcodes. You could scan in with a barcode reader.

Yeah, that's pretty cool. Well, so we got just a few days left, five days left on the Kickstarter. Looking for a pledge of total of 28,6,684 U.S. greenbacks, and currently at $16,903 U.S. So if you guys want to check it out, go look for BPBR. We'll have a link in the show notes, too. So, Graham, anything else we should know about the effort here?

So is this going to run kind of in long side, sort of the same production team as Linux Voice, or something like a subproject? How is it exactly sort of the same production team as Linux Voice and sort of, or something like a sub-project? How exactly sort of situated? Well, part of the money that we're all really so busy making the magazine, part of the money from the kick-starting campaign would actually go to help us commission out more stuff for the magazine to give us some time to do the book.

We're also going to do an interactive part to it so that at the end of each chapter, you can actually, with your child, if you want to, go online and type in bits of code and kind of experiment with the characters in the book to kind of augment the story in that way. But yeah, the idea is, I mean, the thing is that print publishing of magazines, it's a pretty static business. And in a way, we're trying to safeguard and kind of looking to broaden our horizons a little bit as well. So we thought we'd give it a go. Well, best of luck to you.

And like you say at the bottom, it's not necessarily just for kids. No. Secretly, it's my fantasy, Pirates and Robots. Yeah, it's a good one. And with a little bit of software ideology in there. I think it's pretty good. Well, best of luck, and hopefully you guys go check it out. Thanks.

So, Graham, you're absolutely welcome to stick around and chat with us during the rest of the show. I had something I wanted to talk about. I saw Wimpy on Google+, saying there's a mutiny afoot for Ubuntu 16.04. And Wimpy now makes news, apparently, when he posts on Google+, because pretty soon news outlets picked it up and covered Mutiny, the new Unity-style desktop layout for Ubuntu 16.04. And then I very quickly noticed Wimpy take to G+, trying to make sure everybody understood it wasn't going to be mandatory.

It was just an option. So what is Mutiny, Wimpy? It's another user interface layout for Ubuntu Mate. So those of you that have been following the project may already know that you can one-click to augment the user interface to look like Windows or Mac OS X. And now we've added a look and feel that is a poor facsimile of Unity. It's a functional facsimile. Yeah, yeah, it does. It does work, yeah. Looks pretty good.

So it has the global menu, and you have the dock down the side. And it kind of looks and works like Unity. But really, it's there to sort of showcase some of the new components that have been introduced into Ubuntu Mate, which are there for anyone to use in their panels to create a user interface that suits them so that global menu can be put on any panel anywhere you'd like and that dock down the side is just an applet that can go into any panel so it can go top bottom left right you know you can align it how you like and you can so that whole side panel is an applet uh the panel is a panel and then the top right the icons are a big applet out there yeah that's that's all in an applet and that's the mate doc applet made by uh robin thompson

uh he started that about um six nine months ago um and i've been talking with him and i'm actually really pleased. He's actually developing within the Ubuntu Mate team now. So whilst we're talking, I can see a Telegram group going with the Ubuntu Mate developers and they're feverishly working on new stuff.

So yes, it's worked really well. And I like the backdrop as well. Yes, I like that a lot too. That's a got a backdrop from one of the Google Plus community members, Ghost67, and he's got a good YouTube channel as well with distro reviews and insights. So I have had some additional time with Ubuntu Mate 15.10 that shipped on the Apollo, with Ubuntu Mate 15.10 that shipped on the Apollo. And every time I use it, every single time, there are just, like this time around, it was the fact that VLC was pre-set up,

installed as the default audio player. Like, you know. Nice. It's just, here's the difference for me between Ubuntu Mate and Ubuntu. Legitimately, when I'm between Ubuntu Mate and Ubuntu. Legitimately, when I'm installing Ubuntu standard, 15.10 or 16.04, it takes me – like if I get a machine with Ubuntu 16.04 on it, it takes me less time to wipe it and install enter gross and then from the command line using your word, install everything I need with one command. It takes me less time to do all of that than it does to set up the Ubuntu installation.

Not the case with Ubuntu Mate. Some of it's because of Mate Tweak, Mate Tweak, and some of it's like the predefined looks that Wimpy has or that the team has put together. It just feels like a tool, however you want to use it. Some of the things I just have to do already, like for another example, install GDebi, the graphical GDebi package installer. When you download Debs, that's just the best way to install a Deb if you want a GUI, and it's already set up on Ubuntu Mate Edition.

So things like that are always really nice. So 16.04 is looking like a great release, And so I kind of had a question about this. Isn't elementary OS also working on a 16.04-based release? And how the hell do you get your hands on something like that? I guess there is a way. There's instructions on Launchpad to build the Loki ISO, but I think you need to have elementary OS already installed. So if anybody out in the chat room or out in the community is up for making me a Loki

beta ISO so I could try it out. That would be fun. Yeah. I'm curious to see where they're going to because I haven't checked them out for a while. I've been thinking a lot about the elementary OS project recently. And they're just taking over Geary? Yeah, they just took over Geary and have Pantheon Mail now. They announced that this week.

They just took over Geary and have Pantheon Mail now. They announced that this week. And I think part of it is because my son has been using elementary OS for almost a year now and it's really been flawless. Wow. And I just sat down and used his computer to set up some Minecraft mod manager. I can't even remember what it's called now. And, you know, it's just a clean, simple experience. I just – I think, I don't know.

I feel like maybe it's worth another look. I've been following Element. We've all done 1604 hotness. Yeah. So if somebody out there wanted to make me an ISO, because if they have Element REST installed and follow the instructions, I'd be curious, because I don't have Element REST installed. Speaking of some of our favorite distros, just a real quick shout-out to Antegros. Antegros. And what do you say, Wes? Hmm? Antegros? Yeah, let'sout to Antegros. Antegros. What do you say, Wes? Antegros?

Yeah, let's go with Antegros. Guess what, Wes? ZFS support out of the box in the new Cinchy installer. They've redone their installer, a whole bunch of new stuff. They're moving this over to Stable. Wow, look at all those downloads.

Woo, 52,384 downloads for Cinchy 0.12. It's interesting how they're almost focusing more on the installer than they are the distro itself. Cinchy 0.12. It's interesting how they're almost focusing more on the installer than they are the distro itself. Cinchy 0.14 development, 148 days of development, 510 commits, 46 bugs squashed. Look at the new installer there. Wow. 0.16 is looking real smooth, and one of the new features is built-in ZFS support.

You can install now with ZFS support. Go ahead. And Teragos is basically 90% the Cinchy installer anyway. Yeah, so it's good that they're focused on that. Yeah, it really is. That's why I think it's actually kind of smart that they do this, because otherwise it's essentially Arch. Yeah, so I don't know.

I think that's pretty neat. So they obviously moved after Ubuntu made the news, but they must have been working on this already. Yeah, right. I would think so, at least. Yeah, so this is cool. I think you're going to have it in 16.04, which I guess would mean that Ubuntu Mate 16.04

is going to have ZFS support too. Wendy, is that going to be available to me in any way if I do an installation? What, ZFS on Ubuntu Mate? On the 16.04 version. Yeah, in just the same way it will be available on any Ubuntu flavor all of the ZFS stuff is going to be in the official archives but that's not in the installer though right I don't think it's going to be in uh ubiquity now at least I've

seen no evidence of that so far yeah and we're in feature freeze, so unless they do a feature freeze exception, I don't know. But I imagine it's – well, I don't know. Are you feeling good about it? Maybe if you use the minimal ISO, you'd have to do a bit of fiddling. You could use the minimal ISO, install that on the ZFS, and then install the retopackage for the desktop of your choice on top of that. I'm not thinking it's time to move your root file system over to ZFS. You could maybe make the argument for home or like a data partition, which you would set up maybe after installation anyways.

But after your root partition or boot even, I'm not sure I'm ready to make that case yet. And if you are, it's something you're going to set up manually yourself. I'm not sure Grub supports ZFS, so I don't think it could be used as um well i guess you could support it just fine pcbsd has even better support does grub support it just fine i've been using it for a long time oh it does how long is a long time i've been using it for two years at least really well like a git version of like a like a fortune oh yeah yeah no no you definitely use a git version of grub but you probably already are because yeahub hasn't released an actual release in years.

That's true. Most distros are using a Git checkout. The question is, does it support all the new features? If you use less features than the latest, you're probably okay. But if you're using a new Grub, you're okay regardless. They support all the ZFS features. So are you saying you've been booting off ZFS for two years? Yes.

Well, there you go. Even slash boot on ZFS. Really? And how do you feel like performance overhead is for something like that? It's not bad. I wouldn't say you really notice very much. I mean, I have a lot of RAM on my machines, so I'm not hurting there. Okay. Well, see, that's

interesting to me. That is interesting. And I know they've just recently started working on it on BSD, so that's why I just didn't feel like it had a lot of testing. Right. And it's another level if you expect any user who can use the installer to understand the file system. So I feel like there's an argument there, even if it works great.

Yeah. Huh. Well, look at that, everybody. It's interesting times. 2016 is the future. Yeah, it's the year there, even if it works great. Huh. Well, look at that, everybody. It's interesting times. 2016 is the future. Yeah, it's the year of the Linux desktop. It is. Just depends on who you ask and what desktop they're using. I'm curious.

I'm curious to see where elementary OS is going. I want to try that out. What? What? I agree with Colonel Panic here. Computers have plenty of memory and CPU cycles. Yeah, that's, well, I don't know. I don't know if I agree. I could always use more. You know what else I could always use more of? and CPU cycles. Yeah, that's, well, I don't know. I don't know if I agree.

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Yeah. Here's a good one. I think this is the one, I think. I mean, if you don't need, like, the S6 or S7, or you don't need a Nexus, because they got the Nexuses, too. Yep. LG Volt 2, 5-inch display, tri-band LTE, Lollipop 5.1, shout. Probably going to get an upgrade, though. Mm-hmm. Yeah, but look at that. That's a nice phone. LTE, Lollipop 5.1, shout. Probably going to get an upgrade, though.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, but look at that. That's a nice phone. Of course, Lollipop's not bad, really. $183, no contract, no early termination fee. That's nuts. LG's Nexus 5, the OG Nexus 5. Still in my pocket.

$215. Wow. Yeah. I know. That's a really great phone still. That is a really great phone. The Aquius Crystal, that's pretty nice The OnePlus One, $299

Unlocked Moto X They got all the great phones, right? And they also have just the SIM cards Go over to linux.ting.com to support this show And while you're there Do the savings calculator That's fun Oh yeah, Kitson points out that you could put Cyanogen on that

That's true, you could put Cyanogen on that, Volt Shoot, put Cyanogen on that. That's true. You could put Cyanogen on that, Volt. Shoot. Put Cyanogen on that. You know, Ting has a really great community on Reddit, on their forums. They post YouTube videos where you can interact with them. The reason I bring this up is they're not going to shame you if you want to put some weird thing on your phone. Like, they just want you to use their network and, you know, be a customer. They won't not give you support because you did something different?

No, I was straight up. When I was trying out Ubuntu Touch on Ting, I was straight up honest with them. Yeah, I'm, be a customer. They won't not give you support because you did something different? No, I was straight up. When I was trying out Ubuntu Touch on Ting, I was straight up honest with them. Yeah, I'm running Ubuntu Touch. And they're like, oh, that's awesome. Will you give us feedback on how that works on a network? Because we're watching that. That was their response. That's not an authorized phone operating system, and you're in violation of your terms of service.

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Speaking of mobile devices, Mobile World Congress, yeah, everybody knows what's going on in Mobile World Congress. It's all Chris talks about. It's the only thing we're going to be in Barcelona.

They have a fancy new phone over there at the Ubuntu booth that people have been checking out. I've been watching some videos of hands-on demos of it. And, in fact, I posted it in the chat room. I should probably go grab it real quick. But anyways, people have been looking at this new Mizu Pro 5,

and The Verge says, not good enough. The Verge talks about it being leggy. The Verge talks about it not responding to some interfaces. There's a good hardware design, they say. But they're worried that it's just too darn leggy. I think for you and I, Wes, that's kind of a big deal, don't you think? Your thoughts after you read something like this, is this just an issue because it's a pre-release phone, or do you think this is something on a bigger picture level? I don't know. It's hard to say. I think there is a lot with the pre-release that, you know,

the fact that it runs, that you've still got Ubuntu. You've got, you know, real Linux right there on the phone. A good-looking phone. The hardware looks nice. Yes. I think that's a lot. The hardware looks very nice. And it's got one of Samsung's nice processors in it, you know, like a really good processor.

Right. It's got a really good camera in it. And I do think that there's probably a significant amount of, you know, optimization for touch, for quick response times rather than throughput kind of stuff that you see, especially on real Linux. So I'm sure there's a lot of tunables. I'm hopeful, but I'll be really curious to see

when, you know, the final production models roll out. All right, so here's what I'm really looking forward to, and this is where I'm willing to give it some. I mean, I'm really, really sensitive to lag, but XDA developers

have a video of convergence in action. Here we go. Actual real-world Convergence. The usual stuff from Ubuntu phone. It's getting better, it's getting more refined, but that's not the exciting thing I'm going to show you. The exciting thing I'm going to show you is Convergence. We've now connected the phone to a monitor,

and it's automatically switched into windowed mode. So we've got the full Ubuntu desktop here. One of the new things we've got is the switcher. So I push into the right edge and I can select an application. Here you see LibreOffice. This is running. So any app that can run on Linux will run on this. Well, ARM Linux.

Another nice feature we have is when you switch from phone onto the desktop, 100% of state is preserved. So if you're halfway through filling out a set. That's kind of nice, right? That's really nice. I want that right now. That sort of changes my opinion on it a little bit. I know anybody in the chat room have any thoughts on Ubuntu Touch or is actually using it right now.

I'd love to hear from somebody who's been actively using it. I know. Wimpy, weren't you trying it for a bit? Yeah, I've been using it for a while. And later this year, I'm going to have an extended period where Ubuntu for devices is the only thing I use. Okay, I thought so. So the Verge really panned the experience. The Verge seemed very dissatisfied in the article they published today from Mobile World Congress.

Do you have any kind of initials? satisfied in the article they published today from Mobile World Congress. Do you have any kind of initial – Was that to do with the user interface and the phone, the operating system, or more the hardware? Well, I mean it's on this. It's on this MU-S Pro 5 that has the Snapdragon processor in it. It's supposed to be pretty good hardware. Since it's the Verge, I assume it's because it's not Apple be pretty good hardware yeah since it's the verge i assume it's because it's not apple yeah i don't know i don't know if they're apple buys or not

and when the last uh meizu device um shipped with ubuntu it um it took a couple of revs to iron out you know some of the kinks. I seem to remember they had some difficulty getting it all working smoothly. So maybe it's just early on. Yeah. And MarX in the Mumble room, you've been running it for a bit. What are your impressions?

I've been playing around with it. I've been trying to get it in a state where it does all the things I'm doing with Android. And I find that I really like the system and I really like the sort of, I don't want to use the word paradigms because it sounds rubbish, but, you know, the style they're going for with the swiping from the edges and the general feel of the system. I really like it.

But when I come to try and use the apps, I find that there's, you know, they're just not mature like the ones I'm using on Android are that's where it really falls down for me at the moment I don't have the features which I just think oh a podcatcher will have this or an audiobook player will have this and then I go looking for them and there's just they're missing that that feature that I use all the time so uh this is a chicken and egg problem for sure. And the Muse 5 Pro looks really, really nice. It does. Like, I think it even has, like, a super high-end, might even be 20-something megapixel camera.

Like, a really high-end camera. USB-C charging there, it looks like. Is that USB-C or mini? It looks like USB-C. No, I think it is USB-C. It kind of looks like an iPhone, to be honest with you. Yes, it does. It does.

But Linux on your iPhone. Hey, that doesn't sound bad. Wide power button on the side. Oh, wow. Look, they actually have it right there next to an iPhone. Pretty similar. Yeah. So, yeah, we'll see, huh?

We'll see. Meizu. Meizu. Not my-zu. Meizu. Thank you. Oh, yes, Wimpy. Tell me about the UI usability study that we'd mentioned.

You ended up participating in it. Do you have anything to share about that? Well, yes. I was actually the first person to participate in that usability study. Wow. That was a week and a half ago, I think, I was there. So I'm not going to go into too much detail because i'd be stealing show content from upcoming ubuntu podcast okay fair enough but um i suppose i suppose the thing to take away from that

is that um they are actually looking at the user experience of the phone and the applications and not just the core apps that are being developed by Canonical, but also some of the community contributed apps. So there is an effort to, you know, try and improve the user experience across the board. And did you say, would you say while you were there that you witnessed somebody giving pushback saying this doesn't make sense and then being receptive to that pushback? Absolutely. Oh, that's good to hear. Okay.

You know, that goes a long way. And then they can also say, you know, we've tested this. Yeah, exactly. We have studies. Yeah, that's a good one. Speaking of testing, wow, 100 million users are testing the hell out of Telegram. And I bring this up on Linux Unplugged because the secret is, this is like one of the number one messaging apps now on Linux,

is Telegram, freaking Telegram. And you were looking at a Telegram alternative. Do you remember what that was called? It was like an open source. I think you put it probably in our message thread. I believe I did. They say, check this out. Telegram now has 100 million monthly active users,

350,000 users sign up each freaking day, and they are delivering 15 billion messages daily. Wow. 15 billion. That is really nuts. And it really has undoubtedly become one of the largest Linux messaging programs. Did you find it there, Wes? Just about.

I'm waiting for Slack. Oh, jeez. That's what you get for not using Mattermost, Wes. I know. After that big. That low latency, maybe on some sort of server that we only use. Do you think it would be faster? Is that a thing?

Because, you know, I could always use faster. That is something I could take. So, anyways, Wes had found a project that looks like it may have some relation to... Actor.im. Actor? Yes. Okay, Actor.im. And it looks like what, Wes?

This has some relation to the Telegram folks? Yeah, I believe it's being worked on at least by some people formerly associated with the Telegram project. It's free, secure photo and voice messages. It's all under an Apache 2 license. And they're talking about it. I believe so. I have not verified that myself. And they're talking about integrating signals protocol, which I know a lot of people have spoken good things about that.

It looks just like Telegram. It really does. Huh, that's interesting. So if it has the same performance and maybe a better or more open backend, that would be interesting. Because one of my favorite things about Telegram is it really just works. The question is what encryption are they using? Daredevil, you know a quick trick to see how many users are actively on Telegram at any given time?

What's that? I don't hear you. I do not hear you. Sorry, yes. Oh, there you go. Sorry, yes. The trick is they use, in at least Android phones, they use the accounts. And when you're going to your contacts app and you're going to export your contacts, it shows Telegram as an option.

Even though it will not export them, it will show the number of actual users registered in Telegram. Yeah. Oh. Ah. Interesting. Good catch. I also, by the way, just one more thing before we get off the Telegram topic. I gave a quick mention during the last that I was impressed that the Linux Mint Project was communicating via the –

there's a group I subscribe to on Telegram with security alert notifications. And I thought maybe I'd share that with the rest of you since I've gotten some questions about, hey, what group did you subscribe to to get those alerts? So let's see. If you go to telegram.me slash ITSecAlert, this subscribes you to a Telegram group that is essentially a read-only group of, well, IT security alerts. So like when Linux Mint got hacked, this was one of the first places. Well, IT security alerts. Wow. So like when Linux Mint got hacked, this was one of the first.

Since then, there's been like 18 other projects that have been hacked, and there's been a notification that's been posted on this Telegram group. And so it's kind of a neat thing. I'll put a link in the chat room. And so this was one of the ways I found out about Linux Mint being hacked over the weekend was by this group. Again, that's telegram.me slash ITSecAlert. And you know what? I'll throw a link in the show notes too, so that way if you guys want to cover that.

Mumble, are there any other thoughts on the Telegram or open source chat or secure chat before we move on? I just hope they finally get the back-end free software too. Yeah, that would be the big difference if Actor has the full client as open source. It looks like the back-end is there. They have a server folder in there. I like that. I like that. I like that.

I think that's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, we did. EKS, we did. EKS just joins the chat room. Hold on. Hold on.

Just for EKS. Stand by. Stand by. This is CNN Breaking News. Yes. EKS, we have reported that Antegros is integrating ZFS in their installer, but just reconfirming, if you're just joining us live now on the jblive.tv stream, it has been confirmed.

ZFS support has been added. Knowing Chris, he will be reinstalling his machine right before the show next week with ZFS on mute. So stay tuned. That is very possible. All right, so Linux Mint, they got compromised over the weekend. Clem took to the Linux Mint blog and said, hey, I've shut down the servers where this is happening. Oh, by the way, Clem, also your forum server got down. Oh, OK, I'm going to shut that server down.

OK, now we have shut this server down. Oh, yeah, they replaced the MD5 sums. Don't pay attention to the MD5 sums you download. Use these MD5 sums. Oh, boy, this just started getting out of control. And shortly after that, you started seeing everybody talk about it. By Sunday afternoon, everybody was talking about it. Uncle Leo was talking about it on Twit.

Oh, dear, Leo. Ed Bott was taking shots at Mint, exaggerating the scope of the flaws. ZDNet got an exclusive interview with the attacker and got all the details. We're going to talk about all of that. And we're not going to sit here and rub Linux Mint in the ground. It's really more about the meta discussion that needs to happen here. And maybe, towards the end, if we could bring the discussion to a place where we could maybe answer the question, what could be done as a community to solve the problem of verifying

the source and identity of an ISO? And I know there's a lot of different ways we can accomplish this. You can have lots of different signatures. You can have there's MD5 sums today. All of these things exist. But what if there was maybe something centralized? Maybe it's distributed like through a blockchain. Some way to verify the identity of files that was reliable and distributed.

Oh, man, that could be pretty cool. So let's start talking about Mint, what's happened since the Linux Action Show on Sunday, and then maybe we can sort of end up with that bigger conversation about what could be a really cool long-term solution to this problem. And maybe you'd host that solution to this problem, that long-term solution. I know where I would. A DigitalOcean droplet, Wes. Come on, don't fool around.

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And then I'll open up to the mobile room to kind of jump in. But the hacker, known as Peace, had a nice chit-chat with Zach Whitetaker. Or Whitetaker. Whittaker. Oh, I like my version a lot better, Wes. Thanks. My bad. Zach Whitetaker.

He, taker of white men. He comes in and he talks about what this guy did to Linux Mint. And I don't understand. Zach apparently writes for security websites, but yet he talks about Linux like somebody who's never heard of it before. But anyways, so the hacker responsible, who goes by the name of Peace, told me in an encrypted chat, probably Telegram, on Sunday, that a few hundred Linux Mint installs remained under their control, a significant portion of the thousand plus downloads during the day.

Wow, how about that, huh? Peace also claimed to have stolen an entire copy of the site's form, not once, but twice, friends, once on January 28th. Happy birthday, Chris. My birthday's on the 26th. And February 18th, two days before the hack was confirmed, the hacker shared a portion of the form dump, which we verified contained some personal identifiable info, like birthdays, profile pictures, passwords, emails.

Those passwords also might not stay safe for very long because Clem was using PHP pass to hash the passwords, which has known flaws. It later emerged that the hacker had placed the full form dump on a dark web marketplace. Well, that's what you do. He wanted $85 because well, he needed $85, so he asked for it in Bitcoin. Peace was just poking around the site in January when he found

or they found a vulnerability granting unauthorized access. The hacker also said they used credentials to log into the site's admin panel as Clem, but were reluctant to explain how it provided useful later on. I can think of a few ways, though. On Saturday, the hacker replaced one of the 64-bit Linux distribution images —that's an ISO for those of you at home—

with one that was modified by adding a backdoor, and later decided to replace all the mirrors for every downloadable version with the Linux on the site with their own version, a.k.a. altered the site links to point to their versions. The backdoor version isn't as difficult as you'd think, P. said, because – oh, no, that's right. This is one of the things the author just threw in here. This is not a quote from the hacker. This is a quote from Zach Whitetaker here. Zach Whitetaker adds, The backdoor version isn't as difficult as you'd think because the code is open source.

The hacker said it just took a few hours to repack Linux that contained the backdoor. What does that have to do with being open source? It just means it's easy to do. Those closed source ISO files, Chris. You can't touch them. And this guy is supposed to be a journalist that writes on this stuff all the time? Anyways, the hacker used their access to change legitimate checksums

and which people then downloaded to verify the integrity of the checksums checked out. Peace said the first hacking episode started in late January, but peaked when they started spreading the backdoor images early Saturday morning. They had no specific goal to their attack, but Peace said that their motivation was essentially to build a botnet using the tsunami malware that we talked about in the Linux Action Show.

For now, the hacker's motive was just having access in general, but they did not rule out using the botnet to carry out data mining or many other nefarious means. In the meantime, the hacker's botnet is still up and running. But the number of infected machines has dropped significantly since the news broke on Saturday. Peace confirmed. Clem decided not to respond for comment to the article. Okay, Daredevil, and so you think it's not a big deal at all.

Not a big deal at all. Tell me why. So, I will say not a big deal at all. Not a big deal at all. Tell me why. So I will say not a big deal at all because in one, if kernel.org was able to be our target and existing as a much simpler, less feature-oriented website, I guess it's okay to understand that a project like Linux Mint could be infected. to understand that a project like Linux Mint could be infected. Actually, any project has that same issue in the sense of there is a likelihood of being a target.

So this is number one. Number two, most people that use the Linux Mint already have it installed. They're probably upgrading their packages, which also means that if you already have it installed and your're probably upgrading their packages, which also means that if you already have it installed and your distro properly rolls, which is usually something that Linux Mix tends to do somewhat decently, you are not downloading as often. Okay, all right.

So they say thousands of people download the ISO. They say a few hundred are still running the botnet. Yeah, a few hundred are still running the botnet of thousands that downloaded. Like, how many times have you downloaded because you couldn't find that CD just out of laziness? I've downloaded it all the time. Yeah, totally. Yeah, out of laziness, you couldn't find that CD or that USB stick or that ISO. You did that.

Yeah, that's not really that critical. I wouldn't call it critical for the amount of user Linux Mint has. So, Swift, you also think this has sort of been blown out of proportion. It's not really good to go after Linux Mint. Yes, it's bad for the community in general. I mean, we need to really look at this as being an opportunity, yes, to make improvements. But overall, it's going to be beneficial for the whole community. They're going to see areas where there are weaknesses and then patch those things and just do better and better over time. But trolling

different channels about Linux and saying Linux Mint sucks, that's not going to help anything. And it makes me question a person's really intentions. So I got to tell you guys, I've definitely noticed that the dogs are out. And what's really kind of impressive about it is the dogs are out inside the Linux community, and they're going after Linux Mint and Clem. Most of it seems to be a bunch of cranky package maintainers

who, like her from Debian, who've had package namespace issues and things like that. But there are a lot of people that are very upset, pointing out a multitude of issues. Rodencorps, what do you think? I mean, do you think this, part of the reason why this is getting as much attention is because there are outstanding issues with Linux Mint

that people still argue, well, this is just another example of the overall problem? Yeah, there's, like you mentioned, the package manager issues. I mean, the namespace is a problem. The priority control is a problem. The fact that they... You mean for the kernel updates?

Yeah, the kernel updates, but they have priority controls over their own packages. So if they have a package that is in their repo and is updated in Ubuntu and Linux Mint doesn't change that and doesn't recognize that the thing has been updated, you're not going to get that update. And that has nothing to do with whether you have the same packages or not. It's just they have a priority that is much higher than anything else. So even if you install a PPA, sometimes the mint priority just overtakes it, and you cannot get it installed unless you manually force it. So there's weird little bugs like that that Mint has done that are legitimate problems. But this overhyped thing about it being insecure

is just pretty much garbage. Well, okay. So, Wes, you have a laptop. Here's your work laptop. You run Mint on it. It's sort of a standard practice. Cinnamon edition, as a matter of fact. True.

And you watch this stuff. Let's talk. Here's a couple things off the top of my head that Mint kind of gets tossed around for for not really addressing Some say they inappropriately Just pull from the Ubuntu repos And sort of ride on top of that

Their bandwidth, their infrastructure, etc They distribute Now of course they make ISOs available that don't have this stuff But they distribute ISOs with Codecs and Flash pre-installed Which many distributions, see Fedora And others, say you can't actually do. There seems to be no regard for that, although an attempt is made to make an ISO available without them.

But it exists nonetheless. There's also the matter of sort of avoiding kernel updates as a matter of actual desktop policy. Then there's the whole create your own X apps, et cetera, et cetera. Here's the whole create your own X apps, et cetera, et cetera. When you look at all of this in whole, are we seeing something here that is perhaps indicative of some things that are just not properly being taken care of? And when you look at it as a Linux Mint user, are you worried that their eye is off the ball on a few of these things? They could have somebody come after them for legal issues when it comes to the codex. They've obviously got infrastructure problems when it comes to the security.

Why weren't the MD5 sums properly signed? Why weren't they properly signed? That's an easy thing to do that anybody that has a moderately large distribution would probably want to have done. They didn't even bother doing it, right? Why were these things missed? And as a user, does that bother you? I think it shows a lot of the, I'm not going to call them growing pains,

but just Linux Mint has gained a lot in popularity since its early days, like 13 or whenever, right? And it really is, you know, it gets compared a lot to Fedora or Ubuntu. These are both distributions with companies behind them. Linux Mint is, you know, a volunteer team. And not only are they focusing on, you know, building, well, an operating system,

but building a whole skin for an operating system, as well as these new X apps and all of that. But they have to run all the infrastructure. And I think it's showing that you don't, you know, it takes a lot to do that. And especially if your passion is, I want to make, I'm working on, you know, Cinnamon, a whole DE that they're building here.

You probably don't have many cycles left as they're running a first-rate infrastructure. But I view it as a – I guess I don't know if I – yeah. I guess I mostly agree. It feels like it is a bit of a growing thing. But at the same time, it feels like it's also just a lack of priority. I guess before I go too far, I think one of the things that's maybe not serving Linux Mint at this point is Clem has traditionally been anti-media, anti-interview.

Very closed off. Doesn't do them as sort of a matter of policy for him personally. Good or bad, what that has kind of left is it kind of left a lot of people to fill in the gaps about what Clem thinks about things until something like this happens. And then all we can do from the outside is go, well, why didn't he have the hashes signed? Why was WordPress not – like we can all sit here and play, you know, like hindsight 2020 kind of thing. But I guess I don't want to bash on him for it, but I do look at it and I go, this may be indicative of larger problems. I think it is indicative of larger problems.

And I think if Mint's going to – I guess if Mint's going to keep growing, these are problems they're going to get. You have to really reflect on how you build what you're doing. They're going to be this scale. Exactly. That's the problem is, well, guess what? Now we're here. We're at this scale. And these problems are out in front of everybody.

And it's those kind of things like Linux is great for letting you set up, right? Like he could build this website on a couple of servers that runs and distributes for his distribution. But once you're a popular Linux distribution, you get a lot more attention than you do if you're just, you know, one of the ones in the weeds and you start needing to like be secure. Yeah, dicks like this peace guy go after you. Kitson, I want you to jump in and share your thoughts on this so far. after you. Kitson, I want you to jump in and share your thoughts on this so far. Actually, I think that a site like DistroWatch could really help with something like this. They could

host the checksums. They could even make it a little interface to where you could download the torrents or the ISOs. What happens when they get hacked? And then everybody's compromised. I would hope that they would have better security. I would hope that about Linux Mint, though.

Have you seen that website? I mean, this is probably a good question because I don't think this is something unique to Mint. Anybody could run into this issue. I would have if I had started my own distro. Right. I mean, it could happen to JB. Yeah. And so I feel like maybe we as a group could come up with a better solution, something that is maybe – I don't know.

So I'm going to start with Mike Lee. Mike Lee, he wrote a blog post, and a couple of things jumped out at me. He said, it's also important to note that comparing the checksums of the file you downloaded with ones you see on a website you download isn't secure either. And this is always like, oh, check the checksum, check the checksum. download isn't secure either. And this is always like, oh, check the checksum, check the checksum. Even if you're using SHA-256, if a hacker can hack the website to modify the download link, they can modify the checksum at the same time to match the malicious download. The only solution to this problem is to use public key cryptography.

And that seems registered with me. This is a wider problem that all distros have when it comes to actually verifying the ISO that you get. Go ahead. Well, no, not every distro. Tails, I think, is the only one that actually, one of the ones that I remember, that actually provides

a PGP key to verify the ISO file. That makes sense, yeah. Other than that, almost all projects never do most of the time. But guess where those keys are provided? But don't other distros besides Tails also GPG sign Wizard? You're mentioning other distros do this as well, right? Yeah.

So the thing is, almost every distro I can think of off the top of my head that most people flock to is one that everyone uses the GPG key to sign their final ISO release. I mean, it's built by the main, you know, the main build server, and then it's pushed out, it's tested, and then they sign it and say, okay, put it up there with the GPG key so that the mirrors will go and will only copy that specific file with GPG key that we've signed. They know that GPG key. And it would have been a huge thing if the mirrors had come back when this all happened to Mint

and said, hey, your GPG key just changed. Is there a reason? You know, why? Right. It would have saved them so much trouble. It would have probably

been alerted them immediately. Maybe. I mean, you're still relying on end users to check. And I think that's sort of the failing bit about it. It needs to be a system that almost checks itself, sort of like how a BitTorrent did. And distributed so that it can check multiple and make sure that, you know, well, if the checksum for this or the signature for this matches, well, from this source.

UEFI? We have the solution. Okay. We need to get OEMs to install a UEFI key that actually affects Linux. Yeah, yeah. We'll have one central key. Secure boot, everybody. Everybody.

Oh, God. Oh, no. You're probably right, too. Which would work as long as Clem didn't keep that on. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I feel like that gets screwed up. But having that said, I think this is a good point for rolling these truths.

I mean, you're not installing all the time. Serious. Yeah. It won't be an issue, at least for that long. Yeah. And, well, people reporting non-user-centric bugs should be having more attention, because usually those are not exposed. It's like, oh, there's this thing, but we've got to keep it quiet because we want to fix it, and things are forgotten.

I think before we move on, one thing I wanted to just mention is I was pretty damn surprised at how the Linux community has turned on Mint during this. One of the more popular Linux weekly news threads right now is I don't think Linux Mint is a professionally built distribution. And there's a whole deep conversation going on right there. And a lot of it is a bunch of people who just seem to be upset from previous encounters and things like that kind of dogpiling right now. And I think it's a little unfortunate. I think it's unfortunate that this happened. And I think that bad is on Clem. But I think at the same time, what he needs to do now, and if he did this, I think if he just came, you know, he's already been pretty transparent and straightforward.

And so now if just moving forward, he's very honest and transparent about what they're doing to resolve the issue and how this isn't going to happen again and why they know it's not going to happen again. Talk about your new infrastructure. Talk about what you're changing. That's all it takes, right? Yeah.

That's what it takes. People will read it and be interested and you'll get, you know, you'll lose users, yeah, but you'll get new users. You see what you're doing. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Okay, Wizard, you get the final word here. No, I was just going to say, the main people that are pushing this are a couple people that have a little bit of sour grapes because they've dealt with these projects before.

And they have had disagreements, and some of those people tend to think that if you don't follow their agreement, then you can't possibly be right. So there's just no everyone's jumping on everyone right now because everyone's going and saying, ha ha, I told you. And, you know, so little for a little while, I think you're going to see people jumping all over the place. Yeah, I think you're probably right. And, you know, that is sort of the price you pay when something like this happens, right? Yeah. That is sort of, unfortunately, the thing.

And that is why I broke my WordPress installation Sunday night upgrading WordPress, because I didn't want to be the guy that was talking about this. Right. Please don't go pick on me, because really, I don't have enough time to work on this. And, you know, we need some white hack JB stuff here. I wonder if this is across Clem's mind, because I've definitely talked about this on air. There's several times I thought, I just need to drop WordPress. I don't have time.

I mean, I think WordPress is a great, super awesome project, and I don't have any problems with it. But I also, like, I'm not here to manage a website. Right. And I just, I don't, nobody is. Nobody is here to manage a website. Everybody else has got something else to do. And the problem is that that means it just sort of sits. And it's one of those things that really does need to be managed.

Yeah. See, I was thinking about going to Ghost. Exactly. See, you don't remember. I was. But then the issue was I started looking at all the features we'd have to rebuild. And I thought, oh, gosh, well. And the Ghost download was just down for a little while.

They moved to Singapore. Okay. All right. All right. All right. So Swift wraps it up with, he says, well, Swift, do you want to just sort of say what you just said in the chat room sort of as our final thought on the topic?

Yeah. I want to make it clear I honestly trust Clem. Linux Mint has not lost my support at all. I'm sorry this happened, but it ultimately will be good for the Linux community as a whole. I hope so. I hope that is a very good way to put it. That's a good final thought on the topic. If you have any thoughts out there in the audience,

LinuxActionShow.reddit.com. Look for episode 133. Lucky 133. Hey-o, everybody. Give us your comments, your feedback, and let us know what you think about it. Yeah? I was just going to say, if I were Clem and I needed to brush up, you know, make sure that I had really good infrastructure,

I think I know where I would turn. Yeah, you know what? Make sure you got the skills, Wes. Linux Academy. Linuxacademy.com. Please go there, support the show, but also get one of the best discounts around to an incredible opportunity to learn more.

Linuxacademy.com. Where you go, check it out. Seven plus distros to choose from. Look at this. 2,333. Man, look at that. 33 again. I'm just saying, this is the week to sign up.

It's episode 133. They have 2,333 self-paced courses. Wow. 33, my friends. It is the magic number. I invite you to go check it out at linuxacademy.com slash unplugged step-by-step video courses. Downloadable comprehensive study guides. Comes with your own server spun up when you need it.

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You can go get a nugget. SSH tunneling, Bash aliases and escapes. Bash is... Oh. The command history shortcuts is going too, but I think this one's really good. Bash, the comma, is your friend. That's true. That is

very true. Administration with Tilda, and of course they've been posting their live events there as well. Always new things coming out as part of your Linux Academy membership. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. But wait, an all episode for this. So, as you may have been aware, Wes, last week,

after 445 days of waiting, I had a chance to try out the Purism Librem 15. Ultimate Linux laptop. And I don't know if, you know what, to get the timing right on this, we're going to go to the horse's mouth directly here, just for a moment, but my recollection goes down like this. In the time since I

backed the Purism, a company I'd never heard of called Entroware has come around and has they started shipping laptops, preloaded, by the way, with Ubuntu Mate. And they have a couple of different products out there. We'll talk more about that in a sec. But the one that I want to talk about today is Entroware's Apollo laptop. I think it starts at base price around 700 U.S. greenbacks, somewhere around there, depending on the conversion rate. It is a 13-inch laptop. And I have it here in my hands. And they sent me a version of the Apollo, pretty well specced, to see how it stacks up to the Librem 15 and others in terms of build quality, performance, and all of that.

So I have it here. I have had it for about 24 hours. performance, and all of that. So I have it here. I have had it for about 24 hours. And before we go any further, I want to introduce Mike from Entroware. Mike, welcome to Linux Unplugged. And tell the folks listening what you do over there at Entroware. What is that title of yours?

Hi, I'm the co-founder of Entroware, and we build Linux computers for the UK at the moment and soon with Europe. computers for the UK at the moment and soon with Europe. And the Apollo arrived on my doorstep yesterday. And it is a 13-inch laptop. It's very similar in sort of look to, say, a MacBook Air or really the Apollo 15 only – I'm sorry, the Librem 15 only 13 inches. Very, very, very good build quality. And so, Mike, I'm just curious.

I don't actually think, are you selling these in the U.S. at the moment? No, we're not selling them in the U.S. for a while. The reason why yours has got a U.S. keyboard layout is because we're going to be shipping them to some EU countries because they also use that layout. Oh, I got you. I got you. So a little bit about the Apollo, if you would. Can you give me some background on how this computer came to be and any kind of interesting details about the Apollo?

Yeah, we started selling Linux computers about a year and a half ago, maybe two. We got a lot of requests for an Ultrabook. We just found an ODM in China where we could have them built and shipped over. You make it sound so simple, but what I find to be remarkable about it, and this is something that every single person that I have put this in their hands has said,

is it feels really, really sturdy, really well built. And they also, people often tell me it feels a little heavy, which I think adds to that it feels well built. And so I'm curious how, was it a matter of finding the right builder? What is it that Entraware has been able to accomplish here when it comes to build quality that other vendors sort of in the space maybe haven't gotten to? Does it just happen to be the partner builds a good machine? Because, I mean, it seems, feel-wise, it's pretty significantly well built.

Yeah, so we approached a few people, and these were one of the few that did solid aluminum chassis. So we chose them, obviously, because they had better build quality. And then the keyboard also. I don't know what the process was of selecting the keyboard, but versus some of the others, the keyboard's pretty nice too. And feels good in the hand. The keys are actually translucent, so the backlighting shines through, which is nice.

And the fan isn't running crazy loud. The fan actually seems to properly cool the machine, which was a nice surprise when I took it out of the box. Was there any particular tricks you guys had to pull to make this thing work properly with Linux, or was it all pretty easy? Well, at first, the first revision we had, there was a few problems with the fan, but we had the mind out in the firmware,

so that's now gone. Yeah, I would agree. So there was definitely some problems with the fan if you ran into the same problems I did. So if I wipe the OS that this came loaded with, will the fan still work fine, or will it stop working normally? No, it'll work exactly the same as what it's doing now. So it's firmware level, then.

It's totally hardware level. Well, that's awesome. I got it. So my first impressions of this are, this is one of the most well-built laptops I've ever held. Would you agree? Oh, yeah. I really want one now. Yeah, so it's got one, two USB 3 ports plus USB-C. It's got an SD card slot reader, full-size HDMI out, and a headphone jack.

Enterware was kind enough to include a USB Ethernet adapter in the box, too, because there's no USB Ethernet on this. It's got a 13-inch screen, 1080p resolution on it, two hard drives, a 500-g spinning for the home and a 120 gigabyte SSD for the root. Yeah, two hard drives in a 13-inch laptop, too. Mike, that's a pretty impressive spec, a Skylake Intel processor, and it's silent. I haven't heard it sound since I've been here. Yeah, that's a pretty impressive piece of hardware. Are the Apollo cells meeting your expectations?

Yeah, they keep growing as we get more publicity on them, because they are really good for the price. Yeah. Base $700. Now, the base $700, I think, has like an i3 and 4 gigs of RAM, but you just bring it up from there. Yeah, that's right. And then, Mike, could you talk a little bit about the choice to work with Ubuntu Mate?

What drove that, and how's that going? Well, it was approached by Martin about a year ago, and we just added back in two, and I was a big fan of the project, so it was obviously a good move to start shipping the Mar machines. Yeah, it feels fast. You know, it's my first experience with it. When you get a machine, you know, with a nice, fast Skylake processor and plenty of RAM, and then you throw the Mate desktop on there with the Ubuntu base, it feels really snappy.

Just ready to go. Yeah, and the battery life, I don't have numbers yet, but the battery life has been pretty good. And I think part of that is because the desktop environment just isn't really very demanding. So you feel like you get a nice performing computer with a very reasonable modern desktop. Plus, you get someone like IntraWare here, where they're a company, right? So if you have

problems longer term, you know they're going to be around to support them and to fix them. So the number one question, Mike, that everybody in the chat room has is how likely and possible is it for IntraWware to eventually start selling in the U.S.? Is that a possibility for you guys or is that just a lot of trouble? It is a possibility, but we're going to wait for a few more, a larger amount of orders before we start shipping over there. We're going to make sure all of the use started first.

Yeah. Yeah, you get it nailed there. That makes a lot of sense. We'll have to work on a JB group order. Yeah. There you go. Yeah, a group order. This thing is, boy, I can't wait to just keep trying it over the week.

This is going to be my main machine for the week. It seems like a great little just getting stuff done laptop. Yeah. I'm really looking forward to putting it through its paces. So far, it sounds like it's silent. And silent is a big deal for me. So I'm really looking forward to putting it through its paces. So far, it sounds like it's silent. And silent is a big deal for me. So I'm really happy about that. And one thing I may be continuing to troubleshoot, and I don't know if it's just the Wi-Fi here or what,

but I've had a couple of Wi-Fi issues where either the transfer rate has been real bad, like I'm talking like I'm getting 2,000 millisecond pings, or it just won't find the network. But in both cases, it actually could be interference. So I'm going to take it out to a known good location where I only have one Wi-Fi access point. There's no other Wi-Fi access points around or access eyes and see if I have any issues. But so far, other than that, and then with the Ethernet adapter, of course, I've had zero problems. And Ubuntu Mate has been pretty great, too.

I really like the design. Because it's a little bit smaller than the Librem, it feels a little tighter. There's a notch where you put your finger that kind of is reminiscent of the way the MacBooks do it, which looks nice. It really all comes together. It's got a bottom plate that could be removed with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 screws. So you remove 12 little Phillips screws, and it looks like the bottom plate would come off. It seems like such a good laptop. Like you show up at a conference, and it's just a little different, and you've got it running Linux, and it works well. Yeah, yeah.

That's awesome. I really like it. Works well. Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. I really like it. I'm really, really happy that the keys are actually, the letters are translucent, so the backlit key light actually shines through the keys, which is nice. Because otherwise it's kind of pointless to have the backlighting.

Mike, is there anything else you want to add about the Apollo before we move on? No, that's it. Very good, sir. And Wimpy, was there anything you wanted to add? Any thoughts? There's something I'd good, sir. And Wimpy, was there anything you wanted to add? Any thoughts? There's something I'd like to add. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike's being far too modest. Mike has a partnership with a company that you'd be very interested in hearing about, I think. Tell me more. They're Valve partners. Valve? Okay, Mike. Are you burying the lead here? hold on we have ourselves a little Valve story

I gotta hear it tell me about it yeah so we're official Valve partners so we're going to be building a steam machine shipping them out in a few months very cool have you already begun testing? come on now are you a gamer Mike?

yeah we had one Have you already begun testing? Come on now. Are you a gamer, Mike? Yeah. Cool. We had one prototype at our camp this year for people to use, and it got a good reaction. So, Mike, I've got to say, I don't know a lot about Entraware. My initial impressions are you guys are very clever. So it struck me just in the name of this device. It's a pretty great device. And you went with the name Apollo, which when I say Apollo, Wes, what's the next thing you think of?

Fast. Oh, you do? Well, I don't know. I think 13. I think Apollo 13. Oh, 13. Right. And what is this? A 13-inch. It's a 13-'t know. I think 13. I think Apollo 13. Oh, 13. Right. And what is this? A 13-inch.

It's a 13-inch laptop. It's brilliant. I mean, it shows you a little bit of the – to me, I think it just – it sort of demonstrates a little bit of the thought that goes into it. It's an Apollo 13, but, of course, the product name is just Apollo because the 13 just sort of comes naturally. That's part of it. And it makes you think, what laptop did Chris get? He got that Apollo. And how big was it? Oh yeah, it was 13 inches. Apollo 13.

That's clever. Yeah, and the 15 should be called Creed. No. No, nothing ever gets called Creed. That has been banned. But yeah, so I think it's pretty good. Kitson, you had something you wanted to add. Go ahead, sir.

When you said Apollo, I actually thought art and illumination like the Roman slash Greek god. Yeah, yeah, okay, alright, okay, fine, not everybody thinks Apollo 13. But it does have proper backlit keys, so illumination

is accurate. Alright, okay, fine, fine. All those are good. See, it's a clever name. Nonetheless, it is a clever name. So I have a – if you're listening to the audio version and you're curious, what the hell does this thing look like? And probably a lot of you are listening to the audio version. In the show notes, I have a link to an album I took up at my campsite. And I posted pictures of it because I was like, hey, you know what?

You know what makes a good background for photos? The freaking Pacific Northwest. Yes, it does. It's a pretty good-looking state. So Washington is. So I put that up there. And, yes, it does have an Ubuntu button. Actually, it's a Mate button.

So that's pretty cool. Yeah, I like seeing you can customize that right on the website. That's great. Yeah, yeah. And it's a sticker, but it's a translucent sticker. So it doesn't block the light, uh which makes that attention to detail yeah it is it's very well done uh so i'm right now i'm running ubuntu mate 1510 uh or mate or whatever edition on there i may stick with that i i i don't i don't know what exactly it is but this

particular hardware has made me also want to just see what it would be like to have elementary os on it just to kind of go all the way uh i don't know though because the thing is is right now for testing ubuntu mate makes such a great uh low-key desktop environment that it's like you just get all of the machine's performance out of it so i just don't know about it wimpy you had one more comment. Go ahead. Yeah, the version of Ubuntu Mate that you're running there is actually sort of Ubuntu Mate 15.12. Really? Yeah, yeah. So what you've got there is Ubuntu Mate 15.10, and then I worked with Mike to get the Mate 1.12 desktop on there rather than Mate 1.10.

desktop on there rather than Marte 1.10. And the reason we did that is because in Marte 1.12, we introduced in the control panels two-finger, three-finger touch configuration. Yes, and I do really appreciate that. Yeah. So that's why we've just given you a slightly custom version. So if I reloaded the OS, I might not get the trackpad configuration stuff?

No, the trackpad works on all OSs. Sure. But Mate didn't have two and three finger touch options until just recently. That is actually exceptionally nice because it's a good-sized trackpad, and when you go into the mouse settings in Mate, you can say two fingers down is a right click or in the corner is a right click. I want to scroll by touching the right side of the trackpad.

I want to scroll by using two fingers. All of that is available for you. Wow. Really nice. That's good to know. I think I might stick with it. I really have very little reason to replace it once I have it all set up. It really works super good. The only thing I might want to replace it with.

Sorry. I was going to say you'll be fine when you go with Anturgos as well because I know Mike runs Arch. Oh, really? Oh, okay. Cool. And, you know, I was also thinking all the other things I might do is I might do the 16.04 version of Ubuntu Mate. Yeah. Yeah, and just do that.

And that would likely still have the configuration options, right, for my trackpad? Yeah, that's all built into 16.04. Boom. Boom. I loves it. I have not done the distro balance the chatroom was asking, so yeah, there they go. But I might by the time LAS comes around. I think if all goes as planned, this will be my review for LAS, and we'll compare it to the two.

I might try to do some performance stuff. Yeah, you should. If anybody has any questions or, even better yet, suggestions of ways to benchmark a system like this that actually produce information that we care about and that is relevant, I would love to know that. LinuxActionShow.reddit.com. You could link the benchmarks there or something like that.

Oh, okay. So I will absolutely have to have Loki if I want to try it on this machine. Why is that? Yeah. For elementary. Elementary's based on 14.04. Right. Which doesn't have Skylake support.

Right. Right. And Loki's based on 16.04. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, see. 15.10 or better. See, somebody's got to make me a Loki ISO. Right. And Loki's based on 1604. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, see. 1510 or better.

See, somebody's got to make me a Loki ISO. Yeah. Because it looks like, it looks like if you, here's my thinking, right? You put that on here and then you go to like a mall or somewhere and you say, look at the new MacBook. What do you think? See what they say. It's your inner prankster, Chris. And, you know, before we walk away and say, oh, it's a big MacBook ripoff, I want to actually make sure I'm clear.

When I look at it, I actually don't get the impression that it's trying to rip off from the MacBook. What I get the impression of is aluminum makes pretty good material for this. Exactly. And when you make a 13-inch machine, there's only so much room. I actually, in some ways, I would say there's potential the keyboard may be better than the MacBook keyboard. I'm going to type some more and tell you the truth if that's... I don't know about the trackpad, but the keyboard, I think, might be better.

And this thing with one, two, three USB ports, I think, outclasses the MacBook in terms of connectivity, plus a dedicated HDMI out port and an SD card slot reader. This thing might outclass the MacBook in connectivity, but I'm not sure about that. And so I don't actually, I think it's selling it short to say, oh, it's copying the MacBook. I think what it is, it's taking design cues from a good design. But it also, I think, is its own product, very much its own product.

And I like it a lot. That's my first impression. If you want to check out some pictures, go over to the show notes. And if you've got ideas on things you want me to do to test it, let me know. So Skylake has got Intel graphics. So we'll see what happens.

We've got two drives in there. Let me know. LinuxActionShow.reddit.com. That's also where you can go to submit content for this show or any other show we do. We appreciate that. It helps sort of form what we end up talking about. Wes, is there anything else we want to cover in today's episode of the Unplugged program?

I don't think so. It's been a big show today. Oh, my gosh, Wes, and I've got to be the fool that edits this all together. Oh, man. It's for people who like to mess with computers. I am not looking forward to that, Wes. That is grueling work. You know, maybe it just comes out later this week once Rekai is back.

Yeah, right. Yeah, just put it out a few days. Rekai left all the editing for you. Yeah, that's true. Hey, Mr. Producer Q5Sys got his acceptance letter for LinuxFest Northwest Talk. That's awesome. That is super awesome. And of course, we're going to get Wes at LinuxFest Northwest.

You know it. We're going to have people up there. You guys have got to be there Wes at LinuxFastNorthwest. You know it. We're going to have people up there. You guys have got to be there too. LinuxFastNorthwest.org. It'd be so cool to have people from the Mumbler room make it too. Yes, please do. That'd be super nice. All right, check us out on Tuesdays.

We do this show live, jupyterbroadcasting.com, slash calendarjblive.tv to watch that LinuxActionShow.reddit.com to send us feedback, jupyterbroadcasting.com, slash contact to send us in some emails. See you back here next Tuesday. uh grant thank you for making it in i hope the project makes it are you guys gonna push forward if it doesn't quite clear what's your what do you have are you formulating a plan b yeah we may try and do something. If it doesn't quite go through, we'll see what happens.

Yeah, I think that's a great idea regardless, but hopefully it makes sense. Animation's so cute, too. I love that. It's great. Yeah, and sometimes those crowdfunding projects break through towards the end as people get motivated. So you never know. Yeah, yeah. Cool, man. Thank you for being here. Thanks for inviting me.

JBtitles.com chat room. Everybody go boat or bangsuggest.com. Let's pick our title. Get it out of here. And then we're

going to get the heck out of here. So I'm like, okay, even though this is the dumbest idea, I should probably upgrade WordPress before I

release Lass. I mean, because otherwise. One more thing to do, man. Well, and it's like, well, it takes a while to

encode. So I've got like an hour here to play with. And I'm like, I could spend this hour upgrading my WordPress installation. And then I don't look like the world's biggest hypocrite, right? And even though in the show I'm like, I suffer from this problem too. I just thought this would be a good idea. A little follow through.

Yeah. And so... I don't want JB to get hacked. Pretty solid idea. A couple of things that really bit me in the ass that compounded. So first of all, I had to struggle through getting Final Cut to work, which was just a disaster. It required a ton of maintenance to get Final Cut to perform properly. I got through that.

Encoding, that's pretty solid. Not a big deal. Although WebM, encoding a two-hour and ten-minute episode, WebM was literally going in real time. And so it basically took two hours and ten minutes to encode one WebM file, which looks way worse than any of the X264 files and is way larger. And on top of all that, getting through all the Final Cut problems, I decide, okay, I'm going to do this WordPress upgrade. I do the upgrade. It goes pretty solid, except one of the most critical plugins we have breaks. Convert Markdown to HTML.

And as you know, Wes, all of our show notes are written in Markdown for all of our shows. And this ability to post the shows in Markdown just broke on the JV site. And I'm like, okay, I didn't need this. Nope. I don't want this right now. And so I start looking into, well, I'll just go get a new WordPress plug-in. So I do the thing that everybody does. I install like three different freaking plugins.

And the third plugin I try to activate, something happens. And it just starts slamming the MySQL database. Well, that takes down the whole back end of the WordPress site. And so I'm like in the chat room, I'm like, Alan, are you around? Alan? No, Alan, it's a Sunday afternoon. He's in Canada. I don't even know what he's doing.

He's doing something Canadian. and he's totally AFK. The back end of the JB website is down. The files are finishing encoding as the site goes down. I'm like, what is going on? Of course, the YouTube encoding is chewing away now, and I'm like, come on. I can't get this site up. Eventually, the MySQL server starts responding again. I don't know why.

Maybe just some sort of BSD magic. It finished deleting all of your data. Yeah. And so I log back in. Still no Markdown plugins. Turns out in the new WordPress, they want you to use Jetpack. And Jetpack has a Markdown kind of feature that you can use. Okay.

Well, so to use Jetpack, you have to activate Jetpack. Naturally. So I install the Jetpack plugin, and, so to use Jetpack, you have to activate Jetpack. Naturally. So I install the Jetpack plugin, and I go to activate Jetpack. Authentication failure. What? I try it again. Authentication failure, unable to activate. What is going on?

I start looking into it. They're like, yeah, if your MySQL server is running real bad and having some performance issues, it causes enough of a delay that the sync doesn't work and you can't activate the plugin. So, because whatever's going on with the MySQL server, I can't activate this plugin, which gives me Markdown support, so I can't post the show, because

now I need Markdown support to support the show. Long story short, I've now been manually converting Markdown to HTML and just posting the damn shows, which is not a big deal, but it means that we have this... It broke your workflow. And we have this mismatch of some stuff in Markdown to HTML and just posting them shows, which is not a big deal, but it means that we have this. It broke your workflow. And we have this mishmash of some stuff in Markdown and some stuff in HTML, and it's just.

You don't have a canonical copy. Yeah, so now he's going to have to go fix that. I love you, Rick.