LINUX Unplugged - Episode 140: Blame Popey for ZFS | LUP 140

Episode Date: April 13, 2016

ZFS on Ubuntu gets new prominent criticism from Richard Stallman & we launch into a wider discussion the underlying message in these recent statements. Leo Laporte gives Linux another go after his previous switch disaster & reports back with some interesting insights.Then we discuss the big updates to XFCE, the HTC Vive's lack of Linux support & Chris finally sets up Traccar, a self hosted location tracking server & discovers it’s surprising limitation.

You know, well, hmm. Okay. You sound unsure, Chris. Don't tell those jerks over at the Linux Action Show, but I think I'm going to steal one of their Runs Linux. Let's spot the Runs Linux. Are you ready, Runs? Runs set in T-minus five minutes. To do something as ambitious as making a car drive itself, you need lots of testing and lots of places so that you can cover all the scenarios you might ever expect to see. All right, so a lots of testing and lots of places so that you can cover all the scenarios you might ever expect to see.

All right. So a couple of interesting things about this. You notice there's not a whole bunch of cameras hanging off this car here. You know, one of the things I have honestly wondered, and I know they use LiDAR to some extent, but how well do the Google self-driving cars work in the dark with no lights? I've wondered about that. And, you know, so far, all of these self-driving cars seem to run Linux, but I bet we spot some in this one.

It's my kind of bet. NVG check. So they're putting on helmets with cameras. Fusion 9R12, prepare to go dark. They're covering the steering dash column stuff with Fusion 9R12, are all personnel in place?

Some sort of blackout. Gold leader, I'm in position. Okay, you ready, Wes? Fusion 9 or 1, 2, could we get a systems check, please? These guys. LiDAR is go. LiDAR is go. IMU is go.

Radar is go. Camera is go. All systems are functioning. We are ready to go at time. Oh, look at that. Wow, wow. We are ready to go at time. Oh, look at that. Wow. Wow. We are getting a lot of stuff here.

So they're using the system sentry log message interface. Don't reckon that's probably something to them. But over here, I'm noticing Wireshark over here, MBV player. There's Java. There's hardware info, VLC, screen capture program. They have an update manager running in the background. Wow. Look at all that stuff on that Linux box. They're just like you.

They do updates right before they have to do something. Yeah, they totally are, aren't they? All right, guys, we're going to go. Now watch this. They're using a camera that captures the LiDAR lasers. That's awesome. Or whatever. I guess it's not lasers or whatever.

It's whatever. Oh, no, I guess it's not lasers or whatever. It's whatever. Oh, no. I guess it would be. But look at that. Look how it blankets the area, surveying the ground, as they say. It's an odd feeling to be looking at the viewer and seeing exactly what I expected. But as soon as I looked out the window, all I saw was blackness. Through the S's again, everything is stable.

I thought it was Linux again there. It's breaking into the hairpin and accelerating out of the corner. Pull back in here, complete the mission, and then we'll restart again just to do it on the full lap. It's going good. The car is functioning just as it should. The car is driving by itself

in the middle of the night. You know, I have yet to see one of these that isn't powered by Linux. And isn't that something, Wes? Yeah, that is something. Because this is going to be a huge deal. This is going to change our culture forever. This is how they should have made the, what is it, Kinect. Because Kinect shows a bunch of dots in infrared and maps the depth perception throughout the room.

This is doing it in a 3D area. This is how Kinect should have been. And they're using Linux end-to-end. They're using Linux in the computer in the car. They're using Linux for the reviewing of the data. And then when they were playing back the 3D map of the thing driving, they're using Linux. End-to-end using Linux to create something

that's going to fundamentally change the world and probably kill the podcasting audience because people won't be sitting in traffic anymore. Dang it. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 140 for April 12th, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that didn't force Wes to reload his laptop this week. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hey there, Wes. I think this is like the first week in like five episodes. I think so. I'm still running Apricity.

How's it going over there? It's not bad. Nice. Well, it's like you get to just enjoy it for a little while. Maybe install some things I forget. I bet we'll break it next week. There's going to be something we'll have to try out. But this week we have a huge show. We have so much

stuff to get into. We have an interesting follow up from something that happened about 106 weeks ago in Unplugged History. We'll get to that coming up a little bit in the show. I went and installed myself a tracker so I could track myself as I move about the world, not on Google, in my own cloud, something I wanted to use for Lady Joops as we take

the rover over to pick up Mr. Ham Radio. So I installed the open source track car server, and I'll give you my experiences with setting up a tracker that uses your smartphone for yourself or whatever you need. For me, it's so you guys can follow me, because why not be creepy? Also, we have some really big updates for some pretty important projects that we've been following, some interesting scuttlebutt and news, as well as a quick LinuxFest Northwest update coming up towards the end of the show.

It is a bunch of stuff to get into, Wes, so we should probably start with my favorite thing. One of my, I think, one of my favorite beers probably in the last couple of weeks, maybe. Wow. Yeah. I mean, you've been bringing some really good local brews. Another brewed in Seattle beer. Now, this one stands out because it's gluten-free.

That's right. No gluten here. Which you didn't even realize. And also on the bottle they want you to transcend your limits. That stands out too. We do that every week here? Yeah. We do. So it's Ghostfish Brewing Company we're drinking this week and maybe some of you in our virtual lug will be as well. And how do you suppose, I was going to say, how do you

suppose Wes, but I was going to say watchstander. I believe so. Watchstander. Yeah, I like that. The Watchstander stat. We've got a pint here. We'll be drinking on the show. And an additional six fluid ounces after that. One pint, six fluid ounces. Oh, you're right. I didn't even see that. I had my thumb right there.

So thanks, Wes. These are some nice brewskis. I'm glad you enjoy it. We'll be enjoying them. Alright, so let's get into some of the updates for the week. Let's bring in our virtual lug first. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.

Hello. Hello. Hello. It is good to see all of you, or at least, well, hear you. One of the stories that people seem to be kind of jacked up about today is, well, it's a Valve story. We're going to do a little Valve update right here at the top of the show. An open-source driver, an open open source contenda has emerged, at least early development has, for the Steam Controller.

You might not have realized this, but to get the actual full Steam Controller driver on your rig, on your Linux rig, you had to have Steam installed. You had to have old Steam installed. Yeah, and so the final purpose is to have a custom mapping ability created for this controller, also some others. The initial target is for GNU slash Linux, but there are welcoming contributors to port it to. What is this, Ox10? No, OS10, Windows, BSD, or even perhaps Android.

Android, I think, would be really awesome to have. Yeah. Yeah. So there you go. You have to check it awesome to have. That would be interesting, yeah. Yeah. So there you go. You have to check it out. It's on GitHub right now if you want it. But it will mess up your current driver if you do load it. What do you think, Wes?

Is this important? RodenCorp seems to think so. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, it seems like good hardware. We already enjoy good support for things like the Xbox 360 controller. I'm sure people want to use this with weird niche games or games that really have no place on Steam or don't support Steam or for gamers that just don't want to have anything to do with Steam but enjoy the hardware. Yeah, I could definitely see it also as a pretty cool – just as an example of something we were talking about before the show is if you just had a standard open source driver, then maybe you could integrate it with other kinds of open source projects. And all of a sudden you could have a really cool controller for those.

Who knows what those could be? Maybe it could be something to brew beer. Speaking of the Valve, we talked about this Itch app store on Linux Action Show. That's right. Yeah, it's already been pulled. So quick update on that. Yeah, Valve has pulled the Itch or Itch.io desktop app. It was in violation of their terms and service.

So there's a quick one there. And they were clear about what categories they do allow in. And your own freaking app store is not one of them. So sorry, guys. Sorry about that. Now, that was sort of just a real quick update. That ends our Valve section of the show. And now it brings our Richard Stallman section of the show.

I've never installed GNU slash Linux. Into the focus. Your favorite. Yeah, it is. So Richard Stallman has spoken out about Popi's attempt to get ZFS working on Linux. And now, as we all know, Popi is personally involved in getting ZFS to run on Ubuntu 16.04 and is personally responsible for the legal fights that will be. I mean, we all know this.

It's obvious. He's the one loading the kernel. He might downplay it. But remember, if he tries to downplay it, Wes, his denial is actually a confirmation. Absolutely. On the advice of counsel, I decline to argue. Very well.

So Richard Stallman has spoken out about ZFS, as Mr. Jude would say, shipping on Ubuntu. And he said the code under GPL incompatible licenses cannot be added neither in source nor binary form without violating the GPL. If you distribute modules meant to be linked together by the user, you have made them into a combined work, and you must release the entire combined work under the GNU GPL. He says it's therefore impossible to release ZFS alongside the GNU GPL license code because ZFS under the GPL and solve everybody's problem. It would make it possible to combine that version with Linux without violating the license of Linux. This would be the ideal resolution, and we urge the copyright holders of ZFS to do this, is what he said. That ain't going to happen ever. No.

No. No. That ain't going to happen ever. No. No. Never ever. No. Wimpy, have you noticed that both the Software Conservancy and now the Free Software Foundation are taking this tact of, well, it's not Canonical's fault and it's not the GPL's fault. It's Oracle's fault. And I'll ask you, Wimpy, what you think of that. But that seems ridiculous because what you're doing is, hey, that thing that you made and you own, I want it so bad that I think you should change it to this. That seems like a childish argument.

So, you know, I'm no fan of Oracle, quite the opposite, in fact, but they are not at all motivated to change the licensing of ZFS unless, of course, they want to start shipping it in there. They call it unbreakable Linux or something. So the only the only time the license will change is if Oracle decide they want to ship it in their own version. And haven't they? No, there was components of D-Trace that they've shipped in Unbreakable. Oh. Yeah, which has sort of put some of this in question. And it would be interesting to take that as a trial balloon and see what happens. But yeah, to me...

If Oracle re-license it, it will be under some license that suits them and no one else. Exactly. Well, and they're not going to do something i wouldn't i wouldn't think i mean maybe i'm wrong on this but if they re-license zfs to gpl wouldn't that screw over the bsds well no because they can fork it from the last yeah but they cdl licensed version can't they not ideal though is it well no not ideal so they're not going to do that they're not going to do that oh. Oracle will do whatever they see fit without any regard for the BSD or the Linux community.

Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, that's true. OS writer says that this is actually just a passive-aggressive threat against Canonical. I wonder if that's true. You know, they also – Mr. Mogan, even, Eben, just wrote a really long piece on understanding the Linux Foundation's role in arbitrating these issues. Basically saying it's not their role to do these. They did a good job of explaining their tax structure. Right.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Tax structure and – Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And when I read that, to me it said that they're going to make their own decision and take some sort of action. These two things are not being talked about in isolation, right? Right. Eben is making this blog post at the same time Richard Stallman is making these statements.

And within a short time after the Software Conservancy has made their statements, all of which are sort of like limp-handedly, sort of passively, aggressively throwing some dirt on Canonical. But most of them are trying to say, but it's really Oracle that's really the bad guy because everybody loves to hate Oracle, I think. But in this case – I mean I'm no Oracle fan. because everybody loves it. They hate Oracle, I think. But in this case, I mean, I'm no Oracle fan,

but in this case, they now are the rightful owners of ZFS, and it seems strange to me that we have the nuts to just come up and say, well, we want it so much that you should have to do this thing, and that's the good guy thing to do. Well, no, it's not good or bad. It's their code.

Right, they do have the right to do it exactly the same thing. Yeah, and you know what? They have chosen not to license it that way. And so we've made the Clownshoe file system ButterFS, which is, you know... At least it sounds like butter. ...pales in comparison. Actually, they made it, oddly enough. Yeah, that's true. True, true.

Very good point. Thank you. That is true. But they got the license. Yeah. But as soon as they got ZFS, they dumped it basically. Yeah. And now the community maintains a lot and there's developers from a lot of large companies that now contribute code to it, which we've talked about before. Kitson, you wanted to make a point though.

Realizer's point is good too. Yeah. Do you think that RMS is just pitching a fit because he wants to have his absolute way and is unwilling to compromise about the issue even though compromise is sometimes the best solution in the short term? Hmm. You know, I, well, he doesn't compromise. I will grant you that. When has he ever? Yeah.

That's the thing. He never has. But he's. So it makes sense that he wouldn't hear. I'm sure he gets tons of email about this. And so he has to release a statement so that people stop emailing him about it. I'm sure he does too, actually. But the, but the, but the fact of the matter is it's, fact of the matter is, to me, his argument doesn't sound passionate.

It sounds cold and legal. I mean, he's clearly quoting the confines of what the GPL code is allowed and not allowed to do. And he's not like talking about crushing our freedom. He's not calling it the swindle. You know, he's saying you're just legally not allowed to do this thing. I mean it sounds like a very cognizant argument. It's not his usual rhetoric.

But it's not like he's OK with software piracy, right? Because that's kind of the same – like it's in a similar boat. You're doing something against Oracle's terms of their license. The difference here is that he's not talking about free software and non-free software. He's actually talking about two free software license bits and incompatibilities between those free software licenses. There's really not much room for passion here because his passionate subject is being addressed. It's a legal issue now. May I ask a question to clarify the issue? Yeah.

Okay, Popey. to clarify the issue. Yeah. Okay, Popey. Does the kernel module for ZFS actually contain ZFS code, or is the issue having any similar compatible implementation of ZFS? Whose issue?

Stallman's and this whole general hubbub about ZF. The problem is mixing cuddle code with GPL code and linking them together. Right. It has nothing to do with implementation. The kernel module – It does, I guess. The kernel code doesn't have any non-GPL code in it. That's not the issue.

The issue is that fully GPL kernel code connects to a binary blob but as we've discussed before we are really getting into the weeds on this. Do we care that much about this? Final thoughts did you have any final thoughts on that question before we move on? No it's one of those technical legal arguments where you have two people who have differing

opinions and the only way to settle it is for one of them to take the other one to court usually. We need the fun animation for this. You for one of them to take the other one to court, usually. We need a fun animation for this. You know, this is no different than any other legal disagreement. It's just the fact that it's all very public and out there, and, you know, because we're in this, these are personalities that we listen to, and people align themselves with one side or the other.

Yeah, very well said. I would like to say, though... Yeah, go ahead. If RMS does want his license to stand up legally, he should try and defend it and make sure that it's legally enforced where possible. Why allow this one case, which may be against license, because then that allows all sorts of other cases in the future if people want to just disagree with the license and do what they want. Well, we will continue to watch this.

I don't want to spend too much time. I remember when I was new to Linux and I heard Linux users talking about this kind of crap, it just melted my head. I didn't care at all. And then later I realized why I should care, but it took me a while to get there, and so I don't want to scare off people that are tuning in going,

God, is this what these guys talk about? So I think we should probably move on, but it is interesting to follow. You know what else is a big public disappointment? It's for people who like to mess with computers. The HTC Vive and Valve's SteamVR will not be getting Linux and SteamOS support at least – well, at least not anytime soon, which is a total go figure. I mean a real bummer too. But just as a follow-up to last week's episode episode it doesn't look like they're going to have SteamOS

support at least not for now there's also been no official statement so really not much news Chris takes a deep breath he takes a deep breath do you think Wes this is I mean here's why I think it's a disappointment if it requires something real crazy in the operating system you're doing it wrong

it should be something to hook up to HDMI and USB and then it shows up as a display device and that should really be it. And I realize that this is sometimes not a super awesome area for Linux, multiple display devices and whatnot. Let me

worry about that part. If you developers who get paid so much money and companies who are backed by Facebook worth billions just can't find it within yourself to learn how to use SDL properly. Just release it and let the community work on it. Figure it out. For God's sakes, how many times do you have to be told this lesson? If you can't figure it out yourself, there's probably a community out there that is passionate enough to –

It can work for you. Yeah, especially when it's something hot like this. It boggles the mind that companies still fail to figure this out in 2016. How many times do we have to learn this lesson? And how many different industries have to figure this crap out? There's just nothing else to say, I suppose. All right, Wes, do you have any thoughts on that before we move on? Because I got something I got thoughts on.

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Pretty. Dude, they are seriously pretty. Which is a weird thing to say, but they are. But they are. They are. The interface though, also speaking of pretty, which is a weird thing to say, but they are. But they are. They are. The interface, though, also speaking of pretty, that interface.

Very nice interface that allows you to do simple things to very advanced things. With an HTML5 console, so you get access from post all the way to login. And DigitalOcean's got a few tricks up their sleeve. They launched early access to sign up for their new block storage service, which I am super stoked about. If you want to try that, go to digitallotion.com slash features slash storage. Remember, when you're spinning up a DigitalOcean droplet or if you have one spun up already, you can apply the promo code DOUNPLUGGED, give yourself credit, and support this show. And then go check out DOCTL or TI.

What do you think that is, Wes? What do you think that is? Oh, I'll tell you what it is. DO Control. It's a command line utility for managing your DigitalOcean droplets. And it is slick. It takes advantage of their straightforward API. Again, another great tool that uses their API. You should just throw that in the IRC right now.

I will. I will drop it in the Internet Relay chat right now. Go check them out at DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. And then when you need to create something up in the cloud, or a.k.a. on somebody else's computer that's way more badass than yours, go to DigitalOcean.com and use that promo code DOunplugged. I'm going to be talking about TrackCar later today on the show.

Of course, I have it running on a DigitalOcean droplet. I just got a YubiKey, got my own validation server on a DigitalOcean droplet. Boom. You can do anything with them. I'll give that a ding, Wes. I agree. DigitalOcean.com, please use that promo code DEOnplugged to support this here show. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Unplugged.

And don't forget, they do have that block storage early access. Oh, I'm excited. I know, me too. All right. Hey, everybody. I'm Ryan Sipes, CTO and Community Manager at Mycroft AI. We got ourselves a Mycroft AI update virtual lug. And I'm sure probably a lot of you have seen this video already.

Maybe some of you haven't, and I want to go through something here. First of all, I really think it's great that the Mycroft project is continuing to do these video updates because they really are working on something unique here. Now, Ryan is going to do a demonstration of the Mycroft, and Ryan decided not to edit it, I think. And I want to continue to play it because I think he's being very honest with the performance of the device and how it works, and so I want to play a little bit of it. Today I have an early developer's kit unit of Mycroft, and I'm going to be demoing some of the features for you. Remember that this is an alpha build, and so you may see some bugs,

but I'm really excited to get to share what we're working on with you the internet so here we go hey mycroft what time is it it is currently 2047 sunday, April 3rd, 2016. That is super cool. Nice. The first thing I noticed is it didn't sound like Popey. What happened there?

I thought it was going to sound like you, Popey. Was that just you showing off the voice emulation stuff? So the one that it ships with at the moment is, yeah, whatever their prototype default voice is. And I finished recording the audio uh yesterday day before no uh so yeah so yes that is so cool they'll start mushing that somehow some clouds somewhere will start turning that into words and then wow i think that'll be an update that's a little bit of read yourself to sleep at night? That is a fascinating process. I would like him, you know what,

I would love to somehow be able to document that, like how they put it all together now. Boy, isn't that neat. I can tell you my bit. Oh, yeah, let's do it. Which was, right, so picture the scene, my son's bedroom with blankets covering all the walls and all the other hard surfaces.

You mean you don't already have that set up for recording your podcast, Popey? No, not at all. But, you know, I thought I'd do something half decent for them. Me sat on the floor with a table with a laptop and a microphone and me speaking three and a half thousand sentences into this laptop. Wow. So was it tedious or was it fun? Or it had to be tedious? Oh my god, it's tedious. Yes.

Yeah. And the weird thing is, the phrases, they're snippets from books. Well, there are bits of The Wizard of Oz, but in order to not have me linearly, because you have to read it flat like the she-wolf saw the thing like you you can't put any intonation in the voice at all you have

to read it flat and um every like you read a line and you think oh that's he's talking about the scarecrow that's from the wizard of oz and then the very next thing you read is not from the wizard of oz it's from a completely different book so you don't start getting into a flow i think right you can't tell even any kind of story with huh right oh interesting you read all these different phrases and then once you've read all of the phrases they've captured every possible word and they don't have you sound they don't have you uh like uh so you know i don't say hello my name is mycroft or anything like that. I say a whole load of words that have nothing to do with Mycroft. At no point did I say the word Mycroft. But they will be able to generate...

A whole bunch of other words. Yeah, they synthesize. So I'm interested to find out when my bank wants to do voice print analysis for, like, authenticating. Because I'm just going to say no, because I know that there are computers out there that have my voice on. And so someone could fake my voice. So I want to show you as an example. I'm going to do – let's try this. Hey, Siri.

How many days ago – or what was the question? Wait, I should ask – well, I can't remember. Okay. So we tried this on the pre-show. The reason I want to bring it up is because there's like an inflection that the modern voice assistants use to end a sentence. So, hey, Siri. Hey, Siri. What was the date 106 weeks ago?

It was Tuesday, April 1st, 2014, April Fool's Day. You see how she kind of does different, like. April Fool's Day. You see how she kind of does different, like... April Fool's Day. Yeah, and then she sort of ends, there is a way she ends the sentence. Now, were there, like, did you make clear, like, punctuations and things like that? Yes. There were bits where I had to ask a question, and a question mark is one of the sounds the sounds that they capture they can't oh

you know every sound you make and then they synthesize a word out but that is really something i have no idea how much it will sound it might it may not ever actually sound like me at all um well the demo they did sounded like you yeah that was me recorded oh yeah that's true yeah that makes sense right yeah you yeah. You sounded very robotic. Good job. Robo-opo-bing. Wow, so what do you think about being the voice of Skynet? Does that weird you out at all?

No, not really. It's weirded out my coworkers and my friends who say it's going to be really weird having you talking to me in my house. I'm like, well, you know. My thought is... Talking to their wife. The as all of the AIs, all of the AIs come online because AIs will create more AIs.

Naturally, obviously. And they will need to bring all to their own distinct voices. And so they will go out into the web and they will download all of the podcasts of humanity within, you know, days and have listened to all of them.

So all of us that have been in podcasts will eventually probably be a voice of an AI out there. Robots are stealing our voices. Yeah, exactly. In the future. Future robots are stealing. Thanks, archive.org. Anyways, so Ryan continues on, and I want you to notice how he interacts with it

and sort of how he chooses not to edit out some of these things, which I think is great. Hey, Microp, what's the weather? Right now, it's clear sky and 73 degrees for a high of 75 and a low of 70 in Lawrence, Kansas. It's going to be a lovely day. Aw, it smiled after that. That in itself isn't all that impressive. But let's see what is going to be the lovely day. Aw, it smiled after that. That in itself isn't all that impressive. But let's see what is going to be the case tomorrow. Hey Mycroft, what's the weather in Kansas City tomorrow?

Tomorrow, Kansas City will have a high of 67 and a low of 49 with clear sky conditions. A general query. The unit can also answer various questions using sources like Wikipedia and Wolfram Alpha. Let's ask him a question. Hey, Microb, tell me about Mozilla. Not as fast as the Echo or Siri or Google, but... All right, I am looking for Mozilla.

Still looking. And those eyes are so cute. Mozilla is a free software community created in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads, and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and opens standards with only minor exceptions. Uh-oh, future podcaster right there. So kind of, I like that Ryan left in how long it takes to do the things. If you guys want to watch the whole video, you can in the show notes.

And obviously that's going to improve as the hardware gets more powerful and as the backend services grow. It's going to get faster and faster. I've been hearing a lot of people talk about their Echo. Have you tried one? I haven't, no. Anybody in the mumble room have that Amazon Echo? Have you tried one? I haven't, no. Anybody in the Mumbroom have that Amazon Echo or something like it? I've been hearing a lot of people talk about it or reading a lot of people talk about it and watching on YouTube. I guess I would consider trying the Pi one.

Yeah, where you can load the Alexia service or whatever on a Pi. Yeah. Yeah, that is pretty neat actually. Then you can at least kind of sandbox it or have some control. Yeah. All right. you need, actually. Then you can at least kind of sandbox it or have some control. Alright, well, I know

we're going to have at least somebody that is interested in XFCE. We got an update on XFCE. 4.14 is going to go... Are you ready for this, Wes? GTK3. What? They're going to replace their

Dbus implementation with GDBus. They're going to go new icon names across the boards. They're going to replace old widgets. They're going to replace their Dbus implementation with GDBus. They're going to go new icon names across the boards. They're going to replace old widgets. They're going to replace core components like their compositor. They're going to update their compositor to actually use OpenGL and GLX for compositing instead of XRender. Sweet. They're going to redo their panel to support GTK3 across the board. Now, they've already shown an example of some of their work.

One of those is a GTK 3 app and one of them is their old GTK 2 app. And you really can't tell the difference. The one on the left is GTK 3. They're probably going to try to keep it as close as possible, I would guess. Hey. Yeah. Yeah. That'll keep people happy anyway. I'm kind of actually – I'm kind of curious about Wimpy's thoughts on this just having spent a lot of effort and energy having people working on Matei getting GTK3 support going.

Is this – what do you think, Wimpy? Is this an obvious step for them and will it actually happen? I think it'll happen. The lines are blurred a bit for me between XFCE and Zubuntu. It seems to me that the lead developer for Zubuntu is doing most of the XFCE development now. So if his advancements are anything to be um uh taken as reference then yes it's likely to happen and it's a big job i don't so again i don't know xfcu very well i know it sort of pulls

in other components you know like open box and stuff like that and some of the underlying bits are different although it uses its own farm and manager now, doesn't it, XFWM? So it's taken us ages, and we've only got a small team. I don't know how big the XFCE team and how far along they are, but like what the Marte team have done, I think XFCE really have to do this, need to do it to stay relevant with the rest of the desktop components well even just to support wayland don't you have to eventually get here well wayland and uh mia because both of those have got right mir's a thing too yeah yeah mir's totally a thing and from from my point of view the most important thing that gtk brings to the table is high DPI capability. Yes, absolutely. More than Wayland, more than Mir,

more than composited desktops, the most important thing is high DPI. I think we're just, we're not quite at the tipping point yet, but I think in a year from now, high DPI is going to be, if you're not doing high DPI, if you can't support it, that's going to be an issue.

Well said. Richard, if you wanted to jump in on this, I'd be curious to know your thoughts on what do you think, just your personal opinion, XFCE could do to make itself more attractive to distros? We kind of talked about this last week in regards to the Plasma desktop. Using that same kind of lens, what are your thoughts about XFCE? I don't think it needs to make itself more attractive. I mean, it is, on openSUSE, the most popular lightweight desktop we've got. So, I mean, I'm really interested to see them jump to GTK3, because for us, the pain point has often been keeping all this GTK2 stuff about.

As long as it's relatively easy for us to package and live with. Right, that could make it a lot... Yeah, because now you only have to worry about GTK 3 for a majority of your install base. I didn't think about that. That's a great point. Yeah, this reduces the GTK 2.0 dependency for a ton

of people once they get there. It's probably going to take a while to get to that point, to be honest with you. Yes. But it's on the roadmap. Yeah. There's an awful lot of GTK2 desktop applications out there. What are you using, Wimpy, that's still GTK2?

GIMP. Firefox. Oh, yeah, Firefox. I don't use Firefox. Firefox. Yeah, yeah. Firefox has GTK3, though. It's pretty good at this point.

I do use GIMP. I forgot about at this point. I do use GIMP. I forgot about GIMP. I do use GIMP. There's so many. There's so many. How can GIMP still be on? How can GIMP not be on the new GIMP toolkit? I don't know.

How can GIMP not be on GTK3 at this point? I mean, obviously, it's huge, but that's... It stopped being the GIMP toolkit long ago. Yeah, I know. I know. I'm just making... The GIMP toolkit. I'm just taking a shot because it does seem a little crazy

that GIMP isn't... Are they working on this? There's a port in progress. You're saying GIMP is taking a long time to do things? No. No way. Rod, did you have any thoughts

on the XFCE roadmap before we move on from the topic? Well, I think it's funny that it's on there because it's like, yeah, okay, it was on there like three years ago as well so we'll see yeah yeah i mean it takes a while especially for them it does take a while dare devon you want to jump in about gimp go ahead i just wanted to say that it's a good opportunity for gimp to revamp their ui again and actually make something decent just a hint saying take the chance you're porting it to GTK3

for the building UI components is there. Do not take the chance to make better UI. I'll make a proposal for you. Maybe they should go the route of starting with Google Photos. I mean, GNOME Photos. Start with GNOME Photos

and go from there. Sort of recently, this affected Ange. Apple just totally dropped the ball on their iPhoto program, which was like a key part of the switch to Mac iLife suite is this iPhoto. And so she puts, you know, like, you know, terabyte or something. I don't know. Just a crap ton of pictures in there. And then they come along and say, oh, yeah, we're no longer going to make iPhoto. But we're going to take our iOS app and we're going to scale it up for the desktop.

And I thought this was going to be a horrible train wreck for her. But so far, it's gone fine. And the idea might be sort of the same for GIMP. Because Gnome Photos is in way better shape and it's already a desktop application with great features. And so why not just start with that? I don't know. I guess there is somebody, Real Azure out there says he likes the GIMP UI. Kitson, you wanted to jump in about GTK apps being unmaintainable in the long run.

Go ahead. Yeah, it just may be that they are unmaintainable in the long run when you are talking about going from version 2 to 3, et cetera. etc and i wonder if somebody could maybe do a comparison between qt and kde apps and how they fared from version to version and see if there's similar issues because this is something that i i have noticed uh between major desktop shifts there's there's there's differences but they there's never been a catastrophic like massive bug that's between Qt 4 and Qt 5. There were a few things that were harder to port, like Dolphin took longer than expected, but the majority of the stuff moved over very quickly.

Yeah, I know. Every tool change stack is going to have some kind of pain at some point. We've got Qt 5.6 in tumbleweed staging right now, and it just seems to be randomly breaking keyboard shortcuts. But that's true of like every major upgrade. Apart from 320 for GTK, it was pretty smooth for us. Really, yeah. I feel like that's a valid concern when GTK 3 first came out and maybe until – maybe even until 3.10, 3.12. Yeah, 3.12 maybe.

Yeah. I mean maybe but I mean that's – even 3.12 was really pushing it and that's years into it at that point. Right. development um uh momentum that's going on in gtk3 when you're not part of that core team is really hard yeah we've tried really to align the mate really the gtk releases, and we managed it through the releases, Marte 1.12 and Marte 1.14. They've been released alongside GTK 3.2, but almost the whole five-month cycle for Marte 1.14 was accommodating the changes in GTK3.20, which is significantly different from 318 under the hood. Is it, Wimpy, in your opinion, that GTK 3 is still just so busy catching up that they have to be this aggressive? Or is it perhaps legitimately time to reconsider either A, the six-month cycle, or B, switching

to a different release style? And there could be release styles that accommodate a six month cycle but yet if you use something like a feature flag set just like open zfs does where you have feature flags and you just don't if you don't support those flags then you're not incompatible you just can't use those features i think the actual solution to this problem are things like xdg app and snappy and app image and that we can start to focus on building a runtime for a desktop environment and we can just say we are going to target this and the next two versions of mate against these libraries and it doesn't matter what the development momentum is that really does make the most sense we've got we've got a platform that we can build against yeah and i'm not sure

when that's going to be a reality for us but when i see i mean the the gnome team are innovating you know they're taking things forward they're developing very quickly but it's very very difficult for other projects to keep pace with with because, you know, they've got a lot of full-time developers and we simply don't. container-based, these isolated runtimes and application environments and start to leverage those so we can say, we're going to put a flag in the ground here. This is our tool set version we're going to target and we can just build against that for whatever period. Interesting. That really seems like what that would do is it relieves the pressure off of the downstream projects to sort of, like you said, exactly say we're going to stabilize around this for a while. And then because the end users remain unaffected with XGG app and – although I would imagine XGG app is going to be the most tied to GTK feature sets of all of them.

But that would probably solve the problem and allow each project to work at their own rational pace. That would probably solve the problem and allow each project to work at their own rational pace. Odyssey, you have some experience with a drawing application that's making the transition. How did that go? So far, when we first ported MyPay over to GTK3, it actually broke a lot of our cross-platform builds for Mac and Windows. And even with the update to GLIB, they may have changed the way it handles GLIB. It ended up breaking builds for Integros or Arch builds. No!

Are you saying software development breaks things? Now, is this a matter of hours to resolve, days, months, unresolved? What is the process when something like this happens? Usually it comes down to just trying to get the person who first reported the issue on their GitHub page to just kind of submit

debug reports on Python and stuff. And then our only developer actually opens up the ticket on the actual GTK to get it fixed. See, I haven't asked the obvious question. What was the catalyst to go to GTK 3? I don't exactly remember.

We've been using it since it came out. That's awesome! All right. Embracing the future. I think it was just trying to keep up with GNOME. All right. Embracing the future. I think it was just trying to keep up with GNOME.

Yeah. The problem with GTK3 on Windows and Mac is because the pace for GTK is still being the GNOME pace of six months, but the pace for the Windows and Mac builds are actually like two versions behind. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And the major problems with us with with the GDK part, is the fact that the tablet support, even though our Wacom tablets work okay,

a lot of the off-brands will not. Well, I guess I appreciate the insights there, honestly, because I hadn't really heard about it from that kind of breakage standpoint. The other kind of things I've usually heard are more on the desktop level. Just to point out one thing, though, is that the speed of a toolkit does not necessarily mean there's going to be a lot of

breakage, because if you pay attention to the release dates of KDE and QT, it's actually like every four months. Three to four months. So they're doing double pace, and they're not breaking stuff. Okay. All right.

So there you go. There's Rotten's obligatory plug of the week. I'll make my obligatory plug of the week. Now that's Ting, everybody. Go to Linux. No, Linux.Ting.com. I'm going to go to Linux. I'm going to go to Linux.

Jerks. Go to Linux. Careful now, Chris. Linux. I'm at war with the Linux action show. Me too. Yeah. That one guy that's on the show all the time,

he's always wearing red. It's obnoxious. I don't like it. So if you would like to save a little cash on your next mobile service provider and you want to put the power back in your pocket in your relationship with your service provider and you would like to disrupt the duopoly a bit and vote with your wallet, go to Linux.ting.com. You get yourself a discount off your first Ting device or if you bring a Ting compatible device, and you likely will because they got two networks. Well, then you're going to get $25 in service credit. Your first month, probably going to be about $23 if you're an average user. They got great customer service.

You get to speak to a real human being. GSM and CDMA services. You get to pick whichever is better in your area. And I found this to be extremely useful when I go on the road trip. I was going to say an anfametanazizable or something like I was trying to come up with a new word, like something like my kids would think of for something that's so mind bendingly awesome. One of the first things that really I mean, there's a ton of things like you can set up thresholds and alerts and all these kinds of things. But when I when I realized Jesus only

six dollars a month for a ting line, I was like, I'm going to give our nanny a line. We had a nanny, and I wanted her to have a phone so she could always contact us. And I wanted it to be a smartphone so that way she could send us pictures of the kids and we could – I won't even – it was just a garbage feature phone. Six bucks a month, right? So then I go into Ting, and I label this as the nanny's line. And so I can see how much data she's using specifically. And I can set thresholds and I can be like, really?

Really? Don't need 10 gigs of data this time. Right. Or, you know, I can just turn it off or anything like that. So when we no longer have a nanny, just turn that line off and no longer – I'm just not paying for it. It's really – it's a super nice control panel. And that's just – I'm just scratching the surface. They have companion apps and all kinds of stuff.

It's a really, really great service. They have everything from feature phones, just the bare SIM cards, all the way up to the best smart devices. You can bring them yourself or grab one from Ting. And they're doing the great Ting mobile data experiment. They have information over at their blog. If you'd like to get involved, they have a great blog with tons of good info, including a recent review of the Roku 3 and the Roku streaming stick.

Check them out. Just start by going to linux.ting.com. That supports this show. You can try out their savings calculator. This is kind of cool too because, you know, I'd say if you're a listener to our audience, you're already kind of by default a pretty good target for the Ting service. But you can just sort of verify where things would line up for you by seeing how your rates and plan would stack up to what Ting would do. You go over to –

And they're so transparent about it. Yeah, it is nice because if you're not going to save money, then just don't switch. But you likely are going to save money, especially if you're Wi-Fi savvy. Just start by going to Linux.Ting.com and use the savings calculator. Plug in your current usage and just get an idea. Like for me, because I got Wi-Fi everywhere I'm at. I actually – even when I don't have Wi-Fi, I still, you know, I don't really worry about it that much. And it's still everything works out just fine.

Plus, I don't, this is the one thing where I do save. I almost, I probably haven't received a text message since New Year's. Wow. Everything else is Telegram. Right. Yeah. Or Hangouts. Speak of the devil.

Wow, that is some crazy timing right there. There's Telegram. Right. Yeah. Or Hangouts. Speak of the devil. Wow, that is some crazy timing right there. There's Telegram. I love it. Yeah. And it's that right there has been like, because I don't use the phone much, because I use Telegram or Hangouts for everything, and because I've got pretty much Wi-Fi everywhere except for when I'm on the road, my team bill, even with three lines, is usually under $40. Nice.

Yeah. I've saved a ton of money by switching to Ting. Linux.Ting.com and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Okay. So I've been teasing it. But 106 weeks ago on April 1st, 2014, we talked about nationally syndicated Premier Radio Network's host, Leo Laporte. Our good friend. The tech guy who we from time to time play. It's for people who like to mess with computers.

And you know who you are. If you're somebody who doesn't want to mess with it, I just want to surf the – I just want to buy something on Amazon, send an email to my kids, look at some websites. If that's you, you don't want to mess with it, probably not a good choice. I think the Chromebooks are a good choice. I think a new version of Windows would be fine. Windows 8, if you can afford it. A Macintosh, if you've got even more money, that's a good choice. It's only for the enthusiasts that I'd recommend Ubuntu. So that was on his radio show, and we were just very displeased. And the reason why Leo had made that recommendation was

he'd gotten some bad advice from his chat room. Did you ever hear this episode? Do you remember this? Do you recall this? You know, I think I did listen to it, but it's been a while. Yeah. And we were like, oh, man. And it was also at the peak of some other bad press that Linux had recently gotten.

And it was sort of all – it was like, oh, this is just another blow. Well, I felt after 106 weeks – it took a little while. Yes. But I felt recently Leo really got it right. And props to the subreddit for pointing this out. But Leo stopped. He did his homework. And at the end of this week in Google, episode 347,

he talked about his experiences studying Linux, and I thought for us, because a lot of us are always thinking about the new users that are coming to Linux, which just drives me crazy. It's like, let's focus on the geeks for a while and get that right. All of us here.

Anyways, we're always talking about the new user, the defaults, all that kind of stuff. And so it's really interesting to listen to Leo's journey into Linux because it reminds me very much in some ways of Chase's journey into Linux a little bit. And he actually did his homework here. And so

it's sort of, it's kind of educational to listen to this. So I'm going to play a bit of this, just a little bit of it as sort of a follow-up from our coverage on April 1st, 2014. It's kind of made me think I really probably should start looking at another operating system. You know, the best desktop, without anybody knowing it, the year of desktop Linux happened with Chrome OS. That is Linux.

So you can't really install anything on it. Linux happened with Chrome OS. That is Linux. And it's... You can't really install anything on it. No, but it really gets you most of the way there. It is Linux, and a lot of the merits of it are based on the fact that it's based on Linux. And Android is Linux as well, so Google's done a lot to put Linux in the

mainstream, but I thought, I wouldn't mind finding a desktop Linux that would give me all of the stuff I get from OS X or Windows. Now, actually, just as I start engaged in this process, Microsoft announced that they're going to put the Bash shell in Windows 10, which is really good news for web developers, anybody who's used to the Unix tool chain, and most developers want some sort of Unix tool chain, that means Windows is no longer out of the question.

I was pretty impressed so far, what I was hearing. Are you impressed so far? Yeah. A lot of web developers use Macs just because of that, because they have the bash shell, they have a command line. So I've been shopping around, and with lots of help from our chat room, I've tried a lot of different distributions. Of course, the first one you go to is Ubuntu. A lot of people say Linux Mint.

That's the most popular distribution right now on DistroWatch. But there's security reasons. Now, I thought when he mentioned the security reasons, what do you think he's going to say? I was thinking he was going to talk about the website hack, right? I'm not sure I want to go with Linux Mint mint they block some of the upstream updates and so forth for compatibility reasons ubuntu also in a way kind of gets out of date uh fast if you do the stable release you're going to be out of date on a lot of stuff i then i looked at debian which is what ubuntu and based on wow and that's a pretty nice operating system if you use the Debian Stretch

version. Debian has it right. They have a stable version that tends to be older but is very rock solid. And then somebody told me, oh, you should use Arch Linux. That's a build-it-yourself Linux. And I did build an Arch system. You have to be a Linux guru to do it. And finally somebody told me about this.

What? It's also like a backhanded compliment there. I did build it. You have to be a guru yeah yeah yeah that's typical leo but then he discovers wes and then i looked at debian which is what ubuntu and mint are based on and that's a pretty nice operating system if you use the debian stretch version. Debian has it right. They have a stable version that tends to be older but is very rock solid. And then somebody told me, oh, you should use Arch Linux. I said, build it yourself, Linux. And I did build an Arch system. You have to be a Linux guru to do it.

And finally, somebody told me about this. This is Antergos. Antergos is from Spain. Anterogoth is from Spain. And it is a Linux distribution that is Arch, but it's pre-configured to be very easy and friendly to use. And actually, I really, really like it. I put it on two machines now.

And I think anybody looking to get both a rolling updated Linux, a Linux like Arch that is constantly up to date, but a user interface that is agreeable, easy to use. And remember, you've got a full, you know, free Office suite, LibreOffice. You've got a lot of the tools that you use. If you put Chromium on it, that's identical to Google Chrome. In fact, you log in with Google. Okay, North Ranger. I think North Ranger has the best comment on all of this.

Will you share it with the class real quick? Because that's gorgeous. Yeah, go ahead. I'm totally buying a lottery ticket right now. Yeah. Hell is freezing over. I don't know what's going on. What bizarre alternate universe do we live in right now?

I know. Microsoft is releasing Bash on Windows. Leo Laporte is running Arch Linux on two computers. And loving it. Yeah. I mean, previously he said. Most of the web runs on servers powered by Linux. That's how reliable it is.

Android phones are based on Linux. All Android phones run Linux. That's the operating system. You're probably using Linux all the time. Maybe you don't even know it. So you can get a free version run Linux. That's the operating system. You're probably using Linux all the time. Maybe you don't even know it. So you can get a free version of Linux. There are many, as I mentioned. So he's talked about it before.

He's not like he's new to Linux, but this is a big development. So I wanted to give him props for not only trying it, but he apparently, you know, it sounds like, I get the impression at least, he's done his homework. He really does sound like he's curious and wants to use it. He's dug in before. This is actually probably his third update that's impressive. My favorite one was when he first started really getting into doing it. It was an episode where he talked about Linux Mint when he was using it, and he was talking about how Cinnamon was great, and he was showing, this was really early on before he realized there was, you know,

those security issues. But he was looking at it and saying, like, this is great. And the best part about when he was doing it is that he was showing Paul Terat on Windows Weekly. There you go. There you go. So props to Mr. Laporte. Now, Mr. Laporte, if you want to stop taking advice from your chat room and would like to learn more, I invite you to go to LinuxAcademy.com slash unplug.

Be the real expert. Maybe you should tweet that to Leo. Leo, take your Linux skills, which apparently he's got some, and take them to the next level. I bet that next website could run on a system built by Leo Laporte if he goes over to LinuxAcademy.com. Leo, they've got 2,364 video courses that you could take. I'm talking good stuff with downloadable comprehensive study guides. You can take that and listen to it in the shower, Leo, which is really, according to my audience, the best time to do it. Scenario-based labs put you with hands-on experience in an environment just like the real world.

So that way you walk away with real-world experience. And that would really help inform your commentary on the subject. Instructor mentoring is available, which if you think about it, from some of the competitors out there, not even really a serious offering. And they have instructor mentoring. Live streams, too. We can do Q&A. A community that is stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members. Graded server exercises give you grades in real time.

The entire Red Hat course, well, most of the Red Hat, and they're working on more all the time. Yes, they are. It is really cool. And I just recently heard from them that the OpenStack stuff is blowing up right now for them. The courseware is on OpenStack. Blowing up. Really, some of the best Amazon Web Service courseware, too. Now, that is legit.

You should check that out. They are blowing the doors off of that. And if you want to go investigate that dark, murky world of DevOps, well, guess what? Linux Academy has courseware on that as well. They have a really cool system as well if you're busy. Say you're like Leo and you're recording like a dozen podcasts a week. You're on the air all the time. You don't have a lot of time to do all these courses.

I understand that. Shoot, I'm busy, too, son. You know how many kids I got, Wes? Three. Yeah don't have a lot of time to do all these courses. I understand that. Shoot, I'm busy too, son. You know how many kids I got, Wes? Three. Yeah. That's a lot of kids. That's a lot of kids. Not enough time for the limit.

No. So you know what I do? I use their availability planner to customize my coursework. Nice. I know. It is real nice. And plus with their practice exams, I can feel like I can go in there and try something and make sure I got it right, which is good for me because I got that test anxiety.

something and make sure I got it right, which is good for me because I got that test anxiety. You know, except for an STD test because I don't feel like – Then you need to know. Yeah. I don't feel like that's like a – that's not like when I got to get the question right or wrong. I should be pretty solid. They judge you either way. But I just – you know, they just prick me and it's done.

But with this where I got to answer questions, I need a practice exam. Maybe I need – anyways. Enhanced learning plans are also available, which are really great because you can get a detailed learning plan with reminders and daily assignments, labs, quizzes that are doing things like that. It's a really awesome place built by people who are crazy passionate about Linux. Linuxacademy.com. Go check them out.

Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged to save some money and support this here show. Okay. Odyssey Wester is going to be at LinuxFest Northwest. Let's see, who else? Blaster, are you still in there? Blaster is going to be at LinuxFest Northwest. Blaster gets here on Tuesday evening, actually. Yeah, so you're going to just have missed him because, yeah, he'll be in here after the show.

Anybody else that I've missed that's going to be at LinuxFest Northwest in the moment? Ham, you're in there. I'm going to be there. Who's that I've missed that's going to be at LinuxFest Northwest in the Mombo Ham, or you're in there? I'm going to be there. Who's that? Who's this? Richard. Oh, Richard, you're going to be there. Oh, great, cool.

Well, you should stop by the booth and say hi. That'd be really cool. Oh, I plan to. Oh, good. Good. And if you guys have Sousa beer koozies, you should bring one of those with you.

Or bring one for Wes, because he doesn't have one. I have one. But if you have him this year. Anybody else in the Mombo Room going to make it to Linux Fest? That's sad. If the network was crazy rich, I'd just like, you're all coming. Right.

That'd be so fun. Well, if you're going to make it. If the North Ranger wins the lotto. Right. Yeah, maybe, maybe. If you're going to make it, meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting, and you'll find the event there. I have it linked directly in the show notes.

Oh, I should sign up right now. That'd be cool. That'd be cool. This is where I think we'll eventually coordinate some of our game plan, which I'm a little hesitant because Emma could technically just sign up herself and then get access to everything. Don't tell her. I'm sure she's thought of that. She's smart, yeah. Yeah.

So I don't know exactly, but I feel like at the same time, we have to do it in a way that is approachable to the audience. This is a real conundrum for me. My need for absolutely dominating this contest is interfering with my need to share with the audience of where to be at. You see what I'm saying? I do. Yeah. Yeah. But anyways, meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting.

At least this is the starting point. I got it. at least this is the starting point. And then maybe once we'll... I got it. We use this to coordinate the in-person meetup place, and then from then on, everything's in person. Right. Then you can tell if she's there or not.

Yeah. That's how we're going to do it. Just don't tell her the secrets. There you go. And plus, you could also, if you're just going to make it to Linux Fest, even if you're not going to make it for anything else, if you're just going to go there, let us know.

I know more than 22 of you are going, because here's a funny thing that the audience always does to me. It's a nice joke they play on Chris, it's super funny because it happens every year. 30, 40, 50, 60 people will sign up for the meetup page. 500 people will come and shake my hand. So what – where were the rest of you? Why didn't the rest of you – now, I know you're busy.

I understand. But seriously, like. He's very friendly. I do this every year. And like 60, 70 people sign up on the meetup page. And we're like, oh, we're going to have 60 or 70 people. So we get like, you know, 100 things of a swag item just in case. Right.

And then 500 people show up. And it's like, OK. Right. Nice. And literally last year, it might have literally been 1,000 people. I don't know how many people. Anyways, my point is, if you could take a moment out of your busy day and go over to meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting. Let us know that we're going to see your smiling face.

Yeah, I'd like to know. It'd be nice. I'm not trying to give you a hard time here, but I'm just saying it'd be nice. So in preparation for LinuxFest Northwest, we're going to go pick up Mr. Ham Radio. And I'm looking forward to this because it's been a little while since I got to spend any time at all in Idaho. Oh, nice. And so Ham Radio here, who is often in the mumble room with us, he's often in the chat room as well, he is one of our newer editors.

And he kind of does some of the extra stuff you guys will be seeing in the future, some stuff you've seen in the past. And he's going to help us and Rikai go through a lot of our footage from LinuxFest. And so – I'm reading the chat room right now. And so, yeah, like Blaster just said, Operation Ham Holland will take place very soon. We're going to – Noah and I and my lady. I should pick up a ham. Oh, that's a really great idea, actually, and bring it with us. So Noah is going to arrive next Saturday.

Yeah, probably late in the night. He's going to stay up, probably do that thing he always does where he travels where he stays up for 24 hours like a jerk. Oh, fun. Yeah, he likes to do that. But then, you know, the nice thing is then he gets to go. Here's his logic is then he gets to sleep in a hotel room where he has, where there's no kids. It's just him. And he just sleeps like he's never slept where he has where there's no kids. It's just him. And he just sleeps like he's never slept in like months.

Close the blinds. Yeah. He's out, too. So he actually has a he actually has a bit of a plan there. But he's going to fly in super late Saturday. Next Sunday is a big episode for the Linux action. He'll be in. Not only will he be in studio, which means I might need rotten.

I don't know if we need to think about frame changes for that or not. We might. He's going to be in studio, and we're going to do a very special episode of Linux Action Show. And then after that episode, jumping in Lady Jupiter, and we're driving over to Idaho to go pick up Ham. It'll be a couple-day trip. Going to get back late Monday. Hopefully be able to do Tech Talk today on Tuesday morning, and then we'll have Noah here in studio for Linux Unplugged on next Tuesday.

And Ham will be around as well. So I thought, boy, wouldn't it be nice if Noah and I head off to go pick up Ham if people could watch our progress like last time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash rover. So I have been talking about for a while setting up a track car server. And so I did just that. I went and I downloaded track car, T-R-A-C car.org. And they have downloads for Windows and Linux and even Linux ARM and the Mac. And the installation, Wes, it's pretty interesting.

It's not your typical Linux software installation. When you download it, you download their zip file. Right? And you need to have OpenJDK. I have, for mine at least. I don't know what you need. I don't want to tell you. For what I did.

I installed OpenJDK 7 JRE headless. That's the package on Ubuntu. I have it in the show notes. And then I installed OpenJDK 7 JRE headless. That's the package on Ubuntu. I have it in the show notes. And then I installed Unzip. I unzipped the package. And then you run, like they just have a little.run file, a little script. So you run the trackcard.run file.

And it just goes off right in all of your file system. Oh, fun. Oh, you got a package manager? Screw you. Screw you and your package manager Let me just put Oh, I see you have an old style init system Let me stuff these right here

I'll stuff these in your init system Oh, good, you have an op directory Well, thanks for running me as a root I'll go write all my stuff to your op directory And then if you don't have Of course, because it's not using your package manager If you don't have the Java packages installed, there's no error. Right.

Well, no. No, no error. Until you try to start the daemon. And their website instructions tell you to just reboot your machine. Like, I'm going to reboot my entire server so that way I can start your daemon. Which you don't need to do that. There are daemons in just your op directory. You can just go run it yourself.

There is a – they're daemons in just your op directory. You can just go run it yourself. And then it creates a website for you with really poor security that you can access from any computer in the world. Show us, Chris. I will. Because why not, Wes? Because who cares about security? So right now I have it running on my DigitalOcean droplet, and I have a tracker called LJTracker for LadyJubes, and it's running on my internet phone 6, and you can see I can zoom in right here, and it's right here

in the studio. Hey, that's us. And here's the internet phone, Wes. I'll just show you the UI so you can see it. And it's kind of neat because it keeps a log of when it's pinged. See on the phone here? It keeps a log of when it's pinged the server. Oh, neat.

And the settings to set it up are – that's all you have to do. It's like five lines you fill in. That's a beautiful address. Thank you. Thank you. So that just runs now in the background on the internet phone, and it updates the TrackCar server, which is really a Java app. And you can add as many devices as you want, and you can have as many users as you want with their own device list.

And you can set some server defaults. A couple of things I really like about it right off the bat is by default... So you can keep track of everyone at Linux Fest. Your crew makes sure you know right where they are. We could, yeah. Actually, we could if we wanted to do that, which may be helpful for people who get lost. But one of the things I like right off the bat

is it's using OpenStreetMaps for the map. And at least in my area, the OpenStreetMaps stuff is just real beautiful, well-labeled. It looks nice. Yeah, it really does, Wes. And the other thing is you can – this has a server API. So you could also overlay it with Bing Maps or Google Maps or whatever you want if you prefer those. Right. And their satellite data or something like that.

It gives me extremely accurate longitude and latitude positioning. So, yes, that is the longitude and latitude of the studio. Yes, that is public information. I know it's on the stream right now. And it tells you how fast the tracking device is moving, which right now is zero miles per hour. And it gives you the address there, but that's actually – that's funny. That's actually not the address of the studio.

I would imagine the longitude and latitude coordinates are correct, but that is not actually the address of the studio. But that would just be open – that's just its guess based on the OpenStreetMap data. Now, here's something that I'm majorly bummed about because all of that's really cool, and it took me about 30 minutes to get it all set up. And it works for Android, too. You don't have to have an internet phone from Apple. Nice. Nice. Yeah. Here's the major bummer.

And I just did not expect this. They don't have any facility for embedding the map in your own web page. No easy link. No. Which, as Popey knows, is like the entire intention of why I'm doing this. And he did it correctly. He wrote his own because he's so fancy with the Ubuntu touch over there. Right.

And I just wanted to use TrackCar because it just seemed like a nice, easy, straightforward solution. Someone's already done the hard work for you. Yeah. And so doing a little research, I've discovered there is a way to, I guess, and I don't really understand how this works, but you can embed a Google map on your own website and then you can overlay data on top of it. Okay. And the track car server can act as that API source for the data.

My track car server has an API now. And if I knew how to embed a Google map and overlay data from an external API, I could embed that on the jupiterbroadcasting.com slash rover page. Okay. Let's do it. So basically I'm going to punt that to the audience and know if anybody knows what the hell I'm talking about and you know how to do that, please let me know. Telegram me. At ChrisLAS on Telegram.

I can't Telegram you because one of you bastards trolled my account, but you can Telegram me. And then I think if you Telegram me, like I wanted to say something to Wimpy like a couple of weeks ago. Like super bad. I wanted to relay something to Wimpy. And I can't message him. I can only message Wimpy when he messages me first. And then I can reply to Wimpy. But I can't initiate the conversation.

Wow, man. Yeah, it does suck. It does really suck because I had something I really wanted to tell you. And I've completely forgotten what it was now. Yeah, it does suck. It does really suck because I had something I really wanted to tell you, but I've completely forgotten what it was now. But my point is if you know, let me know. Either hit me up in the chat room or actually ping Rekai in the chat room if you're going to do it via the IRC or hit me up on Telegram.

Because I'm – just because of everything that's going on, Twitter would actually be fine too. But I'm not checking email very much for the next few days because I'm running around like crazy. I would love to get that set up though so people could watch. And then because I've wanted – what I've been using in the meantime is a proprietary solution that uses a dedicated piece of hardware and a monthly service fee that's a couple of hundred dollars for like three months or something like that. There's no open source anywhere. No. And I want every component of Lady Jupiter to be as open source as possible. And I've even to some extent had to put things in and roll them back to try to accomplish that.

And then eventually, I mean this is like probably a 2017 thing, but eventually I'd love to do an episode on a fully open source setup that I've set up. And I feel like this I shouldn't... Open rover. Right, and I shouldn't implement anything that isn't open source

today if I'm trying to get to that goal. So I bought this thing, this tracker, for the first road trip. And then because I had prepaid for the service, and I knew this at the time, it also covered the scale road trip. So that worked out perfectly. So I just used the same proprietary thingy because I had paid for the service. But now my service is done, and it's like several hundred dollars. If you guys want, it's Silver Cloud Tracker if you're interested. If you want, the thing that was appealing to me is it's a dedicated hardware device.

And then you can embed their web app. And they had really pretty decent support too. Anyways, but now I'm done with that. And I'd rather just have an app that runs on the background on my phone. And then just have something I can embed on the website. So if you have any idea on how the hell I could actually accomplish that, just let me know. And Blaster and Ham Radio, I got good news for you guys.

While you guys are out here, we're going to have a big turkey feed. What? Yeah, we did Thanksgiving for Dylan's birthday last week because that's his favorite meal. And so we – and I just got this huge turkey because we had a whole bunch of people over. We had people snacked and stuff. So there's a whole bunch of turkey left over and we're going to have like turkey enchiladas.

We're going to have all kinds of crazy stuff while the crew is out here. So, yeah, we're going to have a good time when everybody is out here and I'll be on the road. Hopefully you guys will be able to track that. So if you tune in for next week's Unplugged, it should be quite the show. I would try to catch that one live. There's probably going to be a lot of shenanigans going on in the studio that day. It'll probably simmer down by the time the show's on the air.

But if you can make it live, next week would be a good one. You can go to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar for your lifetime. But I got a feeling like what I'll probably do is I'll probably jump out for a little bit, for like a segment or two, and let Noah sit in or something. Or we can rotate out or something. I don't know, we'll figure it out. No little bit, for like a segment or two, and let Noah sit in or something. Or we can rotate out or something.

I don't know. We'll figure it out. No, totally. We can definitely do that. We'll tag team the hosting or something like that. Yeah. All right, guys. Is there any mumble room? Is there anything else from the virtual lug we want to cover before we wrap up on this week's episode of the Unplugged program?

I'll turn it over to you guys for one, a two, a three. Nope. That's how many licks it takes to get to the center of the unplugged lollipop. You ever seen that commercial? Oh, yeah. That's my favorite lollipop. All right. So I'm really looking forward to next week.

I think it's going to be fun. I'm super excited. Sunday's a big show. I hope you guys can catch Sunday's episode of the Linux Action Show. If you're tuning in live on Thursday, we've got the double tech snaps coming up. A lot's going on. It's crazy, and it's a lot of good content. Even if you can't make it to any of these events it's we're gonna make the we're gonna put the

very best stuff why watch anything but jb that's crazy west there's not time no time no no no all right jupiter broadcasting.com calendar for our live times linux action show.reddit.com for feedback jupiter broadcasting.com contact for email and we'll see you right back here next tuesday Thank you. And with that, I say get it out of here. Because that is the end of the show. All right. Thank you, Mumbleroom. Yeah, guys. You're welcome. Thank guys. You're welcome.

Thank you. JerryTitles.com. Wimpy, your Matei edition of the Ubuntu distribution, I'm not sure if you're familiar with this, but this is – Something you've been doing for a while now. The hype is strong with the 16.04 release. I can't believe how many websites i'm seeing right about uh about it everybody from from uh basically network world uh matt you got uh softpedia you got uh network world yeah or not was i think or

maybe it was pc world maybe one of them somebody wrote some from okay i know i blur all the world ones together but i just i i tell you what the the uh awesome yeah like uh it's like i i mean i almost wonder if it's overshadowing the other main release i think the reason it gets uh so much hype is because really in my experience of actually using uhuntu Mate, it really feels like what Ubuntu should have been had it stuck with its original path. Alright, alright, but what about what about Handy Linux?

Right? Get a Handy with Handy Linux. Yeah, get a Handy with... Okay, so it's Debian without the headaches. Right? Based on Debian GNU slash Linux, you heard of that. Lightweight and stable XFC desktop environment. Handy Linux is safe, convenient, and free of charge.

Now, that's a distro with a name. That's a brand right there. Yes, it is. And look, it even has a hand as its logo. Yeah, I was reading today on Google Plus that the Fedora project is working on it. And I guess there's just certain syscalls that maybe aren't even implemented yet. So it might be a more narrow range that the Ubuntu user line is using than we suspected. So it sounds like OpenSUSE guys are thinking about it, but it's like a trial and error stage right now.

So no Archon there yet? Yeah, because I'm wondering, like, who's the next distro? Because you know it's going to be, some distro is going to be the one that announces, we got it running on the Windows Linux subsystem. Once there's some choice, I'll be more excited to try it. We've been able to retask the build service to basically pump out what should be viable images, because we

have similar use cases we've already been playing with for that, so like dump out an open user space. We build our docket images that way, all that kind yeah yeah so so that that's been the final easy part so yeah it's just yeah figuring out those sys calls and and you know poking around those parts i would like to see it the same the same stages for daughter but we've managed to get bits and pieces of tumbleweed and bits and pieces of leapap on there. Huh. Well, that's a start. That's exciting.

That's great. Yeah, that'll be fun. That could be, like, I don't know, like, the next time I ever have to install Windows 10, that might be something I'd like to play with it. Right. So you got a while. Win Arch 10. I kind of wonder if it'll be Arch, but see, I don't think so.

I think this is probably not going to be Arch's strong suit, unless a really savvy developer out there does it for the distro. Right? But see, some of the more structured distros sort of have an advantage here, I should think. Yeah, you need a way of getting your root file system

deployed on there. Yeah. Yeah, well, you know, you see... What is an Arch root file system? You see examples of people reloading DigitalOcean droplets to different distributions while it's loaded. The BSD guys on BSD Now have talked about doing that too, swapping out your BSDs. It's a good way to learn about Linux too. And so you wonder if it could be done from within.

In fact, you almost would have to do it from within the Ubuntu environment is sort of replace it from within. If you didn't want to package your own Windows app. Well, because you can't want to package your own Windows app. Well, because you can't get into the App Store, and when you install the subsystem, I believe it pulls it down as soon as you try to run it or something. It's not really coming from an App Store. It's actually just, it says it is,

but it's lying and coming from a plain old website. Yeah, it's just on an Azure server. You can man in the middle of that, no problem. That's true. Oh, that's a good point. You could just do a little DNS trick or something. Add this line to your host file. That's what our guys did, yeah.

Blaster. If I could just inject for a moment, what you've been referring to as Windows NT is actually GNU slash Windows NT. Very good, sir. Very good. I've been corrected. Windows NT. That's an interesting point. You can fire up YAS from some pretty peculiar angles.

I did that before with some host. It wasn't DigitalOcean, but they didn't provide an open SUSE image. So I took their Debian image, hacked around with a grub and had it boot into Yash and nothing else. That's great. I like it. I'm sure it's been said a number of times, but isn't it amazing how much of a proof this is that Linux has won when

the Linux API system is used in Linux, it's used in BSD, and now it's used in Windows. It's kind of like the universal platform. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think so.

That or it makes it extremely easy for its competitors to integrate, embrace, and expand. I don't know. Come on, glass half full, Chris. You're right, you're right. I don't think I know anyone who's tried it yet. Actually, I've installed Ubuntu Bash on Windows 10 to try it out. How'd that go? Well, I installed Clang and built a C binary just to try it out,

and it actually worked. Pretty sweet. And an update. I can update and upgrade. Not just upgrade, but just upgrade. And is it a 1510 environment? No, 1404 at the moment.

Oh, right, right, right, right. And so will you be doing a dist upgrade to go to 1604? Like, how does that work? I'll give it a shot. I'm not messing around with it too much because, you know... Well, okay. I had to kind of use the latest snapshot image

in order to actually update the Windows 10 laptop that I've got because it just didn't want to upgrade to the actual build. So I just kind of overwrote it to get the Bash on Windows thing. So it actually does work. I've upgraded, just tried a few binaries or at least compiling a few things. I haven't done too much beyond that, but it works. And apparently. I'm getting really, you know, for me personally, I just, I couldn't care less about Windows 10 in so many ways. It's still, it's so Windows still, it doesn't matter. You know, I was thinking

about this recently. Microsoft will have truly changed when they have one version of Windows for all systems. If you want to run it on a server, you want to run it on a desktop, they don't have enterprise and data center. Because look at the way the market's going. Microsoft, when they started as a company, they were one of the first companies to figure out you could take the same exact code. And if you're just a smart enough business major, you could sell that same code to people who will pay $3,000 for it because they're in a business and they depend on it, and you can sell it to people who will pay $100 for it because they're a consumer and they don't require it as much. And it's the same damn stuff with artificial limitations.

And they were some of the people that just brilliantly made, obviously, a lot of money off that. He brilliantly made obviously a lot of money off that. And now they are in an era where things are in the cloud and those kinds of little divisions and things are on mobile. And that little artificial limitation seems trivial and obvious now. And the rest of the world has realized it. Apple realized it, for God's sakes, before Microsoft did. And Apple is the company that charged their beta users to do upgrades originally. And then Steve Jobs came out and claimed, well, we have to do it.

It's an accounting rule. We have to charge you. And then two years later, they dropped the charging. So Apple figures it out before Microsoft does. And so Microsoft is still trying to sell this differentiator product. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's still the same crap product. I have a close family member. I didn't even know this.

I'm actually very sort of upset about it. Their parent went out and bought them a Windows 10 laptop at Best Buy. And they're all excited. They came over for Dylan's birthday party and they're like, hey, Chris, look, it's my laptop. It's got the new Windows 10 on it. Isn't that great? It's got the new Windows 10. I'm like, wow, they really got sold. So how's it been going? And so Dylan, you know, he brings down his elementary OS Sputnik, and he fires

it up. And, you know, this is the same exact install that Dylan's had since I gave it to him for his last birthday. So it's now over a year old. And he fires up Minecraft, and he's got all his mods installed. He's like, come on, let's play. And he's like, oh, I can't. And Dylan's like, why not? Well, I got a virus a few days ago

and we took it into Geek Squad to replace it and they had to format my computer and they lost all my worlds and we haven't been able to get Minecraft reinstalled since then. But I got a Geek Squad shirt. It's the same. It's the same crappy OS.