LINUX Unplugged - Episode 153: One NAT to Rule Them | LUP 153

Episode Date: July 13, 2016

Chris discovers he’s being snooped on by his ISP, we discuss some Linux friendly solutions solve the situation. Is Linux Mint 18 really the best Linux distro every? Or should Ubuntu 16.04 be getting more of the credit?Plus our chat with a Matrix.org developer, Solus goes rolling, Unity on Windows & building a long-term financially sustainable open source product.

Oh, I have a problem. If anybody, just super quickly before we start, maybe you guys could help me with this. Wes, what do I have here in my hands? What is this? Do you know what this is? Let's see. That's your Entrawear Apollo. Boom.

Wow, good. I just figured you'd say laptop. Yeah. Also a laptop. This is the Entrawear Apollo that I'm holding in my little hand right here. So I'll hold it up. I got my stickers. I got a Gunter sticker on there.

Look at that. You see what else I have on there? Wes, I have a Fedora sticker on there. And so I thought I should make that sticker not a liar. And this is what I loaded Fedora 24 on. Oh, very nice. I've been keeping it on there. It was my road trip machine.

Really? Wow. Yeah. I want to give a plug to No Maps. No Maps? I use a lot. I didn't use it exclusively, but I use a lot of Gnome Maps on Fedora 24 on the road trip. Wow. And it was really cool.

So if you haven't tried out Gnome Maps, it's pretty cool. And I've been really happy with Fedora 24 on the Apollo. One problem, though. Oh, what is it? So I did the updates because you know me. You have to stay updated. Even when I'm on a MiFi connection on a road trip in an RV, I'm updating my packages. I mean, it's a priority, Wes.

It's a priority. So I got all the updates installed. It went real good, except for the latest kernel won't boot. It just won't boot. No. Ooh. Yeah, all the other updates work fine. The latest kernel will not boot, and I just get a blank screen.

And I did some quick Googling. You don't have that old kernel laying around, do you? No. Well, that's what I did. That's what I'm just booting. Yeah, they just keep it in the boot menu. I mean, it's recoverable because I just chose it from the other boot menu, and I'm up and running. I did some searching around.

I didn't find anything. So if anybody out there has a Skylake Intel machine with all Intel parts, something kind of like the Apollo, let me know if you've run into this problem and what you did to fix it. And also, if there's a way I can blame it on the fact that I installed Snap packages, be sure to let me know at ChrisLAS. That's right. Hang on a minute.

Repeat the question. So I've got Fedora 24 on the Apollo. See, it'd be better if you knew what the kernel version was. Yeah, I know. I'll tell you right now. I'll boot it up. All right. So I have good news, Wes. I've brought Fedora 24 on the Apollo. See, it'd be better if you knew what the kernel version was. Yeah, I know. I'll tell you right now. I'll boot it up. All right. So I have good news, Wes.

I've brought it with me. All right. So let's see. You've done tech support before, haven't you? In fact, I will reboot and I will give you the kernel list right out of the Grub menu. So I'm getting it straight from the source. Wes will be my witness. Mainline.

That's right. That's right. Okay. So I'm rebooting right now. Sure, boot, boy, I tell you what, it boots up and reboots real fast. It reboots real fast. So my kernel options are the one that doesn't work is kernel 4.6.3-300. So 4.6.3-300. Okay?

And then the one that does work is kernel 4.5.3-300. Okay? And then the one that does work is kernel 4.5.7-300. So 4.5.7 was pretty much the kernel it shipped with. 4.6, which is the... Oh, man. And here's the thing, guys. And I don't mean to be this guy. I don't mean to be this guy. But if you go back and you look at my Fedora 24 news coverage when the when Colonel 4.6 was announced and Fedora 24 was delayed in last, I suggested perhaps perhaps they ought to just delay it by one more week.

Because that's all he would have had to play by one more week. It had already been delayed. And ship it. Right. It already been delayed by two or three. And then just ship it with kernel 4.6. So that way people who get updates don't get their machines ruined. And Noah said to me, that's not necessary, Chris.

They would have to do a whole bunch of testing. They should just ship it later as an update. It won't be a problem. Well, you know what? I'm here to tell you, Wes. I'm here to tell you. Not that it's unsolvable. I'm sure we'll have a solution.

That's an interesting statement for Noah to make. I'm a little surprised. You can go back and watch the episode. It is in the video. And so I'm here to tell you, Wes, that it might have been just a little bit better if they just would have shipped it with 4.6 as a mainline feature. But that's okay. I'll get it working. Otherwise, Fedora 24 on the

Apollo, really nice. Like, I just didn't even care about the battery. I was totally honey badger. It was, I mean, probably six hours. I don't know. That's great. I was playing Minecraft with my son over Wi-Fi, not having to be worried about plugged in.

That really is a slick little machine over there. Oh, man. Super happy. I'm really glad I put Fedora on here just because the slick minimal GNOME setup, and I did a few tweaks to Fedora with like Fetty and whatnot, it just makes for a great package. So if I get that – I think we need like Chris Lass' guide to livable Fedora or something like that.

Yeah, I'm working on it. Because you talk about it a lot. I'm going to try – I'm trying to keep Fedora 24 on this bad mamma jamma for as long as possible. So I'm working on it. And I'm sure somebody out there has a fix for that. Yeah, probably. Maybe even by the end of the show we'll have it.

I saw one thread. I haven't read it yet. I put it in Slack. All right. Okay. Let's start the show. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 153 for July 12th, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's so packed full of content,

we have one of those oversized load signs. It's kind of embarrassing. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. Good to be back with you. Oh, it's wonderful to see your shining face. Oh, thank you.

Thank you. You know, to celebrate the return from vacay. Yeah, I said it. We have a great show. We have a great show. We have not only updates. So excited. I know. So Wes and I have been, there's a topic we have been wanting to discuss for what?

Four weeks? A while now. Yeah. And it's sort of evolved in that time too. So it's perfect to talk about it this week. We'll get more into that later, though. We also have a little tech support for Chris to do. I discovered my ISP is doing a man-in-the-middle proxy on me, intercepting SSL connections,

intercepting HTTP connections. Yeah. That is wild. It's aggressive. It's nasty. I've got the Anetalyzer report. We're going to talk about it and then maybe come up with a few ways I could

DIY or brainstorm. Or maybe a service I could work with that works great with Linux to get around some of these problems. It's also just good if you have some privacy concerns, you want to protect your traffic online. We'll be discussing that in a, of course, Linux user-focused way in today's episode. There is

big reviews hitting the web for the world's best Linux distribution. We'll tell you which distro that is, what the reviews are saying. We've also got updates from the horse's mouth in here. And then towards the end of the show, we're going to talk about Matrix. No, no, not the Neo kind of Matrix. Not the math thing. No, it is an overused word, as the chat room was saying earlier. Matrix is a technology we talked about a long time ago, really before I even really understood what Slack was.

Right. And it's such a better idea than Slack. It's so much more than that because it's a bunch of open source standards. It is a platform. We have an interview with one of the developers. We have a major development in a pretty cool way that's come out, I think, just in the last week or so. It's written in Rust.

It's going to work with Matrix. We're going to tell you all about it and why you should even care about these words I'm saying right now. So before we do any of that, let's bring in our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mama Room. Hello. Hello. Hello, everybody.

Hello. Hello. That makes Hello, everybody. Hello. Hello. That makes me so happy every time. What, the soundboard? Hello, guys. So we have, right now, some big breaking news to get to. We have to start off with the biggest story in the entire Linux ecosphere. This is CNN Breaking News.

Linux Mint 18 is the best Linux desktop, period, ever. Ever. This is CNN Breaking News. with the Cinnamon interface. Over at InfoWorld, Jim does a roundup of different reviews. Hectic Geeks is Linux 18 is how Linux should be done. DistroWatch, Linux Mint 18 is stable and problem-free experience. Unix Mint, Linux Mint 18 has it all. Matthew Moore says two thumbs up for Linux Mint 18.

And the reviews go on. They're all positive. They're all super positive, Wes. And you know what? I thought this first comment, I'm not sure if it's the first comment anymore. Yeah, it's not the first comment anymore. Too bad. The first comment that was on Stephen's article summed it up for me.

I hear this every single time with Linux Mint. And I generally give it a positive review myself, but I don't know if it's the best Linux, period. I don't know if it's the best desktop distribution in 25 years. But boy, the hyperbole is strong with this one. And it almost makes me sort of want to repel from it. Like, just, ugh, I don't want that.

When I looked at it, I, I don't want that. I, when I looked at it, I thought it was, it was adequate and good. I thought the improvements were nice. I think part of the, part of the problem too here

is that there's like, I mean, obviously you have to, what he doesn't mention as much as what the audience he's writing for here is. So I think if it, if he's talking about people

coming from Windows or new Linux users or people who just want a computer without any of the other joys and awesome things that Linux users know how to do, then maybe without any of the other joys and awesome things that Linux users know how to do, then maybe that's right. Maybe that's true.

I'm not sure that it is. Wow. I am. I am. That is that is exactly the conclusion I came to. You nailed exactly what I was thinking. Like perfectly. This is if you like the Windows paradigm.

Set it and forget it. Just, you know, like people will know what to do. Start menu, taskbar, icons on the desktop. That, if you like that paradigm, then this is a great distribution for you. If you like the UI that we came up with 25 years ago, 30 years ago, or if you want to give credit to Xerox,

you know, okay, then more than 30 years ago. If that's the paradigm of desktop UI you want to go with and you think that's probably a good way to go for the next 5, 10 years, then Linux Mint 18 is a great desktop for you. I mean they've polished a lot. The X apps still have a weird name, but they're not terrible. It's a very pleasant and usable experience. But it's not exciting and it's probably not – I mean best – if best means more than usable and what is expected, then I don't know if it's best. I actually think it's a great release and I'm just sort of playing devil's advocate here because it obviously serves a market. And I think the donation model, the donation revenue show that for Clem that people really like what he's doing here. So I think there is obviously a market that this serves.

I guess part of me – part of me what it does actually if I'm being sincere with my criticism, I would say the part that does repel me is it feels like a lot of the credit goes to Ubuntu 16.04. And then they put stuff on top of that. Like if you took out the Ubuntu stuff, you took out the Ubuntu packages and you took out – it feels like it gets attention in a way that Ubuntu flavors, official flavors don't. That's true. You're right. It seems people consider it more separate. Yeah, they consider it. It is but it's – But in some ways –

The actual way that it's produced is not as much. Right. But in some ways, it is just an unofficial flavor that has a lot more – well, not even that a lot. Just its own custom packages on top of it. But the way it's talked about is almost like it's its own entire operating system. operating system. If you think about the whole fact that the underlying 70% or maybe even arguably 90% of the operating system is created by somebody else, does it still hold up that it's the best desktop ever when it's based on 90% of somebody else's work? Maybe best desktop flavor ever? No, it's fine and fair to say that realistically speaking it's our mentality that this is all one system that actually screws this distribution we just claim that there are

different operating systems because they are they are free to diverge when they want free to make stupid decisions too true so it's like, just consider them different operating systems, let them innovate on their own. And then for once and for all, we will actually look at, well, this suits my purpose or not. We'll be able to benefit from innovation. Things that are good to crossbreed, we crossbreed, but the rest, it's unique. I don't know if I completely agree. Wimpy, what are your thoughts on this? Does this feel like agree. Wimpy, what are your thoughts on this? Does this feel like 90% of the work is being done by somebody else and that feels when you take the overall product into consideration, you should factor that in or is it a completely separate beast?

Well, when I started Ubuntu Mate and it was unofficial, really what I was taking there was the Ubuntu base and a lot of the packages from the ubuntu system and then adding the mate packages on top now to give you some idea right now there are 35 packages that define the ubuntu mate bit that sits on top of the ubuntu bit and 35 packages is a very very small number of packages in totality when you compare everything else. It's way smaller than what Mint is. Mint is considerably more.

Well, only because they choose to do that, not because they have to do that. That's a fair point. I'd say the following, though. When the user comes in and sees a set of experiences of predefined, like we say that default is king, happens to a lot of people. They're coming for the default experience. That was curated. Even though they selected a base, they selected the base and did the enough necessary adjustments so that it makes that group feel at home.

I'd say that that's, and also who's the first to answer in case of necessity? If you are doing that and not just delegating to upstream, hey, go bother Ubuntu guys. That's an Ubuntu issue. If they're not doing that, they're actually taking responsibility for their system. I think it's fair to say that it's their work. Yeah, I think that's an interesting standard and I think that is actually probably – that right there, that last piece is probably one of the clear markers that makes them their own beast versus a flavor. But yet technologically underneath, still, so much of the code is shared. I guess the point I'm making is, is it really the best?

I think that's overshooting i think i think when you make that statement you're kind of subjective right yeah it's qualifier so you can't you can't never get best out of on being personal so yeah that will be that okay so before we move on to something completely different any other thoughts on that topic? OK. So I see completely different. Let's talk about Solus. Ike is here to tell – I don't even know how this is possible because I've been told that the case of OpenSUSE or in Canonical considered going rolling release. Apparently you have to reinvent all of the things and reconsider

all of the things. But somehow, somehow, when you're a small, nimble distribution. That distribution that keeps surprising us. That's Solo Us from IKI and team over there. In fact, there's a post here by Josh that talks about the latest release of Solo is basically becoming indefinitely supported because the distro's going

rolling. Ike, how can you do this? Are you crazy? I've heard this is unstable. What are you doing to us all? Well, I mean, obviously I'm crazy anyway. I mean, that's kind of a given. Okay, good. Confirm. Okay, check. That one's totally confirmed. But I mean, as for going rolling, it's kind of easier for us

because we suck at trying to do the whole stable model like we're really really not good at it we're better at doing the rolling stuff for an example Solus has already got like Mesa 12.0 and we was using the RC4 to land OpenGL 4.3 in Solus already

we already had that stuff in we got GCC 5.3 DLipsy 2.23 so we kind of sucked at not being rolling. Yeah, I mean, it seems like you guys have opted for stability in key areas. Like one that I think a lot of people would appreciate that want to do gaming is graphic stack seems to be pretty on target, remains pretty – like that's a goal of yours to keep that stable, correct? Oh, yeah, definitely. Like the graphic stack, it's basically sacred in Solus. Yeah so there are elements of soulless that you're very more cautious with

but it seems like you just i mean like for example like you said you just ended up to make it great ended up putting a lot of this newer stuff in there so what is the transition like to go from rolling is that just now you'll just update the repos more often that's all that really changes or is there actually more changes behind the scene? Well, I mean, you gave the examples of like OpenSeus and, you know, like the other initials, they're designed differently than Solus was. I mean, our packaging is completely different. Everything is that little bit more simpler the way that we maintain packages. And the way that it worked out, it's actually easier to do a rolling release than it would be to make it static because we haven't had a Solus 2 yet, have we, right?

Right. So we're still in this one particular repo. So we don't have all that infrastructure in place that says that this has to go into this repo, and then it goes into that other repo, and this is how you branch between them. So we don't actually have anything to undo, which makes it a lot easier for us. I got you. And Wimpy, you had a question. which makes it a lot easier for us.

I got you. And Wimpy, you had a question. Yeah, Ike, I was just wondering if you've had to devise or communicate any new rules in order to support being a rolling release or is it just business as usual now? Well, I mean, it's not strictly business as usual. To support this, you know yourself, you're going to have to have a few tooling changes in places. The main thing that we have to avoid now is ABI breaks.

So anyone who's ever been on a full rolling release will know the horror and pain of one day getting an update to something like libpng and their system no longer boots. Yeah, I mean, for things like that, we have to completely avoid. But that just means building slightly extra tooling around Y package to generate ABI reports. So we will know in advance that something is going to break and these reverse dependencies need unbreaking before we then sync them. So we've got the unstable repo, which is like, do not touch this. Do not ever use this unless you are on IRC 24-7.

And that's kind of what we've always had that's the immediate dumping ground of the builder um but once those have proven themselves and we're all right with them they then get synced back into the main repo and then all the main repo users get the updates so this is this is having the mechanics to handle eso bumps for example and rebuilding all of the affected packages. Yeah, I mean, I would say that would be the main problem with it, especially if you had something like a GNU TLS. If that got an update and you don't want a brick network manager,

for example, because then nobody can ever get an update again, which is a bit of a problem. What about approaches to patching upstream? Are you planning to ship upstream as vanilla as possible, or are you going to be carrying distribution patches? So in the majority of cases, we try and carry things as vanilla as we can. In some cases, that doesn't always work. There's some kind of build issue, or it doesn't quite work with the way that things got installed but i mean i think that's kind of standard distro

weight that you would have anyway versus technical debt um so but these these are to support the build system rather than to change behavior or look and feel for example right um there's only a very minimal amount of places that we've done anything that would impact the look and feel um that was things like the default g sentence schemas but that's because we ship budgie by default we've actually shipped we've started moving away from that and doing everything in a single branding package which will then provide all the relevant overwrites like you would do with a bunch of mate yeah um so keeping everything as vanilla as we can because then you have less of a diff to worry about

if a new update comes through well you haven't got to rebase a dozen batches which obviously makes life that much easier because it's just a bump so also along with all of those things there is an improvement to YPKG package manager which I don't just explain this to me like I've never used YPKG before, Ike.

What is the benefit of supporting Git as a source? I have an idea, but I just wonder if you could actually explain it to me from your mouth. Well, there's a couple of reasons to support this. Not everyone has the infrastructure to actually distribute their own tarballs. structure to actually distribute their own tarballs. So if you look at something like Gnome, they have hundreds of tarballs going back years and years, like to Gnome 2.x, and they're fine to do that. Not all the projects can do that, and quite often the tarballs go missing or the tarballs aren't generated.

And, you know, like a lot of the projects now aren't even bothering to generate the tarballs anymore. They, you know. They're relying on GitHub tags, which are auto-generated and a complete and utter nightmare. Yeah. Like most of the ARCH AUR packages. The way that we're going to do it is, if

something is Git-only, we're going to support the Git, and then you'll be able to download it via a tag, which is especially what you want to do. You want an immutable tag, an immutable point in history. So we'll be able to build directly from Git now, which it just opens up options for people, I guess. Wow. I got to say, almost on a damn near weekly basis, your project has something that makes me go,

that's kind of cool. And I'm in particular, the rolling, it's just the fact that I won't have to worry about, you know, that I can see a machine or two going to solve it. But also having some confidence that about you know that yeah yeah but but also but also having some confidence that you know my graphic stack is probably going to be pretty solid which means that when i want to chill out and play video games or it feels like a nice mix like you're optimizing the results not just new things or staying stable it's a happy medium yeah i mean if i might elaborate on that whole graphics thing so i mean obviously i knew straight away when i

was doing, you know, like the work we did with Linux Steam integration, the Solus Steam runtime. Obviously I knew how important that was already, but I only recently got to experience that fully for the first time myself. So I bought an Optimus laptop for Solus because we have to enable these evil things. And it's like an NVIDIA GTX 765M, I think think so like for me this is the first time i've basically

bought anything with a graphics card since i was 15 oh congratulations right so i mean that was like an inno 3d geforce fx 5200 tornado the sacrifices you make for the user base yeah so i finally got this one i was like okay i'm going to try out these games that everyone else is playing so originally i put ubuntu on it because i wanted to see yeah i i know i went and used another distro i know i'm bad but i wanted to see how optimus support actually worked and how it was implemented in other places so i put ubuntu on it and it was basically a case of either use the nvidia or don't so i was like okay which basically brings your battery life down from something like four hours to 40 minutes yeah

seriously it's like you are screwed you're going nowhere keep the plug in or you're gonna die and you're done so i was playing it on that and i was playing um counter-strike global offensive never played it before in my life and i was like i'm gonna have a go at this and it was it was running okay but i had to put it down onto medium settings so at some stage i completely bricked the ubuntu install because apparently i don't know how debian and ubuntu work anymore like i've just forgotten uh so i put solace on it completely forgot about all the settings didn't bother putting the uh changing any of the settings put cs go on there and it was running like really fluid. And I was like, does Steam sync the graphic settings?

So I had to look at it, and on Solus it was running on the high settings, whereas I had to put it on the medium settings, because I was lagging on Ubuntu with the Ubuntu 12.04 runtime that comes with Steam. And there was a definite performance increase just by using a newer runtime.

So it's not me saying that, you know, like Solus magically makes it faster or anything like that because, you know, then we'd have to have benchmarks and we'd have to have pissing contests and all of that stuff. Right, sure. But just by having the newer updated stack, like Steam ran infinitely better. Yeah. So I'm kind of hoping that other projects now adopt that philosophy and try and go for their own native updated runtime.

As somebody who's tested that myself, I completely agree. And, you know, we see a lot of the updates from like Pharonix reviews and other things talking about the graphics tech. So it's like exciting to see those features in your hands. Yep. So right now, I see Wimpy in the chat room says he's hiding his laptop running Solus. So right now, if I go download the Solus ISO and I install that version, will I effectively be on a rolling release immediately?

Yeah, basically, but what I would do is wait until Sunday when 1.2.1 comes out. I know, I'm always dropping bombshells. So 1.2.1 is going to come out on Sunday and the reason is that's got a couple of minor installer fixes as well as full disk encryption and all that crap.

Oh, okay. There was a tiny little bug which came up with two users. One of them, funny enough, was Softpedia, who installed Solus on a Chromebook. Oh, interesting. Yeah, sure, of course. As you do, yeah. But there was a minor bug that was encountered on there

that would crash the installer, so that's since been fixed. But yeah, it's basically going to be on, you're on this repo and we don't break you and you keep running Solus forever. So once that's done, we get to do the cool stuff like put in GNOME 3.20 and update more of the graphical stack and all the core libraries. You hear that, Fedora24? You better get your act together. All right. Solus is chasing you. That Apollo is looking hungry for a new distro right now.

You know, it's got that look in its eyes. Well, thank you, Ike, for stopping by and giving us an update on that. My pleasure. My pleasure. Sounds like a very interesting development. So I want to do a little discussion with you guys about a problem I ran into just over the last couple of days. In fact, I'll give you the whole story. I'll give you the whole, like, disappointing, like, you guys will totally feel my pain story.

And I have a feeling in that discussion, DigitalOcean is going to come up. So let's do the pluggy plug right now for DigitalOcean. Go over there and use the promo code D01plug to get a $10 credit. That's one word lowercase. Just smoosh it all together, D01plug. It's one word lowercase. You just smoosh it all together. D-O-1 plug. It's a simple cloud hosting provider with an entire infrastructure built around Linux. They use KVM for the virtualizer, which, I mean, I personally think KVM is the best virtualizer out there.

I love KVM. If I build my own virtual machines, I use KVM. And so they're checking two boxes right there with Linux and KVM. And then the third box that they check is their entire infrastructure is SSDs. And then the fourth box that they check, seriously, I'd be happy with three of these things at this point. There's so many boxes. The fourth thing is they have great internet connections into these boxes.

And then there's a five. Yes, there's five things. There's five things. They also have a great interface. Oh, there's six. Six. There's five things. There's five things. They also have a great interface. Oh. There's six. Six. There's six things.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. I forgot about this. They also have this incredible API that we use on a daily basis here on Jupyter Broadcasting to control it with our chatroom bot. Seven? No, it couldn't be seven, Wes. They have every operating system pretty much that you would ever want to install.

I mean, they've got even FreeBSD. Yeah, right. And I guess there could be an eighth. The really, really good documentation. Like the stuff that makes the Arch Wiki look like Amateur Hour. And I love the Arch Wiki. We all do. We all do.

Don't tell the people over at DigitalOcean that their really great documentation would basically be applicable to any Linux installation because then they might stop doing it. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code D01plug. Smoosh it all together and get a $10 credit. You could try the $5 rig for two months for free. Or you could run a rig that's whatever spec you want and just use it hourly. Like, you know, spin it up, create something, and then destroy it. The serious part about this is, like, I joke around,

but one of my favorite things about DigitalOcean is you can spin up a rig instantaneously, practically, and you can have an entire application stack or a base rig. And when you combine the ease of doing that with being able to base it on templates or previous images and the hourly pricing and our promo code, it basically comes down to you can have incredible compute power up in the cloud.

As much as you want. For like nothing for a while using our promo code DL Unplugged and you support the show. That keeps us going because the way they track this, instead of us collecting data on who watches the show and what parts of the show you watched and where you watched it from and what your age is and what your sex is and how much money you make. And when's the last time you've heard Jupiter Broadcasting ask you to take an audience survey? When's the last time? We don't do that. I don't want your data.

I just want your downloads. And then when you use the promo code D1Plugged, that's the only mechanism they have to track to know that it worked. That's the arrangement we have. There's no data sharing here. There's no like stitcher, like all the information kind of being shared. You use the promo code D1Plugged. That registers as a use over there. That says, hey, our investment in Jupyter Broadcasting is paying off.

That's the system. You get a credit. We get acknowledgement. DigitalOcean gets a new customer. It's a super slick system. And it doesn't involve a whole bunch of spying data. I think that's pretty cool. So you get a great product. Everybody wins. DigitalOcean gets a new customer. It's a super slick system, and it doesn't involve a whole bunch of spying data. I think that's pretty cool. So you get a great product.

Everybody wins. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Okay, so I'm looking right here. I got a Netalyzer report. High-end stuff here, Wes. And if you guys haven't heard of Netalyzer, which you probably have because it's forever old,

you can get the ICSI Netalyser command line client. It's just so fun to say. Yeah. The real actual nice tool is an Android app. It's legitimately nice. Oh, really? I love it. But they also have a Java applet that you can download, just a jar, and then run it on the command line.

And then it generates you a fairly impressive comprehensive report. And what it revealed to me was that I was behind an HTTP and HTTPS proxy and also intercepting FTP connections. Wow. Yeah. And it will tell you this as well. And it does it by using a few different metrics. But primarily they know what I'm connecting, what IP I'm connecting from and what IP I'm connecting to. And if there's something in between us – so if the request originates from my IP but the actual connection comes from –

But they don't see it. And it comes from a different IP, then they know it's been proxied. And they have a couple of different tests to verify that. They've also indicated that some of my DNS results are getting kind of mushed up in here. Oh, no. To popular websites. That's insidioused up in here. Oh, no. Some of the popular websites. That's insidious. Yeah, here.

Yeah, right here. So six popular names have moderate anomalies. We are unable to find reverse name associated with the IP address provided by your ISP's DNS server, although we expected to find a name. And it's for things like Chase.com, WellsFargo.com, Yahoo.com. Their DNS, what it is, and I've done some additional testing after this, is their DNS server, my ISP's DNS server, in some cases, has a 6,100 millisecond response time to my DNS queries. 6,000 millisecond response time to my DNS queries.

That seems pretty suspicious. Yeah, it's bad, bad, bad. So why is it so bad? Well, let Chris tell you a story here, ladies and gentlemen. For many reasons, some of which are economic, I live in an RV. I love it. I would not change a thing. I love it.

I live on the coast. The freedom, the road. The West Coast is beautiful. Oh, it sure is. I live right there on the water. I freedom, the road. The West Coast is beautiful. Oh, it sure is. I live right there on the water. I couldn't be happier about that. And it's only possible because I live in an RV. And I don't own the space.

I just have it for – it's an RV thing. Anyways, there is no way to get a data connection out there. There's no Comcast. There's no Verizon. There's no Frontier. There's no wire that's going to come to where I'm at. The only data connection I can get

is over cellular. You're like living in the future, man. It is a little like that in some ways because it's also like living in the past more so. In some ways it's like, wow, look at me. No wires. Everything's wireless. All my media consumption, everything I do is over a MiFi connection.

And that does in some ways feel like that's probably the way it's going to go down the road. But in other ways, MiFi connections, especially where I live, are extremely unreliable. There's only one provider out of all of the U.S. providers in the area. So where I live, and you can look it up on anybody's coverage map, is I live on the coast in La Conner, Washington. There's only about 900 of us there. So you can actually probably come find me pretty easily. And there is tribal land all around us. And the tribes don't allow cellular tower installations.

I see. There is, however, one state-owned island where they have been able to install one AT&T tower. So that's your service provider right there. That's my service provider. And so – Limited by the trunk available on the island. This is a particular situation I got into recently where I discovered there is a thing – and I don't want to give too much information away. But there's a thing such as grandfathered unlimited plans that you can purchase on eBay.

There's not a lot of them. They're getting expensive. I may know some people with – Yeah. And when you purchase one of these things, you essentially – you adopt or you – I guess sublease would be the – you subrent, if you will, a – or purchase if you have a lot of money, a unlimited AT&T account. You're buying a contract or renting, subletting a contract. Yeah, yeah. And so I went that route as an experiment because for me, data connectivity is pretty essential.

So I've got – I have every provider because one of the nice things about Ting, who is a sponsor of ours, is I get CDMA and GSM. And I don't have to worry about caps. Now, I will have to spend more if I want to use a whole bunch of data. But it's available. Right. So that is super nice. Then I have a Verizon MiFi, which is like a 5 gigger or something. And they have like a no contract plan.

And that's the one I never use unless I have to because it's like – That's the only Verizon in town. Yeah, that's – I'm in Wyoming on Highway 90, and the only person here is Verizon. That's – because this is literally something I drive, right? So I just got back from Montana where there was – when you go through the passes, there's just no connectivity. And even though I have every cellular provider in the RV, there's no connectivity. And also I should say, I should probably disclose that Ting has provided me with a MiFi that I have been using for quote unquote testing for a while now to, in some ways, legitimately

test the Ting network as I move around to get a true sense of what Ting is like. And as long as I don't go crazy, they don't worry about the data on that line. So that's nice. But where I'm at is only AT&T. So I've gotten this old AT&T MiFi, this used AT&T MiFi. And this is what I've been connecting

the Lady Jupiter network to outside the firewall. That's your main uplink. And I've recently, so you remember that device you got me that was a firewall that I could connect the Wi-Fi to? That's right. Yeah, so about two months ago, when Noah was in town for

last 10-year anniversary or whenever that was, we upgraded that to a cradle point Wi-Fi access for last 10-year anniversary or whatever, whenever that was. We upgraded that to a cradle point Wi-Fi access point. Oh, wow. That allows me to – it does a few interesting things. I can connect MiFis to it and then it will share that MiFi connection with the LAN. I can connect it to another Wi-Fi network.

Nice. I repeat it. So if I take Lady Jupiter to an RV park that has Wi-Fi, I can connect to that and then it repeats it to my LAN. And I can connect it to Ethernet and it will repeat that. So it's really cool. That is really neat. And so I got that set up. It's all – and I'm like, wow, this is a huge upgrade.

I have a persistent LAN now, which was so nice. Before it was hit or miss, right? Yeah. So now I always have a persistent LAN regardless of signal, which is really fantastic. And it all runs off an inverter that runs all the time, even if Lady Joops is disconnected from power. Those things run off of an inverter that's connected directly to my battery bank. So my LAN is always online.

The house is a built-in UPS. It's a real network. It's great. That's amazing. I get the Wi-Fi. I get it all hooked up. And I have negative 114 dB signal. And for those of you that maybe that's like less than one bar, one bar, negative 118 is no bars for where I'm at.

So one negative 114 dB is – You're pushing it, man. How do you like the edge network? Well, actually, it was a little better, but it was like – it was 300k down and about 96 kilobits up. So awful. Okay. And that was, that was sort of the situation for a couple of months. No big deal. I just went all offline on everything. Whatever. You know what? I just went, I doubled down on Cody and local media. You end up at the studio or other places. Sometimes you can studio has a hundred megabit down, so that's fine. So that was my solution for a while. But then I started thinking about wanting to be able to do productions on the road.

In September, I'm going to go to a Linux conference, and I'm taking Lady Jupiter down there, and I want to be able to do shows from the road. And that's when I started looking into a new product built for RVs called WeBoost RV. into a new product built for RVs called WeBoost RV. And this does a 60 dB boost of all cellular network provider signal. So it just increases your antenna size basically? It takes – Some active filtering as well. So for example, at my primary campsite where I'm parked, I go from negative 114, negative 112, depending on the day signal, to about negative 65, 70.

Logarithms, everyone, remember. It is a huge boost. So I went from on a good day, 600K, on a bad day, 196K, like really bad, to now I'm clocking six megabits down, six megabits up. Wow. And I went from a ping timeabits down 6 megabits up. Wow! That is a real usability improvement. I went from a ping time of around 380 milliseconds to 32 milliseconds.

32? No, that's quite reasonable. By the way, the studio's ping time right now is not much better. It's 22.7. So Comcast is taking a crap right now. Screw you, Comcast! So anyways, the huge – so again, it's WeBoost RV. It's extremely tricky to set up because the antenna that receives the cellular signal

and the internal antenna that boosts to your devices have to be far enough apart that they don't pick each other up and just create a – Yep, yep. And so I got all that worked out. And so then it started to become a matter of, well, why now that I have six megabits, why am I still getting horrible page load times? Why am I getting horrible? So I started looking at, so I set up a local DNS server, of course.

Naturally. So I set up a local. What did you go with? Oh, I just set it all up on the cradle point. Oh, nice. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. Once you go into advanced mode, it has a DNS server and all that kind of stuff. So that was super easy.

Then I started running Netalyzer. And so, again, I'll have a link to Netalyzer. You can run it on your Linux rig if you have Java, or you can run it on Android. Again, it's Java. And it clearly showed that I was behind a proxy server. And because this is a MiFi connection on AT&T, to me it makes sense that they would probably be proxying people's traffic. Well, there's a lot of carrier-grade NAT that goes on with cellular stuff. The problem is I do not like AT&T as a company.

I do not trust AT&T, and I definitely don't. I have a reseller of AT&T as my primary phone so I have experienced exactly the same thing. And I don't want AT&T knowing everywhere I go on the web. Absolutely not. Especially because honestly. And they do the super cookie thing. Yeah. And honestly I search for some disturbing stuff for Unfiltered. Like

I don't really want that associated with who I am as a person because it's not representative of. That's a business. It's a research thing and it's not representative of who I am. But they have no idea. Like, boy, he sure looks up a lot of things about Vladimir Putin. Like, no, I don't have a thing for Putin. I mean, yeah, I love that he wrestles bears with his shirt off.

Everyone does. But that's not a thing of mine. And I really want to come up with a solution that is super Linux-friendly that avoids this problem. Now, it doesn't have to be network level. If I could just do it on my laptop, my lady's laptop. Okay, yeah. So she's running Mate and I'm running GNOME. I'd like to have – and I would love to have something that integrates

with the desktop environment if possible. So for her, it's just an easy toggle on, toggle off. Like it would be if she had a Mac or, God forbid, a Windows box. I'm sorry, Wes. Shh, Chris. You're scaring box. I'm sorry, Wes. Chris, you're scaring everyone. I'm sorry, Wes. And I got a few suggestions.

I've got IP VPN. I've gotten private interface. And, of course, Tink has been a topic before. Oh, right. But the solution, the problem I'm trying to solve in this particular case is I want something that is as fast as possible. I just want to tunnel around my ISP as much as possible. And the other thing that's particularly tricky is I think sometimes like the MiFi, when I go to like look up where my IP is or when things try to do, can we access your location in my browser?

They show that I'm in Dallas when I'm in Washington. So I don't know where. I've seen that as well. I don't know how they're routing that. It might be one horrendous NAT that we're all behind. I don't know. But I would like something that is performant,

that is easy to enable, and also definite points for something that's easy to set up because I try out so many different distros and then I take them home. I don't want to have to load a kernel module to do like what's the new one we just talked about? WireGuard. WireGuard.

Or I don't want to have to install a whole bunch of – I mean I could do it. But it needs to be something that's fairly straightforward to get going on different distros and whatnot too if possible. I don't know, Wes. Does anything come to mind for you? I mean I've used a few different like private VPN providers. TorGuard comes to mind. I mean, I've used a few different, like, private VPN providers. TorGuard comes to mind.

Private Internet Access is one that's in the news a lot and talked about, and they have fairly good cipher suite selection and that kind of thing. I know I've had some friends playing with, like, getting that all integrated with Network Manager in GNOME in particular. You know, like having the OpenVPN files. OpenVPN probably should be a pretty reasonable performance. Obviously, there's a lot of, like— That was sort of—one of the things I was thinking about was OpenVPN on a DigitalO pretty reasonable performance. Obviously, there's a lot of like... That was sort of... One of the things I was thinking about was OpenVPN on a DigitalOcean droplet. But at the same time, I don't want to be in the position where I'm here at work and Hadea's at home,

and all of a sudden her VPN's not working, and now I need to go troubleshoot an installation. That's not huge on my list, but that's the best solution. I have seen some scripts out there that will, you can kind of get it like when you want to use the VPN. I mean, you'd have to make like a GUI, a desktop file or something for her maybe. But for you, if you could run a script, it could spin up a droplet, install everything,

provision it, start everything. So you might have a little bit more of like, it might have a delay, but it would be more reproducible. And then turning it off and on again might actually fix it. So I see TechMav links to a DigitalOcean tutorial on setting up a basic VPN on a Bluetooth 14.4. There's also a fair number of options. SSH will be less efficient, of course, but there's both the SOCKS proxy and using it as a tunnel. So nobody wants to say go with something like TunnelBear or – I mean I will say I use TorGuard just for some

So TorGuard is not a Tor thing? They're just using the name Tor? Yeah, I think they also have servers that allow torrents. Oh, well, okay. Which is obviously not the main concern here. So anonymous VPN service. I'm not going to say they're the best. I've just been grandfathered in on a really good

deal, so I pay like $2.50 a month or less or something. They have a fair number of servers there's private internet access is fairly well reviewed uh they just had a big thing in russia where they're pulling out of russia because russia is required has a new law requiring them to keep logs i saw that so they're shutting down their russian say they don't do that's hard to audit i know on the rlinux subreddit they've had it posted a few times like a someone has made a great list and review of these VPN services. And obviously for the VPN services, what you're really paying for is hiding amongst the crowd

and using their servers in different countries. Otherwise, if you're just concerned about proxying past your immediate ISP, DigitalOcean works just fine for that too. So I've seen NordVPN and IPVanish. Does anybody in the Mumble room have any suggestions for either a DIY or a service that they trust and like? It's pretty scary to realize when you're being tracked. Trusting and sharing trust. Hard.

Yeah. I definitely was hoping to hear from somebody who's like, yes, I like these people. And, yes, they acknowledge that Linux exists. And so I looked into, for example, TunnelBear because that's the one I've seen advertised on YouTube. And the thing about TunnelBear is you feel like they begrudgingly support Linux. I know a lot of them have their own custom clients, but as long as they have an OpenVPN file, right? That's true. As long as they do.

Here's what I really want from that is I want to be able to link somebody to something. Here, read this. That's really what I want. I see. That's fair. That's fair. Which is what I don't really have if I roll myself either. Right.

You're the support person. And then I guess the other question is am I going about this all wrong? Should I just not worry about it? I feel like maybe even from a performance standpoint, I should worry about it, even if it's not from a data security. Well, especially if what those DNS numbers that you're talking about.

Horrible, yeah, and I fixed that by just using my own local DNS, but I didn't even think about the fact that the router would just pass on the DNS from the, whoever wants to use their ISP's DNS, it's disgusting, yeah. Does OpenVPN's AWS image count? So this is an instance that I would

run on AWS? That would probably haul balls. Hmm. It's like their blessed image. Now look at Rekai here. Rekai is also linking to ViperVPN, who I've heard of before, from goldenfrog.com.

And it's their golden frog support here. It talks about using Ubuntu. And I like that. Like they tell you what packages to install. So that's doable because then, yeah, I'm going to have to play with this. And maybe I could – I'm going to have to see. Maybe people know a good review somewhere. Reviewers they trust from like a security and performance standpoint because that's the other thing.

You can read reviews about these things. And I don't really care if the VPN service provider knows what I'm doing. I don't really care about that. What I really, really care about is performance and I would like the fundamental technology to be sound. Right, right. Like you want ciphers that aren't 10 years old. You want, yeah. And so maybe

it's worth the exercise of setting it up myself. I just, you know, I've run VPN servers before in the past, but they were for end users where I had to constantly reset passwords.

I will say DigitalOcean or some of the other ones have some exciting possibilities where you could have a step where it pings some of their test servers or DCs and figures out what the best place

to spin up your new VPN proxy is. Which could be particularly good from a MiFi. Right. The Private Internet Access has Linux support as compatibility things, but they also have a thing where you can set it up where DDWRT

uses their stuff. Yeah, that would be nice. Network level does make it simpler. Especially if you know that you're always being tracked. That's true. The other nice thing about that is then I don't ever have to worry about distribution reloads or working. And if it breaks, you're fixing it for yourself just as much as for Hadea. Huh. Yeah.

That's just the problem is that I don't – I looked through the Cradlepoint software and I didn't see anything that talked about VPN support. So I would have to run a separate device and probably put it in between. Right. anything that talked about VPN support. So I would have to run a separate device and probably put it in between. And to give you an idea, all of this is running under my dinette, which also means it's in a very small tight space because they're under benches. You're fitting it in your rolling home here. But the awesome thing is if you came over to the RV right now, you would have no idea that I'm doing this because I ran everything. I brought the wiring in through where the slide's at, and it goes right up into the benches.

You can't see any of the gear. Oh, that's so cool. Which when you think about the limited counter space and whatnot in an RV, that is such a win to have. I have extremely powerful Wi-Fi because it's 47 feet long or 37 feet long. So it's not like you need the craziest Wi-Fi router ever. Pretty reasonable. Everywhere in my campsite, I'm on Wi-Fi, which is great. That is awesome.

Because I don't have cell signal out there. So to be able to be on Wi-Fi through the one unlimited AT&T MiFi thing is perfect. And this is really the last little bit is this. They also are apparently intercepting FTP connections. They don't mess with VPN or SSH, though. You know, I've seen some stuff on

AT&T stuff, weird stuff, too. I was playing with one of those... What's that separate terminal for Android that... Do you know what I'm talking about? No, but I probably have used it way back in the day. Termux, that's what it's called. And they have their own repos and stuff, do you know what I'm talking about? No. No, but I probably have used it like way back in the day. Termux, that's what it's called.

And they have their own repos and stuff so you can install it without root and have like without having to install it. I like that, Wes. We can talk about it. But I noticed that like over just the cell signal, I couldn't hit the repos. And once I VPN'd up, boom, no problem.

Downloaded it instantly. So it's like you really can't trust the major wireless carriers to provide you with the kind of pure uplink you would get from like a business grade or, you know, when you're running your own BGP. It's sad to say. I don't think I've come to a solution. I don't know if I have. Anybody in the mumble room, any other thoughts before we move on? I like that there's some good suggestions in the chat room. Hey, Chris, Lael had a question regarding your issue with your ISP. Oh, what was it? I didn't see it. Sorry. I think it went by before I got a chance to catch it.

No, I just was talking to WWNSX for that. My question is, if I understand what you're trying to do is you're trying to get around the bandwidth block that your ISP is doing. Is that correct? It's not so much that I wouldn't call it a bandwidth block. I would say that it would appear that the proxy server itself is introducing a certain amount of additional load time and latency. And I just don't like them tracking and watching everywhere I go and doing their – I would also –, I would, I would presume that's where the super cookie injection happens as well. Yeah.

As you leave their network. Yeah. All right. So when I was in my networking class, this is the question I had for my teacher. And maybe this applies to you and maybe it doesn't. As I understand it, what ISPs do is they get a block of addresses and they have a certain amount of bandwidth that they can divvy out to that block. And so I'm not sure if what you're trying to do is getting around that divvying or if I understand it correctly. If there's any bandwidth controls, that's going to be at a much lower level. That's

not happening at the proxy level. At the proxy level, that's going to be at a much lower level. That's not happening at the proxy level. At the proxy level, that's a protocol level application layer thing where you're looking at the individual HTTP connections and traffic and the images and the web pages being sent back. And in the cases of an HTTPS proxy, you may in some cases actually have some sort of way. Corporate proxy servers do this, too, where they actually have a signed certificate where they can be a man in the middle for HTTPS traffic. Or maybe they're just passing it on. Who knows? But if they're actually doing any kind of throttling or quality of service control, that's going to be happening at the network level. That's going to be happening

probably, and I know this for a fact actually based on conversations I've had. That can even actually happen at the individual cell site level. And that doesn't happen at the centralized proxy server, which appears to be in Dallas from what I can tell. But what it does mean is where performance does become a factor is instead of my HTTP traffic going directly to the end destination, it is going through a data center in Dallas first. And the problem is, is any performance issues in – yeah. And every stop of the route, every hop of that trace route where you could – where between me and that proxy server could be a potential point of slowdown, performance issues, increased latency.

And you know that they're running it through some sort of edge box that's doing processing, tracking. They may even be doing image degradation. They're looking at the packets. Yeah. You just want them to pass it through like a dump pipe. Right. And so what I want to do with a VPN is I just want to give my web traffic a clear path to the end VPN point and then out to the web from there, VPN point and then out to the web from there, which hopefully would be a quicker, shorter set of routes because when you do non-HTTP traffic, you don't go down to Dallas.

So that's my hope. I've also had pretty good experience with, I don't know about necessarily on cellular. I haven't tried it there, but on like Comcast or other like commodity home connections where I'll just use SSH as a layer three device um making a ton device to a do droplet that i spin up and i have i have several machines in europe that sometimes i want to sync larger files between let's just say and i don't know if it's just congestion more at my local level but even just proxying to like a droplet in san fran and then using their pipe to europe i can i'll max max out my local connection, no

problem, where I'm pulling like two megs down otherwise. Yeah, I've run into this too. I've run into that same thing too. You can maybe benefit too from other providers' better connections to other areas once you've gotten out of your local area. Yeah. Well, interesting. Okay, so if you have suggestions, if you have ideas, linuxactionshow.reddit.com or tweet

me at Chris Elias if you just want to link me to a service you use and trust. I would love that. It's just one less thing I have. One of my goals in the – any rover incarnation that I have, and this one I hope to be the most teched out ever, is even though I want to have like crazy cool stuff in there. I only want to be managing and installing stuff that's really necessary. If I can use something because the content of my data is not the paramount issue here. It's a consideration, but it's not the paramount issue. I feel like it does open it up to potentially using a service provider because I'm just not super concerned about that aspect. I'm not looking at kid porn or something. Yeah, and anonymity is not the major concern.

You just want to get around your local ISP. You know, and it sucks to even have to worry about it. It's 2016, and these practices should have gone out in the 90s. And if you want to just break away from this and you want a service provider who just wants to make mobile simple and give you a data pipe, check out Ting. In fact, go to linux.ting.com. When I hit the road and my Ting, my MiFi, I activate that thing. I've got the Netgear Ting MiFi. And the thing I love

about that son of a gun is it's got an LCD screen right on the front. And before I got that, I was like, oh, that's a gimmick. What a waste of battery. Well, first of all, it turns off right away. And second of all, the thing has a ridiculous battery. The thing has a bigger battery than, the thing has such a big battery that you can actually charge other devices with it. That's how big the battery is. And the LCD screen gives you real-time data usage right there on the Wi-Fi screen. That is awesome.

Very nice. When you have three, four, five, six devices pulling data off this thing, super nice. Plus, it gives you a list of all of the Wi-Fi clients. Ting is mobile that makes sense. It's no contract. It's no contract. It's no early termination fee. The arrangement is you just pay for what you use.

So for me, this works out pretty well. When I go on the road, I do end up using more data on my phone. I do end up making more calls and I don't really change my texting at all. And so the month of July might be one of my more expensive Ting months. It might actually be like a $55, $60 bill possibly. That's with three phones. That's traveling from Washington to Montana and back for eight days. That's going to happen.

The rest of the year, my Ting bill is like $30. I mean it's just there's nothing that beats that. So Ting has a savings calculator. You go in there. You put in your information. See how much you would save. Try them out. See if you're – that's the litmus test.

See if you're a good fit. It really feels like wireless for adults. It's like, yeah, of course I want to tether. And I don't mind – when you're on Wi-Fi, you use it. And when you're like, yes, I used your service, I'll pay you the fair market rate for your service. And for those of us who really kind of get sick and tired of the whole OEM holding back the updates paradigm, and like especially when you follow tech news and you know that there's crazy exploits out there and some of these things are just running kernels full of holes. And that kind of stuff eats away at you when you're a tech-savvy user.

One of the things that's great about Ting is they have – there's no incentive structure in their business to withhold updates, to get in that – to even get in that position. So one of the things I think the sweet spot is now, you get a Nexus device. They put the 6P and the 5X on sale just about every other week. The 6P is on sale again right now on the Prime Day. Happy Prime Day, everyone. It's like $150 or something. And the 6P was like $400.

Just check them out. So you get one of the Nexus devices. Either one is still a good phone. And maybe it doesn't have edge screens or something. But it is a fully up-to-date, monthly updated Android device. Pure Android. And you put it on the Ting network. They don't have any contracts.

There's no locking of the phones. Nothing like that. They have GSM and CDMA. I just threw a link. Their GSM SIM cards are on sale right now. $1. $1. I'm going to buy like 10.

You should probably tell Noah. Yeah. Actually, yeah. If you have Telegram on that, you should tell him because he'll buy a whole batch because it's ridiculous. Because you can hold on to those SIM cards and then put them in when you're ready, and then you just pay for what you use, no contract. Just start by going to linux.ting.com. That gets you $25 in service credits if you buy one of those $1 SIMs. So then you have $25 of service credit, which is – that's great.

That's going to get you more than like through a month likely. And then if you want to buy a device instead, they'll give you $25 off the device. Then you just get the device from Ting. They have a great dashboard, great customer service. You can talk to human beings. They're a cool company, and they're backed by two cows. So you just can't lose. Check them out, linux.ting.com.

All right, so there's one story we have to talk about. One more update. We haven't even gotten to the main show yet. No, what's happening? Jeez, man. Some of the show. Tech Talk today, yesterday, 50 minutes long. Whoa.

That's unheard of. I did tell – it is worth listening to though. There is a story in there. There was a major technical snafu that happened to me as a result of production ongoing in the studio while I was gone that I did not expect. Oh, man. I share that story. It's embarrassing and it was super confusing.

There's no way I could have ever predicted it. I don't think I could have ever foreseen the issue. And I don't think I could have troubleshot or resolved it any faster than I did. And there was no way for Noah to know it was happening. Good nightmares. So I tell that story in Tech Talk today yesterday. So let's talk about a story that we're all telling each other before the show started. You can now run the Unity desktop on Windows 10.

Thanks to that bash on Ubuntu business. What is happening? My life as I know it is upside down. GitHub user Guerrera24, of course, has managed to achieve this. After doing all sorts of tricks with Comp Compass Config Settings Manager and all that goodness, he managed to run Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with a Windows X server environment and then

the Unity desktop environment on top of that. There you go. And then later, because that wasn't good enough, also got XFCE running on top of Windows 10. So the only question I have is, Wimpy, how long until Matei is running on Windows 10? It'll have to be a community endeavor because I will never run Windows 10 personally.

I don't know, Wimpy. You never say never. I hear it's really taken off. So can we also piggyback on Windows convergence and you just run an Ubuntu on your Windows phone now and boom, convergence as well. Done. Problem solved. Huh. Yeah, okay.

I do wonder though, like, is this really fun like opening up? Are we going to see like less of the MacBook Unix developer grace? Because now instead of getting the weird OSX, older FreeBSD user land, you can run Windows and have Outlook and Adobe and then also a real Linux environment to work with.

You know, I think maybe I can't remember if it was Daredevil who was saying before the show, this really is going to be one of the easiest ways to install Linux software. It really is going to. Because there will be people who do all of the legwork,

all of the esoteric little hacks that you have to do, and they'll package it all up in some sort of MSI or something, and you'll be able to install... I bet you there'll be like Vagrant support and like all kinds of stuff. Damn it, Wes. I don't like that at all. We can run Mumble in Ubuntu on the Windows kernel right here.

I'll tell you what, though, Wes. It surely was 10 years ago I saw Mac users that were attempting to run GIMP on Mac OS with X Windows on Mac OS. And now Apple doesn't even ship X11 on Mac anymore. I think they'll try it. But it's such a jarring – well, I don't know. I don't know. I shouldn't – to me it feels like it's such a mishmash jarring difference that if you really want that as those tools you just run the linux desktop that's true

but you do get like you get python you get ruby the the shell even if it's dated and you don't get the nice like you know have command line arguments any which way you want you can run a lot of the basic like deployment tools i'll tell you. I'll tell you what it does do, I think. And maybe Rikai would be a person to ask. Rikai, does it make you want to run Windows 10? Oh, yeah. Rikai, he's a multi-OS user. He'll run them all.

But I would say his daily driver is the one that has his Steam library and game library. And that's his Windows 7 desktop. And he's sworn off Windows 8, sworn off Windows 10. But eventually, you know, every Windows 7 user realizes the inevitability. It's that or abandon it. And when you look at this and you go, well, shit, Rikai, he likes to play with Linux tools and software too. And you got to think this makes it a little more appealing to switch to Windows 10. So what I think it really does is it just sort of greases the ramp onto Windows 10

for more technical Windows users. And even that kind of pisses me off, because I think they would make good Linux candidates. They would make good Linux candidates. Yeah, so Rikai says in a way, yes, it'd probably make developing JBoss Ruby stuff easier. See, right? The utility of it is just infectious. Damn it. And. The utility of it is just infectious.

Damn it. And I mean, it's just unfortunate because then we fall back on the philosophy, you know? It's less of like look at what it can do because if you can use a Windows desktop to do 90% of what a Linux desktop can do, and not in the same way, and not with the same flavor. And it's not that the falling back

on the philosophy is bad. No, it's not bad. It's that the philosophy only speaks to a niche of the niche. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And when you're trying to sell to somebody who's got to get some work done, the selling on the philosophy could be particularly hard. They're like, I don't care. I just have to get this done by Tuesday.

Yeah. Yeah. So let's feel better about Linux. Oh, yes. Please. Okay. Good. So there's some pretty cool technologies coming to

the Linux. I'd say, let's just call it the AV stack in Linux. We all are users of Pulse Audio, and most of us- Whether we like it or not. Yeah. And also GStreamer, even a lot of KDE users are GStreamer users. So let's start with Pulse Audio. There's something pretty damn cool that could make future podcasts much better coming to Pulse Audio. So get excited for all you podcast listeners out there that listen to any Linux podcast that sound like they have crap audio because beamforming is coming to Pulse Audio. Now, you might think of beamforming as a Wi-Fi technology.

Right. That's what we hear about most of it, especially in the newer standards. Yeah. It's a concept used in various aspects of signal processing, including radio waves. But in this post, they're talking about using it in audio. The basic idea is that you have a number of microphones or a mic array in some known arrangement. It is then possible to point or steer the array in a particular direction. So sounds coming from that direction are made louder, while sounds from other directions are rendered softer. Now, practically speaking, you could really see the value of this on a laptop. It doesn't have to be some big, sophisticated mic array.

For example, you might want to focus a mic on the person who's speaking on a laptop. Say you had a laptop microphone and you had something like the Logitech 930 here, or C920 perhaps, or 920C. Super popular webcam. One of the greatest. I think also on sale on Prime Day. Oh, really? At least I saw some 920s on there.

That's a great webcam that works great with Linux. If you guys want to get it, you should check it out. And that webcam has two microphones. And in some situations, like under Windows, it uses some Logitech software to actually use one microphone to listen to background noise and one microphone to listen to your face. I was about to say, that's a great way to think about how this technology works. If you have microphones around the edge, you know that certain sounds hitting those, you really want to subtract. And that's just like certain high-end Android devices do that for your calls. The iPhone's been doing that for years with your calls.

They have multiple microphones and they use that to isolate your voice. Now, you could – in a more sophisticated setup, you could take advantage of a much wider array of mics. that could make the Pulse Audio underlying software be able to focus on your mouth and cut out some of that background extra sound and warbles and all that. Especially when it's like – you really go from a situation where it's like you have one mic or you have three mics, and right now it doesn't matter. But six months when this is pushed to our laptops, you could have a noticeable difference in the sound quality. Yeah, I'm really excited about it because it could help mobile contributors. There's some great pictures here.

And if you follow this link, he has another article. He links to labbookpages.co.uk. And they've got graphs. They've got math breakdowns. They've got some C programs you can compile and run yourself. It's really cool. This is one of the geekiest and coolest posts. And it really helps you appreciate the amount of knowledge and research that these developers have to do.

These are people solving real problems. And it has nothing to do with actually writing code other than it helps you design the right code. In fact, along those same lines, this next update is another perfect example where they have done scientific studies. They have done demos. They have graphs. GStreamer is getting a virtual reality plugin and something called Sphere.

S-P-H-V-R. This is coming to a GStreamer near you soon and it's going to make VR on the Linux desktop a little better. Now this whole, whole post is freaking phenomenal. It's like it has an introduction to just the spherical coordinate system in general. If you haven't done that for a while, it's a difficulty of capturing the full information

of spherical video and all the colors. Great visuals that show that. Oh, it really gets me excited to play with GStreamer. I played with it a little bit recently trying to do some RTP streams for VoIP stuff. It's a fantastic library there is so much you can do it's so composable it's awesome i'm really excited to see like they're really pushing forward you know we said it with ai and minecraft but i feel like for vr now we're finally seeing like you know especially with like hololens and you get you kind of get like and oculus and

the vibe not really supporting Linux. It gets depressing. You're like, where's Linux on these frontiers of things that are really getting all the tech press these days? And it's really cool to see behind-the-scenes people working on it. Yeah, and that they're super sharp. Yes. It makes me want to help. I mean, I don't know, but it's awesome.

It makes me want to pick their brain, too. It's really good stuff. I also liked the announcement of Spheres. So it's, again, SPHVR. It's a Python video player that's using these new GStreamer VR plugins to give you a video player capable of opening a URL which has a mapped spherical video coordinates in it, and then it can play them back. And the other thing it can do is if you have, like I do, if you have the Oculus DK2, which is the last Oculus I got, perfect, you'll be

able to manage display rotations and stuff like that to work with the Oculus using it. That is so cool. Super cool. So, anyways, we got a little update on the VR front. Maybe it'll go nowhere, but it's nice to see it being done by really smart sharp people and it being done at really smart, sharp people and it

being done at the infrastructure level. And all of this is open source. So you want to use it for your own things? Go for it. I love that. I love that. So I want to take a moment before we go any further. And I want to thank Noah for stepping in and doing the hosting last week.

Just did a phenomenal job. And beyond just the actual hosting itself, which is the least amount of work. The actual show part where we sit here and talk into these microphones is the most fun. It's the least amount of work. And it's the part you guys see. All of the hard work is setting up for the show, is, in his case, building the broadcast profiles over in OBS. Yeah, I know. You had to sit there. I know, Wes. Thank you to you, too, on Sunday, too, for stepping in on last. Yeah, I know you had to sit there. I know, Wes.

Thank you to you, too, on Sunday, too, for stepping in on last. That was a lot of fun. And keeping the chat room warm while Noah set all that stuff up. Noah did such a phenomenal job. Yeah, it's so much work. People have no idea how much work it is. And if you watched live, you might have got a glimpse of how many millions of little things there are. It's all those decisions.

So I really appreciate it. And, you know, what's really great about Noah is he didn't do it because he wants the mic time. He did it because he wants to make sure. He loves the network. He wants the content to stick around. And he doesn't want me to become like some crazy person who pees in jars and locks himself in a theater. He wants to make sure I get out there and see the open road from time to time and actually take some time off.

And so I really appreciate that. And I, you know, he takes his, he takes the time out of his, of his work and, and, you know, his family. And he certainly has a busy life. It's, it's really, really appreciated. Also a big thank you to Ryan, Ryan Sipes from Mycroft, who's often on this show. He stepped in on last Sunday and co-hosted with Noah and did a great job. And, you know,

big thank you to Ryan for doing that. It's great to get insights from somebody out there who's working on a very interesting project right now and is following these trends. And it was Ryan, amongst others, who passed along our next story. And it's called Copperhead OS. It is a hardened open source operating system, air quotes, based on Android, end air quotes. Only works with the more recent line of Nexi device I, but they say it has protection from zero-day exploits. It has firewall and network hardening. It's open source, so it's audited. It has an unofficial port of PAX. Nice. I don't know what that's about. But PAX, by the way, is the Kernel Self-Protection and High-Quality ASLR Tool. And it has a sandboxing and isolation for apps and services. So there you go.

It's called Copperhead. I think it's pretty cool also just to see, like, obviously there already are 5X, 6P ROMs, et cetera. But this is kind of the one, like the as still a user of the original Nexus 5 it was such a developer platform so it's cool to see some more promotion around the 5X and that sort of stuff makes me more interested in getting one yeah like it's still gonna be around for a while I don't know about Copperhead itself

so I'll put it out there to the audience if anybody has any experience with it or questions about it I'd like to hear both it seems pretty like we're waiting for feedback I got a little bit of a sense from a few folks in the chat room that there's a few concerns. And in the pre-show, some people are questioning the – how active perhaps you could say PAX is anymore. So there's some questions still. But like anything like this, there's a lot to get into.

Right. And who knows like how much will it track upstream what's the delay on these patches. So anyways thank you to Ryan for setting that into us and thank you to him again for sitting in on the Linux Action Show and one last thank you

the most important thank you really is Rikai. I don't know if it comes across probably not because basically every great decision that Noah has to make on the fly when he's on camera is probably being prompted by Rikai behind the scenes. If you see Noah waiting for something, it's Rikai's answer in Telegram. Yeah, and it's Rikai that's down here at all different hours that the shows are being recorded. He sets everything up.

I mean, it's crazy. And, you know, when I'm not here, somebody has to be in here to turn this studio on, which is a task that has to be done in a certain methodical process. And I think at one point he even got a curveball of a power outage, which is one of the worst things that happens in this studio. And things have gotten better since we switched to OBS, so it's not as bad as it used to be. But as fate would have it, there is a bug in Antigros with ZFS. No.

Yeah. And it's one that he's reported in the past that they marked fixed that still exists that prevents the OBS rig from booting. Turns out we don't reboot it very often, so we had just assumed. We had to forget about it. Well, we had assumed since they marked it fixed and we've been keeping up to date. We assumed it was fixed and wouldn't have an issue with the next reboot. It turns out. So not only did he have to really provide assets when Noah needed them and answer questions and give guidance and pick better titles than Noah picked.

But he also had to deal with those kinds of issues. So a huge thank you goes out to Rikai. So really all of you guys made it possible and I really appreciate it. And Noah was even threatened about offering to do it again sometime. Wow. So you never know. What a guy. I know, that guy. So Wes, we have to talk about Nihilus.

Nihilus? This is something that we've debated if we should really discuss on the show for a while because it's one of those areas that you're going to not like. It's a weird spot. I'm going to tell you about it and you're going to be like, this sounds like a horrible idea. It has a back-end server side that collects all your email and processes it.

It's a fork of Atom. It's an Electron app, basically, right? Is that fair? It is a web app that packages a desktop application. And they want to charge you for the mail client eventually. So those are all things you hate. And you're probably wondering why we'd be talking about

it. And I'll give you a reason. They're doing a couple of things that are extremely interesting, mostly around the funding model, about going open source, and about creating a sustainable long-term email client when the future of Thunderbird is a little questionable. So that's Nalaeus. And you've been using it for a little while. I have been.

And let's just call it N1. That's the current version. Yeah. And why did you pick it up? Why did you try it? You know, at work, I had some reasons to be – I still had a Windows environment I hadn't interacted with, and then some things changed. And so I didn't need Outlook for a certain set of niche features,

exchange features, etc. And so I was really looking for like a Linux, I was like, well, everything else I do, obviously, is in a Linux environment. And so I was looking for something that had maybe exchange support, but at least was like a functional, maybe pretty desktop client with just basic email support. I don't do that much. I have email on my phone as well, of course. And it was interesting because it was open source. I've also kind of followed some of their blogs.

They have a lot of blogs about like Python deployment. They have a cool tool that turns virtual environments into dev packages that I've used personally at work. And I also liked that it was like yeah okay it's paid maybe that's okay we've talked a lot we want to talk about we have talked about sustainable development in open source but they had a build it yourself use it so i have played with that a little bit i'm running so you're running so you can host your own server component if you want to build it yes the nilusc Engine. I've had some issues with

stability in that I usually have to restart it a couple of times a week to get it to... It seems to get into a state where it doesn't really check updates anymore, or it doesn't at least... The client no longer syncs those updates down. I've actually had that issue with their hosted server, too. Yeah, so I don't know if that's...

I will admit I'm probably at least one or two weeks behind on their current version, so that may be fixed so I don't know if that's... I will admit I'm probably at least one or two weeks behind on their current version, so that may be fixed. I wouldn't know. But it is pretty cool. There are some limitations like the Exchange support. You don't get the ActiveSync protocol in the open source version, so you're limited to IMAP, Gmail, that kind of stuff.

Which probably comes down to a licensing thing. Yes, I'm sure they're licensing some proprietary implementation or something like that. That's how probably Microsoft rolls. Yeah, right. Exactly. But it is nice. It does work well. But you also then lose a lot of the features of the Pro.

Like they have like link track, like click tracking. They have that kind of stuff. I will also say that with this move, they do seem to be pushing the Pro pretty hard. So before you could download their uh pre-compiled files from their website and then you had to make some they have a json config file you had to edit it and then you had to like change the environment from production to custom and you put in the url to your server location and they also don't provide any authentication for that so it's all plain text http from the server to the client so So you have to provide your own, you know, SSL proxy.

Or I use SPipeD by the developer of Tarsnap, which is an awesome, easy to use thing. But it does work. And it is cool. It's kind of neat to have like an intermediary that syncs everything down and then kind of proxies your client in a smart way. Why do you like that? Well, they just made like searching works pretty well. The responses are nice. The interface is pretty clean.

So there's server-side processing that makes the client experience better? Yeah. I don't know how much better. There's also some losses, right? Like, you have to restart this process that doesn't work that well, at least in the versions I've tried. And now I installed their latest version, and I can't quite seem –

I might have to just sign in once, but I can't seem to get it. Even though I've changed the config file, I can't get it to reference my server. So maybe they might have changed it so that you have to build it in as a compile-to-mum option. I don't know. Wimpy, did you have a question? Yeah. Wes, did you say you're running your own instance of the sync engine?

I am. And did you install that using Vagrant or VirtualBox, or are you running it on the Metal or in Docker or something? I took their Vagrant file and then just built it myself following the Vagrant file instructions. It's running in an LXC container. Okay. And once it's running, do you need to, I mean,

the instructions here just say, you know, start it. Is that all that you need to do is start it and then the client talks to it and you configure your accounts that way? Or do you need to poke at the sync engine at all? It seemed like a little intermediate. You can tell that they've focused really on the, like they have their own authentication. They've rolled a lot of their own stuff that maybe isn't open source or they haven't open sourced yet for their pro service or their, you know,

their hosted service. So the way that I had to do it, at least when I initially configured it, was first you run a command that adds your first account to it. Like I just used a Gmail account or you can use an IMAP account or whatever. And then you run one service. It's kind ofap account or whatever uh and then you run uh one

service it's kind of like a microservice architecture so you run one service that's their api that you you talk to and then you run another service that actually does the background syncing with your various upstream accounts um right and then and then once you've got those two running uh it should just work you you have to you have to manually edit your config file to add your new account information there's like a account ID UID that you plug in you plug in the email address and some other things and then the

API URL and in the past it's been working I did have these stability problems as I was mentioning but otherwise it did work well I've been using it talking to the IMAP interface to an exchange server just fine it's been pretty nice have you tried it wimpy no not the not the self-host sync engine i tried nihilus way way way back when it was first out with uh you know a gash account just to sort of get a feel for it.

Yeah. So I'm always... The reason I was interested in the experiences with the sync engine is the only way I would run this is if I was hosting my own sync engine. And at work, I couldn't run it if I wasn't because I can't... That breaks the rule. Yeah, exactly. You can't talk to your Exchange server without doing that. Yeah.

So here's what they say. So there's a transition happening and I think what – maybe I don't want to speak for Wimpy but, you know, Wes, I've had conversations with you. We don't love email but it is just – it's a fundamental part of our job and something that can help us sort through different hats that we wear and triage our email. And one of the things I really like about it is it does really good to – so when I open up my inbox, I often talk about it. I call it the inbox monster, and I go in there, say, before a show, before Linux Unplugged, and I want to read some emails. But what happens is at the top of my inbox are really super important emails I need to reply to really quickly. And that's where I – so the system that N1 lets me do with setting reminders and coming back, it allows me to triage my inbox in a pretty effective way.

And I like that some of those things sync across multiple devices and whatnot. So they say N1 is free as in beer. And due to its popularity, the API traffic for N1 users has dramatically eclipsed the combined volume of all other apps they've built. They already sync several hundred terabytes of data for their users. And they're adding tens of thousands of new users each month, which costs them real dollars. And the way they write this, it's plain spoken. It's clear English. It's not that red hat speak that I got.

And people were like, you know, I was just kind of having fun, but it was very corporate speak. This is very clear. They say it very straightforward. We're a small venture-funded company with a goal of creating a long-term sustainable business that fuels innovation for email. And I will say, obviously, the caveat is they chose to make a service where they're relying on the self-hosting. But that's their business model, and they say it up front. So it really is plain spoken. They kind of make the case for why they think that's a good model in here.

They also say that really if they're going to make a sustainable business, on the long-term horizon, they see a risk of continuing to subsidize the free beer version of N1. Companies like Mailbox did this and were forced to sell or shut down before they found their business model. They say in reality the beer unfortunately always runs out, which is something we talk about on the show. And so I do kind of like it that they have a clear revenue model and they take the ad thing and they just address it directly. And they say, why not show ads? Well, that's not for us. Companies like Google and Yahoo provide free email services by mining your data and serving targeted ads based on the content.

That's not the way they think – that's not the way they want to do business. They say, well, this is potentially lucrative. It goes against our principles and it's not the business we aim to build. We think there's a better way. So with their quote-unquote pro version, they're announcing a premium version of N1. It will allow you to continue N1. You can use the Nihilist cloud or you can use it for free on your own with your own hosted server. So their revenue system, their model here basically breaks down to we have a reasonable priced version.

We've open sourced it and we implement it for you and you can pay us. Or if you don't want to pay, you can go through all the trouble that Wes just went through and you can pay us, or if you don't want to pay, you can go through all the trouble that Wes just went through and you can run it yourself. Is that a fair model or is that just basically one hair shy of not releasing the whole thing? Because you're not necessarily providing pre-built builds necessarily. You're not necessarily providing any documentation. You're not making any real clear design choices in the N1 client to make it support the

self-hosted sync server so is that really legitimate Wes? I will also say it's interesting that's a great question also they're kind of adding like a new link in the chain here where it's like there's plenty of services where you're like do I want premium email and to pay

for it and I don't have like email or the Gmail. They read your stuff. They're making me pay monthly for email. But they don't host it. This is just an intermediate. Like you're still connecting it to an other email account that you may pay. Like maybe you have FastMail and then you pay also for Nylas to connect to. Well, and the irony is if you have it in Gmail,

are you really that worried about the data sensitivity if it's in Gmail? Do you really care if N1's sniffing through it? I don't know. So what do you think, Wes? Is this a legitimate model? They get to write open source all over this blog post. Let's do a little search here. So let's do a search for open.

Let's do a search for open. Just open because I don't want to do two words. So there's 13 references. If I narrow it down to source, 10 references. So they've referenced open source 10 times in this blog post. Wow. Do they legit – do you think – do you feel like they can legitimately consider themselves an open source project? I don't know.

I mean it's pretty close. It does seem to be and I'll do some follow-up. I'll make sure I've recompiled everything with the latest stuff and make sure it all still works. But as long as they give you that option where you can self-host, you're comfortable. I mean, I don't know about comfortable. It doesn't make me necessarily want to use their service

and I think they are harping on that pretty hard and they are also kind of you know, they started out with it and they switched but I mean, they are being transparent but it is still kind of like a, we were excited for the free thing and it was like the users that were going to switch. And so it kind of – it changes the – Here's the good guy thing they did though. Anybody who's using N1 now got a coupon to use the paid service for a year for free.

Yes. So that's not cheap for them to do. A couple of stats to throw at you. Just – is it an open source project? Well, one of the things I like about N1 is they've shipped 26 major updates. They are legitimately iterating on this product. That's why I think you need to

find a revenue model that doesn't mine my data, which is even more important when they have an intermediary. They've launched new features like snoozing and send later and read receipts and link tracking, which are intensely helpful for me when I do certain reports. I really appreciate that.

They have scaled their back end by 20 times over. They have had 1,200 GitHub issues resolved, 130 poll requests, 24 new themes launched, 20 new plugins, 50 outside contributors, and the repo has 17,000 stars, ranking it number 75 across everything on GitHub. It's actually ranked higher than Elastisearch, Ansible, Go, or Kubernetes. Wow. So I want them to find it.

Do you know what the monthly price is here? $9 a month monthly, $7 a month yearly, or something like that. That might be wrong. I'm going to play with that. I've been using it for a few days because email is a big problem for me. And all my email is essentially public anyways. Most of what I read on air. Some of it's not, but the stuff that's not, again, it wouldn't

ruin me if it got published. There's nothing really. There's no Snowden leaks in there or something. And the email that I'm super serious about, I have PGP encryption. Go ahead. I was going to say, and they've had some pretty cool pairing with Keybase to work that into the client. They also have been working with them. So if you use Nylas, you can jump the line on Keybase and get yourself a Keybase account.

Oh, that's cool. I didn't know about that because I already have a Keybase account. So that's cool. Keybase is, I don't know. Maybe you're not a big fan of Keybase out there, but for me it makes GPG encryption approachable to just about every audience member, and I have had people take advantage of it to send me confidential things, and I'm extremely thankful for that service.

So integrating that support into my mail client, because it's already the workflow I'm using, that might be worth the price of admission right there. And it's pretty neat workflow I'm using is that might be worth the price of admission right there. And it's pretty neat. Like I tried it out a little bit. Maybe you and I should send some email later. Oh, yes.

Hello. You know, you just like you go in there and you can search for your Keybase friends or people you know on Keybase or people on Keybase and then you add their keys. And then when you send emails to them, you have the option of encrypting it using their Keybase key. And that's how it should be. Yeah. Right.

Because it's and it's backed by legitimate GPG security. So it's, I like it. So N1, it's interesting to see a, oh, and of course it's cross-platform. It's not just a Linux app either.

So that's also, Thanks, Electron. Yeah, it's very, it's very useful. They talk a little bit about how they forked it from Adam in there, which I thought

was really kind of fascinating. The UI's nice. It has a dark theme. It does, yeah. I've just had, I've had a few bugs. My main bug is I tend to leave my email running on one of my virtual desktops all the time. Sure.

And after about 24 hours, it integrates with GNOME Desktop's notifications. So I get notifications of new mail arriving. But when I switch to the mail client, nothing new in the list after closing. So still some things to work out. But it's open source. Yeah, I don't know. Mumble Room. Hey, Mumble Room.

Maybe you know. Any thoughts before we move on? Anyone else? No. Look at that, Wes. Nothing. Nobody thinks anything about N1, about Thunderbird, about email on Linux, about how to fund open source development sustainably. Didn't we solve everything with web?

Yeah, I think we're getting web-based, too. Outlook 365. Really? Nobody wants email on their desktop as a standalone application, even if it is an Electron app? That is a mighty... What you do is you use Firefox as an app or Chrome as an app, you know, Market as an app.

I know. Problem solved. Your web-based works. Or Pentabs. Pentabs. I use Thunderbird quite happily. I love Thunderbird. This is Emix. Seriously. Yeah. Maybe we should all be using Deco. RottenCorp's dropped this one in there. Shaping up my sleeve. It's got now

Desktop Convergence in there. This is a pretty nice-looking mail client that will be one of probably the premier mail clients, maybe one of the top apps, once the new Unity desktop ships. So this works in mobile, and it works in desktop config. And if you think about it,

screw syncing. I just want the same application in whatever form factor I'm using. I want the same exact application with the same exact set of data. That's the way to do it. I don't need some back-end sync.

Deco, check it out. We got a link to an OMG Ubuntu article that talks about it. It looks pretty cool. Dan Chapman is the one that was talking about it on Google+. Cool, Dan. Nice work. Check it out. Deco. D-E-K-K-O. That's important. Yeah. Now, if you want to get the skills to pay

the bills and maybe set up your own N1 server, check out Linux Academy at linuxacademy.com. Support this show and get yourself a discount at Linux Academy, a platform to learn more about all of the technologies around Linux, the core fundamentals and all of the great technologies that we all talk about all the time. And also things like OpenStack and AWS, which is definitely its own monster, and the DevOps quote-unquote category, which used to sound like a joke and now is like a full legitimate category that people do as a full-time gerb. And then astonishingly enough, Azure courseware too.

It's here, ladies and gentlemen. It's here. They're adding stuff all the time. They have great material. They have a system that will help you regardless of how much time you have available. A little bit of time, a whole lot of time. Linux Academy has a system for you. They have availability planners. You can plug it of how much time you have available. A little bit of time, a whole lot of time, Linux Academy has a system for you. They have availability planners.

You can plug it all in there when you're available. They'll create courseware. They have great pre-done courses you can follow with really easy-to-understand sections. You'll go in there, you'll log into a dashboard, you'll see how much work you have to do. You can download the material, listen to it offline. Instructor mentoring is available when you want it. Assessments and note cards are great features. And the practice exams are one of my favorites.

They also have great study tools, a community full of Jupyter Broadcasting members, and hands-on scenarios that will give you real-world experience. So if you want to go set up a mail server on your own, why don't you try it out first in the lab? Learn to do it the right way. Get hands-on experience because once you set something up like that, you hit the ground running and you never look back. I think this is a great tool. Check it out at linuxacademy.com slash unplug. Give yourself a discount

and support this show. Thanks to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program, and thanks to you for visiting linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. So, Wes, I could try to stumble all over myself and try to describe what Matrix is. They describe themselves as an open standard for decentralized communication or group collaboration, a fully distributed, persistent chat room with no central authority, the missing signaling layer for WebRTC. It's like Slack, but way better.

It's like Mattermost, but way more. It's like XMPP, but people really use it. Maybe? Yeah, and there's some really interesting developments around it, too. So to kick it off, if you're not familiar with it, let's start with an interview I did last year at OSCON with a Matrix developer. Oh, hold on. You could hear it, right, Wes? You could hear it, but you know what? You were hearing it

only when I was sending it to Noah. I'm going to send it to you. So we spent 12 years building SIP infrastructure and got quite depressed in the end because SIP was meant to be like this email, but for VoIP and video, except in practice nobody has SIP was meant to be like this email but for VoIP and video. Except in practice nobody has SIP URIs on their business cards

and the Open Federation the open interoperability thing just hasn't really quite taken off. So we went and wrote an alternative to SIP based on HTTP just a really simple HTTP API where if I want to set up a video call to somebody I do one hit with the

offer of what media I want to talk, and you do one hit back with the answer, and that's it. We're in a call. So none of the complexities of SIP with all the, you know, is it UDP, is it TLS, is it TCP, is it, you know, this version, is it that version. SIP is quite old and very fragmented. Just doing it in HTTP works a lot better, and that's one of the things you can use with Matrix. Except Matrix isn't just about voice and video. You can also use it for instant

messaging. We've got the little drone sitting down there, which we're about to launch as an Internet of Things demo, where you can go and get the video off it via Matrix, but you can also control it. We went and hooked up people's cars to Matrix, so the car kind of sends out telemetry

as little globs of JSON into Matrix, and you can go and consume it anywhere else. So basically, Matrix is a big, open, decentralized object database with PubSub semantics so that anybody can publish any random data they want, and it could be a message or whatever. And over here on the screen, am I seeing like a

persistent group chat environment? Kind of looks a bit like IRC and messaging. So this is one of the classic things you can do with Matrix. Use it as a persistent group chat environment. It kind of looks a bit like IRC and messaging. Yeah, so this is one of the classic things you can do with Matrix, use it as a persistent group chat thing. This is an Angular environment, and there are a couple of hundred chats going on there. A lot of these are bridged into Freenode. Freenode have been very cool and let us go on

and actually bridge Matrix into Freenode or vice versa. Here's another view of the same room, say, but a more Slack-like environment. This one's written in React. So this is kind of like a team collaboration sort of version of it sitting on top of the matrix object database?

And so I assume in this I could have text, image, video, audio, all those things in here? So any JSON you like. So, well, you can hear these are just instant messages with people trying to do a weird shit with UTF-8. But if we go back to this one, if you double-click on stuff like a message like test there,

you can see it's just arbitrary JSON. So it could be a M room message, or if you were doing a video call here, it could be a bit uglier. It's a M call message, or if you were doing a video call here, it could be a bit uglier. It's a M call invite and you've got the description of the media for that caller. But it could be drone control, it could be car telemetry, whatever the hell.

And my program, my app, just needs to be able to read this and know what to do with it. Yep, precisely. I want to stop right there because he's about to talk about servers. To find some standard types like M.call, anything that begins M. is matrix and it's part of our spec. And this is where we're going to pick up, so I'll let him just finish off his thoughts here. So matrix itself is not a one particular project.

It's not where it gets interesting. Yeah, it's not just like where matter most is the entire thing here. But it's like Java namespace. So if you wanted to have a, I don't know, com.google.whatever-the-hell-google-might-use-it-for, then just feel free to have a com.google. whatever the hell Google might use it for, then just feel free to go nuts and put data in. So if I wanted to roll this out, what's my backend structure look like? Is it a Linux server?

What's it running on? So we're providing one reference server at the moment, which is written in Python and Twisted, and it's about 30,000 lines of code. It's pretty beta, but it works well enough to have rooms with like 1,000 people in it and a couple of hundred servers participating. And it runs on any OS that can support Python, really.

Some of that is, well, it could be Debian. We've got Docker files, SUSE images, Fedora images, and even somebody made it run on Windows. So that was 2015 when they had the one implementation. Now we're going to fast forward to 2016. Let's see, how are they doing? Well, there's a couple of new contenders.

Wes, you found Ruma, which is a Matrix home server written in Rust. A home server? Like families? Or is a home server like your base, and then you connect to other servers? What's the home server? Yeah, exactly. So part of the power of Matrix is kind of the federation angle. So you can make an account and you identify with a home server.

And then those home servers integrate with other home servers as part of the larger Matrix network. Pretty neat. And so an application like this written in Rust is pretty compelling itself just because of the advantages of something like this being written in Rust. But then there's something that has a lot of momentum behind it right now. The chairman was just talking about it during that interview, and that's Vector. And Vector is an open source collaboration app. They say it's production ready and it's built on top of the Matrix open standard. And they have Android apps.

They have a really nice looking UI. It looks well polished, yeah. It really does look good. And so these are full-featured collaboration suites that involve not just chat and connecting in with IRC, but WebRTC and document transfer and all this kind of stuff.

What would you see like a work use case for you in Matrix? At my work in particular, we've used Slack. We also use Skype for Business, and they kind of meet different needs. It'd be interesting if those were integrated. Also, just like with Rocket Chat and the other things we've checked out, Slack is proprietary. You lose control.

In particular, at my office, there's multiple teams that have different Slack accounts. And also, if you don't use their paid account, you start losing messages really fast, as we're aware. So this would be interesting. And the other cool part is Slack has their bridges, like the RRC bridge. People really like that. But Matrix does that too. And so they even have a Slack bridge.

I haven't tried it. I'd be really interested to try it. But it sounds so extensible. Yeah, it's like a plumbing system for collaboration. Exactly. And when I talked to them, I was really – the interview is – it's much longer. It's at least another four minutes in that interview and then I probably talked to them for 15 minutes. I have the interview linked in the show notes if you want to hear the other four minutes.

And it was really – they were so far ahead of the puck. So when – to put this in context, when I was talking to him, this was more than a year ago. Slack was this newish thing that just seemed like IRC that I thought was a joke. And I didn't really – nobody talked about it at the time. And they were talking about something that's ten times more than Slack. And they were just so far ahead of where the puck was going that I think they're still ahead of it. And so that's why with these servers just now a year later kind of coming out, I think they're just on time really.

Anyways, it's a fascinating open source project. We've talked about a few of them this week. I will say also just seeing their connection with SIP, that's a technology that is deployed at massive scale today. And so just if these people have that kind of pedigree, it makes me confident that they can deploy things that really do scale and can develop a protocol that might actually work. And SpiderOak is working on something kind of like this called Semaphore. And we're going to have a quick review by Mr. Ham Radio in the post show. So Semaphore is another thing kind of like this.

But yeah, there you go. So Vector and Ruma, they're all matrix implementations. Really kind of like this. But yeah, there you go. So Vector and Ruma, they're all matrix implementations. Really kind of neat thing. So that is a lot to process. If you guys want to read more about it, we'll have links in the show notes. LinuxActionShow.reddit.com is where you go for any of the feedback topics we have posed to you this week. I will toss it to the Mumble Room one more time. Mumble Room, is there anything you'd like to add before we go? OMG, OMG, OMG. No? No? There you go. You see,

you could be part of our virtual lug and have nothing to contribute at this point, too, by coin. Please do. I tease. There's really nothing. There's not much more to say, is there? I just give them all. But go try it. Come back next week and let us know what you think. I miss them, you know? I miss this Mumble Room. So I gotta give them a little bit of a hard time.

Yeah, if you've played with any of this stuff, really, let us know what you think. Linux action show at reddit.com or even better, show up live. Here's how you do that. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar and then go over there. Get this show converted to your local time zone or any of the shows you would like to attend. We have it all listed there and it converts automatically to your time zone. That's how we roll. And then JBLive.tv is where you go to watch it, and you join the chat room.

You do a bang mumble in there, and the J-Bot, who stands by waiting for your commands, will deliver you the info. Then we just do a quick mic check, and you're in. Mumble is pretty cool like that. It really is. Although you threw me a curveball second year in a row. Where would I go? I went somewhere last year where Noah hosted, and you had to do push to talk and mumble. Oh, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So I sat down to do tech talk today, and I was like, why can't they hear me? And Mitt Friesen was like, we can't hear you, Chris. I'm like, I can hear you. And it took me about 10 seconds. Oh, man. It wasn't a big deal.

I figured, oh, yeah, it's push to talk. Yep. It's push to talk. Oh, sorry. Yeah. So we like it if you about 10 seconds. Oh, man. It wasn't a big deal. I figured, oh, yeah, it's Push to Talk. Yep. It's Push to Talk. Oh, sorry. Yeah, so we like it if you have a headset. We like it if you use Push to Talk and we just check your audio and if you pass those things

and you have something insightful or interesting you want to say about one of the Linux topics, we'd be more than happy to have you join us in the Mumble Room. It really is our virtual lug and if you can't go out and meet with people in Meetspace,

why not get the next best thing right here, right here at the Linux Unplugged program. And that brings us to an end. We have avoided the lawnmower one more time, just barely. Just barely. Watch out. He's coming back, Wes. We've got to sneak out of here. Thank you guys for tuning in.

Don't forget to submit content if there's something you didn't hear us talking about or if there's something just burning inside your soul, maybe a compliment you want to make. Maybe you want to welcome me back. Wouldn't that be nice? LinuxActionShow.reddit.com. You'll find a thread for 153 in there. And then you can also go over to the contact page at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact and send us in some feedback. Okay. That brings us to an end of this week's show. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday. You hear that? Do you hear that? That sounds like a lawnmower.

Get the F out of here. That sounds like a lawnmower. Oh, my. Oh, they ruined the end. JBTitles.com. JBTitles.com. Get out of here. Most of the web runs on servers powered by end. JBtitles.com. JBtitles.com. Get out of here. Most of the web runs on servers powered by Linux.

Like that one. Actually, I think that one might actually run on BSD. Is that true, Rikai? Does that run on Linux now? Most of the web runs on servers powered by Linux. Hey, look, Popey made it. I secretly use Arch Linux. Oh, wait.

That was Fopey. I miss Popey. I do, too. I haven't seen him for a few weeks. Makes me sad. He's on holiday. Oh, good for him! Well, that makes me happy, so there you go. I did see, I did see like

a post recently, I think. I did know that. JBTitles.com JBTitles.com. Let's go over there, ladies and gentlemen. If we could all direct our attention to BangSuggest.com or JBTitles.com Whatever makes you happier.

There's been 93 title suggestions in the last 24 hours. Now we just need to go through those sons of bitches. Be gentle with them, everyone. Let's just sort them out. Bring the best to the top. Who doesn't like a little upvote now and again?

Over at Jamie Toddles, make that arrow take off. Niche Android OS, horrible. Quantum of Solace. Ha ha ha ha ha, horrible. Those are horrible topics, horrible titles. Linux Mon Go. Horrible. Unity on Windows.

Kind of funny. Yeah, kind of funny, actually. So. Ha ha. Windows United. Your vote matters. Over at JBTitles.com. It might not matter anywhere else, but at JB Titles, you make an actual difference.

Not that it was the core of the show, but go and get Solas. That's good. That's good. Yeah, I like it. You know what we need to get more of is direct lines from the show. Yes. I like when I'm listening to podcasts and I hear a direct sentence and I'm like, oh, that's the title. So we should do more of those, too.

Those are kind of fun. Thank you guys in the Mom Room for being here. Oh, yeah. We're super appreciated. You guys are great. Your son's turning into Spider Kid? Uh-oh. Uh-oh. My kid, Minecraft Maniac. Really? Oh, boy. Anyways, I said we'd hear from

Ham and get his review of the Seamaphore, so let's bring him in. Hey, Chris, how you doing? Good. Good. I doing good good i'm good i'm good what are you up to over there in idaho too much checking out uh sema 4 sema sema sema tell me what do you got all over your hand sema 4 what is this is this like a slack killer yeah it is but i don't think quite yet okay so I saw this, I'll tell you what got me excited, maybe even maybe irrationally, is that it's made by SpiderOak. And I thought that was pretty cool. That is cool.

However, it's not quite there yet. Uh-oh. So it says the world's first zero-knowledge collaboration tool is here. Now, they say it's here. Right there, Ham. They say it in the first sentence. They say it right there. it's here. Right there, Ham. They say it in the first sentence. They say it right there. It's here.

Now you can collaborate productively and, by the way, privately because guess what? Your ideas matter. That's right. Hashtag channels exist and you can create teams for your company, for your fam, and for your friends. Just your BFFs. So what didn't you like about it? Well, it's still early days. There's no Android client yet.'s coming soon okay so i only have

the chance to test it on the desktop the nice thing is is it does come in debian and rpm packages oh so completely native to linux uh they have windows 7 and mac support and iOS support. Andrew, coming soon. Coming soon. You can create a channel, but you can't lead a channel. You can't edit messages. You can't delete messages. I tried posting in a YouTube link, and it just gave YouTube link. It didn't actually have the YouTube show up.

Oh, I do like the link preview because then you know it's worth your time clicking or not. That's one of the nice things that Mattermost does. I think Mattermost does that super well and so does Slack. Yeah, I agree. Now, these things are coming in upcoming versions. It's just not there yet. Well, interesting. I mean, I like this from SpiderOak, and the thing that they said that kind of got my attention was that it's zero knowledge on their part. So they –

Definitely. Yeah, and hackers love weak passwords that say to protect your security and privacy. SEMA 4 will generate a secure recovery queue for you at signup and then store it in a safe place. Which they email to you. Huh. That's interesting. They email that to you. Huh. That's interesting. They email that to you. So don't ever lose that.

Print it. Yeah. I'm curious what the intended market for this product is. Hey, Wendy. I think it's like people who want Dropbox and Slack in one thing, maybe. Okay. All right. Okay.

So the Dropbox thing I get get because they're, you know, zero knowledge encryption for SpiderOak 1 makes perfect sense. Yeah, yeah. But for a chat tool that is primarily adopted by development teams these days, why does that need to be zero knowledge and encrypted it seems unnecessary and overkill i'm not sure you know where i could see this for is journalists maybe what about that what about journalists want to collaborate within something like slack yeah exactly sure it's pretty niche though because they could also just run their own matter most instance right journalists won't do

that though no no they won't no they won't typically yeah i think i think that's a good one i think i think you've you've found you found the market that i was struggling to identify boy Analysts won't do that, though. No, they won't. Typically. Yeah. I think that's a good one. I think you've found the market that I was struggling to identify. Boy, I mean, I like that SpiderOak is doing this. I myself am not really all that tempted. Ham, what tempted you to try it? Was it just the SpiderOak name or what? That and just the zero knowledge, you know, just the complete security and privacy.

For all these things you need to keep totally secure and private in Idaho over there. Exactly, exactly. It kind of integrates with our Spyderoog one backup. I dig that. It's kind of separate, but yeah. And it uses some of the Spyderoog infrastructure to send files and whatnot, which is good. Yeah. It uses some of the Spyderco infrastructure to send files and whatnot, which is good.

Yeah. It's slightly more expensive than Slack because I think you said Slack is $6 a user. A user, yeah. So you can try it for free. Now, do they have their own hosted server or how does that work, Ham? Do you run it off? If they're talking about it being zero information, they must run all of these server components, correct? Yes. There is no way, as far as I have seen, to run your own server.

Okay. They charge $9 a user. So their market is people who don't want to go through the hassle of setting up their own server but still want to have trust in the security of it. Exactly. And there is probably something too that if I was to set up my own Mattermost server, this Spyder would probably be even more secure than that, really.

Yeah. You know, to be honest. At least after the first couple of weeks, because I'm not going back in that thing once I've got it set up. Yeah. Yeah, okay. They do have so they have standard and pro which is standard is you can have you know unlimited teams unlimited history nine dollars a month standard which is everybody pays their own three nine dollars uh protein is

where the leader of a team pays for everybody else, which is still $9 a month. That's kind of nice. Yeah, they do have a basic version, which is what I'm trying out now. And you can have unlimited people, but it's only 30-day history. Hmm. So are you going to stick with it for a bit, or are you going to move on? I'll keep trying it out. I mean, there's no reason for me to uninstall it.

I mean, you know, it's a free version and stuff. I'll keep trying out. As your buddy Richard says. What's wrong with that? Yeah, what's wrong with that?