LINUX Unplugged - Episode 158: Happy Birthday Debian | LUP 158

Episode Date: August 17, 2016

We throw a birthday party for Debian, discuss the future of the project & the possible awkward moment that might be near.Plus Ryan Sipes stops by to give us a post Mycroft update, we dream of a bcachefs future, challenge Wes to get Linux fully working on a MacBook by the end of the show & lots of community updates!

Gotta say happy birthday before we start the show to Debian. Debian turned 23 today. Happy birthday, Debian, and we'll be talking more about it later in the show. They have a really cool timeline we'll be covering. It is Debian Day. Let's start the show, everybody. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 158 for August 16th, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's celebrating Debian's 23rd birthday. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. I am really looking forward to today's show. We have a fun show lined up. We've got a bunch of really, really good updates from the community we're going to get into. Mr. Sipes is here from, or formerly from, the Mycroft Project to give us an update on what he's doing. We have some really good Firefox news, which is like the first time I've got to say that for a while. Warms my heart.

It does, doesn't it? It feels really good. And then I'm going to throw a challenge in Wes's face to see if he can get something done by the end of the show. Then later on in the show, we're going to celebrate Debian's birthday by talking about, perhaps, what the future holds for Debian. And where Debian may be going and where some of the places it's come from. And a little look at the Debian timeline, which is super fascinating. Really some good stuff to share with you guys. And then we'll wrap it all up and see how Wes does on the challenge.

So the question is going to be coming in pretty soon because rumors have it that your friends in Cupertino will be releasing a new MacBook soon. Hey, oh, it's been about time. Jeez, it is ridiculous. And you know what's going to happen? The current models, which are still perfectly usable, will go up on eBay, and people can buy them for a reduced price. Right. And we have a pretty common question that comes into the show.

How do you install Linux on the MacBook? Does it work? What should I know about? So this week— Is it worth the amount of effort that might be required? Have you ever done this before? You know, I have, but it's been, oh boy, probably three years at least. So this week—

Actually, I was installing Debian. Really? Yeah. Great. I'm going to see if by the end of the show, Wes can get Arch Linux or maybe Fedora Linux, where we'll see, running on a MacBook. It's like a late 2013 model, I think. And we'll kind of give you a report of what it's like to try it.

If he can get the dedicated graphics working, the wireless working, and we'll give of give you a report of what it's like to try it. If he can get the dedicated graphics working, the wireless working, and we'll give you a review so that way some people out there, they just want that hardware. And this is an old production rig that we have that's like it's good. I'd like to see if you could leave Mac OS on there because I think a lot of people are going to want to do that. Based on the emails we've received, people want to do a boot, and I can understand that.

Yeah, absolutely. And if you want to do it for more updates. Wes, I officially am handing you this Linux unplugged branded thumb drive which contains the latest official released Antigros image from last month. Oh yeah, I checked it for sure.

Oh yeah, for sure. Absolutely. So there you go, Wes. Good luck to you. Thank you, sir. It is already partitioned into two separate... The OS X partition because I've played with Linux on there it is already partitioned into two separate, well, there's the OS X partition, because I've played with Linux on there before, is like already shrunk down. And so there is like a, there's like right now, I just made it like fat or something for you that you can mess around with.

So there you go, Wes. The challenge is officially launched. It's for people who like to mess with computers. Hey, before we go any further, let's bring in our virtual lug to dig through the community updates. Time appropriate. Greetings, Mumble Room. Greetings.

Greetings. How's it going? Very good. Hello. I am excited to share this Firefox news story with you guys. So we put it right up here at the top of the community updates. Firefox 49 for Linux is going to be gaining plug-in free support for Netflix and Amazon streaming.

This is super nice. No more crazy workarounds. No more depending on Chrome. I know a lot of Firefox users who have Chrome installed just so they can watch Netflix. So this is cool. And it's really another plugin biting the dust. They're using that Widevine technology, which is created by Google, I believe. Right?

But Google has released it freely. Yeah. And now Firefox will be integrating that, and they specifically plan to publish support for Linux users in September in Firefox 49. That is great. That's a big equalizer. This and electrolysis is making Firefox look super attractive again. There those days where you're just frustrated with Chrome for whatever reason and you're like, oh, maybe I'll use something else.

Firefox is getting there. For me, the story around how plugins and extensions have to be refactored to support electrolysis might still be the final decision. But I know both... Have you? I know you've looked at

Vivaldi before. I was going to say both you and I have messed around with Vivaldi. Yeah, I used it probably for a week or two. Yeah, I've recently looked into it. Mr. Tunnell there in the Mumba room has been playing around with it. Michael, has it been specifically – like has it gotten to the point where it's specifically ready to switch from Chrome and it solves some of your Chrome frustrations? Or is it – where is Vivaldi at in your testing so far? Well, I mean, actually, I don't like Chrome at all because it does a lot of things I don't like.

And I prefer Firefox over everything. However, everything that I didn't like about Chrome has been solved in some way in Vivaldi. So the things that I, if I went from Firefox to Chrome, I would lose a lot of features. But all, well, 99% of the features that I, if I went from Firefox to Chrome, I would lose a lot of features. But all, well, 99% of the features that I would lose are available in Vivaldi. So the transition wouldn't be as bad for me to go from Vivaldi, go to Vivaldi. But whereas Chrome would basically just not even remotely be an option for me.

Okay. So it's the tab hibernation specifically is one of the most important things i've seen because i i set up a the tab stack where you can put a bunch of tabs into one tab and then you can hibernate that whole stack oh that is nice so you can take like 30 tabs and then hibernate them all so you only have like two active and you can jump to them wherever you want to oh all right that's really nice uh i have heard i read about their, I just never really thought about using it in that way. That is a pretty compelling use case for me.

Vivaldi is going to switch to feasible when they have a sync solution. It's tab sync and bookmark sync is pretty critical. Like if I'm upstairs and I'm working on a Google doc for a show today, I have a current shows folder in my bookmark toolbar that all of my docs for the shows that week that I'm working on, as I create that doc, I drag it down into this folder, and that becomes available on my machines here in the studio and my machines in my office. Pretty important to me to have that feature, and Firefox has pretty good sync now. So that's one of the reasons I keep eyeing Firefox. Michael, while you're kind of up and center right now,

have you followed at all this theme pack that makes GIMP look more like Photoshop? It's something that's been around for a while but just recently got updated. And it really makes GIMP work and look a lot like Photoshop. And I don't know how I feel about it, but I'm wondering if you've tried it. I tried it a long time ago. I haven't tried the latest version, but it works in the sense that it brings the UI to a more usable state and not the absurd every tool is hidden at the bottom of the columns. Yeah. I like overall, but it's not really necessary

because a lot of the things that it does is not that much different. because a lot of the things that it does is not that much different. Like it does a dual column tool set instead of a single column tool set. That's cool, but I really don't care. But the only thing that GIMP has a problem with, in my opinion, is the fact of where they put the tools option section. And this theme pack changes, or whatever pack it's called, changes it and moves it to the top right so it gives it a lot more prominence so that one feature that one change is probably enough for me to use it yeah so it uses some of the same icons but really a big for probably a

lot of switchers is it uses some of the same keyboard shortcuts uh which is oh no that's the most important part part of me for me because I've used Photoshop for so long that when I go to GIMP, I have to relearn every single time all the shortcuts. Yeah. Ryan, I kind of wanted to get your thoughts on dragging old design paradigms and ways of using things from our proprietary days

into open source projects. Is this encumbering GIMP in a way that sort of prevents it from sort of branching out into a different UI design, even if it's bad by some people's comparison? Is there maybe a downside to doing something like this to open source? It seems like it doesn't feel like something that happens to proprietary commercial applications. I don't think it's bad just because a lot of my friends who have moved from Photoshop to GIMP oftentimes complain about things not being where they're accustomed to, and that makes it a lot harder to continue using it. And so I tell them about these different

things like GIMP shop. And I saw this the other day and sent it over to my dad who used Photoshop for years and years and years before adopting GIMP. And he likes this type of stuff because it puts things in a place that he expects it to be. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, for my mom who's been a graphic artist and literally lived inside the Adobe applications for the last 25 years, For the last 25 years, this would be just – it's just simply a matter of like Rotten was saying, Mr. Tunnell, that it is a mapping that's two-year – it's like a muscle memory mapping. How is the challenge going there, Wes? I notice you're inserting the boot drive or the thumb drive for the first time. Have you been doing research ahead of time? I did a little bit of research.

I've got it booted. I'm just – there's some – Oh, really? Let's just say the word Broadcom is a factor. Yes, that is an issue. Now, I wonder if we don't have an easy way to get you Ethernet either. That's okay. I'm working on it.

It wasn't an Apple's best wisdom to include an Ethernet adapter in their Pro laptop. You see, that's silly. Those are so floppy drive. I think I might even have a USB adapter in my bag, but hopefully I won't need it. I wonder if anybody in the Mumba Room is moving on from GIMP. I think we've probably said our piece. I wonder if anybody in the Mumba Room

is an Internet of Things advocate or skeptic, because this next story is, I think, extremely good news for an actual manageable Internet of Things world. This is a big deal for Canonical. They just struck a deal that is going to put Ubuntu on AdventX x86-based gateways,

and they're going to be certified to fully support Ubuntu images. Now, these Internet of Things gateways, I think, are a pretty sound way to go because you have your various janky, cheap endpoints that are distributed throughout your house that you're probably going to be replacing every couple of years. And you have all of that connect back to a central gateway device that proxies. Oh, God, it's weird to hear a Mac. It sounds terrible. That is weird.

I apologize, everyone. I got a little shook up there. That sounds terrible. That is weird. I apologize, everyone. I got a little shook up there. So it acts as sort of a centralcreated embedded OS by some hardware manufacturer. I think this is a huge win for that. Oh, look at that. I didn't even know I had that shot. Well, that's pretty fancy.

So does anybody in the Mumba room have any thoughts on the Internet of Things in general and ways we could prevent an Armageddon where all mayhem has been unleashed on us because these devices are out of date and unpatched. I like the idea in general as long as I get to control what it runs. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, what it runs and how up to date it remains and how easy that process is are all pretty key for me, I think. I suck at that pretty much. Yeah, very nice. Very nice.

Sorry, we all know that a lot of this stuff right now, we set it and it never gets updated. And so, I mean, that world in which some of these things actually run a legit operating system that's used in other products and actually gets updates, that's a win regardless. I'm delighted to see Mr. Popey here. I'd be kind of curious to hear your thoughts, Popey, about this particular Git. It seems like a pretty good position. Just your personal thoughts on this market for Ubuntu as somebody who's watched the platform for a long time and maybe the internet and things in general so hi

poppy welcome back to the show and your thoughts sir yeah it's funny you know the old um there's no such thing as the cloud just other people's computers yeah i saw someone do a tweet earlier i think yesterday they said there's there's no internet of things there are just many unpatched vulnerable small computers on the internet nice yeah and that is so true and having a platform that is updated you know i worry that my home gateways but not just home stuff corporate environment there are devices on corporate networks of all kinds which are not updated not patched not centrally managed. And I think it's great that we're making inroads in companies that are making these

devices that allow them to be centrally managed and updated and secure and have apps via a store installed on them. I think it's great. You know, but Google would tell us that we need something like Fuchsia to make this possible. Yeah, can you tell me where I can download that? Apparently in the future. That's where you can download that. I'll be waiting.

Wimpy, are you a bit of a skeptic on these particular device categories in general? And the only reason, I don't mean to label you as a skeptic, but you and I have shared similar thoughts on the past in regards to VR, which also seems to have the same kind of hype smell to it. I don't think Wimpy's there. Yeah. Oh, there you are. Hello, sir.

Hi, Wimpy. Oh. Hello. Hello. Can you hear me? Yep. Hello? I think you just have a delay.

Okay. Yeah. Oh, dear. That's unfortunate. um yeah oh dear that's unfortunate um is this the um alloy device you're referring to or something else it is i think it's actually a not yet released device by advantech which is so it's basically a full-fledged x86 computer uh and it's it i don't think is a shipping product yet all right yeah advantech embedded computing, Popey, if you know anything, you don't want to correct me,

but I believe that's the case. I don't have an issue with these devices so long as they can actually run Linux of any flavor, because then you're able to put a Linux operating system on it after whatever platform they've tried to build out of open source tools and things have sort of passed away.

It's when you get these things where their thing that runs Linux is like a heavily patched version and they've never open sourced the patches back so you can't, you know, reutilize the device fully without having to reverse engineer a load of stuff or if they have like an image that they build once in a while like they use rootstock or rootstock ng or something which builds a root file system that they deploy on the device and then that's it ships out with that and no one gets any updates unless there's some kind of you know deep leet technical user who will go and download the latest image and flash it on the device if it's got no internal way of updating

itself i don't want it on my network i would much rather have devices that you know can check in with a central server get an update uh make sure i've got the latest version of apps latest version of the core operating system whatever that might be and And yeah, I agree with Martin. If it ships with some form of Linux, then at some point I could potentially put some other form of Linux on it that's more secure. What an excellent point that is. I think that's exactly it. And maybe the meta story there is by enabling Ubuntu on this thing, it's opening it up for people like us to tinker if we wish, but also giving regular consumers that just use

it with the stock Ubuntu image a pretty fair shot at what seems so far to be a security disaster. So either way, it seems like a positive story for even non-Ubuntu users. So I'm pretty excited about it. I like that stuff. And it always felt like it was like, okay, we're going to get Linux on these devices, but it's not going to be a Linux we trust or

a Linux we understand or can use. So if this is real Ubuntu, that'd be great. Yeah, I know that. And I know how to Google for things about Ubuntu and I know how to read Stack Exchange and I can do things with this. And it kind of goes back to my hesitations with FreeNAS. I like the product and here in my business, I use it. But in my home, I kind of want something I feel safe.

If I ever got the wild hair to tinker with, I want to be able to. And I feel like with FreeNAS, I break it. Yeah, with FreeNAS, I feel like I break it when I tinker it. But if it's something that's Ubuntu-based, I grok that user space. I know what I'm doing there. Okay, so before we continue on. Oh, you busted out a USB Ethernet adapter. I did happen to have it in my bag.

Holy crap. Respect. So, okay, I'm guessing connectivity is a major issue, especially for something like Antigros, which requires connectivity to install. And I've noticed you've brought the thumbstick back to your Sputnik laptop. What's going on? Well, for some reason, it's not booting now, so I'm checking the integrity really quick. I'm also copying the Broadcom driver onto a second USB stick. Oh, clever, sir. So I will then hopefully be able to reboot, install that driver, the integrity really quick. I'm also copying the Broadcom driver onto a second USB stick. Oh, clever, sir.

So I will then hopefully be able to reboot, install that driver, and get it installed. Okay, so Ethernet could be tricky. However... That's what I assumed. If we wanted to take out the wireless here at the JB1 studios, you could go around the corner, and there is an exceptionally long Ethernet

cord that powers our wireless that you could bring it into here, and I don't think it would take out any of our production systems because they're all Ethernet. That's good to know. Hopefully we will all. Yeah. But. Yeah, that's a, by the way.

Option two. I think is like if you're going to dive into the realm of Linux on the MacBook, if you want to do that, go get yourself a USB Ethernet adapter because that's going to come in super handy. Mm-hmm. Yeah. All right. So we have more updates to get into, and I want to do that.

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So Mr. Ryan Sipes is joining us, and you've heard him jumping in a few times. And you may have also heard the news this week that he has departed from Mycroft, the project that we have talked about a lot on this show. And I'm sure it must have piqued the interest of a lot of our audience. So, Ryan, first of all, I just wanted to say thanks for coming on the show, and how are you doing? I'm doing great. I have a bit more free time on my hands. That's okay.

Good. I bet. We appreciate you spending some of that podcasting with us then. So, I imagine you've probably gotten a lot of questions and seen a lot of different discussions happening online. Is there anything in particular you wanted to address or any particular feedback items you wanted to touch on? Mostly, I just wanted to assure everyone that iCraft is licensed under the GPL version 3. And that as a result, regardless of my involvement, the project can continue and uh people are should feel just fine using it and get and implementing it into their projects and uh that's all i'm willing to say

right now about about it really specifically the i i think that if people are keeping up with me, um, online, uh, you have my blog post pulled up there, um, to just, to just stay tuned and, and, uh, I will, I will kind of bring people into, um, more of the mindset behind that, but I was really just ready to move on to other projects and, uh, and this was the best time to do it so ryan um i kind of wanted to talk about you in a different context for a second uh do you remember how long ago it was that the mycroft funding campaign launched i mean that was probably the first time i'd really heard your name so how long ago was that do you think oh it was well i think it was September of last year. Okay, so it's not even been a year yet. Correct.

Here's what's pretty damn astonishing about that. A year ago, I wasn't thinking a lot about open source artificial intelligent personal system devices. It wasn't really, it was obviously something the big guys were thinking about. It wasn't really something on my radar, which I think was a mistake. And then also I had never heard the name Ryan Sipes before, and I didn't know you from Adam. And now here we are less than a year away – or less than a year later, I'm sorry. And artificial intelligence and voice recognition and intent parsing are something that we talk about all the time. And Ryan Sipes is a name project that people are interested in. And that is really one of the most, I think, interesting sort of side meta stories about you and Mycroft

is how quickly you've become sort of a common technology that we are discussing simply because it sounds fascinating on its technical merits and what kind of that says about our community. on its technical merits and what kind of that says about our community. And I'm kind of wondering, Ryan, if you reflect on sort of some of – if you could reflect for a moment on what that process has been like going from nobody knew your name really. I mean maybe I'm wrong on that, but I certainly really didn't, to now you're making videos on YouTube about Mycroft. You're going to System76 and you're getting interviewed on podcasts. You're having to make blog posts when you quit a job and tweet about it. And then all the follow up that comes from that. What the hell has that been like for you? into open source software for a long time. And so I was always watching and seeing people who I thought were much more technically talented

than I was, shaping the conversations around the future of open source and kind of what projects were rising to the top. I think that the thing that happens is that after a while of being in this community, you start to want to share your ideas and you start to want to contribute back. I had never used a server,

like I'd never set up a server until somebody finally was like hey check out ubuntu you know in 2005 whatever and uh and when i started using the desktop ubuntu well then that opened my mind up to linux and at the time i remember i wanted to host a website and people were saying like, oh, you have to use, you know, this version of Windows Server. And and I just was able to get acquainted with all this technology because of open source. And so since then, you know, you want to pay it forward. And and I got the opportunity to do so by introducing lots of people to a new technology to do so by introducing lots of people to a new technology that is going to shape the future of computing in in a lot of big ways yeah now before then you know uh i actually was in the mumble room

a couple times before mycroft ever came around i talked about kansas linux fest oh okay yeah sure okay and uh i think when i spoke for myself though i'm really kind of meaning in the broader like like Ryan Sipes is a name is probably not something I don't think there's probably as many people are talking about you before something very technically interesting came along that you were involved with. Because of my experience at MyCrop, I am very happy to be able to use the microphone that's given me to share other projects that I think that the open source community should be gathering around and should be aware of. One of these things is machine learning. Absolutely. That's an enormous opportunity. It's an enormous space that's going to blow up. We should be able to take advantage of that. We'll need something there.

And the proprietary people are there now and will continue to be there. So we need to be there too. Yeah. Fortunately, there's projects like tensorflow from google and some of the and cafe from yahoo and uh a few others that are open source yeah exactly but uh i i'm really excited uh to to kind of go go forward from here and continue to help shape uh maybe like open source ai and uh and personal assistance um it's after a lot of self-reflection i just found that that i might have a better opportunity to do that um on my own, uh, at this point, uh, there, there are other projects that, uh, I hinted getting involved in, in my blog post. And, uh, I would love to come back and talk about them and share

some things. I think that, uh, uh, one of them, the community will be familiar with. Um, and it's just a project that hasn't gotten a lot of play that I think is really important. And then, uh, and then there are some other ones that I'd like to talk about and, uh, see if we can't get some, some, uh, collaboration, you know? Um, but yeah, it's, it's been a crazy wild ride. I met a lot of people who I considered to be celebrities, including you, Chris. And, uh, and, uh, it was kind of crazy when I posted the blog post to get calls from people who I, who I, uh, uh, a year ago, if you said that they were going to give me a call, you know, out of the blue, uh, I would have told you

that's just not possible. It's not going to happen. Uh, and so, And so it's been a wild ride and it's not over. I think that there's so much more that I can do for the open source community. I think that there's so much more that we as a larger community, the Jupyter Broadcasting community, the Linux community can do. And I'm excited to be a part of that. Absolutely. Yeah. And you are always welcome to come and contribute to the shows because I always love hearing your take on stuff. And I know you reflect on this stuff quite a bit. And I've always sort of enjoyed following what you do and I'll continue to do so.

So thanks for joining us, Ryan. And thanks for having me on. Maybe some of you guys can help explain this next story to me. Wes, I'm looking at you. I know you're in the middle of a challenge right now, but this sounds like a bad thing, and I want you to talk me off the ledge, okay? Fake Linus Torvald keys have been found in the wild, and we need to knock it off with the short IDs ASAP. Apparently, it's well known that PGP is vulnerable to short ID collisions, and many experiments have been done to demonstrate

that, but what I didn't know is that keys, fake keys fake pgp or maybe gpg keys i guess have been found for lenis for greg kh and other kernel developers in the wild recently holy shit this seems bad to me this seems like nsa russia kind of hacking china bad well it's it's really more just talking really shouldn't be using these short keys. A project called Evil32 to try to demonstrate this, they took the web of trust, the usual one that you'll use if you are using a GPG, PGP keys. Right, yeah, say that five times fast. And then they computed all of these brute force, you know, using GPUs. And it looks like some people have been taking their publicly available files and uploading them to some of the key servers and so then people looking for them have found these so it's it's uh it does sound bad it is bad but we also know that you just

we these are not equivalent we know they do not provide the kind of identification the kind of security that we expect from them pgp gpg keys don't do with the short ids anybody else in the moment have any, uh, takes on the story. Cause this is kind of one of those thick ones that it seems like something we know, but probably the,

the issue would be there's stuff out there already that is signed with these short keys, short IDs, I guess. Uh, and I don't know if anybody else has insights in the mom room, but, uh,

that's our take on it. Yeah. Go ahead. Um, so I don't think this actually, um, is bad for the normal users of Linux, but more on people that maintain distros. And if they don't check it well, then that's bad.

Oh, good point. That is exactly who needs to be paying attention to this story. Well said, Mr. Z. Well said. Thank you. That is a really good point. I wanted to mention something that I think was well said and started a conversation that I think probably wasn't necessary. But I wanted to give a shout out to Ninja Aaron, who 23 hours ago created a Linux Action Show subreddit post saying a quick comment about the ButterFS coverage on the latest Linux Action Show. And that's where we discussed the fact that the official ButterFS project Twitter account recommended people use ZFS or ZFS. That's pretty wild.

That was wild. And our story was really about the reaction to that. But, you know, he makes a great point. He says that ButterFS is definitely having its issues, but he makes a couple of good use case for ButterFS in this post. And I guess I did want to mention, like, I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea of people that want to use ButterFS

on their laptop that has an SSD drive. I don't really think ButterFS is like the devil file system. Yes, totally. Really where I have an issue with the ButterFS advocacy, it really comes down to when people try to advocate that it should be used in a business slash enterprise setting, however you want to describe that. I started in IT in the year 2000, about 99. Well, actually, really, actually, that's not true. 97 was when I actually officially got paid in IT when I was at that time desktop tech support. But one of the things that I had two – there was interesting – I had two challenges over my career that were very much about data retention and then I had many challenges beyond that.

But there were some that were very particular legally mandated, very, very, very carefully audited use cases that I can't even really go into. And in these scenarios, back then we used very, very cutting-edge file systems that were very risky, mostly because that was all that was available at the time. Yeah. And so it's not that I'm also like some holier-than-thou soapboxer who says, oh, you should never use ButterFS because you're a lunatic. I mean I've been the guy that's been putting in a file system that's a little edgy in production.

I have on a lot of my systems. edgy in production. I have on a lot of my systems. But there is sort of, I guess, there is sort of this, it feels to me like there is this failure to look within a bit to sort of self-analyze and say, we've made a mistake here. And so I wanted to acknowledge that while I have been sort of anti-Butterfest in the last few weeks, as there's been more flaws, I also think there's many useful use cases for it. And I wanted to give a shout out to Mr.

Ninja Aaron for kind of, you know, very well stating that case and making me reflect on it a bit and go, you know, I myself, if I, for that, actually for this, you know, for this MacBook here, I would absolutely consider ButterFS on there. You should have said that like two minutes ago. You're getting the XT4 just

because I figured you wouldn't mind if it was safe and solid choice. No, so you're actually that far, huh? It's installing right now. So then in order for you to be that far, that means you got wireless working. Oh, yeah. Now, that wireless fix, this is one of the interesting things, though, is that wireless fix will not persist once you reboot into the main OS

after it's been installed. No, but maybe I'll be smart enough to cheroot into and install that preemptively. Thank you for the reminder. Damn it. You know, Wes, I'm actually pretty impressed that you got the Wi-Fi working without any other connectivity. So what did you do? What did you do?

Because this is going to be the number one challenge is these MacBooks, any recent MacBook doesn't have an Ethernet port. And everybody that's going to be doing this is going to run into this problem where they're not going to have Wi-Fi when they get in a live environment. So what did you do to enable networking without having a connection? Well, I had conveniently, we're installing Antigros here, and I had a Arch Linux little laptop right here. So I just ran make package, built the

package, copied it on a USB drive, installed it, mod probed the Broadcam drivers, and away we went. Well played, sir. Which I was very pleased. Everything worked perfectly. Well played.

Network manager picked it right up. We were on the network. Damn. And also, I'm impressed that you remembered the Wi-Fi password, too. Because I didn't tell you what that was, and you still, good job. Anybody have thoughts on ButterFS in the Mumble Room before we move on to just a quick shout-out I have? I'll just say I'm excited for a BcashFS.

We'll see when that's actually usable. Is that a Btree kind of RAM based? I'd second that. Tease me a little bit. Let's see. There's actually a Patreon for it. Are you serious? Wimpy, why are you looking forward to it?

Let's throw it right there. Oh my god. Maybe that'll explain it better than i could probably well bbcache is something that bcache is something that i've used to uh accelerate uh spinning drives by putting a bcache partition on solid state to effectively create sort of a level two cache. This is great. The authors behind Bcache realized that they were very close to actually having a full block file system. So they're going the next step to implement it as a copy on write file system. They only have 38 patrons. I feel like maybe we could bump that up a little bit for them.

So it's going to be a copyright on right file system like ZFS or Butterfest. They aim for good performance. They say significantly better than existing copy on right file systems. Comparable to the performance of Extended 4 or XFS. We really need this. Oh, wow. Metadata and data check summing multiple devices including replication and other types of RAID, caching, compression, encryption, snapshots, and scalable. It's been tested up to 50 terabytes and will eventually scale higher.

Already working on stable with a small community of users. This is super exciting. This is super exciting. And what I really like about it is – and this is where I was trying to get to in the conversation on Sunday but I think I went off track is ButterFS, when you look at the model, almost seems like this funding model makes a lot of sense. It's just they would need way more support because it really is a full-time job. It is a lot of work to do this properly. And this is great so be cash i'll put a link to the patreon in the uh in the show notes so that could be really cool i'll check it out more after the show uh has anybody tried it out just watching it i have not now

wimpy what would be your use case i've not not tried it, but one day. One day, yeah. As a principal file system on laptops, for example. Yes. Oh, could you imagine something like that? The features of that, if we had... Okay, so here's why it's a big deal. Here's why we need to get this right. So one of the things that TrueOS... Is that out, that they're changing the name to TrueOS?

Is that an official thing? I hope I didn't. Anyways is that a thing? This is BSD unplugged. So PCBSD has the Lumos desktop environment and they have done a lot of work on their file manager

to integrate ZFS snapshots and backups and multiple versions into the file manager. And that is honestly the level that we need to get at with the Linux desktop. And until we really kind of land on something, until we really sort of solidify something like this, we're not going to have it integrated at the desktop level like that. There's no way until it has mass adoption that's going to happen. the desktop level like that. There's no way until it has mass adoption that's going to happen.

And definitely one of the advantages that the PCBSD guys has is if you're going to go with it, if you, they have one file system choice that supports all this stuff and that's ZFS. Using it and they can plan for that. And they can, exactly. And it's the same advantage that once Apple gets off their ass and they finally get APFS working, they'll do that and they'll integrate into Time Machine. Yeah, absolutely. And to be honest with you, in some ways, NTFS has been kicking our ass for a couple of years with shadow copy.

I mean, shadow volume copy has really saved my ass a couple of times when I was in IT. And it's one of the reasons why I wanted to use ButterFS here on our server that runs our VMs because it saved my ass a few times. VRVMs because it saved my ass a few times. So there is one story I want to talk about before we go any further into the show because last week I kind of offhandedly mentioned the Humble Bundle and was sort of like dismissive with there are only three games that supported Linux. And then this week, Humble Bundle 17 went live and all of the games, all of the games in this bundle support Linux. So I just – I wanted to follow up on that because I came

kind of a hard time last week, and then they totally delivered this week with Humble Indie Bundle 17. This is the Humble Indie Bundle. And all the games freaking support Linux. That is awesome. Yeah, if you pay more than $10, you get Nuclear Throne, which is, I think, I think that's one of the games I wanted.

We have a link. Octodad, nice. Always a classic. I like that OMG Ubuntu has been writing about this, too. Yeah, that think that's one of the games I wanted. So we have a link. Octodad, nice. Always a classic. I like that OMG Ubuntu has been writing about this too. Yeah, that's nice. I think it is. I like that they're posting more over there. They kind of slow down for a while and it seems like they've picked it back up. And I think that's nice because it feels like there's a lot going on these days.

It feels like things in some ways, it's August and the news is slow. But at the same time, there is a lot of really – we're on the precipice of the interesting things really hitting us. And so that stuff is beginning to arrive. And if you're watching closely, like that terminal we talked about, there are things beginning to land. It's like an incubation period right now. There's stuff happening. It's kind of just not visible and soon it will be popping up. It feels like they're doing a decent job of percolating some of that stuff up. And some of the stuff like the GIMP theme or ARC theme, stuff like that. It's also just kind of nice as a daily driver.

It's nice to have that kind of stuff. So hats off to Joey over there for seemingly picking it up recently and really doubling down on content that I've been enjoying reading. Even as a non-Ubuntu user, I still find it kind of interesting, which has got to be kind of a challenge for a site called OMG Ubuntu. Hey, before we go any further, I'll tell you about a challenge I have. And that is every time I need to do something, it feels like I've got to get a new computer. Well, that's where DigitalOcean came in. I am able to spin up a server in less than a minute now, and that is a game changer for me. When I want to try something out, I spin up a droplet.

When I want to put something into production, I use a droplet. And when I want something just for family members, I use a droplet. DigitalOcean is simple cloud hosting dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to spin up your own server on their kick-ass infrastructure. They have SSDs throughout the entire thing. They've got data centers all over the world. They have multiple data centers in multiple cities. They have private networking amongst your servers in certain areas, which is a really cool feature. I'm just going to put this out there.

I have not actually done this yet, but I'm going to admit Alan has been teasing me. You could do a little Freenas thing on that back end now that they've got block storage. You've got ZFS. You could also do Ubuntu 16.04 with a little ZFS action and then do the back end block storage. Or you know what? If you want to go crazy, you could probably

there's probably, I mean, it's block storage. You could use ButterFS too. Yes, you could. You really could. It's kind I mean, it's block storage. You could use ButterFS too. Yes, you could. You really could. It's kind of fun because it's SSD-backed and you just attach it as you need it. It's on demand. Their pricing starts at $5 a month.

And if you use our promo code, and this is kind of nice, if you use our promo code D01plugged, you get a $10 credit. And then you can try it out two months for free. They have a really nice interface. They have a super sweet API that tons of open source code has already been written around. And I got to tell you, now I've been using it, I don't know, a year and a half.

I'm not sure how long I've been using DigitalOcean, but almost every week I've sped up a droplet at least for a little bit, try something out and then destroy it. And on occasion, I keep it in production.

And I've been really sort of changing the way I think about computing. Like when we wanted to start streaming on demand to certain outlets that prefer you only stream when you are actually live, it made sense to just take an existing configuration, sort of improve upon it, and spin up a new droplet on demand using their API. And then we just pay for it while we're using it. It really is like infrastructure on demand. And it feels like 2016. You combine

that now with their great tutorials and the huge community around it and the fact that not only do they run Linux on their entire infrastructure but they back a lot of the projects that we talk about in some capacity or another and a lot of the folks that we talk to interact with DigitalOcean in a way

that I don't know if DigitalOcean really promotes properly because there's been projects that have come along and been sort of desperate for hosting and DigitalOcean has just provided it to them for free or worked out deals with them. It's not publicized very widely. And the other thing, when they decided to bring on CoreOS

as one of their distributions and FreeBSD and those are just the two since they've been sponsors that I have some information about. So I'm not sure what they did in the past. Probably similar. Is they actually contact the upstream distribution and say, we want to work with you. They don't just go grab the ISO image and make it work.

They're like, we're going to work with you on this. Let's get this going. That's pretty cool. That's very cool. So use our promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. You know, Chris, if you didn't have a handy Arch Linux laptop, you could, there are some scripts out there to convert your droplets to Arch Linux. You could compile your,

you could do your make packages up there. Yeah, that is something people could look into because it's, I think it's mostly made possible because they're kick-ass console. Yeah, exactly. So I want to talk about Debian. Today's its 23rd birthday, and maybe we could talk about the future of Debian a little bit. I wanted to reflect on something for a moment before we get any further. This is from Swampy over at Dismucketware YouTube account. It's a video of Linus at DebConf14, which was in Portland, which I think JB live streamed this. I don't remember.

So I probably could have played from my own clip archive, but credit to Swampy for this clip here. I'll start with something non-controversial. No, no, I'm fine with controversial. That's not usually my problem. It's well known around these parts that in 2007, you did an interview where you said that although you've used many Linux distributions, you had never used Debian because

you found it difficult to install. Yes. Have you tried it since? No. That was quick. I'm sure it's gotten much easier to install. To me, a distribution is...

I'm sorry. You may want to close your ears now. A distribution is not very interesting. I want it to be easy to install so that I can just get on with my life, right? Which is mostly the kernel. The closest I got to installing Debian was there was one machine...

I forget which one it was. It may have been the MacBook Air that actually had trouble installing something. And Debian, the installer, would boot, but then it didn't install there either. And eventually I figured out what was the problem with that machine, but by then it was too late. If there's a way to break installing an operating system, I've found it multiple times, and if there isn't one, you already know if I found it.

And Debian, last time, super easy. Highly recommended trying. Maybe I should try. I mean, one of the problems I have is I am not an MIS person. I mean, I may do kernels and people think that that means that I'm technical. But when it comes to actually maintaining machines, I am a complete disaster. It makes me feel better, right?

It's funny that he's like so caught up making and maintaining the kernel. Yeah. The actual running of the kernel. Yeah, not a big deal. Not that interesting. Okay, that's fine. Debian is one of my first Linux eyes. It wasn't my first Linux eye, but it was my mostly impressed. It was the one I was most impressed by

and the one that saved the day for us the most when we first started using Linux. Oh, yeah. So I don't know if it wasn't for Debian, I don't know if I would be a Linux user today. Really? Yeah, maybe. I mean, it might have still happened, but I think it was definitely a major contributor.

It does seem to have been a rock-solid choice early on so that kind of people could latch onto it. Yeah, yeah. So I, boy, I really am really thankful to Debian because we had definitely tried, it was old Red Hat. It was way, way before Fedora. It was way way way long time ago like red hat four and five when we were trying some of this stuff and when we were trying to do

things like get the most current version of squid and it's funny to even talk about debbie in the context and getting a more current version but literally our red hat distribution is shipped with a really ancient version of squid and debian with apt-get made squid setup and then the other thing that was really nice about Debian is after you installed a package via the internet, which by the way, back in the 90s, that was magic. That was

unbelievable. And it also still supported CDs, which was great because we needed those. So to be able to install Squid, but then the next thing after installing Squid where it would bring up like an NCurses interface and ask me questions about what I want. And then to make it so easy to do that and set up email server – that and then setting up an email server on Debian where nobody made it as easy and quick and then continued to keep it secure and up-to-date like Debian did. It was just – you could rely on the fact that they were so slow

and they took so long to upgrade that you were going to get a solid five years out of that machine with solid updates and probably longer. It was just going to run. And then when you did have to disk upgrade after five years or six years, it was going to work. And that made Linux a safe bet for me. And it made it possible for us to fix major networking problems that we had. So I have a really soft spot for Debian. Then obviously it's sort of the proto distro that so many things have come from.

If you look at the success that Ubuntu has had on the cloud and all of that and the fact that those origins come from Debian, it's really, it's kind of incredible. So I wanted to open up the Mumble Room and say, hey, guys, what are your thoughts on maybe where Debian as a project itself is going to go in the future? Where does this, where does the next 5, 10, maybe even 20 years, where does Debian go? And I wanted to give the Mumble Room time to ping me in the chat room with their, you know, who wants to ever go. So Wes, while we give them time to let us know where they, and it could be quick or long, have you reflected on this at all since, you know, you and I were kind of chatting

about this? Do you think Debian's going to continue to be a dominant player in this space? Is it going to continue to just be sort of the foundation? What's the next few years look like for Debian in your mind? I'm kind of uncertain. I've played with Debian 8. I've used it to run like FreeSwitch, for example, where there's some good like Ansible recipes

and other things that are freely available. And I mean, I find it a relatively pleasant environment. They've got SystemD now. It seems like, you know, it's pretty standard. They have a huge amount of software available. The Debian 8 release is still very current. The software there is good for most needs. They've got their own PPA

system in the works. I have not played with that or tried any of that, but it's coming. What I haven't looked at is SnapD, that kind of thing. That would be interesting as well. But it does seem like a good place to run software. What I don't know, what I don't know, and what I'm curious to hear from everyone else is,

what's the enthusiasm like? Are people looking for it? Is it like when you're just looking to run a Linux for some reason? Does Debian leap to your mind? Should it leap to your mind? Well, you know, I'm gonna, I see, so Ryan's tagged me. But first, I'm actually gonna, I'm gonna jump it over to Wimpy just for a second because I have an idea where I feel like Debian is going to grow a lot in the next five years, and that's Raspbian and the Raspberry Pi. And I'm wondering what Wimpy thinks about that because that's also a super popular trajectory for Ubuntu Mate. It seems like a likely continued area of success for Debian. What are your thoughts, Wimpy? area of success for debian what are your thoughts wimpy i i think that's a little bit awkward actually because raspbian isn't really part of the debian community um and i think raspbian would do

well to more closely align itself with debian um rather than sort of be yeah an offshoot with its own repository sort of bolted on top um so this is not a debian issue more a raspbian issue i would definitely like to see raspbian become more closely aligned with debian so maybe in the future there isn't a raspbian there is just a debian and everything you need to power everything on the Pi is in Debian proper rather than this sort of thing. And if you're absolutely right and if I'm right that this is going to be a continued area of success for Debian, that is just going to get even more awkward. That is really something. That's a great point, Wimpy. Ryan, I want to give you a chance to jump in. What do you think? Do you think there's going to be another distro that will ever be surpassed as like

the proto distro in this next few? I mean, this seems to be a solid spot for Debian right now. Yeah, I think that you're right. If I pull out my crystal ball and I look at it, though, if i pull out my crystal ball and i look at it though i think that we see we see like let's look at ubuntu for instance sure i right now everything's based on debian i don't know how long that's gonna last i think for the foreseeable future that's a for sure thing but the but i could see them since they've gained so much prominence in in the cloud and and across you know when you're deploying stuff there's so many people would just say yeah i deploy ubuntu you know and they don't even think twice they just use whatever configuration management tool that they're going to use on

their cloud and just bang it's like spun up 20 machines yeah all running a workload and what's crazy is you see more and more of those running you know docker images and like it it makes me wonder how long is it until until the uh until the ubuntu guys say like, hey, they want to go a different direction than we do. Why don't we finally begin to break our reliance on them? Will Snaps be the thing that pushes it over the edge there perhaps? Interesting. I think it's possible. Sweet Lou, as a user you say you don't really see a big difference between Debian and Ubuntu, so do you just sort of default go Ubuntu? Yeah, I've tried some other Debian-based OSs before.

To me, they just really didn't seem all that much different, other than not having a usable place to install stuff from, you know, besides the one that begins with an S there. I would say, yeah, from a user usability perspective, that's absolutely the case. Minimac, you make the point that you kind of view Debian as having a special role in the open source community. Yeah, I see the Debian devs or the technical committee as somehow the moral authority.

You remember the SETAverse discussion or adaptation of SystemD? Yeah. I mean, the work of Debian developers has still some impact. Yeah, absolutely. Boy. Yeah. You know, geez, MiniMac, good point. If we reflect on the system D discussion, it really seems like there was a massive change in the discussion.

Jeez, that math thing. I know. There was a big pivot when Debian decided to go system D. And then when Debian did some of the legal legwork to make ZFS possible, you immediately saw Ubuntu able to jump on that. And those are two huge, huge technology issues and social issues, quote unquote, in the Linux community that Debian was sort of the deciding authority on. It's a great point. What an interesting position for them to be in and, you know, it also makes me think a

little bit, reflect a little bit on Ian Murdoch and makes me miss him a little bit. So there you go. That is, boy, if you want to play with something kind of neat, and by the way, you still have a few minutes left

or a minute left to jump in if you want. But if you want to look at something kind of neat and the history of the Debian project, we have timeline.debian.net linked in the show notes. And you can scroll through this and look at some of the major activity in the Debian project, we have timeline.debian.net linked in the show notes. And you can scroll through this and look at some of the major activity in the Debian project over the years, major milestones like dev camps and huge bugs that were like news stories and first

alphas and then, of course, the final releases and the betas and all that kind of stuff. And also things like the bug squashing parties in Cambridge. And you kind of get a sense for the Debian project at a larger scale. It's pretty neat. And you can also get a sense that there's still plenty of 2016 left to be filled out on that map and plenty of the future for Debian. It goes way back. I don't know what tech they're using to generate this. Does it say that?

It's really neat, though. Yeah, it's this tiny font down there. I can't quite read it it's at the bottom you see how small that font is at the bottom of the page dang but somewhere down there probably tells you what they're using uh so uh happy birthday to debbie and guys it's uh it's really cool we're really happy to have uh something like you around for so long so hats off, and we give the special winner's award to you. Yeah, that's for Debian right there, just for you guys. All right, so I want to get to how the challenge is going and the reasons why this challenge was actually concocted in the first damn place.

And while you'll probably be hearing more about it pretty soon, if I were a little bit of a crystal ball rubber. What? What? ball rubber. What? What? Did you? What? Did you say? Crystal ball rubber.

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Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Okay, Wes, I heard you rebooting during that spot. I heard you. How's it going over there? It's installed. Now we're working on getting it to show up in the bootloader. Do you have a preference? Do you want refined?

Do you not? I don't know. I don't know what's the difference. This is all new to me. I mean, you can get it to work with the native EFI bootloader. That seems good. Okay, but you can also install refined, which is kind of just a nice, better bootloader.

What would make it easier to get the NVIDIA graphics working? Because that's part of this. That's a good question. Because I think that's like a kernel boot parameter. Because otherwise I think it uses the Intel graphics by default. I believe so. So I want to talk about why this is happening. Because this is some crazy bull crap.

I mean, actually, I will be in full disclosure, I will be honest with you. The number one question we have ever gotten into the Linux Action Show and Linux Unplugged, and I am literally talking since episode one over a decade ago of Linux Action Show. The number one question we have gotten is how do I get Linux working on a MacBook? And we answer it from time to time, but we never really fully go into it. And it's one of these things that we're simply sick and tired of getting the question asked.

And so we just don't address it a lot. And I've been using the Entraware Apollo as my daily driver at home pretty much since my review and absolutely loving it. And it is light. The battery lasts for hours. It's small enough that I can carry it and just bring it to work when I need it and not

have to worry about bringing the power adapter. And it is a very nice machine. And I have all my stickers all over it. I really enjoy it. But then No Man's Sky came out. And that damn game. I can't help but love it. And it requires OpenGL 4.5 support and SSC 4, I think, and basically dedicated graphics.

And that's where the MacBook came in. Yeah, right. And then I connected with, okay, so I sort of visualized myself as an audience member. I've either bought a used MacBook, I've inherited a MacBook, or I'm sick and tired of macOS, and Apple is not getting around to updating this thing. And one of the things that I know from previous testing experience is that Linux runs a hell of a lot faster on the MacBook than OS X does. So the fact that this is a 2013 is going to feel, it's going to feel – I estimate under Linux, it's probably going to feel like a brand new machine. It's probably going to feel very fast.

I mean it's got the PCI SSD in there. It's got dedicated – I thought about using F2FS or whatever. Yeah. It's got dedicated NVIDIA graphics. It's got a wonderful retina screen on it. It's a really – it's a pretty nice laptop. Yeah, it is a nice laptop.

And people generally accept that the MacBook is built well. So the question has always been, how reasonable would Linux be on the MacBook? Because my intention is, and I know this sounds ridiculous, is to then install Wine and then install No Man's Sky. Eventually, I plan to also put OBS on there and do some broadcasting from it because it does have a four-core processor as well. Oh, sure. Yeah, that would work well.

Yeah. there and do some broadcasting from it because it does have a four-core processor as well. Oh, sure. Yeah, that would work well. Yeah. So that was sort of the impetus for myself to want to try Linux on the MacBook. And then that sort of sent us down the path of trying to figure out, well, what do you need to know before you put Linux on a MacBook? And it definitely seems to be one of the things you have to get your head around is what model of MacBook do you have? And this is somewhat not obvious since Apple just calls everything MacBook. And if you have macOS on your system,

you can actually entertain this by going into the About Mac system. And I have a screenshot of this in the show notes. You go in there and it'll tell you like it's a late model something something. You Google MacBook Pro late model 2013 and it will tell you the specific like model number. It's like it's 11 comma two or something like that, right, Wes?

Am I? Yes, I believe so. Yeah, and there's other ones. Older ones are different. So it's a major model number, minor model revision. And you can find Arch wiki entries, which for mine I've linked in the show notes, that specifically tell you about the little kind of esoteric tweaks you have to make to make it work on your particular MacBook model.

And as I look at this, I think this could be a really great Linux box if all of this works out. So I'm kind of really interested to see where it goes. I'll try the Thunderbolt out and then I can report back to the audience on some of my adventures with it. on uh on some of my adventures with it i also was kind of wondering i was kind of wanted to pick wimpy's brain and ask him if he hears many people in the ubuntu mate community that are running it on the macbooks because that also crossed my mind as a possible distro if we couldn't get arch working yeah it does crop up from time to time um mostly in uh discussions in the ubuntu mate community and if it's something that you're interested in doing, then that is the place to first search

because it's a discourse so you can find the right discussions easily. And if your model hasn't been discussed, then start a new thread. And there are a few people in there that can assist you with that. It doesn't come up a lot. It comes up a bit, but not loads.

It's certainly not a major platform I'm seeing people use Ubuntu Mate on. Good. I just don't, at this point, I don't know if I feel like recommending it, although maybe I'll feel differently after we try this. I do see it as like it could, so a couple of things have changed recently. First of all, based on some of my reading, the roadblocks of getting the wireless working, the Broadcom wireless, have been significantly reduced. But the big change, which is in the more recent kernel – it's been around for a little while now, but it depends on your distro. There is built-in kernel-level support with the Synaptics driver

for the MacBook touchpad or trackpad or whatever you want to call it. And that was something that used to be a sticking point on my particular model. Have you had to do anything to get the trackpad working or has it been working? No, it's just been working. I mean, it's not quite as nice as the default one but i've got scrolling i've been impressed the media keys have working even in the live media uh what about the i can see the high dpc i support gnome working nicely really you can see the tiny text on the console boot up and then yeah once you've uh got to the login screen really did gnome just

automatically go high dpi yeah no way really yeah way, really. Yeah. At least in the Integra's installer. Now, what about the keyboard backlight? That's a great question. Is that working? Can you turn that on? Oh, yeah. And it even has the scrollable Gnome menu. Shut up. Really?

Yeah. Wow. That's actually pretty. Look at Gnome kicking ass on that thing. Yes. So are you in the live media right now are you in the uh installed media uh os well now i'm in the installed os actually i have to review how how it actually got here i was just kind of troubleshooting that but i rebooted again and uh i expected it to go into mac os x but it went right into yours so this is

really going to be nice to be able to play no Man's Sky at home if you get this working with us. I'm pretty excited. I did a, after Tech Talk yesterday, I did a Let's Play with, I guess that's what the kids call it. I did a Let's Play with my son Dylan, who is a huge Minecrafter. And there's definitely Minecraft elements in No Man's Sky. And so it was a lot of fun. He's seven years old, and so he gets to experience some of the stuff like a kid does. It's a lot of fun to experience it through a kid's eyes.

And I think I'm going to post the Let's Play if you guys want to see it for the patrons at patreon.com slash today. So before we get out of here, anybody else have thoughts about the MacBooks? Or actually, I know Mr. Tunnell there in the Mumble room wanted to also say give a little bit of love towards the Zen books. Are you still in there? I'll see him. I think he had to leave. No, I think he left. But he wanted to say if you're looking at MacBooks, you should consider the Zen books.

I think I probably summarized what he was going to say. He had particular models in mind, but he would say check out the Zen books. So do you want to continue on? And then we'll just wrap up the show and then we can cover it in the post show. That sounds great. Okay. All right. So that brings 158 to a close. Ryan, thanks a bunch for coming. And man, you are welcome to join us any week you have time. We're always live at this time. So it was good to hear from you. And I definitely look forward to what you're doing in the future. Where should people follow you if they want to kind of stay tuned? Sure. Yeah, they can follow me on Twitter at Ryan Lee Sipes,

R Y A N L E E S I P E S. And thanks for having me on Chris. I love it. You bet, man. And why don't you link that in the IRC so that way I can easily throw it in the show notes too. So that way people can lazy web that and,

uh, sure. They don't have to worry about spelling. All right. That brings us to the end of this week's unplugged. I tell you what, Wes, I'm damn impressed.

I think you have so Wes, I'm damn impressed. I think you have so far essentially completed every damn ridiculous challenge I've thrown at you during the show, dude. Almost, anyway. Coming close. Well, this is pretty much in there. I think the dedicated graphics is within your reach, man. Hopefully.

I am. Wow, wow. You, I, okay. Alright, if you'd like to show up live, it's a lot of fun. Join us over at jblive.tv. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get it converted to your local time zone. Don't forget to follow me at Chris Ellis and at Jupiter Signal for the network. Linux action show.reddit.com is where you go for feedback. And we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Thank you. It's for people who like to mess with computers. All right, jbtitles.com. Thank you, everybody. It was a fun show.

I really enjoyed that. And also, sincerely, happy birthday to Debian. I really appreciate Debian. I mean, not only has it been the basis of some of my most enjoyed and used OSs and continues to be the basis for my favorite server platform, Ubuntu. But also I think it really was a big part of why I got into Linux. So thank you. Thank you, Ubuntu.

Thank you, Mumble Room. Thank you, Chat Room. Now let's go boot. All right. So where are you at with that thing? I've got it booting. I'm making sure the bootloader is actually working and getting the Wi-Fi back up. Nice.

All right. Let's go. We'll see about that proprietary driver. JB Titles. JB Titles. So this is a MacBook with an NVIDIA chip in it. Yes. Yeah.

I think it's a 750, I think, or a 760. And is this a new computer? No, no, no. It's one that I used back in like before, I think even before I hired Rikai for editing. And then once Rikai came on board, he had – 750M. Okay, 750M. He got the dedicated Mac and then this sort of became like every time I wanted to do a comprehensive video editing project, this is my machine I would go to and still do to some degree. But I have been transitioning to K Cadian Live more and more. So I've had this sitting around and

it's a late 2013 model. And I actually think with an old MacBook, you have a better success rate with a slightly older model, which is kind of bears out why I think you'll probably see more of these showing up on eBay when the new model comes out because it's literally been too long. And so they'll probably, people throw their old models on eBay and you might have Linux users who want a particular build quality of a machine grabbing these and snapping these up perhaps. So this is a

Pro 15 of some description is it? Yes, yeah, it's a late 2013 MacBook Retina 15 inch with a 750M and the 1TB SSD PCId and 16 gigabytes of ram and wes did you decide on a bootloader well right yeah right now it's just using the built-in efi so like when you hold down the option key or whatever it is the that's what

i'm working on confirming interesting but But we might just install Refind anyway. Yeah, I'll look at you. Because it's awesome. Look at that. It would be interesting to compare battery life between the systems. Yes, it would. No TLP installed and all. It would really interest me. Yeah, I absolutely would do that.

Because they say Linux is not well optimized for these kind of computers. Well, to be fair, the cards are definitely stacked against Linux. However, I was reading the Arch Wiki and it appears that LM Sensors now has some support. But see, honestly, the core issue why I've never really been super compelled to do this is the way Macs are built. They are Intel machines, absolutely, but they use a completely different power management and cooling management architecture than a standard desktop PC. And honestly, if I were Apple, I would too because ACPI and all of that is just total shit.

So what Apple did is they created the SMC controller. And the SMC controller is both hardware and software. And the software component is only available in Mac OS X. There's no open source equivalent to it because Apple holds all of the information. And the SMC controller is used by Mac OS X to escalate the fans with CPU usage. So the OS is constantly monitoring the demands and predicted demands, the predicted demands, if you can even believe that, of the OS workload based on your average workload. And it preemptively throttles the thermal management of the Mac

based on whatever metrics that Apple has come up with with their black magic. And there's just literally no way to translate that to Linux or Windows. It's the same problem for boot camp users who decide to run Windows 7 to 10 on their Mac hardware. They have the same exact issue. And in the past, what I had done is I got a program called SMC Control, and SMC Control is a Mac OS program. What you do is you can use SMC Control to hard set your fans to a certain RPM.

So that way, at least there's some thermal cooling. Because otherwise, what happens is without the SMC controller kicking in via software ignition, then the thermal limits of the actual hardware are what dictate the fan usage. Yeah, it's not what you want. No. So when you actually get to the full thermal limits of the Intel i7 processor, that's when the fans cool. When you get to the thermal limits of the GPU, that's when the fans kick on. So by using SMC controller in Mac OS X, I could set the fans at a steady 5500 RPM or 4000 RPM, depending on my workload, and then restart in the Linux.

If you shut down, then the SMC controller reset. And so if I booted from a cold boot right into Linux, I have no fan control. But if I would first boot into Mac OS and then use SMC control, which is a third-party utility that only supports most Macs, and then use that to set the fan and then reboot from that into Linux, I could have proper thermal management. So one of the things that appears to have changed since I had to do that rigmarole was LM Sensors appears to have some capacity to control the thermals on the MacBook now. And so that could make a significant difference in battery life. And it's absolutely an area I'm going to test versus macOS, whatever the current release is. So I was just looking on eBay in the UK at that spec,

and they still sell used for around £1, pounds, which is about $1,500. Isn't it amazing? See, I think Apple has always managed to have super good resale because they only at best release a model a year, it seems. So it's sort of like by their apparent nonchalant attitude towards their Mac hardware customers, they have created a very robust aftermarket value for the MacBook. But every time a new one comes out,

everything shifts down a bracket. So that, I believe, this MacBook will probably shift down to about $800 once the new MacBook comes out in September. And this, a Core i7... So is that still a current model even though it's been around for a few years? No, no, no, no.

But the current model will shift down a price range and because this is a model or two below the current model, this is going to come down significantly to about $800. That's my estimation. I could be totally wrong, but that seems to be the history. Because this is like two models or three models behind, this is going to be the real bottom basement. Like still get an i7, still get Thunderbolt, still get Retina, still get PCIe storage, but under $1,000 easily. I believe that will be the price of this machine.

And at that price range, it almost becomes reasonable to experiment with Linux on it and just see, well, what the hell? Because it's a $600 to $800 MacBook depending on spec. And, well, at the end of the day, if it doesn't work, I could just do Mac OS X with Linux and VMware. And so I think you're going to have a lot of Linux users that will pick this thing up because the cult of hardware worship around the MacBook. They'll pick this thing up. They'll try putting Linux on it. And so I was like, this is probably something that I'm going to get a whole new wave of emails about. I'm kind of preemptively getting that.

And you're only excited about Linux on Mac because the hardware is decent. Well, mostly what it's come down to is I want to start doing more remote broadcasts. And I need a pretty powerful system to run OBS because what I need to do is I need to bring in a couple of RTMP streams, I need to send out an RTMP stream, and I need to record. So I'm

probably going to look at something that's for cores is probably going to be necessary soon for me on the go. The problem is OBS is available for Mac OS X. And if I'm not careful, because of simple practical demand and need of production, I might accidentally use OBS on Mac OS. I have to be careful.

It's like somebody who's an alcoholic. I don't want to be around people that are – I got to make sure that if we have Linux on this thing, I just continue to use Linux. So it's sort of preemptively preparing for that. It's also because I now want a Linux machine at home that has a dedicated graphics card. And that's kind of the big driver for me personally is all my Linux machines at home are Intel graphics. And that's been fine. But now that I want to play No Man's Sky at home, since I already have the hardware, it's not like I'm buying the hardware. If this was me buying it, I would never do it. But because I already have the hardware, it seems like it's worth trying. Yeah, definitely.

Right. And Linux does seem to run pretty damn fast on it. Like it's interesting. You know, Apple's gotten a really bad rap for how long it's been since they've updated the MacBooks, and I've been one of the people giving them a hard time. But this is the 2013. It still feels pretty damn fast. Once you go SSDs and Core i7 and all that, it's a lot of – but then it comes down to if you need things like QuickSync or other –

or, you know it would be nice as a is a is a nicer graphics card like a 980 or something yeah that would be nice yeah or even a 1080 yeah i've got a 980 i'm in my new intro where oh oh yeah how is the best you have the athena don't you how has that been going for you it's epic yeah yeah honestly wimpy if i had the money if that that would be my preferred route to go hands down. Absolutely. See, I feel like I can get in with I can get within a stone's throw distance of something like the Athena with the MacBook that I already own. But I would. Yeah. So are you running are you running like a like a like a like a multiple boot environment on this thing? Or is it just one distro? Are you gaming?

Tell me all about it. It's just one distro. You can probably guess the name. I bet I could, yeah. Yeah, no, it's just one distro. Wes has got it. That's it, yeah, yeah. No, it's one distro, so one root disk,

which is an NVMe drive. Nice. And then I have two one-terabyte SSDs in there. One is mounted as my home partition, so just for me. And the other is mounted under a separate profile that I have just for Steam. So when I download the Steam games, it goes to a separate disk. just for steam so when i download the steam games it goes to a separate disc and what that enables me to do is if i want to re you know play on the desktop or something like that i can just r sync that partition to the home directory of the steam profile everywhere else so i don't have to keep

down because i'm on you know wireless internet that's a problem i have at home too yeah so you don't have to do it with a separate disk you just have a separate profile that you just use for steam and then you know you can just rsync that to your steam profile steam accounts you know on your other machines do you log out when you want it when you want a game do you log out yeah yeah when i'm when i want to game I have a separate profile because I don't have any file sync services. I have a very minimal desktop configuration. I have the Compton manager going rather than comp is or something like that. So it's specifically I am going to play a game right now. Have you toyed with the idea?

I know you've probably seen there's tutorials to have like a separate big picture mode instance of x running or you can have login you can have user sessions that are only steam big picture have you toyed with that idea um yeah if i ever make a um a box to like go in the front room um then i would do something like that but this is just on my machines. I finished working. I'm going to play a game for half an hour, log out, log into steam and it, it auto starts,

you know, the steam client. It doesn't go to big picture automatically because you don't always want that. Um, but that's how I do it and it works very well for me and it prevents me having to keep downloading gigabytes and gigabytes of stuff over and over and over again. That is clever. I think I might try that um i also heard in the ubuntu podcast you're talking about it coming pretty handy at the snap sprint event yeah yeah so i lugged it along so i took my apollo

and the athena with me to the uh snappy sprint two very different laptops two very different laptops. Two very different laptops. And the reason why is because the power supply, or rather the internal battery on the Athena, is really a UPS that lasts long enough for you to unplug the power in one location and walk to the other location. To be fair, it's probably, what, two hours, two and a half hours maybe? Yeah, it's about two hours. So it's not that, but when you compare it to the Apollo, which I can comfortably get over seven hours on that. I describe the Apollo battery life as it's one of those laptops

where I open up the laptop and I don't even consider when was the last time I had this on the power adapter. That is such a freeing feeling. It's so nice. Yeah. It makes it the perfect go-to really quick at home laptop. Yeah. And the new Apollo you can now get with 16 gigs of RAM as well, which is quite tasty.

Yeah. Yeah. um so yeah i was using the athena uh for building snaps because you can now build uh use snapcraft to um build your snaps in lex d containers so you can have multiple snaps building at the same time so consequently i was working on a snap start that building switch to a different workspace work on a different snap start that building and at one point i had seven or eight snaps building because that's great just had loads of yeah loads of disk performance it's got 64 gigs of ram it can do eight threads it was just belting through that that would be the perfect that's the perfect obs remote rig for me so down the road that might be where i go actually while i while i'm picking your brain, so I've been looking at PodPublish, and I have a secret project in the works that I think I want to use PodPublish for.

And I wonder how hard – do you think – I'm thinking about enlisting somebody in the community to make some changes, and I wanted to bounce it off you. One of the things I would like to do is – because I believe the pod publish, if I understand correctly, one of the files that it will output is a – like we talked about before, is an MKV ready for YouTube that takes the audio track and then takes a still image for that episode and repeats that still image that matches the length of the audio track, right? Yeah, that's right. What kind of changes do you think – and they could be major, I don't know, do you think it would take to make it possible to have it loop like an MP4? What do you mean by loop an MP4?

Have a video that is just repeated through the length of the thing? Yeah. I imagine that would be quite straightforward. Yeah, that should be quite straightforward um yeah that should be quite straightforward i i love the idea of pod publish uh and uh it's it seems like should i tell you the thing i wanted to do yeah using ffmpeg there is a i'm not sure if they're called filters but there is a way to generate animations based on audio waveforms this wanted to be yes was actually just have it uh you know a spectrograph you know waveform of the audio for the duration of the video i have been trying to

solve this problem since i launched i i mean i mean reek i might know we have tried we have tried video editing plugins that will try with they generate this. I have spent good money trying to solve this problem. Well, I found like half a dozen snippets of how to do this with FFmpeg, and I couldn't achieve the exact result I wanted to achieve, but I did find some reference stuff. So if there's somebody out there who wants to have a go at solving that that would be kind of neat because what you could do is have that overlaid on your still image you have your still image your cover art yeah it superimposes all of the text for the you know the the episode and title and all the rest of it and then you could have that um you

know uh spectrum going as well with the audio that that is so badly what I want, that I so badly want it that I've given up on it. And I just assumed I'd have to compromise with a MP4 loop. Because the thing is, YouTube is a viable publishing platform for a couple of reasons. First of all, it works for a lot of people to get around certain restrictions. It also has a huge built-in user base existing. It's great for discovery. Just ask the chat room. A lot of them are in there because they found us on YouTube once and then decided to become podcast listeners.

And then last but not least, YouTube links are fundamentally just more shareable than an MP3 file with a certain time index in the mp3 file and so if you ever want to have your podcast shared with somebody else it kind of has to be up on youtube so people can pass the link around but i don't want them just i don't want to publish something on youtube and have people stare at a still image right yeah yeah i agree um so i would like to do the um the audio animation is there is there could be several podcasts now that end up using PodPublish from a snap, and then if we make improvements to it like that, it could be several podcasts to get that. So PodPublish, for those that don't know, we've talked about it just recently in I think last week's show, so check that out.

But it's a tool that is currently installable as a Snap. So I have it installed on Arch actually. Surprise, surprise. And you run it through there. You give it your podcast that you've done and it can output the files you need for people to be able to download. But also can create the WordPress post and whatnots like that and has an INI file where you specify the different parameters. And then it makes it very automated. and it makes it very automated. And for somebody who's very busy but has a couple of really fun podcast ideas up his sleeve,

it makes it feel more approachable. A lot of that's just taken care of for you. Yeah. So I'm really excited. So I've got a fix coming to PodPublish in the next couple of days, specifically the snap of PodPublish in the next couple of days. I've had some feedback from running snaps on different distros where there's an issue with locales and it can get its pants in a twist. So I've got a fix coming that will make that more robust.

So after I install it from a snap, it doesn't show up in my path, does it, until I log out and log back in? Is that how snaps work? Yeah, it does. It should show up. What's the command I run then? Because when I ran... So this is an implementation detail about snaps.

So if you have a snap for, say, FFmpeg, and there's only one binary that you're exposing from that snap called FFmpeg, it goes to the path under slash snap lash bin ffmpeg pod publish has four executables in the snap so consequently the name space for the binary is pod publish dot and then the name of the original executable. So in your path, you should have podpublish.publish underscore podcast, for example, and podpublish.encode underscore podcast. And there's a couple of others specific to upload. One was specific to when I uploaded everything to YouTube

for everything even to podcasted done, which got us banned. So that was the, don't use that because you can ban yourself. It uploaded, you know, 250 videos. Break your account script. Yep.

Yeah. And there's another one that I forget what it does, but, um, the main two, uh, encode, uh,

encode and then, uh, publish. So it snaps, it's pod, publish dot enccode underscore podcast. Okay. And then just path to config file.

And in your config file, you tell it where all of the paths to your assets are and stuff. I'll send you a snippet of, I'll redact some bits of the Ubuntu podcast. Oh, okay. i'll redact some bits of the ubuntu podcast okay any file because what we do is like uh nine tenths of the config file is just boilerplate yeah and we just have like six or seven things at the top of the file which are the episode number um and the markdown for that episode oh i love it links and then it automatically drops all of those necessary markers into the rest of the configuration for you so you don't have to

do a full you know edit of a clean file every time you can start you know with a template and just change the the few things at the top and And it makes turning the publishing round very fast. What I like about this. So we've recorded this evening. Laura's already updated our new files for our show notes. So they're ready to go. Mark's doing the edit this week, which he'll do tomorrow. So we turn around the publishing very quickly now.

Yeah. Wow. Well done. And does he edit in Audacity? Because that's what I'm guessing. Yeah, we both do. Yeah. So on the UbuntuPodcast.org website, there's a page called About the Show.

And most of that page is actually how we produce the show and all of the software we use, including the server stack and everything. I encourage you to continue on pushing PodPublish forward because I haven't really been super interested in automating audio podcast publishing for a long time, and so I haven't really paid attention to it. And Noah and I, and Rikai, and Wes even helped in a little bit recently, have been really working on what we are trying to create a way to bring video podcasting up to an entirely new level using Linux and open source.

And it's not an automated system, but it will be a technology stack that you use to create essentially super high quality, I think better than anything I've ever seen before, video produced podcasts, even with remote hosts and whatnot. And so I like that you're sort of contributing at the audio end there, which is still super obviously relevant and something I'm just kind of getting back into. And at the same time, we're kind of working on creating sort of a stack that people could deploy to also make podcasting video-wise under Linux super straightforward, really high quality. So at both ends of both audio and video, we're sort of working on automating and creating the best product under Linux.

And I think that's going to be really cool for media content producers who want to be able to look at Linux, and we may one day have these tools available to them that give it an edge up over some of the other desktops. And we'll make them flee to proprietary OSs just to publish. Yeah. Because really, if you can make it easy for people to produce their content, they'll go with whatever. And if we can say this is what you use on Linux to make your audio podcast or your video podcast and you can make really nice reproducible episodes. It automates the process for you.

It follows these standard conventions. And this is, I think, something that the Mac has sort of gotten the default nod to for a long time. And maybe we'll make a little bit of a difference. You know what didn't make it into my NVIDIA Shield TV review? Because it didn't even cross my mind to try this until I was just on my Google Dashboard recently. You know in Google Dashboard you can go back and you can play back all of your dictation. So whenever you dictate to the keyboard, Google actually keeps a recording of that.

And you can play it back. And it's kind of interesting because I play it back sometimes and I hear my kids in the background and stuff like that. And it's like, oh, it's almost like a little time capsule up on Google, a creepy little time capsule. And so I decided to play back some of the recordings from the NVIDIA Shield TV, and the audio is super, super bad. Oh, really?

And I didn't think about this in the review because it just didn't seem like something to – it's not something you've had to think about before. How good is the microphone so that way you can do voice dictation? Because that's a key way you interact with the NVIDIA Shield TV. Like all YouTube searches, it kind of says, you know know just hold this button down and talk to it and then it'll search and uh one of the things i discovered and the reason why i i realized there might be something going on is i noticed that it started detecting hadiya's speech but not my speech weird so i would give it to her she could search for things but i couldn't search for things

hon will you search for me again it'll get get old really fast. It is very embarrassing actually because it's like I sit there and I'll try like three or four times and I start saying it very I try to enunciate very clearly and then I have to give it to her and she just says it once and then it's fine. Like you don't even exist, Chris. I was a certain pitch.

Let's see, that was about, I'm trying to figure out, it doesn't tell me it doesn't really break it down by device which devices I was doing. Let's see. That was about... I'm trying to figure out. It doesn't tell me. It doesn't really break it down by device, which devices I was doing. That's funny. Looking at some of the things I've said, it's kind of funny. But what I discovered

is that the audio is really, really scratchy from the NVIDIA Shield remote. It just has a really crappy, crappy... That is unfortunate. Yeah. Let's see.

It'd be interesting for Google to have an evaluation of just evaluating these as they come in and giving you an idea of, this device has a nice little bright colored meter or something. Yeah, exactly. I was trying to see if I could find an example for you. This might be it. Yeah, Android TV. So let's see.

This is me saying Starbound. Starbound. Oh, that's Adia having to say Starbound because it wouldn't work for me. She says it so well. Yeah, well, you could hear it wasn't very good, but let's see. Sage Brown? Sage Brown. It does sound like Sage Brown, doesn't it?

Yeah, it does. Sage Brown. And here it says it got total chaos See how you can't understand what I'm saying at all The microphone is just horrible And there you got THR Roundtable. And there, you got THR Roundtable. THR Roundtable. And there, because I think, do you hear it cut out right there? Yeah.

THR Roundtable. Oh, weird. Yeah, yeah, it's just, so I, and then here's me. Starband. Yeah, I got that one clearly. Okay, Google. Yeah, and that one's from my phone. You hear much better that one is.

So that's one thing. I don't, it's a weird thing to amend to a review, but I just kind of figured it out recently. I like it. All of the details. It really depends on where you hold it, too. Yeah, and I was, and I guess I also just revealed that I'm watching YouTube videos about Starbound. God, that's sad. I didn't, I didn't mean for that.

All right, I'm excited to announce that Wes is in the market for a new Switch. That's right, everyone. Aha! A new networking Switch at home. They have frames. They need to go places. It's important that they get there quickly. What is in your requirement list for a new Switch?

Quiet? How important is quiet? Not that important. It's going in a closet. Look at you with the dedicated networking closet. I mean, there's a lot of other things in that closet but i mean there's also gonna be there's gonna be a switch in there by dedicated i mean the closet yeah right that's right so uh managed yes i would like a managed vlans and all that shenanigans that would be nice i don't i don't

have like a huge need of a crazy number of ports but But I would like it. What is your base amount of ports? Probably 16, but I could get away with 8 if it was a nice interface. And we're talking 100 megabits good? Absolutely not, Chris. I need gigabit. My upstream is gigabit. I need gigabit internally.

Oh, yeah, you do. Yeah, you do. That's really why I'm doing it. It's like before, everything I had didn't matter. Your firewall has gigabit networking on it? Not my current edge device, but I'm going to replace that with a tower I have set up. I just got a new Intel dual port NIC

that I put in, which I have not set up yet. It's just sitting there. I can see it in LSPCI, but I haven't played with it yet. I feel like we might have an episode topic in the making, because you're going to do what? Straight up Linux, right? That's the intention. I'm going to try seeing if I can just do that and uh how it'll work wow wow so maybe i'll regret it maybe i'll convert it to a pf sense box i could always pin that up if you remind me before you go uh i have a uh i have a switch you could take a look at that you might want to consider it's a silent gigabit switch of course you don't care about noise too

much but boy have i learned my lesson on that one. And it's worked really well here in the studio for us. Oh, that's good. I will have to look at that. Fanless, too, which is super nice. Yeah, actually, that might be what it is, the anime, the Netgear GS724. That might be exactly it. In fact, if somebody would find that on Amazon and ping Angela

with it, she needs that, too. So, also, I love the HP switches, so shout out to Sonix711 in the chat room for mentioning the HP 1910 16G. Some of the best switches in my – there was a moment in my IT career where before HP switches and then there was a moment after HP switches. And I'm being dead serious. Like it was a game changer for me professionally because I constantly was battling with clients on the cost of switches. They always wanted to lowball that particular component. And HP switches came along and offered a super competitive product, like competitive with Cisco high-end products for a much more reasonable price.

So what might be an $8,000 switch from Cisco was a $3,000 switch from HP. And that price scale has reduced even further now. They make a good product. So definitely love the HPs if you're really looking. I mean, so just as an example, I think Angela has like an eight-year-old HP gigabit switch, 24 port, fully managed. It's been running nonstop for damn near as long as I can think of. I mean, no, it's got to be, yeah, eight years old. And damn near eight years old, Wes. And it's got to be one of the best switches to this day that I've ever owned.

It's a really good one. So big plug for HP switches. But also I'll have to introduce you to my switch that I have in the garage.