LINUX Unplugged - Episode 164: Dial Up Linux | LUP 164

Episode Date: September 28, 2016

In this special edition of Unplugged we do away with the traditional format & take calls LIVE on the air for free.Some say the advice is worth what you pay for it!

This is Linux Unplugged, episode 164, for September 27th, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's changing up the format a little bit. By throwing your usual hosts out, and taking over by taking calls. The phone lines are open to be a part of the program. It's a free call 1-877-347-0011. The number again is 1-877-347-0011. So this is a special edition of the Linux Unplugged program. Typically, we meet as a virtual lug, a virtual Linux group that comes together to discuss Linux. And this week, we're going to be changing it up a little bit. And if you listen to our new show, User Error, that's a show hosted by Chris, myself and rikai the beard and we talk about everything we talk about life and technology and linux and last week we were having a discussion

about how we could improve the network and one of the things that came up is for the longest time chris has wanted to host or at least have the network host a call-in program. And one of my longtime passions for a long, long time has been, I want to help people get started with Linux. You see, back in 2009, December of 2009, that was a big year for me. Les Brown, the great motivator, said people change when they say, I've had it. And I had one of those moments. I had one of those. I've had it moments. I reached my lifetime limit of how much windows I could

take. I just, I couldn't install one more driver to a windows box. I couldn't add one more windows computer to a domain controller. And I reached December of 2009. I said, I'm done. I'm just, I am done working on windows. And a lot of people said, you're an idiot. Um, there are practical reasons why windows needs to remain in the workplace. And if you think you're going to go out and start a company and service only Linux machines and recommend to people that they only install Linux and that they don't ever use window on the bare metal, you're ridiculous. That can't be done. And in fact, the number one hindrance I had to switching myself to Linux and starting a company in Linux is people telling me that it couldn't be done. And people kept saying, you're arrogant. And a couple years in, it started to kind of work out.

And then people said, you treat Linux like a religion. You need to be more practical. You need to be more reasonable. You know, you can't treat operating systems like that. And, you know, I think part of me just realized, and it's really in the last couple of years, that that's why AltaSpeed has never lost a customer since 2009. Because when clients switch to us, they know that we understand it's not just an operating system. That's where the pictures of your kids live. That's where the video of your children's birth lives.

That's how some of you make a living. That's how some of you have entertainment after you get home from a long, hard day of work. You don't want to fight with your computer. There are some people that live out in the middle of nowhere. And the computer is their lifeline. It's their emergency communication. And so after years of people telling me you can't start a business on Linux, and after years of people telling me

that you're too arrogant and you're too single-minded, you need to be more reasonable, now people are asking, how'd you do that? How are you making so much money installing Linux and switching people to Linux? How are you doing that?

And so this hour of the Linux Unplugged program, we're not going to have our typical discussion format. We're going to be taking questions. You can ask a question by calling 1-877-347-0011. And I'm going to try and answer those questions. Now, those questions can be general questions about computers. They can be Linux specific questions. general questions about computers. They can be Linux specific questions. They can be business questions. Anything that's on your mind as a tangentially relates to Linux and open source and business. We'll throw that in there. You can ask. And if I can't answer the question, if I don't know the answer, we have standing by our Linux mumble room, which are the people that usually meet here every week to have a discussion.

So I'll say, hello, guys. How are you? Hello. It's the mumble room. It's good to have you guys here. Thank you so much for being part of this inaugural program. Glad to be here. I'm hoping you guys can help me now. One small little technical issue

I'm juggling is that the machine that the phone machine is connected to is actually the same machine that the mumble machine is on. And so I have to bounce between the mumble room and our phone lines. And so hopefully the mumble room will be a little patient with me as I make those with me as I make those jugglings. But yeah, I'm encouraging everyone to call and ask a question or tell us about your experience on Linux or, you know, something that's worked out with, you know, worked out very well for you. So joining us, starting off is Ben from Louisville, Kentucky, and he has a question about Awesome Window Manager in Arch Linux. Hi, how are you, Ben? Hi, how are you, Noah?

Hey, good. Thanks for taking time to be here with us today. So tell me a little bit about Awesome Window Manager. You've been trying that out, I take it. Yes, and I sent you a pic on Telegram of the error I'm facing. Okay. It's based around Lua, which is a scripting language of sorts. Yes. And I have been trying to get this particular theme

that I showed you the crash on to work. And I downloaded it from GitHub. I did a git clone, et cetera, the path name and whatnot. And when I load up, I keep getting that error over and over and over again. I contacted the developer of the theme. He is a heavy as heck user of Awesome.

And he looked at the theme and I said, you know, dude, can you take a look at this for me? And he did. He was stumped as to what was going on. I was like, oh, okay. So I was like, okay. He most likely said it's the piano bar stuff in the theme. And I opened up the config file, took a look at it, and I was like, okay, what the heck is this?

So, yeah, I'm not sure exactly how to fix it. So I kind of called in today to see what your suggestion would be for Chris's or whoever's hosting with us. what your suggestion would be or Chris's or whoever's hosting with us, because truthfully, you know, I looked at that theme over and over again and even my friend Jamie tried to come by and look at it and he didn't know what to do. So I was like, I don't know if I should look at another theme or, you know, I just wanted to ask my question because, you know, I haven't dabbled much with awesome and I'm sure you guys haven't either,

but I just wanted, you know, to get your advice and to see what could possibly be done about it, because I've been dabbling with this for weeks, and I just couldn't figure out what in the world to do, because I just, you know. Yeah, no worries. Let me ask you this. Do you have a copy of that script that you could send it? You said you sent it to me on Telegram?

I sent you the picture, yes, but I can send you the GitHub link to it as well. That's fine. Yeah, that'd be great. And actually what I might do is I might throw that up into our – are you communicating with me on Telegram or are you in the chat room? I can send it to you on telegram. Give me just one. Yeah, no worries. And what I'll do is I will throw that into the, uh,

the chat room and I'll have our, our chat room and our mumble room. Uh, take a look at that. Uh, take a look at that script and, and somebody there might be able to dig in. You got it.

Yeah, sure. Not a problem. Well, I've got you on telegram. So let me, let me get that over to you and I'll see what they tell us. Sounds good. Well, what I will do is I will obviously that's going to be a script specific question.

So what I'll do is I'll throw that in the chat room and see if somebody there can't help you out with that. And if they find an answer for you, then I will respond to that in telegram. And of course, we'll post that answer in the show notes of this week's episode. So thank you very much. I thank you for the call. We really appreciate having you. 1-877-347-0011. That's the number to call.

We're going to answer your Linux questions, Linux questions, technology questions, or business questions, all of the above work. questions or uh business questions all of the above work and uh joining us now is uh is uh who do we have here we have we have roller is my pronouncing that right roller yeah and i'm paulson pfeiffer in the irc oh cool well thanks for being here with us how can we help today um so i'm just calling to see if anyone's using Mageia. I switched to Mageia when Mandriva died, and that was sad for me because Mandriva was the Linux that I knew I grew up on. So is Mageia still good for Linux? Let me ask you this. What are you trying to do with it? Linux. Let me ask you this. What are you trying to do with it? So I was just actually using

it as a desktop just to do my office and just documents and just normal stuff on. Let me ask you this. What led you to Nagia to begin with? So when I was way younger before I even knew anything about computers my oldest brother came from uh portland oregon where he was doing his he was getting his phd so he ran the computer lab up there um just voluntarily and he learned all these different cool tricks about linux and that's he had a land party with mandriva in Utah, and we had tons of people show up from Idaho and all over the place.

They showed up at his office, his practice for his chiropractic stuff. Sure. And they all came, and it was really cool to see everybody not know very much, and he just showed them, here's like six different DVDs, and we're going to start installing them and see what's going on and work through strange issues. Sounds like a man after my own heart. So you're basically looking for a general office use kind of a Linux distro. Yeah, and by using it for general office stuff, I ended up deciding that I really want to know what's going on behind the scenes, but I never really had a chance to learn that before. So when I tried to dig into it, I found FreeBSD and, you know, forked off that way.

Gotcha. Well, I'll tell you what I would start with. I might start taking a look at Ubuntu Mate. Have you ever used Ubuntu Mate or played with it? No, I've just been, I went straight from Mageia to FreeBSD. No, I've just been, I went straight from Magee to FreeBSD. Okay, so if you, so I'll start with this. If you're looking for a general office distro, I might stick with something like Ubuntu Mate, because it's going to be a really nice, stable, clean, very polished operating system based on Linux, and you're going to be able to do a lot with that. And I'll tell you why I would choose a Linux distro over a BSD distro. You know, the BSD guys, they're great guys and they have a really great competitive product out there. And I think that there is something to be said about the community, the BSD community, because they don't bicker as much as a lot of the Linux guys do. I think they have a much more cohesive product. But a lot of the day-to-day stuff, the reason it works on BSD is because it's

using a lot of the tools that we built on Linux, and then they're just kind of importing those. And so you kind of shorthand yourself from a desktop perspective if you're trying to do a lot of day-to-day things on BSD. Now, I use BSD all the time in data centers when it comes to things like FreeNAS. I think it's a great choice there. As far as the desktop distro, I might look at something like Ubuntu with tape. Now, if you want to dig in a little bit deeper, if you don't just want to stick the flash drive in, install, and be done, if you want to dig a little deeper, what you might consider doing is playing with something like Arch. But Arch can be a little rough to get started with.

And so what I would recommend is taking a look at a distro called Antrigos. Have you heard of Antrigos? Okay. So Antrigos is a distro of Linux that is, it is essentially Arch. Arch is basically you build everything yourself. You choose what the web browser is. You choose what the file manager is. You choose what the mail client is.

It doesn't assume anything. And that's great for learning how things work because you really have to dig in and you have you like I remember the first time I used Arch, I had to load the application or the the the the application that I needed to read a fat file system. And it was just it was a very enlightening thing because it was a sobering thing because I just something I'd taken for granted when I stick my SD card in in there i can read files off of it now i have to go i had to learn about what what program specifically allowed me to read fat now the nice thing about antragos is it holds your hand a little bit when you when you first boot into the installer it will ask you it'll say which of these web browsers would you like would you like chrome would you like firefox would you like thunderbird would you you know and yeah and it kind of walks you through but but it it has enough pain that you have to you, it forces you to learn a little bit at a time. Right.

Does that answer your question? Yeah, yeah, that's great. And, you know, that's what I stuck with BSD for was because I started to find where they were hiding all the documentation. And, you know, obviously they have a handbook, so they're not really hiding it. But once I started finding where they were putting it all, I was like, oh, wow, you know, someone's taken a lot of time to write this all down. I should read it. Exactly. Exactly. Well, yeah, I would suggest you give Andragos a try. Take a look at that and see how that works for you. And if you don't mind, if we ever do this again, I'd love to hear back from you. Either you write in or give us a call

back. Like I said, we do the episode again because I'd love to hear how that works out for you. Now, on Sunday on the Linux Action Show, we talked about a story from Lenovo. And the story, if you hadn't heard, Lenovo, well, what we reported on Sunday and what actually happened, there was a little bit of clarity that has now come to light. And that clarity is that Lenovo, as far as the story went on Sunday, Lenovo made a computer and just basically intentionally decided for it not to run Linux. And I'm assuming that Ryan from Lawrence, Kansas, that is what, I'm assuming that's the premise of your call, right? Correct. Hey, Noah. nice to talk to you.

Yeah, great to talk to you. So tell me a little bit about your thoughts when you first heard about the Lenovo story. Well, first off, I'm a little bit biased, you know, people should know me from the implications of that Lenovo story were, because people started coming out and saying, well, it's not really Lenovo's fault. It's Intel's fault. And so we shouldn't be raising our pitchforks and going after Lenovo. and going after Lenovo. But that story struck me totally different because it means that not a single person over there gave enough of a shit about Linux users to be like, hey, we should test another operating system on this. So let me give you some clarification, see if this changes your opinion at all. What was reported on Sunday was that Lenovo made a computer that simply didn't work with Linux. In fact, what it actually is, Microsoft came to Lenovo and said, we want you to custom build us a laptop that meets these

specifications. We want better battery life. We want better performance. We want better cooling. We want software RAID. We want all these things. And Lenovo said, said okay and took one of their existing model computers that you can buy at best buy and install linux on and it will work fine and they took that model and they called it the signature series and customized it for microsoft gave it to microsoft and then microsoft sold it through the microsoft online store that specific computer has AHC turned off by default. And so you can't install Linux on it. So my question is, my question back to you is, is that really what we're that upset about? Is that a computer custom built specifically for Microsoft and sold only in the Microsoft

store and an alternative that is the exact same model computer, but is more widely available, and that one is available to install Linux, do we really have that much ground to be upset about? I think that my feeling on it is pretty straightforward. only a problem because people who wanted to run Linux bought a computer and they just assumed, you know, Lenovo is a good brand. We, in the past, I've been able to install Linux on their machines fairly easily. And so I'm going to buy it. And it, it, I see where you're coming from. I see where you're coming from. It does kind of bother me, though, that there's a... I guess if it's made to run Windows, well, I guess that's perfectly fine.

Yeah. You know, it just... Since the revelation, I would hope that it's updated to say, you know, something along the lines of somewhere in the documentation will not run a Linux operating system. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think that buyers have the right to be informed for sure, and I definitely – I thank you for the call. I think that they have the right to be informed for sure. And I definitely, I thank you for the call. I think that they have the right to be informed. I just, I question if, and I'm the first person to say that everything should run Linux. If I bought a computer, it's running Linux or I'm not buying it. But I think when you go so far out of your way to make such a niche system for such a niche purpose, I feel like

there is just, I just have a hard time getting completely bent out of shape um and maybe that's just me and maybe maybe i need somebody to switch me more to linux make me more hardcore than i already am frank is with us from stanford connecticut hi frank how are you i'm good now what's up hey thanks for calling in today how can we help so sort of two questions, but different. First one, so over the years I've collected enough parts to sort of want to build a storage server.

Got the easy part done, a bunch of hard drives. Kind of need a controller for them. And I know that's the tricky part, especially if you're looking at CSS, so I'm trying to figure out how to pick the right hard drive controller, host-host controller for about eight spinning tests a pair each like in Western Digitals

but yeah. Sure so you're looking to build an entire file server? Yeah and I've sort of got in my head that quite possibly it may end up serving duty also doing VM work but main purpose is file server

so I already have a chassis and hard drives? So the chassis already had a motherboard, but it's so old, I'm going to replace it anyway. Sure. But my big one's like, well, I've got eight drives, and how the heck do I get them, you know, talking to the motherboard and patch experience as, you know, get a dedicated card, you know,

something that hopefully doesn't do RAID or at least presents the drives to, well, a problem with ZFS. So it presents all the drives to ZFS, and it can do its wonderful magic. Well, I'll tell you what I did, Frank, is I had a – I actually just got done building a file server in December, and what I ended up doing was I bought a case that actually had a hard drive controller built in. Now, as you pointed out, that backplane that connects all the drives then reports as individual SATA drives

to the motherboard. So there's a little PCI card that goes in the motherboard and that connects to this backplane and then those drives go in and then they're reported. Now, there's a couple of nice things about that setup specifically.

One is when I was looking for a motherboard, I could just shop for the best possible motherboard and as long as it had a PCI slot, I didn't have to count SATA ports. The second thing that's really nice about it is because all of the hard drive controlling mechanisms are handled on the chassis itself and on the controller itself on the, on the, on the case, I can do things like hot swap. So I can pull the drive out, put another drive in and let it rebuild that kind of thing. Um, and I will find, I can find a link for you and throw that in this week's episode show notes. Would that help? That'd be great. Yeah, cool. Well, thank you very much. And I

thank you for the call. Really appreciate having you. The number again, 1-877-347-0011. You give us a call and we will talk about Linux or business or computers or all three. We love chatting. And this is a super fun program. Like I said, something a little different. But I think it's fun. I think it's going well. We're going to have to make some changes to the audio setup, I think, because of the call quality.

And people, as I'm moving on from calls, people are thinking I'm hanging up on them. And, of course, it's difficult to patch both the mumble room and the callers in. My good friend Sean from Washington is calling. Hi, Sean. How are you? Hi, Noah. How are you doing today? Excellent. Thanks for taking the time to call in today. How can we help? So I have some friends back in Phoenix, and they're starting a company,

and they're building a web application. It's going to be on Linux, used open source like Django and Ansible. My question would be, what kind of business or technology advice would you want to give them? A small business just starting up that you wish you could have given yourself when you were first starting AltaSpade. I'll tell you the first thing I would tell myself is grow slowly. I actually, I probably erred. At first, I erred too far on the side of growing too fast. And then I erred, I think, a little bit on the opposite of that, of growing too slow. And so I'd say just take it one step at a time. The practical ramifications of starting a business are pretty simple. You can open up a checking account in your own name using your own social security number, and you simply open the checking account with letters DBA. That means doing business as and then the name of whatever you want to call your company.

And what you do is every time you do work or any time profit comes or any time money comes in from that business, in this case, a web application, you put the money into that checking account. And the only checks that get all the money from the business goes into that checking account and only business expenses, only things that are directly, you know, payable from the business come out of that account. And then at the end of the month, what you have left by definition is profit. And so you can take that money home.

You set aside a quarter of that to pay your taxes with, and, uh, and now you have money to spend. That's the, that's the, that's the, that's the practical tactical part of getting the business up and running. Now, as far as advice, uh, you know, like, uh, like, um, big picture type advice. One is I would stay away from any sort of debt. Um, debt in business is super, super risky, uh, business going into business, small business in and of itself is risky. And so going, uh, going into debt while you're going into business is all the more risky. The second thing I would say is the more you can increase your profit

margin, the more you can get the spread up, the better the business is going to be. And so one of the ways that I have found to make AltaSpeed remarkably successful and why our profit margins are larger than many of our competitors is because we leverage very cost-effective technologies. And so instead of buying a $10,000 Cisco IP phone system, we are running free PBX, and we have inexpensive SIP-compatible standard phones that I bought used off of eBay. And open source and Linux is a really great way to increase that spread, to increase that profit margin. You can gain a lot of traction if you leverage that software that's available to you. Another way we do it is we don't buy Microsoft Office. We don't own a single copy of Microsoft Office. We don't own a single copy of Windows 10. And so every computer that we issue to an employee, we're not paying that license fee. We're not paying that yearly fee to Microsoft. We're using LibreOffice because it can do all of the things that Microsoft offers, whether or not people want to admit that. And so and we do on all those things together have added up to a significant spread in our

profit margin. So we're fundamentally able to make more money. And the third thing, if there's if there's if there's only one piece of advice that anyone would listen to me from business, it would be make sure that you're putting a tremendous focus on integrity, because if customers see you serving them well, they are more than happy to write you a check for appreciation. If you go into it with the heart of, I just want to make a lot of money, I just want to do a lot of things to make a lot of money.

That's where I see a lot of people get themselves into a hurt because you start to lose sight of what's really important. That is, you want to be helping and serving other people well. Does that answer your question? I think I love it. Absolutely. That's really helpful. Cool.

And thanks again for calling in. It's really great to talk to you. Sean and I met actually in a hotel at like three in the morning. It was at Linux Fest Northwest a couple of years ago. And we just started talking about Linux. And we just started talking about Linux. And Sean is a great guy and has a very successful career in Linux. And we've been friends ever since.

And so it's really good to be able to chat with him for a little bit if you caught the familiarity there. Who do we have here? Frank from Canada. Hi, Frank. How are you? Oh, oh hey this will be our first international call how can we help today um okay yeah so i bought a new computer finally about a year ago an i5 with a 970 strix um asus video card um so i had a um okay in short when i install nvidia drivers the reboot goes from about 15 seconds to about three minutes

um i've tried this on kabuntu 1604 mate and um and neon Mate and Neon. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Does that sound familiar at all? It does. It sounds very familiar. And I'll tell you what, I have not had any luck shortening the boot time with Ubuntu. I had a very nice, very powerful Linux laptop, and I had the stock driver, just regular driver, and that thing booted in like four seconds flat i mean it was incredible and i think part of that was it had an m.2 driving it i loaded the nvidia driver

on that thing and it slowed down to probably i mean at least 30 seconds if not more from a from a cold boot i mean it's absolutely you know unbearable and you know part of it is i don't i didn't care a whole lot because i'm not one of those people that shuts his laptop down. I just close the lid, let it go to standby, and then I bring it back up. Lately, actually with 1604, there's actually a new bug. If you have a Skylake machine, there's a bug with the NVIDIA driver where if you try to encrypt the hard drive, you can't use the NVIDIA driver. It just won't boot. It gets to the desktop and then it just, you get that little brrm, and then you try and log in and then it just goes back to the and you can't log in the only luck i've had with getting faster boot times and using the uh the nvidia driver is using antragos have you ever heard

of antragos or played with it yeah no never played with it though okay so but um is this exclusive to 1604 the as far as i know i've got a 1410 machine and it reboots like quickly split yeah yeah i i don't have any 1410 machines i have a 1404 machine that same thing is is very fast and so as far as i'm aware it's a 1604 you know here's another thing you might try a lot of the issues that i've had in 1604 namely wireless because we all know that wireless doesn't work in 1604, namely wireless, because we all know that wireless doesn't work in 1604, have been actually fixed by Ubuntu Mate. You might try Ubuntu Mate and see if that doesn't fix the NVIDIA driver problem. Now, I don't actually have, most of my Mate desktops are machines that are a little underpowered. And so that's why I'm using the Mate desktop to begin with. So I don't have

any NVIDIA cards that are installed in any Mate boxes, but I would give that a shot. I would give Ubuntu Mate a shot and see if that doesn't fix your problem. If that doesn't fix your problem, then I would start looking at Antragos. And, you know, as I was explaining to a guy earlier today, Antragos is basically as easy to use as Ubuntu, but has all of the power and stability and flexibility of Arch. Does that help you? So you're using yum instead of apt? You're using actually a packer, P-A-C-K-E-R, instead of apt or yum.

And the command line syntax is a little bit different because there are flags. So, for example, when you go to install, like if you're installing on Ubuntu, it would be apt-get install Firefox, right? In Antragos, you would type something like packertac-s, so a little dash and S, and then you would search for something like Firefox. And then if you want to, or I'm sorry, small s, capital S, we'll search. Just a small s, we'll install. You can actually, I have a cheat sheet if you head over to jupiterbroadcasting.com click on the contact link up at the top bar and click on ask noah and shoot me your contact information so i can get in contact with you i actually have a little cheat

sheet that i use when i first started using antigos on the like the the how do i get commands going how do i get things started how do i install things how do i remove things those things i'd be happy to send that over to you if it helped you okay so i just find that on the jupiter broadcasting website yep get over to jupiterbroadcasting.com up at the top click on uh click on contact and then ask noah now he brought up something um kind of interesting he was uh we were talking uh a little bit ago about 1604 and computers that don't run stock aren't designed to run Linux. And so they've had all of these little weird things. And one of the things that I should have asked Ryan about this while he was there because he works for System76 is they have some pretty amazing machines that just work uh right off the bat with uh with linux and so

they actually in my oryx even though 1604 is problematic they were actually able to fix a lot of that and it is super appreciated and they're you know that that's not even a sponsor spot that's just that's just how cool they are they just do that thing all on their own and it's amazing okay let's see here who do we have here who's next we have eric from indianapolis eric welcome to linux unplugged hello noah great to talk to you great to talk to you too sir how can we help so i'm i'm a fellow podcaster myself on i want to start starting it back up and i want to do some interviews kind of like you guys have been doing and I've heard great things about masters I want to give that a shot but I also wondered if there's an easy way to share my desktop with the person I'm interviewing so that we could like

go over some websites or some programming code and if meet.jitsi might be a good fit for that yeah actually meet.jitsi has a screen sharing app. So there's a couple different ways you can tackle this. The first way is a lot of people use Hangouts. Now, they've discontinued Hangouts on air, but to the best of my knowledge, that regular Hangouts is still a thing. And there are a there's a disproportionate amount of people that are doing Internet communication, VoIP communication, video conferencing over Hangouts. And that is perfectly accepted.

Now, Chris likes to basically what Chris does, you have to understand something about Chris guys, Chris goes and finds whatever everyone else is doing. And he says, how can we do it just a little bit better? How can we get our video quality a little bit higher? How can we get the audio quality a little bit higher? And it's that, it's that little bit of extra silver lining, which is why Jupitercasting remains one of the largest, best, um, regular, one of the best, uh, networks out there. Um, and I'm, I'm just getting messages. Yes. Uh, regular hangouts is still a go. So that's, that's one way you can do it. The second thing you can do is meet.jitsi, which does have a screen sharing ability. And I've not tried it myself, but

everything else in meet.jitsi has worked so well that I'm going to go ahead and stick my neck out for them and say that I bet it will work just fine. Now, the third thing you can do and how we do it at Jupyter Broadcasting is there are these small little USB devices that you can buy from a company called Magwell, M-A-G-E-W-E-L-L. They're about $300 and they're on Amazon. And basically what it is, is an HDMI capture card that plugs into USB natively compatible with Linux. It actually presents itself to the system the same way a webcam would in a video for Linux device, V4L. And the nice thing about that is you can pull it into any piece of software you want. You can pull it into OBS if you're doing podcasting, you could pull it into VLC and record. You could pull it into, I mean, you name it. If Linux can see it, you can

pull that device in. And one of the things that I have done is if I am conferencing with somebody, I will take my laptop, which has an HDMI out, plug the HDMI out into the module in plug the module back into my laptop. And now one of my second display quote unquote, becomes a captured thing that I can send out of a Skype window or through OBS or through Hangouts or whatever. It just becomes another video input. So that might be something you, uh, you could take a look with any one of those three sound like they might work for you. Yeah, definitely. I think the meet that Jitsi one might be the simplest. I think my question was, I would have to make sure that they're on mute on Meet.Jitsi so that Zencastr doesn't have a conflict with that, right? off your camera you can turn off your um you can turn off your uh you know your microphone or whatever so you can you can kind of pick and choose which which parts you want to pull from

which uh from from various services yeah okay yeah i think i'll try that first but then if that doesn't work out i like the idea of having the hardware uh capture device and my primary um device for recording it would be a laptop it's's ironically a Lenovo ThinkPad, even after all the crazy crap that's happened with Lenovo lately. But it's been a rock-solid laptop for recording. I was able to take it to a conference and did some interviews there on site with a lot of the equipment that you guys have recommended, like the Electro-Voice microphone and the FreeSonic USB mixer. it's been really well done.

So thank you guys for recommending such great hardware. Yeah, yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you very much for the call. I appreciate having you. The – man, I tell you what, those Presonus stuff, that's what I'm using right now. I have a RE-20 and I have a Presonus audio audio interface and that thing is sweet absolutely sweet um and uh and and works very very well and is actually pretty cost effective all things considered i mean we've gotten to a point where you can get a pretty decent audio setup uh in in

almost no time at all now one of the things i was doing was a couple days ago i was on facebook and this guy is challenging me to switch him to Linux he's kind of like taunting me and um and and I and eventually it got to a point where I said listen I drove all the way to West Virginia and that guy was already switching to Linux uh and so if you think I won't come to wherever he and I won't tell you where he is but if you don't think I'll come to and then I said his location then you're dead wrong and joining us right now is Chris from West Virginia chris welcome back hey no how you doing long time no talk how have you been how's that school going how are those kids working out

all those kids are surprising me every day how fast they take to it what they've done with it and um the high school has already purchased, they've already got the purchase order going to purchase the machine so that we can start doing it there. So I'm really excited to see what those high school kids can do because they are just, what they do with what they've got,

if you recall, seeing what they had, they do amazing things with what they have. And when they get OBS and Linux going, they're going to knock the socks off me, I'm sure. Well, that is definitely awesome. And thank you very much for what you're doing. How can we help today?

Well, I actually have two questions. The first one's really small, if you don't mind. Sure. From a business standpoint, you know that I'm trying to start my own, and that seems to be moving right along. How well does SimpleHelp scale when you're talking large number of computers, say multiple thousands? Do you have that many? Have you seen that? I have not used it at the scale of thousands. I will tell you that their sales team seems to have no concerns selling it as a large- scale solution. So I certainly wouldn't be hesitant. I'll tell you, if I was if I was worried about, you know, if I was really worried about it,

if I if I if I really had if I had like 10,000 people and I absolutely had to have control of all those computers at some point, it does make sense to go and take a look. Another look at TeamViewer, not really. I mean, neither of them are open source. I don't think you're really giving up a whole lot one way or the other enough. Memory serves the way that TeamViewer licenses is per technician. So I think it's, you know, it's like, and it's kind of expensive. It's like 1500 bucks or $2,000 or something like that. But you could install theoretically, at least my understanding is you can install all 10,000 computers on TeamViewer. You would just be the only one to control it.

So the cost goes up as you have more technicians, not necessarily as you have more clients. Does that make sense? Yes. To toot my own horn and say I'm going to have thousands, that's, yeah, I'm shooting for the moon there. I don't know about that i think that i think that uh as i think that as you get into it i think you're going to find that if you go out there with the right attitude and you serve people a while and you're willing to charge a fair price and do good honest work i think you're going to have people flocking to you i would not be surprised if you have a thousand people that you're going to need to support well i i do support um uh somewhere in the neighborhood of

7 000 computers in the in the county school system exactly we have a proprietary microsoft thing so yeah the second one the second question okay um from your standpoint how do you convince a business owner let's say you you've taken on a new client and he's a small business owner i don't know, say five machines. And from your perspective, how do you convince him that, you know, Linux is a better, a better fix for his business? I mean, you know, you and I, and most of the people listening, obviously know that it's probably the better choice. Sure. But if I'm a small business owner and I've been using Microsoft and QuickBooks for five plus years and it's just working for me and you present this to me in my eyes, oh my goodness, I've never heard of this. This could possibly destroy my business.

How does Noah make that sale? So what I do is I approach every client with the assumption that the client is smarter than I am and they know better how their business works than I do is I approach every client with the assumption that the client is smarter than I am, and they know better how their business works than I do. And then based on that, what I do is I make my sale catered around what is going to benefit them and what is going to be in their best interest. Now, I'll stop and tell you, I don't waste a whole lot of time trying to, Now, I'll stop and tell you, I don't waste a whole lot of time trying to – my grandma used to say those who are – what's the phrase? Those who are convinced against themselves remain of the same opinion still, something like that. You can't – if somebody is dead set against something, sometimes you're just not going to convince that person. They want to be stuck in the mud. They want to be ignorant.

And sometimes you're just not – there's just not much you can do for those kind of people. And when we do initial consultations – confrontations? It seems like that sometimes. When we do initial consultations, one of the things that we mandate from our clients – and I've turned clients down for this – is they have to be willing to allow us to make technical decisions where we feel strongly see it fit and you know if i am not i am not going to be uh someone's paid monkey hands uh if you want somebody to walk in there and just do the work that you want you want done there's plenty of companies that'll do that that's not us we craft solutions for solutions for people. We craft cost-effective solutions without compromising quality. That's what, if you call our 1-800 number, that's the message that we'll read.

It'll say we provide innovative solutions without compromising quality. We take the same quality that you would get from a Wirecast machine with a $4,000 Mac, and we will build the exact same quality machine. It might look a little different, might behave a little different, but you're going to get the same result, except we're going to do it with Linux and we're going to do it for a 10th of the price. Um, and if you don't want that kind of solution crafting, we are not the right, uh, we are not the right fit for you. So to some degree you have to decide as a business owner, how do I want to sell myself and what, what kind of clients do I want to work for? And then once

you have that decided, um, then you go in and you start looking at the advantages to them. So I'll give you an example. We had a church that was broadcasting using a, it wasn't Wirecast, it was an alternative software. And basically we went in and said, hey, listen, you're doing this wedding. This is coming up in a couple months and you're going to be using this software. And the problem is like this really isn't up to being able to switch cameras.

It didn't have enough horsepower to handle the amount of video inputs we wanted. So, you know, we can throw together a box for you for a tenth of what you paid for that. And we'll be able to stream that out. You'll be able to stream 1080p because they were using standard definition. You'll be able to use USB cameras if you want like a camera angle of the drummer. You want a camera angle of the worship team or something like that. It's going to be really cheap to get additional camera angles. Plus, we can take your existing video camera if you want to use it. It's SD, but we can apply it. We can use a converter and pull that in

because that lens shot all the way down the sanctuary and hit the podium. And they'd spent a lot of money on it, even though it wasn't HD. Really, people aren't watching to get high video quality, right? They just want to see the service. And this case, it was these people were getting married and they wanted their family to be able to watch from the East Coast. And so we said, we can do all that in a much more cost-effective way, and we will increase your ability to grow and expand. And that resonated with them because then they saw and they said, oh, we could spend less money and we could get more. And that's something that any business owner is going to understand. And you have to remember, for the most part, businesses are actually easier to switch than people are to Linux.

They really are. And the reason is because businesses have a common denominator, and that is their bottom line. At the end of the day, they just want to make money. I have yet to meet a CEO. I have yet to meet a president. I have yet to meet, you know, a general manager that really cares what software is running on his computer. What he does care about is that that stupid thing stays running 24-7, that those employees know how to use that computer system, that somebody is going to be available to him when something goes down and get it right back up and um that that machine is going to function in their environment and if it meets those four or five criteria i've yet to meet a a business owner or a business manager that that really cares one way or the other and uh and so and we actually just got done doing some kiosks actually and this might be a runs linux uh this coming week um for a for an amusement park that has uh that needs to sign these liability waivers.

It was an easy sell for Linux because the cost of buying an actual computer with the windows license and site kiosk on top of that was going to be seven, $800. And to be able to do that with Ubuntu Mate, a Firefox in kiosk mode and Intel Nux was, you know, a 10th of the price. So my suggestion is,

and I thank you very much for the call. My suggestion is look at what the business is going to benefit from what things, if you were that business owner, the whole moccasin thing works really well here. Take a look at if you were in their moccasins, if you ran that business, what would make you want to switch to Linux and is Linux appropriate for those people? Because sometimes, you know, you might run into a place where you say, listen, they're an all-Windows shop. They, Microsoft, for example, people that work on Microsoft Office, if they came to me as a client and said, we wanted to switch to Linux, we want to use Linux, we want to

see what AltaSpeed could provide for you, I would tell them we're probably not the technical solution provider for them. I'd be honest with them. If your job is to support or run Microsoft Office, you're probably not going to be very happy when I set you down with LibreOffice, nor are you going to be very effective to your clients. And so, you know, there are just some situations where people are just stuck in. I want to do X, Y, Z, and I'm going to do X, Y, Z. Now, don't confuse that with they Microsoft couldn't run Linux. It's not that Microsoft couldn't get word processing and spreadsheet calculations and PowerPoints done in Linux. They absolutely could. They just choose not to do that.

And they make choices that make it necessary for them to run Windows. But I've yet to ever meet a business that if they wanted to run Linux, that it wouldn't save them money or save them resources. Now, somebody I haven't talked to in a while, this name popped up and this is really cool. Elijah from Idaho. Hey, Elijah. I, uh,

how are you? Hey, no, I'm doing pretty good. How about you? I'm doing excellent. Thanks a lot for calling in today. How can we help?

Awesome. Okay. So I've got a couple of questions and they're really similar to each other. Um, on my home network, uh, right now we're just running a super cheap $20 Linksys router that I want to replace. Now, I'm wondering, would there be any real difference between putting in a PFSense-based router or one of those Ubiquiti AirOS routers?

Is there any real difference between the firewall and that kind of stuff? So they're targeted at kind of different markets. PFSense is a really great solution if you have a very large enterprise and you need a very large, powerful level or layer three device, edge device that's going to do something for you. In those cases, PFSense make a lot of sense. I have a couple of concerns with PF sense. The first is I try to stay away from computers when I can, as weird as that sounds. Um, but traditional X 86 computers that aren't appliances, like actual computers that are just being purposed for something, even if it's by a company, um, I, I, I've had an appliance-like device fail. I've never had a router fail. I've never had an access point fail. I'm sure they do, but at the scale that we work at, I've just never seen it. I have, however, had servers fail all the time, especially if those

servers have spinning disks in them. I've seen them fail a lot. In fact, you basically count on it. We actually swap all of our spinning disks. And so the idea that I would take my entire network and base it on a device, on a single device, um, that I know is, you know, especially if it has a spinning disk, I know is going to go out in a couple of years. That has always made me very nervous. And the, and, uh, the second thing is that you can't buy a PF sense for more than a handful of manufacturers. So a lot of people are just end up building them themselves. Um, that's not a bad way to go. And I have a file server that I built myself and put free NASA on. So I suppose in that regard, it's kind of the same thing, but you have to remember when your edge device goes down, you have taken a lot of stuff out. So then that brings us to

ubiquity. Now ubiquity makes great stuff and we have a ton of ubiquity stuff and I love ubiquity. I can't see enough good things about ubiquity. It's amazing. All that said, they, the things that I like about ubiquity are that they are heavily central, centrally managed and controlled, which when you're managing a lot of sites is very, very helpful. When I think about my edge device, I mean, everything that passes through my network is eventually if it's leaving the the network is going through that edge device and so i i become very very picky at what device i'm going to to allow uh essentially trust to keep my network safe from outside intrusions and allow any of my personal traffic encrypted or otherwise uh to leave through it and so a device that is centrally

managed and a device that goes up to this controller and stuff that has always made me a little bit nervous. Now, I understand that the newer versions of the edge routers, they can function completely autonomously. I had a chance to play with one, I think itself, and it's just, it's a little web interface and you can control it and do everything that way. And so it's definitely not a bad way to go. Personally, I have invested so much time and effort into microtech that I have a hard time dragging myself away from those. You can get RouterOS as a standalone distro and play with it and learn it. And then you can go buy a $35 router that has all of the features that the enterprise grade ones do,

and then some. And then when you decide you need to move up and you've learned that interface and you've learned the web interface or you've learned the command line interface or however it is you want to manage it and you want to move up from that, now you can go buy a $10,000 Microtech or whatever the largest one is, as a 4U monster, and that is more like a computer thing. And you can go put that in some large business, but guess what? You're still using the same web interface that you used on the $35 one, the same web interface, the same CLI interface that you used on the distro that you just loaded into VirtualBox.

And that is very compelling to me. I don't know if either of those, I don't know if I made a very good case for it or not, but does that kind of answer your question or does that give you some insight or some things to think about? It does. It does. does that's great thank you and one other real question that's pretty similar is a local business hired me on as their tech guy and it's a local small business and they need to make sure that their uh home that their network for that business is secure and along with that um the guy wants to become PCI, I think it is, or PCI compliant. And so would a microchip router that you're talking about, would that do

that for them? It would. Basically what they're looking for when they talk about PCI compliance is you essentially want to have two networks. You want to have a public network that is giving Wi-Fi to people or whatever it is. And then you need an admin network that is just for the business. So we run into PCI compliance issues all the time at hotels. They have a single network and then they just let their guests go on their, their wifi network. You can't do it that way. Um, now there's, there's a couple of different schools of thought. Um, I personally totally separate the networks. I come in at the cable modem. I go into what I call a WAN switch.

And so I just plug the cable modem straight into a WAN switch. I take two feeds out of that and I go to two entirely separate edge devices. I have two Microtechs. I have an admin Microtech and I have a guest Microtech. And then from there, those networks are entirely different, are configured entirely differently. And the thing is the guest network sits physically outside of the firewall. So there is no, oops, I had them on separate VLANs, but I accidentally tagged this port and now they're joined together. There is no, oops, I had a firewall rule separating these two networks, but I accidentally disabled it or deleted it because I was troubleshooting. No, there are two physically separate devices that sit physically apart from one another. And then I, and you know, the downside is, of course, one is they are paying for two routers.

And the second disadvantage, of course, is that we're managing two devices. But in the long run, I think that's a way better way to go. The only downside to doing it that way, or the only problem with doing it that way that I've run into is every once in a while, you run into an ISP that won't assign you more than one dynamically generated address. And so then they have to pay for statics. Um, typically that's not the end of the world because if you're doing anything remote, you're going to want static assigned addresses to those devices anyway, because if you ever need to make a change to them, it's really nice, especially in your case where you live out in the boonies and you're commuting into work.

Very, very nice to be able to just SSH into those things and restart them, you know, or make changes to them versus having to actually drive out there. But most of the ISPs that I've worked with, if you just put in a switch to the cable modem and it will split out those two, those connections and give you a dedicated guest side and a dedicated admin side. Hey, great question. Thanks a lot for calling in. A couple minutes left in the show. If you want to call in 1-877-347-0011. That's the number to call. And we're talking about Linux and technology and of course, personal life and business.

Now, hey, Ashley from Ottawa, Canada is joining us. Hi, Ashley. How are you? Not too bad. Hey, Noah. Long time listener. First time caller Hi, Ashley. How are you? Not too bad. Hey, Noah. Long-time listener, first-time caller. All right. How can we help today?

I'm not sure if it was Linux Unplugged or the Linux Action Show. You guys mentioned that if you know most of what, not obviously as much as you or your coworker know, but if you know most of what you guys are talking about, that you should be working with Linux. your coworker know, but if you know most of what you guys are talking about, that you should be working with Linux. I just got accepted to college for CompTIA certifications and stuff like that. They're trying to push Windows, and I really just want to work with Linux.

Can you suggest just, like, going to, like, Linux Academy or getting in material and stuff like that and studying for your certs as a way of getting into Linux itself, like the industry? Sure. So I think that anytime you look at spending any kind of money, especially something like college, you have to look at it as an investment. So what you look at anytime we do an investment is we want to look at the return on our investment. Anytime we do an investment is we want to look at the return on our investment. If I buy a laptop for my business, if AltaSpeed writes a check for my laptop, we look at the return on investment for that laptop. If we spend $1,000 on that laptop, will it fundamentally enable me to make more money than it costs thus by returning on its investment?

And the answer unequivocally is yes. The more places I can get work done, the more efficient I am, the more efficient I the more efficient and the more money this place makes right that's just the way it works and so uh and so yeah uh we we want to look at the we want to look at the return on investment and if you look at college as a return on investment you say how much money am i spending i'm spending thirty thousand dollars i'm spending fifty thousand dollars and what am i getting for that fifty thousand dollars well a couple of things if you want to work in large corporate environments, a lot of those places, you won't even get your foot through the door if you don't have a degree, right? They'll just ask you. They'll say, what's your after high school experience? And if you don't have something to put on those lines, they don't even look at your resume.

The second thing we can get from college, though, is real skills that are applicable in the workplace that will fundamentally make you a better better at what you do. So I have a degree. I went to school. I learned things in school, both on the business side that let me sit down and look at our books and I can instantly get a picture of what my company is doing, as well as on the technical side. doing, as well as on the technical side, I learned, you know, networking things and subnetting and stuff like that. And so when I went into the industry, I could walk in and I already had an understanding of how some of those things work. Now, is that saying that you have to go to college to work in IT? No, no, it is not saying that at all. In fact, arguably more people are hired and the preference in this industry is on certifications and being current. Because one of the big things that I see that drives people out of the industry or that doesn't get them hired is people will walk into a job interview, but they'll walk into a place that they want to work

at and they'll sit down there at their, their, their resume and they'll say, yeah, I learned red hat five. Okay, great. So we're using red hat seven soon to be eight. What do you know about red head eight? Well, I don't know anything about Red Hat 8, but I know Red Hat 5. That's useless. That's useless to me. As me as an employer, that's a useless thing to me. I would much rather have somebody sit down at my desk and say, listen, I don't have any formal education. What I have studied the material that's there and I am very comfortable in making things happen. I am very comfortable in achieving the goals that Linux Academy has set up. And if you give me a production environment, I can go out there and I can do the kind of work

that you need me to do and you let me work for a couple of weeks for you and I'll show you, I can make you more money than I cost. I'll hire that guy in a heartbeat. In a heartbeat, I'd hire that guy. I can't speak so much for Canada. I would assume it's similar to the U.S., but in the U.S., most people are not working for large corporate firms.

Most people are working for small business and small business cares way more about can you get the job done than they do about what your formal education is. done than they do about what your formal education is. So what I would encourage you to do is I would sit down with a guidance counselor at the school, or I would look through some of that material or the courseware. And I would say, is any of this material valuable to me in the workplace? And is it something that I can't get other ways? And if the answer to that question is yes, and if the answer to that question is I need to know Cisco networking so that i can go get this job making seventy thousand dollars a year and so if i spend thirty thousand i can make seventy thousand well that would be a good return on investment if if you go to college and you and you say i want to go learn about a linux server administration or maybe you maybe you go and learn about windows

system administration because that's where the next job is and that's that's how you put food on the table while you work towards the goal. Taking a step back so that you can take a step forward in the future, that's an okay way to go, too. Is that something like, because you're a huge Linux enthusiast, and I'm the same way, but would you suggest doing that, like actually taking the time to learn the Microsoft stuff just to put food on the table until you can get into the Linux industry? No, I guess I wouldn't suggest, I wouldn't suggest, I mean,

I will do it. I will say this. I will do whatever it takes to, uh, to feed my family before I let them starve. So if, I mean, I'll work at McDonald's before I let my family starve. However, that said, I don't, I think that the paradigm that you have to either work for a company that uses windows or use Microsoft products, or you won't have a job. I think that is a that's a false paradigm because so many people are hiring Linux people right now. is smart and talented. We have people that, you know, and we have other, there's other employers. There was a guy just wrote in, I think three weeks ago, four weeks ago, he wrote into the Linux Action Show and he said,

I am looking to hire some Linux guys and we're dry. We cannot find Linux guys. So can you give me some contact information for some Linux guys? And so I made a plug on the air

and people that wrote in their resumes, I forwarded off to him. Yeah, I remember that show. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, there are very much people

looking to hire Linux guys and they're so desperate to hire Linux guys, they'll even hire them remotely. They don't even care if you move. They just want Linux guys. So I think you can easily make $70,000, $80,000, $90,000 a year working in a Linux career. But I guess what I was saying was,

if you have to take a step back, if you take one step back so that you can take a step forward, that's an okay thing to do. You just want to make sure that you're moving in back so that you can take a step forward, that's an OK thing to do. You just want to make sure that you're moving in a direction that you're comfortable with, because if you're like me and you don't want to be working on Windows for the rest of your life. And I started working on Linux. I started working on Windows. I started working on Windows in a help desk and it about drove me crazy. And so and you don't want to be you don't want to be that guy.

You don't want to be myself 10 years because you about want to kill kill yourself so uh so yeah but does that answer your question yeah it does and uh yeah you guys are like rock stars to me so keep up the good work awesome enjoy this new show well thanks we really appreciate having you and thank you very much for the call uh just a couple minutes left if you want to get in 1-877-347-. Um, let's see here. Who do we have here? I'll tell you, let's just stop here and talk about, uh, talk about Linux Academy, right? Linux Academy is Linux Academy is the, it's interesting in 2016 that I would get that call. I would get the call where somebody is talking and I have to think about it to give them an answer, mind you, where I'm asking, do you want to spend $15 a month or

do you want to spend $30,000 a year? And if you spend the $15 a month in about six months, you there's you have a reasonable chance of obtaining the same skill set as somebody who spends $30,000 and goes to a liberal arts education system. Of course, you're not going to be liberally arts educated. You're not going to take basket weaving and music therapy and whatever other classes you got to take to actually get a whatever else you have to take to get the degree. But you're going to learn the same skills and those skills are valuable in the marketplace. And it gets even cheaper if you are a Linux Unplugged listener because we have a code. If you go to LinuxAcademy.com slash Unplugged, they're going to knock a couple bucks off. And I have done all of my education in the last two years strictly through Linux Academy. And I'm comparing that to doing actual like red hat classes i've done both and i know which one i like better i like being able to sit in my skippies at night drinking a drinking a a coke watching the linux action show but that's that's self-serving i don't watch myself but

watching tech snap and uh and uh and and doing linux academy on my computer in their in their you know bite-sized pieces. It's a really valuable way to get an education. And I've said it on last and somebody was bringing it up here. You don't have an excuse not to have a good Linux job. You don't have an excuse not to be doing what you love. You know, that's an old quote, right?

You do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life. Honestly, I swear to God, I don't feel like I work, guys. I don't feel like I work at all. I feel like I wake up every morning and I get to go out and play with Linux all day, every day. And part of that is because I have the skill set to do it. And part of having the skill set is going to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And while we're talking about advertisers, I'll just tell you something. It makes me so irritated and sick when I see people that complain about advertisers.

I was listening to a radio show. I recently got back into Sirius XM and I'm really following the political election. And in this election or in this show, this guy is talking and he makes this beautiful point about the Constitution, this absolutely stellar pinpoint, perfect point about how we need to we need to get to a point where we all agree on the rules to which we're going to govern society. And it's just it was a beautiful point. I just I was so interested in the show and I was so interested. I'm like, that's a great point. And then he goes, have you upgraded your underwear lately? And I went, say what? You know, I did one of those, one of those, you know, German Shepherd cockeyed, you know, the tilt the head thing. What? And I'm like, what? What did he just say?

Underwear? Have you upgraded your underwear lately? Let me tell you about underwear, blah, blah, blah. And then he goes into this ad and all i could think about was my god that man just took x amount of dollars and then talked about underwear on his political show because somebody paid him to do it that is such a weird thing and it is so jarring and and and weird that i i don't even want to listen to the rest of the program because he's talking about underwear and it has nothing to do with the program. And frankly, I don't really

want underwear advice from a guy I'm listening to politics. It just doesn't make any sense, right? If you guys could see, I mean, you know how valuable Chris's hair is and he pulls half of it out stressing over which advertisers he's going to take on the network. He is anal retentive when it comes to who he will allow to advertise on the network. And the process, the way that Jupiter Broadcasting does advertisers is so much different from every other show I have listened to. It is absolutely, truly unbelievable. And the way that it works is he goes and finds products and services that serve him well and that he's been using for years and have provided him great value.

And then he goes and says, you know, it'd be really great if I could go tell the audience that wants to hear my opinion on technology, because let's face it, the man is pretty well versed in technology. He spends every waking minute researching, reading or trying technology says, I'm going to go share those opinions with people. And because he's not an idiot, he capitalizes the heck out of it because you would do that, right? If you have an educated, formed opinion that is a positive reflection of a business and you're going to go give that opinion on air, you might as well get paid for it. That is a basic fundamental function of business is when you're good at something, you don't do it for free. And the fact that people find a way to complain about that is unfreaking believable to me. It is unfreaking believable that people have

the audacity to complain about it. What's further unbelievable is that the same people that complain about the ad reads are not the people that are on the Patreon contributing to Patreon. If you want to not hear ad reads on the shows, then the Patreon should be like double or triple of what it is because this network has to be funded somehow. And right now those advertisers are funding that network. And by the way, those advertisers are providing an extraordinarily valuable service that you're lucky to know about. I was before I got on this, before I walked up those stairs down this hallway and sat down in this chair to do this show today, I was in the middle of troubleshooting when I've had the worst week of my life this week, as far as ultra speed troubleshooting goes, because we've had a ton of like nitty gritty problems that I had that

require my attention. And I don't like to do that. I like to, I like to be the, uh, the, um, you know, the manager. I like to sit and have the techs go out and do the work. And then I just kind of check things off, make sure that things are going smoothly. Occasionally I poke my head in something that I find fun this week. It hit, we've been so busy. I've had to devote my energy to fixing dumb little problems that I don't want to be fixing. And just before I got up these stairs and sat down to do this program I had just finished setting up a new phone server for someone and I didn't have time I didn't have time to go provision an actual box and set it up and coordinate all that stuff and so I took a

snapshot of a of a stock phone system that I have set up with generic extensions and I used their imaging thing to create a droplet from that image. And I had a phone system up and running from start to finish with the trunks configured the whole nine yards in like 30 minutes. I mean, it was absolutely unbelievable. And using the code D O unplugged, you're going to get $10 off your Linux rig. So in this case, it was a $5 rig. I'm going to get two months of that file server for free, or I'm sorry, phone server for free. I won't even pay for it. The fact that I'm telling you that the fact that we have to explain why this is valuable to you, that you can, I'm charging that client, by the way, $75 an hour. And we build based on a templated thing. So if,

if, if, if to set up a phone system system from scratch i don't know what exactly it comes out to be but whatever that is whatever that time thing is that's what we build the client and then when we go back if i can find a way to shorthand that and shorten that up a little bit guess what maximizes my profit maximizes my spread and i make more money doing that and i'm doing and all of those innovations are happening because of digital oceancean, not because of anything I'm doing. It's because of what they're doing and I'm able to resell. Absolutely incredible. Just absolutely unbelievable. So there.

There's my rant for Average. And I'll tell you something else, too. Just before I'm done. I'm almost done. But before I'm done, my phone. I am leaving for an international trip. I'm going to take my Ting SIM out. I'm going to go buy an international SIM. I'm going to put it in my phone i am leaving for i i'm leaving for a for an international trip i'm going to take my ting sim out i'm going to put go buy an international sim i'm gonna put it in my phone and then i'm gonna have phone service wherever i am because that's going to be because i because ting doesn't

charge you for what you don't use and so you can go to you the the ability to just pay for what you're using, the ability to own your own device is unbelievable. And it's the same appeal as Linux. It's the same appeal as being able to own my own computer and doing what I want with it. Now I've extended that to my phone. I just I it is it just it makes my brain hurt to think about, like, why this is controversial, why we have to explain this to people, why that's not like painfully obvious that this is like an amazing thing. But if you think if you're one of the people out there that say, oh, they just do those ad reads because they pay the network, you are 100 percent wrong. It has that that is that is a very small fraction of what contributes. It's the it's the complete other way around. We serve people by providing them with valuable information and we happen to find a way to capitalize on that. And I'm not done yet. I'm almost done, but not quite done yet. One last thing. The other day I was driving out to my buddy's house and we're having a conversation about phones and he's talking about how he bought this phone on on his whatever

network and now he wanted to get a different phone but he wasn't sure if he wanted to stick with the same service provider and he's like well i'm trying to decide what service provider so i can decide what phone to get and i'm like that doesn't make any sense dude just buy the phone you want and then put it on whatever service provider you want you know i'm used to ting and he says no i can't do that this one only activates here this one only activates there and i'm like listen dude here's what you do you go to ebay and we bought him a nexus 5 and he got it for like 85 and he activated that sucker on ting now what i do is i actually keep ting sim cards on me at all times so i can give them out to people so i

had him a ting sim card we activate it and he went over to linux.ting.com. And that got him the promo code. He was able to activate his phone on the Ting network. Now, the great thing about that is, because I know that he's going to end up sticking with Ting, because the fastest way to decide to stay with Ting is to go try somebody else. And then you realize how much more you pay or how crappy the service is, and then you come back. So if he wants to leave, though, he's not locked into Ting. He can go over to AT&T or he can go to T-Mobile or he can go to name a GSM provider. He can go to those places.

And then when he either gets sick of paying $190 a month for his phone service or he doesn't have reception anywhere, then he'll decide to come back to Ting. So linux.ting.com, you'll save a couple bucks and you will own your device. You will own your service. You'll only use for what you pay. You go on a trip out of the country, you don't use your phone for a couple of days, then you don't pay for those couple of days. Only pay for what you use. linux.ting.com. That's all I have to say about that. Okay. Zachy was on hold, but

you got dropped there and you have a question about setting up your wireless? Yes. So I'm about to purchase a Toyota motorhome that I'm going to strip out and redo, and I want to make it smart. I travel up and down the coast from Oregon down to Arizona. And what I want to do is make it so I can park, like, you know, like in a Walmart or wherever and hook up to their wireless network but not have to hook my devices up directly, have my own, like, separate wireless internet inside the vehicle. Okay. The audio cut out in the the last can you give me that

last little bit again okay um what i want to do is set up a wireless um basically have wi-fi boosters on the outside okay of the mobile home gotcha so that way i can have my own network on the inside and don't have to hook my devices directly up to their system or go into the building itself. Gotcha. There's a great device for doing something like that called the cradle point. And basically what the cradle point is, is it is a hardware device that connects to a wireless network and then has its own router built in and then its own access point built in. And so basically you can connect it via hardline or via wifi to any network you want and all of

your devices connect to it. And then it becomes to any network you want and all of your devices connect to it and then it becomes your router and edge device and all that stuff and then your connection to the internet it can be either wireless or wired um it connected whatever you want so if you're you know you're mooching off the neighbors that would work chris for example uses the cradle point in his rv so when he travels from rv park to rv park he connects the cradle point then to whatever the wireless system is there, or if he's parked at JB, then he plugs in. Um, but all of his devices inside just talk to that cradle point. Would that end?

Would that, uh, would that help you? Uh, yeah, that would help me, uh, quite a bit. And I just want to let you know, thanks for all you guys do. I, uh, ended up finding a computer in the dump and I switched it over to Linux. That was like my first step. I had an expired Windows card and then I went and purchased a couple of Elite books

and they're running Linux Mint beautifully. So I just want to thank you for all that you do and keep up the good work. Cool. Well, we really thank you for the call and I appreciate having you. It is a lot of fun. I can honestly say

this might be one of the most fun things I have ever done on the network is doing these calls, hanging out. I love answering questions and the thing is, people are asking me for my opinion today and I have to tell you, I am an expert on my opinion um

i i know everything there is to know about my own opinion it's it's kind of incredible but uh but this has been a lot of fun and i really appreciate you guys taking the time to call in and hopefully we were able to provide some meaningful answers to you i'm gonna take a couple more calls i'm gonna go to is it goffin from Chicago? No, Goran. Goran. Hi, Goran. How can we help? Hi, Noah. Nice to meet you finally over the phone. Long time listener, first time caller. I do shoot you guys an email every once in a while. I hope I'm not bothering you too much. No, not at all. I do have a question. So I do run a small, I think consulting. I support local

small businesses. I use Linux distros mainly for phone systems and file servers and stuff. So I do wonder what can you recommend as like a customer database? It doesn't have to be fully open source. It doesn't have to be fully free. I'm fine with a small monthly charge so I can keep track of all my customers and then all the hardware that I have installed at their network, a lot of credentials for servers, for searches, access points, and stuff like that.

Sure. So what you're looking for is what's known as a CRM or customer relation management system. ERM or customer relation management system. And, um, there's a couple of them out there. Um, there's a, there's also ERPs that are out there. Um, I actually am just, it's funny you asked this. It really is because I actually was just, uh, taking some time to investigate this for myself. Basically we have, we have reached the end of what I think we can reliably provide for our, meaningfully provide for our customers. I think we are serving them as good as we can possibly serve them. They don't have a need that goes unmet. We have a 120-minute response time, and so things are going great. And so my next thing is now I want to help more people. I want to expand out.

I want to do more remote management. I want to I want to do Wi-Fi and more hotels. And part of that is going to involve provisioning, if you will, a sales team. I need people that will go out and sell these products in addition to me because I need to spend my time working on the actual business. And so I need people to continue sales and continue to move the business forward. But I also need to, because I'm a control freak, whatever you want to call it. I like to keep track of all these things. And I like to have a, I like to wake up and sit down in my office.

And I like to have an idea of at least an idea of what all of the people that work for this place are doing, because after all, my name's on the building, I want to know. And so I have looked for a CRM. And basically what I've come down to is Zermo, Z-U-R-M-O. It is an, it is an open source CRM that is completely web-based. So you could spin this up on something like DigitalOcean and it would cost you practically nothing. And this will allow you to track your customers, track your sales. And, and so basically what we are going to use it for is we are going to use it to focus on

customers. Because one thing you have to get right, there's a difference between serving somebody and annoying the heck out of them. If we go into a hotel and they have crappy Wi-Fi, and so they are losing hundreds of dollars a month or thousands of dollars a month, because these days Wi-Fi is just as critical as hot water. And we go into that place and we say, These days, Wi-Fi is just as critical as hot water. And we go into that place and we say, for $5,000, we will go through and we will increase your revenue by $2,000 a month because you're going to have that many more guests because your guests demand Wi-Fi. If we can do that, that is not bothering somebody.

That is not selling. That is not the stereotype of selling somebody something it is, it's serving somebody and we are taking, we guess we're going to get paid for our efforts and, but we are going to make you more money than, than we cost you. There's a difference between doing that and then just cold calling places and saying, hi, I'm Noah with all the speed and I want you to buy my wifi. You know, that, that is not a, that is not helping. That's just annoying somebody. And so there are little things you can do. For example, you know, when you go in and talk to somebody, you say, well, how do I, you know, can we follow up?

Can we follow up in a couple of days? Can I give you a call? If they say yes, then you're not bothering somebody. It's not harassing somebody to call them back two days like you said you were going to do and follow up with them. And if they say we're not interested, then, you know, you move on. not interested then you know you move on um but we need a way to track who has been called who hasn't been called because sometimes you walk into a place and you say i'll do xyz and it'll cost you xyz and they say yeah that's great and now they're waiting for you to come in and do the thing that you promised to do and so you need a way to track that um and so that's kind of what we're doing at

the cm does that sound kind of similar to what you're looking for yes i was hoping that a web-based crm would be the solution i tried some of them and vms on my vm host at home like v tiger sugar crm and some others but most of them look like way over complicated for for my basic needs at the moment so yeah i haven't came across dermal but i'll be definitely installing it tonight and i'll check it out for sure yeah check out check out dermal i think you'll find that's uh that's a pretty decent one to go to uh and it's definitely the one that altispeed is going to look at and um i will follow up as either an app pick or as maybe a show episode idea about that later hey if you haven't heard we do this show every week well ch, Chris and Wes do the show every week. This week, they're out on location filming interviews, so they're not here. So that's why I'm filling in. And we would like your I would like your opinion. I would like to know how you thought this show went. If you like this segment, if you want us to do this kind of episode again, Chris and I are talking about spinning this off as its own show.

It would be a call in show. I assume that I've done an OK job hosting it and that he would let that continue. But that's basically what we're looking forward to. And we need to know. So head over to Jupiter Broadcasting dot com. Click on the contact link. Choose Linux unplugged from the drop down menu and let us know what you think. Mostly just as this is a show, this is not going to replace Unplugged. I sorely, sorely apologize to our mobile room. I was told early on in the

episode that basically they can't hear what's going on from the calls. There's no way to tie those in, so I need to have a bigger mixer to make that happen. And, uh, but we, we very much value your contribution and you guys taking time out of your day to be here and the show will return to its regular format next week. Um,

but if this is something that was fun, if you had as much fun with it as I did, or you didn't get quite in, didn't get to ask your question, would like to do that in the future, then, uh, drop a contact link and let us know because we would love to do that.

I'm the co-host of the Linux Action Show. That's every Sunday mornings at noon on Sundays. That's Pacific time. A special thank you to Rakai, our video editor, Michael Tonell, our producer, and everyone at Jupyter Broadcasting who makes this show and every other show on the network possible. And we'll see you back here next week. Thank you. All right. Now that that is over, I am, let's hear it. Do, do, do, do, do.

I didn't, here's the thing. If I would have seen somebody from Germany, anyone that's calling, especially from Germany, I would have taken, I get, uh, here we go. Jay. Uh, hold on. Let's see if i can pull this up jay jay from germany do i have you yeah you asked me hi hi i'm sorry i'm glad you said something in the chat room i the thing is it doesn't tell me i have to i it the way that it works it doesn't go in in any specific order just kind of goes in the order that people called in and i've got like 15 calls in 15 calls that I haven't gotten to, but we're literally 40 minutes over what a show is. And Rekai still has to edit this thing and get it out, so I had to wrap it up.

But I will answer your question now that we're off and I'm done recording. How can we help? Okay, thanks. I just wanted to ask, how much pain is it changing from one main Linux distro to another? So are you locked in like with Microsoft, or is it harder or less hard? Because I fear I'm currently locked into the Ubuntu system. Yeah, so I, you know, it's funny, it's really interesting you ask that, because I have actually just gone through that this week, I have switched from an Ubuntu based distro over to Antragos. And what I have found was that it actually isn't that bad, most, especially when you go from a very well supported Linux distro to another very well supported Linux distro, you don't run into a lot of pain. You know, anything that's available in Ubuntu is pretty much available in Antrigos. Now, where it wouldn't be so smooth is if you went from something like Ubuntu to Fedora. I love Fedora. I think Fedora is a great operating system. I think Red Hat is the best Linux company out there. And if that's not clear, let me say that again. I think Red Hat is the best Linux company out there there but i don't think that they're

i i don't think that they have a desktop offering that uh that fits exactly what i'm looking for these days and that is that a rock solid desktop operating system that's designed for a business class system that i don't have to do anything with for a couple of years um but even knowing that even knowing that how much i love red hat the company and i've been a fedora user since version one there are some things that i just never could get to work right in fedora gns3 which is a network simulator when i was doing my networking certification would not run in fedora so i had to run ubuntu in a virtual box inside of fedora to run gns3 that might that change. Yeah, I know it's ridiculous, right?

That might change now. No KVM? Yeah, yeah. But five years ago, six years ago, that was the case. GNS3 would not run. Herupad, to the best of my knowledge, there is no precompiled binary. There's no RPM or it's not in any repo. You have to extract and run the actual binary.

So if you go to an uns you know a less supported less used linux distro you might run into some of that um but yeah if you if you stick with main distros uh i don't think you're gonna have a problem at all so no problem switching to arch not at all no i think you're gonna be fine in fact i think you're gonna i think you're going to be fine. In fact, I think you're going to find that your experience is a lot smoother on Arch. So it's just going to be a reinstall and copy files, or could I do this even in a more or less hot-like state where I install the new system onto the old one? Well, I don't know that you can cop, you know, if it's just a folder full of binaries, it would, it'll probably run. And if you copy over something like your home folder, you might keep your bookmarks and

stuff like that. In general, I would probably expect to have to reinstall your programs and reconfigure things. I don't know that you're going to be able to quite that seamlessly smooth over. But I guess what I mean is all your programs are going to be available. If you have any database files or personal files, you'll be able to back those up and restore them without any problem. Things like your Firefox bookmarks or Chrome bookmarks or something like that.

Yeah, you could move a home folder over. That wouldn't be a problem. But yeah, I don't think you're just going to be. It is possible. Google actually swapped their Red Hat servers for Ubuntu without ever even turning them off. They literally swapped like one file at a time. Yeah, yeah. And they made a presentation about it and it was wicked cool.

So I'm not saying it can't be done. It is definitely possible. It's probably 10 times more work than it would be just to back your stuff up and reinstall. But I don't think you're going to find that to be overly burdensome.