LINUX Unplugged - Episode 174: Mesh of Thoughts | LUP 174

Episode Date: December 7, 2016

We ponder the implications of Fedora possibly going rolling & LTS, get schooled by the mumble room about the state of linux on the Raspberry Pi & debate about the effectiveness of mesh networkingPlus we talk about Clonezilla, one of our favorite backup tools & more!

Okay, all right. So I want to talk about tools that we can't live without. So today started a very interesting day. I woke up and the first thing that happened was every device in the house is going off with alerts. And the alert was that my kids are not going to school today because they canceled school. Okay, all right. That's fine. not going to school today because they canceled school okay all right that's fine and then the next set of alerts were all of the places that are closed the city offices and stuff like that

and then the alerts after all of that were in our ticketing system where a bunch of businesses were like well we're not open today this would be a great day to rip out key parts of our infrastructure and replace it because we're not going to be using them. Of course. So, yeah. So my day is, you know, quickly filling up. And I thought, OK, well, I need to prepare for Linux Unplugged today and I need some time to get everything set up in the studio. So I'm going to get my car. I'm going to go drive to the studio and I'll take care of that. Well, I step out of my front door and my foot just goes about a foot down.

And there's a foot down. Yikes. A foot of snow, yeah. And so I'm not taking my car. I'm going to go to the Jeep. Take the Jeep, go to back out. I cannot get out of my driveway because the snow plow has come down the street and pushed all the snow that's in the street into my driveway. Nicely building a blockade for you.

Yeah, now I can't get into the driveway at all. So I think, all right, so I'm going to go start the snow blower, and I will blow out my driveway. Nicely building a blockade for you. Yeah. Now I can't get into the driveway at all. So I think, all right, so I'm going to go start the snowblower and I will blow out my driveway. Then I will get into my car. Then I will drive to work and then I will fix all the problems so that I can then go start Linux Unplugged. Snowblower doesn't start. And there's something wrong with the carburetor. So I'm not going to work on the carburetor in, you know, 15 degree weather with 40 mile an hour wind buried in snow. You drop parts, you lose them. So I take the only thing I can do is I take the snowblower into my kitchen, which my wife is thrilled about.

So I'm disassembling this carburetor in my kitchen. I clean the carburetor. I get everything put back together and I'm not going to take it outside and test it only to find out something doesn't work and bring it back in. Right. Like bundle up just to go outside, test it. Yeah, exactly. So I put some gas in and doesn't work and bring it back in. Yeah, right, like bundle up just to go outside, test it. Exactly. So I put some gas in, and I start it up, and it starts right up.

So I did a good job fixing the carburetor, but then it dawns on me that exhaust is going, and just like every puff is just filling the kitchen. Well, I don't want to shut the snowblower off, because I just spent three hours getting it started. So I take my snowblower running through my house and push it out the door. Blow out the driveway. And eventually I end up – a bunch of other bad things happen too. Right.

That was obstacle one of many. Yeah, that was obstacle one of like ten. Right. But it made me start to think, what are tools that we can't live without? Today for me, it was a snowblower. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 174 for December 6th, 2016. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that fought the weather, sacrificed a laptop, and built a computer all within the last hour to be here with you today.

My name is Noah, and joining me remotely from Seattle this time is Wes. Hey, Wes, how are you? Hey, guys. I'm doing great. It's a pleasure to be with you here. Thank you for being the host today. Okay, I'll be honest with you. I appreciate the effort you took to be here, but let's be honest. I put in more effort to be here today. I do think that's fair. It sounds like you had quite the day, Noah. I almost died. Like, basically, death followed me.

Death almost followed me. That's bad for the network. At every turn. It was crazy. Do you know what I am excited about, though, Wes? I bet it's our giant show today. Our giant show that revolves around Linux. And specifically, Fedora.

We're going to be talking about Fedora and some potential changes they're making. Now, these are speculation. It's just speculation at this point. There's no confirmation that any of this is going to happen. And it is possible that matt miller might stop by uh we spoke with him and he thought he might have some time and so he might be here with us later in the show to talk about some of the speculation and what fedora is up to so quick recap i have been a fedora user since version uno since the very first basically forever yes that i i was using red

hat back when it was red hat and then they did the split and they did rel red hat enterprise linux and they did fedora and i was there when that split happened and i have used every single version of fedora from fedora one on up now somewhere around fedora 2021 ish somewhere in there the direction of my company started to uh to to push me in a direction that required me to use a little bit more ubuntu and so i hate distro hopping uh inside of my own home i hate having one computer that works one way and one computer that works the other way in different software it's hard to have that inconsistency in your day-to-day life. It is.

And when you sit down to do something, I want things to work the same. And so I had kind of moved myself a little bit away to Ubuntu, but my main big workhorse downstairs always ran Fedora. The thing I did most of my work on had always run Fedora. And recently, I wiped every computer i owned uh at least that i use personally and put arch on them you can follow that in the linux action show we talked about it a couple different times some of the some of the challenges i ran into but i still i still had a fedora machine and um upgraded that recently to fedora 25 and again you can check out a review of fedora 25 in linux action. But my real reason for going to Arch over Fedora was the update cycle.

And I got a lot of criticism from that. A lot of people wrote in. They said, you're complaining about the Fedora six-month support cycle, but you went to Arch, which literally has like a one-day support cycle. I mean, every day there's new updates and you have to push them, right? So it doesn't seem to be very consistent. The problem is, and I spoke about this in our last review of Fedora, I don't trust their updates. I don't trust updating from one version to the next, upgrading, I should say. So for you, it then means a reinstall.

It does. It means Nuke and Pay. And the obvious problem with doing that is I don't have time to Nuke and Pay my system every six months or every year even. I could do it every five years, but I'm not willing to do it every year. In fact, really, to be perfectly honest, I'd probably get a new laptop every five years. Yeah, right. So I have always wanted Fedora to go to an l an lts like version and there hasn't and at the same time there's a lot of people that have been pushing for the fedora project to go the rolling uh style which i have questioned because i don't know where fedora would fit in then you know especially, especially when you kind of compare that to Arch, right?

Right, it might change its place in the Linux distribution ecosystem. The folks at Red Hat will tell you that Fedora is bleeding edge. And I don't agree. I think Fedora is leading edge, and I would classify something like Arch as truly bleeding edge. And so to take Fedora to rolling, I don't know that that makes a lot of sense, but I know there's a lot of people that would like to see that project take that route.

Now, Matt Miller wrote a phenomenal post on a mailing list here. And basically, he talks about how he's really pushing for a change in the release cadence of Fedora. And if I'm understanding this right, and I've done a little bit of research, if I'm understanding this right, there are two major changes that would be occurring. The first would be that Rawhide is going to become the gated rolling release, and the release will deviate from it by stability and life cycle. This is essentially what Soos has done with tumbleweed and leap respectively so my understanding is they're going to break it off and have essentially two fedora versions uh he goes on to write and he says what if instead of a two-year release cycle we updated the uh the the core on a cycle aligned with the kernel so roughly roughly every three months, and had just one June

release of Fedora, Workstation, and Fedora Server every year with an optional one update in November or December. Fedora Topic would keep its two-week updates as a rolling release. This seems huge to me. I'm interested to see what you think, Wes. It is a very different model of how to do it. I do kind of like that cycle aligned with the kernel. It seems to work well for the kernel community. Obviously, there's a big difference between a distribution and releasing the kernel, especially not

necessarily the LTS kernel or anything like that. But I do appreciate how much Fedora represents Linux Next on the desktop, in the GNOME world, like that um but i do appreciate how much the fedora represents kind of linux next you know on the desktop in the gnome world a lot of things like that uh system tools that you know they had systemd early they have wayland now um and so it would kind of i i could see myself doing that you know it's not quite the burden of arch it's not it's not that model but it does give you fresh packages fresh kernels it seems like a really good thing to build a workstation where you're willing to update, but you want new tools and you want the new hotness.

Right, right, exactly. And the thing is, and I struggle with this from time to time because sometimes I struggle to really articulate why I value this. But to me, there is an inherent value in having a company that's backed by a billion dollars or more, really. I think they're approaching two billion, or they've made two billion, backing the Linux distribution that you're using. And if I could go into a client and say, look, because, I mean, here's the reality. We can fight about distributions all day long. Nobody has ever gotten fired for putting RHEL on a server. In 2016, they are like the IBM of computers.

Fifteen years ago, you bought an IBM computer and you sold somebody IBM computers and you stuck them in their office. Nobody ever got fired for doing that. That was a very sensible, solid choice. And RHEL keeps that. There's an expense associated with it, but it's a good sensible solid choice and rel keeps that there's an expense associated with it but it's a good solid choice from a technical perspective now if i could go into a client and say look you have you know whatever 15 20 you know the university of new york dakota for example has a cluster of red hat servers right if i could go in there and say look

you guys are running red hat on these servers the same same company will back a distribution that is designed for the desktop. One of the things I hear all the time when we have this discussion is, well, why don't you just use Red Hat on the desktop? Why don't you just use CentOS on the desktop? And the reality is the distribution is not tailored for desktop use. It's not easy to install things like VLC. It's not easy to install things like, you know, I don't know specifically because I haven't tried. I know VLC is a huge pain point, but it is just not optimized for desktop applications because it's not designed to be a desktop operating system. It's designed to be a workstation. Sure, right.

Yeah, work fine maybe where you're, instrumentation for a scientific tool or machine tool, but not for something that end users need to use. They might need to use the tool of the day, whatever's popular. You know, calculations, stuff like that. That workstation will do fine. Photo editing, video editing, installing Lightworks, for example. We're talking about

that in the pre-show, right? Installing Lightworks on CentOS, I will get no help from Red Hat because it's... They're going to say that's not what it on CentOS, I will get no help from Red Hat because they're going to say that's not what it's for. And I will get no help from EditShare. So we can rule out using Red Hat on the desktop except for extremely rare circumstances. We need a enterprise-grade desktop, though, that we can use. And right now, I don't feel like we have it. That should be the promise of Ubuntu. But every release of Ubuntu seems to be getting worse. Either they don't move forward at all, or in the case of 16.04, they break key components that I

need to make the desktop work, i.e. wireless. I don't have wireless in 16.04, and that wasn't fixed in 1610 so the prospect that fedora would be moving to a a system in which we would have two versions one would be kind of lts like and the other would be rolling seems brilliant for a couple of reasons one of the things that originally drew me to fedora was that i could find out what was going to happen on the server on my desktop first and play with it and experience the pain and then watch those problems get resolved. And then when it went into production, we were all ready for that. If I could do the same thing, I could run rolling on my laptop, but put my clients on the LTS version or whatever they call it. That would be huge. That would be game-changing.

And I'll make a vow right now, Linux unplugged, at 4.37 in the afternoon Central Time, if Red Hat decides to do this, even if it's a year or two-year support, it'd have to be more than that, though, because I can't reinstall every year. But if we could get anything above two years, I'll switch every computer I own back to Fedora. 100% of them will run Fedora, and 100% of my servers will continue to run CentOS.

What do you think, Wes? You know, that does sound interesting. I'm also struck by some parallels in terms of some of the benefits here. They talk about more time for QA and release engineering. And I know in the software industry, we have seen that as well, a push towards continuous integration, a push towards continuous delivery, where you're adding, you have small changes,

but you're iterating quickly. But when you make those changes, they're fresh in your mind, you can go fix them as soon as you notice problems. So that strikes me as something that may be beneficial. I don't know what we'll see out of that LTS, but I could see if they're continuously working, they're getting better, and then are able to kind of cherry pick,

all right, here we go. This is a great stack that we've got ourselves on. We found ourselves in a really good place. Everything's working well. Support this for some time. It might work better than the release model now, which it seems like maybe they've struggled with a little bit. They're not always released. We've talked

about on this network a lot about after a couple weeks or a month, then yes, it's really solid. You've got everything that you can use. If we can get away from that, it seems like it'd be a good thing. I agree. MumbleRoom, what do you guys think? It kind of sounds like the same thing OpenSUSE

has been doing for a year. Yeah, it does. What do you think about this? So you are or were an OpenSUSE user. I believe you're using KDE Neon right now, right? Yeah, I'm using Neon now. What do you think of the comparison between the company that backs SUSE Linux

and the company that backs Fedora. How do you draw that parallel and say, well, how do you view that and say, well, I trust this company more than that company or I think this company does a better job at paying attention to the community than that one? Where do you fall on that? I think they both are pretty close in community aspects

and I think they're both fairly large in the sense of different parts of the world. Red Hat's more North America, whereas Europe is more dominated by Sousa. But the only thing I would say that makes me slightly hesitant of Sousa versus Red Hat is that Red Hat is owned by Red Hat, and Sousa is owned by who knows any of that right now. It's like Novell was purchased them and then that was then sold again. It's kind of weird that slight hesitation

from that, but other than that, they're both solid in the same ways. Except for also, Fedora is not using rail packages. They even say that they're not using RHEL packages. They even say that they're not compatible with each other. Oh, yes, right.

OpenSUSE is actually using SLE packages. So you kind of have the more enterprise workstation-type desktop with the OpenSUSE approach. I'll be very honest with you. About the time, and I'll tell you exactly when it was too, Fedora 15, about the time that they started to do this split where Fedora was no longer really going to be what the next version of RHEL is going to be, or, you know, a couple versions, because RHEL, you know, a couple years in between. About that time that they made that switch was about the

time that Fedora started to become less appealing to me. And as a system administrator, that was something I really appreciated. So I thought that they gave up something huge. But at the same time, I think that it reflects well on Red Hat as a company, that they are willing to let the Fedora team, the Fedora project be its own project. It's not just the beta grounds for RHEL. It is its own distroro it's its own project and so i i think that reflects well on on them though from a corporate business i need to make money and this was a this was a tool that i used to facilitate that i was a little unhappy about it do you think that seuss is becoming any less relevant actually i think seuss is becoming more relevant specifically

for their their switch their their infrastructure of the Leap and Tumbleweed approach. Before those happened, which has only been a year, they've only had two Leap releases, 42.1 and 42.2. And that was only like a month ago they had the second release. Actually, less than a month, like three weeks ago. release actually less than a month like three weeks ago so they haven't really they've they've been coming much more and more uh getting attention and like just more relevant in the community because of this massive change because it's it is revolutionary at the time and it's still it's it's kind of like getting people to consider other things and especially like their infrastructure of like open qa like there are people from Fedora saying that it's amazing and they would love to use it,

but it doesn't work for their stuff, so they don't. But if more people hear about the stuff that OpenSUSE is doing, it's just going to continue to improve in their market share. Do you think that those changes that they're making and and the uh and the ability to to run that rolling or or or run a more of a stable platform do you think that that increases the saleability so to speak to businesses like if you're a new business you're a new business you're starting up do you think that gives them a competitive advantage over

other distributions absolutely because well not only in certain cases like as far as like server stuff uh when you're if you're going to use slee that you can use you can have that connection between your desktop and your enterprise like in your and your servers and all this other things so you can have your personal desktop or you can have a rolling desktop that also uses slee or and also some parts that slee uses parts of tumbleweed and things like that. Like it's a really interesting, um, infrastructure that they're doing.

The only problem in, in, in the open SUSE case is that leap doesn't have very long support. Like it's, I think it's a total of 18 months, which it sounds good, but it means that once a new version of released, you only have six months to update. So that's kind of lackluster, but overall it's still better.

It's not five years, but at least it's almost two years. Would the argument that you could try on the desktop and run on the server not also stand true for fedora workstation and fedora server and ubuntu desktop yes uh more ubuntu is more in line because like the server packages and the desktop packages for ubuntu are essentially in the same repo in the same compatibility structure whereas fedora they split stuff off so that you you that if you're going to use Fedora server, great. But if you're going to use CentOS or Red Hat, not really. Right, right. Yeah, there's definitely a difference. You know, when we were doing our review of how to pick a distro, which is the last episode of Linux Action Show, Chris and I did.

And, you know, I think really that was one of my favorite episodes I think that we've ever done. I think that because both Chris and I come at it from very different perspectives um and it was interesting that we both kind of gravitated and arrived at kind of the same conclusions which kind of gives me a big head and i i say to myself well clearly i think we're doing something right i think we've landed on the right way because somebody that I very much respect his opinion has arrived at the same conclusion. And one thing we didn't really get to was I had divided that post out. He basically asked, how do you choose a distro? And I said, well, basically, I would divide that out. Desktop users, server users, power users, development users, and specialty distro users. And we focus then on desktop distributions because that's what the original post was asking. But, you know, I think

server, picking a server distro has an equal amount of questions. And I think the conversation that Michael and I are having right now really exemplify that. I think there's a lot of good reasons to choose RHEL. I think there's a lot of good reasons to choose CentOS. I think there's a lot of good reasons to choose SUSE. And one of the arguments that i have made to every client and you know basically if you ever watch the if you ever know somebody that's in the military and they uh and they were they were assigned a specific weapon system a lot of those guys will go buy similar weapon systems when they get home to shoot um because they're very comfortable on it they were trained on it and they're very accurate with it and and

this that and so forth and i've had conversations with them and i would say why would you use that particular rifle in this particular scenario it doesn't seem like it really fits very well and they say well i'm very comfortable with it and that actually kind of rings true because i started on red hat and so i'm just very comfortable with Red Hat. And so when I go in, anytime I set up a server, it's just Red Hat. And one of the things that works so well for me is being able to go into a client and saying, hey, listen, I tell you what, this is a project that you want to do. And so I'll give you an example. We were working with the University of North Dakota and they wanted to do this chemical calculation server. So basically,

the way it would work is the students would submit these chemical values and the server would do all of the crunching. Now they bought like this $28,000. I mean it was crazy, just crazy. Custom built. Everything was just amazing. And they were trying to decide if they were going to contract with us to set this particular server up. And I said, well, listen, we have a lot of experience, probably more than anyone else in the Grand Forks surrounding area in setting up Linux and working with Linux. And I will tell you that not only is this possible, but we can we can make this we can make this amazing for your students.

We can put it on a on a public network and your give it a public IP and your students will be able to access this box from home and submit their chemical calculations from home, submit them from anywhere. And they said, we don't know about that. Is it secure enough? Is it really going to work? And I said, all right, I tell you what I'll do. I will give you for the first month, I will give you a server to use. And they said, you have a $28,000 server. And I said, well, not exactly.

But I tell you what I do have. I have access to some really powerful machines and i will give you access to one for free for a month and you try it and if it works then you call me back and i will come and i will come set your server up the exact same way and they said oh okay that's great when can we get that rolling next week next month and i said no right now i'm gonna do it right now for you So I opened my laptop up and I went over to DigitalOcean.com and I used the code word DO Unplugged. And they gave me $10 credit. Now, I had to buy a pretty beefy rig because of the sheer amount of bandwidth that we were going to use and the sheer amount of CPU power that we needed to use was going to be incredible. So I bought a pretty beefy rig.

It didn't really save me a whole lot. But if you're doing something like a Plex server, or if you're doing something like a simple FTP server or a web server, maybe you want to host your own blog. Or you're connecting to our IRC room and you're using Quazzle, you want to have a Quazzle core up there. It's perfect for that. Exactly. As long as you're not using it for production so it doesn't crash, you at quasal not digital ocean you would be you'd get two months out of that because you can do it on a five dollar rig and if i'll tell you what let's do this let's sign into my let's sign into my account right now and let's see how many rigs i have and which which ones they are i i would say the majority of my rigs are $5 ones.

And the reason I say that is because most of the things I do are pretty simplistic. So let's see. Now, this is my personal account. This is not our company, my AltaSpeed account. So let's see here. We can tell. So any of these that say $5.12, so that's a $5 server. That's a $5 server.

That's a $5 server. That's a $20 one. That's a $5 server. That's a $20 one. That's a $20 one. The amount of work I'm able to get done with just a $5 rig is incredible. So head over to digitalocean.com. Use the code word D-O unplugged and get yourself $10

off. You have no idea the world that you are entering into with hosted VPSs. If you've not played with VPSs, you are missing out on a whole spectrum of Linux. You think you like distro hopping and you think it's fun to do it on your desktop just wait until you can do that with a click of a button and if you use the ub keys then that's really where the rubber meets the road let me tell you because i literally i click on no as ssh key and then all i have to do is uh type in the ssh command in my laptop and it prompts me for a pin i enter a four digit pin no emailing me the password which you know they cc the the nsa on that stuff too right like anytime anytime those anytime a password goes over the internet like basically the nsa is grabbing that it's terrible it's terrible so uh

use the yubi key way better i want to talk about something that I came across that just made me sit back and go, huh. I, as I said earlier in the show, I recently switched to Arch. So you can imagine my reaction when I saw that Rasp Arch is going to be a thing. Arch Linux on the Raspberry Pi 3. And it ships with Yort, which is an important distinction. I'll get to that in a minute. If I have a Raspberry Pi, usually I am putting Raspbian on it, right? That's kind of like the go-to of the Nubes installer or whatever.

As an Arch user, being able to choose one distribution and run it on everything now that has been extended not only just from my servers to my laptops now it can go on a raspberry freaking pi michael were you going to say something yeah uh alarm is as arch linux arm already exists. Well, but was there a Pi image? Yeah. Was it easy? It's been a Pi image since the Raspberry Pi B.

Are you telling me that Arch for the Pi has existed and I didn't know about it? Yes. Well, that's embarrassing. Technically, though, it's a separate distro. It's not actually made by the Arch Linux group, but it's the Arch Linux. Arch's not actually made by the Arch Linux group But it's the Arch Linux Arch Linux has an agreement with the Arch Linux ARM project

To use the name so they are In conjunction but they're not officially Like Arch Linux is not powering it So it's more like Let me ask you this Did it come with York installed or Packer Any of those No

It comes with the ability to do those yes Yeah I mean yeah Let me ask you this. Did it come with York installed or Packer? Any of those? No. It comes with the ability to do those, yes. Yeah, right, right, right. So when I first started using Arch, one of my biggest mistakes was I wasn't aware of some of the package managers that were out there. So I was downloading these files and extracting the thing and doing the make and all that stuff, right? And after use, one of the things I appreciate about Antragos and one of the reasons I use Antragos instead of Arch proper is because it handles some of that stuff for me.

It comes with Yort installed. I don't really like Yort, to be honest. It asks me too many questions. But I can simply open a terminal, type Yort, TACS, Packer, enter. And then once I hit yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, yes, yes, no, no, yes, no, yes, no, no, yes, yes, no, no. It's ridiculous. And they have to bounce between.

Like, I wish I could do all of the edits first, and then do you want to continue last so I could, like, get into the habit of pressing no a certain amount of times? And yes, they don't do that. Once I get packer installed, then I can just, you know, move on. And yort makes it very easy to do that. I think that all Arch systems, if you're not actually doing Arch from scratch, like the way that you're supposed to do Arch, I think it should include a package manager of some sort. And particularly on the Raspberry Pi, where it takes a long time to compile stuff,

I feel like that's a big, big, big advantage to have just a built-in package manager. What do you think? I just checked. Yoward is not available on Archonics ARM or Alarm, but Packer is. Oh. Packer's in the official repos?

Yep. Nice. And being completely honest with you, I'd actually, I would only use, York to me is only useful to get Packer on there. Packer is really what I want to use. Now let me... Let me just skip this step.

Let me draw a contrast because I have a feeling you're going to be on the other side of this and I think that's a good thing. Seuss has also announced that they have images available for the Raspberry Pi. specifically Seuss Leap. And when I first saw this, I guess I was honestly, if I'm being frank, I was a little confused.

part of it is the you know the article goes on just it goes in here and it says that um having a stable code base for leap images which provides fewer updates than the tumbleweed for the raspberry pi 3 gives people stability and expands opportunities for those who are wanting to use the raspberry pi for home automation i am wondering how many people are concerned about stability from a $35 computer? Am I missing something? Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I would use Debian if I was caring about stability.

Right. Well, so that's a conversation all in itself, right? We're using Leap. But I understand the argument for using Seuss on the server. It wouldn't be necessarily what I would choose to do. I don't necessarily think it has enough advantages to pull me off of Red Hat, but I could definitely see it if Seuss was already in place or if you're a business starting up and there's, you know,

you have somebody, you know, you hired a system administrator, maybe he knows Seuss very well, or maybe Seuss happens to be the predominant server platform that a lot of your competitors are using. And so a lot of the industry software is written and works very well. And, you know, there's a number of arguments where I can make to see how Seuss works in the enterprise. I am really not getting it. Why somebody would want to run Seuss on a, like what the compelling reason to run Seuss on a Pi other than, well, because we can, which is a perfectly valid reason. I think you answered it earlier when you're talking about, you know, that analogy of people leaving the military. There are people who like to use,

you know, Seuss in production. And so, you know, if you're also starting to do things like using pies to automate around your office or in your home, you know, that's probably what they're most comfortable with. And then now you have an option. I think it's also just nice in the, just the aspect of the arm, I don't know for you, but the arm world still sometimes a little weird for me, or, you know, it has different paradigms.

There's different things available. So the more sort of parity between like the x86 world and the ARM world where, you know, I have the tools and distributions I like here. And I kind of expect, even if that's a wrong expectation, I expect to be able to use them in the ARM world and the Pi world. And so this kind of just goes a little way towards that. Hurricane Hernandez, am I pronouncing that right? Yeah, you got it.

Okay, so as you guys know, I'm one of the main packages for Envy. And when I became a developer, I mean, I started distro hopping and somehow ended up on Seuss because I just couldn't get packages that were up to date on Debian or Ubuntu. Now, when you bring Seuss in ARM arm i think suce becomes even more relevant because of obs the power that obs gives you is to compile the packages and anything you're working on their system which means you're not bogging down your pie now i understand arch and i understand hacker and if i'm correct yeah i meanR, most of the time you're compiling those packages on that Pi. So that's going to be taking a hit on your system. That might take days.

Right, right. So I think that's when SUSE now becomes even more relevant is if you're using a low power system. And OBS is there and available for free to every user. That's slick. I like it. That's a good point. I guess I can see that. I guess I can see that from both a comfortability standpoint and just a drop-in desktop-like,

everything is just ready to go for you. So essentially, I go to work, and I work on SUSE servers, and then I sit down at my SUSE desktop that's provided me by work, and so when I get home home I can use that same operating system. I guess that makes sense. You can also do custom builds on OBS. Hmm. So you can have a company

specific stuff being built for you or something like that. Does so here let me twist it a little bit. So I guess all of those arguments make sense from a desktop standpoint. Do we think that those arguments stand true if we're talking about a home server? Is it still important to have all of that familiarity? Because, I mean, you have to think about it.

The Raspberry Pi world is kind of its own bubble inside of the Linux ecosystem. And so a lot of people that are making something that works on the Pi, they, you know, typically, you would use the distribution that they're using, right? And you're probably not going to run more than one service on a Raspberry Pi. One service is right taxing it, to be honest.

So if you're using a, you know, whatever, a home automation controller, would you not be using whatever distro the home automation controller people are using so that you kind of stay in sync with them? Am I off? I mean, you may want to.

If you're using it as an appliance, yes. But I think there's also, you know, that does happen, and I think you see those in wider distributions, but it seems like, at least to me, that the majority of people who pick up one or two Pis, you know, they're just playing with a couple things. They want custom projects. Maybe you're writing a little home homebrewed script to run something

that prints out or sends you messages or whatever. And in that case, you might just want whatever distribution is easiest for you to run that code on. And also people say stuff about how the Pi is not as, like, you only can do one thing. That's not true. I mean, you can have a sync service activated and you can have a full

desktop with, like, Raspbian. You can have a bunch of other stuff working. I mean, I have a Pi doing that and it's not even the newest one. It's like the Model B before the B Plus came out. Nice. You know, I have a problem with the Raspberry Pi.

Not really with the Raspberry Pi, but what I call the misuse of Raspberry Pis. I think the Raspberry Pi is a great educational tool, and I think it definitely has some production value, and I'll give you an example. We have a client that has a PBX phone system, and there is an RS-232 serial output

that basically dumps every console thing that occurs. So every time somebody places a call or receives a call, that call gets spit out to RS-232. Well, basically the client wanted to log all of that information. And so attaching a PI and pulling that serial output

and just dumping it to a text file was trivial. In those kind of circumstances, I think it works really, really great. But I have some reservations. A while back at the Linux Action Show, it was featured a Raspberry Pi that was being used in a medical device, right? And I think that we have begun to stretch the limits of what the Raspberry Pi was intended for and what it is capable of. And that is an opinion that formed after having a very deep discussion with Jason, who is one of the, he's an Archarm guy, and he just, he lives, eats, and breathes ARM architecture.

Loves it to death. And can tell you anything you want to know about every device ever made. This guy knows more about ARM devices than people will make. I mean, he's incredible. And he was showing me some of the different ARM devices that are designed for commercial applications, that are designed to be used as embedded servers and this, that, and the other.

And I have noticed, even on a small scale, that if you have a Raspberry Pi, it doesn't seem to run for more than a year or so without running into some sort of problems. And I'm wondering, Michael, specifically specifically have you experienced that um no not really no so how long has yours been in production how long have you been using it um off and on but i don't have them all the time because i don't use it like the syncing is all the time i've only been doing that for about six months but i've been using the same Pis. I have two Pis and they're both the same version and they're both very old and I've been using them without

any kind of problems at all. But you've reinstalled? On one of them, yes. The other one is still, one of them runs Kodi and I haven't reinstalled that one. Oh, that's interesting. Well, maybe it's time for Noah to update his opinion. I think maybe, Noah, where you were coming from is, you know, it's like you can't really do something where you need throughput.

It doesn't make a good file server. You wouldn't edit video on it. But there may be some things where you really just need the lowest common denominator of Unix system. I mean, I tried what I thought was a pretty simple thing, which was I wanted to run a Quasar server. Didn't handle that very well. Then I tried it just as if anyone's familiar with open emr it's it's not anything it's not terribly complicated basically a web server with a with a database back end and uh it wasn't like it was in production or anything with a lot of

users it was just me me my wife we were both uh we were both uh trying and she does billing for the for some of the clinics that i do it support for um And we tried it between us and couldn't handle that. It would crash. I'd get a year out of it, but a little bit after that, it would crash. And so it just kind of turned me off from the pies. And I was actually voicing that frustration to Jason. And then, you know, that's kind of where that whole conversation transpired. But you guys are giving me a new hope.

And I'll tell you kind of what that hope is. It's that these small arm devices, you can combine them with other little pieces of hardware and produce very, very cool things. So you were talking about a USB serial port. One of the things I've always thought about doing is taking one of those Raspberry Pis and combining it with one of those USB GSM modems. And then heading over to Linux.ting.com. I can't get over that URL. It's such heading over to linux.ting.com. I can't get over that URL. It's such a great URL. Linux.ting.com, where they'll give me basically three months of service for free

because they're going to give you $25. And I have so many Ting devices. I would load it on here for you, but it wouldn't all fit on the screen. That's how many Ting devices I have. I've got my mother on Ting. I'm on Ting. My wife's on Ting. Got my dad on Ting.

And then I have all of these other things. I call them auxiliary devices, right? Like my laptop has a GSM card in it. I would love to put a GSM card in one of those little USB modems and have a full functioning, all-in-one or desktop computer that has its own connection to the internet man would that be nice to have inside of the shop or even here in the studio if i needed to check on something i wanted to check to see if the stream was up somebody reports an issue says we can't get the stream sure be nice to have a secondary internet connection just

just to check that and the thing about thing, they only charge you for what you use. So if I, I'm not going to make any calls off my Raspberry Pi. I'm not going to use any voice minutes. So I pay zero. And I'm not going to send any text messages. I'm not, you know, the idea that people still send SMS in 2016 is ridiculous.

Exactly. No stickers. If you have MMS, which is really kind of a, you know, screwed up version of SMS, then you could use you could send pictures there's a stupid character limit 140 characters have you guys heard me it's like sending a telegram and not the good kind of telegram have you heard me on any show do you

think i could express any thought at all in 140 characters or less this is ridiculous anyone who knows me knows i'd blab on for hours this This episode of Linux Unplugged that you're hearing, it probably took Rekhi seven hours to cut out all of the inconsistent babble that occurred throughout the usable bits. I can't say anything. And so the fact that people still send text messages is ridiculous. Move on to something like Telegram or Viber or whatever you use. Don't use text messages. So that's going to be zero. The only thing I'm going to pay for is the data I use. And Ting's data rates, they started out crazy good,

and now they've gotten even better. Do you have somebody, one of your friends, are they bragging about their Google Fi? Well, now Ting has as good, if not better pricing. And let me tell you something, you don't have to buy some super special $600 phone to use on Ting. You can buy any unlocked GSM device. Me personally, I bought my last device from Best Buy. I walked into Best Buy. I went over to their unlocked phone section. I picked out a phone.

I walked up to the register, and I paid for my phone, and I walked out, and I had an activated phone. In fact, the guy at Best Buy actually put my Ting sim in to it. And then we had a discussion about how great Ting was. It was kind of cool. You can buy unlocked phones on Amazon. You can buy phones on Ting's site. You know, right before Chris took off, he was talking about how great it would be to buy a phone for your loved one or even for yourself for Christmas.

Now, I'll tell you something. Here's a little here's a pro tip. See this where it says nine dollars for the sim? That's not that's not what you paid for a SIM. If you wait, Ting runs dollar SIM specials, dollar SIMs. You can get a SIM for a dollar. So I ordered 20 of them because why not? And now I hand them out to people. And I actually, yeah. And I actually I actually handed one out to a viewer. So linux.ting.com, the coolest URL ever, and save $25 off your first device or your first... I'm going to say if you're using it as a test phone or if you're using it as an auxiliary device,

you'll get three months out of that, $25. And because it's only $6 per line. So make sure to check them out. And a huge thanks to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. I hear a lot of talk about mesh networking, and I'm really going to be interested to hear your opinion, Wes,

because I know that you do a lot of system administration. What do you think of mesh networking, specifically wireless mesh networking? I have yet to actually participate in one, but I eye them with much interest. I would like to. It just seems like a very interesting idea, sort of as a people's network, if you will,

or even just for isolated communities or otherwise. And just, it may not always be the most efficient design necessarily, but having all the nodes be able to talk to each other, have this sort of network that you can dynamically add things to, build, take away, reshape as you need to, and have connections be resilient, it seems like it could have a lot of places, especially as we do more IoT things, you have more connected devices all around in many different places. I will tell you something. I'm going to burst anyone's bubble that is really

excited about mesh networking, particularly over wireless. It is not scalable and it is the most inefficient use of bandwidth known to man. your neighborhood and one guy's gonna pay for the internet connection and he's gonna send it to you and you're gonna send it to the next guy and he's gonna send it to the guy after him and you are living in a pipe dream it is never gonna happen it never works it cannot work it is it is so inefficient you can get two or three hops or maybe four or maybe five and then and then it's dead so uh what if the goal isn't perhaps efficiency? What if, you know, in some use case of any communication or connection or signaling is better than none? I'm going to say, and William, I'd be interested to get your take on this. I'm going to say by the ninth or tenth hop or twelfth hop,

somewhere in there, I'm going to guess it's totally unusable. Is that fair? It's kind of hard to say depending on the latency of all the links. I mean, you take many hops through the internet, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to do many through the mesh network. Yeah, but you're not after 30 hops, it'd be bad.

Right. We can pick a number, but you're bottlenecking every step of the way down, right? Like, at some point it comes to a grinding halt. Oh, absolutely. Well, you're adding latency every single step of the way down, and you're adding more point it comes to a grinding point. Oh, absolutely. Well, you're adding latency every single step of the way down and you're adding more potentials for congestion and all sorts of stuff.

So yes. But what I'm saying is like the guy at the top, if he has, let's say, you know, a 10 meg link and now the guy below him has, everyone has a 10 meg link, but the guy at the top is funneling everyone below him's traffic. So, you know, if you're third in line or whatever,

like everything that's below you is getting passed through your network and ultimately hits your upstream pipe. The very concept is impossible. It can never work. You're talking about some kind of centralized architecture, I think, where you have a small pipe way upstream and you're getting funneled into that, but it doesn't necessarily have to work that way.

It could be a mesh network where there are many paths through the network and based on congestion avoidance algorithms you pick different paths well a company claims to have figured this out a this article comes from the wire cutter and basically this is the best wi-fi mesh networking kits for most people and they basically went through and evaluated a bunch of these kits and they settled on the netgear orbi which they say is the best for most people and basically what it is is it's a kit that you can put access points all over your house and have mesh networking so basically you plug the first one into a router and then you put these little hops all over your house and then you can get this supposed perfect wi-fi network okay so these are the localized mesh networks like an ero or the google whatever wi-fi thing yeah i i i think that's what

they're comparing them to yeah yeah ero yep okay um which i admittedly will you probably have better success with than uh trying to do like a you know like a neighborhood network which is what i hear about yeah i was thinking this is way different than your larger scale mesh network of you know like a neighborhood network which is what i hear about yeah i was thinking this is way different than your larger scale mesh network of you know maybe thousands of nodes where this is only going to go to like four or five maybe right maybe ten i i think that you'd have i think you'd have better luck here's the thing these are all pretty low bandwidth nodes this this could definitely screw you and depending on what parts of the spectrum they use to transmit between each other this could actually be pretty slow can you dive into that a little bit? So I think for the Google Wi-Fi, you can actually wire them all up like a normal

access point system, say like your unifies or something. And then you don't have any of the bandwidth sharing problems. They're all separate APs and they all connect back over a wired interface. That wouldn't be a mesh network though. No, it wouldn't be a mesh network, but it would achieve the same purpose, which is to cover your whole house in Wi-Fi. So that's kind of where I was going with this. If we live, at least here in the United States, where we have Western construction homes, I have yet to be inside of a residential construction where I can't get access to the attic. Sometimes it means cutting a little hole out of the sheetrock. But you'll just patch that up later. It's fine. You could, or you could simply just put a little door on it and then you have access to your attic, which I don't know why you would not want access to your attic.

It is – Cat 6 is so cheap and I mean so – I mean we're talking two, three cents a foot, if that. Why would you not just run wires in your house? Why would you – Because you don't want to tear up your walls or your ceilings or whatever. It may be easy in some types of construction but in others – and some people just aren't capable of dealing with it or don't want to hire a contractor or whatnot. Or they value their time. It makes it easier to just take all these nodes, throw them next to random power outlets, and kind of spread them throughout your house, and then have them all automatically connect to each other and go back to one central point. It doesn't make any sense.

You know, it's the wireless range extender all over again right but more easy to manage setup so you don't have a separate router from a separate wireless range extender it's all the same device and it just configures itself for you how'd those range extenders work out they were terrible but that's not to say with five gigahertz band and everything it couldn't be better today because you have a lot more wireless channels to deal with. And as long as you place them somewhat close to each other, you do potentially have more bandwidth too. And your far away nodes may only need, you know, like 20 megabit. You're not trying to do like gigabit rate file transfers across all your mesh network.

You're just trying to like access Facebook in these cases. It's definitely targeting a very simple user. definitely targeting a very simple user if you're if you're hooking up internet of things i'm guessing that might be useful to have something that's not not not the big the best for bandwidth but you know that'll cover your your millions of devices i yes uh and to address everyone in the chat yes wi-fi kind of sucks and wired is better, but sometimes, and depending on your technical capability, you don't have a choice. Yeah. And sometimes one is good enough and you don't really, you know, diminishing returns would get you to wired and you really don't need it. Yep. I'm going to go ahead. You're

just using Facebook. We can, uh, I guess we can, what's the old saying? We can agree to disagree. I don't think there is a time when i would i could look somebody in the face and tell them uh you know i mean if if you're looking at what like what we charge through uh structure wiring i bet we could easily do you know an average 2500 square foot house i would say 200 bucks 250 bucks to to to drop some to put in some put in some structure wiring and put in some access points. I just, I'm not seeing it. I'm really not seeing the... That's your cost.

Yeah, exactly. You're going to be paying a contractor thousands of dollars just to get there. No, no, no. Come on now. A licensed contract? I just, I mean, I pay an electrician to come in and run service. They're going to charge me, not for the materials, but for the time. Right, but that's different, though.

You need a licensed electrician when you're working with 110. This is low voltage. There's basically, other than you can't share, so electrical wiring has to be strapped every two feet or three feet or whatever it is, right? And you can't share a strap with low voltage. But aside from that, there really isn't a lot of regulation

on where you can throw low voltage wire. You can go up in an attic and throw it around if you want well but you're gonna have to pay more for plenum wire technically to be within code for a lot of places that make it easy to run if you're not actually yeah if you're not strapping yeah well you i mean you i mean you know you can buy plastic i did the janky thing i bought really cheap cat six and i ran it through plenum space through air ducts and i don't care but i'm gonna have to rip that out at some point if we sell the house. Right, right. Yeah. So I mean, I don't know. I don't know where you live that you think it would be thousands of dollars to have somebody come put some low voltage wiring in. But I got to tell you, I mean, I've I know I know a lot of people in the industry and people that do this all over the country.

I know a lot of people in the industry and people that do this all over the country. And I think $500, especially depending on how big the house is, I mean, really, I could cover a 2,500 square foot house with one, two, maybe at the most three access points. And so three runs of wire and then down into a basement or out into a garage or something like that into a punch panel, I'm not seeing the return on investment for what you're going to pay for what you're going to pay for this system and for what you're going to get out of it versus hiring a professional to come and drop some wire in and then you put your access points and the great thing about putting wire in is you can go and upgrade the access points and you got you got an all-new system you know when it goes from 802 11 n to to G, or sorry, the other way,

G to N and then to AC, I just replace the access points and I'm good to go. I don't know. I guess it works for some people and if you're looking for a cheap solution that doesn't require much, I guess maybe that's the way to go.

Anyway, I don't know. It might work for some people. I am not into – there's a line I will admit where – I'll give you a great example. There are times when I'm willing to take less because overall sometimes less is more. A great example of that is when I am going to do my – what I'm trying to keep up to date with things that are happening in the field. It's very difficult for me sometimes to stay current on some of the things that are happening in the field because we don't use everything, right? You know, I work with some technologies and not others. How do you stay current with that stuff how do you stay

up to date and typically what i used to do was take a week off of work and drive to minneapolis which is the the closest place to me and enroll in a basically one week training session. And what I'm doing nowadays is heading over to Linux Academy. And basically what Linux Academy is, unlike this mesh network stuff, Linux Academy actually provides the same quality of education that I would get if I was at a training session.

And I know this because I have done the in-classroom training and I have done remote training. i have done the in-classroom training and i have done remote training i have done all of it and the i paid twenty six hundred dollars for an instructor to sit and uh and teach a class remotely i took it remotely and i remember you couldn't attend the class the instructor was he was doing it in his house, but he didn't invest in a good quality microphone. And so it basically sounded like this the entire time he was talking. Well, that's just great.

It was terrible. I could listen to that for hours. As a person, the speakers that are in my basement that I listen to my music on are Sunfire CRM2 ribbon speakers. I mean, they're $1,800 per cabinet and they sound incredible, right? So as a person who can appreciate that kind of quality, I'm not, I'm not, I don't demand like a perfect system, but oh my God, dude, go to OfficeMax and spend $35 on a Logitech headset and you would sound better. And it was so distracting. I had a very difficult time

comprehending the material. Well, Linux Academy is these instructors are true professionals. These are the people that they live, eat and breathe Linux and better yet, they live, eat and breathe teaching. And if you use our, if you use our website, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, they're going to, they're going to make it even better because they're going to make it cheaper. So I guess what I'm trying to say is this is your opportunity to get the same quality for a fraction of the price. Instead of spending $2,000 or $3,000, you can spend $20,000 or $30,000. And you'll come home with the exact same thing because you'll get the same skills. Learning is really what you put into it, not necessarily what you're pulling out. And so, you know, I always say

knowledge is the one thing people can't take away from you. People can put you in prison. People can take away your money. They can take away your possessions. Something that you learn is something you have for the rest of your life. So add something. Yeah, this Christmas season. Maybe you can buy it for somebody else, too. That would be a nice thought. Paying it forward.

You know somebody that wants to make a career transition? Maybe buy them a membership to Linux Academy. That's a great idea. Yeah, I thought so. Would you appreciate that? Heck yes. Everyone would. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. So one of the tools I wanted to talk about that I don't think gets nearly enough attention for the amount of money that it has made me and the amount of hassle that it saved me is Clonezilla.

Oh man, I totally agree with that. Right? I tell you what, I bet you, just right on right on the spot wes tell me the last time you used clonezilla uh that'd be like two weeks ago i think i don't know it seems like at least i i can't go with like six months without using clonezilla or thinking that i could use clonezilla or wanting to use clonezilla and being upset that i don't have it on me i will also just say clonezilla is just anytime you have an antergos live cd or anything else, Pac-Man, DSS, CloneZilla, it's there. You have Wi-Fi.

You have CloneZilla. Mount, you know, SSHFS something, and then you can just take a CloneZilla of anything. Anytime I get a new computer, I get a new upgrade, anything, just bam, take an image of it, store it away somewhere, delete it in the year if you don't need it. But then, you know, you always can go right back to where you were. So we actually have a small USB hard drive that is in a bag we call the imaging bag. And we have computers that go in at client locations. And the first time we set up that computer, we take an image of it. And so when clients buy computers after that, instead of having to install and set that up every single time, we just take that client's image and dump it onto their computers.

Then when they upgrade and we go to, you know, like we had a client that went from 12, they just upgraded from 1204 to 1604. Then we make a new image and then we roll that image out. And it's been absolutely incredible. It's a tool that I couldn't live without and I would pay thousands of dollars if that's what it costed to keep using it because I need it. The good news is it is the most advanced open source disk cloning utility and it doesn't cost anything.

This article is saying that it's the first release to use the kernel from Linux 4.8 specifically 4.8.7. We don't talk enough about Clonezilla and what it does. And I'm interested, is anyone in the mumble room using Clonezilla for something incredible

or just to save their bacon? I don't know, man. I would at least like to use it in the future. Really against cloning disks in most cases, unless, you know, the disk is absolutely failing me or something and I want to recover data from it. Why is that? I think rebuilding whenever you have, like, some kind of catastrophic failure

or you're, like, setting up a new system, I think rebuilding is just more worthwhile to give you a fresh file system and everything. I think I do agree in many cases, but a NixOS user would say that, I think. But there are a lot of cases, and I do really appreciate that CloneZilla has, you know, fancy features

so that it at least does take like, you know, it won't copy blank space. It's not quite as good as, you know, having configuration management or an OS where you can really rebuild things very cleanly, but it's a much better middle ground than just DDing things. So I appreciate that a lot and it makes it a lot easier to work with. What's the disadvantage of using CloneZilla, William, if you have, let's say, 50 clients and all of those workstations are essentially set

up identical where is the advantage in building each one of those from scratch or even when one fails building it back from scratch yeah I guess I'm just not seeing it it seems to me that the that the that that when you want to deploy something at scale, I mean, yes, you can use things like Puppet to individually configure those systems, but a lot of times that much intervention is not needed. And I got to tell you, as a person who has managed Puppet

numerous times for numerous different clients on numerous different occasions, there's a lot of work in setting Puppet up. It's one of those things I really dread doing. I think only second to Pixie servers. I hate setting up Pixie servers. That's a shame. servers i hate setting up pixie servers that's a shame i really like setting up pixie server i like pixie i mean i don't love it but uh i appreciate it and i feel like i haven't had much i like what i guess i like what pixie does but like the actual action the act of setting up the pixie server do

you not run into like a bazillion problems that you have to troubleshoot along the way yeah there are in particular firmware implementations and those kinds of things. I mean, it is at that bottom end of the stack that's always kind of troublesome, right? That just makes my stomach turn just thinking about it. I do think you do have a point. I mean, there's, you know, it depends on what your environment is. It depends on where, you know, what your bottlenecks are. So I do think there's probably also a middle ground here of like, you know, can you make yourself and, you know, you shouldn't just like make a crude image, not clean it up, not set in place first run scripts or other things.

So I think there is a middle ground between like just a simple copy of an image versus like something that, you know, you've set up a nice copy that's ready to go. It boots up, enters a network, configures itself. Maybe you don't need full configuration management like Puppet or Chef or Ansible. Maybe you do, but there's like a you can have something, some stage in the standard image stage and some in the configuration management and maybe you just need the standard image.

Yeah, I don't know if I could go back. Again, when I compare the two, I'm like, man, Puppet would sure be overkill in a lot of situations. Most situations really where we have large deployment because you're not making a lot of changes system-wide per class per host yeah right right we don't with the exceptions of updates and software management um you know and even those a lot of times if you're making a lot of changes to software management

it's because of different roles in the business you know you have the graphic designers and they need they needed a different version of this or they needed a different program installed or something. And it's something I wouldn't really want to manage, you know, at the level because I'm not making those changes to every single machine. One use case I've had a little closer to home is,

you know, as Linux users, well, I think the network, we, you know, we do espouse you trying to buy from Linux first vendors, but a lot of people end up, certainly I have as well, ended up, you know, buying a machine that ran Windows or maybe you bought a Mac.

And I've used Clonezilla several times to just take a factory image right there. You know, if I need to send it in for warranty or something, I can just apply that and know that they're not going to futz with me about, oh, you bricked your machine. We're not going to pay for this. Right. You know what? Actually, you know what I've done the last couple of times? I just DD the drive and I send it back to them.

And then when they ask, when they say anything, I'm like, listen listen you can go and put whatever you want on there but i'm not sending my excuses i'm just not sending you a laptop with my data on it so i'm wiping the drive before i send it in and if you need to install something to test then you're welcome to do that most of those guys have you know drives anyway that they use for for troubleshooting i actually use user because i you know they don't have passwords right yeah it's a liability nightmare i i knew i knew uh i know back in you know a while back i don't do this anymore but i used to keep a clone zilla image of my laptop so if my laptop ever crashed i could restore a a already configured and set up version of my laptop anyone doing something like that i would like to but i just

don't know how to just yet i'd say say that sounds like a good idea, Noah. Uh-huh. Yeah. And I would probably do it like maybe at least every couple months or so. I've got to be honest with you. As far as how to do it, it's literally as simple as downloading the ISO, booting off of it, and it asks you questions and you answer them. They have a super slick system going.

You know, it says, you know, do you want to start Glonzoli? Yes. What image, what drive do you want to image? This one? Yeah, I love it. And it'll give you the command too. So if later you want to make this

like something you do on a cron job or, you know, set up in an automated way somehow, they give you like a one line command that you can do that'll just do exactly what you, the backup that you just performed, which is great. Oh, wow. That's awesome. I met, actually, I is great. Oh, wow, that's awesome.

Actually, I had the privilege at last year's LinuxFest Northwest. There were a couple of CloneZilla guys right by the Jupyter Broadcasting booth, so I spent a little while talking to them, and I have to say they were very nice to talk to. They were excited about the project, and they were surprisingly humble for the cool software they've created.

Shoot, man, that's really disappointing. I would have loved to meet those guys. Well, maybe they'll be back. We'll just have to hope. Maybe. Anyone else have any other closing thoughts about Clonezilla or other useful Linux tools that don't give enough attention?

All right. Arsync. Yeah, right. Arsync. Hawkins said. Yeah. All right, guys. Well, thank you so much to the Mumble Room for being here. We really appreciate having you taking time out of your day. Thank you very much, Wes, for joining me remotely. My pleasure. A huge thank you to Michael Tunnell, our producer

for this show, Rekhi, our hardworking video editor who makes everything sound and look amazing, and of course, the entire team at Jupyter Broadcasting for making this show possible. You can find out more at JupyterBroadcasting.com. Check me out on Sundays,'s linux action show where

chris and i host and we'll be back here next tuesday with the same show next week bye Thank you. I sit down at my desk and I'm going through links that Wes provided, things that we're going to talk about today. And I came across this link, which was an article from System76 talking about how they are working with Canonical to improve high DPI support in Linux. Now, for those of you who don't know, high DPI support in Ubuntu specifically has been kind of a disaster. And a lot of laptops now are shipping with high resolution display 1080 is the minimum i will purchase agreed agreed wes how do you handle working with uh lower resolution because i know your xps that's a 1366 yes it is unfortunately that's the only one left in my entire life thankfully how do you uh how do you work around that you know i usually end up using um a tiling window manager or something with um easy control so i can rapidly shift between things and then i'm most places that i end up going you know if i'm not at a coffee shop or here at the studio i have an external monitor configured and

so at that point it's not such a big deal. Yes, that makes sense. But I mean, I would never buy one now. It's frustrating even today that like how in 2016 does the laptop market still have those resolutions offered? Because it's really, I mean, it was fine for what it is. It's better than no monitor, but it is just the worst. Well, I think part of it is cost, right? I think part of it is just that the manufacturers are, you know, they can get a three two hundred dollar laptop, about three hundred dollar laptop if they're not putting in a terribly expensive display. And that works for the, you know, guy or woman that is sitting at home browsing Facebook and checking their email.

It doesn't really matter for, you know, pixel density isn't a big deal. It is a big deal for people like you and I, though, that work in the field and need to be able to scale three or four different windows at one time right yeah exactly right and you need to be able to have a lot on your screen at once you're doing many things at once you know you're a professional so 4k has been a great promise and system 76 has been kind of on the leading edge i don't know of a whole lot of other laptops that are shipping with 4k displays um you know like there's the you know the google pixel shipped to the high resolution display right and the xps does but for the most part um you know the the you're lucky to get a 1080p display most of my 1366

and the problem is if you get a 4k display and i have a 4k display on my uh on my oryx is or no i don't no i don't i have the 1080 version but if you have a 4k display on my uh on my oryx is or no i don't know i don't i have the 1080 version but if you have a 4k display uh the problem is it the ubuntu looks terrible all of the buttons are tiny and you can't see them even you even if you fix even if you go through like there's a recommended you know like kind of tutorial steps that you go through to kind of fix some of the issues and one of that would be like dragging the the uh the slider scale and it increases the windows but that doesn't fix everything so for example firefox it doesn't fix uh the buttons in firefox and stuff so that's still huge so then you have to go to about uh about colon config and you have to scale firefox

individually and just it's it's a very hacked together solution and so it's something that's needed some attention for a long time. And I'm interested, does, is anyone in the mumble room or any of you guys using 4k displays and what's your experience been like under Linux specifically Ubuntu, if you've tried it? I'm not currently using 4k.

I'm still stuck on 10 ADP, but I am shopping for monitors, but I don't feel 4k has, or I need more, a better GPU for 4K. Okay. So you need a better video card, but you would go to 4K. Oh, I totally would, but I'm still kind of waiting for the technology to get up higher for the hertz for the gaming side,

because I hate having monitors that only do one thing i need i need i need color reproduction i need performance i need reliability all that kind of things and i hate spending money on just one thing that i'm going to have to replace a year or two later to get just the same thing but better quality. So I'm still kind of waiting for 4K to get up there, and then DisplayPort and HDMI and all that fun stuff. Right, right. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Anyone else using 4K?

I have two. I have a laptop that is around 13 inches that's 4K, and I have a 27-inch HP IPS 4K display. Now, which laptop? Is that your ThinkPad? No, it's an Asus. Oh, I see. Okay, yeah, yeah, right.

No, the ThinkPad's actually just 1080p, and I actually like that more to some extent because scaling isn't an issue for me. Sure. But the 4K at 27 inches is really nice, and even though I do have to scale some things up, you get much more clarity and screen real estate at the larger display size.

Yeah, the screen real estate seems legitimate at a 27-inch. I wonder... And it's not that much more expensive. If you don't want to go like 144 hertz or something, and you're just sticking at 60 hertz, 4K is not terribly priced, and these are really nice monitors, nice stands, well-built. Do you agree that 4K on anything under 15 inches is a poor resolution to screen size ratio? It's a little ridiculous.

I don't think it's necessary. I think 1440p around that size is fine. And even then you're still scaling stuff up. We'll see. How has 4K worked under Linux for you? 4K has been fine, but i mostly run xmin ads so i kind of customize everything myself and a lot of what i do is in the terminal and scaling that up is trivial it's just it's basically just increasing the font size right sure um and the browser has

add-ons and things to deal with high dpi i mostly use chrome and firefox so okay not a big deal so you're so basically your approach is handle every application individually? Pretty much. Mostly because XMNAD doesn't give you anything to deal with it in some unified way. I'm sure you could change GTK in a unified way and QT in a unified way individually, but I don't really use that many applications and I can deal with the ones that aren't scaled correctly. You have a well-defined set that you have. Yeah, I have a pretty small, limited set of applications.

And even, like, GIMP and stuff has been fun. I'm probably pushing the envelope here a little bit, but have you tried Ubuntu by chance? Nope. I basically only run NixOS and my fork of it, so... Oh, that's awesome. I don't really know. Okay, that's fair.

I work on doing all 1080p, and that's on 14.04, and it's fine. Yeah, 1080 is... Yeah, 1080, even on a. I'm doing all 1080p and that's on 1404 and it's fine. Yeah, 1080 even on a, I've used, I mean our ThinkPads, you have the same. I do, we have the same. Both of us have the same laptop. A 12.5 inch laptop, I find 1080p to be perfectly workable. Oh yeah. Anyone else have experience, preferably experience with Ubuntu on 4K? Or is that it?

Well, long story short, I am happy to see that somebody is working on this problem because I think in the near future this is going to be very important. I think all desktop computers are basically going to be, I think obviously 4K is going to become the next go-to standard. It's certainly going to become the next go-to standard in video production. And so this is going to be a next go-to standard video production yep and um so this is going to be a very important problem that we need to tackle and so it's very nice and reassuring to see that you know both system 76 uh and canonical are aware of this problem and working

on it and i and i guess it's kind of just like a thank you to all of the people that work so hard and put a lot of effort in to make sure that we have the tools that we need. I wish I would have had the tools that I needed this morning to make my day go well. At least I know that down the road when 4K becomes a standard and it's just something that we go to and expect it, I know it'll be there thanks to the hard work at System76 and Canonical.