LINUX Unplugged - Episode 181: A Brisk MATE for Solus | LUP 181

Episode Date: January 25, 2017

It’s a huge show with a bonanza of updates, big future plans & cross project collaboration.Michael Hall from Canonical join us to discuss UbunCon, SCALE15x plans & much more!

So I have a DJI Phantom and it has zone restriction that – so that way they don't get in trouble as a company with like the FAA. And there is an airport near the studio. And so I send the drone up and it takes a few beats before it gets GPS lock. And so I send it about 35, 40, 50 feet up in the air. And by the time it gets to about 60 feet in the air, it has very clear GPS signal. And it realizes that it's in a region lock zone and enforces the drone down on me. And there's really no way to get through it until I just let it get GPS lock. And the other day, it almost came down in traffic. And I'm sitting there trying to abort the

landing, abort the landing. There's a car coming. And I was able to hold it up for a few seconds, got the car to pass like three feet from the car's roof. And then as the car passed, it landed. Then I just have to just agree to be safe, and then I can send the drone back up again. But, of course, you then have to have your device that's connected to the controller. It has to be on some sort of data connection so it can ping the servers that you've been authorized, that you've agreed to the terms of use. And I had my phone in airplane mode because, like always, whenever I'm doing something, I'm getting a ton of messages coming into my phone and I didn't want them coming in over the UI of the drone.

So I turned my phone into airplane mode. So I can't authorize it because part of the authorization process is receiving a text message. So there I am in the middle of the road trying to get my phone out of airplane mode, trying to get a text message, authorizing this drone so I can set it back up in the air out of the road. Oh, God, isn't that annoying? Is there a way on iOS to get rid of the drop-down notifications so they don't overlay on top of things you're doing? Well, what I realized I did, what I should be doing later, and I was just being dumb,

is put it in do not disturb mode. No, but even if you have the do not disturb thing on the switch or whatever, it doesn't actually do anything for the onscreen notification. Oh, really? Well, now I'm screwed. I always have mine in do not disturb mode.

Always. Good man. Good man. I have a solution, though. You know what I should do? This is really the long term solution here is get a drone

that doesn't have this control software on it. Because, you know, come on. I mean, this is the problem is there's somebody else that's controlling what my drone can do. If Richard Stallman was here, he'd be shaking his head at me. He'd be very disappointed.

It's no good. No good. So look at this project. It's a drone built with a Raspberry Pi that's capable of streaming live to YouTube. Now, this is more my speed. It's a quadcopter. It's a quadcopter, and it goes right, the Raspberry Pi goes right on the top of it. And it works.

It's legit. The camera could use a gimbal, that's for sure. I mean, it's a work in progress. And then they're live streaming. There's no real, like, official control software. But they've put a LG LTE card in it, a SIM card. It's got a Wi-Fi antenna. It's got the camera for right now the Raspberry Pi kit camera.

It's kind of ingenious. So maybe future vlogs will be powered by a Raspberry Pi drone. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 181 for January 24th, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show with a host that's flying solo this week. Well, that's never really true. My name is Chris, and it can't really be true when I got a virtual lug, a packed virtual solo this week. Well, that's never really true. My name is Chris, and I can't really be true when I got a virtual lug, a packed virtual lug this week. Coming up, we're going to talk about some big news

that's breaking right now as we go on the air that could affect the Unix landscape overall. We'll talk about Scale 15X and Ubicon. There's some really big project updates we're going to get to this week, including those sly foxes over at Solus adopting Flatpak. What? What?

Yeah, that's what I said. I literally did a what when I saw the headline come across my screen. Then a certain insider in the Ubuntu Mate project is going to leak some of the upcoming details and fanciness that will be rolling out. And then Kali Linux. Yeah, Kali Linux. They're taking it up a notch. You know, they've been around for 10 years now, 10 years. Kind of makes me feel old, to be honest with you. I think I've been using it for 10 years. Anyways, they have some big news on their 10th anniversary that I'll tell you guys about. And then we'll touch a little bit on a future install, a future rig build,

get some input from our mumble room, read some feedback and all of that goodness. There's a lot to cover in today's show. Mr. Wes couldn't make it this week. He sends his apologies. He wanted to be here, but there was just, I'll just put it as this. There was work circumstances that came up. You guys know how this, how this industry goes. Sometimes things just come up and you can't get away for the afternoon to podcast. So we miss you, Wes, and you're here in spirit. I'll channel

you from time to time, Wes, but never fear. We have a great team in our virtual log. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumbaroom. Greetings, Mumbaroom. Hello. It's not even on the air right now and you're plugging

that doesn't matter you know there's back episodes people can listen to a great back catalogue yeah but you know what's going to happen

I'll be fair late night Linux there you go there you go you know what's going to happen is they're going to listen to that back catalogue and they're all going to say

I miss Laura so I don't really yeah this is they're going to listen to that back catalog and they're all going to say, I miss Laura. So I don't really know. Yeah, this is true. That's a common message that we hear. Yeah. Speaking of late night Linux, Mr. Ikey is here. Hello, Ikey. It's good to have you here.

Hey. And also returning to the show in, I don't know how, I think it's almost been a year, Mr. Michael Hall. Hello, Mr. Hall. Hello. Good to be back. Well, I am looking Hall. Hello, Mr. Hall. Hello. Good to be back. Well, I am looking forward to talking to all of you. Of course, we all have a whole cast of regulars in there, too. And so even though Wes isn't here, we have a great crew and everybody will be jumping

in as we go along. But I don't like doing the bad news stuff if we can avoid it. So let's do like a quick breaking news kind of thing. This is CNN Breaking News. Yeah, this is Linux Unplugged Breaking News. And it's unfortunate when this kind of story comes out, but we kind of had a little bit of a sniff of this story earlier. Oracle is laying off more than 1,000 employees.

According to Mercury News, Oracle is laying off approximately 450 employees in its Santa Clara hardware systems division. Now, that matters because that's the division that was responsible for Spark hardware, which it appears to be where the majority of these layoffs are coming from. It looks like cloud is what Oracle cares about now because of software licensing, Solaris and whatnot, the revenue from that plummeted by 20% last quarter, and at the same time, Oracle's hardware revenue also fell 13%. So there's just starting to essentially

probably realign the business with where they're actually making revenue from. But it's kind of sad because I think it's probably at least going to signal a massive slowing down for Solaris. At least that's my read of this story. And that's kind of why I thought it was worth covering today. It's because that overall affects the Unix ecosystem. I mean, in the entirety, it looks like it's going to be about 1,800 employees company-wide

that will be pink-slipped. There was already a story about this on the software side, right? Like, they were talking about how they're canning the new major version of Solaris. It was rumor at that point. I think more recently, though, not only was there the rumor that was like two or three months ago but there was a newer story to back that oh yeah i was talking about the rumor we covered previously yeah yeah i know i think there were two stories on the same thing yeah and this is later yeah

this has sort of been it's been there's been smoke signals really since also pretty strong smoke signals since december it's not surprising because like as someone who worked with solaris boxes at one point and saw the transition to red hat and x86 i'm not surprised they're gonna have to close up yeah especially since everyone wants more open infrastructure and they're offering the most closed proprietary infrastructure possible it's just becoming more of a commodity now where you need open infrastructure so this is just not appealing yeah when um when i worked at some microsystems we used to say solaris for a pro linux for show yeah i've heard that saying before and that's changing yeah more now well yeah i mean

especially with the lack of dedicated resources right like i'm sure there are more dedicated resources in the linux community now than there are in the solaris community oh for sure the community it's not really a community and businesses and software services around linux and you know all the all of that when you go and software services around Linux and all of that. When you go to a trade show, you see all of these middleware businesses that are selling Linux-based solutions, and none of them are selling anything that runs on Solaris. What I'm getting at there is the workloads were becoming more and more specific for Solaris stations too. Yeah. Okay.

So let's talk about something fun. Let's talk about something that I'm looking forward to. March 2nd through the 5th, coming up at Pasadena Convention Center, is Scale 15X, the 15th annual Southern California Linux Expo. We went last year. I think we've gone a few years past. And I'll probably be going this year, too. I'm going to decide after today's show. That's my plan. And just like I believe last year too,

there will be an UBICON summit to take place March 2nd through the 3rd. So sort of tucked up right next to scale and it looks like it's going to take place also in Pasadena. So you just go to this location and you can attend both events essentially. Am I getting it right, Mr. Hull?

Yes. Actually, we're going to be using two of the scale conference rooms for those two days. Really? I think this is such a good way to do it. Oh, yeah. We've got several Ubicons that happen all over the world. Some of them are standalone. Some of them co-host with another big conference like scale.

And it really helps the logistics to be able to do that. So what do I kind of expect if I'm going to go to Ubicon? Is it something that an Ubuntu desktop user would be interested in? Is it something for developers, administrators? Who's the target and what should I expect? It's a little bit of both. Last year, we had two tracks, one for users and the other one targeting developers. And we're going to do something similar again this year with a little bit more workshop kind of sessions on the second day than we had last year. And then in the morning of both days, we've got keynotes and presentations going on that are generally relevant to anybody. Hmm. Well, see, this feels like if I'm going to go to scale, I should plan to be down there a few

days earlier. So that way I could be there for at least get down there by the third but maybe even the second. I like that. What is your overall goal? Is it to inform communities? Is it to get more Ubuntu users? What is the sort of strategy and why is Canonical willing to spend the resources on it? Well, Ubicons are held by the community.

So the Ubicon Summit is being organized by the California community. We are helping them with logistics and we help as much as we can financially also. You know, Michael, I think it kind of feels like a – yeah, for sure. I think it kind of feels like an official canonical event because last year a pretty big canonical crew was there including Mark Shuttleworth. So it feels like it's a big Ubuntu official event and a big official canonical event in some sense. Last year, a pretty big Canonical crew was there, including Mark Shuttleworth. So it feels like it's a big Ubuntu official event, a big official Canonical event in some sense. But I forget that it's really community-driven itself. Yeah, last year was kind of an oddball out because usually there's not that many people from Canonical being flown into Ubicons.

What is the rumor on Shuttleworth making it to Ubicon this year? I don't think he's going to because it actually overlaps a little bit with Mobile World Conference happening in Spain. Oh, wow. Yeah. And we always have a big presence there and he's at that. So I'm not sure if he's going to get over. I think he might try and get to scale, but I don't think he's going to make it for Ubicon. You know who I'd be going to see would be Martin, Mr. Wimpy down there. But Wimpy, you're not going to make it this year either, are you?

I don't think so, no. It's okay. It's okay, Wimpy. It's all right. I was just going to buy you. I'm still eyeing Linux Fest Northwest, though. I think I owe you like a dozen beers. So I'll make sure I get them taken care of at Linux Fest.

That's even better. It's mutual, so that's going to be a fun night. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Well, you know what? I think this year I'm going to park at Linux Fest in the parking lot. So if we get too irresponsible, we won't have to go very far because we'll just walk back to the... Well, Michael, I'm going to try it. I think I'm going to try to make it down there. I'm not sure what my whole approach is going to be this year, but I think I'll try to make it down to Ubicon. So how do I sign up? Do I need to preregister?

Can you give me those details? So we're still working that out. I think we're going to use Eventbrite for the Ubicon registration itself. We just put out a call for papers for the presentations that happened those two mornings, and those are actually going through the scale CFP system. in those two mornings. And those are actually going through the scale CFP system. Even though scale's not taking talk proposals anymore, they still have it open so that people can submit them for UbuCon.

You just use the UbuCon tag and they'll send all of those lists over to Nathan Haynes and Richard Gaskin, who are the California team organizing all of this. The one thing I think I had some confusion on last year from the audience was, I think some people thought you sign up for only one or do you have to sign up for one and then sign up for the other sign up you don't get both right you have to go you register for scale and then you register for

ubicon is that what the how the format is going to work yeah so ubicons traditionally have been free to to come and participate in you haven't had to register you don't have to pay anything to get in and what we've worked out with the scale guys is that people can come into UbuCon without paying to get into scale. But we really encourage people to register to be at scale and to go to all the scale talks in the conference or the expo floor and everything because, you know, it's a huge conference. It's totally worth going to. If you're going to be there already for UbuCon anyway, just pay a little bit extra, get into scale also.

Yeah, I second that for sure. Absolutely. Even if you just walk the floor for a few minutes and say hi to a few people. Well, that sounds pretty good. Oh, yeah. And compared to other huge shows, it's not expensive to get into scale at all. What does it cost? Is it free or is it – it's not much.

No, I want to say it was like 45 or something oh is it so i always go in as media so i've never actually i've never had to pay for it because they let media in for free but i i think it's so reasonable that whatever it is that it's it's i know it basically depends if you just want to go for the expo floor it's kind of cheap it's like 20 bucks but if you want i think the con or the um the talks and things it's almost 100 it's like 80 bucks yeah and the reason why that kind of makes sense to me is because the talks are going to be more focused for people who are there probably because it's their profession and and they would maybe even get work paying for that kind of but that's really really cheap compared to other conferences yes it's still under 100 bucks yeah yeah yeah very much so so

so pay to go to scale come Come to UbuCon for free. If you're there the first day, and I know, Chris, you weren't sure about this, but if you can get there the first day, we've got Carl Rochelle from System76 giving our keynote. Oh, cool. And I have been teased by Ryan that he has some new announcements to make during that keynote. Well, that is really neat. Carl is a super bright guy and really fascinating speaker. So that will be a really good keynote. Yeah, I think I'm going to try to make it.

I think I'm going to try to make it. Maybe I'll see if I can't ping the scale folks and maybe they can get us a coupon because there are coupons out there floating around for scale. And that would be- Yeah, they just ended their special pricing. I think that was a couple of days ago that they had that going for. And they still have student discounts, 50% off. Oh, nice.

Well, Mr. Hall, is there anything else you want to add about Ubicon before we chug along? No, just want to reiterate, you know, if you want to give a presentation there, we've got slots open. Go to the scale, call for papers, and submit that with the Ubicon tag. We're also going to have a Snappy workshop happening there that's second day. So if you want to learn how to make snaps and go through the walkthrough of that, I'll be there hosting it also. Nice, nice, nice. Let's make sure Ikea attends. Haha, I kid. I poke.

I poke. I'll get to them. Don't worry. I don't know if I believe that. Well, I think it's going to be a pretty good show, and if you can make it to both, come say say hi because I'm going to try to make it down there. I might try to make it down there for the whole thing with Carl doing the keynote. So maybe I'll end up doing some live shows from down there too and doing a meetup. We'll see.

We'll see. I'll get my plans figured out. I kind of feel like this might be the year I fly down instead of drive down so I can get down there, cover it, and get back up here quick because I might have something coming up in the near future, which would be a much longer drive and a refreshed website, and it was really Producer Michael who threw it in my face because I don't generally follow the Cinnamon desktop mod scene, I guess you could call it. But Cinnamon Spices, which is cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com, has been refreshed and relaunched, making it easy to modify your Cinnamon desktop environment with things like themes, things like themes, applets, desktop, desklets, and of course, extensions. I don't really know if this is something that appeals to most of you out there, but I think it's worth giving the guys and gals working on this project a shout for the really nice work they've done to showcase some of the stuff. I mean, it's, dang, it really makes these themes – it really makes this stuff look good.

So thank you to Producer Michael for throwing that in my face. So if you are a Cinnamon desktop user, you might want to go check that out. I'll have a link to the Cinnamon Spices site in the show notes. Lineage OS, which was the continuation I suppose of the Cyanogen open source project. I guess the Cyanogen forked. Lineage OS we could say for now, have started surfacing. We actually have real legit builds now that will work on Nexus devices like the 6P and 5X. Now, if you're already running CyanogenMod, there's an important note, so pay attention to this.

You need to first install the experimental ROM, which has a big old ugly watermark on it, before you can start installing regular Lineage OS builds. Otherwise, Lineage OS is not going to work at all. You're also going to have to be prepared to get a new version of the G apps because that will also require an update. But you can get experimental Lineage OS nightly builds now on a bunch of devices, but the ones that jumped out at me were the 6P and the 5X.

Is anybody in the mumble room a Cyanogen user or even an alternative ROM user on Android? Anybody using different ROMs? Yeah, I have it as base for Sailfish OS. No. Okay. So I think both Minnie and William, was that who I heard? No, someone else. Oh, okay.

Oh, okay. Let's start with Producer Michael and and then we'll go Mini. So go ahead. I used to use CyanogenMod before Cyanogen Company was created, but that was like – my late phones I haven't bothered. Yeah, that's basically been my setup. Now, Mini, you said you were using Cyanogen currently? Yeah, we have it as base for Sailfish OS for the ports for the Nexus 5. So we have a port for

Cyanogen 11 and 12, and there is one user who is working on CM13 even now. And will that eventually become Lineage? I don't know. We will see. So now we

are looking for CM13. We got the base and we have some little struggles to go. But if that is working, why not go further? Yeah, I guess so. I think it's good that the project's continuing. I don't feel good about the future of the ROM market. I feel like it's going to get more constricted than ever. I'm not saying it's dying. I don't want to about the future of the ROM market. I feel like it's going to get more constricted than ever. I'm not saying it's dying.

I don't want to be dramatic about it. But it doesn't seem like it's particularly good. Wimpy, are you still rocking Ubuntu Touch as your daily driver? No. Dun, dun, dun. Now, hold on, hold on. Now, this. We got to stop the show.

We got to talk about this. What happened? Tell me what happened. I got a Christmas present. The holidays. What did you get? One plus 3T. Oh, and it's now running Android?

It's probably running Cyanogen of a type, isn't it? Well, it runs OxygenOS, which is their version of it, yes. But I've set things up a little bit differently this time so i'm using the f droid store and almost none of the google services very nice and how do you like it is it good compared to what do you think compared to ubuntu touch you are you kind of glad to be back do you miss some features give me a sense of that i miss the navigation of Ubuntu Touch. I think the way that the user interface is moved around in Ubuntu is light years ahead of anything else. It's similar but different to Sailfish. So if you like Sailfish, there's some similarities, but I feel the Ubuntu interactions are more intuitive than Sailfish.

Sailfish is kind of you have to know that this thing does this thing where with ubuntu it's it's much more natural um it's curious so i was obviously using things that were like wraps of web applications on ubuntu touch and now i've come back to android i'm actually using a lot of those rather than native apps because in many cases now the web application version of things is far better than the um the the native app version so for example facebook is one example of that yeah and the old reader is another um two things that i well one facebook is for staying in touch with my family and the old reader is where i get all my news from i think facebook is the perfect example. I feel like Facebook is safer as a web app than it is to have the Facebook app installed in Android

because you never really know what it's doing. And also with the web app, you get access to messaging and all of the other stuff, the little separate apps on Android, you know, as native apps. So, you know, that's good in my opinion. Yeah. There's a slight thing where if you use a browser to do that, it tries to detect that you're using a browser and it says, oh, you need to install the app.

But if you use a web app wrapper, it'll break that and make it think that it's not. It's like a desktop thing, but it'll still show it as a mobile. What a pain in the butt. Mr. Hall, I noticed that you said you kind of agreed that it looks like it might be a dim future for alternative ROMs. Did you want to expand on that at all? Oh, I think you might have gone away from that. Sorry, me?

Yeah, yeah. I noticed you said you kind of agreed that it looks like it might be a dim future for alternative ROMs on Android. Did you want to expand on that a bit? I don't think I agreed to that. I was typing in another window and accidentally hit the press the talk button. So you think, okay. I will typing in another window and accidentally hit the press the talk button. So you think I will second Martin though. I've

been on a Galaxy S7 for five months or so now and I totally miss the navigation of Ubuntu phone. Yeah, that was the Nokia stuff, right? Isn't that what that was powered by on the Ubuntu phone? I can't remember which part.

I think Mike was referring to the touch gestures, not the map navigation. Oh, yeah, yeah, the touch gestures, like multitasking. Really? That's interesting. Really, honestly, guys, really honestly, because I've got to tell you one of my biggest concerns about Ubuntu Touch was that the gestures were sort of opaque. You didn't really have any idea they were there, so it seemed like it would be hard to internalize them.

But that's not the case. No, it only took like an hour to really get used to them. And within a week, you're so addicted to it that whenever you go back to something else, you instinctively try and do those gestures. That's good to hear. I guess I'm still, I'm not convinced about discovery because you guys are kind of bad examples because not only are you canonical employees, but you're around other people using ubuntu touch and you were there during the ui creation so if you came into a cold do you still have a sense that it would be discoverable and usable it just seems so hard to find them i think so i mean the the tuition the tutorial that runs on you know first startup that that explains what the four

directions of movement are oh yeah that's right like 60 seconds to complete and it basically introduces you to it's a pull down it's a pull up yep and pulling in from the left and the right and that's the extent of it completing the same tutorial on sailfish and for anyone that's got sailfish they can maybe back me up to prove I'm not making it up. Their tutorial takes about five minutes to complete. Yeah. And you can't skip through it. You have to, you know, do all of the steps.

Yeah, there's some Android devices like that too. Yeah, and I always feel lost in Sailfish when I want to swipe around. It feels like you're moving through one of these text dungeons you know go south go south by southeast go go west go north and you're not to agree with you i used and then nine nokia and nine before and the gestures were pretty much the same and on selfish you get used as with ubuntu Touch, you get used pretty quick. You use 10 minutes and you get used to it. I always feel lost

when I use Sailfish. So I've got two Sailfish phones. I've got the original YOLO phone and I've got the Intek Aquafish. There's essentially just three gestures in Ubuntu phone. And as soon as you master three gestures, then you've got it. That does seem actually pretty reasonable, especially combined with the tutorial.

All right. So let's cap off this conversation with the obligatory WebOS mention. Go ahead, Michael. Go ahead. Okay. So I like WebOS. Yeah. I was a huge fan back in the day.

Okay, so I like WebOS. I was a huge fan back in the day. Their gesture structure was very similar to how Ubuntu Touch works, except instead of from a side entrance, it was the bottom entrance. So you had the same kind of pull the launcher from the side. You had to pull the launcher from the bottom. You had the same swipe away things, except in a different direction it's they're actually very similar so someone who was a web os person would pretty much just jump right into

a bunch of touch well that's encouraging all right okay now i want to run it on in my 6p that's that's official that's official hey let's uh let's stop talking about mobile but before we go too much for the let's talk about ting this seems like a great time to mention it well here's how you get started with ting you go to linux.ting.com. Linux.ting.com will get you $25 off a device or $25 in service credit. And think about this, $25 in service credit might pay for more than your first month because average Ting bill, $23 after all you're said and done. Here's how it works. No contract, no determination fee, and you only pay for what you use. Minutes, messages, megabytes, you pay for what you use.

Linux.ting.com. I love this system. I was just talking about in the pre-show how I have a couple of different MiFis, one on Ting's GSM network, one on Ting's CDMA network. And I use apps like OpenSignal to determine which one's going to be stronger in whichever area I'm taking the RV. And that's the MiFi I choose to use. It's $6 a month for the line, and if I don't use any data on that MiFi for a month, I'm paying $6.

I can also just go in the control panel and turn it off. It's amazing. It's great for when you're traveling. It's great if you're an IT worker and you need to have connectivity at a moment's notice and you want to have two networks to choose from. I love this functionality. Of course, you can get a phone that's on either network too. It doesn't really – I mean I'm talking about MiFis, but you could use it as a phone.

I've got three phones on the Ting network and I think it's a fantastic service. Usually, and if I'm not using like my MiFis a bunch, which I used actually just lightly this weekend, and it's so fantastic because I think maybe even with the holidays, the phone bill is going to be like around $45 this month. Three lines. When I'm at work and I'm at home, I'm using Wi-Fi all the time. And so I'm maybe making a few extra calls for the holidays. On average, my phone bill is around $35 a month for all three lines.

So it really averages out to be just an unbelievable price. You can get a little idea by going over to Ting's website and see kind of what it would cost for you. It's a really nice service because they also back it with fantastic customer service, an awesome control panel, an active blog full of good information, tons of devices, including ones you can just bring yourself, like one from the Play Store. Just hint, hint, nudge, nudge. Check them out.

Linux.Ting.com. And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Been a happy customer for a long time now. Linux.ting.com. This is an interesting post. And I just will touch on it really quickly. I don't think we have to have a lot of conversation about it. Excuse me.

Chrome 56 is going to aggressively throttle background tabs. Hallelujah. This is just kind of all you really need to really know. But they're coming up with like a timer and a budget system. And each tab is going to get a timer and then it's going to get a budget. And the budget regenerates with a certain amount of activity. And all of a sudden, they got a very, very Google sophisticated system. And they're talking about how it will affect applications like Slack and Discord or BitMix or a Bitcoin trading site.

And there could be some major effects. So you might want to go check it out if you are heavily dependent on one of those applications or a developer on one of those projects because it's going to be big eventually. Chrome 56 is going to be a big deal. But it probably will help a lot of us with two core laptops on battery and you're running Chrome. This is probably going to make life a lot better for you. Yeah, all that budget gets submitted to Google. That is an interesting thought, Altera. Wouldn't that be a fascinating, because they do ask if you want to opt into diagnostics and error reporting. I wonder if that time budget and things like that would be diagnostic data.

Ooh, that sends chills down my spine. I mean, for the first release, I'm sure it probably will be, right? Because it's not going to be a perfect system right away. The amount of data that gives Googs about the way, I mean, it makes Google Analytics look like child's play. That is a striking thought. Not just what sites you go to, but how you engage with them,

how actively you engage with them, how long they sit idle on your website. They can tell you if... Go ahead. We can see if it's going to be in Chromium and Chrome or just in Chrome, whether they're going to be collecting data or not. Yeah. That's a – well, we'll see. We'll see where that goes.

Maybe none of that's going to happen too. So I want to talk about some feedback that I've gotten on Sunday's Linux Action Show, and I shouldn't really cross the streams like this, but I kind of want to take advantage of the mumble room. So this seems like the perfect opportunity. like this, but I kind of want to take advantage of the mumble room. So this seems like the perfect opportunity. I've been considering building something that I'm going to just call because we all understand what I say when I mean this, what I mean when I say this. I'm just going to say it's like a bulletproof Linux installation. Something that isn't like a fun Linux installation, isn't like something I'm going to run on all my systems, but one of my workstations, maybe two, would be set up in a way that is – it's meant to be like a five-year installation

with absolute minimum failure. Maybe with a – I would love to say even a tolerance of one failure a year. So that probably includes maybe a hard drive mirror. Maybe it also includes a UPS power. So there's some physical aspects of this too. But right now what I wanted to focus on because it's more germane to our show would be the Linux configuration that would actually make this possible. idea of installing Solus as the base operating system and relying on the fine folks over at Solus to package up some of the core desktop applications that I want. Like? No pressure, Ikey. Yeah.

No, not at all. Like Telegram, like Google Chrome, you know, those types of – the general desktop environment, hoping – and maybe I should wait until after Budgie 11 but hoping that there would be sort of a consistency and stability there and then a lot of the more esoteric applications, many of which being web-based like SabNZB, CouchPotato, Sonar. Those would run in containers like Docker containers and other applications that maybe I would just sort of concoct one day. And maybe I would also sort of also supplement this with an Arch virtual machine that has access to the AUR or something for command line or maybe even graphical applications.

So this has been something that I've been kicking around, but I think mongas is how I'm going to say it. Three days ago, or no, one day ago in Linux Action Show subreddit wrote, I have the feeling that containerization is not the solution for you, Chris Lass. I think that you have to accept the three M's that Noah pointed out in Lass. You go Ubuntu LTS and you really should use something like snap packages. Also set up a clone and whatnot. But he argues that because predominantly what I'm going to want on this machine is a wide selection of desktop applications, I should probably go with an LTS slash Snap slash Flatpak approach to containerize and contain the specific applications and use Ubuntu LTS for the base

operating system and just go something with much more generic. And maybe he says, yeah, I could go fancy with CFS or something like that. But – and this has been sort of a common thread that's come in is don't go as far as containerization. Just go Ubuntu LTS or maybe it's Ubuntu Mate LTS or whatever it is. But you go with a tried and true Ubuntu install and you don't – you skip the Docker containerization and you go with snaps and flat packs. And when I – every time I look at this idea, which doesn't seem to be too insane, I kind of look at it and go, why does this not appeal to me?

Because it feels like the path of least resistance. I could get a 16.04-based install in 15 minutes. I could go get a few snap packages 10 minutes after that. And I may theoretically be pretty close to done at that point. I'm sure there's a few things I still have to work at. So it definitely has the appeal of being the path of less resistance. But what I feel like – I feel like it's not really ready yet. Like it seems like it's the easy path,

but in reality, I love snap packages. I love everything getting snapped up, but some of the things I want don't get updated as frequently as I want because the package itself is not being maintained upstream. It's being maintained by a volunteer. Some applications I want may not be available.

Things like Steam compatibility are still a big priority for me, and making Steam work really easily and not break is a big priority for me, and I don't really see a Flatpak Snap solution to that specifically either. It feels like to me if I'm building a five-year system today, in terms of application availability, Docker probably blows away just about every Linux distro's repo out there in terms of current modern applications being developed that I would want to try to talk about in reviews and whatnot. Docker is a massive distribution platform already. I would argue larger than snap packages.

And so if you were building a system for today, it actually seems like Docker would be the one to use today. And then in five years years put your head up and go okay all right all right so let's take a look around where how what's gotten snapped up what's gotten flat packed and when it's time to rebuild that would be the time to evaluate that so i i i've been getting a lot of that feedback and i've been reflecting on i think i actually think the snaps and flat packs would be more down the road. Should I pause here? Does anybody want to jump into the mumble room before I continue on? My question was, is there a possibility to use LXC, LXD containers for GUI applications? I mean, I'm not really, you know, I'm not really sold on any particular containerization or necessarily even containerization

over virtualization or even a fancy cheroot, really, to be honest. I don't really have any strong leaning. My one preference towards Docker would be it's pretty simple to set up on Solace and it's got a huge application availability on Docker Hub. And there is actually some subset of those applications up on Docker Hub that are being properly maintained by projects that really care. And you can suss that out eventually, and there's still enough of those that it's a pretty wide set of applications to pick from. So kind of leaning Docker that reason. Okay.

I wanted to – so let's talk about – let's take all of this conversation and let's shift over to Solace. They announced this week that they're adopting flat packs. They've also they've also been an update recently about some big changes coming in Q1 to the to the desktop, including including something called. Why was it here? Do I have it here? Bulletproofing. We're going to talk about all of this. We're really going to talk. Let's talk about all this. So let's take a moment. If we're talking about containers, we're talking about virtualization, and you want to know more, go to Linux Academy.

Linuxacademy.com slash unplug. Sign up. Take advantage of a seven-day free trial. Support the show and learn more about all of these technologies. They have really dedicated professionals that follow this stuff, like legit people in the industry that have come to Linux Academy now or working with them, consulting with them. They have full-time instructors. This is where you get the knowledge directly from the people that know what's up. And I love it because the people behind the company started it because they're Linux enthusiasts.

And somebody who runs their company because they were a Linux – started my company because I'm a Linux enthusiast. Yeah, I really dig that. And it really kind of is the perfect essence behind what they're all going for. Linuxacademy.com slash unplug. That's where you go find out about their self-paced in-depth video courses and just about every Linux topic out there. They got labs to give you hands-on real world experience. You build the confidence you need when you go do the job, which I've learned makes all the difference. Instructor mentoring when you do need it. A community that's stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members. Courses specifically for cert training

if that's where you're going. And course schedulers for those of us that are cray-cray busy and you need to have something custom built out for you to match that schedule. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. They also have public profiles if you need to let management know what you've been doing.

That's been really nice for me in the past when I had – what I used to do is I had these little systems, these little papers that I would track my stuff in a spreadsheet and I would hand it in because I would go to community colleges to get my course updating, to get my training updating that were thankfully paid for. But with a public profile like this, such a genius system. Makes it work. It's just all automated. Plus if you're you know talking to a client or looking for a gig very useful there too

linuxacademy.com slash unplugged whoop go there to support the show sign up for a 7 day free trial and a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring

the unplugged program so I don't really know where to start Ike because I am so excited about all of this. But I feel like let's start with Flatpaks. And then I'd like to talk about some of the other stuff you guys are doing sort of in Q1. So what the hell?

Flatpaks? What? This is huge because I thought we had this big discussion on this show about how you weren't really a big fan of Snaps or Flatpaks. You wanted to be in control of the software that gets bundled for your distro. What's changed? In that respect, actually, nothing. So remember, most of the people are having this discussion based on universal apps. The problem that we have in Solus, as you've probably seen yourself, is we have a very, very weird mechanism for deploying third-party software like Google Chrome.

And it just doesn't work very well. I mean, it's flaky. I'm not going to- What is the big challenge there? You mentioned a couple of times in your post the Google Chrome problem, solving the Chrome problem. The only thing I really, from my experience, was I went to a third-party section and it seemed like it took a significantly long time to install Chrome.

I had the sense something was going on behind the scenes, but I don't really understand. What is the Chrome problem? Okay, so, I mean, you're not allowed to distribute Chrome full stop. Only Google can do that, which, you know, I mean, that's fair enough. So the way that we get around that is behind the scenes, it's actually downloading the dev and repackaging it as an eo package then installing that locally but i mean to do things like that i mean there's things like exit compression involved and all this stuff which is why it takes a horrifically long amount of time it's not viable there's no update mechanism for it so we had to re-evaluate it because at the end of the day

anyone's personal views aside it's leading to a poor user experience so one of the developments i saw recently in flatpak i say recently recently ish is it can uh it supports downloading extra files at installation time now the first place i saw this was over on endless had to dig around there and i could install chrome straight from the software center but being such a problem for me i was like how the hell are they doing this how are they pulling this off so the more i dug into it it turns out that they're making use of the same thing that i'm going to be making use of and it's it's essentially still pulling the debt but it's doing it in a way that's efficient quick supports updates and is transparently integrated and in the I mean, I put the poll up on Google+, but that itself wasn't a deciding factor.

But it was definitely one of the things that enabled it as an option for me. So the other thing that probably comes to most people's mind is why say snaps, why not say snaps or app image or one of the other competitors? Well, I mean, app image, again, it's the same distribution problem, so it's immediately out. I mean, an AppImage contains a file system, which means it would contain Google Chrome. So it's instantly out of the races. And then, again, it's Snap versus Snapchat. No, but Snaps do have the ability to pull files down and sort of essentially work around that problem. Right. And don't get me wrong, there's a lot of hype and love around snap but it may if

i'm going to integrate something into solos it's got to be done properly it's got to be done fully so we don't have app armor and solos now you can yes you can run snaps without app armor but again then you don't get properly and exactly so to do it fully and properly you've got to enable app armor now that's an obstacle in terms of integration so there's a lazy aspect to it because it would be there's a large integration challenge for something like snap but the main thing that actually won me over in the end i mean everything else aside integration problems distribution all that side it, was being engaged on a technical level consistently by the Flatback camp. And every time I brought this up online, every time I've ranted about it, discussed it, bitched about it, whatever, that fact has always remained true.

They've always engaged with me. Now, fair play to Snaps as well, because Michael Hull actually contacted me offline after all. And, you know, I've got a lot of respect for that but i was being engaged on a technical level consistently by the flat pack team and they've always answered my responses and it's more aligned with what works in solos and for me it's kind of what won in the end it i had to be on technical merit only it couldn't be on the hype It couldn't be around marketability. The universal apps part of it at this point in time is currently not interesting to me. I'm talking about distributing some third-party applications.

Now, does this also solve any problems around packaging Steam for Solus? So what we're doing with Steam at the moment, I mean, at the moment, solace so what we're doing with steam at the moment i mean at the moment we have this steam runtime compatibility if you like within our repos it works really well now uh but give it a couple of years something like that would eventually fall apart at the seams because you know they're going to be using older have a an abi problem so large you wouldn't be able to solve it anymore so while it works for now, it's not a long-term solution. We actually spoke about this

on Late Night Lennox last night. I know, plug. Anyway. Atta boy! So-so, so-so. But yeah, I mean, it's kind of soulless only, which is kind of not fair. So what I've done is I proposed it upstream i opened up a github

issue and basically like here's the cards on the table i would like to take everything we've learned about building a steam runtime because we're actually pretty good at that and offer one in the form of a flatpak runtime which is optimized which has all the things that we want then anyone flatpak would be able to use it on any distro not just solace so it makes it a lot easier then for distributions to have steam because they're kind of hmm an omen and are in about the whole lib 32 crap it would be a lot easier for them they don't need to have like a 32-bit driver so this would be though uh kind of all back-end plumbing right if i'm uh if i'm a user of Solus, I would just basically hit an install button in the… Oh, yeah, definitely.

You don't want to complicate it. It's got to be natively. Would it mean, though, as a Solus user, I could run other flat packs that I found? Yes. So the one thing I didn't want to do is say, like, this is only for third party, and that's all you're going to use it for. If we're going to do it, we're going to do it properly. And, again, that was the you're going to use it for. If we're going to do it, we're going to do it properly. And again, that was the thing when we were looking at Snap.

It would have been hard to integrate that properly into Solus. For a flat pack, it's very, very simple for us to integrate. Producer Michael, you had a question about sandboxing? Yeah, sandboxing, containerization, whatever. Flat packs originally were doing via Wayland. So how did they approach the issue if they have it right now?

Sorry, I didn't quite get that. I don't know if they're... I actually just saw a blog post about this. I think this is sort of in the works still, isn't it? I didn't read the post yet. I had tagged it for reading, but I haven't. If one of the issues is AppArmor is not available to install in Solus. But Flatpak is covering this issue for security.

But last time I checked, they don't have a solution for that. Oh, they do have a sandboxing mechanism in place. It's called BubbleWrap. And it effectively creates a kernel level. It's effectively a container, you know. To avoid, they don't call it a container because it has all the connotations of Docker and things like that.

But effectively, it's like a kernel level namespace and container. So you do have the containerization. Yeah, and then you have, there's basically a Dbus proxy that sits in the middle that filters all out the calls. You've got a set comp, which is involved as well. So it can actually filter system calls going through. So in terms of integrating into Solus, I had to update LibSecComp.

And I made one patch, which has now been merged upstream already. And that was to actually support a stateless configuration in Solus. So it was very, very easy to integrate. For Google Chrome itself, we wouldn't be sandboxing it. Here's the difference. So we'd still be using the native file system stuff there. It's just effectively a way to distribute and update it. So the sandboxing for that part isn't important,

but for future and applications that are being distributed as these things start to get more popular, obviously we do want that fully integrated. That makes sense. So how will I see this and when will I see this as a Solace user? Am I going to be waiting for a while? Oh, no, no, no, no, no. No, that wouldn't be fair at all. So at the moment, we are doing a very, very large stack upgrade. We're going from GNOME 3.20 to GNOME 3.22. You will see me ranting and raving about it on Google Plus at the moment. 2.2, you will see me ranting and raving about it on Google Plus at the moment. I'm not in a good mood with some parts

of it, but anyway. So while we're doing that, we also try and bring up some of the reverse dependencies. So Flatpak has already gone in there at the moment. That's part of the next update series that will go into the main repos. But it's going to be a colossal update. Like, when I got as far as

packaging, I think it was Nautilus, which was the first GNome app that i'd updated there was already 200 updates to solace by that time yeah so it's i'll be nice i'm going to issue some delta updates as well uh but yeah so the next set of updates that will all come through flatback is already in the repos enabled now we just need to plumb it into the software center to make it all work nicely so that's uh that's kind of huge that's kind of a huge thing and you talked about something else in in a recent post talking about uh budgie 11 and you talked about bulletproofing i think was the verbiage was like bulletproofing the upgrade process yeah bulletproof boot uh is what it is oh

yeah that was the name i gave it so the kernel update mechanism in Solus isn't great. Effectively, you're having the carpet ripped out from under your feet every time you upgrade. Now, there is a variety of ways to do it in some different distributions, and that usually involves having a meta package, which will then depend on a new package that comes in, and then you end up with multiple parallel kernels installed the way that i'm doing i'm actually adopting something

that i developed at work which is clear boot manager from clear linux which is an intel project what i'm doing is make adapting that to actually support solace fully and more importantly be generic enough that it'd work for other distributions so the way that this effectively works is you take the control of the kernel away from the package manager now that's probably going to sound a little bit weird so if you upgrade a package on your disk it takes away any files that are left there the difference is with this approach you have this package once you upgrade it leaves the old files on the disk. They are no longer within its domain. Then Clear Boot Manager is fired up.

The first thing it does is make sure that your running kernel has to stay there. That's like rule one. It has to stay there. You're not allowed to remove the running kernel. This is a very bad thing to do. It will then install the latest kernel and the last running kernel. So when it goes to install them, also make sure they're repaired so they're fully present on the disk.

If anything's happened to them, it will actually repair them and fully restore the EFI system partition. How does it accomplish this? Through the code that I wrote, basically. Is it like pulling code down and patching? What's happening? No, no, no. So if you upgrade it now, like, in Solus,

you'll be automatically shipped to this new package. It's called Linux LTS, and that will be on the 4.9 branch. So when you update, the old files stay there, and so do the new files. They're specifically namespaced versions with release. Everything is encoded in the name of these files. So when you upgrade, it automatically knows which one is the next new kernel because we'll have a symlink, which is default LTS, shipped as part of the files. So when you upgrade, it automatically knows which one is the next new kernel because we'll have a symlink,

which is default LTS, shipped as part of the packaging. So it knows who the new guy is. When it looks at the uname output, that is also encoded to carry the version release and type information of the kernel. So it knows which one needs to stay,

which one needs to be repaired, and which ones need to be garbage collected. And so this is how it's able to, this is how the package manager is able to just not even worry about it, and it's able to keep... Exactly. Ah, that's really clever. So the package manager comes along.

So say we went from 4.9.4. It then deposits all the 4.9.5 files on there. The difference is now that default LTS link has changed from the old 4.9.4 to the 4.9.5 one. And it doesn't have to be a version update. It can just literally be like bumping a release to fix something. Your current kernel will stay on there. The one you booted before will stay on there because we run a systemd unit at boot. And once it's got past the multi-user target, it records that information to a file. So it

knows that that kernel successfully boots. Anything that doesn't meet those parameters is then garbage collected from the disk, including the initial RAM disks, which are now shipped as part of the package instead of being generated at install time, which is risky. So everything is now pre-shipped, ready to go. So you're never going to have a situation where you upgrade and kernel modules go missing and things disappear and you can't roll back. So does this clear boot manager land in Solus as well? I mean, at the same time that Linux 4.9 does? So I'm actually on the 4.9 now, but yeah, they will come together.

So basically you'll have one last derpy upgrade, which is going from the 4.8 stuff because that part of it is unavoidable because it was broken to start with. Once that's happened, you'll be upgraded to the 4.9 and from then on, you can just keep upgrading. And if there is ever a problem happened, you'll be upgraded to the 4.9. And from then on, you can just keep upgrading. And if there is ever a problem, you can just roll back to the old kernel. Now, the difference between this approach and the typical sudo update grub kind of crap, you have to record bits of those information around for it to keep working properly. So if

you've ever had encrypted installs, you've got to keep hold of the resume parameters, So if you've ever had encrypted installs, you've got to keep hold of the resume parameters, the locks UUID parameters, the root equals, all of that stuff. And it's even harder for UEFI. Clear Boot Manager is picking up all this information automatically and recording it. So it's entirely stateless. It can completely restore a boot partition for you. So I put a video up on my Google+. If you want to go and have a look at it. I basically RMRF'd everything on my ESP, which is something you probably shouldn't do. But then just to kind of demonstrate the confidence in that, I ran the command and bam, my ESP was restored, including the bootloader itself.

Because it manages the updates as well. I will have a link to IKI's G Plus page in the show notes as well as to the Clear Boot Manager. That's a pretty nice upgrade. That does sound like if everything works as intended, that it should make that update process much more bulletproof. That's kind of what I'm going for. That's what I'm going for, IKI.

Yeah, I mean, it's been used in Clare Linux now for a long time. Obviously, I'm not speaking on behalf of Intel while I'm here now. I'm speaking on behalf of Solus, but it's a project i work on at work and we've been using it there for a long time and it does work it's you know it's field proven if you like and the the original thing that basically bugged me was dual booting on an efi system partition nobody really does that nicely i mean if you look at some systems you'll get like a slash init rd zero dot image and things like this who does it belong to you know where's the domain ownership and then you have these subfolders it's kind of nasty so i wanted to basically implement standards and have a way that things can cohabit peacefully on an esp without conflicting so the solace kernel

now is like a com.solus project, and then it'll have the version and everything coded into the file names, so you don't have to worry about things conflicting or fighting over the ESP. So I'm also making it very agnostic, so if anyone else does want to integrate it into their projects, they're more than welcome to. And so does this make it possible to, say, run multiple branches of the kernel? So say if I wanted to have...

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that was one of the motivations because in Solus there is a kernel package. It's just called kernel. You're kind of limited on your choices there, which is kind of sucky because we have to run the kernel that's going to be safe for everyone. But sometimes there's hardware enablement differences or we need experience with that new branch of the kernel before it becomes a new kernel so this one is becoming the linux lts kernel so you'll upgrade and that's what you're going to okay that'll be handled automatically then the default one the lts yeah just to make sure everyone's safe you're going to go to the lts branch and then that's where you're going to be by default are you tracking greg kh is that

where the lts moniker comes from? Yeah, basically. So that would be the 4.9 branch for now. And once 4.10 is stable, then we can start like a Linux mainline package to kind of, you know, have a bit of symmetry between us and kernel.org just so you know where you stand. I like that a lot. I think that's a good idea. Well, okay. Well, that's a hell of a lot of awesome stuff that's making me really want to continue to use solace so that's good that's yeah there's a lot of things that

are coming um we've just started up budgie desktop.org as well uh you know we do want to talk about a little bit about budget if we could yeah i mean you know yourself i mean budgie 11's kind of achieved meme status by now yeah you know like after budgie, after Budgie 11, this thing is going to be fixed. But it's actually 9 now. Now I'm nervous because I'm like, I feel like things are just getting stable for me, and then my desktop's going to get just pulled right out from underneath me. No, no, no. Budgie is going nowhere.

I mean, you have my full assurances on that. I'm just worried about big changes. It sounds like 11's a pretty big rewrite. Well, the thing is, well, I'm going to be explaining more of this in the blog post later. I don't want to spill the beans. Okay. All right. All right.

I'll keep my eye out. But it will be a significant blog post. But effectively, we're taking measures that will unlimit our creative freedom, which will make Budgie a lot better because we've got some longstanding bugs that we just haven't been able to fix. So those will be coming. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. It's big stuff. Yeah, sounds like it.

All of this is basically focused on one singular topic. It's about giving users the experience they deserve. Right now with Budgie, we are not there. You know, we are not there. There are some annoyances, some bugs that are there, and the user shouldn't have to put up with this shit. So that's what all of this quarter is about about it's getting everything in place so the users can actually have that experience that they deserve from their computer that they bought that computer

you know they shouldn't have to suffer these stupid bugs so we will have that up there and it's going fully fully distro agnostic like it's up on its own namespace on github has its own domain it has its own blog so it's going to be very some people you know are going to be how people are when they see something about new stuff and this is how we do things but it's believe me it's for the best uh we'll say i say from the blog post keep an open mind and we'll we'll wait for updates maybe you come back and tell us a little bit about it because i'm curious as heck. All right. Well, I want to also – I've never installed Gnostic.

Hey, I'm doing a show. Excuse me. I wanted to also mention some big updates that are coming to our friends over at Ubuntu Mate as well as Kali, which I am super, super excited about. So we should keep moving so we can make room for TechSnap. And, you know, I would be amiss if I didn't mention DigitalOcean. That's the secret sauce. Guys, that's the secret sauce. It's a super simple, straightforward cloud hosting provider that will get you up and going in no time.

If you're a one-man team up to a multimillion-dollar company, DigitalOcean is going to work great for you because it's super intuitive. It's super reliable, super fast. I'm trying to think of another super. Super SSDs? I'm losing it. I don't got any more supers, but it is a great service, and it deserves all the supers I can come up with. They've paired an amazing user interface that really accomplishes it simple to use while also being very advanced and letting people that know what the heck they're doing just to go at it.

Automatically attaching your SSH keys. spinning up multiple VMs from templates, snapshots and backups, but the best part is all of it's exposed by a very simple, straightforward, got to love it API. And, you know, in my day-to-day usage, I talk about the UI so much because I was born in the fire of a time when virtual machine management only ran under Windows and it was the worst, slowest MMCUI knockoff you'd ever seen. So now, in 2017, to sit here and look at this DigitalOcean interface, it just blows me away. So that's what I always focus on.

But the reality is their API is really where it's at. As a daily driver of DigitalOcean for spinning things up and down for our infrastructure all day long, up and down, up and down, all day long, I'm using the API. I'm using bot commands that trigger the API, to be honest. That's how I'm doing it. And it makes it so easy to integrate DigitalOcean infrastructure that's in San Francisco for me and in New York. And it's just one single bot command. And in the background, these systems spin up online. These sites go active.

These streams turn up. It is so incredible. Making multiple systems is a snap. Well, you can do it from a snapshot, but it is super simple. And the other thing that's really nice is not only can you transfer droplets to other folks. So say you're going to build something for a client or for a friend or a family member, et cetera, et cetera. It also is really great working with teams. or a family member, et cetera, et cetera.

It also is really great working with teams. For your personal use, say you want to do a Mumble server, a Minecraft server, an IRC server, a sync thing, BitTorrent sync, all of that. They have 40 gigabit e-connections, SSDs for all of the machines and data centers all over the world. Check it out at digitalocean.com.

Just do me a favor. When you sign up, apply our promo code D-O-unplugged, D-O-unplugged to your account. You get a $10 credit. You can try out that $5 rig two months for free. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code D-O-Unplugged.

So there has been a massive leak, Edward Snowden-sized leak about the progress on Ubuntu Mate. There's an insider. I'm not familiar with this person. I think his name is Martin. I'm not sure who he is but wimpy is here to help us make sense of all of this so wimpy there's some really nice things coming down the road and there's also some stuff that we talked about previously on the show from ikey brisk in there so where do you want to start with the update for the mate project okay uh well let's

start with brisk we've just heard from ikey i don't know if you noticed he's quite a clever chap isn't he lots of lots of technical detail there that said he does need help from an older wiser gentleman with bitwise operators from time to time but aside from that he's uh he's a smart cookie um yeah so let's start with brisk because there's there's some news there that i've not announced that dovetails with that. iKey released Brisk menu 0.3.0 yesterday evening. And that's being developed as an efficient menu for the Mate desktop. And we created a PPA for Ubuntu for that.

So if you're running 16.10 or 17.04, you're able to get the 0.2.0 release. And that PPA is now up to date with the 0.3.0 release. So if you're already using that PPA, you'd have got your updates today. And there's a bunch of bug fixes. Cool. Risk in there.

And that's cooking along nicely. I've gone through IKI's issue tracker and sort of highlighted the bits that i'm interested in seeing and ubuntu mate we're in our is that our second month now i keep we're open to the crowdfunding from ubuntu mate some of that money's being funneled into solus uh so that ikey can work on brisk um for the mate desktop as a whole um which is really cool to see. That is cross-distro collaboration. Yes. And I also heard that Mr. Producer Michael there in the Mumble Room was involved in updating

high DPI and low DPI for what? Icon themes, I think it was. That's right. Yeah. So, yeah, Michael in the chat room here, Producer Michael he retouched all of the um assets in the not the icon theme but the the gtk theme itself so things like sliders switches radio buttons and all of that sort of thing um and all of the outlines for those and the shading they've all been retouched so that there are two versions there's a low dpi and a high dpi version available for those now yes um so that's all good stuff and yeah he was another fund that was another funded uh contribution

in the same way that um the work from daniel foray elementary he um he contacted me just before the christmas holidays and uh he was saying you know would we be interested in adopting some of his um updated folder icons and things of that nature um in ubuntu mate because those of you that don't know daniel years ago used to work i think it's on a contract basis but worked with or for ubuntu on the humanity icon themes so that all of those icons that you're using in Ubuntu originated from his work. And he's refined and improved those over time. And he was saying, you know,

did I want to adopt the new version of that? So he did a bunch of work and we've adopted those icons. And then there are a few that looked a bit rough because they were the old style. And he's now touching up a few of the others there. So we've got a whole new icon theme uh for all of the common um actions and uh folders and stuff like that and that's all come from daniel at elementary and again funded through the ubuntu mate crowdfunding that is slick i really that sounds like some really nice updates it's great that the crowdfunding is

making that possible too that's i love it it really, so it's made quite a difference. You might remember me saying, I think it was a few months ago, we got sponsorship from ByteMart to cover all of our hosting and bandwidth now. And that took a few months to fully kick in all of the advantage of that because although we moved to them as soon as they made that available to us, we'd got some longer term hosting agreements with some other providers that we've had to sort of be paying for. Well, that all ended at the end of December. So this January is the first month where we're completely free

of any legacy hosting payments. And already for January, the amount of funding that ubuntu mate is paying out to other projects and independent open source developers is sitting around two and a half thousand dollars of money going to other developers to work on either mate or ubuntu mate related projects so if we're able to keep that up over the next 12 months, that will mean that we get good quality, consistent contributions coming into the projects that we care about. But some of those cross distro collaborations, that's money going back into those projects that they can use to fund their own work. And for the part time collaborators, you know, some of them are students and some of this money is meaning that they don't have to flip burgers at the weekend. They can actually work on open source and get a decent amount of money in return.

So I'm really hoping that that will continue to escalate over the next year. So you know what I really want to talk about, though, is – I'm guessing. The Mate desktop 2.0. I mean, you put 2.0 on there and i i want to know i want to know more details yeah so uh internally within the um the mate team there's there's four of us that make up the core team and there's two of us that want to go with mate 2.0 and the other two are like no let's call it 1.18 so um i'm kind of uh forcing the agenda here oh clever clever by putting it out there that uh it could be a marta 2.0 um and it might it might still be well we'll have to have some polite conversations and agree agree that this is what

we're going to do but the reason reason for this distinction, in my mind, is that with the next stable release, which at this point could be 2.0 or it could be 1.18, it's the first version which is you can only build against GTK3. All of the legacy GTK2 code has been removed from the entire project. So that's all gone now. And there's been some other incremental improvements there, but really I feel that 2.0 is worthy because GTK2 is gone.

And it would be nice to know that the 1 series was the one that you could build against GTK2, and the 2 series is the one that went to GTK3. Yeah, that's awesome. And then we've had on our roadmap, And the 2 series is the one that went to GTK3. That, yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. And then, you know, we've had on our roadmap, you know, this gentle progression to GTK3 has always been more so from some of the other distributions. They've got an eye on adopting Wayland.

So another step towards Wayland is this current, so we have the development snapshots, they're currently 1.17. Those development snapshots now have support for libinput, which is a modern library for handling input devices, including mice and trackpads and trackballs and touchscreens and what have you, which supports both Wayland and X11. So that's in there now. So we're looking for some testing and feedback on that. But that gives, if you've ever used lib input on, say, Gnome 3, which has had it for a little while now, you'll notice that the sensation of, especially on track pads, you feel like your finger is really moving the mouse

rather than there's sort of you're dragging, your finger movement is disconnected from what you see on the screen. With Libinput, those things are very sort of glued together and you can feel that that relationship is very strong. So that's good and it opens up some compatibility. is very strong so that's good and it opens up some compatibility so improves things like um disabling um taps when you're typing and stuff like that is much better palm detection oh yeah so that's great stuff and then yeah that also puts you closer to wayland right it does and then um with um fedora 25 going to wayland by default, the Fedora maintainer for Mate, he's now had a series of bug reports where some people are installing pieces of Mate on top of Fedora 25 running GNOME 3.

And then those applications don't work under wayland so this is things like kaja the file manager i have mate the image viewer the terminal you know various other bits and pieces text editor and what have you so we've now got this to the point where the applications will run as applications on top of wayland now that doesn't mean you can bring up the whole of the Marte desktop in a Wayland session. That's a little way off. But the individual applications, when they're running on Wayland, will now run on one of them, and that's Pluma, the text editor,

can run natively on top of Wayland. So baby steps, but we're getting there. We're getting there. Yeah, sounds like it. And the way this support's integrated, I'm hopeful that this will also mean that MIR will work as well. But I shall be testing that later in the year. So Ryan Sipes in the chat room there is asking

if you've heard any little birdies tweeting about perhaps lib input ending up in Unity and Ubuntu, because that seems like that'd be a nice feature upgrade for Ubuntu desktop too. Have you heard any discussions? I may have done but I'm foggy on this so what I'll have to do, Ryan I will check some things and get back to you

on that. I think I think it's in Unity 8 already. I'm pretty sure about that. It's not in Unity 7 and I I wonder if one went digging around on Launchpad if you might just get the answer. Yeah, well, I will need to go off and have a little look in the code repositories, but not that I'm aware of, but that doesn't stand for anything

because some of the people that are working on this are sort of disconnected from what I'm doing at the moment. So for end users, what kind of new stuff is landing that we've just discussed is landing in the next release? Everything we've just discussed is landing um in the in the next release everything we've just discussed is in the next release it's already in the development snapshots you are crazy sir remember how remember how one of these releases you're just going to kind of back off and just have like a really boring release remember how that's going to happen this is this is this is that one yeah so what everything i've just discussed is what's happening in Mate itself rather than Ubuntu Mate.

Oh, wow. So Ubuntu Mate is going to move to the next version of the Mate desktop in this release. We've already uploaded Mate 1.17 development snapshots to the Zesty archive. So if you install a Zesty daily image for Ubuntu mate now you get all of this stuff i've just been talking about um if you um download the um alpha which is coming out in a week or so then you know you'll get all of this stuff um but in terms of what ubuntu mate is doing all of that high level you know uh headline grabbing stuff we've just spoken about is only part of it. There was a load of rough edges in Marte 1.16 because that was the one where we sort of really jumped to GTK3 and it was available everywhere, although it's still a build time option for some of the components. the components and i've been going through the issue trackers on launchpad and on github for mate and joining up all of this stuff and sponsoring the upstream mate developers to fix

all of the sort of the real serious paper cut issues with with that transition to gtk3 so there's a lot of refinement going on in Marte in this release, and consequently that will filter into Ubuntu Marte. So it's just going to be boring and fixes is very true for Ubuntu Marte. We've got some shiny new artwork from Daniel. I really wanted to bring the Brisk menu into the Ubuntu archive now, but for those of you that don't know,ian stretch what will be debian nine they're in final freeze uh in a few days so consequently they're not allowing new packages into debian and if they don't go to debian then they don't automatically sync to ubuntu

and i prefer when i'm working on mate to do everything in debian so these packages have been so brisk has been uploaded to debian it's in the new queue and it won't get out of the new queue until debian 9 is released so maybe i'll upload it just as an ubuntu version at some point but i'm i just want to see what happens see does debian 9 materialize in this uh cycle in this window but um i've done a bit of work with brisk so that you can have the brisk menu with its search capability and you can still have the places and system menu along it so instead of applications places and system you can now have the brisk menu and you get menu places and system so you still have the three

tiered menu you still have places and system as you used to brisk is very much like the applications menu as was but has fast search and some additional session management capabilities in there so i i'm thinking brisk might become the default if not in this release then the next release uh sitting alongside the traditional three-tier menu i think uh i did i did i hear you mention i think i think in the post you said alpha 2 is scheduled for release in like three days so yeah it's very it's very soon yeah i i i forget exactly exactly, but it's this week maybe, maybe this week. There's a couple of releases coming up, and I can't remember which way round they're up.

You've got a lot going on, don't you? We've got the 16.04.2 release coming up on February something or other, and we've got the Alpha 2 of 17.04 coming up as well. So it's all releases at the moment. Yeah, boy, I'm sure that's not a stressful time at all. That seems very low key. Sounds all very low key. All good fun.

You're a good sport, Wimpy. You're a good sport. All right, so before we get out of here, I just wanted to give a mention to Kali Linux, who celebrates their 10th anniversary this year, and they have announced today a new Kali Linux certified professional course, which will debut at Black Hat 2017. The KLCP is the first and only official certification program that validates one's proficiency

with Kali Linux, which I think is interesting, perhaps, if you're in the penetration testing business. I used Kali when I did that. And Kali Linux also announced that there will be on June 5th, a Kali Linux revealed Mastering the Penetration Testing Distribution, the first official book on the Kali Linux platform. And keeping in Kali Linux spirit, they're also going to make the online version free for download. So you can get it if you want for free. That actually is going to be also a big refresh in the documentation area too. So you combine that with the book, documentation, and a certification.

It's kind of big movements for Kali. That's kind of a big deal. I don't – oh, and also I should say – cute. 5.8 was released yesterday. That's the news right there. Oh, yeah. OK. All right. We're going to call it there. We've got to go because we've got to make room for the new TechSnap program, which if you ever want to tune in live is on Tuesdays now.

Yeah, I just thought that was really cool to mention for Callie. MumbleRoom, you guys, thank you very much for making it. It was great having you here. I think we've got lots of good info on what everybody's working on. The planes are overhead now, flying the banners to celebrate our excellent job. I think that got lots of good info on what everybody's working on. The planes are overhead now flying the banners to celebrate our excellent job. I think that means job well done

when they launch the planes. That means we did a good job. So we can get out of here. We'll end on a high note. Thank you for tuning in this week. We miss you, Wes! I'm sending love to Wes right now. He misses you too. So don't worry. If you miss

Wes, he'll be back next week. If you'd like to join us live next week, perhaps participate in our mumble room, anyone is welcome. We just like to do a mic check. Go to jblive.tv, sign into our chat room, bang mumble, get the information. When? Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that converted to your local time zone. Oh, feedback and stories? Linuxactionshow.reddit.com.

I'm on Twitter at ChrisLAS, the network at Jupyter Signal. Thanks for being here. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday. All right. That brings us to the end. We have a couple of minutes to pick our title. So everybody in the chat room, go to JB Titles. It is watching live. Guys, thanks so much.

There was tons of good info from everybody in there. Also, thanks to Mr. Hall, who had to move on because he had another call to jump on, but he had to jump too. So that was good stuff. Now, Ike, I had a question. You said something in there about a new icon theme. Is this a fork of Mocha?

What is that? Nope. Nope. You got the author, right? Oh, really? Yeah. So what we've deliberately done, and this is going to sound like me being a complete

knob but we've deliberately done it on a private gift for now because it's something that's going to be important to the visual identity of solos now it might sound like a minor thing but solos was the first one to ship with arc theme you know we've worked with horse the uh the author of arc and getting budgie to look good and be integrated it's it was effectively the official solace theme everywhere you look now i see that bastard thing oh yeah it's good looking so so what we're doing is we're doing it behind closed doors first i can't speak today doing it behind closed doors first just because i don't want to see it turn up in the aur tomorrow and already being warned by half the country before we even get to release the solace

out but it will be coming in time and it's going to be nice and it'll help you know define the look of solace that little bit more so you know i was just pinged during the show that there is a there is an event that i've been wanting to go to for a few years. It's happening in my backyard during scale. Oh, man. I really want to go to this. Plus, there's something else that's happening with some friends on that weekend. And now I'm considering maybe seeing if I can get. I think Noah would go regardless.

But now I'm wondering if I really need to go. In the show, I said I was going to go to scale. And now by the end of the show, I'm like. Noah's going to be there. I'm forcing him to go. Yeah, I think he'd be regardless. So we get coverage. I don't know. The question is do I... because it's not... the thing is

it's a hot air balloon event. It's this massive huge hot air balloon event in this... in a town that looks like it's from 1805. It's like this western town, like wooden sidewalks, dirt roads. It's a really cool little place, and they have an RV park that is within walking distance, and you take a

wooden stairway down into the town, and they're going to have this massive hot air balloon event. And it would be so cool to go. I've always wanted to go, and it's only like two hours, three, two and a half hours away from where I live. We're normally quite boring. I like hot air balloons.

And I like going to that town too, though. So I don't know. So do I, but I live in a city where I have a big one every summer and it gets a bit boring. I bet. Towards the end. I bet.

I would only go for like one day. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know what to do now. It's always so hard. Scale comes at the worst time possible. I actually don't like that they moved it up this year, so it's closer to LFNW itself. Yeah, I wish it was.

It should still be in January like it was, because it would have been happening this past weekend. I wish it was happening actually later in the year even. That would be fun. Like November or something. Well, that might be a little too late. Interesting. Somewhere in that range might be not bad, though. October? Like August, October. Yeah, October could be fun. Like November or something. Well, that might be a little too late. Interesting. Somewhere in that range might be not bad, though.

October? Like August, October. Yeah, October could be good. Yeah. August might be a little hot. August is bad because there's a lot of security conferences, honestly. Like if I'm going to DEF CON, I don't want to make the right of scale. Yeah.

Although I wonder if they nosed it up to something like that, if they could get some more attendance. Although they get plenty of attendance. Scale timber. Scale timber. Wimpy, do you mind if I ask what – you consider going and did why you decided not to go just because i'm considering if i should go or not um well i was either going to go under my own steam or go with work and there are people from work going i can't afford to go to scale and linux fest northwest um so uh and it's a bit a bit awkward timing for scale so yeah unless i was going with work i decided uh i'm not going to go individually

that's the thing with with noah going i don't it's not like mandatory that i go i don't know i gotta think about it some more i wish i hadn't said i was going in the show because literally during the last half of the show, I got the message. There's also – we have a close friend who has a concert once a year and we've missed the concert because of scale. And so like six months ago, she's like, well, guess what? We moved the date of the concert. Well, guess what? They moved it to the weekend of scale. March 3rd.

Yeah, great. Thanks, guys. What you could do, Chris, you see, is you could do this. You could save your money, not go to scale, and you could come to UbuCon Paris in November. Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. That would be an amazing goal.