LINUX Unplugged - Episode 187: CIA's Dank Trojans | LUP 187

Episode Date: March 8, 2017

It’s the year of the CIA linux desktop, with multiplatform malware & boot environments designed to attack Macs, Popey & Wimpy share their Mobile World Congress adventures & Bryan joins us to discuss the last Linux Sucks talk ever.Plus we chat with Gnome at SCALE, take a look at Endless OS & ponder the Litebook.

This is great. The WikiLeaks just sent out this one tweet from the OSB Projects. Ah, yeah, OSB Projects, y'all. This is from the CIA's own documents. You know we got all the dankest Trojans. No, I didn't see that. That's amazing. Oh, there it is.

Yeah. That's the best thing I've ever read. The dankest Trojans. Wow. You know we got all the dankest Trojans. That's amazing. Oh, my God. I'm going to work for Trojans. That's amazing. Oh, my God. Man, I'm going to work for the CIA now.

Yeah, well, maybe that's why they got some good hackers. They're actually fun on the inside. I mean, sure, on the outside, they're all about killing and droning, but on the inside, they got the dankest Trojans. You got the dankest Trojans. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 187, for March 7th, 2017. Oh, welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's very well-traveled this week with stories from all around. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. Hello there, Wes. You look very dapper today, sir. Thank you. It is a big show. Oh, yeah. So much stuff. We, of course, as has been tradition for now three weeks in a row, are going to start with some Wolf Blitzer-style breaking news. We're going to get all Blitzer up in here, cover some big news and how it applies to Linux. Everybody's talking about it this week.

Then Mr. Brian Lunduk will stop by the show. He's actually secret. Spoiler. Already here. Going to talk a little bit about the last, the final Linux sucks. It's an end of an era. We'll get the inside scoop on what's going on. I suspect

it's all about his hairdo. Now, later on in the show, we're going to hear from Mr. Wimpy and Mr. Popey about their trip to Mobile World Congress. And then if that's not enough, if that's not enough, like, you know, we got a little scale in there, a little Mobile World Congress. We're going to get you amped up about Og Camp 17. What? Then we're going to warp back to scale. We're going to go to the Gnome booth and talk to the the GNOME guys about some of the stuff they've been working on, why they like Endless OS, the new Endless OS PC.

I think it's called the Mission. Yeah, I think so. Noah got to see it. He got to talk to the guys at the booth. We're going to play an interview from that. And then at the end of the show, new piece of hardware touting elementary OS by default. However, the elementary OS project, super silent on the issue. Kind of like they don't want any attention on it.

And the hardware looks like it might be a bit of a scam. Not sure exactly what's going on. But producer Michael's been following the story from the very beginning, asking questions, getting the inside scoop. So we'll dig into that and talk about the Lite, or I'm sorry, the little Lite, I think it's called, the Litebook, which is a $250 Linux laptop. Is it too good to be true? A $250 Linux laptop preloaded with elementary OS.

But before we can get into any of that, we must say hello to our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hey, babe. Hey, baby. Hello, guys. Hello. How you doing? to our virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Pip-ip. Quibibis. Hello, friends. Hello.

Hello. So, everyone, it is a big news day today, and if you've been following any of the news outlets, I mean, they're all just, I'm sure, just talking about it in great detail. Well, maybe a little bit of detail. Maybe not as much detail. So it's up to us, then.

It's up to us. It is our duty to go wolf blitzer on this. We're going to do a little breaking news right here on the show. This is CNN Breaking News. So this morning, a little earlier than expected, Richard Stallman was once again proven correct. In fact, this isn't even – I don't have to point this out. WikiLeaks tweeted this. GNU founder Richard Stallman's famous quote resonates today at WikiLeaks publication.

With software, there are only two possibilities. Either the users control the program or the program controls the users. If the program controls the users and the developer controls the program, then the program is an instrument of unjust power. Now, this is sort of a pungent. Is that the right word? A pungent? Smells a little bad? You never like to hear this because everybody has, well, except for I want to be able to play games or well, except for I want to be able to record video in ProRes or except I want to be able to make phone calls on my iPhone. Everybody has these little accepts where they don't want

to give on this particular quote. And then something happens. It seems like every couple of months, and this quote comes back up, and it's more right and more true and more correct than ever, and it just stings. It just tastes bad a little bit because, like, damn it. Damn it. He's right. He might eat toe jam, but he is right. Today, WikiLeaks revealed Vault 7, a whole batch of CIA crap. Yeah, like almost 8,000.

Yeah, yeah, over 8,000. Over 8,000 documents, Wes. And it has been dubbed the year of zero. Yeah, year zero, which is probably in reference to all of the zero-day exploits that are contained in this. So there is actually something in here that's a little applicable to Linux. I'm going to save most of this for Unfilter or TechSnap or wherever, wherever it may lie as we go through it.

But one thing I thought was interesting, and it just came out today, is the CIA has malware that it's pretty sweet because it can target Windows, OS X, Linux, or some hardware routers. Linux or some hardware routers. It's called Hive, and it's a multi-platform automated malware attack and control system. Oh, also Solaris. I shouldn't forget Solaris. And it's also related to the Cutthroat and Swindle tools. Wow.

First of all, I love the names. Cutthroat, Swindle, Hive. Totally love the name. I think all of this is great. And it goes into more detail. In fact, they have and I have these linked in the show notes guides on how to use this. Developer guides, end user guides.

It's pretty nice documentation, really. Good information about how ICMP pings and ICMP errors work and which ISPs might reject them. Quite fascinating, actually. They've done some good work here. It's remarkable to read through this and go, oh, okay, so everything you kind of suspected

is probably true. That conspiracy that you thought was totally out there and crazy now looks like it's more and more true every day. They have supposedly tools in here that help them target computer systems and cars. Oh, yeah, totally. That's something a lot of people have suspected before. Mr. Lundik, you and I were talking about this before the show.

Anything in the Vault 7 leaks, Brian, jump out at you as either preposterous or fascinating in the context of Linux or just worth noting? There's only really one thing that's worth noting in all of this, and that is that the CIA has the dankest Trojan doll. Yes. I love that. That is true. And you can't deny it now.

I mean, if they didn't, would they be doing their job right? They make the NSA look like a bunch of middle schoolers, right? Come on. CIA is like, we want our own exploits. We're not going through those guys, giving them our operational deets. This is how the CIA talks because they're soups hip. They're soups hip. So they go out there, go to totes, get our own zero days.

And they're going to be the dankest zero days. They're kind of talking like Trump a little bit. It's a little Trumpian in the way. It filters down. This is all new relevant stuff, too. From 2013 to 2016 is the- Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Christopher Fisher, I gotta call you out for a second here. Go for it. Now, I'm not the biggest Trump fan in the world, but I don't believe I've ever heard Donald Trump get up on stage and say, damn, that is dank, y'all. I would like that, but I don't believe he's done that, so I'm gonna call

Shanann. Can we wait and hope? I mean, maybe. It's only just started. We totally can wait. It's the first 100 days, man. It's the first 100 days. So you never know. That's the second 100-day plan. Yeah. That's the new distraction.

So yeah, 2013 to 2016 is where these documents are from. It sounds like they got it essentially because people were passing this stuff loosey-goosey around the government at this point. And so people inside the government got it over to WikiLeaks. They've been sitting on it for a little bit. There was some discussion in the last few weeks. I think it was even just last week Julian Assange said they would get it released sometime this year. But they were going through – They worked with?

They were redacting not just names and some dates now, but they're also redacting portions of code, which is an interesting thing they have to do. To avoid easily weaponizing the information, at least. This is part one of this was obtained recently and covers through 2016. Details on the other parts will be available later on. And then in there, this is amazing. So they're not just creating malware for Linux, but they're also using Linux to hack Macs.

And they have a guide on how you can use Ubuntu or Mint, whichever you prefer. User's choice. CIA hacker's choice. Mint or Ubuntu, but at least, let's be honest, at least it's going to be something that supports Snap packages, like a gentleman. And they say in here you can configure the Linux or Ubuntu Mint install to hack the UEFI firmware on a Mac. That's actually pretty neat. Yeah, and they have – apparently they have their own internal repos. And they even – look, they even have instructions on using – this covers using GCC.

This is the CIA's documentation on using GCC to build hacking tools on Linux. Yep. Or the UEFI driver wizard. Yeah, this is what it is here. It's a long page. This is pretty legit documentation. That's really kind of a mess. Look at this. They even have a little GUI.

Look at that. It's with the default Ubuntu theme there. Ubuntu's everywhere now. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's really now. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's really popular. Well, when you're hacking at home and you're hacking at the office, you want to be on the same platform. Yeah, that's true, right?

It makes it much easier when you're building. And also they talk about using public VPSs for the command and control servers to make it even more confusing. They talk about tools that intentionally leave quote-unquote fingerprints that look Russian or whatever else they want. This is really, it's a really big treasure trove of stuff. But the one thing that I thought was interesting was this Hive thing, just in context of this show. It's a multi-platform malware suite and control software. The project provides customizable implants

for Windows Solaris, Microtech routers, and Linux platforms. Yeah. Yeah, it also has a listening post, which is what they call it, the command and control infrastructure to communicate with these implants, is what they call the Trojan, is an implant. The implants are configured to communicate via HTTPS with a web server on the domain that they've chosen, which is usually like a cover domain of some kind.

And each operation utilizing these implants has separate cover domains, and infrastructure can handle any number of cover domains. So you can have one server for the command and control, but appear to be hundreds of domains on one VPS if you want it to be. Each cover domain resolves to an IP address that is associated with a commercial VPS provider, and the public-facing server forwards all incoming traffic via a VPN to a blot, not a bot, but a blot server that handles actual connection requests from its clients. I don't know why it's blot, not bot, but apparently it's this little server that sits there and handles the incoming connections, manages it.

It's set up for optional SSL if you want, if the client has a valid cert. It can do that. And it says it's forwarded to a honeycomb tool server that communicates with the implant. How about these words here, huh? a Honeycomb tool server that communicates with the implant. How about these words here, huh? If a valid certificate is missing, the traffic is forwarded to a cover server that then delivers it via an unsuspicious-looking website.

Interesting. The Honeycomb tool server receives exfiltrated information from the implant, and an operator can also task an implant to execute jobs on the target computer so the tool server acts as a command and control server for the implant as well. Now, there is a bit of a downside if you manage to infect a Windows box. At the time of this write-up, didn't support automatic client update on Windows. Yeah. However, Linux rig can totally remotely update the implant.

Totally good to go. It's got a cron job, updates in the background, easy peasy. Yeah. However, Linux rig can totally remotely update the implant. Totally good to go. It's got a cron job, updates in the background, easy peasy. Yeah. It is. Yeah, that is. Poby, I saw you go by. Did you have something you wanted to jump in with? No, I just thought, you know, the fact that they're using Ubuntu or whatever Linux distribution is interesting, but I wondered if they'd used anything that uses the JSON license,

given that their license explicitly says the software should be used for good, not evil, and whether that would be a way in which we could legally go after them for using the software. Well, you know, I was also reminded of the VMware lawsuit, because there is some use of BusyBox in here. They bundle BusyBox with some of their tools, which made me wonder if maybe they're violating the BusyBox license. Which has gotten VMware in trouble before. Wouldn't that be hilarious?

It'd be like the Al Capone of the CIA. Yeah, it really would be. Because of the BusyBox license. I saw some discussion of how some of this stuff isn't classified because of the command and control nature, for instance, if it was transmitted or put on a machine that couldn't have classified information. Analysts could be fired or disciplined

because it would be breaching the protocol for classified information. What an interesting catch-22. They can't, like, you leaked classified information. It wasn't classified. Wow, I did not catch that part. That is particularly interesting. It's been really interesting also, speaking of things that, guess what,

are interesting. Reading Edward Snowden's Twitter feed today, I think he's right. And he says the big story is this is the first public evidence that the U.S. government is secretly paying to keep U.S. software unsafe. So they discover – they even – they have teams that discover these vulnerabilities or they buy the known vulnerability off of someone or some trading site, they discover these things that are critical to devices that the American public has in use every day that they're doing God knows what with and they're not disclosing it. They're leaving these flaws open, nothing preventing another foreign government from discovering or buying the same flaw and taking advantage of it instead of working.

The sort of the story that came out after the NSA leaks was, well, yeah, we hold on to those zero days for a while. And then we inform the Microsoft's and the Apple of the world about them. Oh, except for these really important ones. OK, we don't tell them about those either. But otherwise, we totally work with them. Oh, except for these really important ones. Okay, we don't tell them about those either. But otherwise, we totally work with them. And then Microsoft even came out with a statement saying, we do have a program that works with the NSA where they discover vulnerabilities, and we have included vulnerabilities they've informed us about in previous patch sets, like they just talked about, like it was the standard operating procedure. And you're like,

oh, okay, well, this is just something that the private sector and the government have set up working together. Nothing wrong with that. Sure. What could go wrong? Right. No problem. Sure. Then you see this and you discover, oh, no, no, no. They have a huge treasure trove of zero days, hundreds of them actually, and they just don't tell anyone. And they just use them for their own benefit and just, I guess, hope. They just kind of hope that nobody else figures out these vulnerabilities exist. They just kind of hope it's all going to work out.

It seems that way. I mean, I guess we're supposed to assume or trust that they are weighing that risk versus the intelligence advantage of having these zero days. But is that really the case? I don't know. And I guess that's something maybe we can analyze now that we have these documents. Is it also mean that people are more likely to start digging into what these are now that they know they're out there? Yeah, hopefully. All right, anyone in the mumble room have any closing thoughts on their story before we move on? Probably not. It's not very interesting. No, no, okay. No, all right.

Well, speaking of things that are interesting... We actually have a couple of these options. Whoa, whoa, did you hear that voice right there? That was the up-the-nose shot of one Mr. Brian Lunduk. It's a nice nose. And he is holding his final, the last, there will be no other Linux sucks talk at scale 15x this year. And Brian, I just want to say, as somebody who's been around when these started, I think this was your best hairstyle out of any Linux Sucks talks you've ever given. I think you really nailed it this year.

Well, thank you. I did a full and complete retrospective of all of the various hairstyles because I felt like that was probably the most important thing to talk about. That's why people would be tuning in. Sure, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Most definitely. Yeah, most definitely. It was pretty fun.

It was good. It was the last one I'm ever going to do. We did it on Thursday night at Scale. It was rad. Yeah. Yeah. I was able to watch some of it. I was watching live because I didn't get to go to Scale this year.

And man, was that live stream rough. Oh, man. That was rough. That was pretty brutal. But, you know, it's conferences. The conference live streams and recordings, they always kind of suck. Like even the big ones from like the big festivals with like tons of corporate backing, they're always pretty rough. It's hard to get right.

So the number one question everybody asks now is, so what's the deal? Does Linux no longer suck or do you just get tired of doing it? Oh, no, it still sucks. It's just the same thing every time. You remember, Chris, remember when we first started doing those back in what year was that 2000 2008 2009 yeah we started doing those remember the first three years i did it it was like the same slides every freaking year yeah like like it was the exact same slides and part of it is because i'm the laziest bastard on the planet but part of it was that it was like the same stuff to complain about every year you know after after almost a decade of complaining about essentially the same things at one point you

got to just like wrap it all up put a bow on that and say there everyone just go reference that video until it's all fixed and then we can revisit there it's it's all it's now in shrine here it is this is the final version fix these things fix that go these things. Yeah, that. Go do that right there. Because that's worked so well since 2009. It's obviously – it's played out perfectly. It's a winning damn strategy, my friend. Now, did you find that it was – there was trepidation early on, trepidation I guess early on? Do people – little Larry of having somebody come to their Linux event and talk about how Linux sucks?

Because I could see some people not getting the inside joke. larry of having somebody come out to their linux event and talk about how linux sucks because i could see some people not getting the right you know not getting the inside joke well remember we when we did the first one we did it up at linux fest northwest and we didn't call it linux sucks we called it linux sucks and what we can do to fix it we actually made a very big deal about how this was a positive thing it wasn't just about complaining and whining and then once once that kind of was successful we were able to drop that whole charade off and just focus on the sucky stuff no more couching yeah yeah but then after a while i mean i mean after i mean after the video start getting a million views i mean people are like oh okay yeah you can you can come here and give my conference

a ridiculous amount of press yes that's fine yeah and it seems to always it always to always, it always seems people see that, you know, and even if they haven't seen the video before, you see it on the program. You're like, what? What is this? Who is this guy? And what could he say? And so, you know, it's either you know about it or you're upset. You're like, I'm going to go.

Yeah, the only thing I, so I feel like there's probably two possibilities. Either you've thought of another way to get attention that's going to be even better than saying Linux sucks, or you're rolling the dice and assuming you're just going to figure one out. Which one is it? A little bit of both, maybe. So there could be something in the works. There might be.

If there were, I would choose to be very sneaky about it and not say anything until at least LinuxFest Northwest rolls around. There you go. Yeah, there's a good plug, too, for LinuxFest Northwest. Yeah, I will be there. You'll be up there this year, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh rolls around. There you go. Yeah, there's a good plug, too, for LinuxFest Northwest. So I will have it. Yeah, I will be there. You'll be up there this year, right? Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Nice. Hey, Chris. I'm going to live there for a couple days. You know, I've heard that you're good at using your words and talking. Perhaps. You're going to give a speech?

You're going to give a session? You're going to get up in front of a crowd this time at LinuxFest? Maybe. You know how much I hate crowds. You know me and... Come on. It would depend. It would depend. Maybe if Wes could fill in for me at the booth for a bit. I'll tell you what.

I'll tell you what. What? Chris, I will do one with you. What would we do a talk about? What would we talk about? I don't even fucking care. We can get up there and talk about shoes for all I care. We'll get up there.

You give me something good to talk about, I'd do it. I mean, I just, you know... You want something about shoes? I got nothing to talk about because I talk... What do you mean shoes? I talk way too much during the week. So what else do I got to say? Right?

So I feel like it's all in the shows. But if you gave me something new to riff on, I could do it. Man, people would love it, dude. Right? People would get a serious kick. I don't even care what it is. People in the mumble room, the audience of this show, whatever. Tell Chris what you would like me and Chris to talk about at Linux Fest Northwest for one hour.

And we'll do it. Yeah. I'll do it. I'll there i think i think i think with this audience it could be kind of random yeah i was gonna say potatoes could be yeah no see i did i did potatoes for like half an hour at the oh yeah so i gotta come up with something more esoteric than potatoes this time around okay well maybe we'll see we'll see what people say let us know maybe something something gripping. We should do something.

Technically, the call for papers is already closed, but I'm sure we could squeeze something in, man. They'd get a kick out of that. We'll just go take over a room. Yeah. I mean, if we walk in there with cameras and microphones and lights, people are probably going to get out of our way. Right? They'll move. Either way, it's content.

You could almost do the history of LinuxFest Northwest. Could almost do that. I just don't really think that would be... I don't know. You'd have to have... I don't know. See, there'd have to be like years of... No, that's boring.

Come on, man. We got to do something rad. Something gripping. Something that really grabs you by your cockles and just gives it a good yank. I think we can do it. How about let's do Stop Using Ubuntu. That actually could get some attention. Stop Using Ubuntu. That's really get some attention. Stop Using Ubuntu.

That's really not that much different than the Linux Sucks Talks, honestly. That's pretty much the gist of it. So we'll have the final Linux Sucks Talk. It's up. Yeah, yeah. The final one was out just got released. A couple days ago? Yesterday. Yeah, yesterday. Oh, yeah. Less than 24 hours ago.

So we'll see how that one does find that on brian's channel also have that linked in the show notes if you guys want to check it out it's also in the subreddit and and there is i don't know if you saw this chris but one of my favorite shots from any of the linux action shows or any of the videos that the one with the flag the flag i saw that i did see that we got to use i'm like i forgot about that i did too i told was that from coding with got to use that. I'm like, I forgot about that. I did too. I totally forgot about it.

Was that from Coding with Brian though? That was from Coding with Brian. Oh, no. That was just the Linux Action Show. Remember, we recorded it. And you remember the year we went up to Linux Fest and we had like a classroom that we were going to stream live from the whole time. And the internet sucked.

And the audio was terrible. And so we recorded a little intro with the american flag behind me where i was telling people how bad the audio that wasn't even green screen that was legit flag no no no that was green screen oh okay we green screen oh we did green screen okay right after we got that green screen that's hilarious when we were like we were just like farting around with it like trying to like do stuff so we had also the biggest gaud. Like, you know, how much better is that picture with that stash? I don't think it would have the same. I don't think it would have the same landing if you didn't have that.

America, man. I am just eating beef in that picture and I don't even have beef in that picture. It's amazing. I think it's the same jacket too. No scarf anymore, but it's the same jacket. It was. It was. I realized that when I was up there, I grabbed the same blazer, the same brown cord no scarf anymore but it's the same jacket it was it was i realized that when i was up there i grabbed the same blazer the same brown corduroy blazer i had on and that was i

don't know that was 2010 2011 something like that it was forever ago dude yeah but you're just now breaking it in yeah yeah yeah well you know it's just starting to get soft finally yeah so stiff yeah you got this you know this is a 40 year blazer here you gotta it's just getting warmed up it's a particular category yeah the 40-year blazer. All right, Mr. Lunduk. Well, I know you had to go around this time. I do. I hate to jump in here, be fantastical, and jerk when I know my good friends Popey and Wimpy are in the crowd.

But, guys, you're going to have to do something rad without me. You guys, carry on. Do awesome things. Somehow they will manage. You'll manage, I bet. Well, thank you for stopping by, and congrats on a long run of the Linux sucks. Tux.

The Linux sucks. Yeah, not too damn shabby. Also, I was looking at it, and if anyone wants to see early camera work from Chris Fish. No, you don't. Oh, my God. Go back.

Don't do it. The first year or two, we had a tripod, and then the third year we did it, we were just like, eh, F it. We're just going to hold it. Yeah. You know what I don't understand is, like, how come we never got that dialed in? Like, I mean, even now you're still shooting up your face right here. Oh, you want to know what's crazy?

So this year, right, this year we had a sponsor for it. We had really good cameras set up for it. So we had four cameras set up. Whoa. Two of them came out awful. Like, it was nice DSLRs. They recorded it. The image quality was good.

But, like, the shots were just bad. Like, it was just terrible. The one great, like, good-looking one is just, like, this, like, webcam that's, like, up my nose. Yeah. It's great. It's always something. It's always something. I feel like that's the style of Linux sucks sucks though like that's its thing like we had because we recorded two completely separate

years on those old n900 camera those old n900 phones yeah just with some guy sitting in the audience really nice i'm sitting there holding it for a freaking hour and the and the battery didn't last very long on it so we had to have an extension cable run so we could hold it there so it was charging over USB while he was holding this cheap, cheap little camera phone. And then that particular show goes on to get like a million views. Yeah, go figure, right? Go figure. See, that's how you do it, Chris. You got to go cheap cameras, cheap microphone, make sure it's as bad as possible, and then you get like a million views.

Okay, I'm taking notes. I'm taking notes. I'm going to do it. I'm i'm just you know a little bit of schooling a little bit of schooling help you out a little thank you i appreciate that all right i got it all i'm gonna get rid of this microphone all right all right hey guys hey guys look behind you what where'd he go well there you go we'll have that all linked up in the show notes and uh hey brian you're still here what are you doing don't you know how to work mumble close that thing get out of here come on all, so before we go on,

let's stop and thank Linux Academy for sponsoring this week's episode of the Unplugged program. So much more to get into. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to sign up, support the show, and free 7-day trial. What? What?

That's amazing. That is me and my mind literally exploding at the awesomeness of this. You get into the platform, you can dig around and really figure out how Linux Academy might work for you. They have labs to give you hands-on scenario-based learning, instructor mentoring when you need it, videos with self-paced in-depth courses. Whether you're an experienced sysadmin or new to the world of Linux, Azure, and AWS, OpenStack, and DevOps, a sharp skill set is an absolute necessity to succeed. Meet Linux Academy, an online Linux and cloud training platform

that uses self-paced video courses and hands-on labs to give you real-world experience for a wide range of skills. Train for your certification, learn the latest DevOps tools, and grow your skill set to do better work. Linux Academy is not just a video library. We'll see you next time. Yeah. All right. Watch it. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. One of the things that I love about Linux Academy is they have a little breathing room now to engage with the community. And it's really exploding. I mean, they have a great community on their own, but they're now engaging with the wider Linux community.

They're going to a lot of these events. They're at scale. They're at scale. I'm hoping they go to Linux Fest. That way we can get a chance to hang out with them. It's a company in a really sweet spot of growth right now. Not only are they doubling down, investing on their content and their staff and making your subscription more valuable all the time, but they're doubling down on their engagement with the community. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged,

and a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring this here Linux Unplugged program. This one. This one right here. I want to move on. I want to talk about Mobile World Congress and Ogg Camp, but maybe to slide us into that, to prepare us, to get our bodies ready, let's talk a little bit about the story of Firefox OS. I thought this was an interesting piece.

And just this shot of the booth is really something. It really is, yeah. Look at that. Look at that. Look at that investment just right there. Now, you know, Canonical was just at Mobile World Congress. Massive booth. Really a housebooger.

Crazy. Bigger. This booth. Bigger than my house. Bigger, this booth, bigger than my house. Bigger than, maybe as big as the studio. It was a big-ass, big-ass, big-ass booth. So I'd like to tell you, this is the guy writing this, from Firefox, from boot to gecko, all the way up to the software project dying in 2016. And he writes out where they went wrong.

It's an interesting write-up about Firefox OS. I don't know if we need to spend a lot of time going into it, but I thought I would point it out to the audience who's curious about these free software operating systems for mobile devices and maybe where they've gone wrong now that these folks involved, like this guy who was a product developer, have a little hindsight. Yeah, perspective. And can look back at it and go, well, where did we go wrong? So it's interesting from that perspective. look back at it and go, well, where did we go wrong? So it's interesting from that perspective. Now, I want to segue not so brilliantly into Mobile World Congress, where Popey and Wimpy have just returned from.

This is a comparison that people will often make. Well, look at Canonical. They're investing so heavily in mobile, which is kind of like, how do you know where they invest their money? How do you know? What are you basing that on? What are you they invest their money? How do you know what they – What are you basing that on? What are you basing that on? How do you know what returns they get from that?

But anyways, it's a common criticism that you hear lobbied at them quite a bit. And they did indeed have a big presence. So I kind of wanted to get a little perspective from a couple of the booth babes – I mean a couple of the guys that were there, Popey and Wimpy, what they thought of it all and sort of walking away from it. What is the reason Canonical is there? And I don't know. Maybe if I was going to go, what should I expect? So, Popey, I'd love to start with you.

I know that I think following your Twitter feed, I saw several different tweets about the event, about having fun. I'm guessing you must have had a great time. Yeah, it's my first time at MWC. I've never been there before, and I kind of had to ask around in the company to find out what to expect but overall it was an overwhelming experience and i like the size of the place i couldn't get over it it was just humongous so many halls that are the whole building buildings were built specifically for mwc wow it's it's just gigantic and we had a sizable booth i mean

you look at other people's booths like the giant companies like huawei and nokia and and companies like that they had really gigantic booths that were like the size of a town whereas ours was you know pretty big for a free software development company you know relatively a part of the town yeah it was comparable in size to lg who were opposite us on the um on the strip wow wow okay keeping up with the joneses so it wasn't it wasn't like we had a tiny little postage stamp size one compared to all the others but what was really nice was like the diversity of stuff that was on the stand it wasn't just here come and get an ubuntu cd or here's a ubuntu phone

that you can't buy you know there was there's a there's a whole load of stuff and it wasn't just canonical it wasn't just ubuntu there was a whole lot of their demoing stuff and i i know while we were standing there demoing our stuff that me and martin were talking about there there were just so many other things to see and do, which was great because people spent ages on the stand and spent ages talking to us. Now, Wimpy, I was curious from your perspective, this is a pretty big event where you're going and showing off some of the hard work of either yourself or teammates.

Did you feel a bit on display? Was it like, here's our hard work, what do you think? Or was it a different vibe? Was it like, here's our hard work, what do you think? Or was it a different vibe? Yeah, it was, to some extent, it was, here's what we've been working on. So specifically what Poppy and I and our team with Ev and Jamie were showing was all the new stuff to do with Ubuntu Core and Snaps. And we were introducing that to developers who were at MWC. And it was interesting because those conversations went very differently

from the conversations that you have with traditional open source projects. So software developers who just want their software out there and they want to get it on as many devices as possible, as easily as possible, the whole Snaps and Ubuntu core story really resonated with them and uh the feedback was overwhelmingly positive but then you're saying you know ubuntu has from our you know from the discussions we've had here the ubuntu mobile story has been about the phone and the tablet in the past. But going into this, what I've learned is just like the rest of the IT industry has embraced virtualization and containerization in order to get more value out of their servers and pack the most amount of functionality into the equipment that they've got deployed in places the telecommunications

sector are doing exactly the same thing so they have been buying great big devices that have single purpose and single function and these are very expensive bits of kit but they are now moving to a software defined platform where they are rolling out their new era of networks based on open stack and software to define software defined radios software defined networks uh virtual network function infrastructure so it turns out that because ubuntu is the dominant platform in the cloud and supports open stack kubernetes and lexd transparently throughout the you know the stack of offerings and supports OpenStack, Kubernetes, and LexD transparently throughout the stack of offerings that Ubuntu has.

The telcos are queuing up to rework their internal infrastructure on Ubuntu using those cloud technologies. You know, Wes and I went to the Open Daylight Summit that was put on by the Linux Foundation. I bet you were, yeah. Because it was a lot of this, wasn't it? It really was. Yeah, exactly that.

A lot of data centers that look like – there are multiple data centers that look like one flat network that is all spun up on demand. Different connections are created by software-defined networking. Now, they were hoping people would be using open daylight to manage it all or to, I guess, as a network component anyway. But this is, you know, it's big. It's a big infrastructure reorganization on the back end that's totally transparent to consumers. Yeah, exactly. And we don't even realize it's happening. I mean, we hardly know and we're, we went to an event. Yeah, we went to an event about it and we we could hardly tell

and it's you know it's interesting to hear you uh echo that wimpy because that's that's exactly what we observed too and the and the driver for the telcos is that they're they're losing sort of they're losing the fight against the big cloud providers and the data centers of the world and they need to compete there they need to be in that space and that's why they're going to be using many of the same technologies to offer much of the same capability. Poby, you were going to say something? No, it was interesting to me that the people who were coming by the booth, the way that MWC works, on the first day, you get these scouts come by the booth. And these are scouts from some of the biggest companies you've heard of, checking out what's on the booth and checking out the demos. And then they go away.

And then the next day, on the Tuesday, they come back with their CEOs and CTOs and the execs to actually see the thing for themselves. for themselves. And it was interesting to me to see these scouts going around and asking loads of questions and then coming back the very next day with different people alongside them to demo, you know, whatever it is, software-defined radio or Ubuntu Core or OpenStack or whatever. And seeing our salespeople talking to their people was quite entertaining. Yeah. Boy, wouldn't that be, wouldn't that just be one more perfect industry for Linux to completely take over? Just – and not because they're like big Linux enthusiasts but simply because it's solving a problem for them.

Practical problems. And the reason why I like that is it forces these companies to get involved in a way that is beneficial to their long-term viability. And once they get all in on something like this, Linux and all of this technology stack becomes part of that. Well, we have to get involved from a long-term viability standpoint. And Wes and I talked from – I think it was two different people from AT&T, somebody from Ericsson. Where else? AT&T, somebody from Ericsson, where else? I know we talked to a wide range of companies that were getting involved in open source simply because they're now moving into this field.

Yeah, it becomes the tool set that they use and the way to get the easiest way and the best way for them to get the things that they need changed or fixed or improved is contribute to upstream. And the Linux Foundation is trying to figure out a way to, you know, kind of get in on this a little bit because they feel like, well, we should be there setting the standard, setting this. And I don't know if they're getting – I don't have a good sense if they've gotten a lot of traction. Did you guys see a lot about anything about Open Daylight or the Linux Foundation at Mobile World Congress? Nope.

No. Ooh. Yeah, that seems like the event you'd be at though. Ooh. Yeah, that seems like the event you'd be at, though. One thing that I did see, like, conversely, the flip side of the big wigs and the execs and the scouts on the Monday, Tuesday, Thursday they opened the conference to local students who all come in.

So it's a very different crowd on Thursday. Wow, yeah. And the number of people who came by and told, like, before we'd even talk to them about anything before we'd ask them any questions they were like yeah i already use a bunch of it's on my home it was like so many people every single day telling us how yeah they they use a bunch of they love it people telling us they've got their del xps in their bag and they carry it with them everywhere and stuff like that. That really made it worthwhile going and seeing the real people.

And not just the students coming in who are studying computer science, but at the food stands, because obviously we were all in Ubuntu orange. We were a full food brand regalia. So we got four Ubuntu shirts at the start of this event, one clean shirt for every day. And when you're at the food stands buying your food the number of people that were serving me said i love ubuntu or going into the conference you know the security guards and the people on the gate saying i use ubuntu and and people smiling at you from a distance as you're walking along and then when you get there like ah you you know, I use Ubuntu. Or walking around in your lunch break

and people running up to you and tapping you on the shoulder. You from Ubuntu. It was really great. Really great. That was particularly enjoyable. Wow. Our work here is done.

Yeah, really. Now, rumor has it that there may be a new episode of the Ubuntu podcast soon to be released that may go into more details. Are these true rumors? Can you guys confirm this rumor? We can confirm those rumors. I was scared there for a second.

I wasn't going to say anything then. So, I'll tell you what. Mark, do you want to explain what we've been doing this evening? Well, we've been recording the Ubuntu podcast, of course. Very good. Probably talking a little bit about this. You can hear it on Thursday.

Very nice. In fact, Mark, you're here with a little more breaking news. In the unplugged program, I believe another rumor came out on the 26th of February. This is breaking. This is really late breaking news here. That Ogg Camp 17 is on and a location has been chosen. Are these rumors true? These rumors are extremely true.

Not fake news. No, we don't do fake news over here. All facts. Yeah, okay, good one. Yeah, sure. So what's the details? What are the dirty details that I need to know if I might want to go to Ogg Camp? So if you've not heard of Ogg Camp before, Ogg Camp is what we call a free culture on conference.

So it's a conference with not a lot of schedule, but a lot of room for things if you want to come along and talk about your favorite thing. And it's happening this year after taking a year off on the 19th and 20th of august and it's happening in canterbury in the uk okay so we've got um uh a building at the the canterbury christ church university and we've also got some accommodation at their student accommodation we've got a deal with them uh the details of that are on the website at old camp.org and if you go to old camp.org you can also sign up for your ticket um and as we've have done in previous years we're doing pay what you want tickets so you can uh you can come for free or you can give us a bit of money if you want to nice

i think that's really cool odd camp 17 glad to hear it's back and i've always heard it's a good event oh yeah definitely yeah oh one nice thing about the location uh actually this year is if you're in europe um you can actually get the train quite easily to canterbury because you just get the eurostar under the channel and then you either change in ashford or london and then you can get straight to Canterbury from there. So it might be a bit more accessible than it has been when it's been up in Liverpool, the other end of the country. Yeah, that is really nice, especially for... Oh, I'd love to go. Oh, I got to get...

Book ticket. I got to... Well, problem number one is I can't believe I'm in my mid-30s and I still don't have my passport. So that's something... That is problem one. It simply comes down to who has the time to do that? Who has the time to drive around to three different places or whatever it is, get some stupid little picture, and then put on another stupid – I don't have time.

And then wait around for it to come back. My daughter's had a passport since she was four years old. You should be ashamed of yourself. I am. I literally am. Well, we only have the one really close neighbor, and you don't need a passport. Right. That's the thing.

That is the thing. That is, I just go up to Canada with the, and in fact, if you take the boat, you don't even need the enhanced, oh, I can't I don't know if that's true anymore, but you didn't use to For a long time, yeah. Yeah. Just strap some inflatables to the RV, you'll be over in no time. I would, oh, if I could, that'd be so great. I really gotta do it. I gotta do it.

I just need a way, I just, this is why I need an assistant to have it, you know, take a picture of me. Go, go do these things. Now, if you want to hear more of these fine gentlemen, check out UbuntuPodcast.org. So this is going to be season 11. Is that what's starting off? 10. Oh. So it's already up then.

No. This is episode 00. Oh, it is already. We've done episode 00. Yeah, 00 is the bomb. Oh, you guys are so confusing with the 00s. Oh, I like it, though. It looks good.

It looks like just from a title. That looks that looks good. Yeah, this is the one that we generated. The guy who the guy who emailed in season one saying that we were we were sort of had ideas above our station for using a leading zero. This is the season that proves him wrong. Awesome. Not that you guys hold a grudge. Certainly not.

Oh, no. I love it. We're going to churn out 42 episodes just to prove him wrong. Right. Well, that might have been in his best interest in the long term. Boy, I'm excited about Odd Camp. And even if I can't make it, I'd love to hear a report back here on the show about it because that does look like it's going to be a lot of fun.

Are you guys going to record a live Ubuntu podcast there? Quite possibly. Yeah. That might happen. Yeah. That doesn't surprise me. Okay. Although we should also mention we are going to be recording a live podcast later in the year on June the 24th in London.

So FOSS Talk Live that happened last august uh organized by joe ressington from late night linux he's organizing another fostalk live this year and we are on the bill uh to do that so if you head to fostalklive.com when tickets get announced you'll be able to find the details there and get a ticket for the event they'll be in very short supply small venue it's worth going for the laminated show notes alone. Oh, yes. Well, yes. And if you're lucky, if you make friends with Popey and buy him a beer,

he might sign them for you. Nice. Produced in Gobi. In Gobes, as we used to call it. So, you know, guys, I'm just putting this out there, but if you actually stream the recording of the shows live, some of us would tune in. Just saying.

There might be an audience out there for that. It's not hard. You can do it. You can do it. You don't even have to show your faces. You could just do an audio stream. It would be really fun. I know.

That does sound fun. I think one day this whole live stream thing is going to take off. Catch on. I don't know. I don't know. We've live streamed before. Yeah, okay. I think maybe now that we've got a big Telegram channel, we can

pimp it to them. But before, it was more effort than it was worth. Yeah. Yeah. I remember doing live streams before Twitter, and the only real reason I was thankful Twitter kind of came along in some sense was because I had a way to let people know we were live. Otherwise, there was really no other mechanism.

And that makes me feel like an old man. All right, so we got to talk about scale. We got to warp back to scale. I got a great interview by Noah with the Gnome booth. But before we do that, I want to thank our good friends at Ting for sponsoring this show, linux.ting.com, linux.ting.com. You go there, support the show, and get a $25 credit. Now, this $25 credit can be applied to a device you buy from Ting like a maniac,

direct from Ting, why not? It makes it nice and easy. They can even find a device for you. Or if you bring a device, they'll give you $25 in service credits. And you're like, oh, $25? That doesn't even pay for the line. What are you, stuck in some sort of duopoly quote-unquote agreement? Ting is mobile.

It's different. You only pay for what you use. It's a flat rate. Boom, $6 for the line. That's it. $6, $6, $6 guys for the line. Are you hearing that? I mean, I could say it one more time, but it's just crazy at that point. And then you just pay for your usage on top of that. What? It's that straightforward. You got $6 for the line. Oh, I did it again. Then you pay for what you use, minutes, messages, megabytes. So if you don't use many messages, you don't pay for them.

You don't make a lot of phone calls, you don't pay for it. See how that works? It's simple. And then it's Uncle Sam's cut right off the top. That's going to depend on where you live, bro. I don't know. I can't put that. Don't put that on me.

I don't know. That depends on you. Anyways, you find out. You go to linux.ting.com. You click on what would you save. You get a little chart. It starts telling you find out. You go to linux.ting.com. You click on what would you save. You get a little chart. It starts telling you about numbers. You do the math.

You start realizing, holy crap, in two years, I could have bought an entirely new laptop. I'm like three and a half years into this. I got multiple lines. A ton of laptops, too. I'm all up in the ting. I got it for myself. I got it for the business. It really makes a lot of sense.

And if I ever get stuck, which is really nice when I'm on the road, really good support. Really good. Really good. So good. They stayed on the phone longer than they should have. I did not expect that to get fixed. I legit was done like a half hour, 40 minutes before they were. I was like, this is unsolvable.

This is unsolvable. I don't even, you know, I've been in IT for they were. I was like, this is unsolvable. This is unsolvable. I don't even, you know, I've been in IT for 15 years. I can tell you this is unsolvable. You don't need to bother. They stuck with it and got it fixed, which was super thankful. I was in Montana. Anthra was stopping by. I was about to do, I can't remember which show.

I think it might have been Coder. It might have been this show. I was about to go live on the air. My MiFi had died. I didn't know what was going on. I was parked in a gravel parking lot. And Ting saved the day. Linux.ting.com. You go there. You get the best mobile company in the biz. You bring a

device. They don't honey badger. They just go crazy. They don't care. They're honey badger about it. You just use it however you want. Minutes, messages, megabytes, and you pay for it. It's simple. Also, I really like this blog series they've been doing. If you go to linux.ting.com and this is sort of applicable to any carrier

I suppose, but the five capable smartphones under $100. We always talk about you get like Wes over here with the Pixel. That's right. Although you did rock the Nexus 5 for like ever. Ages. Yeah, so you totally earned that Pixel. If you're not ready to buy, you're not ready to blow $700 on a smartphone or even $1,000 in some cases.

Either way, it's great about Ting, right? Just whatever phone you want, whatever phone makes sense for you. Linux.ting.com and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. So let's talk to, well, let's talk, no, let's talk endless. Let's talk endless PC and let's talk Endless, let's talk Endless PC, and let's talk a little Fedora. Oh yes, that's right my friends, it's Noah at Scale. Walking around the Scale floor, we have to stop at GNOME anytime we see him.

Obviously one of the favorite desktop environments of anyone that uses Linux. How are we doing today? Pretty good. How are you? Excellent. So tell me a little bit about what the GNOME team is up to these days. And also, I know that you work for Endless. I would like to hear about the Endless PC and the operating system that you've designed around GNOME. Yeah, for sure. So this is actually good timing because GNOME 3.24, the new version of GNOME, is going to be out in a couple of weeks.

I think March 17th, March 20th, something like that. And there are some pretty cool features in the new version of GNOME, including a night shift filter like you have, for instance, on your phone that will tint your screen with a natural light at night so that it doesn't strain your eyes as much. There's a lot of features also for developers. GNOME Builder and Flatpak are two big pieces of our ecosystem, and they're receiving a lot of new features for 3.24.

And Christian is right here behind me, busy writing code on Grom Builder right now. Really? Right at the conference? He's coding? Yes, he's right there. Excellent.

So, I know that you work for Endless PC, and you guys have designed a very interesting operating system around, no, one might even say that it's like the anti-cloud operating system. It runs so offline, right? Yeah, yeah. So, that's actually one of our core tenants at Endless. The company was born a few years ago with the mission of bringing computers really to the whole world population, to as many people as possible.

And there's really two barriers to doing that. And one is the price of the hardware. And that's why, you know, you see here some of the computers that we've made they're pretty affordable they're nice they're very compatible with Linux they run very very well you turn them on and you know everything is ready for you the other barrier typical barrier is the access to internet so the cost of connectivity or the access to connectivity at all so we bundled inside the OS a lot of features for consumption of content offline. So we want to almost bring a lot of the value of internet into the box itself.

So when you buy it, it will come preloaded with something like 150 offline applications on a variety of topics that you normally would Google things for, such as farming, encyclopedia, or math, or physics, or biology, or all these things. So it's a really good value for people that don't otherwise have access to that information the same way that we do here. Nice. Excellent. If people were interested in Endless, what is the compelling use for the operating system? If I didn't have an Endless PC, can I go get the operating system?

And what kind of people here in the U.S. where we do have an abundant Internet, what is your target audience here, if any? Yeah, so that's a good question. We launched actually this hardware line specifically for the U.S. market this year. You can buy this from our website, endlessos.com, and also you can download the free operating system from there. You can download the exact OS that you would find inside the box for free from our website. Here in the United States, you're right, internet connection is much better. But it's not, that's not true everywhere.

So even inside the United States, there's a lot of places where that is useful. And, you know, even in California, there's a lot of remote areas where internet just doesn't get there because there's not enough people. So if you live in one of those areas, this could be useful for you.

Another interesting use case that we really had not thought about before when we designed this, but it turns out it's a pretty good match, is actually prisons. So there's a lot of people there that have time and they want to study, they want to learn new things, but they cannot access internet as a matter of policy, of course. So we're doing some pilots with prison systems in a few states in the U.S. to see if this is a good match for them. Outstanding. And how is that working so far?

It's been working pretty well. Yeah, the feedback that we've received is pretty good. There were some things like we were shipping, for instance, Open Arena, which is a slightly violent game. We had to remove it. So you have to adjust things specific for the use case, but it's been working well so far. Outstanding. And you're providing the machines, the hardware, the software.

I mean, that's a story right in and of itself, that you guys are reaching out to these people that are, you know, that are in some ways underprivileged and providing them with skills and abilities that they can use if and when they ever leave the prison system, they can become functioning adults back into society and they will know how to use a computer system. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, in some cases we've donated hardware.

In other cases, we've partnered with associations that were already working in the prison, and we installed it on the computers that they already had. So Endless is, at the end of the day, like another Linux-based OS, it's compatible with the whole variety of hardware that, you know, other distros like Ubuntu or Fedora are compatible with. So you can run it on anywhere. Taking into that, you also have a Fedora laptop. Have you found that Fedora is a good operating system for exemplifying GNOME?

Absolutely. I think Fedora is one of the distros that always strives to give the vanilla GNOME user experience to the user. And actually, in Fedora 25, which is what we have on the laptop there, it's the first distro that I know of that ships with Wayland by default. So, you know, we've been waiting for this moment kind of for many, many years, the point where we stopped using X.

And it's there. And I have to be honest, I didn't even notice that I was using Wayland until maybe, you know maybe two weeks later. I saw some minor bugs, but it is really, really polished. It's a really great distro. That's fantastic. So you personally use Fedora on your computer?

Yeah, on my work computer I use Endless, but my personal computer I use Fedora. Nice, that's outstanding. And so, you have to forgive my ignorance, is Endless a rolling release or are they static build? Endless has about a three-month release cycle. So we have major, quote-unquote, updates every three cycles. So we go from version 3.1 to 3.2 to 3.3. And then we have point releases about every three weeks to a month, depending on exactly why

we need to make a point release. Sometimes there are critical bugs to be fixed, so we have to, you know, make it quicker. But no, new features only get out every two or three months. It's not really released. Now, tell me, what was the design thought behind this idea of on the screen here we have, you can see where, like, these icons are in the center. And if I click down here, there's a traditional menu structure. But we have occupied the majority of the desktop space with application shortcuts. And interestingly enough, we started back in the 90s where we had a bunch of things cluttering the desktop. And then we kind of went away from that. But the reality is now, on my GNOME machine, I just have a pretty picture.

It's really wasted desktop real estate. And you've actually taken that up with useful shortcuts, almost kind of like in between a dock. Tell me about that. Yeah, so the idea for the Icon Grid specifically is to be familiar for users that are used to smartphones and tablets. So that's actually how your Android launcher or your iOS application list works. So Endless, the desktop works similarly. You cannot put your files on the desktop. It's really the launching page for all of your apps. So we try to start with a minimal number of apps on the desktop so that the user is invited to explore the app center, which is based on GNOME software, where you can add more apps to your desktop or download more

things from the internet, download more bundles and expand your list of available apps, basically. Outstanding. If people were interested in more information about GNOME or Endless, where could they go? So endlessos.com is the Endless website. From there you can find everything. There's also forums and a Slack community if you're interested in participating. For GNOME, gnome.org is our main website. And you can also find us on IRC, irc.gnome.org. And you can also find us on IRC, irc.gnome.org.

And the GNOME wiki has a lot of information about the release and, you know, the whole release process if you're interested in contributing back. So wiki.gnome.org. But gnome.org is the main homepage. Outstanding. Cosmo, gnome.org, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate having you. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate having you.

Thank you. Thank you. That Endless PC is actually pretty interesting because they've got this Mission now. The Mission 1 is a gorgeous Linux-powered desktop, they say. Yeah, and it's like got a bamboo case, which has always kind of pushed my buttons. The wood PC cases have always kind of done it for me. And I haven't really tried out Endless OS yet, but after that interview, I was a little more tempted to maybe go give the ISO a download.

So the Mission 1 is $250, and you can either get it with 320 gigabytes of storage or 500 gigabytes of storage, and I don't remember... Do they have the... Oh yeah, here it is.

It's an Intel Celeron N2807 And I don't remember – oh, yeah, here it is. Yeah. It's an Intel Celeron N2807 in it. It's got two gigabytes of DDR3 RAM. So that's kind of your base performance metrics. Then it's got two USB 2.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port. Hopefully one of those is three. So three USB ports maybe or maybe one of those actually. It's a typo.

They meant to write USB 3.0. VGA, HDMI out, headphone jack, Ethernet, built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. I guess, you know, for $250, that's not too bad. That's not too bad. And they really are, you know, you listen to that guy, they really got an idea, a philosophy behind this. And I kind of thought, I'm not always a big fan of yet another derivative of GNOME. But I don't know how much they've, I don't know how extended of GNOME it is. From what I did, I did a little reading, a little research for the show.

It looks like it's based on a slightly newer, or I'm sorry, slightly older version of GNOME. I want to say 320, but I'm not positive. It was somewhere in that range. So it's a fork or at least has a layer of extensions on top of GNOME 3. I'm not quite sure. But it did look very usable. So I might be giving the endless ISO a download. I'm trying to think of who in my life would or could use that.

But I suppose if you're just really using web apps and you don't want a big, ugly, weird box in your nicely decorated living room or computer room that sits nicely on a desk, I guess I could see that. Yeah, I think if you had – I could see a lot of family members. Yeah, I could see a lot of people. While we're talking about GNOME, see, I'm giving a little GNOME look because we've been talking – are you still using Plasma, by the way? Yep. All right, we should talk about that. But there's also a write-up at FedoraMagazine.org on getting more out of GNOME notifications, which is a thing.

GNOME notifications, which are not bad, not bad at all, my friend. And with a few tweaks, maybe a few extensions or things like that, you can get even more, including creating your own notifications. Nice. Like things on the command line. So that's also linked in the show notes. Like things on the command line. So that's also linked in the show notes. So Wes, did you end up playing around with like controlling where the screens go or where your windows go on your screen based on keyboard commands?

I know that was something you were – A little bit. I have a list of things to try that I have not gotten to. So I started playing with it. I got a couple things set up. But there's a couple plugins and settings that have been recommended to me that I have not gotten around to trying yet. There's some stuff that's a little more – replic replicate some of the stuff that i3 or similar does uh so i'm looking forward to extend it more or see if it can meet my needs because i'm really liking a lot of the other stuff the one thing that i keep messing up though i'm used to like when i have the lock screen on gnome

i have to hit enter and then i type you don't have to but i'm just used to doing it but if you do that on the plasma lock screen boom now i have the time out yeah so i have to like unlearn something so but i'm trying to i want to stick with it long enough that those things have all gone away and i can give it really a better understanding of if it works for me so my i had two things this week with the with my adventures with plasma and i thought they were both noteworthy for mentioning here on the show i finally got a chance to getting around to play with kDE Connect because I'm back on Android. I'm back on my Nexus 6P. And so I just took advantage of it.

I was like, well, this is one more way I can use the Plasma desktop now. I really like that. I really do like it. I'm not so sure if I want notifications that are showing up on my Android device showing up on my desktop yet. I'm still, like, feeling that out. But just some of the basic functionality, it really feels like 2017. I mean, it's nice. And it's so much more practical than what I seemed to grok with

the iOS functionality. I guess maybe iOS, I don't know if there's a way to share your clipboard with the Mac desktop with their handoff stuff, but I know you can open up links and webpages, but it's not nearly as nice as it is with KDE Connect.

It seems very thoughtfully made. It's one of those things that would make me want to stay on android um also working on ios support oh really well there you go i wonder if it'll be nearly as functional yeah that's something to watch yeah because it's it's always running on the phone right it's you can get it from the play store and then the other thing the other just sort of noteworthy adventures with plasma this week would be I decided to set up the MacBook Pro that we set up months ago on the show, running Arch. I've switched that over to the Plasma desktop from Node. Hey, yeah. And this was my first time setting up Plasma desktop on a high DPI display where everything was high DPI by default. How did that go?

I'm curious. It was great. I think I tweaked the mouse cursor a bit. But on all my previous installations of Plasma on a high DPI display, I've always, my first, right after install, it's everything's tiny. It's all really tiny. And you've got to go into the settings, and you've got to turn up the scale, and turn up the font DPI, and you've got to change some of your window sizes.

I did still have strange windows that rendered way too small, like the size of a 640x480 resolution, just a tiny little window that I have to resize to see the entire UI. But out of the box, after I installed Plasma Desktop, just logged out and logged into the Plasma Desktop, and everything was high DPI. I didn't have to change a damn thing. That's awesome.

It is. It is really nice to see them going that direction. So I still, so I guess my take is I'm getting deeper into the Plasma ecosystem now with KDE Connect. And I've put Plasma desktop on my main driver at home, the MacBook run and arch with now Plasma. Yeah, I haven't really felt the need to reinstall and go to like KDE Neon or Solus or whatever.

Same thing on our little machines. Yeah. Interesting. And Plasma 510 is just around the corner. Sure. Hey, that's good. Sure. Yeah.

Sure. All right. Let's talk about the LightBook. I think Producer Michael has been following this one pretty closely. I'd like to get his thoughts on it because it seems like a pretty good deal, but is it too good to be true? I'll tell you about something that's great, and it is true. That's DigitalOcean. Go over to DigitalOcean.com and use our promo code D-O-Unplugged.

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Yeah, they run Linux. They use KVM for the virtualizer. Pow. You got Linux for the base operating system, SSDs for all the disk I.O., 40-gigabit e-connections, data centers all over the world in choice locations, highly available block storage, which you can attach up to 16 terabytes. Love it. And an interface. The interface is beautiful.

It's the best interface. It's huge. It's great. It is so well done. And it doesn't matter if you're a total noob, like you barely even understand that web servers are a thing and you need a website. You could manage to use this. servers are a thing and you need a website, you could manage to use this. To somebody who's been setting up virtual servers for literally their entire career will find this to be a great interface.

How do they do it? I think they're from the future. You know, I can't really, I can't square it otherwise. Either that or they had this great API and they're like, damn, this API is so dank that we need an interface that comes close to being as dank as our API. That's the only two things I can figure. Either they're from the future or that dank API is so dank they had to have a dank interface. That's the only thing I can figure.

So you've got to check it out yourself. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code DL1. Plug, spin up a rig. Try out a different Linux distro. Maybe go outside your comfort zone. What? You're so important you can't go outside your comfort zone?

Try it. They also now have load balancers, monitoring service coming soon. You can sign up for, holy smokes, DigitalOcean. Look like a pro. And use our promo code D-O-U-N-P-L-U-G-D and a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring this here, right now. Unplug the program. So the light book, is it a scam?

Is it a total scam? Is it from 2014? For $249, they say you can get a 32-gigabyte M-SATA drive, or you can pay a little more and get up to 512 gigabytes of storage. They say it's got Linux by default, elementary OS at that, a 1080p display, 4 gigabytes of RAM, and an Intel Celeron quad-core processor. Hmm.

$250. That seems to be the new sweet spot. Yeah, right? Everybody's trying to hit $250. And the only thing that's weird about this, outside from just things I've noticed, just looking at this, all of the product images are totally gimped. There's no real shots of the computer. But it looks like you can also find this exact image with like a video game gimped into it or probably in this case it was Photoshopped.

Just probably I would assume running Windows, just the exact same product shot, just a different complete operating environment on the screen going back for years now. So that's a little weird. That's a little concerning. Just the exact same product shot, just a different complete operating environment on the screen. Going back for years now. So that's a little weird. That's a little concerning. But maybe, but maybe, but maybe what they're doing is they're taking something that's been around since 2014.

They're rebranding it. And because it's fairly old, the margins are super low. So they can sell it for 250 bones. That's the reasonable take. But, Producer Michaelael you've been sniffing around what's your take you think it's a scam do you think there's something else going on here or is this a legit rig uh i have no idea it's it's more the thing of uh it looks really promising but it feels a little sketchy with the photos with the fact that uh there is no name associated to the company that there's no person's name. When you go to their forum,

it just says director as the person replying. There's absolutely no name. There's no photos. There's one video on YouTube where it shows a person's face because he's recording the light book with his phone, and then the reflection of him is in the screen.

So it feels weird. But like the photos thing, every photo that's on their website, except for the software photos, but all the product photos are also on like Alibaba and stuff like that. It just seems odd that they're not being more, you know, transparent about the company structure.

But I found out they are supposedly located in Tampa, Florida. And that's where they ship from. So there's no international shipping for U.S. people. And the price, I found out what the processor is. It's a 3050 Celeron, which is a pretty good Celeron. It's better than a Chromebooks typical processor 3150 right? yeah I think 3150

I don't remember exactly the number but I'm pretty sure it's 3150 so it's a decent yeah it's better than the average Chromebook there's a couple things I tell you that and I think this came out via reddit posts and they were replying to people's questions a couple things I tell you that – and I think this came out via Reddit posts and they were replying to people's questions. A couple of things that are odd. So they asked, well, is elementary OS getting a cut of the sales?

A pretty reasonable question for a laptop featuring elementary OS. And the response at first was, well, yeah, about $2 to $4. And then when people asked a little bit further, it turns out, well, it kind of depends on bugs and we run into because we're actually going to be doing this via the bug. They're all from the bounty source. Yeah, they're going to do it via bug bounty, the bounty source. Okay, so they're not getting the cut of each laptop. You're just going to use their bug bounty system if you make some profits. Okay, all right, okay.

So then it turns out, well, is this really elementary OS or are you modifying this? No, no, no, we're not modifying it except for, well, we have updated the kernel to kernel 4.8. We've pre-installed Play on Linux. Also, Kingsoft Office and Firefox is now the default web browser. But otherwise, it's stock elementary OS. Honestly, I didn't see them saying that they didn't modify it. Every time someone asks a question about modifying it, they say they give a list of everything they've done. Oh, I was told they denied it at first, but okay.

Yeah, there's also articles out that are reviewing it. They're acting he deliberately ignored uh no he didn't it's in it's in another thread yeah so you go through there's a couple of them you go through and it's you know a lot of it is just odd stuff nothing that jumps out of you it's just odd stuff and you the thing is that happens with something like this is is you you really have to kind of i just think of all experienced like the kickstarter that's gone wrong or theFundMe or Indiegogo that's gone wrong. Everybody has to go total skeptical mode when they see this stuff. So I'm not actually – I don't actually want to put them down too much, but it does seem to me like if anything – Their responses are OK though.

OK. The stuff they keep saying, like if you go to their forums the the way they're doing it is sketchy the responses they give are kind of promising at best case what we what we have here is a 2014 laptop that's been rebranded right and then they're they're just selling that with some support i think is probably it was probably what's happening i don't know if the laptop is is like manufactured in 2014 or is it like that model was first released in 2014. I couldn't find information about that or not. That's just what one of the articles said was like 2014 and from there.

Like, well, yeah, but they could have just reiterated it. But I don't know. It's hard to tell in those Ali Baba's descriptions because they're all like buzzword heavy. So what was it that set off red lights for you then? It wasn't like a red light thing. It was just like all of this stuff together is sketchy. If it was one

of these things, I wouldn't know. If it was just the Alibaba thing, but they were presenting it and marketing it very well and they have a lot of information about who's running it and all this other stuff, I wouldn't care. Because, you know, rebranding things, people do that with Clevo all the time. So it's not that with clevo all the time so it's not that big of a deal so if if that's all they were doing it's just like all of these things

combined feel weird so like they could have just said we don't have product photos that are genuine yet because we don't have a photographer and we're not good oh we have a camera phone and that's probably not a good way to present your products. You know, they could have done that. There's plenty of options they could have done to make me feel not so iffy about the issue. But it's just like if you go to their YouTube channel, they have like weird videos that are weird. One of the videos is like vertical, recording with the phone vertically,

and then also horizontally. So like they started the video vertical, realized was vertical and then turned it horizontal yet the video's still vertical so it's really awkward love it i love that yeah it's just that kind of weirdness that makes me feel weird but like if i could play with a laptop i would definitely do that because if they had like you know yeah review units or something they could send, that would be cool. That would probably be – that would be the real way to tell. Well, you know what I guess? The other thing I would say, Michael, is it sort of was an indication to me the total lack of enthusiasm or plugging or hype coming from elementary OS, which would seem to suggest that they're not on board with this.

Well, I mean, they definitely aren't involved in the situation, so I wouldn't try to promote it if I didn't know about it as much either, but they were aware that it was happening before it was announced. So, they weren't like, they were just denying involvement, they're not

denying, they don't have any assessment whether it's good or not, they're just basically staying out of the situation. I understand why they're doing it, but I also don't think any assessment whether it's good or not they're just basically staying out of the situation yeah i understand yeah i understand why they're doing it but i also don't think it's a big deal that they are like like a lot of companies aren't you know ubuntu is not you know advocating for specific uh products and stuff like that they'll say they'll give you a list about what works and what what't, things like that. But they're not advocating like market-wise. I agree. Technically, you're right. And from a licensing standpoint, you're correct.

I would think, though, that if any distribution out there is going to be hypersensitive to their product being – because think about who really loses here is the customer. And that sucks for elementary OS because who's going to want something like this is going to be an elementary OS enthusiast. But they're not actually getting elementary OS. They're getting something that ships a different kernel, a different browser, and other things that have been modified to it. So it's not something actually supported by the elementary OS project.

So if it's an elementary OS fan, they're actually getting – it's a disservice, and that's got to piss off, I would think, Daniel. I would think that – I wouldn't be happy about that. It's a bit unusual. So there's been a few uh vendors that have shipped ubuntu mate on their laptops most notably intro wear but a few others around europe as well and they've all had the courtesy to get in touch and express their intent to do this and just make sure it's okay now our preferred ubuntu mate's preferred vendor is Entroware.

But there are others. There's Slimbooks and Tuck something or other in Germany. I forget the name. And they're all selling Ubuntu Mate. And they're adhering to the terms of the Ubuntu trademark requirements, which is they ship the vanilla image so i could understand why elementary would feel a bit put out by having a device probably piggybacking off of elementary's brand to ship a product without actually involving them is this this a Chinese vendor, by any chance, this white thing that I'm looking at on your YouTube channel?

Well, it sounds like you saw there out of Florida. The manufacturer is a Chinese company. Okay, yeah, the builder. But the company who is selling it as the Lightbook that are also rebranding it. They must have a deal because there is branding et you know, like branding etched onto the laptop. And one of the videos you can see them says Alpha on the back of it. And that's the name of their company, Alpha Light.

But where are they based? They're in Tampa. Huh. Tampa, Florida. But they haven't like that's all I could find out because it says they ship from there. But I haven't found like, you know, a business address or anything like that. So it so it's it's weird they have the elementary logo on the site too yeah this just feels like the same the

same kind of thing that you get from any like alibaba chinese vendor who um just picks up a piece of software sticks it on a device and ships it out the door at the lowest possible price this seems this is this is a lot different because in the Reddit AMA they did. People asked a lot of different questions, and every question they responded to was, you know, the responses were very promising. For example, they asked about what processor it was. They gave the details.

They asked about if it's possible to get bigger RAM. Like, well, no, it's a, you know, SD RAM type. They were asking, like, is the battery replaceable? Is the hard drive replaceable? And, like, they were listing about how to replace the things. Like, it wasn't like, they even got to the point where someone said, well, what if I want to have a different icon set like Mocha? And they said, put it in your order and we'll add it for you.

So they are very attentive in the sense of the questions that are asked. And if you go to the forum, they're also very attentive to that. Yeah. In fact, they say here in the AMA, somebody says, did you make this laptop as the post claims? Or are you just reselling somebody else's machine with elementary OS pre-installed? And Lightbook team who's been answering all the questions from Lightbook says, we are buying it at business-to-business prices and then selling it with our logo engraved, higher specs, and on a modified version of elementary OS, the majority of laptops made by smaller companies are just straight-up resales, just like ours.

It's part of an OEM, and then they talk about the Windows keyboard key. It's part of the OEM keyboard. They'd have to order a certain amount from their supplier in order not to have the Windows key on there. So it's, yeah, it's kind of like exactly what I think they're speculating. Yeah, and they also said that someone was like,

well, that's unfortunate that you can't get rid of the key, but they said every laptop comes with a sticker of elementary OS on it. So in a way, they are addressing stuff. It's just like their marketing needs work. I would say that what jumps out at me… Their responses needs work. I would say that what jumps out at me as a systemic problem would be if your product depends on elementary OS to sell, it is in your best interest and longevity to work with elementary OS. Just like Entraware works with Wimpy because it's in their best interest for the project to know about you and like you, because they

want to sell more products, theoretically. To be fair, we don't know if they contacted elementary and elementary said no or not. Yeah, you're right, although I'm pretty much I would be willing to make a bet that yeah. I mean, I agree with your bet. I'm just

saying, like, we don't know for sure and it does feel sketchy but like the responses they keep making on reddit they still continue to respond to reddit questions and on their forum you can go and leave a question and they'll you know that's good so that's a good really quickly it's like it's it's as far as like you know sales uh in customer service type approach they're very good at responding and they're very open. They're not trying to pretend about different things. They're not trying to be like a fake Chinese company using Chinese products and just pretending that it's a new thing. They are admitting what they're doing.

It's just the way their marketing feels really sketchy because there's like no one associated to it there's no like there's no original photos but they do actually show the video in gray that the laptop engraved so it is like their claims are legitimate they have proof of that but it's just feels i don't know it still feels sketchy i if i had a spare, I totally would try it. I think I also agree with the beard in the chat room. He says, you know, the thing is how much of a discount could they really be getting with the expected amount of sales numbers they're going to get? These are probably going to be under $1,000 easily I would say.

But who knows? But even let's just say it was $5,000. They're not going to get some sort of massive discount. So where is the room for profit? sort of massive discount. So where is the room for profit? So what that seems – If you look at Alibaba, they have like – you can get 150 with – you can get a laptop. Those laptops at a – buying a quantity of 300, you can get them for 150.

So that's not – There's another problem then because that's too – that's too easily accessible too. This is not a – We don't know if that's actually what they're doing. I just know – I just saw that myself. It might actually be better for them. I don't know if that's actually what they're doing. I just saw that myself. It might actually be better for them. I don't know if they do it in a bigger bulk. They're saying they're buying – they're saying they are buying business to business

and getting some sort of bulk discount. That's all they've said. I would be – I'd be willing to wager if I was going to be looking at this and this is something I'd be – this would be part of my calculus would be they're probably not going to sell tens of thousands of these things. So they're probably not getting some astronomical discount. And they don't seem to be directly working with elementary OS. So they don't seem to have a clear path to profit.

And they don't seem to have a good relationship with the distribution they're shipping. They're also not, as Michael was talking about, they're not really presenting a human face, right, that you can become excited about, understand the motivation. So we're left to speculate. But here's something that I have learned over the years, and this is where I kind of give them some room, is when you are just setting up, like I go back to the purism folks, when you're just getting set up with this, it is, there is so many little things that you have to get just right for a product like this, that it can take a company a few times of

trying this before they really start to fire on all cylinders. And this could be their first foray into this area. I know LightBook is, I mean, I guess it's available now, isn't it, actually? I think you can, I think they say order now, at least. So I guess they are shipping it. So it's a product. It's going to get out there. They'll have customer feedback.

And we'll see if they iterate on it. It's enough to pique my interest. $250 to $270, depending on your amount of storage. That's enough to kind of pique my interest and go, there might be something here that's worth discussing. Oh, you can get it in black. There you go, Wes. I know how you like everything in black. Oh, really?

You've got to get one of each. I mean, if you're a real patriot. There's a white, there's a black, and there's one that's got white base and black, I mean, a red back of the LED screen. This is pretty great. I mean, you could, in theory, walk away with a laptop with 540

gigabyte, 544 gigs of quote-unquote hybrid storage, which I assume is spinning with a bit of solid state. No. No? It's two different drives. One M.2 SATA 32 gig SSD, and they're set at Dill Boot. I'm not sure how they've structured it.

But one, they're basically saying hybrid approach, but it's not a hybrid drive it's two different drives one ssd that's 32 and one that's the hard drive that's 500 they call it hybrid storage okay so that's where you get the 544 gigs um and so for all of that so whatever like raid or whatever they're using to pull that off for that and a black one that's got a decent Celeron quad core in it, $283. That's a pretty amazing deal. And when I'm looking at it. Especially, yeah.

The specs-wise, especially that it's a full 1080p. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. It's 1366. And, you know, it's better than a Chromebook. It's worth as much RAM as a Chromebook. And they take Bitcoin. Damn it. Let's just put it in danger territory. Damn it. twice as much RAM as a Chromebook and they take Bitcoin damn it

let's just put it in danger territory damn it that's interesting yeah that's something to watch there was someone on Reddit that said that they were going to buy it to do a review on their blog so

I'll try to like you know bookmark that yeah maybe follow keep following it for us So I'll try to like bookmark that. Yeah, okay. Do it. Yeah, maybe follow it. Keep following it for us. Maybe – because it would be interesting to see if they actually turn this into something. Maybe they'll actually turn this thing into a real product.

Maybe they'll get to the point where the elementary OS project is comfortable working with them. Maybe they have to get to a point where they're substantial and demand the attention of elementary OS before – maybe it's – who knows? I don't know. They should just give me a call and I'll help them with the marketing too. There you go. There you go. Find him. He's in the mumble room.

He's unified. I'm going to give a real quick plug before we run for LinuxFest Northwest coming up soon, May 6th and 7th. I'll be there. Wes will be there. It's going to be a hell of a show. there. It's going to be a hell of a show. I think right now after reviewing our adventures at scale

this year and kind of looking at the news that came out from scale, I think it's safe to say there may be a new contender for the number one Linux event in the United States run by the community. I'm not saying it's going to be necessarily as big as something maybe the Linux Foundation could put on.

But as far as run by the community, free to freaking attend with a great venue and great talks, I think we may have a new pack leader stepping up. This is – I mean I am so happy. I'm so happy. I mean scale – I'm sure they'll pull things around too. They're going to get that live stream taken care of and that whole attendance thing figured out. They're going to get it pulled around. I believe in them. But I think this might be LinuxFest's year right here. 2017 is the year to go.

I am really looking forward to it. Noah and I are already rubbing our hands together, making plans. Yeah, we've... Very excited about it. You can find out more at linuxfestnorthwest.org and we'll have a booth there. We'll have swag there. We'll be doing a live show from there. We'll be doing an after

party in there. We may do all kinds of things. So check it out. If you can make it, we'd love to see you at LinuxFestNorthwest.org. All right. That's going to bring us to an end of the show. I wanted to say thank you to the live stream for making it this week. You can find the show over at jblive.tv on a Tuesday. In fact, if you show up, you get a little extra because after this, it's the TexNap program. It's like the pre-show for TexNap. That's right. It's the pre-show right here.

Just a warm-up. Yeah, we're warming up. Find Wes on the Twitter, at Wes Payne. That's right. You can also find Mr. Wimpy, Mark, and Popey and the Ubuntu podcast at ubuntupodcast.org. Follow myself at ChrisLAS. Get our live times at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Submit content to the show at linuxactionshow.reddit.com

and get your emails at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact. And last but not least, if you're still listening on YouTube, smash that like button because, come on, long-form content needs your love. Right? Right? Right. See you back here next week.

Goodbye, bye. Thank you, everybody, in the Mumba Room. It was great to have both Popey and Wimpy back. Nice to hear from Mr. Lunduk. Now we've got to go pick our titles. Go get your titles. And then Mr. West has got to get his business up in here. You know what I'm saying? That's right.

Turn on JB1. So, JBtitles.com. Oh, my God. That is bright. That reminds me of the Cody Android situation in a way. It's not exactly similar, but it reminds me of that. Yes, Mr. Puppey. Hey, Chris. So, a couple of things I didn't want to mention on the show, but it reminds me of that. Hmm. Yes, Mr. Poppy. Hey, Chris.

So a couple of things I didn't want to mention on the show, but I thought I'd tell you now. There was a Red Hat booth at MWC as well, and loads of our guys went over there because they had some of the best coffee at MWC. That's awesome. Good on you.