LINUX Unplugged - Episode 195: Rub a Dub Grub | LUP 195

Episode Date: May 3, 2017

Big improvements are coming to a grub near you, Wes has a batch of really useful new open source projects & we consider the “threat” posed by Windows 10 S.Plus the dirty secret about Linux’s battery life, some of our LinuxFest Northwest plans & a lot more!

What color is your hair? Still brown. Still brown. I think I'm going to do it at Linux Fest if I remember. Problem is that the hair dye already got taken from me, so I already had forgotten until you said something. Got taken from you. Every time I'd sit down at the studio, I'd set my arms down, and all of a sudden, like, everything was turning red. It was ridiculous.

I was like, oh, this is no good. I think if Chris does it, he needs to go all the way and do the orchid. Oh, God. I don't know if that's going to happen. Maybe. I also feel like if he's going to do it, he needs to bleach his hair. Oh, yeah. Chris, are you going to bleach your hair?

No. No, he says no. So it's going to look like junk then. Yeah. Is it going to look bad? Really bad. It's going to look no good. Really?

Why? Because you should do orchard. What? You should do Orchard. Why do I have to bleach my hair? That sounds like a bad time. Because how are you going to put a lighter color on a darker color? Is it lighter?

Both of them are. I would think so. Pretty dark hair, bro. It's not going to show up at all, really. You know what they say about guys with dark hair, right? I feel like we could have not said this on air, and then that could have been my out. Now you guys have just totally... No, no. The mistake you made is we want you to do this.

I know. Well, damn it. See, what I think you should do is I think you should make your hair red and your beard organ. It's not actually a terrible idea. Oh my gosh, dude. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 195 for May 2nd, 2017.

Oh, welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's ripped out all of the proprietary software, replaced it with good old Linux. My name is Chris. Get it out of here. Wait, no. My name is Wes. Yeah, we're going to keep it here now. Yeah, we've got all the proprietary software out here. We'll tell you a little bit about that later, but that's not what we're gathered here to talk about today. Oh, no! We do have a great show, though. Oh, that was really totally... Look at you.

That was great, though. that was really totally look at you that was that was great though i really enjoyed that some new projects some of the pretty excited about because wes has gotten his hands on him directly and he's like hey i've been trying this we gotta talk about it i always love those segments on the show then a big big big change has come to all of those encumbered audio files on your hard drive we'll tell you about. And then Windows 10 S has been officially announced and it's got Chromebooks and desktop Linux in the education market

squarely in its crosshairs. Oh, boom, squarely. Let's just right in there, Wes. Watch out for that. And then coming up in just a few short days, the final episode of the Linux Action Show,

Linux Fest Northwest, live Linux Unplugged, perhaps on Locate. We'll tell you all about all of that. Wow! And some of the efforts we've been going into here to get all of the Linux, get all of the Linux. And maybe if we have time, we'd like to have

a very honest and frank conversation about the state of Linux battery life. Some tools, some tips, some tricks from us and the virtual lug to manage battery life, to get better battery life. Wes has a story he could perhaps share with the class from a co-worker who recently tried Ubuntu 17.04. And we'll just kind of hopefully walk away with some tips

to have better battery life on our laptops because it seems like it's on a downward trend these days under Linux when Mac and Windows perhaps are at their best, the new Microsoft Surface laptop announced today, they claim 14 hours of battery life. So we'll see. Can we get Linux close? Can we get close, Wes?

That's the question. I certainly hope so. Yes, yes. So before we can do any of it, we've got to bring in our virtual lug. Oh, boy. Time-appropriate greetings, Bumble Room. Hello, hello. Greetings, users.

Hello. Hello. Greetings, users. Hello. Greetings. So, guys, there is a couple of open source projects that I thought we'd start with this week that are just really cool to check out and really cool to come to fruition. And the first one is one that the Mac users have had for a while that I really thought would be great on Linux, and now it's here. It's called OpenSnitch. really thought would be great on Linux and now it's here. It's called Open Snitch. It's a open source port of the little snitch application that's pretty famous on Mac and it's an application firewall but what it does is it gives you graphical alerts

about the applications on your system that are trying to take or trying to make an outbound connection and then the first time it happens you can take immediate action. You can whitelist that application. You can block it, allow, deny. It's a cool way to see what's talking to what, and sometimes you're surprised what's talking to what. Yeah, exactly. You ever seen it?

Yeah, you know, I've used it on, or I've seen people use it, institutions that used it on macOS, and it's to me like it's that, like, last mile kind of thing that we often associate with the mac or some of the programs for it where it's like yeah right i could do all of that with ip tables or you know other means command line applications but but probably you don't i mean if you do great and there's a lot of cool guides out there to do that but for like you know the people who've just installed linux or they're casual users or they just want like a you know they don't do it

all the time they want a, simpler interface they can remember. I think this looks like it could be nice. Yeah, the other thing that's cool about it that I've used a couple of times when I had client Macs is I was installing a new piece of software and I wanted to figure out what I had to punch open in the corporate firewall or I just wanted to know what's going on in the system. You fire up, in this case now, OpenSnitch. You run it for a couple of hours and you just get a list of everything

that's trying to talk to everything and you discover that this application that runs in the background actually pings this http server every hour which you didn't know before yeah totally that's good it is nice just a little bit of visibility yeah now there's been some people said oh you know running this kind of stuff through python probably isn't a great idea and it probably doesn't have the best performance so you wouldn't necessarily want to put it on a server that's handling tens of thousands of requests but if it's on your, you know, like little, your laptop or your, your parents' computer or something, it might be, might be worth a try. They do caution that it's alpha quality software. We don't know how, how good it is right now. I've only played with it just a little bit,

but something to watch. Yeah. It's officially being entered into our cool open source projects that we're going to keep track of category that we like to have on this show. And now in the category of cool projects, and I think you've had a chance to play with this maybe a little bit too uh deb simple get it it's like dead simple but it's deb simple and uh i don't really understand because it's like a repository server for app so it's like your own local repository server but does it does it not have packages is it is that right like it says on here that that there's something about does not require packages or something. I read this on, what the hell is this, Wes? What is it?

It is a little confusingly described. So I was in a position where I just had some programs that I needed to modify, then build. I was packaging them up as dev files. I really, I mean, I could just download them and install them, but it would be nice to have a little repo. And ideally, I'd like this to be minimal effort. It was just for some internal processes, right? Nothing customer facing. And it was a little like this to be minimal effort. It was just for some internal processes, right? Nothing customer-facing. And it was a little more work to get set up.

I mean, like, you know, a Debian ARC repo, it's not that complicated. It's mostly just an HTTP server around some special files with metadata that index the packages and that sort of thing. So there's, like, some app programs out there that'll build that for you, access it. But it was kind of manual. I found a Docker container that was like,

alright, well, you run it this way, you SCP the thing and then it'll update it. I was just going to say, there must be a Docker container. So there totally are. And that would have been okay but that was like really, if you were making like you had your.changes file and you were doing it, like you were building like a source package. And I was really just, I just wanted that one artifact. And so this is a little Go implementation

that provides a HTTP API. So it just makes it super simple. If I have a new package, it comes out of my build server, Jenkins or something, you just post it over HTTP post, that'll add it to the archive, and then bam, that package is up there.

It supports multiple versions for packages, multiple architectures, and it has API keys, so you can kind of control things as well. So it'd be like, well, only this user can update new packages, but other people can get them or more granular than that. I realized the limitation that I was talking about earlier was that it doesn't have the ability to mirror existing repos.

Right. So this isn't like a full apt proxy type setup, which I've used before, but really isn't what I needed. I just wanted my own little simple local mirror for build results. Yeah, exactly. That is really nice. So it was really handy. And because it's Go, it was like go get GitHub dot blah blah blah, and then it was done and running.

So it was super easy. So there's a project that I'm watching, and maybe if anybody in the virtual log there has a suggestion for something else, feel free to jump in. But I'm watching this project called Hardened Linux, and it's at Hardened Linux dot GNU, or I'm watching this project called Hardened Linux. And it's at hardenedlinux.gnu, or I'm sorry, old habit, hardenedlinux.github.io. And they say they're a group of free software

enthusiasts, anarchists, and cybersecurity researchers. Long live anarchy, the site reads, and long live old school, spelled with O's. I think they're being a little tongue-in-cheek there. It's a small step in security hardening and a giant leap in free and open-source software. It's an interesting idea. It's a core infrastructure. So you're familiar with, like, obviously all the different projects out there to secure your system. So what if you brought them all in one spot? What if you just brought them all together and tried to make a distro based around that?

That's kind of, I think, what they're going for here. They're also big on a bunch of different open source security projects like PAX and GR security and whatnot. So interesting new initiative. I've always been fascinated with the whole like really super ultra secure Linux stuff. I've played in the past. Super locked down. I've played in the past like there's a, I can't remember if it's like called Bastille. I can't remember. There's a piece of software you spell to load on Linux that would go through and try to harden it to meet all these requirements. And so I think they're basing it around like a Debian base.

I don't know, just something I came across this week that I'll be digging into more. I might have a review down the line once I get a chance to check it out and try it out or learn more about it at least. I was just sort of digging around when I came across it this week and thought, let's share this with the class. It started, though, in 2014, so it's not like it's brand new. The group's been together for a while. I don't know if they're shipping out code or I don't know really what they've got at this point, but something to dig into. Hardened Linux. And one of the things, too, that I used to struggle with was I used to have to be able to show regulators that I was taking steps to meet certain requirements.

Be in compliance. And so if there's certain things that, like, if you can come across, and this is a question to the audience, if you know of one where you can come across, like, checklists for how do you make Ubuntu Linux meet these regulatory requirements? How do you make CentOS meet these regulatory requirements? Or are there distros out there? Or is something like Hardin Linux maybe a project that could get us there where it's like you can start with a Debian base, and we've applied all of these security packages or all of these standards.

I don't really know quite what's out there these days because I haven't looked for a while, but I've had a few questions come into the show. So I thought I'll open it up to the audience. So this is one thing that I've come across in my research, but I'm curious if anybody else has anything. I think it's – I don't know. I don't know if this is even really a project that has much legs anymore. I'm not quite sure. But there's got to be something out there to meet this particular requirement because I've gotten notes from people that say,

well, we can't really use Linux because there's no way to prove that we're following this particular standard for whatever the reason is, whatever the industry is, it changes. Yeah, exactly. So let me ask you this. Say you were going to deploy a server for a company. Have you ever worked in a company where they say, when we deploy a server, you must always configure these things and set these settings and turn off these services and install these packages and turn off root login on this service? Have you ever worked in a company where there's like a checklist of –

Oh, yeah? Okay. And that's just an internal process that they've developed. Yeah in a lot of cases that that has been the case and then like these days i see a lot of it done with configuration management systems or others like you can run you can have roles or recipes that what defines what what needs to be changed like how do you know what to secure how do you know like what services should be configured what way like other than just personal experience and just learning over the years,

how do you know you're actually doing it right? When you have an issue like hardened Linux or something that has a group of people that are experts in the area that can go through and really come up with a common standard of how you secure a system, how you make it auditable, that's something that's a little easier to get more,

I think, larger buy-off. Like, otherwise, it seems like, to me, companies come up with their own, well, we're going to configure these things to meet our standards, and it's sort of their own internal tribal knowledge that defines what all those things should be. Yeah, I mean, I think there's, like, you know, there's some best practice guides, and there's some guidance from, like, the actual requirement documentations, or, like, you know, when you get compliance tested or that sort of thing. Yeah, because that's usually where some of that will come from. Yeah.

Right. But if you're not an industry that has compliance testing, but you still want to secure your systems. Yeah. In that case, then something like this, I think would be, even if you don't use it, it might be a very handy reference. Like you might also go look at some of those like cookbooks or other things that see what settings they, what changes they're going to make.

Yeah. Yeah. But you're right that it's not always. And then I think there's even goes above and beyond where a lot of times, like, you know, the compliance things will be concerned about, you know,

like goals and end goals and real world things. And then that doesn't always necessarily a one-to-one mapping back into how you should configure your system or which way you should configure. Yeah. Yeah. That's the tricky part. Monkeycom, you had something you wanted to add.

Well, yeah. I mean, every time you do a, an audit inside of a banking company that does any kind of financial transactions or has any international transactions with banks, they always do those audits where they bring a company in to audit your entire network. And they want you to explain how you're securing these things, how you're doing that. That's what I was trying to say, yeah. You're securing these things.

Right, exactly. That's what I was trying to say, yeah. And they don't, you know, it all comes down to having good auditing and good practices inside. Because even if you're, I mean, we were running Puppet, but then somebody goes and installs a bunch of applications on a Linux box because they want to be able to debug something and they leave them running. And so the scan tool goes out and you find all these open ports on a server for something you didn't even know was running on it. And, I mean, those are the, I think it all comes down to, you know, controlling access to servers. And if that's what they're doing with a hardened install,

I just don't see that working because most people don't want to use a custom install for anything. It's got to be something that uses like CentOS or Debian or Ubuntu. It can't be like its own custom world distro because you need a lot of industry support. You need folks that can walk in off the street that you've hired that have some built-in knowledge. And you need something that in some industries the auditors can recognize.

Like one of the things that happened to us is a couple of times we got pushed away from Linux just simply because it was Gentoo and they didn't know what Gentoo was. They knew what Red Hat was. This was years ago, years ago. And yes, I had Gentoo in production. Yes, I understand. But I had a Gentoo system in production i had many of them and they actually dinged us for it as having um like this they didn't call it fragmentation at the time but they dinged us for fragment a

fragmented network because we had we had windows boxes we had zeus enterprise boxes which they understood what that was we had netware and we had gentoo and it was a lot of systems because we were in the middle of the transition from netware and windows and and and so they they come in they're like well these gentoo things are some weird thing that somebody's down some one of your rogue it people has just installed across your system and they should be replaced with windows 2000 using active directory and because that was actually a finding that the auditors recommended the way that what happens is that by the next time the auditors come around, you don't have it. That's a big deal. And then if the second time they come around, you don't have it, you lose your FDIC insurance.

And then the bank goes out of business. And so we ended up deploying Active Directory simply as a response to that. So it's really been codified in my memory that sometimes you really got to get that stuff dialed in. Well, you know, there's another way to learn more. Linux Academy. You go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. You support the show. That's a great idea.

I know, right? Learn more. It could be like the little command line tools that you need to learn more. Or it's the big stuff. You know, like the big stuff, like the container stuff we're talking about. AWS, Azure, all of that stuff. You can learn more at Linux Academy. You go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, and you sign up, you support the show, and you can get a seven-day free trial.

I like this graphic they have. Look at this, Wes. Doesn't that really tell you the state of Linux in the world today? You've got Linux at the core, and then off at the different branches, you've got AWS, Azure, OpenStack, big data, containers, DevOps, the whole category of DevOps. And it really is, at the center of of it all Linux and open source technology. And Linux Academy has the entire platter covered. You want to go in and get an education buffet? Linux Academy.

Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. You sign up. You support the show. You get to learn more. A community stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members, instructors that actually know the material that can help you. They have systems in place for team training if you want to get your whole team trained up. And you can do it all for seven days absolutely free.

Just go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. I like the flashcards because they're forked by the community. I like that they spin up servers when you need them. And you can use SSH to log in. The courseware and the servers all match. It's so great. It's so great. Our buddy Michael Dominick just started taking some Linux Academy courses too.

Nice. It is. It is so great for continuing education, for challenging yourself, for staying up to date on stuff. And it's just so easy, right? Like it's modern. It's kept up to date by Linux experts, people experts in all of the fields that they support. And so you just know that you're getting fresh information that you can count on. It makes it super easy.

You can tell the passions there. Exactly. You can join linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Now, Mr. Noah joins us to talk about our next story. Finally, Noah, after all these ages, we have a brand new version of Grub. You ready for this? I'm ready.

It's Grub 2.02. It's going to support experimental 64-bit extended to support. It's going to support LVM UUIDs. It's going to have proper handling of LVM in general, which I know you're probably excited about. Absolutely. Here's the thing I'm excited about. ZFS support. Okay.

Yeah. And XFS version 5 support for the version 5 format of XFS. Like, talk about checking a couple of my boxes. That is awesome. As well as support for LVM RAID 1. Now, does it support defaulting to the LTS kernel? So, okay. So, a little revealing here, a little behind-the-scenes reveal here.

We're doing a lot of work here in the studio, as we've mentioned. And where's that mouse? Hand me that mouse. I'll give him the – for people watching the video version, I'll give you a little behind-the-scenes reveal here. We're doing a lot of work here in the studio, as we've mentioned. Where's that mouse? Hand me that mouse. For people watching the video version, I'll give you a little behind-the-scenes shot of what we've been doing here. Yeah, we got a new SkyCam, Wes. So a bunch of new equipment in here, and all Linux-based. All of it. Even this big honking mixer. This right here, that's Linux. What?

Yeah, this mixer runs Linux. I know. Chris left for a night and I ripped out all his Macs. That's amazing. Is there a single Macintosh in here? There's not. No, that's Linux. What? Yeah, this mixer runs Linux. I know. Chris left for a night and I ripped out all his Macs. That's amazing. Is there a single Macintosh in here? There's not. No, there is not. It's really something.

In a decade, it's taken us, you know, but the quality is there. Like everything is like, it's a no compromise setup. In fact, it's better than the old setup. That's great. Yeah. And here's what is awfully funny about it is all of it comes crashing down. If you accidentally boot the OBS machine with the stock Arch kernel and not the LTS kernel. Really?

Yes. It all stops working. Everything relies on that LTS kernel. And it's funny because we had one thing. It was like, oh, OK, well, this capture card requires a module, and that has to be on the LTS kernel. Oh, well, actually – and I think actually to begin with, we even want more because we had ZFS, and that needed the LTS kernel. So it was like there's all these things that had to have the lts kernel and then you yeah we just we didn't even think about it we just restarted the box and like all of a sudden nothing's working none of the

caps is working none of the audio stuff's working just set it up yeah when we'd restarted it before so we were like how does that happen yeah it is super funny right and we sit here we're scratching our heads we're like everything was working and we're about to start with Coder Radio. Today is a busy day. We've got Coder Radio, Linux unplugged and TechSnap all back to back. And so there's not a lot of time for things to break. What's going on? What's going on? And we're sitting over there in the chair, he goes,

Hey, Chris, did you remember to... Oh, damn it. We had to take the stream down. Choose the LTS kernel. So you removed that option now, right? Well, we haven't had time yet because we've been recording shows. But that's the time to grub, right? Yeah, totally.

So maybe there's some new cool features that light boot up the LTS. So back to grub. Also, you're going to have some network support in there as well as – Really? At the boot level? And improved support for core boot too. Really? Yeah.

It's a serious release. So on grub – like what do you mean by network support? I don't know. I'm reading this. I haven't read past that. I just read that – I you mean by network support? I don't know. I'm reading this. I haven't read past that. I just read down the line. I hadn't read that far ahead.

Do you know how cool it would be? I was so excited about the LVM and ZFS. Do you know how cool it would be if I could get to a point where I could just be like boot off, network, inside of the Grub boot menu? Yeah, that's something to get into, right? That is really something to get into. However, by the way, if you're ever using Arch in production, I highly recommend the LTS kernel. It's a good way to go. It's a good combo of rolling user land software, which is what we needed. And nice level stability.

That's right. That's right. Hey, guys, do you mind if we do a little gaming update just real quick here on the show? There it is. I was going to say, you've got to have that. Yeah, you've got to have that. This is something that it's a little bit of hoops you've got to jump through to get to this, so I'm going to warn you right now.

You got to buy the Windows version. Yeah. And then you got to sign up for the beta. But when you do under Linux, you will get access to what looks to me like a very, very well done mech game. You like mech games, you know, where you're walking around and like in a huge like mech suit. You know what I'm talking about? You know what I'm talking about, guys? This is Dark Horizons mechanized corpse.

And gaming on Linux has got good things to say about it. It was really good. Like the way the mech moves, it feels really good. Like they've really nailed the feeling of walking around in a giant mech suit. Now, it's not yet out for Linux officially. Right. The developer is actively developing this software and he's just kind of on the side, started making a Linux version. Now, this is why I mentioned it because I think this is the time to show some love. Just say, hey, yeah, there's an audience here that's interested in this.

So if you want to check it out, you first have to get the Dark Horizons mechanized corpse under Windows or just buy it through the Steam web app. Sign up for the beta or enable beta mode, and then you can go into your library and pull it down under Linux. Okay, cool. Kind of excited. So what happens if you just buy it and like the web store? Yeah mode, and then you can go into your library and pull it down. Okay, cool. Kind of excited. So what happens if you just buy it on like the web store? Yeah, that's what you do. Okay. You don't have to buy it under Windows.

No, that's what I mean. It's just that the only version on the store. Yeah, that's what I would do is I would buy it on the web. I would do it on the website for sure. And then you don't even have to go close to that Windows stuff. Yeah, exactly. Noah and I did try while we're in the Valve section. Noah and I did try to set up a Steam VR this week. Oh, exactly. Noah and I did try, while we're in the Valve section, Noah and I did try to set up a Steam

VR this week. Oh, really? And so it's hit and miss. So there's really two, there's a two-pronged approach to get Steam VR working under Linux. Either Arch or the second prong is Ubuntu. And in Arch, it's because all the stuff you, well, here, let me back up a little bit.

You need to be at least on kernel 4.10. And you need to have, as of this recording, NVIDIA driver version 3.75 .x, and it needs to be the Vulkan beta edition of that driver. This is where it gets tricky because both Arch and Ubuntu

have NVIDIA driver 3.75 as a package name, but it doesn't have the beta Vulkan stuff. And it's in the regular repo. So if you just try to install it, that's what you get. So under Ubuntu, you have to go get the Vulkan driver version PPA. Then you have to go into your PPA priorities, and you have to pin it above the main repo one and fight that fight.

Or under Arch, you have to play dependency hell, where there's all these different conflicting dependencies. And then once you even get all of that set up, it's basically like hardly anything works. So it was a little disappointing. So it's still a work in progress. So we haven't really had a chance to really try it out fully because it's sort of lackluster. Yeah, that is too bad. Yeah.

But we continue. But now it's like halfway set up for when, you know, there's more interesting stuff to talk about. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to keep working on it because I would like to actually do a little report on the show and say this is how the state of VR under Linux. Also, I just want to get Wimpy's head in a VR headset and have him see how cool it is. He's such a VR hater, you know?

And he's going to be out here for LinuxFest Northwest, rumor has it. So it would be the perfect opportunity to put his head in a VR headset and get his opinion. Because I feel like maybe he hasn't really experienced a good VR. Right. Because I was a big – see, here's why I say this. I was like VR, come on. Wake me up when we have holodecks, please.

And then I got the Oculus and I was like – Mind blown. Yeah, I had a moment. I had a moment. And then ever since then I was all in. I thought it was pretty cool. So maybe we'll get a chance to get it working. If anybody out there has any experience, please pass it along. Let us know what you did. Go to the contact page. You know what we could do? I tell all in. I thought it was pretty cool. So maybe we'll get a chance to get it working. If anybody out there has any experience, please pass it along.

Let us know what you did. Go to the contact page. You know what we could do? I tell you what. Here, AltaSpeed Technologies to the rescue. If there's anyone out there that thinks they could set it up, just get in contact with me, and I'll get you remoted into that machine. There you go.

You've got a fresh, nice, fresh 1604 install, and you just set it up for us. And I'll be your remote hands. I'll plug this stuff in for you. Yeah, totally. You know, whatever. There's got to be somebody out there. Keep on dreaming, dude. Keep on dreaming. Maybe, though, right? Maybe. Maybe. I'll plug the stuff in for you. Yeah, totally. You know, whatever. There's got to be somebody out there. Keep on dreaming, dude. Maybe. Maybe, though, right? Maybe.

Alright, that concludes our gaming section. There we go. Wrap it up. Yeah, I gotta wrap it up. Anyways, you can find that Met game. Link up in the show notes. This could be good news for all of you who are struggling with our aug feeds that are under repair right now. The MP3 technology, the licensing program

around certain MP3 related patents and software has been terminated. Isn't it one of them? Of like the four? This would be I think the remaining and the reason why I say this is on the Fraunhar website. Like the actual like patent holders of MP3 have a post

on their website basically saying have at it. Really? Huh. Okay. They say we thank all of our licensees for their great support for making MP3 the de facto audio codec in the world during the past two decades. The development, they go into the development of MP3. But yeah, they say that essentially MP3 is still very popular. However, most state-of-the-art media services such as streaming or TV and radio broadcasting use modern ISO MPEG codecs such as AAC or MPEG-H.

And that's where we're making our money. Yeah, and they make higher quality at much lower bit rates. And then they link you to the successful history of MP3. They're done with it. Here's the history if you want to read about it. Yeah, they say the Technicolor MP3 licensing program

for certain MP3-related patents and software for Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated. I was thinking before— It doesn't mean it's—now, I think this means it's free as in speech and it's free as in beer, but it's not like free as in GPL code. Right. Yeah, I don't think it's—yeah, it's definitely probably not GPL code, but I was under the impression that we still had some limitations on MP3 due to some existing patents. I could be wrong. Well, it's definitely not like just free code, but I think it means it's legit to, I think it means it's safe now to redistribute it,

like straight up 100%. Yeah, I believe so as well. Okay. That's a big deal. Today I learned. MonkeyCom, you wanted to do a follow-up on a discussion that Noah and Ryan had a few weeks ago, it looks like. Go ahead.

Yeah, so I just installed the pop theme. Oh, yeah, the System76 GTK theme. What do you think of pop? Oh, it's freaking awesome. I mean, I know they're just starting out with it, but if this is what the next few years is going to handle for that, I mean, they're doing it right.

They're going to get their users exactly what they need to have to make GNOME a wonderful experience in Ubuntu. Now, did you also replicate the bar at the bottom like the omg ubuntu screenshot has no no i i did mine on the side um you can play around with it but just the theme itself i mean it's gnome so you can do whatever you want with it but the theme itself is just really clean all the the icons pop everything looks good and when you

bring up windows it it just they're making they're laying the groundwork so that when their users have it they can use the system 76 theme and it just everything looks the way it's supposed to there's no hidden weirdness and they're going to back it that's the greatest thing about it yeah yeah it is very bright in some areas like the like they have the gnome tweak uh tool up and and like the remove buttons and the orange checkboxes. I feel like they're hitting me in the face a little bit. But I also – I like the shade of color they've chosen there. So it's – I don't know.

There's some tweaking there. As a theme, I think it's a great theme. Here's my question. You start out on that and then you go to a generic install. The nice thing about System76 in the past has been if I know, if I start, if I bought a system 76 machine, there might be a couple of little tweaks, like they turned off, like, you know, the, the auto logging privacy stuff, they'd shut a couple of those things off, but it, it, the, the system wasn't, didn't look drastically different. If I sat down at an Ubuntu machine, I knew I was sitting at an Ubuntu machine. And I

feel like depending on how far they take this, especially if it starts getting into the point where they start, they put in a dock or something like that. Does that then change the – essentially I guess what I'm asking is have they just forked the time when we all just finally got settled on a given desktop? Right. When you say forked, you mean like the user experience in a sense, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I think we're talking apples and oranges there because Conical supported Unity. Yeah, but I think we're talking apples and oranges there because Conical supported Unity.

And I know GNOME has its own support structure, but there's not a commercial company behind GNOME saying, you know, this is what we're going to do. Well, I think System76 does as a vendor. I don't think you just say, here's my desktop, whatever they do, flies, and I'll be okay with whatever they choose next year. But I think they have to make a choice. I'm of two minds of this because my first thought is, well, where do you draw the line? Because I've had a big revelation recently about GNOME extensions that I'd like to share with the class here in a second. But before I defend them, I'll raise you my concern. And my concern would be is what we end up with is essentially the bastardization that's

happened to Android, where you've got Samsung skin, you've got LG skin, you've got a Moto skin, and some vendors have a light skin, some vendors have an entirely different UI with their own applications on top, and it's a real shit show. And what everybody pines for is just a good, clean, regular Android experience. And that's why Wes has a Pixel right there, right? That's where, that's the market spoke. And so we don't want your customizations. We don't want your...

We know you think you can add value, but the problem is you can't keep up with the pace of rapid development. Now, GNOME is not Android. GNOME is not developed or modified nearly at the rate that Android is. And GNOME is a product and project of limited means and limited resources. And so it's within that context that I look at what System76 is doing. So not comparing what they've

done to like what Android has done or what other desktops like, you know, because you could also say the same thing about we all know there's some Windows OEMs out there that have just crapped up Windows with their own start menus and their own updaters, and they just crapped up Windows with their own start menus. Lenovo. And their own updaters. And they just junked up Windows. And nobody wants that either. So there's definitely a risk of that. The thing about GNOME, though, is while it's a great desktop, and I just recently switched back to it, really enjoying it, stays out of your way, very efficient, but it's not

enough. The thing is, you have to have extensions with GNOME because the team just doesn't have the time or resource to add everything that everybody wants in an entire world full of geeks. And adding to that, what everyone wants is different with every person. And, you know, you look at the last few releases of GNOME, solid incremental improvement, but no moving of the gas pedal. Nothing that's freaking people out. No big changes. And so there's really no massive progress that System76 is going to fall behind by shipping their own theme.

The risk of divergent user experiences is there. And that's – I think we just have to wait and see how that plays out. But I think because of what the reality of GNOME is, there is room for a vendor to improve on it. But they just can't go too far. And so System76 has to walk like this. They are not only going to kind of create the line they have to walk, but they have to walk it like super tight and then we're all going to have the advantage of sitting back and go well they did a good job or they didn't yeah i don't know i i'm so i share your reservations but i almost feel like there's no path forward yeah well the path

for an alternative path forward might be we say we go to the gnome team we say here are the things that we think that would really improve this experience what do you think about it and then you know collectively everyone that's all that's using GNOME, everyone that makes those decisions looks at it and says, yeah, we agree. That would be, you know, a way forward. And then now we've improved it, not just for System76 customers, but for everyone that's using GNOME. I feel like it took them forever just to get AdWadi updated. And I'm like, why do you guys care so much about the rounded corners of your menu, but you don't care that your default theme looks like garbage? Like, how does that work? And I think their stance,

you know, what I, after I thought about their stance as well, the themes can be changed and that's why we built it this way. And so they're like building the core of what you need with the expectation. Part of me, I gotta be honest guys. I really hope that Ubuntu does not ship stock gnome in some ways because it's

not that great. Yeah. It's really not that like there's not it needs a spit shine right on top a little bit yeah like it needs a couple of things fixed up but it you know that wouldn't kill you to set a decent default background it wouldn't kill you to turn on one or two extensions really you know really whatever whatever you got done just in about five minutes of goofing around with gnome the thing is what you got to pretty quickly and you said it best you just said it's pro you go from what looks like a hack on Linux, what everyone thinks of as like a Linux graphical desktop, and you turn it into a professional broadcast machine just by tweaking a couple of little things, right?

Like the dark menus and the dark windows and the smaller window borders and stuff like that. It just makes for a much more pleasing desktop. Yeah. like that it just makes for a much more pleasing desktop yeah if they if they just even i agree like if they if gnome if gnome adopted a default theme of like arc or even numix or something like that then i feel like we'd have a totally different conversation then i'd be like uh now i feel like system 76 is just trying to differentiate and you know make themselves you know brand their desktop right but right now as it stands i feel like they don't really have a choice i mean they almost have to in some's interesting to see what it would take to get them to change things like the default theme.

That's not very good. I don't know why it took them so long to begin with. Yeah. So we're going to have a conversation about laptops here in a little bit. In fact, we had a question that came into the show about the setup you did on the MacBook 2013. Oh. So I thought we would get to that in a little bit. I also thought maybe in the context

of that, we could talk about Windows S and Microsoft's attack on Chromebooks and all of that. So we have a lot to get to. Plus, we still have Linux Fest stuff. So let's stop and thank Digital Ocean for a moment, digitalocean.com. You go over there, use the promo code DEOUNPLUGGED, one word, lowercase. You apply that to your account after you've created it, and then you get a $10 credit. So you know how they introduced high-memory droplets? You can get, like, 220 gigs of RAM. They got block storage. You can attach, like, just a block device with a teensy-bitsy tight little bit of storage,

or up to 16 terabytes of SSD storage. Now they're introducing—you can request early access right now. It's not finished, but high CPU droplets, like maximum, consistently fast, lots of core CPUs. Like there are some big compute jobs going down at DigitalOcean.com. Now, if you're like me and you just want to run a NextCloud instance, it's great for that too. In fact, you can get started at $5 a month and you get a machine with 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, a terabyte of transfer, and all of the storage is SSDs. All of it. Runs on KVM for the virtualizer,

Linux for the hyper, or yeah, Linux for the host hypervisor. It's got 40 gigabit e-connections into the data center, right up to the VMs, each VM. I mean, we're talking, can you imagine that? I would love to see that. They actually have some pictures on their Instagram feed and it looks super, super tight. Can we just get SSH access to all of them? Just for like a couple minutes. The whole thing, just the whole thing. Yeah. It's so nice. I love DigitalOcean's interface too because it makes managing all this easy. We all know how to use it. It's straightforward.

And then when we're done setting everything up, we just plug it up to the API and just push a few buttons. Tell the bots what to do after that. Just yell at the bots. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code D-O-Unplugged. Check them out. And also, when you're there and you've got a machine set up and you want to do a little more with it, take advantage of their really great documentation. They have a tutorial on Greylog for Ubuntu 16.04 they just posted seven days ago. Nice. or hosting multiple websites with Nginx and HAProxy using LXD, setting up Debian, setting up CentOS, setting up Webmin.

Lots of tutorials, lots of open source projects to take advantage of your Droplet. Once you have it going for experts or total beginners, trust me, you can make it work. Go to DigitalOcean.com, sign up, and then apply our promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. So today, Microsoft announced Windows 10 S. It's not a joke. It is a simplified Windows Store only version of Windows

for schools. The S stands for Streamlined and Performance, guys. That's so jank. But this seems to be actually sort of exactly what Valve was worried about. Why we got Steam Machines to begin with. Was this eventual Windows Store only closed down

nature? Even though the, you know, and I thought when the Windows Store failed and that nobody bought stuff there that they wouldn't do this. But even despite the failure, this is what's so incredible about these rich corporations that can just burn cash. Doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter. Like, oh yeah, our store's been a total failure? Just keep the vision.

Keeping the vision. And they say that you get better battery life when you can only run store apps, that you don't have weird stuff updating in the background. They say it's better security. It's best for schools. And they're going to pair this with some of their hardware partners. They're going to sell computers running Windows 10 S for $190. They have to.

They have to do this. Right. Because if they don't do this, they are going to get overrun by Google and Chromebooks. Yeah. They're going to get overrun by Raspberry Pis and Debian. They're going to get overrun by all of the other hardware and software combinations that exist out there that don't require Microsoft's licensing model. And if they open it up and let people use apps, then people would be running

these Windows S books with OBS and learning how to broadcast. And they would be running OpenOffice or Google Docs. So the only way they can prevent that is to force them to buy their applications through their store for their Windows book that is specifically designed for education. It's really

kind of a sad thing. What do you think, Wes? I mean, it does seem like they kind of, they have to do this. I imagine you can, you know, also sell the schools on Office 365 educational editions or whatever. So it is, you know, you get them in your platform. And I do see, I mean, it's kind of like iOS.

I do see some of the like, well, right, there may be some auditing capabilities of Windows Store apps, other things. It may be a lower maintenance burden for IT staff. That's possible. I don't know for sure. I wouldn't necessarily say more than Linux. Having used Google Apps, you can drill down the management of Chromebooks like you would not believe.

Down to what icons are available on the Chromebook itself. So can that person go to this given site? Can they click on this given link? Can they run this given application? You know, down to that. So is there like a potential opportunity for Linux or for, yeah, I guess for like for regular Linux here in that will this make Windows more associated with this limited thing? Well, see, here's my worry is it's, first of all, probably not going to be a lot of open source applications in the Windows store. Right.

So probably not going to be getting GIMP in the Windows Store. You're probably not getting Inkscape, which would be great tools for schools, just as an example. So on the low end, you've got so much momentum around Microsoft OEMs, Active Directory, Windows Management, that I could see it doing some serious actual credible damage to even people that might be putting Ubuntu on library machines. So I'm worried on the low end that it's going to eat away.

And then on the high end, they're also doing something else. So it's like a two-pronged approach. On the high end, they have the $1,000 Surface laptop now, which is like their new developer machine. They got a big fancy video. Look at the verge, and Microsoft has created a real laptop this time. So this is the Surface Book laptop, and one of the things Microsoft's done with this sucker is

it's cloth on the inside, and they've laser cut out the keys. Whoa. Yeah, they've really got... They have a PixelSense super high resolution 1080p display on the thing. It's light as hell. It doesn't have any ports, which seems to be what everybody... Actually, it has a couple ports, but you

get my drift. It has like one USB port and one mini USB port. Dongles. Yeah, you got to have dongles. You got to have dongles. So what are the chances I can run Linux on that weird cloth bad boy? I don't know. Honestly, probably pretty good.

I have had amazing luck running Linux on Microsoft. You try it. You try it. Oh, nice. You try it. I feel like. I don't really want to give Microsoft any money. I feel like it's going to be a little bit before it's working.

So they got a high-end thing here. This is obviously going after your XPS 13s, those kinds of machines, your Lenovo's. of Microsoft any money. Right. I feel like it's going to be a little bit before it's working. So they got a high-end thing here. They got, you know, this is obviously going after your XPS 13s. Yeah. You know, those kinds of machines. Your Lenovo's, your Galago Pro's.

And they're claiming 14.5 hours of battery life if you use Windows S. That'll be great for all those VB developers. Yeah, right. And they have integrated a vapor chamber

into the aluminum chassis to give it better cooling out the rear. Standard for $999 is a Core i5 version with 4 gigabytes of RAM, 128 gigabyte SSD. And it's going to start shipping June 15th. Nice. 4 gigs of RAM, man. That's unbelievably low. But $999.

So when you get the $2,500 version, it'll be everything you need. So you've got this two-pronged approach. You've got them going after Chromebooks and students. Oh, also, I should have mentioned this. Windows S, Windows 10 S, free for students and teachers. Saw that coming.

And I'll tell you what. I made this prediction on AskNoah, and you're actually seeing the start of it come up. You are going to see Microsoft pivot to software as a service. And so they'll give you the student and teacher version for free. And then once you go to the pro version, they're not going to sell it to you. It'll be $39 a year or $59 a year or something like that. That's coming.

We've already seen it start with the high-cal license seats stuff is all subscription-based now. So, I mean, it's... And that's a bad boat for everyone to be in, because... That's how I feel. Because here's the thing, what you're going to wind up with... It's dumping on the market, too.

You're going to wind up with a bunch of people that get sucked in on a free thing before they can actually ever do anything interesting with it. They're going to have to pay a ransom fee. Ew. So... And that's how Microsoft plans to stay in business,

because they have to sell something, and nobody's buying Windows. So – and that's how Microsoft plans to stay in business because they have to sell something and nobody is buying Windows. So – Mumbleroom, anyone there have any thoughts on how free Windows is going to affect student and teacher adoption of Linux? What do you think, Monkey? I don't think it's going to affect it. I just got – I'm working with a school right now, and the conversation is how do we get away from Windows and all of their requirements just for doing business with them? It's not – Can you elaborate? Well, with Google, it's a web interface.

You log in and you basically manage everything remotely. You don't have any infrastructure requirements uh a secretary at the front desk could set up a student where with microsoft it's not like that it's just that their their their barrier for entry is a lot higher especially for small private schools and that's something that you see a lot with these guys is is microsoft comes in and they offer a lot of free stuff but it's not free because you still got to buy the hardware. You still got to buy the infrastructure. And they're getting away – they have a bunch of Macs that were donated to them.

But they're having to get away from Mac because they put Apple TVs in every office, and they plugged them in so that the teachers could present their – take their iPads and put presentations up. And it completely destroyed their entire network because of all the Apple talk and the broadcasts and it brought everything down to a knee. The DNS just killed everything. That's hilarious. But see, that's how these guys do it. They're not delivering a complete

solution. They're delivering just one component of it. And that's why I don't think that Microsoft is going to take off in the schools unless you have a vendor who's developing the whole solution and walking in there with a Microsoft solution. Right, right. Okay. Fair. So I see a couple more people.

So I wanted to go to Arm1. He says not much Linux in UK schools to begin with. Go ahead, Arm. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of the schools in the UK are buying into the Microsoft stuff because of all the Office 365. Oh, yeah. So that you can link all schools together and you can easily talk between teachers. What about Chromebooks? Not much?

Well, I've worked at a few schools and never seen one in a school. I mean, the last school I worked at, they were starting to go all in on like just getting dumb ipod the very basic ipods just to use as a it's like just an interface for smart boards and things and finding that was cheaper than doing it any other ways but you very rarely see like classes of um laptops in uk school sometimes but the school i work for if if, you know, if I want to use laptops, we might have three sets of laptops for the entire school. And then you've got to, you've got to book them out whenever you want your class to use them. Sure. So that's interesting.

That's an interesting dynamic from the U S because in the U S Chromebooks are like highly prevalent. Yeah. We just have cards of them. Yeah. No, I mean, you go into, um, you know, you go into some of the PC worlds here, and there's maybe four old Chromebooks tucked into a back corner. Most people don't even know what they are or how they work. And as far as schools go, I was having a conversation with our IT guy and he was saying that their head of IT was looking at maybe Google Classroom

and stuff, but no one's really got the time to look into what it is and how it works. And then Microsoft is saying, oh, we'll take all of our free stuff. And we've made this new Microsoft TeamSpeak, you know, just utter crap that replaces this thing, but we're not going to turn that old service off. So now you've got SharePoint, and you've got 365, and you've got this, and you've got that, and you've got, and none of the teachers know what the hell they're supposed to be using right hmm that is very good insight thank you very much i that's good to hear just even for another perspective swift you kind of are on my train of thinking where i'm like well crap is this another market opportunity that linux could be

about to miss out on if microsoft can come along all of a sudden and offer windows machines for 180 bucks 190 bucks all of a sudden the entire rules have changed. What do you think? Do you think this is yet another maybe opportunity slipping between our fingers? Yes, I really do. I mean, Linux has been around for a long time. And I mean, we get to the point like with Vista, missed opportunity. We got 8, missed opportunity. We got ten, again, missed opportunity. When are we going to have our stuff together so that we can really compete with the other stuff that's out here? I'm tired of these people with their shiny little Macs and their pretty little computers and whatever. Just use Linux, for crying out loud, and do what you got to do and stop paying all this money for this stupid crap that we just don't have to do.

When is it our turn? It's our turn. Yeah, it's our turn aren't you supposed to be giving up already give up on this market damn it i'm with you man i'm with you uh my only my only thought on it is you know there is such a there can be in some of the schools not always but there can be a tinkering element and that tinkering element often leads to linux and source. And there's something about open source and maybe even GNU and the GPL in particular that feels very in line with sort of the core principles of continuing education or fundamental education. Like there's something about it that feels like a really organic fit. And there's something about licensing and proprietary software that, to me, has the feeling of walling off knowledge and holding knowledge,

whereas open source is about learning and sharing and improving, which is what education should be about too. It doesn't limit exploration, creativity. You can do whatever you want with it. So there is, to me, it feels like a really fundamental fit that is almost long term too hard to deny. But there's also practical commercial budgetary things that are very real in schools too. So you just I don't know. We'll see where it goes.

You know I remember when Windows 10 was about to be released and the tech press was so stinking positive. And if you guys recall Windows 10 was given away to everybody for free initially. Well in their defense Windows 10 was given away to everybody for free initially. Well, in their defense, Windows 10 was a drastic improvement over Windows 8. I guess. I mean, if we're... I mean, if we're...

If we're going to compare, I mean, it was... They had a reason to, because after Windows 8, it was like, man, geez, DOS would be an improvement, you know? So I... Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I guess so. Well, both of them, you can only have the one app open at the time, so. RH, you think we should make a video to sell it, to like pitch it to the people? That would be a good NOAA.

That would be a good NOAA video. Oh, yeah? That's what AltaSpeed should get into is the education market. Oh, yeah? Maybe. Although that's pretty budget constrained, but I imagine hospitality is too. Yeah. Yes. Especially lately. So I don't know. I mean, once you get in there, like you can, you know, if you get a right school, you can, some of the funnest work I did in some ways was at schools just because there isn't quite the like, we have, this site has to

go live on Monday morning so we can start taking orders kind of pressure. That's not there. But it's still like we need to do a good job, but it's not going to be in the end of anyone's careers if this goes south either. And that's a nice environment, even if it's budget constrained, because you still get a little creative. Linux is a good fix for a lot of that stuff, but there is still scale that you get to play with.

And there's really busy hours and there's privacy that you have to take into consideration. So it's still a very challenging and interesting environment to work in. So, yeah, I'd be – And at the end of the day, you're helping kids. Like, that's great. Yeah. So as long as you just give me a little off the top for that recommendation, I think you should totally get into it now.

Yeah. For the idea. Give me a cut. Consistent. Exactly. Send all support to chrisatjupiterbroadcasting.com. Does that work like that? Does it work like that?

Oh, okay. It's a three-year SLA. Yeah, right. Exactly. Three years. Have you ever emailed that man? That was the hopeful. You know what?

That is not. I have actually gotten to emails like they're three years old. I've been like, hey, thanks for emailing. I'm sorry. I just got to this. It came up on a search. And yeah, I've done that before. Boy, once I left for Texas, the inbox just kind of went.

Yeah, well, you didn't have many before that, so I can understand how that drastically changed your outlook. You know what I got to do is I got to get a really good email program on my phone. Have you seen some of these? Like there's Google Inbox. That's not bad. Yeah, I use Inbox. You do? You do?

I'm a really big fan. I just started using a new one. It's called. Because you were, before you were using one that I liked. K9, yeah. Yeah, now I'm on a program called Blue Mail. were... Before, you were using one that I liked. Canine, yeah. Yeah, now I'm on a program called Blue Mail. Oh, yeah, I've heard of Blue Mail.

By far, my favorite thing about it is I can swipe left and mark it as later or done. And that allows me to archive that message and then come back to it as a task. That's nice.

Yeah, like Blue Mail, yeah. Yeah, the task angle is a nice map. Yeah, when I'm using a lot of inbox, because I feel like I'm already using Gmail, so it's not like I'm – Right, it's just a layer on top. Yeah. I like the remind me about this at this day at this time feature because it's like, okay, I have certain days that I deal with this kind of work, and so I'm going to set it for a minder on that day.

An inbox you can use with other mail service providers because I'm on FastMail. No, no, no. No, that's what I really like about blue mail. Okay, gotcha. Yeah, if you use it with FastMail, you don't have to have all the privacy-stealing compromises of Gmail. Right, right. You know, speaking of mobile phones, Ting. That's what you do.

You go there, get a deal. Go to linux.ting.com, get $25 off one of these phones. You want to get a new mail app on your phone, first you've got to start with a phone. That's math, guys. That is phone math. Linux.ting.com is where you go if you have a compatible phone, and you just might. They got CDMA and GSM.

Then you'll get $25 in service credits. You bring it over to their BYOD page. You look at all the dirty details, and they'll tell you if it's going to work on Ting. Or take a shortcut. Call up Ting and talk to a real human being and just ask them. They'd be more than happy to work with you. The fact that they have CDMA or GSM is big for me too.

If you go on road trips like I do or you travel every now and then, huge. Or heck, you're just going to move and you don't know what the cell service

is going to be like. Right. Go with Ting. Yeah, or, you know, just have fun and experiment. Like if you get like a Nexus device, I've in the past just, let's go to an area

and I'll activate this one and then I'll put it in and then I have the other one active and I just switch between them and, you know, it's a little bit of hassle, but not bad. And on the newer devices, it's even easier. And just do a speed test. I offered to give Wimpy a Tim Singh.

Oh, really? Yeah. For when he's out here? Yeah. He has global roaming, so he doesn't need it. But I was like, hey, hey, coming to the US, do you need a SIM card? Because I can hook you up, bro. I can hook you up.

That's awesome, dude. And they have a really great control panel, too, that lets you manage all aspects of your account, set limits, alerts, turn things off. So, like, right now, not driving to Texas, don't need my Ting Wi-Fi on. It's great. You know, and the other thing is, even if I left it on, it's $6 a month for the line. That's it. Those are the kind of things that other providers would feel like you're, like, breaking a rule or doing something shady.

But at Ting, they're like, no, this is your plan, your minutes. Like, just use them when you want. Or, you know, feeling bad for having, like, a $30 a month device. And you're just not using it. Yeah. And for Ting, they're like, no, this is your plan, your minutes. Just use them when you want. Or feeling bad for having a $30 a month device. And you're just not using it. Yeah. And for Ting, it's $6. And then it's just when you use it, you pay for the usage. Just minutes, message, and megabytes.

And whatever you use, that's what you pay. And $6 for the line. It's so simple, so straightforward. Bring a device. Buy one from Ting. They don't care. Just try them out. They also have a calculator.

You can see how much you would save. And a blog that's full of good tips, even if you're not yet a Ting customer. Just go to linux.ting.com, linux.ting.com. And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Big event coming up, and this is almost the perfect representation of how this event works. Noah, do you agree? If you disagree, I'm sure you'll speak up. Me?

Really? LinuxFest Northwest has the possibility of becoming the largest community organized event in the United States. Yes. And I love these guys, but they really got some problems still. Right now their website's down. They got a Drupal issue. It looks like their MySQL server is down. They have issues on

the website. They still on the website say it's going to be announcing their schedule in the coming weeks. Now, I'm not saying any of this to criticize. I am pointing out that this is truly a lug-run event. It is like an event of the people, and there are certain things they're stronger at, like putting on a hell of a good event, and there are certain things

they're not so strong at, like... Planning a hell of an event? Yeah. Exactly. But see, in some ways that's what I love about it, dude. It's not polished, it's not... But it works, right? We know it's going to happen, we're going to be there, and it's going to be awesome. Yeah. Being in contact, you know, from the broadcasting side,

we get a lot of behind-the-scenes things that, you know, we don't necessarily share with a lot of other people, and basically, suffice to say that a lot of things in the Linux landscape are changing a little bit, and there is an opportunity here for LinuxFest to become the LinuxFest to go to. So if we could get some of these issues worked out, that would be really great. And even if they don't work them out, to be honest with you, just show up. That's my answer.

People ask me, they're like, I couldn't register because of the—just show up. Just show up. If you have trouble, just show up. And if anyone gives you trouble – You will not be turned away. The site's back up now. Oh, good. But I've heard – maybe they're getting a lot of traffic.

Maybe that's it. Maybe they're getting – and they just have it on some little server and now it's getting a bunch of traffic. I wouldn't put it past these guys to be running this on about Raspberry Pi. No. This is the kind of thing they would do. Totally. The Slackware server X486 there crashed. We've got to restart that.

There was a time. So now it's May 6th and 7th. We're going to be streaming it live at jblive.tv if you want to check it out. And it will also be where we record the last Linux Action Show. Wow. Wow, that's crazy. That's the end of an era. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then almost immediately we launch into whole new projects. User Air comes back. The Linux Action News show. It's going to be big. Joe and I are getting really ready. We're going through final things now on the show. Oh, that's so exciting. Yeah.

It is really fun. It's been a long time since I've done something like this. And I think it's going to be a big hit, I hope. I hope people like it. We'll see. Maybe they'll all hate it. I don't know. Well, you'll get, I hope. I hope people like it. We'll see. Maybe they'll all hate it. I don't know. Well, you'll get some of both. That's just a guarantee. Yeah, yeah. And then I'll just switch to

vlogging full time. There you go. There you go. Anyway, so... When you have time to edit. Yeah. As is always the case when the Linux Fest is near, we like to punish ourselves. We like to punish our bodies. We like to punish our mental spirit. Our stomachs. We like to punish our bodies. We like to punish our mental spirit.

Our stomachs. We like to punish, yes. We definitely punish our stomachs. And we punish equipment, too. By the way, Wes, sorry you may have bad lighting for text now. Yeah. Is that why you look so good on Sunday? Yeah, we actually did not have the right lighting on Sunday either.

So since last Friday? Yeah. Since last Friday. God, has it only been a week? We've been basically. Feels so much longer than a week. So not, yeah, not even, no, but it's been the Friday before last, right? Oh yeah, that's right. Okay, that feels better. Yeah, the Friday before last. It's been a lot of work. We started, we ripped out everything in the studio, pulled out every single wire, everything was out. We were down to the four walls and the ceiling for a while. Yeah. Boy. And then we've been, and that was the last time a Mac was in here.

Yeah. Just so everyone knows, those were the first two things I took out. Like, literally, I unplugged it, carried it out, and I was like, okay, now we can go with the rest of the studio. Just set it in the backyard, let it go craze. I was actually nice to it. Stay on target. Stay on target. I was actually nice to it. set of requirements. And now we essentially rebuilt the studio for the new set of requirements. So that was the first thing. And then the second thing we built it around was all Linux. So everything's Linux, even down to our mixer, which is Linux. We put everything around that. And then,

of course, really the third thing, because the mixer is so huge, which is not a final mixer, but it's all kind of built around that. So we've made a lot of changes. We've made, I can't show it on camera, but we've made additional room for guests. So we'll be able to have guests in studio, mic'd up, be able to hear everybody. It's way more like clean and efficient. Yeah, lots more room to move around. You know my favorite part of the whole studio renovation is?

After 10 years, Chris finally found where he wanted his microphone. Yeah, actually, he's not kidding. So for the first time in 10 years, really 11 years of, actually 12 years, because before Jupiter Broadcasting, I had a couple of things. I could never, ever – every time you buy a microphone stand on a boom stand, it comes with a desk clamp and something that you can drill into your desk. And I've never been able to commit to it because, you know, in video production, like I'm moving stuff around all the time. And almost for every shoot, like I have a laptop this time. This next time I'm doing a capture.

The next time it's two people. And so you just can't be static and you can't just lock things down. And so. But did we or did we not just nailed it? Nailed it. We finally, after 10 years, I found the perfect spot. Noah got it drilled or drilled it in my hand actually with his brown bear muscles. And then we finally actually mounted a a microphone

to the table it's fixed in place beautiful it can move around it's great it's on a it's on a gesticulating arm i enjoy i know i just hit my head um so it's an almost perfect position we've got a touch screen over here for something i'm about to talk about. All of this is really built around now making higher quality productions, better than ever, Wes, at least I hope. But to my left here, we're running something called Caster Soundboard. It was a project that was created for Jupyter Broadcasting by a Coder Radio listener. Caster Soundboard is sort of a recreation of proprietary software that's available for mac os to do a production soundboard you know we're like we fire off sounds like that this is written in c++ and q5 it's gpl it's up on github you go to github.com slash jupiter broadcasting to see it

and it's really close to being perfect it just needs a few tweaks and we have open issues for what needs to be fixed, and we're hoping maybe folks in the community would be willing to work with us. Hey, look at that. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I don't know if it shows up on the webcam here, so for those of you watching the video, over here we have a 1080p 21-inch

Dell touchscreen monitor, and I can try. Do you want me to try it? We have one clip in there. This is from the open-source soundboard running on Linux using a touchscreen. And it's got a little button right there. But, oh, let's see. Did you not hook up the USB port? Never mind.

Noah is fast hooking up the USB port. I jumped ahead. But anyways, doesn't that look great, Wes? Like from what you know, you've seen my past soundboard setup. This is it right here. This is a dedicated soundboard setup. It's got multiple tabs. It's all written in cute.

It's essentially touchable. It's not perfect, but it's touchable. Oh, it's muted. There we go. This is it right here. And one of the things that's really nice is every button is triggerable by a keyboard. But what I'd also like is I'd like each tile to be pressable and playable. I'd like it to be.

Yeah, that seems really nice. And if the volume slider was a little bit bigger, I'd be able to slide volume and stuff like that. So it's really, really close. We don't have the ability currently to save or export soundboard. So if the application closes, you lose the entire soundboard. So there's details in there. But the principle. Here's how he prompts work out of me.

This is how he gets free labor. He's like, is soundboard up yet? I'm like, eh, you know, you've got to close. He's like, well, I can get a dongle and a MacBook. Go get the MacBook in here. MacBook with a dongle. Come on, Noah. You don't want a Mac in here, do you?

Ah, fine, fine, fine. So we find a developer. We're like, yeah. But if there's anyone out there that wants to work on this, we have links in the Coder Radio show notes. Yeah, and I'll put them in here, too. Yeah, and you can also just find it. We have it pinned at the top of github.com slash jupiterbroadcasting.

Sweet. Yeah. It'd be really – because here's the thing, Noah. Tell me the thing. There's a few open source projects that we've now been involved with like Showbot and a couple other things like PodPublish and whatnot that I think we can help out. And we can – and people have – there's like many podcasts now that use some of the stuff we've written for JBot. Sure. And they have their own title suggestion systems and all that kind of stuff.

And it's helped podcasters. And I think this is another one because there's nothing that says it has to run on Linux. I mean, that's what we're using it for. But if it's just an open source soundboard, I think that'd be useful for people in general, not just Linux users. It could be a very big project. You know, actually, I would not mind if nobody ever bothered to fork it outside of Linux and we just – and that became one of the things that people could be like, you want the world's best podcasting soundboard? You're going to run Linux. You've got to use Linux.

That's right. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. We could get there. Not the thing you have to grandstand on. It could just be an AUR or flat pack away. Or maybe a Snap package one day. Either way, if you'd like to help us, boy, would we appreciate it. Because it would basically improve all of the Jupyter Broadcasting shows.

And it's really the last thing that the Mac's better at in here. Like I can objectively say, in my opinion, everything else in here that we've replaced with Linux is better at. Linux is amazing. The only thing the Mac can do is play random clips. Isn't that stupid? But, I mean, in terms of what you actually. When you say it out loud, yeah. But if you actually had ever done it as

a living and used a soundboard before, you understand it is a very important piece of equipment because it's not just about playing stupid noises. It's also how the music's done in the shows. Intros, outros. Yeah, like it's actually a pretty critical piece of equipment. So you want it to work right. And objectively, it's the only piece

of software slash equipment that we've replaced that is very much a downgrade. Everything else has been an upgrade in terms of performance, reliability, functionality, all of it. And then obviously the fact that it's free and open source. This would be the one thing that is not quite there, but it's so... I'd say it's like 60%

of the way. I think it's like 60% of the way. And what's amazing is it was put together by... Do you remember the community member guy? Zerak? Was it Zerak? No. He's the guy that made me work here. But it started with a C. Yeah, shoot, I wish I hadn't. But anyways, he was super cool, worked with me before. And we kind of had a couple people work on it.

We also had a web-based one that was worked on. We really like this one because we have the touchscreen here. You can just see looking at that how useful that would be. So, yeah. Pop, pop. Caster soundboard. And when we get it done, it could be something that takes off.

It wouldn't just be for podcasting either. It could just be fun to have a soundboard. We should probably get going in a little bit, but I wanted to talk a little about laptops and battery life. Yeah. So why don't we start with a question that came into the subreddit by Pasuduv, I think. He had a question about the setup on the MacBook running Linux, Arch Linux, on the 2013 MacBook. And I said, you know, essentially, systemdboot was what was used to do the boot management.

I used the built-in UFI manager that Mac has when you hold down the option key to get to that point. And the Linux-MacBook package from the AUR were some of the bigger, like, important components. And so he followed up with a couple of specific questions, and I thought maybe I'd toss them to you. He said, does he know, do we see of a way to switch between the integrated Intel GPU and the dedicated NVIDIA? Because I think the way we did my config was just dedicated NVIDIA all the time, right? I think that's right.

Yeah. So that was one thing he wanted something on, so I don't know if we have that. I don't know. That's worth looking into, though. And then he also, and this is one I will toss out to the audience. What would you guys do for snapshots? Would you go with LVM? Would you do ZFS?

Would you do ButterFS? Clonezilla? If you wanted to do snapshots of your system. My personal take would be Clonezilla, but did you have any? I would do Clonezilla. Yeah. I mean, I guess it depends on how frequently, what kind of downtime are you willing to support?

What is your use case? And how comfortable are you experimenting? If you're okay with LVM, I think LVM snapshots have gotten a lot better in recent years. If you're already experienced with ZFS, then just do that because you'll have a great time with it if you know how to use it and administer it. If not, then definitely don't do that.

And yeah, maybe clone Zillow or something where, sure, it's not as frequent. It's not just instant, but it's reliable, understandable. The thing I like about Clonezilla is I can store it totally off the machine. You just have to see if it's send or receive. Oh yeah, you could do that, yeah.

I would say this, though. I was also of the mindset that I better have snapshots for this MacBook, because I know it's going to break on me, just like Pursuit of Dev is thinking of. And it really has been fine. I've done many kernel updates. I think I even did like a complete OS upgrade to Final Cut OS, Sierra. Nice.

And I think nothing was affected. Like I just hold down the option key and choose Linux and it's just fine. It's great. Yeah. So I found it to be pretty reliable. I was surprised how reliable it was on there so you might just give it a go but uh i did notice one thing that's definite it's obvious that the battery life under final cut os when not editing is superior to just linux you

know just say you're browsing the web and final cut os is going to switch between the intel and video graphics whereas linux is always on the NVIDIA graphics. But the battery life difference is like seven and a half hours to an hour and a half to two hours. Like it's a huge battery difference. Yeah, it is a big difference. And I don't know what is going on with Linux battery life right now because across all my laptops, it's not really where it should be. It's not that bad. That's the worst.

But across all of them, it seems like it's... Have you noticed this? Have you struggled with this? I know you were saying a co-worker struggled with this recently. Yeah, you know, I did know someone in my life who, you know, he's done Linux stuff for a long time. He uses it at work, you know, very good on the command line. Hadn't dabbled that much in the desktop side of Linux.

And so he got himself a new laptop. I'm not sure which one. Installed the latest Ubuntu on it. And just had a hell of a time, you know, getting anything like decent battery. I don't think he did any configuration, but just running out of the gate, you know, he installed it, kind of got us up and running, boom, battery's dead, which is not a great first run experience. And he'd already, you know, when he came with windows and we just ran out that it was, you know, eight, eight hours of battery life. Oh, easy. Um, and so, you know, I was kind of like, I was talking to people who were like, okay, well, we start giving them some tips about what to do.

But it's like, okay, well, are we ever going to get to a point where, you know, even mainstream distros have some of these changes out of the gate or optionally for laptops? I've seen a couple of distros like Ubuntu Mate Edition does some decent battery loving tweaks out of the box that some other distros don't do. So I know that's one of them. But yeah, so there is some distro differential as you might say yeah right distro the diff the distro differential indeed uh but it's still i think across the board since i really would say since kernel 4 it's just been shit i think it's gone down i think it's yeah i think it's been bad since version 4 of the linux kernel i don't really think it's ever come back up and i don't really care so it's not like i talk 4 of the Linux kernel. I don't really think it's ever come back up. And I don't really care. So it's not like I talk about it very often.

Because to me, I just need my battery to last long enough between where I have plugs. You know, it's funny. I'm in a totally different boat. For me, I need my battery to last only from the time I leave my house until the time I get back. Because I won't have plugs. But you get great battery life. I get about 16 hours. Well, but then again, there's three batteries in that ThinkPad, you know, effectively.

So there's that. Not the best test. Yeah. I see what you mean there. Yeah. So does anybody in the virtual lug there have anything that they do to save battery life? Like maybe TLP or PowerTop? Because I know those are things you can do with PowerTop, for example. You can at least get a sense of what's draining your battery, which is a very useful tool, but that's maybe old school. Is there new things people are using to figure out what's sucking down battery life? I'd love to know any new tips. Because from where I'm at, I feel like I have a limited set of tools to really track it down. Earlier, I'll add it to the show notes.

Architect in the IRC room posted a good link that kind of had a rundown. These days, it seems like TLP is the most popular, or at least what people are talking about the most and seems to be the most up-to-date or most modern. are talking about the most and seems to be the most up-to-date or most modern. And, you know, is one of the ones, laptop mode tools being the other one where, you know, you can kind of just install it and generally forget about it. I think TLB has less config that you might want to do or able to do. So if that might just work for you. And then, of course, yeah, there's PowerTop, which can be very useful, especially if you're just trying to understand things, you're writing your own UW rules, or you're just like, oh, yeah, it's this thing all the time.

I'm just going to disable that hardware or not use that program. And Sandy Bridge, was that the Intel release that you hated? No, I hated Skylake. Sandy Bridge and Skylake, if I recall, both had issues with their P-State driver, which screws with the CPU scaling and just burns battery life like crazy, too. So that hasn't helped either, and that was an Intel problem. I mean, it's a Linux kernel problem because it's in the kernel, but it's Intel code.

And I feel like we're just kind of getting that solved in, like, 4.12, I think. Didn't we just have a new release come out like today or yesterday, too, of Linux kernel? I think 4.11 just came out. And that's not in there, I don't think, but I'm not sure. You did a little rundown of it. Did you see that in there when you were doing it? I didn 4.11 just came out. And that's not in there, I don't think, but I'm not sure. You did a little rundown of it. Did you see that in there when you were doing it?

I didn't. No, that's a good question. Yeah, I didn't see it in there. I went through your notes. Wes did a nice little breakdown of what was in there, and we never even put it in the show, but it happened during our show prep period, and I saw it in there, and I was like,

oh, okay, that might be something worth talking about. But that still doesn't fix it on, yeah, you mostly called out LZ4, improvements to software RAID, and SIP hash, which sounds interesting. Yeah, it's just a new hash algorithm that people are relatively popular. But not a P-State driver fix. Apparently not. We'll have to go review the kernel newbies and see what that says.

Yeah, maybe it's something buried in the details there, but I know that's also been part of what's causing this. I know from reading some of Matthew Garrett's older posts, remember him talking about these days more and more things are being combined onto one chipset or linked together, whereas separately they used to be more separate components, and so now you have to get the power states right on all the components for the group of them to power down sufficiently. So that's not helping us very much. No, that sounds complicated.

Yeah. Well, I guess I would say this. If you have a great tool for sort of tracking this problem down or if you've solved it on a more recent Ubuntu or Destro, because one of the other problems I have is when I looked, I did see some stuff, but mostly what I saw was like really old guides. I'm like, is this from 2009 I don't think that's a good idea so I would kind of like to see something maybe submit a few articles

to the subreddit linuxactionshow.reddit.com or you can send them in directly to the show go to jupyterbroadcasting.com slash contact and put it in that way maybe I know power tops I mean so those ones the basics we know but some other cool ways to track it down like one thing i was thinking about this is really stupid but like if it's just something you wanted to stay on top of all the time and just sort of whittle it down is what would happen if you just put a temperature sensor extension on gnome and just look to the devices that are running hot all the time and track it down that way like if your cpu seems like it's running hot or your gpu is something hitting that more than it should yeah i could at least give you an indication that something's working hard, because the power obviously would translate to heat somewhere.

Yeah, so it might be a way to start. Mr. Noah, before we go, why don't you tell the people at home where they can find you, and maybe what other shows? Yeah, at Kernel Linux, at least for one more week, the Linux Action Show on Sundays, and the Ask Noah Show at 6 p.m. Central at jblive.tv. And if you're in Grand Forks on KE'm KEQQ88.3OPFM. And give that number around, 855-450-NOAH. That's 1-855-450-6624.

That's what I want to do. I want to make that number the thing that people say, well, I'm getting started with Linux. Okay, well, here, here, at 6 o'clock on Monday, give these guys a call. Yeah, you know what we should do for swag? Wouldn't it be awesome if we had business cards that were like, need Linux help? Call 1-855-LINUX-FEST. Why didn't we think of that earlier? We still could.

It's new. It's early. You think so? Well, not – oh, I mean for LinuxFest? Oh, yeah. That would be good to give out at LinuxFest that people can hand out. I might see what I can do about that. I might be able to get something printed because it would just basically be like a little card that says, need Linux support?

Call. What is it? We already got artwork. 855-450-NOAH. That's 1-855-450-6624. And it's live on Mondays if you want to tune in and call in live or just watch. 4 p.m. Pacific? Yeah. 7 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Central.

Mm-hmm. Very good. Very good. Keep going. Round the world. Round the world. The thing is, I started by just doing Pacific time, and then the radio station were like, why are you always giving in Pacific time? We're in Central time. I'm like, oh, okay, well, 4 p.m. Pacific and 6 p.m. Central. Then people wrote in and they're like, why don't you give it Eastern time? Really? Everyone measures in Eastern and Pacific time. And I'm like, 7 p.m. Eastern. So I just like rotate between the three.

And then, Mr. West, there's places people can find you outside the show as well. Yes, that's right. I'm at Wes Payne on Twitter. And if you just stay tuned, you'll catch me on the TechSnap program, which is coming up next. Very well. Very good. And I'm excited about that. And if you just stay tuned, you'll catch me on the TechSnap program, which is coming up next. Very well, very good, and I'm excited about that. And there is some big news this week for the TechSnap program. I am at ChrisLAS. The network is at JupyterSignal. The vlog is YouTube.com slash Chris

Fisher. Tune in live this week at JBLive.tv for our LinuxFest Northwest coverage. Wow. It's finally here. It's that time of year again, and you can also keep up to date on that coverage at Jupiter Signal on the tweeters. Even if you don't use the tweeter,

you can still read the feeds. I know. It's crazy. Thanks for being here. If you want to join our virtual lug next week, you'll have to show up live. Go to jblive.tv for that. jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar.

And if you want to give us your feedback, linuxactionshow.reddit.com, at least for a little bit longer. What? I'll leave you with that. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday.

See you later, everybody! Thank you. jbtitles.com everybody go to jbtitlescom. Let's pick that title. Good show, Wes. Good job. Good job podcasting. Now, what do you think? Did you see any titles go by that you like? I actually haven't looked yet. Yeah, I haven't either. I'm excited about Linux Fest. I think it's going to be a good time, Wes. I know. It's going to be a good time.

It's going to be great. Windows 10 Sucker Edition. That's kind of funny. And Gabian was right. I like that too. Windows 10 Titanic Edition. That's kind of funny. And Gabian was right. I like that too. Windows 10 Titanic Edition. Windows is the S. We also have Kill Dash 9. Grub 2. Oh man, I got the burps

right now. The burps. Rub-a-dub grub. That is funny. I like that one. That's good too. System T. That's funny. Where's rub-a-dub grub? I gotta give that another vote. That's going up. That's going up fast. That's going up really fast. People like that one. That's good, too. System T, that's funny. Where's Rub-a-Dub Grub? I've got to give that another vote. That's going up. Do it. That's going up fast. That's going up really fast.

People like that. Battery Life Myths, Linux Shenanigans, a Hoppy Lup. Yeah, it was. That's true. Mm-hmm. Max Unplugged. I get it, the Max Unplugged. That's pretty good.

Oh, is that what your solution is? I know. It's all right. It's good. It's good. It's good. No, it's fine. It's fine. Rub-a-Dub Grub is going up there. Let's go with it. I think that's perfect. I think that's alright. It's good. It's good. It's good. No, it's fine. It's fine. Rub-a-dub grub's going up there. Let's go with it.

I think that's perfect. I think that's perfect. Oh, wait. You know what was funny is we got the SkyCam in here and that was done like at the last minute. We did that during the show. It was perfect. Oh, yeah. That was good. I like the SkyCam. Alright, chat room. Thank you for being here. Thank you everybody for listening at home and oh, good.

Hashtag blame Noah's going up on the list. Okay, now we can officially end the show.