LINUX Unplugged - Episode 202: Halls of Endless Linux | LUP 202

Episode Date: June 21, 2017

Michael Hall from Endless joins us to discuss his new role, Endless’ involvement with Gnome & the unique approach they are taking with EndlessOS. Plus Fedora shares some future plans that have us really excited & we try to grok casync, Lennart Poettering’s new project for distributing file system images.

Anybody in the Mumble Room using something besides just the default terminal for their desktop? Like, I love consoles. That's almost always the one I go to. But anybody using something besides the default? Like Termix? Terminator. Terminator? Yeah, yeah. I use Tilda myself.

Oh, really? Okay. I recommend Hyper Pokemon. This is something that our crack team here at Linux Unplugged has discovered, and I just want you to give it a consideration. It's wondrous, tailor-made Pokemon themes for Hyper Terminal. Okay? So just give that a consideration while the link in the show notes. It's for all you

Pokemon enthusiasts. This is Linux Unplugged episode 202 for June 20th, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show, where your host is being bombarded by BSD enthusiasts. It's a full-on attack! I'll tell you more about that later on in the show. Mr. West is in route right now, battling Seattle traffic, but the show goes on. He'll be slip streaming himself into the show. He'll be live patching himself into the podcast in a little bit. In the meantime, we have some community updates to get through, including some really important

security news for K-Mail users up front. Huge update from the Fedora project. We're going to dig into some shenanigans going on out there. We'll tell you about that. There's some mystery afoot and some mess. What? I know, it's very confusing. And then Mr. Michael Hall joins us, formerly from Canonical, now at Endless, to tell us what he and Endless is up to. And then towards the very end of the show, we have a random grab bag. I have some updates on something we talked about last week, and if time permits, although we have so much stuff to get to this week, I have an interview from the floor of self that we haven't had a chance to play yet in the show. Now, it's not super time critical, so if time doesn't permit,

never fear. We could always sneak it in at a later time, but if the show permits, we'll get to that. So before we jump into all of our community updates for episode 202, before I start talking about the barbecue coming up in a couple of weeks, before we get to our follow-up, let's bring in our mumble room. Time of probes greeting, mumble room. Greetings. Oh, my gosh.

Wow. I feel like if I was in a room and we were in a physical room and you all did that, I would nearly go into an anxiety attack. But for some reason, you're all coming into my headphones. Maybe it's even more intense. But thank you guys for being here. I'm looking forward to chatting about all this stuff. Michael, welcome back to the show, Mr. Hall. It's good to have you.

Like, this is your third time. I think you might be a record holder. Yeah, do you do, like, the SNL, like, five-timer jacket or something? I think I should get one of those. I think we should. I think we should probably. You could be the person that starts that tradition. You never know.

And it would be a good jacket, too. Like, not one of these WWDC jeans jacket, but all really nice materials. I'm afraid you'd have to give Alan and Martin a full wardrobe, though. Yeah, there'd have to be a line between occasional guest and frequent contributor, because those guys basically would have not just the wardrobe, but

they'd also have to have a whole line of swag just for them, for their attendance. Although, to be fair, if you keep it up at this rate, you might beat them, because they've been very busy on Tuesdays recently so they haven't been able to join us. Oh, there's my life goal right now. Yeah, of course it is. Obviously. I mean, what else

you got going on? So we do have a few really positive stories to get into, but I wanted to cover one that's... I don't know if negative is the right way to describe it, but I did want to cover one that is pretty important for KMail users. KMail's Send Later feature, when combined with K-mail's PGP support, didn't work. And so if you were scheduling emails with the understanding that they'd be encrypted

when they were sent later, those emails were getting sent in the clear text. They were just getting sent plain text, no encryption applied at all. Even though the UI would suggest encryption was being applied to that email, the backend scheduler that actually grabbed that queue and sent the emails off didn't go through the OpenPGP system. And so those routines were completely bypassed, leading to the email being sent in plain text without being signed or encrypted, which even just not getting signed is a big deal. And so the bug would lead to unintentional information disclosure of private messages.

And it's CVE-2017-96-04. How about that? And the KDE project is aware of it. Version 4.11, that's when the send later feature was introduced. And 17.04.1 are vulnerable. KMail version, so it's versions between 4.11, guys, to 17.04. K-Mail version 17.04.2 released on June 8th of this year contains a fix for the problem. And so this is one of those where, I'm not sure what distros are patching. I haven't, I didn't look into that,

but I'm not sure if it's getting backported to older desktop versions by the distro maintainers or what. There is several links that have more information about it, but that just is one of those things, you know? It's just like you're using a tool, you think you're using encryption, and maybe you have a reason why you, especially like when you're doing this type

of communications, which I've had very limited amounts of doing some of our work for some of our other shows, timing is sometimes kind of an important thing about it. Because like you're writing somebody something and you want to send it off after something, after a piece of news breaks, or after a story comes out, then you want the email. So the timing thing of really sensitive communication turns out to be pretty important. So this is one of those where uh if i if i ran a linux critics blog i would be extremely harsh about this because it's um an example i think of a vulnerability and i don't

need to harp on this too hardly but i do think it's an example of a vulnerability that if say Gmail had this problem, or even, say, Apple Mail on the iPhone had this problem, it would be, there would be mobs in the streets. There would be mobs in the streets about this lack of security and this simple, obvious, amateur mistake by these companies. But when it's K-mail, and we all love the K-mail folks. I mean, it's not like we want to shame anybody here. But when it's K-mail, we're all just like, oh, okay, good. Well, I'll go ahead and get those patches installed. And we don't really even talk about it. I mean, this is a story from June. And I was like, well, nobody's talking about this.

So I think it's worth mentioning. AHRS points out that Gmail doesn't support GPG, but you get my drift, right? If there was a critical vulnerability in something like this, in a commercial product, we hold it to a different standard. WW, do you agree? I mean, do you see what I'm saying here, at least? Like, if this was Gmail that had a flaw of this magnitude, I feel like there would be a totally different level, not just because the users are larger, but because the expectations are different. Or do you think? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I think if this was happening on Gmail, and I, like, I'm a Gmail user, even though I'm going through Thunderbird, I would probably demand offense. You know, you wouldn't want to be left out of this, you know, vulnerability and have your stuff out and open.

And to their credit, you know, when they found out about it, they hustled to get it fixed, and they've been really clear on their communication about it. It's not like they're trying to, like, snuff the story out. It just doesn't seem to get... I mean, I'm sure user-based size must be part of it. I don't know. Feels like more than that, though.

One of the stories getting a lot of traction is this post by Christian Shaler on the future of Fedora just even beyond Workstation 26. And there's a couple of things I pulled out in here that have me super excited about just long-term Fedora. Not a lot of stuff we're going to get our hands on immediately, but long-term. They're working on improving integration of the NVIDIA binary driver, which is kind of remarkable talking about the Fedora project here, but they think they're going to have a solution in place

where you can use the NVIDIA driver when you want the extra graphics power, and they think that it's going to be a pretty smooth installation. And they're also working on a fleet commander, which will be a tool essentially to allow you to manage Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise desktop centrally. It's a tool that's really targeted more at like universities and large installations, but I don't know,

could be pretty cool. And the other thing is they're going to help you integrate it with their free IPA suite of tools. So it's essentially going to give you an LDAP Active Directory style like Active Directory support. But the one that I really want to talk about in this post, and I think this is probably why this post is getting the most attention, is Pipewire. We've talked about it before on the show when it was called Pinos. And now it's been renamed to Pipewire. And they're increasing the scope of what Pipewire is going to accomplish. So think of it maybe at first pass as pulse audio for everything, video and audio. It aims at unifying Linux audio and video. The long-term goal is for Pipewire to not only provide handling of video streams,

but also handle all kinds of audio. Wow. I've got to stop right there. That, if they pull that off, that's the home field advantage Mac OS has for media production because they have that whole quick time and core audio and core video system worked out

where there's just APIs available. And Final Cut X just sits on top of that technology. So they're spending a lot of time to make sure that Pipewire can handle audio in a way that not only addresses Pulse audio use cases, but also the ones that are handled by Jack today.

Wow. A big part of the motivation for this is they want to make Fedora Workstation the best place to create content, and we want the pro audio crowd to be first-class citizens of our desktop. Oh, my God. Wow. So this is huge. This is really, really huge.

If they can get this even close, it's going to be a phenomenal, phenomenal groundwork for multimedia applications. Also, Flatpaks. So they expect to start shipping Pipewire and Fedora Workstation 27, which is pretty soon if you think about it. But it's only going to be sort of like the first version, the really early stuff. It's going to handle video. And they say one of the reasons they need to do that is to handle video for Flatpak applications because they've got to poke a portal for video.

And so they're going to also provide an APIi for flat packs and get ready for this an api for screen capture under wayland this is one of the number one questions i get about wayland i had one just just it came into the show 45 minutes before I went on air. What about remote access to Wayland? What about screen capture software in Wayland? This is going to be huge for desktop users of Wayland that want to do screen capture, that want to maybe have a remote desktop system.

This could lead to all of that, potentially. So, Pipewire to the rescue for media production and also for the Wayland transition. Then there was this moment. And, oh, man, I wish Wes was in here so I could see his face in this one. So they make a post and they make a part in here, a little section here about fractional scaling for high DPI systems. Fractional scaling.

A lot of talk about that recently. We've been talking about that recently because there was that hack fest between Canonical and GNOME developers at Canonical's, what was it, Taipei offices? Well, it turns out Fedora Workstation has been leading the charge in supporting high DPI on Linux.

They write, and they hope to build on that current work to enable fractional scaling support, where they link to the GNOME.org blog post about the fractional scaling hack fest. And he.org blog post about the Fractional Scaling Hackfest. And he goes on to talk about the importance of fractional scaling and how they're going to be there to support that when it's ready. And some great work also going into just the general performance of Gnome Shell. This almost feels like a direct criticism response of mine recently. And I'm happy to see this.

They are closing bugs on small little performance issues in Mudder and Gnome Shell. It's coming on top of earlier work that they've done. And while it's a real, you know, subjective thing, they are working on, quote-unquote, Gnome's performance and, quote-unquote, Gnome's overhead to make Gnome Shell even more performant in future versions of Fedora, which, of course, is going to benefit everyone using the Gnome desktop. Then there's a little note in here about flat packs. They say essentially what we're doing is making it very simple

for a Fedora maintainer to build a flat pack of an application they maintain through the Fedora package building infrastructure and push that flat pack into a central flat pack registry. So they're going to make it easier for people to ship flat packs as well. Good stuff overall about firmware updates. They're getting closer to shipping codecs

just as everybody's streaming things and it doesn't matter anymore. Yay, we're glad we fought that. And this is a big one. We'll end on this I think. Yeah, we'll end on this. Yeah, this will be good. Battery life. They're looking into hopefully making a dent here. They say for a while now we've been digging into this and we'll end on this. Yeah, this will be good. Battery life. They're looking into hopefully making a dent here. They say, for a while now, we've been digging into this, and we'll hopefully share information soon on which laptops users should buy that will have good battery life under Fedora. Hmm.

They also have a point. Christian Kellner is the main point on battery life and taking up improving battery life benchmark tools that they use. the main point on battery life and taking up improving battery life benchmark tools that they use. So hopefully we'll see a distribution taking battery life very seriously, one that's very GNOME-focused. Again, pretty good because it turns out a lot of distros are shipping something based on GNOME Shell these days. That's a lot of stuff coming to Fedora. After just last week, I said, it's fine, it's fine, it's all right. Does anybody in the Mumba room have any reactions or responses

to any of that stuff that I just rambled on about? Go ahead. Not really. No. Only that Weston already does support an RDP backend, so... Oh, okay. If you look in the link up... I may have heard that, yeah. Did you just put it in the chatroom?

I'd love to know more about that. So it's like a full-on RDP, like Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol backend for Weston? Basically using free RDP and using those libraries as well. So there is an implementation of it for Wayland, but only in Weston. For some reason, I don't know why the desktops haven't taken it up. Hmm.

Yeah. Well, and Weston is sort of like the reference, right? So they don't have to necessarily choose to use that part of the reference implementation, I suppose. No, I mean, they could use their own interface for the libraries. But the toolkit's there. I think part of it is too, like a lot of them are adapting their existing compositors or existing systems to use Wayland instead of creating something from scratch. So maybe some of that might be belted on later. I don't know. That's interesting, though. You know what?

I'm going to take a look at that more. Thanks, Fairtune, for linking that. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Anyways, we'll have a link to the Fedora 26 workstation post. Go ahead. Sorry? I think the Flatpak thing is rather interesting.

Tell me. Because that could some kind of replace the PPAs of Ubuntu. If you have a build server that can build some Flatpaks out of the sources. Imagine the same thing as Snap Packages with the Git servers. Like some kind of open build service. Yeah, that would be rather cool. I agree. That would be really cool.

You guys know about Flathub, right? So this is, I think, separate than Flathub, but no, go on about Flathub. That's because it's pretty interesting. So Flathub is this kind of centralized Flatpak repository. It's spun out of the GNOME work. It's independent

of GNOME now and trying to get buy-in from app developers and platform developers. And it's really just to ease discovery and distribution of flat packs by having one place where distros can set up by default, users can just go there and find whatever apps are available. Yeah, and they were last week. We talked a little bit about they're looking to raise some funding. And I like that they're trying to set something up that's independent, which is

great. And whenever you're trying to figure out what software is available, it's nice to have a central place to go see what applications. So if you go to flatpack.org apps.html, you can get all the GUI or command line apps. And there's quite a bit of stuff, really.

I mean, there's some good stuff in here. CoreBird is pretty nice, and Discord, and GNOME MPV. Shoot. Shoot. Yeah, so there's some good stuff in there. And, yeah, Flatpak.org slash apps.html for that. Yeah, I think that's fascinating. So speaking of competing technologies, it's kind of a similar trend. Everybody's friend, Lenart Pottering, has a new tool, a new project.

And it's CAsync. Casasync? I'm not sure. CAsync, I'm going to call it. And it's a tool and delivering file system images and for optimizing for high-frequency update cycles over the Internet with a focus on delivering to IoT devices, containers, VMs, applications, portable services, or entire OS images. But he hopes to extend it later on down the road to more of a generic way, a fashion to become useful for backups and home directory synchronization as well. And he goes through his blog post here and says he took a look at the different approaches out there. He says he wanted something that made updates cheap.

He wanted something that respected boundaries on disk space and usage on servers, something that was friendly to content distribution networks, something that was simple. And he does specifically in here address systems that operate on block layer and replace squash FS images, you know, out on updates, and they just write over the squash FS image and then mount it. He seems to not like that approach, which I think is kind of the, I could be wrong on the details, but I think it's kind of the Ubuntu core approach. And he wants to, he goes on to say later, delivering direct squash FS or other file system images is almost beautifully simple. But of course it means every update requires a full download of the newest image, which is both bad for disk usage and for generated traffic, even though you can try to hack it with z-sync and things like that.

He says, besides the issues I pointed out already, I just wasn't happy with the security and reproducibility properties of these systems either. So this isn't like a flat pack, snap packages alternative, but it is like a whole new way to distribute OS updates and images. I think he was working on something in the past that used ButterFS to accomplish something kind of similar to this, but this is different than, say, just using rsync or OSTree or similar tools because those tools...

He is doing something where he's removing all of the file boundaries, and then he chunks things up. Small files get lumped together with their siblings, large files get chopped into pieces, and then he can recognize similarities between all of those files beyond the file boundaries, make sure all the chunks are distributed, and then send them around. And the chunking algorithm is based on BuzzHash, which is a rolling hash function. And SHA-256 is used to store the hash functions to generate the digits of the chunks. I know, it's super complicated.

It's all up on his blog post. What do you think, WW? Are you loving this? No, I'm not loving it because it reminds me of how I'm recovering files and I can't even use any hash functionality or anything to double check files. And I have one files merged with other files and compressed containers and all kinds of junk. So, no, this just does not sound appealing to me at all. I feel like it is complicated to understand, and this diagram isn't doing any benefits,

but there are other operating systems out there, like Plan 9, and there's other systems out there that have this functionality at an OS level. And it's really nice, because you can essentially send a system from one system to the other system, boot it up, and it's live. You can clone it. You can send an update over the internet. And if it fails, you have recourse. You can slowly trickle something to a device when you have a limited bandwidth connection and then have it assemble the updates on its side and then do itself, you know, screw itself over in the upgrade process.

So I totally recognize on the surface of it a need that it seems to be addressing, just like I did with SystemD. When SystemD was announced, then I was like, oh, yeah, like the network socket stuff and some of these other things are really pretty useful in the server space. This is one of those where when you have systems

that have all kinds of random-ass containers or dozens of containers running on it, you do kind of need a way to manage all of it that's sort of standardized at the OS level that goes just beyond just software delivery, but actually addresses delivering and managing the operating system. And you do want something that's sort of almost like the plumbing level. And he's pretty good at that kind of stuff.

But I do wonder if it's competing with other solutions that have already been created. I got to learn more. I'm going to study more into it. But if anybody else has done a deep dive and can help me figure it out, I'd appreciate it. The whole thing is really fascinating. He talks about where it could go down the road. He talks about how you can operate at the block level or the file system level. Anyways, he's already got essentially, this is

what's crazy about Lenart. He's already essentially built the whole damn basics here. He's got functional code you can use right now. I just find this to be one of those things where he creates something that's slightly thought-provoking and sometimes causes a strong reaction. So C.A. Sink, and we'll have a link in the show notes if you want to see

more about that. C.A. Sink by Lenart. Quite the transition he's made over the years. Anybody else have any thoughts on it before we move on? I'll throw in a quick related story. I guess I have a thought then if nobody else does. Just a quick update.

Canonical has released a new stable version of the Snapcraft utility for creating Snap packages. And this one supports resuming downloads of the core Snap when building a classic Snap or an error occurs or something like that. The package can't be – you know, this just happens. Sometimes you can't fetch. You just can't fetch. And this is going to be very handy for anybody that's trying to do that or people that are doing continuous integration.

They will continually be downloading, pulling things down, and sometimes the snap just fails to grab something, and this is going to help that. Maybe the connection resets, because for me, I'm on a MiFi a lot. This is going to be really cool. So good for them. Everything is continuing to move forward. I say connection resets because for me, I'm on a MiFi a lot. This is going to be really cool. So good for them.

Everything is continuing to move forward. I say it's good to see all kinds. We've got news on flat packs. We've got news on snap packages. Cadian Live today just announced

that they're shipping the next test version of Cadian Live via App Image for the first time. Or they said something about the first time we're shipping this in App Image.

So they're still doubling. They've been talking about it before, but they're doubling down on AppImage. It is, and now Linard's got CA Sync. So welcome to Linux, everybody. It's a party, and you're welcome to join it. Just bring your own booze. Now, I don't know what to make of it.

I don't care, just as long as I can install software. If I could pick one, I'd probably go with snaps or app images, but I'm happy with Flatpak. I'll take PPA 2.0. Just get it to me. Just, yeah. BYO packaging, exactly. You know, let's talk about DigitalOcean for a second. Let's take a moment and talk about something that's really simple and straightforward.

It's an easy way to spin up a Linux rig on their super powerful infrastructure in just seconds. In probably less than a minute, you could have a Linux system up on one of their many data centers all over the world with a 40 gigabyte e-connection coming into that hypervisor. They got SSD storage for everything. An interface that is so easy to use. If you're a total noob or a long time expert, you're going to have a good time. And then when you're ready to growob or a long time expert you're gonna have a good time and then when you're ready to grow it's easy to increase your memory attach highly available block storage it's also all ssd based a simple api when you start having multiple systems monitoring alerting to make you look like a boss and you're on top of things load balancing as a service and And ladies and gentlemen, a brand new baby coming soon. Object storage.

Yeah. Yeah. And if you sign up for early access, you can receive one terabyte for free through October 31st. Oh, my gosh. They don't they don't like they don't ever rest like they don't do. They just never take a vacation over DigitalOcean. They're wrong. Like they just rolled out the new cloud firewall, which is such a brilliant thing. Now this. Object storage a simple, easy, cost-effective way. Man, this is

brilliant. DigitalOcean is just killing it. Go to DigitalOcean.com Use our promo code D-O-Unplugged Apply that after you create your account. You get a $10 credit and you can start messing around, build a system, put it in production, learn more. DigitalOcean.com. And use our promo code D-O-Unplugged.

It's all one word. You just apply it to your account. DigitalOcean.com. Promo code D-O-Unplugged. So you heard Mr. Michael Hall just a little bit ago chatting with us, and he joins us today, but not from Canonical anymore, but from now flying the Endless flag. Is the flag, is it sort of, is it like really well-rounded on the corners and with beautiful translucencies? What's that flag look like, Michael? Welcome back to the show.

It is familiarly orange is what it is. It is, isn't it? That is sort of the color scheme I'm picking up here. The whole thing, it's a big change and yet not a whole big change. So I was talking about Endless a few weeks ago on the show when I was talking about how I think the future for GNOME is extremely bright, beyond just the fact that more people are working on it and everything, but just a lot of things are lining up for GNOME right now. And on my list of things that are lining up for GNOME in the positive direction was Endless and Endless OS, which I believe is based on GNOME Shell. Am I right?

It is, yeah. It's got a modified version of GNOME Shell. So what is Endless about? What is sort of the elevator pitch on Endless for people that aren't familiar? So the company's mission, summed up in a single sentence, is the whole world empowered. And it's basically there are about 3 billion people who want a desktop but don't have access to one for one reason or another. And the company's mission is to make a desktop that works for them, price point they have, the internet that they have. price point they have, the internet that they have.

Because a lot of desktops right now, if you don't have internet access or you've got very unreliable or very expensive internet access, a lot of the stuff that regular PCs will do are not available to you. It's super awkward. Yeah, when the internet goes out, which happens from time to time, my smartphone and my PC, it happened recently. I sat there, Michael, and I thought to myself, well, what the hell did I do with my computer before I had the Internet? There was a time, a very long time, before I was regularly connected to the Internet, and now when it's out, it feels like everything, I can't search, I can't reference Wikipedia,

I can't really pull down my email. It feels extremely limited. So how does Endless address that specifically? So there's a couple ways we go about it. One is preloading content. Like you said, you go to Wikipedia a lot. But how many pages of Wikipedia do you actually go and see at any given time? You can fit thousands and thousands of these pages onto a few gigabytes of hard drive space. So we'll preload a whole bunch of Wikipedia content onto the hard drive of these computers that go out so that all of that information is there, whether they have internet access or not.

And then the second thing that we're working on is what we call asynchronous internet, and that's ways to deliver content in either times where internet is cheap or when in the brief periods where they are connected so sort of batching up like updates exactly so like if you've got a news reader app or something you've got an app for your local newspaper it doesn't need to go and download the content every time you open the app. It can go download it overnight and get you the next day's stories already there for you. And a lot of the bandwidth expense in a lot of the areas of the world that we're targeting is really cheap at night when everybody's asleep. So people can download content when it's cheap, use it offline when it's expensive.

So why not a few apps on top of Ubuntu? Why a whole OS? Why a complete solution? Because it feels like it's more than just a desktop. It feels like it's a whole integrated product and solution. It is. It's actually built off of OSTree and Flatpaks. Oh, okay.

So the OS image is delivered through OSTree. We can do transactional updates of that. And then you add apps to it via Flatpaks from GNOME software. That's some cutting-edge stuff there. Yep. And part of what we're doing is we're working on a way now where you can load apps or OS updates or even application content updates onto a USB stick from a computer that has internet access, and then take it to a whole bunch of these computers that don't have it,

and they can use what's on that USB stick just like they would connecting to a remote server. So they can get their OS updates, they can install applications, they can refresh their news app, whatever. their news app, whatever. And so are they focused only on the markets that have occasional internet and things like that, or are they looking at also the broader Linux desktop market? That is the specific market, and it's kind of a vague definition because it's not just like, you know, in Africa or parts of South America. But there's work being done right now in prison systems where those computers are not connected to the internet ever for obvious reasons. But they still need a way to put updates on there, get new content on there, make them useful without putting them actually

on the internet. Absolutely. Gosh, that may, oh boy, there. Gosh, there must be so many use cases for that. And there's really nobody that's rushing to fill that void because everybody wants to integrate their OSes with their cloud product. Exactly. But a lot of these technologies that you were just talking about with Flatpak and C-Async and everything, they're all going to make it easier to do all of this offline or asynchronously. So why also hardware? Because it's pretty unique stuff. everything, they're all going to make it easier to do all of this offline or asynchronously. So why also hardware? Because it's pretty unique stuff. It's got a unique look, a unique design.

Is this part of the, we don't just give out an image, but is this part of the whole it's one product thing? So to give it a little bit of history, the original attempt that the company made was to use mobile hardware like tablets or phones. Oh, interesting. And they were going to have them plug into a TV for a monitor. You might call it like a convergence type experience. Yeah, similar to what Ubuntu was going for. But that wasn't working out for them, and they tried some variations on that before settling on actually doing a desktop OS based on Linux. So once they started getting the OS going, they needed a way to actually put this OS out there and give it a run, make sure it works, show investors that it works.

So they did this line of hardware. They did the Mission Mini, the Mission One, a couple others. The devices that you've probably seen, the little white ones. Yeah. Which did their job of letting the company test the OS in these markets with hardware that they knew it would work on. Since then, though, they've been partnering with Acer and Asus and HP, and now those OEMs are the ones who are making hardware with EndlessOS running on it and putting that out into those markets.

No kidding. So we're in Brazil and Mexico and Guatemala right now, and we are just about to launch in Indonesia. Wow, congratulations. That's really great. And so I guess as part of this growth, they brought you on. Are you on there as your official role like lord and dictator of Endless, or where do they fit you in there? Same role that I had at Canonical, actually. I'm a community manager and going to be working on growing their community and helping the users get in touch with the company, make sure we're getting good feedback into the company and vice versa.

Cool. So I guess what excites me about Endless is, first of all, brilliant idea. Seems like that's a pretty good market to go after because even outside of developing nations, there is a lot of installations just in the West that sounds like they could benefit from a system that's intentionally designed to be offline with ways to update it via thumb drives and whatnot. That's just – I love all of it. So to me, when I heard this, and thanks for filling in some of the gaps, to me, the reason why I thought this was going to be great for GNOME was now you have a company who's going to have something based on GNOME in front of a lot of users that are truly that quote-unquote new user.

People that really expect different things from their computer. It's going to bring in a whole new set of users that are going to drive finding more bugs, that are going to drive future upstream development of GNOME. I think that more deployments are going to increase the eyes on the bugs in the code. All these things are going to stack up. But what are some other ways that Endless is involved with the GNOME project outside of just what seem to me to be obvious benefits? So I mentioned FlatHub already. One of the Endless employees, Rob McQueen, is the one who's getting that set up. He did the crowdfunding that you mentioned. And Endless is

already planning on shipping FlatHub enabled by default in future versions so that people who want to put apps available to endless users, submit them to Flathub, they're automatically going to be available. That's awesome. Just that would be great for all Linux in general, really, is just getting a universal package format more accepted. And why Flatpaks? Do you know the history and the decision there?

Was it just because it's the whole GNOME ecosystem? I don't know the history and the decision there? Was it just because it's the whole GNOME ecosystem? I don't know the history of it. I think it's because there were a bunch of GNOME people that started the original engineering around this. That's what was there at the start. It was available. It worked. So they went with it.

Can you fill in any of the details around that? Because that was the other thing I remember hearing about Endless is that there was some GNOME people behind it. Right. So I don't know all of them, but I know Cosimo, who I think he's been on your show before. I'm not – I can't remember. He's been on some show. Cosimo Cossitz? Yes, yes. The GNOME director is an engineer here at Endless.

Yeah, it was a Linux action show ages ago, I think. Yeah. And I know we've got some others, too. I just don't know who's who. I've been here for less than a month now, so I'm still learning everybody and what their past connections were. So what are some of the secret future projects that you can tell us about and then blame on the fact that you were new to the gig and didn't understand all the rules? Give us a hint. So if you go to community.endlessm.com, I'm going to start posting some kind of teaser videos about what's coming in the next version. So Endless 3.2 has got some really big changes. We fell behind in our sync with GNOME, so we were a few versions behind. That's being caught back up. A lot of new flat pack improvements have landed.

A lot of OS and shell changes have landed that make it a lot better. So I'm going to start dropping some short little videos showing off the changes. You can check them out there. That's our forum site, community.endlessm.com. Awesome. I will link that in the show notes, too, to make it easy for anybody that wants to lazy web that link. It looks like that's a pretty cool resource. So if I was looking to switch distros, is this something that would be in – is this something you'd say, yeah, Chris is a longtime desktop Linux user.

I think you should give this a consideration or is it more for totally new users who are coming into Linux and want something just – something that's more met for their expectations? I would tell you to give it a try, but if you're a hardcore tinkerer, you're probably not going to like the fact that it's got this read-only OS tree system image. Oh, interesting. If you've got a

guest computer or something, anywhere you've got Chrome OS being run, it would be a great replacement for that. I actually just gave a laptop with it to my grandmother to let her try it out because her Windows machine got a virus and the hardware died.

What does Grandma think? She's only had it for a little while now. She played a lot of online games, so that's been some issues with Flash, but I put Chrome on there, and that seemed to have helped stuff. I love it. MiniMech's got some tough questions for you, Michael. See if you've managed

to grok this stuff yet. Go ahead, Mini. Yeah, Michael. Do you have some upgrade priorities for your system? I imagine if you have bad internet, so let's say you have priority kernel bug fixes and kernel bug fixes and other bug fixes,

and then at the end only application updates. I don't know yet. I know the whole offline upgrade with a USB stick is still being developed. And I would imagine it uses just OS tree images. So the kernel and the system libraries and stuff would all be in one update but if you have some if you have normal online connectivity could the system just decide okay i have online connectivity i have new kernels first i do a kernel update if i have

connection i continue with the upgrades. Oh, like the, oh, wow. Oh, that is a neat idea. So the update system itself says, okay, well, now that I've got a moment of data, these are the most high priority. But you know what would be tricky about that is you'd also have to figure out dependency resolution somehow remotely. Yeah, that's why I asked the question. Well, it's a whole image, so you don't have to do that. You're going from one predefined image to the next, and you get a diff of that.

So it either applies to the whole thing or none at all. Right. In fact, so the OS3 model, it's like getting it. It has checksums for individual files, right? So you can check to make sure every file is legit. So if there's a bad file, you could abort the update. So that's pretty solid. So you have a good chance the update is going to work.

And it uses hard links, I think. So I'm rough on my understanding, but OSTree is like sort of it does the entire thing in one go, and then it goes through and does a full check of all the files to make sure that everything is solid and that there aren't any corrupt files, and then it flips the bit and says, this is now the live file system. Is that kind of right? Right, and I think it keeps that old one around, too. So if you go to reboot and something's wrong, you just flip back to that old set.

Right. Which is sort of going back to what Lenart was saying. Like, here's a different way to do it. Lenart has CAsync now, which is a totally different thing, which I'm sure we'll learn more about in the future. But this is another way to deliver this feature set. Yeah. Well, it sounds like maybe CAsync is going to deliver these differences to OSTree images.

Maybe? I don't know. I'll have to look more into that. That'd be interesting. So do you... I guess I want to make sure I understand your answer to the hardware stuff. Sounds like sort of the implication in your answer was that Endless might pull back a bit from

producing hardware now that they kind of have some momentum going and feature more. So it sounds like you're going to focus more on working with upstream OEMs. Did I just grok that? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we don't want to be the hardware provider for Endless OS. That was a way to bootstrap things to get it out into the market. But we really want to work with hardware partners to get it out there.

Ah, okay. All right. Well, you know what? That seems to make a lot of sense. I'm really excited about just something really focused on that market, focused on... It's so refreshing to hear somebody that's building something that's not all about integrating their cloud solution, and it's more about building a system for people where they could be offline for long periods of time, because that happens to me quite a bit.

And it's going to happen to me in about a month. I'll be offline for a large period of time. And so it would be a great time to give something like MLS a spin. So I'm considering throwing it on an XPS. How's the high DPI support? I don't actually have a high DPI monitor to test it on, so I'm not sure. I might give it a go. But I mean, it's a GNOME shell.

Yeah, yeah. And you got all that fractional scaling coming soon, too. Well played, sir. Well played. Well, Michael, is there anything else you want to mention or tell us about Endless before we scoot? Yeah, if you want to get it, the latest stable version is available at endlessos.com slash download. We're pushing BitTorrent, so if you could help us out by seeding it, that would be awesome. We'd love you for it.

And then keep an eye out. In about a month, the next major version should be coming out. Oh, very well. We will keep our ear to the ground and keep everybody updated. And feel free to join us in the future and tell us what's going on with the project. I'm excited. I'm really excited about it. I look forward to it.

Yeah, give it a try. I want to see what you think. Okay. I might just time it perfectly Yeah, give it a try. I want to see what you think. Okay. I might just time it perfectly with my offline trip, and we will report back. Now, before we go, I wanted to just mention also really quickly another bit of community news. Just sort of a quick aside. Our friends over at Elementary OS have announced their move over to GitHub. Oh, there he is. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Wes

Payne. Hello, Wes. Hello, everybody. It's good to see you, Hanson. It is. Sorry I'm late. Looks like you've been holding the fort down, though. It's been an awkward show, but now that you're back, everything's right. So I just mentioned that really quickly because I think that's going to be great for Elementary OS. Yeah, hopefully that makes it easy for

people to contribute and join up with the project. You get more people in there. That's exactly what I was thinking. You read my mind, Mr. West. You know what? Let's take a moment and thank Ting. Go to linux.ting.com to sign up and get $25 off a device if you want to grab one directly. Or if you bring one and they have a CDMA and they've got a GSM network, so you might just want to bring one. Check out their BYOD page.

If you bring it, you get $25 in service credit. Now, son, I'll tell you what. Girl, it's $23 per phone per month on average for a Ting customer. So you see why that $25 credit's nice. It's really simple. In fact, it's the way mobile would work. A lot of times outside the States, my audience tells me, you mean this isn't how you guys do it?

It's obvious. It's so simple and obvious. I guess it took two cows to figure it out, and they launched Ting, and now now they have a simple smart way to do mobile. You just pay for what you use. $6 for each line. So if you want one line, it's $6 a month. If you want two lines, it's $6 a month. If you got a phone that you occasionally use, that's a really, really nice thing because you can have your main line like I do and then you can have a standby line that's only $6 if you don't use anything on it. And when you do need it, you just pay for what you use, your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes.

It's all clearly laid out on Ting's website. There's no hidden charges or surprises. You get a great dashboard to manage it, incredible customer service, all the stuff you'd expect with a standard plan, nationwide coverage, no contracts. You can see your usage at a glance, so you're on top of it all the time. Bring a device or grab one from Tingle. Check this one out, Wes. I got to scoot up here for this.

Got to scoot up. Got to get in. Yeah, I got to zoom in here. Zoom and enhance. This is the ANS H450R. Say that again. The ANS H450R, Wes. I'm sure you've heard of it, right?

Oh, yeah. I've seen ads for it all over the place. again. The ANS H450R, Wes. I'm sure you've heard of it, right? Oh, yeah. I've seen ads for it all over the place. You might notice it's a bit rugged looking. I was going to say it looks quite handsome and rugged. It looks like the fridge that Harrison Ford jumped in to survive. Nook proof. Yes. You get it. So this is, I bring this up

because this son of a gun is in the sub-70 market when you use our code. Oh. Yeah. Go to Linux.ting.com. $65 Android phone. Now, you know it's not going to be the S8 here. It's not got the – it doesn't have like the eye tracking.

It does look like I could drop it and have a decent chance of not scratching or ruining it. Yes. That is exactly – you get an Android 5.1 device with a quad-core 1.3 gigahertz processor that could stand a nuke test. It's got Corning Gorilla Glass display that takes a punch. It's got wet touch technology. Oh. Yeah, so you can laugh at a maniac during rainstorms while you're using your phone like a boost. Yeah. It's also apparently dust-resistant, waterproof, dust-proof, and get ready for this, Wes.

This is why I picked it for you. Shock-proof. Oh get ready for this, Wes. This is why I picked it for you. Shockproof. Oh, perfect. Yeah, you're not getting it for its 2-megapixel front-facing camera, though. That is not, well, you know, that's going to catch you when you're jumping out of the airplane. Maybe I really prefer the lo-fi selfies. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's like a look.

I don't need that much detail. It's retro. Yeah, it's like a 70s film. So you can get it with like, you know, 8 gigs or whatever internal. But here's the thing, Wes, micro SD in this son of a gun, and if this wasn't enough for this truck-sized Cadillac, get this. This son of a gun has a 2-SIM

slot. Well, guess what? That's pretty handy. I don't know why. Does it have CDMA and GSM antennas in it? Let me see. No. I just think it has CDMA. I mean, I think it just has GSM.nas in it? Let me see. No. I just think it has CDMA. I mean, I think it just has GSM. So I don't know why you would want two SIMs.

That's a good question. Maybe one goes bad on you. Because two is better than one. You're dropping it around a lot. Yeah, it's like eyes. It's like your eyeballs or your ears. Two is better than one. Somehow I'm sure Noah could tell us why we want two.

He probably has two. Yeah, you're right. He probably could. Linux.ting.com, that's where you go to get started. You could go get yourself a Cadillac phone. Maybe just go get yourself that phone. I mean, I'm not judging. To be honest with you, I'm not judging you. You're jealous. I'm super jealous. So we have ourselves a barbecue coming up, I should probably mention really quick, because it's getting, not next week, but the week after,

the 4th of July, America's's birthday go to meetup.com slash jupiter broadcasting if you're anywhere in the pacific northwest if you're within i'd say six hours you should come because seeing wes in a skirt's worth it alone i would say i mean i mean usually on show days you wear skirts that's true yeah because you know we have we cut it off the table now i won't even now i'm not pretending like I'm not wearing a skirt, because I'm just not wearing any pants. So if you want to see that... It gets warm in the studio. It really does. There's a lot of equipment, and you want some flow.

You do, yeah. You need some flow. Otherwise, you're getting distracted, and if you're thinking about other things, you can't do a good show. So meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. We'd really like to have you join us, hang out. Maybe help my chair. Does this squeak on you during TechSnap like this, or

do I just move around more than you do? I mean, it does squeak. I do the latter, yeah. Yeah, I do. Or I'm conscious that it squeaks. It's funny because I'm not on camera. I'm just sitting here. I could just sit here like a lump, but instead I'm moving around constantly. Meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. I don't know what's happening, other than we're going to be cooking a lot. In general.

We're going to be hanging out. I wonder if we'll have the VR set up or if we can enlist somebody to set up the VR. We could have the VR going. That could be pretty fun. And then we're going to do Linux Unplugged Live, and we're going to invite everybody to stay and hang out with us. And we'll have it going on the TV in the living room. And we also have a couple of chairs here in the studio. So if we get a couple of brave souls who might want to go from a virtual lug member to an actual physical lug member. Yeah, take it to the next level. Right.

So meetup.com slash jupiter broadcasting if you can make it just so we kind of know how many people are coming so we can plan food wise and then we probably are going to stream it somehow. I mean, if nothing else, we'll have the studio cameras on. We'll have the mics open so people can come in and talk to the chat room and

I don't know, maybe we'll have like a barbecue cam or something. It could be a lot of fun. We're going to celebrate episode 200 of the Unplugged program. There we go. I got that out of my system. I feel like we can do the show now. Breathing room. Do you see that box behind you? Do you see that? There's a box back there. There is a box. What's in that box? These started showing up around the web. They are hand-painted, I believe, tux masks. Sort of like a Guy Fawkes mask, but it's a Guy Tux mask.

Oh, this is adorable. Isn't that pretty cool? So System76 has been sending out these guys. Here, I'll turn on. Do we have studio cam? Yeah, there we do. It's not a very clear picture, but here you can kind of see, if you watching the video version, you can kind of see the Guy Tuck's mask here. And it comes in a nice envelope with a wax stamp.

Straps right to your face. And so they have quite a big – they're making – something's going on. There's like a hashtag involved and there's – I also noticed on their website there's a countdown going on. So I suspect if you go to the System76.com website and look around for their revolution – or look – so it's either Revolutionist76 or HashtagRevolutionist76 if you're on Twitter. I think there's probably some sales coming down the road. But they're making – look at this. I don't know what it is. It could be something bigger though because – I mean at first I thought, OK, it's going to be a big sale. start talking about that people have forgotten what real freedom means, to have the possibility

of attaining anything you can imagine rather than allowing limits to define your greatest potential. I don't like to allow limits to define my potential. That's true. On June 27th, which is soon, hashtag revolutionist76 commences, for which I have a grand surprise in store for our community. This shall be the day, the day that we reveal to the world a global society of creators. Today we will remind the people how to access

freedom from surveillance, from limitations, from restrictions. So I... So I don't know. I don't know what this means. Access to freedom sounds good, though. So I don't know. It could be... At first I was like, well, this sounds like open hardware, almost. Like maybe they're going to launch... Is that what you were thinking?

Something like that. But it also could just be a sale. It could just be a sale. I think it does go to show that those System76 keyboards, the caps lock key, definitely works. It's very effective. Yeah, it does. Smooth travel. There is a lot of caps lock in that.

You're right. Yeah. That is a takeaway you can make on that one. And there's also, it's happening here in the tweet too. Yeah. That is a takeaway you can make on that one. And there's also – it's happening here in the tweet too. Look. See, there's a lot of caps in that tweet there too. Well, when it feels that good, why not use it? Pretty pumped up.

Yeah. So if you want to play with the – it's pretty nice. Oh, and then they have a website inside the mask, opensourcerevolution.org. Let's go there. Let's see what that is. Let's do it. Open Source Revolution. You know I'm having a hard time typing?

Today is a weird day. It's because you're not wearing your mask. It's because all I've had today is a smoothie. Oh, it just goes to the website I was already on. All right. So you can go to – if you want to check it out and – So you know people always say like, oh, let me put my sysadmin hat on. Now you can put your sysadmin mask on and you're ready to do some penguinating.

Right? Right? Do you think it would look good? It might. Hmm. All right. Well, it kind of smells all right, so I could wear that. It's kind of loud, though, when we sit around on the table.

You know what I mean? It's not a good show prop. Yeah, it would be good if this was more if we had a camera straight on to us. But anyways, yeah, so you can – we'll have a link in the uh actually hopefully i'll have the image embedded if you want to see it in the show notes uh so uh uh dooder linux says that there's going they're going to be launching uh new cases and stuff wow oh my god west holy crap that was freaky man hold on i'm gonna take a picture i just i just uh i just turned over and west was wearing the mask i looked over at west and he's wearing the mask and I

just about had a heart attack. That is... I'm going to tweet that so people can see what I'm talking about because that is some creepy stuff. Yeah, so Duder says that they're going to be launching new cases and stuff. That could be it. I'd like to see something. I mean, there's

a lot of caps and there's a lot of promotion for Freedom and Open Source. So we'll see what it comes out to be. Anyways, I'll post that later because I'm getting distracted by it. I wanted to cover something that I think is just really important. Anybody who likes Minecraft or, like in my case, is a parent of a Minecraft user, two of them as a matter of fact, of a Minecraft user, two of them as a matter of fact. Minecraft is going to this new backend,

this new fancy bedrock backend that's going to be a common core for Minecraft on Windows 10, Minecraft on Xbox and Android and console versions like that and tablets. And there is currently no backend for Linux. Yeah. And there currently is no back end for Linux. Yeah. And there currently is a... Are they dropping Java?

Yes, exactly. They're moving away. They're going to maintain the Java version. So it's not like the Java version is going away forever. But the issue is that if you want to multi-play or if you want to download any of the new texture packs or any of the new levels or skins, you have to be in this new back end. I see. So if you want it, the Java users will probably just be able to keep playing amongst each other forever.

You'll just never get any of the new cool stuff. Yeah, exactly. My son Dylan says he's fine with that. But I have a – see, what I'm worried about is this eventually leads to, Dad, I want Windows 10. And that's – this we cannot have. out i want windows 10 and then that's this is this we cannot have so they have this feedback dot minecraft dot net site where there is currently a petition yes i know it's a petition there's currently a petition going on for linux support and uh it also is for mac support um but uh they're for more like radical approaches, kidnapping developers' children.

It's just these petitions so often fail to work because the developers themselves bring in a certain bias to the market. So this guy, his name is Mojang Tomotio MMO, and he's got a Windows icon. He's got Mojang in front of his name, and he's responding on the Reddit post about this feedback thread. And he says, he talks in here, he says, well, one of the reasons we're not shipping for Linux is there's no store. There's no Xbox Live, which they'd probably just have to build that in. There's no update mechanism for closed source stuff, so we would need to make our own store, and then we'd have to sell the launcher there. And it's just a massive amount of work for us and probably more than just porting issues. So he's saying the reason why one of the most highly played games in history isn't getting ported to Linux is because they can't figure out a way to ship it for Linux. That's what he's saying.

Yeah. Ouch. I would like somebody to tell him about flat packs and snap packages and app images. App images. I mean, like the app image right there. Can you just? Yes. Yeah.

And then, of course, so somebody says, what about using the distro third-party repositories? Google does this for Chrome and Debian. You can set up your own repo and then send updates that way. And he says, but how do you plug that into a store so then people can buy it? And if they don't buy it, they don't get it. You can't use repo for paid updates out of the box. Also, each distro can choose different package managers, so instead of one, you have to support two,

and a lot more than that, really. Or go Steam, which is going to be unlikely for Microsoft. Yeah, that part's difficult. Which he totally acknowledges in this post. He says, I've ported a game to Linux before, and the fragmentation and the nonexistence of the ecosystem makes Linux easily the most expensive platform to support for developers. Which crossed with minimal sales makes it a really tough idea. Actually getting the game to run is almost the easiest part, and we're already there because they've got it working on Android, too.

The game I've ported sold something like 56 copies in the first month on Linux. This guy's a Mojang employee, in theory, or a former Mojang employee. He might be an MS employee now, I'm not sure. But anyways, we'll have the thread and all that linked in the show notes if you would like to see it ported. Maybe it's worth throwing in there, because if it gets enough attention,

they'll learn about ways to distribute software on Linux. It's a solvable problem. It's actually a problem we've already solved. So I would love to see that. Because, man, wouldn't it suck if Linux missed out on one of the most important games simply because it was too frickin' hard to figure out how to ship software on it?

Mm-hmm. Especially for so long when people were running like Minecraft servers on Linux. It feels like we've been at least somewhat connected to it or it's been a part of our community or at least on the edges of it for so long. Yeah, Architect points out, and I'm going to

respond to this because they'll probably get this in the comments too. Architect points out, well, you know, Chris, you could run the new Bedrock or whatever it's called version in Wine. You know, maybe Crossover. We'll build a nice easy installer and put it in a bottle. But the thing is, is my kids and all of my kids' friends aren't going to install Linux to then install Wine to then install Minecraft.

See, the thing is, is right now, and this is kind of what muddies the water, is there is a quote-unquote Minecraft launcher, which is kind of recent, might still actually be in beta, and is native and available for Linux. This is a native Minecraft launcher for Linux. And that's been available for a while now. And then there's this new Bedrock Core version of Minecraft, which is only at present in terms of desktop computers available for Windows 10. There is a port, like a small educational version that they have forked off that is available for Mac OS that is also based on the Bedrock core. There is nothing for Linux. And that's really depressing. So links in the show notes. I'm going to try to get in there. I'm going to try to pass around this information to folks

and maybe get the folks over there in touch with people that know more about how to package up software and deliver it and maybe get them communicating with the folks that are developing the new Minecraft version so that way they can get educated on what's available. Maybe we can help them. So we are working on it already behind the scenes. It is tough, though, when you're relying on the... Other games, bigger games, are things

where you weren't so assuming that there would be the store infrastructure. A lot of games, they'll just do it in-game or that kind of thing. It's tough when we don't... We have kind of those, but we don't have a great set of primitives for, hey, here's your private DRM'd paywalled app. It's just not... Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's one of paywalled app. It's just not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's one of those things where like the old version is not going to die necessarily. So maybe it'll be just fine for a while, but you don't also want to be down the road. Yeah. Yeah. There's a, yeah, there, there's always a, there's always the possibility that mind test could take off. Yeah. JB mind test server.

That's what you're saying. I don't think so. No, I don't think so.'s what you're saying? I don't think so. No, I don't think so. Play it at the barbecue? I don't think so, man. You know what I gotta do? I gotta quit playing video games. It takes up a lot of time. I never have time for anything, because I'm just playing

all these video games. But you still have a little Race the Sun here and there. Okay, you're right. Just to wake up with. Okay, you're right. I was teasing. I don't actually play video games, but you're right. Just to wake up with. Okay, you're right. Okay, I was teasing. I don't actually play video. But you're right. I do play some race of the sun from time to time. You know what I would do if I had some spare time? I would lay seeds in my mind and I would then pour stinky, stinky fertilizer over those seeds.

I would then water it and maybe every now and then splash in a dash of coffee grinds. Have you heard of this? Coffee grinds in your garden. Have you heard of this? Oh, yeah. Sure. You have? Uh-huh.

I haven't done it, but. I've done it. Don't do it too much. Did you grow me some more coffee? No, I grew tomatoes. Because a coffee tree would be just fine. But this is supposed to be an analogy about your mind. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. See, I got off on the, I'm being excited about coffee,

but the thing is, is you could lay the seeds for your mind. And in Linux Academy, that's the fertilizer. You go in there, you get some self-paced in-depth video courses on every single Linux, cloud, DevOps topic, the big stuff too, like Azure and AWS and your OpenStacks. And oh my goodness, oh my goodness, if you don't have all of the basics of networking, don't feel bad, don't sit there and hide it from everybody,

don't keep it your big secret, just go to Linux Academy. They've got great courses and all that stuff. Hands-on, scenario-based labs that give you experience on real servers. Human beings, instructors that are happy to advise you and answer questions when you get stuck. Course scheduler, which is nice to work with your Biz A schedule. Learning Paths, which are series of courses and content planned by Linux Academy's instructors. iOS and Android for when you're on the go like Wes.

Hey-o! Woo! And study guides, like lesson audio and notebooks that you can take with you and study offline. And flashcards that are maintained, forked, and made even better by a community stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members. What's not to love? Go there and try it out for seven days for free at linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. This is a tool and a platform built by Linux enthusiasts wanting to spread Linux to more people and make it more accessible. This was their mission.

They combined up with developers and educators and now more and more people's Linux Academy has just grown like crazy and they're building out a team that keeps that content fresh, builds in new stuff all the time. They have virtual labs that they really have nailed because you can pick the courseware distro, click that, and then it'll match up with the lab server and spin that up for you. That stuff is magic. And I was involved in some of the

conversations on how they were putting it together. Super impressed with their team. Really smart people running Linux Academy. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. So I want to do a little follow-up. We got a comment in last, so we got a couple of things.

So the first one I want to address is like, just what, it's like a question. I'd like to get people's comments that listen to the show after the fact. And the last week's show was like an hour and 27 minutes, so almost an hour and 30. And the comment that came into the show was, too short.

The show's not long enough. That seems like it was probably, and see, in my world, about an hour is about probably just right for most commuters, maybe an hour and 45 for the longer commuters. 30 minutes is even a good time. That's what we try to do with Linux Action News is about 30 minutes. And it's, you know,

so I was like, what are your thoughts? I feel like an hour and a half was probably too long last week. I think like we went too long. And so I'm kind of curious what you think and then I want to toss it out there for people listening on like the YouTubes or in their cars when they commute and maybe tweet me some feedback and let me know what they think or leave in the comments. But your thoughts, what do you think? I mean, I do agree that an hour, it's a very

tractable time, kind of understand it, you know how to budget for it. Maybe an hour and a half is less. So it does bring up a good question about like, how do we want to manage that? What do we shoot for? And when do we break? You know, what's our flex there in terms of like well we're having a really good discussion it makes sense to go that longer or that that deep dive made sense but hmm so maybe the content should decide yeah and i've been i think that's why we went long is like that's just what the content called for yeah but i mean we should think about how it's distributed how people can listen to it and i know that like you know i don't want to get in a position where it's always just a little too long and then people aren't finishing it or feel like they don't get to enjoy it the right way.

Yeah. Or I don't want people not listening because it's too long. Right. Like I got other shows I got to listen to too. I can't spend an hour and a half on one show. It could be a thing. I would like to think that we would be high on their list, but you never know. So give us your feedback either in the YouTube comments or at ChrisLAS. Let me know. Speaking of at ChrisLAS,

Paul tweeted me on some Moonlight follow-up from last week. This is really cool. So remember we talked about Moonlight is an open source project that allows you to take advantage of NVIDIA's proprietary lockdown only to Windows on-chip GPU accelerated network streaming? Moonlight opens that up for Linux users, tablet users, Raspberry Pi users. Like it just opens that whole thing up, and it's really slick. And you and I speculated.

We thought, well, could you use this to stream a Windows desktop to a Linux PC? Right, yeah. And this would be sort of like, screw Wine, screw VMs. I'll just put a Windows box in the corner and just stream the whole damn desktop using Moonlight. Yeah, well, Paul tweeted me, and he said, at ChrisLAS, you can use Moonlight on the entire desktop by pointing it at explore.exe. And it doesn't work on Grid Cloud, so it won't work on AWS because it requires a hardware GTX. We also said, well, shoot, put this up on a cloud server.

Yeah, but it needs a physical GTX card for that, which we knew that, actually. And then Alder wrote into the Unplug subreddit at unplug.reddit.com. He said, sometime last year, I had a grand plan of putting a Windows PC in a corner and using it as a gaming appliance. Ah, sounds familiar, doesn't it? Yeah, he said, so the idea was to run Linux on a laptop with a clean-looking office space, with Moonlight helping to bridge the gap of missing games for Linux. But suffice to say, I ran into a few problems. I tried every version available of Moonlight on the iPad 3, on the Nexus 5X, on an Android TV box, Linux laptop, Windows laptop, Chromium extension, and the Java client.

They all performed amazingly up to 720p at 60 frames per second. But there is some input lag, but it's mostly workable, especially with a single-player game where Twitch FPS or competition isn't the goal, as in it's not super Twitchy, but rather the experience of enjoying the game. In that use case, it's fantastic. However, once I tried to push it up to

1080p, the lag became very bad. The H254, which I don't know if that's a typo, or maybe it is H254, stream freaks out at times. You have to wait for it to come back. It does reconnect, but it does freak out from time to time. He was running on a four-core Intel rig with an NVIDIA 970, and then later he put a 1080 in there, and he had it connected to a gigabit LAN. As far as he could see, there wasn't a bottleneck in the setup, but he just thought maybe it wasn't up to snuff.

He also messed around with Wi-Fi and things like that. So he says, you make sure you have some network stuff. But he says he's happy to report the video drivers didn't really seem to make a big difference. Same performance with different video drivers, he says. I'm not sure. Anyways, he says, I just wanted you guys to know that if you dig into it, it's pretty close. It just needs a little more work and give a little forgiveness on the performance from time to time.

But if you're doing a 720p stream, you're going to be pretty happy, up to 60 frames per second. That's reasonable. Yeah, especially if you're just trying to pull down a Windows desktop application. I mean, after we talked about it, I was like, well, this could be a great way to do Photoshop or maybe even Premiere. But that 720p would be pretty limiting. Or for me, you know, you might even like I remember using this,

playing with the Steam streaming stuff. Yes. Where I just wanted to be hanging out with my roommates in the living room, but I didn't want to like drag my tower and hook it up to the TV. But still, you just like sit on it. I could play on this little laptop and there we go. Yeah, kind of a similar thing. Kind of a similar thing.

So thank you guys for – I got a couple other people that wrote about Moonlight, and they were similar in tone. So I thought that would probably be a good summation. But I was – we actually got a few bites on that Moonlight topic. I was surprised by that. Maybe I should go try it. So yeah. If you do, let me know.

Let me know. Let me know how it goes, Wes. Let me know how it goes. If you'd like to join us here in the show, we'd love to have you. Yeah. We have a decent – let's see how many people right now. We have – if you expand the window here. Hold on.

Let me see. I'm going to tell you. We have eight people have joined us this week, which is pretty good. We love each and every one of you. They're not super talkative this week, but we love having them here. And that's nice. But we have had sort of like – in the past, we've had up to like 40, 50 people in that room. It's been a park.

And I think the summertime is here and people are out and about. Enjoying. Yes. So there is an opening for a new opportunity for new voices and new opinions. Yeah, come talk about Linux. Yeah, the opportunity is there. It's not as crowded as it has been. And you could take advantage of the summertime exodus.

I think we have a – just go to the chat room, really, because you can find out about the guide that we have. You can find out about the mumble room. So really, the best resource is to go to jblive.tv and just go to the embedded chat room there. You can do bang mumble to get the mumble server information. And then we'd love to have you join us next week. And if you don't make it to mumble, the IRC is fun, too. Yeah, yeah.

You can definitely hang out in the IRC. We're watching that during the show as well. We do try to. We have less stuff live than we did because Linux Action Shows used to be live, right? So we're kind of moving more towards this is the big live show that we do for our Linux community. So we'd like to see more people get involved. I know it's during the day, and that makes it rough for a lot of people. Right.

But it's just kind of the way it's worked out for us. Another option would be just do it even earlier in the day, and that's not going to be good for anybody involved. It's not a good idea. But we'd love to have you if you can make it. So go to jblive.tv, you'll find the chat room, or go to irc.geekshed.net, and it's hashtag Jupiter Broadcasting.

And you don't have to be here the whole show. You can come in, chime in on a couple issues, hang out, and disappear. Yeah, like Mr. Hall today. He came in, and we kind of had to get out of here by 6 o'clock East Coast time, and so we just kind of made sure we chatted to him before then, and then he chatted a bit with us, and then he was out. And I think that works too.

If you can't make it for the whole show, we're just happy to have you for a bit. Sometimes, same with Popey and Wimpy, they'll pop in when they're not podcasting themselves. Yeah. Also, I guess Mozilla has a new podcast coming. I saw that. That's an interesting little headline before we get out of here. Yeah. There's been a lot going on in the Linux community this week. And so one of the things that I've been doing is I've been transitioning Linux Unplugged a bit to more about the community stuff. So, you know, talking with Michael Hall about Endless and talking about the elementary project moving over to GitHub. I'm trying to get more community stuff that isn't necessarily headline-grabbing, but still good discussion here in this show.

Because every Monday we have Linux Action News now. It's about a half hour long. It ranges depending on the news. And hell, if our most recent episode maybe wasn't our best yet. Really? Oh, man. Because you know what it was? And I don't mean to – I really wouldn't tout my own horn unless or whatever that's the phrase.

It's definitely not tooting my horn. I actually kind of like – I'm tooting my own horn here. It's pretty good. I like that. Well, the skirt makes it real easy. I'm not wearing a skirt. I'm not wearing anything. You know, I was looking at the news. In Linux Action News 6, Linux Action News Episode 6, we covered Debian 9 getting released,

Tails 3, Firefox 54, FreeNAS 11, OpenMediaVault 3. Plus, we did a follow-up from the previous week's episode, and Joe gave Ubuntu Touch on his phone a spin, and we managed to get all of that in 30 minutes. And I swear, I'll stand by it. It's all of the most important things about all of that in 30 minutes and i i swear i'll stand by it it's all of the most important things about all of those releases you need to know and then we just get through it and it doesn't feel super rushed it just i it's i think because joe and i have been doing linux news coverage ourselves for so long that we really come into it and we really it's just i really like the way that episode worked so if you haven't checked it out yet or if you

checked it out and haven't come back, check out Linux Action News Episode 6. I thought it turned out great. And speaking of that Debian 9 story, there's something I just wanted to mention before we get out of here. Debian 9 did come out this week. Congratulations to the project. It is always a big, big deal when Debian 9 comes out. And this release is dedicated to the project's founder, Ian Murdoch, who did Pass

Away on December 28th, 2015. So Debbie and Nine is dedicated to Ian. And I thought that was pretty cool. I thought it was worth mentioning. It's really kind of classy of the project to do that, too. Alright, that'll bring us to an end of this week's Unplugged program. Steaming right towards

rushing at a mad pace towards our V-Log BBQ meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting. Go there, check it out. If you want more Wes Payne, check out the TechSnap program. I'm going to be listening this week because there's a story that didn't make it into this show that I think you guys are going to cover in typical

fantastic TechSnap fashion. Don't forget our mumble room. We'd love to have you participate with us live. Follow the network at Jupiter Signal. Thanks for being here. And we'll see you right back here

next Tuesday. Say goodbye, Wes. Goodbye. Goodbye, everybody! Bye! And the value of this is negative. So go figure. I don't have my co-pilot this week. And right before the show starts, like, I was already on the air.

It was actually, I think, 1 think 155 something like that the obs machine lost all of our uh so i couldn't grab like my screen and stuff like it lost all the capture yeah yeah so i had to had to fix that super quick and then uh got that all solid and then i started the show and realized into the show that in fact it's it's happened again it happened again my uh my browser highlighting extension that i use that i was just using before the show started that i went through and highlighted like this this fedora 26 blog post because it was thick and long and it was meaty and i was like i like i don't need to put i don't need to read all of this in the show because this would be an hour-long show of me just reading this post.

So let me highlight these sections. I highlight upstairs. I come downstairs and using Chrome upstairs, I come downstairs and my extension is gone. And so I installed it. I stopped the show. I stopped recording. Explicitly to install this. Because there's no way I can do this next story without this and without you here to fill dead air time.

I can't sit here and search through a thing, right? So I'm like I got to stop the recording, which i never do unless we have a crash i stop recording then i go and i install the extension and now it's gone again it's gone again and i did that mid-show and so there's no way i'd install the extension during the show and i was using it to read up to our last story i was using the highlight function and now it is actually gone from Chrome again. I really can't fathom. Is this like shareware extension where you get like six highlights

and then it uninstalls itself? It's actually, you know, Diago, D-I-G-G-O, it's actually a paid service that I've been using. Yeah, it's disabled. This extension may have been corrupted, it says. Oh. What the hell is repair extension? Okay.

So I just, okay. Can I just, if I can click a button and say repair extension, and then another screen comes up and says, would you like to repair extension? And then I click repair extension. Why doesn't it just automatically repair extension? Yeah. And then. Is corrupt?

Yes, repair. And why is it corrupt on this? I wonder if I'm having a mismatch in versions. I wonder if I have a newer version of Chrome here or something than I do upstairs. I wonder if that's what's going on. I wonder if this is a side... Because I did an update on this computer yesterday. So I'm on Chrome 59 here.

You need a script that'll just update all of your workstations at the same time. All right, jbtitles.com. We've got to get out of here for Mr. OAS. jbtitles.com. So I'm going to leave you high and dry. That's all right. It's all right. So Ititles.com. We've got to get out of here for Mr. Wes. I'm sorry to leave you high and dry. That's all right. It's all right. So I had like that hardware thing.

So it was just a weird start. It was a weird start for the show. That's all right. It's too bad. I was actually really excited about it. I mean, I'm always excited about it, but I was especially excited about this one. Yeah, I think it all shook out in the end, Wes. It all shook out.

All right, jbtitles.com. Everybody go boat. and Wes. It all shook out. Alright, jimmytyles.com. Everybody go boat! So it sounds like the way LAN is going, it should really just be called like I don't know, it's basically like Pac-Man S-Y-U but just for all of your Linux news.

Yeah, really, yeah. When we got done afterwards, because when you're recording, you don't know how long the length of the episode is because you're recording for a while before you start, you record for a little bit after you end. Plus you might stop midway during the show or something like that. And so

we didn't know because we had quite a bit more than a half hour in the recording. So when it published and it came in around a half hour, I was like, damn, that's amazing that not only did we not watch a clock but with all of that stuff, we still managed to nail it. I mean, Joe's an editing machine

chopping things. Don't forget the door knocker. Oh yeah. Oh that's actually what threw me off. Wow thanks MN. That's what threw me off super bad. So I was actually I actually had a good groove going.

I bounced back from the technical failures. I hadn't ran into the gnome extension issue yet. Right. So I hadn't hit that flaw. So I didn't know what was down the road. But at 2.02, 2.01, so I'm starting up, I'm spinning everything up

where I've already hit record. We're getting ready to go. The doorbell rings. Ugh. No. And five minutes before the doorbell ring, I got a telegram from Angela who said, by the way, there's somebody coming to work on the roof. Rika's having his friends over again. She says, by the way there's somebody coming to work on the roof you guys having his friends over yeah right and he's no she says by the way somebody's coming to work on the roof don't worry I've pre-briefed him not to ring the doorbell not to knock on the door

I told him you are in there recording uh it says oh shit yeah because it it always happens yeah there's no way right because like it's instinct especially for people doing roof work like they you know they they want you to know what that noise is They want you to know why there's somebody in your yard. So they feel obligated. To talk to you, right? Regardless of what they've been instructed. They feel for their own personal reasons. So it always happens.

But what threw me off was all of it. This guy, we went out of our way to tell him not to do it. So that was kind of frustrating. And then also he took a long time. He was just talking to me about stuff. I'm like, I'm on the air right now. I didn't say that to him. But that frustration builds up in the back of your mind.

You're like, okay, I've got a clock ticking. I've got a sound clip. You should have just had him come right in. You kind of had that on you. I know, right? I should have. I'm like, could you come in here and talk to me? I had a sound clip for a certain amount of time that was playing,

so I didn't have dead air. And I'm like, okay, well, I've got this amount of time to talk to this guy before we have dead air. So then I sat down, and I was totally flustered by it all because we just really went out of our way to make sure that didn't happen. And then I started thinking, well, God, can we just never, ever schedule stuff on show days? Well, we always have a show day. There's a lot of show days.

Yeah, yeah. And people don't want a lot of show days. Yeah, yeah. And people don't want to come out on Saturday. Yeah, yeah. So it's, after that, that really did throw me off. It was a weird episode. You know, it was just weird. Just weird.