LINUX Unplugged - Episode 206: Beardy McBeardface | LUP 206

Episode Date: July 19, 2017

We've chased Chris out of the studio and invented some new segments: First up Wes, in true TechSNAP style, highlights a few complicated ideas explained well, then it's on to updates from a few of our favorite projects, including some exciting news for WireGuard & a great collection of new stuff from around the internet.Plus special guest host Rikai & Wes geek out about gaming, we celebrate Slackware & pose the question: Just what is Mageia & why does it exist?

It was kind of funny this week. I was at a bar having a beer, you know, like one does occasionally. As a responsible adult, I'll pretend. And I was talking with a very nice guy there. He just drops this bomb on me. I grew up in a Linux household.

And I was like, how is someone that I've never met saying this to me? I'm not at a Linux conference. I'm not in a Linux users group. You've got that look apparently look yeah well he was asking me like i'm in there a lot like i'll just you know be working on something or show notes or whatever um you probably saw a lot over your shoulder he may have yeah anyway it turns out he didn't he doesn't use linux currently but uh i guess uh one of his

parents was in the it field so when he was growing up they switched the whole he told me some stories about like he's able to play diablo 2 which he liked a lot and then they switched the whole house over to linux and he couldn't do that anymore but he got into it i guess at one time he was like a regular contributor on some ubuntu forums it was just funny because i had brought back a whole like a whole life ago for him he didn't do any of it now totally had different interests but yeah i do think he did say he had some live cds here live usbs he carried around and i was encouraging him. He was curious about, hey, what distros might I not have heard of, that sort of stuff.

He was actually really interested in Solus, especially when I told him it wasn't just a new derivative. It was its own first-rate distro. Yeah. So maybe there's a new Solus convert out there next time. If I see him again, I'll have to ask. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 206, for July 18th, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show.

My name is Wes, and joining me this week, oh my, it is an oh-so-special guest. Oh, guys. Who is that? The one, the only, the beardiest. It's our friend, Rikai, the editor who keeps everything going around here. Welcome to today's episode. We've got a, you know, it's a special show. Anytime Chris is away, we've convinced him to take a vacation. Finally. Out of the house, out of the studio.

We get to play, do whatever we want. So, you know, the show will probably be a little bit different, but I think it's going to be a lot of fun. We've got some complicated things explained well. Obviously, I've been convinced that this is a good thing by my, on the TechSnap program, by Deep Dive Master Dan over there. So we've got some highlights of just some things I think around the web that there's a lot of complicated things that are hard to explain. It's always a great thing when they're explained really well. We're not going to go as deep as Dan did. No, it will not be a Dan Deep Dive.

Don't worry. We don't want to put him out of a job. We won't even talk about Let's Encrypt. So you just, it's fine. It's fine. But it should be fun. After that, we've just got some updates from some of our favorite projects around the web and maybe not so favorites but you know

they deserve updates too. Plus there's you know as always a couple new things to highlight and Rinka I found a very interesting handheld project over on Indiegogo that it's not every day that I think one of these is actually interesting or that it might happen or that it's worth

talking about but this one seemed kind of unique and had some interesting things going for it that, hey. Like maybe some new AMD technologies? Ooh, I like the sounds of that. And after that, of course, because I'm hosting, we're going to talk about containers and about the evolution of containers and how they've gotten a little bit more friendly, a little bit more confusing, and oh, so many more daemons. Plus, there's some birthdays for some of our favorite distros or not-so-favorites. We'll kind of talk about what does that mean?

What does it mean to be a distro in today's world? And what should you reflect on on these birthdays? And if we have time, I'm going to pick the beard's brain about some Linux gaming and maybe some not-so-Linux gaming. But before we get there, we should really bring in our good friends, the people who make this show possible. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Oh, hey, guys. I didn't even see you there. I know. They were just hiding there in the corner this whole time. And boy, aren't we glad to have them. Yeah.

How do you feel about a beard on the show? I'm pretty stoked about it. Not bad. Awesome. Look at that. Yeah, see, there you go. Nice. A warm welcome for his beardiness, the beard. See, there you go.

Nice. A warm welcome for his beardiness, the beard. Okay, so first up today in our new category, probably one time only, but complicated things explained well, we've got a real world guide to WebRTC. Talking directly from browser to browser, sign me up. WebRTC just makes so much sense and lets you do many awesome new things that simply weren't possible before. Anyway, that's the promise of WebRTC. I mean, we've certainly played with a lot here at the studio. It kind of promises to be that thing where you don't have to, I don't have to super learn all of the ins and outs of VoIP and SIP and all of that or have an ISDN line between

studios. Do they have the part where they explain why it doesn't work half the time? Yes. So that's where the real world aspect comes into this. And looking at some of the discussions over it, you know, people talking about this, I think that's the key is that WebRTC has been talked a lot about how easy it is, how simple it is to get started, distributed, peer-to-peer, all those things. But there's a lot that has to go on. There's a lot that has to get right.

And it turns out, yes, peer-to-peer is important, but you also still need a server. And there's a lot of things you have to get right. Things like stun and turn and NAT busting and all those things just to get two browsers to talk to each other in a way that will work, be reliable, and provide acceptable video quality. Have you had much experience experience do you use any of these uh you know conferencing programs or just video chat mostly just hangouts yeah that's a that's a good problem because most of the the other options tend to as you pretty much explain not work reliably yes so they talk about here like what do you what do you need to get started? Two things, a reasonably recent browser and, drumroll, a server.

Yeah, that's right. So they go on to explain, like, isn't WebRTC all about peer-to-peer communication? Well, yeah, it is, but these peers need to find each other. So they kind of go over, like, what all this means. They talk about ICE, which is Interactive Connectivity Establishment, which is just a fun way to say, how can you actually get two people maybe behind that to talk to each other? You'd think that eventually we'd be able to figure out IPv6

and get through some of these things, but no, it's not going to happen. Well, you'd think you'd also be able to take some of the info that the browser itself has where it's able to negotiate various connections to do some of this stuff automatically. I wonder if there's security reasons for that. Yeah, that's a good question. So they just got some, you know, we're not going to dive any more into it,

but they've got a lot of cool details here, stuff about data channels, mesh connectivity, audio and video, screen sharing, a lot of stuff like if you're just getting started or maybe you have a pipe dream that you want to, you know, implement your own web rtc solution you kind of just need some javascript a back-end server and a lot of time yeah talking about uh the stuff like stun and ice it kind of makes me realize that web rtc is really just sipping your browser yes exactly

yeah um we're not gonna talk about today but that makes me think about uh you know the the matrix project that we've talked a lot about before. And I know I've seen them, and there's a couple other things too. FreeSwitch does some of it trying to marry that where you can make a WebRTC call through a SIP gateway that goes and talks SIP to another thing. Because you've got to complicate it more but we might have a glorious solution where i can be on wi-fi on a bus and make a web rtc call that goes through sip and then i can just ask no questions on his show whenever i want except that the connection will never be established so you'll never be able to have that call or it'll be like really distorted and he'll keep asking and then drop me and i'll have to yell at him later that's no fun or he'll get really angry and confused because you talked about windows oh you know that happens that happens a lot. Yeah.

I think especially with you. Oh, yeah? Mm-hmm. You just like to troll everybody. Mostly Noah. Yeah, mostly Noah. That's why, if you guys haven't seen it, make sure you check out the most recent user error because that show, there's always something worth listening to there.

And we try to make it worthwhile. Plus, there's that sweepstakes, right? I think it actually just ended. Did it just end? Yeah. Ah. I think it ended at 11 o'clock, actually. Okay.

Well, there you go. You were too late if you're hearing about it now, but I bet there'll be some announcements about what's going to happen with that in the future. Yeah, probably in this next episode. Excellent. Okay. So, you're admittedly someone who spends some time on Windows, right? Yeah, that's true.

So, maybe you don't know about this, but have you heard about the SS command? No. Okay. Well, I've got the article for you, Beard. An introduction to the SS command over at Linux.com. News for the open source professional. That's us, I think, right? Yeah, it's got to be us.

So Linux includes a fairly massive array of tools available to meet almost every need, from development to security to productivity to administration. If you have to get it done, Linux is there to serve. Yes, of course it is. The SS command is a tool used to dump socket statistics. You may have heard of this in the past. A similar capability was exposed in the netstat tool. Ah, I've used netstat.

Yeah, see, there you go. So there's a lot of people, a lot of people end up using the, you know, the IP command, which is the new replacement for ifconfig. These are all part of the IP route to library or a set of tools rather. But I feel like a lot of people end up missing SS

or actually just don't like it very much. A lot of my colleagues, it kind of has a bad rep around them or they're just so used to netstat. Netstat's been written in just about every guide everywhere. It has command line arguments that you're used to reading, simple to use. But SS Expose is actually a lot more functionality in some ways. It's faster, more modern, and it's going to be here for the future.

There's probably a lot of distros that at some point will no longer ship netstat out of the box. You'll have SS. So if you are on a system where you need to troubleshoot something, maybe you don't have the ability to install netstat, it's probably a good idea to learn, even if it's not your program of choice. I don't know.

I tend to use netstat for basic troubleshooting, but then if stuff gets much more complicated, I just switch to Wireshark. Yeah, that's right. stuff gets much more complicated. I just switched to Wireshark. Yeah. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's fair. Sometimes when you have to get to that level of troubleshooting, you know you're in trouble. Yeah.

All right, well, I need packet captures. That's, something's wrong here. Is that something you have to do very often? No. No, I hope not. Although I did use it to figure out why our live stream was getting knocked offline because Noah accidentally assigned the same IP to a printer. Yikes. I will refrain from comment, but maybe...

Oh, we already gave him crap on the Linux Action Show. Excellent. And maybe that's why you should go check out our pre-show where we've got a DHCP solution that might be right up Noah's alley. Anyway, this article, you know, it's not crazy in depth, but it does have some handy guides. If you haven't used it before, I'm sure that's not many of our audience. I just want to throw it out there because, you know, it's good to stay with the times. And honestly, I've been using SS a lot more as just like a conscious effort. It's really not too bad. It makes it pretty easy to choose between IPv6 or 4 if you just want to listen for, you know, listening sockets or UDP connections in the unconnect state, pretty simple, pretty quick.

It shows the, you know, it's easy to filter, easy to say things like don't, you know, don't try to resolve all my IP addresses. Show me the program that owns this socket, that sort of thing. So you have some homework to do, I think. I guess so. Yeah. Get with the times, beard. Get with the times. Contrary to popular belief, I do have a Linux box, so I can do this stuff.

Do you? Yeah. Hmm. It's just the knock. Oh, okay. So it's not as beefy as the Windows rig. Well, it doesn't need to be. It doesn't need to be, right.

You're saying that because Linux makes such great use of the system's resources? Yeah. Why are you grinning at me, Wes? Why? Never. I would never. Okay. So, there's still a couple more things.

Really, I've just got, you know, you haven't heard of SS. Maybe you're a BSD convert. You might fall into, you know, the target audience of this next piece as well. Systemd for impatient sysadmins. System D, it's the init system that some love to hate. I think more than some, actually. So, full disclosure over here at Tyblog, I find System D a little overbearing, although by no means would consider myself militantly anti-System D. It has obvious advantages, and though I'm at philosophical odds with at least some of it, I see no reason why everybody shouldn't understand it a bit better, especially now

that most people will need to deal with it on their favorite distros. This post is sort of just a formalized set of operational notes that I've made frequent use of in my experience with SystemD. I hope this post serves as another tool in your operations sysadmin utility belt. When you need to get solutions quickly but are working with a system that relies on different tools than your normal sys5 toolbox. Just a note, the paths and examples here will be drawn from Arch Linux, but most of them should carry over to many other distributions. So really, I think that's it right there. We can really get past, especially for a lot of people who have to use this stuff at work or on systems they didn't get to set up or dictate all of the software on,

even if you don't like SystemD, or especially if you don't like SystemD. There's a lot of people who didn't like Sys this five, uh, RC in it kind of thing. You still had to use it. You still have to know how to do it. I never loved upstart, had to learn how to use it. Uh, so from that angle, I think this blog is just a great post. You know, it's like a field guide. It won't teach you all the theory. It's not a man page necessarily, but if you just like, I'm on the system, I need to disable services. I need to edit this unit file. Boom, here you go go you don't have to read anything written by leonard so you don't have to like strangle anyone or erupt into a ball of hatred and confusion

no my friends just head over to to tie blog here i think it's really handy i i can think of some people in my life that i will definitely be handing this out to just as like don't hate it i'm not saying it's the best thing ever does It does come with your system now. Here's a systemd cheat sheet. Exactly, yes. Are you a systemd person on your Linux box there? Yeah, I don't have a problem with systemd. I actually kind of like it because it's very easy to look at the unit files and see what

the hell's going on, which I did not find that to be the case with sysvnit because sometimes those were very complicated scripts. No, I think that's true. As he points out, there's a lot of very legitimate problems with systemd, things where especially experienced sysadmins, experienced Linux users or developers don't like. They lose control. They do things in a stupid way or dangerous way or insecure way. But I will say from the casual

user, it's pretty easy, especially when I have an executable I'd like it to run as a service. Done. There are other in-systems that I should point out here that can do that just as easily. It's not a unique feature to systemd, but it is a benefit. I do also appreciate

system control status on a program. It will actually show you if it's running or not gives you an excerpt from its logs it's a pretty nice little drill down on a system if you don't you know i will say also from a casual user's perspective the logging system is less straightforward yeah that's for sure like you know with sysv you can just uh go and look at a log file. But with SystemD, you have like six different commands to get different sets of logs that tell you different things. Yes, that's certainly true. There are definitely disadvantages and advantages to the journal, and I think that's probably one of the most controversial pieces of SystemD. I will say I think both, however, are better than Upstart. I really do not like Upstart.

There are so many Upstart scripts that I've just never gotten to work and gave up on and actually reinstalled a different distro just so I didn't have to use Upstart. Wow, that is dedication. I mean, I think Upstart had a lot of good things going for it. It was modernization. It was advancement. Yeah, but at the same time, it seemed very easy to break to me. Yeah, and I didn't enjoy the interface to it very much, and it was, at least on the systems I used, especially around like 1204 period, it was kind of awkwardly integrated and confusing.

And the documentation for it wasn't very clear either. Yeah, it felt like one of those things where it was an awkward stepchild where it could have been the future, but then before it really got to the point of being polished and used widely, it was killed. I think that's the perfect phrasing. Okay, well, enough about that, because we certainly don't need a

flame war today. Well, unless the beard wants one. He gets what he wants. Still in the topic of interesting things complex things explained well or questionably well perhaps we've got uh over on uh kushal das's blog we've got a piece about encrypting drives with lux so uh if you're not familiar uh you know encrypting hard drives it's a common step that you see all the time now, especially on smartphones, maybe on laptops. A lot of installers even these days will make it pretty easy for you to get started.

And this article, I think, is just a nice... He's got some good pictures here that kind of sketch out some of the concepts that you're going to run into. Starts right off with an XKCD comic, which is, you know, a classic. So you know he knows what he's talking about in that regard. But it's basically just a breakdown over, you know, what is Lux? It's Linux Unified Key Setup. It's a disk encryption specification, first introduced by 2004 by Clemens Fruitworth. That's fun to say notice the word specification instead of

trying to implement something of its own lux is a standard way of doing drive encryption across tools and distributions you can even use drives from windows using the libre crypt application that i actually did not know that's near to me so he kind of just goes through it this in this tutorial he's using us sticks, which may be more practical for a lot of people who are not... Not everyone has a laptop or a computer. They can just be like, I'm going to wipe the disk, play with encrypting it.

I would suggest maybe stay tuned for some of our sponsors later, and we'll have solutions for that as well. But virtual machines, USB sticks, that's a great way to do it. He does have some very diligent notes here about, you know, execute things with caution.

You will be erasing your hard drives. Watch out. But otherwise, it's just a great explanation. It walks you through things and holds your hands in ways that things like the Arch Wiki, while it may have more detail, may have more technical specifications or examples, it's not necessarily for the first timer. It can be if you're an experienced first timer, but I remember, you know,

way back in the day when I was first playing with encryption and you're kind of like, well, what? What's happening here? When it's not like one command, you're like trying to piece all of the pieces together. I don't know. It can be complicated. So I think I would have really appreciated a guide like this,

say, eight years ago. Do you encrypt much over there you got bitlocker on all your windows systems no I actually don't encrypt anything I don't really have much that I feel I need to secure anything I think needs to be secure is not on a computer interesting a hard copy man well i mean nobody can hack into your stuff and steal your data if it's not there that's true and i suppose you're not you're not too worried about the physical security aspect here no no no one's breaking into the studio for your precious secrets if they want it they got to go through me and if they go through me i'm probably dead and don't care most Most of it, I think, thereafter is that large photo collection of the beard that you have. Oh, yeah. Various beard shots, profile pictures.

It's highly sought after. It is highly sought after. All right, what about you guys, Mumble Room? You guys have been pretty quiet over there. Anyone play with Lux or any other forms of encryption that they want to talk about? I think it's becoming increasingly popular, increasingly used, and now that people seem to trust LibreVault at least a little bit.

And been using it a fair bit. I mean, it'd be more of a solution. I was literally talking to someone in IRC last night, in the JBIRC, about they wanted something that worked on Linux and Windows, and LUTs would work, except for the Windows setup part.

So I'm not sure because I've just lost some keys, so I'm not sure if I'm going to do Lux again. I'm debating it. Yeah, no, that makes sense. You know, I've had some friends in that position as well, where if you don't do it all the time, if you're unfamiliar with it, if you've got yourself in a situation where you have a system that you don't necessarily understand how to administer well, then you can lose data,

you can lock yourself out, and you don't have a cloud provider that you can call up and be like, hey, I lost my key, can you guys use your backdoor and get into my stuff for me? When you do it this way, that's just not an option. I saw some points here, though. I guess GNOME disks has gotten a lot better in recent days at, you know, including encryption support. So there are a lot of GUI options as well for people who want encryption.

They want the security of it, but they don't necessarily want to master running all this stuff, encrypt setup, managing their encrypt tab, all of that stuff on the command line, I can realize can be daunting for some people, or just extra administrative overhead that, you know, that's not really what they're trying to do.

But hopefully, and as the author notes, hopefully this post encourages people to use encrypted drives more. All of his drives are encrypted, and most of mine are not on my current system because I just reformatted it, but it is something I try to do on sensitive systems or on laptops, especially when I can.

And you can use Lux encrypted drives with Windows now, can't you? I believe that's possible. Via, I think it's Libre Crypt? Yeah, I believe that's true. Yeah, and that's actually what the author notes here. I have not tried that. Yeah, me either. But

that would actually be awesome. Because then you've got a cross-platform solution. As long as you don't have a Mac. That's open source. Well, you can probably get it working on the Mac somehow. Yeah, I bet you probably could. Yeah, that's probably true. Same here.

I'm using BitLocker on Windows. I haven't used open source after. Had some problems with it, but Microsoft helped me solve it. And for Ubuntu, I'm using whatever is standard when you press encrypt in the Ubuntu multi-installer. Oh, see? There you go. I think that might actually be less.

I would imagine so, yeah. Unless it's only doing the user stuff, but I don't think anything does that anymore. Nah. I know that used to be the style. It's like you could have your own little encrypted, you know, home dir. Yeah. But I think those technologies were largely proven not to be secure.

Makes sense. Okay, so moving on. Do you ever have slow systems, you know, systems that you're just not happy with their performance and you're struggling to understand why? Maybe JBots not not uh doing titles as fast as it should it's that memory leak west why are you gonna call me out i'm sorry it's not your fault you can blame blame someone else it's a ruby's fault yeah it was whoever coded that part of the code yeah just

you know not me certainly not me well our friend jul friend Julia Evans, who is maybe one of the masters of explaining complicated things well, just got a guide for you. Linux tracing systems and how they fit together. So everyone knows we don't have DTrace. It sucks. It's sucked since like the mid-2000s or whenever DTrace was first released. We've always wanted it. We haven't quite had it.

And there just hasn't been, there hasn't been like a, you know, the solution for that on Linux. But a lot of workloads are on Linux. A lot of our systems, you know, especially here at the show,

like you want to be able to have insight. You want to be able to understand your production system. You want to be able to troubleshoot them. So I think this is a great guide. There's been a lot of developments in the recent years there's a lot of different systems that have a lot of overlap and i think julia does a great job of talking about you know what's what are these you know there's s trace l trace k probes trace points u probes f trace perf ebpf that's a lot of things i mean that's kind of that's crazy so she's been doing some

work she went to uh papers we love uh and uh hung out in in montreal where i guess lttng comes from and she's been working on trying to understand how all of these can fit together. So you can split Linux tracing systems into data sources, where the tracing data comes from, and mechanisms for collecting data for these sources. An example of this would be something like ftrace and tracing front ends, the tool you actually interact with to collect and analyze data. The overall picture is still kind of fragmented and confusing. Amen. Especially since some of these also fit into multiple categories, like F-trace. Yes, exactly.

But it's at least a more approachable, fragmented, confusing system. So here we have a summary in pictures. And I just love this. She has great pictures. I really appreciate that. Let's see if we can't. Something like that. There we go.

So Linux tracing systems and how they fit together. For data sources over there, you've got k probes, which are basically kernel functions, you've got kernel trace points, you probes, which are user space c functions, usdt detrace probes, and ltt ng user space tracing. So these are ways that we can actually collect data inside of the kernel and in Linux systems. Then you've got ways to extract data, which include perf, which actually perf is a great tool. If you haven't used it, you should definitely try it out. Ftrace, LTTNG, SystemTap, Sysdig, and eBPF. eBPF you may be familiar with. It's been worked on a lot by some of the people

over at Netflix, Brendan Gregg in particular, who's done great work on Linux profiling and performance in general. So I definitely recommend checking him out if you haven't already. And then you can see a lot of the overlap right here as Rika was talking about. In the front ends category, you've got things like perf, ftrace, catapult, kernel shark. Actually, I've never heard of that one. Trace command, BCC, Sysdig, LTTNG, and system tap. Well, I'm instantly excited about kernel shark just because it's a shark. That one, trace command, BCC, Sysdig, LTTNG, and system tap. Well, I'm instantly excited about Colonel Shark just because it's a shark.

I like that a lot. So, you know, this article goes on and on because it's awesome. And there's a ton of great pictures. And they really are worth thousands of words in this case. And actually the pictures are like 90% words. So you can tell that it a kind of complicated uh but i think if you're at all interested in this stuff it's a great place to start it can maybe tell you some of the tools that you should look in personally um there's a lot of tools that are just not it feels really inaccessible sometimes i guess um but i've recently been upgrading you know been able to work on more recent systems that have newer kernels and can take

advantage of some of these eBPF tools and it's awesome and in particular like the BCC project has a lot of pre-built scripts that you can use to measure things like like run queue latency or you can you know see where things are blocking you can

chart MySQL long running queries based on query execution time or even one of the ones I've used just to troubleshoot some systems that I was, you know, a system I didn't build but I had to go in and diagnose. They've got one called execsnoop, which is great. And you just run it and it reports everything that gets executed on your system. Well, they specifically say here that one of the newest and most powerful ways is to write a small ebpf program then ask lineage to attach it to a k probe slash u probe slash trace point and then the epb or ebpf program

will send the data to user space with f trace perf or bpf maps yeah exactly so i mean i think that exactly covers how confusing that is yeah and why I'm glad there are guides like this. But, like, it's getting a lot better and there's a lot more options, especially, like, just between perf and eBPF. Like, there's just a lot of ways that you can get information that will help you start on this path. It does seem like a lot of them end up glomming around eBPF. So, maybe that's where you should start. Yeah, I think so. And I think that's where a lot of the more recent momentum has been.

So definitely worth checking out. Brendan Gregg, this article links to, there's got a ton of great stuff there, continual developments. So go check it out. Go profile some of your systems. Let us know how that goes. I think I'd be curious to see this evolve. And it's great that we're finally, you know, with eBPF and some of these more recent developments, we're finally in the place where we can build things that

Illumos and Solaris have had for a long time and FreeBSD and OSX even. So we can finally be in that category. And hopefully that goes a long way to making people more confident to run serious workloads on Linux systems. I don't think there's any dearth of that now. But you know, there's old school admins and holdouts that are rightfully so or like, well, I don't have the same kind of insight that I've had on other systems. But on recent kernels, that's finally changing. All right, well, keeping with this theme, you like complicated things, but you need them explained well, just pop on over to our first sponsor tonight. And that's our friends over at Linux Academy. Head on over to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. There you will find basically the premier place to learn about Linux and related

technologies. They do it differently than pretty much anywhere else. They're not going to teach you how to maintain your garden. You're not going to learn how to repair your car, but you are going to learn from Linux experts, industry insiders, people who've been doing this for years and who are passionate about Linux. You're going to learn what you need to know to get a job, to pass exams, and to be prepared to use Linux in the real world. Yeah. I will say I haven't used Linux Academy personally, but I have recommended it to some people that were looking to get into the IT field. And they took some courses and ended up getting a job.

That's awesome. I'm kind of consistently impressed that people that, you know, I don't, that don't watch these shows that don't seem particularly hip, or they've been doing this for years. It doesn't seem like they really necessarily even need Linux training necessarily. But Linux Academy has gotten a great reputation and totally deserves it

because it's a great reference and employers are starting to recognize that Linux Academy is serious business. If you can go get some certifications or go take some courses and show that off, employers understand that that means something. It means that you're, A, passionate about this, and B, you've gotten really good instruction, up-to-date instruction. You didn't learn on some outdated six years ago distro that just won't apply anymore.

You already know about SystemD. You can do that. And it supports some of the latest stuff. Go check out their courses. It's awesome. already know about systemd you can do that and it supports some of the latest stuff like go check out their courses it's awesome they make it super easy to get started they have things like a you know a scheduler so you can understand how long some of these things are going to take for you if you don't have a lot of time they've got nuggets which are just little tiny things little facts i mean some of them are a little bit long some of them are like five minutes of them

are like an hour they're fascinating and it's a great way to just you know them are a little bit long. Some of them are like five minutes. Some of them are like an hour. They're fascinating. And it's a great way to just, you know, you have a little time to kill. You got stuck in the train. You're on your way to work and someone else is driving. A nugget is perfect to increase your Linux knowledge, get things started. If you take a look at all their courses, you'll see that they really have pretty much any Linux thing that you want to know. And what makes them so different is you don't have to do this on your system. You don't have to set up all this stuff. You don't have to worry about paying for that.

It's all included. And when you go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged, you'll get a seven-day free trial. Well, and even if you're trying to get hired at an employer, for example, that doesn't know about Linux Academy because they're old and behind the times and they suck, but you're trying to get hired there anyway, you still get the certifications. And on top of that, it becomes pretty obvious that you have a good foundation of knowledge, even if they don't know what Linux Academy is. Yeah, right. Exactly. And it shows that you know what you're doing.

And I think it makes it, you know, you'll be backed up because employers can go to Linux Academy and check out what they teach. And I think it'll instantly show them that, oh, these guys know what they're doing. Plus, they do things like, you know, they customize it. You're trying to learn about a Red Hat system. They'll make sure that the VMs they spin up for you are the distribution that you want,

and all the courseware automatically customizes for that. So you'll be running the right packaging commands. You'll be running the right, you know, init commands. It doesn't matter. They've accounted for that. They make it super easy. And I know for me, I used it a lot, both learning Chef and working with AWS resources I hadn't used before because, I mean, sometimes to model some of this AWS stuff, you have to spin up a whole VPC for yourself. You've got a ton of stuff.

You're getting databases. You're getting load balancers. That's a lot of money to spend just to learn how to do something on your own time with linux academy you pay them they manage all those resources they help you do it and they make sure you don't waste your time you don't waste your money and you just get the best educational bang for your buck so go on over to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged get your learn on i agree beautiful oh linux academy you really do make things a lot easier i'm glad they exist it's kind of funny to think about like a couple years ago they didn't and what what would you do i don't know you'd have to you'd have to go learn from some some worse resource i think i don't i don't

want that all right so now we move on yeah read man pages i think that's about it ww you read man pages which is not a bad way to do it if you have the stomach for that, but I think it helps lower the boundaries. It makes it more digestible. More digestible. Mmm, mmm. Tasty. Plus, you can't deny, there are some man pages that are pretty crappy. Yeah.

Like, I love man pages, but some of them, not so great. Yeah, exactly. Could be info pages. Oh, I like that IRC room. Colonel Panic, you're brilliant. Okay, so up next, we've got our updates section. And this is just, I thought we'd just take, you know, not anything crazy long, but we just talk about a couple things we've talked about before on the show.

So first up, how Microsoft brought SQL Server to Linux. Now, SQL Server is not something I actually have had to use very much. What about you? Nope. I've thankfully managed to avoid very much investment in the.NET stack, but I know a lot of people who do. Maybe that's what they learned in school. SQL Server is actually, I mean, legitimately a really good product.

It's a great SQL Server if you have the money to pay for it or you work somewhere that does. And I know for a long time they've had a lot of features that people have relied on. So it's interesting. This article just kind of explains some of the history. You know, back in 2016 when Microsoft announced that SQL Server would run on Linux, the news came kind of as a major surprise to users and pundits alike. But over the course of the last year, Microsoft's support for Linux, and some would say open source in general,

has come into a clear focus, and the company's mission now seems to be all about bringing its tools to wherever its users are. So they first launched this back in, sorry, excuse me, they today launched the first release of SQL Server 2017, which will be the first version to run on windows linux and in docker containers i i think that kind of shows that microsoft's

really they are trying to pivot to this cloud first mentality containers they they use the word docker all the time now the docker container alone has already seen more than 1 million polls and i think they get that you know they really are trying to target developers with that. Like, if I can just I can already go, like, Docker run MongoDB. If I can do the same thing for SQL Server, maybe I'll start considering it. Yeah, exactly. Do you use Docker much at all in your

development work? Not really. I just run on VPSs. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I think a lot of this, too, like they talk here, like, you know, talking to enterprises, it became clear that doing this, it was necessary. You know, we were forcing customers to use Windows as their platform of choice. And it's funny to think about because in another incarnation of Microsoft,

that probably would have been seen as something positive. But the company's strategy today, you know, it's quite different. It's interesting to see them actually think about, you know, they acknowledge now that Linux kind of dominates the server world and they have to play ball if they want to get a piece of that money, which they really do. So this article kind of just continues on. how they managed to, you know, change the abstraction layers, change the architecture, or work with the existing architecture of SQL Server to make it run on Windows and Linux, and to do so really well. I mean, I think it shows, like, Microsoft's got a lot of developer muscle, and when they actually pour it into something like this,

or similarly, like, the Windows subsystem, they produce some interesting things, even if I'm not personally using them. Have you used that subsystem much? Do you use that on your Windows hosts? I've used it a little bit, but I ended up not using it as much as I would like because since I do do a lot of my development on VPSs, it would be nice to have the Linux subsystem there,

but I can't do SSHFS because it requires a kernel module. Oh. So it became pretty useless to me. Yeah. Your, like, existing workflows no longer really worked. Well, if you're interested, SQL Server for Linux should reach general availability later this year. But even today, there are some people using it in production. So I'm sure we'll hear some more about this story soon.

so I'm sure we'll hear some more about this story soon. Speaking of another somewhat foreigner in our midst, did you know, Rikai, that ZFS is the best file system? At least for now. Yeah. Okay, well, this is not news to you at all, is it? ZFS is the best option. It's just too bad that we have to use it via DKMS on Linux because that makes

it a lot worse. Hey, unless you're running the most recent Ubuntu. True. They've got that compiled already for you. But I've also not seen that work. So, I haven't messed with it much, admittedly, but Yeah, that's fair.

Well, Stephen Foskett over at Fosketts.net, he acknowledges ZFS is the best file system, but he starts out with, ZFS should have been great, but I kind of hate it. ZFS seems to be trapped in the past. Before it was sidelined, it is the cool storage project of choice. It's inflexible, it lacks modern flash integration, and it's not directly supported by most operating systems.

But I put all of my valuable data on ZFS because it simply offers the best level of data protection in a small home, small office or home office environment. Here's why. One does not simply return zero instead of one yeah i mean that that that is that is pretty much pretty much how it works right i mean you need a file system that has checksums you need file systems that are designed with failure in mind and plan for that ahead of time and zfs is really the ultimate example of a file system with those kind of thinkings designed right into it so he goes in you know talks about the ZFS revolution circa 2006.

When it first appeared in like 2005, it was absolutely with the times, right? Copy on write had been a research thing that was now starting to see general deployment. But he does kind of talk about some of the things he'd like to see be improved with ZFS or things he'd like to see in a, you see in an even newer, more modern file system. I know there's a lot of complaints about, it's not that you can't expand it, you just have to be a little bit careful or plan with how you'll be expanding your arrays or building them. It's certainly not necessarily for the casual admin if you're going to be administering a lot of storage. I think you can use CFS just fine. There's a lot of FUD out there about memory consumption or difficulty to administer. I think

really actually the tools are really good, but you get to a point where you have enough data or enough redundancy or not enough redundancy and you have to do things appropriately. ZFS does have somewhat high memory consumption, but that's because it's doing a lot more than pretty much any other file system out there. Yeah, exactly. So they kind of talk about, you know, 2017 to 2010, ZFS is derailed, and then talk a little bit about the Sun to Oracle transition and the changes there, how that all goes wrong.

Then he gets into what's wrong with ZFS today. So he talks about many remain skeptical of deduplication, which hogs expensive RAM in the best case scenario. And I do mean expensive. And goes on a little bit about how, you know, he'd like to see a more first class notion of flash storage. You know, there are things you can do things with the ZIL and L2 arc caches, but there are some limitations there, which he gets into. So I think it's just an interesting article. I may not agree with all of it. I think his conclusions are reasonable for his use cases, but maybe a little bit over exaggerated. ZFS has got right. Here are the things that we should focus on in the future. Where should we be taking, what should we be thinking about for the future of file system development? Because it's not like we need the next file system today, but 10 years from now,

are we still going to be able to use ZFS? Will it be feeling a little bit stale? Is it the kind of stuff that we can change, especially in the way, you know, incremental change without breaking things, but getting new features, or at some point are we going to actually have to have, you know, a new file system design,

not from scratch necessarily, but you know what I mean? Yeah, I think that your willingness to learn ZFS is directly proportional to how much you care about your data. The more you care about your data, the more willing you're going to be to learn ZFS. Yeah, I think that's entirely accurate. That's, yeah, if you take it seriously, that's kind of what you need to know. So maybe ZFS isn't your thing. I will say even, you know,

as the IRC rightly points out, it's really not that hard to set up. Even on Linux, you do, on a lot of distributions, have to compile the kernel module. DKMS tries to make that nice and easy for you. If I was running it in production, I think I would almost certainly compile that myself and then ship my own repo that had

those pre-built. I know on Antergos you can just use EFS as part of the install process. You can even install on root. I would not recommend that. It often breaks systems. Which you can certainly make it work, but that's the category where it's like,

all right, well, you are now administering this. Be prepared for failure. Know how the command line works. Also, I hear that if you want to learn about ZFS or if you're having issues with ZFS, there's a guy named Alan in the Jupyter Broadcasting chat room. He has no problem receiving any PMs about ZFS. You're right.

Like pretty much at any hour of the evening, ZFS problem question. 24-7. He's like a ZFS helpline. But then you do have to say, Alan, switch me to ZFS, right? I think that you have to say that. Yeah. When you go to buy your file system. Is that how it works?

Oh, yeah, exactly. Yes. Oh, beard. Okay, so maybe ZS isn't your thing. Maybe you're not. You just missed the boat on that one. You're like, CFS, that's so 2006. I want something new, but obviously ButterFS, I just don't,

it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I'm not going to talk about it. Really, the only thing we've got going for us, actually, there's a lot. I shouldn't say the only thing, but in the Linux world, it's our friend Kent Overstreet working on bcash fs so we've talked about this it's kind of something we like to highlight occasionally just not not because i think it's going to be necessarily be great not because that's necessarily the future but it's one possible future and it's

development that i like to see um there's probably better ways to do it i'm not saying this is optimal or going to be perfect, but Ken Overstreet has a great history of writing good code. Bcash has proved very fruitful and useful in the kernel. And it's just exciting to kind of stay up. You know, I contribute to his Patreon. If you guys want to as well, I think Linux needs to get over this ButterFS thing.

There's just so much, the license issue with ZFS, we'll see what happens with ubuntu i'm not confident that we'll actually see easy to use or at least as easy as in kernel solutions to zfs anytime soon but we do need a file system that we can use that's modern um hopefully bcachefs can go at least part of the way there some developments here that i thought were kind of interesting um he's been asked a few times about the potential for porting BcacheFS to other operating systems, right? We were just talking about, like, you know, if you can use Lux or, you know, ZFS is sometimes something that you can actually use that's very portable if you can use it on Mac and Linux, for instance. But nearly about 90% of the BcacheFS code already builds and runs in user space and is used by BcacheFS tools.

BcacheFS code already builds and runs in user space and is used by BcacheFS tools. So the core file system code is more or less structured as a library and BcacheFS tools mostly just implements command line interfaces to it. What this means is that most of the code is not actually particularly tied to the Linux kernel.

If most of the code already works in user space, we're kind of most of the way there to be able to run it on other operating systems. Well, the problem is the other operating systems outside of Windows, which will probably never be able to use BcacheFS anyway, they already have file systems with these features. Like Apple is starting to roll out APFS or whatever the hell it's called, which has most of the features of ZFS.

And the BSDs and Solaris, they already have ZFS. So why do they care? I mean, not to be mean, Linux could definitely use it, but it's true. The portability is not really. No, I think that would only be, you know, if, if, if eventually there were some open source projects that, that took up that banner and then let you, I mean, it would be nice to have a, you know, to have a nice file system. Yeah, cross-platform. That wasn't NTFS or FAT or XFAT or UFS,

all of which have issues. I mean, there isn't really a great... A kernel panic in the chat room says that NetBSD could potentially use BcashFS. I guess they don't use ZFS for some reason. I don't know. I don't know. That's a good question.

We'll have to look into that. I'm not sure. That would be interesting. I would also love to see more, you know, development of the Linux of BSD file systems, Hammer 2 in particular, see that used, or at least the potential of it being used on Linux. Do you know what license

the APFS is under? You know, I don't. That's a good question. Let's find out. It'd be interesting if it were open and it could be ported to Linux. Yeah. I'm not an Apple fanboy by any means, but it is a good technology. Right. I mean, and they're paying talented developers to work on it. So you can't really ignore that. Some of which are former ZFS developers, if I remember correctly.

Yeah. I don't see. Okay. well, Wikipedia doesn't mention the license. Okay, so it's probably proprietary. Yes, I think so. That's unfortunate. We'll see what happens with that. I mean, Apple definitely does a... I mean, they open source Swift. They open source a lot of stuff.

I think they're picking up on that this is an important thing to do. So, yeah, we'll stay tuned. Hey, there we go. Hey, TechMav, thank you. Okay, so there's some licensing link there. We'll check that out and have to update the show notes. That seems to be for APFS cloning, though. I don't know what that is

or how it relates to the direct APFS code base. It seems to be some sort of example code. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, F2FS is another contender flash-focused. I've used it a little bit, but I haven't played with any of its necessary, any of its features to a large extent. That's something we'll have to play with more here.

Okay, so another update from a project we've talked about before on the show. WireGuard has just gone through formal verification of their protocol. So I should stress here, this is not a verification of implementation. It's not saying that the code that you run that runs WireGuard has been verified. No. But it's still important. If you're not familiar with WireGuard, it's a new intended to be hoped to be in kernel VPN solution for Linux. There's a lot of issues with the complexity of current solutions. OpenVPN is a huge project that has some known problems and performance issues. IPsec is pretty great and reasonably well-trusted,

but is also very complicated, has a large formal spec, and doesn't deal with key exchange, and the key exchange itself is actually quite complicated in many cases, and doesn't have easy user land support in Linux anyway. So WireGuard aims to have a lot have lower overhead have high performance be simple be built on modern crypto and work so this is a first step here um it's based on noise which is a modern cryptography framework that you may be familiar with from um some some of the other podcasts here as well as uh it's used in some of the stuff like from Signal. So what they've done here is, yeah,

they've used a software called, a symbolic modeler called Tamarin, which I had not heard of before, but it's called the Tamarin Prover. It's a security protocol verification tool. It sounds like a spice. It does sound like a spice, but it supports both falsification

and unbounded verification in the symbolic model. So what they were working on here is proving that if implemented correctly, the security model around the protocol is actually secure. So the paper is a work in progress, but they are using, you know, computer aided proof here to try to show that the wire guard protocol is secure when done properly. And that's kind of the first step. It will help audit and conformance of the actual implementation. And then it opens the future for, you know,

if you want to build a verifiable, in like a verifiable programming language, something like F-star, you could build a WireGuard that would be provably correct. This is obviously very important, especially in times we see China cracking down on personal VPNs. The internet at large is, you know, more government interest, more surveillance, more corporate surveillance, all of those problems.

It's important to have an easy-to-use VPN where you can get security right or at least understand the security of it or have others understand it. Yeah, that's been designed from the ground up to be easily auditable. Yes, exactly. Not have to go back on this, you know, large, that's been designed from the ground up to be easily auditable. Yes, exactly. Not have to go back on this, you know,

large thing that's been developed for years and try to figure out if it's proved. Opened VPN code base. Yeah. So what do you think of WireGuard? Have you used it at all? No. I don't have any uses for a VPN, really.

Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. I got to say, I'm excited about it. I don't know, but it's super easy to set up i enjoy that it's they make it really easy to implement with standard linux user space tools and i've got great performance i mean nothing i'm doing is like super performance critical where open vpn wouldn't work but this is easier to set up by far than open vpn yeah they say that they specifically wanted to be as easy to set up as s than OpenVPN. Yeah, they say that they specifically wanted it to be as easy to set up as SSH.

Yeah, exactly. I would say it's approximately in that category. And so I think it's not in the kernel yet, but they do have an up-to-date repo. DKMS builds it really quick. It's actually a very small module, so it doesn't take ages to build or anything. They say it's even capable of roaming between IP addresses, just like Mosh. Yeah. And that's the thing.

It's really nice. I've been using it for a while now on my laptop, and it's one of the better VPN experiences I've had. Because you don't have to worry about it. I don't have to worry about it. It handles everything. It comes back up. Wi-Fi comes back up. I connect back up to the server.

It's kind of amazing how it can handle so much while being so small compared to all the other ones. Yes. I guess they do have the bonus of being able to start much later than the other ones and learn from all their mistakes. Yes, it seems thoroughly modern. And, you know, I don't advise production use of it. I'm not saying that you should go out and deploy it everywhere, but it's definitely something I'm trying to keep track of,

and I'm excited to see future development. They do say that they make conservative and reasonable choices and that they've already conservative and reasonable choices and that they've already been reviewed by cryptographers yes so there's already been some work they're trying it feels really like they're trying to do it trying to get to that the right part where you can trust them yes exactly we'll see though so while i'm using this project of course i need somewhere to like put the end of my vpn right That's like a thing that you need. Tor, I hear, is great. Tor works pretty well. I could use my house.

But a lot of times I choose DigitalOcean. So head on over to DigitalOcean.com. There you will find, I'm pretty sure, your future cloud provider, because it's cloud computer designed for developers. I mean, really, it's designed for

admins, Linux enthusiasts, anyone who's tired of complicated APIs, inane user interfaces, or just paying too much or paying an unknown amount for questionable service. If you go on over to digitalocean.com, you can use our promo code DL unplugged. Oh, yeah, that'll get you a $10 credit. And when you find out that prices for their awesome droplets, yeah, what's a droplet you might say? That is a VPS in the cloud on real KVM hypervisors with incredible 40 gigabit E networking right to that hypervisor. It's like the rain cloud. It's just a series of droplets. I think that's exactly right.

And the droplets contain little bundles of Linux goodness or BSD goodness. It's all honey badger on DigitalOcean. Unlike in actual clouds where they only just contain water. Yeah, it's much worse. Much better on the internet. Yeah, much better on the internet. That's why we recommend it so much. So you get like a ton for that $5 a month, right?

When you go on over to their pricing page, they make it super clear that you're not wondering about how much you're going to be spending each month. I never worry about that at DigitalOcean. They make it super easy to do, and it's kind of a bargain. I mean, okay, you get the $10, so maybe you just want to use that. You're like, all right, I'll get one free month. I'm sure I won't need it anymore. Actually, you're going to be hooked. Or two months for the $5.

Or two months. Yeah, it doesn't matter. If you go with the $10, you get a whole gig of memory one virtual cpu which these are some nice cpus too so don't don't think that's some skimpy arm thing no no certainly not 30 gigs of all ssd disk and a whopping two terabytes of transfer plus receive free access to services including monitoring, cloud firewalls, and more. Maybe that's not enough for you though. Maybe you're like, I really need more from my provider. They've just rolled out high CPU droplets. So if you're crunching tons of data,

really putting the cloud to work for your projects, DigitalOcean is now totally viable. And they've done a ton of stuff like adding monitoring, load balancers, attachable block storage. They're working on object storage, which I'm super excited for. There's a ton of things that you can get that you can find at other cloud providers that don't have nearly the same kind of ease of use simplicity of DigitalOcean. They've got an incredible API. They use it to build their awesome, super clean, super easy to use UI.

We use it here. The API is super easy to use. All the apps are super easy to use. It's just, it clean, super easy to use UI. We use it here. The API is super easy to use. All the apps are super easy to use. It's simple. It's no nonsense. It's easy to get started with. And when you use our promo code DEO Unplugged, you get a $10 discount. We wanted to be able to turn droplets on and off via the IRC to control the live stream to YouTube. And so I asked one of the people that was helping me develop JBot, can you find a way to hook up these commands to JBot to be able to turn the droplets on and off? Within 20 minutes, he had finished the plugin because the API is that good. Wow.

That's kind of incredible. Yeah. Like I was talking to Chris and Noah about it and they're like, yeah, that'd be cool if you could do that. So I went upstairs, I messaged them, and I came back downstairs and then I checked a little bit later. I'm like, oh, I guess it's done. Wow.

Yeah. That's awesome. And we use it like every day here. I mean, all the freaking time. It's pretty reliable. Yeah, I think it is pretty reliable. Awesome. All right, well, go check that out.

Thank you very much to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. And that promo code one more time is DEO Unplugged. All one word, all lowercase. Oh, and all those VPSs that I was saying I was doing development on? DigitalOcean droplets. Of course. So sly. That's your secret sauce.

Super cheap and no effort to set up. That is awesome. All right. Well, okay. But to set that all up, right, you do need internet, right? Like you got to be able to get to DigitalOcean? Yes. I don't think they have IP over paper yet.

Mm-hmm. And you know, a lot of people today, a lot of people today, they don't, they've heard a lot about security problems. They want a secure, secure wifi router. Maybe they, maybe they went with the Google wifi router. You know, it's been pretty popular these days. A lot of people buy it for maybe loved ones or family members. Without looking at the chat room right now, I'm going to say that they're probably saying that anybody that thought that google would be secure is kind of dumb but and i would agree i don't know if i agree yeah i mean it depends on their on the product line i suppose um anyway you may have had one of these i know some people who got them or uh you know inherit them or are troubleshooting their family members and i know

for me it's always frustrating when you're on like a, you know, stupid proprietary router and you can't troubleshoot things. You don't have access to a console. You can't use all this Linux knowledge that you've just gained or have always had, especially on super lockdown things. But if you're on Google hardware,

my friends, there is a new open source project called Galeforce, which allows you to customize your Google wifi router. router like the wind yeah like the wind so i guess the hardware name for google's wi-fi is gale you know much like they have the hammerhead for the nexus 5 or for all all those fun names that they have so i don't i don't expect anyone to go out here and buy google wi-fi necessarily but if you're already already administer one, Galeforce is kind of the best of both worlds. It lets you run your own VPN server, customize your gateway IP address, or do any other system administration sort of thing that Linux makes possible.

The bad news, you do have to get your hands dirty. To put the router in development mode, you'll need a screwdriver, a USB-C adapter with power delivery, and some very precise button presses. So, you know, fat-fingered people out there, maybe this isn't one for you. Get a helper. Don't let Noah set it up. Don't let Noah set it up. But this is pretty fun, actually.

I think it's neat. What's nice about Galeforce, it's that it's going to keep working even if you get updates. So it's not some sort of thing where you, you know, flash your router with alternative firmware, you're stuck. No, they've just kind of, they've figured out a way to unlock down things so that if you want root access, you want to get things going, you can. But you still get security updates. You still get feature updates. It still has a nice UI that your parents can use. They just probably replace user space stuff.

Yeah, exactly. So you can go check it out. It has a GitHub project, and it makes it really easy to get started. It basically enables you to get root SSH access, so you have any extra features you want. And they keep mentioning this. Apparently, with the stock firmware stuff, you can't customize the gateway IP address, which personally, that would frustrate me at least a little bit. It actually makes Google Wi-Fi more appealing to me because I've been doing research because, as some people might know, I've been planning on

moving eventually. And I was looking at what the best way to do whole house Wi-Fi is. And apparently Google Wi-Fi is one of the easiest ways to just get repeaters and coverage without really having to deal with it. So maybe that combined with some of this more open stuff would be really nice. have any interest there before. I'll have to look into that. I actually hadn't looked at the hardware at all kind of for those reasons. I was like, well, I don't need that. I'd rather run something that I can actually play with or mess with. Interesting.

When are you looking at moving? Or is this kind of just off in the future? Off in the future. Yeah, that makes sense. Hopefully next year. Yeah. So I'm running my Linux router still, which has been working really well. And then I just this year just added a Ubiquiti AC Pro, which has been performing quite well.

Nice. But I live in an apartment, so it's not like I have crazy Wi-Fi needs. It's like, you know, a couple hundred square feet and then I'm set. Yeah. Okay. So speaking of things the beard is interested in, you pointed this out to me. And it's not all the time that we talk about an Indiegogo or Kickstarter project because... It's actually on both. I don't understand

how that works. Interesting. But, yeah, so there's this project. What's the name of it again? Do you have it up there? Yeah, Smotch. Smotch? Smotch Z. I think it's Smock. Smock. Yeah, that makes more sense. So, essentially, it's SMOC. SMOC. Yeah, that makes more sense. So essentially it's a desktop PC in a handheld form factor.

That's what the pitch seems to be anyway. So basically it's based – well, originally it was based on one of the AMD mobile E processors and some sort of AMD GPU. Now they're saying, actually, I'll just read it. Yeah, please do. Where is it? It is over here. They posted an update exclusively to their backers, but I happen to have a way to see that post outside of there. We won't talk about how.

They said, AMD has kindly agreed to let us inform backers about their new SoC upgrade. We can officially confirm that we are moving to the latest generation AMD technology, which will be based on Ryzen and Vega. We are working together with AMD to bring the best performance to Smock Z, so it will be the most powerful handheld console on the market. The new generation looks amazing, and we want to thank AMD for all their support and efforts contributed to our project. At this point, we can't say any more,

but we hope that will alleviate the long wait. Because this Kickstarter happened sometime last year. Okay, yeah. wait because uh this kickstarter happened like sometime last year okay yeah and then they they had a um a partner that they were partnering with for the the soc technology back out and because they backed out that caused delays but on the other side that let them work with amd to get this new tech in there so it's kind of a handheld that's basically a low to mid-range PC in a handheld form factor. So you can basically run all your Windows or Linux games because you can install either OS on there. Wow.

And it ships out of the box with Linux. Out of the box? Assuming it ever comes out, of course. Yeah, assuming it ever comes out, of course. And to me, that's the kind of handheld, although admittedly still way too bulky for my taste. It is pretty big, yeah. I will still probably get one. But that's the handheld I've been waiting for.

A lot of people, you know, they're like, you should get the Pyra or you should get the Pi Top or all those mini boxes and laptops. The Pi Top or all those mini boxes and laptops. But to me, this is the one I've been waiting for because it's got new recent hardware in it rather than something that's like several generations old. Like the Pyra, for example, has a resistive touchscreen, which is very old technology. Yes, totally. This has a 6-inch 1080p capacitive touchscreen. Ooh. And look at those big, I don't even know what to call those, the pads there for controlling it. Those look nice.

Oh, yeah. It reminded me a lot of the Steam controller. It does remind me. Yeah, exactly. Definitely. Interesting. So, yeah, look at that. Powerful enough to play almost any game on Steam.

Portal 2, Dota, Left 4 Dead 2, Two Portraits 2. They've got benchmarks there somewhere. Haptic touchpads, the evolution of the mouse. Like, you're not going to get, like, top-end performance out of it, but at least from the benchmarks they did on their prototype, you can play most games with medium to high settings on 720p. For serious gamers, this looks like maybe something where, you know, yeah, it's not your pixel perfect

60 frames per second that you get on your desktop with your SLI card but you still have to take the bus to work sometimes and you can keep gaming. Yeah, so for people wondering the tech specs the old setup that they were using they haven't updated with the new information yet

was the Merlin Falcon RX 421BD which is like a 12 to 15 watt SoC. Okay, yeah. they were using they haven't updated with the new information yet was the merlin falcon rx421bd which is like a 12 to 15 watt soc okay yeah that had four cores and an iradion r7 nice the four gigs of ram that sounds actually pretty sweet i like that a lot they claimed at the time that it would get five hours of battery life i don't know if i believe that but maybe if most of that bulk was the battery i could believe that yeah i mean it is it is sizable i mean we should be we should be clear about that but it does have a micro sd slot a usb type c uh connection and hdmi port and wi-Fi or 4G LTE connectivity.

Wow. And apparently a front-facing 5 megapixel camera because everything that is portable has to have a camera. Has to have one. Yes, exactly. Interesting. All right. Well, that's pretty exciting.

And the multi-OS support comes with Linux right out of the box. Yeah. And yes, I do believe it has a headphone jack. Somebody in the chat around? Unfortunately, you have to ask these kinds of questions today. But does it work with my AirPods? It's not a phone. Well, it does have Bluetooth.

There we go. Alrighty then. That's awesome. Yeah, so I'm kind of excited for that. So what do you think about Vulkan then? Are you excited for Vulkan? I'm excited for when I actually start seeing games that are shipping with Vulkan. So I found two things around the net this week that maybe will help.

The first one was just some beginner-friendly Vulkan tutorials. So right out of the bout, I'd say you probably don't want to learn Vulkan tutorials. So right out of the bout, I'd say you probably don't want to learn Vulkan first. It probably shouldn't be your first intro to graphics programming just because it's a lower-level library. Maybe experiment with some higher-level stuff, get your fundamentals down.

There's a lot of math that you likely need to understand as well as hardware specifics. But if we want to have Vulkan roll out and be successful and be adopted, we need pipelines to get devs involved, trained up and be able to, you know, make, make new games with this stuff or new tools, or, you know, I'm sure also machine learning stuff. So Stephanie Hurlbutt recently put out a call for beginner friendly ways to learn Vulkan. For those who don't know, Vulkan is a new graphics API. In other words, a fresh new

way to talk to your GPU and make it do things. It's managed by the Kronos group, which means no one corporation controls it. It's pretty cool. Anyone wants to do work on GPUs, not restricted to graphics programmers, that's an important point in today's world, should at least have a high level knowledge of what it is. By beginner friendly, I mean that a total newbie should be able to at least understand what Vulkan is. And after some programming knowledge is assumed, you know, of course, no graphics API knowledge should be assumed. So this is just kind of a, you know, it talks about a little bit about what this should be. And just provide some really good links. And it talks about how Vulkan has actually kind of helped

people, you know, like her friend Dustin writes that, so how did I finally break through that wall of understanding? I'll give you a hint. It begins with a V and ends with Vulkan. But Vulkan is the hards, I hear you saying. Shouldn't I start with something easy, like OpenGL? And actually,

no. Maybe you shouldn't. The point is that Vulkan removes the mystery. It spells things out plain as day. And for a programmer, this is awesome. It's intellectually honest about what it needs and what it's doing. It will teach you what it really means to program a GPU. Don't think of all the extra code as a mountain to climb, but instead as a clearly articulated set of instructions to help you get where you need to go. So go forth, friends, and enjoy learning some Vulkan.

So they've got some links down here at the bottom that can help you out. You know, it's not top of my list of things to learn, but I think there are a lot of people that are, and I'm really excited to see what happens. And, you know, maybe you try out some of these tutorials. You probably want to go benchmark your results. We've got some news there, too. Introducing VKMark. More than a Vulkan benchmark.

Ever since Vulkan was first announced a few years ago, the idea of creating a Vulkan benchmarking tool in the spirit of, you know, GLMark2, for example, it's been kind of floating around. Recently, thanks to Alexandros' employer, Collabora. Collabora? I don't know. How do you actually say that? It's the people they do.

I think it's Collabora. Yeah, okay. That's what I thought as well. But, you know, you got to explore. Especially, I'm in Chris's chair today, so I'm. Collabora. I'm kind of obligated to mispronounce things. I think that's how it works.

I feel like that's a combination Chris, Noah mispronunciation. Well, I'm trying to channel them. Yeah. For inspiration, you see. Anyway, thanks to them, this idea has materialized. It's now on GitHub, and the result is the VKMark Vulcan benchmark. Like its sibling GLMark2 sibling project, VKMark's goals are different from the goals of big, monolithic, and proprietary benchmarks.

Instead of providing a single, complex benchmark, VKMark aims to provide an extensible suite of targeted and configurable benchmarking scenes. So just kind of a new tool set. As you're learning Vulkan, you can kind of go see what does the performance actually look like. So I thought that was kind of fun. And since we're already talking about games, I thought we'd just touch on real quick something that we'd been discussing earlier today, which is the Pterodactyl Panel. Pterodactyl Panel, it's a free open source game agnostic game management portal. What did you think of this? I'd be curious for your opinion. Well, it seemed to me like it was a super easy way to set up game servers, if I understood correctly, which appeals to me because I am

a lazy SOB. No, you don't say. And anything that makes that easier is good in my book. I don't know. Does it handle like Steam games, like Steam servers? I'm not sure about that. I was wondering about that too. If it did, that would be amazing because Steam servers are notoriously difficult to set up.

Yeah, that's true. It does mention Team Fortress 2 and CSGO here. Oh, so then yes. It sounds like yes, yeah. So Pterodactyl Panel is a free, open-source, game-agnostic, self-hosted control panel for users, networks, and game service providers. Pterodactyl supports games and servers such as Minecraft, Ark Evolution Evolved, CSGO, Team Fortress 2, Insurgency, TeamSpeak 3, Mumble, and many more. Some of those aren't games.

Oh, they're servers. Yeah, that makes sense. Wes, you're a Linux gamer. You probably don't know. We don't mention Ark. Ark is a bad thing these days. You're okay. Yeah.

You're right. I didn't know. They did very bad things like early access DLC and raising their price from $30 to $80. Oh, ouch. See, this is why we need you here for context. I really appreciate that. You'll notice that it looks like you can even use the web UI on a Mac. So even though you're not gaming on your Mac, probably you can administer from it.

Well, yeah, you have your MacBook that you're not using off to the side running the website. And then Linux is on the server. And then you have your Windows gaming machine. That's how it works. Or your Linux gaming machine. A lot of those are available on Linux. That's a very good point. So it looks pretty sweet. It's got a nice looking web UI. The other thing I like about it is that since it's open source, if you want to see support for a new game, you can probably just go open an issue. Yeah, exactly. This is something we can do. It's secure. It's themable.

Docker-based, which is maybe a plus or a minus, but it should do um it's secure it's themable docker based which is maybe a plus or minus but it should hopefully mean it's really easy to get started with that's kind of the whole idea it's free open source user friendly and scalable so they got a bunch of screenshots i've not had a chance to play with it yet but as someone who does like to casual game um but is not always an expert at running the server necessarily just because I don't do it a lot. This looks awesome. What I would like to actually try is see what, yeah, what does adding a new game look like?

If it doesn't have out-of-the-box support, what are the hooks there? What is the interface? How do I get that started and have it understand the new game? How can I set this up myself or maybe see if I could get somebody else to write that for me. Exactly. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. So anyway, I thought that was a great development. It might make things a little bit more accessible, and maybe this is the final drop in the bucket where you've wanted to run your own game server, you want to have a game server for you and your friends to play on, but you're not a great admin, you're a little wary of having that all work,

go check out Pterodactyl. Yeah, so going back to Smok for a minute. Yeah, sure. Somebody in the IRC chat room asked how much it was. They don't have retail pricing yet, but at least when they did on Indiegogo, the price for the original version was $350 for the Wi-Fi version or $550 for the 4G version. Wi-Fi version or 550 for the 4G version. Also, supposedly, from what I was reading,

all of the parts are replaceable. So potentially there could be upgrades in the future to the GPU and CPU. That's awesome. Yeah. And just as an aside, it's a group of Spanish people doing this particular project, which is something you don't often see. No, totally. So go support it.

We need a nice, diverse community of people making these awesome handhelds. So does our very quiet mumble room have anything to say about any of this stuff? Yeah. Please chime in. I guess that's enough. I was about to say about VKMark. It sounds like a wonderful set of tools to develop Vulkan-based games, just to continuously figure out

how to get away all the, like, things that are stunting performance and just streamlining development. Yeah, exactly. And maybe something you can set up in, you know, maybe not quite continuous, but, you know, some sort of pipeline. As you're going, you can keep track of

what does this look like? Make sure you don't have any performance regressions or get an idea as you're experimenting with new techniques. I wonder if it's something we'll see integrated into the Pharonix test suite at some point. Oh, that's a good question. So they can test more Vulcany things. Yeah, as that continues to roll out. Interesting. Anyone else have any thoughts? None of these guys are gamers

that's true it's not something we always talk about but yeah also Vulcan actually had an update last week so I'm surprised you guys didn't see that with new extensions and some parts of it are promoted to stable

so that's also good so hopefully they'll announce some more stuff at SIGGRAPH 2017 in a little while, but outside of that, not much else. I'm just waiting to see the first

breakout hit game that runs on Vulkan primarily. That still hasn't really happened. I know. It's still like everything has Vulkan as an option, so you kind of really want just something that runs on Vulkan. It's easy to port over so it can run on Linux.

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Well, so we were just talking about, you know, trying to make these things easy, trying to make them simple to use. I think that just leads us right into our final sponsor this evening, which is our friends over at Ting.

Head on over to linux.ting.com to discover a smarter way to do mobile. Did you know, Rikai, that the average Ting bill is just $23 per phone per month? Seems unbelievable, right? That seems crazy. Have you ever been on any of those big name carriers with their unlimited data plans? Yeah, especially T-Mobile. I'm not a fan of T-Mobile. They charge a lot of money for not a lot of stuff. Yeah. And it puts you in the position of trying to figure

that out, right? Like you're like, okay, well, the cheapest one I can get is Yeah. And it puts you in the position of trying to figure that out, right? Like, you're like, okay, well, the cheapest plan I can get is X. And I assure you, X is more than $23. I have to make sure that I stay within that limit. Otherwise, I'll get charged a boatload more. Yeah, either you get charged a ton more. 10 kilobytes over. Or you're in the position of like, ah, I got to like try to use my data because I paid for this much.

I'm just not getting a good deal with it. Or you want only data, but all of the plans tack on minutes and messages that cost a bunch of money. My friends, this is just a bad way to do mobile. Go on over to linux.ting.com and find mobile that just makes sense. It's mobile a la carte. So if you're curious what the beard's talking about here, just go on over to the rates page and you will see exactly. Turns out you only pay for what you use. Each line starts at $6 a month. Now there may be some taxes and fees. That depends on your locality. Ting can't do anything about that. That's just a fact of life. But they'll

charge you $6 per line. Two lines, just $12. like that it's so simple it's easy to understand and if you have a line you just want to hang around you're not sure if you're going to need it or not six dollars is like nothing that's less than a sandwich i could be wrong but i think that six dollars is actually to cover those taxes and fees that may be true even better but don't quote me on that i don't quote us on anything that's just not cool but after that you just tally up how much how many minutes you've used how many megabytes and how many messages probably no messages maybe a few minutes depends sometimes people call you nothing you can do about that but it doesn't matter because you just pay for what you use so let's

say you just you know a little bit of messages or a little bit of minutes, you know, just to cover it a little bit of messages, same reason. And then a whole bunch of data, you're still only using $32 a month. And that's all of it. You get three way calling tethering that's included. You don't have to pay extra. There's no limits. There's no special tethering budget budget, and there's no early termination fees, no overages, no weird, strange extra fees. It just is simple. You can bring your own device. They support both CDMA and GSM, which is pretty much all of your options here in the US. So you'll be covered. And honestly, that's great because I know at my parents' house, CDMA is king. But in the city, for whatever reason, GSM ends up being a lot better. So it's super simple to keep those, you know, we can all be on Ting.

It doesn't matter. You choose the thing that works for where you're at the most. Or for just $6 a month, maybe you have an extra phone or an extra SIM hanging around. Totally worth it for $6 a month. You can bring your own device or shop their devices. Did I mention? No, I did not. But I should have.

When you go to linux.ting.com, you'll get a $25 service credit. So that will probably pay for the majority, if not all, of your first month. Or you can use it on one of these shiny new phones. It's cheap enough that you could have like an emergency backup phone for when you lose your main phone. Yes, exactly. Tossed away in a drawer. And if you lose your phone, well, here's your other phone already ready and ready to go. Yes. And the Ting interface is so easy. And if you lose your phone, well, here's your other phone already ready and ready to go. Yes, and the Ting interface is so easy. Whether you're using their app or their web interface, it's super simple to do that.

It's super simple to activate or deactivate or register a new phone. I will say that if you use Ting smartly, your boss that has your phone on a business line, because I have my phone on a business line because I have my phone on a business line because I don't use my phone much. He'll forget that he even has, that he's even paying for your phone because it's that cheap. Like I mostly use my phone on wifi. So there's not much data and I make like maybe a dozen calls a year at most.

Yep. Mostly to harass me because I didn't finish the tech snap show notes. Yeah. Well, no, those are usually text messages. When you don't have weird blocking things that don't let me talk to you.

But yeah, I barely hit 10 bucks a month at most. That's awesome. And that's not something you could do on like any other carrier. That's the thing. Yeah.

And Ting doesn't have to focus on like building new poles or lines or anything. They can focus on keeping things simple and customer service so whether you want to pick up the new samsung galaxy 8 or just bring your your crappy burner phone it doesn't matter it's super simple linux.ting.com and thank you to ting for sponsoring the linux unplugged And thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. Ting's pretty great. Yeah.

I mean, it's just so easy. The only time Chris notices that I'm even on the JB Ting account is when I go home for a week and I actually have to use the data because Maine has no internet. Maine has no internet. Yikes. All right. Well, I guess it'll be time for Tech Snaps soon, so we should probably get out of here. But before we do, I just wanted to talk about a couple things real quick on our way out. The first of which is, it's a little bit late now, I know. Happy birthday, Slackware.

24 years of awesomeness. That's pretty cool. Something I learned about Chris last week is he's never used Slackware. Never? Never. Really? Apparently he skipped that phase. Just wasn't a Slackware person.

He ended up on Gentoo, but he's never tried Slackware. That's hilarious. He was going to try Slackware at some point, but then he took the Arch challenge and started using Arch and never used it. Never got back to Slack, huh? Yeah. What about you? I used it in the 90s and not since then.

Yeah. But I respect the people that use Slackware. Yeah, I think you have to, really. It's a very different kind of distribution. It is. And it's the kind of thing that, you know, especially in the Linux community, we shouldn't be focused on conformity or trying to press people into our favorite boxes. So, like you're saying, like, it's it's great like slackware offers a particular it's saying it's a different kind of minimalism it's a different kind of minimalism but i think one that like i can certainly respect people who

use it know what they're doing and understand the distribution that they're using and and i think that's great anyone in the moment room want to chime in about Slack? We got any Slack fans here or people got some good stories? Still haven't used it. So I'm with Chris. Mandrake was popular in my day. So, you know, I feel like if you haven't used Slack where you're missing a bit of the Linux experience. Yeah, you know, that may be true. It is the first distro, if I remember correctly.

Is that right? I think that's right. Let's just find out, folks. Or at least the oldest still existing distro. Yeah, okay, yes. According to Wikipedia, as of 2015, which is slightly out of date, but I don't see how that would change because Slackware's still around. So, the oldest currently existing Linux distribution is Slackware.

Awesome. I've used it for Onyx too. I haven't used it that much myself, but my webhoster is using it. So whenever I SFTP files, PHP and HTML files, the webhoster company is using it. And I have a couple of friends that use it. But I haven't used it myself as a client or server. That's interesting. Other than using it

on other servers. I would not have expected a web host to use Slackware. That seems peculiar. I like it, but it's peculiar. Yeah, the Swedish web hosting company FSData from Skåne using Slackware. I found out after doing like cat, etc.

Interesting. I wonder why they chose Slackware. You know, I could see it from some, you know, it's kind of like some people who use this, like Gentoo, for instance, where if you really, if you're doing something special or you have a particular way or you're really knowledgeable and you know what you're doing, you know, it might be customized enough that you can get what you need

without all the bloat or it just might be that that web host that's what they know yeah yeah might be comfortable with it all right well then um slack is great keep using slackware some another birthday not really a birthday but a release that we should talk about just real quick on the way out here magia 6 6. It's finally ready to shine. The whole Magia community is extremely happy to announce the release of Magia 6, the shining result of our longest release cycle so far. It comes with many new and exciting features, a new range of installation media,

and the usability and stability that can be expected from any Magia release. So, are you excited? from any magia release so are you excited uh i have not heard about magia in so long that i forgot everything about it so i will have to say no luckily for you if you're a little concerned i do we do in the show notes we will have a link back to an article um from 2010 called forking mandriva linux the birth oh right itva. Oh, right, it's the Mandriva fork. Yep. Mandriva, one of my favorite Linux distributions, has been forked,

and the new distribution is named Mandriva. Mandriva's no longer around, right? I believe that is the case, yes. And so Mandriva is what lives on. It's a fork that's outlived its forky? Yes. Before that time, there was Mandrake. And then Mandrake before that.

Yeah, and before that, that was Fork from the Red Hat stuff. Yeah. There is a Fork called Open, Mandrake. Oh, nice. Oh, nice. Interesting. I haven't checked on it that much other than seeing it on DistroWatch. So some of Majia's goals...

This is Rosalav. Oh, go on. Oh, Rosalav. Got it. So some of Majia's goals... Is this Rosa Lab? Oh, go on. Oh, Rosa Lab. Got it. So some of Majia's goals when they launched... Rosa Live. Yeah, that makes sense. Were to make Linux and free software straightforward to use for everyone, provide integrated system configuration tools,

keep a high level of integration between the base system, the desktop, and applications, especially to improve third-party integration, be it free or proprietary, target new architectures and form factors, and improve our understanding of computers and electronic device users. So the thing with that list is it sounds like

the same list that every other fork has. It does kind of. So my question is, I've lately become kind of an anti-more distros, more forking kind of guy. Understandable. As you can hear on user error. What sets Magia apart that would make me ever want to use it? Do you know?

I'm not really sure. I'm going to throw this to the mumble room. Do you guys have any insights here? Magia, I kind of put this in the show because I wasn't super familiar. I did download the ISO. I didn't have a chance to try it today, but I will try it later this week. I never was on the Mandrake, Mandriva lines. I don't have a lot of insight there.

I assume it's RPM based because of where it came from. But at that point, why wouldn't I just use something like Fedora? Yeah. This new release does have Plasma 5. They've got DNF in there. They support AppStream and GNOME software and Plasma Discover. They support Copper and the OpenSUSE build service. And they've got a new DNF Dragora GUI tool for package management.

So it sounds like Fedora with a couple more GUI apps and OpenBuild service. Right. And I guess more focus on providing good integration with third-party services. So maybe this is a Fedora you can install on your friend's computer? Yeah, but that third-party integration, isn't it just a matter of adding a text line to something? See, once again, I don't see the point of having a fork just for that. I think that may be true. But I will say congrats on their sixth release.

That's awesome. They're doing lots of hard work. I just personally don't understand why it exists yeah so i think this is great a great way to provide feedback you know if there are people out there either right now in the mumble room or who want to write in and give us feedback to the show like i'm i would be curious as well i think that's something ongoing what does it take for a distribution to really have you know carve out its own way and exist well it should have a consistent release because i'm kind of with the recline with this, but I thought it was dead. So

you're saying Magia is around. I'm like, wait, they're around? Yeah, I think that's what a lot of people thought. All right. Anyone else? Yeah, please chime in. Don't break when I update. Yeah, don't break when I update. Have the software that I want.

That would actually be something in its corner is if they have third-party integrations, and when you update, it doesn't break. Because that is a problem that some people have with Fedora when you enable things like Copper, and they try to go do the DNF update to the next version or whatever, and their system basically breaks. Exactly. So if Magia couldn't handle that, that would be a differentiator. I think you've hit the nail on

the head. And with that, I think it's time to bring this episode of Linux Unplugged episode 206 to a close. Thank you very much for guest hosting, Mr. Rekai. It has been an absolute pleasure. If you want to see more of this show, you can head on over to jupiterbroadcasting.com. There's the archives, a ton of other shows. If you want to see more of this show, you can head on over to JupiterBroadcasting.com.

There's the archives, a ton of other shows. If you want to see more of me, I'm at Wes Payne on Twitter. And where can they find more of you, dear Beard? Well, they can find me on Twitter at Twitter.com slash KyleP, or they can find me on Twitch, streaming usually

almost every day. Hey-o! The short URL is rekd.net, rekd.net. Or if that doesn't work for some reason because I screwed something up, it would be twitch.tv slash RekylP. Perfect.

Well, thank you very much for joining me. Thank you, everyone, who joined us in today's Mumble Room. You really make the show, as well as the IRC. And, hey, we'll see you next week. All righty. Thanks, everyone. That was a fun show.

Hopefully you guys enjoyed it as well. So now it's time to go on over to jbtitles.com and get your vote on. So we have a bit of a problem with the titles here, Wes. Do we? All these titles are about me. Of course they are. So you want something filed under B for beard? That's what you want?

I don't know, Wes. I'm going to leave it up to you. I think we leave it up to our dear friends, the voters out there, the voting public. Well, see, the way this works, though, it's kind of like it's, um, you might call it an electoral college

where there's the public that votes, but then there's these mysterious people in the background that make the final decision. We don't speak of them. No. We can't, actually. And then one of our titles is president. For the whole next year. Ooh, Linux unshaved. That then one of our titles is president. For the whole next year.

Ooh, Linux unshaved. That's kind of fun. I'm kind of partial to Beardy McBeardface. Beardy McBeardface, yeah. But at the same time... Unplugging the beard is not bad. I feel like having the title be about me is is really self-serving but it's a special episode i guess but what happens next time i'm on

exactly they'll have to like the dubstep allen things it'll have to be even more creative then we named an episode of last dubstep allen and then we had to end last yeah that's true so think of the show. So think of the show, people. Think of the show. Man, we just had so much stuff today, I didn't even get to ramble about containers at all. You didn't get to ramble about containers, you didn't get to piss off everybody

that was listening by talking about Windows games like you wanted to. That's true, yeah. Wes wanted to do that, by the way, not me. Not you. You were a willing participant. I said we could do whatever you wanted, but I wasn't going to take responsibility. That's what you always say. No one wants to take responsibility. I've been too busy with file systems to even game.

Hey, that's not a bad thing. I'm going to rat Wes out here. Wes has been gaming on a Windows box, I'm told. There is now one in my house yeah it's true it's true less fever yeah pretty much you're losing come on i'm still also gaming on a windows box it has both wait wait you're gaming on a windows box and also windows box i mean linux box god windows has infected me what am i going to do? This is what happens, Wes. That's what I'm told. Windows isn't good for anything. So in full disclosure, it's not like it's a shared system that is dual boots Linux and Windows.

It just also now boots Windows for some games that other people in my household would like to play. But it does open the possibility of if there is a Windows game that I want to play or have wanted to play or should be playing, I now can. Not saying I will. I still keep it booted into Linux most of the time, but it's a new world. Some games that I don't like are available for Linux that you might be interested in. Factorio. Oh, yeah. I've seen you stream in that.

And RimWorld. Oh, okay. I'll check those out. I tried the beta of LawBreaker. That's kind of fun. I'll check those out. I tried the beta of Lawbreakers. That's kind of fun.

FPS by the guy that did some UT stuff, CliffyV. Also, the Battlefield games doesn't work on Linux. One of my most entertaining games, I've been watching a lot of it. I'm not playing it much because I'm really bad at it, but it's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. It's kind of a battle royale game with more of a realistic bent. So you just have

like a hundred people that are dropped from a plane all across a map and you kill everybody until there's only one person left and they're the winner. Yeah, it's similar to DayZ, right? But instead of having like that eternal continuous map, you have a closing in map. So you have to stay within certain bounds of a certain radius or else you'll die.

That way it keeps it interesting because people have to continuously get closer to each other. Yeah, because you start with the full map and then as time progresses, you have a circle on the map that gets smaller and smaller and people that are outside of that slowly take damage and later in the game they take more damage until basically if you're outside that circle you'll die within a couple seconds wow, okay so it kind of forces PvP

until there's only one person left cool I've seen a co-worker played some of that it's a lot of fun. Even when you're bad at it, it's still fun. I might have to give that a shot. There's a lot of good suggestions here. There we go. Alright. I think there's

a humble bundle of some Telltale games, but I don't think they run on Linux. Some of them do. I believe. I thought I saw a Linux icon on Linux. I'm kind of checking right now. Some of them do, I believe. I thought I saw a Linux icon on there. I could be wrong. But even if they don't, if you happen to have a Windows box,

I would highly recommend any of the Telltale games. They're almost all great games. That's awesome. They're all point-and-click games, but they are very story-heavy. Yeah. And most of them are based on existing franchises like The Walking Dead or Back to the Future or Batman or Minecraft.

Borderlands. Yeah, Borderlands. The Borderlands one is actually really funny. Nice. It is. I've played the entire thing. It's so awesome. Even if you don't traditionally like point and click games,

I would still recommend trying them. My favorite one, I think, is The Walking Dead series, which if you're a fan of The Walking Dead, it's amazing. If you're not a fan of The Walking Dead, it's still a fun zombie story. Huh. Well, here's a classic. Basically,

Beneath a Steel Sky is available as a flat pack or a snap, I think. Oh, that's nice. It's a pretty old school point and click game. It's really fun to play. Once you've got the audio working, too, and it works. So it's nice. That's awesome. And here's another tip. I used to play Monkey Island

on Linux when I was younger. You can play the older adventure games in ScumVM. Is that right? Yeah, that's something, too. One of the JB Lives in the chatroom said you could probably play most of the tailgames via wine yeah okay because they're on the simpler end of the technology scale

yeah you know it's that's nice also hitting back on the you had two machines one is Windows and one is Linux I don't know how good Windows 10 supports IOMMUs but maybe you could just bypass hardware you're like good Windows 10 supports IOMMUs, but maybe you could just bypass

hardware to your Windows install on a partition and play those games on Linux. Oh, virtualize it? Yeah, that's totally worth investigating. I'll have to see what that hardware supports. It's a slightly older system with a modern GPU,

so I'll have to look into that. Okay, so I guess we should pick a title and get out of here, because we've got a live tech snap coming up next. I've got to go edit a show. And you've got to edit a show. So, Linux Unshaved or Beardy McBeardface? As the guest, I think it's up to you, Mr. Beard. Or Unplugging the Beard or the Bold and the Beardy Fool.

Those are all hilarious. Not that SS. I like that too. What do you think? I think we're going to stay away from the SS status. Yeah, I agree. Hmm. Let me refresh here. Yeah.

Doesn't it auto refresh? Didn't you make this? It doesn't seem to be working on mobile, so that's a bug. File a bug! Yeah, it hasn't been working on desktop for me. Also, you had to restart JBot earlier, so that might be a thing.

Yeah. That might have been it. Yeah, that's fair. As I mentioned in the show, JBot has a memory leak that I can't really track down, and it only happens on certain distributions, which makes it even weirder. Weird. Yeah, by the way, I'm looking for people to help me with JBot because I have no time to develop it. That's fair. So if anybody knows Ruby and wants to help out.

Damn it, I know Ruby now. I should help. All right. I'll help. I'll help. Stop twisting my arm. All right. I guess we're going to go with the beer title since that's all the top-rooted titles.

Although I do kind of like init it to win it. I also like that. Or init to win it. Init to win it. I'd be okay with Or init to win it. Init to win it. I'd be okay with that if that's what you want to choose. Colonel Panic offers to rewrite it in a real programming language. I mean, if you want to support it, then yes, do it. Do it.

No, don't. Because I won't use it. Are you Ruby or not? Well, the problem is I'm the one that at the end of the day that has to maintain it and make sure it's running for jb and if something breaks i have to fix it so i still have to know the language and the only language i'm really comfortable in is ruby that's fair then i think that's how a lot of things get made one last gaming thing is there's a survival game called The Long Dark that I've been playing. I have about 205 hours played in it.

And it's coming out of early access in August 1st. So the story mode will finally be coming out. So maybe once I've played that, I can say whether it's good or not for someone to buy. that i can say whether it's good or not for someone to buy well if we're going to talk about games where there's thousands of hours in games uh i can recommend a couple uh civilization 5 great game i have like 600 hours in that game uh path of exile which is kind of uh like a diablo 2 clone with a much more extensive skill tree. We're talking hundreds of different variations on skills.

That's something if you like action RPG kind of stuff. One that I'll probably get a lot of crap for from some gamers, Final Fantasy XIV Online is an amazing story-based MMO. I hate most MMOs because they all feel like fetch quests.

Yeah. But Final Fantasy XIV, it has a crap ton of stories. So it kind of just feels like a regular RPG where you're playing, you happen to be playing with other people. Nice. Yeah. That actually kind of sounds exactly like what I want. I think I have like 3,500 hours in that game. Dang. I'm impressed yeah i think

path of exile is like 1500 i game a lot you sure do and that's why we love you all right we should probably get out of here thank you everyone for an awesome show your feedback and input has been very much appreciated and a lot of fun chatting about games too, surprisingly. So this is awesome. Thank you very much. Stay tuned. We'll have a live tech snap coming right up. Lots to come.

Awesome. Okay, we're going to switch things over so streams will blip, et cetera, et cetera. Hey, Elixir's actually kind of fun there, Chrono Panic. Anyway. I actually have an article I can link about how Discord used Elixir to scale to millions of people. Yeah.

I'll put that in the chat room later. And don't worry. The Beam VM is written in old school ADC, so everyone can be happy. Nice. Okay. With that, let's get things switched over. Beard, thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun.

We'll have to do more shows again. Let's get rid of that Chris guy. We'll just post all the shows together. Who needs a stay in Montana? I'll have to do more shows again. Let's get rid of that Chris guy. Yeah, who needs a Jay in Montana? I'll take over on LAN. Yeah. And then we'll host this together. I don't get to do anything for text now because you've got that under control.

I guess I have to do on filter? Yes, you do. Or do you want to do that? Well, we can switch back and forth. Okay. Or bring Noah on. I guess I'm going to have to replace you with Chris on user error since I'm already on there. Yeah.

Or Chase does user error? I don't know. We'll replace Noah with Chase. There we go. Yeah. Okay. I think we've got it settled. And we never speak about the hair again.

Yeah. Woo. Alrighty. He can just stay in that Montana place. Exactly.