LINUX Unplugged - Episode 209: LILO and Slack(ware) | LUP 209

Episode Date: August 9, 2017

We conclude our Slackware challenge & share the lessons and results. Plus why you really need to give Firefox another try, easy sandboxing of any Linux app, GTK4’s blockers, the official anti-systemd resource... And we announce another meetup!

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a tiny battery for for lower end appliances which was exactly what i needed but look at this beard you see this you see that battery section there that's removable so So the UPS battery, which has a charge indicator and two USB ports on it, slides out. So you can actually pull the battery out of the UPS and use it as a portable charger for your devices. Which is kind of neat.

And you can buy a spare one. That's true, too. You can buy modular ones. That's another nice feature. I'll swap them too. Yeah, you can buy modular ones. Yeah, that's another nice feature. Oh, yeah. I'll swap them out. Yeah! Yeah! Shit's busy.

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This is Linux Unplugged, episode 209 for August 8th, 2017. Oh, welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that I think is trying all of the IPAs. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. Hello, Wes, and hello, Mr. Beard. Beard joins us again. Good to have you guys. Now, we have quite a show. Quite a show. Oh, my.

So today is the conclusion of the slackware challenge we'll be giving you my results and wes's results after running slackware for the week we're going to talk about red hat's more official plans without butter fs the new firefox is so damn fast we got to talk about firefox again plus we got a meetup to announce. Friend of the show has some new code he's pushing out there. Looks like GTK4 might be sooner than we expected. Of course, there's a lot of community news and updates. And we're going to talk about a new tool. Something that is built right into your Linux.

It just needs a little wrapper. And it is some damn fine security. We'll talk about it. We'll talk about it. We'll talk about it coming up in a little bit. And then, of course, towards the end, we'll get into some also Slackware alternatives that are based on Slackware. If you want to dip your toe in the waters,

but you're not sure you're quite ready yet, you're not sure if you're ready to be a full Slacker, there might be a couple of options out there for you. How about all that, right? We've got a big show this week, lots of stuff, so we can't go any further without bringing in that mumble room. Time-appropriate greetings, Virtual Dog. Pip-Pip.

Hello. Hello. Good day to you. Man, Pippi, Pobie is Pippi. Pobie with the pip-pip is on the money. Like, you know, latency be damned. He is primed and ready to go. It's always nice to see all of you guys. Yeah. Hello, everybody. Thank you guys for joining us. So this is our Slackware episode. After all

of the years, literally 20 of them plus me skirting around, ever trying out Slackware, it finally happened. It's a milestone. Mostly thanks to you bastards really for calling me out of that episode where I wasn't here. And so I figured I had to happened. It's a milestone. Mostly thanks to you bastards, really, for calling me out on that episode where I wasn't here. And so I figured I had to try. It's all right. I'm already concocting up the next distro. Ooh, I like this.

Oh, you guys. So I thought before we go any further, we got to start this episode with some proper hate and cover one central repository for all of your anti-SystemD needs, from distros to articles. That's right, everybody. Without-SystemD needs, from distros to articles. That's right, everybody, without-systemd.org, a wiki for all your resources on life without SystemD. And of course, the most poignant arguments against SystemD, like the fact that it has broken promises, it's a bit immature. It has scope creep. It has absurd bugs.

It has poor design and its ignorance of fundamental operating system concepts. None of those are opinions, of course. I'm surprised they don't have the Leonard dictatorship on there. Yeah, well, I think that might be implied with the poor design and ignorance. Like, that's sort of poking at Leonard, isn't it? It's a little bit. Ouch. Ouch. Yeah.

So then they have a bunch of external links to like modern init system designs, all of the GNU slash Linux distributions that run without systemd. And good God, good God. Now, some of these might be running without systemd simply because they haven't been updated since systemd was announced. But of these are uh yeah what stands out to you well slackware slackware definitely stands out to me as one that you know i mean everybody knew it of course gen 2 still on the list everybody knows that one too other than that archbang i guess archbang was the other one that kind of surprised me and chromium osium OS, which is still rocking Upstart. Still rocking Upstart lives on. That's too bad for them. Wow.

Wow. Why you got to be so judgy? Maybe it works great for them, Wes. Maybe it's a real good solid piece of code for them. Well, when you don't have to run any local software, you probably don't need to, Cindy. Yeah, maybe so. Chromium OS is based on Gen 2 anyway.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Of course, and they also cover some of the BSDs, which would be, surprise, surprise, all of them. I like that they have like a set, as if there's BSDs that do use SystemD. No one's managed to port SystemD over just to bother people yet? No, they're still working on their own replacement.

System BSD. Give them time, give them time. It'll come, it will come. So I just thought that'd be a good way to start our Slackware episode out with the definitive resource on SystemD. I like their logo, too. It's real innovative. They've taken SystemD, and maybe my favorite thing about it, and I wouldn't normally call this criticism out because, you know, who am I to say?

But when you look at their logo there, see if I can, can I zoom in a little bit? Yeah, there we go. Boom, look at that. Live action zooming right here. Zoomed and enhanced. I like the circle around the circle. Yeah, there is the circle around the circle. They obviously just took a circle and a line clip art and they grabbed it from somewhere else because you can see like it's been cut out.

Yeah. But did something else jump out at you about their logo that maybe is a little incorrect? The S is capitalized. That's right now i normally wouldn't mention this but um if your entire purpose as a project or a site is to be so super informed on systemd that you are trying to educate the world not to use it because you know more than they do wouldn't you wouldn't you know how to write it too busy hating is that a dumb thing to like but that just really weirds me out the fact that they're so obsessed with this but yet they can't

get that detail right depending on how they did it if that no symbol is an image in the system d under is text the wiki might have auto-capitalized it no it's all image it's all one image it's a little jpeg maybe they're doing it as like a it as like a slam. Yeah, because you know what? They do it throughout the... Well, they don't do it... So they do it in any of the title sections. That's where they do it. There, too. See, that's why I said it might be the wiki page. That's probably automated. Yeah, that part would be. Yeah. This right here is a little

JPEG. Can we mention the blink tag also? Because that's fun. That is good. Although it's not blinking. Yeah, because it doesn't really work anymore. No, but they do have a blink tag up at the top, which is solid. On the top of a wiki page. of fitting in a way um last week there was a story that we weren't really going to talk about but like it kept coming up in the chat room so we ended up talking about it you remember the butter fs story yeah it was announced last week that red hat is officially deprecating i guess red hat and red hat is officially deprecating ButterFS, and Red Hat has clarified their position on that since the last episode.

Michael over at Pharonix is writing that it is going to be deprecated in all future versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And so you might be wondering, what are they going to do in its place? Red Hat says, no, we're not looking at ZFS. They say, yeah, people probably want ZFS, but that's not something that we're going to do. And I don't really know. I don't really. I wish they could really come out and really just sort of simply iterate or not iterate, but simply outline, I suppose, on what the blockers are for ZFS. Because it just would clear people's minds up on this.

It's got to be the licensing. Oh, yeah, clearly. Clearly. But it would be really interesting to know why one company believes that it's not a problem and the other company does. I would just love to know the answer behind that. I have a feeling Red Hat's just being conservative. Yeah, or maybe they have to follow different rules because they're predominantly a U.S.-based

company, something like that. Maybe they haven't seen a real ask from their clients. I don't know. I doubt that. See maybe they haven't seen a real ask from their clients. I don't know. I doubt that. See, that's where I... See, because I think a lot of the enterprise people who haven't dabbled in the enlightened parts of the file system world, they have SANs and other technologies they're already using.

So I see a lot of benefits for even just root file systems or other times anytime you need snapshots, et cetera. But I'm not sure that that's a really large opinion in old school enterprise Linux. One of the things that sort of informs my opinion in the back end is just watching the sales explosion for iX systems for all of their ZFS-based storage appliances. Like, people are coming to them and saying, build me this around ZFS. Like, they have people come into their doors because iX is a go-to ZFS company. So I don't know. It probably depends on the market, right?

It depends on the, yeah, because I bet you what you outlined is probably really true as well. It's interesting regardless. You're right. It would be helpful to have a little more clarification on what they've reached here. But Red Hat may have another solution in the works.

It's something they've been working on for a little while. You may be familiar with it. We covered it briefly on Linux Action News episode 13 on Sunday. It's called Stratus, and it's a overall umbrella project for combining different built-in storage solutions in Linux already, like LVM and RAID management and copy-on-write capabilities and excellent compression utilities. In fact, they just made a software purchase where their core focus is compression on SSD. And Stratus initially plans to use Device Mapper and the XFS system to bring a layered approach to taking these tools that already exist on Linux that essentially achieve what ZFS does

and put them in sort of a stacked system where you extend existing tools instead of creating entirely new stuff whole cloth. You use the XFS file system, which I think is one of the best file systems on any operating system on the planet today. And you take a customer-driven sort of demand. What Red Hat seems to have outlined is we have a lot of customers coming to us that have super-fast SSD storage, they have super-fast CPUs, and they have a shit-ton of containers. And they want to compress those containers on disk. They want to read the compressed version of the container,

have their super-crazy-fast CPU decompress it crazy fast, and execute the code. And that's one of the things that ZFS is really good at. But if you think about it, ZFS is a bit of a bastard. Now, you know, Alan Jude's not going to like me saying this, but in a way, it does something that nothing else out there does that we really never talk about. And that's the fact that it is a layer-violating monster. It takes all of these tools that used to be at different parts of the OS stack and smashes it all down to the file system layer. Not necessarily a bad idea because then you have, you know, some cohesiveness between the tools, but it's also a little untried. So I

like this idea of taking existing known good production ready tools already in Linux and stacking it on top of XFS. That's what Stratus is. And it's going to do copy on write. It's going to do compression. It's going to do compression, it's going to do encryption, it's going to do device mapper management, all that volume management stuff, snapshots, all that stuff. And it's going to be a sort of whole project solution

replacement to ButterFS. I'll be the hater in this case because I feel like the exact thing you don't want in a file system is a bunch of utilities being developed independently of each other that you're smashing together. Yeah.

If the Stratus project could come in and sort of work cross-project to sort of unify it, that could work. Yeah, assuming that all the projects are happy to work with each other. Yeah, that's true. But Unix philosophy and such. Yeah. Yeah, I also think it's very possible that it could be excessively complex.

You know, this could be, like, way too complex. And so it may not be very approachable. It raises the floor of the potential issues that you could have because you're working with a bunch of independent components. So every place that you have separate components talking to each other is a potential breakage point.

Okay, now I'm on your side. That's true, but I don't think it's going to be a huge number of projects in this case and some of them, like XFS, still, but do you want even one in your file system? Here's an example where I think it makes a difference.

So one of the nice things about ZFS is you could have an array of ZFS drives in a Linux box, and the host ZFS box totally dies. You could take that array, attach it to a BSD machine, an Ubuntu machine, an Arch machine, anything that has ZFS support, and that all comes right back up online, and you have access to the data. And one of the things that makes that possible is the ZFS support, and that all comes right back up online and you have access to the data.

And one of the things that makes that possible is the ZFS feature flag. So when they build ZFS, they say, these are the features of this version of ZFS. It's like a stable API. So the client utilities know what to expect from that version of ZFS. So even if I take something I created on Ubuntu 16.04, which might be an older version of ZFS than what I'm using on an Arch rolling box today, it's still going to work just fine because the feature flag setup,

it was designed with this very eventuality in mind. I don't know if you're going to get that same cohesiveness from an array of projects like in Project Stratus because... I think you could add that on the top. You could, but what happens if you move from, say, a Red Hat Enterprise 8 box and you, say, a Red Hat Enterprise 8 box and you attach it to a Red Hat Enterprise 10 box? I mean, the tool differences,

the tools in Project Stratus... You're right that you would then have to... Could be hugely different. Have to have support for those. So either Stratus would implement the conversion between them or you'd have to rely on the underlying tools. And I don't know anything about the architecture of Stratus, so I don't know which way, how that might play out.

Yeah, that's right. You're right. And since it is like LVM and XFS, it's pretty solid, pretty tried and true, not very fastly moving. I agree that it could go that way. I guess I just don't know enough yet to preclude that as a seat. for migrations, then you're going to have to account for different mixing variants of the tool sets underneath it for each migration, which seems super complicated. Especially if different distros go in different directions with it, like they take Stratus and they...

MonkeyCon, what do you think? Have you actually seen that happen in the wild, where you can take a ZFS array and move it to a different operating system and just have it recognize everything? I have moved a ZFS array from one version of an older FreeNAS to a newer version of FreeNAS. Definitely have done that myself, but I don't know if I've done one from FreeNAS to Ubuntu,

but as long as the major ZFS versions are the same, as long as the on-disk format and feature sets are the same. I think the other thing to think about here is, I wonder how many of these projects does Red Hat already employ people to work on? Because that would be perhaps a large factor, too. Do they feel they already have a significant stake or control where they have confidence in the direction of the projects? I don't know.

This is interesting, though. It really is like a giving up on ButterFS. It really is. We weren't totally sure when we were talking about this last week, but it's absolutely redhead saying. What about Seuss? Yeah, I don't know. What about Seuss? Did we talk about that last week?

Like, where does that leave Seuss? No, I don't think so. On their own island. Well, I would say look back to see what they did with RiserFS. How long until the rest of the community moved on from RiserFS did it take them to go to something else? And that might be your answer. They seem to like to stick around. Plus, they've really built a lot of pretty nice tools

on top of ButterFS. So if I were them... It would be neat to see some of those ported right over to ZFS and then I would use it. I mean, the tools are kind of neat. Yeah. It is. I think you use ButterFS for like a default file system.

Yeah, ButterFS is default and the package manager can take snapshots using ButterFS. And there's some new other tools they're working on. Don't they have some boot environment similar stuff as well? And there's some new other tools they're working on. Don't they have some boot environment similar stuff as well? Yeah, there's some other tools they're working on. They're using ButterFS as well. And maybe they'll just keep plugging away at it and keep making it better. It's not like they can't just keep...

Right. You know what's kind of funny? If Canonical did this, people would lose their minds. But when Red Hat does it, people are not doing the not invented here thing. Well, it's because nobody thinks it's going to be adopted outside of Red Hat. Well, people said that about SystemD. Yeah. Yeah.

It's all up on GitHub right now if you want to check it out. There's also, let's see, stratus-storage.github.io. Yeah. Which was hard to find. They don't advertise it. No, there's not a lot of talk about this.

No. We should probably get somebody on the show to talk about this. That's a good idea. That would be the thing because I think one of the reasons it's not getting a ton of attention is because it's just improving existing tools.

It's not like some radical rebirth of a brand new way of doing things. Well, that, and it's also enterprise focused. Yeah, I suppose so. There is a big radical update today, though. I just installed it today, just a few hours before the show. Firefox 55. Holy crap, guys.

I was like, okay, we're probably going to stop talking about Firefox for a little bit. We've been talking a lot about Firefox. No. Holy crap. Firefox 55 is legit. Initial features, also besides the new fancy rendering that is crazy fast and the, I haven't used the new dark

minimal theme, but man is it great. WebVR, I think, is also landing on the Windows version. That doesn't help me. No, in fact, they have a little promo video. Let's just check this quick little video out, really. Oh, yeah. So she's painting

and, of course, there's sort of like Kickstarter music playing in the background. It's like, I don't know what else to call it. I'd buy that painting. A Steve Jobs looking guy sits down and now they're talking silently. No, she just walked right away. Yeah. playing in the background. It's like, I don't know what else to call that. I'd buy that painting. A Steve Jobs-looking guy sits down. And now they're talking silently. No, she just walked right away.

Yeah. I wonder if he could turn that into VR. Don't look at her. That's private. No more stupid painting in real life. Now you can paint in VR. And so WebVR is actually a technology that Noah and I saw demoed a couple of years ago at OSCON running under Linux.

So I thought it was kind of odd that it's actually not shipping on the Linux version of Firefox 55. But holy smokes. First of all, it seems like to me that every single web page I could throw at it loads faster. Give me, let's do a little live test.

Give me like a complicated website. I got Firefox loaded up right here, 55 on my machine, using their new minimal dark theme, which is slick. How about the Amazon front page? Amazon.com. All right. I've not been to anywhere in this browser. It's Amazon.com. It looks nice. Can I just say?

And boom. Amazon.com is loaded. That was suspiciously fast. Yeah, it's nice. It's nice. What's another complex? Probably... Twitch, maybe? Twitch? Okay. Is it twitch.tv, right? Twitch.tv, and it's loading. Pow.

And also one of the things they've done is uh flash is uh click to start now by default is that right yes finally this is uh also um the i think the one where electrolysis is turned on for everyone do you know if that's right michael no 54 was when it came on okay everyone okay and then it's when it came on for everyone. Okay, and then it's in 50... Well, when it came in stable. Okay, and then... It's not on for everyone, but whatever. 58 is the one where... 57. 57 is the one where the traditional plugins go away, the traditional extensions? Yeah, 57's web extensions, like, only.

I mean, this is really good. This is... I know you've been saying this, but this is really good. This is really fast, really good. I'm very excited for Firefox and where they're going. I am a little worried that when they kill off extensions, it's going to be super challenging for Firefox.

I was looking at some of the extensions I use, and I don't even think more than one or two of them have been updated, including, I think, even LastPass. There's actually a website that lists what's being changed. It's a really absurd link url so i can't remember what it is but it's um it's on the mozilla side they have a like web extensions port thing and there's a lot of things that are being ported that haven't finished being ported but they are still they are being in in the works and they should be done by the 57 release at the very latest latest

um some of them be 58 58, but there's, um, a lot of extensions that are also just being destroyed. Like, unfortunately, because there's, there's one thing I use. The,

the tab groups extension is, is, was just abandoned like six months ago. I remember that. I use it as well. Yeah. The guy was like, um,

well, I'd have to rewrite the whole thing and I don't want to. So sorry. Yeah. Uh, Joey over at OMG Ubuntu also points out that, well, I'd have to rewrite the whole thing, and I don't want to. So, sorry. Yeah. Joey over at OMG Ubuntu also points out that you'll find a new performance section under preferences general, where you can choose to use recommended performance setting, or you could dive in and manually enable or disable hardware acceleration, which is probably going to be dependent on what your distro supports.

And you can set a multi-promise, I'm sorry, a multi-promise, a multi-process content limit. That's really interesting. There's one of my favorite things about this. It used to be we had to go in a balconfig in order to do this. Yeah. The new feature is making it a lot easier. But you can have it where, like by default, there's four processes in the electrolysis structure but you can make it as many as you want holy crap i'm turning that up yeah oh wow that's awesome

yeah i'm gonna turn that up to a six so so chris how does this does this change any of your feelings about firefights yep because because i think there's been kind of two problems right there's been technical criticisms as well as like more cultural societal criticisms well um i feel like there's a i i feel like i'm not alone um maybe i'm hopping on a bandwagon i didn't realize but i feel like there is a lot of underdog type coverage for firefox right now cnet just ran a ran a piece called firefox fights back with like intense artwork and just like some sort of browser wars video game i can play right right it's a super stylized piece from cnet about firefox 57 that's going to be out in november this was a logo that was there was this was a design art thing that someone made that they

the event made to announce the 57 thing yeah it's kind of this is like a couple months ago they made that i was kind of thinking it was something like that. So I noticed a general turning in the opinion about Firefox, but for myself what really has really sort of persisted, of course I've been watching them persistently improve Firefox for a while now, so that

plays a role as well, but for me it's really Chrome has started to exhibit issues that I had in Firefox that made me switch to Chrome, and that is that my extensions, I uninstall an extension to sort of like slim down my Chrome install, and then over time, depending on what computer I sit down at

or something, my extensions get re-added back, and then I have way more extensions than I ever had. And then, of course, there's like only two or three extensions I really need, and one of them is crashing constantly on the computer here on the live stream. So I've just really kind of been in a tough spot with Chrome. Plus, I'm getting increasingly more uncomfortable with Google all the time and the power that they're using, the power that Chrome is giving them. So I've just been kind of curious where Firefox is going. And man, if they aren't

really there now, like you can, I feel like with 55, if you've sort of been sitting back and just sort of watching from a distance, using Chrome in this meantime, I feel like with 55, you really feel it. It's like the release where it really hits you. It's about three times faster. It's very noticeably faster than

54. That is pretty great. What platform did you try it on, Chris? I was, well, it's on this machine here, which is under Arch. What platform did you try it on, Chris? I was... Well, it's on this machine here, which is under Arch. They're both Arch boxes. I haven't tried it much else because I was just trying it before the show today, but on the system

upstairs and on this system, which are identical in spec, it's just super fast. No real extensions. I installed Privacy Badger, and that was it. That was my only extension I installed because I didn't want to break electrolysis, and I wasn't sure where that line is or not. Your baby in it.

There's a testing ability. You can actually test to see if an extension is breaking it by running an experimental thing inside of Firefox. Oh, right. I've tried that. Did you have Firefox installed there on your Slackware install, Wes? Oh, no. I guess it came with it, but an older version. Yeah, I've tried that. Did you see, did you have Firefox installed there on your Slackware install, Wes? Oh, no, not, I guess it came with it, but an older version. Yeah, it's 24. Oh.

ESR. It's Firefox 24. Yeah. Woo! I got Chrome installed now, though, so that's fine. Okay, well, we'll talk about that. But, yeah, so there was, you know, during the week, running on Firefox 24, and then I go over to the Arch machine, and I'm running on Firefox 55.

It was pretty funny. It was like, oh. It's only an installation away, Chris. It is the ESR release, out of all fairness. It is an ESR. I saw also, I saw Firefox, like... It's a very old ESR. I saw like 52 or 42 also available for Slackware,

somewhere in the... There's a more modern version available as well. 52 is an ESR as well. Yeah. But yeah but you know 24 esr is definitely not maintained by mozilla no there is some cool things that like the page shot that's coming in or that was a screenshot basically but it's it's it's in 55 now but and also the like if if as far as people like you know getting weary of google and wanting to get excited about Mozilla's work, the common voice integration they're doing with the new voice system and the voice search, but also the Mozilla Send structure, the Send 2, is an open source feature,

so you can actually run your own instance if you want to. So they're bringing this... Instead of having multiple products that are somewhat related, they're just focusing now on different features and stuff to have a cohesive community approach of a good suite for a browser.

Yeah. I think Send's an interesting project. I'm really glad that it's available for self-hosting too. I think that's an interesting project. I'm really glad that it's available for self-hosting, too. I think that's sort of its killer feature. I've been following them more and more for Linux Action News, and I like what I see. I think some things, though, still make me scratch my head, to be honest. I try to stay mostly positive about the Mozilla Foundation, but there are some things they get into. I'm like, what a waste of time and money.

But for their core thing, Firefox, this is the best Firefox I've ever seen. I would definitely say it's worth the upgrade to 55, definitely. And 57 is already coming in November. Ooh. That's exciting.

Also, little side note, get a little more of producer Michael there. He was on the most recent episode of Late Night Linux as one of their co-hosts. He did a great job.

Good work on that, Michael. That's awesome. Yeah. And check out Late Night Linux as one of their co-hosts. He did a great job. Good work on that, Michael. That's awesome. And check out Late Night, or I'm sorry, you can also check out Joe on Linux Action News, which I've now mentioned several times. But it's because we've been covering all this on there. Yeah, anyways, more info

from OMG Ubuntu, which we will have linked in the show notes, and I think I'm going to, I'm not saying I'm making a big switch, I'm not making a big deal out of it. I'm just going to use it more. I'm just going to start using it more for more stuff. And then 57 switch. Makes sense.

Maybe. Maybe. I mean, I'm just going to – basically, I'm just going to get it spun up and running alongside Chrome. It'll have a place. And then if I see if I can just make the hop over, you know, see eventually if I can't get there. Why do you even have to choose one over the other? don't you just use both right i think what would happen is

one might become the primary driver which always is the one with the canonical bookmarks and all that kind of stuff and the canonical extensions and then one would become like my backup browser what you need is a cross browser bookmark syncing so they're both bookmarked yeah there was something that did that for a long time. My other problem is links. When I want it to open, which one's my default? Is it like a GNOME extension to switch your default? That would be nice. Right.

I want every application to let me right-click and open in the browser. A little switch in your taskbar that switches between Chrome and Firefox. Oh, like a middleware for all MIME types that opens up with a, like, what do you want? We're getting crazy. We're getting crazy.

Let's take a moment. Let's calm down. Let's talk about DigitalOcean. Woo. Right? Breathe. Breathe. I bet you could do it with their API, Chris.

I bet you could. They've got a great API and a dashboard for days. DigitalOcean.com. Go over there, log into that dashboard, or create an account, and apply our promo code D-O-Unplugged, and you get a $10 credit. You can spin up their $5 rig two months for free or use their hourly pricing to bang around in a new open source project you're trying out.

You can get deployed in seconds, and all of their machines, from their best price to their crazy big dogs that are monsters, are all SSD-based. With lightning-fast 40 gigabit networks, team account capabilities, so you can work together with folks. So if you've got, say, an AltaSpeed

and a Jupyter Broadcasting kind of situation. Highly available block storage, so you can grow the storage on your droplet as you need it. Pre-built open source applications, you can get spun up or start with the machine from the very bare metal, and you can use their HTML5 console to get some fancy features. And then they've got Boss Mode,

where you can do monitoring and alerting, stay on top of performance, receive alerts when things go down, and load balancing as a service, and firewall at the network level so you can set rules and then they block it at the network level so that crap never even hits your droplet. DigitalOcean.com, use our promo

code DL1plug. Damn, what a good service. They just posted two days ago. I remember hearing about that, maybe three days ago. I remember you were about that. Maybe three days ago. How to install WordPress with Caddy on CentOS 7. So you want to get set up with Caddy and WordPress. And this is a really nice way to manage WordPress.

And you want to do it on CentOS? They got a guy. Oh, what? What? You don't want to do it on? Well, they got a guy for Ubuntu 16.0.4.10. Oh, my God. How do they do it?

I wanted Fedora, though. Just follow the CentOS. Damn it, Wes. Just follow the Fedora.0.4.10. Oh, my God. How do they do it? I wanted Fedora, though. Just follow this. Damn it, Wes. Just follow this. Okay. Jeez. And even at FreeBSD up there on that DigitalOcean, go check it out. DigitalOcean.com.

Use our promo code D-O-Unplug. Check out that dashboard for days. You just got to create that account first. You want to know something, Chris? I think their dashboard sits on top of their API that everybody else uses. It is an API client. And I think that's why the API is so complete is because their dashboard

is a client of their own API, which is a pretty hip way of doing things these days. You got to admit. They're real pros over there. They take it really seriously. That's all their stuff is so good. Yeah, we use it every single live broadcast.

So you know it's good stuff. Like we rely on it 100% here. Every day. Yeah. So digitalocean.com. Use our promo code D-O-N-Plugged after you've created your account. And a huge thank you 100% here. Every day. Yeah. So digitalocean.com. Use our promo code DOunplugged after you've created your account. And a huge thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. All right. I'm very excited. I just decided before I went on air

that I'm going to do a meetup, a last minute meetup in just a few days. On August 21st, something amazing is happening here in the States. On August 21st, the United States will be treated to a total solar eclipse, one that will span the country from sea to shining sea. It'll be the first time that's happened in nearly 100 years. So this eclipse, solar eclipse, is going to be going right over just 200 miles south of Seattle, like prime right over. And I'm like, OK, I got to see this. I got to go to this. I got to go. I mean, if it's only 200 miles away, I can jump in my truck. I've never seen the Corona before. I can make that drive in five

hours. I got to go. I got to go. So I've decided I am going to go on Monday, the 21st, down to the Oregon coast. Pacific Wayside Crest is where I'm going to be at, which is about an hour and change east of Salem. And it's just north of Lincoln City. The sun and the moon are going to go directly over Lincoln City, like square smack dab. And we're just north of Lincoln City. And we're going to be on the coast, the Oregon coast, watching this eclipse over the water. It's going to be amazing. So I thought, you know what? If anybody's in that area, this is a really once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If anybody's in that area and wants to meet up, maybe we should do it.

Maybe we should do it. So I set up a meetup. So you go to meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting. I think you'll see it there. I also have a link in the show notes if you want to join me and Hedia. So, Chris, have you ordered any of the special solar glasses solar glasses no but i did get an nd filter for my drone so which is the priority yeah so so what you're saying is you're going to go to oregon to see us all our clips and then you're going to look at a drone screen to watch it exactly yeah it's hd it's great yeah it's a

high-res screen i'm gonna order you some of those glasses yeah uh i know i know it's a high-res screen. I'm going to order you some of those glasses. Yeah. I know. I know it's going to be crazy, Micah. It's going to be crazy. Crazy amounts of people in Oregon, I would imagine. I'm planning to sleep on the side of the road. I'm not even going to try to book. And this place that I'm having the meetup at is just like some pull-off on the side of the road. But it's right there on the water. It's got parking.

So I figured we'd give it a go. Is there good Wi-Fi, Chris? Well, I don't know. I could try to bring a Wi-Fi. If there's a good Wi-Fi, you could do a JB Eclipse stream, I could try to bring a Wi-Fi. If there's a good Wi-Fi, you could do a JB Eclipse stream, like they're saying in the camera. That would be so cool. Oh my gosh, yes. You know, if it's possible, I'd definitely consider it. That way

for people that don't live in the path of the solar eclipse, you can bring it through the... That would be really cool, actually. If we have a good signal there, I'd consider it. It's going to be on the coast. We're either going to have great signal or no signal. So again, it's going to be Monday, August 21st. The eclipse happens around 10 a.m. It's going to run to about 1 p.m. for the viewing. So I figured we'll just set the meetup for that.

It's Pacific Wayside Crest, and I have the address in the show notes as well as a link to the meetup. Could be fun, right? Oh, yeah. Ooh, Chris, are you going to become a citizen scientist? NASA says that you can. Sure. You may already be. Maybe, yeah.

Am I already a citizen? Maybe I'm already a citizen. Do you often mix unknown chemicals together? I think that's all it takes. I think that's the start of Breaking Bad. Yeah, right. I'm getting confused. I think that's what's in an IPA.

Yeah, that's what it is. So I'm really excited because I'm just going to take Highway 101 down right on the gorgeous coast. I mean, people talk about the California coast and all that. It's nice. But the Oregon coast is really a gem. It's one of the gems of the gorgeous coast. I mean, people talk about the California coast and all that. It's nice. But the Oregon coast is really a gem. It's one of the gems of the United States. If you ever want to come to the States and do a road trip, take the 101 coast. The only thing you're risking, though, being on that side of the mountains is them clouds.

Oh, yeah. Rain. Also, constant construction on Highway 101. Yeah, right. It's constant construction. But we're going to come down 101, end up just south of Pacific City, just a little north of Nesquen, north of Lincoln City, east of Salem. And gosh, what a cool event. Linux geeks hanging out, looking at an eclipse. We should also just mention that we're really very lucky.

There's no reason that the area that the moon and the sun take up in the sky should be so close. But they just happen to be. The size difference, the location. It's amazing. This really, we'll get off this now, but the sun is 400 times larger than the moon. But it's also 400 times further away from the Earth. So they wound up being about the same size in our

sky. Just a wonderful, natural chance. It is so great. Here's a question. Between the sun and the moon, which one runs Windows and which one runs Linux? Definitely the moon because nothing's ever changing with the moon. It's just boring and plain where the sun is constantly regenerating. Is that why the moon gets bigger in the fall? They install system data?

No, and in the fall, it's the fall creator's update or whatever the hell Microsoft calls it. So anyways, if you want to hang out with me, meetup.com slash jupiterbroadcasting, link in the show notes. I just think that'd be really cool. I'll probably do a little vlogging while I'm down there, do some drone shots. You never know. Could turn out crap, but could be a lot of fun. I want to give a shout out to a friend of the show, Michael Dominick,

from Coder Radio, who's getting some love over at betanews.com this week for his new launch over at the Mad Botter, which is the Alice AI Bot. And I love it. It's such a great idea because it handles all these things that, as humans, we're horrible at, like generating reports on the fly, nagging clients to pay. I hate that. Pinging your project members to get status updates. It's really cool. One guy telling me to finish the show notes.

Yeah. This guy, he sees JBot, he takes the idea and he monetizes it, and he doesn't even throw back me any money. Well, he says that Alice was born out of the challenges he faced when managing a distributed team. Now, actually, I grok it because we have that too to a degree, and the bot can just sort of smooth over a few areas. So it's pretty cool to see him getting that.

If you're curious about it, check it out. He's got a great new website, themadbotter.com, where you can look at it. And also listen to last week's Coder Radio. He talks about some of the frameworks he used to create this and the back-end stuff. It's a pretty cool project. Did he say what language it was in? Well, it's all in the, I don't remember, but it's all in the Coder, yeah, he did, but it's all in the Coder Radio that we did.

Okay. Yeah. Now, let's talk about GTK4. It may be here sooner than we thought. Of course, Guadag just wrapped up in Manchester and the GTK maintainers got together and started talking. And they got together a list of current blockers for GTK4. And the list isn't as

long as you might suspect don't think we have a timeline on any of these but uh they're working on a really cool constraint based layout feature they have uh also uh they're working on a finished gl renderer they are uh they are doing event cleanup they're handling keyboard events better uh they're working on non-fallback text rendering it's it's just a it's like a few things that once these couple of like big important but not all of that major things get wrapped up we essentially have gtk4 upon us which is good however i can think of a handful of places that aren't even caught up to GDK3 yet. So it's almost like they're getting

laughed. What's that, Alexa? She's not sure. Alexa, how are you feeling? You good? I'm doing great. Good, good. It's reading season, and I love a good story. The bitch needs to shut her mouth. Shut up. She likes a good story. I think it runs

XFCE underneath. It just doesn't have a display port. Shut up. She likes a good story, Chris. I think it runs XFCE underneath. It just doesn't have a display port. Well, she interrupted. The mumble room is more behaved than the Echo. Chris, maybe she just wants to learn about Linux. Don't be rude. Speaking of the mumble room. I feel fine.

I love a good story. There you go. Anybody in the mumble room have thoughts about GTK4, things still on GTK2? Anybody care? Should we just move on? have thoughts about gtk4 things still on gtk2 anybody care should we just move on it's i think that it's going to be an interesting thing mainly because like how many things that are based on gtk are going to be just sticking to the lts so they don't have to have this massive headache like mate is already pretty much pointed out that they're going to do it like i don't know

if they made an official announcement but there's been talks on like the mailing list and stuff that they're going to stay with the lts of gtk3 and like how important is gtk4 other than gnome users i'm gonna bet like very little yeah yeah i agree okay so let's you guys you guys ever have a friend who like shows up and just sort of like drops the bomb that they got like this brand new amazing car or a huge powerful new laptop and they just try to be all sly about it like they don't want they want you to know but they don't just want to come out and say i bought something new so they oh yeah that yeah i've got but yeah could you read this it says uh bmw chris i already talked about my video card i know i'm just gonna say just like the parents boom his video card uh i feel like that's what our friends over at Purism are doing today.

They're like, hey, go ahead and just share your input on our upcoming phone that everybody obviously knows about. Wait, what? Yeah. Yeah. And then they say, we know your time is precious. So we've made filling out the survey only a few minutes. But then the link to the survey is, I think it's crossed out. I don't know why it's crossed out.

The survey was made a year ago. Oh, okay. So apparently this is a thing that was floating around again on the web. This whole phone thing. This whole, like, we're going to make a phone thing. I'd like to know if there's any smoke to this rumor or any fire to this smoke of a rumor because I've seen this floating around a couple of times. Yes. They're making a phone.

Are we really going to do this again? Are we really going to do this again? Are we really going to do that? Is that really... They say they're making a phone. Yeah. And they're using the core base bands that are built into it so they can have like... I forgot what they were using to make it compensate for it

so that it will use a regular distro. Yeah. And they've been talking about it for quite a long time yeah well like they're just not very yeah well yeah but i've been saying like that that's where them last september they were talking about you know we're interested in it they officially announced they were going to do it like seven months ago but they do it they when they announce things they do it and it's like this is a sly thing that you're saying. I talked to them in a conversation, and they were like,

oh, well, you know, and also, I'll go ahead and tell you, we're working on a phone. Like, oh, okay. So you might want to tell people that. I'm really, part of me wants to sit here and mock this. Like, how have we not learned this lesson? Very painfully. But then I also sit here and i think well shit i there's not actually like one phone that i really like i'm super happy with right now i there is still room to build the right phone for me well my question is why are they trying to put a desktop linux distro on a phone

when they're not well they're making a custom it's it's distro it's a it's a distro on a phone. They're not. They're making a custom... It's a desktop distro underneath, but it's like how Plasma Mobile is going to be. Yeah, but that's my question. Why don't they just use something like Sailfish or Plasma Mobile that already exists rather than trying to reinvent the wheel again? Well, Plasma Mobile is not ready,

and Sailfish is unreliable. So put your development effort into that. Well, this is a hard line because... I agree with that part. I feel like they should be focusing on the laptops. Like, get the laptops just solid and shipping and, you know, get all that. I know they're working on all that,

but, like, to me, it just... That's where you have maybe the most buy-in already. You know, I want a great Linux laptop. What do you think, Monkey? Are you desperate for a new phone? No, but we always talk about how Ubuntu failed at the phone, but I couldn't even get one if I wanted to when they were even making them.

So it's like, what I get frustrated about is when everyone says that Ubuntu failed to deliver their phone, it was the hard version. Sold out every single one of them. Well, doesn't that tell you that them getting into this area might not be as easy as it sounds? I think Ubuntu was trying to build for the carriers. They wanted to have that phone in Verizon stores and AT&T stores. And they were going head-to-head.

If they would have just produced something that could run on the hardware that you get, then there we go. That is what Purism is doing. They're talking about making one phone and the OS is specifically for that phone. I don't think that's a bad idea. I mean, that's how they solved the baseband issue. Poby, do you think this is worth trying still,

especially maybe this type of approach? Having some experience in the open source-y phone area, I think it's difficult because each of the vendors took a completely different strategy. Like Mozilla took a completely different strategy with mozilla took a completely different strategy with their firefox phone than sailfish did with theirs than we did with ours uh than tizen do with theirs like the tizen model is samsung throw a giant bucket of money at it and that's what makes it happen um but the others chose completely different methods and if purism have a different strategy that differs from the failed strategies of Canonicals and Mozilla's, then maybe they have something.

I'm not quite sure what that strategy would be that would be successful. But good luck to them. I do wonder if there is some room for low-volume handset manufacturers to do something that's different than the rest of the market. MiniMac, isn't there a bigger problem, though, here? Like, it's the ecosystem, the apps, the whole ecosystem. It's, yeah, it's again another operating system with the application gap problem. You see, Ubuntu Touch had the good idea that they tried to do some web pages, use some web pages into apps with that. That would have been a lesser problem with the application gap. But if you have an operating system again,

where you have to develop some applications and everything, you will have some huge problems. It's always the same. I think the solution is obvious, and it's been around for almost 10 years now, and we've all had the solution. WebOS. WebOS. Oh, my God. Oh, wow.

You know what else was a solution for WebOS? I love it. I think Nokia came out with that Mamo, which was just a Linux tablet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was actually pretty good. Mm-hmm. Yep, yep. Then Mego. It's funny you say that. Mego was cool. Oh, that's so true. That's all so true. We kind of did arrive on the solution,

but it was just too early, I guess. Yeah, too early, and their hardware was crap, but the software was amazing. I still have my Palm Pre Plus, which is awesome, except for the hardware itself is crap. The battery was atrocious. But the software is amazing still, and you can still technically get it. It's just, I don't know. We have it. People use it.

Just do it. There was a lot of really good ideas in it. I think that's why it still gets mentioned even today. It never will die. It never will die. All right. Well, we have some slack to get to, don't we? But we also have a really cool application that uses just the built-in container features.

Actually, that might be even giving it too much credit. It really just uses the built-in namespacing feature of Linux to give you some excellent security for anything that might be Internet-facing. It's like on-demand sandboxing. We're going to talk about that in just a moment. First, I want to thank Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. This is just such a – I couldn't even imagine a sponsor this great when I was starting Jupyter Broadcasting. Just such a great fit because it's Linux-focused, Linux enthusiasts creating a platform for people to learn more about Linux. And they just – that's what they work at every single day. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to sign up and get a free seven-day trial.

So you can try the platform out as well. Self-paced in-depth video courses on every Linux, cloud, and DevOps topic. They give you hands-on scenario-based labs that really help you learn how to use this stuff. And so you walk away with the self-experience of actually having hands-on with the material, which for me is a total anxiety solver. That goes from I'm totally anxious about a job to I got this. And if you ever get stuck, they have full-time human instructors that are there to help, ready to give you any advice that you might need. They spin up their cloud servers on demand. You select a distribution, the courseware and the cloud servers match that automatically. You're busy. We're all busy. So they have a course scheduler that works with your busy timeframe, helps you

stick to your learning goals. If you just want to deep dive and get certs, well, of course, they've got courses created specifically to prepare you for that. And Learning Pass, so if you want to go down a series of courses and content planned by instructors for specific entire tracks of a career, they've got that too. Flash cards that are forked by a community that's stuffed full of Jupyter Broadcasting members. It's such a great platform. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Grab the iOS or Android app as well, so that way you get value on the go.

And enjoy the downloadable stuff that works like offline, like their audio and their study guides. It's just great for taking on the go when you want to listen to something offline. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. And thank you. Got to get the bell in there. Thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the unplugged program. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. So FireJail is a SUID program that reduces the risk of security breaches by restricting the running environment, say a Firefox or Chrome, for example, to a Linux namespace,

which is pretty cool right there. And it uses a couple other technologies that are all just baked right in to the Linux kernel. Stuff in the network stack, the process table, the mount table. It's written in C. It has virtually no dependencies. It runs on any Linux computer with a 3.x kernel or newer. Okay? Have I got your attention?

How great is this? This is one of these things I just love about Linux. I just love this. I get so fired up about this because this is so fantastic. And so you know it's going to be easy to get going because there's no daemons running in the background. There's no complicated configuration files to edit. The sandbox is super lightweight and the overhead is low because it's just using the namespace space stuff built into

the fricking kernel. And all the security features are implemented by the kernel. So as long as the kernel is good, this security of fire jail is good. So it's, it's, it's dumb, dumb, dumb, easy to get working. You can, you can just say, for example, if you want a FireJail VLC, who knows what that crazy VLC is doing? Not nearly as trustworthy as that MPV. You could just write in FireJail space. I kid. I love you guys at VLC. FireJail space VLC, and it will start VideoLand Client in an isolated namespace, still has access to the network, and can still do your business, but is completely, like, it could be violated with zero day from Edward Snowden directly, his personal stash, and it's contained into this namespace. So if you have something that's internet-facing, maybe like, probably something like transmission,

maybe you're doing like torrents or something like that, and you have a listening port for remote web management, fire jail that son of a gun. That's a good phrase right there. That's the takeaway of the whole episode, just fire jail. Fire jail that son of a gun. There's also a graphical interface, which I haven't checked out, but it's called

Fire Tools. What, what, what? The graphical interface is clunky and awkward, and it's not really a GUI. It's just like a little overlay thing. So most people wouldn't use it. Okay, so nice. So you haven't tried it.

It's better to put it in your.desktop file or something. Okay, so that would then, when you use the.desktop file, you launch it with FireJail just to isolate it at start. Yeah. I like that. And also, I've been using FireJail for a long time because the best way

to do security sandboxing of app images is to use FireJail. Oh, tell me about that. Well, essentially, it does the same thing that FireJailing a regular program would do.

But the main thing about it with app images is because app images doesn't really have a security mechanism built into it. that FireGel in a regular program would do. But the main thing about it with AppImages is because AppImages doesn't really have a security mechanism built into it. So FireGel kind of wraps that around giving it a sandboxing of an AppImage so you can have everything stored in its individual sandbox and namespace

with AppImages while at the same time AppImages are still integrated with the theme and font and home folder config files and stuff like that. That is great. Verituna, you've also used FireJail for a while. Yeah, I mean, I'm quite sure you mentioned

on less, which you've quite well picked up in the first place, but the cool thing about FireJail is that it will make sim links for your common applications, like Firefox and Thunderbird or whatever else. the configuration file is a very very simple to look at because it basically gives you a set of directories to whitelist and blacklist and all that sort of stuff and gives it restrictions to kind of redirect access to individual file system parts which is quite good but also quite annoying sometimes in firefox because

if you forget to whitelist your download directory then you're stuffed. If you want to try and read from another directory to try and upload to a website, then you have to think about that a bit ahead of time. Obviously you're restricted to the

file systems that you've actually specified in the config file. The other thing that's nice for Arch users out there is there is an AUR package. It's fire jail dash extras, which has a bunch of extra security profiles. And for Fedora users, there's a copper build for it. There's also some Ansible. What do you call a role, right? It's an Ansible role.

Is that what it is? There's Ansible roles for fire jail as well, which is pretty nice. And then there's a Bash script you can use, which maybe I haven't used this either, but maybe Producer Michael has. Could be better than the GUI. It's called FireWarden, which is a Bash script to open a program with a private FireJail sandbox. Yeah, I've

tried it, but I prefer the FireJail because it's just... Just a simple command? Yeah. I use it for app images all the time. But I do want to point out one thing. It's a little weird. Oh yeah? Go ahead. A security tool like this. Who makes

it? I have no idea who makes this. If you go to their website, no names. No GitHub accounts. Nothing. There is absolutely nothing you can find about who makes this or anybody. That's something great for security that you're trying to rely on. Look at this, a little conspiracy bacon here on the Linux.

The only reason I use it is because it uses built-in kernel stuff. But it is pretty weird. Yeah, you're right. I mean, it's not like they're rolling their own crypto and creating their own sandbox technology. They're just a rapper. Yeah, but it is. That is weird.

Now you got me looking. Now I'm digging around. You won't find it on their GitHub or their WordPress. And it's a WordPress site. It's not even like a real site. So these are like NSA namespaces that just send everything right back to them. No, it's the Russians. No, I believe it's speaking to China.

Don't you know that? Oh, yeah, you're right. No, we're Russian now. You're right. Sorry, it's Russian now. Get, I believe it's speaking to China. Don't you know that? Oh, yeah, you're right. No, we're Russian now. You're right. Sorry, it's Russian now. Get with the times. I know. It's hard to keep track.

Or it could be North Korea. Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Yeah, I really see nothing. You're right. That is so weird. Anyways, FireJail looks like a pretty cool tool, even if producer Michael has me now freaked out. So now that we're going all conspiracy, can I completely derail us?

Yeah. I would like to mention that currently DebConf17 is going on. Yeah, right now. In our Canadian to the north area in Montreal. I wonder if Alan Jude's going to go. Something tells me he'll probably miss that one. It started on Sunday, but it goes until the 12th. Yeah.

That's very long. And if there are some streams going on there too but don't go don't leave. Oh God. Oh God. We shouldn't. Oh God. Watch directly after.

I wonder if they'll post them somewhere. After TechSnap. They already do that. Yeah. I wonder. On the meetings video page.

Okay. Can post it. I see. I might go check that out then. That could be some good stuff in there. I'd love to go to something like that one time. I gotta get my passport. I really gotta get my crap together on that. That could be some good stuff in there. I'd love to go to something like that one time.

I got to get my passport. I really got to get my crap together on that. So they still have four days to go. OggCamp is also, you know, we should give the guys for OggCamp a plug. Yeah, that's true. Because that's coming up like super soon. I don't know what their ticket situation is or none of that. I got no affiliation with them.

But OggCamp 17 is going on August 19th and August 20th in Canterbury. So, and look, it's proudly sponsored by Intrawear. You might check it out because they're selling, they still have tickets for sale on the website. And so that's coming up as well. Actually, the tickets are free. You can optionally, it's pay what you want. So you can either get a free ticket and not pay or you can pay every year we've done this. And if you choose to pay, then that money goes towards funding the event.

And usually the community that optionally donates actually qualifies for like gold level sponsorship because they all throw in enough money. It works out quite well. Well, there you go so you can find out more at oddcamp.org if you're near canterbury what about you uh poppy are you gonna make it i'm not sure i've got a whole lot of family stuff going on that weekend so i may i may not it might be a last minute thing isn't that always the way it goes isn't that you have nothing for like three weeks and then everything on that one it all hits at once Joe from Linux Action News is going to be there

I'm definitely not going there I definitely would love to be able to go to next year's that's kind of like a personal milestone get my crap together the problem is I've got to go get my passport and you can't just submit a picture, go online and order it you've got to go to like two or so different physical locations like three times I don't know, it's, and order it. You've got to go to two or so different physical locations three times.

I don't know. It's a damn process, and ain't nobody got time for that. Chris got no time for processes. They don't want Americans leaving Chris. I haven't even gotten my oil change into my truck for 4,000 miles overdue. When am I going to get time to go get my passport done? And you've got to go get a picture taken somewhere on some crappy camera. Give me a break.

But I'll get around to it, and then hopefully I'll make it to Odd Camp 18. Can that Alice bot help you with that? No doubt. That would be good. I really just need like a clone or I need somebody to create like the Mycroft AI system. Instead of Mycroft developing their own AI, they need to create an AI framework in which it can watch all of the Jupyter broadcasting content in its totality and then synthesize a version of me based on its observations, which would probably be a little extreme, but okay. And then make decisions for me automatically online, like pay bills, respond to emails. Then I'd have time to go out and get my passport. So Minecraft should pivot and work on that, create an AI framework that analyzes an individual and then recreates their personality

and then gets close enough where it can make decisions for them. Isn't that already what Google's doing? I feel like they're doing that on the back end for ads and stuff, yeah. We just need somebody doing that in the open source space. We're behind. I don't want to think anymore. Yeah, just somebody do it. Just somebody just yeah beans with hair exactly that's all i want is it's just make it even call it beans well that should be what that's they should they should

change it to beans and it'll be the bean system anybody with me nobody nobody i'm just out on my own on this one huh okay good enough well let's talk about Ting then. Everybody right now, linux.ting.com. Everybody loves Ting. Go there and get yourself a mobile device that you only pay for what you use. It's just $6 for the line.

There's no crazy contracts, no agreements, quote unquote. It's just pay for what you use, a fair price, nationwide coverage with a great dashboard, $6 for the line.

And no magic beans involved. No. I mean, maybe if those are your own, but that's not Ting's thing. That's your own thing. That's how you go. You go to linux.ting.com to get $25 off a device if you want to buy one from Ting. Or if you bring one, check their BYOD page because they have a CDMA and GSM network. So you can bring quite a bit of devices. A lot of low-powered IoT devices work with that too. It's pretty slick for $6 a month. And also while you're there, linux.ting.com,

check out their blog. They've got a solid post right now on fiber optic internet and talking about the future infrastructure of America. And I like the argument that they make here. It's pretty solid. They included an embedded video with one of their executives. It's all pretty nice, and it's pretty good talking points for yourself, too.

Check it out. Go to linux.ting.com. Learn more about Ting. It's just a smarter way to do mobile. It's really how they'd have to do mobile in the U.S. today if they were to start over, if the industry had to reboot. They'd have to do it this way.

Nobody would accept anything else. Once you switch, everything else looks so crazy complicated. It's really nice. linux.ting.com. Thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program.. Linux.ting.com. Thank you to Ting for sponsoring the unplugged program. Linux.ting.com. I tell you what, Chris, I might have to look at their phone shop soon because this phone is not doing so hot.

Really? Is it starting to give out on you? Well, it stopped reading the sim the other day when it got really warm. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Chase has been having problems with his Nexus 6.

Is that right? He's going to give us an update on the next user, but he's been doing some ROM hopping. So that's kind of interesting. I've been doing some distro hopping. Tried out Slackware this week. What an experience it was, too. So I'd never done it. I'd always, you know, by the time I got into Linux, SUSE was already a thing.

So I just skipped right over Slackware and I went with SUSE. And then later Red Hat and Mandrake and I went with SUSE. And then later Red Hat and Mandrake and all those. Gen 2. Of course. But Slackware is one of the OG Linux. It's the oldest distribution that's still being maintained. It's 24 years old. We should have shown one of those charts of all the

distro history. Yeah, right. Yeah, no kidding. You can find them, though. It started in 1993. It was originally based on soft Landing Linux System. Slackware has been the basis for a bunch of other distributions as well, like SUSE, like I just mentioned. Its initial release was July 17, 1993. The version we tried out today, version 14.2,

was released on June 30th, 2016. So it's just over a year old by just a couple of days. So the release that Wes and I have been running is just over a year old, came out last June. So I thought let's start with the installation because it is very much an old school type Linux. It really took me back actually to early days of Debian to some degree too. You boot, in this case I booted from a USB disk. I tried to get the CDs, but I just didn't have enough time for them to make it for the show.

And it's like a six-disk set, which is adorable. Or you can get one big DVD. So I got the DVD USB image, flashed that to a thumb drive, and I booted my system. When it boots up, it immediately drops you to just a login prompt. The installer does. You just go to a login prompt, and

you are prompted to log in as root. It just tells you to log in as root. You hit root, and it just logs you in. There's no password. And then it tells you with the message of the day to type in setup, or to run FDISC and start partitioning your crap. A little bit like the Arch

installer in that way. Yeah. And so you can, you know, there's various ways you can set up your partition schemes. You can do it manually before you launch the installer. Or you just type in setup and it launches the Slackware setup. Here's the important part, Chris. Does it support ButterFS?

I actually don't think I did see ButterFS. It was really almost immediately at this point I was left feeling this is already something that all of the other Linux distributions literally solved 10 years ago and that was they took the installer and they removed as many steps that were not necessary like making me log in when I only have one login option and there's no password just log in for me there's nothing else I can do so just log in for me. If I can either only partition my disk or

start the setup, just ask me which one of those things I want to do and then do it. Or at least it could be a little more explicit in that part especially. I don't mind a few simple steps, but that part was confusing because you just drop to a terminal. And it doesn't even say that there's no password. You just have to find out by entering, like, okay, it worked.

Great. Yeah, you had no idea. Maybe it's just a step to get rid of all the noobs. Yeah, it almost works. Yeah, almost. But it seems like modern Linux has worked out those unneeded steps. This, again, it feels more like Linux from another time. In a way, that feels kind of good, too,

though. It does, yeah. It's not necessarily all bad. It uses an old-school NCurses installer, which has always worked really well for me. I've never had a problem with NCurses UIs. Simple, works on pretty much anything. You can do it over VGA. Yeah. Yeah.

And I did the option, I wonder if you did this too, where it says, what packages would you like? And one of them is just install everything. Recommended. Yeah. Yes, I did. install everything. Recommended. Yeah, it is.

Yes, I did, which that itself was, this is totally, it also feels like a different time, a different era, and it's kind of nice. Yeah, so I did the same thing. I installed all the things. Then the thing I liked at the end of the installation, which I wish all Linux installers, like at least maybe give me a checkbox at the beginning to turn this option on, is it prompted me to create a USB boot stick. That was interesting. Yeah, here's your rescue USB stick. You create this, and if you can't get your system to boot, dummy,

put this USB stick in and it will take you right to the root of your file system. And I was like, that's a great idea. Every Linux distro should offer that. Yeah. So I like that aspect of it. Did you do that? No. I skipped it as well.

That's a great idea that I'm not going to use. Well, because I only had the one USB on me that had the Slack one. I was like, well, if this doesn't go well, I'm going to need to do it again. So what you guys were saying is that you came to Slack not ready to play with Linux. Well, I'm only using it for the week. I knew I wasn't going to be sticking around. If I had been installing it with a DVD and then I had a flash drive, or if I just had a second flash drive, which I think was just in a different bag.

Yeah. So did you get X? Did you go all the way up to X and do a desktop? I got which I think was just, you know, in a different bag. Yeah. Yeah. So did you get X? Did you go all the way up to X and do a desktop? I got KDE on there. Did you? Mm-hmm. I went with Mate. Oh.

Yeah. See, that's nice. Yeah, I was. It actually was. It was just fine. And, you know, I'm not such a Mate connoisseur that I can't tell, like, a super old version of Mate from a... I can tell it's an older version, but I can't tell, like, how out of date it is.

So to me, it's like, that's fine. This works. This is doing the job. Well, you just missed that, the new Super Key hotness. That's the only thing I know. I got a little antsy pretty quick when it came to software availability. And at first I ran into, like, God, all these packages in the repo are so damn old. And all this stuff is just too ancient.

I can't use this. It was nice, though, to, like like it was so strange to have all the things you know what i mean like yes there's just like nine gigs of software that i already had yes building things i don't need to install any dependencies because they're all there yeah um but i pretty soon found myself coming across slack builds.org yeah yeah did you go to slack yeah that's how i got chrome i got slack on there which slack for slack was kind of hard yeah to search for. That is funny. That is the modern terminology, dude.

So they have Chromium on there. They don't have Chrome, but I was able to take the Slack build script for Slack because it's just both Chrome and Slack give you a deb. Yeah. And I just converted it. So now I made one for Chrome. So let's talk about this for a second. So Slackbuild.org is pretty cool. Slackbuilds, I should say, builds with an S,.org.

They say their goal is to have the largest collection of Slack build scripts, which Slack build scripts is the very mechanism that Slack is put together with, Slackware is put together with. They want to have the largest collection of Slack build scripts available while still ensuring they are of the highest quality. So they test every submission prior to including the repository. So it's not that this is a repository of software, but it's a repository of Slack builds

that link out to other software and they QA them before they list them in the directory. That's pretty handy to have. I mean, the ones I use, they did just work. It's curated build scripts. Yeah. And that, I'm like okay all right i i can especially when since you already have a bunch of the dependencies and they kind

of know what those are it seems pretty you know it's less of a moving target than the aur yeah i um oh go ahead i was just gonna say it's like a higher quality aur because it's getting testing yeah and it's it's more focused in some degree um And there's some stuff, like I said, like Firefox is still not the latest in there. So I thought a lot about who Slackware is for and if there is a space for like an Antigros equivalent of Slackware. Is there room for that? Is there room for a Manjaro equivalent of Slackware? I looked around a little bit and I did find Salix. I think that's how you say it.

S-A-L-I-X. Salix or Salix. Salix, yeah, which is a distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast, and easy to use. They say stability is their primary goal. It's fully backwards compatible with Slackware, so Slackware users can benefit from the Salix repositories, which is kind of neat.

They can also use extra quality source software for their – they can use it as an extra quality source. It's available in several different – they have a Mate version. They have an XFCE version, a Fluxbox, Openbox. I don't see KDE on here, though. But, yeah, so they have several different versions, 32-bit and 64-bit. And it's sort of like an easy face for Slackware, which I don't really know if there's a market for because it seems like – Well, but why is there a market for that in Arch and not Slack?

I feel like Arch is more new Linux. So there's more – when your market is new Linux, then you also have a bunch of new users that are looking for an easy on-ramp to that, I think, maybe? Okay, from the new user angle, I can see that. Yeah, because here's where I was going with this, is to answer your question, I think it would be better to answer, well, who is Slackware for, like as a desktop? Who is Slackware for as a desktop user? And I think that's a little bit of a different question.

And I did some thinking as I was using Slackware about this, trying to get an idea of, like, who would I recommend this to? And it struck me that there's several different analogies you could make, but I like the analogy that there are simple cars versus easy-to-use cars. The easy-to-use car will have cruise control. It'll have power steering. It'll have power brakes. You know, it's going to have like climate control. Like my truck even has individual zone climate control, powered mirrors, automated sunroof, you know, these kinds of things that are really easy to use. And it has like some sort of voice control system.

The simple car doesn't have any of that. You know, maybe it has manual windows. control system the simple car doesn't have any of that you know maybe it has manual windows it has a really basic steering maybe it's a manual stick it's not some fancy six-speed automatic now you're talking my language right it's got like you know it's just windows that you just pull open and pull closed but the thing is they never break they literally just will operate you see those you see these cars from the 80s and earlier that are just simple built that are on the road still um and like my and it's funny like my rv has a huge truck engine in it right and because that's like in a different it's in a different market it's actually it's simpler to look under the hood of my rv and do work on my rv than it is my truck because my truck's like a more modern

quote-unquote easy to use vehicle. And this is where I see Arch. The simple car is just reliable, solid. It's exactly what you expect. The easy to use car with the automatic transition is going to have more problems. There's no automatic anything in Slackware. If both cars are priced around the same, which in Linux, that is true. Most people would probably just take the easy to use car, which is why things like ubuntu and arch are larger and redhead obviously are larger than arch easy to use right here on the public look at that when you use anagross and

stuff yeah yeah um and i think it's probably easier to manage software on arch uh but but yeah well again i mean if you want new things yes yes i would say slack's easier to just get up yes like if you install it with a graphical i guess that's where i see like the gooey part mean, if you want new things, I would say Slack's easier to just get up and, like, if you install it with a graphical GUI. I guess that's where I see, like, the GUI part is, like, if you had an AndroGhost installer for Slack, you could just do that and then not touch it. If you had that, like, if you get a modern OBS from Slack builds and then just leave that running, I think that'd be a very stable system. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing about Slackware, too, is that it's good to build on top of it. It'd be good to deploy somewhere that you just want to put in a corner and have run forever.

People who value reliability, maintainability, modifiability, I guess. Is that a word? Am I making up a word there? And predictability, too, with Slack, I would say, with Slackware. I'd say predictability as well. I'd say those are people that would be well-positioned to use Slack. So are we going gonna use slack in the studio that's just no it's not my cup of tea it never has been that's why it's never particularly

drawn to it i don't have any criticisms of it it's just not my cup of tea what was interesting to me was that it felt like it was kind of like i use i use a little bit of santos ubuntu and arch really is my daily driver between work and personal life and by and large the conventions are pretty similar. Ubuntu obviously has the Debian heritage, so it does things in some Debian ways and Etsy alternatives, all that stuff. But most of it's the same. Slack was different. The default paths

for users and root were different. I was trying to get it... This is the first time I've ever used Lilo. Oh, right! Oh man, I haven't used Lilo in ages. So I accidentally hit, don't install it when I reboot it.

So props to Slack. Slack is like the easiest thing to boot because they like by default, it uses a huge kernel that has all the modules built into it. And so I just, I K exec from arch, but you don't have to have a kernel command. Like all I did was say like root is dev SDA four. And then I hit

kegsec and it just rebooted right into Slack. But what I noticed trying to get it set up through chroot or systemdnspawn was that some things are just different on their kernels where the EFI variables are. Different path under slash sys than on Arch.

I wonder if they would be the same as they are in SUSE, because I've noticed that's true when I use SUSE too, is that sometimes some of those things are different than they are. So it's really just a lot of fun to be of a different heritage in Linux, because you know, it's like there's so much that we take for granted when a lot of the things that we have are not Linux or even GNU Linux by

default, it's just modern convention. I would tell you, I would say too, there was a genuine sense of nostalgia when I was using it uh which is almost worth just doing for that if you if you enjoy like um looking back at older hardware and a different era of computing when things were a little different but also you had more control um it's it made me feel nostalgic and so i enjoyed using it just for that in fact you know, I would love to take this even further and get like an old computer running with Slackware on there and do the full install. Like I would have done back in the day when I was on a dial-up connection. Like I would much rather take a Slack laptop than an Arch laptop on a plane.

Yeah. If you're on a 12-hour flight or something. It's true. Or you're on a damn MiFi all the time. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And then go set up and get my Gopher client working and go get on Usenet.

So what did you think of like, how do you reconcile between like Slack and Arch? Because I feel like there's a lot that is sympathetic between them. The desire for simplicity over ease. The KISS principle. But there's also, they're very divergent in other ways. Yeah. To me, Slackware would be perfect on a old Intel computer that I'm serving up webpages for, and it's something that I don't want to touch for three years.

Arch is something that I'm touching several times a month, minimum. That's where I draw the line. So is Arch the hipster, got to have the new software version of Slack? I've been avoiding that hipster word the entire time. Yeah, but Rika has used it like six times, so I'll use it once. You don't have to say it. Yeah, I think your term there, Wes, that you have chosen to use at this

juncture is probably a close insinuation of what the potential possible situation should be. Or the difference between people who are trying out a lot of new software versus using the same software that they know works. Yeah. Arch is the new breed hipstery distro, and Slack is for the old craybe they know works. Arch is the new breed hipster-y distro, and Slack is for the old craybeards.

Yeah, that is one way to put it. I also would actually say it could be a bit of a science history project for new Linux users. So say you're new to Linux in the last five years, and you want to know what it used to be like for us Linux users that have been around since the 90s, give this a spin. It gives you a taste of it without having to actually really sit there and load it from floppy disks and really grind it out. And you'll get a new appreciation for Grub.

Yeah. I tell you, Lilo is fast as hell, though. Man, it was great seeing Lilo again. Talk about making me nostalgia just seeing words can and on on an end curses screen seeing lilo on it just made me that was good times it was worth it just for that it was worth it for the lilo you you rekindled that relationship with that old girlfriend yeah it was like coming it was like it was like going to a high school reunion literally it was like going literally going to my high school reunion it's that's about how long so so here's a question what are you willing to try a another older

style distro but that includes some newer concepts i mean i sort of i mean i'm kind of ready to start on the my personal journey of picking the distro for you ready to start settling again yeah this can be a separate thing okay what do you got? So there's this distro called Crux. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We've talked about it. Crux is a big thing, too.

It's like it's a crazy file system, right? Well, the thing I noticed about it is that it uses a ports package system. Like the ports system? Like the BSD ports system? It says ports.

Crux is a lightweight x86-64 optimized Linux distribution targeted experienced Linux users delivered by a tar.gz-based package system with the BSD style and NIT scripts. It's not based on any other Linux distribution. It also utilizes a port system to install and upgrade applications. If I recall, it was an inspiration for Arch back in the day, right?

And maybe even some of the original Arch people worked on it, I think. Well, you know, so they had a server failure. It says tomorrow. Yeah, okay, inspired by Christmas. How is that possible? Isn't that 2000? No, no. No, that's European-style dating, isn't it?

Isn't that? So the month isn't the middle of the day. July 9th? Yeah, okay, July 9th. Okay, all right. Yeah, oh, yeah, July 9th. So during the week of July 9th, they had a server downtime. That's the last, looks like, oh, okay, here we go.

February, they released Crux 3.3 of this year. So the project's still active. Yeah, I'd be willing to give it a go. I suppose if the audience wants us to. I mean, I don't want to sit there and blow my week if people aren't actually interested in Crux, but I'd be willing to give it a go if people suppose if the audience wants us to. I mean, I don't want to sit there and blow my week if people aren't actually interested in Crux, but I'd be willing to give it a go if people want to let us know. Let us know in the comments. You know, I'll watch

for the first couple of days, and if we see people saying give it a go in the comments, and they want to hear what using Crux is like, I'll do it. I kind of like the idea of us just looking at some of these more esoteric distros. Going back in time, in a sense. That are maybe not the most mainstream things. I actually think this is something that open source is uniquely good at because the source code sticks around.

Like when proprietary software has a new version, the old version dies. Yep. Once it's no longer hosted on their site, no one has an archive of it. Yeah, right. But with open source, you can still get the old stuff. You can still build it. We can look at some of these sideline distros and find out what they do good that the main guys aren't doing and maybe highlight that. Yeah.

I mean, I do think that is a common trend in our world is like things succeed partly by technocratic American, partly by momentum. And there's a lot of things I think like in particular like we would say about Unix perhaps like that old ideas, some that were old and weren't modernized but that have very good principles or ideas that just haven't, that are yet to be mined by the new mainstream. Hmm. That's very true. Mubleroom, any passing or closing thoughts on Slackware or old Linux before we wrap up for the day? Going once, going twice.

Yeah. Okay. That's about, that's about, that sentiment right there is about, I would expect the overall actual interest in Slackware. I actually had a lot of fun on the Slackware challenge. I'm glad that we did it. Yeah, me too. I really enjoyed it. I don't think it'll be in my life.

Now I can say I've used it. Like, I don't expect to continue to use it. No. I think that probably if I was going to go off Arch, something like Solus, Gentoo even, I would do a gentoo challenge like 2017 oh my god now that's a can of worms oh my i don't know if you're interested on that bombshell i say we uh all right all right coward all right i mean i'm down for it you win win we can pick a good time for both of us but next week would be fine all right so next week let us know on Crux. Next week, it's going to be the Gen 2 challenge. I'm down for that.

I am down for that. Wow. It's been a long time. It's been a long time since I ran Gen 2. Mumble Room, thank you guys very much for making it here. I really appreciate having you guys. You can join us live too, jblive.tv. We do it on Sundays at 2pm Pacific. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that converted to your local time. And you can

send us your feedback at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that converted to your local time. And you can send us your feedback at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact and unplugged.reddit.com and jupiterbroadcasting.com slash talk fam! The Discord Alliance grows the discord alliance discord.me slash jupiter colony more and more people getting in there the hair care channel we mentioned that recently is getting some attention yeah there you go there you go also the first place i actually honestly thought hair care was about um let's talk about big beards and grooming and stuff like that you know beard you know that wouldn't be bad actually i also kind of think we should create a rick and morty

channel because oh my gosh no kidding i got so much rick and morty to talk about really oh man anytime anytime i'm your i'm your yeah i love it have you seen pickle rick of course i've seen watched it the night it came out what do you think i am some barbarian so who's not obsessed with the show i love it i love it um firefox is on fire there was something i said at the end like i did it for the lie i was in it for the lilo or something like that that could also be a good title what did i say so i honestly remember news like from several years ago when efi was becoming popular and lilo was like gonna be dropped so I guess they eventually did add EFI support to it and I

suppose that's the only way it's used these days we could use we could do some wordplay and be like Lilo with Slackware I was in it for the Lilo's too long I was in it for Lilo they had me at Lilo

how about that yeah that's not bad it's L-. They had me at Lilo? How about that? Yeah, that's not bad. It's L-I-L-O, right? Yeah. L-I-L-O, and it's all uppercase L-I-L-O. Right? That's technically... Linux Loader. You know, you guys are going to do Gentoo, but you're not going to get the real experience, because

they do Stage 3 installs now. Well, we don't have to do Stage 3. No one said we had to do Stage 3. Yeah, but it's not recommended anymore to not use Stage 3. I used to actually always do a Stage 2 install. So is Lilo... I do a Stage 2 when I install Ubuntu. Lilo and Stitch is...

It's funny, because I was a Gen 2 user, the way I backed into Ubuntu is I would always install the Ubuntu server version and then install the desktop meta package on top of it. That was always, always, because I didn't want to use the live CD, I wanted to use the command. Because that's how you install on Linux. And then I eventually backed out of that. Weirdo. I know.

So what is it? What is the, was it capital L-I-L-O? Is that the, yeah, okay, good. All up case. Yeah. It was throwing me off when I searched for it as Lilo and O. Is that the, yeah. Okay, good. It is. Yeah. It was throwing me off when I searched for it as Lilo and Stitch or whatever that cartoon is. I was also, it's kind of, it's nice to boot without a, uh, in it RamFS too. That was nice of Slack. Yes.

The, the, the other thing that I haven't had to answer in a long time is what resolution do you want to run your console at? I hadn't had to, I hadn't had to answer. All the font choices? Did you spend some time playing with those? That's good times. That is like warning. There's a safe choice here, and there's also a version that might make it so your consoles don't work. So pick carefully.

Nobody likes Had Me at Lilo? What's the matter with you guys? That's good. You Had Me at Lilo is good. We could do Lilo and Slack. Lilo, you complete me. Lilo and Slack. You Had Me at Lilo I think is pretty good, though.

I mean, but also the other one that's winning right now is Defecating Butter FS. Chairman. That's great.