LINUX Unplugged - Episode 212: The Free Phone Nightmare | LUP 212

Episode Date: August 30, 2017

We reflect on the communities appetites for another GNU/Linux phone fundraiser & pontificate if the Librem 5 might be our last hope. Plus a live unboxing of some new shiny surprise hardware.We also cover a batch of community updates, a cryptocoin you’re going to want & discuss additional options for offsite backup.

Wes Payne, ladies and gentlemen, bringing in something that smells rather fierce here, Wes. What do we have here? It's in a red Solo cup, too, so I have legitimately no idea what it is. It's like a sneaky beer. That's a very interesting taste. Yeah, what is it? What is it? What do you think it is? Well, it's fruity on the nose.

I'm going to go a little beer is tasty on you here just for a moment, okay? I'm going to... Yeah, it's definitely fruity on the nose. It's got a thin, crisp smell. It has a very thin head, just a thick layer of foam on top, but not a lot of head there. I'm going to go ahead and go for the mouth test. The good thing is, I don't completely hate it, so that's a good sign.

Wow. Well, you know, it's interesting. It's sort of like, it's sort of got a, it's got a lot going on in the, like, on the higher notes with the, with like kind of a sparkle effect, like a real carbonation, but there's not much in the, like, on the higher notes with the, with, like, kind of a sparkle effect, like a real

carbonation, but there's not much in the middle. There's not a lot in the middle. I kind of like that. Yeah. It's definitely very drinkable. Like, you could drink it very fast. Like, it's good. Like, it's refreshing, too. Like, if it was hot, like, right now, if we didn't have the AC going,

like, once we turn off the AC and it starts getting warm in here, I'm going to get warm, and this is going to refresh the crap out of me. It's got a little bit of the bitterness, but it doesn't sit on your tongue. Yeah, but I feel like it's not hops that I'm getting, but I mean it might be. Citrusy isn't the right word because it's not citrusy. Well, kind of. It reminds me of grapefruit somewhat yeah okay so tell us what's going on here what are we what are we it's real simple it's just a

sierra nevada hefeweizen huh oh that's where the citrus is coming from that is hilarious that is none of the six packs looks good so i just gotta grab the 22 and split it between us that's what happened so you combined you hold on Just so I understand what you just did here. You combined soda pop and beer? Right together. Where the hell did you get that idea? What the hell? Do you not have Shandy in the US?

Oh, no. I guess. I guess. I just... Wow, Wes. That's good, though. That's ingenious. You know what?

I applaud your resourcefulness. Well, thank you, sir. Wes, that's good, though. That's ingenious. You know what? I applaud your resourcefulness. Well, thank you, sir. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 212 for August 29th, 2017. Oh, welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux podcast that might be dodging airplanes as we record. My name is Chris. That's your go. That's your cue. Yeah, sorry. What am I doing? What are you, installing Gentoo over there or something?

Maybe, yeah, a little bit. I was hanging the command line challenge. And of course, we're joined by Beardsley. Hello, Beards. Hello. Hello. You know, guys, it's okay if you uninstall Gentoo, but wake up. We have a lot to talk about today. We sure do. In fact, we'll get to the Gentoo challenge here in just a moment.

But first, we're going to do big community updates, really big community updates. And maybe a couple that might make you a little hungry, plus a new segment that might have to become a reoccurring segment we'll see called Wimpy Was Right. We'll talk about that. It pains me. It pains me. Yeah, I hope not. Bitcoin was spent.

It pains me. And then we're going to do a little follow-up on your feedback about replacing LastPass. A lot of great suggestions. Plus, Mr. West there found a great tool that might just do the job for you for your off-site backups. Then Purism is getting serious about creating a phone. They call it the Librem 5, and as we record right now, their fundraiser is about 10% funded. It's actually a substantial amount of money.

And also, as we record right now, coming into the studio is a brand new Librem 15 to replace the one that I crowdfunded years ago now. Right here, we're going to do a live unboxing and look at the new Librem 15 that was just sent to us by Purism right here on the show. Yeah, we'll just do initial hands-on reactions and then we'll do a review later on. So we're going to take a look at that. Plus, we're going to talk about their new fundraiser Plus we're going to talk about their new fundraiser. We're going to talk about all the things I mentioned and community updates. But before we go any further,

we've got to bring in that virtual lug. Yes, we do. Time appropriate. Greetings, Mumble Room. Pip pip. Guys, I have to start the show with a plea to you. I'm going to make you judge and jury here. There may be a penance that I have to pay.

I don't know what it would be, but we'll discuss that. We have to punt the Gen 2 Challenge one more week in light of the new Librem 15 hardware. It's just what we got to talk about today. It just came in. I don't know, Chris. It sounds to me like you're scared. Sounds like you're still compiling. Oh, did you install KDE?

Now it makes sense. I was going to ask for your guidance, Mumble Room, on what we should do in light of yet another punt of the Gen 2 Challenge. Where do we go from here? Because to me, it feels like a fail to deliver. But to be honest, we've had some really good reasons. Yeah, I think so. I'm torn up, and I need your guidance. feels like a fail to deliver but to be honest we've had we've had some really good reasons so i'm torn up and i need your guidance we're just let's just say we're workshopping it

it's a special distro it needs a special take yeah yeah so uh here's here's what i was hoping is uh maybe maybe if i in exchange for something some of you would help us with the Gen 2 Challenge to really keep us to it next week. Like if one of you in there were willing to also take the Gen 2 Challenge with us, then we would feel obligated at like a friend level to really make sure it gets done. And I don't know what that penance needs to be to make that happen, but I feel like that's what it would take right now. Does anybody understand that in the Mumple room? Anyone? I think the penance has to be Linux from scratch challenge.

I mean, Producer Michael, you're trying out Linux all the time, and there could be additional content in it. MonkeyCom, you've got to be thinking about Gentoo sometimes. Somebody in there. Mr. Arm, you have to be a little curious. Nobody wants to take the Gentoo challenge with us. Ain't nobody got time for that. Interesting. I think

Gentoo is so screwed. I did Gentoo about four or five years ago and that's all I need to know. So screwed. Maybe Wimpy needs to see what mate is like on Gentoo. No, he really doesn't. Wow. What does that tell us?

I tried it and my boredom threshold got hit very, very quickly and I was like, screw this, and just switched off the VM. Goodbye. I've always been of the opinion that the best place for Gentoo is in embedded systems. I thought you were going to say the kitchen, just for a second.

Sure. The best place for Gentoo is Cromwell. There's plenty of embedded systems in I thought you were going to say the kitchen. Just for a second. Sure. The best place for Gen 2 is Chrome OS. There's plenty of embedded systems in your kitchen. Well, you know, so the Chrome OS is a great thing to bring up, Producer Michael, because it's a reminder that it's legitimately a relevant distro, isn't it?

For sure. And the fact that it's based on Gen 2 makes Gen 2 even more important but as far as like i think most people aren't going to be putting too much effort into gen 2 like i did it once just to say i did it and that's about that's enough i care about i did it for years in production because it was the only way to get the versions of cups and the drivers i needed to get the bank that i wanted to move over to linux right to move that's one of its advantages right you have that kind of control.

Okay. Well, the unfortunate thing is that Gen 2 is no longer the fastest, and just because it's sourced doesn't mean people assume that it's going to be the fastest updated. Right. It's not. It's very, very slow in some cases. I've had software that just was abandoned years ago,

and they don't even care. And people who are trying to get maintainership are not given maintainership i just want to just a hypothetical situation we'll step into the transporter we'll go into the mirror universe where gen 2 no longer exists maybe maybe chrome os is based off of linux from scratch or android or whatever um what changes i mean they used to be known for really great documentation, but now that's sort of Arch's mantle. Yeah, it is.

So what changes? They still have that documentation. I think Gen 2's documentation is better than Arch. I think it's the same. I found a lot of things. I think there's a lot of things on Gen 2 that Arch doesn't address and Gen 2 does. Hmm.

Well, okay. Gosh, I feel like you and I are... I did fix one of the things on the Arch wiki that I found on the Gentoo wiki, but whatever. Well, I in some ways now am more determined than ever to prove

all of you jerks wrong and show you that there's some value still in my old friend Gentoo. You know what you should do, Chris? What? You should install Gentoo on that super ancient laptop you did on that last throwback.

You know where Gentoo makes a lot of sense to me is like a Raspberry Pi 3 where I do the building off the machine. Like either using, well, back in the day. Yeah, is that still a thing?

Yeah. It is? Yeah. I used the shit out of that back in the day yeah is that still a thing yeah it is yeah that's I used the shit out of that back in the day because I had

a whole server farm yeah and so I would just I would just distribute the builds like crazy and like I was like

update shmupdate yeah I used to run Gentoo on a Wii way back when so that's and it worked very nicely

hmm had mplayer going could stream things to it it's great well let's get into community updates maybe we'll have more on the from Gen 2 land in the near future. But

this week, we're going to talk about the new Librem 15 that came into the studio. But first, there's a story that has been going steady since January. And it's picking up more and more momentum. And I'm kind of wondering what we all make of it. Mazda and Toyota now are getting together on this Linux infotainment system for cars. It's a project that the Linux Foundation has been working on, and they've been, to some success, keeping it in the news every single week, and that seems to be paying dividends now. With Mazda and Toyota joining forces, they're going to be working together on the Linux-based

Connected Car Navigation Entertainment System. adjoining forces, they're going to be working together on the Linux-based connected car navigation entertainment system. Now, the system that Toyota ships and has been shipping, I think, since 2012 is called Intune. It's an in-car infotainment platform, and it's got all the crap that is always sort of hacky and not so great. It's got the hands-free phone call support over Bluetooth, music streaming, sat navigation, sat nav as they call it. And it's running on top of Linux. This automotive grade Linux project is taking off more and more though with different people getting in Toyota and now Mazda and others that are getting involved. The reason why they're working together, even though they're competitors, at least according to a Japanese business newspaper that the register is citing, they reckon that the joint effort is at least partially due to a shortage of vehicle-focused software development and developers, especially in the land of the rising sun, as the Register puts it.

So Intune and in broader scope, the automotive-grade Linux project, I've talked about it a couple of times now on Linux Action News, and I've done some research into the project. It seems interesting. If you are someone who likes to have everything built into your headset, where it does all the nav, it does your music, it runs your apps, it does your streaming, it has Pandora. Maybe it has some kind of iHeartRadio and Spotify. Maybe it has some kind of iHeartRadio and Spotify. Right now, currently, because Microsoft's involved, it includes Bing. Yeah. Yeah.

And you can get like OpenTable for booking restaurant tables and whatnot. Those things are all inside the dash and running on this Linux system, that's the approach of automotive-grade Linux versus, say, Android AutoPlay or Apple CarPlay, which is more built around the smarts being in the phone and then the receiver, the headset, being more of like a projection. It's a client of the smarts in the phone. The automotive-grade Linux project does not support CarPlay or Android AutoPlay or whatever, Android Auto, as it's called.

So it's sort of a competitor to those. And so therefore, I'm a little leery on it as somebody who owns a 2012 vehicle and is ready to replace that really old, prehistoric, awful computer in the dash. Oh, man. no kidding, right? I really don't want to replace it with another one that I'm just going to get driven crazy by later on. I am more and more thinking about maybe a Raspberry Pi with a touchscreen, maybe even something as crazy as an NVIDIA Shield, or maybe Android Auto or CarPlay.

All these things, it's not that I'm going to be doing anytime soon, but right now what I can't deny is I have an audio aux in. A lot of people use Bluetooth, but I've been using audio aux in, and I just play everything from my phone. If I want news, I listen on my phone. If I want music and, of course, podcasts, I do it all on my phone, and the receiver in my truck is just like a dummy unit. It could just be a glorified, it could just be a volume knob and an aux in jack for all

I care these days. So I don't need a lot in Dash. And automotive grade Linux is more about you build your entire system on top of this Linux platform where we give you these basic functions and apps and UI elements, and then you deliver an experience for your car on top of it, which of course is what automakers are interested in. But as an end user, I'm good just with my aux in jack and running it off my phone. Well, in theory, you could also take the base that you get a car that has support for that. Maybe, maybe if they don't have some weird, you know, locking system or whatever, you

could replace it with whatever system you want. Sure. Well, that would be nice. Yeah. Well, you can say something. There's also, this is interesting mainly because Mazda and Toyota already have a partnership for other things. So it kind of like solidifies it even more that they're partnering. Good point.

Because they have like, they have partnerships with a like technology of like car to car development technology so now that they're doing it with the the infotainment part of it means that it's likely that i mean this this particular one if if this was the first time it'd be kind of weird but the fact that they've been doing it for a few years now that means that this is likely to be a pretty solid partnership sure that makes sense are there any is there any value i agree with you. Like, I'm just going to do this on my phone. I have my phone set up,

but for people who like just use a phone as a phone, if those people still exist, is there value in having a better platform in the car? You know, maybe you're, uh, you're a senior and you just, you know,

you want to be able to, you know, about some of these things, but you don't want to have to try to figure out how to do that and use the small screen of your car. I think so. Yeah. Especially if they can make it better quality connection with your phone calls.

I know a lot of people who are at that age that use the Bluetooth in-car stuff. It's just an awful experience. It's hard to set up. It's like the worst quality audio possible. If they can fix that, that would be fantastic. What about self-driving, where there's so much information that all has to be integrated? Speed, traffic, weather conditions, information to the driver. It seems like having a platform that these car manufacturers,

a common technology base that is sound and proven based on Linux, that they can build on top of, they've got to be working this, even if as a consumer, like the reasons I just vocalized, I'd prefer to just do it all from my phone. Three generations from now of drivers, though, they're going to have a totally different set of requirements,

and they're going to need a really refined system to bring all that information together. So I kind of get why they're working on it. Is it funny that we haven't even talked about that we're talking about it because it's Linux probably, but we haven't talked at all about it being good for Linux or not? I think that we're just...

We assume that this is what Linux does now, right? It's in embedded systems, it's in cars, it's... Hmm. Yeah, I guess so, huh? Yeah. I guess maybe because I get a little lost in the... My thoughts are like, what version of Linux is it? That's a good question.

What kernel is it running? And there's not a lot of details here, even about the product. No, if there was, I'd be talking about them. Yeah, you're right. So I haven't really thought about what does it mean for Linux. I guess I don't think about that much anymore. I've mentioned this recently, but we used to be supremely concerned with the devolization of Linux. That was a supreme concern for us.

And really sort of the impetus of the GPL3. Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, that was the Tevo issue of trying to lock down Linux or violating Linux. And now here we are, and there's a foundation that's... All right, so moving on. This is something that I think Poby's really going to have to get in on i know he likes cryptocurrencies quite a bit popey we should really make you our cryptocurrency reporter to be honest in the field yeah in the field uh uh on the on the on the lines of the

brexit in the bits where on the lines of brexit where cryptocurrency will become more relevant than ever is our field reporter popey uh and uh submitted to the desk, Mr. Popi, was this story by BBC. And it is Burger King launching a Whopper coin in Russia. And the reason why I wanted to put this in here is because, of course, this is going to happen. You open source blockchain technology. Of course, this is going to happen. This is the natural progression when you open source a fundamental technology like this. So Russians will be able to buy a Whopper with virtual cash once they have amassed 1,700 Whopper coins.

Whopper coins. That's a lot, though. Yeah, it is. Yeah. And so Waves is implementing this. They're going to use a blockchain ledger to keep track of who's gotten coins, although some people say they've been getting screwed already. So here you go, ladies and gentlemen.

This is Burger King helping usher in a cyber dystopia. Thank you, Burger King. And of course it's Russia. It's either Russia or Florida. How is this any different than the half a dozen store loyalty cards that I already have in my wallet that I get no value out. I think it's actually better, to tell you the truth. You know, I mean, you tell me you're a crypto reporter, Poby,

but to me this actually seems a little more legit because, honestly, especially if I could trade, say, you know, you're a big Whopper guy, you want to go get a Whopper and a brew, I could throw you some of my Whopper coins. Well, not only that, but I'm sure there's going to be a Whopper coin to Bitcoin exchange rate. Oh my gosh. It seems to me you're going to have to eat an awful lot of Whoppers in order for this to be worth anything at all. Or you've just got to hang around outside and accost everyone who gets their Whopper coins and buy them when the clueless people who don't know anything about blockchain stuff, which obviously isn't me.

Right, of course, you're a reporter. But what about, I mean, in your opinion, what about getting into like Whopper coin day trading where depending on you peg it to like say the dollar and when the Whopper coin is strong and the dollar is weak, you could trade Whopper coins to other people using their iOS and Android apps. I mean, that seems... Well, I was thinking just amassing a ton trade Whopper coins to other people using their iOS and Android apps. I mean, that seems... Well, I was thinking just amassing a ton of Whopper coins, and then you just hoard them,

and you wait for the Bitcoin price to crash, transfer all the Bitcoins, and suddenly you just made a bunch of Bitcoin. Okay. Which I'm still going to spend on hamburgers, but whatever. So I guess the only natural conclusion, and Wimpy, this is just a suggestion. I'm just going to... I'm an idea guy. I'm going to throw it out here for you.

You can choose to run with this, but I think you should seriously consider implementing a Matecoin. And then here's the, here's the thing you, what you do is you patch Kaja and people could share their local storage into a pooled encrypted shared cloud storage using BitTorrent to distribute files. And the more storage you share and bandwidth you share, the more Matecoin you earn.

So you know that exactly what you've described exists. Yeah, I'm not that original, am I? Yeah, it's very good, actually. It's StorageShare, S-T-O-R-G-E, and there's a command line version, a terminal version, and there's a version. That's too funny. But you don't get any burgers. There's no hamburgers involved with this.

I'm sure there'd be an exchange, right? Which is the downside. Exchange it to WhopperCoin. That'd be okay. Yeah. I think we need to discuss the most important question. Can the WhopperCoin be used for chicken fries? Yeah. Yeah. Especially the Cheeto ones, right?

And you'd hit those suckers in the head. Or is it just Whoppers? Because that would be disappointing. Right, right. Okay, I have to admit something. And this technically qualifies. Yeah. You know how that makes me feel.

Yeah, yeah. And the value of this is negative. So Wimpy was right. Wimpy, Wimpy was right. This never happens. VR's dead. I'm going to extract this clip and put it to my wife tomorrow. I'll say it right now.

Nice and clean right up front. I hate to admit it, but Wimpy was right. VR was hype. It's officially dead according to TechCrunch, and I think they're right, because the metric they're using is kind of sound. It's this year's E3. It's the biggest gaming date in the gaming industry.

It's known under its full title as the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Huh? Huh? Woo! Uh-huh. And there was an Oculus-shaped rift where there should have been a lot of showing off of new games. And HTC is dropping their price as well as Oculus. And TechCrunch's Lucas Matney says, over the past several months, it's become clear that the war is no longer HTC and Oculus trying to discover who is Betamax and VHS.

Now they're trying to ensure that high-end VR does not turn out to be laser discs. My counterpoint to you, Chris? That hurts. Star Trek Bridge Crew. I haven't tried it. I'm thinking about while I have a Windows 10 machine, trying it.

Because I have one for like, I feel like this week, I'm going to have a Windows 10 machine, and that's about as long as I'm going to make it. I should give it a go. VR can't possibly be dead if you can play Star Trek on it, Chris. I know. I mean, I have seen it at, like, some bars and other type venues that have these sorts of,

and there's at least one in Seattle that has, like, you can go there and play VR, including Star Trek. So I think you can have, like, a party where you rent multiple of their rooms, and then you're all playing Star Trek together. No kidding? Yeah, so that sounds fun. But that doesn't make it necessarily the same sort of cost-benefit for an individual consumer. I also think that they're not counting the fact that

PlayStation just added VR to their system. That's a relatively large user base that they're going to be targeting. Well, they added that in Decembercember last year didn't they and and the sales were well well lower than they were anticipating well yeah i didn't i didn't know that this was the the topic that was going to come up um but what's interesting is i happened to be thinking about the whole vr thing uh because you know predictions for this year, December's coming, and I was reflecting on my predictions this year,

which have the usual VR is rubbish in it. And I went back and I listened to, what episode number is this of Linux Unplugged? 212. Okay, so I listened back to episode 82 of Linux Unpl unplugged where poppy and i have a rather heated exchange about the relevancy of vr and everything that was discussed back in episode 82 is the same today i had a good experience and i just wanted other people to i just wanted I feel like the problem was it was the hardware and it was the expense. What were you going to say something?

Poppy? I was just trying to remember that, that conversation. I tried to block it out of my mind because Martin was right. And you're focused on cryptocurrencies. Oh my goodness. I'm so having that as my ringtone. I do hope everyone else was talking over me.

So Martin can't grab it. Yeah, no, Martin was right. Talk over, talk over. Martin was right. I do hope everyone else was talking over me so Martin can't grab a key. Yeah, no, Martin was right. Martin was right. It's a good link to me. Talk over, talk over.

So did we talk about only VR or did we talk about AR as well? I think back then we were only talking about VR. I think we touched on AR at the very end. I think I suggested that that might be the only thing that would be useful. You might be right on that because because Google have announced ARCore for Android. Yeah, that's the thing today. So ARCore, which is a lot like ARKit, even kind of sounds a bit alike.

And the reason why these are pretty substantial is you can write once and run on both, because you're talking about Unity and Unreal 4 here, and then the tools in between will make it run on ARKit, or in theory now, ARCore. And I've been seeing, you know, if you step outside the Linux bubble,

I got to say, there have been some significantly impressive AR demos. I'm sure we've all seen them on Twitter and stuff of the iPhone with iOS 11. There is some really interesting stuff happening there, and it does make sense to do it at the phone level because you've got all those sensors for where you're at in space, the angle of the device, the cameras. Which has already had a ton of development effort poured into them over the years. And then a really solid way to deliver new versions of the apps

which need cutting-edge development to stay competitive. It just makes sense to do it there, but I mourn for the loss of high-end VR on the PC because it's so much better than anything you could do with cardboard or even AR. Yeah, see, I don't think VR is dead. I think just the VR hype is dying. I think VR is continuing to progress and starting to come more in line with consumer expectations in terms of price. That's why the price drops are coming now, because I don't I don't think that apparently is to buy a backpack that you put your computer in so you can now walk around tethered to this computer that you carry and then all of these

sensors that you have to rig up in a room to know where you are ultimately you're blindfolded you can't actually see what you're doing so you're just an accident waiting to happen and then there's the expense on top so there's a lot of reasons reasons why VR has just got a load of reasons why mass consumer adoption is a long way away. Are you saying that VR's problem is the PC? Yes, to some extent. Jeez, that makes me sad. But the fact that you're blindfolded, you know, and you get these baby walkers that you can stand in so you can now run around and walk around because you're sort of harnessed inside this safe space.

The 360 degree. It's just the solutions that are being created for this are just mental. I've always thought the escapist aspect of it would be too overwhelming, too appealing to deny, and that it would take off just because it would be like another drug. It would be like another way to escape reality. Yeah, I mean, to me, it's like that's not why it has problems. That's why I want it. It's putting me in a completely different reality. Yeah, yeah.

It sounds fun, especially with those 360 degree treadmill stuff yeah that's why i can see it in like you know bigger places or community events or bars or venues and maybe not like not in my home anytime soon yeah meanwhile though ar is obviously going to get a lot of attention over the next especially in the industrial space yeah but they've but it's the same thing about ar people have been saying ar have been saying AR is more interesting than VR, and it's basically gone nowhere. The same amount of stuff. I would be willing to bet you at dinner,

the next time you're out in this neck of the woods for an event, I'll bet you at dinner that by this time next year, we're talking a lot more about AR just because of ARCore and ARKit. Because ARKit is going to ship on every Apple device that supports iOS 11, which is going to be 80% of the iPhones in the marketplace. They're all going to have this AR capability. And you know the new feature on the iPhone 8 is going to be dual cameras that have depth sensing sensors that are going to support ARKit. Yeah, but I don't want to experience augmented reality through my little phone screen. No, no. But maybe this is the trajectory.

Maybe you have to start here to get buy-off on this concept. I don't know. But do you want to experience virtual reality sat down because it's the only safe way to experience this reality? Yeah. No, because that's the

360. I'm kind of lazy, though. I mean, if I'm going to be in there for hours, I kind of want to sit down. See, to me, the only compelling augmented reality thing, and I know I'm on Linux unplugged, but it's the HoloLens. Like, if you're going to do AR,

that is how you do it. Yeah, and then on VR, we've still just got a bunch of tech demos. There is no compelling titles. Oh, I disagree with you on that. You know what? I have more faith in ARCore that was announced today by Google than I do in HoloLens just because Microsoft can't ship anything other than Azure.

That's the only thing they ship these days. We had this conversation. We should, yeah, okay. All right. I have one thing I want to punt to you guys. Minimac had an opinion about this in the pre-show. I wanted to bring it up here. Joe and I, Joe Resington and I,

talked about Sailfish charging for their new ROM that they're customizing for the Sony Xperia X. 50 pounds, I think it was, or I can't remember. Actually, where's the price at? 50 euros. 50 euros. I can't tell them apart. I'm kidding.

What is the price? And I actually, in Linux Action, I thought, shit, they should charge 100. Because what they're eventually promising is grade A support for the sony xperia x running sailfish they're not there yet there's some of the sensors that don't work bluetooth doesn't work but the idea idea is ongoing support for this device and they've included licensing for things like exchange so mini mac uh you you want to do a couple of follow-up points from linux action news 16 i think it was if i from recalling correctly. Why don't you take some of the highlights there and then maybe we'll kick

it around and see what other people had to add. Yeah, thanks. So as mentioned before, I'm by no means a Sailfish developer. I may be a script kitty for the Nexus five for nothing more. So as you said in the show, the Xperia X is considered to be a first class device for Sailfish OS.

And that includes the license parts. That means Android support, T9 root prediction, and Microsoft Exchange support. So one part of these 50 bucks is simply license fees. But there is a cool thing about it. YOLO will publish the source code of the hardware adaptation layer called LibHybris for the device in the coming week or weeks. So there will be a free community port for the Sony Xperia X. And that is the cool thing about it, because this is a milestone. The Xperia X is the first ARM 64-bit port of Sailfish OS.

And that might be the start of other Sony and other devices running 64-bit chipsets. So they're doing the legwork to get this working on ARM64. Well, okay. So what about Joel's point, then, that, well, if there's a community version available, where do they get off charging $50 for it? Like, what's the incentive to pay for that? I think that's what Joel's concern was, like, why would I pay $50 for something I can get for it? What's the incentive to pay for that? I think that's what Joe's concern was. Why would I pay $50 for something I can get for free?

I guess the idea is that you have software for Windows 10 and even macOS and Linux where you can click install the ROM on your existing Sony Xperia X device in the future.

But for now, you need a Linux computer because right now you have to use a console for it. Producer Michael, what are your thoughts about charging something like this for a ROM? And let's just, for sake of conversation, say it was like lineage, even. So something that's super available,

but it's just been totally designed for, insert Android handset here, and it's perfectly designed for that. Perfectly tuned. I would say that it would be, the business model itself is not necessarily a bad thing. If they were to say make a freemium version

where you could get extra features for paying for it, that'd be cool. But as long as it's not like limiting the phone in any way. But it's just like an extra thing. Or it's more like if you want to support us, here's a way to do that and buy this particular thing like that kind of thing is fine and i don't even care if they only did a premium and that's it um i just don't like who it's coming from

oh tell me about that well i mean i i don't i don't trust yola like i i can't you can't trust yola in my opinion. Mainly because how much of this $50 is going back to the money that they owe people for the tablet? Well, that, I mean, yeah, okay, maybe. Yeah, so, like, if they still owe people, like, $100, $150, depending on what level they were in, like, why would anyone trust them to buy a software that doesn't even work right now? Like, yeah, you can put it on your system, and also there's fundamental pieces that do not work.

I'm surprised to hear that, because you in the United States have this thing that a company can fail, and YOLA failed with the YOLA tablet, and I was one of the backers. But still, they live on, and they try to continue, and they try to do something which is really good for the community. So I can't agree with you, really.

And most of the selfish owners is open source. When they pay money back to the people that they didn't get the money to, that would be fine. They are trying to. They are trying to. Okay, good. If they say how much money of this $50 per purchase goes to that, that'd be great. But until they do that, we don't have any information except trust us. No, they have a program which says when the YOLA is making profit,

they will take a part of this profit and pay back the backers. So that was announced in the beginning of the year. I don't really have an issue with the price either. The price seems really reasonable. So it seems like if this is how they're going to pay that back,

it's going to take them a while to do it. I bet a big part of how they're paying that back is coming from the more business deals. That was what I got when I did some digging for Linux Action News. They've lined up a couple of customization jobs for businesses, and that's going to pay some of that back. But you're right. You don't really know. Yeah, you don't know.

If the software was ready to go when they announced this, and it wasn't like, hey, here's these things that don't work and one of them happens to be very important to a lot of people Bluetooth. You need to fix that before you ship it. And I would be interested if this ROM was fully functional right out of the box and I don't

have to wait for some absurd early adopter thing. If it's an early adopter, i'm just picking it up and then just flashing it myself that's fine but i have to flash it myself and have to pay for it then i expect it to work because it's a it's a premium product yeah yeah but the xperia the xperia x is a pretty reasonable price phone fifty dollars extra on top of that still way under like the majority flagship phones so i would be interested as long as the rom worked i have i have good memories of sailfish os2 uh all right well we should move on

because we have yeah but wrap it up go ahead for for bluetooth i think there are two problems with bluetooth right now so first there have been big changes to their operating system, they introduced Blues 5 for devices that have run kernels that run the Blues 5 API. And the other problem might be the Qualcomm chipset, which is certified for Bluetooth 4.2. So I guess they're just filling out these problems and maybe even the community can help them to fill out these problems. Well, MiniMac, thank you for keeping us posted on that.

That is good perspective and I appreciate it. And if you want to know what sort of inspired this entire conversation, check out linuxactionnews.com. We've got the latest stuff from there. And if you think of anything else, let's include it in the post show.

I think we should probably keep going. There's like... There's more to talk about today. You made us an amazing show. I mean, we have so much more to get to, including I really want to unbox this Librem and check it out. I have really no idea what to expect. So let's talk about how we made this show possible. It's our first sponsor this week, and that's Linux Academy.

Go over to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. That's where you can sign up for a free seven-day trial and support the show. Linux Academy is a platform to learn more about Linux created by Linux enthusiasts. From the basics all the way up to the big platforms that make the big bucks these days, Linux Academy is really something special. With human mentoring available, instructors when you need it, and a community stacked full of Jupyter Broadcasting members. Whether you're an experienced sysadmin or new Thank you. video courses, and hands-on labs to give you real-world experience for a wide range of skills. Train for your certification, learn the latest DevOps tools, and grow your skill set to do better work. Linux Academy is not just a video library. Our scenario-based server labs and quiz

system allow you to learn hands-on. We also have full-time human instructors who answer questions and help you earn that certification or promotion at work. We add new training every week so you'll always be up to date on the latest tech. Sysadmins of every experience level use Linux Academy to stay on the bleeding edge of the Linux ecosystem. You should too. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Free seven-day trial. It is really a secret weapon.

I can only imagine if I could go back in time. It'd be like if I was if I was Bic or what's his name? What's his name? Bic? Bic Tannen? What's the guy's name from Back to the Future? The bad guy. Yeah, I think it's Bic.

Is it Bic? Why does it sound right? Is it Biff? Biff. Biff. Yeah, if I was Biff Tannen, if I was Biff Tannen and I had the Sports Almanac, only this would be Linux Academy. It would be a Linux Academy. And I'd go back in time with Linux Academy and I'd know all the answers.

But now, of course, all them young whippersnappers. I'm really good with system D. All them people looking for jerbs. All those people looking to get ahead. Now they got Linux Academy. You know what would be even better, Chris? What? Is if you went back and you started Linux Academy.

Oh, I should have. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Thanks to them. And sign up for a free seven-day trial. All right. Let's talk about a couple of quick things in Mumble Room. Feel free to jump the F in if you got something even better that kind of conclude our conversation about replacing LastPass. Do you have any thoughts on remote backup, Wes, before we go any further?

Remote backup in general. Because last week we had to talk about crash plan was dropping their personal plan. Right. And that's sort of like that really good deal, unless you just send a ton of data up there. And you gotta get the F off the service. We talked about different options. Do you have any immediate thoughts? Do you want to chime in anything on off-site backup, on anything

like that? I mean, I think you guys did a pretty good job of rounding it up. I use TarSnap myself for some things, and then I also have a couple friends, and we do have some, you know, set up some boxes that we can do R6 doing from, which works pretty nicely. What about you, Beardsley? There is one service that we didn't mention that I'm surprised we didn't mention. At least I don't think we did, and that's Backblaze.

Well, we mentioned in the context of B2 or whatever because of their Linux support. Yeah. Yeah. WSHacks wrote in on the subreddit and said, I'm surprised SpiderOak didn't come up, which is my bad. I'm a SpiderOak subscriber. He says it's one of the few consumer-focused backup services

that I know of that has a Linux client. Besides TarSnap and Rclone, the other options I looked at are rsync.net. So that was what he had to add. I know rsync.net now does, you can do like ZFS send to them. So that's pretty sweet. That is? If you have a big ZFS array. That is really sweet.

Alan Jude should get into something like that. That would be right in his wheelhouse. I'd send some bits over to Alan. Yeah. I just looked up Backblaze. It is super damn cheap for B2. It's half a cent per gigabyte per month. Ooh.

Ooh. So that's really... But B2, you're looking at B2? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so there's like... Our clone of WebNauts does support B2. Well, not only that, but they now have their... They have their own command line Linux client as well not only that but they now have their they have their own

command line linux client as well is that right all right now mr wimpy you were going to make a mention about npass yes this isn't a backup utility but an alternative to lastpass for storing your passwords which you probably need to back up yeah uh and the way that npass works is unlike lastpass they don't provide the cloud storage back end it's client software that runs on all the different platforms and then you then sync your wallet with whatever back end file syncing service you choose to use do you want it and the price is very like it's it's it's free unless you want to do mobile stuff and then it's only like 10 bucks per device so wimpy do you feel like divulging what you've

chosen to sync it with uh well i have it synced in dropbox at the moment because it's all locally encrypted so there's nothing going into dropbox that i need to worry about i was hoping you'd say because you hate freedom. I knew there was a low chance, but I just thought that'd be really funny. Yeah, that's what I'm using too myself. Yeah, Dropbox is still being used for a lot of stuff, and for off-site backups, I'm using Rclone and S3. Oh, and how are you liking that?

Yeah, very good. And I've also got Amazon photo storage and Amazon file storage through Amazon Prime. And what I like about that is you can actually instigate cloud-to-cloud transfers. You don't have to R-clone all of your stuff down locally and then push it somewhere. You can actually clone it between cloud storage backends without having to pull it down.

Wow, that is nice. Mr. Popey, you weren't here last week either. Do you have any thoughts on off-site backup or want to share anything you've tried and had success with? So, yeah, I don't do any off-site backup. I do it all to a home server. So, yeah, if my house went up in flames i'd lose everything that's bad and i keep not quite getting around to anything and i i've tried

most of these i've tried um what was the one you mentioned spider oak yeah and i found it atrocious user interface yeah yeah um but i i'm keen to know what other people use that are that are good and reliable and i can just fire and forget and not have to faff about and worry about it with large volumes of data because i i have a huge um multi-terabyte array with all my backups on at home and i don't know what to do with it so uh oh what. Mm-hmm. Howdy ho. What was that? Hi, Chris. It's Ben. How are you doing?

Hi. What was your suggestion, Ben? Well, I just wanted to talk about this part of the show. Well, I've always used – I've used rsync a couple times and I've also used Google Drive and what else? One Drive and a couple of other different solutions. And also, can I jump back to the Gen 2 part for just a minute? I just wanted to say that I'm willing to help you on that front. That's what I wanted to point out. Oh, you're going to take the challenge with us?

Welcome aboard. Yeah, welcome aboard. I wanted to help you guys out at any point. If you get stuck in the installation or anything like that, I'm willing to help. Oh, I'm not so worried about that. I mean, I feel like I can do that. I feel more like I just want somebody to do it with us. It's like when you're trying to...

Yeah, I'm willing to jump on board. That's fine because I've installed it half a dozen times. I mean, Spatry even said I've installed it more times than people change things. Well, okay, so to our topic at hand here, so you're using rsync to offsite what? Like, are you going to...sync to offsite what? I've uploaded different Linux respins and different things like that and different ISOs. I've helped out a couple of different people with their Linux respins, and I've uploaded stuff for them on rsync and different stuff like that. So yeah, I've uploaded several different files and stuff like that that I've had to back up to different cloud sourcings like SourceForge, GitHub, different stuff like that with our sync.

Surfrock wrote into the show, and he says in regards to CrashPlan eliminating home accounts, he says, here's what led me to convert to a CrashPlan Pro account. He did some soul searching. He did the math. He looked at the fact that he's got a NAS server with 12 terabytes on it. He's got some Dropbox systems that he wants to send off site. He's got a couple of machines he wants to back up. He said, now I could do a single backup of my entire home to the local server, you know, all over like some sort of NFS or some amount. And then still like trying to do all the math, he says the best thing for me is to just go for CrashPlan Pro.

It's 120 US greenbacks a year, but the backups not only capture all of your data, they also capture all of the configs for all of the machines, which to him was sort of like the, ah, that's the cincher for me. I want a utility that'll blast everything back to exactly the way it was, not just back up the data, but everything the way it was.

And that's where CrashPlan Pro for him. That's on the more managed side of services. And in that scenario, I think $120 a year, if you can afford it, is a reasonable amount for the kind of protection that you get. Yeah. Yeah. And it comes always back to that question of like, how much do you,

you know, as a, as a sysadmin or type similar person who can do some things, is this something you outsource or is it something you roll yourself? He says, when I kind of laid it all out with the wife, she said, he says the spousal approval factor is pretty high,

especially when I mentioned the pictures. Yeah. Right. That's a, that's an important one though. We kind of invented digital cameras and then didn't come up with a reliable way to make sure you could keep those pictures. Yeah. Spider Oak.

So my thing has always been like is what I use Spider Oak for is to back up Dropbox, which is like it's like my belt and suspenders approach to Dropbox. But it's really excessive and it's really slow. And it depends on one machine running that has both Spydero and Dropbox installed. It's like that's your sync machine. Like why can't one connect to the other and just do it like cloud to cloud? You know? I mean, it's just servers.

It's not like they don't need some desktop. It's all just Linux. Do they really need a desktop PC in between? They can't talk directly to each other? Give me a break. And of course you're never going to get that with these closed source. So one of the things that a lot of people wrote into the show,

a lot of people wrote into the show about was NextCloud. I don't think we've ever gotten more people suggesting NextCloud ever than we did in response to all of this. Offsite sync. But the thing that people really brought up was that's where I store a lot of my data that is resynced. So calendar, contacts, photos, notes. They just keep them on NextCloud and then they reload the machine and then NextCloud syncs that stuff back to. That's a pretty good way to do it. Yeah, but at the same

time, if it's critical data, I'm not a security engineer or... Are you sure? That beard's pretty legit. I don't trust myself to be able to take care of that data that's why i want to offload it to another service geez yeah okay there's that that's fair yeah because that's what they do yeah that's their thing yeah they spend their entire day doing that. I think that's what's sort of great about open source, though, is there is a good contingent of us out there that we are.

I really kind of ebb and flow on it. Some stuff I'm willing to maintain myself and some stuff I'm willing to just like sort of off. Yeah, I agree. For me, it varies depending on how important what you're doing. How interested it is, how easy it is for you. And that kind of changes depending on how much it would hurt you if you lost it. Right're trying. Yeah, how interested it is, how easy it is for you, and that kind of changes depending on what you do. How much it would hurt you if you lost it. Right, right, yeah. And backups, though, are...

What I really dream of is something that is like a... Is this possible, but maybe even like a 15-year system? Is that just ridiculous? These are your backups. Like, you know, these are your photos and your music and your documents and your creations like you're gonna want them for a while right and in the past that would have all been physical things that would have gone in boxes that you would have stored somewhere ridiculously

and then your family would have to do something with when you died but now you're making three copies of that that you put at different people's houses well that's just it like the longer i go am i just building up more and more shit that I'm going to have to keep converting to newer formats, drag to new cloud storage services, move to new types of open source programs that come online, hosted by new cloud providers? Am I just going to drag all this stuff with me? And the thing is, is the more dispersed it is, the less control I have over it now, the less flexibility I'll have down the road. You see, so there is some logic to all of these people writing in saying use NextCloud because at least then you have some sort of escape hatch.

Like right now I got a ton of stuff in Google, and Google is going to be around for a really long time. Will I be using Google services for 15 years? I doubt it. And at some point I'm going to have to come to that reality of having to migrate all of my crap out of their crap. Well, even with like I've had that with Dropbox. I kind of just stopped using Dropbox at some point, I'm going to have to come to that reality of having to migrate all of my crap out of their crap. Well, even with like, I've had that with the Dropbox. I kind of just stopped using Dropbox at one point.

I still had stuff in it. And then, you know, I have to make sure that my account stays open or I have to then make sure that I migrate. So there are... I had to go through my entire Dropbox and remove everything. Mm-hmm. I think this is why some of us feel compelled to build like super NASs in our houses and just get something that has a ton of disk and, you know, like Popey, just mine crypto coin and

have a bunch of disks and just keep it all local. You could VeriCrypt stuff maybe and put stuff on these services. And use, of course, ZFS to prevent bit rot. Well, that's just important. I'll just take a nap and let it back up to Tarsnap.

I don't want to lose my Whopper coins. Well, you know what? A lot of them are like, duh, Chris, NextCloud on DigitalOcean. I don't know if you've heard, Chris, but DigitalOcean is a really easy and quick way to spin up droplets in less than 55 seconds. Install BSD and get ZFS and SSDs. All right. So now this is sponsor time right here. DigitalOcean.com.

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And the API is so well done, you're going to love it. Lightning-fast networking, highly available storage. You can attach as you need up to 16 terabytes. And use ZFS. And use ZFS. Just like the beard was saying, because it shows up as a block storage device. And what you could, you could use that.

Or you know what? You know what? You could make the SUSE folks happy and you could use ButterFS. You sure could. Play around with it. You know, I hear RAID 5 and 6 are pretty popular. You give that a go. See, the nice thing about DO is once you get tired of that, you just blow it away.

One button click, one API call, it's gone. Yeah. And something that the ButterFS folks really love is they also have snapshots. So you can take snapshots of your system before you create some sort of offense. In fact, because that API is really nice and well-documented, you'll find that there's open-source projects that might integrate with your package manager, Fedora, that will actually take a snapshot of your DigitalOcean droplet before it installs all your packages.

So if something blows up, you can revert right back. That's awesome. DigitalOcean.com, use our promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. Big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. And thanks to everybody out there for using the DEOUNPLUGGED promo code after they create their account at DigitalOcean.com. So this week, the smoke was revealed from, I'm sorry, the fire was revealed from the smoke that is the Librem 5. And the Librem 5 is Purism's attempt to build a GNU slash Linux powered open source phone that respects your privacy and your GNU slash freedoms.

Now it's going to start around $600, which is actually a pretty reasonable price for a bona fide smartphone. That's the world we live in. And it's got one interesting element that, out of all of the things about it, impressed me, is its support for matrix phone calling. is its support for Matrix phone calling. Now, I have quite a bit of skepticism about a fundraiser for $1.5 million for a smartphone in 2017. But I thought before we really even go there, I thought I'd tell you a little bit about it. They say it'll be the world's first IP-native mobile handset for a new kind of cord cutter.

And that cord cutter is one that's cutting the cord from the cellular network. Hey, yo. Which I actually feel like is, not to make this a sponsor thing, but sort of why I use Ting, because I just pay for what I use and I try not to use the cellular network because screw the cellular networks. Screw those carriers. And so Ting is sort of like my hack around that. And now apparently it just turns out I'm a new kind of cord cutter hipster.

You sure are. I didn't even know it. And all of you Ting users out there didn't even know it. And you're not going to get credit for it either. Don't worry. And the other thing about this phone is it's not shipping iOS. It's not shipping Android. It's shipping PureOS, which is their Linux distribution.

They're working with the Matrix Project to get that calling and texting. It's going to be like a full-fledged messaging platform wow it's not just phone calls it's going to have a five inch screen it'll have hardware kill switches for the camera microphone wi-fi bluetooth and the baseband that's a lot of switches it is a lot of switches it's kind of like spiky on the outside of the phone maybe i'm wondering i'm wondering about that they say they're going to have a separate CPU and baseband. They're going to have... Really? Now that's something. So, what do you think, Wes?

2017, to get a phone of any real substance, to get a phone and a charger, you've got to back it at $599, $600 U.S. An estimated delivery is January of 2019. That's a long, that's a ways away. And I wonder, it just seems like there's been a hard time in the past to get these things. Like right now, if I could have that phone right now, yeah, all right, that seems great. I would try it. I would use it. I'm curious about it.

A lot of that appeals to me. But that's a long time we've seen things slip in these kinds of projects and the money i'm paying is money today will that really have sold the same value in a year and a half or whatever yeah yeah this was a pledge that you could get this they know that there's people who want to do it are willing to give them money but not taking the money even when the campaign's over waiting until it's actually like a physical thing. That I would be happy to do. But $600 for a phone in a year and a half?

No, thanks. What about something that sort of shakes up the whole iOS, Android death grip? As far as PRS, what they're saying that they're doing is amazing. There are certain aspects of this phone that I would love it, especially the separate baseband thing, because that brings so much potential to the mobile platform as the Linux mobile advocate that I want to be. That is something that is fundamentally important. $1.5 million. 55 days to go. They've raised 8.55% as we record,

so that's $128,000. So I think I was a backer of their first fundraiser. I think that's how I got the Librem 15. It's been a little while now. The reason why I lose track is because I've kind of lost track of how many fundraisers there's been. Because I think there's been a couple of different fundraising campaigns at this point for different hardware,

and I've kind of lost track. I don't know if this is a bad thing or not. Does it become a red flag if you're three or four fundraisers in? Does that indicate that perhaps this is starting to become a business model in which that every few years you have to, or every year or so, you have to do a fundraiser to keep going? That was one thing I was kind of bringing up is I would almost have more confidence in this, like, at least kind of with the YALA stuff. It feels like there is more of this business angle and I can kind of get on board or I have a little more faith that that will have the sort of

traction or momentum to influence the industry or at least take a bite out of it. So like you're saying, this sort of intermittent funding model, does that have the same sort of staying power that we need to actually get market share, which is what you need to get apps that people want and users that are using it? I guess it's a way to maybe fish out consumer demand before you go all in on a product, perhaps? Well, to me, it just looks more like they aren't making enough money that they can be able to do these projects themselves. Whether that's true or not, that's the perception it gives me. Hmm.

Wimby, you're suggesting that they've created their own funding platform. I guess I hadn't noticed. You're right. This isn't Kickstarter Indiegogo, is it? No, it's that they're using their own platform, i guess i hadn't noticed you're right this isn't kickstarter indiegogo is it no it's that they're using their own platform and i'm just wondering what people feel about that because if you're taking the money and managing it yourself do we lose some of the oversight and having a place to go that's independent of the organization looking for the funding and does it suggest this is going to be something that happens more often go ahead poppy uh it also means that there's no publicly visible feedback like when i go to um a kickstarter or an indiegogo or many of the others i know i can go and have a

look in the um the conversations that people are having in the comments and the comments underneath the updates to see what the general feel of that project is before I'm going to back it. If all I've got is the mouthpiece of the people who are making the project, I'm less inclined to, to feel I want to contribute to that thing. And they don't actually provide any policy information, like how,

like what their structure of payment is either. Well, okay. Not only that, but like, it doesn't make a whole lot of business sense to them because aren't they limiting their their number of eyes to the people that visit their site well and maybe they're just hoping that social outreach will uh i mean how do you really get people to your kickstarter page you got to get i think they had to do this in order to be um fsf friendly you know you can't you can't make a fully pure fully free software device and then say come on to this non-free

platform in order to back the thing like kickstarter or indiegogo because they're all completely non-free i think one of them was on crowd supply but i can see why they would want to do it on their own site but it smells a bit bad to me. It's not the first people to do that, though, because the new PG people did it as well. But, Kim, I mean, okay, so that is an interesting thing to be aware of and something to consider. I mean, it does mean that you bypass whatever rules are in place. Like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have certain criteria that must be met before you can just you can't just throw any old project i mean it looks like that on indiegogo sometimes but you can't just

throw your projects on there there are some rules and there's some opportunity for recourse if things go bad what opportunity for recourse do we have directly with purism themselves, if there's no intermediary who can say, this project went south and you need to provide some kind of remuneration for the people who were done out of their cold hard cash. We also don't know if it's like a Kickstarter style or if it's like the Indiegogo where you can do both fixed or you get it automatically regardless if they meet the thing or not. Fix and flex. So outside of the payment platform, I mean,

is there a bitterness developing around this concept, or is there still enthusiasm amongst us all gathered here today for an open-source Linux-powered handset that you can load any distro. This one would be shipping with a Debian derivative, which would support hooking up a mouse and keyboard and an HDMI device and, you know, quote unquote convergence if you want to start X.

The claim that it can run any Linux distribution is an interesting one, given that it's an MX board and therefore it would need, you know, you'd need to have a target for that platform. It's an ARM board, effectively. The reason why it would be ARM, yeah. Technically, any distro could run on it,

but in practice, somebody would have to enable that hardware for that distro. Right. Well, they also, because of the baseband, because they're doing a separated baseband with the firmware built into it, that kind of... I understand that, but I'm just talking generally you know just just everything about the board you know if someone's not based on arm for sure yeah who is that who we got oh is that poppy oh poppy you're breaking up hold on say it again oh sorry go again yeah there you go now you're clear so thing that gets me is this is

basically just a small computer like the gpd pocket that people have been raving about the small computer that has an hd display and a full-size keyboard is like a tiny tiny netbooky kind of thing it's not a distant step from that to the purism device right it's the that there are tricky things because it's a it's got no hardware keyboard and it's going to be used in a pocket with expected long battery life. But there's not a giant leap from existing hardware that can run general purpose Linux operating systems like the GPD Pocket can. Okay, Modulo busted drivers for various things, but that'll get fixed. There's not a big leap from there to a mobile device that can run general purpose Linux operating systems.

And we're talking some time away for this thing to be delivered. So it's not unreasonable to think that that could be delivered. I agree. And I tell you, I agree with all of you that said that if it was shipping today, it's something I would definitely consider

purchasing. Yeah, I'd already be having it in my cart right now checking out you know something i did notice about their announcement was they are not committing to specific hardware as well which or functionality yeah the faq items like clearly states everything is subject to change yeah so it's it's like they're asking you to back it but they're also not committing to delivering you a specific product which is really worrisome to me well in a sense like you could say that maybe because they don't want to commit to the hardware specs because in a year from now or something like that or six months from now the hardware specs because in a year from now or something like that, or six months from now,

the hardware specs would be so much different that they wanted to upgrade. And if they already committed to a certain thing, people would expect that. This way they could say, well, we're going to upgrade it automatically, and then you're going to get more RAM or a different type of RAM or something like that.

Yeah, well, just the other day, they did an update on their blog, and they said that the general interest in the fundraiser so far has kind of got us talking more with hardware manufacturers. And based on their post here, what I grok is that they have a rough idea of what they're targeting. They have an idea of the processor. I think it's going to be about four gigs of RAM. And they have a couple of rough ideas, but I don't think they're super committing yet because it's all subject to change because it is so far out. I think that's pretty much it. campaigns will be able to essentially print a device like this every time somebody backs it.

So the moment you back it, it's just on-demand manufacturing. You don't have to secure 1.5 million orders because you don't have to pre-order 300,000 units. You can just print out a unit as and of course printing I'm using loosely as a way to automate manufacturing. But you do have to wonder, when will that scale get to a point where they can do one-to-one ordering and it doesn't require a huge batch purchase that has to be planned out for a year in advance? Because in some ways, it feels like that's what's holding back

true unfettered development of a free Linux phone. Because you would need something that was reasonably priced. That was reasonably functional. And that people could actually get their hands on immediately. So the moment it started to tip into popularity, people could start ordering it. Like a Raspberry Pi Zero. Or a Raspberry Pi when they were brand new.

Like those, there was a tipping point where resources were limited. But there were ways to get your hands on it and and um that's not possible for companies like purism they're in this position trying to get off the ground with a new product like this but that's gonna be fair you could think about the fact that they don't have to uh set up deals with different companies and oems and all this other stuff because they're not making a software like an OS for a plethora of

devices. They're making one device and one OS for that device. So Michael, what do you think? If this doesn't work, is this dream dead? No, I don't think it's dead because of UbiPorts and Plasma Mobile, what they're doing.

And the Holium project is awesome. So it's just going to be a different version of the dream. Instead of having the one ideal device you can buy that just comes all ready to go, it's going to be you buy the hardware and then load your OS. Right. It's going to be a flash-it-yourself kind of thing. Yeah, that's sort of what worked for Linux. On the desktop, I guess.

Yeah, I think that's the most likely to happen in general, especially because all the projects, especially the ones that are working together, like the Holly M project is a collaborative project to work with multiple different approaches. So I like that. But I hope Purism is successful in this and makes a fantastic device because i would really

love to do it i just can't convince myself to pay six hundred dollars for you know a dream but i hope other people have money to to risk on that so you know feel free to back it so i can eventually get it well speaking of their hardware, arriving just in time for the show to give you a first impression is what appears to be a brand new laptop from Purism. So we'll talk about that in just a moment. Any closing thoughts, gentlemen, in the mumble room on the crowdfunder?

Anybody that decided to back it want to chime in? I'll kick it to you for final comment i really wish them all the success having worked on a phone that didn't succeed uh i know this is hard really hard and even if you have a lot of people who are willing you on and are willing to get you like a significant chunk of the way like you went to edge $12 million towards the $30 million target, and I know we didn't hit the target, but we got phones out in the market, and we got an operating system out there.

It was a lot of hard work, and I think they're going to need a lot of help to get this done. I wish them all the best. Todd says just a few years later, all you need is $15 now instead of 30 million. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. I don't know the mobile market well enough to know if that's actually true

or whether you'd get this. I mean, bear in mind, these are two wildly different devices. The Ubuntu Edge was a unicorn a unicorn you know and with everything that phones now already have um yeah but i yeah for it for a two years prior to technology existing right so i don't think i think it's probably reasonable to say the numbers are lower yeah yeah the phone that they're going to be using is an ODM part. So I imagine most of this money will go into funding the required software development. Oh, okay. Well, we will have links in the show notes.

And I definitely would say I'm in the camp of somebody would love to see this work out. To your point about the manufacturing, it seems like it's a shame that this hasn't been, you know, that the way it's gone never really involved the Linux Foundation, because it seems like some sort of group like that, or something that could, for spanning multiple projects, facilitate and build those reliable connections to the actual manufacturing community. Because when we do it, like, re-spin these up

every time, it just can't scale. Maybe somebody's run the numbers and said, we're going to focus on the car instead. Exactly. Oh, I don't know. I don't know, but I'll tell you what. If they ever ship it, I'll run it on Ting. Go over to... Were you going to say something? No, no.

Oh, okay. Oh, you can if you want to. It's all right. Go to linux.ting.com. linux.ting.com. Not to get a burger, although that does sound delicious right now, but to get something even cheaper, and that's your mobile service plan. For just $23 per month, that's the average cost of a Ting plan. That includes your minutes, your messages,

and your megabytes. The reason why is it starts at just $6 a month, and then it's your usage on top of that. Nationwide coverage, no contracts, no quote-unquote agreements. You just pay for any pairs that you use. And by pairs, I mean minutes, messages, or megabytes. That's what I call them now. A fair price for however much you talk, however much you text, or however much data you use. You're always in control with their great tools, both on phone and their web app. You can buy a device directly from Ting. Really nice. The whole line of solid devices. Things that I think often people don't think of immediately when they think about getting, like, a value Android device.

Ting is really good about spotting devices. They're going to get updates, or they've got good functionality, or they've got great battery life, and they're a great value. Of course, they've also got all the Cadillac devices, both on the iOS and Android side. They have really fantastic customer service. But my favorite feature of Ting is paying for what I use because I feel like I'm in that hipster cord cutter for the new mobile age. I live on Wi-Fi. I live on Wi-Fi.

I live on Wi-Fi. Yeah, right. Like I download my podcast before I leave. I pin my music to my device. I have photos backed up only when I'm on Wi-Fi. It's perfect for when I'm on the go. I just, all of it's local. And, you know, I don't want to be on the phone anymore when I'm driving anyways.

And those are really only times I'm off Wi-Fi these days. Or if I'm be out shopping or doing something on the holidays. And that's why it's perfect for Ting to fill in the gaps. CDMA and GSM networks, no contracts, no determination fee, just $6 a month, plus Uncle Sam's tax. And then whatever you use.

I love it. Some months I'm a little busier. Some months I'm not busy at all. It all really averages out to just an incredible price. You're saving money. It's amazing. Also, when you're over at Ting, linux. Some months I'm not busy at all. It all really averages out to just an incredible price. You still end up saving money. It's amazing. Also, when you're over at Ting, linux.ting.com, check out their blog. They got a blog post about Ting offering internet, home internet service in the future. Yeah.

Read about that. I'm just going to have to move right over there. linux.ting.com. So just in time for the show, the Librem came in here. This, I believe, is a replacement for the one that I kick-started a long time ago that had some cooling issues. Do you want to do the honors of the unboxing? Oh, sure. I did a little cutting of the tape, so that

way you wouldn't have to, like, futz with that on the show, but ladies and gentlemen, right now, Mr. Wes Payne is extracting a sub-box from an outer white box. It says nothing but Purism on it. He pulls it out. It says Notebook on the box. It says nothing but Purism on it. It pulls it out. It says notebook on the box. All right, Wes.

This looks like your average laptop box, just as you would expect. I would turn on the inside webcam, but our Logitech camera died. If anybody has any recommendations for really great wide-angle, high-definition cameras that work really well under Linux, tweet me at ChrisLAS.

All right, so he's opening up the sub box right now. What are your initial impressions, Wes? Very normal packaging. Seems fine. Looks like, you know, it's like I bought an Acer at Costco. Does it feel cold? Is it metal? Like, can you tell?

Oh, it does feel cold, yeah. Here we go. Is it in a plastic wrap there? It is, yes. Styrofoam on the sides. Nicely saved. It was not damaged. Is it heavy?

It's not the lightest, but it feels sturdy. It's in a plastic case. Let's get this out. Oh, yeah. It's dark. It's dark. I'd say it's like a black metal. It's like a midnight... There's nothing on the top surface, which I kind of like. It's elegant.

Oh, look at that. So, let's see. We've got DC power in, two USB 3 slots, headphone jack, SD card reader on the side, and then two more USB ports, HDMI out, and USB-C. Interesting. Not much else, though. There's the power adapter. It doesn't appear to be much of a manual or anything else.

How big is the power brick? Oh, not too bad. No, not bad at all. Pretty standard. Yeah. Yeah. So it's got a pretty or anything else. How big is the power brick? Oh, not too bad. Pretty standard. Yeah. So it's got a pretty big track pad. Typical barrel type power plug here. Purism button there. Oh, and there's

those classic kill switches. So look at there in the hinge of the laptop. You see the kill switches? Right here just underneath the screen. Oh, yeah. Look at that. That's actually not a bad place for this. It's out of the way. So this thing has a 6th generation

i7 processor and it's using Intel graphics. I think it has 16 gigs of RAM and an SSD in there for the storage. I'll do a full review after I've had a chance to play with it. I just got it before the show. There's a little reset button on the bottom too. Really? Like a physical reset. Like a classic PC reset button. I kind of like that's like a really like a physical reset like a classic pc

reset button i kind of like that actually yeah that is kind of nice i think it's using ddr4 ram too which should be you know nice and fast what do you think about the weight and feel of it and maybe give a give a try that keyboard too i i was trying to think of how i i'd say it's it's like a old style macbook keyboard so not the new like the really not the new really flat touch bar keyboard but like the if anybody's tried those yeah right yeah no like it's kind of like that not like a Old-style MacBook keyboard. So not the new really flat touch bar keyboard, but like the... Have anybody tried those? Yeah, right. Yeah, not like that.

You're right. It is kind of like that. Not too much flex. Or like a later generation... Not like a great ThinkPad keyboard, but like one of the more modern ThinkPad keyboards. Yep, the travel's not amazing. I don't particularly like this enter key.

Some keys seem to be a little better than others. What do you think about that trackpad, though? That's pretty good. Yeah, not bad. Big size, nicely offset, and it's a little less smooth than I think I would like. You want to hit the power button? Did you see it

there? I don't know where it is. I don't know where it is on that thing. Top right. Go ahead and power it up. Let's see if it's got a charge. It should be loaded with Pure OS. Yep, it looks like it's powering up. Wow, boom, right there. There's the Purism logo right there. Boom. Wow. And it looks like it's going right into a mem test.

I'm not sure. It looks like it booted right into mem test. Maybe that's all that's on there. That might be the whole that's installed. It's just mem test. Because it just booted right into mem test. I'm good with that, actually. That's fine with me.

I don't know what to put on there, though. So that becomes, maybe that's what I should put Gen 2 on. I thought I'd be trying out PureOS again. Maybe it is. So is that just like their customized firmware image there that has their, I thought that was going to be a Linux bootloader. Or it's just an image on the disk. A rumor has it that Beta 1 of

17.10 is coming out soon. That might be what I put 17.10 on. And by the way, it's silent. You hear that? That's silent. You know hear that? That's silent. You know, I got to give them credit. I got to, you know, it took them a few years, but they really came through.

There is a fan in the same spot on the bottom pretty much. To be fair, the other one was pretty silent until you put it under any load. No, no, it was 24. It was always. It was just full. You boot it on, it was full blast. You're thinking of the Galago. You're thinking of the Galago.

Oh. You're thinking of the Galago Pro. Yeah, no, the Librem was just full blast. So, you know, the other thing that I really got to give them credit for here is they also sent us the Librem 13. They sent it to Noah, and he didn't give it the best of review. So, you know, in the face of all of that, you got to give them credit for still coming through. I don't know if they would have done it if I didn't host this here show, but as an, as one of the,

the note I got from them was as an original backer, they wanted to make it right. And that the timing had nothing to do with with the phone kickstarting. Yeah. But because the kickstart, the phone fundraiser actually got moved up a few weeks and this was just, this has been in manufacturing for much longer than a couple of weeks. Well, I've got to say, I'll be very curious to see what you think of it,

especially after you load Gen 2. I just said I was thinking 1710. Sorry, Chris, did I hear crux? I really am feeling like Beta 1 is going to be when I jump in on 1710 and start living the 1710 lifestyle. And I think Beta 1 is perhaps nigh. The future is nigh. I wouldn't have expected FreeBSD. Wow, dude. That's not what I said at all.

That's not what I said at all. Do you want to hand it over to Beardsley to have him take a look at it? See what he thinks of it. See what the beard thinks of the first impressions. I'd like to hear your thoughts on that trackpad, too, Rikai. It feels really heavy, that's for sure. But that's not necessarily a bad thing so yeah so this is

the libram 15 and this is part of like the second batch they've done of these later models has a core i7 skylake in it i think at 3.1 gigahertz with 16 gigs of ram ddr4 ram at that uh it has a i think 1080p screen and you can do M.2 in it or an MVME drive. I think this one has an M.2. Yeah. And it's got instead of the Windows key, it's got the Purism button. It's got a Theros wireless in it. It's got a hardware kill switch for

the radios, the microphone, and the camera. I'm not a big fan of the trackpad. No? It feels like I'm not just sliding my hand across it. I have to drag really hard. It doesn't feel very smooth. It is a little more frictionless than I would want.

Is it grabby? Grabby is a good term for it. The keyboard, though, I really like. So this is... Does it say on the back there, does it say version 3? Is that what it is? Is that version 3 of the Librem 15? Yep.

Version 3. Version 3 of the Librem 15. There you go 3. Version 3 of the Librem 15. There you go. I'll let you guys know what I think about it after I've spent some time with it. It seems like a nice piece of hardware, though. Yeah, the build quality actually seems really good. And it looks nice.

I would not be ashamed whatsoever to have this in a coffee shop. Yeah. Especially with a few Linux stickers on there. I wonder if I rub my grubby hands on it for a while if my hand oils will smooth up that track bed. Do the hardware kill switches look better than the first revision? Yeah, way better.

Because in the first revision, they were just holes in the side of the laptop with black toggle switches. Oh. And now you don't even notice them, do you, at first? Now they're... I wonder if I could... Can I pull up a picture? Honestly, it feels to me a lot like a very black MacBook. Now the kill switches are underneath the monitor somewhere.

It's hard to explain where they're at, but they're above the F keys below the monitor. There's like a little bit of flex by the hinge on the bottom, but otherwise it's very sturdy. So there you go. The new Librem 15 in-house. How about that? August 31st, says Wimpy.

So that is, the rumors are true, Wimpy. Where'd he go? There you are, Wimpy. Sorry, that was my bad. Say again. Yes, they are. It's August the 31st is the release date for 1710 Beta 1 for the participating flavors.

And I'm doing the corralling of various flavors to do the release management for that this time around. And if you go and grab a daily image for any of your favorite flavors today, there's a good chance that that's probably what will get shipped on Thursday. So at this point, is mostly what we're seeing what we're going to get?

Like the look of it and the major software and all that? Like pretty much now we're there yeah so obviously proper ubuntu doesn't participate in beta 1 you'll see that for the first time in beta 2 a month from now okay okay all of the flavors are participating in beta 1 which is out thursday right okay so including theate that I've heard of before, I would assume. Yes, that's looking very tasty for this release. Maybe I should put that on the leave room.

Yeah, I think you should. Yeah, you totally should. I'll turn on compass. I'll get my mutiny setup going. That's exactly right. I do like Kaja. And I do like that software boutique so you do get now that there's the super key i mean what's not to love that is true that is very true probably live in there for

quite some time and the hud all up in your face and everything yeah which is now locally integrated by the way oh really for beta one nice wow wow this thing is this this this 1710 release not just for ubuntu proper but for some of these flavors too, is really something. What the hell happened? Yeah, I think everyone's working really hard on their 1710 releases. It seems like in the last couple of releases, like, you know, enough things have been changed or stabilized in the below parts of the distro that there's really, you know, time now or effort that can be spent on making all these things we've all been excited for. Well, it's good timing for me since i'm distro hopping right now so the machine i you know it's great as i don't really have a horse in this race so the machine i'm recording this show on

is running arch the machine i'm sitting in front of like showing web pages and stuff is running solus and the machine the mumble room is on is on ubuntu lts so i'm pretty much like i'm sitting pretty and whichever way this thing goes, I'm pretty much happy. I'll just, I'm just sitting back and enjoying it and just trying out different distros at this point. It's kind of a nice. Have you heard of the Church of Neon? You know, don't worry, buddy, I got your back. You know, it's funny is I do still have, I still have a system at home running plasma and I, it's my one, like it's still my one plasmaasma system, and I sit down at it, and I fire it up, and I'm like, you know, this is so smooth and so nice.

I really enjoyed it. So, yeah, it's still a- You're just a sucker for K-Win. It's still a contender. It's still a contender. All right, Wes, well, you know what we got to do? We got to get out of here. Enough Linux for today.

We must go. There is tech snap to be had Mumbleroom thank you very much for being here I really appreciate it guys I think you just want to play with the purism

that's true that is true that is totally true that is totally true thank you to our discord chat for hanging out with us at discord.me slash jupiter colony

thank you to Beardsley where should people find you Beard? rec.net r-e-k-d dot net you can of course get more of Wes on tech snap anywhere

else you want to send folks at wes pain on twitter boom check out youtube.com slash chris fisher i just posted a brand new vlog today where i go inside a very creepy barn thanks for joining us see you right back here next tuesday Thank you. all right we did a podcast we did a podcast. We did a podcast. Thank you, Mumble Room. Thank you. Yeah. That's some good Mumble today. Thank you, Discord. So we got to pick our title, and I thought maybe should we do something around the Librem, the purism, like the hope of the free Linux phone, something like that.

What do you guys think? Bueller? Librem free phone. What about Librem 5, A New Hope? Oof. The New Hope thing's played, man. It's played. It's played.

I don't know. Okay, how about Librem 5, The Phantom Menace? What do you think? Anybody? Mumbler Room thoughts on titles? Mobile Linux Purity. We could just call it pure Linux. No.

No. No. What about... Something about the free phone dream. Should it just be the free phone dream? The free phone nightmare continues. The free phone nightmare continues. The free phone nightmare. The free phone nightmare is not bad.

Own freedom. The free phone nightmare. Floss nightly. Phoning it in. Oh, I think we've maybe done that. Yeah, I think that does sound familiar. It does. We're so funny.

It's not our fault. It's our culture. The free phone nightmare is kind of my current leading. I like that one. It's pretty good. Libram phones hone. No, it doesn't do that, I swear. That's deliciously ironic.

I like that.