LINUX Unplugged - Episode 226: Bitcoin for Linux Users | LUP 226

Episode Date: December 6, 2017

Why Bitcoin is the next Linux, the Gentoo Challenge is in full swing, and we catch you up on the latest community news, a throwback app pick & more!

Since we're in pre-show mode, we should crack open our beers and talk a little open-source retro gaming hardware. It's called the Game Shell. And I think Popey was saying on the Ubuntu podcast that he's a backer of this thing. It looks just like a Game Boy with a few more buttons on it. And, of course, it's a modular open-source hardware that is meant to run classic games. And the price is pretty reasonable. Like, you can get the early bird price at $108.

And they have real, already built hardware playing Doom, of course. That's the handheld one, eh? Yeah, it looks just like an old retro Game Boy. The old black and white Game Boy. The problem with that is, how likely is it going to be that Nintendo shuts this down

because it looks too similar? Maybe. You think? Boy, that would be pretty awful. Nintendo is pretty heavy-handed with their copycats. They are pretty litigious. The thing is, is you have seen other products kind of like this. This is the most Game Boy looking.

It is colored screen. One of the pictures they show it being black and white, but it does have a colored screen. And, of course, it runs different emulators. It's got support for Lua and Python. Of course, it's an open source operating system. The hardware is open, of course, of course, it runs different emulators. It's got support for Lua and Python. Of course, it's an open-source operating system. The hardware is open, of course, of course, of course. Of course. Yeah.

I think it's pretty neat. They got a pretty reasonable set of goals and stretch goals, and they're doing well on funding. They wanted $50,000. And as we record this episode, they've raised $252,509. Yeah. They've got 2252,509. Hey-o! Yeah, they've got 2,280 backers.

Not too shabby. No, they're doing great. So that's the game show. It's a Kickstarter. So, you know, the usual Kickstarter disclaimers apply. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 226 for December 5th, 2017. Hello, Wes. Hello, Wes, and hello, Beard. Hello. Guys, today's a big episode on the show. You know, we do that from time to time. Just sneak them in.

It happens. I don't know how this happens for an unplugged show, but coming up on today's humble podcast. That's right. We're going to kick things off with a new Runs Linux this week, just for old time's sake. We'll get into that, then some local community news, and then something that Google's doing to get people into open source. Those of you looking for the perfect remote desktop solution, we may have you covered. Say it's not so. It could be so.

It could be. And then we have some great news for you VLC lovers. I think really, really great news. And then, before we get to the Gen 2 challenge this week, I want to take a moment, if I could, carve out a little bit of your time and tell you a little bit why Linux users, more than just about any other segment of the internet, should probably care a little bit about Bitcoin. So Bitcoin for Linux users, why you should care about it, and specifically, I'm going to answer a couple of common questions that I think Bitcoin doubters

have. Not that I'm trying to convince anybody, but I just want to give you a different perspective and maybe help put some context into why the hell as we record this episode, one single Bitcoin is over 11,000 green US backs. What is going on? Well, there is an expert in the Bitcoin community who I've pulled a few quotes from that'll explain how Bitcoin compares to services like PayPal, how to think about all these other cryptocurrencies, these altcoins that are coming out and what they mean. And is this going to be an open source mess? And then the potentials that Bitcoin has for charity as well as why, without question, even if it's not Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies are 100 percent here. They're never going back in the bottle. They are here forever. And I'll kind of give you the ironclad reasoning behind all of

that, too. So this is really the pitch on why you should care as a Linux user, because it's an open source money protocol. And it's going to take over the world in one degree, not like in like, like, like, like the way Linux has, right, It's easy to overstate, but it's also potentially serious. If you were back in the early 90s right now looking at Linux, that's what Bitcoin is. And so it's going to be an implementation detail that is incredibly valuable, just like Linux is for Android and a bunch of set-top boxes. And I'm going to explain why. And so that's why you should care about Bitcoin, because it's at the early stage that Linux was. And it's also an open source project that's going to change people's lives.

It's going to create new work. And the thing you're going to see a lot of is tons and tons and tons of hype. In fact, you're already starting to see blockchain apps coming out. Oh, yeah. You see this CryptoKitties app that everybody's talking about. CryptoKitties. And there's a bunch of other ones that are coming out now that help you invest in Bitcoin. And Joe and I recently talked about one that's partnering up with Yala for Sailfish.

Is that right? And they're creating a zip currency that developers will use inside the development community and bug testers. And they're going to create their own cryptocurrency for development on Sailfish. All kinds of interesting things are happening. And we'll give you some of the background, but we won't take too much of your time because nominally today we are going to get into the Bitcoin Challenge. We're going to kick it off officially here in a few minutes. So get your systems ready.

Then we're going to check in with folks in the virtual lug and see how they're doing. And then we'll reveal the desktop environment that the audience voted on for west to build in our gen 2 challenge yeah so without going any further let's stop right now and bring in that virtual lug time appropriate greetings mumble room hello howdy i love it every single time hello guys it is good to hear from you So let's kick it off with a little community news. And this one just sort of, I don't know if you could really classify this as community, but for nostalgia purposes, for old time's sake, I wanted to start off with Arun's Linux this week.

This one's a little odd. It is a little odd. Amazon has released an Ubuntu-driven AWS DeepLens cam. And it's got a 4-megapixel machine learning camera with AWS hooks that runs Ubuntu on an Intel Cherry Trail system on a chip. So it's an Atom processor. It's got a HD-ready AWS DeepLens development camera. It's for machine learning. Available for $250 in a pre-order.

learning available for $250 in a pre-order. To describe the look of it is like a big boxy webcam bolted on top of like a gigabyte nook, like a tiny nook. Yeah, it does look like that. This thing's running Ubuntu 16.04.

Or maybe like a cute robot with no hands. Yeah, like the beginnings of it. One that is aware of its environment but can't interact it in any way. With a nice how circle. Yeah, it does. of it. Yeah. Yeah, one that is aware of its environment but can't interact it in any way. Right. It's just watching and brooding. With a nice how circle. Yeah, it does, doesn't it? It does have a circle. Oh, man.

So it's billed as the world's first video camera optimized to run machine learning models and perform inference on the device, inference from the images. It's Wi-Fi enabled, and it's working with the Amazon SageMaker development framework for managing machine learning models. Now, that's something that I'm just sort of tossing in there, but that's kind of a big deal. Like the models around machine learning are sort of like the recipes, right? And so if you have a marketplace to share these recipes, then you can take your hardware and you can go grab a recipe, and all of a sudden you can take your box and you can start doing machine learning, just any average Joe. And so we got the SageMaker development framework for managing machine learning model processing

on this thing. And some of the things that it can detect, there's like, I think, a category of 30 different activities that this thing is aware of. It obviously has face detection and object detection. It can detect the difference between a cat and a dog, which is similar to Google's TensorFlow AI Vision Kit, which is available for the Raspberry Pi Zero. But this thing can also detect different activities that you're doing, ranging from brushing your teeth to playing guitar, probably baiting and other things. I would imagine this thing is going to be able to recognize. And you'll be able to train it to learn new behaviors as well.

And then it all can talk back up to AWS. 1604 LTS on an Intel Atom. The thing has 106 gigaflops of performance. The Cherry Trail Atom processor with 8 gigs of RAM, a microSD slot, 16 gigabytes of flash, which can be expanded, has dual band Wi-Fi, USB ports, HDMI out, an audio jack, reset buttons, and a power jack. It's pretty well specced.

Does 14 images a second by default. So it's not like it's, it also does have a video mode, but by default it's taken 14 images a second. Yeah. I mean, but it does bring machine learning down to a price point for an individual because it's only 250 bucks. So that's what this is for. This isn't a consumer product.

This is for people at home, enthusiasts or developers to learn machine learning. Is that because I'm struggling to understand why the hell anybody would ever want a product like this. Well, yeah, in traditional AWS fashion, they've made it as confusing as possible for someone who isn't already invested in their ecosystem to understand what the heck is going on. So if I'm leveraging the rest of their machine learning infrastructure, this thing could be extremely handy. Yeah.

Well, if you read their PR announcement, you'll see they reference their own products like 17 times. So that'll give you a sense of how interconnected it can be. Yeah, you're right. It's a cheap way of leveraging AWS to do machine learning interfacing with the real world. Yeah, okay. All right. Was somebody in the mumble room going to chime in?

Yeah, actually, he covered it all. Okay. Yeah. I guess, okay, I can see in that context. It doesn't creep me out as bad in that context. Yeah. Just where's this going eventually? Is this going in Echoes eventually?

Maybe. In some regards, I wouldn't mind my Echo telling me when Dylan's come home from school versus when Abby's come home. You got the video Echo, so it's already like 60% of the way there. I also see it as their cloud play. They're launching more and more products to help. The more machine learning you do, that's a lot of math, a lot of numbers that end up being crunched somewhere aws obviously wants you to crunch those numbers on its cloud so if they can make like development kits that's why i have all these other things like cloud nine they're like cloud desktop anything they can get you to like if it's

easier to integrate with them and then when you go to production and spend real money that's where you go right you're already there and i think they are having a better strategy vision on this than Google at this moment because of that point precisely that actually you will get to see the data yourself. It doesn't just get crunched on their servers, but you actually get to be able to get the data back because of how their services are modeled. And in comparison, Google is not doing that. It's doing the Google Assistant that you can just put it in any place and you can just use their service as a whole package. It is easier entry, but we don't have the control there. The other thing it underscores just though is that Amazon sure uses the heck out of Linux.

It's here, it's in their data centers, it's all over the place. Yeah, and they're putting 16.04 Ubuntu on there. It's an x86 box. I do think this is also kind of a thing where they are giving a cheap product to get developers to expand the capabilities of their framework for them. Yeah, I mean, they can probably take advantage of those models too, right? So that makes sense. And if it's a price point that's around the cost of a high-end Echo or Kindle that you can use to get into machine learning and then it plugs into the AWS infrastructure. All right. It makes sense.

It makes sense. Plus they also get feedback on what developers doing this kind of stuff actually want for basically free. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, clever Amazon. Mm-hmm. So let's talk about something else that's clever.

Linux Fest Northwest, April 28th and 29th, 2018, coming up pretty soon, surprisingly. Yeah, the April 28th and 29th, they move it around from time to time. They sure do. This is the 19th year of LinuxFest. Wow. Yeah, and I feel like they're at a transition point, because different conferences have come up over those years,

obviously. A lot of commercial conferences in the last 19 years have come up. So they're trying something a little new. They're doing a message in a bottle theme, which I think is interesting. They say they're encouraging but not requiring that presenters touch on a theme, message in a bottle, security, containerization, and personal data. They don't have to follow that, but they do have a call out for papers right now if you're going to be at LinuxFest Northwest or call out for presenters. You know, why not help them make it a good 19 years? Because it is a transition point for them where they can become a slightly different

style conference. Yeah. And it'll be interesting to see which direction they go. I would also say it's just such a friendly event. Like, if you haven't spoke before, you want to speak, you're not sure, like, well, what is this conference? Like, you will have a great audience. You'll have lots of people at your talk, most likely, if it's Linux or anything close to

that. And everyone's just in a happy, sharing, open-source mood. Yeah, and it's a good town in the Pacific Northwest to visit. And even if your talk goes terribly, just go get some delicious food in Bellingham. Yeah, Bellingham's got some great restaurants, it's got a great vibe going, and it's got tons of beer. Now, it's a little busy during Linux Fest Northwest weekend, so you've got to plan for that a little bit.

But there's also just a lot of social events going on at the hotels, there's game nights going on, people sitting around talking about Linux and all that stuff. LinuxFestNorthwest.org if you want to know more, if you want to maybe submit a paper. We're going to be there. We're going to be doing something different. Instead of us sitting there like emceeing the booth, it'll be different productions happening live at LinuxFest that people can tune in for. Maybe some shows that aren't traditionally live. But while those shows are being recorded, if it's one that not you or I or Noah is on, we'll be out on the floor going to the sessions, talking to people. We'll be out and about.

The whole experience. Yeah, it's going to be really good, I think. But Chris, how are we going to the sessions, talking to people. We'll be out and about. The whole experience. It's going to be really good, I think. But Chris, how are we going to get JB into a bottle? Yeah. Well, I could talk about security and personal data. Containerization, I feel like that just sort of turns me off a little bit when I hear that because it's almost like it's slabbed in there. Like now you've got to talk about containerization. You've got to talk about Docker. We've got to talk about containers because that's mandatory.

At a conference, you've got to talk about containers. In fact, we should even create ContainerCon. That's the only reason to have a conference is to talk about containers. It's okay, Christian. You can just go to DockerCon. Well, I've been to ContainerCon, and I've been to DockerCon, and I've been to LinuxCon, and I've been to all of these where they just go all in on containerization, and it sort of defocuses it. Instead of just putting it all in one place, it sort of diffuses it, and it's not as useful. It could be different with a convention like LinuxFest Northwest, though, because it's more community-focused.

Yeah, you've got people in the industry coming to do talks. It's a different thing, so I'm curious to see how it goes. I like that they're trying a theme. And if anybody was going to do it right, and you're going to get the right voices in the conversation, it's going to be at LinuxFest, at least around here. So check it out, linuxfestnorthwest.org. And now we have just a little bit of hardware news to get to. This is sort of the last breaking news, really, in the last couple of days.

And this story is getting more and more traction, and it seems to be a good way to get attention these days, and it's disabling the Intel management engine. So we first start out with Purism. They announced that they'd be disabling the management engine on future computers going forward. And then a few weeks after that, System76 announced that they'll be rolling out

firmware updates to disable the Intel management engine on some of the laptops sold in the last year. And then some eagle-eyed Redditors noticed that Dell has begun selling computers that can be configured with an Intel vPro ME and operable custom order config. Is that right? Yeah, no Intel ME on the Dells, too. So it seems... Sort of subtly. Yeah, without much fanfare.

Now, the interesting difference between Purism, System76, and Dell is the Dell one is the only one that's actually shipping. What System76 and Purism have done is have announced, which is funny because that's not how the news articles read. They read like if you were to buy a laptop today from either one of them, it would be shipped without Intel ME. And so you see that sort of propagate in the different blogs and Pharonix did this and the different outlets just ran with the headlines. Yeah, yeah. As it just spreads out. outlets just ran with the headlines. Yeah, yeah. As it just spreads out. And now, I've actually seen

in comment threads that, well, Pop! OS has custom code to disable Intel ME. It goes from they haven't even shipped it yet to Pop! OS has been custom engineered to disable ME. That's what the Pop! is for. I'm really curious to see how the System76 solution plays out because they're going to

be delivering it through their PPA, which means you'll have to be running Ubuntu. So if you're putting a different distribution than a modern Ubuntu on your hardware right now, you're gonna have to switch back. And I think they're still yet to announce exactly which models and which versions of the models will be getting the firmware updates. So that's also to be developed. And I think Purism has also said that they'll be working potentially on updating some of their previous models. But I really don't think anybody gives a shit. I mean, I know some people do. I mean, I kind of care.

I care on a – obviously on a technical level, I think it's shit. And I care that it could be vulnerable. But just even seeing the sloppy, inaccurate coverage of these announcements and how people just propagate it around as if it's now done. It's just happened. And it's fact. It all reeks of armchair technologists who are taking a moral high ground position. But at the end of the day, when it comes time to buy a new rig, they're going to get a ThinkPad. They're going to get something. They're going to get a MacBook. They're going to get a machine that Intel and management engine would be a factor. But I don't think it's really more than a small percentage of people really care. And those people are probably already buying ThinkPads

with core boots that are two or three years old that have been retrofitted. Yeah, the people that are covering it, they just found a story that would get them clicks, and then they found a nice bow to tie it to them. I'm not saying that if I could buy a computer and the computer that I wanted had an option to disable management engine, I would choose that option every single time. But it's not going to move the needle on which computer I buy.

I'm going to pick a computer that best suits my needs and the management engine thing, it's happened. It's just like the baseband. If this was a problem, then everybody who is on Twitter and on Reddit making a big deal about this wouldn't be using cell phones because of the baseband. Yep. It'll become the new normal, just like the Equifax breach becomes the new normal.

All these things just become the new normal, and we make a big stink about it, but it actually reflects in our accuracy. Because all these armchair technologists and all these armchair Linux enthusiasts on the R-Linux subreddit, they're kicking around like it's already come and gone. You can buy a computer today. Operating systems have been custom fitted to disable the management firmware as if that's even possible. Nobody really cares. It's just like this something, hurrah, we're better at kind of thing. Yeah, the way it felt to me was that before all of this, before that recent vulnerability, you had people that were concerned about it. and it's this small niche market that has valid concerns. Maybe they're journalists or other people that are really concerned about this and are probably the people

running Corboot or as you say. Exactly. There's definitely a market for it. Right. And then there's this, but then you had these people that were previously like, yeah, whatever, it's not a big deal. Suddenly, for like a split second, they're concerned about it. But you know that in six months from now, everyone in that camp is just going to be back. It feels like the Linux user equivalent of changing your avatar.

I don't know. I think there's actually slightly more to that. I mean, when you think about that we're moving to and touching a topic that was mentioned in the beginning of the show, that Bitcoin and, you know, you're going to carry your money now yourself. So far you trust on an institution to do it, your bank.

And the more you start doing that, the more you care about that security. The control you do have on your device. And it always starts with a nurse, like us. Yep. Yeah, I do agree. The research thing, you do it, it kind of evolves, and then all of a sudden it's needed. But there are other products on the market.

So there are other products to support this use case of having completely open firmware, like if you look at the Talos 2 workstation, they're taking IBM's new power CPUs and they're going to build a workstation and that has entirely open firmware for the entire chain. And so if you are interested in going that route,

it is expensive, but you can do it. Unfortunately, it's not a mobile solution, but it's like a step in the right direction, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, see, the thing about all this stuff about disabling the management engine, I do think it's a good thing, and I'm really glad that researchers are pushing that and making the discoveries that they're making. But it isn't a guaranteed solution. See, they're flying blind. And what they've managed to do is they've managed to take out chunks of the management engine

but still get the CPU to boot. And that's where we're at right now. That doesn't necessarily – it's a black box. Am I wrong? You do need parts of the management engine or, in AMD's case, the PSP in order to boot because they are actually critical. They do bootstrap the processor to some extent. That's what I'm saying.

It's like they've taken out a chunk of it, but it's not completely gone. It's still there. No, but it is modularized enough that you're basically eliminating anything that's not needed to boot or is not needed to keep the system running. It feels like you're not necessarily objecting to any of the ongoing... Like two months ago as Purism in particular, they've done

some good work, you know, continually to explore this space. There was like a reasonable amount of coverage. I did not object to any of that. It's just more, you know, continually to explore this space, there was like a reasonable amount of coverage. I did not object to any of that. It's just more, I think more like this, the inaccurate and recent explosion of coverage without really understanding or by people who aren't really invested in that effort. Yeah, I think that's probably, that's probably a good summary of it. Not to mention, you know, Dell is getting credit for already having this stuff shipping, but my guess would be that they already had that option many, many, many months ago for

the small sector of the market that is very security-focused. Or the Chinese sector, and it's a huge sector potentially. It could be the other way around. It could be because if I'm a non-U.S. – if I'm like a company in Iran that's buying a bunch of Dell laptops or Syria or China, anywhere where the U.S. government might want to peek in on what I'm doing. Yeah, you don't want an American company being able to look into your CVU. That's why they don't like Microsoft either. So, Mr. Payne, what do you think? Are you ready to officially kick off

the Gentoo Challenge? Let's do it! Oh, boy! All right, Wes. We're officially going into the Gentoo den. The virtual machine has spun up. It smells weird in here. What's going on over there?

Well, we're getting ready to build ourselves a kernel. You've heard about it. The one, the only Linux. All right. So now Wes is off to the races. He'll be building his system. So it's not yet bootable. No, not yet bootable.

You think we might get bootable? Because the kernel is going to take a while to build unless you build a really lean one. It might take the rest of the episode just to get through the kernel. We're about to find out. All right. We'll check back in on you, okay? All right. So there you go.

The Gen 2 challenge has officially kicked off. Now, real quick, did he do any special things with the kernel compiling? Are you there yet? No, I'm in the menu config right now. So if there's people who have some opinions about how this kernel should go, we can also fix it up later. I mean, we just got to get to booting first. Well, all right. Yeah, we got to get to booting.

That's true. That is true. But if we have any quick tips from the – yeah, go ahead. I have an idea for Wes, for his kernel. Okay. I have my kernel backup on my Google Drive. And I'm willing to share – let me just finish. Let me just finish.

I have it saved, and I can help him with it if he wants me to hmm that would be an interesting cheat that would be but would it be more would it take more time to rig up a way to transfer that thing and then get it in your vm than it would to just config and build well here's the thing it's almost fully set up you just have to edit it it kind of feels like cheating though it feels like cheating a bit dude it might be not it's not cheating it's just he downloads the dot config file and puts it in listen i say it in his he puts it in his um user src linux folder and he can just you know change it to his hardware it's not that hard yeah i say we wing it and the mistakes are show content we build it live i mean we got to build it live we

got to build it we got to build it yeah that's probably if you build it they will come because part of the problem right yeah like that's part of the fun of this thing is it's not like i'm sitting at home you know trying having a good time building a beautiful system it's sort of like we're doing the experience we're doing the experience. We're doing the experience here. Trying to build some Gentoo on the side. Yeah, yeah, all right. I kind of like it. It's exciting. So Wes, he's off to the races right now. Yeah, it won't be the prettiest kernel I've ever built, that's for sure.

But it will be a kernel. All right. We will check in, say, towards the end of the show. So yeah, that's going over here in the Gentoo corner, okay? We're leaving the Gentoo corner now. And with that, let's take a moment and thank linux academy this week linuxacademy.com slash unplug that's where you go to sign up for a free seven day trial i am super jealous i think it's debil wasn't it jabil debil yes i believe so check this out wes

debil now hit the place he works when you sign up and you start working there they hand out linux academy subscriptions to get the team up to speed. How brilliant is that? I think a lot of businesses should look into this because there was always training budgets. And this is something that is going to snap in perfectly with that kind of system. It's a great platform to learn more about every Linux, cloud, and DevOps topic with hands-on scenario-based labs with instructors that can help you whenever you get stuck. And and learning paths if you want to go down for specific types of content, like a very specific track that you just need to get up to speed on. Or if you're going for certifications, they've got training that's dedicated to really immerse yourself,

and they also have the whiz-bang sort of practice exam and quizzes approach, so whatever works better for you. And they have cloud servers they'll spin up on demand when you need them, a course schedule if you're busy, especially with the frickin' holidays coming up. Trust me, this is the best thing ever. They'll help you pick a course and set a time frame to fit to your schedule and your learning goals. And then they have a public profile where you or your employer or a potential employer can see the courses that you've completed,

iOS and Android apps that you can study on the frickin' go, and study tools that you can take with you, like the guides or the lesson audio and your personal notebook and different tools that are offline that you can just use as reference or study as you need. And they're always adding new stuff. That's what makes the subscription valuable.

LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to sign up for a free seven-day trial. LinuxAcademy.com. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Linux Academy. So we noticed that the elementary project has been keeping the public up to date on their endeavors with the App Center and other things that are happening over there. And we just happen to have Mr. Daniel Foray from the Elementary OS Project

in the mumble room again this week. Daniel, good to see you again. And what the heck is going on over there? You guys are just on top of it with this stuff. Yeah, well, you know, people have been asking about stats, and so I kind of poked everybody, and we pulled together some fun numbers if you want to take a look at them. Yeah, okay.

So I noticed right out of it that the new version of Calendar Close was 28 reported issues. Sounds pretty good. So it's like these are the core apps, and these are the things we've been doing to them. What's your highlights here? Okay, so this represents our – this last blog post was our our updates updates for november so we've got a calendar update app uh we've got a few little bugs fixing here but the big the big ticket items actually are are still app center is where we're putting huge amounts of focus yeah it looks like it looks like a new automated test we're added is that like automated for

what what are you testing with these new automated tests were added. Is that like automated for what? What are you testing with these new automated tests in the App Center? This sounds really fancy. Yeah, so when a developer submits their application to App Center, the first thing it does is it goes through an automated test suite. So before it ever gets to a human reviewer, we run all these tests on it. And since you're connected with GitHub, then we can kick back issues to you automatically from the test suite.

So it might take a while of robot testing for a while before you even really get to human reviewer. So we can do reviews really quickly with this way. That is really great. Wow. I love it. And I noticed then you do have the OK. All right. OK.

OK, here we go. We got some real numbers here. We got so 70,000 downloads from the App Center. Wow. Is that the whole run of the App Center, 70,000? Is that the whole thing? That's just this month. What?

That is crazy. Wow. That's fantastic. That is amazing. Elementary OS was downloaded 61,000 times with about 77% of those coming from closed platforms, which I think is always the goal of the project there is to convert a bunch of those users over. And $132 were paid out to developers this month.

70 app releases this month. Holy crap. Wow. That's really taken off, Dan. I mean, I think it's kind of a hit. Yeah, it's been pretty crazy to see um you know that's the 70 70 releases a release is either a new app or an update we've got uh 65 total apps in the store right now so that means some apps uh updated more than more than once this month

so we're getting regular updates up to users and i think i think it's pretty neat jeez well uh i'm i every time we talk about this after afterwards, I, I, I walk away from the show and go, I kind of want to try this out. I want to just give it a go again. It's been, it's been a little while since I didn't, I haven't checked it out since it first launched. Um, I like it. How do you guys handle firmware updates and stuff like that? How does, how does that get like these Intel ME stuff? There was say some firmware update that came around to fix stuff like we've seen in the past, what happens in elementary OS for that? We don't have a GUI yet hooked up for that. I think the plan is to use FWUPT, right, as the kind of standard. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah. Well, I will link to the post lots of nice screenshots, too.

I really like the design of these apps. Just all good stuff. I got nothing but good stuff to say. This has got to be one of the best distributions that I'm not currently running. I got to put it. I had a laptop. It goes so well on my XPS 13 laptop. Oh, yeah.

I bet it's just beautiful. The edge-to-edge high DPI. Oh, man. It's nice. So I think that's the laptop I'm going to put this back on and try this stuff out. Wow, I can't believe that. 70,000 downloads in the month. That's great.

That's a really solid number. It shows you that your users are going in there and really trying it out. I think that's pretty good. It really makes me think, too, that if you introduce some new users into the elementary ecosystem, they would get a really nice idea about what this Linux world can be. So, Dan, what about the possibility of something like one day I could go in there and install Telegram or Chrome? Is that possible, like with Flatpaks or Snaps?

Is that somewhere this could go? Or is it always going to be just stuff that's been built specifically for the platform? We want to keep it to just stuff that's been specifically built for the platform. And we've actually seen in our Reddit and other places that our users want this too. And without even us suggesting it, we constantly get suggestions of, I want to be able to hide apps that come from Ubuntu and Debian. I don't want to see them. I just want App Center apps.

Yeah, because they wanted them to match the aesthetic and fit in with the overall design theme. So that makes sense. So what would be the solution? Yeah, and they know that these apps have been tested and work on the platform. Right. So what would be the solution? Say I want to switch over to elementary OS for a bit, and I want to get Telegram and Chrome and some of those things set up.

What would be my best solution on elementary OS? Our stance on sideloading outside apps not from the store is that you should use Flatpak or Snap. Okay. And because it's, you know, we're built on the same Ubuntu 16.04 base, so Snap works great. Flatpak works great. It's the same stuff you're used to on other Linux systems. So how do you install Chrome?

Me, personally, I still grab the... The dev? Yeah, and it's not a PPA. It's a repository. Yeah that's what i set up yeah yeah yeah and they set all that up for you for future updates for your convenience yeah okay i'm gonna give it a go i think pretty soon um i really like the aesthetic of it and i think that app center has got to i got to check that out there's some cool stuff i've been waiting for a distribution to get that right um since before the Software Center was ever a thing on Ubuntu.

And since maybe Click and Run. Right. Oh, gosh. Yeah, I think it's since Click and Run I've been waiting for this to get done right. So I'm really pleased to see this. Good work, Dan. Thanks, man.

All right. Was there anything else from the lug there before we move on to something kind of cool? Something getting young people involved? I have a quick question. Go for it, Ben. Can you use apt-get on this distro, or can you not? Sure you can.

It's Ubuntu LTS underneath the... Okay, I was just curious. That's all I had to ask. Yeah, you can go to town. If you want to go that direction, I don't know. Yeah, well, that's what I'm used to. So if I did install it, that's what I would probably end up using personally. That's just me.

So, Wes, are you familiar with Google Coding? I am not. I wasn't really super familiar with it either, but it's been going on since 2010. They've had over 4,500 students from 99 countries involved in a contest. Now, it's for kids, so maybe that's why I didn't get it. Well, it's like the kid version of the Summer of Code.

Exactly. So it's running right now until January 17, 2008. And I think they're still accepting submissions. So I'm kind of putting this out there just in case anybody that's younger in our audience might be interested in something like that. Students choose the tasks that they wish to work on from the following categories, which are coding, documentation, training, outreach, research, quality assurance, and user interface. Then students will earn prizes for a successful completion of tasks. And one of the organizations that's participating in Google Code-In this year is Ubuntu. So this could be a great opportunity if you want to work with Python or JavaScript or

Snapcraft or work on the GNOME desktop environment or UC or C++, there are tasks that are available for people that want to do this. And so you just subscribe, you get in there, and then you can go look at the tasks that Ubuntu has put up there. And some of them are not even really to necessarily go directly into Ubuntu. Like this one's just package and publish your first Node.js snap. Install the Ubuntu 17.10 desktop. I think that's pretty doable. Translate Ubuntu components. And there's some ones that would genuinely get a student involved in creating open source. And this work goes upstream. And Google's flipping the bill here for this. That's great.

Yeah. So it's Google Code-In. And it's going right now, November 28th through January 17th. And I will link to the Ubuntu entry if you want to get involved there. There's a few other organizations that are in there. But this is pretty cool. And it's a great chance to get some work on some legitimate open source software and have Google behind the whole thing

and orchestrating it all. You know what I'd like to see? They have this for the kids. They have Summer of Code for the university students. What about something just to connect people that have free time to projects? Like a bug... Well, there's bug bounties,

but yeah, there's nothing that's really taken off. Yeah. Different projects have different solutions, but yeah. Like us. We need somebody to help us with our bots. I think one of the benefits of things like Code-In and Summer of Code is that there's a central place to look at all these different projects that want all these different things done. Yes, exactly.

That's the value. That's the value of it. There's like 500 organizations that are involved in Summer of Code now. Yes. You can just go to one place and go through whatever projects might interest you. Organizations and projects. And now Code-In is kind of getting – it's not the same scale, but it's getting more and more popular. I mean, it's been going for a few years.

Yeah. Plus something like Summer of Code offers like sometimes monetary incentives as well. Yeah, I wasn't – I didn't look to see what the monetary incentives were for code-in, but they did say prizes and whatnot. I imagine it gets a little different when you're – so here's a – upon successful completion of tasks, eligible students can earn prizes, digital certificates, T-shirts, and hoodies. And grand prize winners will receive a trip to Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California for themselves and a parent or legal guardian for four nights in June of 2018. Plus, that's pretty great. You know, it probably could maybe be a stand-in for some homework if it's involved with school. Well, imagine if you're like a high school student.

What a great addition to your resume. Talk about getting some real – putting, you know, Ubuntu on there and working with Google. Those are imagine if you're like a high school student. What a great addition to your resume. Talk about getting some real way and putting Ubuntu on there and working with Google. Those are things that go on a resume. That was, I think,

the real value there. Just one last quick Ubuntu little community news item. Just an update here. If you're a fan of All-in-One boot CD

that that project, you know, the Linux AIO is the ISO image that you download and it's like all of the versions of Debian, or it's all of the versions of Ubuntu. So they just updated for Ubuntu 17.10 Linux AIO, so you can grab one single ISO and get Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu LXDE, Ubuntu Mate, and proper Ubuntu, Kubuntu, all in one ISO image.

And then you just choose... I'm really glad those guys are still doing that. Yeah, I could, you know, you never know. They could have gone the other way. It could have faded away, but now they've expanded. They have Linux Mint now, they have LMDE, they have, so you can get different

you know, like, anyways, Debian Live, Fedora, and then they have what they call secondary releases, which I didn't look at. They also have Ubuntu, which you didn't mention. Well, yeah, it's just all of the different Ubuntus. You can get LTS when they just did 1710. So it's like you can have, you can write, the reason why I mention it if it's not obvious,

is you download this one ISO, you DD it to a thumb drive, and then you've got all of the different versions of Debian, or you've got all the different versions of Ubuntu for that release. Something I also noticed that is becoming somewhat of a rarity is that they still do a 32-bit version. Oh, yeah, right. Huh. Hmm. I wonder if that's true for all of the distros.

So, yeah, so there's a little update, and then... Go ahead. Manjaro and other Arch-based systems, including Arch themselves, have dropped 32-bit. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if Gentoo eventually drops it, too. Yeah, yeah. Just, you know. Good news. For those of you looking for a remote desktop solution and have been avoiding TeamViewer forever like I have,

maybe we can look at it again. This could be really great news. And they drop a little Wayland tidbit in here, too. TeamViewer 13 preview is out for Linux, and it's no longer based on Wine. Yay! Is that right? Yeah. That's big news, kind of.

It is. It is. Native 16 orbit. Yep. It's cute. Be still my heart. Yep. They started by building a new back end for the host. And then from there, they built out the front end. It's the front ends in cute. And they, they say that we just decided at one point when we started building the new

host that we needed to start over due to technical limitations of our, of our wine port and increasing user. They, they note here in their blog that more and more users that are doing technical support are doing it from Linux hosts and that their wine version just wasn't up to the task anymore, which I think is, this is just terrific news because it's an, it's another company saying customer demand is making us release this for Linux and write a native version. Hallelujah for that. Right. Um, and they're writing one, one sort of team viewer and team viewer host common code base to make it.

Oh, see, that's awesome. It is. That means we can probably rely on Linux support to continue. Exactly. And they say that they're going to continue iterating on it and that they're going to continue to make it seamless to work with modern Linux desktop environments too. Now, there is a big disclaimer, or as they say, a note on Wayland. Disclaimer. Or as they say, a note on Wayland.

On Wayland currently, only outgoing remote control and incoming file transfer are supported. If you need incoming remote control, you have to sign into Classic X.Org. This is a funny part of their blog, too. This is like really frank. From a developer perspective, we'd be more than happy to leave the archaic X11 technology stack behind and jump on the new and shiny Wayland train. However, it is not as simple as it may seem. Now, if you've been listening to this show for a while, you are very aware of this conundrum that they're facing. This is who else but TeamViewer is going to get, I mean, like this company is going to get screwed by this. By design, Wayland does not provide an interface to do remote control. We're talking

screen capture, mouse and keyboard emulation. It's not in there. It's to keep Wayland core lean. The idea is that the compositor provides these interfaces, which could mean that TeamViewer would have to implement different interfaces for every

desktop environment we want to support. This is what I've been talking about and why having like a common API like mirror or something in between there that can implement these feature sets could be extremely useful. So they write, this is unfortunate, but even more unsatisfying that these interfaces are not even available yet. The closest to having something useful is GNOME. They're talking about Pipewire. So it's likely

that it will be the first desktop we can support in Wayland. We want Wayland support as much as you, and we're working on it, but it's a bit complicated than just make it work. But they have a native, cute version of TeamViewer. It's in preview right now for Linux.

64-bit versions. They have DEBS and RPMs available, and no more wine. I am so happy to hear all this. Thank you, Lord. As much as I want to be excited for them, and I understand their pain, I'm not feeling bad for them having

all this work. With Wayland support? With Wayland, yes. And I'm going to give you a reason. TeamViewer, as a company, has actually, to a member of the community, requested payment where he was not using for more than a month just because he didn't want to go to the panel and cancel, but he actually canceled the actual payment. So the member had to pay for an extra full year

because the terms say that if you don't cancel, it gets automatically renewed and you're due to pay, even if you're not using the service at all. And there's proof of that because you didn't log in at all. Yeah. I'm not feeling bad. I have my qualms there too. Yeah, but at that point you're kind of...

It's also proprietary. You're kind of giving crap to the development part of TeamViewer for the billing department's issues. Well, it's just that, you know, over the years... It's the company's overall approach to a customer base. Like, if you are paying a customer and you're treated like this, I don't expect better treatment because I'm an open source project. And I am concerned about the whaling developments for the open source alternatives,

not for TeamViewer in particular. It's interesting that they're suffering and they're having to pay the buck. Stooge, you had a take on this. Go ahead. Oh, I'm kind of reminded of your rant about Chrome last week. Yay, we have more proprietary programs. Now we're a feature party with Windows. Yeah, this is one of those applications where I completely agree.

I'd like Guacamole or some other remote desktop solution that just becomes the industry norm. But having worked in IT for many a years, watching TeamViewer in production, I can say it is, when you have it set up right, generally fairly bulletproof and easy for a basic user to get set up. And they can read a number to you and you can connect to that. And it's very compelling from just a pragmatic remote support, get the job done. I know I installed this TeamViewer host once and I know I'm going to be able to remote support that user. And IT shops have full dashboards with all their TeamViewers categorized by different companies. And I mean, I've really seen this thing produced at scale, and it seemed like a pretty valuable tool for them.

So having support on Linux is definitely a good thing, but I do feel like for most of us that aren't working in corporate IT or doing IT support for large groups of people, it'd be nice to have something that's just 100% free and open but offers similar functionality. Yeah, I've never used T-Mobile, but I probably won't.

Google Chrome just works. Google Remote remote remote desktop you really want something you could yeah it works i've used a little bit on the flip side like there is something to be said for not having to punch something in your firewall even as an individual user and then on top of that somehow still getting like insanely awesome performance. Yeah, I mean, you and I have used it, both of us when we're remote and we need to get something out production-wise, you and I at TeamViewer was the one that ended up just working for us

when like we're moving desktop environments or we're, you know, those kinds of, or switching different distros. TeamViewer was the one we could just kind of hit the button and it did work. When I was in Long Beach, I edited and released user error over TeamViewer. Nice.

I have been using TeamViewer forever to help my family out, and it always seems to work. Yeah, it is a good one for that, too. And there was a time that it worked for the people who just could break the PIN codes, too. Yes, yes, yes. So this is just a

preview. It's still early days, but the rewriting with the user interface in Qt, I think it's a good move. We'll keep an eye on it. We'll probably end up trying it out here. I'd like to pick Noah's brain about it too because I know he's been a big TeamViewer fan in the past. He's moved to other things. Yeah, right. Simple help. Yeah, but I'd still like to talk to him about it as well.

And then one last note, just community news-wise, for folks that are big fans of VLC, some great news. The European Parliament has approved a budget to essentially allocate funds for bug bounties around VLC. And they're doing it through the HackerOne project, which I am a huge fan of. I've been covering that since Tech snap days and i just think it's a great way for companies to get one central arbiter to act as sort of escrow and and our arbiter between the company and the people that have made disclosures about vulnerabilities that they've discovered that's sort of the role that hacker one can play get easy on both sides and it's a directory of this is what we are looking for this is what our bounties are it's sort of one centralized location like we were talking about earlier for other things and uh the European Parliament is, I don't

know exactly how much money in total, but we do have an idea in terms of bounties. And so looking at this, they're looking for all kinds of different issues. I'm assuming they must use VLC. And you know, the nice thing is, is that the core developer of VLC is one of these guys who has been approached several, several times with very lucrative offers to install advertising into VLC. And he's declined it every single time. So I love to see – this is a great use of public funds in my personal opinion. So they don't have really huge, huge, huge bounties. But again, you're doing open source development here, so you're getting some money. In fact, the top bounty isn't even worth a single Bitcoin.

It's only $2,000 for critical, $750 for high, $300 for medium, and $100 for low is what you get. And these are all based on the CVSS score. So if you find something that's like a 7.0, you get $750, which would be like code execution without user intervention. And then if you get remote code execution, you get $2,000. These are all in US. It's interesting. I've never really thought of VLC as being like an attack vector for a system. But what if we knew about a vulnerability when somebody connected to our RTMP stream,

we could do like some sort of buffer overflow with our stream and get access to their box through VLC. Yeah. That would be a pretty amazing hack. We should do this. This would be a good revenue source for Jupyter Broadcasting. We can use it to mine Bitcoins.

Yeah. We'll start remote Bitcoin miners on people's machines. So yeah, that's that HackerOne. You can go to hackerone.com slash VLC if you want to read the details on that. I think that's great. I'd like to see the U.S. government get in that, you know, because the truth is this situation sucks as bad as it does because these governments are buying up zero-day exploits on the black market to stockpile. And they're giving them an extremely high value, which is driving people to break software at a rate we've never seen before.

So it's about damn time they use some of that money to also pay for public bounties, too. Yeah, right? And it helps just go like, you know, you may not use VLC personally. There may be media players that you prefer. But like, yeah, it's part of this open ecosystem of like, there is a free and open source video player you can use that will probably meet your needs. And it's nice to see that reflected in the comments. I agree, Wes.

So hey, while we're over in the Gen 2 corner, let's check in and let's go over to the corner. How is the build going? How's the kernel? What are you doing right now? Oh, it's compiling. Is it? So you've selected your options.

I've selected my options. Anything interesting and noteworthy? Well, I made sure to choose ButterFS support just for you. Did you really? You're going to spend time building ButterFS support? No, of course not. That's funny. I did throw XFS in.

Oh, good man. That's worth building. Yeah, I wanted to make you smile. So you're off to the races over there. You'll probably be building for almost the rest of the show. Well, that's good because coming up here in a second, I'm going to play some clips of Andreas Antonopoulos, who is, I think, one of the best thinkers and speakers on Bitcoin.

If you're a Bitcoin skeptic, and I've been hearing from some of you, stay tuned because we're going to get the Bitcoin out of our systems. We're going to talk about it, and then we're just going to move on for a while. But it is an open source issue. It's not even like a Beanie Babies kind of tulips. It is an open source issue, and I want to talk about that. So first, let's talk about DigitalOcean. Oh, DigitalOcean.com, you go over there, you create an account. Once your account's set up, you use the promo code D1plugged.

It's magic. Then you get a $10 credit, and the next thing you know, you're spending about infrastructure in less than 55 seconds. Everything is SSD-powered. They're all SSDs. They have a gorgeous, simple, elegant interface to manage all of it. And it's not simple like in like the her, her dumb way. It's simple. And of course, it should work like this, which is the sweet spot. They have all kinds of storage options

from built-in storage to your droplets, object storage, which is simple object storage, block storage, which is one of the easiest ways to go because it just shows up as a dev SD device. And they have monitoring and alerting that collects metrics, and you can receive alerts when things go down. Load balancing is a service that are fully managed out of the box and distribute incoming traffic. And 40 gigabit connections into the hypervisors with data centers all over the world.

DigitalOcean.com. Go spin up a Linux rig of your choosing. They got a bunch of distros to choose from. Use the promo code D1Plugged and apply some of that to a future project. And amazingly, you can use that all on BSD. You could. You could. You really could.

You could go all in. Or you could do, I've been doing a lot of LTS for like even just like a half hour. I'll spin something up, try it out, and be like, and just destroy it. It's done. It's gone. Why would you do that, Chris? You got Ports and ZFS. You don't need none of that stuff. The other thing, too, is when I'm doing this,

and I start working, I'm like, oh, this is something I'm keeping around. It takes like two seconds to set up the DNS. It's really easy. And then you can also attach your SSH key, so you don't have to even mess around with changing passwords after the machine spun up. It's just, it's aces.

I like the portability of storage between different droplets. DigitalOcean.com. Use our promo code D-O-Unplugged. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Now, let's talk a little about Bitcoin here. And Andreas Antonopoulos was on the Kevin Rose show, which apparently is a thing. Didn't even really know this. Yeah.

But then from the ashes of dig. I am. Yeah. I'm a big fan of Andreas and I've read some of his books. I'm going to recommend them to you right now. Mastering Bitcoin, the Internet of Money and his one that hasn't been released yet. But I think it's going to be the one I read, Mastering Ethereum, which we'll talk more about at some point in the future. And there are several issues that I want to talk about today on the show that I think probably apply the most to Linux users.

And it's the idea of closed services, centralized services versus distributed services, open protocols, and community efforts. And it's in this context, I think it's where we could start talking about Bitcoin versus things like PayPal or other payment services. There's lots of payment services now. Everybody's got a payment service it seems like. So what's the difference between being able to send money with Bitcoin and being able to use these payment services that actually use like your local currency? And it's sort of the same difference between linux and a commercial operating system their services uh bitcoin is a protocol and there's a very big difference between those two

bitcoin is a protocol that allows you to do trusted transactions with people you don't trust and to independently verify the authority of those transactions without trusting anybody else. And that's really the magic behind it. By turning money and other trusted transactions into an internet protocol, it opens the door for all of the internet related goodies to happen. When you're talking about Bitcoin, you can't really talk about Bitcoin without talking about the technology of the blockchain, which is sort of that trust guarantee system. And I think that's one of the unique aspects of Bitcoin that you can't really rely on PayPal, you can't really rely on your bank. And these two organizations have to be

competing with each other, they don't even necessarily trust themselves. And the entire relationship is awkward for the customer. All of that goes away with a public ledger. So that's that is one of the true core values of Bitcoin outside of the currency that you can spend itself. But I know one of the other things people are getting confused about these days, and it is really confusing, is all of these other currencies. There's tons of other cryptocurrencies. Back during Plan B, there was a couple. You had Dogecoin, you had litecoin now there was simple clean easy world now from that has has emerged great complexity and there's many cryptocurrencies and this is

something that people often point to and say well obviously bitcoin is going to fall apart and disappear one day because there's all these other cryptocurrencies out there and it's just a mess. Well, what does that sound like? Money. Yeah, it does. And it sounds like there's a lot of Linux distributions out there. There's all these different Linux distributions out there. There are thousands of Linux distributions out there. How will you ever be able to pick? But just because there's thousands of Linux distributions doesn't mean that people don't install CentOS or Ubuntu. So you have to think about these as niche products.

I think there are a lot of promising things happening across the entire ecosystem. And I think part of the adaptation that we're having to go through is this idea that we've grown up having monopoly currencies that are national flag currencies that exist in a zero-sum geopolitical chess game where one only wins if it beats the other and all of that attitude. Very much like in the past, we used to have five national newspapers. They existed in direct competition. The space was limited. The market share was fixed. And then bloggers happened. And then you have to ask, well, how many bloggers can possibly exist? And the answer is all of us. And it doesn't diminish or change the value of mainstream news if they had value in the first place, if they retained value in the first place. And it doesn't mean that all of them are good. Most of them are not. But some of them are great.

but some of them are great and so the same thing has now happened with currencies we have to get used to a world in which there are now thousands of currencies there will be tens of thousands then hundreds of thousands then millions and then billions of digital currencies that can be created and destroyed in moments that can be created by anyone for reasons as silly as a loyalty currency that's created by Joey, the five-year-old, in order to socially engage with their primary school friends, you know, versus a global reserve currency that China is using to buy oil. Both of those are digital currencies. Both exist on the same spectrum of continuum, have nothing to do with each other. Once you get comfortable with that idea,

you start realizing that all of these currencies effectively are now playing an evolutionary game where as programmable currencies, they fit into specific niches and they compete for those niches. And some are successful and some are not. And they emerge to occupy new niches, and they compete for those niches. And some are successful and some are not. And they emerge to occupy new niches. And they may be designed to do one thing and then somehow the market twists them into doing something else, etc, etc.

And one of the things I think that is hard for people in the States in particular, I think people outside the States maybe don't suffer this problem as much. But in the US, a lot of people, a lot of the people that don't get Bitcoin at all, they don't get the value of it because they have the benefit of using the US dollar, which happens to be the world reserve currency. It happens to be very well established, very good value. So Bitcoin doesn't really have as much of a, there's not as much of a need. There's not as much of a market demand here. But we've all heard of countries like Zimbabwe and other places where currencies are going like crazy, or countries where they're using it to control the citizens in a very oppressive way that are outside the US. You start seeing where a worldwide

accepted internet-based currency could be extremely useful. But there are uses even in the West. Even though our governments are fairly stable and our currencies are accepted for paying taxes and we're all pretty happy with this arrangement, think about how open source software development brought an entirely new level of transparency to the software development process. And there's aspects of it we still suffer from today. Like when Linus yells at somebody, we go, oh my gosh, somebody said something hostile in the workplace.

As if that doesn't happen at every major company like HP and Dell and Apple and Amazon. As if there aren't tyrants in all of those companies that are the iron hand that actually get the project done. But we don't see it. Open source development brought a level of transparency to software development that we'd never seen before. In fact, it would make companies like Microsoft back in the 80s extremely uncomfortable. And Bill Gates famously penned a letter to a computer society just talking about all of the downsides of free and shareware and open source software. It was a big warning piece because this would expose the way software was developed. And it did. And it has. The development history is in the public. We can review it. The mailing lists are in the public. That kind of transparency fundamentally changed software

development, just like open source money and a public blockchain with a public ledger can fundamentally change money and fundamentally change trust. And think about it in the context of charities. Part of the difficulty we have in the area of charity is that a lot of the need is in places far away across borders. A lot of the resources is, you know, on the other side of these borders and getting the money across the borders and distributed to people without 99% of it disappearing in the cracks

is a big problem with charities. So there's a favorite charity of mine called BitGive that's doing, it's a Bitcoin foundation. It's a Bitcoin charity that is a charitable foundation. And it uses this technology to re-envision how charity can be done. And they have a project called Gift Track. And what this allows you to do is watch on the blockchain and track the money you sent in all the way down to the money that got spent to buy the bricks to build the well for the water project in Kenya.

And so you can actually see all of the flows of money. It's not an accounting report that's sent to you. Every single contributor to the charity can, in real time and without asking anyone, audit the charity online and just looking at the blockchain track all of the information. That seems really like a very compelling use. And you could, charity is one example. I think we could all sort of wrap our heads around, but there's so many others. I mean, what about public broadcasting? Think about that for a second. It's just real or open source development where you could see exactly how the gnome foundation spent every single millabit down to like the forks if you wanted to, which would just totally change transparency and the trust level that end users would have by giving. And you could stand out as a brand if you participated in that level of transparency.

And cryptocurrency isn't just Bitcoin. It's all – and you can have all these other crazy currencies. isn't just Bitcoin. It's all, and you can have all these other crazy currencies. But this concept, cryptographically verified transactions with a public ledger, it's already a huge source of application development.

You're seeing a lot of different stuff come out. Companies like Bank of America, IBM, the Linux Foundation. I was about to say, we've talked about the Linux Foundation. Yeah. Hyper ledger several times.

Yep. They're all working on like their hyper ledger, which is a blockchain based technology. Cryptocurrencies are here to stay forever. There is no putting this genie back in this idea of a network based open and decentralized currency and all of the other applications that happen. That has happened. The recipe was created. It's repeatable. It can be recreated as many times as needed until it succeeds. If it has flaws, those flaws can be fixed in various evolutionary iterations, some continuous, some discontinuous and disruptive. The bottom line is the world

needs that. The world needs an open, public, neutral economy that's not being kicked around because of geopolitics or used as a tool for surveillance and control, that is needed. And it's needed so much that I have no doubt in my mind that it will be wildly successful and it will completely transform the way we do commerce in the next 20 years. Absolutely. And it's going to transform in ways we can't even expect. And that thing will underpin trillions of dollars of economic activity, whether it's Bitcoin, and we still call it that. I don't know. I know that such a thing will exist. There's no going away from that. Yeah, I think I agree. I don't know if it's Bitcoin either. You know, in a year, Bitcoin could be totally crashed, or it could be worth $100,000. And I think what you were talking, you know, like a year, Bitcoin could totally crash or it could be worth $100,000.

And I think what you were talking, you know, like it really is the 1990s in the Linux world, in the public ledger world. There's a lot more that we haven't yet seen. Ethereum is still pretty niche. Like there's just there's a lot of potential applications. controlled society, then if that's going to be the real master that we all are obeying, then why not have it be something that's open source, that's publicly trackable, that's cryptographically verified, that's detached from the state? So you always hear about the divorce of church and state, the separation of church and state. Well, how about the separation of state and money? That's what cryptocurrency represents, is money and state

becoming separated. And all the actors that are involved, right? Because right now, it's really just a good old boys network of places that are deemed on the trustworthy list with algorithms that we never see that get to handle how these digits and accounts work. And if you follow the Unfilter show, there's been

lots of manipulating of things like LIDOL or whatever it's called. Yeah. So anyways, I have a bunch of additional resources in the show notes including the link to the Kevin Rose show that has the entire interview with Andreas. It's good. Andreas is a really good speaker and he's really good. He's thought a lot about this. And it's episode 16 of the kevin

roe show i got a link in the show notes if you want to catch that it's a it's pretty good because kevin's a bitcoin investor himself so he's got a lot of questions like what about quantum computing is that going to screw up bitcoin and andreas answers that i also have links to a couple of the wallets that go on your phone that he likes the best that bit give foundation that he mentioned and a link that was provided in our Discord that is so cool. It is a command line utility that you throw on your GNU slash Linux box, and it's called CoinMon, and it spits out, after you install it, it's like if you have NPM, it's npm install dash g CoinMon,

and then you run CoinMon, and you can tell it what currencies you want and whatnot, and you get, look currencies you want whatnot and you get look at that screen there wesley get this uh you get this like like there's a dump of btc value and ethereum all the different coins and it's a you know me i love a nice sort of anchors style it's not actually it's all ascii but i just love that in a terminal especially when you can put it in like a quake drop down terminal exactly just your, exactly. Just get your nerd fix right there. Boom. That's CoinMon. We'll have a link in the show notes. Just a great way to track different cryptocurrencies.

You know, we just kind of had to get out of our system, I feel like, because people have been asking. When it gets to these new price milestones, more and more people either come out as skeptics or more and more people come out as interested all of a sudden. Yeah. And I really do think it's a Linux, I think more than, say, your average tech enthusiast. I think Linux users should be more keen to recognize the values of something this important being open source. From the open culture sort of from the aspect, even aside from the technology aspect.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Daredevil wants to jump in, I think, on it. So before we wrap up on the Bitcoin topic, Daredevil, you wanted to shoot. Go aspect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, Daredevil wants to jump in, I think, on it. So before we wrap up on the Bitcoin topic, Daredevil, you wanted to shoot, go ahead. Yeah, I actually see a couple issues with these existing,

everybody that is optimistic, and especially people that are invested and want to see it succeed, I understand that perfectly fine. Yeah, sure, yeah. I understand the value of having the transparency, which is great. But there is the other point of now certain governments,

like Venezuela's government that is actually issuing their own currency russia that is issuing their own currency cryptocurrency the idea is that then they are able to avoid sanctions so you lose a little bit of the equilibrium that exists politically and you might think that that's not important but i personally actually believe that there's actually great importance right there as if it wasn't for the new strategies of war, really putting in words as they are, the political spectrum, sanctions being a form of not actually investing in physical aggression, you start actually having again a lose of an ability of the level that you currently have what what is the difference between honestly i'm asking what would be the difference between that or them choosing um you know another currency that's not bitcoin that's like it's gold or so so it's not so much that is bitcoin they're using they're actually creating right the purpose here for me and that i feel is this will lead to another imminent problem but don't you feel like that would be the same if they used any other currency?

Like even if it wasn't crypto? No, I don't think actually, no. Because so when it's not crypto, because there's an actual institution behind it, you actually, when people talk about the PayPal being a service and Bitcoin is a protocol, not quite. There's actually an international service,

how trade needs to work. You actually have to set up, other countries have to believe it so that they can actually buy and have some balance on your currency so they can actually trade with you. It's actually a protocol. Now they put a name to it and then there's an institution and a government. They can look and say, it's your fault. You did it wrong. So the argument though, the core of the argument is that if they go to an uncontrollable currency that doesn't have an organization behind it, then other governments lose levers of negotiation.

Yes, and not so much. Not only that, actually. There's actually another piece, a little bit, which makes it worse. We're moving towards a spectrum, a state that governments will want to actually be regulating Bitcoin. They have the actual capacity to be having the majority of the servers. Just so you guys know, and I'm not sure if you've been looking,

actually the current Bitcoin economy, only Bitcoin, already spends more than 21 European countries in electricity bill. Yeah, I've heard that. I don't buy it either. It's not combined, but if you look at individual, European nations are small, so it is very likely and your point that if Russia goes off and creates, you know, the Moscow coin,

and now the Russia economy is doing sales with other large economies using the Moscow coin, I do grok that then the US and the West in general lose a hammer that they can hit Putin over the head with. But at the same time, that feels almost similar to the argument of, well, if you open source the software and give it away, then these huge corporations are going to go out of business and there's lots of jobs that are going to be lost. Not at all. I'm not going on that route. What I'm going is there is a lot of things that are tied to the fact that there's actual power structure and money is what governs this power structure. What we're moving away is the power structure. For us as people that have been enjoying democracy, it is fantastic that we can get these extra further control of our lives. It's awesome and it feels great as a principle.

The problem I see is the other power plays that we actually don't have to deal on a daily basis, that we are totally dependent on, but we don't realize in an everyday. That's a hard sell. That's a pretty hard sell to get people to care about that. I mean, because you're essentially, you're also at the same time advocating for the ability for some nations to abuse that lever, which likely happens more than it gets used correctly. I try really hard to not be hypocritical in the way I live my life. And that requires that I acknowledge what advantage points I have.

You're right. There is an advantage there. That's a fair point. It seems like a lot like, oh, sorry, Gopi. I mean, advantage in the terms of, you know, as Trump would see it, that's an advantage for Donald Trump or Rex Tillerson at the State Department. It's not necessarily an advantage for Chris the podcaster. Other than the benefits, I guess, I receive

remotely as a citizen of a nation that is using those levers to make life better. I would say too. I would wrap this segment with this thought is we are at the really early stages and it's weird because the value is starting to get to the point where it feels like it's bigger than – it's like it's bigger than it fits in its own boots right now. And I think we're going to see probably, I don't know, 20 years of iteration. And that's where all these different cryptocurrencies will sort of battle it out. And again, to make a comparison, just like we see a bunch of different open source forks and projects sort of battle it out over years. And sometimes it looks like a waste of resources or

deferral of resources. But over time, usually projects emerge as the dominant player in that particular vertical, if you will. And I think we're going to see that same thing happen with cryptocurrency. I think, I mean, to summarize both you and Derek Devlin's points, this is early days. There's a lot of effects, both positive and negative. So it's just something we should be paying attention to. Proceed responsibly. Yeah.

And also consider that any of this stuff could be replaced by something superior because it's a technical thing, right? So you can actually have something even more innovative come along one day in theory. Yeah. So it's a totally different beast that people are now actually putting real money into. all, it is going to make like international monetary stuff more transparent because like if foreign governments implement something on a blockchain, well, you can now track the movement of money through foreign governments on a public way. Boy, it'd be really inconvenient to have like ISIS on the blockchain. That would be really inconvenient to track that.

Let's go. Let's move on now and get ready for the Gen 2 Challenge. So everybody get ready that wants to check in. We're going to follow up on the Gen 2 Challenge here in just a moment. Yeah, you feeling good over there? Yeah, yeah. Oh, very good. All right.

Well, before we go into the Gen 2 corner, I'll mention Ting real quick here. Go to linux.ting.com. Go check it out. This is the perfect time to pick up a Ting SIM for about $9, $7. Depends on the sale they have going. You can even get it off of Amazon Prime. You can get a Ting SIM. You pop that in a device, and when you're ready, it's pay for what you use.

Wireless service. Your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. Whatever you use, that's what you pay, my friends. It's that simple. It's just $6 for your line, and then you got the Uncle Sam cut in there for your particular region. And then it's just your minutes and your messages and your megabytes. With no contract, nationwide coverage, you pay for your particular region. And then it's just your minutes and your messages and your megabytes with no contract, nationwide coverage.

You pay for what you use. And they have a CDMA and a GSM network to choose from, which gives you the option to pick up whatever might be better in your area. Like I did a little speed test here. And I think on average, I get about 21 megabits on GSM here at the studio, which is a little bit better than I got on the CDMA. So for the most part, I use GSM now. And it's wonderful when I travel to have those different options. They have a dashboard that makes it easy to use. You can see your usage at a glance, have complete control,

set up usage alerts. If you want to buy a device directly from Ting, you can do that too. You don't have to buy the SIM card. If you want, you can just buy a device directly. It's a really easy process to bring a phone over though. And I recommend that because if you bring a phone, you get $25 in service credit, and that'll probably pay for more than your first month. Average Ting bill is $23 a month per month. And the compatibility is pretty crazy, especially with both networks. Like, of all the people I've switched to Ting, I don't think any of them wasn't able to bring their phone. It was just like... They have a really easy BYOD page, too, that makes it super easy to look it up. Is this

going to work or not? So yes, go to linux.ting.com because if you want to get a device, if you just want to hit the easy button and buy one directly from them, they'll take $25 off the device too. You deserve it. A new shiny Christmas present. I mean, come on. Yeah, really.

Give it out to somebody in their stocking. They can put in a device they have sitting around. All of a sudden, they have great use out of the device. They just pay for what they use with it. And it's a stepping stone. From there, you go, geez, Ting's great. Then you get another device and it's only $6 for each line,

so it's easy to go from there, and they'll love it. You can get it for yourself too, I suppose. Linux.ting.com. Linux.ting.com. All right, so let's go over into the Gen 2 corner here. How is your build going over there, Mr. West? Oh, we've got a kernel. Do you?

Oh, yeah. I'm impressed. So I think that's a pretty good way to end it. Now we just need to do a little more configuration of the bootloader, FS tab, a few couple other niceties to have, host name, you know those things. Yeah. I think next episode will be booted and ready to go. I am impressed.

I am glad to see that's going well. So are you ready for the reveal then on the desktop environment that people want you to build? Oh, yeah. I'm excited. Should we take guesses? Yeah, all right. I mean, do you remember. Should we take guesses? Yeah, all right. I mean, do you remember which ones we asked about? We asked about three.

Enlightenment, Sway, and Lumina. You are correct. Those are the ones. Do you have a guess as to how it's gone? Knowing our audience, they probably chose the most boring one, Sway. Why is that the most boring one? I think that's the most exciting one.

It's boring. Yeah, 48% of the audience voted for Sway. Why is that the most boring one? I think that's the most exciting one. It's boring. Yeah, 48% of the audience voted for Sway. Lumina Desktop came in at deuce, and then Enlightenment with 25% of the votes. Actually, really close to Lumina. Oh, wow. See, but the thing about Sway is that it's a Wayland compositor and drop-in replacement for i3. So you got the i3 lovers, and you got the Wayland lovers. They're all going to come together behind Sway.

That just seems to make sense to me. Yeah, but you don't get the esotericness of Lumina or the eye candy of Enlightenment. But it will be our first Sway review on the show too. That's true. We do need to get back to Enlightenment and Lumina though. That is something that does need to be we got to get to that. Alright, so let's

check in with the virtual lug. How are we doing in here guys? How's your Gen 2 day gone? Anybody? Anybody? I'm not doing Gen no i thought ben was i'm a bit sad that you went with sway even though i understand it's the most popular yeah yeah but you would have covered sway inevitably at some point that's true i like that you did with it like that you actually went with it because I've been actually the lame. I switched this way. Well, we put it up for a vote.

So it was really, you know, on the flip side, it does mean that we're going to be compiling Wayland on Gentoo. Yeah. True. It's either that or X. Right. We're building it one way. Now, Bashful, were you doing an install along with us? I noticed you said you grabbed the minimal ISO during the show there.

What kind of shenanigans were you doing? No, that was actually back regarding the multi-Ubuntu installer. Oh. Well, that'll work, too. That's an easier path. That would be. Yeah, that would be. So are you feeling good about Sway?

Are you okay with it? I've been meaning to try it for a long time. I mean, you could as a challengee. I suppose you could override you could submit an override but i i have been wanting to see it you could secretly install all of them that's true well jill's taking a long time yeah i might have to do some pre-building in that case i know we have some people building along with us and so if they would like to do sway as well i think though ben did um it's like gnome 2 recently so yes i. I did Gnome 2. That's an option we haven't considered at all.

Dude, it's hell. You do not want to go down that road. I've got it. I've got it. I can imagine. Let's do Gnome 1. It was just such a huge, like, going from Sway to Gnome 2. That's a bit of a leap.

That's what it is. Oh, Lord. Wow. It might be tricky, Gnome 2 on Weyland. Yeah, that would be a thing. And it would all be in an X-Wayland session. That would be crazy. Yeah, the power of X-Wayland there.

So any other notes, Ben, on your journey so far as we've done the Gen 2 Challenge? I think I'm good, thank you. Okay. I like that you tried GNOME 2, though. Good on you. And I think the report works. So next week, then, we'll get the system bootable, it sounds like. I'll be back for that.

Okay. All right. And if anybody else wants to play along at home, if you want to catch up to us at this point, you have to get your VM essentially booting off of the install stage three, get your kernel built with your particular parameters, and then I suppose next episode it's bootloader, set it all up, and reboot. Have you already partitioned? Yes.

Okay. So you've got your file system set up. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, okay. And it went just real simple this time. That's right. So it's basically like an EFI partition. We are doing GPT-EFI here,

so that's an extra layer of fun. All right. Well, that closes out the Gentoo corner this week. Very nice, Wes. Good job over there. You pulled it out. It's making me want to build some Gen 2 on DigitalOcean, too, now that we're just doing this already. Well, and you'd have a lot faster CPUs. Yeah, right, exactly.

But you got the kernel built. That's true. So, challenge day one is completed. Episode 1, 226. We're going to see how long this takes. I think you're going to go faster than we initially expected. I think you're going to have this done pretty soon. Alright, well, let us know what you think on your thoughts about Bitcoin and open source currencies on the Gen 2 challenge and any other news items you think we should cover. Go over to linuxunplugged.reddit.com. linuxunplugged.reddit.com

is where you go if you want to give us your email thoughts. If you don't like the social medias, you can go to the jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact. Otherwise, you can also always hit me up on Twitter at ChrisLAS with your show thoughts and ideas. Also, check out Wes and I on the new brand new rebooted Texas coming out later this week. I guess we probably should have teased this a little more. That's probably true. It's going to be a soft landing. It's going to be a re-envisioning of the show and I think one for the better. And I hope you guys will give it a go

and share your thoughts with us. And in the meantime, go over to jupyurbroadcasting.com slash calendar and observe the live time. Observe the live time, because there's only a few left this year. Wow. Yeah.

Boy. And there's some more Bitcoin coverage on upcoming user hours as well. Yeah, we'll do a little more. Ooh, I'll stay tuned for that. Friend of the show, often a frequent contributor, and all-around great guy, Martin Wimpress joins us. Hey! For a very special user air in the future.

Well, that'll be coming out down the road, though. There's just so much good stuff to look forward to. Yeah, like a holiday special, if you will. Which we may do a holiday special of this here show, too, as well. So I'm open to ideas for that, too, if you want to leave a comment on what we should do for a holiday special, let me know at ChrisLAS. Thank you for joining us on this week's of Unplugged. And you know what? We'll see you back here next week. Thank you. I feel like for the holiday show, all options are on the table.

I think we should be drinking some sort of heavily alcoholic eggnog. I don't do big on eggnog, though. Oh, right. That makes sense. Just because of the dairy. Yeah, right. But what about like a spiced apple cider or something? Yeah, don't. Yeah. I'm sticking with the eggnog just because of the dairy but what about like a spiced apple cider or something

I'm sticking with the eggnog I'm open to ideas from the chats and the discords and the mumbles on what we should do for a holiday special open source Yule lug I don't know what that means or sous vide with Wes and Chris

and Beard as our food judge yeah we um we could uh make things from the open your mouth repo yes that's right i forgot about that we could that's a good idea that's interesting those open source recipes are up there uh so a bit of emerging value emerged unplug gen 2 madness those are our irc kind of like gen 2 madness it's not bad although it doesn't talk about anything else in this show. Plus we got to save some... We need a Bitcoin reference. Yeah, and we got to... Oh, that's right.

And plus I think we want to save it for the finale too, the Gen 2 thing. So we have the open economy, welcome to the real world, open source, doing it in public. That's not bad. Kind of like doing it in public. So I had a real basic one, but I thought it would maybe be the most descriptive. And it was Bitcoin for Linux users. Yeah. Kind of felt like...

That is like the heart of your message in this episode. Yeah. I think that's reasonable. All right. So, yeah. Anybody in the mumble room have any ideas on what we should do for our holiday special? Bashful, you could come down and celebrate with us. Come down here and do a little holiday special. What day are you doing it? I don't know i just thought of this we just we literally just we have something we know we need to do we're probably to do it in the next couple of weeks

you know so that way with the holiday time yeah yeah the sooner probably the better but we need to come up with a fun idea first i like it sounds like we're trending towards food at the moment but i don't know if that's what we're gonna do we're trending towards food you could you could uh play a bridge game on gb did you see how many people did you see that was like one of the number one feedbacks from the last user errors people want people wanted to learn about like you need a video stream bridge game or something okay yeah that would be good that is doable i'll bring my tv machine i'll show west like one thing and then he could destroy me at bridge. What a great idea.

How do we do that? How do we do bridge in an audio podcast, though? That's the question. Yeah, we'll probably do a video stream for that one. Yeah, because a lot of people listen to Unplugged. That's the, you know. But there's something there. There's something there.

Too hungry, though. Right? Yeah, that's the problem. But something to think about. We shouldn't have talked about this at the end of a podcast when we're tired and hungry. Yeah, something to think hungry, though. Right? Yeah, that's the problem. But something to think about. We shouldn't have talked about this at the end of a podcast when we're tired and hungry. Yeah. Something to think about, though, if you guys have any ideas. Give it some thought.

All right. Well, I think we're going to go with the boring, basic Bitcoin for Linux users just because that's sort of the best of what we can do. Do it. Open economy. Yeah, I saw that one. I don't mind it, but it sounds too, like, corporate-y to me a little bit. Like an American express ad or something but i do appreciate you guys being here thank you very much love your faces and uh probably see you

next time right i hope see you guys oh god oh god please leave us please come back all right okay okay sorry okay okay