LINUX Unplugged - Episode 228: rm -rf 2017 | LUP 228

Episode Date: December 20, 2017

We debate the best distros of 2017, get into some community news, and a bcachefs and Gentoo challenge update & also learn a bit about Canonical’s new Multipass project.Plus a few Linux commands that are guaranteed to destroy your install.

that whole like firefox is fast thing i remember going to fosdem three years ago and seeing two years ago maybe a demo of servo their rust rendering engine and it was like ridiculously fast it was like um i i can't describe it was just like an image appearing on the screen the rendering time it just looked like they just opened a png like and it immediately appeared and there was and flicking backwards and forwards through pages they were going through various wikipedia pages and because the renderer was very early on in its development and so it couldn't render every page they all used wikipedia as the the example but they were skipping through wikipedia pages and it was like they were all cached locally and he made a point of clearing

the cache and saying nope we're loading each one and going to it new and they were all cached locally and he made a point of clearing the cache and saying nope, we're loading each one of these and going to it new and they just look like flicking between PNGs. But when I ran Firefox locally it's nothing like that. So in those three years they've lost something from that. Or the web's gotten more complicated. Well, yeah, maybe.

Staged demo. Well, there's that. This is one of those things that I always feel like a bit of a dork for describing as one of the things that i like about firefox but because it's so like intangible um but it's one of the things i like about using unity over some other desktop environments like these certain intangibles and for me on firefox with with the new rendering engine it's like uh i just prefer the way it loads the page. It's about, I feel like Chrome and Firefox are about neck and neck. Maybe Firefox has a bit of an edge right now,

but it, and it definitely has an edge on the, the impact it puts on my system compared to Chrome. But like I just, the way like, the way my brain reads websites, it feels like Firefox gives priority to rendering those elements first. Oh, interesting. Where Chrome seems to like chug on the whole page and then dump it on the screen or something. I almost have to like get a high frame rate camera and record the two of them loading. Shit, maybe I should do that actually.

Too unusual. It doesn't. I do remember in early browsers, there was definitely a tendency to render fields and stuff first before they rendered anything. It feels like we're back i feel i should take out my phone and try the high frame rate uh slow-mo video recording and record chrome loading the page and then record firefox loading the same page play it back and see if then i can figure out what it is well you could you could just open the developer tools on the right hand side and it gives you a timeline of what's loading so you can actually see it lists

everything that's loading and you can you know you it will tell you what it's that's pretty fancy that'd be a fancy way to do it but i remember um one of the uds's we had in brussels many years ago like i think 2010 this would be um there was a chromium developer who was giving a presentation about how they sped up chromium and how they made it faster and he the demo that he gave, I may have said this before on the show, sorry. The demo that he gave, he was just launching Chromium from nothing. And as a demonstration of a comparison, he opened GNOME Calculator next to it.

And he just kept opening them one after the other and going Chromium Calculator, Chromium Calculator, and just showing. And you could see Chromium would load faster than GNOME Calculator. And if you watch GNOME Calculator, you could actually chromium would load faster than gnome calculator and if you watch gnome calculator you could actually see it draw each of the buttons on the screen and he said look i'm not i'm not having a go at the gnome calculator devs and someone shouted out that's a good job because he's in the audience right here he said this is an example like all this

complication you've got with the gtk toolkit doing all of that work, and we've stripped that out. And the browser, which is way more heavyweight than GNOME Calculator, loads tons faster than just a simple calculator. And a lot of it is that perception of how quick you watch it draw. Exactly like you were saying, you can kind of see where it's drawing the page. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 228 for December 19th, 2017. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's all prepared, battened down, and our hatches are ready for the holidays. My name is Chris.

My name is Wes. Hello, Wes, and welcome to the last live Unplugged of the year. Boom! Yeah, we still have more shows in the can coming up in the feeds and on the site and all the usual places, but we are kind of excited because this is our last live production of the year. Goodbye, 2017. And we're going out with some great community stories, and we're going to try something fun since we thought it is our last show.

Let's just do something that we've always kind of wanted to do. And it's the Linux commands you should never use. Like a few commands that are guaranteed to wreck your box. Just don't do it. Don't do it. We're going to tell you about them. Maybe a new Linux box came to you for the holidays, and you want to know how to destroy it immediately?

We got you covered in this week's episode. But we also got a bunch of really great community news. And for the love of all that is Linux, I really hope we're almost in the homestretch for the Gen 2 Challenge, but we will find out later today. We will have to wait. Stay tuned and find out. So we have a lot to get to, and like I said, it is our last live show

of the year, so it is at this moment. We must bring in the virtual lug. Time-appropriate greetings, Mumble Room. Hello! Hey, Pip. Good evening, boys. Hello. Oh, I believe I heard a beard in that mix, too, and a poppy and a wimpy. Good to see you guys. Mr. Veritund is in there.

CM, hey, Citizen, Mini Mac. You guys. You're my mumblers. I love you. I love you. Let's start out with something you could be looking forward to in the summertime, because it is the thick of winter right now. In fact, I think it's damn near winter solstice.

You know, Wes, when is winter solstice? Do you know? Let's take a look. Hey, Alexa, when is winter solstice? Do you know? Let's take a look. Hey, Alexa, when is winter solstice? I'm just kind of curious. Usually right around the 21st. Yeah, December 21st. Winter solstice will be on Thursday, December 21st, 2017.

We're pretty darn close, and it's pretty darn dark outside. So let's talk about the summer for a little bit. Oh, dreams of the summer. What can we look forward to in linux in the summer of 2018 well uh probably some stupid drama that's my that's my bet yeah yeah yeah i think you're probably right uh but linus claus uh has an answer for us we could ask him you actually fully control and most likely can mathematically predict this is linus uh at a recent uh foundation linux foundation event keynote, where he's being interviewed

by Dirk, and he says, all right, tell me about Linux kernel 5.0. So when are we going to get Linux 5.0? Oh, well, I have been known to start losing track of numbers when they go into the 20s and 30s. Fingers and toes? Yeah, when I had to take off my shoes to count kernel releases. Can I just say that I love that

this is how Linus decides when it's time to rev the number. It's not like some Phil Schiller marketing scheme or Sanjay planning the next big phase of Azure and the version number's got to jump from 8 to 10 so that way they can pretend like 8 never happened. Nope, it's just, I don't know. It seems to be like the numbers are too high to me and I can't really keep them all straight,

so I feel like I should change it. Yeah, plus one. No, it's psychological for me. It turns out 13 and 14, they're easy to remember. But when you're looking back and you can't recall the difference between 23 and 24, the smaller numbers stand out more. So I suspect that we'll hit 4.19, and instead of 4.20, I might decide it's time to 5.0.

The numbers don't mean anything at all. They have not meant anything in a long time. It was actually very stressful back when they did. It was a horrible model for development. I remember, I mean, even back in the 1.0 days, just trying to draw the line in the water, in the sand of this is 1.0 and this is when our internet code is actually working

was really tough and very stressful. And then you never end up doing the right decision anyway. So jettisoning that entirely and saying, no, the numbers don't mean anything. They do keep incrementing, but we just try to make them sound like easier to remember than any other kind of meaningfulness has made my life much easier.

And I think pretty much everybody enjoys it now. But then there are still the few people, when I make 5.0 and they expect lots of new features, they're disappointed. So if I get my math right, that means next summer-ish? Probably. I also did some numerology and decided that every two million git objects is when I need to do a new major release. But

since our development is accelerating, that actually might be sooner than next summer. So it really depends on... It's a random number and I want people to be aware that it's a random number and has no meaning. So there you go. Be arbitrarily excited for no reason at all that we may get Linux kernel 5.0

in the summer. Hey, yo. Are you arbitrarily randomly excited for no reason? Very much so. Me too. I can't help it. It's 5.0. It feels like then we get to have, even though it's not true and it makes no more sense, you can shame people for being on older kernels. Like, wow, you're still on 3 something. We're on 5 now. Man, your Android device is running kernel 3.4? Wow. Exactly. I have the whole talk. It's about a half hour linked in the show notes if you'd like to watch it.

It's a wide-ranging discussion as well as a blog write-up from its FOSS if you'd rather read it. Now, OMG Ubuntu put together one of those traditional end-of-year posts, the best of 2017 Linux. I thought we'd just go through it with the mumble room, see what they think. This was mostly put together by Joey's readers, and then he voted, and then he, I think, added a few spices and dash here and there. The number one distro of 2017 is Ubuntu 17.10, according to Joey. Obvious reasons there because of the huge, huge release. But number two, what do you think of number two? The number two Linux distribution of 2017, Solus 3.

Solus getting the nod here as like the number two competitor to the Ubuntu 17.10 release. That's pretty big news, I would say. Yeah, although thinking about it, I don't know who else I would give it to. I mean, it seems obvious that it should be Solus. In fact, it's remarkable that Solus has shot this far up on these kinds of lists already. Right, I do think it does speak to things that we've noticed and maybe commented on

throughout the year, but it's sort of a big win that it's deserved, seems like. Huge, I think. What do you think, Mumble Room? Do you agree with Solus being the number two distro of the year? about that uh what about that ubuntu mate sorry i just i had to poke wimpy a little bit well i've installed an ubuntu mate way more than i've installed solace that's for sure yeah yeah i have to get stuffed and put you on a shelf that's brilliant i have to say i i'm surprised i personally i was surprised at how much take-up there's been of 1710.

I mean, I know it was significantly different from previous releases that we've put out over the last three to eight years, but we're seeing a ton more people running 1710 than 1704. 1704 is probably proportionally what a normal a normal interim release would be it's like not a huge amount of take up most people stay on the lts but we're seeing comparable numbers of people running 1710 as run the lts there's that many people who have jumped on it what do you suppose that tells us i'm trying to interpret what that means people like new stuff could it

be actually that you know the people who left ubuntu because they went you know unity and now they're doing gnome and flood back to it because that's what i was wondering definitely there's definitely i think anecdotally there's some evidence that that's happened that people have come back to ubuntu but i think also there was a lot of uh interest around 1710 and there was a lot of good communication from the desktop team about why people should care about 1710 and I think that piqued their interest for a long time you know that that that hasn't been there and you know there was a lot of new stuff and a lot of things that they knew that were coming and yeah people have have really flocked to it the common wisdom though before the 1710 release was that uh you know we get some i

mean this is my interpretation was we get some pickup but for the most part everybody will stick on the lts um now i wonder if as this development pace continues if that trend will continue or if 1804 will become really sticky oh that'll be italian wouldn't that tell us if it's gnome or if it's new stuff well we tend to get two bumps uh when the lts comes out because the people who are on the interim release so people right now who are on 1710 will get offered 1604 the moment it comes out as an upgrade option and sorry 1804 we'll get that as an option when when it comes out um but people who are on the previous lts 1604 won't get that offered to them by default until the 0.1 release a couple of months later so to iron out all the all the bugs

so they don't we don't get everyone from 1604 coming to 1804 on day one of the release they come a little while later so we tend to get two bumps but i think we're going to see two similarly sized bumps for people coming from 1710 because there's a ton of people on that and a ton of people coming from 1604 later so i think by like middle of next year like august next year we're going to see a huge number of people on 1804 more than probably we expected. Yeah, I agree. Okay.

That makes a lot of sense. So I'm jumping ahead a little bit in Joey's list here. The number five event or Linux thing in 2017 was Ubuntu for Windows, the Linux subsystem for Windows, and the arrival of Ubuntu on the actual Windows Store in July. And then it became available in the Fall Creators Update for anybody that wants Windows 10 and wants to go check that box. And OpenSUSE and Fedora, I believe, are in route still, although I'm not positive. I think SUSE might be in there.

I thought they landed. Okay. I haven't heard any speak. I think SUSE might be, but I don't know if Fedora is. I checked kind of recently, a few weeks ago, but it's been a few weeks. Yeah, wow, what do we think of that? Do we agree? Has this been a good thing?

I don't know if I agree it's been a good thing. I think I deviate. I agree that it was a moment. It's certainly noteworthy. I don't think it's the sky falling, everyone will just use Windows subsystem for Linux and never switch to Linux. I don't think it's the sky falling, everyone will just use Windows subsystem for Linux and never switch to Linux. I don't think that.

I think there are plenty of developers, plenty of developers, and I'm sure Michael Dominic would speak to this, who are either forced or encouraged to use Windows at work, but they want a typical Linux user space somewhere on their machine, and this is perfect for that. And we get a fair amount of feedback from people telling us that is where they use it.

It's just at work where they have to. Yeah, that's what I've heard too. But I've also heard people say, yeah, I was thinking about switching, but I'm not switching now. I have heard that as well. So I think WSL is going to continue to evolve, but there's also a number of things that it just can't do right now. WSL is going to continue to evolve, but there's also a number of things that it just can't do right now. So depending on how exotic your requirements are,

you may run out of rope with WSL. But it does a job to provide, it does a far better job to provide a familiar Linux working environment than, you know, SigWin and MinGW and things of that nature. Yes, yes, very, very, very much so. So it looks like Beard just checked in here. And, yeah, Ubuntu is in the store right now. Leap 42 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 are in the store, but no CentOS or Fedoras or nothing like that.

I'd love to see CentOS wind up in the store. I love the idea of the Windows store being taken over by loads of different distros. I do love the idea of them Windows Store being taken over by loads of different distros. I do love the idea of them being some of the most popular apps in that store, because let's be honest, that store is filled with trash. So it could be possible. Some Arch Linux in there.

Yeah. He wraps it up with a few other things, like Atom IDE being one of the better desktop IDEs, along with all the packages. And Geary as the best alternative to Thunderbird, which I don't know if I agree with Geary either. I may give the nod to MailSpring, but perhaps- I'd definitely give the nod to MailSpring for the best mail client right now, yeah. Yeah, it's one of those where Geary is great in a world where there's not other platforms that have better mail clients. Not to disparage Geary because it's one of my favorites. MailSpring is competitive on all platforms, Mac, Windows or Linux.

It's a very competitive application. It's a very good looking application. A lot of thoughts gone into the design. It's a very responsive in terms like I can have it vertically stacked in a small space on my desktop. I can have it maxed out over a 2K display. A lot of work has gone into MailSpring and Nalaeus before it. So I'm going to talk,

I think I've been pinging back and forth with the developer. He's a busy guy. It's the holidays and I've been pinging him last minute every time. But in the future, I think we might do a segment on it because I think it's a very nice,

very, very, very nice mail client and it's in better shape than I think it's ever been when it was Nalaeus. I've been using it's a very nice very very very nice mail client and uh it's in better shape than i think it's ever been when it was in the latest i've been using it for a couple weeks i just wish it'd support gpg but oh well oh well i'm sure the future holds many great things who is it that you mail regularly that uses gpg okay all my family friends friends. Really? Really. So you're some users of all of the people using GPG for mail. Yeah, there's the majority. I haven't had, I've used it on and off over the years, but nobody else I email sticks to it. So then I always feel like the fool that's, I almost feel like I'm fronting, like I'm showing off because nobody else sticks with it.

And then it's like, okay, I'm that guy. There's even blogs from the GPG developers explaining why they don't use gpg for mail because it's just a poor solution huh well we're all doomed we're all doomed when it comes to a solution poor implementation that's difference yeah the implementation is the issue yes yes yes good good point because unless everyone's doing it it's irrelevant one of my favorite projects to follow this year just on the back burner has been bcash fs if william was here he'd tell you why but yeah uh i just really am excited about this next generation file system this may be eventually the one that i end up putting on my workstations and uh kent has taken a he took recently a little time off over the hot

over the summer but he's been back since then and he's been banging out a lot of different features. And I just want to give us a quick update. He says the biggest thing he's been spending his time on lately has been improving the test infrastructure, which is awesome, and chasing bugs. He says there's also been major and cool improvements on the core IOPath. The recent change is that now whenever generating new checksums, BcacheFS verifies it against the existing checksum by generating multiple checksums that cover all existing data, one of which covers just the data we're keeping, and then merging the checksums we calculated and verifying the equal to the original checksum.

This means that even if you don't have ECC memory, memory corruption can't lead to silent corruption or bit rot of existing data. So this is, in my opinion, some nice stuff. So a lot of times people are always talking, especially when you're talking about large ZFS implementations. One of the most common questions that comes into TechSnap when they're talking about setting up ZFS is,

do I need ECC memory? And a lot of times the answer is no, but geez, it sure helps. And now with BcacheFS, you sort of have that safety net, which is way more economical on laptops and desktops and low-end ARM devices. ECC memory has a big cost overhead and performance overhead to a degree. So not that this checksum checking doesn't, but BcacheFS is so damn fast. It's just it's beautiful to see this happen in the file system. And it's going to be one of those banner features once it ships

and people ask, is this thing production ready? This will be one of the things people cite. Very happy about that development. Also coming down the pipeline is quota support, which he says has been the cause of much wailing and gnashing of teeth. For now, the less said about quotas,

the better. I don't know. said about quotas, the better. I have not followed the drama there. But then here's the big thing. He just slips in very, very last sentence of this rather long Patreon post. He says, lastly, Bcash has Bcash FS has its first corporate sponsor. A big thank you to Elements.TV. And if you need me to storage appliances, you should definitely check them out. So apparently Elements.TV making a little long-term bet on vCacheFS.

Really cool to see that. That's really cool to see. I just don't feel like, I can't be emotionally invested in ButterFS, but there's just some things that as great as XFS is, it's just not what it has been designed to do. This is the new hope of Linux file systems,

and I'm glad to see things are progressing. If you're listening, you're going, well, what is so great about it? Do a site search and look in our back catalog where we talk about it, where William goes into some detail about it. And if you're excited like we are, you can help out Kent at patreon.com slash bcachefs.

Before we move on, anybody else in the mumble room want to wax poetically about BcashFS, or are we all... Actually, I have. I have. I don't know who I should ask, because it's on the community hub, but little birdies around

me had told me many little bits and details about this, and I have kind of a picture, but I have a suspicion that Popey or Wimpy may know a lot more. It's Multipass, and it's not a password manager. No, no. It's a totally new project coming out of Canonical that manages virtual machine instances

that are running Ubuntu. It uses cloud images. It's a QMU KVM on the back end, and I imagine it's going to be hot stuff, but I really don't know much more about it than that. I've seen little rumors and bits and pieces about it. I saw some murmurings at Ubuntu rally where people were behind closed doors. Okay, we're going to do this.

And make sure you get contact. And I oversaw a lot of that, but I haven't seen any concrete pictures. But I bet you somebody in our mumble room knows a little more about it. Who wants to bite, Po you spoke fast teamwork gentlemen okay so um multi-pass is to kvm what lex d is to containers so lex d is a tool for provisioning thin containers and multipass is a way for standing up full-blooded virtual machines on ubuntu really quickly so you just snap install well in fact not just on ubuntu actually because you can snap install multipass in fact i was joking with ikea about this the other day that this is what all solace users have been crying out for because now they can snap install multipass and then they

can multipass launch and it will uh provision and uh fire up a 1604 funny uh vm uh on on solace there you go so yeah it's just a really fast way so it's designed as a developer tool so if you've used things like vagrant in the past for example it's a much simpler way to actually stand up a bunch of vms running different supported uh releases of ubuntu so that you can flesh out your dev environment and i think you'll see a bit of noise about multipass in 2018. It's definitely the one to watch. Yeah, since I got to. I also noticed what seems to be some rather banner features again is a it can fetch and cache images from the cloud of like what I presume to be like a preset up virtual machine, sort of like all a Docker images. And then it can periodically refresh uh to make

sure that the image is staying up to date that seems like some pretty big features yeah yeah it's it's good stuff so they use the what's called the cloud in it images which are updated frequently so when when something in the archive changes that affects those images those images get respun and then are available to you uh fresh and immediately are there any plans for uh api support or similar um interesting question i'll decline to comment for the time being that's acceptable i will say you mentioned vagrant i'm definitely excited vagrant could be so slow i already use lexd for some similar things but having like a full virtualization

virtualization is sometimes what you need so i'm excited sometimes you need it yeah sometimes you do yeah yeah we have a couple use cases here in the studio where we're still using virtualization we're on a very old proxmox installation and when multipass came out i said to wes i said this might be what i use to redo some of these virtual machines because it's an early it's early days for the project this post is is made December 13th, although it's been in the works for a bit. But it's sitting on top of KVM and other technologies that are tried and true.

So there's not a lot of risk for me to try to spin up a virtual machine based on this because Ubuntu is a known quality, KVM is a known quality, Snap is a known quality. Yeah, between the tooling from Snap from snap and lex d i've really i've really enjoyed what's come out of a bunch of there so i'm sure this will be an equally pleasant experience yeah multipass i'm not so sure on the name but i like the idea the name will become relevant in the future i think um yeah um so i've got a number of VMs stood up with a multipass, different versions of Ubuntu.

And what I've been doing for fun is installing inside those the Ubuntu Mate meta packages and then X2Go and then connecting into them for running instances of Ubuntu Mate on different releases of Ubuntu. I don't do it for those purposes, but I do something similar with several Ubuntu Mate on different releases of Ubuntu. I don't do it for those purposes, but I do something similar with several Ubuntu Mate instances. I do that same exact thing. Well, I use it so I can test stuff across different versions of Ubuntu Mate. You know, it's just really convenient. It's much, much simpler to get versions up and running than using VirtualBox or some other UI. You can poke it around. It's nice. get versions up and running than you know using virtual box or some other ui you can uh you can

poke it around it's nice and i'm looking forward to how it's going to develop over uh at 2018 i smile that it's a snap because it's it's just it's so funny that it's now just boom it's everywhere it's everywhere that runs snaps it's there now uh that's that's pretty great speaking of being there one of the things that freaks people out about thunderbolt 3 is you're on the PCI bus. You're right there. That direct memory access. It's too late. You've seen everything.

And there is finally a project in the works to tackle this problem. I think this is probably Beard's favorite story of the week because I think he told me about this on Sunday. It was like early on. Do you remember? What was it about the story that stuck out to you, Rikai? Because I was like, okay, well, that sounds interesting. Why do I care about this again? I don't know.

It just seemed like it's nice to have security on every part of your system. Yeah, sure, I suppose. What I do like about it is that it's like a full-fledged solution here. This is coming out of the skunk Works at Red Hat, I believe. And one of the things it'll do is it'll even give you a prompt, say, in the GNOME notification area, which is kind of awesome. So you're sitting there, you go, hey, hey, yo, Holmes, some rando just hooked up an unknown, untrusted Thunderbolt device to your system. Are you cool with this? And that, I think, is a pretty great feature because unlike usb thunderbolt allows wide access

to devices you could just read the memory and uh you could in theory attach a malicious device to that thing and just dump everything that's just that's in the io i mean uh it's it's it's pretty critical that this thing gets secured especially on a system that might have randos sitting down at it. The only thing that I wonder is what happens for some of these use cases where some – we have had issues where hardware will reconnect and disconnect and reconnect and disconnect and reconnect and disconnect. There could be kinds of problems where you have another step where you have to say yes, approve. Yes, approve. Yeah, right. I could see some instances in troubleshooting.

Of course, this is probably just something that people that don't live in a production environment don't really have to deal with very much, but hopefully bolt just nails that right between a good way to give a security without causing a bunch of inconvenience when troubles or an easy, you know, like whatever,

I don't care. Just, I know I'm unsecure right now. I was reading up on it and I think, uh, if it recognizes a hardware device that's been previously accepted it'll just right okay yeah it does look like that i suppose that's true so i hope it's not going to ask me to uh authorize a device

using an on-screen prompt when my device is booting with an external gpu oh i suppose that is i'll explain now full disclosure with an e-gpu attached when you boot your system you get no output whatsoever until the display manager has loaded a little spooky yeah yeah i mean you know i do really like the ui implementation like in the gnome drop down menu it even gives you like scanning peripherals like it's it's it's using a dbus api to list the devices and enroll them and then emit new signals to the desktop environment when a new device is attached it so it does feel like it's very dependent on the desktop interface but i just can't imagine they wouldn't have thought of that use case scenario. I do think that this is also good for, there's devices that are starting to come out now that require these security levels.

So it's nice that Linux is getting this early on before, you know, there's devices that you can't use. Yeah. Yeah. And there, again, not to make it all about us, but there is a very serious use case where we take devices that have USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 specifically on them to cons, fests, whatever you want to call them, rallies. And we take hardware there and we set up and we record and we broadcast and our peripherals connect over these buses. So we really – you could so easily have somebody walk up to the booth and they could lean in while they're talking to you. They could plug in something to an open port and screw with you.

And we're live on the air. Don't get any ideas, people. I shouldn't have said any of that. Forget all of that. Got to cut all that out. But it does, for us, it really is that the struggle is real. Well, as more and more laptops have these ports, people are using them. There's more peripherals you want to use.

It could be vulnerable. You MacBook users, you. All right. Exactly. Before we go any further, let's take a moment and go to linux.ting.com. Everybody now, linux.ting.com. Sign up for a better way to do mobile. The way that if you're outside the states, often seems like mobile should just be done.

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than $23, you just paid for more than your first month. What? Now, say your phone's busted. It's old. You need something new? They have a bunch of great devices you can buy directly and they'll give you $25 off one of those. In fact, I think they got a big sale on the nice Motorola devices. You want to go over there right now.

Go to linux.ting.com and then click on the shop page. If you want a nice Android device that doesn't break the bank, yeah. Yeah, they got the Moto 2017 lineup on sale right now, so you can apply our discount at linux.ting.com. You can get the Moto X4 unlocked, no contract, no early termination fee, no blocking updates for their Ting experience, everything with a great Android experience, nice performance, beautiful screen, expansive RAM or memory, $324. I'm so excited. My brain doesn't even comprehend how that's possible. They've also got the E4 Plus for $144. Under $200 for a great Android experience.

And they have those physical home buttons, which are apparently going out of style these days. They couldn't fit that in on the latest iPhones. No. Linux.ting.com. Go there, sign up, and a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Linux.ting.com. Firefox Quantum was a good release. We were just talking about it in the pre-show, how I've been using it more and more.

And then they went and did that thing with the extension that we all know about. You know the one where they injected the Mr. Robot looking glass extension, disabled it by default, and then had a whoopsie daisy, said we're sorry, and retracted it. I've already covered this in Linux Action News. I don't really have much more to say about this. default and then had a whoopsie daisy, said we're sorry, and retracted it. Uh-oh. I've already covered this in Linux Action News. I don't really have much more to say about this. But I wanted to hear your thoughts, Wes. Oh, and then we got to open up the Gentoo Challenge.

But then I wanted to hear your thoughts. What do you think about this move Mozilla made to push down the add-on? It's disabled by default. If you participated in the feedback program, you got this installed. And it looks like the angle was going to be some sort of tie in with Mr. Robot where people watching the series could go unlock a game and they would discover oh my gosh it's already

in my browser oh my gosh Firefox and Mr. Robot work together on this it's so cool I just love Firefox so much I'm going to use it for the rest of my life and so they pushed it down to everybody's computer because that was obviously what was going to happen and it looks like Mozilla wasn't even paid these rumors I to happen. And it looks like Mozilla wasn't even paid. These are rumors. I have not confirmed this.

It looks like Mozilla wasn't even paid a dime for this. So this wasn't like they sold out to the Mr. Robot series. It was like, we're going to capitalize on the momentum of Firefox Quantum and we're going to capitalize on this somewhat popular geeky television show and blow everybody's mind. And it really backfired, I think.

Yeah, I think I'm sad. I'm sad how much it has backfired and the amount of negative press. Personally, I'm not thrilled about this. I like Mr. Robot just fine. I don't necessarily need this add-on. But being shipped from Mozilla, by using their browser, I am in some ways implicitly just trusting the software they ship. This seems like it would fall under the same domain. So I

wasn't actively offended. I also don't think it was a great move. Quantum had a really good release, and so it's sad. I can see why maybe they would think that this could capitalize on that, but it maybe also shows some wrong priorities or people who hadn't really thought this through at Mozilla. And it's just sad that this reaction maybe will make people less ready to try out what really is quite a good browser. Yeah, and it does go, geez, what? How did you not see how this wasn't going to be received? What's wrong with you guys? Does anybody in the mumble room have any thoughts that they want on this story?

Okay, go ahead. I want to give you guys a chance. have any thoughts that they want on this story okay go ahead i wanted to give i want to give you guys a chance so i i'm i'm kind of a little disappointed and companies make mistakes and people can be very caught up in internally in their own thoughts and i know we've made mistakes in the past at canonical where we've thought something would be a good idea and there's been a gigantic backlash and we completely didn't expect it because inside our own bubble the thing we did made sense but outside if if you're if you're not um an amazon subscriber and you're not part of the the culture that knows what mr robot

is this is just offensive it's it's cultural arrogance on the part of mozilla to think that anyone outside that bubble gives a shit about mr robot because they don't right it might well be a popular program in the united states of america and a few other countries but nobody else gives a damn and i think it's arrogant on their behalf to think other people would yeah and insensitive to what is probably a large percentage of their user base. Maybe that's not who they want to add right now. Especially people who are fans of Mr. Robot. They're going to be the more technically aware,

more privacy-concerned group out of anyone watching any television show. That too. So either way, it's not a great play. Yeah, it really shows a lack of understanding. And the echo chamber effect, I think, is what Popey said. If they'd bundled... Maybe if the extension was something like hey we're gonna bundle tor in there or we're gonna bundle yeah right yeah as an option like things like that might have made more sense that

might have not been used for even i think and i appreciate that the the extension that they did install they only did it for english language installs so but that still represents a significant chunk of people who don't live on the continental us you know would have received this thing um so yeah i think it was a little bit sad i think it was a little bit overblown in the community that people went a bit nuts about it but you know i can kind of see why it does seem to be there's building momentum at getting angry at mozilla that's really the core thing they've got to figure out how to address is the mob is ready to get into justice mode at a moment's notice these days and uh mozilla's name is ending up on that list more and more but on the positive

side of this whole thing unless anybody else has anything they want to say i think the positive side of this has been vivaldi has received a lot of publicity. A lot of people in our Discord rooms and our Telegram group and other places are saying, oh, I'm trying out Vivaldi. I'm switching to Vivaldi. When people say, what should I try instead? I'm seeing Vivaldi linked a lot. You should try Brave.

Brave is just awesome. Yeah, yeah. If you actually want a browser that is interested in your privacy, then Brave is the way to go because that's just baked in that's their whole usp right yeah and brave got a little news this week because uh they've launched now as a snap you can snap install brave which is kind of awesome so it's a great chance to try it out

i believe they're adding some preliminary support for ipfs as well and really so all kinds of interesting development activity you can also snap install ipfs oh what a combo geez let's keep a roll you know what else you can snap install now apparently vlc 30 rc1 is available as a snap where the video is the video land team looking at snapping is this is this happening yeah does that one have support wow i've been working with um one of the um v VLC developers on this for a few weeks now, and we worked through some issues to make sure that hardware-accelerated video playback works out of the box on all of the platforms, so it does the right thing. There are still some TV issues.

There are some theming issues. Those are down to us in the Snap world. That's nothing to do with VLC. It's our fault. So we're addressing those. But it's really nice because it's hooked up to their CI. So direct builds of VLC 3 go straight to the Snap store. Awesome.

So you get the latest builds straight from there. Yeah, that means it's really integrated in, too, to the process, which is great. So to keep things rolling, speaking at Coda Radio earlier, Mike might be happy to hear this, that JetBrains is also getting on board with Snaps and shipping 21, I think. I know they have 21 different tools. I don't know how many are going to be snapped up. But I know that the one that some of our audience might be interested in is the PyCharm stuff as well as the PHPStorm web storm uh go land oh cool very nice so i've been working with one of the jet brains developers good work they uh they currently have 12 of their

products okay uh in the stable channel and they have two others that are in the uh candidate and beta channels at the moment that they're hoping to push out by the end of the year. And then they'll be looking at other products in their portfolio to see what they want to snap. But, yeah, they've been working very hard over the last six weeks or so, bringing more and more of their products to the store. That's encouraging. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of that.

And the JetBrains tools, I wasn't super familiar with them and still i started working with them and they're very very good i have to say yeah yeah mike's been raving about them for a little while i mean if you do if you do enterprise java that's what you use that's just that's just how it works so and a lot of those people do it on windows or i mean on a bunch of these days so that's that's really nice you know that is a solid ending for 2017 for Snaps, you know, for an initiative that really was birthed and really got into momentum this year. That's a pretty triumphant ending to that and a good positioning for 2018. We feel like, I feel like the reasons for me to run Arch are getting fewer and fewer. If flat packs and Snaps and app images bear out,

I am really going to get to that point where I could have a solid, stable Linux core with an LTS core and then fairly up-to-date fluid user land application, which has been the most achievable for me on Arch. But now it feels like it's almost going to be achievable anywhere. And then there's just gaps to close. If we could get the upgrades a little smoother. Oh, man, I'm very excited about the future. There's overhead.

There's changes. There's things to be worked out, like Poby was just saying with the theming. But we have time to get there. And we're making good progress. Yeah. And for the things that it works really know like really well with it it's it's just amazing well uh i want to talk about one more thing that caught my attention this week i don't know why i never noticed this before but you know etcher right the the usb writing tool i actually think it's pretty good we've

covered it before is that electron it's electron isn't it is yeah freaking electron app to write usb thumb drives wow Wow. Welcome to 2017. They have a command line node app to do it as well. So there you go, 2017 indeed. They have a little piece of hardware they're working on. Have you seen Etcher Pro? No. This thing is, it almost feels like a fantasy.

It's got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. Something like 17 or some nonsense USB ports, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, something like 17 or some nonsense USB ports plus a master source port and an embedded touchscreen that is Etcher just running on the touchscreen. It's like the Electron app just running on a dedicated screen in a hardware slab that could be best described as a large USB hub. And they say they currently have this thing able to write to 500,000 different SD and USB drives per month. Etcher is already known for doing this. So they're like, you know what we're going to do? We're going to create a standalone hardware device that allows you to write multiple cards or USB disks at once at the best speeds we can possibly get to compared to any traditional method. Multiple writes at the same time.

It does 60 megs per second. It can do 750 megabytes. They say megabytes. A second total. You're going to have a limiting factor of just the total speed of the USB drives. But 16 different cards you can hook up to this thing. Also, I guess there's a whole bunch of SD card slots that you can't see in the picture as well they say if the pricing is going to be competitive but i don't see an actual price on here but this thing's i mean how would you i'm trying to

describe this to the audio audience like this thing looks like um uh almost like something out of star trek but like retro star yeah like the original series it looks like captain kirk would like something they would have where you could plug in a bunch of stuff. You could totally see how like the hardware. It's very clinical. Yeah, very just minimal interface. Look at them go though. So that's the Etcher Pro.

They don't really, they just have a subscription to find out about it. It's interesting that this whole Etcher thing, you know, came out from the resin.io people. And Etcher is just this, you just this thing to help them burn their software on USB drive to get you to install it. Which is why they, you can see why they, I mean, they're like, well, we'll make this for ourselves. It's been a huge hit seemingly. Yeah, look at all these people that download.

Well, now we'll make a hard drive device. We'll make a hardware device to do it. And if a few people want that, and you can just see where their thought process from beginning to end. I have used some products like that way back in the day to replicate a whole bunch of USB drives, and a lot of them are not, you know,

their interfaces are not great. They're pretty minimal. So this is, maybe there's a target in the luxury USB mass writing market. I'm not sure that's a thing. You know, Veritunda points out that Noah could use something like this when he's trying to switch people over to Linux.

I think that's pretty good. And Cody the Dragon says maybe they should call it the sketch. So it would be the Etcher sketch. Boom. Boom, boom. Yeah. Womp, womp. But that's pretty good, though.

I think they should actually do that. Why not? Yeah. Yeah. You know what else is great? DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean.com. Go over there and spin up some infrastructure.

I was reminded recently that there's so many great features of DigitalOcean that I often go off in the woods and I'll talk about spaces or I'll talk about block storage. All this crazy modern stuff. You know what they say? They say, Chris, you really got to talk about that dashboard. It's a dashboard for days is what they say to me. They say double down on the dashboard, Chris. It's a dashboard for days. If you're a total noob or you're an expert server administrator, you're going to find that dashboard wonderful. They have an API too that matches it. In fact, I think the dashboard is a client of the API, but I digress. Everything you want to deploy, you're going to be able to deploy it within seconds. Everything's backed by SSD drives, and they have team support if you want to work with a group. And one of the features that probably gets a little under-talked about besides besides the dashboard, is the snapshot and backup functionality. For just very little additional,

you can build in backups to your DigitalOcean droplet, which gives you real peace of mind regardless of what you're doing. And you combine that with monitoring and alerting that you can collect metrics, monitor performance, and receive alerts to optimize performance or know if something's down. And that's at no additional cost. It's just a really, really good system, and they've built it in a way where you can do work really fast. You get an idea, you go from idea to actually deploying a system. Hey, I want to try this thing out on GitHub.

Hey, wouldn't it be cool if NextCloud could do this? And you go from that moment to actually trying it within just a couple of minutes. It's really enabling. DigitalOcean.com. Go there, create your account, and then use our promo code D-O-Unplugged. It's one word. You put it together. You apply it after you create your account.

You get the $10 credit. Spin up that $5 rug, rig, run it for two months for free. You know what I'm saying? DigitalOcean.com. It's just so much more pleasant to use than like any of their competitors. The APIs are simple and clean. The UI is beautiful. That dashboard.

Four days. Oh, days. Years even. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. Big thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the show. And thanks to everybody out there for using the promo code DEOUNPLUGGED. All right.

I got to admit it. Steven got me. Steven VN. Steven over, usually writing for ZDNet, but now picking up a gig for HP Enterprise, filling out their website. He wrote the Linux commands you should never use. And I got to admit, he got me. Because this is an idea we've kicked around for the show for a little while, but never really just put the list together. We've actually even made jokes about it on the show.

Oh, crap. You know what I just realized, Wes? Oh, my God. Fascinating. We've got to start the Gen 2 Challenge. We're over halfway into the show. What's going on? All right, we're going to get to this in just a moment.

I'm sorry. That was not an intentional tease, but I want to see this thing through. I've got to get this over. I was recently told by a listener that this might be the worst audio, the least compelling segment we've ever done the show. Yeah, probably true. I feel good about that, which reminded me of the satire piece that Swampy posted over at Pseudo-Satirical. And the headline was, man loses will to live after a Gen 2 install. A man has been left hospitalized and his family left distraught in the aftermath of a grueling install

of Gen 2, the Linux operating system. The 32-year-old man was admitted on Thursday and is currently in stable but serious condition after he reportedly lost the will to live. Sources say he was installing Gen 2 late on Monday evening on his main computer, and this was his quote, first serious attempt.

Alright. So how are you feeling right now good in all seriousness how many weeks i know it's not weeks but how many episodes have you been doing this this is the third i think or fourth third or fourth yeah so we're just doing it during the show we're just doing it during about three you're about three or four hours in to install well about two and a half i'd say probably yeah right okay all right two and a half hours yeah if i get a usb stick of ubuntu in fact a blank usb stick and i have to download the iso yeah and put the iso on the usb stick sure and then install the system

i'm done in like 20 minutes tops right right so for all of the extra performance you're going to eek out of this install of gentoo do you think it's a false economy oh you're asking that question Right, right. I would say for most people probably not it is a lot of fun I will say I really enjoy it's been it's fun to configure a kernel it's just a lot of fun and there's a lot of neat options there's value in visiting down obviously you can do that in other distributions in Ubuntu and Argent it doesn't matter

Gentoo it feels like it's feels like it's just part of the process a few of the houses I grew up in and Angela's house they have this crawl space under the house. And like you don't go there very often. But when you go under the crawl space of a house, you kind of reacquaint yourself with some of the mechanics of the plumbing, the electrical. Oh, yeah, that hack job we did a while ago. And it's sort of good to just have a real intimate understanding of actually how all these things connect together in your home that you live in every day.

But at a certain point, you go above that crawl space and you just want to move on with your life. So I do feel like it is, in this day and age, not particularly worth it. If I was on a system that was very old or 32-bit or maybe even ARM, if I could use disk CC or something like that, then maybe. Then maybe. Or if you're just a very skilled user who has an interest in maintaining all the little bits and pieces of what goes on in their operating system, you will enjoy it. All right, Wes. Well, are you ready for the official check-in? How are we doing over there in the Gen 2 corner, Wes?

Well, we're working on Emergent Sway right now. Really? Yeah. So when you do that does that oh yeah oh i hear the build going now yeah that's it right there oh look at that building away mighty fine so is that it does that is that pulling in whaling and all that stuff as a dependency how's that working yep we should be good to go after all this is done so you are building not just wet uh sway but also whaling now do you think that's going to finish? Actually, I installed that earlier before.

But, yeah, exactly. Do you think that's going to finish? 51 of 120 right now. That's where we're at. We may not get to a graphical environment this episode. We're so close, though. All right. I will also say this has been slow, partially because we've been doing it in a virtual machine

and while doing the show. And I had not installed Gentoo for years. I did install Gentoo on another system just to play around. Yeah, me too. The second time is so much easier. Oh, yeah. You know what I mean? After you've done Arch one time, it's like, okay, it's simple.

It's really not that complicated. Oh, yeah. If you don't go in the weeds, probably in like an hour I could have Gentoo. Depending on build speed. As our friends in the mumble room might say, we're really just kind of taking a piss here at Gen 2, but in the reality, if we really wanted to buckle down and get this done, it's not that difficult. It doesn't take that long, but we

want to, if we're going to do this damn thing, we're going to have a little fun with it. That's what we figured. Alright, Wes, well, before the show's over, we'll check back in with you, okay? That sounds good. Alright. So let's move on. That wraps up the Gen 2 check-in, I guess. That doesn't wrap up the challenge yet.

I'm doubtful we're going to get to a graphical environment this episode. Jeez, though, that would be great for our last live episode to actually get to a graphical boot. So the system's booting at this point. Oh, yeah. Well done, sir. You're doing well. You're doing well. Which kernel do you remember?

Which version? Probably not. Now you can't check those. I think 4.12. Maniac. All right. So the Linux commands you should never use. We're going to start with the obvious one right here at the top.

rm-rf/. The first one that I ever learned the hard way. Back when it was much easier to actually delete your running system. Now it's a little more difficult. But just short version. I've told this story thousands of times probably. But one of my favorite things I ever experienced about Linux was the fact that I could delete my running system. And then the fact that components of it just continue to run as if I hadn't just deleted

my entire file system. So I have the slow realization of what I had done this like, Oh, what is, that doesn't seem like that's, Hmm. Well, my, my gnome session is still going, my terminal still working. And then having this slow discovery as my system completely fell down around me and more and more things stopped working and then i said hey guys come over here because i'm in the middle of a school lab come over here guys and i'm showing look at this thing i deleted my entire file system and it's still running let's see what else i can

do what else is in ram and it was like it was this massive fascination how powerful single-handedly that i could delete my own, because this would never happen on a Mac or Windows, that I could delete my own file system and then keep using it to a degree to debug the fact that I just deleted my own file system. So, yeah. Maybe you should go RMRF your system. It's a lot of fun. I mean, if you're done anyways. Maybe do it to someone else's

system, or better yet, a virtual machine. Oh, well, sure. But I mean, like, if you're on a system and you're going to nuke and pave anyways, after you got all your stuff backed up, right before you just go wipe the old disk anyways, want to have a little fun. See how far you can get. See which desktop environments last the longest. I bet you

could get pretty far. You'd be surprised depending on how much is in memory. The Bash Fork Bomb, of course, which is kind of hard to translate to audio, but you can find the link in there. Then he points out how easy it is for noobs, and I want to see what you think, because I think he's probably right, how easy it is for noobs to accidentally overwrite their hard drive, because you can basically pipe anything to dev HDA

accidentally, ls-la, and then you go to pipe that to, like, a file, and you're being dumb, you're a noob, you write in slash dev slash HDA, and you hit enter, and the next thing you know know you've just overwritten the hda device with the output of ls-l. What do you think? Is that a destructive one there, Wes? Is that like a... I've never heard anybody doing that. I've never heard a single person doing that.

I have not either. Not to the actual to the device. It is pretty easy to overwrite a file, especially if you're running into similar name files or versions that have just changed letters or numbers after them. I will say, in general, the command line is not a very forgiving environment in its default

configuration. Now, if you have backup snapshots or even just helper things to make RM, for instance, more friendly, then it's not so bad. When you're coming to Linux or just Unix in general, really, one of the things that is hard for long-time Windows users to understand is nothing returned is generally a success.

A lot of times that means failure in the Windows world. Like, you run an application and nothing happens, that's a failure. Whereas in Linux, you run a command line application and it just returns the command line, and it generally means it succeeded in what you wanted to do. And so it's this weird kind of like mental like space you gotta bridge. But the command that I

would bet more often screws not just noobs but experts is DD. Because that's really where you could accidentally just put the wrong thing in there, put the wrong dev SDA device in there, the wrong... Right, I in there the right i mean it'll do what you tell it to do and see here's a little more plausible because using dd you generally

are working working with a device of some kind so you're already mucking about here it's pretty easy to just be oh well i typed a two but i meant a one there or an a instead of a b and everything's okay right let's let's get this out to a wider audience uh chris your friend and my joan wessington has another podcast called late night linux and one of his co-hosts is jesse who's a very good friend of mine but jesse had made a bit of a faux pas earlier in the year where he managed dd pop os over his hard disk not onto the USB stick and this caused all kinds of confusion

because he accused Pop OS of silently installing on his hard disk whilst he was testing it on the live environment which actually happened to be his hard drive now let's just say to everybody stop using DD

this is a recipe for disaster Now, let's just say to everybody, stop using DD. This is a recipe for disaster. Everyone has IDD'd over my hard disk story. We've already talked about Etcher. And if you don't want electron applications, then Gnome Disks has a facility to restore a disk image. And you just say, restore disk image. Here's where my ISO file is is point it at your usb drive that you've plugged in and it will stick an iso image on your usb stick without any of

the confusion of whether you've got the right device selected or not so let's for 2018 let's all make a new year's resolution that we're going to stop using dd for putting iso images on usb sticks i've never installed gnu slash linux now very tuned it sounds like you have a horror story of overriding a drive recently not drive but i was actually building a um open wrt image and it was a i386 image and i accidentally did a make kind of install type thing and what it did it would basically installed busybox i386 on my amd c64 laptop and what that does is beatbox will replace all the kind of core binaries with sim links to busybox um and basically trash your system because you now cannot ls you cannot cat you cannot do any of the other crap

that you used to do to try and unpick the system. And so I had to spend time, okay, on the system, copying across 64-bit binaries over the symlinks to restore the system enough that I could actually get the system

running properly. Yeah. Now, Beardsley, you have like a belt and suspenders approach to DD Rescue. Or I mean and suspenders approach to DD Rescue. Or I mean to DD. It's DD Rescue. I kind of gave it away.

DD Rescue, that's GUI. Yeah, the dash GUI might be the easier part there. Okay, so I was just going to say this. I've actually – now, I shouldn't say this because it's going to happen to me because it happens to everybody eventually. I've never DD'd over the wrong drive before. I've never made that mistake. But I have made the format the wrong drive mistake. MKFS, Extended 3, slash dev, slash.

And I had several USB disks attached. And what I would do was this clunky manual system where I would edit and edit and edit. And then I would fill up my scratch drive. And I would fill up my output drive. And then I would use rsync to kind of like collect the entire project, the project files and the output file, and move them all onto these large USB enclosures that were like four terabytes because it had two mere two terabyte drives. So it was supposedly hardware mere in this enclosure. The idea being I load this up with about three months worth of content. And then I put it on a shelf and I put a label on the side of it and say these date ranges of episodes. Okay. Yeah, makes sense.

So I had this – I I was pretty far into this. Just about have the whole drive filled up. Pretty proud of myself for actually finally for one year getting my crap together. You were on top of things. Yeah, I'm saving our source files. Until I went to go format one of the disks in the computer. And instead, I immediately and instantly formatted that USB drive. Just wiped it all out right then and there.

And I hit enter. And then I reread it. and I was like, oh, that doesn't look right. I'm like, well, I should probably double check that. And then I did like a quick mount. You know, that's always my go-to to like, where is everything at? So I open up another tab, do a quick mount. Okay. Then I tab back over. Oh, my God.

It's just like that. I knew. That sinking moment of realization. And then the command line returns. Right? And then, of course, I'm like, and this is, you can probably find it in TechSnap. Like, I tried some data recovery stuff, and this was a long time ago now, but it was one of those moments. So, yeah, make sure when you're formatting, you're formatting.

I've also probably done it with gparted, too. I just don't have a story for it. So I have done that one. So be wary of that. I think something else, and this is one that SJW or is it SJW? No, it's not SJW. That's something else. It's SJN.

What he points out is one of the other things that's pretty common is for noobs that are trying to get tips online to do the whole grab like a command that W gets a shell script and executes it and just paste it right in the terminal. We've all seen the websites, really nice, fancy websites. You go there and they've got like that syntax that you can just highlight right there and paste it into your terminal and have a go. And why should you care? They're a pretty well-known name. And that's pretty, I think it's impossible to tell newbies not to do that, to be honest. I think the risk to reward ratio is too skewed, and I don't think there's any way you can properly tell a newbie not to do that

because at the end of the day, they just want sublime text or whatever it is that they're trying to install. Not to be a pessimist, but that is such a dangerous, slippery slope. Right. So there's dangerous for multiple reasons. One of them is some of those scripts are poorly written, and so if they are an incomplete download, could execute something that is not

properly run, but will still execute. You can engineer scripts to not do that. So in that case, in the best case situation, it's about insecure because they also don't expect any newbies to really verify that the script is anything. They probably don't know what it's doing. They don't have the

capacity to audit it. It's true. But it's really just an unfortunate situation in general. Any other, like, don't do this to kill your system tips? For anybody that got a Linux computer under the holiday poll this year, does anybody have a going away parting? I'll add just at the start, find has the dash delete flag, which can be really useful.

But if you put it before any of the other arguments you use to filter your find, it will just delete everything. So that's one thing to watch out for. That's a good one, Wes. Especially with those things, it's always best to do one run just finding the files, save that to a log file to put in the ticket for later,

and then run the delete command. And always, always, always double check when you're new to the command line before you execute anything as root. One of the things that I do if I am like just double checking now before I format a drive after I had that horrible circumstance where I deleted nearly four terabytes worth of source material, what I do now is I write the command in usually like G edit, but whatever you want, whatever you have that's your favorite scratch pad. At least you didn't say nano.

You son of a bitch. And then I run the mount command. I look at my mount points. Like I make sure – and one of the things I will do – I know this is going really – I'm being pedantic here. But I will do – I will type mount. I'll see my output. I'll highlight the output like the dev slash sda1 i'll highlight that with my mouse cursor and then i'll use the x middle click paste to paste that into my command

syntax in g edit so that way there's no typo it's a one for one i know it's a copy pasta and then i complete the whole command out i type out the rest and then i copy that and paste that into my terminal and execute that when i'm doing it like a format just because I want to double, triple check it. Right, and it can be like you can accidentally get returns in your copies or other things where things execute before you've had a chance to completely review the command. So I think that's great, right? Like, yeah, compose in a scratch pad and then you can run in a terminal. Yeah, yeah, we have more in the post.

Rounding the terminal. Yeah, yeah. We have more in the post, so you can go check out SJVN's whole post over at the HP Enterprise blog, which I thought was interesting. Look at HP Enterprise trying to get in a little bit. They have enterprise.next, which is their insights and resources to help IT pros shape the future of business. It's the new enterprise blog for HP, Heliot Packard. And I think it's very, very interesting that they hired SJVN, who is a Linux writer, and they want posts about Linux. What does that tell you, Wes?

I suppose they know their customers, or at least the people who they want to send emails to get them to click and then maybe talk to their boss about buying HP Enterprise. Speaking of talking to your boss about buying something, why don't you talk to your boss about buying a Linux Academy subscription? This is, I think, a great way to go. If you have any kind of training budget, because Linux Academy is such an outstanding value, this is a win-win.

It's a win-win for the employer, but even more so, it's a win-win for you. If you just want to advance your career or just challenge yourself or just learn a new skill set, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. You go there, you sign up for a free seven-day trial, and you can try out the whole dang platform. There are downloadable comprehensive study guides. There are virtual servers that spin up right away. Linux Academy is such a great platform to learn about every Linux, cloud, and DevOps

topic or those major big infrastructure things like Azure and AWS and OpenStack. They have learning paths, which is a series of content and courseware plans specifically for your education. And like I was saying at the beginning here, they also have great support for like team accounts. And you have these profile pages that you can use for a lot of different reasons, like a GitHub public profile where you can kind of bragvertize about some of the accomplishes that you've completed. But you can also use it as a way to say, here's the things I've done with the training budget. So it's a great way for you to really turn around and show this has been worth your time. The reason I mentioned that is that's

something that can easily be hard to quantify in a corporate environment if there's not a really clear rigid structure. And you can avoid all of that hassle of a super rigid structure with just the tools built into Linux Academy platform. Whether you're a single individual, you're working at a business, or you have a whole group like Noah with his team, there's so many great resources. Instructor mentoring, real human beings, hands-on scenarios, real labs, and course schedulers to fit with your busy time. Wow.

Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there, sign up for a free seven-day trial, and you support the show. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go there, sign up for a free seven-day trial, and you support the show. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. All right, Wes, how's the Gen 2 corner over there? What's going on over there, Wes? 71 of 120. I thought so.

This is not the fastest rig in the universe. In fact, far from it. We have to, well, we can't always just be talking about what it's like on, like, 6-core and 12-core systems. Like, we do have to sometimes run a... Yeah, really, part of this was, like, what's it like for the casual Linux user who's never installed Gentoo before to just come over and, you know, they're not a newbie, but they have some Linux knowledge. I think we need Beard to act as official judge because he could be our impartial decider here but i would agree with impartial but okay all right yeah decider what do you think about for the sake of getting through

the challenge since it's quote the worst content of the show ever um what what if what if we let the build finish yeah like we don't boot we don't reboot. We let the builds finish. If they error out or finish, we let them finish or error out and then pause the virtual machine. You're really emphasizing error out there. They're going to finish. They'll be fine. The build will be fine. I saw a look on your face earlier and it was like, oh shit, the build just stopped kind of a look, I thought. So I was a little worried.

Oh, no. No. It's just slow. But here's the alternative. Or the alternative is when the theme music ends, the Linux unplugged outro music ends, Wes has to hit pause immediately on the virtual machine, which is more in line with the original spirit of this whole thing. Yeah, that is part of it. I have not let anything finish.

I have just been like... So I think Beard's got to be the decider if we let this one go through and then we pause it, or if we pause it during the outro music. I say we let it go through okay all right judge uh judge has decided judge beardley so then hopefully that means next week we may be able to boot up and get right into sway which would be the first time i've ever seen sway i mean i have an idea of what it looks like but it'll be the first time i've ever seen i'll have to make sure then we can show it on air too so yes oh that'll be good we'll come up with a little

way to do that too which will be maybe impossible from waylon now that i think about it i don't even i have seen one at least screen recorder i'm i'm doing some research in for us but oh waylon you already bring me damn it i'll also have in the show notes if you want to read that satirical thing about the man who became um suicidal after installing gen 2 that'll be that'll be linked to the show notes but okay i feel good about, I feel good about that. I feel good about that. And you notice nobody in the Mumba Room is participating in the Gen 2 Challenge anymore.

Perhaps the worst idea ever. But I submit it would have been even worse video content. People are like, this is just horrible audio content. I'm like, yeah, you know what would have been worse? If you were watching us do it. That's even worse. So you have spared us all of that. Now, this is our last live show of the year,

but we will be back at the beginning of next year, and we have releases coming out during the holidays. Also, just a little plug-ski right here for the new TechSnap program, TechSnap.Systems, a reboot of the TechSnap program on the Jupyter Broadcasting Network. So you can catch up on that,

if you'd like, during the holiday break. But we will be back in the new year. We'll have the live times over at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. We'd love it if you'd join us in our Mumble room, which is mumble.jupiterbroadcasting.org. But you can get all the information you need when you go to that website. And we have a dedicated Linux Unplugged community chat room at discord.me slash jupitercolony. That's room at discord.me slash jupitercolony.

That's right, discord.me slash jupitercolony, Linux Unplugged in there, as well as the IRC room at irc.geekshed.net, hashtag jupiterbroadcasting. Wow, that's a lot of stuff. You know, and that content, you kind of underpoint it, but it's not like a lame clip show. That's not what we're leaving you with for the holidays.

This is all new, off-air. Original content, yeah, right? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Turned out a lot of fun, actually. Also, let's give a little plug-skies for the wonderful and around 30-minute podcast, the Ubuntu podcast. Yeah, yeah. Go check out more Wimpy and Popey over there. Please do.

Season break soon. We strike for 30 minutes as long as we don't have Aikido. Yeah, I was just going to say. Some things you just can't control. Yeah. We're having a season. The last episode of this season will be out this Thursday, and then we'll have a break for a couple of months. Wow.

So jealous. So jealous. I have an idea for a podcast where I'm going to do seasons. I'm going to get all in on it. Oh, seasons. Thinking about it. Thinking about it, Wes. But that'll be a story for 2018.

All right, guys. Well, have a great holiday. We won't be gathering together again until the new year. So everybody there in that virtual lug, have yourself a holiday. I really appreciate you guys being here throughout the year. And I don't know. What other nice thing can we say to them?

Thanks for all the great content over the year. Here's to 2018 and lots more Linux. Yeah. Yeah. And really same to all the audience as well. Everybody out there, I hope you have a great holiday and I hope you tune back in and we have I think 2018 is going to be the best year for Linux

Unplugged ever because we have so many cool things in store. I'm super excited. It's, I don't know, it's just feels like we have just the things that we've even thought of for 2018. I think if we just pull those off, it's going to be a great year for the show. So, yeah, like Wes was saying, don't miss the holiday content. That'll be out on the site, the feeds, the YouTubes, all the regular places.

You catch Linux Unplugged. So be sure to grab that. Check out the calendar for when we're live again over at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. Contact page slash contact. At Jupiter Signal for the network. He's at Wes Payne. I'm at Chris LAS. The beard is at wrecked. the network. He's at West Payne. I'm at Chris L.A.S. The beard is at

wrecked.net. Hey, look at that. Hey, how about the subreddit? Let's slip that in there too. Linuxunplugged.reddit.com. Go there.

Submit content to the show. All those good things. All right. I got to go. They're playing me off. Producers are saying get out of here.

It's time to wrap up. You're done. Let it go. Go enjoy the holidays. Okay. Thanks for being here. See ya in 2018! I've never installed GNU slash Linux. All right, for one last time this year, we've got to pick a title. We've got to pick a title.

You know, I resisted the urge to do like a predictions episode this year, because that's pretty common. But I did sneak a couple into Linux Action News, so we've got some Linux Action News in the pipe, too. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. We get any title suggestions? What do you think, Wes? What about something about BcacheFS being a

hope? Yeah, yeah. Help us BcacheFS. Yeah. That's not bad. It does play on the Star Wars hype right now. Etcher because DD is scary says Architect. Multipass!

Yeah, if we did artwork, we could have What's-Her-Face from Fifth Element. Leloo. Yeah, yes. Of course, I bet you guys have been hearing that a lot recently. Yep. I tried not to make the joke in the show too much because I figured that's one that everyone... No, we love it.

Does Multipass support custom images at the current current point you can create you can customize the cloud in the images and use those yes okay okay that's i figured but yeah i love those cloud in it those images are great what about rm-rf slash yeah that's the ultimate customization, but for the title, no, for the 50, use the,

um, bash for bomb was the title bash fork. Just the, just the word bash fork bomb. No, there's squiggly brackets and everything. You know, that could actually break somebody's podcast catcher.

I bet. I will say that is like, if, uh, if you're trying to find someone who's like, if they're familiar with bash, it's a reasonable thing to make them explain to you. What do you think?

Bash Fork Bomb is actually kind of funny, but I also like RM-RF. I can't believe we've never done that. How about RM-RF 2017? Yeah, there you go. That's not bad either. That's pretty catchy. It means something, sort of.

That's not bad. That's not bad. So basically, I'm going to paste it in the Discord and tell me if you guys like the way that looks. Now that I actually see it, I don't know if I like it. But I'll paste it here and see if I like it better on screen. Doesn't that look weird to you?

That looks weird right sorry give me five minutes to find where on discord you posted that well you just look on the live stream if you know it's on the it's in the oh yeah right right right what if i took out the slash one i think just i think just slash i think well no i'd have a trailing slash 2017 slash, there you go. I like that. Really? You think that would make the difference? But without the leading slash, maybe.

Oh, okay. Because I kind of don't like the leading slash. Because it's a directory beneath where you are. Yeah. Yeah. Or even just plain 2017 is all right, as Rikai suggests. Yeah, I kind of just like rm-rf, though. But I could, all right, so now of just like RM-RF, though. But I could...

All right, so now what if we do just without the slash at all? Hmm. Yeah. Okay. Oh, okay. All right. Hmm. I think I like it best without the slash.

Yeah, I think I do, too. I think you get it without the slash, right? Yeah, I think you're right. It's a bit nerdy with it. Well... Yeah, yeah. Now's a bit nerdy with it. Well, yeah, yeah. Now it's not nerdy.