LINUX Unplugged - Episode 253: Personalities Happen

Episode Date: June 13, 2018

There is trouble at CopperheadOS, Plasma has a shiny new release, and we share the story of how Linux has powered the curiosity rover for 17 years. Plus our stories from a weekend of Linux parties, Texas LinuxFest, SouthEast LinuxFest, and FOSS Talk Live.

Now, Chris, I know you're an animal lover, but mostly just on the outside. You ever been curious about the inside? No. No, that sounds like that would be something a psychopath would want to do, like cut open a cat or something. It sure does. Why are you asking me this? Well, I've got a link for you.

A kind of cute, kind of disturbing new VR cat demo. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. This one from Leap Motion. Yeah, I heard about it. I had not seen it. I don't think I need to go inside a cat, Wes. This is Linux Unplugged, episode 253 for June 12, 2018.

Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's definitely not going to talk about Microsoft buying GitHub this week. Well, I mean, I mean anymore. And yes, I'm still live from the road. I'm just outside of Dallas, Texas. Parked at the Linux Academy headquarters. I'll tell you more about that, but let's bring in everybody. My name is Chris, and that right there over there is... My name is Wes. Hello, Wes. You and your wonderful Seattle weather.

Oh, I know, right? It's overcast right now. Can you even imagine that, Chris? No, no, no, no, I cannot. Wes, we're going to try something a little different today. Going to reformat the show a little bit. This is the Unplugged program after all, and we're going to do things in blocks. This is an idea I came up with while I'm on the road, totally 100% open to feedback. So here's what's going to happen for the first time. We're going to bust through a community update block of news. Then I'm going to block all of the sponsors together in one easy to

navigate spot in the show with all the links of the stuff I'm going to block all of the sponsors together in one easy-to-navigate spot in the show with all the links of the stuff I'm going to talk about this week because they're all launching stuff, some big stuff. I'll tell you about that. Then towards the end of the show, we're going to kick back. I'm going to tell you about Texas Linux Fest, what the event was like, about the parties that we attended, and all of those kinds of stories.

And then we'll wrap it up with an ad pick that is extremely useful. And our own Mr. Wes Payne will tell us all about it. But Wes, before we go any further, there is one duty that we must perform. We must. We must. We must holla at that mumble room. Time appropriate greetings, Virtual Lug. Hello.

Hello. Hello, everybody. Wonderful to hear you. I'm feeling pretty good right now. You know, I've started to acclimate to the Texas heat. You're Texan. Through and through. Yeah, I'm not doing too bad. It's 97 degrees here every single day in Keller, Texas. But

I don't know, you kind of get used to it after a while, if that makes any sense. And it's a little less humid here than it was down in Austin, so that helps a lot too. And I got to, Anthony, the CEO of Linux Academy, picked me up Friday morning from the campground to take me to LinuxFest. And while we were driving, I chatted with him. I said, yeah, you know, we're a little concerned about the heat because it's going to be 97 degrees. We're a little concerned about the heat because it's going to be 97 degrees. And of course, I'm going to have to run my generator to be able to run the AC.

And that's going to be loud. And it's going to be limited. I'm only going to run it for, you know, it's just kind of like, it was just kind of convulsing as I'm sometimes known to do. It's only sometimes. Yeah. It's almost like I've made a living out of it or something. And so, you know know super cool guy he he gets a hold of his facilities guy friday morning and by sunday when i got here they had a power hookup for the rv so i could hook up and get

full service yep so i got ac i got full power it's great even i'm even in the shade a little bit by the by this time it's uh, it's almost about 3 o'clock, about Chicago time zone area. About this time, the building starts to shade the RV too. So it's actually downright comfortable. I couldn't believe it. How did you get such a sweet spot? I don't know, man.

I was worried about it the entire time. Before I left, I was worried. I almost went out and got this whole Reflectix kit that I was going to put out all over the windows. And I was going to – I remember I was really upset when my awning got busted because that was a key part of – and that still would have been very useful. But it was a key part of my shade strategy. I was very concerned about this particular aspect. And it's gone way better than I could have imagined. And on top of that, we're right next to like a little pond crick thing.

I don't know. They're not like what we have in Washington because it's just like any old average, like basically big ditch, but it's a natural thing. And it's full of fish and turtles. I have a turtle pond next to the RV. And so far I've counted four turtles

and I'm told there's some turtles in there. They're as large as hubcaps, like big turtles. So you brought one on as a guest on the show today? Yeah, yeah. He's sitting right there. He just hasn't had much to say yet. So last night, I'm working out by the pond watching the turtles, Levi and I.

So that was pretty cool. Yeah, and then Hadiyah found this tour app. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right, but it's tour or something like that. Have you seen this? It's Airbnb for cars. Yeah, and then Hadeeth found this Tour app. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right, but it's Tour or something like that. Have you seen this? It's Airbnb for cars. No, I have not. And they specialize in sort of fancy cars.

Like, you know, so Mercedes, BMWs, Teslas, or like really souped up Jeep Wranglers and trucks for Texas. And so for 60 bucks, we rented today a Mercedes with great air conditioning, a white Mercedes with air conditioning that we can bop around for a couple of days. Bopping around in Texas in style, no less. Look at you. You really know what you're doing. It's been pretty good. I mean, I'm getting there. I've got to walk through the Linux Academy office too and got to see some of their studio space that they have here and I've got the OBS rig loaded. It's got OBS on it. It's got Kubuntu 18.04 loaded. It's got the capture cards and the audio interface all

hooked up to it and I'm going to try doing a Chromebook HDMI capture on it after the show. So they're... Oh, interesting. Yeah, their transition to Linux from the Mac is well underway. So it's been a great visit, and I now have

a new term for air conditioning, and that term is life support. I now understand it's life support. So it was a great trip to get here. It was hot. It was 104 degrees on the drive up here, and there was construction in Waco. So, yeah.

It took a while. It took me five hours to get from austin to dallas and uh 104 degrees in that drive but so so are you are you homesick yet are you missing the comforts of the jb1 studio you know actually today's kind of the day that i wasn't like some days i am right but today isn't one of those days today i'm really kind of digging i'm kind of i'm. I'm comfortable. I got the car, so I was able to go out and I was able to get some babes fried chicken, which was described to me as fried chicken that's better than grandma's fried chicken

when grandma grew up making fried chicken. Yeah, yeah. That sounds incredible. It was actually pretty good. So it's been a great trip there's been so much cool like uh people to meet there's some people that are visiting the linux academy offices that are out like writing software and doing startup stuff and they're building on top of linux and they're here talking to people so the thing about the thing i'm starting to appreciate

is there's like a bench of people here that are like Red Hat experts and Azure experts and like expert experts, like really, like really, like I shouldn't give anybody ideas, but like Amazon and Microsoft and Red Hat are poaching people from here constantly. Like these people really, so Linux Academy has people out here.

They're just, you know, getting questions answered and stuff like that. They've got this new meetup space they're building to bring people in from the community and so they can get questions answered. And it's just a really cool thing there. So I got to see all of that that they're building out right now. It's pretty neat. That is really neat. Yeah. So there's probably going to be some more Linux-y community things going on in this area later on down the road once they get all that stuff rolling. But what do you say? Should we

get into some larger open source free software community news updates? That's what we're here for, right? Let's do it. Yeah. We'll talk about Texas Linux Fest later. But let's talk about some news items that people should probably know about this week as we're it's only Tuesday. And there's things you should probably know about if you're a Copperhead OS user, especially. Now Copperhead OS is a security enhanced Android distribution started in 2016. But it looks like the company behind Copperhead OS appears to have run into some internal trouble. Now, I don't really know the specifics at this point, but the situation seems to be devolving

and there's clearly some kind of dispute between the founders. You guys know how much I hate drama, so I don't really care to get into it. But there is a Reddit post that we'll have linked in the show notes where apparently one of the co-founders essentially is kicking out the other co-founder from the company. So that does tend to cause drama, Wes. Absolutely. Especially, you know, at these really small distributions or companies where that makes

up a lot of the culture, a lot of the history, and a lot of the people, you know, trying to do work and organizing things. So, yikes. Yeah. And my thoughts are with the users. I know it almost sounds cliche to say, but it's like, okay, well, now what? Because, you know, you have a user base who's using this because they have very certain kinds of considerations. A Copperhead OS appeals to a certain kind of user base. Well, now what?

I don't know. I honestly don't know where they go because I don't follow this very carefully. I see Mr. Popey has entered in the room. Hello, Popey. Good to see you. Hello. Hello. And Tyler's here too.

Tyler, welcome back. It's been good. I haven't seen you for a little bit. Hello, Popey. Good to see you. Hello. Hello. And Tyler's here too. Tyler, welcome back. It's been good. I haven't seen you for a little bit. Taking the night off. I just got back in from driving home from Southeast Linux Fest. Well, maybe we can pick your brain about that a little bit in the show. What do you say? Do a little Texas Linux Fest update and a little Southeast Linux Fest update. Both were going on

this weekend. So, I'd love to pick your brain about that. Stick around. I'm glad you're here uh yeah so this weekend was huge it was full spectrum for jupiter broadcasting so we had bsd can going on in canada and alan jude and i was there and it was live streamed tyler and noah were Self, and they were live streaming the hell out of Self. I was at Texas Linux Fest doing no work at all, just hobnobbing with everybody.

And Joe and Popey were at Flosstalk this weekend. So all of that was happening this weekend. So, Popey, if you want to talk about Flosstalk in a little bit, too, we could just do kind of a whole kind of roundabout about some of the events we were at this weekend. Yeah, sure. That'd be awesome. All right, Poby, if you want to talk about Flosstalk in a little bit, too, we could just do kind of a whole kind of roundabout about some of the events we were at this weekend. Yeah, sure.

That'd be awesome. All right, so yeah, Copperhead OS, back to the news. So, Copperhead OS is perhaps in trouble, and it might be time to look for an alternative. I don't know if anyone in the Mumba room has any alternative suggestions, or if you do, Wes, but I'd love to hear what the audience thinks on that.

It's kind of a shame to see these projects. Maybe things will work out fine, but it's a shame to see things go this way. Especially in a security-focused project where you sort of hope that calmer heads will prevail as it's, you know, serious attention to detail sort of work, but as always, personalities, they happen.

That's exactly, basically just summed it up. Personalities happen. That's a title, somebody should bang suggest that, That's a good title suggestion. Open source personalities happen. So Plasma 5.3, speaking of refinement and working away on stuff, Plasma 5.13 launched today. And I think the big headline feature for most users is going to be the browser integration.

It's a new set of features for Firefox, Chrome, and Chromium-based browsers that integrate in with Plasma notification pop-ups, transferring files with Dolphin notifications, media controls can now mute and skip videos playing from within the browser, and you can send a link to your phone with KDE Connect now. And you can also choose browser tabs. I have not tried this at all, but I understand that you can try to choose browser tabs somehow from KRunner with an alt space keyboard shortcut. That's blowing my mind.

I got to try that at some point. So that's probably the biggest user-facing new feature in Plasma 5.13. The one that I have been anticipating the longest is the redesigned for system settings and the new look for the lock screen and login screen, which I think looks really slick. There's also graphics compositor updates. KWin gained a much improved effects for blurring and desktop switching. And of course, as all these updates go, there's been continued work on making Wayland awesome, including the return of Windows rules now on Wayland, which is a fantastic Plasma desktop

feature, and the use of high priority EGL context, as well as initial support for screencasts and desktop sharing. Whoa. Interesting. Huge one. Plus something that's not really just like a bullet point feature. Here's tons of performance improvements, memory usage improvements, lots of improvements on the system setting stuff and a tech preview. That's what they're calling it of the GTK global menu integration. So if you're a

fan of global menus, there has been a hack available on Plasma. I call it a hack, but there's been a way to get it working on Plasma for a while. This is official stuff. This is going to be official stuff. So that's really nice. And then a small one. It's kind of funny they're even putting this in here, but I legit like it. The digital clock widget allows you now to copy the current date and time to the clipboard. Hallelujah, Wes. It's those small little usability things that when they're there, it just makes sense, right? So new users are like, oh, hey, look, this is handy. And when you want it, or you're just trying to just trying to copy the things you need to send it to someone right now, and then it works. And you're just like, yes, great, perfect. And now, I think, I think I'll leave I'll leave it as an exercise to the user,

but producer Michael and I worked together on a video for the Plasma 5.13 introduction, so I'll have that linked in the show notes if you guys want to watch that. That covers more stuff and shows screencasts and whatnot of all of that. But big news for you, Popey, now that you're a big Plasma desktop user, you must be looking forward to this.

Yeah, always. I love just getting the firehose of updates that come on KDE Neon because it's different for me because I'm used to Ubuntu where we have our six-monthly releases, so I have to upgrade every six months in order to get new crack at the platform level. With KDE Neon, I've got their PPA enabled or their repo enabled, so I just get new stuff all the time, and it's great.

I love it. It kind of is because it's the desktop stuff, but your core OS is pretty much not changing much unless there's been some upstream change from Ubuntu. So it's kind of just the right balance in a weird way. And surprisingly, it has not broken yet for me. That's the other thing. Sweet. Always a bonus.

Has it broke for you at all um not oh i was gonna say it did right back at the start there was a well kwin has crashed once maybe twice i think but everything carried on working all the applications are still running it's just the window decorations died and i just went to a tty rerun k run k win and carried on running. I carried on running for about a week with KWIN running in a TTY. It was fine. And it worked. Yeah.

That's a testament right there. The neon updates will probably be flowing. I have not tried to update my box yet because I'm doing the show right now, but I think I will after the show. Oh, you've learned. Good job. Good job. I'm proud. the show right now, but I think I will after the show.

Oh, you've learned. Good job. Good job. I'm proud. I am a little extra conservative about it when I'm on the road, because if it breaks at the studio, well, I could probably just go grab another machine. If it breaks while I'm on the road, I really am going to be in a... It'd be kind of embarrassing to walk into Linux Academy with my laptop in hand and be like, anybody have a thumb drive I can use? That's not the direction I want that to go. Poby, did you hear about these wine packs it reminds me just last week we talked about a couple of snaps that were quote soaked in wine and now we have wine packs which uh are just like the name sounds uh it's a

packaging up of wine applications as a flat pack bundle and they have um fortnite overwatch and world of warcraft as well as internet explorer 8 everyone's favorite browser um as uh i guess you could call it uh what do they call them wine packs as a wine pack what are your thoughts i think these um these various uh tools for making containerized applications are suited perfectly to this use case of having wine plus something and the reason why is often you want to have a specific build of wine or a specific tweaked set of additional libraries that you might install with wine tricks plus the application and that that delicate balancing of all those things someone needs to figure out and then get it all right and package it all up and it works but then you don't ever want to touch it and you don't want to then

you know update the version of wine or screw around with what's inside that that um that you know fake c drive as it were um and that's exactly what these containerized applications let you do you end up having the right version of wine and the right config for fortnite or whatever the right version of Wine and the right config for whatever other game, and they don't interfere with each other. It's a great idea. I like that. And I wonder if this could be something that maybe Crossover Office could jump on top of and bundle their applications in a way, or bundle Wine applications in a way that make it even easier for end users to install those. That could be kind of a neat thing.

Yeah, it really seems like it could open up this. I'm thinking about the number of people I've sort of, you know, softly pushed onto Linux. Some of them are playing more games or trying to use some more, you know, they're just doing more, and sometimes that involves Windows programs. I don't want to teach them how to use Wine. So if I can point them at these things, that's so much better. It makes it easier for them to get at. It's just, you know, click an icon or,

you know, download a flat pack or whatever, and just make it easy for people to get all the necessary bits and pieces that make it work. I'm going to be curious to watch how many more of these we get with snaps too and I think the whole concept is also potentially a huge boom for piracy you could go pirate all kinds of Windows applications if you can get it working right and get it in one of these containerized application delivery mechanisms

well that's already been done on Pirate Bay there are a whole bunch of flat packs for commercial uh windows applications that have been bundled with wine that was done probably about eight months ago um but you know people will always bend technology to their will even if it's nefarious uses unfortunately yeah um in some ways maybe that's a way we can preserve software too way way down the road so that'll be something interesting to watch. Yeah. I mean, there's a Mosaic Snap in the store. Right.

So you can get the original Mosaic browser if you really, really, really want to. Yeah, just do Snap, install Mosaic, and you can run the Mosaic. Not a lot of websites work with it because it's a very old web browser. But the original homepage for the Mosaic web browser does work, and that's what it is, the a very old web browser. But the original homepage for the Mosaic web browser does work, and that's what it is, the homepage for that web browser. So yeah, it is a great way to preserve software. You can have it in a little container. It's not going to break out of that container,

and you've got a little runtime environment that it will work in for forever and for always. Now, hold on. I've got to do this. This is too great right now. I mean, I'm sorry if my connection gets a little shaky because I'm actually legitimately installing this right now. Well, the good news is Mosaic browser isn't particularly large. It's like 1.4 megs.

Yeah. Right. Oh, this is great. Oh, boy, it's also a train wreck on high DPI. Surprise, surprise, everybody. Oh, yeah, it will be. Yeah. I wonder if there's any webpage you can actually

open on that. There are a few. You know what, one of my favorite sites, one of the great things that I think GDPR brought us US citizens is a whole bunch of news websites can't figure out what to do, so they just threw their arms up and made text versions of their websites,

which has nothing on it but the text. NPR's done this, CNN's done this, and it's the best thing ever. In fact, if you want to try it, go to text.npr.org and it's just an all-text version. I tweeted a couple of days ago what the

CNN one is. I want to try it. Text.npr.org. Let's try it in the Mosaic browser and see if it works. Probably going to fail on an SSL, sir, I'd imagine. Oh, it is. Yep, it's SSL. Yep. Damn.

That seemed like if anything was going to work, that would have worked. But yeah, it's... You know, I hear that SSL can't be trusted, so they should probably drop that because I hear it's bad. Oh, it's the worst. Just stay away from it. I'll try out more. Are you familiar with Gopher, Chris?

Because that, it's making a research, so let me tell you. Oh, man. Jeez, you just really showed your age there. You want to talk about BBSs too while we're at it? Oh, I thought that was on the docket already. We're always on the lookout for old, crusty software that we can put in a snap for a bit of a lol. So, yeah, if you have any ideas, you know where to find me.

Yeah. I love the idea too because it is, in a way, preserving old work. We've been following this slow march to Linux apps landing on Chromebooks, and last week we talked about how the Samsung Chromebook is getting Linux app support, even though it's an ARM-based Chromebook. That's just great news. But now it looks like a new Chromebook that's on the market soon, two, actually, that were introduced by Acer,

the Chromebook 13 and the Chromebook Spin 13, are going to ship with this Linux app support. So you guys recall, Google revealed back at Google I.O., and we'd be covering it before that even, that Chrome OS would be adding support for running Linux apps within Chrome OS's environment on certain select hardware because it involves either a certain modern version of the kernel or backporting certain kernel modules and features to older versions, which is what's happening in some cases, or

in some cases like the Pixelbook, it just has the newest version of the kernel and you're good to go if you get the dev channel. Last week, we discovered that if you subscribe to the dev channel on the Samsung Chromebook Plus, you could get Linux apps. And now, according to a commit that was spotted by the XDA developers, Acer's new machines are going to support Linux apps at launch. That's kind of a big deal. So they're going to start from day one with Linux apps.

This is actually happening faster than I thought it would, Wes. What are your thoughts? Does it seem like this is happening faster, or is this about what you thought it was going to be, pace-wise? No, I agree with you. It sort of felt like, okay, yeah, you know, the high-end stuff, the developer-focused stuff, that's going to get this right away, the things that are already out there

and people are already using as sort of experimental machines on the bleeding edge. Not something we'll see, like, launched right away or that people marketing Chromebooks would necessarily think that a wide array of people, potential customers might want. But boy, this seems like, you know, the couple of news items we've covered about this, it does seem to have some real momentum. And like, it's a feature that's well designed enough or stable enough that they feel like they can ship it, not have to worry about it. Sure, probably not a huge amount of people will use

it right away, or at least won't know that they're using it. But for the rest of us weird Linux nerds over here, it's awesome. Yeah, it's weirdos. Eric, do you have a Chromebook? And if you do or don't, would you consider getting one that has this Linux app support? Yeah, I would definitely consider one. I've been pricing out like S13s and that kind of thing, but that's a little pricey for my position right now. So a Chromebook might be a good way to get Linux, but not at, you know, at a Cadillac price. That's a good way to put it. I was thinking too, it works well as sort of like my backup Linux rig. You know, I can have,

I can have, I can have, maybe I can have a 15 inch laptop. And then I have a smaller Chromebook that's sort of like my backup portable Linux rig. You know, that'd be pretty nice. I think this might be the year that I buy a new Chromebook. I've never, never have, never bought a Chromebook. I've bought a used Chromebook once. Of course, I've played with my kid's Chromebook, but I've never bought a Chromebook. And so this might be the year that I finally break down and I do it.

What about you, Bobby? Would this put you over the edge for getting a Chromebook or a new one? I actually picked up a Chromebook just last week. It was in amongst a bunch of stuff that was being thrown out from the canonical offices. They were clearing out some cupboards. So I grabbed it and it's quite neat, but it's out of support

because unfortunately it's the very, very first Chromebook, the CR48. So there's no chance it's out of support because, unfortunately, it's the very, very first Chromebook, the CR48. So there's no chance it's ever going to run Linux apps unless I wipe it and put something like Ubuntu 13.10 on there or something really old and crusty. I think that was the Chromebook I had. I think that was the same one. That was a popular one. I don't remember why it was so popular. So, yeah, I think I'm going to shop a little bit and I'm going to try it. Yes, check that out. Acer Chromebook. Yay. All right. So let's talk right now, this week, from a dust storm. And engineers

are delicately balancing the remaining battery power. It's caught in a pretty significant dust storm. In fact, the most significant I believe that it's ever been in. And if not, it's the second most significant. And the craft is hunkered down, trying to survive the intensifying weather. The storm was first detected on Friday, June 1st by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, at which point the rover's team was notified because whenever there's a large storm near one of the rovers, they page the team. The rover uses solar panels, so a dust storm is going to have an extremely negative impact on the rover opportunities, power levels, and its batteries. I feel like I understand its pain. You know, I feel like my rover also has suffered from similar situations.

It's just a harsh universe out there, and you've got to protect yourself. And then on June 6th, Wednesday, June 6th, Opportunity was in minimal operations mode because of the sharply degreasing power levels. Now, the brave little rover is continuing to weather the storm. In fact, it sent a transmission to Earth Sunday morning, we last heard from it, which is a good sign. So, that means there's still enough charge left in the batteries to communicate with home, despite the fact that the storm is continuing to worsen. But the main concern isn't really the dust storm itself. It's the need to keep the rover's heaters operational while maintaining minimal power levels in the batteries

because it's so cold. Opportunity though is a pretty hard little rover and maybe Linux has contributed this a little bit. It's continually defied everyone's expectations for 15 years. It was only designed to last for 90 days and it's still going. So this, I mean, this is why it's such a kind of a big deal, because not only does it represent just a massive technological breakthrough for NASA, and it's just an incredible accomplishment, it's also representative of when NASA and the Jet Propulsion Labs made the change to using Linux as their development and control systems. Really? Yeah, it represents a really cool story.

The long-term development story behind this rover was this wasn't going to be the rover initially. It was going to be a different rover, completely going to be designed, controlled, managed, developed for using all SGI systems, SGI top and bottom, SGI everything. But that mission took a turning point. And in the background, JPL and others had been experimenting with Linux here and there. A Debian laptop had gone up on the space shuttle STS-83 in 97. So

Debian went up into space in 97. But internally, they just weren't there yet. But they had sort of like this skunkworks project to move things off of the SGIs and onto Linux box, onto a Linux box. And I've got the full story from Linux Journal from years ago linked in the show notes, but I'll just give you the highlights of this piece. So they say, Linux originally was not intended to be the primary development platform our software initially was intended for use on the mars 01 mission which essentially would have been a repeat of jpl's 97 mars pathfinder mission the plan was to do all rover commanding on a single silicon graphics workstation as had been done on the mars pathfinder our linux support was, at that time, mainly a hedge

against SGI's fortunes. Wow. After the failure of JPL's Mars 98 missions, however, JPL replanned its Mars strategy. The Mars 01 plans were scrapped in favor of a later launch. That mission later on

became the MER mission. The upshot was that we got two years of development time that we hadn't planned on. Although it was for a different spacecraft than we had planned, we had two years. In those two years, Linux and the generic x86 hardware it runs on made enormous strides in both CPU and graphics speeds, thanks in no small part to the graphics chip maker NVIDIA

and its strong support for Linux on the enterprise systems. As a result, we increasingly came to favor the faster, better, cheaper solution that was Linux. We eventually purchased two high-end SGIs to add to our Linux boxes during flight operations, but it's unclear whether we ended up using them. The Linux boxes

now give us equal, if not better, performance, and as a result, the MER rovers are being commanded by multiple teams working in parallel on dozens of Linux systems that we purchased for the mission. And now that's for 17 years they've been doing this. Our software, a suite of applications

called the Rover Sequencing and Visualization Program, RSVP for short, was developed, tested, and deployed on Linux. RSVP gives Mir, was developed, tested, and deployed on Linux. RSVP gives MIR engineers and scientists sophisticated tools for commanding Mars rovers. Because of the lengthy light time delays, which amount to nearly 20 minutes round trip, it's not possible to control the rovers interactively. RSVP provides an immersive environment that accurately displays the rover's environment and simulates its behavior.

Throughout the Martian night, we Earthlings use RSVP to plan a days of activities at the command level and then uplink the resulting commands to the rover. The rover then executes those commands during the following Martian day. So there's two main components of RSVP. The rover sequencing editor, which provides text-oriented commanding for all spacecraft commands, and HyperDrive,

which provides an advanced three-dimensional graphics for driving, arm motion, and imaging commands. I think we call that AR these days, Wes. We sure do. And they say also the messages is based on RML, an XML-based specification designed specifically for representing rover commands and sequences. We sure do. to test our code and then set up a simple cron job to run the test every night. If any self-tests failed, they were reported an email message to the developer the next morning. This helped us catch bugs early,

while the changes that it caused them were still fresh in our minds. Our aggressive self-testing was something of an experiment, and it paid off handsomely. How about that? This is an incredible article, and what a story. I think you really hit on it. The rovers have been so cool, How about that? right? You don't have to make sure that you've budgeted accurately for the number of machines that you hope that you actually need and all the licenses to run them. If you can get commodity parts, you can just stick more Linux on it, have multiple people working on the same thing. Not a problem. And it's so interesting that it kind of started as like this little

side skunk works hedge. And then as time went on, it's like, wait a minute, this thing has just surpassed what we were originally hedging against. That's so Linux. That's such a Linux thing to do. It is a Linux thing to do, right? You're like, well, it's free, so you can kind of sneak it in. Oh, we're just running the test server on it. Oh, yeah, the backup system. It's fine.

And then you realize it's just easier to work with. I met some Linux Journal people at Texas Linux Fest, actually. Is that right? Yeah, speaking of Tejas Fest, yeah, they had a booth. They were giving away posters and things like that. We'll talk about that in a minute. So what we just did there is kind of a new format. We just did everything just all back together. No stopping, no interruptions. We just did all of the news right there. because our sponsors are doing a lot of cool things this week, and you're going to need links for some of this stuff. And so what we're going to do is we're going to do all of them right here,

and then the rest of the show we just continue on. And I want to get your feedback on if you like this, because I know, A, some of you have heard this before, so it makes it a little easier to navigate. And B, when we talk about some of the stuff our sponsors are doing, there's no clear place where in the show you go get those links. So let's start by thanking Linux Academy, because that's where I'm parked at right now. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged is where you go to sign up for a free seven-day trial. Linux Academy can help change your life through affordable, high-quality online cloud

training. You can learn new skills, get certified, and train your team and advance your career. We heard from several people at Texas Linux Fest who said their whole IT department has an account, and a lot of people said, I just got one because I'm learning to go somewhere. I'm trying to get into security. I'm trying to get into cloud computing. I'm trying to wrap my head around how the Google Cloud works. It was really fascinating, all the different reasons people get into it. But the one thing that remains true is that it's extremely valuable, extremely valuable resource. It's a training platform to learn everything about Linux and whatever Linux runs on. And back in April, they launched 70 new courses, challenges, and learning activities. And I mentioned it here

on the show. And it was a big deal. 70 is huge. It's a lot of content. And now that I'm here, I have learned, little bird, I won't say much, but little birdies have been telling me, they are all focused on July. They have a lot of content coming out in July. Their biggest ever. It's going to be a ton of stuff. They've already kind of been teasing it a little bit, including their newest pillar, security. They're going to be launching a bunch of security courses,

and they're doing a giveaway to celebrate all of it. So I'm going to put a link to their blog in our show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 253. So you can get in on the swag giveaway and find out about the new content that's coming out. It's massive. And to watch the whole team work on it as they are from, from art people to developers, to the course authors, to the executives and the admins, to, to, to the marketing folks and to the community people, they're trying to get the word out there. Like everybody's focused on this because it's just a huge launch. It's massive.

It'll blow your mind away, and they're really proud of it. So go to Linux Academy right now. You can sign up for a free seven-day trial, try out the platform, and then next month a whole bunch of stuff is going to land. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to support the show and get a free seven-day trial. Now, Ting. Ting has been providing my connectivity on this entire trip from the moment I left Washington to right now.

They have been a rock-solid mobile carrier. They're smarter than unlimited. If you use less, you pay less. You can go to linux.ting.com and get $25 in Ting service credit or $25 off a phone. That's linux.ting.com. The average bill is $23 per month per phone. You pay for what you use, a fair price for however much you talk,

however much you text, and however much data you use. So this month, my data bill's going to be more. But for the other 11 months of the year, I pay hardly anything for data because I have Wi-Fi everywhere I go, and they have nationwide coverage. I've been able to use CDMA and GSM. Where I'm at right now is a GSM

town. It's a GSM town. It's been working just fine. But sometimes CDMA works a little better, especially when I was in Utah. I found that CDMA just worked a lot better. No contracts, no determination fees. You can try Ting risk-free, and you can support the show. Linux.ting.com. They give you a control panel where you can manage everything, see your usage

at a glance, take complete control, set usage alerts. Oh, and complete control, set usage alerts. Oh, and they're doing some giveaways. They have a lot of things going on. But the thing I'm going to direct you to, because you've heard me do these ads before, you could probably do this ad and you could make some money.

Ting is doing a $100 Amazon gift card if you refer a friend or family member, you know, whoever, maybe a child. Convince your 8-year-old. No, I'm kidding. You can't do that. Yeah, refer a friend to Ting and you refer a friend or family member, you know, whoever, maybe a child. Convince your eight-year-old. No, I'm kidding. You can't do that. Yeah. Refer a friend to Ting and you get a chance to win $100 in Ting gift card, Amazon cards from Ting.

And you just take all the things I've told you about Ting. You pay for what you use. Take your ministry message, your megabytes, whatever you use. That's what you pay. $6 a month for the line. No contract, no determination fee. Great company. Fanatical customer support. CDMA and GSM, you can bring your own device or you can buy one directly. They got no agenda. They don't necessarily care what you do with your device. Just use it. They're not going to try to push some sort of Ting experience

down on your device. You say all those things, and then you give them a link, and you're probably going to get this $100 card because you're going to sell it. You're going to sell it. I know you. Start by going to linux.ting.com, either for yourself or a friend or a family. Or if you're visiting the States, I've met people traveling that come here, they get themselves Ting, and they use it while they're here because it's $6 a month. Why not? It's great. I love having it.

I love having it. I have a CDMA and GSM now, just to make it easy. I'm not activating devices or nothing. They're just ready to go. linux.ting.com. And finally today, big thank ready to go. Linux.team.com. And finally today, big thank you to DigitalOcean, making changes everywhere in the open source community. And they're making it possible for you to build better applications and get things deployed in incredible speeds at industry-leading price performance and predictable costs.

Start by going to do.co.unplugged. You get a $100 credit. You can apply that to your DigitalOcean account and you can mess around with a new account for 60 days with $100 credit. My favorite rig is 3 cents an hour. So $100 credit is going to get you far. And they have incredibly fast infrastructure, enterprise grade SSDs on everything from like the $5 a month rig up to the big mama jamas that have hundreds of gigs of RAM and Xeons for days. Oh, and they now have flexible droplets. You can mix and match the resources you need. I've got a Fedora 28 box running up on DigitalOcean using 250 gigs-ish of block storage. It's so smooth the way all of this works. When you set up a Fedora 28 cloud

instance, you immediately connect your SSH key, you get the DNS all set up if you do it like I do, and you just log right in and get working. It's so straightforward because of this dashboard. They make managing all this stuff simple, even if you've never done it before or if you've done it for a decade. So check it out by going to do.co.unplugged. Cloud firewalls that block traffic at the network level,

monitoring and alerting to keep you on top of what your rig is doing, easy to use, well-documented API, and tons and tons of documentation. Speaking of that documentation, I've told you in the past that DigitalOcean is willing to pay folks that write really good documentation for DigitalOcean. Well, now they're introducing something different. So I'm going to put this link in the show notes as well.

You can now write for DO nations for DO nations. Okay, sorry, but that's the joke. You can actually now write for Digital Ocean and then what they were going to pay you contribute to an open source project or a charity. For example, there's a article I have linked in the show notes how to verify downloaded files that you download on your Linux box like an ISO. That was written by Michael Hawley, and he donated his $300 writer's fee to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. So you can go write up something that you're a technical expert on and then contribute out to a charitable donation. And they're going to match, too. I think they'll match up to $400. Something like, I can't remember.

So if you want to, anyways, the details I'll have linked in the show notes. I think this is a super cool program. It's definitely worth reading if that's something that you could possibly be good at. It could be a great way to contribute documentation to a community and contribute to a charity or an open source project that you like.

So I'll have that linked in the show notes as well. Everybody's got something going on. It's just a big, great week. Check it all out and get started by going to do.co slash unplugged and get that free $100 credit for 60 days. do.co slash unplugged. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean, to Ting, and of course to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program.

Okay, moving on now. Let's talk about Texas Linux Fest. What a hell of a party. So it looks like Omnipotence had to leave. He joined me there along with a whole bunch of people. We had such, such a great time. So let me tell you a little bit about it. We won't spend too long on it, but it'll be real quick.

Texas Linux Fest 2018 was held at the AT&T Conference Center in Austin, Texas on Friday, June 8th to Saturday, June 9th. And it was a hell of a party. Oh, Ironic Badger. Oh, where are you? Hello. Hello. I'm in Denver today. You are? Well, good to see you. Good to see you. How are you doing? How's the road been? How's the trip been? Are you recovered? Are you still hungover? How has it all gone? 2,000 miles in two days for a British man. That's all I'll say. Yeah, that is a lot for you. Yeah, you've done a ton of driving. Welcome to the States. Yeah. Well, that's awesome. Alex, Mr. Badger there, has been traveling around looking for

reasons for places, perhaps. And he joined us at Texas Linux Fest. I think you win for probably making the furthest trek to Texas Linux Fest. Thank you. Is there a prize? No. The barbecue, I guess. Bragging rights. Yeah, bragging rights. How good was that barbecue?

Life-changing barbecue. Life-changing. People talk about barbecue a lot? Life-changing barbecue. Life-changing. People talk about barbecue a lot, about Texas and barbecue. It's next level. You agree? Well, I wrote a blog post about it, and I used the same phrase, life-changingly good. So yeah, I do agree.

Okay, good. It was amazing. It was incredible. And it's one of the funny things about Austin is if you're hanging out with Austin locals, they're really passionate about discussing the best place to get food. And that might just be a Texas thing because we were in the hallway here at Linux Academy talking about where to get lunch, and people stopped by to give us their two on where we should go.

It seems to be food is important in Texas, and I can respect that. I really can. About 500 people made it out to Texas Linux Fest. There was roughly about three to five tracks going on at the same time. Really good talks. In fact, I heard a lot of people saying they're having a hard time choosing which one they wanted to go to. I attended a few.

Wes, I went to a talk about how BPF is being used to do Linux kernel tracing and stuff like that. Oh, that sounds fascinating. Yeah, the BPF talk was probably my favorite. Yeah, I was kind of creeping on the whole, you guys down at the fest, and it looked like there were a ton of great talks. I would have had the same problem.

And that's always a good sign when you're at a conference, right? I mean, it's a little upsetting because you can't go to every single one of them, but you know it's packed. There's no filler content. Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to put it. And I liked also the talk, so you've been pwned, like what to do in the next 30 minutes

or something like that. I can't remember what, but it was a good one. A good tech snappy kind of talk. Lots of tech snap fans there. Tons and tons of Linux Unplugged and Linux Action News fans. That was so awesome. Every night we had probably about three parties, really. It was one of those things where you'd go out

and then you'd go out again and then you'd go out again, and then the group would break off again, and there'd be like three separate parties. The first night we went out, it was, I mean, we probably had a group of 40. I don't know. I'm guessing. It was huge, and it was because Linux Academy bought out the hotel bar and paid an obscene amount of money, and drinks for everybody were on Linux Academy, which was amazing. So generous.

There's no way I was going to cover that tab. And then we went out to another place. Alex, you don't remember the name of the place that was on the lake, do you? It was the Hula Hut. The Hula Hut. What a place the Hula Hut was. Great drinks, great atmosphere, right on a lake. And so we hung out at the Hula Hut for a bit with the Linux Academy crew and another group of the Jupyter Broadcasting group.

And then from there, we went to a brewery where we got a little minor brewery tourie and drank some great ciders and shut that place down and then went home. And Saturday night was the barbecue shenanigans, which were just life-changing. and drank some great ciders and shut that place down and then went home. And Saturday night was the barbecue shenanigans, which were just life-changing. My first thought after I ate that barbecue, and I'm 100% serious, and I did not expect this reaction, was, shit, now what am I going to do? Now I have to come up with some excuse to come down here soon so I can eat this barbecue again. Because it was like, I have to be back here.

There's just no, no question about it. So that was Saturday. We did a bunch of festing. And then we went out. Oh, man, I can't even remember. Oh, Saturday we went and got some horrible pizza, I think, and fried food. That was pretty awful. But then a few of us, like Alex, we went back and hung out at Lady Joop's for a while.

That was pretty great. That was a lot of fun. It was good to see Lady Joop's in person. That's for sure. Now, I think it was a total blast. People take their food very seriously. And so do I. The whole thing was so much fun. I've adapted to the heat. I'm damn near ready to move to Texas at this point. I really had a great time. It's definitely hot, but for some reason, it doesn't matter. You know what I mean? It's because you're having had a great time. It's definitely hot, but for some reason it doesn't matter. You know what I mean? It's because you're having such a good time. You don't care. That first cafe we walked to for like 30 minutes Friday was the most brutal of the whole trip,

really. That was rough. Yeah. Exercising in that heat is not a good idea. No, Alex and I are both used to around Seattle and London-style climate, so walking around in 100-degree, sun beating right on you was quite intense. But everybody takes their AC very seriously, so once you get inside, there is some sweet, sweet relief. There was a thread on our Linux. Your favorite. And it's, I attended Texas Linux Fest.

Where's the Linux? And they're calling out people, I attended Texas Linux Fest. Where's the Linux? And they're calling out people for being at Texas Linux Fest and not using Linux to present, including they call it somebody from Linux Academy, although I don't know who it is, and several others for using Macs and whatnot. But, and it's got a decent amount of upvotes, 529 votes. It's got something like damn near 345 comments. And it's this old boogeyman that we have in the Linux community where we'll collapse an entire person or an entire company

down to a single variable. And we'll say anyone at company X is not using Linux, therefore that company is disingenuous. Or that presenter isn't using Linux, they're using a Mac, so therefore they're not a very good presenter for a Linux event. And it's almost bigoted in a way if you think about it. Because say you take away Mac user and say they're because they're white or because they're bald.

Now all of a sudden, that's a real asshole thing to do. Now you're a dick. But when you replace that variable with Linux, that's a perfectly fine thing to do, apparently. And it's kind of sick. It's kind of gross. It's something that I think if you were coming into the Linux community and you saw that, it would kind of disgust you a little bit. And I think it's because of insecurity.

I think people are looking to those people to be validated, to have their choices validated. And when they don't have their choices validated, they're looking for, well, what's wrong with this person? Why wasn't that what I expected? Why am I not wrong and they are right? That's, of course, me playing armchair podcast therapist. If you look at one of the comments, Chris,

it says, Linux Academy have invited Chris from JB to come and convert their broadcasting workflow. The next comment says, but they are Linux Academy, so why do they need help from somebody else? Isn't that the point of the open source community to share ideas and collaborate? Yeah, help each other. I just don't understand the hate.

I don't get it. Yeah. And, you know, it doesn't make you an expert on every topic, does it, Wes? No, no, not at all. Right. And I think we Linux desktop users obviously like that, want to promote it. And that does usually get, or at least historically, has gotten a fair amount of time at these Linux meetups and events.

But especially if you just have, you know, Texas Linux Fest, that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be desktop Linux. It doesn't really have to mean anything else. And shouldn't we try to be an inclusive community of, hey, we want whatever you like. Maybe you started on the server, you love using your Mac on the desktop, it works really well, especially with the corporate provided PowerPoint that you're required to use or whatever else and just try to show that, hey, look at all these, you know, if you come to the conference and see a bunch of other people presenting on ThinkPads or see people with ThinkPads showing you how great they are, that's one way to do it. And complaining about it probably won't get very far.

Well said. Good point. And what do you think about this idea that if we bury our heads in the sand and say none of us ever use a Mac, or nobody ever tries Adobe Premiere, they only use KD and Live, or they never try anything on Windows, they've never even booted Windows, are they an expert that you want to hear their opinion on topics from? I mean, aren't they missing a huge data point? Can they be trusted? What do you think of that, Wes? You do need to be aware of what alternative workflows actually exist if you're going to speak to them, especially if you're coming from a world

where people are already using those workflows. It's much easier, especially in the open source side, if you just have never touched the proprietary stuff. And sometimes, honestly, I've had it in my life where I just avoid it, you know? I don't need that. I know that if I try it, I'll probably get hooked and I'll start wanting to use that service instead of whatever open source tool I'm using. Yeah, that's the slippery slope.

It really is. And that can be fine, right? We've talked a lot on the show about sometimes it makes sense to pay for things, even if they're proprietary for your own personal life. Be pure when you can. Support open source when you can. But none of us are perfect. You can support open source when you can, but none of us are perfect. And then especially going the other way, once you've established a workflow,

especially if you're using it for some sort of commercial endeavor for your business, at your workplace, you can't just change because you want to. You have to be able to change because it actually works or maybe is even better. Yeah, true that. Eric, you have to use a Mac or Windows for your day job. Do you find that gives you a good contrast, a point of comparison? So when I first started this job, I was issued a Dell laptop running Windows 7. They announced shortly thereafter that they'd be moving to Windows 10, which is okay for the two games I play twice a month here at home. games I played twice a month here at home. But as far as a work system, Windows 10 just isn't there at all as a Linux server engineer. So I was able to request a MacBook Pro,

which I liked my 2015 MacBook, but they issued me one of the touchpad MacBooks with the new keyboards that feel like you're just pounding on concrete. But having all three operating systems around me, I'm a Linux server engineer, and then I'm actually talking to you guys from my custom-built Arch PC at home. So I feel like at least having some exposure to all three platforms really gives me an appreciation and really gives me a drive to work on what tools can I port over to my Linux system? Because I may be running Arch, but it's still the most stable platform of all three operating systems I work on. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. It sort of drives you to keep pushing it forward. So, Pobi,

I'd love to hear your perspective on this, because rumor has it there may be a Mac user to a Canonical. Someone may be using Arch even at Canonical. So, this is a controversy that you've witnessed, not just at Canonical, but all over the place. What are your thoughts on, A, don't you kind of, isn't it good every now and then to like look at a Mac and see how they do it when you're working on, say, creating software for the Linux desktop because that's good, valuable experience? And B, what about this whole attitude around the whole thing? So it's not controversial at Canonical

because we've never had a policy where you have to run Ubuntu. You run whatever you need to run because actually the computer is your own. The company doesn't provide you with a computer. You get a chunk of money periodically and you go and buy whatever you want as long as you can do your job nobody cares what you're running on your desktop um and so that means some people are running ubuntu some people actually aren't running ubuntu

and that might mean they're running some other linux distro it might mean they're running a different desktop or it might mean they're running a mac and many of those people who are using max are using max because the software they need to use to do their job is not available on Linux. End of story. And no, GIMP and Inkscape are not alternatives. So yes, some of those people work in design, but some of them aren't. Some of them are server people or DevOps people, and they run OS X on a Mac because they prefer that laptop,

and they do all their linuxy stuff in vms or on remote machines they're not part of the desktop team so there's no real reason why they should have to run a bunch of desktops so you may see someone who works for canonical on the server side or the cloud side who uses os 10 but it's their laptop. It's their choice. They can do whatever they want with it so long as they get the job done. Personally, I can see why people have this need to point out that if you're an ambassador of a distro or an ambassador of a product,

it makes sense for you to use it. You would never see someone who works for Coke on stage drinking Pepsi. It's no different than that really but if your role is in pr you know you're making a massive faux pas by doing that you know coke pepsi thing but if that's not your job if your job is working on something that's completely unrelated to the linux desktop and is like a server component or an application that runs on a server, then all bets are off.

It's up to you what you run on it. So I think it's a little ridiculous that people go hunting down people who are running something other than the thing they want to run, right? And these same people are the people who reboot into Windows in order to run Steam, and they're allowed to do it, but you're not. And I don't like that attitude. That's a good point, too. Yeah, I think my wrapping thoughts are really around this whole thing is

it just makes really good practical sense to stick with free and open source software. And it isn't necessarily worth like going to the pitchforks when somebody is talking about Linux from a Mac because there were other presenters that were using, I don't even know what kind of hardware it was. It was ARM-based, eclectic, self-built, small-batch computers that had wires running to an HDMI port. And I didn't see a Reddit thread started about that, but those were running Linux.

So it's, I think, important to keep in mind that you want to have an informed opinion, especially if you're going to have a strong one. I have a strong preference, for example, for iOS over Android. Not a big fan of it. Just think iOS is slightly better. Think Android is slightly worse. I think there's also serious privacy trade-offs with Android versus iOS. That's a position I'm

perfectly comfortable defending because I've owned an Android device. I still own Android devices. I've bought many, many Android devices. I know how to use Android very well. I'm a very competent Android user. So my preference for iOS is based on my direct experience using Android. I feel like that's a good thing because at least you know I've tried it. I'm not sitting here espousing how great Siri is without trying the Echo. I'm not telling you that I think iOS is better without ever trying an Android device. That would make me an idiot. It's important that we don't lose sight,

that we can't just whitewash the world and have everyone on Chromebooks or everyone on a Linux desktop and pretend like Windows and Macs don't exist. Because the reality is they do exist. So we have to know how to interact with them, we have to know how to support them, and we have to know where we're deficient

so we can make up our deficiencies. And when you're trying to convince someone to switch over to a free or open source software product, and if it has deficiencies, if it does not have equivalent functionality to the proprietary thing you're switching them to, you're going to lose credibility if you don't tell people that. If they get over and then they discover, it's going to leave a bad taste in their mouth and it's probably going to push them back into the arms of commercial software harder and probably forever. Exactly, yeah, right?

And it's the wrong perspective. You know, especially if you're trying to convince someone, like, the nice thing to do is have a conversation. So we should, you know, maybe we can have a conversation about this topic as like, why did we not see more Linux laptops in presentations? And instead of being antagonistic or an interrogation,

it can be a conversation. And if you start from the place of, hey, what are your workflows? I'm curious if maybe Linux could do those better instead of, or just try to understand why they think a Mac works well from them. That's very different. Is it a projector thing?

Is it a slide software thing? You know, what is it? What are we not proficient enough in? We don't know. We don't know. That's a great point, Wes. Okay, so Tyler, if you're at the mic mic i'd love to hear how self went about maybe do you know about how many people were there um yeah i couldn't give an exact number but it was

definitely a healthy crowd uh pretty much filled the room during the keynote talk that jeremy gave and that was a good talk uh going over the last 10 years of self He had plenty of funny anecdotes, especially stories about, including a story about a wedding that went on one of the years that they had the conference at a hotel. That's great. And was there a fair amount of vendors?

From what I understand, there were fewer than there was last year, from what I was told. And I think that's probably due to the overlapping in schedules with conferences like Texas Linux Fest, so he didn't want to step on too many toes on that one. Yeah, I think that cost Texas Linux Fest a few vendors as well. And that really, I think, the reason why it was going down at the same time

came down to venue scheduling or something really benign that ends up just totally being like, what was everybody thinking? It's really kind of a shame. So now, do you regret skipping LinuxFest Northwest or do you think it was good to balance it out this week or this year? I think it was definitely good to balance it out this year. But having experienced both now, I am definitely returning to self next year. Really? Yeah. Okay. Good plug for self. Very nice. Maybe I'll go. So, Mr. Popey, how was Flosstalk? A good get-together of Linux podcasters drinking beer in a small, intimate venue? Must have been fun. and um this is a third one i think uh uh we went along as in uh the people who run ubuntu podcast uh joe and the guys from late night linux and there's uh the guys from linux voice go along and also there's a drunken mashup show at the end of the evening which is variable quality but was

excellent this year much better than they've redeemed themselves from last year um and there's um a podcast recording that a break and a podcast recording that a break so everyone gets to clear out and go and get another beer and then come back down into the the very small cozy um uh basement where we record the shows and uh it's very intimate um there's some familiar faces that turn up in the audience and also some new people each time. It's lovely. It's really, really good fun. It's a really nice way to just have an evening out with some friends

and record some silly podcasts. It's good fun. Yes, that does sound like good fun. And yes, Flosstalk, of course, is Randall Schwartz's show that I get stuck in my head because my brain does not have enough room for words. Now, I know that Joe's already put out his late night Linux of the talk there, and it was good.

I won't lie, it made me a little bummed because the topics they chose were, all the guys had very, I thought, clear analysis of challenges facing Linux. And it actually kind of motivated me to kind of want to try to fix it, some of the things they talked about around marketing and all of that. So anyways, their episode was out i'm assuming an ubuntu

podcast must be coming soon yep ours will go out at 3 p.m uk time on thursday uh we were on immediately after them they were our warm-up act and uh we um we were a lot more upbeat i think we lifted the mood a little bit. So yeah, look out for that on our website on Thursday. I should have stacked them. That would have been better to stack them in my podcast player if I had known because I was like, oh, all right, we can fix this. It was kind of motivating, though. So it was good.

I'm really glad that that happened. One of these days, although they're at Texas Linux Fest, there were several people saying go to FOSDEM. Go to FOSDEM. Go to FOSDEM. That's the thing to go to. So that may be in my future as well. Yes, go to FOSDEM.

It's amazing. So this must be your first US Fest, Alex. It's the first time I've been to anything outside Europe, yeah. But FOSDEM, you should definitely go to FOSDEM. All right, there you go. That's high praise, yeah. Another plug for FOSDEM. All right, there you go. That's my place, yeah. Another plug for FosDem. It might just happen.

Well, I'll go with you. You and I will both go, Wes. We'll go over there. We'll do like a Wes and Chris tour London. Or Storm Europe. So start drinking your water now, because we're probably going to be drinking a lot of beer. Yeah, Wes and Chris Storm Europe.

FosDem's in Brussels, so you get great beer and great waffles oh my oh my yep so i'll be uh fasting pretty soon to make up for the tons and tons and tons of eating uh because there has just been i mean what else you're gonna do when you're in texas yeah i think you're 90 barbecue did you manage to steal any recipes to sneak back up here to the pacific northwest i tried to bring back a few samples so that we could study them and then derive. Yeah, but somehow it all got eaten. I don't know what happened. It's some mysterious thing.

I think the secret's in the cows, Wes. That's what I think it is. The secret's in the cows. Actually, speaking of secrets, though, after our really great barbecue that we had at Terry Black's barbecue, we got to tour the where they make where they cook it all. No way. It's like behind the restaurant. Yeah, we we just casually, you know, asked and they're like, yeah, man, come on in.

Mind you, it was like 98 degrees outside and a humidity of like 80% or something. And so you go inside this barbecue pit, which is like a large greenhouse almost, only it's full of barbecue cookers. Temperature shoots up to like 110 degrees. It's dry heat, but it's just incredibly hot in there where they were smoking tomorrow's meat. And the guy works in there in that Texas heat all day long. And when you step out, when you step back outside, it feels like you're stepping into air conditioning because it's the temperature. It's so hot in there in that Texas heat all day long. And when you step out, when you step back outside, it feels like you're stepping into air conditioning because it's the temperature. It's so hot in there.

So I did try to grok a few secrets. They converted old propane tanks, like big propane tanks, like on the side of a house, they converted big propane tanks into barbecue tanks. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. It was a good time. It was a really good time. And I'm going to have to do it again. So let's talk about our app pick this week, and then we're going to wrap this sucker up. It's FERP, F-R-P, a fast reversible proxy. And I like the way they describe this, Wes,

because it will help you do one of two things. It'll expose any HTTP and HTTPS service behind a NAT, or, number two, expose any TCP or UDP service behind a NAT, which would seem to include HTTP. So what is FERP, Wes, and how is it doing it? It is a fast reverse proxy. And it's a Go application that's got just pretty simple INI-based command file. You run one instance on some server with a public IP address. So I've got one up on our on our dear friends digital ocean. And then you connect to it as well as a client program. Both of them have a configuration file, the server is sort of like sets up opens its port for clients

to connect to there is token based authentication, if you you know, have security in mind, and you probably should, then you configure your client and sort of configure on the client side what services you want to export. You then get that running with that client config, connects up to the server, and then they do a little, you know, a little magic mumbo jumbo talking to each other. Then your services are, that's it, your services are exposed. You can reach them from the public internet. It does the reverse proxy back to whatever computer is behind the NAT. It doesn't really have to care. You don't have to open anything on your firewall. As long as the client can reach out and then, you know, the stateful firewall does its job and lets the server talk back through, you're good to go. That's pretty cool. And I could think of all kinds of fun ways

to use and abuse that. The other nice thing is it's also got a dashboard that comes with it, and the dashboard is pretty, it's a little more full feature than I really expected it to be, especially for something that is probably just thrown together. So there is a link that'll exist at least for a little while in the IRC room. You can go check it out. The password's admin. The username is admin.

Just, yeah, simple little view. It shows you all the proxies that you've set up so you can get a good idea of what's actually running, if they're online or not. Cool. Plus it's Go, so it's just like a little, you know, it's a little static binary they've got for different architectures, whether you're on ARM or AMD or whatever else. Have you moused over one of these pie charts for the network traffic yet?

Have you seen that little bounce effect that it does? It's pretty cute. That's really neat, actually. I did not expect the dashboard part of this. That surprises me. Oh, this is really cool. And it's actually still responding, even though myself and others in the chat room

are banging on it right now. Yeah, you know, I have not used this a ton. It just caught my eye this week, and I thought it would be neat. In other situations, you probably set up some sort of reverse or dedicated tunnel, but if you're just moving around a lot, you don't really know what you need,

or you just need something for short-term, this could be super handy. And I like how minimal the config is. Instead of having a generic VPN lot, you don't really know what you need, or you just need something for short term, this could be super handy. And I like how minimal the config is. Instead of having a generic VPN tunnel that you have to really carefully firewall, you know with this program that you're really only setting up a few exported services, and you can see them right there in your config. Absolutely. So that's pretty cool.

Again, it's FERP, and we'll have a link to that in the show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 253. Mr. Payne, before we go, you should probably tell people where they can get a little more Wes in their life. Oh, yeah. Well, one, techsnap.systems. Stay tuned. There'll be another one coming out sometime this week.

Or if you're just impatient, I'm at Wes Payne over on the Twittersphere. Heyo, I'm at Chris LAS. The whole network is at Jupiter Signal. I'll be down in Texas for about four more days, three more days or so. And then I'm starting the long journey back up to the Pacific Northwest. Man, do I miss those kids. I'm excited about getting home.

I'm almost tempted just to fly home and see them. Leave Jupes behind. We all miss you, too. Don't worry. Go get more episodes at linuxun unplugged dot com slash subscribe go check out the Ubuntu podcast they're going to have their episode and Joe put out late night Linux so go grab more Linux content

over there at our friend sites and of course join us next week live over at JBLive.tv we do this show on Tuesdays and if we don't see you then I'll see you on the download next Tuesday! Oh, when the boss is away, Wes, the bots will play. I thought JBot took the afternoon off, but it looks like the title page is actually loading. Oh, it is? Oh, good. I thought it was down, too. Yeah. Personalities

happens not bad. That's pretty good. That's not perfect, but it's pretty good. It's close. Pretty good. Hey, Mumbaroom, thanks, guys. It's great to have some of you in there for the first time. You're welcome. You guys are the best. Where did you get FRP from, this graph

thing? West found that. Yeah, West found that this week. He is a sleuther, Popey. It's true. I don't actually quite remember where I saw it from. Kind of neat, huh? Eric and I were wondering, we need to try Kansas City barbecue. Yeah, that's what everybody says.

Although, man, do the people in Austin talk shit about Kansas City barbecue. You know what else they say is that you guys think it's good because you don't know any better, is what they say. That's what they say. Multiple people say. People tell me. People tell me, Tyler. People tell me. Don't they also BS about Carolina barbecue? Hey, look, I have tried all the

barbecues on this trip. Uh-oh. I've tried North Carolina, South Carolina, Memphis, Arkansas, Catfish barbecue, Texas barbecue, and Carolina, Memphis, Arkansas, Catfish Barbecue, Texas Barbecue, and hell, if Texas Barbecue didn't win, hands down. Only one got the life-changing title.

Only one. Does anybody want to visit Alabama, though?