LINUX Unplugged - Episode 28: Neckbeard Entitlement Factor | LUP 28

Episode Date: February 19, 2014

Michael Hall from Canonical joins us to discuss his personal views on what he’s coined the new 80/20 rule for open source. Are the consumers of open source the biggest hurdle to projects becoming sustainable?Plus Valve might looking at your DNS history, getting young users to try Linux, and your feedback!

This is Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's still riding high from episode 300 of the Linux Action Show. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. My name is Matt. Hello there, sir. Hello, Matt. Hello. We've been enjoying quite a good amount of feedback, a lot of positive feedback about the announcement of our new show, How to Linux,

which you're going to be hearing more about soon on all fine Jupyter Broadcasting programming, I'm sure. It's just so cool to see so many people so excited about something new like that. So that's really gratifying. Thank you, everybody. Now, look, we've got a good show coming up today right here on Unplugged. Later on, towards the end of the show, we're going to do a giveaway. We're going to give away some games for the trivia that we announced in episode 300 of Linux Action Show. So we'll get that taken care of.

We've got some really good feedback about getting the younger generation into Linux. And also, we're going to bring on Michael Hall. He works at Canonical as, get this, Matt, the upstream liaison. Ooh, oh, right on. Yeah, that's so, you know, like, could you imagine like you're at a bar and somebody says, you say, what do you do for a living? Oh, I'm an upstream liaison. That's a great title.

Yeah, I mean, that's a great title. So we're going to bring him on because he just had a recent post today. I guess he's been doing essentially a blog a day, and he's calling it a new 80-20 rule for open source. He says, put simply, the rule says that people will tend to appreciate it more when you give them 20% of something and resent you if you give them 80%. He says, I know it sounds completely counterintuitive, but that's what I was seeing in all the conversations around Mozilla and say things around Canonical and Ubuntu. People by and large were saying that the reason Canonical and Mozilla were being judged so harshly was because they already did most of what people wanted, which made them resent when they didn't do everything. What a great point. And I got to tell you, I think that's something you and I have some thoughts on.

you and I have some thoughts on. Definitely. I think there's multiple tiers to it, but I think the meat and potatoes of it is definitely that people do develop an expectation surrounded with what they're presented with initially. So back when I was doing a lot of free Linux questions, I had people that were really upset if I didn't respond within a certain period of time, or if I didn't have time to respond at all. I mean, they would really feel offended. And I think that certainly translates as true as in this space as well. Yeah, and I could totally see how software developers find themselves in this position, especially in an open community. So we'll talk about that coming up in the show. And then if we have a little time, I've got a couple other topics we're going to jump to as well as I want to help a fellow Linux Unplugged audience member who had a hard drive kind of give out on him recently.

Oh, I always feel bad for that. I know. So maybe we'll pick the mumble room and see what they think we could do for him. But first, let's start with our feedback from last week's episode. We like to try to keep a thread going between all of the episodes.

So that way, if you listen continuously, you kind of get a payoff there because we're not episodic. We're not going to get some big deal from the networks like Star Trek The Next Generation to where they couldn't have a nice storyline. No, no, sir. Here we have storyline. And our first email comes in from Extraordinary Benny.

He says, hey, Chris, Matt, and Chase. Oh, look at this. Chase is getting emails now. He's in. The community is giving him a big hug. That is awesome. He's doing an AMA right now in the Linux Action Show subreddit, too, if you guys have any questions for him.

He says, hi, my name is Ben, and I'm a fellow Washingtonian. Ooh, nice, Ben. He says, by the way, since there's other Bens in the IRC, you should probably just call me Extraordinary Ben. First off, I want to thank you guys for all of the effort you put into making such an awesome content in Jupyter Broadcasting. Thanks, Ben. I was very excited when you announced the new HowToLinux show you're planning. This is just the kind of thing the Linux community needs for newcomers or those who want to improve their skills in Linux. I was really surprised with the timing of your announcement,

because I was just thinking about starting a website for Linux users that would be a repository of guides, how-tos, and whatnot for people to search, update, and contribute articles to. Similar to how DigitalOcean has one for their community, but it would contain everything from customizing GNOME themes to setting up your own firewall. Of course, this would probably be a far too great of a task to take on my own, but with the new show coming into play, I think a community-organized effort would make it possible. He goes on to say,

If we had a site like this to complement the show, I think it would be a huge benefit for everyone. I'd love to hear what you guys think from the JBU community of this idea. Extraordinary Ben. So, you know, we hadn't really talked about this, but I do see value in something like this. I think this is a great idea. So Extraordinary Ben, we should chat more. And I'd love to hear all ideas you guys have for the how-to show. We're going to have in the future as the show gets probably really just the next week or two, you'll see these prop up

in the Linux Action Show subreddit. We'll start up some threads looking for your ideas and your feedback. So keep thinking of this kind of stuff and we'll have some outlets for you to bring those in. And then also, as the show starts, we'll incorporate your feedback and any ideas you have like that. I think having a web resource though is a really great idea. So thanks Extraordinary Ben. I'm not quite sure how we'd pull that off because the podcast production itself is such a task that I don't know about also updating a website, but it seems really valuable. I think that if it was done with the – if it was done, first of all, wiki style, I think that would be the first thing, which means that it's done by the community, that we're hands off.

It's up to you guys. I think if something like that was to take place to where it was based off show notes and basically what was observed, perhaps. I don't know. That's going to be tough though. Yeah. We'll chat more. I think that's worth – I think that's worth – I thought it's a great's going to be tough, though. Yeah. We'll chat more. I think that's worth it.

I think it's a great idea. And I'd like to hear what the community thinks about it. So Tom writes in, and this was really the topic last week that I thought really got the most traction as far as our feedback goes. And we got a lot of emails in about this. So I picked a couple that I came across and some other ones I didn't get to all of them. So Tom wrote, he said, this week you had a younger listener write in about their experiences and I thought I might add my perspective perspective i'm a slightly older than your writer i'm 17 but i've been doing the same sort of thing since i was younger i'd experienced similar

problems in education my teacher is poor is so poor and i don't think he means in the money sense i think he means in the sense that it's turned into a running joke there are at least three people in my class of 16 who could teach better, two of which are JB listeners. That's awesome. Even worse, the curriculum for my computing A level is unimaginably out of touch. For example, the operating system chapter is more about obscure batch processing systems and considers operating systems which can multitask as notable than about topics relevant to this decade. I think that there is no chance of people being taught useful groundings in schools here in England

without substantial change. However, I have found that a very large number of my peers religiously follow gaming subreddits and Valve. With the Snowden revelations and Steam coming to Linux, I have noticed many more people asking me to recommend a distro to try.

Very interesting. Thank you for all the hard work you do and amazing shows. One Jupyter Broadcasting show is more educational than a month of my A-level classes. That's funny. Double win for you. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, I felt like, so this is one of the reasons that I have a a proponent of gaming coming to linux uh not because i like promoting a platform that you know sells commercial games that are restricted by drm that

is not my you know that's that's not oh i would what how i would prefer it but i believe that um humans are like they like shiny things and they will they will i they will go to a lot of efforts to have a great gaming experience, right? And it's fun for them. It becomes a mission. It becomes a quest to have the ultimate gaming experience, to have the most frame rates, to have the best sound, all of this, and to have your system be the most performant possible. And I think this is why gaming is important for desktop Linux, even though the vast majority of Linux users today do not find themselves that interested by the gaming topic.

Boy, boy, you know, I think you pretty much nailed it. I definitely think that because I know for myself, I try to limp along with my older experiences, my older computers and whatnot. But I'm always yearning for that next greatest, latest thing. I want the fastest phone. I want the best computer. So I think you really nailed it. Yeah. And, you know, if SteamOS and Linux become a, even, you know, a good option and Microsoft keeps cocking it up with Windows, I mean, the two will come to meet and people will be driven. And

then you have all these other ancillary issues like privacy and the cost and reinvestment in hardware and all these kinds of things that also push people towards Linux. So I'm positive in the freedom dimension about Linux's potentials, even when it's being used to play proprietary games, because I believe the benefit of bringing more people to use Linux just to get people on the desktop will improve the Linux desktop situation on a whole. So even though what might have brought them, I guess what I'm trying to, the way to summarize this is what, what might have brought them

might have been that proprietary game that has DRM that they paid money for, but then they end up staying in an open source ecosystem. And I think that's, that's, that's the important part for the long run. Well, I think, so that really could translate into, they came for the really fancy micro brew beer and they, you you know and they stayed for the cheap stuff and the camaraderie of the folks around them yeah well cheap or uh cheap or low cost yeah yeah however you want to put it i'm

not saying low rent right low cost you know i like anytime we can try to uh get this close to a beer analogy because washington's got some great microws. So I would love to do an episode of Linux Unplugged at a micro brewery, even though it's completely unrelated to Linux. I just, I want to do it. So if you are in the area in Washington and you have a micro brewery and you listen to this show, you should probably get a hold of us. Email us, go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com and click that contact link. I want to do a show from your brewery. I don't care if the sound's going to be bad, but I would like to drink a little bit of your beer. Just a little bit.

I can't drink a lot because of the gluten. Are we air quoting a little bit? I'm serious. Well, little is a, you know, there's some flexibility in its definition, you might say. All right, Matt. Well, before we go into our next email, which is really a great stretch of a couple of emails we'll get to, I want to thank DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is one of our sponsors for Linux Unplugged.

And DigitalOcean is simple cloud hosting dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up your own cloud server that you have root login to. Users can create a cloud server in 55 seconds, although I believe the record right now is 44 seconds. If anybody beats that, you got to let us know. But the record right now is 44 seconds. But here's the best part. Pricing plans start at $5 per month for 512 megs of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU and a terabyte. Yeah, a terabyte of transfer. Now, what you can do with these is endless because they have Ubuntu droplets you can deploy. They have Arch, CentOS, everything you might want like that. They have ones preloaded with the LAMP stack, preloaded with Docker, etc. You can create your own snapshots, back them up, redeploy them as you need them.

I just heard from somebody in our chat room today who used it to set up their own private XMPP server. So they have their own private chat server, right? I'm using it for BitTorrent Sync, and I just set up a Pastebin alternative, an open source PHP based pastebin alternative that I might talk about in a future Linux action show. I just tossed it up on my DigitalOcean Arch server and it's been awesome. They have a great connection, tier one bandwidth paired with those SSDs. It really sings. DigitalOcean has data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, and now

Singapore. With that simple and intuitive control panel, you'll be whipping right through there. And good news, if you're a power user, you can actually replicate the functionality with their straightforward API. Build your own commands. Build your own interface if you need to. I'll tell you what. You know, you bundle this with – we were talking earlier about Jitsi and Jitsi's video bridge and Jitmeet and whatnot. You can run this on one of these bad boys.

Yeah, perfect. You could essentially have your own Skype. It'd be perfect too for a web RTC control server. Look, go play with it because we have a special offer for you. Use the promo code LinuxUnpluggedFebruary. Yeah, LinuxUnpluggedFebruary. That's all one word.

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and snapshots, a web console, one click application installed,, two-factor authentication, and a fantastic developer community. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code LinuxUnpluggedFebruary. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. All right. Let's continue on this thread that we were talking about with the younger audience getting into Linux

and how they're kind of up against a lot of odds right now. Daniel Roni says, I don't think that Linux literacy is specific to today's generation. Illiteracy, I should say. It has always been like this. It was the same back in the days when I was in school. People in general are not interested in how stuff works, just that it does work. This is changing, though. Before, it was practically impossible to find any 14-year-old doing Linux anywhere. Now, there are a couple of them in every city. They might be alone in their school, but overall, there are more youngsters doing it than before. Steam will change this, too, and it'll become even more common in the generations to come.

Schools are not doing Linux because it's not perceived as common enough, which is true. Most workplaces do Microsoft and its Office suite. And as long as this is true, schools will not change. Oh, buzzword! Oh, yes. Just like the Intel Edison, an SD card sized computer, which is about as strong as a Pentium 4. Think about it. A couple of generations of that, and you could make anything a phone.

That's a really good point, and I think that he nailed it when he said there's always going to be a couple people out of every town that are running Linux. I walk into my local grocery store with my rocking new sweatshirt and I'll tell you, I had a couple people. One person did recognize

the show and kind of freaked out a little bit. No way, really? Cool. Yeah, the other person recognized the Penguin and the Linux. Oh yeah. I thought that was kind of cool too. So it's awesome that it all takes a couple people to really really help the growth happen I think. Yeah, and I think too like we are stuck in an old generation's way of thinking where Microsoft – and we're thinking in the old paradigm. And I think school districts are and all of the people that are making decisions on curriculum are.

the people that are making decisions on curriculum are. But the reality is, and this is why I've been, this is really what makes me excited about Linux, is not what it is today, but the fact that as technology becomes more general purpose and these market leaders who were creating these specific technology empires, like AIX and System 390, et cetera, as they begin to fade,

the general purpose technology that is cheaper to implement, is more economical, more people have expertise on it, is easily deployable, it has a lot of flexibility. That type of technology replaces those special one-off tiered types of technologies, and Linux eventually ends up everywhere. And this Internet of Things is a cute way of calling it that, but that's what it is. And Linux will become relevant because everything will be running Linux that is a general technology component. And I think it's going to take a long time for schools to sort of work in how that's incorporated into their curriculum. And maybe it's through things more like using the web browser and things like that. I don't know exactly, but what we have today is a

reflection of the old computer industry. And for better or worse, that industry is going through major redefinitions. I just read a stat recently that average Joe and Jane Americans, like 70% of their computing now is done on their quote unquote tablets or smart devices. Isn't that wild? I mean, when you really, because you hear it and it kind of, you know, you don't really think anything of it. It doesn't seem possible. Right. But then you see it happen. You're walking down the street, you go to maybe, I don't know, a doctor's office and you see tablets and phones everywhere. It's like, a lot of these people are doing work from these devices.

When you think about it, because the availability is higher, so they've always got it, right? They've always got it with them so they can whip it out. So the frequency goes up because they're whipping it out, Matt. They're just whipping it out. Whipping it out. That thing is flopping around all over the place, and I'll tell you those tablets and phones are in action, folks. That's right.

But they're simpler and they're easier and they're faster in a lot of senses and they have less trouble, so there's less resistance to just, oh, I'll just grab it and check the Facebook feed real quick. And it does make sense. And maybe those computing activities that they're doing on those devices aren't all that important. They're not creating something.

You know, they're not developing something, but it's still usage. And I think at the end of the day, that's what has Microsoft freaked out right now. Oh, yeah. All right. Our last bit of feedback this week comes in from Dakota. Dakota writes in about Linux in schools and says, I'm 15 years old and I've been using Linux for a year now. I've done stuff from write my own code to compiling a custom kernel on Ubuntu. I think we as a community should start a petition to get open source into more schools. And like you talked about on Unplugged with the same other teens, I think the school should actually teach you something useful in the computer and IT classes.

It's really sad when there are kids out there like me who can teach the class better than the teacher. You know, that sentiment of teaching the class better than the teacher, which can come across a little bit like the youngster knowing more than the teacher and these damn kids. than the teacher and, you know, these damn kids. But in the same sense, like, I remember one of the reasons I wasn't super spun up about taking more college-level courses is because I quickly felt like I was outflanking my teachers and knew more than they did. And it was frustrating when the teacher would incorrectly cover something or say something wrong or use the wrong terminology or, you know, write System D with a capital D or, you know, bad example. But you know what I'm saying.

It is very frustrating for these students. And it's interesting because we got a lot more emails than the ones I just read on air, and a lot of them iterated that point. And there's a frustration there. It seems like we're a trend of young people saying, hey, don't give up on our generation. We're here. We're talking. We're sharing.

We're teaching others that are willing to learn, maybe not the teachers, but certainly other students. I'm almost coming to the conclusion that I think the future of Linux on the desktop in a non-enterprise situation, perhaps at home, will be with young people. I think that much like how Firefox had its adoption spread, I think it's going to be young

people that make it happen. Interesting, like mom and dad screwed up the computer, let me replace the OS with something that works. Just like they used to with the browser, be like, oh mom and dad, you're not using Firefox, this is what your problem is, let me fix that for you. Yeah, yeah. You know what, you might be right about that, Matt. Still early days. I would say too, when I think about

this, you know, looking at these kids that are really smart, I think that really, there's two things that we have to realize is that younger Linux users will find resources that we have out there for the adults, like these shows. Like these shows, like when we make these, you know, we don't really have a specific age group in mind, but we're definitely not trying to target a younger demographic. But yet they still,

obviously, we have an audience that they, you know, they represent a percentage of the audience that's noticeable. And they are finding the same resources that we create for adults and i don't think we have to get in this mindset that we have to do something very special for the kids i think smart savvy kids that are told it is okay self-education is an old is an okay thing if we can you know because a lot of kids i felt when when I was in school, I felt the internet was new, right? And it was untrusted. And there was pushback from my teachers when I would self-research and self-educate. Like, you can't rely on that. You don't know if you're teaching yourself the right thing. You're not smart enough to figure it out on your own. You need our guidance is really what they were saying. guidance is really what they were saying. And now looking back on that, I resent that because self-education is a fantastic tool and the internet empowers people to teach themselves things on their own in their own room, don't you think?

I think that's – I think you really nailed on something there even bigger than just the experiences that you had. I think the problem is it was a – it represented the changing of a guard to where it was no longer teachers who were the teachers essentially. I mean they no longer were the power player or had all the knowledge that there's this new new finagled thing that kids were quite frankly more adept to than the adults were. I was at that time when this was happening I was pretty much out of my own and out of school and whatnot but I witnessed this happening

a lot just in society that there seemed to be a real shift and so I think that that's probably a lot of what you were experiencing. Yeah. And I think maybe that could still be, there could be a little bit of that still in play today because some of those same teachers are still in. And they really are, aren't they? Yeah. So I think, you know, if we tell these, if we tell these teenagers and kids that, hey,

you know, dude and do that, it's fine. Go out there and learn on your own. Go teach yourself. You don't have to have somebody's blessing to become educated on a topic. That's right. All right. So that wraps up our specific email feedback. But I did have a little Valve update.

So we've been covering the evolving Valve story here on Linuxux unplugged and uh big story broke out this this last in the actually just a couple days ago uh that uh val was apparently monitoring people's dns cache and then parsing out where you've gone anybody in the mumble room did you catch this whole story where val was supposedly looking at people's first it came out valve was looking at your browsing history right and they were monitoring your browsing history and then okay okay oh they're not monitoring your browsing history they're looking, okay, they're not monitoring your browsing history. They're looking at your DNS cache. Did you guys hear this story? Anybody here familiar with this?

Yes. And also, Gabe went to Reddit to kind of set it straight. Now, that was the interesting twist here. So just to fill some of you guys in on the background, I guess Valve has been in this cold war, not even a cold war, a war with these cheats. He wrote, Gabe wrote on Reddit, there are a number of kernel-level paid cheats relative to this Reddit thread. He links to a thread about a bunch of these kernel-level cheats where, like in Windows, it's almost like malware in a sense.

He says, cheat developers have a problem getting cheaters to actually pay them for all the obvious reasons. So they start creating their own DRM and anti-cheat codes for their own cheats. The cheats phone home to a DRM server that confirms that the cheater is actually paid to use the cheat. Now, they have this program called VAC, V-A-C. It's a checker for the presence of these cheats. If they were detected, VAC then checked to see which cheat DRM server was being contacted.

Now, here's how they do it, and this is the part that got people upset. The second check was done by looking at a partial match to those cheat DRM servers in the DNS cache. If found, then hashes of the matching DNS entries were sent to the VAC servers. found, then hashes of the matching DNS entries were sent to the VAC servers. The matches double-checked on our server. This is Gabe talking. And the client was then marked for a future ban. He says, by the way, less than a tenth of 1% of clients triggered the second check.

But this was, well, hey, so wait a minute. Valve's been checking my DNS cache and then doing hashes of it? I didn't know this. It's like they only read part of that, right? But, I mean, they're not getting the deeper reasoning, so it's interesting. It appears like there's a really big back and forth thing going on here. And I just wondered, did anybody in the mumble room feel like Valve has crossed a line by doing this DNS cache checking? No. It was first reported, but then when it was explained, it wasn't as bad as it first seemed.

Yeah. The whole thing is... Go ahead, Rod. People thought that they were checking it, so if you just happened to go to the server, you would get banned. But the second check is what explained that it wasn't doing that. So even if you went to the servers for the cheat, you weren't being logged for doing it. Okay, yeah. And I mean, it's a hash, too, of the DNS cache.

Is that what you were going to say, Webby? Web wizard? No, I was just going to, like, I think they really needed to go and just be more forthcoming so that when people go and say, oh, look at what I found, and everyone just explodes, start pointing fingers, saying, oh, we must be doing something bad. Well, I mean, before we go too far, I mean, Crash, don't you think that people are just

kind of taking valve on their word on this whole thing a little too much? That's exactly what I was just going to say, is that Gabe went and made a statement in which he basically said, well, you know, you've got to trust us and we don't want to break your trust. Yeah, trust us, just like Obama says. He basically said trust us because if we were doing something bad, how would that look for us and everything? But at the moment, all we have is his word that that's all it's doing

and that it isn't going to be used for anything worse, which, okay, there's no evidence that it is doing anything worse, but we also know that the capability to scan your DNS cache and send hashes of it exists in their software that only they can control because they send updates to Steam and they're all closed source and there's nothing. You can't check those to make sure that it isn't doing anything else. So we've got Gabe's word, and he seems like a trustworthy guy,

but how do we know that? I mean, lots of people seemed trustworthy before the Snowden leaks came out. Faye, what do you think this means for our state of privacy? Well, I mean, maybe it's just this constant state of talking about it, but there's so many companies that are ripping off your data online now. I mean, Google's the big player there. Valve seems like a pretty reputable company, and at least for me, I think I'm going to take them at their word until I see a reason not to, just because it's just so prevalent

nowadays that, I mean, you can't just lock yourself in a room and not connect to the internet. That's true. Well, Ick, it sounds like you think this was a little bit of a came down to disclosure versus PR, but could Valve really properly disclose this without then disclosing to the cheaters how they're

checking and catching them? Well, not exactly. What I'm thinking is, you know, if they would just disclose that there could be the possibility of something like this happening, just a little bit of disclosure can solve a whole slew of the pr problems that would happen in the wake of that yeah i'm saying yeah i do i'm glad to see operating system let it happen well that's that's a great question why is there functionality to look in the dns cache and see what's there

maybe to retrieve something from the cache like if you want it doesn't make any sense like you the whole it's supposed to be transparent right you go to look something up and if it's there. Maybe to retrieve something from the cache? That doesn't make any sense. It's supposed to be transparent, right? You go to look something up, and if it's cache hit, yay. But why should you be able to see what other programs you've been looking up? Yeah, maybe you can specifically look one particular thing up, but you shouldn't be able to see what all of the entries are. Right, well, you look something up, and you might be able to tell by how fast the result comes back, whether it was a cache hit or not.

It's like a timing attack. But you shouldn't be able to just by how fast the result comes back, whether it was a cache hit or not. It's like a timing attack. Right. But you shouldn't be able to just see what's in the cache. And I'm not sure that they actually can. So I'm not sure exactly. It could be disinformation. Yeah. Well, not disinformation.

It's just, you know, a bad explanation. PR is full of those all the time. Yeah, and I wonder if this is a Windows-specific thing. I wonder if they even can do this under the Linux client. Yeah, like I wouldn't imagine there's some way to browse the DNS cache on a Linux client, right? Yeah. I'm not familiar, but yeah, it's

very interesting. So we'll keep following it. We'll keep watching it. I just thought... Oh, go ahead. One thought, they could have something built into SteamOS now because they're rolling that out and I'm not sure if they've released open source code so

I mean they could eventually build something into that. I mean I think people would be able to tell if they could look at the difference between the Debian version of libDNS or whatever it is versus the SteamOS version but it is, it does your overall point is a good one in that them having their own operating

system opens them up to the possibilities of just baking these kinds of nice little features in. It definitely makes you take a pause and go, okay, I do need to remember that Valve is a company and that they have their own motivations and that I need to be skeptical. And I think that's a good healthy thing for all of us to think about right now. I definitely think so. I think one thing to remember, and first and foremost, never trust anything from any company. That's just a good rule of thumb. But that being said, I also look at motivation and how recent they are to a new market. So I take Valve, they're very recent to the Linux market, so they're pretty new here.

Their motivation is to capture as many new users as possible. And so pissing people off early on probably isn't a real great game plan. So based on those things, at this point, I don't see anything with them doing anything nefarious at this point. That doesn't mean in the future, but just saying. I'll link to Gabe's full post in the show notes, but one of the interesting things he said

is that this little trick that they discovered, that they came up with, only worked for 13 days until the cheat authors came up with a new way to do it by purging the DNS cache. Yeah, now the cheats just purge the DNS cache, which overall impacts your performance. So that kind of sucks, you know? All right, Matt.

Well, we're going to talk to Michael Hall here in just a second about a really great post that he just had called the new 80-20 open source. What did he call it? Let's see. He called it the new 80-20 rule for open source. Yes. Which was a great post. So we're going to talk to him here in just a sec. But first, I want to thank our second sponsor this week,

and that is the amazing folks over at Ting. Now, I've told you a lot about Ting. Ting is mobile. It makes sense. It's no contracts. It's pay for what you use. But I actually thought this week, maybe I'd have one of their fantastic Canadians tell you a little bit about it. Ting keeps rates simple. We don't make you

pick a plan. Instead, you just use your phone as you normally would. How much you use determines how much you pay each month. You can have as many devices as you want on one account. That's good because when you use more, you pay less per minute, message, or megabyte of data. Your usage plus $6 per active device on your account plus taxes is your monthly bill. Simple. That's what we mean when we say Ting. Mobile. That makes sense. Yeah. So go over to linux.ting.com to check them out. They've got a really awesome dashboard. I think all mobile carriers need to step up their game now. Ting has schooled everybody on how your dashboard should work. Web standards, so it works on your mobile device, it works on your desktop. They've also got iOS and Android apps that let you manage your account.

You can set up call forwarding, voicemail options, stuff like that. They've got a really, really great customer service. You can call them at 1-855-846-4389. And if you call them during business hours, a real person answers the phone right then and there and takes care of your problem. They've got some videos on their blog too, some behind-the-scenes videos on the crew that works in the support department. So you get a little idea of, you know,

and they're Canadians. They're so nice, Matt. They're so nice. So they just posted one, I think, today. Yeah, today. Yeah, I think it was today. Yeah, so that video is up on the Ting blog. While you're over at linux.ting.com,

check out their savings calculator because Ting just dropped their rates. The Ting deal is even better for data now. So go over there, plug in your current bill information, and then just weep at the savings, my friends, because you'll be like, oh my God, it's so much better. And oh, there's no contract. Oh, I only pay for what I use.

Oh, Hotspot and Tethering are included. Oh my goodness. By the way, they also have an early termination relief program. You can find out more about that at ting.com slash ETF. Get started by going to linux.ting.com. That'll let them know that you heard about it right here on the Unplugged Show. You appreciate them supporting the Unplugged Show. And my friends, it'll get you $25 off your first device.

If you've already got a Sprint-compatible device and they've got a BYOD page that outlines everything, well, then good news. They'll give you $25 off your first month. And if you're like me, that actually ended up paying for my first month of Ting. And I really love it. We were out.

I can say this now. Oh, I can talk about this now. So Matt, Chase, and I were out in the car, right? And we're driving around and Chase doesn't have Ting, right? Because he originally had an iPhone and he has another mobile carrier who likes to spy on you and give all your information to the government. They're great like that. Extract as much money from you as possible. Anyways, that carrier is pretty well known.

So Chase says, well, let's do a speed test and see where we're at. So we both bring up the speed test app. You know, I had perfectly good pings, perfectly good speeds. And I'll tell you, I'm paying $33 a month. Chase is paying like $120 a month. We both have two phones on the account. So the value in Ting is just incredible. So linux.ting.com.

And thank you to Ting for sponsoring the Linux Action Show. I'm just kidding, Chase. He's like, hey! Yeah, he's like, hey, come on now, come on now. No, Chase, it's cool, it's cool, man, it's cool. All right, well, let me bring Michael Hall into our restricted casting room here. And Michael, welcome to Linux Unplugged.

Thank you, guys. So you had a really great post this morning on your blog, mhall119.com, and you said it's a new 80-20 rule for open source. So before we get into that, I noticed, are you trying to do like a blog a day kind of a thing right now? Yeah, there was some conversation at the end of January about the content going on Ubuntu Planet,

and I came up with this, well, I didn't come up with it, I stole this idea of doing a blog a day for a month. So you're hoping to sort of populate the Ubuntu planet with some reoccurring content every day kind of a thing? Yeah, I was just trying to get people to kind of blog more actively on it. So what do you do at Canonical? Well, as you mentioned earlier, my official title is Upstream Liaison, but I really haven't been doing a lot of upstream liaising lately.

I've been doing a lot of app developer focus. Yeah, I bet. You guys are ramping up the Ubuntu touch effort, right? Yeah, and the Ubuntu SDK. It's really a lot of exciting stuff going on. What has got you most excited right now? Everything around the app development and the phone. I mean, I've got a Nexus 4 that's running Ubuntu, and it's been my

primary phone since August of last year. And just the workflow using the phone is so much better for me than what Android was. So is that really, I mean, the essence of that is, you know, because so many people, when we talk about the mobile market, so many people talk about, oh, you know, Android's there, they're the new Windows, they're dominant, the market's all locked down. But you're telling me that you sit there, you're using this thing, you're like, you know what, this works for me. And that's what's got you excited. It's like, I see this fitting into my workflow. And do you think this is like a whole new generation of opportunity for Ubuntu? I think it is. And the one, the thing we have over everybody else in the market right now is that we're running the same software on the phone as we are on the desktop.

So it's not like you've got completely different platforms like you do with iOS and OS X or even Windows and Windows Phone. And of course, Android, there's not even anything on a desktop space with Android. There's Chrome OS. with Android, there's Chrome OS. So being able to have just the one platform on all the devices, being able to have the same apps on all your devices, it really changes the experience of it. So changing gears to your blog post here,

I know you've been active at Canonical for a long time. You've been in the open source community for, do you have a rough estimation of how long you've been in? I've been involved with the Ubuntu community for probably six, seven years now. And so you've had time from that perspective to sort of notice trends as they come and go, you know, the big hooplas of the week that sometimes last multiple weeks, sometimes fizzle out fairly quick. And I thought, you know, you had a really poignant piece when you wrote here on your blog, people tend to appreciate it more when you only give them 20% of something, and then they resent you if you give them 80%. Let's unpack that a little bit.

When you say people appreciate it more when you give them 20%, that sounds crazy to me. That sounds ludicrous. What do you mean by that? to me. That sounds like that sounds ludicrous. What do you mean by that? Well, it does sound ludicrous. But what I realized is that at some point past the 50% mark, I just chose 80-20 because, you know, the 80-20 rule is a common thing. But at some point after you've given them more than half, people start to think of it as something that they're entitled to or something that already belongs to them. And so instead of looking at what you're giving them, they're paying more attention to what you're not giving them. Oh, interesting. So it's sort of like what Matt was saying. It's one part expectations and two part,

what have you done for me lately? Yeah, it is. And as people have mentioned on my blog, there's another aspect of that. And that's, and that's what direction are you changing in? I mean, if somebody goes from giving 10% to giving 20%, that's better than somebody who's gone from giving 90% to giving 80%. And that's a valid criticism of my original blog post, is that the direction of change does matter as much as where you're currently at. Sure, sure. But I think this is fascinating in the recent light of Firefox's announcement of enabling ads on their new tab page. And part of it, like Matt made a very good point last on Sunday, that part of it is honestly how they announced it. And part of it is, I think, the phenomenon that you're writing about on your blog is that, wait a minute, you're telling me I've gotten this thing all this time for absolutely free with no ads attached. You guys are the anti-NSA, anti-ad tracking cookie organization on the internet, and now you want to ram ads down my throat?

How dare you? This, maybe while it doesn't surprise all of us, Michael, how do you combat something like that? Because Firefox has got to make money. What can Firefox do? It's really a tough question. I mean, obviously, it's a question that we've been trying to figure out in Canonical also. And I think a lot of it is getting the messaging right. But a lot of it is just the community needs to understand that every project is going to have missteps.

And if somebody has been doing 80%, 90% right for so long, you have to be a little more gentle when they have those missteps. Well, let me give you an example. So Linux Unplugged, this very show that we are currently recording at this very moment is a symptom of this problem that you're talking about. I knew that I needed to make changes, even just from a creative expression standpoint, to the Linux Action Show. But I also knew that we had a really great product that was firing on all cylinders and has a ton of runway still. firing on all cylinders and has a ton of runway still. And I knew that if I changed that product to what this show is, there would be massive upset.

Oh, yeah. And so my solution was to create an entirely new product. Now, that has been wildly successful for multiple reasons, but it was exactly this kind of pressure. And we made the mistake years ago with the Linux Action Show when we decided to broaden the scope and change it to the Computer Action Show. And we basically took a beating for an entire season over that decision because we had changed the product. And the problem is, at some level, you've got to change the product. Apple, they changed the product with Final Cut.

They changed the product with the Mac Pro, right? Two recent products from Apple that are used in professional industries, completely gutted and redesigned from the ground up with less functionality, but yet in the long term will probably be better off for it. As somebody who uses Final Cut for editing, I can tell you everybody who uses Final Cut 10 as crap hasn't used it recently. I just recently went back to the old Final Cut. It's like going back to the 90s. It's like when you've been using GNOME 3 or Unity and you go back to GNOME 2. It feels like you've gone back in time. And sometimes a lopping off like this, a major change in implementing ads, implementing the Amazon search scope is necessary for the sustainability of the project, the very people who depend on the project are then the ones that turn around on the project and attack them.

What can a project do, do you think, in your opinion, to communicate that change better so that way they can sort of preempt some of that attack? So a lot of it has to do with the messaging that goes into it. But another thing that I've noticed that I didn't really expand on in my blog is that there's a difference in reaction between people who are just users of the project and people who are contributors of the project. And people who are contributing seem to be more understanding, be more willing to work out an ideal solution instead of just jumping on the, oh my God, you're evil now bandwagon. So I guess what I don't understand is why can a company, just doing my example I set up here, why can a company like Apple reboot something, cut away tons of functionality, and be called an innovator? But if an open source project does the same thing, they're crazy, they've lost their way, they're evil, they're whatever people are accusing Canonical or Mozilla

of, you know, that week. It seems to me, I mean, Canonical has people that deal with PR, they've got a pretty good presence online, and yet they have been unable to get in front of this. Mozilla, same thing. They have an entire crew that works there, and they were still unable to get in front of this. Matt, I want to ask you, because I know you've worked in this space before. What are these people missing? What is Mozilla missing in this case? What did they do wrong? What should they have done before the news came out?

Well, the big difference between Mozilla and Apple is Apple sells experiences. Mozilla offers a browser. A lot of people think that Apple is a computer company or a technology company. They're not. They're a PR company, pure and simple. They've mastered this years ago. And so they could literally be like, hey, we have this iHome invasion thing where we're going to come in and basically invade your house and ransack everything you own. People are going to be excited about it because they can present

it in a way that's attractive. What Mozilla needed to do when they came out with their whole advertising thing for browsers and whatnot is they really needed to get in front of us and say, here's our rationale. Here's how we've been supporting ourselves thus far. Here's what we're challenged with. This is what we're planning on doing. We would like to have an open forum debate about this and actually get all the questions out in the open and really have a conversation about it.

But at the same time, we need you to understand why we're doing it, why it is or is not a threat, why you should or should not be concerned, and to quit treating people like they need to be talked at and actually talk to them. That's something that historically geekier companies don't do real well at. Google, Mozilla, two real big offenders in that space, probably Google being the worst. I see it over and over, and it's something that's not really addressed very well. And I've seen other companies do this as well. over and over and it's it's something that's not really addressed very well so um and i and i've seen other companies do this as well but i'd say but apple they honestly as much as i'm not a big fan of their company they can spin anything right they control the narrative from the very beginning

yeah and and and props to import i mean really i mean they know how to do it and so rather than everybody yelling and how horrible apple is about it let's look at what they're doing right i mean the products aren't kind of meh but as as far as their marketing techniques, come on, let's get with it. So, Michael, what do you think about, like, so if we don't have the means and resources of a company like Apple, you know, these smaller, you know, even Mozilla would fall into the smaller category. What about being just more direct? Like, and I'm not asking you as a representative canonical here, I'm asking just your personal opinion of somebody who's been following open source for many years now. Do you think that if a company like Canonical come out and said,

hey, we're doing these Amazon placements in our dashboard results because honestly, we've got to generate a revenue from the desktop in order to keep it sustainable. Or if Mozilla had come out, maybe let's take a more recent example. If Mozilla had come out and said, look, guys, we can't have all our eggs in the Google basket. We respect our relationship with Google and we appreciate the financing they've given us so far, but we've got to diversify because this browser is more important than one contract with one company and we've got to implement these ads to come up with a new source of revenue. If they had just been totally straight, plain English like that,

do you think things would have gone over better? I think it would have helped. But I mean, you're always going to have people who would rather see your project go down in flames than have you backtrack a little bit from their ideal. And you're always going to deal with that. There's no way to explain things sufficiently for those people. But one thing we did do, you know, when we came out with the Amazon lens in 12.10, it just kind of landed out of the blue with no explanation of why it was there or what it does. And, you know, we're still dealing with that, you know, even today. But then the next release, we came out with the broader SmartScope service. Right.

we came out with the broader SmartScope service. And we came out first with a public spec on our wiki. We held multiple Google Hangouts that were recorded explaining what the feature was going to be and what it was going to do and how it's going to work. And the security improvements. Yeah, and the security improvements. And that certainly helped. I mean, if you can get the narrative right from the start, that helps.

As soon as the FUD comes in and establishes itself, you're going to spend all of your time just trying to fight that. Yeah, great point. Boy, that is a really well-taken point. And I wish there was a way to sort of reinforce this with the open source community. Because I'll give you another recent example I talked about on Coda Radio yesterday. I want to say front of the show, although he's never come on. I'd love to have him join us. But Martin, who is responsible for the KWIN project, he continues to battle this problem.

We talked about it several weeks ago here on the show where the media grabs a headline from the KDE mailing list and just runs with it. You know, first, we inaccurately reported the KDE Next release date. But more recently, and because of my lessons learned, I did not run it in last, thankfully. But more recently, Pharonix ran a story that the KDE search system was a waste of money and that it's being abandoned in favor of something completely else, which is inaccurate in total. And of course, not everything's being abandoned. Of course, Recode's going to be repurposed.

But again, they're fighting a battle that you just touched on, Michael, where they're responding to a narrative that somebody else created for them. And this is happening more and more for open source projects because, and this goes back to something else I've been really getting on recently.

The coverage in Linux and the open source space is going downhill. It's becoming industrialized and it's becoming – it's not original reporting. It's reposting based on what a corporation wants you to post and it's getting worse. And there's agendas involved and it's getting to the point where not all of the information is coming out and the press is not giving the actual narrative a chance to get aired out. The only narratives that are getting repeated by the media are the ones that get created first. And this is a massive problem that is plaguing Linux and open source and it affects the way the entire open source community perceives events, I believe. And I think it's one of the

things that I want to set out to help correct on our platforms, any shows that we have, is that I want to try to give the actual real narrative a chance to get some airtime because nobody else seems to be doing it. And that's why I really that's why I wanted to bring you on, Michael, because I really appreciate the fact that you're even if you know, there are some things I could disagree with on your post here. And you've actually generated a very active discussion on our subreddit. People are taking issue with minimizing the CLA and things like that. But I want to save the CLA discussion for a future episode. I'll just say I want to thank you for bringing this topic out to a broader discussion because I think the problem really has to be solved with the actual consumers of these open source projects. It is our responsibility to consider the long-term viability of these projects. I extend that to our own projects and our advertisers and why we have ad-supported media, because that makes it

sustainable. I think we have to consider the software we consider valuable, and when they make changes, we have to understand that sometimes they're doing it for their best interest in the case of the Mozilla project, and perhaps even in the case of the dash lens results. And I think in that context, your post, while I think there's plenty of things people could quibble with, it definitely provokes some interesting thoughts. So thank you for coming on Linux Unplugged today. Is there anything else you want to touch on before we wrap up? No, I think that's it. As long as we stay away from the CLA topic, I'm happy. Okay, alright. We'll stay away. And that's fair. Yeah, we'll stay.

I've been planning to save that for future shows, so what I'll do is I'll toss you up into the main mumble room here now. Anybody in the mumble room, go ahead and let me know if you had anything you wanted to touch on this. But I wanted to zoom out as we kind of wrap up here, guys, before we get to the hard drive recovery thing that I want to get to before the show ends.

What do you guys think? You know, looking at this, you've probably all witnessed these kinds of things where the community gets really upset about something that sort of is necessary. And I'm willing to say that perhaps I've been too critical of the Unity Dash results, especially now with the security improvements that have been made. You got to make something sustainable. What do you guys think? Chris, I want to take something actually Matt said and take it one step further when he was comparing Apple with open source companies specifically on this topic.

Yeah. And that's Apple stands as like an authority. They make decisions and we don't have a choice in them. They're kind of like our parents in a way. There's nothing we can do. Whereas open source companies, we've helped them grow. We've helped nourish them over the years. So for us, they're more like friends. We feel personally attached to these companies because we've been there from when Firefox started till now. And in a way, because we've been there for that long and we've been

there to support them and nourish them, we feel like we have a personal stake, not only in their successes, but also in their failures. And when they do make missteps, I think we kind of take it a little more personally because, you know, we want to be the open source, you know, banner of what's right. And when we see that, we see that as our community as a whole faltering, not just Firefox faltering. And we invested our time and our energy because their ideals aligned with our ideals, right? And so when those ideals deviate from our ideals, we feel a little bit robbed because that wasn't the original bargain. Is that what you're saying? Is that what you're saying? Yeah. So go ahead, Crossroads, because you said it was bad enough when it was just Amazon. What did you mean? Yeah.

So go ahead, Crossroads, because you said it was bad enough when it was just Amazon. What did you mean? No, what I meant was that it was bad when it was only Amazon. Because when it's only Amazon, then it appears as ads. In 1310, once they had smart scripts and it covered plenty of sources, at that point it became okay. Gotcha. Go ahead, Riley. I think the thing is, is just ads itself. Ads are never a cool thing, no matter what it is.

I don't care who you are. If you say you're going to introduce ads, there's always going to be people who say no and scream at you. I mean, you can all have the best PR in the world, but if you introduce ads, it's still a bad thing to a lot of people and there will always be those people who hate you for it. So, I mean you can all have the best PR in the world, but if you introduce ads, it's still a bad thing to a lot of people, and it will always be those people who hate you for it.

So I mean you just got to take that with a grain of salt. I mean you win some and you lose some. Right. Yeah. Well, I would take that because I agree with that actually. I think that's a spot-on statement. I'd take it even further and say part of what Apple does to make their own efforts successful too is that they're choosing their battlefield. So they're picking people that won't be as likely to object as folks that will by going to the tube TV versus exclusively going online.

They're working with people that are already comfortable being bombarded with crap and aren't going to react as poorly. Well, I mean – so Ick, what do you think? You say maybe it's a necessary evil to react as poorly. Well, I mean, so what do you think? You say maybe it's a necessary evil to have these ads. Absolutely. And the reason is, is because people have to be able to make some sort of income. It doesn't matter if you are, you know, I've dealt with nonprofits for a good chunk of time myself in my professional career, and they have to have some income somehow um the thing is now there is a line that can be drawn and lampy too in the chat room did mention it

just don't track me it's when you start getting followed around the internet and you're browsing yeah that's exactly a line of privacy being crossed dare dev Devlin, do you think there's an alternative to ads? Yes, I think there's many models that can work and that can put it into test. Ads has been the model that is mostly used because it reduces costs and you can actually sell, even if you're selling something, you can sell it at a lower rate and expect to gain those profits later.

But I don't think it's the only model and people should try look a little bit also and risk on models business models not only on development models but business models as well i kind of want to dovetail on that a little bit because you know we're still within that topic um when i was uh looking at what firefox is doing you know they're getting most of their income from Google. Well, what if Google decides to pull out on that agreement? Then they have to come up with their revenue some other way. And, you know, the thing is, they're only getting 1%,

actually less than 1% of their revenue from donations. So that becomes a problem when you're not going to be making as much money to be all your developers. Very true. I think Mozilla is going to have hate thrown at

them either way. What Apple's done is they actually just make the product throw it out there, see how it sells, and just go with that, like gnome in a way. So, Daredevil, and I know, you know, so I'll tell you, you think maybe donations aren't the model, but God, don't we all want them to be?

Don't you want the people who are consuming the thing to be the people who finance the thing? What are your thoughts? Yes, I think exactly that. And actually, for example, I quite appreciated when Ubuntu had this button that when you were to download, you could actually vote with your wallet where the money goes. And I think that's actually much better. And I think that's actually much better. And let's say you make three months or just a limited time where people get this. They can get the source code as well while they download and they get the paid version.

They just pay for the product. It's a license. And then after that time, it actually gets released for everyone. And that's another model for instance. Mr. Hall, I know you had a response to Art of Music's point go ahead can you hear me now? so you mentioned that the Apple approach is to just

throw something over the wall and be done with it that way and I think part of what I wanted to stress in my blog post was that if we keep going after the companies that are doing mostly right so harshly, we're going to drive more people in the opposite direction. We're going to drive them to the Apple approach where they just throw it out there and say, here it is, use it or don't. Good point.

Now, Riley, I wanted to shift gears to you because I know you had an idea about a Mozilla service. Tell me about this. Yes. How about instead of maybe ads, how about you start offering some streaming services or cloud storage services, things like that. You can join revenue from subscription-based type things, maybe. For the sync or something. I'd say privacy services would probably be the most logical course. Exactly.

VPN service. That would be excellent. Yeah, I can see that. People have a trust there. I don't know. I, I can see that. People have a trust there. I don't know. I think I kind of fall down with you, Crash Benedict. Crash Benedict, you say, hey, Opera, Safari, these guys have been doing this since day one.

But how successful are they? The actual proposal that they made was that on a brand new install of Firefox, you're going to get the new tab page with the nine squares on it. on a brand new install of Firefox, you're going to get the new tab page with the nine squares on it. All they're going to be doing is giving companies the ability to be put on that before the user has actually filled that up with their own things. So until you've visited your first nine websites on a brand new install,

you're going to see those default sites. But then eventually you would even replace them with your own sites that you frequent. Exactly. And, I mean, I recall installing Opera way back when. This was like five, six, seven, eight years ago. And they had, you know, the page with all the different tiles on it. And when you installed it, you'd open it and they'd have links on that to Facebook and Google and YouTube and whatever, Wikipedia and stuff like that.

It was just some default sites that they suggest to you. And the mobile Firefox does the same thing. When you open it for the first time, it has some default things. This goes to Michael's point. I think if Firefox I mean, tell me if I'm wrong here, Michael, but if Firefox had shipped

the browser from day one when they invented this new tabs page, the first time it went out, if they just signed up agreements and populated it, no one would give a crap. That's it. Right? Nobody would care. It would not even be a topic of discussion. But because they're changing the deal after we've already all made the deal, after we've all done some sort of imaginary handshake, now it's a big deal. Now we're all upset. Now we're all buttered. Instead, we'd rather they have some sort of imaginary handshake, now it's a big deal. Now we're all upset. Now we're all buttered.

Instead, we'd rather they have some sort of deal with Google, but God forbid they make money directly. I prefer that, to be honest with you. I prefer that they're not attached to Google at the hip. Maybe someday we'll see DuckDuckGo as the default search if they're not getting $300 million a year from Google. Maybe DuckDuckGo gets product placement now. I mean, I think this could be a really good thing.

Oh, I don't know. Hey, why don't we solve Joey's hard drive problem before we get out of here? He writes and he says, all right. He says, to start, I'm a complete newbie to using Linux. I'm a 50-year-old systems analyst who has worked in Windows world for a long time. A year or so ago, I got hooked on the Linux Action Show, so I decided to try Linux. I've got a couple old Dell D630s, one with KDE and the other partitioned with Maya and Ubuntu. So far, my experience has been absolutely positive, and I kick myself for not trying Linux sooner.

So, I have a ton of questions, but the most pressing is regarding an issue I ran into a couple of months ago while updating Ubuntu. I mentioned earlier that I have Ubuntu and a Mint slash Maya on this machine. During the update, the hard drive crashed, and now I'm getting bad sector messages when I try to boot up Ubuntu. I can still boot up my Mint with no problem, and I'd like to see if any of my data on the Ubuntu partition is retrievable. I realize this is a hardware issue related. It's related to a hardware issue, and it's not changed my mind about learning about Linux at all. However, I can't seem to find a way to access the partition from the Mint partition.

If it's not possible, then so be it. I sincerely apologize for my lack of knowledge, and if I've used any incorrect terminology, I hope that you have not known you with my lengthy message. Your assistance and advice is most appreciated. So, boy, I read that last paragraph and I get

a little worried. Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, when in doubt, do hard drive, obviously. I guess outside of that, maybe a file system check of some, you know, I mean, I don't know. Yeah, Riley's got his, Riley, what do you think? I think you're going to recommend one of my favorite tools, aren't you? Yeah, it's System Rescue CD.

He actually has a lot of tools where you can check and clean your hard drive out. There you go. He should be seeing the hard drive and partitions from his Mint installation. And that makes me think that it's really real bad. It's real bad. Yeah, if it's dead, then there's not much you can do, unfortunately. But it's just a couple bad sectors, and System Rescue can help

with that. Yeah, for sure. It sounds to me like he may have lost his root file system, what have you, on the hard drive. You know how it's set up. So it's beyond file system check at that point. It sounds bad. So what he needs to do is he needs to get a list of the drives attached and their partitions.

And the other thing he could try doing is he could try installing. I would recommend, we did an episode on this. It doesn't quite show on the window, but it's called DD Rescue. And we did an episode of Linux Action Show on this a while back. So you can find that if you dig around. But DD Rescue, it's a data recovery tool. And what's great about DD Rescue is that it will perform like a soldier. It will read and read and read and read that bad sector for as long as it possibly can, every single block,

man, and it will read and read and read it. And the way it does it is it will take a pass at your hard drive, it'll get everything it got on that first pass, and then it'll go back and get the next pass, and then the next pass, and the next pass. And it'll keep going and keep going and keep going for as long as you really want it to. I mean, it will go for a really long time. And it can spit that out to an image file that you can then look at later on. So that might be something you want to look into. And there you go. The random person in the chat room just linked the video.

I'll put a link to that in the chat room. I'm sorry, in the show notes. Yeah. in person in the chat room just linked uh the uh the video i'll put a link to that in the chat room all right i'm sorry yeah um one suggestion i have and it might sound a little bit extreme but it's worked for me is when my i had a 500 gig drive that wasn't readable at all in bios or in the system so i threw some googling on and i ended up putting in a Ziploc bag and putting it in the freezer for like a couple of days. And then it actually read it for a limited time before it heated up to normal operating temperature. So I could at least pull some files I needed off.

It's not 100% foolproof, though. That sounds like a last-ditch effort. Yeah, that would be a last-d ditch effort, if ever. Yeah, that was pretty much my last ditch effort since it was a power surge that happened on my drive. So, hold on, I'm going to play this clip. Let me see here. You're seeing timeout errors on SDA, whatever. You're getting

error messages on there. Some red flags are being thrown up at you. Maybe like when you mount the drive, your system kind of locks up for a little bit. These are all indications that drive is going out. You need to get the data off there real quick. That's where an open source program called DD Rescue comes in. Now here's what's great about DD Rescue. You're familiar with DD,

I would assume, right? DD Rescue is DD for data recovery. And I'll link to a walkthrough video. You guys can see how this process works when you're recovering data on a drive. But think of DD Rescue as like this. You start it on a drive, and you can assign it some thresholds and some variables.

And what DD Rescue's essential mission is, is it tries to rip through that drive from one end to the other end as fast as possible. And as it goes, every time it hits a bad sector, it marks it along the way, and then it just keeps going, and it writes all this to a raw image file. So you need to store that raw image file on a different drive. I have the syntax for this in the show notes. And then, as it finds these errors, once it gets to the end of the drive, it then

loops back, and depending on how many times you've told it in the command line flag, it then once again tries to get those bad sectors. So say you set it for three times. It'll go through all of them again. I should just play old clips of us all the time. I mean, that was exactly what I just said. So that was a Linux Action Show season 27, episode 10. If you want to check that out. Sorry,

Mom, you couldn't hear that. I was playing on your channel. But Joey, good luck with that. And so check out that episode. We'll have it linked in the show notes. We've got a couple other tools in there. And I think I totally agree with Riley, too. The System Rescue CD has got to be one of the greatest little pieces of... I always have a copy in my bag. Whenever I was going to a client, I always had a copy of it. So, very cool. Good stuff. Alright, well, I want to say thank you to Michael for coming on

Linux Unplugged today. It was great having you here. Yeah, thank you for having me. That was awesome. Yeah, thank you very much. You are welcome to come back and join our member room anytime. We always have it open during Linux Unplugged, so if there's anything on your mind you ever want to share, we'll give you a little slot. You come on the show, we'd be happy to have you.

And also, we'd love to have you join us live. Why don't you come over live? Join us at jblive.tv. We start at 2 p.m. Pacific. And you can also get that in your local time zone over at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. And guess what? I'd really love to hear your feedback.

You know, you might have noticed this, but Matt and I, we start every single episode of Linux Unplugged with your feedback. That means we need your feedback. That's how it works. Just the math of it. So go over to jupyterbroadcasting.com and click that contact link and send something in to us. We'd love to hear it. Now, Matt, we have a surprise.

We are scheduled to talk with some of the folks from the Numix project. scheduled to talk with some of the folks from the Numix project. They are setting out to make the GNOME desktop even more beautiful with a complete theming package that I've been using for a couple of weeks. It's really elegant. It's really amazing. And I want to talk to them about

making the Linux desktop look better and make it look even just more incredible. And that's what they're working on. So they'll be joining us on Sunday. Right on. You know, that doesn't mean we're're going to have a great show next. Linux Unplugged, we've got a great show planned for that, too. So don't worry, everybody. All right, man.

Have a great week. I'll see you on Sunday, okay? All right. See you Sunday. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Thank you.