LINUX Unplugged - Episode 38: The Rest of the Fest | LUP 38

Episode Date: April 30, 2014

We had a chance to chat with folks from Firefox, the EFF, SUSE, and more. Plus we discuss the real benefits to Linux conventions like LinuxFest Northwest.

This is Linux Unplugged, episode weekly Linux talk show that's still a little hungover and still pretty dang happy from the most excellent Linux Fest Northwest. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey there, Matt. How are you feeling? Feeling pretty good. Well, I'm looking forward to today's show because we have some follow-up interviews that didn't make it into this Sunday's Linux Action Show from the floor of

LinuxFest Northwest. If you watched our live stream, and a lot of you did, and we had a great show, but that was always at our booth. We showed some clips from the floor, but there was still even more. Even the ones we streamed live on Saturday and ones that we showed on Sunday. Guess what? We still have more interviews to show today. So we've got some great ones we're going to play.

And I'm looking forward to that. So we've got kind of a special show today because we've also got folks that have joined us in our virtual lug, the Mumble Room, who are also at LinuxFest Northwest. So it's going to be a little bit of a follow-up from this Sunday show, but don't worry, even if you weren't there, that's actually even better for you because it's going to be stuff that you didn't get even a chance to ask these folks or talk to these folks. We've got guys from SUSE, we've got folks from Firefox OS, and others. So we're going to get to that. But first, Matt, before we get into our clips, I want to thank our first sponsor this week, and that is the great folks over at Ting.com. Ting is mobile that makes sense, my mobile service provider and Matt's mobile service provider.

And Matt, you probably weren't, of course you weren't, you're a Fios customer. But last Thursday, I don't know if you heard about this, Comcast got their fiber connection completely cut, and we were out of internet connectivity for the entire day. It started like at 1 a.m. in the morning, and it lasted until about 4 o'clock in the evening. It was huge. Oh, my. Yeah, and Ting saved the day in a really big way because Ting is no contracts, and you only pay for what you use. So I knew that I had the ability to just turn on Hotspot because it's included with my Ting service, and I was just going to pay for the usage for that day.

And it was just absolutely critical because Alan had just flown in from Canada. That's another country. And he was here in studio to do TechSnap, and we didn't have any internet connectivity. I mean, that was like worst- case scenario because when does that ever happen? And Ting totally saved the day. We got, I mean, I don't want to waste my nexus, right? I grabbed Dori Kai's HTC One, put that down on the table,

turned on the Wi-Fi hotspot mode, and boom, Al and I were able to prep the show. We even started the first half of TechSnap live using the HTC One tethering. It was pretty crazy. And then thankfully after the new segment, the regular internet connectivity came back up. But I was getting like 15 megabits on my LTE connection.

So here's what I want everybody to do. Go over to linux.ting.com. Yes, linux.ting.com. And check out what you would save by plugging into that savings calculator. I think you'll be pretty impressed. Go down also and watch the demo of their cool dashboard. It's really intuitive,

and it makes it really straightforward to manage your account. And that's one of the things that, now that I've been a Ting customer for over a year, I really, genuinely appreciate how great that interface is. And I feel like I've never, like, Matt, when I got you to sign up with Ting, I was like, Matt, you've got to try this out. Like, even before they were really coming on as a sponsor, like, Matt, you've got to look at this. And then also now with Rikai, I've given him a phone, and neither one of you did I ever have to say,

this is how you use the dashboard, this is where you log in, this is what this does. It just makes sense, like all of the Ting lineup does. And you know what's really great? It was stupid simple. Yeah, you could walk right into it, and you were good to go. What's really great now is that now that we have multiple lines on that dashboard, it's really simple to just say, okay, this is the cost of X, this is the cost of Y.

We can keep everything separated. We can set up alerts if we need to. The more devices you add, it still stays simple and intuitive. And that's what I love about it. But I've got great news. If you already have an HTC One that's compatible with the Ting network, and they have a BYOD page where you can check out what devices are, you can now bring it over to the Ting network. You can now bring the HTC One over to the Ting network, and that's pretty exciting because that is a really good phone. I really love the HTC One. So go over to linux.ting.com. That'll take $25 off your first month of service

if you're going to bring, say, the HTC One or any compatible phone. If you don't already have a phone, then going to linux.ting.com will take $25 off your service. And that, if you're like me, will pay for your first month of service. Linux.ting.com. And a really big thank you to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Love those guys. And the Ting devices were showing up and representing at LinuxFest Northwest.

And we were using Viber to stay in communication. I know Viber isn't perfect with security. and we were using Viber to stay in communication. I know Viber isn't perfect with security, but at LinuxFest Northwest, it was so great to have group chats with picture and voice capabilities, like quick, almost like radio. Roger that, I'm moving down to the lobby.

Over, and it would just send it to everybody. But then also to be able to work on my laptop and also keep in the Viber discussion, that was really cool. And having those on the Ting devices was awesome. Okay, Matt. Go ahead. I was going to say, I was actually pleasantly

surprised with Viber's capabilities, because I found it to be not only easy to use, but I find myself, I'm probably going to stick with it now. I'm actually kind of addicted to it. It seems kind of stupid simple. It doesn't look... I think they could series up the UI a little bit if they wanted more people to take them a little more seriously.

But once you start using it, it's pretty useful. And I've read reports that there's ways you can get access to the pictures stored in clear text on their servers if you were super motivated. It's not obvious, but there is a way to get to them. So it's not perfect with security. And the same with the voice memos.

It's got some issues. But for what we were using it for, like I'm going down to the booth, that's fine. Yeah, exactly. No big deal. Yeah, in fact, I remember too, we were pulling up Sunday morning for the Linux Action Show

after everybody had eaten at our hotel and we were driving towards the fest and they're like, Chris, Mad Dog is waiting for you. And I'm like, yeah, well, we're not even set up yet. So we're not ready for an interview. They're like, no, Mad Dog is waiting for you. And I'm like, yeah, well, we're not even set up yet. So we're not ready for an interview. They're like, no, you don't understand.

Mad Dog's here. I'm like, guys, I know. But we were able to have this back and forth. So they were able to relay to him what was up. So it was super useful. All right. Well, while we're talking about LinuxFest Northwest, maybe we should play a couple of clips. I don't know where to start exactly because these are all just really great.

But one that I think just kind of stood out for me as kind of a funny moment, and I'm sure the Mumble Room will agree with me later on in the show, Microsoft made a big splash, right? I think we kind of mentioned that in the last. They were the talk, weren't they? They were huge. I mean, not only were they just actually all-around great guys to be around, but they were giving out food, which is always a win with the Linux crowd. Like cotton candy, cupcakes, donuts, and then like full-on shirts in tubes and in crazy shapes. So they really brought the swag. So that's why this chat we had with someone.

I don't want to use his name. If he uses his name in the clip, that's fine. But I'm not going to say it if he doesn't. I don't want to use his name. If he uses his name in the clip, that's fine. But I'm not going to say it if he doesn't. But we talked with an employee from Microsoft who came up not as part of the Microsoft crew. In fact, I think he just kind of came up on the sly because he's a Linux user at Microsoft.

And he wanted to see what's up. So I talked to him a little bit. And I just found the whole chat delightful. Say again in the microphone what your name is. My name is Jason Wagner. Jason. Oh, hello, Jason. Hey. Nice to meet you. Tell the folks what you do uh i work for microsoft i believe

there is a pretty big presence of microsoft here this year is there yeah yeah i've been hearing a lot about the microsoft booth everybody stopped by talking about the microsoft i'm not with them oh i'm just by myself oh okay cool so uh why do you think it is i mean you don't have to share if it's just in your opinion why do you think it is? I mean, you don't have to share. It's just in your opinion. Why do you think it is that Microsoft does have such a splash here this year? Does have to sponsor? Does have such, is making such a big splash. Very popular.

I mean, you've got some great food. Cotton candy. That's pulling out all the stops. I like that. I don't know. Maybe we have conventions in the area and we just have to make a presence. Wow. I loved that answer. I couldn't believe what he said i mean i don't know man but basically we have a budget uh and this one's local

so it's easy for us so what we kind of do is just figure look they have this much money so we just send them up and it was just funny because if that's true like they don't they don't they don't project that they seem genuinely interested to be there I definitely felt like there was more of a genuine connection there for sure. Yeah. All right. It continues on. So now he's going to talk a little bit how he – I eventually find out that he's a Linux user at Microsoft, but it takes me a little bit to get there. Maybe.

I thought you were going to tell me something more fancy than that, to be honest with you. It's probably pretty simple. What do you do for Microsoft? What's that? What do you do for Microsoft? I do IT. Oh, okay. Do you have much Linux

at Microsoft that you end up working with? I don't work with it. But you're just kind of curious what goes on up here? Yeah. So what do you think? I'm loving it. I'm running it at home now. Oh, yeah? Yeah, my primary desktop. What distro do you use? At home or on my workstation, I use Arch. Okay.

With GNOME 3.12. Look at you. On my laptop, I've got the new Ubuntu GNOME. What do you think? I love GNOME 3.12. Look at you! On my laptop, I've got the new Ubuntu GNOME. What do you think? I love GNOME. Yeah? Wow. I was the guy on your Google Plus who was posting the hey, this is kind of the best way,

the best workflows for GNOME. Yeah, that was actually kind of helpful. Because I've been using, you know, I have a lot of different dash drives. I'll use Unity right now. But, yeah, I agree. GNOME has really gotten really great. Yeah.

So are you able to use that at work? Am I what? Are you able to use that at work? I use it. I work from home. Oh, okay. And so I can use GNOME as my primary environment, and then I have a VM that I run in GNOME boxes. So that's Windows 7.

Yeah. And I do everything for Microsoft there. That's really interesting. GNOME Boxes. Yeah. Yeah, I use GNOME Boxes too. We even use the smart card readers, and I'm able to pass that through USB. Oh, nice.

So is this the first Linux Fest for you? This is my first Linux Fest. Very cool. Have you gotten any sessions? Have I gotten any what? Sessions? Any sessions? Oh, yeah.

And what do you think? It's pretty good. Anything stand out? I went to a Python intro to Python. That was really great. So I'll be picking up some of that. Yeah. I just went to Brian's Sousa talk.

Did you enjoy it? Yeah, I did. Good. What do you think of Sousa? I'm not sure yet. I'm going to have to try it. Yeah. But I picked up a Sousa and Fedora CDs, and we'll see how that goes.

It's going to give them a try, huh? Yeah, I think so. Good. Arches, it really scratches an itch for me. Yeah. I love the AUR, but there's just a bit too much breakage that I can tolerate on my primary machine. Sure, sure. The other day, I couldn't update my system because some font thing got changed, whatever

that was. I'm using the Infinality packages. Yeah, yeah. Love them. Beautiful fonts, though. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. But I couldn't update for a day until I figured out what the break was.

Were you able to fix it? I was able to. I had to find some forum post about it. Yeah. I'm not sharp enough to do it myself yet, but yeah. You know, I've had a few bumps like that too. It feels like it's only been a few times every couple of months maybe, but it's enough that I can see how somebody could be kind of sensitive to it because if you're busy, it gets kind

of a... And then you don't want to fall too far behind. Exactly. Yeah, especially an arch. So I try to do it every two or three days and then if something breaks and i've got a day or two to kind of get on it and then i'm never really like a week behind or anything yeah well very good well i'm glad you stopped by after he got up you know what i said is i said yeah it doesn't break that often for me anymore but i think if it ever broke to the point where it took me more than 30 minutes to fix it

i'd probably wipe it oh really yeah i think that's how I feel about it. Like, right now, I've never had anything break that's taken more than, you know, you figure five minutes to do the quick search, five minutes to read it, and then about five minutes to fix it. And if it, you know, that's not too bad, considering what I get in return.

Anyways, I just thought that was an interesting conversation with a Microsoft employee who's running GNOME 3. Now, he's doing it remotely, though. But I like that one. That's still clever. I wonder how many other Closet Linux users there could be hanging out at Microsoft.

So we had a chat with Peter from SUSE, and Noah asked him a few great questions, and I wanted to roll that. We're here with Peter Linnell from the OpenSUSE and SUSE project. How are you doing today, Peter? I'm doing fine. I want to note you pronounce it SUSE like John Philip SUSE.

It's always a confusion for people. SUSE. Well, tell me a little bit about SUSE and OpenSUSE and what the differences are between the two. Well, for starters, SUSE, the company, is actually the oldest enterprise Linux company. It started some 22 years ago in 1992 in Germany. And in the SUSE 10 timeframe, after SUSE had gotten bought by Novell, the decision was to open source all of the SUSE Enterprise. And from that, now OpenSUSE, the community project,

is basically upstream for the SUSE Enterprise Linux product, which will have a new version coming out in the fall. Okay, now you work with both OpenSUSE and regular SUSE, is that correct? That's correct. I'm an OpenSUSE community member, which many SUSE employees are. As well, I'm an employee of SUSE, the Enterprise Linux company. I cover the West Coast as a sales engineer. Okay. Now, even though one is more of a business model, one's more of an open model,

they're both technically open source software, correct? Correct. 99% of what SUSE enterprise Linux is actually GPL-compatible software. It's open source. You can download the sources. When you're a SUSE customer, you get all the source DVDs and source RPMs. What exciting things are the OpenSUSE project working on? Are the SUSE project working on? What exciting things can we look to see that might be coming up? Well, one thing we're doing, and tomorrow I'm going to give a talk on it,

it's called the OpenBuild server. And we're almost a victim of our own success in that OpenSUSE, the community distribution, has grown traumatically in terms of the packages. We went from 5,000 to near 9,000 packages now. And the challenge is the release management. So we're refining the tools behind the scenes to have a better release management plan for the next version of OpenSUSE. Other than that, we are continuing to push the envelope in kernel and things like that. And the other great part is the SUSE engineers who work on the enterprise kernel are constantly contributing back into OpenSUSE,

their fixes, enhancements, and things like that. Perfect. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate your time. Thank you. Good talking with you. Yeah, the SUSE booth was really one of the great ones. They always have a great approach to it, so that's one of the fun ones. They had a great spot this year, too. Nice.

So we had a chance to chat with Adam, who showed up with something kind of cool. I gave a mention in last this week. It's called Crouton. And I'm particularly interested in it because I have this C720. That's a pretty good machine, but I've had some flakiness under Linux, and I almost wonder if maybe I should try give Chrome OS more fare of a shake. Because there's some things I do like about it, and I feel like to really have a well-rounded opinion, I should probably give it more than a few hours, like I did before. So I was thinking, I would kind of like to go back to Chrome OS on the C720 for a little while, but I'm just not quite ready to give up full desktop functionality. I like the option of sometimes actually getting

something considerable done on a laptop that size. And so Adam happened to show up at just the right time to talk to me about Crouton, and now it's really got me thinking about juicing up my Chromebook. Welcome to LinuxFest Northwest. Thank you very much. 2014. I give Jupyter Broadcasting full credit in getting me out here from Flagstaff, Arizona.

Oh, wow. Wow. So you brought your Chromebook with you. Yes, I did. But it seems to be a little schizophrenic. Very fun. Because just a few seconds ago, I thought that thing was running Linux. What's going on?

So it is running Linux at the same time as it's running Chrome OS. Sounds awesome. Let's see here. There you go. All right. So how are you doing this? Because I know there's dual boot, but this isn't dual boot, right? This is a Chrome boot.

Oh, that would be nice. No, dual boot. You're not using dual boot. Oh, no. There is a Kubuntu project where you can install in place of Chrome OS almost any distribution of Linux you want. This is a different project. It's up on GitHub. I can pull up the link in just a second.

But it's called Crouton. C-R-O-U-T-O-N. Like the kind I eat? Yeah. Do a GitHub search for Crouton. And it's basically a shell script that you download that handles finding whichever desired distribution you'd like to run in a chroot. So it does all this with chroot. So it's actually running under Chrome OS?

Exactly. Ah, that's the trick. I got you. You keep both of them running at the same time. You can keep one application running while you switch back and forth. I can have YouTube playing on Chrome OS while I hop over into Linux to do some monodevelop or maybe my TeamSpeak or, you know, those few applications that I haven't been able to completely get away from.

And, you know, also, I love Linux. I want to use Linux. So it's nice to have it right there in my pocket whenever I need it. Yeah, no kidding. So what kind of overhead? I mean, Chromebooks are kind of historically tight on resources. So does this kill the resources on a Chromebook? I found that my major complaint about this Chromebook itself is that as far as I know, the RAM's not expandable. Four gigs? I'm stuck at two. Two? Yeah, and that's probably a bad choice

on their part. Yeah. They put the touchscreen in it and, you know, the Haswell, so this has got great battery life. Yeah. But, man, if you had four, that'd be great, right? It would be. What I've noticed, and I can even show it on the system monitor, is that basically once I have both of them running at the same time, I'm sitting at about 75%, 80% RAM usage. So I am somewhat limited on what I can do. Up to that red line. But it works.

It does. Yeah, it definitely serves my needs. So when you're in the Troop, you just have your own walled-off file system. You can't get to the Chrome OS file system or anything like that? You actually can. Really? Yes. So anything you have in your downloads folder, if anybody's used Chrome OS,

they know that there's usually a Google Drive with everything, and then there's your downloads folder, if anybody's used Chrome OS, they know that there's usually a Google Drive with everything, and then there's your downloads folder, and that's what you work under. And, yes, you can get to all of those files. Oh, hey, look at that. That is really fancy. So do you have to do anything special to Chrome OS before you install Crouton? You do. You do have to go into developer mode.

And for whichever Chromebook you have, there are lots of online instructions on how to get into developer mode yeah which does reset it yes yeah it does yeah so if you're going to do this uh do it early on before you get a lot of stuff set up it's not chrome os is not so bad most in most cases no yeah most of your stuff will repopulate yeah pretty quickly so that's not a big deal. But once you have it going, it's as simple as once you have run the crouton script to install whichever distribution you want or whichever desktop environment you want, then it provides you with a handy-dandy little shell script that you can run to just start it up. So if I can get this on the thing there.

Alright, so you're in Chrome OS and now you're running is it booting right now? Wait for it. There it is. There's a boot to. And there we go. I recognize Unity. Yep, and I chose Unity because I wanted to see how it worked with the touch screen.

Yeah, and how's it been? Yeah, so it's been really good. I can quickly launch things with a touch. And then I've been really impressed with the responsiveness. I was really shocked that the touchscreen worked at all. Yeah. I was kind of just imagining that that's probably not going to happen. Yeah.

And I hopped over into it, and everything's been working. I was just demoing, also running some applications in Wine. So to me, I've got three different operating systems kind of working in tandem there. You know what? One of the things that kind of struck me, I don't know if you – did you catch it? We had a few people show up at the booth that were using touchscreen machines. I actually noticed that. I was wondering if other folks caught on to that as well.

Seems like a trend, yeah. I don't know. I didn't see – I saw a lot of tablets, but I mean, I saw like Chromebooks, and I know Eric in here, you brought your laptop that has a touchscreen. You use Unity too, don't you? Yes, I do, for that very reason. Yeah, that seemed to be everybody that brought up to the booth that was using touch was using Unity, almost universally on a laptop. Well, it only makes sense because really, in KDE, it doesn't have very good touchscreen support. In fact, it even keeps the cursor wherever you touch it.

Have you tried the Plasma Active interface? You know what? There's nothing really working with Plasma Active yet. You still have to compile it from source in most cases. So there's that. And then I tried tried gnome and gnome it is not as easy to resize windows or even move windows as uh it is in unity for instance you can't drag it by the title bar in gnome for some reason i even know why that is yeah you think with those big client-side

decorations it may be easy to grab exactly Exactly. No, it's not. Exactly. I can't do it. I just put my finger on it. I try swiping that thing over. It won't do it. It doesn't follow my finger. Yeah.

All right. Very good. Well, I don't know if it's a trend. I don't know if I'm ready to call it a trend, but definitely it was an observation I made that seemed like people are taking to touch. And I think what it is is so many of these Windows 8 laptops have shipped now with touch support, and people are buying those and loading Linux on them. And, you know, there's vendors like System76 also that sell touch.

And it's happening. It's happening. Speaking of something that's happening, our second sponsor this week is absolutely happening, and that is DigitalOcean. Go over to DigitalOcean.com and use the promo code UNPLUGGEDAPRIL. It's going to work for a little bit longer, getting close to the end here, but wouldn't it be great to give us a little boost towards the end of April? And here's why you want to do it.

You'll get a $5 credit or a $10 credit, which is great when you get the $5 rig, which, do the math there, that's two months for free when you use our special promo code UNPLUGGEDAPRIL. So what is DigitalOcean? DigitalOcean is simple cloud hosting dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server. Folks in our audience have gotten these things up and running in 40 seconds, 47 seconds. Most folks, and don't be ashamed if you're one of them, 55 seconds. And pricing plans start at only $5 per month for 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, which is awesome, one CPU and a terabyte of transfer. And the best part is that DigitalOcean has data center

locations in New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Singapore, you name it, you can put a rig there. The interface is simple. The control panel is super intuitive. And power users can replicate it on a larger scale with their straightforward API. And you might want to check this out because over on the DigitalOcean website, over at digitalocean.com, click on the community tab and then go look at view projects. These are community projects that are, some of them are using this DigitalOcean API to really provide some great functionality. On Sunday, I talked about an application that ties in with Ubuntu to manage your droplets, to turn them on, turn them off, check their IP, their OS status, things like that.

And then almost like, I think it was Monday, that there was one out now for the Mac. So people are really kind of rallying around DigitalOcean. It makes sense because they've been investing in SSDs for a long time, and there's a reason. You just get better performance, higher density when they pair it with Tier 1 bandwidth, and the data centers

all over the world, they've all been hand-chosen by DigitalOcean to be really excellent. So go over to DigitalOcean.com and check them out and see why so many folks are using DigitalOcean, not just for projects and learning like lots of our audience does, but also for hosting the back-end infrastructure for their critical applications.

DigitalOcean.com and use the promo code UNPLUGGEDAPRIL. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Yeah. So let's go back to the LinuxFest Northwest coverage. One of our very own was there, Brian2040 from the chat room, and he had a booth to talk about his distribution, which has recently sort of changed course. We're here with Brian from the DescentOS project.

Most people in the Jupyter Broadcasting community are going to know him as Brian2040. Mr. Brian2040, how are you doing today? I'm doing pretty good. Tell me a little bit about what DescentOS is and what you can do with it. Mainly what DescentOS is, currently it's a Debian-based distribution that's actually saying it's on the desktop. We are in development of the 5 release right now where it is actually more for general usage. That means you can use it for desktop servers, embedded systems, and everything like that.

And it's totally independent. But right now what we're doing is mainly just, you know, going out there with the desktop version and say, Hey, we're back. We've got this new version of our 4.0 system out here, which I actually released last year, on this date last year. And basically what we're doing is, hey, it's back. Let's see what we can do with this. So you were telling me a little bit earlier that you are looking to push DescentOS more into the embedded space and primarily focus on the embedded space. How is the development of the embedded spin of your distro coming

as opposed to the desktop one that we see here on the laptop? It's going pretty well. Embedded is a whole other monster, pretty much. We're bringing support for the Bagel Bun Black initially. We might end up bringing it to the Raspberry Pi right now, but right now it's mainly for ARMv7, not for ARMv6. And if people wanted to find more information about DescentOS or what you guys are doing, where could they go? You can always email me. My email is brian at descentos.org with no pipe in there. That's probably the best way to get information from me right now. We're bringing our site back up.

That would be at descentos.org. We're bringing that up Monday. Tyler, you were there with Brian at the booth. What kind of big changes does he have coming to DescentOS? Because it sounds like he's got a few ideas in mind. I would say the biggest change that he does have coming up is going to be the package manager he's going to be including in DescentOS 5. Because it's not going to be based on anything else, it's called HPM, which is a hybrid package manager that will do both binaries and compile from source. Oh. Oh, wow.

HPM. So, yeah, we'll get him in here soon to talk more about that because they've got a whole new idea, a whole new approach that sounds pretty awesome. So that was DescentOS, and I think they're going to be hitting sort of that sysadmin sweet spot if they keep on their current path from what I talked to him about at LinuxFest. All right, so we got a chance to talk with the folks from Firefox, and I believe this was Ben. Hello, Ben.

There he is. Can you tell me a little bit about what the Mozilla Corporation is up to right now? Yeah, we're doing a lot of things. We're focusing on mobile a lot, so we have a device coming out with an operating system that we've developed called Firefox OS. And with it, we're trying to bring, we're trying to kind of close the digital divide a bit and bring smartphones to emerging markets. So we, a lot of emerging markets are still using feature phones, if the people who are lucky enough to have them. And we think that we can improve quality of life quite a bit for people

if we bring them from a feature phone to a smartphone. And to that end, we do a lot of things, like we're developing things, and we're getting feedback from a lot of the people in these countries. So we've talked to some people in Argentina, and we figured out that they really use FM radio a lot on their phone, and they rely on that as their main radio, and they use that a lot for communication. And they might not necessarily have a computer,

so they need a lot of these features in phones that a lot of other markets don't have, like sharing pictures over Bluetooth with their friends. And so we're focusing on that. We're also focusing on lower-end hardware. So most people in these markets can't afford a $400 smartphone or something like that, but they can afford a $25 smartphone. So we have a $25 smartphone coming out geared for them. It's not stripped down.

It still has a touchscreen. It'll still have a full smartphone experience. It'll just be at a lower price point that people can actually afford. That sounds outstanding, and I think that really does fill a niche market. If budget constraints weren't an issue and I was looking for a platform that was a little bit less locked down than, say, for example, Android, which is called Linux, but is it really open source Linux operating system? Is there something that Firefox OS can offer me that way? Yes, definitely. All of the development happens in the open. You can go on GitHub,

you can watch our development. And I mean, beyond that, it's a lot more open in that we actually interact with community and you can see all of these things that happen as they happen. And as such, it's a much more open platform. Now, I know a big concern is the, you know, the applications that run on the phone is the Mo OS, is it a very locked down app store? And if I buy my apps on Mozilla Firefox OS, is that something I'm not going to be able to run on any other phone? No, absolutely not. That's not something we want. And so we actually created standards. So all of the things, create apps for Firefox OS are now part of the upstream standards that they use, like JavaScript and programming languages, things like that.

And so you can actually write apps that are web apps, and they have access to things like hardware. So you can write a web app to use your camera, and you can write a web app to make phone calls, things like that. And these are also compatible with the desktop, and they're compatible with other operating systems like Ubuntu have said that they're going to be fully supporting Firefox OS apps, for example. So when you write an app, you can run it in many places. Because they're web apps, wouldn't they technically work on any device that has a web browser?

Absolutely. So you can actually share a lot of assets. Obviously, like a desktop browser is going to have a much bigger screen, so you have a different layout, but you can share a lot of assets. Obviously, like a desktop browser is going to have a much bigger screen, so you have a different layout, but you can reuse a lot of the same resources for that. Outstanding. Well, thank you so much. And if somebody was interested in learning more about Firefox OS or if they wanted to make a donation to the Mozilla organization, where would they go to find more information?

Mozilla.org is going to be a great resource on there. It should have everything you need, and it's very intuitive. Sounds good. Well, thank you very much for your time. We really appreciate having you. Man, didn't Noah do a great job? He really did. Yes, he sure did.

I thought that guy's answer regarding web apps where he said, everybody knows the benefit to web apps if you can make it truly integrate at the OS level but still then also have something that works in the web browser, that really would be sweet because the thing about it from a lazy developer standpoint, that really saves them a lot of time. So I don't know. He says it can access the camera and all that good stuff. Web apps are getting pretty good.

Maybe Firefox OS, whatever it's going to be called, has a shot. I'm looking forward to at least getting something to play with it. Personally speaking, I think if we can find an audience, because I see this as like the perfect entry-level virgin smartphone people type individuals that are looking to kind of pop their chair and get into this realm. My mom is a great example. You couldn't get her to use a smartphone to save her life, but something like that where it has a reasonable barrier to entry, especially at that price point, that doesn't sound so scary.

What about, Alan, what about you? I mean, you have a Nexus S, so you're not totally, you obviously don't feel the pinch to have the most crazy high-end smartphone, and I don't think you have too many apps on there. Would you consider a Firefox OS phone if it did calls, texting, email, and maybe Twitter and stuff like that? I don't think he's there. Well, that's too bad.

I'd be really curious because Alan's basically had, he got one phone at the start of TechSnap and he's used the same phone. Meanwhile, I've had like six phones. I'm crazy. This is true. He's a no-frills individual when it comes to stuff and I think he's really kind of got a system that works for him and he's probably just going to stick to that. Yeah.

And I think you probably nailed it. I could see also a class of geeks out there. I think there's a lot of geeks that walk around with a feature phone a lot more than we suspect. I think it's fun. Oh, yeah. Especially with tablets. You can get something like the Nexus 7 that fits in your pocket anyways. And then if you just have a feature phone to make phone calls and send a few quick text messages, no big deal.

There is? Yeah. Go ahead, Tyler. I was saying, as somebody who currently has a Galaxy Nexus and wanting to look for something more powerful, I think something like Ubuntu phone would speak more to me than Firefox OS. Yeah. What do you think, Matt? Boy, that's a tough one. I'm trying to draw the comparables between Ubuntu phone and Firefox.

I would need to spend some real quality time between the two devices because I think they definitely scratch different edges. I think as far as usability, I've actually had my hands on more frequently with a Firefox phone, and I would say that it seems like it's a very straightforward experience. The Ubuntu phone is constantly developing and evolving,

so I would need to see how that really turns out in the long haul before I could really make that direct comparison. Yeah, and it always depends on can it run what you want. Right. And for some people, like you just pointed out, that list is smaller. And for other people, that list is longer. I think so.

And I think the other thing to really consider, too, is that I think potentially they will be tapping into much of the same market. I think they'll be tapping into much of the same type of user. People that just want – look, they want a smartphone, but then at the same time, they don't necessarily need an Android market. They don't necessarily care about that other stuff. I mean, Firefox seems like it has a bit of a head start right now, but if Ubuntu starts with a good splash, they'll essentially be in the same spot, kind of going for the same customer. All right, well, so we also had a chance to chat with Seth from the EFF.

We're here with Seth from the EFF. And Seth, how are you doing today? Doing great. How are you? Excellent. Can you tell me a little bit about what the EFF is and what you aim to do? Sure. EFF is a non-profit, member-supported organization based in San Francisco. We've been around for about 25 years. And we're the foremost organization promoting individual rights online. So we have lawyers, we have technologists like myself, we have activists, and we work in the

courts, we work in Congress, and we work with technology explaining how things work and trying to protect people's individual rights, like free expression and privacy, in the context of technology. protect people's individual rights, like free expression and privacy, in the context of technology. Now, how has maybe your role changed, or maybe not your role, how has the relevance and importance of your organization changed since the revelation of Edward Snowden? I would say we've gotten a lot more public attention to our work on surveillance issues in particular. And electronic communication

surveillance is one of the core issues that we've worked on and that we've always worked on. So we were already, in fact, suing NSA over electronic communication surveillance, over mass surveillance, years ago, starting back in 2005. And so the Snowden revelations have certainly brought a lot of attention to our work in the courts and our work in Congress. Our membership is way up. We're hearing from people all the time that they really care about what we do, that they really care about the fight against mass surveillance. Now, I know you told me when we started that you're a little short on time,

but if I can ask you real quickly, if somebody was interested in supporting the EFF or getting more information about the EFF, where could they go to reach out to you? Well, the best place is our website at EFF.org for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Perfect. Thank you so much for your time. Yeah, I don't know how much traffic they got, but I thought it was pretty cool that they were there. And Noah's question about,

how's it been since Snowden was a good one? That was an excellent question. And I think that no question, well, it's really telling if you stop and think about it. He mentioned that they've already been in the process of addressing the whole NSA thing previously. Yeah. I honestly didn't see much of that in the news until the Snowden stuff happens. Right.

I mean, all of a sudden, everybody cares. Everybody in the mainstream media suddenly cares at that point. Yeah. Previous to that, eh, you know, honestly, most people didn't, and that's sad. Yeah. So that's – we'll call it there for the clips from LinuxFest Northwest if you didn't catch the Linux Action Show be sure it's worth the watch just for the chat

with John Mad Dog Hall but there's also a bunch of other great chats in there too so go watch episode 310 of the Linux Action Show if you haven't yet and hopefully you'll get a chance alright Mumbler before we wrap up today did anybody want to share any thoughts or experiences

from Linux Fest Northwest that made it this week? I was thinking in the EFF clips, a funny story. I actually took one of the papers from the EFF booth to use as a mouse pad because those tables sucked for a surface for using an optical mouse pad. That is not what I expected as an observation at all. Wow. But it is a factual observation, not what we're going for.

Yeah. All right. Anybody else that want to chime in on their thoughts? Go ahead, Popey. Yeah, Chris. As someone who was watching remotely, I thought you did a great job of keeping your stream going and keeping people entertained remotely. Oh, thank you, sir. Good.

I'm glad. We basically started when the show floor opened and we wrapped when it ended. And then first night we went out and got a whole bunch of pizza, although I wasn't going to eat any of the pizza because it would have screwed me up. So I had salad bar. I asked the guy, I'm like, so how's your salad bar? It's okay. And I'm like, really? And Alan's standing right there. I was like, get the salad bar, Chris. And I'm like really i'm like yeah and alan's standing right there i was like get the salad bar chris and i'm like well is it is it a bad salad bar man and so then alex who walks over

to the salad bar and he's kind of like surveying it and he looks over at me and he shakes that gives me the thumbs down sign i'm like man i'm getting some i'm getting some advice here the salad bar is no good and you're not selling me very much on the salad bar and he looks at me what no no it's a good salad bar it's fine the salad bar is fine really it's a i on the salad bar and he looks at me and goes, what? No. No, it's a good salad bar. It's fine. The salad bar is fine. Really. I got the salad bar and you know what? It was fine. It was not that bad. And now I'm glad I didn't go for any food. Yeah.

The ultimate pizza was pretty good. Yeah. And after the show at the museum we went over to that Bayou restaurant down the street. How was that? Yeah, that smelled delicious. There was a Cajun restaurant next to the

Spark Museum where we went for the after party. They're one of these guys. They're brilliant, Matt. They put the smokestack on the outside of the building right there on the sidewalk. As they're Cajun cooking, the smell from the grill is just going right out into the street.

It smelled wonderful. Oh, my gosh. Bellingham restaurants have a knack for really nailing it out of the park. That's one thing I've noticed. Yeah. And that's a great example of it. Yeah. It was like we were all standing in line like, oh, my gosh, that smells so good.

So the guy behind me, I literally, I was like saying that like a dozen times. The guy behind me says, yeah, yeah, we just went in. It was like they're super fast. So we went in there. We got some Cajun food real quick. We got some jambalaya. And then we came back in line. And we just lost like 10 spots in line.

No big deal. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. And then I get in the Spark Museum. And like the Cajun place comes up because it smells delicious. And people are like, yeah, I just jumped out of line and went in. They're really quick. And I just lost like a few spots in line. It was totally worth it.

And I'm like, oh, that's funny. Somebody else says to me. Then another guy walks up and says the same thing. It worked. They made some money that night. That was pretty cool. The Spark Museum was really packed. It felt like a sardine. Isn't there some cool

old tech in there, though? It's amazing how far it is. I was watching a whole group of people try to figure out how to run that old cash register. register was funny that was hilarious I tried to play Star Trek on the what's that thing called that I tried to play it on? the theremin but I failed miserably

I tried to play TNG on the TOS instrument yeah I thought of a Star Trek tune and TNG came to mind because TNG's awesome but I think the best part was just getting to meet a bunch of these people in person like Blaster and Eric and Fate and Q5 and not Tyler. Yeah, that was a really cool part. And, you know, I mean, Matt, how awesome was our crew?

Oh, it was amazing. Not only did we have all these great guys coming from all over the country and even from other countries, as Alan will attest to, but also our crew is just fantastic. They literally enabled us to make this happen. It was awesome. and make sure it got it done. And Chase tore down his whole studio, his whole production setup, put it all in a bunch of bags, and then drove it up to Bellingham. And then at the end of it all, Sunday night, I go back to his house late after we had a little after party here at the studio. And now he's got to hook all that stuff back up

before he can do shows. So I really appreciate that. I hope he brought up the quality of the stream. I was going to say something, if you didn't, that Chase deserves a shout-out. Yeah, he does. I think he really made this possible. Yeah, and his Wirecast mastery is serious coming through. Yeah, he's got some serious food.

He knows what he's doing with that thing. Yep, yep. And he had, you know, like all the lower thirds we use in the live stream, like he just kind of made up on the fly as he grabbed assets. Like he pulled the last logo from like the subreddit. Like he just went and found it. So I loved lower thirds. I thought that was something you threw together, but he did that? No as he grabbed assets. He pulled the last logo from the subreddit. He just went and found it. I loved lower thirds. I thought that was something you threw together, but he did that?

He did it Friday night as we were setting up the booth. I was sitting right next to him when he was doing that. It was just like boom, boom, boom. I could not believe how fast he was getting it done. The funny part is he was actually annoyed by something he did and he fixed it during the live stream. He was like, I don't like this.

I'm going to fix it. That's exactly what he did, too. He just – Yeah. Well, it was great for me. It looks familiar. The chat room says, I had no idea Chase was so amazing. Neither did I, but now I do.

I had an idea, but not – he blew me away. It wasn't confirmed. Yeah, exactly. I decided – I was pretty sure I wasn't going to tear down the studio after we just moved in. So I was like, if we didn't do that, I didn't know what we were going to do. Maybe laptops and microphones. It was way beyond what we would have gotten. And next year, now we know.

Like, now we know we're going to go whole hog every year now because that was just great. And if we have a crew like that again, assuming to enable us to be able to do it, we'll do it. So make your plans, people. Just the parallels. enable us to be able to do it, we'll do it. So make your plans, people. Just the parallels. I mean, it's like having that managed, having Chase master that entire setup so that we could do what we needed

to do was just... Oh my god, it was awesome. Absolutely. Plus, that's where Chase In Your Face was born. And boy, he was sure excited about that. What is the website?

Chase In Your Face dot TK. Chase in your face dot TK. Chase in your face dot TK. He's like, you guys couldn't even do a dot com? I mean, like, really? He was just like, I mean, if you're going to do that, it's like, there's going to be all these GoDaddy codes. Yeah, there you go. Looking for a good deal, right?

Yeah, and I think, too, I really wish more industry people who run these events would come to this kind of event to see it. Because you could take some of this format and apply it to other types of fest or cons or whatever they are. And I think there would be some winning recipes. You wouldn't have to change the other formats very much. But this is, they call it a low-stress fest. And that's very true. It was very true. It was very low stress i was amazed yeah at how how nonchalant just easy it was just the overall vibe was just calm and one thing that's kind of neat because it's at a it's at a technical college which first of all is a beautiful campus and second of all they

really made that showroom really nice that we had as the main room. But what's neat is to run the network. It's like some of the networking students' final test, or not final, but one of their big tests for the whole class is they run that wireless network. They make sure that LAN stays up, and they are responsible for all of it, and they're really helpful.

We were able to get a line punched through the firewall, we were outside the firewall we got our own static ip address from their provider and had a direct connection out to scale engine so we were you know our stream was very steady there was one time when uh when albert decided to post a video and he killed our stream he didn't probably should out it was totally fine no hard feelings it just happens uh and so it was really great because they worked with us and you know we got there and we had a we had a ethernet LAN they specifically punched it down and they wireless wasn't perfect we had issues and we also had ways to solve that but it for what you get at a conference with I think now the number is actually up to like 1600 I think it's even higher than what we said in the show uh to have 1600 people who all of them

probably have a cell phone that has wi-fi most of them have a tablet or a laptop that has Wi-Fi. I had two devices on me. I had my laptop and my cell phone that were taking up Wi-Fi. So when you figure 1,600 people, many of which have two devices on the Wi-Fi network, it gets pretty nuts, and they still managed it. And I'm just thinking, as somebody who worked in education for a little while, or somebody who was a student at one point, it would be so cool to have a last lesson like that. So that's just kind of at the end of the day one of the neat little side things about Bellingham and having the Linux Fest at the Bellingham Technical College. So there you go. They've done pretty well for themselves.

Yeah, I was really impressed with that because I compare it to other conferences I've been to. And I've been to conferences with way less people, way less devices, and the wireless was crap. And you paid $500 or $600 to get into it. You know what I mean? It's like, wow. So you compare it to other events, and it's like, this is really impressive.

And next year, I don't know how we're going to pull it off, because I loved having the live stream, so we'll always have that. I want to do that every year, but I also want to try to get to some of the sessions. Yes, yes. Just attend some of those. I think we'll do shifts or stuff like that. But as it starts approaching, I'd love to, maybe the community can work together

and we can find ways to get folks out so they can experience it because it's a really good time. But Matt, with that, I think we'll come to the end of this week's Linux Unplugged. Now on Sunday on the Linux Action Show, we're going to do a gaming episode because, honestly, it's just Matt and I have an itch that we need to scratch, and we still have these loaner laptops, so we

figured, why not have some fun from System76 and run them through their paces? So, tune in on Sunday for that. We'll be live at Sunday at 10 a.m. Pacific for Linux Action Show over at jblive.tv. And don't forget, we want your feedback. Go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com, click that contact link, and then choose Linux Unplugged from the drop-down.

You can catch us on Tuesdays at 2 p.m. Pacific over at jblive.tv or go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that converted in your local time zone. All right, Matt, I'll see you on Sunday, okay? See you then. All right, everyone, thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. See you next Tuesday.