LINUX Unplugged - Episode 40: Developers Get Qt | LUP 40

Episode Date: May 14, 2014

We chat with two of the LXQt developers, and find out what’s behind this major undertaking. Then we discuss our favorite packages for a Linux home server, and the brand new Ubuntu Orange cluster box.Plus your feedback, our follow up, and much more!

This is Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that just hit its distinguished 40s. My name is Chris. My name is Matt. Hey there, Matt. 40 weeks, buddy, right in a row, too. Man. I mean, it's no Coder Radio 100 or TechSnap 160, whatever. But I'm a little proud of it, you know, because this is just a little idea we have.

We're like, hey, we got too much show every week. Let's do another show. Right. Here we are 40 weeks later. I think it's turned out pretty good. Not to pat ourselves on our own back or anything like that. No. But it's going to be a fun show today, too. We're introducing

a new segment in this week's show. I'll tell you about that in just a second. Of course, we've got our feedback like we always do. And two developers from the LXQT project have joined us to discuss our first look that we had over the weekend at LXQT. Just hit their first major beta. So we're going to chat with them in a

little bit. Then we'll get to that new segment. So that new segment I mentioned, we're going to chat with them in a little bit. Then we'll get to that new segment. So that new segment I mentioned, we're going to call it the Mumble Roundtable. And right now, I've submitted a link to our chat room, and they are voting on what should be the roundtable's topic. I've proposed two topics. I don't pick the topic. The livestream picks the topic.

And right now, the two topics we have proposed to them is the orange box that canonical announced today it is an ubuntu cluster in a box it's a pretty cool concept and it's like made up of like 10 nucks in a box 10 intel nucks in a box and it's a pretty neat deal and then also the second topic that is being voted on so there's two choices choice number two antivirus pioneer alan solomon thinks that antivirus is dead, and he says he switched to Linux instead. So whichever one is the winning topic towards the end of the show will be our open roundtable discussion that we'll get to. So I'm looking forward to that to kind of give our virtual

lug a chance to stretch out a little bit and pontificate on a good topic. But, Matt. Yes. Before we get to that, we should probably start with the feedback because there was something that, man. Oh, boy. Jupiter Broadcasting was off the air basically yesterday for Chrome users. Yeah, what was up with that? Case of the Mondays. So Mark writes in and he says, hey, I'm getting a malware warning.

I'm running Ubuntu 14.04 with XFCE and Chromium. I like that he's giving us the XFCE, like, just so you know. I'm getting a malware error in Chromium, but I'm running on it. Okay. I tried to download the HD video version of Last 3.11, and I got a malware warning from Chromium. Probably a bug, but I thought I should let you know about it. Love the show. Now, we got a lot of emails like this, but Mark had a good, concise email.

And Mark also was kind enough to include a screenshot. So if you didn't get to enjoy this air that was happening to us yesterday, there it is. It says, the website ahead contains malware. And Chromium has blocked access. Now, if you read carefully, it actually says Chromium has blocked access to www.podtrack.com. No, it actually wasn't a problem with the Jupyter Broadcasting website. It was a problem with the download stat tracking service we use. PodTrack's kind of like the gold standard in legitimate podcast statistic download counts. As good of a service there is, it's pretty much PodTrack. Now, the problem was their whole domain got blacklisted by the Google anti-malware whatever it is.

And so every podcaster that uses PodTrack had their downloads unavailable to Chromium users and then Chrome users and then eventually Firefox and eventually Safari and other browsers later in the day all got their downloads blocked. I mean, this is not only taking out Jupyter Broadcasting, but it took out Twit, it took out NPR, The Nerdist, the Discovery Networks, all of those guys that use PodTrack were nailed by this. Now, our awesome web developer, Aaron, was able to, about midway in the day, I said, all right, I call Uncle, Aaron, can you please go in there and just pull all the PodTrack links from our site? Because this also affected the HTML5 video player. So even just trying to stream video from our website, the only thing that worked was the live stream.

And Lynn this morning, earlier this morning, PodTrack sends an email. He says, hi, Chris. Dear Chris, yesterday we discovered an issue with the PodTrack domain that impacts some non-iTunes podcast users. Yeah, like everyone using Chrome. It's like, come on, really? Yeah. You know, for those idiots that don't use iTunes, the Chrome browser blocked PodTrack.com domain

reported as malware, followed later by Firefox and Safari as they used the same malware list as Google. At the same time, Chrome's diagnostic page said there's no reports of malware for this domain in the last 90 days. And for more than eight years, we have not seen a browser return the domain as malware.

They scanned the servers ourselves, and we didn't find any malware. We requested a review from Google, and sometime between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. Eastern today, so that's this morning, Chrome and other browsers corrected their listing of podtrack.com domain, and the services are working in all browsers again. So we, you know, essentially just didn't have,

so for the first half of the day, we didn't have downloads. For the second half of the day and into today, we didn't have any tracking. So not a great day for us, and not a great day for podcast listeners either. And in a way too, doesn't it show you how dangerous it can be to consolidate power like that on the web? Because even though that anti-malware tool does a lot of good and it saves a lot of Windows users butts, it also can go very badly. And in this case, it essentially took an entire industry,

the Google malware system took an entire industry off the air. Now, did PodTrack have a legitimate malware? They claim not, but maybe they did. I mean, they do use IIS after all, so it seems entirely conceivable they did have something. But the end result for me was like, oh, well, sorry. You know, all of our listeners and downloaders are getting this big old scary error that makes it look like the Jupyter Broadcasting website has malware on it. So it's not a good experience all around. And I hope that Google – this isn't the first time we've seen something like this happen.

I think this is maybe the largest scale outage that the Google anti-malware service has caused. And it's not a great experience. So I apologize to you guys out there who are trying to download the Linux Action Show or the Faux Show on Monday or Coda Radio and got that error. Monday's a big day for us, so I know it affected a lot of folks out there. I apologize about that.

But it should all be resolved now. And, you know, the RSS feeds, for the most part, weren't impacted as far as I know. So if you ever want to just bypass it, just subscribe in your favorite RSS client. Maybe it's GPotter or Miro or whatever it is, and that might have solved the problem. All right, Matt, next email comes in from Gargan, I think, Jarjan? Gargan, okay. Well, I apologize. I'm not getting that one right.

He has a little follow-up on our fragmentation time bomb discussion. He says he feels that fragmentation isn't really an issue. Consider Qt and GTK. So what? You have them both on Windows and even OS X. Does using Qt on iOS fragment iOS? Not one bit. It's still iOS, a well-defined target for developers with a semi-stable API.

Look at the toolkits that Windows has. Microsoft Foundation Classes. The Windows Template Library. Smart Win++. The that Windows has. Microsoft Foundation classes, the Windows Template Library, Smart Win++, the Object Windows Library, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, Qt, GTK+, Swing, and WX Widgets, all on Windows. The problem is a fragmented

core. Examples would be the multitude of Glypsy, Unstable Kernel Driver API, Systemd, Sysv, Upstart, Glyb, Mesa, Mesa, Cairo, Gstreamer, Pulse Audio, and versions that compromise the bedrock of the OS. So I was arguing yesterday that, yeah, the core is stable. He's saying, no, it's not.

It doesn't matter what's happening up in user land. Let them use whatever toolkits they want. What really matters is we have stable ABIs and APIs to target. And that's something we've heard from driver developers for years too. Do you think, Matt, maybe I was a little off the mark? Maybe I was misrepresenting how fragmented the Linux core is? I don't think so. I mean, I definitely see what they're saying. And I definitely agree with it to an extent. But I also think that because we're so freewheeling that we don't really have a dominant anything in the ecosystem. And I think that's probably kind of where a lot of people find frustration, including yourself.

I think that's kind of the frustration we have. So I half agree with him, but at the same time, I also think that we do need to kind of, in user land, kind of figure out what we're doing, at least with the dominant distributions. And then everybody else can just do whatever they want. That being said, our biggest problem is we have half the camp that adamantly loves the fact that we have no dominant anything, and then we have the other half of the camp that hates it. And as long as we have that,

I don't ever see this getting resolved. I think it's a waste of effort. It's a waste of effort, Matt, until it gets resolved. Yeah. And, you know, it's kind of like evolution in a sense. Like, eventually, dominant strains and implementations stand out, in a way. And

eventually, it's a lot messier. It takes a lot longer. I think it eventually gets worked out, and I think things like SystemD, and I think the kernel API thing is a valid complaint, but I don't think it's as valid as it used to be. So, I think it's over time. It is actually just kind of improving upon itself.

Nico writes in. He says, thanks for the great show. I really like it, but. And there's always a but, Matt. Always the but. I was extremely disappointed with your discussion on Mangea in episode 39. I almost never write any kind of comments to anybody, but this just got me so sad that I just have to write this one. Now, he specifically laid out what he didn't like. I wouldn't went ahead and cut it because these emails that we're getting these days are just

way too long. So I'm editing a little bit. So I just I wanted to kind of just touch on some of his core points. First of all, what I was the most disappointed with was that you guys obviously did no research on the subject yourself. You just let the mumbaroon tell you what they think about Mangia, and maybe it's okay. But by doing so, you sure made it sound a whole lot more difficult and strange than it really is. And I must say, I do not even understand half of what the complaints were. So long story short, do your own research. of it to make it prefer. I mean, the one thing like he took the most issue with was our discussion around packages and and like some of the how some of the weird packages in the repos and stuff like that. And I I just it's RPM based into discussion. I mean, it's he loses right there. I mean, as far as I'm that's not even a debate now.

I mean, that's not to say it's not a nice distribution from other aspects of it, but that's that's through years and years of banging my face into RPM distros. That's that's well researched. Yeah. I mean, into RPM distros. That's well-researched. Yeah, I mean, I do see your point there. I mean, I don't know, Matt. I mean, maybe we should put it on the schedule down the road in a few weeks. Maybe we should throw Magee on our machines and just kind of see what we...

Because I was pretty sure when we took the Arch Challenge, I was going to be like Mr. Nose up in the air like, this is stupid. I know, and I'm speaking exclusively of packaging where with Arch, I had no experience with the packaging. Yeah, that's true. I mean, we do know. Unless they've got fairy magic dust to make RPM suck less, and

maybe they do. I don't know. Well, there is URPMI in there. Yeah, well, you know, so I mean, I think it's worth a try, sure. Yeah, I see what you're saying, though. Like, Arch is a fully different beast, but you've been down the RPM alley before. You know what's at the end of that alley. I mean, I'm not negating that at all. I think they did a lot of things right, but at the end

of the day, for me, it's more than appearance. Packages, packages, packages. I could have the ugliest desktop in the world, but if I got the packages, I need them happy. You know, that's just me. Yeah. You know what? You make a lot of sense. And so let's give it some thought. Maybe you and I can do a little collab after Sunday

Sunday's last and figure out if there's a spot Where we can slip an Imagia review But I kind of see your point too Like at a certain time You've been around the block enough That you kind of learn Sometimes there's just no change in a distro I don't know, we'll see

I don't want to make it so heavy So you and I will talk on Sunday. Maybe we'll decide to schedule it in the last and we'll do it. I have a feeling we're going to do it, but we'll talk about it. All right. Witter writes in. He says, hey there, Chris and Matt. Love the show.

I'm writing in for an idea of how to Linux, for how to Linux. Now, we get a lot of these, but I just thought I'd take this opportunity to kind of update everybody on where we're at with how to Linux. He says, I'm writing in on an idea for the show. My idea is using a DigitalOcean droplet and install a light desktop on it using X2Go and XRDP server on a thin client to connect

to the droplet over the internet. You could have local sound, print and drive forwarding. I realize it's not a simple how-to, but I'd love to see your approach to the task. Cheers. An interesting idea, turning a DigitalOcean droplet into essentially a remote I realize it's not a simple how-to, but I'd love to see your approach to the task. Cheers. Watar. An interesting idea, turning a DigitalOcean droplet into essentially a remote cloud desktop server. So I'm going to give you guys an update on where we're at with how-to Linux.

But first, why don't I give a thanks to our first sponsor, and that is DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is simple cloud hosting. And I got to tell you guys, we got a great brand new promo code for the month of May. Guess what it is? Unplugged May. Unplugged May will get you a $10 credit so you can try out DigitalOcean for two months for free if you get the $5. You don't know what DigitalOcean is? DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server.

Now, you're like, oh, sure. Sure, Chris. Sure. I got a tweet this week. I think our new record is 37 seconds. 37 seconds. Now, most DigitalOcean users can spin up a cloud server in about 55 seconds or so. Not our audience. Our audience is now 37 seconds. But here's the best part. Pricing plans start at only $5 a month for 512 megabytes of RAM, Pricing plan started only $5 a month for 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer for $5. You know exactly how much you're going to pay.

It's a fixed cost. It's not going to scale up for CPU usage. You're not going to get charged one price for 200 gigabytes of transfer and a different price for 900 gigabytes of transfer. You get a terabyte. It's included with that. And DigitalOcean has data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, and Amsterdam. Their interface is simple. Their control panel is super intuitive.

And power users can replicate this control panel on a larger scale with their straightforward API. I have heard so many awesome stories of what our audience is using DigitalOcean for. So go over there, use the promo code for the month of May, UnpluggedMay. One word, UnpluggedMay will get you that $10 credit. You can try out a DigitalOcean Droplet for two months, even if you only use it for two months to just increase your own skill set. Work on something that you've been wanting to do. Scratch that itch.

Try out that thing. They've got a great image backup system. So if you screw something up, just take a snapshot first, revert right back. You get tier one bandwidth. It's all sitting on top of SSD drives with, I got to tell you, some of the best data center locations in the world. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code unpluggedmay to get that $10 credit. Go check them out and see what you can do. A really big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Every month I find something new to do with my droplet and

in this Sunday's last I think we're going to be scratching an itch for you guys or at least we're going to make something itch and you're going to want to scratch it. So keep DigitalOcean in mind when we start talking about some server stuff on Sunday. DigitalOcean.com and use the promo code UnpluggedMay and a really big thank you to those guys. Really and use the promo code UnpluggedMay and a really big thank you to those guys. Really appreciate them sponsoring the Linux

Unplugged show. And there's so many cool things you can do with it. And you know what? It's all built on top of Linux, so that's pretty cool too, right? So now you're supporting a company that also runs on top of Linux using KVM and all kinds of stuff. They really get their users. I think that's the big takeaway. It's just awesome.

Now, we have joining us two developers from the LXQT project. Now, I know them by their mumble names, but maybe we'll get to know their actual names. Starting first is Jay Lanch. Am I saying that right? That's Jerome Leclanche. Jay Leclanche. Jerome, welcome to Linux

Unplugged. And we also have PC Man joining us. And PC Man, what's your first name? PC Man? My name is in Chinese Chinese my name is Hong Ren Yu so so I use this ID for short and you're talking to us from Taiwan right yes I'm from Taiwan and Jerome is in Cambridge I believe so we got a 10 o'clock and a 5 a.m. are here with us. So I really appreciate you guys joining us. We're going to keep it brief since it is so after hours and the connection is a little shaky. But the one thing that really struck me is LXQT, as we looked at it on Sunday on the Linux Action Show, kind of looks like it's almost, for a lot of users, Matt said he might be one of them, ready to use today. How far along do you guys see yourself?

I don't know who's maybe the best person to ask. PC Man, what is your role at the LXQT project? I'm responsible for the file manager and some other parts, yeah. And Jay Lanch, what is your role at the LXQT project? Yeah. And Jay Lanch, what is your role at the LXQT project? I do mostly system administration and UX, but PCMan is underselling himself. He's really the guy who built the original LXD Qt project before we merged with RazorQt.

Well, big respect because I think the work is remarkable already. So, PC Man, I'll start with you then. How far along do you consider it right now? Is this sort of halfway baked? Is this 5% baked? Is it almost done? Where do you see it at right now, in your opinion? It's not completely finished now. We still need some more translations and artwork

and there are some remaining bugs, but actually it's already working and uses daily. How are you guys seeing response from a user base? Are you seeing people circle around and get excited? We've had a really

huge, huge uptake from our recent release. You've got to understand that before it was LXQt, it was RazorQt. And RazorQt already had its own kind of community. LXQt really is the continuation of that. It was just kind of on the back burner for a while. So are you guys, being honest with me, are you on a QT holy war, or is this one of these things that you were looking at it

from a practical standpoint? You said, I like the direction QT is going in. I think we could build a compelling desktop around it. How did, this is a major, going from, you know, a GTK-based desktop, switching over to QT, merging two popular projects. Is there something, is there a larger motivation there, PCMan? Yes.

Actually, we are, one of the reasons is the GTA 3. When we try to port LSD to GTA 3, we encounter many problems, and some APIs

are changed, and some even encounter many problems, and some APIs are changed, and some even with different behavior, and the themes are changed too. So actually, it's not very backward compatible. Right, right. Yeah. So was the sense that it was moving away from being a toolkit for all and maybe a toolkit specific for the GNOME desktop?

And since you weren't necessarily interested in creating the GNOME desktop, you needed to move something that gave you more flexibility and a quote-unquote freedom? Am I grokking? Pretty much correct. This is pretty much what we've seen from a lot of GTK developers who feel that GTK is becoming way too GNOME-centric. This was the experience of the LXDE desktop. But on the Razer side of things, we just like Qt. We've always been Qt developers, and we want to continue being Qt developers.

So it was kind of just two projects with the same goals. Right. And you guys seem to be positioning the desktop in a pretty good spot. There's a lot of people who are seeing these trends that are interested in Qt development. I think that's a big one. I think people that are looking to switch to Linux

that are interested in Qt development, but they that's a big one. I think people that are looking to switch to Linux that are interested in Qt development, but they're also interested in having a more minimal desktop experience. And when you guys decided to go forward with the merger, was it with this sort of 50,000-foot view of, well, this is the way the landscape is going, and so we should make this merger, or was it, this is what I want to do,

and now, just by happenstance, you guys seem to be in this really great position for the desktop. I'll take this one. Basically, when we decided to merge, the LXDEcute project was just getting started, and it was based on a lot of RazerCute parts. was based on a lot of Razor Qt parts. And on the side of Razor Qt, we had a lot of problems developer-wise. We had about four or five active developers, and it kept cycling between people leaving the project and people joining the project.

So we never really had a solid team. So the merger was really from a need of having more activity and was really successful in that sense. So about how many people are working on the LXQT project at this point? I would say about a dozen, but as I said, we've had a lot of uptake recently. but as I said we've had a lot of uptake recently. Any talks of like a commercial sponsor who might provide funding for some full-time development? You guys been approached?

No approach? No? We've not really had... I mean some people contacted us not directly for sponsoring, but we're definitely open to it. And a couple of our community members want to fund the project as well. Great. I mean, the other really great use I could see for LXQt are enterprise desktops where they want a cute environment. And they don't necessarily need GNOME 3 or full KDE. These are just business class machines.

Perhaps a more traditional interface is actually a performance or I guess a productivity improvement. It's a good thing for productivity to be a little more classical. So to me, I could seriously see commercial entities getting interested in wanting to encourage LXQT's development because, like, imagine a CentOS-based distribution around the LXQT desktop. It's like, this is your iron-solid, bulletproof desktop that looks and works a lot like your old XP machine did. But this is, you know, now you guys are a QT development shop. This is a made-up scenario.

But here's your QT development shop. this is a made-up scenario, but here's your QT development shop, here's a great desktop that works for you. So I think it's, and then of course it's for enthusiast users who want to eek the most performance for games and things like that, but still want to feel like they're not totally stuck in the 90s. I think it's a very interesting project, guys. So was there anything

you wanted to mention or touch on from our review that we did on Sunday, or any follow-up before I let you guys go? I wanted to say I touch on from our review that we did on Sunday or any follow up before I let you guys go? I wanted to say I really liked the review. I watched it yesterday. I really liked the review. The

KDE system settings you were talking about system settings. Yeah. Having like three or four different system settings and you actually reviewed the KDE system settings not having three or four different system settings. And you actually reviewed the KDE system settings, not the actual LXQt one. Right, it's hard to tell when you do it on an Ubuntu

installation. Yeah, so at the same time I also felt like LXQt was sort of like, hey, whatever you want to use to configure. I didn't feel like I was being forced to use a specific set of configuration

tools, too. Is that intentional, or is that just where things are at right now? Bishiman? Pardon? What do you mean? Well, for example, it seemed to me like, and I don't know if this was just the PPA archive that I was pulling it from, but

if I wanted to use the KDE settings to configure something, it seemed to work. It seemed to allow it, for what I was pulling it from, but if I wanted to use the KDE settings to configure something, it seemed to work. It seemed to allow it for what I was doing, at least. And I was just curious, I know there's a modular aspect to LXQt. Is that the modular you mean? Is I can use this as my default file manager? I use this as my default configuration program for my whatever? Or will there be a very specific set of LXQT configuration tools that as the desktop matures, those are the ones you use regardless? Okay, it's modular, but it's not that modular as you think because part of this is because the design of Qt. When you run some KDE programs, you will notice that they do not apply the setting from your

Qt config because they have their own module and doing this. KDE guys have their own platform plugin to improve integration with KDE. So their programs sometimes do not load the settings from Qt config. So you will have inconsistent settings among the Qt programs sometimes, and it's hard to solve.

And we suffer from a similar problem because independent Qt programs sometimes load different settings than yours. So we implemented Qt plugin to solve this. So there are still some limitations and some settings only apply to our desktop session. So not all of the tools

can be used outside LSQ, but we will do our best to make it. All right. That makes sense. I understand how that could happen. Yeah, it seems like that. And that's probably something in a few years it'll get worked out just on the QT side. All right, guys.

Well, thank you very much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate it. I know the times are a little crazy where you guys are at. And all over the world, too, at that, especially PC Man. I really appreciate it. And keep up the awesome work on the Pac-Man file manager or the, yeah, right.

Yeah. PC file man. Anyways, that is a great file manager and I'm loving the QT implementation. So great work on that. Uh, Matt, I've got,

uh, I got a little question I want to toss towards the audience is going to help inform this Sunday's Linux action show. In fact, it's, it's, it's a bit of a survey. It's,

uh, yeah, it's something, it's something, um, something I want to, I want to talk about. We've talked before on the Linux Action Show about building the ultimate Linux home server. And in the past, our builds have always been Ubuntu-based, 1204 and 1210, somewhere in there. And so now that we're over at JB1, we've been sort of building out a new server infrastructure.

We've got a FreeNAS NAS here. It's a FreeNAS Mini from iXsystems. Then we have in front of that a Proxmox machine that's running multiple different instances, and I'm going to go into more detail on the big show, of Linux in front of that FreeNAS VM. And we're loading up different services on there. And I kind of want to ask the audience, like, what makes your perfect Linux server? Like, if you're going to load on your house or something like that. So I just put the link to the survey in the chat room if people want to fill that out.

And while they're doing that, while they're answering the questions, it's a pretty quick survey, while they're answering those questions, I want to tell you about our second sponsor this week, and that is Ting. What is Ting? Ting is mobile. It makes sense. It's my mobile service provider and Matt's mobile service provider. And you know what we love about Ting? You only pay for what you use. I know, it sounds insane. It sounds impossible. There's no way you only pay for what you use, but that's what's great about Ting. It's $6 a month for every line you have, and then just any applicable taxes and your usage on top of that. I know. You're like, Chris, that's too good of a deal. And I'd be like, well, listener, how come you don't trust me by this point? But if you don't believe me, maybe you'd believe Kyra. 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 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 mobile. That makes sense. One of the great things about Ting too is the ting dashboard as i've been a customer now for well over a year i really really appreciate this and the other thing that's really great about ting is they're uh they're great at just blogging about what they're working

on what they're thinking about the industry and as a whole and as somebody who follows this stuff i like to be an informed consumer i think this is one of also my favorite features they uh had an interview with one of their sysadmins on their blog about how Ting uses data to make sure that when they make a rate change, everybody is getting a good return on that change. I think it's a really interesting and fascinating way that they do this. So you can watch that over on their blog. They're also helping out with budget tips. You know, this is something they think about a lot. And so they've got a new guy in who's doing blogs on finance tips and things like that in general. And of course, it includes saving money

on your Ting account. So go over to linux.ting.com. That lets them know you heard about it right here on the Linux Unplugged show. Also get you $25 off. So if you want to grab a Ting phone, they'll take $25 off your first phone. If you already have a phone, if you're just going to switch over and you're going to port your phone, you're going to BYOD, they'll take $25 off your first month or they'll give you $25 credit. That paid for more than my first month. And Ting has a whole range of devices. They have the Sanyo 3810 Red starting at $52 and you own this phone outright. And then you're only paying for your usage on top of that. You can get a feature phone, one of the best feature phones out there. These Sanyos are amazing with these really cool front displays where the clock shows through for $52, and it's yours.

You own it. It's not subsidized. There's no contract, and there's no early termination fee. They've got a whole range of really great devices, so go over to linux.ting.com. Also try out that savings calculator. One of the things I realized is for about a year, I was saying, oh, yeah, my cell phone bill was about $125. And Ange is like, actually, you know, your cell phone bill was $140 a month. And when I plugged in my old cell phone bill to the savings calculator, it came out to $2,200 over two years that I'm saving. Well, that's a new computer every two years right there just by switching to Ting. I could buy myself a fully loaded Ultra Pro every two years by switching to Ting.

And that was a massive statement because I realized, you know, I kind of was willing to make some sacrifices. I was willing to kind of get into a bad deal because I was honestly a little distracted by the shiny nature of smartphones and how cool they were. And then I got a couple of years into it. I said, what am I, $140 a month? What am I doing? Like, I didn't even realize that's what I was spending. Like, it didn't really click with me. I didn't realize it was that much money.

And now looking back at it, what was I wasting my money on? I didn't get my value out of that. Linux.ting.com, go get the value out of your mobile service plan. And a really big thank you to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. And by the way, no hold customer service. How awesome is that? You don't have to, if you call in between 8 a.m. or 8 p.m. Eastern time, you don't have to hold. And you know what? I really appreciate that. I really do. All right, Matt, I want to talk about the perfect home server. So here's what I've asked the audience, and hopefully they're filling these out right now. So you're building a brand new Linux home server. You here's what I've asked the audience, and hopefully they're filling these out right now. So you're building a brand new Linux home server.

You're using everything you've learned or heard about over the recent years. You're starting from scratch. What would you start with? So, oh, well, goodbye, Matt. What would you start with is what I asked the audience. And so I put out the call. They're doing the survey right now.

Hello, are you back? I am back. I have no idea what happened. I think, I don't know. Maybe the g right now. Hello. Are you back? I am back. I have no idea what happened. I think, I don't know. Maybe the gremlins infected Skype. I don't know what happened. Yeah. Gotta love Skype.

I've asked the audience to go out and fill out that survey right now. This will help inform the Linux Action Show on Sunday. I'll incorporate some of their feedback. See what we get. I'm kind of curious what people, also I left a spot in there to just kind of describe your dream setup and all those kinds of things. So go out there, fill out that form. It's the perfect home

server. And I'd be really curious to see what you guys would do and see if it lines up with... Oh, we're already getting some results in right now. And by the way, you can see the results. I said in the forum to allow people to see the results. So Open Media Vault looks like I'm getting an Open Media Vault. Sab NZB, Plex, Subsonic.

Oh, yeah, Subsonic's a good one. I should have put that in the checkbox. BitTorrent Sync, File and Network Services, Couch Potato. So we're getting a lot. And also I asked folks if they would just avoid building a LAN server and maybe just do like a VPS, like a DigitalOcean Droplet. But we'll see. We'll see where folks go on this.

I'm kind of curious because what we've got set up here now at JB1 is a Proxmox rig sitting on an i7 box with some internal storage and then some NFS storage. And it's pretty neat because we set up an Arch server. Yes, an Arch server. I'm going to talk about more of that on Sunday while we're doing that. we set up an Arch server. Yes, an Arch server. I'm going to talk about more of that on Sunday while we're doing that. We set up an Arch server, and then we, you know, to save ourselves time down the road, made a template of it, and now we can just deploy these Arch boxes. And so I've got one Arch machine that's limited to two cores, and that way, like, if it's doing things like BitTorrent Sync or SabNZB

Usenet downloads, it can't go too crazy. And then we've got an encoder box on there that's for Rekai to bang on for doing like a show encodings. And I just like, I said, just have at it, do whatever you want. You get eight cores. You can use up as much when Rikai wants to take over the rig. Like he just logs into this one virtual machine that I set up for him and he gets full control of all of the resources. And it's this cool way. So to, to kind of provision stuff from one machine that, you know, isn't necessarily busy all the time. So why not? And it's this cool way to kind of provision stuff from one machine that, you know, isn't necessarily busy all the time. So why not? And what's really kind of, I did some testing on the machine with only two cores assigned to it and limited memory. We did an encode of

this week's Fosho, and we were getting about 22 frames per second. When we switched to the encoding machine, and with the eight cores available and more RAM, it went up to 122 frames. We gained 100 frames per second improvement on the encoding speed. So now we got an Archbox. We're doing, and this isn't even like optimized FFmpeg scripts yet. This is just the basic boxes. But now we're going to start doing multi-machine encoding using this Proxmox VM. And I thought, no way are you going to encode inside a VM. That's crazy. You can't do that. Can't be done.

Can't be done. But it's actually working okay. It could be a little faster, but beggars can't be choosers, Matt. You only get so many. All right. Well, I've got a new segment I want to introduce here in just a second. But before we do that, I want to just mention we've just got a few days left on the Coder Radio 100 hoodie and T-shirt. Teespring.com slash CR100. We've sold 154. There is six days, four hours, 14 minutes,

and 23 seconds remaining until this shirt is no longer available. The hoodie, if you're in a cold area, might be the way to go. It is hot. It is over 80 degrees at JB1 right now, 80 degrees Fahrenheit. And so I'm looking at these red and orange Coda Radio hoodies. Ange tells me the one that's selling the best is this kind of dark gray is doing really well. So go to teespring.com slash CR100, grab the limited Coda Radio 100 shirt, only available for a few more days just to celebrate Coda Radio and hitting 100 episodes in a row, too. Maybe one day we'll have a Linux Unplugged t-shirt up there, Matt. Nice. I'd love that.

I can only dream. So go get it while you can at teespring.com slash CR100. No, we're not making a bunch of money. This isn't a fundraiser shirt. We just did a limit of 100, and we just wanted something for the fans to be able to grab it. And I wanted some new shirts because it's getting hot out there. So this isn't like any big money raiser, but it's still a fun way to kind of celebrate.

You know what I mean? All right, Matt. Well, it's time for us to own up. We've got to look at the results. Hazel Bishop's new longer-lasting lipstick, the only lipstick I've found that stays on beautifully all around the clock. Now, that wasn't what I was talking about at all. I don't know where that came from.

You know, I have been considering changing my lipstick. All around the clock, Matt. All around the clock. No, actually, what it's really time for is our all-hands-on-board roundtable. We asked the live stream before we started, which topic would you like our roundtable to discuss? The antivirus pioneer, Alan Solomon, who thinks antivirus is dead, and now he switched to Linux? Or the orange box, a $12,000 Ubuntu cluster. Now, Matt, what can you say about our audience when I do a poll? What usually ends up happening, Matt? What do you usually get when we ask our audience, what do you guys think about something? I'm going to probably roll with the hardware. I could be wrong. Yeah,

I think we should, because this is a 50-50 split right here. Yeah. We got it. Our first one falls on its face. And I said we would go with whichever one polled ahead. 220 votes. You know what? I'm going to put that in the chat room. I'm going to put it to a vote right now. We can have one person tip the scale. If you go to right now, live stream, go to strawpoll.me slash 1687395. Go over there and tip it one way, and then that will be our topic. They're both really interesting. However, I personally think the Ubuntu one is slightly more interesting. But that's just me.

All right, here we go. The poll has been tipped to the Ubuntu Orange Box, 113 votes out of 223 votes. Ubuntu Orange Box got 51% of the votes and the Antivirus guy got 49% of the votes. Alright, Mumble Room, so

why don't we let Popey go first. Popey, can you tell us what the Orange Box is and why it looks so damn cool? So it's a box that was designed by Canonical and built by a company called Tranquil PC in the UK. It's got a bunch of Intel NUCs inside, which are i5 computers that are passively cooled. which are i5 computers that are passively cooled. It's got a gigabyte switch, and the idea is that you could use it as basically a cloud in a box.

You could carry it around. It goes in a flight case, and you could cart it to a location and build a cloud locally, a private cloud. No NSA snooping for you. And, yeah, you're off and running with one box one bright orange box so it has what like 10 NUCs stuffed inside this orange box and then it has a gigabit switch integrated in this box and a USB hub right yeah it's it's impressive actually we saw it in the office a couple of months ago well I saw it in the office, and a bunch of us were kind of peering in because they had the lid off. And it was quite impressively built.

The guys at Tranquil PC have done a really nice job building this thing. And I know that at the time when they built it, I think it was a one-off. Well, more than one-off because I saw two of them in the office. Well, so here's the specs. Okay, so it's 10 Intel NUCs, specifically the Ivy Bridge D53427RKE model, rolls off the tongue, with an i5-3427U

CPU. It's got an HD 4000 graphics, 16 gigs of RAM in each NUC, a 20 gigabyte SSD, Intel Gigabit NUC, and then they've got a D-Link gigabit switch in there with VLAN setup. All 10 nodes are internally connected toLink gigabit switch in there with VLAN set up. All 10 nodes are internally connected to that gigabit switch in aggregate. This microcluster effectively fields 40 cores, 160 gigabytes of RAM, 1.2 gigabytes of solid-state storage,

and is connected over internal gigabit network. A single fan quietly cools the power supply while all other nodes are passively cooled by aluminum heat sinks spanning the side of the chassis. And then the first node, which is called Node 0 in the box, also has an Intel Centrino Advanced N6235 Wi-Fi adapter, a 2-terabyte spinning hard drive, USB and HDMI ports are wired and accessible from the rear of the box, and access to the USB and HDMI of Nodes 1 through 9 are accessible under the unit. It also has 6 gigabit LAN ports all connected to that internal switch that the NUCs are all connected to,

which is hooked up right there at the rear of the panel. Doesn't that just sound amazing? Yeah, it really... Sounds like a lot of fun. I've had some fun with the NUC recently, and I can tell you it's a serious machine. Yeah, so 10 of them must be 10 times the amount of fun, surely. Alright, so roundtable, mumble room, anybody

in here, what do you guys think? Could you see a use for an orange box like this? Could it be like, think about this, maybe like a portable data center? I think this is pretty exciting. Anybody think this is bogus? Anybody not excited by this? Actually, I can think of several applications for something like this.

For instance, you know, for doctor's office record keeping off-site, you know, that kind of thing. It definitely hasn't used. And I could see, like, too, like, you could do everything working together in, like, one big cluster, or you could have one machine's the web server, one machine's the database server, one machine's the file server, right? You could... One's the Quazzle server. One's the Quazzle server, exactly.

I think this is a pretty compelling idea and I think it's interesting to kind of demonstrate maybe in a way how you could have extremely high-powered servers in a very small little container like this. You think about it, like the price isn't that crazy. So it starts at, what, 7,500 euros, and then depending on how you configure it,

the price is going to go up in there. But, I mean, you can get a Mac Pro for that price, right? And this is 10 machines in one box. Yeah, Mark Shaddleworth unveiled it at the OpenStack conference in his keynote today. Right. And yeah, it's certainly had a lot of attention as a result. Yeah. So there is an OpenStack thing going on right now.

So I guess this was sort of the big, this was the big show for Canonical, wasn't it? One of them. Yeah. Oh, is there something else going on there? Yeah. One of them, yeah. Oh, is there something else going on there? Yeah, so Mark has a lot of times he does a big tech demo or announces some new product, and I think he gave two things away. One was the orange box, and another was the fact that there's the most powerful machine on the planet,

the most powerful computer on the planet in China happens to run Ubuntu on OpenStack, which is quite cool, really. That is quite cool, although I think we covered that in a Linux action show, so Mark should watch last. That's all I'm saying. All right, hold on. I think I have the keynote that you linked us earlier. Let's see if it'll play. I don't know if I have the audio from it or not because I had to hook this machine up during the show.

from it or not because I had to hook this machine up during the show. But it was pretty funny because Mark was on stage revealing this orange box and he had it under like a big curtain, like a big sheet. So there's this big black sheet on stage with Mark Shuttleworth and he's walking around it. He's not really drawing a lot of attention to it. And then at one point when he introduces the orange box, when he starts talking about it, he pulls off the sheet and then it's like huzzah

here it is it was it was a pretty good moment he loves the big reveal we'll have the keynote linked in the show notes and popey was nice enough to give us right to the time index so you can watch that a big reveal since i didn't have it set up for the show today i apologize uh yeah but i think that's i think it's a pretty neat thing i mean the antivirus thing is a cool story too but that's like i felt like the antivirus thing is we already kind of knew that that guy was just saying stuff we already knew look at that master hdmi that's so cool here's a million dollar question though can it play minecraft i think it could i think it could although it is man think how many minecraft servers you could have inside that one box the problem is that the problem is that hd 4000 might

be your limiting factor i I don't know. Well, as a server. You could have a cluster of Minecraft servers in that box. I'm thinking this is our new encoding rig, right? There you go. That's not where I was thinking. Yeah, we do a little GNU parallel scripting and go in there and get FFmpeg running across all 10 NUCs,

and then it spits out a file in two seconds. Oh, man, I totally want one of those yeah yeah and i also i find it compelling that it's just that single fan in the back too so they have so they've obviously like taken every nook like they're not even getting nooks in the cases they're like motherboard nooks mounted inside they're all out of the boxes and they're all mounted on the side. So there's a picture on the Tranquil PC site of it upside down with the bottom off. So you can see inside. And all the NUCs are mounted along. There's five on each side, I think. And they're mounted so that the heat is dissipated through the outside of the case.

I was trying to find that on their website, but I don't see it. I saw that on one of the Ubuntu announcement pages, but I don't see it yet because I saw that on one of the Ubuntu announcement pages but I don't see it on the Tranquil PC site. So when you saw this, does it look like they're actually buying full straight up NUCs from Intel and then pulling them out of the boxes or does Intel sell them to OEMs just as the

boards? Did you get a sense? I don't know. I mean, Tranquil PC built them so we contracted them to build them and they deal with all that kind of stuff. I don't know whether they have, Tranquil PC built them. Right. We contracted them to build them, and they deal with all that kind of stuff. I don't know whether they have someone sat there with a screwdriver taking them out of the cases or whether they have a deal with Intel. I really don't. I like the idea, though. I do like the idea that just a whole bunch of guys are at Canonical, and they get a big shipment of these things, and they sit there and just take them out of the box, and they hook them up to this thing.

I think that's kind of funny. There's a whole pile of empty Nook boxes you can chuck on eBay if you wanted to. Well, I'm actually, you know, I'm doing the – I'm showing this picture, this image from a Nook right now. And it's – you know what? Like Rikai, our production pipeline guy, calls it the glue for the studio. It's like when you need to hook two things up, you need a box in one place, you just stick a nook there, and it's the perfect glue because it's small, it's tiny, in terms of the space it takes up on the table is actually beneficial,

but also the amount of power it draws and the sound it makes is all very minimal. HDMI out is very nice. So they've been really good rigs. And I love the idea, too, of kind of not just having multiple cores but having multiple machines and then having the ability to either have them all work together

or independently. I think it's kind of a neat deal. Now I know what I want. Now I want one, Matt. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Now you see System76 should get on there and give us a review unit. That'd be great. You know what? Tranquil PC76 should get on there and give us a review unit.

That'd be great. You know what? Tranquil PC, if you guys want to send us a review unit. I'm just saying Linux action. You okay with that? Yeah, we could take a look at that. That'd be fine. Sure.

I wouldn't mind. All right. Well, before we go, before we wrap up today's show, I'd like to make a special request that you guys get out there. Oh, go ahead, Crash, if you had something you wanted to add. I just saw that you flagged me. Go ahead, Crash, if you had something you wanted to add. I just saw that you flagged me. I looked up the CPU that they have in those NUCs on the Intel Arc site.

Yeah, are you about to? I noticed that they're actually one of the fully enabled Intel CPUs. They've got all the virtual machine stuff and all the directed IO and all that sort of thing as well. You think about for an office, like a small office that needs to run a bunch of machines, you could stick one of those in there. They're not going to be ultra-fast VMs, but you could run 20 virtual machines on it. Right. You specifically saw it has VTXD support? Yeah, it's got everything. I'm just going to look on the site now.

So the VTXD support's nice because then that means you can give direct access to hardware to the virtual machine, which is really nice for, like, storage and stuff. So that's really cool. All right, there you go. We'll have links to all that stuff as well as the specs listed out. And if you're curious about that antivirus guy who switched to Linux, we also have that linked in the show notes. And I do want to ask you if you do me a solid, help us make this Sunday's Linux action show even better. If you go

over to the show notes, I have a link to the perfect home server form you can fill out at home and let us know what you would and add your own descriptions and things like that and submit that and I'll be going over that. We're going to do on Sunday. Now, I am having some FreeNAS problems right now. In fact, if anybody is familiar with how to, on a FreeNAS box, just do a one-to-one swap out of a failed hard drive. I had my last non-Western Digital Red drive in my FreeNAS rig died yesterday or the day before. I got the overnight drive replacement. I put the drive in, and FreeNAS does not have any interface for just doing a swap of a drive.

It still thinks the drive that died is still attached to the pool, and so the pool's still all screwed up, and the machine's locking up. It's a FreeNAS catastrophe! So if anybody out there has any ideas or tips, I'd appreciate that. Or if there's anything else you want to comment or give us a topic to chew on, go over to jupyterbroadcasting.com and click that contact link, and then choose Linux Unplugged from the drop-down and send in your feedback to us. We'd love to start out the show with a little bit of that.

You can also go over to our subreddit, linuxactionshow.reddit.com. And don't forget, you can also join us live over at jblive.tv. We do this show Tuesdays at 2 p.m. Pacific. You can get that converted to your local time zone, going over to JupiterBroadcasting.com slash calendar. All right, Matt. So here's what you've got to get thinking about, all right? Get thinking about what it would take to have Matt Hartley's perfect home server. Like, is it Plex on there?

Yeah, I'm going to have to think about that. I have a couple ideas. Yeah, so we'll talk about that on Sunday. We'll get the audience's ideas. And on top of that, you'll see what we've come up with here at JB1 for the new setup. We've got some pretty cool stuff we're doing, and it's kind of nuts how awesome this technology has gotten. So we'll cover the perfect Arch server on Sunday's show. Our ideas plus the community's ideas.

So go over to the show notes for Linux Unplugged 40. Find that Google Doc form and fill it out for us if you would. Alright everyone, well thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged if we don't see you on Sunday for the big show, we'll see you right back here next Tuesday. Bye everybody! Thank you.