LINUX Unplugged - Episode 46: SouthEast LinuxFest Unplugged | LUP 46

Episode Date: June 25, 2014

We’ve got another round of great exclusive interviews from the floor of SouthEast LinuxFest 2014. Find out why Slackware is still going strong, the BSD kindness brigade & more!

This is Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's reporting in from Charlotte, North Carolina. My name is Chris. Hello, Matt. Hello, Matt. Hello, Matt. Hello. Hello. Hi there. So we got a big show today because we got more stuff

from Southeast Linux Fest 2014. Matt's joining us on Mumble this week. We're going mumble mumble for all of the audio, which we'll see how that works. It's an experience. So far, it's been a little troublesome, but I think we worked out the kinks enough to do a show.

We also have Q5Sist. He's joined us today. He was down at Southeast Linux Fest. Noah couldn't make it because I guess he's going to Australia. I guess. I don't know. That guy's crazy. And he just sent me an awesome little goodie bag of stuff. He's got these

BlackBerry chargers he loves so he sent me a couple of those and like a microphone and then the coolest thing ever it lets you run hdmi over ethernet so we could have like machines up in the editing office that we could run down to the studio over our ethernet and capture their full screens 1080p capture over the network it's kind of cool that's awesome no it's so cool So we just sent all that kind of stuff in and got a bunch of great interviews we'll be playing today. But I thought, Matt, we would start with a little bit of follow-up and feedback. Mr. Rottencorps, are you in here today? Paging Mr. Rottencorps. Did you have anything to mention about the XBMC app art that you've been working on?

Paging Mr. Corpse. Yeah, sure. Is my audio on? It's all right. It's enough to tell us about the XBMC app. Yeah. Yeah, me and Rob Lowe are working on an update to the XBMC app. There's been a lot of improvements to the artwork and language,

so there should be a new update to it in about a day or two. Very cool, very cool. So it's a better time than ever to have the Jupyter Broadcasting XBMC app. And I saw that you guys were working on that last night, and that's really cool. So I wanted to give a mention for that. So let's jump into our feedback. Corky98 submitted an article to the Linux Action Show subreddit. Kind of following up on our conversation regarding Mantle on the Linux Action Show this Sunday, he says,

Hello, Chris. On this week's Linux Action Show, you showed a clip of an AMD representative announcing the possibility of Mantle support for Linux in the future. While this is all very good, Mantle is another proprietary solution to the problem of graphic APIs and is bound to eventually fail. I respect that the first few years Mantle will probably outperform OpenGL and maybe even DirectX, but proprietary solutions will always run out of steam due to the amount of effort needed to maintain them. Money runs proprietary solutions, and AMD will not assign a large budget year after year to maintain the code. I did my research, and before I was old enough to remember OpenGL and DirectX, saw eye to eye, here's John Carmack complaining about DirectX and a 2002 article summing up DirectX.

In early 2000s, DirectX was considered shambles, and OpenGL was clearly an outperformer by then, by far. Then Microsoft stepped up their game and caught up. DirectX is still ahead because of that boost in support in the early 2000s. So what does this mean? It means that maybe Matt's assumption that OpenGL couldn't be fixed could be considered incorrect. OpenGL is heavily restructured because the industry support for multiple versions of OpenGL and the newest version is not pushed, unlike DirectX. Yes, OpenGL is very differently structured to DirectX, but it doesn't mean it cannot be saved. And

there's also something that doesn't go into it, but there's also an extension system to OpenGL that is also a good thing and a bad thing. But he thinks the important part is that the same AMD representative said that before mantle support, that a high quality OpenGL driver was going to be provided for Linux. This is the news, Corky thinks, not mantle support for Linux. Of course, they're lying, and they'll put a bit more work, release an entirely new version number, and it will still be pretty. But he said also with things like Wayland coming down, this

completely coincides with Wayland becoming usable so if they leave it for a year or two, wait for Wayland to get sort of figured out, wait to see where Valve pushes things and then maybe AMD will come along with either their new OpenGL or Mantle release. That's an interesting idea, Corky.

And Corky wanted to kind of write in essentially and chime in in support for OpenGL because both Matt and I were kind of like, well, OpenGL seems to be fine, but developers seem to have written the book on it and decided they're not happy with it anymore. And I think that was sort of the key piece that Matt and I were talking about. And I think that's still the case. I think part of the problem is that developers have just kind of checked out. I mean, Matt, am I missing anything? Is that kind of?

Well, no, I think that's it. I also think it's important to remember that my point was that the very first thing out of my mouth is I know squat about OpenGL. That was the very first thing out of my mouth. So I can't speculate on something I don't understand. Yeah, totally. Let's get that out of the way. Let's just make that disclaimer. Yeah, let's be clear on this.

But that being said, I do think that at the end of the day, whether it's tinfoil or OpenGL or pies out of the sky, if the developers aren't into it, that's a thing. So we can try and tree hug our way through this like we usually do. Like, smell the coffee. Okay, Matt, so let's take heaven's revenge's take here uh heaven revenge you think it's something to do with the kids i think so because didn't all this graphics api hoopla happen in the late 80s early 90s where there was a whole bunch of different

apis and then they all converged into one well two standards direct x and open gl so they're just going back and making a whole bunch of problems all over again. Oh, I see what you're saying. The new developers didn't learn the lessons of the past generation. Yeah, they don't know what our older elders went through to get us to this point. Yeah, some of those gray hairs were well-earned fighting those battles that they're sort of retredging up. I will see.

I think just to kind of cap off the whole mantle thing is earned fighting those battles that they're sort of retredging up. I will see. I think just to kind of cap off the whole mantle thing is it'll happen if gaming on Linux really becomes enough of a market force that people want to make money on it. And then that's when AMD will pull their head out of their ass. But by then it will be too late to become fully relevant and lock it in. So Sebastian writes in, we got really up in a huff a couple of weeks ago about Alienware switching over to Windows for their quote-unquote Steam machine. Sebastian says, hey guys,

there's a video from E3 with the Alienware console that you talked about. In the video, they talk about being flexible and giving you the opportunity to upgrade to SteamOS or install the beta of SteamOS without voiding your warranty. So I thought this was extremely interesting because this was a huge, like, you know, they're basically torpedoing their future SteamOS efforts. So here is the clip of the Alienware rep.

Now, if someone is interested in SteamOS, if they pick this up now, it's going to come with Windows, and they'll be able to upgrade this later, correct? Absolutely. Alienware rep. It also works with the Logitech GamePad and a few others. So this is SteamOS ready. Exactly. I know a lot of guys out there were a little bit hesitant when they first started hearing about these pre-built SteamOS boxes coming out, or in this case, a Windows OS box, because they're like, oh, why don't I build my own? This has a compelling value due to stuff like form factor and price, which is actually very impressive. There you go. And that was on the Linus Tech Tips YouTube page. It was on the Linus Tech Tips YouTube page, and they talk about the fact that, you know what?

They're going to actually support users that want to install SteamOS. Does this make you feel better, Matt? It makes me feel a little better because I feel like rather than living with their head in their clouds or off their butts, depending on how you want to put it, I feel like they're actually trying to embrace it. But basically placing responsibility onto the end user and not i'm fine with that yeah as long as they're not being debated about it so uh riley you think it's a terrible idea terrible idea yes because you still have to support their software which is windows essentially and you still have to do the license fees for it and you you have to support it after SteamOS does come out. They should have just waited for a stable build on SteamOS, but they didn't. They were just lazy, and I don't know what they did with it.

Yeah. But they should have waited. Yeah, I think that's still it. I think the fact that they had a Windows UI ready to roll right out of the gate shows that they were kind of planning for things not to work out. They weren't fully into it. And I think that's the real nail in the coffin. Alright, Rod and Corpse, if you want to play devil's

advocate, go ahead. I'll let you. Okay, so I was thinking maybe it's helpful in a way. Not necessarily it's negative to the SteamOS, sure, but it could potentially be good because if they're calling the Steam box or Steam

machine and people start seeing that more often than just regular Valve Steam users and they see that the machine is able to be bought as a Steam box and then the next version is Linux they will still see it as a Steam box and maybe have

more likelihood to buy it. Hmm. Alright. Okay. Hmm. All right. Okay. I guess I could see that particularly if the user is just totally unaware, but it seems at least for the first year- I don't believe that.

I'm just thinking it's a possibility. Okay. Okay. I was going to say, because, yeah, it seems like for the first year or two of this console's life, the consumer is going to be pretty aware of what it is because it's going to be the savvier of the groups buying initially i don't think like the most average consumer has any idea that the xbox 360 runs a version of the anti-kernel i think it's totally irrelevant to them they don't need to know it runs windows they don't give a crap that it runs windows and i think steam os machines

would eventually be like that but i think for the first couple years is probably probably people who know what an operating system is probably know what the advantages of windows over Linux are maybe, I think, I don't know. Oh, go ahead, Matt.

Well, I just wanted to drop one thing on here is that at the end of the day, even if you know what the OS is, if they're trying to target gamers, little thing called titles. Yeah, very true. And they're trying to launch with as many

titles as possible now well i think alienware is definitely kind of selling us all down the road and certainly that's true for the day it's a money grab expecting them to be all touchy-feely about it just they're looking at making money they don't care yeah yeah and pobey what's your point of view on this topic i they're a hardware manufacturer. They need to sell hardware. And I think given SteamOS isn't out, I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to make a machine that runs whatever operating system is out at the time. Like right now, I would really love to have a box underneath my TV. I cannot be bothered to build something. I would rather buy off the shelf. And maybe I'm paying a premium for that.

Maybe I'm not getting the same components. But I'm pretty sure there's plenty of people out there who, like me, would buy something, like, over the internet or from a store. And if it happens to have Windows on it, so be it, in the same way that anyone else would buy a laptop that happens to have Windows on it. I'll stick it under my TV. Maybe I'll install Linux on it later when the Windows install becomes

cruft-laden and horrible. And I have to, because that's what Windows installs do. You know, so what do you do? You wipe it and you put Linux on it. And that's what people will do. Maybe so. They'll see it as a performance upgrade, a boost.

Right. And I don't think it's a lazy thing. I think someone suggested that it was lazy of Alienware. I don't think it's lazy lazy thing. I think someone suggested that it was lazy of Alienware. I don't think it's lazy. They need to sell hardware. They've already put the R&D into making this thing, so it makes sense for them to ship the thing

rather than leave it on shelves or mothball the thing. Do you think maybe it underscores the fact that they believe in a home theater PC-type setup for console gaming, and they think that's the real revolution is getting a PC that powerful and that form factor in the living room with a controller capable UI. That's the thing that they believe in,

not necessarily what operating system powers it. Exactly. And the fact that they're willing to support people trying to get SteamOS on it, the beta of SteamOS, all power to them. If anyone else had come out with a piece of hardware and said, look, we're running a proprietary OS, but power to them. If anyone else had come out with a piece of hardware and said,

look, we're running a proprietary OS, but we will actively help you install an alternative OS, surely that should be applauded. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You said commercial software. Yeah, thanks, Richard. He wanted to clear that up. Yeah, right.

All right, well, we're going to get into Southeast Linux Fest. We'll have more links, including some additional info that didn't quite fit in the show notes if you guys want to check that out. Before we go on, I want to thank DigitalOcean, one of the sponsors of the Linux Unplugged podcast. Now, you know about DigitalOcean, right? Because it's kind of like one of the coolest companies to come around in a while. It's simple cloud hosting, and DigitalOcean is dedicated to offering really the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server. And, you know, I mean, sure, you can make a cloud server in under a minute. No bigs, right? Wrong!

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six clips I want to play here on the show, all really good stuff. Our first one is Zach Underwood. Now, I don't know, Mr. Sis, is there anything you want to kind of set us up with before we jump right in, or should we just start? Well, I do want to end up with something, but before we jump in with Zach's video, I do have to say that for those of us that were there at Linux Fest Northwest, we realized and we remember that the wireless network situation was kind of bad. Yeah. The wireless network itself was phenomenal.

Oh, snap. Absolutely fantastic connection. The way they had it set up, the way they did everything was the way it should have been done. This guy, Zach, he knows what he is doing. Now, how many people in attendance do you know? Do you have a rough number? Like, versus Northwest? Versus Southeast?

I don't have an exact number. Was it more or less people? Because I might explain the Wi-Fi. It was a little bit less. But just the way that the conference was set up, I would say about the same, you know, in the area at the same time. Yeah.

You know, Linux OS Northwest had a higher volume, but I would say with Southeast, I think more people stayed around for the whole day. Interesting. Interesting. So, hey, that's always a big plus when the wireless works. All right. Well, we'll kick it off with Zach's interview, and then you can chime in with anything you want to add, and we'll run through some of these. So we'll send it over to Zach Underwood.

Good afternoon. We are still at Southeast Linux Fest, going around table to table, meeting a bunch of exciting people. Zach here from Global Vision drove two hours to not only be at Southeast Linux Fest, but he is giving me internet tokens. Isn't that right, Zach?

Yes, I am. So this is possibly your presentation, which is coming up in an hour or so, is going to be the presentation I am looking forward to the most out of any of them here at Self. And it's primarily because I have a particular problem that we were kind of discussing off camera that I've been trying to find a solution. And your expertise in this area is going to be, at least I hope, is going to be instrumental in fixing this problem.

So if you could tell me a little bit about what exactly your presentation and specifically your company does and what it is, the service that you provided here at Self. First off, I'll start off with the company. My company is Global Vision. We're a wireless ISP, so we provide wireless Internet to clients that typically maybe have only DSL, and they want something better than the 1.5-meg DSL.

So we set up a tower with access points, and then we point client radios on the client's house to the tower to show them internet. So what we're doing, my presentation here itself is basically how to optimize indoor wireless, particularly in a multi-access point environment. So you would have in a hotel or a conference room, a lot of the stuff I'm going to be talking about is not really applicable to a single radio.

Those are pretty easy. That's pretty simple. And so I'm going to be talking about optimizing it as for performance, for speed, the difference between 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz radios, and basically just how to make Wi-Fi not suck. So give me an idea for somebody who is maybe looking at setting up a very simplistic wireless network. Maybe they want something just a little bit better than the integrated radio that's in their router. What do you recommend for just a single autonomous access point? I'm very bullish on a vendor called Ubiquity.

They are very price conscious. They make a wireless access point called the UAP. It retails for about $69. They are very price conscious. They make a wireless access point called the UAP. It retails for about $69, and it competes with Cisco access points that go for $600 or $700. So there is a little bit of a learning curve with these systems. First off, none of the Ubiquiti radios you can actually log into and see a web interface. You have to use a separate management software, which they give away for free. They don't charge a license. Thank you, Cisco. So the UAP is a great choice for an AP, and we actually deploy them quite often to our clients. So, and we have set up a number of the

Unify access points. How does that, how do those work with Linux? They actually work really well. They actually run Linux, and you can SSH into the radios. They're running BusyBox, which is a very stripped down embedded version of Linux. How about for the management service? If I wanted to stay away strictly from a Mac or Windows environment, can I do that? Yes. They actually prefer to run the management server on a Linux platform. In this case, Debian and Ubuntu. It is a Java-based app that uses MongoDB for the back end. Outstanding. And if people wanted to find more about Global Vision and the concepts that you're talking about, where can we direct them to? Globalvision.net,

and anyone feel free to email me. I am zunderwood at globalvision.net, and I'll be happy to send you a copy of the presentation. Outstanding. Thank you so much, Zach, for taking some time to talk with us. All right. Thank you. Wait a minute, Wimpy. You're connected to us right now by shortwave radio? That's some kind of special. Yeah, we can hear you. So where do you live that you have to connect by shortwave radio? Well, as I learned today, about 15 miles from Popey, but apparently in the back of Beyond. So in the farming belt of North Hampshire. I love that those APs run Linux. I'm all about that.

Like, oh, yeah, you can just SSH in and run BusyBox, and then you can pretty much do everything you need. And it sounds like those guys really knew their Wi-Fi stuff based on what Q5 was saying. Okay, well, so there's a group called Wicked, and they're working on a two-factor authentication system. And I haven't watched the whole clip yet, but I'm hoping it's essentially an open solution to two-factor authentication. Let's take a listen. Nick from Wicked, and I don't know anything about Wicked right off the bat, but I got to tell you,

from looking around your table and looking at some of the promotional material you have, I have to tell you, I'm intrigued. Can you tell me a little bit about what Wicked is and what it is you guys do? Sure. So we provide a two-factor authentication solution. It is a software-based solution. So the two factors are possession of a private key embedded in a software token and knowledge of a PIN. And we have a server that sits behind your corporate firewall.

It's Linux-based. There's a key pair exchange, basically, between a software token and your server. A PIN is created by the user, and there's a registration process. After that, when the user wants to log in, they type their PIN into the software token. It's encrypted, sent to your server. If the PIN's correct and the encryption's valid and the account is active, a one-time passcode is generated on the server, encrypted, and returned to the user. Now, this is a solution that can be, you said that it's based on Linux.

Can your system be used with Linux? Oh, yes. So in your infrastructure, what you want to do is establish an authentication protocol. Typically what we see is companies use RADIUS. So your VPN, SSH, Apache, FreeNX, all these systems will talk RADIUS. And the ideal thing is to have them all talk RADIUS to your free RADIUS server or in the Windows world, the NPS. your FreeRadius server or in the Windows world, the NPS, have it do authorization in your directory, and then proxy the credentials to an authentication server like Wicked.

Sure. Okay. To get this product rolling, does it take a lot of knowledge in the development field, or is it something that an administrator could do? No, and it's primarily targeted to administrators, and we've got a very easy setup process. We're trying to make it as easy to set up as software as a service, but be reliable and be in your location. So this isn't a subscription-based model. It's something you buy outright. Actually, our licensing is different. We have a subscription licensing.

So instead of having a permanent license and charging you 20 bucks, you know, 20% per year for support, we actually charge an annual subscription, but you still control the software. We have a three-year prepayment option, so you can get a discount if you prepay. But we kind of looked at it as being like, well, you know, do you really want to pay up front for all of our software? And then maybe what if we got a business? So it's less risk for our buyers. We're incented to keep the software up and running and solid and secure. So it kind of aligns our incentives. And the thing is, is that funding model is probably a little bit more beneficial to your business to have that steady income rather than somebody, they come in and then they buy it and then they take off, right? Yeah. So it makes it harder to grow fast

because if you get that big chunk of money, you can actually grow fast, but it makes it more disciplined. And we're not going to grow faster than we can grow our marketplace. Now, how does your product compare to something like, say, Google Authenticator? So Google Authenticator is primarily their software token. They have a PAM module that you can run for SSH. There's two key differences. One is that it is an addition to passwords.

So we prefer to get rid of passwords because they suck. And it's also really just a PAM module. So what happens when you want to use it for your VPN? Where's the integration for that? Where's the Apache module? So if you're doing a one-off thing and you just want to lock down a couple servers that you manage or have at home,

that's great. If you're really looking at deploying something that can help your organization grow and manage users and have logging and have support, that's where you'd look to Wicked. Outstanding. Where can people go to find out more about Wicked and what you guys do and how to get involved or to I guess in your case, how to purchase the product or service?

So, wickedsystems.com, W-I-K-I-D, systems.com. We have a SourceForge site, so we've got an open source version and we do welcome contributions to that. And we are on Twitter at Wicked Systems as well. Perfect. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us. We really appreciate it. I like, it says, Doggo Red in there.

Dago Red in the chat room says that they were also giving out mixed drink shake like drink shakers as swag at the fest. That's awesome. That's a great swag item. I kind of want to check that out. And again, that's wicked. And it's a W.I.K.D. Q5. Did you get a chance to look at that stuff? What did you think? Yeah, their stuff is actually really impressive. And just to let you know, I did happen to get one of those drink shakers for you. Oh, for me? So I will drop that in the mail.

No way! Yes, I did. Oh, awesome. I saw it, and I was like, this is something Chris would love. I do. I looked at the guy. I said, I'm going to take two. And he's like, well, I really don't have that many.

And I said, well, we're doing an interview. He goes, yeah, okay, I can afford two. Good man. Good man. Well, I love that. And I'm so glad Noah got the Google Authenticator question in there because that was totally what I was thinking too. So Q5, were you on camera for these interviews? Was that you? I was actually the man behind the camera for all of these. Okay. Okay. Wow. Very awesome. Okay. Our next group is the Internet System Consortium. And Noah stopped by and had a quick chat with them. I believe they just celebrated their 20th birthday, too. We're here with Chuck from ISC, the Internet Systems Consortium. How are you doing today, Chuck? Real good. How are you? I'm doing excellent. Now, to start out, if you can tell me a little bit about what ISC is and what it is you guys do.

Well, ISC has been around in the Internet for a long time. We just had our 20th birthday this spring. ISC is the author and publisher of the Bind9 DNS software that most of the Internet uses now. D&S software that most of the internet uses now. We also have ISC DHCP product, which again is the standard implementation of DSC across most of the internet. In addition to the software services, we provide

support for free software. In fact, that's a good deal of what funds the company, and that's my job. I'm a support engineer. And in addition, we do have a hosting service, which we have a commercial side and a public benefits side. We have a commercial side and a public benefit side. And we do DNS hosting, SNS secondary name service, which, again, is split into a public benefit and a commercial side. We also maintain the F-root root name server,

which is an Anycast server all across the world. I don't know exactly how many nodes it has, but F-Root is everywhere. We do a lot of cool stuff to benefit the internet. Awesome. Thank you so much for taking time to meet with us. We really appreciate it. I didn't get a chance

to fit in because we put in the last week's episode, but another Slackware advocate too, right, Q5? It seems like Slackware was big down there. Is that just the impression I got from these clips? Oh, yeah. Slackware users came out in force. Yes. And actually, talking with Chuck, his whole family uses Slackware.

His wife uses it. His 17-year-old son uses it. His 15-year-old daughter uses it. his 15-year-old daughter uses it. His entire family runs Linux. That's awesome. Yeah, he made the comment like, if Slackware is meant for you, it'll eventually find you. You don't have to find Slackware.

I love it. You know, that's so cool. And it's good to see, like, you go to these kind of events, you get everybody together, and one of the old dog distros is still getting a lot of love. Before we go to our next group of clips, I want to thank our second sponsor this week, and that is the great folks over at Ting. Go to linux.ting.com. That'll take $25 off your first device. Or if you've got a device that's compatible, well, then they'll just give you a $25 Ting credit.

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First of all, it's a flat $6 per month, and then it's just your usage on top of that, plus whatever cut the man's going to take. But really, it's a flat $6, and then your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. Ting adds them all up at the end of the month. Whatever bucket you fall into, that's all you pay. The great part is their dashboard makes it crazy easy to see where you're at. You can track individual devices, set limits, set alerts, go in there and set up call 40 when you miss a call. All that kind of stuff that you're always wondering, hey, what's that

code I'm supposed to enter in my phone to activate this feature? Ting exposes all of that through their dashboard and through their companion apps on Android and iOS. Lots of nice things about Ting. And I also want to point out that when you're over at Ting, go to linux.ting.com to get started. Try out that savings calculator. And then after you've played around for a little bit, head over to the blog.

They got a really, they do, Ting really, really puts a lot of effort into this blog. And there's a ton of good content, even for non-Ting customers. But what I want to point your attention to is if you're in a contract and you know you want to switch to Ting, but you're not ready to go whole hog and cancel your contract, I want to remind you that Ting does have an early termination relief program, ting.com slash ETF. You can find out more about that. There's also another system they've set up, Ting Reminders. Ting will just send you a nice little gentle nudge when your contract expires and says, hey, bro, why don't you move over to Ting now? We'll get you taken care of. They've also got a new swap program to help you swap up to a Galaxy device and move over to Ting.

Linux.ting.com. Check them out. No hold customer service. Voicemail, caller ID, tethering, hotspot, three-way calling, call forwarding, all other features you'd expect. All part of your service. No hidden charges. No BS. It's really quite awesome. Linux.ting.com. And a really big thanks to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged.

I've been using them for well over a year now. And it totes rocks. I got my recently bricked Ubuntu Touch Nexus 5 on the Ting network. And until I tried to do today's update, I was quite enjoying using it on the Ting network. But now, now I'll just use Android. Okay. Now we're going to move over to the BSD folks. And if you haven't gone to one of these fests, you've got to understand how these BSD guys work.

They are sneaky. They get in there. They talk nice to people. They play nice. They listen to the Linux users, and they politely nod their head. And they say, here, Linux user, take these horns, put these horns on, and then walk around with these flashing. It is subversive. It's devious.

And it works every time. And Noah had a chance to stop by and chat with Chris's brother, Chris Moore, who you probably know from BSD Now. Well, he got a chance to talk with Ken Moore about PCBSD. We're here with Ken Moore from the PCBSD project. How are you doing today, Ken? I'm doing very well, thank you. Thanks a lot for taking the time to talk to us.

Now, I know that every time I see Alan June, he makes it a point to tell me. We gave Alan a ride back from LinuxFest Northwest back to his hotel. And the entire way back, the conversation was dominated with the idea that everyone in the world should switch to BSD. Oh, of course. So tell me a little bit about what your connection to the BSD project is

and what it is that you do. I am one of the developers on the PCBSD project. I generally focus on designing the graphical utilities to make system management, system administration, installing and running applications, doing all of that to make it simple for the user to basically use any system, any FreeBSD system. Now, PCBSD is primarily geared towards people that want to install it and run it on like a laptop or a desktop. Is that correct? Yes. PCBSD is more desktop focused. So any of the different desktop environments, we have them all available and we just try to provide PCBSD is more desktop focused. So any of the different desktop environments,

we have them all available and we just try to provide PCBSD utilities on the side for managing the free BSD specific functions in the background, like wireless and stuff, because they're very different from the way Linux is run. So since these, since these projects are, since the project is very different from the majority of Linux distributions, what would be a reason that I would want to switch to PCBSD or maybe just give it a try and see what I think of it? Well, a couple of the things that come to me off the top of my head is the stability of FreeBSD. Since the operating system is completely separate from all the third-party packages,

you can add and remove things like desktop environments and utilities and really configure your entire system however you want without having to worry about breaking your system. Another one is ZFS. We have ZFS natively on FreeBSD, and it is fabulous. That is actually the required file system for PCBSD. Whenever you install a PCBSD system, you are installing onto ZFS. And then with that, we have a number of ZFS functions that we use and tie in to create boot environments. So whenever you're going to perform an upgrade of your system, it will automatically create a boot environment in the background.

And if you don't like the upgrade, if something got changed, like it went to a new version of an application that doesn't work right, all you have to do is restart your system and say, oh, I want to go back to this older boot environment, and you're back to your system in less than a minute. Okay, well, thanks. If somebody was interested in getting involved in the PCBSD project or learning more about PCBSD, where could that person go? You can go to pcbsd.org, or we also have forums and a wiki and a blog, all of them just with the prefix.

So wiki.pcbsd.org, forums.pcbsd.org, blog.pcbsd.org. Any of those sites will get you going and connect you to the project. Outstanding. Well, thanks a lot for taking time to meet with us. We really appreciate it. Thank you very much. I thought that was a great chat. And unfortunately, maybe we'll get a chance to talk to Ken about this more.

They can get a chance to talk about that new desktop environment that PCBSD is working on. But they make good case for running PCBSD. I'm digging that update snapshot system, Matt, where it's just sort of like, hey, you updated? Well, let me just create a little backup environment you could boot into. That's pretty nice. I kind of want that. Oh, I love that idea. I want that on everything I run. I wonder if once ButterFS is a little more widely adopted, a little more mature, if you might see distros integrating that. I mean, this is the nice thing that PCBSD has going for them is they really just focus on BSD and can focus on just what BSD supports so they can unilaterally do something like that.

Now, we've got one more BSD clip to get to. And I'm really glad that Noah got a chance to chat with Drew. She's sort of world famous for her involvement with the FreeBSD Project and other things. I believe she's also been a guest on the BSD Now podcast. So I was really glad they got a chance to chat with her, so here we'll play that clip now. As if one interview with the people from the BSD project wasn't enough, we actually have two people here that we can talk to, and the second is Drew. Now, Drew, we were specifically asked to go seek out and talk to her.

We were told that she has phenomenally interesting things to say by Alan. How's that for a setup? And so we're here with Drew today. How are you doing today, Drew? I'm doing fine, thank you. Tell me a little bit about what it is that you do with the BSD project and how your role differs a little bit from the guys at the PCBSD project. Yeah, so I'm involved in a lot of little pots. So my main focus is on documentation, and my background is in system administration.

So I write the documentation for both the PCBSD and the FreeNAS projects. And what we do is we aim to have a comprehensive user guide for every release of the operating system. So it sort of keeps me busy. I'm also involved with the FreeBSD project. So I'm one of the directors at the FreeBSD Foundation. And I also, as I can, I try to assist in the FreeBSD handbook. Because FreeBSD has always been known for having very comprehensive documentation. So I try to assist with that as well.

From my system administration background, I also care about, in addition to documentation, education and ways to get future system administrators to have a good solid base in open source. So one of the things that we founded 10 years ago is the BSD certification group. So we concentrate on making sure that system administrators know what skills employers are looking for when it comes to system administration, and we focus on the BSD operating systems. systems. Now, I asked the gentleman from the PCBSD project what he thought the compelling argument was to give PCBSD a try. Can you give me what comes to mind as a compelling argument to give BSD a try on the back end, on the server? Yeah, so if we look at it from the FreeBSD point of view, which is basically the base for the projects PCBSD for Freenas, for PFSense.

I would agree with Ken's assessment that ZFS is definitely a big one. We've had ZFS for some time. It's very mature. It's very stable. And both the PCBSD and the FreeNAS projects are building on top of that ZFS base to make utilities, to make it easier to take advantage of the features built into ZFS. Some of the up-and-coming stuff that's coming out of FreeBSD from a programming point of view, Capsicum is a really big deal. So Capsicum is a set of APIs that make it possible to take existing applications that were originally not designed to be secure, and you can hook, redevelop those applications with a very small footprint to actually secure them. So Capsicum actually came out of a project, FreeBSD was a reference-based system, it's the University of Cambridge and Google, and they took the Chromium web browser, and nobody could accuse a web browser of being securely designed from the beginning, and they were able to prove that they could secure that application

in less than 100 lines of code. Wow, that is impressive, especially in a web browser. If somebody was interested in finding more about the server side of BSD or getting in contact, maybe even contributing to the project, how would somebody get in contact or do that? So FreeBSD has been around a very long time. It's a very large project. There are several hundred committers, dozens of people that work on documentation, hundreds of thousands of end users. So huge project. Because of that, and because it is an operating system, it really depends on which parts you're interested in.

So, for example, we have several dozen mailing lists. So somebody, if they're coming in on the development side and they're interested, say, in writing network device drivers, there would be mailing lists that would hook you into the right people to discuss that sort of thing. If you're interested in file systems or if you're a system administrator, you're interested in administration. So I would recommend go to the FreeBSD website, check out the mailing list. Because one of the things you want to do

is you want to become familiar with who's who in the community. And you also want the community to become familiar with you, what it is that you can bring to the table. community to become familiar with you, what it is that you can bring to the table. And FreeBSD has always been known as being a helpful community. But, you know, you have to really engage with the community. So we have the mailing lists, we have IRC channels. So we really recommend don't be shy, come in,. Come in and engage with the community. Outstanding. Well, thank you so much for taking time to talk with us.

We really appreciate it. I noticed she's not wearing horns. Now, okay, Q5, be honest. Did their insidious niceness get to you a little bit? Because now not only are they going to these Linux conventions, but they're enlisting the help of Canadians who are famously nice. Are you feeling the pressure to run a little BSD now? Oh yeah, they're definitely nice. And actually let me pause you right here because Alan has been quietly listening to me talk in our community about my preferences with desktop

environments and how I like to manage my system and how I like to run it. So he casually one day is like, oh, you should ask Ken about the one he's designing. So I'm thinking, okay, sure. No big deal. I'll talk to him about it. So I talked to Ken about it So I'm thinking, okay, sure, no big deal. I'll talk to him about it. So I talked to Ken about it, and I'm like, okay, give me a kind of rundown. He's like, well, better yet, let me just show it to you. Oh, you got to see it. I'm not going to say much, but let me say that Lumina is unbelievable. Now, keep in mind, I'm a puppy Linux dev, but after checking out Lumina and where it is in its current alpha state,

it's actually tempting me to install PCBSD on one of my laptops. But it seems so crazy to have another desktop. It really was. Now, was it sort of like, can you give me, it sounds like it maybe is a little bit like a tiling window manager a bit? No, it's not. It's a regular, it's not a tiling window manager. But it's just, it's all the little things that make workflow so much quicker. The seamless nature of how he's worked in Life Preserver with ZFS is just unbelievable.

Yeah, that is pretty sweet. Yeah. Yeah, Ken's got some skills, huh? Yeah, I'll be curious to follow the way that goes. So it's called Lumina. We've talked a little bit about it before. There's not a lot of details yet. L-U-M-I-N-A.

He did say that it has, there's some distribution, it might be Arch, that has actually already ported it over and has it as an option. But I don't know exactly what distro that is. Very nice. If somebody runs Linux and they want to test it out, I mean, obviously they won't get any of the ZFS features, but they can at least poke around and see how it works and what it's doing. I can't wait to try it out, I mean, obviously they won't get any of the ZFS features, but they can at least poke around and see how it works and what it's doing. I can't wait to try

it. Hey, I could load PCVSD. Hey, hey. I mean, if it comes with a pair of horns. Well, very good. So, worth a trip, you think? Is it something you'd recommend folks go to next year? Absolutely. You know, thinking back,

kind of comparing it to LinuxFed Northwest, because we had a bunch of our community members there. I've never been to either conference before. This was my first year at Northwest. This is my first year at Southeast. And I know this may sound kind of cliche, but I really do mean this. Self felt like more of an extended family. Even though I knew none of these people before, after, you know, that one day on Friday, I felt like I was one of them. That southern charm is what you're saying? Exactly. I had a great time at LinuxFest Northwest, and if you take all the goodness that was in that conference and you add in that legendary southern hospitality, you have a recipe for an amazing event. What about being at a hotel? Did that give it a weird feeling at all, or did that work really well? Did that give it a weird feeling at all, or did that work really well? Actually, it worked really well. The layout and the way that they had the floor track and the individual speaking rooms, everything was right there and easily accessible. So you could easily go from when you're going around talking to different vendors, seeing what they have to offer, to, oh, there's a talk in that room right there that I want to go to.

It wasn't like I need to go walk off and go up a hall and up a staircase and find what room. Everything was there. Everything was easy to get to. It was just, it was a great event. Very cool. Well, maybe, maybe we'll have to do a live, a live stream from there next year. You never know what's possible. It's interesting to see these events because, you know, they don't get a lot of coverage. There's not a lot of people talking about them, yet they're a major event that happens in the community. And I think you'd almost expect them to ever. I don't know. I think maybe people somehow have managed to realize that there is actually some value in meeting in meatspace somehow. I expected we would all just be staring into the monitors for the rest of humanity, but we still managed to get together from time to time.

So if you go to a fest that we can't attend to, we'd love to hear your report. And one of the ways you could share your experience is by going to linuxactionshow.reddit.com. Start a thread there. Why not start a thread about doing a meetup? That's what Q5 did. And you can also send us an email.

Go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com. Click the contact link and choose, why don't you send it to Linux Unplugged. Choose Linux Unplugged from the dropdown. Or Linux Action Show, depending on the timing. I'll leave that to your savviness. That's up to you. If you're an email ninja and think you can time it just right,

you could also choose Linux Action Show. All right, guys. Will anybody have anything to contribute before we run? I think that was a pretty good coverage. I know Riley was thinking they were too nice. There's something off about that. Riley, are you okay? No, I'm not okay with it.

There's something off about it, seriously. I just see them in a dark room going at it with their hands up. Those lights flashing, those horns flashing in a dark room. What you're saying is you don't trust people who are nice. No, you know what? It's like in some ways

they are there solving a same problem and they just think they have a better way to do it. I think it's like it's a bit of confidence in a way I think it demonstrates the fact that they can show up it's not a hostile thing they can share the room it's something that's taken Microsoft a decade to figure out

I mean we just now saw Microsoft really start to get it at LinuxFest Northwest but the BSD guys you know they're cut from the same cloth just maybe one that has more stitching. I don't know. All right, well, we'll leave it at that. I also had a link that I wanted to chat about, but I think we'll save it for the big show. But if you guys want to do a

little additional reading, I'll leave it to you. You can find it in the show notes. Go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com, look for Linux Unplugged episode 46. And also, we're putting a call out to have folks help fund our Patreon page that goes in to contribute to investments in the network. Patreon.com slash today. We're trying to do some crowdfunding to bring revenue up for the network so that way we can do things like hire contractors to resolve problems that we have or buy some on-location equipment to do some more on-location streaming like these types of events. And all of that is dependent on increasing our financing. And really, there's two ways that a network like ours could increase financing. We can add additional ads, and that's certainly something that we could consider doing.

And we can also go to crowdfunding. And I believe the real answer lies somewhere there in between. I think it's more about a balance and finding a mix and diversifying income sources for the network so that way we're here for the long haul. And that's what we're trying to do. So if you go over to Patreon.com slash today, you can find out more information. You can pledge whatever you can afford. That money is distributed to all of the shows, all of the profits generated there go into the network.

And it's celebrated via our Tech Talk Today podcast. As we reach different milestones, we have a little party in the show. Like the barbecue challenge is kind of like a fun way to just celebrate in the show. But it also means, oh, the network has achieved another level of funding, which means we can accomplish X, Y, Z. My big, big aboo right now is as the network has grown, we've greatly increased the complexity of our technical infrastructure to the point now where there's enough equipment that it really could take

at least a part-time person coming in a couple of times a week, keeping it all running. And that's why I'm constantly struggling these days with hardware failures, because it's just, when you have this much equipment running 24-7, things happen. And you need somebody who has really solid IT experience in networking and storage and network-attached storage and really high-performance networking, but you also need someone who has broadcast equipment experience, that understands about encoding, about the specialized needs that a certain rig might have, and that's sort of a nexus of talent that's extremely difficult to find and not free. But it's an example of something that we have to be able to do in order to keep moving the network forward because it just is getting to that point.

And the way we can do just is getting to that point. And the way we can do that is by knowing we have a good, stable platform of funding by our audience. The folks who consume our shows can be the folks who fund our shows. So go to patreon.com slash today. We greatly, greatly appreciate your support. And check out Tech Talk today. In fact, join me live tomorrow. If you're listening to this on Tuesday night, we'll be covering the Google I.O. keynote live in Tech Talk Today at 9 a.m. Pacific, noon Eastern.

When that launches, you can join us in the Mumble Room, our virtual lug, and comment away on the Google keynote as it happens. And we'll release that as a download so you guys can go catch all of the goodies that came out of Google I.O. So that'll be tomorrow's Tech Talk Today, episode 15, I believe, which will be on June 25th as we are recording this episode. That right there, though, will wrap us up. So go over to linuxactionshow.reddit.com, help contribute and comment,

and give us your thoughts, your feedback for this week's episode. We'd love to hear it. Don't forget to send us an email and all those kinds of goodies. We really appreciate it. Okay, Matt, well guess what? We're all done. We can get out of here. We wrapped up our Southeast

Linux Fest coverage, and I think we're going to do some how-to stuff on Sunday. I'm going to double-check the calendar, but I think we're going to have a great episode on Sunday's Linux Action Show, so I'll see you then, okay? Alright, I'll see you then. Sounds good. Alright. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in to this week's episode of the Linux Unplugged Show. We'll see you then sounds good alright thank you everybody for tuning in to this week's episode of the Linux Unplugged show we'll see you back

on Sunday for Linux Action Show and if you can't make it for some reason I won't judge but I'd love to see you back here on Tuesday for the next episode of Linux Unplugged alright everyone see you right back here next week Thank you.