LINUX Unplugged - Episode 62: Unifying Linux Software | LUP 62

Episode Date: October 15, 2014

We discuss how one software center for all distributions would work & which existing solutions are the closest.Plus looking forward to some new Ubuntu apps & how Linux bit Lightworks right in the memory manager.

Look at them reaching out saying, hey, look at this cool box. What do they run in Linux? Yeah. What though? Ubuntu. Look at that. 100% open source. So it's got an Odroid 1.7 gigahertz U3 quad core processor powered by Ubuntu full specs. Let's go check that out.

So it's imp.computer. Two gigs of RAM. Eight's go check that out. So it's imp.computer. 2 gigs of RAM, 8 gigabytes of storage on board, Ubuntu 14.04, and Cinnamon, Chrome and Firefox. Interesting, they say Office. They say, oh,

Office, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Online, Google Docs, Apple, and iCloud. Screenshot. I think it's like Chromebook style, Chromebox kind of thing. But it also talks about being a media hub. That's pretty interesting. So are they doing a fundraiser?

Yeah, they're going to do one. They haven't said when. Continuity. Imp supports full continuity. Now you can pick up any task you were doing or move what you're watching on your mobile and then continue it on your desktop. Hmm. It looks about the size of a NUC,

only even maybe a bit smaller, I bet. Yeah. Well, if you look at the size of a Nodroid, they're quite tiny. Yeah. That makes sense, huh? And it looks like they're going to tie in with some sort of app

that you can use on Android, iOS or Windows interesting good find Popey I wonder if maybe somebody in this room has heard of this new this new TrueCrypt remake it's better than TrueCrypt it's called VeriCrypt

it's like an alternative they say that they've gone and cleaned a few things up fixed a few problems. Anybody heard of it? Anybody trust it? Anybody found a good true crypt? I ran across the story yesterday, and I don't know what to think about it. Yeah, I don't know if I can trust it yet.

Like, what does it take to trust something? What did it take to get me to trust TrueCrypt? It's just been around a while, I guess. Edward Snowden. Do you know if the audit that was being done on True Crypt is going to publish their findings at some point? They've published the first phase, and now they're

like, I thought we were supposed to see the second phase. This is what I'm referring to is the follow-up, yeah. I don't think we've seen that. Nobody's really talked about it since the project shut down. No, and I think until we see that, we can't say for any certainty whether we trust anything that's derived from it.

That must be it, because what if there's a fundamental flaw in there? Now that they gave up like this, it's that whole thing is still very unsettling. I don't really understand what happened there, and I don't know. And now looking back, it's so weird, all the things that have happened since TrueCrypt threw in the hat. That was pre-Heartbleed. That was pre-Shellshock.

And all these essential open source utilities have had these vulnerabilities in them now. It makes you wonder what the state of TrueCrypt really is. And so is anything based off it? You know, that's the other thing. Remember the developers said, don't base your future stuff off ours. Just start from new code. Quite. Yeah, that's the other thing. Remember the developers said, don't base your future stuff off ours. Just start from new code. Yeah, that's another risk. That's weird when the developers say, yeah, you don't want

to use what I made. I realize why they said it. They said it because when you start going and, well, that one thing. But to go in to take something and then try and slap things on top of it, as soon as you start slapping things on top, that's just another point where you can poke at.

Yeah, you end up with a Windows release. Exactly. Yeah. Nobody wants that. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's powered by a cup of coffee and two energy drinks. My name is Chris.

My name is Matt. I might have a heart attack during today's show, Matt. So if you hear something that sounds like my face smacking into the microphone, just spring into action. Make sure you close out the show and remind people about all the stuff I always remind people about. And then we'll just we'll clean up the mess later, OK? Because sounds good. There doesn't even have to be a video show in here until Thursday. So if you think about it, if I'm dead, you got time. Don't even rush down. You can just get down here and clean me up when you get a chance, okay? There you go. I think if we can get

past the bloat and I can get a hand truck in there, I think we're okay. Yeah, and actually it'd be a good time too because I just got the new Borderlands prequel just came out for Linux this morning installed. So I'll have that up on my machine so you can just play that when you get here. It's worth the trip, too. There you go.

So you're welcome. Yeah. All right, well, coming up on today's episode, we've got a couple of topics that I want to throw in everybody's faces to get some discussion going. Not only do we get some great emails, which I think will get us going on a few things. I'm really looking forward to that. I want to talk about some of the next generation apps coming to Ubuntu that we got a sneak peek at today. And then we've heard a lot of times it's hard to develop applications for Linux. It's too fragmented.

It's changing too much. How do you write for an operating system that's constantly changing underneath you? Well, we actually have a real world example of how that affected something that I think you've probably heard of before. It didn't all end badly, but it does give us a little perspective on some of the challenges writing a major enterprise grade application for Linux can face. So it should be a good show. Why don't we bring in the Mumbleroom with us so we start off the email. Hey there, Mumbleroom, time-appropriate greetings.

Evening. Hello. What? I like that somebody always gets a little singing in there. That's good. All right, so PM wrote in and wanted to pick up on our discussion regarding Netflix and how Linux users are all in on DRM now that Netflix is here. He says, Hello, Chris, Matt, Mumba Room, Chat Room.

I just wanted to offer my opinion on the Netflix equals Linux users are fine with DRM thing. I personally don't like DRM, and I'm certainly not all in on it, but let's be honest. The fact that Netflix now works on the desktop for Linux is a coincidence, not an intention. Netflix, Google, etc. pushed DRM into HTML5 because they want to offer content on Roku, Android devices, etc. Because this DRM scheme is now part of HTML5, Linux users can enjoy it as well. But it wasn't put there because of us, that's for sure. Now we can do two things.

We can be angry at Netflix, not watch it, and they're going to continue business as usual, because quite frankly, they don't care much about us. The DRM will still happily remain baked into HTML5 because it wasn't put there because of us in the first place. It was put there for smart TVs and set-top boxes that they'll continue to sell regardless. We as Linux users can cry all we want, but DRM is now in, and it's up to us whether we at least use it for some benefit to us like Netflix on the desktop, or cry

about it and have none of the benefit with no one listening to our cries about DRM anyways. So nailed it. So nailed it. Oh man. Wow. Wow, that is... I almost stood up and applauded. It kind of is a bit of a reality check. Wow, that is... I almost stood up and applauded. It kind of is a bit of a reality check.

Eric, do you think Netflix maybe has a little responsibility to bear here? I think they have some responsibility, but I don't think they are the main reason. They've come out and said if they could skip the DRM, they would, because it's a headache on them. It's something they don't want to have to deal with. It's the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America, that is forcing this on them.

So it's all of the copyright holders that are forcing this on them because they don't want any chance of piracy. They say that. They say that. But the thing is, it's going to happen regardless. But how come House of Cards

and Orange is the New Black also are still wrapped up in DRM? Netflix made those whole cloth. They own them. Yes, they did. They already had it developed. Yeah, I suppose. I mean, I just, whatever.

I mean, I think PM nails it. It's like it's not even for us. Our protests matter nothing. Like, we're just shouting into the wind because it really is more about Chromebooks and tablets and Android devices and Rokus than it is Linux users. Aren't all these examples Linux-based anyway, so inherently? They are looking at it. They might not care as much, but it's not like we just happen to luckily get it. I mean, they're focusing on devices that support Linux.

Yeah, is that what you think, Wizard? You think it's like they are focusing on Linux, but it's not the desktop Linux user? Absolutely. They do care about Linux as a platform. They don't care about the Linux users. As far as they're concerned, they said, we need a platform

that we're going to put out there. But we don't care about those users. We want the users that are going to be using our Roku, our solution on top of it. Yeah, yeah. Good point. Yeah, and you know what? This is just sort of the benefit of Linux becoming

one of the general technology platforms is we get to go along for the ride sometimes. And I think that's totally fine. Yeah, it's a good thing. My point is we need to be pointing the finger blaming the people who deserve the blame. I think Netflix is an easy scapegoat.

You're saying, Eric, show me the money. Show me the money! Follow the money back to the content creators, and they're the ones pulling the strings. Mm-hmm. All right. Nathan writes in. Get ready for this one, Popey and Wimpy.

He has questions about a software store. He's got some ideas and some concerns. Hello, Chris, Matt, chatroom, mumble room, et cetera. I was thinking long and hard today about Linux users and purchasing software. I know about the struggles large companies have when thinking about moving over to Linux and how there is not really a good way to get their software purchased on end users' computers. The one package for all thought comes to mind, though it isn't exactly easy to get distros on board, especially when you don't have a track record of anything like this really working that well at all. So I was thinking about these software stores. Something could

almost be like the way the AUR works, where the front end knows how to build the program for that specific distribution, and you as the user just have to click download and install, and the app store in the background does the building. From there, all you have to do is get the payment system working, and you're off to the races. Since compiling applications between distro is more or less the same, everyone could just follow tar.gz instructions. A software store could just do all of the work on the back end for you. So this leads me to my question. If you were to make a software store, what would you do to help this process go smoothly? This type of store will only gain traction and help the Linux desktop if it worked across distros, so let's keep that in mind when discussing

this. Also, I'm a Mac guy. I love Linux, but I only know so much. So maybe I'm completely off on this concept. But as a Mac user, he seems like this is something we need. So I wanted to start with Popey and Wimpy because you guys were sort of kicking around some ideas of what could work for an app store. And I know you guys definitely weren't thinking something that builds software. And I don't even think you were thinking something across distro.

Well, in fact, it's quite interesting that the uh the way he describes how a store should work that the back end builds the software and then you just click a button and download a binary that is exactly what the above two software center does it it builds it in a ppa they're private ppas and when you buy a piece of software you are allowed access to a private ppa where that software was built and it downloads to your machine so i think he's talking about it's only for one yeah and it does that oh it does that okay so that that that bit yeah he's got that completely nailed but what he's talking about is building for like multiple platforms so you have one store where you click a button and it figures out that you're fedora so bill it builds and gives you an rpm that that would all be magical. Getting buy-in from everyone, tricky. That's harder.

You think? So it seems to me that it would almost be, in a sense, the burden would be on the software center or whatever you want to call it to figure out that magic. But for these developers… But it frees developers up. It depends whether you're talking about free software, open source software, or proprietary software. Because some developers want to put their free and open software. And, okay, the build it in the cloud and download works for that. But what about those developers who are running proprietary software? So the individual developers or the app developers who are creating applications they will build it locally on their machine and then upload

a binary so it doesn't work for every use case well I'm also now thinking of the OpenSUSE build service right where it builds go ahead Wimpy well yeah I was just going to say the build from source idea is fine but you would need somebody to actually put the effort in

to create the packaging for the different end distributions. So I have some experience in packaging on Arch Linux, Debian, and Ubuntu, and I can't directly take my packaging from Arch and apply it in dev files because the concepts are totally different from one another. So you have to do whole cloth implementations and the packaging for each distribution separately and also spec files from rpms are different to deb's and different to arch pkg builds so you could build it from source but somebody would have to be the package maintainer for all of the things this is why i think the way that we've done it with the

phone which is the developer builds it and they upload a binary is the better way forward because then you make as you as a developer make sure that your thing works and if it works and you can build it locally and you can test it in an emulator or test it on your device or desktop or whatever and then once you've built a compiled version, you upload that into the store and make that available to people. So, Iogogo, you mentioned the magic Docker word. That seems to be the buzz phrase that everybody uses to solve problems like this. What were you thinking in terms of how Docker could solve this? Well, from what I've read in places,

I've heard that Docker basically emulates distros on top of an existing software or kernel. But companies could use that. I can't talk with this echo. So you're thinking that companies could deliver their applications. Close your mic and I'll summarize. You're thinking people could deliver their applications through Docker, and they are kind of starting to do that.

Like, I deployed Smokeping on my Arch setup over that, and I found it to be really simple and straightforward. And, of course, it means I'm kind of running an Ubuntu machine in a container. And that makes me go back to... Do you make that sound bad? Well, no. You're like, oh, God,

I'm running an Ubuntu in a container. No, it just seems like a lot of extra overhead back to that. You make that sound bad. Well, no. You're like, oh god, I'm running Ubuntu in a container. It seems like a lot of extra overhead to run a single application. A lot of extra stuff has to be updated and maintained now. But in the long run, I'm not convinced it's not. It might be better. I mean like build it in a Docker container and then you give out

the binaries from the Docker container and you have different distros in the Docker containers containers with all the thousands of gigabytes of storage they need to be on the server side for these companies in order to get all the combination of phones fixed and figured out and it relatively bug free either they can do it and host 50 different binaries for 50 different things that they know should cover most phones, it's very hard to go and just give the software store the source. Then you can use your phone to chug through it and compile it straight up on your phone because you're going to need some serious power cord usage after that. Otherwise, they need to make sure that all these programs, apps,

are compiled for their target operating system in a runtime environment. And in order to get all that, it's a lot of space used up on their servers. Rotten, I want to hear your grand vision of one app store to solve all, because this is exactly what Nathan's going after. What do you think? Yeah, a universal app store for Linux would be the perfect option, because it would be a structure more in the sense that every single app every single distro that can keep doing whatever they want to do they can use rpm they can

use deb or whatever and this software center or store or whatever just gives you the packages that are for your distro and it based on which is installed to it can tell what distro it has so it knows what packages to give you so it'll give you an RPM if you need RPM, if you're on Debian, stuff like that. I don't know. I feel like this problem is already solved by our friends over at Valve. I mean, we all have different distributions.

All of us have Steam installed. We're all downloading and installing applications. They don't have to only deliver desktop games. They could also deliver desktop productivity applications. They already have some in their store. They do what I suggested, which is the developer uploads a binary. They don't build it in Steam.

The developer builds the binaries and uploads a Windows binary, a Mac binary, a Linux 32-bit binary, and that works. I see in front of us we have Lenart and the Known Team's version of distributing software through like a ButterFS, you know, a Delta. You have delivering applications through Docker.

You have delivering applications through an App Store, Steam, the OpenSUSE Build service. Obviously, I think it's pretty clear that even though this is, we're working towards something and we still haven't figured out what it is. It's kind of crazy. It kind of is over the top. But I feel like we're getting somewhere. And I kind of feel like containerization and all this stuff is almost going to maybe start nullifying all these differences.

And we might look back at a time where developers and package maintainers know what all of these little things are, but it's been pretty well abstracted away from the end user. So that's my vision. where developers and package maintainers know what all of these little things are, but it's been pretty well abstracted away from the end user. So that's my vision. My long-term vision is distros will keep their distro-specific tools that they use to manage their software and build their distribution, but long-term, it's almost abstracted away from the user in all cases.

I mean, you see it today where now the GNOME Software Center, it's the same way to install Transmit on Fedora as it is on Arch now. And they are hugely different under the hood in terms of installing packages. But that's ginormous, right? And that's one instance of it. And that's maybe just a little glimpse into the future. I don't know. I just really, really think it's going to change eventually.

It has to change eventually, I think. Because it's something that does keep coming up. If you don't move forward, you're moving backward. Well, and it's something that seems to be, it's something that never goes away, especially when people switch to Linux. So it's always an email that's coming in our inbox because people are switching over to Linux

and they're like, what a mess! You know, because on Windows and Mac, when you want to download something, even though it's a little more archaic than how we do it, to the end users, it makes a lot of sense. You Google the name of the thing, Skype. You click on the Skype download Google results, like the second or third result, right, every time. You download it to your desktop, and you double click it. And that's how they think software is supposed to work. And so the idea to them that you download something for Linux and it could work on one Linux and not work on another Linux, that's broken to them. That is fundamentally flawed.

That's a flaw to them. And I can see it that way. So I think eventually it's going to have to be abstracted out. Something smarter is going to have to happen. Well, and you say that it's archaic. But, I mean, the reality is if all the software existed in every software repository, I would agree with you. But since it doesn't, depending on which distro I'm using, drastically varies. Yeah, it can still happen.

Yeah, I mean, it drastically depends on what software is available to me, right? But what I mean, like, they get all their software that way, right? For Linux users, we have in repos, we can download it. But for them, like, they go hunt and peck and download from the web. And that's why sometimes they download the wrong thing and they get malware. It's not a safe... Trying to get printer drivers for something that... Yeah, it's very different than how you do it under Linux. And to them, it totally doesn't make any sense how you do it under Linux, how you install software. I know I've mentioned this a lot, but watching Chase try to install a few applications for the first time on Ubuntu, and other people I've had try it too.

Like every time I tell them, okay, now let's install some software, even though I intentionally kind of introduced them to the software center and then close it and make sure we move on and say, okay, now let's install some software. I swear every time they open up the browser and they go to Google. They don't even think about packages. No, they don't. I think you're also combating muscle memory. You know, people have it wired into their – it's like, you know, people that are analytical, they're dealt with a certain situation,

they instantly go into solving mode, you know, whereas someone else just goes into freak-out mode. I think it's the same sort of thing. These people have been wired to find software in this fashion and you're having to unlearn that. Yeah, exactly. And it may take some time. It's all training.

Yeah, yep, yep. It doesn't, yeah, exactly. You can teach, yeah, trust me, you can teach an old dog new tricks. Hey, speaking of new tricks, let me tell you about DigitalOcean. They got a few new tricks I'd like to tell you about.

Oh, you're not familiar with DigitalOcean, my friends? Now's the time to go to DigitalOcean.com because we've got a promo code for the month of October that'll get you a $10 credit. Hey-oh, unplugged October, all one word, lowercase, $10 credit. So what is Digital Ocean? It's like a warm cloud blanket. You just want to wrap up it and you set up all kinds of

droplets because it's a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server. Users can get started in less than 55 seconds, trust me. way to spin up a cloud server. Users can get started in less than 55 seconds, trust me. And pricing plans start at only $5 a month for 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer for $5. And DigitalOcean has data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and up in London. Why not get some global diversity? That's what I always say. In fact, I've been doing that. I actually have done it just for performance purposes, because we have a lot of folks that are syncing to some of our resources from other parts of the world. So I thought, okay, let's have a server in their

area. That just makes sense. But then I later realized, hey, I just distributed my data across the world, and now I have regional backups. That's great. So that's also great from that standpoint as well. So you can do it for performance or for data purposes. And I think the other thing that's really awesome about DigitalOcean is I know that because their interface is so great, I can really get up and get something running in pretty much no time. So getting the server part ready, spun up, backed up,

whatever I need to do before a project, DigitalOcean makes that crazy easy. That's never the barrier to getting started, which I really appreciate because their interface is super simple and intuitive. And you can replicate the functionality on a larger scale with their API. But something new DigitalOcean is doing. Now it's your chance to make a little cash on the side. If you're an expert in something, if you've deployed something and you want to write a tutorial for it,

DigitalOcean can pay up to $200 for your tutorial. And they have editors that will work with you, so don't worry. The burden's not all on your shoulders. They just need somebody that really knows their stuff, because DigitalOcean wants to get their community tutorials beyond anything else that anybody else has, and that's why they're willing to pay the good

$200. That's some good money for writing. Yeah, that's actually, in most circles, for just a standard article, it's outlining how to do something. That's the going rate. That's not bad, right? Especially if it's something you already know.

If it's something you already know. And you know what I would have done, Matt, is I think like even if I already had like if I just wanted a little play money. I mean I could take those credits or something, put them on my DigitalOcean account and have Droplet pay for it for a long time because they're talking it's $5 a month. But even if I – I kind of kick myself because I think I probably could have taken advantage of this when I first deployed on Cloud7. I had that up and running the night it came out, and then I had a whole bunch of people asking me how I got on Cloud7 running, and I thought, you know what? I could have written that up, worked with one of the DigitalOcean editors, and potentially made $200. So I'll have a link in the show notes if you want to find out more information about that. It's an initiative that DigitalOcean is really excited about because they're trying to get that just better than anybody.

They've already got amazing tutorials, a great community. Now they're trying to make it better than ever. DigitalOcean.com. Check them out. Unplugged October. We'll get you that $10 credit. Find out why Matt and I have got droplets coming out of our ears these days. Well, and just to touch on that whole writing thing one more time,

what I'm saying is that most places that you go to seek out freelance work for, you're not getting paid anywhere near that. This is unusual. This is more closer to pro-level pay. It's a good opportunity. I know. It's a great opportunity. I know, right?

It's good money. And especially I know people in our audience, there's stuff out there they know a lot about. Definitely. They can make a little extra money on. All right, so we've got a couple more emails that I think are really going to get us going on a couple of topics. So let me jump back into the emails here. The first email that we're going to talk about is Peter's. And he wants to know, this is a question I get all the time.

He says, hey, Chris, the other day I was watching one of the episodes of Lass, and you jumped into a terminal when you were installing an app. While you were using the terminal, I noticed a kind of auto-completed helper tool that would suggest your next command. I tried searching for Bash in the search input field on your site, but it returned a bunch of shows where I could not easily find any mention of the tool. And if you're watching on the video version here, I'll bring up my

terminal. Here's a big font. And if you'll notice, like if I start typing Packer or Ping, you see how it's starting to automatically suggest commands for me, and I can hit over arrow, and it'll complete the command, and then it'll run a search. That is Fish Shell. That's the Fish Shell, and I like it a lot.

It's just in the Arch. It's in probably every distro's package. It's in the Arch packages, too, and I installed Fish a while ago because I'm a lazy person, and I mostly run the same. I run about the same 10, 15, 20 commands on the command line over and over again. System CTL, Restart Plex, Pac-Man SYU, those kinds of things over and over again. And so the nice thing about Phish is it not only is really smart about figuring out what directory you're trying to get to, like here, I'll show you another one back on my screen here. In the mornings, I'm constantly

right before I go on live, I'm downloading like an old retro tech commercial for Tech Talk Today. So a lot of times if I just type in CD, now it's automatically suggesting the path that I might want to go to. In this case, it's Dropbox slash Jupyter Remote Host slash Today. It's a fairly lengthy path. And instead of me having to type in there, Fish Shell is saying, well, you know, you type this one a lot because I pretty much type that every single morning. So if I hit the over arrow, it just completes

that whole path for me and then I hit enter. And I also like the way it displays my current, my present location and all that kind of stuff. So I know Fish Shell isn't the best. Any shells in the mumble room anybody wants to call out that you love besides Bash? Any Bash alternatives? I saw that one on that show and i changed my default to fish having seen it just for the few seconds i saw it on your it's handy right yeah

it's awesome yeah i know a lot of people like zsh yeah yeah i like fish better yeah zsh i think is i also see recommended the most uh and uh i think fish and uh oh heaven so heavens you know zs so fish and zsh are are related i'm pretty sure that uh fish was created from zsh that makes sense because you know shells aren't exactly the most easiest thing in the world to you know come up out of thin air so all of the fish beauty is built on top of ZSH's awesome built-in stuff. And fish just knew how to use ZSH. Blaster, you have a shell you like. Yeah, I've come to like TCSH actually after working on some of the BSD servers

that I have access to. Very nice. Very nice. So there you go. There are some shells you can check out besides boring old shell-shocked bash. I kid. All right, Mike writes in. And guess what Mike wants to stir the pot on? System D. But I thought it was actually a good email, so we'll go into this.

Not to get the whole system D discussion going again, but he says, I finally identified why I've disliked system D for so long. And now that I identified that, I'm actually okay with system D. I have a feeling that my situation also applies to many other who have disliked SystemD. What frustrated me the most about SystemD is that it had an awful product positioning, for lack of a better term. When it first came

out, it billed itself as a simple init replacement, plus a syslog replacement, plus a cron replacement, which in my mind makes about as much sense as putting alcohol, tobacco, and firearms under a single agency. But at least I could get my head around it, and I was fine with it. But then it started taking control of login and managing my temp mount, among other things.

I became confused and frustrated. This wasn't part of the agreement. What kind of cancer is this, System D? I've since realized that even though System D still describes itself as just being an init replacement, it's actually designed to become an entire operating system layer. It wants to be in charge of everything that happens between the kernel and X11. UDEV, DBUS, login, DHCP client, WPA supplicant, etc.

If there's a job that runs before the display manager starts, SystemD wants to provide it. Now that I know what SystemD's true purpose is, it no longer confuses and frustrates me. In fact, I'm kind of okay with it. I could even go ahead and replace mount and fstab for all I care. I mean, that's what it's designed to do, right? Is he right, guys?

Is SystemD designed to just manage all of the things between the kernel and X? Yeah. Yeah, I think it kind of is, too. That's my impression. Alright, Otter it kind of is, too. I think it's providing that kind of abstraction. Yeah, that's my impression. All right, Otter, you have something to say. Go ahead.

Yeah, I was just going to say this idea has occurred to other people as well. Upstart was also going to replace cron and auto-mount mounting and things like that the difference is uh upstart had a limited budget whereas system d had redhead behind it well okay yes i you know it's so i i i think what i want i want to go back up so system d michael dominic on coda radio uh if you haven't listened to this week's coda radio, he goes after me the entire episode. And he got on me about SystemD and was really trying to get to the root of it. And one of the things that he sort of stressed was like, wait a minute, when you describe it, it sounds almost like some of these things are necessary. And I'll give you an example of one of the things that SystemD does for me on my servers that, to me, feels like something that has to be in Linux for it to stay competitive. And that is that SystemD manages my NFS mounts.

And the reason why I find that to be important is because I've had networking issues here at the studio because of Comcast, and we reboot things like our router and even the switch just to be safe sometimes. And my network connections go up and down. And SystemD recognizes that and is intelligent enough to reestablish my NFS mount after the network connection is live again, which makes all of the server software that runs over that NFS mount continue to function without me having to do anything. Now that's handy just here having a server that never leaves the studio. But on a laptop or a phone or a tablet where you're moving between cellular and Wi-Fi and different Wi-Fi networks, that's a must-have critical feature.

And that's just one thing that system D now manages that is extremely – I don't even think it's like a nice-to-have feature. I think it's like we've got to have that now. It's got to be – the operating system has to be more cohesive. It has to be more intelligent. It has to be communicating with each other to stay competitive. It has to be more intelligent. It has to be communicating with each other to stay competitive. And I mean competitive in a way where people actually continue to use it because if it doesn't do these things, it'll start to look old

and not appropriate for modern-day tests. And I recognize that we're kind of betting a lot on system D, but I don't see anybody else really... I guess that's part of it is I don't really see any other alternatives really kind of stepping up to do the whole thing. Well, I ask the key is that nobody else is doing it, and it seems to be a great solution. It's worked for me. It's worked for a lot of people.

PCWiz, you think it's more it's not what systemd does. It's how it does it. What do you mean? I think just the way they're not using standard Unix pipes and things to communicate between the different utils is what's upsetting most people. Because if they just set it out like standard Unix utilities and used pipes to communicate between them, then I don't think people would have such a problem with it. But because it's doing its own custom thing and outputting the binary files, that's the problem people have with it not particularly that all this stuff shouldn't be there and should be unified under one set of things but it should be in different bits that talk in the standard unix way all right all right very good

now we're going to open up something special. We're all done with the system debate. We've got to talk about Ubuntu and the future and some really flashy stuff that I saw today. And I'm glad that Popey is here because maybe I think we'll get this straight with Popey. We won't make it awful. Popey will save us, I'm told. I'm told. Hopefully. Hopefully.

Because I want to discuss that we got some great visuals of the next generation apps that we'll probably be able to get our hands on in Ubuntu 14.10 just to play around with. And I want to see what you guys think and kind of get your take on, you know, if you think they're going to be, if you think they're going to get the job done for you and if you're excited about them. I actually watched a video, I don't know who posted it, I'll get that before we go on, this morning, and some of those apps are looking pretty damn good, especially the Movies and Videos app look really good. So before we get to that, I want to tell you about our next sponsor, and that's Linux Academy. Go to linuxacademy.com slash unplug to get the 33% discount and to check out the brand new website. Man, Linux Academy just really spruced it up. Go over there just to check that out. These guys, I got to talk to them. I got to talk to them to redesign the Jupyter Broadcasting website, because I tell you, this is how you do it. I could see this look working for us.

I could see that. So what is Linux Academy? It's probably where you should go right now if you're ready to take your Linux skills up to the next level, make yourself a little more competitive, maybe get that checkbox on the next review, or just sort of test yourself, find out what you're ready to take your Linux skills up to the next level, make yourself a little more competitive. Maybe get that checkbox on the next review or just sort of test yourself. Find out what you're interested in. Linux Academy has a whole range of courses. And your subscription gets you access to all of it and all of the new stuff they're adding.

DevOps stuff. AWS classes. Basic Linux classes to expert level Linux classes. OpenStack. And they have seven plus distributions you get to choose from when you're taking any of these courses. The courseware will modify itself to match that distribution. They have downloadable comprehensive study guides. You can take those offline. That includes media like audio and video files as well. I've heard from many listeners who now use those downloads as sort of like supplemental podcasts. So when they're not listening to the

shows, they get a little extra learning in. And Linux Academy also has the ability to generate a learning course, a learning plan, just based on your availability. You go in there and plug in the information you've got. They'll build a plan that fits your schedule. When you open up the dashboard, you get an immediate snapshot of right where you're at, what you have, how long each section is going to take. You can do recaps. You can test yourself. You can rewatch video introductions. And if you get to a spot, you can also seek instructor help. They also have an active community and live streams of events where you can talk right to the educators. They're constantly adding new stuff. A lot of these are scenario-based training courses. That way you go end-to-end with

the technology. For example, if it's an AWS course, you'll implement things on EC2 and S3. They'll spin up the instances for you as the courseware requires it. That's really awesome. And now these servers have public addresses so that way other people can log in and you can work in a group. It's pretty awesome stuff. And they're adding new things all the time. So head over to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. You'll get a 33% discount. And this is a school put together by Linux enthusiasts and educators who had the know-how to do something like this, who wanted to give Linux users a spot to go and actually learn something,

and not this stuff that you go to that's sort of like cookie-cutter Linux material that's been put together by some industry. This is from stuff from folks who work in the industry. They really know their stuff, and they're experienced educators. It's an experience that's custom-crafted for Linux users, and you can find it at linuxacademy.com slash unplugged.

Check out all of their awesome stuff. It's another great way to go if you just want to spruce up your skills. I've mentioned before they've got courseware on rsync and backup scripts, bash scripting, things like that, Android development, PHP, the entire LAMP stack, all of that. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Okay, so I'm not going to play a lot of this video because a lot of people listen to the show in the audio version.

But, Popey, I assume you've seen this video that was posted online, the Ubuntu Next Gen apps for 14.10. Have you seen this? No. No, I have. Okay. I've only briefly, I haven't actually watched the whole thing. So I've never seen, like, the movies app. This is the first time I've, I think maybe I. I've only briefly, I haven't actually watched the whole thing. So I've never seen like the movies yet.

This is the first time I've, I think maybe I've seen screenshots of it, but this is like the first time I've ever seen the UI resizing. Is that Flashback? I don't know. It just says movies in the title bar. Yeah, Flashback. Right. Is that the name of it?

Flashback? Yeah. Cool. So this is the one that gets shown. Then also music gets shown quite a bit. What we're seeing is it's obviously like you know for you those of you listening i mean this is clearly a touch ui uh and that makes sense at this stage too but it's fully usable on the desktop and and the rescaling has surprising functionality on the desktop like there's actually like you like well

i always pictured that dynamic rescaling really just for like going from phone to desktop but actually works really well on the desktop too just depending on where you position the window this all looks pretty slick most of the apps actually in that video haven't been optimized for desktop most of them are actually uh tuned for phone and tablet and when we're not even begun to work on them for the desktop we've done the absolute minimum to get them working on the desktop and some of them actually look really good. So, I mean, kind of what, like, I'm going to take an optimistic road here

and I'm going to go, like, way down the road, like, you know, even maybe past 16.04. But we're going way down the road here. Is really what we would have is at that point, the Ubuntu desktop is almost entirely an ecosystem of its own in terms of apps right so it's got its it's got you presumably unity 8 by that point it's got its own terminal app it's its own file manager all these things so that's a lot in one sense it's a big burden for canonical to maintain all that stuff but in the other sense it's nothing not

different than what the gnome project itself is doing or elementary os is doing you know with potentially a lot less resources. And it seems to be maybe this is kind of becoming the trend is just to create your entire own ecosystem under Linux? Not really. We didn't create everything from scratch. I mean, worth noting that most of the apps that are in that video were created

by people in the community. They weren't actually created by Canonical. They were, the projects were started by Canonical. Pretty much 80-90% of the code, if not more, in some of those projects was written by community people, volunteers. And they're the people I work with every day. And they're not all written from scratch either. So, for example, you mentioned, you happened to mention the two apps which build upon existing frameworks. So, for example, you mentioned you happen to mention the two apps which build upon existing frameworks.

So, for example, the terminal app builds on console. I thought so. The KD console. OK. And the file manager builds on some modules that give us the basic file manager functionality. And on top of that, we built a QML interface. So what you're kind of saying is a lot of this functionality kind of comes for free and then you have to kind of build maybe something on top of it in a sense.

So it's not like it's a massive… Yeah, we have to build a QML UI on top, yeah. So there really is a potential for Ubuntu to have some pretty good first-class grade applications that are kind of exclusive to the Ubuntu desktop touch platform. Well, they don't have to be exclusive. Right, right, right. I don't mean intentionally exclusive. Right. I mean, they're all free software.

So, you know, if you wanted to run them on your platform, so long as you've got the necessary dependencies, which for most of them is, you know, have you got Qt 5.3, which is in, you know, Debian and various other distros, I'm sure it's already in Arch, you know, you could probably run most of this stuff. So it's not intentionally, you not intentionally specific to Ubuntu. Yes, it uses the Ubuntu look and feel,

uses our toolkit, uses our branding, and we target Ubuntu as the first platform. Right, but I'm picturing like 17.04, 18.10 releases, like the amount of features, because at that point there will be so many applications that get updated as part of an Ubuntu desktop update, like looking at where 1410 is at today versus where something like 1810 would be at, there is going to be a whole new suite of applications that are shipped in those updates that don't even exist today on the Ubuntu desktop.

Right. And those don't have to be created by us. We've created this store where you can upload your own apps. I'll give you a good example, actually. This week, I saw someone tweet about a calculator app for Firefox OS. And I found it on GitHub, and I grabbed the code, and I packaged it up. It's an HTML5 app, and I stuck it in the Ubuntu click store.

And now that's available for people on the phone and in the future that'll be available on the desktop and that took me minutes to take a piece of code that had already been written turn it into a package the package consisted of like three files three plain text files that are easy to do in fact i copy and pasted them from another one of my projects so it. So it's like near zero effort to take a piece of code that you've created and make it available. And in the future, yeah, we'll have the store that will allow you to deploy those click packages

to desktop, tablet, phone. So what do you think about the fact that, like, some Linux users will be coming to Ubuntu from a different distro, and it's going to be like an entirely, they're going to have, they'll have to learn an entirely different suite of applications. Right, and look how awesome

they already are, and we're nowhere near ready for those people yet. Right, yeah, I mean, I'm not saying it's going to be a bad thing, but it's going to be, for me it's weird because like right now, if I learn, you know, how to use like a file manager, like say Dolphin or whatever,

it's the same Dolphin on all versions of Linux that I install KDE on. It's just going to be a different thing. I'm not saying it's bad or good. It's just something new, I think. Yeah, but these are default applications. I mean, look what Elementary are doing with their default applications. They're setting themselves aside and having their own brand, their own style, their own theme to set themselves aside.

They're not necessarily forking Linux or anything like that. They're making a statement that this is what elementary OS is. And when you come to elementary, you get slightly different applications. Okay, the file manager looks like a file manager, and just the same as our file manager looks like a file manager. The music app will have different features, maybe more, maybe less. So do you think the biggest challenge will be factoring these in a way where they seem a little more native

to a desktop interface going forward? Do you think that's going to be the... I don't think that's the biggest issue. I mean, it's one of the issues. The design team haven't focused on the desktop. That's why Unity 8 isn't finished yet. Unity 8 is a preview remix CD you can get. It's not the default desktop.

We're not going to make that mistake again. Yeah, I mean, I'm looking forward to at least trying to get to play around with them a little bit. I just think it's... Well, you already can. They're all available. They're all free software. You can grab them and play with them. The

code is all on Launchpad. We build devs. You can install them or you can play with them on a phone. It's impressive to see how far they've come already, really. I've seen people... People seem to really not get past the fact that I've seen a lot of people complain about the file manager has a huge header bar

up top and things like that. They're obviously not accepting the fact that they really haven't focused on the desktop UI yet. Right, but even on the phone, it has that quite big header, and we're looking at improving that. So next week, as I've mentioned to you before, I'm going to be in Washington, D.C. Yeah, I've heard that, D.C., yeah.

And a bunch of the people who wrote those apps that are in that video, a whole bunch of them are coming with us, and we're going to work on all kinds of things, whether it's design or fixing bugs, performance, feedback from users. So we're going to look at comments on those videos, comments on Reddit threads and see what people think of those apps and see what we can do to improve them and how people use them. So yeah, it's an open source project. So we take feedback and we improve them. And I will have the video that was posted if you guys are curious. It's a

great video and it's up on, we'll have it linked in the show notes. And you can just search YouTube for Ubuntu next gen apps on Ubuntu 14.10 as well. You just search YouTube. And you get to see some of these apps in action here. Like, do you know what populates this TV and movies? What do you call it? Yeah, that one's called Flashback. It's written by a guy called Necklesh, who's actually the same guy who wrote the Clock app

that's on our phone. Oh, cool. That's also in that video. Is it doing, like, a TVDB search here? It uses, I think it's called tracked okay yeah yeah which is an online service for tracking the tv program she like yeah and he he's one of the first i mean he's he's blazing a trail because you know we haven't even written massively convergent apps you know we talk about convergence as this ultimate goal by 1604 right but he's blazing a trail he's created a convergent app

that works on the phone, works on a tablet, and works on a desktop and adapts itself to the space that's available. And we're learning from him. And he gave so much feedback to the SDK developers at the last summit that we had in Malta. That's why we have these community people developing apps, because it helps to further the platform and give us feedback on what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong that's really cool to hear that they're having a direct uh a direct impact like that because you know it's one thing to say community's involved but that sounds like communities actually oh directly yeah really directly involved that's pretty i'm looking forward to at least getting it so uh in if i install 1410 do i just add a ppa and

i get those or how would i get those today if i wanted to play around with some of that stuff so we have a core apps ppa um that all the devs are built for 1410 okay um so yeah there if you install 1410 uh and it's and added the core apps ppa just google core apps ppa you'll find it okay um and their daily builds of all those all those apps i think i'm gonna play with that cool all right yeah and and again keep in mind like like poppy said they're not yet fully set up for the desktop so don't get all judgy it's just for playing and uh you know yeah we get a bit twitchy when we see when we see videos but i mean it's it's great to see people like excited but yeah what the what the community guys are doing with these apps. But equally, we get a little bit scared because we know they're not finished.

And people need to be aware of that. Yeah. And if there's one you really like, buy that dev a beer, and maybe he'll implement a feature for you if you ask him very nicely. You never know. Or contribute code. Patch is welcome, as always. That's always great, too. All right, well, so I wanted to, while we're talking about developing software,

I wanted to talk about some speed bumps that Lightworks developers ran into. You know the editor that Matt and I talked about quite a bit on last, Lightworks? They ran into a major issue caused by a Linux kernel update that just sort of blindsided them and took them a while to sort of track it down. And it's just kind of a good snapshot of sometimes some of the problems developers face while writing a major application for Linux and how it happened. It's all kind of interesting. So I'll tell you about that. But first, I want to tell you about Ting. Go to linux.ting.com. Won't you? Linux.ting.com lets them know that you appreciate them supporting Linux Unplugged. And it's a good way to go check

them out and get a $25 discount on your first device. And if you already have a device, you can get a $25 credit for Ting. So what is Ting? It's my mobile service provider. It's mobile that makes sense. It's mobile with no contract. It's mobile where you only pay for what you use. Ting doesn't have prepaid plans and packages like that. It's just your usage.

Ting takes your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. They add them up. Whatever bucket you fall into, that's what you pay. Ting takes your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. They add them up. Whatever bucket you fall into, that's what you pay. It's a flat $6 for your line, so you can have unlimited devices with no contract and no early termination fee. And Ting has a rocking dashboard where you can manage your account,

get a snapshot of exactly where you're at, and they also work on the Android or iOS devices with their app. Plus, they've got no-hold customer service. You call them at 1-855-TING-FTW any time between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. business hours and an actual human being, a real one. Somebody said, please stop saying an actual Canadian. It makes us feel bad. I'm including everyone on the planet now. I don't know if everyone working at Ting is a Canadian or not, but I do have a pretty good suspicion that everyone

answering the phone is a human being. I have not personally verified that, but based on the folks I've talked to, they seem quite human to me. So I'm going to vouch for them. And you can find out by calling them at 1-855-TING-FTW. Find out for yourself. They'll probably answer you and any other questions you have because they're empowered to solve your problems. And now's a great time to switch to Ting. Go to linux.ting.com to get the discount and give us credit. They have a warehouse sale. Ting is upgrading their warehouse, and they'd rather give you these devices for a crazy great price than have to move them. Can't say I don't blame them.

That sounds like my style of moving. Take it. I don't want it. I don't want to have to move it. You know, I hate moving stuff. Ting feels the same way. Right now, I don't know how, I can't imagine they're going to have many more of these in stock, but you can pick up the Sierra 4G Tri-Band LTE Hotspot for $63 with Ting's warehouse sale.

$63 plus a $20 Ting credit, and you're going to get our $25 Ting credit. Now, hold on and think about this. You only pay them for what you use with this bad boy. So that's a $6 hotspot because it's $6 for the line, and then that $20 credit is going to last you a while. So you can have a hotspot. Try BandLT. Like, if I was Popey and I was going to go to that fake Washington, I would pick up one of these just for while I was here,

and I wouldn't be able to use the whole thing, and I'd have data with me the whole time. Every time I came to the States, I'd turn it on. And in Ting's dashboard, you can turn things on and off when you need them, so it's another great way to save money. They've got a bunch of great devices right now, including just straight-up feature phones. Hey, maybe you just want to make a phone call.

I know, right? You want to use your phone to make calls and you just want a really great battery, like a three-day battery life. Well, you can pick up a feature phone right now for a ridiculously low price, $43 plus $20 in 10 credits with no contract and no early termination fee. And you're just paying for your usage for a feature phone that's going to get like three days of battery life. Plus it still has a decent camera so like if you get in a car accident you need something for the insurance you can still at least take a picture of it so you're not like a total caveman but it's mostly going to be for making calls and i don't think there's anything wrong with that if that's how you rock that's how you rock i respect that

linux.ting.com linux.ting.com and a big big thank you to Ting for sponsoring. Linux Unplugged. Go check them out. Woo-hoo. All right, so now this isn't going to be a pity party, but I wanted to cover this. I think it's legit that we talk about this, and this is like, you know, this doesn't have anything to do with packaging. This doesn't have anything to do with SystemD or anything like that. But LightworksDeveloper on a Red Shark blog,

that's the blog that tracks the Lightworks development, talked about the problems he ran into and the eventual positive side of it by developing for Linux. He says, in recent weeks, some of the Lightworks Linux users started to report reduced performance in both new and old versions of the software. It's like, hmm, multiple versions are affected. After some investigation, it appeared the slowdown was only affecting systems with Linux kernels newer than 3.13. In tests, kernel performance in 3.14 did seem to be slightly worse than earlier versions,

but nothing could explain the symptoms that were being experienced by Lightworks users. So what could possibly explain this sudden change in behavior? Many of the media files that editors use, you have to kind of understand this part of it, many of the media files that editors use are compressed, like H.264 and stuff like that. Well, these compressed files have a massive downside, and it's something that we try to avoid here at the Jupiter Broadcasting Studios.

We actually record in lossless, with the exception of BSD Now, because they're recording it on the east coast of Canada. So we have one show where we manage, we edit a compressed file. All our other shows are uncompressed. So media editors, when they're working with compressed files, have to deal with this thing where there's these gaps in the frames where the editor is just supposed to figure out the frame numbers that go in between. And it's just sort of assumed you figure it out.

And the problem with that is these editors have to open up every single frame in between these gaps to count them all. And that can take megabytes and megabytes and megabytes and megabytes of memory per clip because it has to open them all up in a memory to count them to figure out the number of frames in between these gap markers. And that takes tons of RAM. That's why you need

a lot of RAM in an editing system. And so what started happening is when you've had tons, tens of hundreds of files open at once, you start running into low memory. Okay, not a problem. That's why we have great memory management. And, in fact, Lightworks handles this by constantly monitoring the system's memory usage, and then it automatically limits and ultimately empties its various caches when it notices the amount of free memory is starting to get low and staying low. This technique relies on being able to ask the operating system, ask the Linux kernel, to report how much memory is available in total and how much has been used and how much is available right now to use.

Starting with Linux kernel 3.14, free memory is being reported entirely differently. Differently enough that it causes Lightworks software to start believing that there is no free memory left at all when in fact there was. As a result, the memory monitoring code responded as it was designed to by ensuring that all the frames and file caches were completely empty all the time. So as you might imagine, that had a major detrimental performance effect on the Lightworks editor. Every time a frame or file was added to the cache, it was then having to be immediately purged. Well, that could happen, you know, 30 times a second, right?

Or 60 times a second, depending on what you're editing. So it was forcing this constant recompressing, decompressing of the media file every time you access that area of the file. So they immediately didn't leap to the idea that it was the kernel, though, right? So tracking down the problem became kind of an endeavor because it kind of seemed like the culprit would be probably a piece of their code that wasn't running properly anymore rather than a piece of code in the Linux kernel that was different. That wasn't what they expected.

Thankfully, they say once they did track it down to the way 3.14 was reporting its memory usage, rectifying the issue was not a majorly time-consuming process, and it actually afforded them an opportunity to rewrite the code in such a way that it made it immune to further possible kernel changes like this in the future. So it sounds like maybe they weren't doing something quite the right way, but at the same time, it sounds like a pretty key piece of the Linux kernel kind of just changed right out from underneath them. You wouldn't think it would happen so suddenly like that, but I've seen, and this is over the course of many years, that sort of thing happen, and it's rare,

but when it does, usually it's like a real punch to the face yeah and uh usually i see this with wireless devices every every three or four years they just do something stupid with the one device that you depend on you know i've learned to have multiple devices and to see that in something like software in this space to where it's like somebody can as a professional be relying on this application. Oh, hey, by the way, screw you. You're out of luck. Through no fault of anyone's, it still sucks. Derek Devlin, is it Lightworks' responsibility that their developers have an open dialogue

and relationship with the kernel team? What are your thoughts? Definitely. One of the things Linus is always talking about is that they won't break user space. So unless people are saying, look, this will break user space for me, they won't know. So they will have to break user space. And sometimes it's inevitable. has no fallback of that functionality. So if I was doing a predictive algorithm, I need to make sure that my prediction works. So I have to put some heuristics that say,

okay, this is changing too fast. I'm going to start using constants and just be a performance hit that it's guaranteed because otherwise the software becomes unreliable. That's kind of design. You make decisions. They made one that was bad. I think so. But Colonel Linux, this problem has sort of already been solved by the marketplace,

in a sense. If you're a media production shop and you're working on Hollywood's next blockbuster, chances are you're probably not running Debian, Unstable, or Fedora, right? Right. And we're in this boat we use uh we use lightworks professionally and we i didn't this is the first i'm hearing about the problem and probably the reason is because the production machine is still on 1204 right yeah wouldn't that be your best bet and why not because the primary purpose of the machine is nothing to do with what the operating system can do it's all about running that application well yeah exactly for us it the machine boots up and lightworks takes over.

And if you've used Lightworks, then you know that Lightworks essentially behaves almost like an independent operating system, right? That's a monster. It essentially captures the screen and everything. You have essentially a little desktop to work on. So the operating system kind of fades to the background. Yeah. And it's exactly why that we have, you know, obviously the guy that's always talking about Arch and rolling releases. This is exactly the use case for a long-term stable distro right here in a nutshell because it isolates you from these kinds of things.

Now, that said, I still elect for my systems to go rolling. Now, I'll be the first person to tell you, though, if our editing was done under Linux, which I wish it were, if it was, I think absolutely we'd probably be LTS. We'd probably be Ubuntu, because I think that's probably what the Lightworks guys are targeting. And that would be the end of it. And I would not probably want to upgrade from 1204 until I had to. Makes sense. Unless there was some kernel feature I had to have or something like that. But when it comes to the systems that I'm browsing the web

and gaming on and show research, yeah, I want rolling. I think that's, I don't know. Daredevil, oh, go ahead, Matt. No, I was going to say, I think there's inherent logic to that. I mean, it's like, of course, I'm not using Lightworks on a regular basis.

I use other applications for video editing because I'm much lower level stuff. But, you know, if I was to experience that, I think it would definitely kind of jolt my chair a little bit. And it would probably make me reevaluate the distro I'm using almost instantly based on what you described. Oh, man. You know what? Wizard just totally made me reconsider my whole position. Go ahead.

Yeah. So I can totally understand because I do deal with this fairly often. I still deal with my high school sometimes. And the one thing that always changes is I'm updating FFmpeg. And FFmpeg moves so fast. And, you know, something small, they could say, oh, well, we just found out we've been wasting CPU cycles here. And there's a 10% increase in speed. And, you know, when you're trying to get something quick,

like I'm sure you do, Chris, you're going to go and say, holy jeez, 10%. That's like another five minutes off my time. I don't understand. In fact, that's one of the areas where the Mac is kind of handy in terms of media production is the user space remains fairly consistent.

They trickle out updates to Final Cut, but Reekai, I believe, and I'm not totally positive about this because I'm not really involved with that aspect of it, but I believe Rikai uses something called Brew, which is kind of like AppGit for the Mac, and Brew just keeps FFmpeg up to date. So he's always got a fresh FFmpeg, but his editing tools remain fairly stale or however you want to put it. That's a nice combo. Homebrew, but yeah, you're close. Homebrew? Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah. So there you go.

And that's a nice system. And so there's ways you can do it on any box. You could always, like what I used to do when I had an old Ubuntu machine that was my primary driver is I custom built FFmpeg, and that worked too. So there's always an option. Yes, sir, yes, sir. All right. Well, people have asked if there's any updates to Ohio Linux Fest. I'll just mention right before we wrap up, it's still on.

When is that? It's at the end of October. And so far, I believe the crew from Jupyter Broadcasting includes Mr. Colonel Linux and Mr. Q5. And Colonel Linux, you're getting down there Thursday night. Is that right? Well, I might actually be there Tuesday or Wednesday. What? Yeah.

It's a long story. Okay. Okay. I feel bad because I'm not getting there until Friday. Now I kind of wish I was getting there on Thursday. You should. Well, it's kind of, you know, kids. Did you just say he should feel bad?

Yeah, he did. He did. Okay. So if you're going to be in the area on October 24th through the 26th, Jupiter Broadcasting will be rocking. Colonel Linux will be there. Q5 will be there. Angela and I will be there.

Blaster, of course. Anybody else in the Mumba Room going to be at Ohio? That's it, right? I think that's just who is here. And, Eric, you're going to be where and when if people want to see you? I am going to be at Seagull, which is the Seattle GNU Linux Conference at Seattle Community College.

Right. And not Seagull like the bird, right? How do you spell it? S-E-A-G-L. You can find out more information at seagull.org. .org. Okay, yeah. And that's going on at the same time right there in Seattle, October 24th and 25th. And so you could go down there if you're in the area and say hi to Eric. And this is their second year?

Yes, this is their second year. It's kind of interesting because they've got some big names like Karen Sandler is going to be doing the keynote. And there's quite a few people who will be there, such as Valerie Zimmerman of Kabuntu, as well as Albert Vaca of KDE. So there's quite a few people who will be there such as valerie zimmerman of kabuntu as well as albert vacca of kde so there's quite a few people also uh mark terra nova from um the fedora project is rumored to be there so there's gonna be quite a few people oh man i think so we're gonna have we're gonna have double double cover conference coverage at the same time so why we're in ohio you're gonna be in seattle and that that's going to be, that's nuts. Yeah, my interview microphone just arrived in the mail, and I just did a quick test on it while we were on the air,

and I haven't tested the sound, but it's working pretty good. Is that a euphemism for something? I don't know what that is. Testing his mic? Yeah, he's testing his mic while on air. I'm not sure what he means by that. All right. In a separate system.

I kept myself muted here. Wizard, do you know about somebody who's visiting? Which one? So there's actually going to be another big one at Seneca College in Toronto. And anyway, it's going to be fairly big. There's going to be a Red Hat founder there, as well as a couple other pretty important people. In fact, I believe Matt Dobson will be there, too. Yeah, this is the 23rd,

I believe. And where again? This is at Seneca College in Toronto. Wow. Wow. Talk about a crazy great weekend and open source going-ons. And you know what's nuts about that is like, and then a couple of days after that, MeetBSD down in California, Alan

and Chris Moore will be down there held at the Western Digital headquarters put on by iXsystems, and they'll be doing live streaming from that. So, like, I guess this must be fest season, and we're getting into it. Absolutely. I guess you've got to get it all out of the way

before the holidays and before it gets too crappy outside. Yeah, no kidding. All right. Just quickly getting there. I think we're all wrapped up. I think we've got everything I wanted to cover. One last just little plea for Linux Action Show is I got some in the queue right now,

but I need more of your Runs Linux. It could be just like you with a selfie in front of your Linux box, I guess. I don't know. It could be your own Runs Linux. It could be something you find in the wild. Send it to linuxactionshow at jupyterbroadcasting.com. Include like a picture or a link to a YouTube video if you would. And in the subject, put RunsLinux. It could be something you find in the wild. Send it to linuxactionshow at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Include a picture or a link to a YouTube video if you would. And in

the subject, put RunsLinux. You can also use the contact form over at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash contact and put RunsLinux in that subject. And that's also where you'd go to give us any kind of feedback. We love reading your feedback every single episode of Linux Unplugged. It's a big part of our lug. If you can't make it to the mumble room, which is an

open mumble room you can join for any episodes, our virtual lug, we'd love to hear your thoughts in email. Also, linuxactionshow.reddit.com. You can go there and get more show throughout the week and help us make the show a little bit better by commenting on stuff. I often look to that subreddit to see what you guys are talking about to see what might get some good conversation going in Linux Unplugged.

So even just sharing your insights and your votes helps a lot. And, of course, submitting stories and things like that. Matt, this weekend, if all goes as planned, if we get all of our ducks lined up, it's the big Ubuntu review, and it's going to be a blowout like nothing else, including Eric and I are going to be doing traveling and all kinds of things to make this happen.

It's going to be a big one. So I'll see you on Sunday, okay? All right, see you then. All right, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Un make this happen. It's going to be a big one. So I'll see you on Sunday, okay? All right. See you then. All right, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. Be sure to join us every single Tuesday. And if we don't see you on Tuesday, hope to see you on Sunday for the big show. See you right back here next week. Thank you. Just want to punch Comcast in the throat. That's all. I just want to punch him in the throat a little bit.

Yeah, so Matt, if you don't have an Ubuntu... Throw one from me as well. If you don't have a 1410 machine loaded up, get her going. We'll share our thoughts on Sunday's show and kick the tires. I got a rig that I've got it running on right now, and I'll tell everybody more about that on Sunday's show. I've got it running on a rig, not only Ubuntu, but Kubuntu and Ubuntu Mate. It's going to be a good one. So, oh, go ahead.

JBTitles.com. I was going to say JBTitles. And I was thinking about doing Lubuntu with the LXQT on there. What about Lube? You pervert. What about Lube? Lubuntu? That sounds like the adult version.

Lubuntu. Fish and chips. Oh, actually, Lubuntu. Do you like that? Fish and chips. Unifying Linux software is not bad. That's good Comcast unplugged

No kidding The master distribution Systemd ain't so bad JBtitles.com Thank you for spending A lot of time on Those core apps Those QML apps because the guys

Work really hard on that, and it's really nice for them to get a bit of exposure. I think it shows. Yeah, I thought it showed, and it's neat to see it. And I don't know how much we'll... Since they're not really necessarily production-ready, I don't think we'll spend too much time on them in the review. So it seemed like a good chance to get a little chance

to give them an exposure without working them into a review themselves, because I don't think they deserve being reviewed. No, they're not ready yet. And following on from last week's discussion, it was a nice bit of positivity. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, you bastards. Alright, are we going to get a title out of this?

Not just Ubuntu, but generally. Well, we've got Unifying Linux Software at the top. It's interesting, you know, so it was a holiday here in the States, Monday, and it's the Apple event on Thursdays. And I think having a holiday at the beginning of the week and an Apple event at the end of the week, the news cycle just goes like a dead fish, like it's just dead. Because A, people weren't working at the beginning of the week, and B, nobody wants anything they announce to be completely clobbered up by whatever Apple craps out on Thursday.

So nothing's going on this week. It's after... There's Android L as well on Thursday. Yeah, I actually thought it was tomorrow. Theoretically. And it's final release for Ubuntu 14.10 as well, final release candidate. Yeah, which obviously eclipses anything Apple or Google do. That's right, that's right. It's all anyone's going to be talking about.

Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty... Yeah. Speaking of both Apple and Lightworks, you know what you should do, Chris? You should install Lightworks on your beloved Mac. And then you could start editing in Lightworks. And then maybe at some point down the future, I could pry the...

I would love to be underhanded, backhanded compliments. I have it right now on my, I have it on my bonobos right now, actually. You edited anything on it yet? I edited our, a couple of our OSCON, I actually edited those, I edited those a while ago, but yeah, I edited a couple of our

OSCON videos, yeah. Oh, really? Okay, maybe I need to give you more credit. I think Noah forgot something, I think what you should do is put Lightworks on Mac and then play it at HTML5. The way I convert people to Linux is I get them using their software

that they're comfortable with on the platform or the software on the platform. So I figure I can baby step Chris away from his Mac and trash. You should, Noah, you should listen to this week's Coder Radio because Dominic was on me the whole time about that. And here's the thing is, I think one thing to kind of remember is I don't edit anymore. It's kind of a thing.

Yeah, so I mean, like, for me, that's why I can use Lightworks now because the editing I do is much... So you don't use a Mac anymore, you pay someone else to use a Mac for you? Yes. Yes. Yes. But you know what? Here's the thing, he bought the Mac and set it in front of him and said, here's the editing rig you're going to use. Well, yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's...

But that's, you know, we've had this... We've had this conversation a few times. I will stand by the claim that the tools are not just like... Boy, it's just a lot easier. No, it's more like the tools are like. You should stop using Skype as well. The years ahead. Here's the thing.

I don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to live production. But as far as editing goes, I think if you're willing to change your workflow a little bit, you could get away with doing it. Probably.