LINUX Unplugged - Episode 65: OpenSUSE Followup | LINUX Unplugged 65

Episode Date: November 5, 2014

We follow up on our review of openSUSE 13.2 & discuss how life on the rolling side has been going for some of our LUG members. Plus the hardware box that promises to replace your password manager & we say goodbye to the Linux Outlaws.

So, uh, now that Wimpy's here, and he's got an audio setup working, and Popey's here, right? Popey, you still here? Did you leave? What an asshole. Maybe. Oh, okay. So I saw some shenanigans on Google+. I don't know if you guys are familiar with this. It's a super secret social network that apparently nobody knows about.

Yeah, that's what I've told. Yeah, there's no one on it. But just some guy on there, Alan something or other, Pope something or other, posted a link about a super retro installer that reminded me of the good old days. And then I dug a little deeper and I discovered there is a brand new edition of Ubuntu Mate in the works, but it's not based on like 1504 or some shenanigans like that. No, friends, it's based on 1404. What the heck's going on here, guys? What?

People want it. It's as simple as that. Just giving them what they need. Since we started this, the number one thing that everyone's been asking for is when is there going to be an LTS version. People want to install it and forget about it. Set it and forget it. And then after that, it'll be 10.04, then 8. we're making it'll be 1004 then 804 then 606

yeah that's interesting so i guess boy huh look at that what's wrong with this picture it sounds like you're listening to your users i know i. I actually pay attention to what they say. Well, actually, yeah. Wimpy is listening to the user, the guy who comes in and says, I would like 14.04. That guy, we're making a distro just for him. No, that's awesome. It's kind of like Garmature. I'm kidding. No, that's good, though.

I think it also shows that people are all in on the LTS model which is yeah it really does especially you know on the buntu that's what wins but um actually 14.04 is quite an evolution on 14.10 so i think this 14.04 release is going to be what 14.10 should have been a lot of new features and a lot of fixes really so in some ways it's it's more of a newer version it is a newer version so for example in the in the 1404 version there's indicator support so you can add indicators in there now and we've pulled in all the latest uh marty packages from uh debbie and jesse so there's a number of updates there and then i've been working with all the guys from the accessible computing foundation and we have fixed everything that they've reported that didn't work with regards to accessibility.

So for them, this is a big deal. This is freaking brilliant. Yeah, yeah. It seems backwards, and I think it's better. Yeah, it is backwards in a sense. And you know what else? Like, the Mate desktop environment is perfect for something you can set and forget for a long time, because it's it's very

much like uh of a time that is sort of already established right so it's like perfect for that i think it's the coolest thing and i've just come back from a weekend in germany where i've been um the x to go gathering where the marta desktop is very popular amongst them for deployment of remote terminal services oh really boy i've been wanting to do a segment on X2Go for a little while now. Well, okay. If you look at X2Go, there's a couple of new features. They've got this new layer called telekinesis, and then they've developed this M-Teleplayer, and that is stonking.

So this is a tool that's been developed for doing real-time streaming of audio of audio and video through the remote terminal services and the demo i saw this weekend was a dual screen with full uh 4k video streaming over a remote terminal desktop and it was stunning that is slick gonna check it out and this this has been this has been developed because there's a company that's trying to develop some sort of set-top box type devices for use in China for delivering streaming video services. And they're doing it by bringing the whole desktop application to the client rather than just the streaming video. That's going to be exciting. I've played with some of that stuff and it worked surprisingly well even a few years ago.

Yeah, well, it's hot rocking now. I'm really impressed. I didn't know much about it until this weekend and I came away thinking, yeah, this is something I really need to get more involved in. So I've already started adding some integration pieces for X to go into Marte.

All right. Just before you wrap up chris there's a question in the irc uh one of the jb live listeners asking can can you turn a standard ubuntu 14.04 install with a ppa into a mate 14.04 do you think you can and there's a blog article i posted on the ubuntu mate website that explains how to do it. Boom! Nice. That's exciting. It's not as good as the real thing, though. Wait for the ISO. It's coming out at the weekend, and that's what you want to use.

Well, isn't it interesting how the Mate edition, in a way, is sort of eschewing so much of the trendy push... It's different. It's pushing it forward and introducing a lot of new stuff and making users happy, but's not chasing like the shiny right it's it's a different kind of pushing it forward and it's really cool to see it and it's so the so the lts makes so much sense in

that context i i think that's really exciting it kind of really appeals to me i like it yeah that's exactly i think i'm looking you want install the 14.04 version because you know how you like to wait a couple of months for all the bugs to get wrangled out. I do. Well, curiously, it's that backstep to 14.04 that's got all the stability and fixes in it that you'll be waiting for. So that's the one you want to install. Nice. I'll check that out. 14.04 is solid just because it's going to get, like, hardware enablements for a while.

And, I mean, so that's awesome. It's brilliant for running Steam as well. Nice, nice, nice. Yeah, or I was actually thinking it's probably the perfect Skype and Mumble rig. Yes. That's what I'm using exactly that now. Yeah, 14.04 Ubuntu Marte with Mumble.

It all works fine. I have a random question. Do you guys know of any... We've been playing with a couple of different packages. VSXU, I think, is one of them, something like that. I'm looking for something that will monitor your default line in and do a full-screen, real-time waveform visualizer. Almost like the old classic Winamp or iTunes plugins.

Maybe not something as gaudy. Maybe something that's just a straightforward waveform. It's like right now in this show we have the chat room up on the screen, but from time to time we might want to have a show that's not live. So we wouldn't have a chat room to put up there. So we were thinking, but it's an audio only show, we need to have the waveform as we talk. And I'd love to have

a Linux box that just has whatever is coming on the default in visualized that I can then capture and put that into our video recording. I believe there is, and I will look at that while the show is going on. Cool, yeah. Maybe you mentioned the post show or something because I've looked at a few of them, and we really need something that would be kind of full screen,

something that's attractive, and something that doesn't require, like a lot of them I looked at will play your music collection or things like that. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's powered by deep philosophical discussions. I don't even know what that means, but I'm going to go with it. My name is Chris. And my name is Matt. I guess it'd be philosophical discussions. I was trying to come up with a new term and I had nothing to go with it. My name is Chris. And my name is Matt. I guess it'd be philosophical discussions. I was trying to come up with a new term, and I had nothing, Matt.

Nothing. You were kind of morphing with the words. I felt it, though. That's what I get for doing a cold open. Well, 65, episode 65, and we've got a big show. We've got some follow-up on the OpenSUSA review, plus some new news and developments there. Producer Eric, he's become like our local OpenSUSA advocate.

He's been running it. He's switched to Tumbleweed. He's even rolling the good stuff now. And he's got some follow-up notes from our review, so we'll cover that. There's a new device, an open-source hardware device, that promises to replace all password managers. I think we're going to talk about that a little bit. And then one of our brothers has fallen.

One of our fellow podcasts is coming to an end. And we'll spend a little time talking about that and maybe what the root, the cause of that. And if it's a problem that's going to spread, we'll discuss that in the show today, too. Plus lots of feedback, Matt. So, man, we got a whole big show. Big show. I got like 15 tabs open right now. Holy cow. You know what I need, Matt? I need something like

tab groups. Just imagine if I could group all of my tabs together. Too bad Chrome doesn't support that, huh? That's really a shame. I was waiting for that to dig in. I guess there's just no way to do that. Anyways. Oh, boy. Hey, Mumble Room. How are you guys doing? You know, I was actually waiting for that discussion to happen at some point, ever since I became a producer.

I don't know why. Oh, is that something Firefox does? Oh, that's good to know. Yeah, yeah. Well, that was a heated discussion we had on the pre-show where the entire Mumble Room ganged up on me and tried to get me to switch to Firefox. But I believe I emerged unswitched,

although still considering. I have tried it before. I may try it again. You never know. Sometimes I walk away and I'm like, I'm never switching. And then a couple of days go by and I'm like, you know what, I'm going to switch.

I'll take a challenge. So if you're inspired to take a Firefox challenge, you know what? All right. All right. I'll do it. Here we go. I'll do it. Here we go. I'll take it.

You just convinced yourself. Yeah, I just did. I just. Those of you that are wondering what the pool is going to be for how many days he does this, I'll start one later. Yes, I just put Flop right here on air. All right, Popey. I'm going in with you, Popey. I'm going to take, starting tonight, I'm going to start taking the Firefox challenge. So if anybody out there at home is listening and is ready to switch back to Firefox or switch to Firefox from something,

maybe it's Chrome, maybe it's Internet Explorer, I'm going to start tonight. So start with me, and we'll see if we make it to the next Linux Unplugged. That's my benchmark. And I'll tell you up front, I'm concerned about UI legginess, inadequate syncing, and a lack of appropriate markdown extensions, primarily template, which is the name of the extension, which is extremely hard to Google when the template extension is called template. You know what the most important thing is, Chris, is that as long as you can go ahead and watch Netflix in it without any problems, you're golden. Oh, wait, that's right. You can't.

And by the way, if I have problems with Firefox, the answer coming back is, well, you should submit a bug is not going to be acceptable when there's an alternative that does the things. Anyways, moving on from that, we'll do a we'll do follow up in next week's episode. And so if anybody out there wants to take the Firefox challenge with me, let's start tonight. In the meantime, and Poppy, how long are you going to do it for? Are you going to go try to make it till next week? Are you just going to keep going as long as possible? I'll try and last longer than you. Let's have a little competition, shall we? You know, so wait a minute.

Okay. Are you going to try to make – okay. All right. Fine, Povey. No, wait. No, I can't do it. I can't do it because I have show prep stuff that you don't have to do. You don't have to worry about the markdown stuff like I worry about.

Oh, boo. All right. I'll tell you what. I'm going to try to get it to next week. It just means show prep is going to take longer And I have a lot of shows Alright I'll get to it until next week And if I can keep going I'll be like Kramer driving on empty I'll keep on going as long as I possibly can

Until I run out of fuel in the Firefox tank I'll be checking on you And Rotten Corpse you're going to take a challenge too? Yeah I'll take the Oprium challenge Oprium! Shh! I'm younger than all of you I have better stamina You're going to take a challenge, too? Yeah, I'll take the Oprium challenge. Okay, good. Oprium! Shh! You know what?

I'm younger than all of you. I have better stamina, so I will try to last the longest on Firefox. What are you on right now? I'm on Chrome, of course. Okay, good. All right. Okay, good. All right.

Of course. We've got a genuine Masters of Our Own Domain competition here. I like that. Oh, hell, I'll join. Oh! Can you install Firefox on OpenSUSE? They got a repo for that, Eric? Don't need a repo. It's in the main. Oh, is that how that works?

All right. So David from Alabama writes in, and he says, save me from Unity. Sorry, guys. For those of you who love Unity, don't take offense. But he breaks it down here. He says, what's up, guys Sorry, guys. For those of you who love Unity, don't take offense. But he breaks it down here. He says, what's up, guys? I love all the JB shows, especially Last Foe and Unplugged.

I'm a football coach. And he says, yes, insert your dumb jock joke here. Hey, jocks are allowed in Linux. Trust us. It's fine. I mean, we might just resent you a little bit, but you're totes allowed. No, I'm kidding. But really, he says, I like Linux, and I listen to you guys on my way to work on my Nexus 5. Even though a lot of what you guys talk about tends

to be over my head, I learn a lot. I noticed that you said Borderlands 2 and Borderlands the Pre-Sequel have come to Linux, so I downloaded both on my Ubuntu 14.04 box. I have the NVIDIA proprietary drivers installed, and my hardware specs are pretty good. I got a GTX 750 Ti. was installed, and my hardware specs are pretty good. I got a GTX 750 Ti. It's got an AMD FX 8320 CPU. Everything seems groovy under Ubuntu, but he's just, he's not

liking Unity. It's not working for him. He says, I just don't find it aesthetically pleasing for myself, so I loaded GNOME. I like it a lot, but when he plays games in full screen in GNOME, he notices there's like a screen tearing effect. He said under Unity, he used Compass Settings Manager

to disable full screen rendering, or what's it called, the unidirectional, unredirect, unredirect full screen applications, what the checkbox is called in Compass Manager. So he did that for Unity, but now there's no such setting under GNOME. So I'm not totally sure that the screen tearing he's seen under GNOME is due to any compositing. But I thought maybe we could punt it to the Mumble Room.

Maybe there's been some folks in here that have troubleshot this kind of stuff. Any ideas for what could be causing screen tearing on his 3D game? Well, by chance, did he say what kind of game it was? Borderlands. I'm assuming it's Borderlands. And it's an NVIDIA graphics card with the proprietary driver and I was wondering if it could be a v-sync issue me too

yeah sorry this cropped up on the Ubuntu Marte community a couple of days ago and somebody actually found a fix for it so if you give me a minute I'll go and find the solution there's a similar problem in XFCE with its compositor turned on. It causes a lot

of screen tearing. You can get rid of that by using Compton, I believe it is. Yeah, I believe it's Compton. And I am not positive because I've been essentially the same setup. GNOME 3, NVIDIA graphics card. I've tried it on a 600 series

and a 700 series graphics card. Full screen, Borderlands. I don't have any tearing on my local screen. I actually sometimes get tearing on capture because it's sending an interlaced signal out. But on my local LCD panel, no tearing. And I cannot remember if vSync plays a role in this. I seem to remember it does. So if anybody has any suggestions, too, you could also put it in the comment sections for the feedback.

I'm reading the chat room right now. Floppy Bacon says GLX blank is the option. Check for that. GLX V blank. Look for that. So, yeah. And if you do find it, you can drop it in the chat room or if you're listening after the fact in the subreddit. I believe the Arch subreddit has something about that with graphics

in particular. Okay. Yeah, it's... No, not Arch subreddit, but Arch wiki. And I know Cinnamon 2.4, which was just released last week, one of the things that they enabled by default is when an application goes fullscreen, the compositor is disabled. Kwin does this as well.

Yep. My understanding is that Mutter does as well, but I'm not sure, and I have not noticed the problem myself. Okay, next email comes in from Les. So we just heard about a hardware woe. Les wants to take the other track. In fact, he thinks maybe we don't do this

often enough. He says, hey Chris, Matt in the Mumble Room, in a recent episode of Linux Unplugged, there was discussion about a laptop that had a graphics issue when booting Linux. Chris made a comment that he was disappointed these kinds of things are happening still. I think as a Linux community, we beat ourselves up about this far too much. Yes, there is occasional problems, but as a community, we focus on these problems, often cite them as reasons why Linux is unsuccessful, on the desktop even. But to counter this, I wanted to mention my recent experience. I bought a Samsung laptop, I use it for testing,

and I've had no problems installing Ubuntu, Elementary, or even OpenBSD. With the exception of a binary driver for Wi-Fi and OpenBSD, everything works out of the box, including graphics and power management, sleep mode. Last week, though, I had the need for a Windows 7 system. So, as the laptop originally came with it, I installed a fresh copy of Windows 7. After the install, the graphics were terrible, and on inspection, Windows had failed to identify nine items of hardware.

This included both the wired and wireless NICs. I then had to spend a whole evening first trying to get my NIC working, then trying to track down the drivers. I had many hours of searching using Samsung's tool, only to find six of the nine drivers. After many hours, I finally got it all working using Samsung's tool only to find six of the nine drivers. After many hours, I finally got it all working using another detection

tool from Intel that identified some of my chipset. Then when the system finally restarted after installing everything, it all ended with the blue screen of death loop. At that point, I gave up and just installed Ubuntu Mate Edition, which of course worked perfectly. Sorry for the long story.

But I think it's important that we recognize it's far worse than other platforms. And maybe we should focus on the positives a bit more. Linux hardware detection is pretty good. I remember the days of Red Hat 4.x. Keep up the great work and stay positive. Less. Isn't he right? He's really right.

Yeah, I would agree. I would definitely agree. It's gotten so much better. And then out of the box, the only system that is better than hardware detection out of the box is OS X because you can only install it on Macs. But as soon as you try to put it on anything else, it is a full-fledged train wreck. And Windows is just as bad. You get lucky with the Windows box. If your NIC's detected and it's semi-older hardware, like it's in that Windows sweet spot, it'll pull down a lot of it.

But nothing matches Linux with the diversity, right? I mean, nothing. That's true. I mean, I remember back in the repair days, you always had that spare NIC that you kept on hand so that when you repaired someone's computer and you knew you were going to have to chase down those drivers, you had a means of connecting to the Internet to do so. That was a definite interesting time. And, yeah, Linux really solves those problems. I mean, legacy peripherals are even a better example. And yeah, Linux really solves those problems.

I mean, legacy peripherals are even a better example. Derek Devlin, do you suppose that we sometimes focus on the negative stuff because we're problem solvers? We want to analyze the problem and try to fix it? Totally. And I think this non-acceptance of something still missing or something not working is what makes us in the position we are, really. And I think we actually should keep that mentality, is that we'll keep improving Linux. Contrary to Windows folks, which stabilize, look, they're dying.

Eric, have you ever had that experience where you pull a drive from one Linux rig and move it over to another machine and plug it in, and it actually boots up? Yes, I have. It's brilliant. It just like automatically, the kernel knows what it's doing. It detects the hardware, configures the machine for that hardware, and boom, you're done. I actually, not exactly moving a drive from one machine to another, but using CloneZilla to clone an entire disk from one disk to another.

Yeah, yeah. And it just works works it works better than windows and a lot better than mac yeah windows will just blue screen uh if the controller changes too much and and wimpy you've got some experience with moving the hard drives around to do an install right yeah i mean i've got some really ancient hardware um and and back in the day i used to install the operating system used to take the hard disk out of a laptop that had no NICs and had no Wi-Fi and had no USB. And I put the disk in a different machine, installed Debian, then take the disk out, plug it into the laptop, and then boot and configure everything and install the desktop I wanted. And I was doing that back in the late 1990s.

So, you know, it's been possible for a long, long time. Yeah, it's just so cool. It is, I think, one of the best aspects that Linux doesn't get credit for anymore. And I think there was a time where it was not as, the roses were not as red, but it's pretty awesome. And something that really sells people when you show them like, yeah, this USB thumbstick stick I can just boot your computer with this and everything just works

and it's it's just blows people's minds still all right Aaron writes in I like Aaron I like the way he thinks he says I'd like to hear more about your latest experience with ButterFS and why you switched to XFS where's the love for good old extended 4 I'm running open SUSE factory soon to be tumbleweed

and I was affected by the ButterFS read-only snapshot bug after upgrading from kernel 3.16 to 3.17. So for now, I've disabled snapshots by uninstalling Snapper and the Snapper zipper plugin. Thankfully, the damage seems to be limited to some corrupted

snapshots. Hopefully, when the bug is fixed, the snapshots can be re-enabled and my two dozen corrupted snapshots can be deleted. I don't want to go nuke and pave style, but if it's necessary, I may go back to Extended 4. From there, I can at least upgrade to ButterFS when it becomes a little more stable. So I want to talk about, over the weekend, I finally reloaded my Bonobo Extreme that was the original install since our Arch Challenge.

I was pretty proud that I held that install that long. And it was really, really a great install. The only problem was I was totally out of storage space. I couldn't install any more games. It even got to the point where I was having a hard time. I couldn't do any more virtual box images for demos for LAS. I couldn't install some of the apps I wanted to install to demo on Lass. So it was actually starting to impact show production.

So when I really realized I was hitting that phase of the install, I decided to nuke it. And I used Angoros, Anderogos, Anderos to install it. And it's been rocking. And I decided to go this time around XFS instead of ButterFS. Even though I was so tempted, you guys. I was so tempted. But it was really the discussion that we had had here in the mumble room at some point where so many people were really advocating XFS that I decided to pull the trigger on that.

And my main problem with ButterFS came down to just the fact that DF doesn't actually report the file sizes isn't a huge deal but it was like it just really gnawed at me that I never really felt like I had a super clear snapshot of what my storage situation was and it was slowly getting worse and worse over time and so because I have in my bonobo I have a 128 gigabyte SSD for my home drive and I have a 256 gigabyte SSD that I slice up amongst my main arch installation another distro that I'm trying and like all of the applications and anything like that so it's a kind of a it's kind of a tight operating margin and with butter fs just sort of fudging the extra metadata and things like that. It just became too expensive. And I don't even remember, I can't remember if it was Blaster or if it was Wimpy who was really advocating XFS so strongly, but somebody sold me on it.

And I was an old XFS user from years back as a sysadmin, so I'd had some experiences. It seemed to be a good file system when I used it. Anybody in here a big XFS user? Who was that? It was me. Okay okay wimpy so do you remember the bullet points of sort of what your main points were for me to switch because you convinced me yeah well i i went through something similar when i had a disk fail recently and um i what i've done is slightly different i've kept um butter fs for the root file system but i'm using xfs for the root file system, but I'm using XFS for the home partition for the reasons that you've just outlined.

Virtual box machines and large files, ButterFS was, I couldn't seem to rebalance it to get the space back. I don't know where it had gone, but it wasn't letting me have it. And I knew full well that there wasn't as much data on the device as it was claiming was there. That was my situation

that's why i made the switch but for me as a as an arch developer i want butter fs on my root file system because i get all the benefit of butter fs on the development tools yeah so that's where it pays off then yeah you know i actually like the uh it sounds crazy i never thought i would become a fan of it but the real-time LZO compression on ButterFS worked excellent for me. Performance was good, so I missed that, especially on an SSD. Yeah, that is great. And then I've still got that on the

root partition, so I've got those benefits at boot time. Maybe I should have done that. I was just, I felt so burned at the time that I thought, no, I'm going to go XFS everywhere. Keep it simple. I mean, I typically use XFS everywhere, but on my Arch machines, I'm sticking with ButterFS on the root partition. The million-dollar question was why XFS over Extended 4?

It's just brilliant. It's rock solid. It's a bit like Marte. It's got a long heritage. It's super mature. It performs as well as or as close to everything else or exceeds some of the others so you don't need to tweak it all the defaults are tuned for performance and it's just bulletproof and if you want if you want some

ButterFS like facilities then stick LVM underneath it and then you can snapshot it. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, for me, it was sort of the antithesis to ButterFS. Like it was going to something that was, I mean, I literally deployed systems with XFS in the 90s. So, I mean, I've used it for a really long time. And so I just trust it. And after getting burned by something new, I think I went to the other extreme.

Wizard, I know you had to mention about parallel writing. Is that for ButterFS or is that another file system? No, that's ExifS. ExifS does a very good job of parallel writing at the same time. So you go and you have multiple files, you're writing them all at the same time, it'll go in and it'll actually split up and it'll write them in a very even way and still maintain a fairly decent speed. XFS is great if you don't want,

if you don't want copy on writer of copy copy on right. Isn't a super big deal. Right. That was sort of, I think I remember from our discussion, it was sort of like you get a lot of benefits of Butterfest, a lot of optimizations. I want it from Butterfest,

but if I don't want copy on right and I don't want compression, then might as well just go XFS. Yeah. It's absolutely wonderful the only real thing that you'll hear from people and they're usually people that have been using xfs or used effects as xfs in the very distant past was they'll go and they'll say well i had a brownout and this did weird things and i couldn't recover the file system and you know it's it's not a big deal at least i don't see it as big deals and i couldn't recover the file system and you know it's it's not a big deal at least i don't see it as big deals and i i wouldn't i wouldn't worry about it yourself just because you have a laptop battery you know you know when it's going to go and shut down yeah that truncating to zero bytes on on files that was fixed about 10 or 11 years ago exactly it's old news i know

now let's still bring it up but one other thing that kind of burned me about ButterFS was I realized maybe six, seven months into the game that there was a thing called defragmenting that I should be doing. Right? And Wimpy, that's not such a problem with XFS, is it? Yeah, XFS has got really brilliant defrag tools. So you can do online defragmentation, and it works really well, and you know exactly where your data is being used. and it works really well, and you know exactly where your data is being used. And for someone like you who will have large video files, you can defragment individual files rather than having to do the whole file system. So if you leave your laptop on overnight, just stick a cron job in there to do the XFS defrag on your partitions,

and it will just stay all nice and hunky-dory. And, Wizard, you have a comment on the xfs tool set yeah the actual commands for going and doing like you know stuff like repairing your file system all this other stuff you can use all the stuff that you're regular you're regularly used to like fcsck.xfs that was big for me too yeah there's also you know and if you know if you're used to the butterfs we had like oh I want to use X program to deal with this. You can do that as well, because almost every single one of them has a program of their own, like XFS repair, or, you know, do, they all have their own. And it's super simple. They're not crazy. You can,

you really can read a man page for once and know how it works. Right. That is very true. And Wimpy, we probably should make a mention because the chat room's asking, XFS, as far as you know, supports trim, right? It does. Yeah. So there you go. And I remember one of the reasons I went ButterFS was, well, it's SSD optimized. When you look into the SSD optimizations, I think it's like they don't massage the access times and it supports trim and a few other things. And I realized when XFS can do that too, that was one of the deciding factors for me to choose ButterFS. It's like, this is the SSD-ready file system.

Actually, the old dog XFS can do it too. So, yeah, I thought, what the heck. So anyways, that was my thought process. It was long and convoluted, and probably a lot of it was in pre- and post-shows. But it was a long series of discussions that brought us there. And there's a lot, you know, I still have, let's see, one, two, three, four current production systems that are still running ButterFS. So it's not like I've switched.

I just switched my main, my Bonobo. I haven't switched all my systems. And I still have a server running ButterFS. Here's a question then. So you were obviously loathe to lose ButterFS and the compression from the performance point of view. Have you noticed any performance degradation? You know, not really, but it's hard to tell when it's such a new install.

So you really need to fill it up in a few months' time. Yeah, I think as the drive gets fuller, I'll see if I start to notice it slowing down. You know, the interesting thing is this Bonobo is a couple of years old. start to notice it slowing down. The interesting thing is this Bonobo is a couple of years old and when I was setting it up I was like, wow, I really could not ask for this to be a faster computer.

This is still exceptionally fast and so it seems like the current higher end hardware for the last couple of years to throw at desktop Linux is more than sufficient. If you have an SSD and a decent processor you get really good performance. So I don't know if I'll be able to tell the difference,

to be honest. But I do feel like when ButterFS really filled up, like when I'd have a virtual machine that was sort of eating away at storage and I didn't realize how fast my drive space was ticking down because it was all happening inside of VM, I really felt like I could tell. It almost seemed like, to me,

I went down to like spinning hard drive speeds and it was painfully slow like having to watch like my directories like actually like load out and you know all that just felt really slow and the only thing that happened is I'd filled up the drive

and when I deleted the drive and rebalanced the performance came back so I don't know if that'll happen I doubt that'll even happen in XFS we'll see only find out after a little bit of usage. Hey, we're going to follow up on some of our OpenSUSE coverage, including Producer Eric's notes. Before we do that, I want to thank our first sponsor, Linux Academy. Go over

to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged to get our 33% discount. And that's on your subscription. You're going to stay subscribed to Linux Academy once you go over there. I heard from a lot of folks at Ohio Linux Fest who've really been enjoying Linux Academy. And I just got a message from somebody last night that said their power was out, but they had downloaded Linux Academy's comprehensive study guides and the tutorials offline before the

power went out and said, they're still doing their study even without the power. It's kind of incredible. So go to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Check them out. They've got all the different distributions you could possibly want to try. You choose from those. They'll automatically adjust your courseware. They just added four more courses over the last week.

It's a ton of new stuff coming out. They have stuff in the pipeline all through the remainder of the year. Go over there. You can learn anything you really could possibly imagine in the Linux system itself. They're expanding beyond that into AWS, OpenStack, DevOps. You can go over there and get an introduction to Android development, introduction to VMware ESXi if you ended up having to support a VMware environment. Go there and pull that down.

And what's really nice is as you go through these courses, you can keep track of your progress. They'll give you estimations as you log back in and say, here's where you left off. Here's the index of where you're going to go. This is how long it's going to take. Here's the guide that goes with it. And they also have learning plans where you can off. Here's the index of where you're going to go. This is how long it's going to take. Here's the guide that goes with it. And they also have learning plans where you can set exactly how much availability you have. And it will automatically adjust the courseware to match that availability. And they'll nudge you and say, hey, remember, you've got a test at the end of the week to keep you involved, to keep you going back. They've got an active support structure in their community as well.

Live streams where you can ask questions directly to the instructors. It's one of these things that you really don't understand until you go there and you engage in those resources that are available to you. You begin to move something forward, and it's very rewarding. I've been doing it now since they became a sponsor. Every week I go in there and I try something out, and it's very rewarding. It's intellectually stimulating. I'm able to see what new things interest me, and I'm able to stay current at a much deeper level. And so even though I'm not in the IT field anymore, I still find it to be an incredibly valuable resource. I could only imagine if I was still in IT how handy this would be. You can get a full end-to-end course on the LAMP stack, Apache self-signed SSLs, remote GUI

administration set up on Linux, setting up an NFS server, NGginx, Nagios, backing up with R-Sync, taking care of the Heartbleed bug, all of that. They have scenario-based training too, so you can do some of these things in lab environments where you'll actually go end-to-end. You'll deploy the software, you'll deploy the application on top of that, you'll integrate in third-party services, you'll have a working product that's accessible from the public because as the courseware requires it, they automatically spin up Linux servers for you on the back end, give them public IP addresses, give you a login, you can assign them roles.

It's a really cool system. People just go on and on about it when I meet them in person. It's awesome to hear that. So go over to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and keep sending your success stories too. I really love hearing that. linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and a really big thank you to Linux Academy

for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged show. Okay, so OpenSUSE as the version 13.2 is officially here. We got ourselves a new green baby. You can go over and get it at the OpenSUSE website. Lots of nice stuff in there. They've also given us the new deets on their new rolling setup. And so I thought we'd talk to Producer Eric and anybody in the Mumble room

that's been running OpenSUSE. Do some follow-up from our review. Touch on a couple of items. Eric, let's start with, really quickly, I know we mentioned it in the review, but you had a defense for GNOME software that I thought was fair. We should give it some time.

Because in the review, I was like, man, there's so many ways to install software in OpenSUSE. You've got three or four different ways. And now they've just thrown in GNOME software. And you kind of raised the point. It does serve some purpose. Yes, it does, absolutely. If you understand OpenSUSE, and this is something that you've actually had a gripe about in the past, is that they don't have any good way for software discovery.

Well, that's where GNOME software comes in and fills in that gap. So it's not the best for software discovery, but it's definitely better than nothing. Yeah. I would love, love to see an app that could expose the coolest and best stuff in software.opensusa.org, because I feel like there's projects that are plugged into that and generating RPMs for SUSE that I don't even know about.

Yeah, but software.opensuse.org is something that you want to search because it's directly tied to the build service. Think of it almost like the AUR. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically, there's no way to discover software in the AUR. You've already got to know about it and then search the AUR to find out. Well, software.opensuse.org is the exact same way. In fact, there's the Firefox extension for being able to search the AUR. I've installed that a lot when I've run Arch.

But also, in OpenSUSA, I've actually made it so that that search box in there, I can directly search that from my bar using a keyword. Oh, that's handy. Yeah, it makes it super handy. It makes it super fast to search it as well. Okay. And I also noticed, too, that you had a Chrome extension in the show notes for a one-click installer for OpenSUSE.

Yes. Basically, this kind of comes by default with Firefox. Oh, it is? Oh, that's in Firefox. So you mean an add-in to Firefox? It's not really an add-in. It's basically they kind of have it in their code. There's like an OpenSUSE

enhancements extension that does a few things, right? Does a few small things to make Firefox work a little better under SUSE. Yeah, just a few small things. This basically fills in the gap for Chrome. If you want to use Chrome, you can just click on that it'll bring up the ymp file in your browser and say do you want to install this right

you can click on yes and as long as you follow the instructions from the plug-in page on the chrome store it will just basically start that one yeah it'll fire off you have the ass installer and you're off to the races. Exactly. Follow your uncle, as you say. You had a make good. In the review, we forgot to touch on how horrible the fonts are by default in OpenSUSE, but it's actually pretty easy to fix. Correct. So in the show notes, all you have to do is you can check out that there's a repo that Chris has on the screen

if you're watching the video version. And select one of those repos on there depending on which version you have, whether it's 13.1, 13.2, or factory slash tumbleweed. You click on that. Go ahead and copy that. Just that whole URL? Yeah. Yeah, the URL into your software repositories in YAST,

and then you add that, then there's a sudo zipperedup, which is distribution upgrade, basically, and it will move your font config files over to that from the defaults and basically change them to the infinality version. That's pretty straightforward. And so if you're having trouble following, Eric has links in the show notes to do that uh so that's that's i would definitely recommend that because i meant to mention that in the uh in the review now something and you're absolutely right about the font rendering it's atrocious by default why is that i don't know it's like they haven't taken anything that

infinality or the ubuntu people have done forever and integrate it i don't know. It's like they haven't taken anything that Infinality or the Ubuntu people have done forever and integrated. I don't know. But honestly, in their defense, it's also excited to talk about because the rolling release thing could be extremely compelling if it's done right. And you took the dive, right? Like you've been doing it for what, two, three weeks or more? How long have you been running? About two or three weeks. After we got done with the Ubuntu back at last 3.35. So that was three weeks ago, I think. That was about three weeks ago.

I went ahead and went all in with OpenSUSE and knowing it's coming out next. I had been running Factory off and on since Factory was announced to be a full ruling distro. And I've been very impressed with the results, to be honest. There's the initial article right there. That's about Factory merging with Tumbleweed. Have you had to do any open source versus proprietary driver installs on their role? How does that work?

I don't have to do that on my machine because it's running full Intel. So I really don't have much experience with that. However, there are one-click installs for the NVIDIA drivers using an actual factory repo or whatnot. One thing that's important to notice is that as of today, Tumbleweed and factory are pretty much synonymous. Basically, the factory repos are just linked over.

They're just alias to the Tumbleweed repos, and Tumbleweed is now the name for the rolling distribution as of today, November 4th. Okay. Okay. And we have linked in the show notes frequently asked questions that the OpenSUSE project has posted up. And do you get updates every day?

Pretty much. It reminds me a lot of Arch in that way, except without the headache of having to manually config files and whatnot. And you mentioned too, something about the way the update manager is constantly running in the background, right? Correct.

Now, that update manager you were talking about for GNOME, the package updater, that is constantly running in the background, just kind of checking, pinging the repos, see if there's anything. And it's always using Zipper as the back end. So it's just basically using Zipper to find out. So if you were on a rolling release does this just kind of constantly check for updates and just sort of notify you when there's a new update well that's the funny thing about rolling is that i'm not sure if it does because i haven't had it pop up at all but in rolling you're supposed to use zipper dup every time you want to update oh okay so yeah so you don't use any of the built-in software tools?

Correct. Not for factory or tumbleweed. It's basically that. But those tools are still there if you convert to rolling? Correct. Yes. Yeah. And the other way, the other thing that's kind of nice is there is like a way to sort of jump in more current.

Like if you want to go straight to rolling, you can get snapshot ISOs, right? Or am I wrong? Yes, there are snapshot ISOs you can do if you want to go straight to rolling, like do a fresh install with rolling. You can also convert your repos over to the factory or Tumbleweed, and there are instructions on that.

But it seems cleaner. Wouldn't it just be cleaner to go right into a rolling release? Yeah, that's exactly what I did. I didn't even bother with switching, you know, installing 13.1 and switching the repos over. I just installed from the ISO. Right. I've converted one install to rolling, and it was pretty painless. But I remember there's, like, a couple of repos I had that there's specific.

It was, like, a 13.1 version 4, but there wasn't a Tumbleweed version 4, so I couldn't switch that one or something. That was a problem where people haven't published more updated, quote-unquote, Tumbleweed packages. There's only the release versions of packages, and it sort of depends on the project or something. I don't know what I ran into, but there was a couple of repos that had to get disabled when I switched over to rolling. Right, I've run into that myself, and it's kind of annoying when that happens. At the same time, you can still stick with those packages and just install the packages, not subscribe to the repo.

And so there's a six-month transition window as we switch from factory to Tumbleweed. Am I getting my terminology right? That's kind of correct. Basically, factory is just kind of linking over to Tumblebleweed but what's happening is that that factory alias is going to go bye-bye in six months so basically it'll stop working um the new uh repo that you have to subscribe to is that tumbleweed repo okay rotten corpse go ahead i think you're reading my mind um there's only there's one thing that annoys me about OpenSUSE.

Is their phrasing for the one-click install from their software website. Yeah. It irritates me because it's like 15 clicks. Yeah, it is a lot of clicks. It is a lot of clicks. It is, and it's really just a branding thing. Basically, the reason it's one-click install is you click on it once in the browser and then you're starting the install process as opposed to having to copy

a repo, paste it into the software repository. In one click, you get the repo added and the software installed. I can activate a dev file to open one click and that's the same thing. Well, let's not take this literally. Well, they could just not use that term and it would just so much so much better it's all marketing man yeah it is it crossed my mind

during the review when i was because you know during the review when you when you first set it up it's like when you run that the most right and when you combine that with the uh media manager trying to check my thumb drive which also brings up two prompts and then you combine that with the fact that i enter my password. And then to kind of make it a little worse, and it's not really their fault, this is kind of the way GTK theming works a lot of times, is you start the first process as yourself, as, in my case, my ChrisF user. And then once I enter in my password, those following dialog boxes are now running as root,

so they drop all of my GTK theme, right? They look completely different. So not only is there three or four windows that come up, several prompts that come up, but half of the windows don't look like the other half of the windows. It's not a very... Yeah, it's not their fault. KDE does the same thing. It's not a very elegant transition or process, but after I went through it a few times, I

was like, yeah, this could definitely be tightened up. But I also just appreciate the ease at which I am getting subscribed to the repo, which is really, for me, the most valuable thing. Because at the end of the day, I could go to any website and download an RPM and install it and just do that, and that's fine. But for me, the true value of the one-click install is not only am I installing it, but I'm also getting that repo, so I'm getting those future updates. And that's more than just installing software. That's also sort of, quote-unquote, subscribing to that software. And to me, that's worth a little extra hassle. I think it could be rebranded too, though, but, you know. What's also cool about that is once you subscribe to that repo, say you find another package

that you want to use with the one-click install on, you don't remember if you're subscribed to that repo or not, it's not going to double up the repo. It's want to use with the one click on install on you don't remember if you're in you're subscribed to that repo or not it's not going to double up the repo it's going to use the same yeah yeah yeah that is nice too uh all right eric was there anything else we want to cover in our open susa follow-up oh plasma 5 didn't you want to mention plasma 5 yeah uh just plasma 5 is a separate repo you have to subscribe to if you want it there are instructions from the kde portal on how to do that. But, yeah, as far as Plasma 5 goes, it is the best Plasma 5 experience I've ever had on any KDE distro at all. That includes Kubuntu.

I mean, all of the breeze theme, instead of having the, what is it, the cute curve theme, actually there is a dedicated breeze theme now, and I was only able to find it in OpenSUSE. That's nice. So that's something to look forward to. It looks really nice. Something to definitely look forward to.

I have reason to believe that if Kabuntu is doing this in the next version with Plasma 5, I have reason to believe that 13.3 will also be Plasma 5. That makes sense. Yeah, so there you go, and the beat goes on. I agree, Rotten, that it does sound like a better way to do PPS. That's kind of what my impression was. It's a centralized way, sort of like the AUR is a centralized way to find stuff.

You get to subscribe to the repo. It is more clicks than it needs to be, and yes, I realize you can also do app://, and a lot of browsers on Ubuntu will recognize that. It's not a totally unique system, but it works well. But that doesn't subscribe you to the PPA. Well, I suppose it depends. There are some Debian, like the Chrome dev file, when you install that, it also installs a repo. So some of them do.

It kind of depends. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if they're the only ones that can do it. What matters is that it works and that there's a nice interface in terms of the website to find stuff. And that part I give them all high marks on. Yeah, consolidating the efforts is much better.

It's better than in Fedora where you essentially have three repos. You have Fedora's repos, you have Copper, and then you have the community RPM Fusion. So it makes it a bit of a pain to determine where you're getting that three repos you have fedora's repos you have copper and then you have the community rpm fusion so it's it makes it a bit of a pain to determine where you're getting that from i agree i agree and daredevlin you had a comment on uh you ran into a problem with network settings yes there's only one major problem which is if you don't read the page when you're going to install and for some reason you're still not on IPv6, you need to go manually on the settings and enable that. Right.

Yeah, what was interesting is the installer uses YAS to configure the network interface, but the desktop uses Network Manager. So once you get through the installation, those two things don't communicate. So once you get through the installation, those two things don't communicate. So if you had to join Wi-Fi in the installation and it has a password, when you reboot the box after installation, you have no connection. And it took me a second. I'm like, wait a minute. I was just on Wi-Fi. Oh, right.

One was YAST. One was Network Manager. Now, how would a regular non-Linux person know that? Like someone just thinking about IPv6 and IPv4 difference. Someone that's not a computer geek. And what kind of tipped me off is once my desktop was booted up and installed,

I was just looking at Yast and I brought up the network management utilities to see what options were available in there. And I got an error message saying, no, you're now using Network Manager.

You can't use this tool. And I was like, oh yeah, of course. You can disable Network Manager and use that tool. But I don't want to. I don't want to. I want to use Network Manager. I know I want to, so that's fine. Network Manager is fine.

It was just kind of a thud when I logged in. And I went to go. I didn't even realize at first that I wasn't connected because so many times, like, when I build an Archbox, like, during that installation process, like, the network is established before pretty much anything else. And, like, when I install Ubuntu, like, if I join the network during installation, that holds over. Like, all distributions, really, for the most part, do that. Because a lot of distributions now, you

boot up into a live environment, and in that live environment, you use Network Manager to configure, and they must just move those settings over. It's fine. Right, and that's what they do in terms of Ubuntu. If you want to use that network settings in Yast, you can. It's just that one tab is disabled for you if you're using Network Manager. In fact, that's the only way you can change your host name.

It's just funny. It bit both Matt and I, so it must be common enough. Exactly. Yeah. All right. So, Eric, great follow-up and great links in the show notes, which we'll have, especially if you want to work on your fonts and stuff like that. He's got all that in there.

So check that out. And if you've been rolling OpenSUSE, let us know how it's going in the feedback thread in the Linux Action Show subreddit. Hello, Jack. How are you doing, Jack? All right. Well, why don't we take a... I want to talk about something kind of neat.

And, oh, you know what? Actually, let's reverse the order. I was going to talk about something kind of neat. And, oh, you know what? Actually, let's reverse the order. I was going to talk about a new piece of hardware. But that's a little bit more of a positive note. I want to end on a positive note. So next I want to talk about our brothers in arms over at Linux Outlaws calling it a day. Before we do that, I want to thank our friends at DigitalOcean. Head over to DigitalOcean.com right now.

DigitalOcean.com. And save this promo code in the back of your mind. Like, channel it to yourself. to digitalocean.com right now, digitalocean.com, and save this promo code in the back of your mind. Channel it to yourself. Say, future self, this is a critical piece of information that I have collected from the past, and I want to put this forward. So just think about it hard right now, unplug November. That's your promo code, unplug November when you check out. At least it should be. I actually haven't checked my inbox this morning. I apologize. Unplugged October will probably work for a while, too. That'll get you a $10 credit over at DigitalOcean. We love DigitalOcean and so many of you have tried it out, but yet so many of you have yet to try it out. So you're really in a

perfect position to go over there and play with something. And then later, I think you'll be surprised at how easy it is to put that in production and how well it'll work for you. So what is DigitalOcean? You're not familiar? Well, DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server. I was playing around with some of my droplets just the other night, and I turned one off. I was experimenting, actually, with taking snapshots and resetting passwords and all this, just trying different things out,

because I love the interface over at DigitalOcean. And I've been adding more machines, and I thought, okay, let's try a few things. So I turned off a box. I didn't know Reekai was using it for development at the time. Oh, no. You know, the thing is, we spin these droplets up, and they're just so useful. We keep finding more and more uses for them. And they make it so easier over DigitalOcean. You can get

started in less than 55 seconds. And pricing plans start at only $5 per month. They get you 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20-gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer. And DigitalOcean has data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. So you could build a global distributed network if you want. And their interface, their interface is simple and intuitive, but yet very powerful. And the best part is, is you can replicate it on a larger scale with their straightforward API. And you've already seen a lot of great apps out there that integrate in with Puppet, Unity. There's some great command line tools, Python scripts. There's so many things you can use that API for that the community has already created for you too. That's just the

great thing about that API is it doesn't mean you got to do the work. Other people are doing it as well, but you could too. You can snap it right in. And if you need to scale on demand, if you've got a busy day you need to make sure your web front end is still responsive you can integrate that API and deploy right up there you can scale right up to DigitalOcean use their droplets, spin them up when you need them spin them down when you don't. They have hourly pricing

if you want them. And if you use our promo code unplugged October or probably unplugged November depending on the timing you can try it out for two months for absolutely free. And DigitalOcean is taking the tutorials up to the next level. They're offering up to $200 if you'll write a tutorial for them. And if you go to their Instagram feed today, they posted one of their tutorial editors. I think he might have broken his leg.

I'm not sure what was going on, but he was sitting there editing one of the tutorials. It was a pretty funny shot. It's on DigitalOcean's Instagram feed. They also got some DigitalOcean data center porn up there, which is, I'm a big fan of that. So I think it's just Instagram.com slash DigitalOcean, but you'll probably be able to find it. Go over to DigitalOcean.com, spin up your own free

droplet. Try out CoreOS for a couple of months. It's pretty innovative. It's pretty exciting. I think it's going to be a big deal in the server space, and you can go play with it right now on a server that's got tier one bandwidth and a data center anywhere you want it. It's an awesome opportunity to do it for absolutely free. You just add the promo code unpluggedoctober to your account.

It credits your account to $10, and you just run it as long as it lasts. Digitalocean.com, and a huge thank you to DigitalOcean for being so damn awesome and sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Okay, so let's talk about the Linux Outlaw guys. They announced, I think it was yesterday or the day before. Let's see, where is the date? November 3rd, so yesterday. They announced that in five episodes, they'll be calling it an end after seven years of

producing Linux Outlaws. It sounds like kind of for both the guys, for both Dan and Fab, that maybe their interests have diverged over the time. They're not done necessarily podcasting, but they're probably going to take a break and come back and do something they're super passionate about. It definitely sounds like maybe the production just came a bit of a chore and definitely understandable after seven years.

I mean, that can become a lot of work. And so I wanted to take a minute to kind of talk about how sometimes there are certain pillars in the community that go away because maybe they're not as involved anymore, or they're not as interested anymore. And is this something that is concerning? Is this a general trend? I mean, I think, Eric, when you and I were talking about on the pre-show, you're like, I'm worried that this suggests maybe something that just happens to enthusiasts over time. And I started thinking about that when you mentioned that. And I thought, well, we've all been in this a while.

Like Matt and I specifically have been doing this particular – been following this particular scene for a long time. Burnout is a big problem. And people move on. I mean, Matt, when you hear about things like this, when you hear about somebody or a group of people who have been working at at something for so long what crosses your mind when they call it an end well usually sometimes it ends up just being an extended hiatus i mean for myself with podcasting i mean when i before i joined jupiter broadcasting that was actually what had happened from another uh popular podcast so you know they may come back with something even even cooler so yes burnout is a thing and thing, and sometimes people just have to kind of keep trucking and find out what works for them.

But I don't think it's necessarily a problem. I think it's evolution. I think people just evolve. Yeah, it's sad to see something go. Yeah, right. But if things change, Popey, you say missing friends. What do you mean?

Yeah, this reminds me. I mean, I know Dan and Fab quite well. On the Ubuntu UK podcast with Linux Outlaws, we organized a bunch of live events in the UK called Ogg Camp. So we worked quite closely with them on those. And I'll be interested to know what happens in the future. But it's reminded me of I was doing a presentation recently, and I used some photos from previous Ubuntu developer summits

and the kind of collective photo of everyone who was there. recently and i used some photos from previous ubuntu developer summits and uh you know like the kind of collective photo of everyone who was there and i was looking through picking out faces of people who used to contribute to various projects ubuntu and other stuff who no longer do or who've whose careers have moved on or they've uh they've just stopped contributing they still use the software but they stop contributing and I got a little bit sad because these are friendships that we've built over the years, and they're people who've moved on to something else. See, when Eric said that, that's what I started thinking is maybe what we're really worried about is in open source, we're so dependent on so many people volunteering their time based on their passion,

but sometimes passion has its limits. It runs out after a while. And maybe what we're actually afraid of is so much of what we depend on that's created by amazing people, those people eventually go away. Right, and you've got to have coping mechanisms and time off. That's one reason why on the Ubuntu podcast we finish at Christmas every year and take a break for two months. It's a good idea. So we don't solidly go.

You lose all your listeners, but it's a good idea. No, we don't. I can't. No, it's good. It's like, and Linux Outlaws has taken a lot of breaks over the years, but it doesn't, you know, at a certain point, it still becomes a chore. And that's totally understandable. I guess, Eric, I didn't want to speak for you too much,

but did I kind of summarize your thoughts? Or when you heard this news, what crossed your mind? That's exactly what crossed my mind, actually. You did summarize my thoughts very well. The thing is, if you get at something for a long amount of time, you don't take a break every now and then. You don't pace yourself. I've seen this time and time again. You will burn out.

It's just the way the human body is designed. Yeah, I wonder. It is designed to take risks. I wonder if I didn't do this full time. I couldn't imagine. Definitely, obviously, not this many shows. Well, there's a difference, though, because you create content and you have a whole team of people around you. With Dan and Fab, it's just the two of them.

And as I understand it, Fab does all of the editing. And to be fair, he's a bit precious about it and doesn't like anyone else. Other people have offered to take on the job, and he's quite a perfectionist and wouldn't let anyone touch it. Yeah. In fact, I think if you don't kind of build a team, that's exactly what happens, right? Right. And so people like you who have a team of people, whether you pay them or not, or whether they're community people who are volunteering their time, is largely irrelevant. They're people who are helping you get the thing out. And if you don't have that cr don't want it to represent a decline in the interest because I don't sense that. See, I think a lot of people have sort of associated with, oh, there's less of an interest in the market.

I don't think that's actually true. I think it's just sometimes the people, like in their case, Dan and Fab, sometimes their interests change. And so it's harder. It becomes harder and harder. sometimes their interests change. And so it's harder, it becomes harder and harder. You can see in the evolution of the show, they start covering more generalized technology and topics and security in the NSA,

sort of diverging more and more from Linux as a topic in itself. Well, arguably, Linux is more popular now than it has ever been in the past. So it can't possibly be that it's not popular. It's just popular to different people for different reasons. Exactly, yeah. And I think it's natural that as that changes,

it might not be as appealing to some people. But yeah, Wizard, go ahead. Jump in. That's kind of all the thoughts I had. I just wanted to make a mention to it. And tip of the hat to him, too, for all the hard work for so long. But Wizard, go ahead. Yeah, so it is sad when you see good people leave and all.

But I tend to find that a lot of times it's not so much that they're leaving. It's just whatever they're making, it kind of comes to summation or it stabilizes. Whatever they're doing, it just seems to slow down. And as whatever they're doing slows down, they just quit putting as much effort in. Not because it doesn't need it or anything not because it's you know it's you know it's totally not perfect it's just they've got what they needed done and now they want to go and use the product because you know they're trying whatever they're doing it's because they're passionate about it they want to see it work and when it works it's like okay i'm done i'm gonna sit back be happy for a little while and

then maybe move on to something different. Very true. And so we wish them the best of luck, and we'll stay tuned to see what they come up with next. Because I have a feeling we haven't heard the last of them. Because I think Six Guns itself is sticking around, and Og Camp itself, as far as they have plans, they aren't changing there.

Hey, I have something fun to talk about. Something that will sort of lift our spirits before we run, maybe get a good debate going. First, though, I want to tell you about something that lifts my spirits every single month. Oh, who was it? I got an email. I think it was Tony.

I'm sorry. It was Tony or Terry. It was a T name. I'm sorry if I'm getting your name wrong. Matt. So you know how we always talk about the savings calculator over at Ting? Oh, yes. Tony went over there and plugged his actual usage in.

And he's going to save like $177 something a month. In two years, it's almost going to be over $4,000 is what he's going to save by switching to Ting. Holy cow, that's like a liquid-powered computer right there. Yeah, I know, right? That's a serious gaming rig every couple of years. Lux capacitor and all that. It's really simple.

It's because Ting is on a mission to make mobile make sense. You only pay for what you use. It's a flat $6 for the line. And then it's just your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. There's no special plan you have to be in to turn on tethering. If you want to use it, you just check the box, and it's just your data usage. And Ting has an awesome dashboard that lets you manage your account, see exactly where each line is at, nickname them so I've got funny names for each line.

I can set individual limits, alerts, disable lines when I don't need them, and then I don't even have to pay for them. And to top it all off, Ting has tier one tech support. Like you immediately go to the top level person when you call them at 1-855-TING-FTW. Anytime between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. and a real human answers the phone and they are set up to solve the problem. Like they have the power to do it. They don't have to talk to their manager. They are the boss.

It's great. And they also have an incredible website that you can help yourself over at help.ting.com, I believe, or ting.com. Here's what you do, though. Go to linux.ting.com. That's where you get started. That's your home base. Linux.ting.com.

That'll take $25 off your first device. If you have a Ting-compatible device, they'll give you a $25 credit. But even more important, you're going to tell them you appreciate them supporting Linux Unplugged by going to linux.ting.com. And you get to put Linux in the URL, which is always fun. Go over to their blog, too, because they just announced that they've rolled out TriBand LTE to 17 new markets. They've been working on this a lot over the last year. Tons of new markets. They now have tri-band LTE in over 400 markets across the, I'm sorry, 500 markets across the United States. Yeah. Tri-band, if you're not familiar, is a superior method of LTE where

there's three different frequencies that you can get on. And so if one of them is working, you get a good connection. If you get all three, it's amazing. I've got tri-band LTE here at the studio. 1820 megabits on my speedtest.net. Not uncommon at all. It's really awesome. And now they just rolled it out to 17 new markets. Ting is constantly getting better. If you haven't checked them out in a little while, it's worth revisiting.

They've invested millions of dollars into rolling out this tri-band LTE infrastructure. Now 500 markets across the United States have it. Go to linux.ting.com. Take $25 off your first device. Try out that savings calculator. Start saving money right now. Own your phone. Don't get screwed over by the mobile carriers.

Get decent support. Use tethering when you need it and only pay for your usage. linux.ting.com. linux.ting.com. And a huge thank you to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. And thanks to everybody who checks them out. I think you'll be pretty impressed. And you'll save lots of money.

Okay. So here it is, you guys. Finally, someone has invented the multi-pass, or multi-pass from, if you remember, Fifth Element. It's called multi-pass, an open source offline password keeper. It's called Multipass, an open-source offline password keeper. It's a hardware-based password device.

I'm going to play a little bit of the video so you get an introduction. It's on Indiegogo. They're trying to raise funds. They're trying to get to $110,000 roughly, and they're at $18,000 right now. So I don't know if they're going to make it, but I'll play a little bit of the video for you guys, and then you tell me if you'd back it and what the problems could be and what security

problems you might see. So here we go. I'll let this go. Login and passwords are an integral part of our daily lives. I know it. They're what prevent malicious users from doing harmful things with our personal data. People tend to use the same credentials for the different websites they visit. People tend to use the same credentials for the different websites they visit. However, recent news has taught us that credentials stored by websites are compromised on a daily basis, which means that once an attacker gets your credential set, he can use it on other websites.

This is why using different passwords for different websites is important. Remembering many different passwords is difficult and one option is software-based password keepers. Essentially, they store an encrypted credentials database on your computer. To unlock this database you would enter a passphrase, which means that at some point, both your passphrase and database must be stored in your computer or smartphone's memory. Therefore, a malicious program could gain access to both and compromise all your passwords at once without you knowing it. To solve this problem, we introduce the Multipass, an offline password keeper aimed at saving and encrypting your passwords in a more secure manner.

The main device contains your encrypted passwords, while a secure smart card and a PIN code allows their decryption. Even if an attacker gets hold of your encrypted database or smart card, it is completely useless without your personal code. And don't worry, we implemented the possibility to make backup copies of your credential database and smart card without compromising your system's security. As opposed to software-based solutions, the Multipass only runs our tested code independently of your computer. the Multipass only runs our tested code independently of your computer. This means viruses or malicious programs cannot compromise your credential database or PIN,

neither of which are directly accessible from the computer. Furthermore, our product is open source, allowing you to make sure that your credentials are only kept inside the device and not leaked to the outside. And with Multipass, you can be sure that your credentials are only in the computer's memory when needed and when you explicitly permit the Multipass to send them. Okay, so let's talk about this. So part of me likes the idea of a hardware-based security device. I'm not going to lie.

I like the smart card with the key codes where that's nice. But there's a lot of good software-based solutions like LastPass and KeePass already existing. Anybody seen this already in the mumber room? Anybody sort of ready to go, jump on this? I was looking at this earlier today, actually. What do you think? It's interesting in and of itself but like what i what i'm gonna i'm gonna just say that it comes down to is that it's going to require you to carry things around and uh you know not that that makes it bad but it's

something that's going to stop me because i'm so forgetful and you know i can't keep that thing on me all the time and whenever I need to go and just shove a password at something so there's another option with like LastPass it's a thing called OpenSesame and basically you could put this on it's kind of the same thing but software wise put it on a flash drive

put the flash drive on your keychain and then you always have it and you could also with LastPass use things like YubiKey as well. Sure, yeah. And with KeePass, you can store the database on a flash drive, and that way you keep it with you. It's always with you.

Yeah, to me, there's too many drawbacks. Losing of the physical item, because I'm mobile, so that means I'd have to bring this with me. I'd have to bring it to my office, to the studio, and to home, which is just not a good idea. So that's why I'm kind of down on it. But if I was super worried about security, for some reason this does feel better. Okay, here's what it is, I think. You've got to understand the guys behind it. They come from an InfoSec background, and I think a lot of them are operating under the

assumption that the computer is compromised by default. So you go into the situation assuming the computer is untrustworthy. Therefore, it's a bad place to store your passwords. It's a bad place to copy them to memory. It's a bad place to input your passcode, all of that, because you're supposed to assume the computer is already compromised. This removes it from that. They say it only runs their quote-unquote trusted code,

even though it's open source. I don't know exactly what that means. It's not for me, but i thought it was interesting enough that maybe the audience might be into it i kind of like i like it for some reason something about it i like yeah but i kind of but i what i thought was really interesting about it was it kind of combined a smart card reader with going and having something that auto but something as simple as something you can plug in and just have it automatically fill in passwords. I mean, that certainly is something in and of itself that is

really interesting for what it does. It combines what we already have had with smart cards for so long and combines it with something that we've typically only ever seen in software. And it kind of makes it very interesting. However, though,

it still has a few fundamental limitations. First of all, with bad USB, we now can't fully trust USB if we're super paranoid, which this device seems like a device for the super paranoid. And number two, if it's inputting the password, it's probably using a human interface driver and sending keystrokes with the password because what you do is you go to your Gmail page, you click on the login box, then you enter your PIN code,

and it sends in the password. That's exactly what it does. It emulates a keyboard. But that could still be captured. If you have something that's reading the memory on a Windows box, for example, that could still capture that stuff. Oh, yeah.

And Linux has got very good software capture options. Yeah, and that target breach, that huge-ass target breach, that malware was just scraping the RAM. It wasn't doing key captures, it wasn't doing screen dumps, it was just scraping the RAM and sending the details straight

out of RAM. And so, this device doesn't really get around that if you still have to enter it in. I don't know exactly, but I guess maybe it's harder to monitor something at the human interface driver level, but I doubt it. Derek Devlin, I know you wanted to get a chance to chime in, and then I think we'll jump on. Go ahead.

I think this is a good initial step, and in the next generation of these kind of devices, the way I see is better browser integration or better website integration as well, to the point that you can generate a cookie that has your key and you never actually send any data. So your password is not sent to the computer. Right, right. Like a token or something.

Yeah, something like that. I think that's kind of the future for that kind of product. They have a place. And as Canseco points out in the IRC, something else I like a lot about it is, you know, they've put all their code up on GitHub. The code that runs this thing is open. It's available now. And the other thing about this project is they've got real units. They've already had it in testing.

People are already using, quote, unquote, production units today and have been for months. They've got a field of beta testers. So this isn't necessarily like a pie-in-the-sky project either. This is something that's already a physical device that they've made. There's already existing open-sourced code. So you're kind of backing a sure bet. But their funding

is a little short right now. So, I don't know. Put a link in the show notes. It's neat. I love open-source hardware. Or at least software that runs right now. So, I don't know. Put a link in the show notes. It's neat. I love open source hardware, or at least software that runs on it. So, yeah, they've got 30 days left. 18,000 of 110,000. For this release. Go ahead.

No? Okay. All right. Well, something that strikes me, like, as I'm looking into this, is that they did a nice job of showing what it's capable of doing. What they're not really – and again, this is only from the fundraising point of view. What they fail to do is to show what happens when your current methods, methodology, local access, local software tools fail. Show that. Then the money might start kicking in a little faster for them.

I don't feel like they did a very good job showing that. Right, because people already know that using the same password in too many places is bad. That's not making them stop. I mean, I stopped using 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 a long time ago. Like, it's been a week. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know. Yeah, now I use 4, 5, 6, 7. Let's get real.

Obviously, right? Or just numbers backwards. That's all good. Well, it's an indiegogo. It's called Multipass. Great name. Got to love the name, if not the name. It actually kind of saddens me that they don't have a cow as their logo. Oh, yeah.

That would be good, too. Multipass. Multipass. Or what's your face from Fifth Element? Yeah. Me and Joe Dallas Multipass. Yeah. Yeah, she'd be great, too.. Alright, I think we're all done.

I think we've done our damage. I think we'll wrap it up right there. I just wanted to give you guys that. Hardware is always fun and something you can get on early and it's a neat idea too. So that'd be neat. We'll have links to everything we've talked about today in the show notes. If you'd like to give us some feedback, some comments on anything we've talked about

go to linuxactionshow.reddit.com. That's also a great place to submit stories, topic ideas, or discussions, or just comment on the existing stories to give us your take, your insights. We integrate all of that into our shows. You can also check us out every single week live over at jblive.tv. We do it at 2 p.m. Pacific. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that converted to your local time zone. I got some cool projects I'm working on for this week's episode of Linux Action Show, Matt.

So buckle up and I'll see you on Sunday, okay? All right, sounds good. All right, everyone. Well, thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. LinuxActionShow.reddit.com. I'm just going to mention it again because it's a great place for you to get involved.

And if you want more show, there's another plot. You can get just a lot more content, stuff that doesn't even make it in there. Pics. Oh, and we want your runs Linux. You can also submit them there. Videos would be great. LinuxActionShow.Reddit.com And also send us your emails. Go to JupiterBroadcasting.com Click the contact link. Choose Linux Unplugged

from the drop-down. Feedback is a huge part of this show. And we love getting your emails. Okay, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. See you right back here next Tuesday. Thank you. I don't mind me. I'm just going to go ahead and install Ubuntu Mate Edition 14.04 here. When is that going to be out, guys? Hopefully Saturday at the latest Sunday.

Very cool. Very cool. All right, jbtitles.com, everybody vote. Got to. Very cool. All right. JB titles.com. Everybody boat. It's got to get a title. Got to have a title. Thanks for all the show notes, Eric.

I just put all that in the official doc. So that's great. Awesome. You're welcome. Uh, isn't it weird that I do like air piano every time we get the outro going? I love it. I,

you guys, it's great. Blast just slow danced with himself. So I think that's, that's sweet. There you go. That's real. I think I slow dance with himself. I think that's sweet. There you go. That's real dance. Actually, I think I slow danced with Josh because he was slow dancing too. Hell yeah.

Yeah. I did the Stevie Wonder dance. Wow. Oh, boy. And it just got weird. Angie and I have decided we're going to go see a concert in a few weeks for her birthday. We're going to go see Fleetwood Mac. Good choice.

It's going to be crazy, I think. It's going to be crazy. Don't know. Yeah, I was following the two options. I was rooting for that. Yeah. One's on Thursday. One was on a Saturday.

And the Saturday one would have been easier, but the Fleetwood Mac's on Thursday. Yeah. Jamie Tuttle's. JamieTuttle's.com, everybody. Let's vote. Can I ask for some help? Yeah, do it. So, I've a an audio failure and i've i've heard some of the

you and the other guys talking about usb sound cards and what have you and i'd like some advice on what should i get that's relatively inexpensive and reliable for plugging in headphones and mic i got this good um anything with a cedia chipset is going to do perfectly. Honestly, the cheapest one that does that is actually called the Daffodil. I know, it's absolutely ridiculous. But if you go on Amazon, it's called the Daffodil USB sound card. It's like $8. It's the most wonderful little thing that you'll ever buy.

I was going to mention that one actually it uses a C media chipset and then that then has mic and headphone jacks does it or do you it does what about plugging in like a USB headset and mic

integrated thingy is that a good idea yes or no I can do the trick especially if your main sound chip is blown yeah yeah that's what i use right now yeah my microphone i'm using right now is a c media chipset and it's a usb microphone yeah a lot of the headset ones are c media too the nice thing about the headset is then you've got uh headphones and mic in one so that's nice for mumble um i buy i have i literally have three or four or five of those really so let's see one two three in my in my view right now of those c media

sound cards we just use them around the studio because they work so well under every os and uh yeah just when i need audio out of a box i just go there and plug one in i don't ever this is it i've got two workstations here both of which have let me down this evening. My laptop, I couldn't get on last week when I was traveling because my laptop mic input has died. So I'm trying to find something that I can plug into whichever machine I'm on.

Plug and go, really, the headset's super easy, right? The headset's going to be the most dependable, in my experience. Platronics, I buy them by the gross. I get them at thrift stores and just stick them in a box and I'm overflowing with them so the biggest variance is going to be mic quality on the headsets yeah you know you just look at the different reviews and stuff and you probably find it yeah there's not too much difference between the actual usb sound device

at all uh so rame 123 hardware compatibility issues well like rame's pointing out and i have run into this too in fact i just bit me during the pre-show. Sometimes, I don't know if it's the C-Media driver or what, but sometimes I go to shave off just a little bit of volume towards the low end, and it just totally silences it. It just drops off at the end really fast.

Yes, and that's more than C-Media, because I have an Audio Technica USB cardioid microphone, and it has a built-in sound card, so the whole thing can just be plugged in via USB. And it's the same thing, and it's not a C-Media chipset at all. I have no idea what it is. I don't know if it's a USB thing.

I can speak for the Game.com 780. I actually submitted a patch into the GameCom 780. I actually submitted a patch into the Linux kernel for it. And is it causing you problems? Nope. Not after that patch. Oh, okay. They took it? Good.

Any Platronics headset will work. I've had minimal problems with them over the years, and I've used like 15 of them. I've never had compatibility issues ever. I agree exactly with that because I had one when I first started doing this, and it worked brilliantly. Did we ever figure anything out about the tearing issue that our emailer was having? Yeah, sorry. I pasted it in the chat room earlier. Okay.

Oh, okay. Would you mind pasting it again? Yeah, let me find it. Thank you. And I'll add that to the post-show notes. Cool, cool. I'm sure somebody listening at home will probably put in a comment too. I mean, yeah.

And whatever headset you choose, I mean, really the big test is that, you know, if it can take me and run over, drop, stepped on, lost. Yeah, right. Basically abused. Tossed it on the desk. Exactly. And never be afraid to buy. If you find one that works, buy a couple.

Trust me. You'll thank me later. Yeah, because they go out. They just, like Plantronics had a really, buy a couple. Trust me. You'll thank me later. Yeah, because they go out. Plantronics had a really, really good one for a long time, and they still have good ones, but they quit making the one I really like. They just quit making it. It's like, oh, no. I got the old school one.

That's the one I have on the other computer. It's got the actual adapter attached to the cord midway. I mean, it's the best one I own. So the other headset after they stopped making the one I really liked is I got the Logitech Gaming Series, the G-something. Yeah. One thing I like about that one is it has a light on the mic itself, so you know when your mic is live. True. It actually lights up the end of the microphone, and then you just flip it up, and it auto-mutes the mic, which is kind of nice.

You know your mic's muted if the headpiece is up. Yeah, and you swing it down, and it unmutes, which is kind of nice. You know your mic's muted if the headpiece is up. Oh, I like that. Yeah, and you swing it down and it unmutes, which is kind of cool. And then if you have it on a Windows box, it supports, I don't think it, I've never tried it on Linux, but it supports 7-point surround sound, quote-unquote. It's kind of a thing. And with any USB anything with audio,

again, don't ever depend on the default sound chooser. You're just going to frustrate yourself. Get yourself the Pulse Audio PavDev chooser, whatever the hell they call it. Yeah.