LINUX Unplugged - Episode 68: Linux Powered Schools | LUP 68

Episode Date: November 26, 2014

We’re joined by a classroom full of special guests, we talk with the students from Penn Manor School District, where they’ve given every high school student a Linux laptop & integrated the students into the help desk. We get the inside scope on the challenges, roadblocks & successes of this large desktop Linux deployment.Plus a preview of our upcoming interview with Mark Shuttleworth & his take on the recent criticism and exodus from Debian & getting started in a Linux career.

my son is currently going back and forth between believing in Santa Claus versus not. Like he has a pretty good theory. His theory, it's pretty solid. He thinks that Santa Claus is real. It's just that Santa Claus is Amazon. So if you ask him, Dylan, who is Santa Claus? Amazon. He's smart.

I don't know. I mean, Amazon does deliver stuff faster. I know, and he recognizes the Amazon wrapping paper, and that's usually what all the presents from Dad come in. Yeah, when he's a father, Amazon will have reindeer-shaped drones to give the presents at Christmas, I'm sure. They will. With custom 3D-printed boxes.

Man, Amazon needs 3D-printed boxes. That would be great. If the reindeer drones don't happen, I'm protesting. Yeah, that'll be a missed opportunity. Wimpy, you should market that, patent that, and then sell it to Jeff Bezos. Why do you think so?

Yeah, just sell it for a good deal, like $500,000 or something like that. I just want unlimited credits on my Fire TV. That is brilliant. That is eating up my spare change. Did I tell you I cancelled? I might have mentioned it on there that I cancelled my Nexus player order.

I don't blame you. I'm going to get a fire. I read the reviews on the Nexus player and it just sounds like a total miss. I think you mentioned on Tech Talk today. I thought I remembered saying something. The Fire TV is really terrific. And some advice you gave me a couple of – a few weeks back now,

I was asking about controllers for Steam on Linux. Oh, yeah. And you recommended the wired Xbox 360 controller compatible with the Fire TV. You can plug in the USB in of it? You just plug it in? You just plug the Xbox 360, 360 USB controller in and all the buttons are mapped. It works exactly like the official Amazon

controller but it's half the price and it's stonking good so I'm using that on the Fire TV for gaming. That is winning. Yeah, Arbulus is right. You have the Google TV now, the Nexus Q and the Nexus Player and all of these three products have been, in my opinion, I'm sure people, like the Google TV is, the Nexus Q, and the Nexus Player, and all of these three products have been, in my opinion, I'm sure people, like the Google TV is used by people still and loved,

but in my opinion, it fails on a couple of critical points that would really bug me. And the number one thing that jumped out at me, especially a couple of the reviews, complained about the same type of lagginess in the same kinds of areas, and it's exactly the kind of stuff that drives me crazy. type of lagginess in the same kinds of areas and it's exactly the kind of stuff that drives me crazy i'm the guy that will uh i'll you know back before the set top boxes like the roku could could handle decent performance i was the guy that would just build an xbmc machine because i needed a pc powerful enough to just not have a laggy system because who wants to sit down with tv and like then wait for their computer yeah quite well the the fire tv is really really slick it's very responsive

um in all respects i mean it does some really neat things as well so um the first thing is when it arrives it's pre-configured with your account credentials that's nice so like the kindle nice touch that yeah nice touch yeah um but it's a, oh, I didn't expect that. But then when you start watching TV episodes and things like that, it will pre-download the next in the series that you're watching. Oh, it stores them local? Yeah. So when you then say, oh, I want to watch the next episode of Battlestar Galactica, it's just instant because it's already there.

And it means that the fast-forward and rewind stuff is really responsive. I like that kind of hybrid streaming download approach. So I assume you could probably stream immediately, right? You could go in there, and if you had not ever watched, say, like, I don't know, 24, and you went to go watch season one, episode one of 24, it would play immediately, right? But then it would just start downloading. Yeah, that is slick. But it will pull it down faster than you're watching it.

So eventually you're playing it off the local device rather than off the stream. And then it will be grabbing the next one if it thinks that this is something that you're into and watching. That's it. What I'm doing is I got a couple of TVs that I like a lot. I feel like buying a TV is a huge decision too, which is a little silly, but I have a couple of TVs that I like a lot that I have bookmarked to see if they go on Black Friday sale,

and if they do, I'm going to get an Amazon Fire TV with it. Yeah, I'm really impressed. We've ditched the Roku in the front room now, and I'm now looking at the Fire TV stick to replace the other Roku in the bedroom. Did you guys see they announced their tiered pricing for BitTorrent Sync? No. Yeah. Yeah, it's a

thing. They're doing a tiered pricing thing. Let me go look it up real quick. I think I saw it. What? I'll stop using BitTorrent Sync and use SyncThing because that's horrible. I'm looking it up now maybe it was a prank before they're still gonna release um like a a solid free version everything that

you have now you're gonna get to keep you won't lose anything all right so that was a thing i saw that wasn't me just being crazy are you guys seeing this are you uh yeah what do you think of this what do you think about this sucks because at the moment i've got probably 200 gigabytes of stuff being synced i think yeah i publish all the unfiltered supporters uh files and every single episode is usually one to two gigabytes minimum and you know there's a lot of episodes and then yeah i know it really sucks that shit isn't it okay so i'm gonna have to bite the bullet on sync thing and get over the rather clunky trust relationship model i problem is that pulse that pulse model doesn't work for me i i can't

add each listener individually no it doesn't work for you and it's a pain in the what's it's for me because i've got um bitync on all of the laptops and desktops and the nas and a couple of servers out you know providers um so i've probably got at least a dozen to 14 things and just that is going to be a mess because that's a 28 way key exchange which is doesn't scale really does it it's a way to add add keys from like the command line because in theory what you could do is when someone subscribes to like the unfiltered stuff you could send them an email like it could and that could be automated they could add their key and then you could have just a back end that automatically adds it to the sync thing.

So, yeah. So, okay. So, sync is going to be, pro is going to be $49, or I'm sorry, $40 a year. Gives you unlimited files. Yeah, boy, this is rough, right? Some people call it bait and switch. Sync folders as well, though. This is rubbish.

Oh, that's the worst about this. Because in lieu of selective syncitch. It's related to sync folders as well, though. This is rubbish. Oh, I'm just warning us about this. Because in lieu of selective sync, I've got lots of sync folders. Right. That's how you do it in BitTorrent Sync. Yeah, yeah. Isn't BitTorrent Sync... So this is actually looking more like €96 a year from what I'm looking at here. Isn't BitTorrent Sync distributed?

It's decentralized. It's the distributed? Well, it's decentralized. It's the way the files are shared is decentralized. It's basically they're nobbling their software to get money out of us. Well, this is why they never open sourced it, isn't it? Wouldn't that technically be illegal? Because you're using other people's autistic money. No, I mean, this is not too uncommon. No, they're charging for their software.

You launch a beta, it's free during the beta, and then when you are done with the beta, you charge. I mean, that's not too uncommon. It's disappointing. Chris, what if you use an old version for RFID on content? Yeah, I suppose. But the thing is, if the client's update, I've noticed on BitTorrent Sync that can be an issue.

If the server falls too far behind some of the clients, at least it happened to me once, it became a problem, and some people couldn't get files anymore. So is Sparkle Share looking good now? Maybe, yeah. So yeah, another one to look at is C-File if you've not used that.

Sparkle Share. Yeah, and of course if you want to pay, SpiderOak. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's really packing it in for the holidays. My name is Chris. And my name is Matt. Hey there, Matt. So rumor has it you were just chowing down on a little bacon before we got started today.

I was. I was. I got up here about 15 till, logged in about 10 till, and I'm like cramming bacon down my face. But the cool thing, you were still doing your thing. So I was like, oh, cool, I got time to eat this. I had some meatballs while you were having your bacon. It's like it's Sunday. It's like we're in our Sunday routine on Tuesday. So I have a lot to cover today. I'm really excited about today's show.

So we are following up with Charlie from Sunday's Linux Action Show, and he's brought some of his students in. They're all huddled around a laptop right now, and we're going to talk to them about their experiences with Linux. Really looking forward to that. We've got some great emails to read this week, some thought-provoking questions, and potentially some big changes coming to the Jupyter Broadcasting website.

And towards the end of the show, I'm going to play a preview clip of an interview that we'll be playing on Sunday's Linux Action Show with Mark Shuttleworth. And the topic is germane to this show. It's something we've been talking about a lot lately, the tone of dialogue in the open source community around all of the recent systemd debates and Debian and all that kind of stuff. I wanted to ask Mark Shuttleworth what he thought about it

and got a brief summary of his thoughts. We go into greater detail in the Sunday interview. We're going to play a clip of that because it felt like it fit pretty well with the topic that we have been recently discussing here on the show. So that will be towards the end of the show. A lot to do today. So, Matt, you know what we've got to do? You've got to start with that email.

Got to start with that email. Sounds good. So Jesse writes in, and he has a question for our guest today. So we'll start with our first email that pertains to Charlie. And Charlie, I'll read this to you, and then I'll give you a chance to respond. And it goes a little something like this. Jesse says, hello there, Chris Matton. Obviously not Charlie.

I saw your latest episode of the Linux Action Show, episode 340, with Charlie Reisinger. And I was just wondering, how would you introduce Linux and open source to a school district that still uses Windows XP and PowerPC versions of OS X, and they can't really afford new hardware or software due to politicians stealing money from the state budget? Thanks for your hard time and all your hard work and any ideas. So, Charlie, if somebody's in a really budget-restricted environment where maybe they couldn't buy laptops for students and can't really afford to buy new hardware, is there somewhere where you would give them advice to start on rolling out Linux and open source in a district?

Oh, sorry, Charlie. I had you turned down. Go ahead, Charlie. Oh, yeah. No problem. Thanks again for having us on the show today. This is just so much fun. Yeah, you know, that's tough. You know, being in a school, you know, you've worked in a school. We've both been there when, you know, budgets and resources are restricted. What I could offer up is probably just starting small. Right, right. In the past, you know, really some of our first implementations on the desktop were with Ubuntu, just simply because the interface was lightweight and we could take advantage of lower-end hardware.

But also, I think more germane to this is a discussion of just starting in a very small fashion. We've scaled up to thousands of machines in the desktop, but we didn't start there. We built on very small successes. In many cases, we installed some flavor of Linux on just a few machines, maybe just a teacher's set in a classroom or perhaps even just a single lab. Very good. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It requires patience, but you start small and you build up after successes. You get some successes under your belt, prove that it's worth everybody's time, prove it's worth whatever little budget is available, and then build on top of that. That's great advice.

Yeah, absolutely. And it helps also just to bring teachers on board and staff and, of course, students too. We often forget that we want to get students excited about technology, And I think that's an important part of the equation as well. Yeah, great point. All right. So there you go, Jesse. There's some great starting points from Charlie. And I wish you the best of luck, sir. And, you know, when I tried to get Linux deployed in my work environment, it was fundamentally critical to have these mini successes.

It started small, and then I built on top of that. And it doesn't have to be a school district. It can be any kind of environment like that. So Bugsbane III writes in, and maybe this is one we can open up to the whole mumble room. He says, I've been using Linux for over a decade and I love it. While I can't write a line of code to save my life, over the years I've gotten very used to setting up networks,

compiling code, triaging bugs, et cetera. I have no formal qualifications, but I've learned a lot. Now I'd like to use all of that training to get a job, but I have no formal qualifications, but I've learned a lot. Now I'd like to use all of that training to get a job, but I have no idea where to start. Entry jobs seem to be overqualified. We have requirements where you've been a network administrator for many years or you're a developer. And currently not having a job, I don't have a lot of money to spend on getting certifications or training to become a coder. So where would you, or anyone in the audience, recommend someone start? And so the question is, if you have a good sense of Linux, maybe you've been using it for a while, but you don't have

anything on that resume, how could you get in and get started? And I'll start with my idea, and then anybody that wants to jump in, please do so. I would, if you are unemployed, consider the fact that you might have something in excess that a lot of people don't have. And it's not necessarily money, it's time. And you might consider starting at the ground floor somewhere and just on a volunteer basis to see if they need help. And then perhaps make yourself invaluable and they might consider hiring you. That would be one way. I know that's easier said than done. Matt, what do you think? What about like just trying to get your foot in the door and maybe trying to get somebody's attention? Is it got to be like, do you need to

know somebody? Is that, is he screwed if he doesn't know somebody? No, you hit the nail on the head with volunteering. Both, pretty much everything I've ever done in my life, I started at some capacity of working for free. And I think that volunteering for a worthwhile organization makes a lot of sense because not only do you have something very strong to put on your resume later, but you also showed

that you weren't watching Oprah all day on television. You were actually doing something productive. Right, getting work experience. And I'm not speaking to someone... Exactly. It's truly it.

I mean, that's, you know, I've been self-employed for years. And so for me, it's like, I can't fathom not having, you know, if I'm not in the middle of a project, I'll go make one. And I think the same thing applies here. If you could find a need, go fill it, figure it out, you know, just get out there and try stuff. I love it. That's great advice. Anybody in the Mumbler want to jump in with anything before we move on? I think that's probably good stuff right there. But if anybody else has any pointers of

something that got them a gig, we'd love to hear it. I'd just like to echo, Chris, that absolutely volunteering is the way to go. You know, open source by its very nature is participatory, and really the best way to demonstrate your skills is to get out and volunteer and be active in projects and programs and demonstrate what you got. Nailed it. All right. I'd also say that there's sometimes where I've talked to people who said that they didn't have enough experience because the job listings required something so absurd that it's not even possible. But a lot of the times, these employers are looking for people who are willing to try anyway.

Yeah, I've heard that before too. who are willing to try anyway. Yeah, I've heard that before too. Yeah, so they'll set up an experience. It's like you have to have three years of experience for this and two years of experience for this. But they don't actually want that. They're kind of like if they have – sometimes they'll have it where it's kind of a deterrent

for someone who's not motivated enough to try. They don't want them working for them anyway. So if you don't have the experience but you go there and say – and you can prove that you can do it anyway, they'll hire you. That's a great point. From their perspective, they're like, well, we're either going to get somebody who's really determined and willing to go the extra mile for us, or B, we'll get really lucky and get somebody who's super qualified and we won't have to pay them very much. And on top of that, once you're in the negotiations for the job, like if they're going to give it to you and you didn't meet all the qualifications,

they can be like, well, you know, we were looking for somebody who had 15 years as a DBA and 25 years as a VB programmer, so we're going to go ahead and cut off about 10K from what we listed in the job application, but you got the job. Congratulations. You know, that's another reason they do it. They make up these impossible qualifications, and when you don't meet them, they can kind of reduce their commitment. That's right.

We want you to have like 10 years of VB experience and also speak Chinese. Yeah. Have you been working with... We need somebody who's been working with Linux for 35 years. Can you do that for us? No, I can't. Lies. Yes, lies, exactly. Alright, I'll tell you about something that's not a lie.

That's saving a little bit of money from Ting. That's my mobile service provider and Matt's mobile service provider, and that's our first sponsor this week. Go to linux.ting.com. Linux. Yeah, you get to put Linux in there. Linux.ting.com. Head over there.

Check out the Ting website. By going to that URL, you automatically are going to save $25 if you pull the trigger and get a Ting device. Or if you've got a compatible Ting device, you're going to get $25 in Ting credit, which could be like almost two months of service. It's kind of crazy. So why Ting, right? Why switch? Why go through the hassle of moving over? Well, first of all, they make that switch pretty painless. They've got an early termination relief program. So if you're in a contract now,

they'll pay up to $75 per line you have to get canceled. If you're not in a contract, well, then this is a better time than ever to move over because you only pay for what you use. It's just your minutes, your messages, your megabytes. That's all you pay. You just take that up, add it up. That's it. It's $6 for the lines. You can have as many lines as you want. It's a flat $6. You can turn them on and off when you need them. And then you just pay for your usage. It doesn't matter if it's a data device or a smartphone, no contracts, no early termination fee, an incredible, incredible dashboard, and no whole customer service when you call them at 1-855-TING-FTW. A real person answers the phone.

Just got a call between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. on business hours. They're not animals. But go to linux.ting.com and try out that savings calculator right there on the screen. You click that, go in there, put in your current usage information. Like, for example, let's just, I don't even remember what I used to use anymore. But let's just say I use – yeah, right. Let's say I use 300 minutes. I'm not a big talker.

And 200 text messages, well, I mean, maybe. I really would probably use Hangouts, to be honest with you. So I don't know. But let's say it's 200 messages, right? And the megabytes, let's say it's about – let's say this month I think I'm probably about 3 gigabytes. And before taxes, that would be normally what? $150 for that cell phone bill? Oh, not $450, $150.

Now you go into the Ting Savings Calculator. If you've got multiple lines, you put that in there. You put your actual usage in there, and then you can calculate the savings and see how much you would save. They can do some data scraping as well. But just at that, which is a fairly moderate plan, you probably are using more than that, a lot of you, you'd save $2,000. And if you're using less, you'd save even more. That's what's so great about the Ting model. It's so sweet. Go over there right now, linux.ting.com. Check them out. See why Ting is mobile that makes sense. And when you're playing around with that savings calculator, don't be surprised if it brings a tear to your eye when you see that money. You're like, gosh,

that's a laptop I could buy every couple of years. And also, I think this is pretty cool. They've been spotlighting different Ting customers on the Ting blog. And they got an adorable new baby in it. Oh, look at that girl with those pretty blue eyes. Let's go over the Ting blog and check out the Ting customers, their app picks, information about Ting, their blog post about their consumer reports rating that was excellent. They got all the kinds of good info. Gives you some behind the scenes information about Ting and kind of gives you a better idea of where your money's going. And I think that's all pretty important to a lot of us. Linux.Ting.com. Get a $25 discount on your first Ting device with no contract,

no early termination fee. You own that phone. Like your computer, you know? I know, it's crazy. And it's not actually, you know what's funny? Is people outside the US, like some of our listeners live in areas where the cell phone system makes a lot more sense. And they hear this stuff like, wait a minute, you guys pay subsidies? Do you realize you pay more in the long run? Do you realize they're scamming you? And I don't know if you heard, but Verizon just extended the early termination fee even further out now and with a higher rate. They just keep getting worse.

They're not getting any better. Linux.ting.com. Go make a difference for yourself and go vote with your wallet. Linux.ting.com. And a big thank you to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. Okay, just a couple more emails to get to. This is, you know, when we started the Linux Unplugged show,

the initial concept for Linux Unplugged was actually going to be just 100% emails. I remember that. You remember that? Yeah, right? I was like, Matt, we get too many emails. We should have a show where we just read emails. So that's why we do emails at the beginning of the show because that's the heritage of Linux Unplugged.

It's like, okay, okay. I felt so bad that these emails were just sitting in the inbox and now we still have the same problem, but we at least get to some of them. So that's good. All right, Mandaray writes in with yet another SystemD survey. This is up to you, dear audience, but he wanted to let us know that he's created another SystemD survey. Unlike the one we ran previously, this one aims to figure out what groups of users are

in favor of SystemD and which are against it, and who is a vocal and who is, you know, all the kind of nuances around that. He says hopefully he wants to find more discussion around it. He's already compiled some of the interesting information, not only about system D, but other topics too, which might be worth discussing in future episodes. However, because he's kind of running this on his own, we haven't talked about it anywhere, he's only gotten about 240 participants so far.

So I have a link in the show notes if you'd like to take yet another system D survey that also asks some other questions. And you never know, we might get some good weekly conversation out of it for a little bit. So thanks to Mandre for writing that. It's a Google form. You know, these Google forms are actually really handy if you haven't checked them out because they output all of the results.

I mean, you know me, I'm not like Mr. Google over here, but they output all of the results right into a spreadsheet and that's just undeniably handy. It's I, in fact,

we're going to, we have one that I'm going to talk about at the end of the show for us. So I'll have a link to his survey in the show notes if you guys want to try it. Okay. Yeah, and maybe we can dig through the results later. All right. Here's the big one that I've been waiting to get to. I know Rotten Corpse is going to have some stuff to talk about that,

so I'll give him a chance to jump in first once I read this one. So on Coda Radio yesterday, I mentioned that I have a dream, Matt. I have a dream of going into the Jupyter Broadcasting WordPress directory, typing rm-rf star and hitting enter. I'm done with WordPress. It's great. It's super sweet. If you run a blog, anything like that, great open source project, I don't want to use WordPress anymore. I don't need a CMS.

I don't want a CMS. All I want to do is put an HTML5 video up on a web page with some download links and some text that tells you what that video is about. That's all I want, Matt. I want to take a flat markdown file, I want to drop in a directory, and I want that to publish up on the web. I don't want a database. I don't want nothing dynamic. None of it.

Static HTML, simple, easy, boom, shakalaka. I hear you. So on Coder Radio 129, I went on about my fantasy of replacing WordPress with something more quote unquote sane as it was written here up in this subreddit post. So here's the, there's a bunch of great suggestions in this post of what Jupyter Broadcasting could do to move away from WordPress. Let me tell you what I'm thinking about here, because I'd love to get the audience, I'm sure there's some people out there that have done this kind of thing.

to get the audience, I'm sure there's some people out there that have done this kind of thing. I really want something very simple that would allow us to import somehow, I don't know how we would do it, all of the back catalog of the existing posts. So we could go pull in all of the previous shows, not mess with all the timestamps, keep all the tags, something that could extract it from the MySQL WordPress database and put it into this new system. So that's one thing I want to get done. I'm thinking like after the holidays, so not like right now, probably after New Year's, and put this all, I'm trying to put something together,

and I'm looking for people's suggestions right now on how we could pull off, what we could use, and any tools that might be useful in a transition like this. It's really early day stuff, just starting to think about it. But Rotten Corpse, you were looking at Pico CMS. I know, I think Alan is using Pico CMS to run the bsdnow.tv site, and he says it essentially does kind of what I was talking about. They run the whole site off of Markdown files and some CSS tweaks, right? Yeah. It's not limited to just Markdown, but it does have a lot of focus on Markdown.

So what do you think? Am I crazy? No, actually, for JB, it makes a lot of sense because the biggest bottleneck for a CMS is the constant checking the database for the content. And for the episodes, you don't need to go back and change the show notes because once it shows out, it shows out. the episodes, you don't need to go back and change the show notes because once it shows out, it shows out. A static file would make perfect sense for JB and the entire structure

would make sense to Twitch over. Pico looks really good. I'm also looking at Pelican, but so far Pico is kind of like the frontrunner. But there are many other options that I'm looking at. A few suggestions people gave actually have been discontinued. Oh, really?

About half of the ones that were suggested were not viable. But Pico does look like a good option. Now, M.B., you've done some migrations. I noticed you mentioned mate-desktop.org and ubuntu-mate.org. You mentioned those as reference. Have you migrated those specific sites from WordPress, or what's that been like for you? So, yeah. So I migrated my own site from WordPress to Nicola, which is a static site generator a couple of years ago. And Nicola has a WordPress migration tool so you can migrate all your pages and blog posts. And it also has – well, no, you don't need to use nicola for this but um within wordpress

you can export all your comments as xml and then you can load those into discuss and then you can link your static site generated with nicola to the discuss account with where your comments have been imported and retain all of your comment history as well so i migrated my own site to nicola because i i wanted a static site generator i wanted a really easy way to deploy the website and i spend a lot of time in the shell and i just wanted to be able to open up my text editor bash in some words and publish and everything for my site is uh done Markdown. Nice. So if you look at the Ubuntu Marte website, that is all Markdown that's rendered into HTML by Nicola. And you just manage a theme that is then applied to the Markdown. So I found Nicola to be really great.

And I actually use Bitsync as my deployment mechanism. So my sites are in in bitsync and you edit the markdown and then i touch a file in there to say publish and a cron job on the server looks for the publish file runs the nicola static site generation and then rsyncs the the generated site to the um web group i was i was thinking of maybe i mean bitdorn sync is pretty sweet too i was thinking of like a github like a git deployment like you know check in check out push kind of thing yeah and i've i've used things like that but too complicated a bit of a well for for my own sites it is although as it happens i'm uh the marta desktop.org website is powered by Nicola and that's in Git Hub and periodically the server checks out the

GitHub and rebuilds the site and deploys it. So that's familiar for the developers who know the Git workflow. For my own stuff, it's currently in Bitsync, but I'm going to put the Ubuntu Marte site into either Git or Bazaar so that I can get some translators involved because Nicola has also got multilingual facilities as well so you can do translations. Oh, I like the WordPress conversion built in.

Yeah, go ahead. What I would recommend is setting up a Gitolite server on your DigitalOcean droplet. And this is what I do, in fact. And you push a change and you can have get a light call a hook and that hook could be to rebuild the static site okay oh this is exciting okay so uh how do you handle uh like changes to like uh so if you how do you like for for example in jupiter broadcasting let's say we had a thumbnail and we want to

change the thumbnail on one of the on one of the stills would it how do you regenerate like a front page what generates that is the is the nicola software taking care of that what's doing that part yeah yeah so the way the nicola works is it knows the hashes of all of the source files and it knows the hashes of all of the configuration and the files that get generated. So if, for example, you change an asset, every page where that asset is used will automatically be generated. So when I did that deployment of Ubuntu Mate a couple of weeks ago, the release part was running Nicola, and it's two commands, Nicola build,

which builds all of the pages and pulls in all of the assets, and then Nicola deploy, which then calls a script of your own to actually push it somewhere. And what I've done is I've added a couple of extra deployment pieces, which are scripts that automatically symlink the ISO images and stuff like that. And does it handle things like responsive design and stuff like that, or is that a little tricky? It does, yeah.

Go and open UbuntuMate.org on your phone and have a look. It's automatic. Yeah, it actually works on the browser too, yeah. Anything can be responsive. That's just in the front end. So the way that that's handled is I've cheated, and Nicola supports Bootstrap, one of the themes. So I just went to Boot Swatch, found a theme that was broadly what I wanted and then just tweaked it.

And then I got all the benefits of, you know, Bootstrap and Boot Swatch. I didn't have to do much work. That's pretty great. That's a lot of great. It sounds a lot up our alley. And does it do any feed generation or anything like that for RSS feeds? Yeah, it generates RSS feeds, and it can do podcast stuff and a whole bunch of other things. And it's not limited to Markdown either.

So it also supports restructured text and BB code and just about every kind of text render you can imagine. Yeah, all of those and so on the martedesktop.org website the front page is actually restructured text because i needed some of the facilities of restructured text um but all of the other pages are marked down that's cool so this is sounding pretty doable i wonder uh i'm sure that i'm sure what nicola does is not that different from what a lot of the other static site generators do but what you get of course is you get some real security benefits because you're not running an interpreted language on your web server so you can't be exploited and the other thing you can do is then trivially hook it up to your cdn to cache all of the assets like your CSS and your JavaScript.

Exactly. So I then integrate my sites with Cloudflare, and that absorbs gobs of bandwidth that I don't have to serve out through my own servers. That is excellent. My really ultimate end vision, like, I don't know when this would ever be done, but, like, the file comes out of the editing software, whatever it is at this point in time. And it's then ran through. We currently have a pretty nice bash script that Rekai has put together to handle all of our encoding and metadata tagging and the different versions of all the different files. And, you know, it spits them all out. It would be amazing then to have something like that, that would then take a markdown file, right? And put it somewhere where it could get absorbed onto the website and upload these files to the CDN and really have it be the point where you export out of the editing application, you run the bash script.

And from that point, everything is kind of on autopilot and it just reduces human error. It, you know, it makes it faster. And the end goal would really be to give us more time and more resources available to do other things, so that way we don't have to sit there and babysit the computer as it goes through these tasks and sit there and upload it to the FTP. We don't need to do that. It could all be automated. But the key part I really want to do is I want to make sure

the whole web posting process could be automated as well. And I would love to have a day where this system works so well that Rikai gets done editing a file, he kicks off the encode, and he can just leave it and it doesn't have to go, and it gets published on its own after that. So we'll see. Yeah, so if you've already got an investment in some scripts that do some of those deployment activities,

you can continue to leverage those and just integrate those as the deployment commands within Nicola. So in the configuration file, it can run any number of commands as part of the deployment. And I've got half a dozen shell scripts that get executed in my deployment, one to deposit the files in the right place, and then a few other bits and pieces to link up iso links and then torrents and stuff like that so not dissimilar from what you would want to do with with media and it can be automated because cron is your friend yeah wow oh where do you think i just touch a file and how long have you had so far how long has it how long have you been using it in production? On my own personal site for two years, on the Marte desktop website for about a year,

and obviously I've been to Marte just about five months. So what do you think, Rod? I think that there's now a potential battle between Nicola and Pico. Good. All right. There you go. And out there in the audience, if anybody has some suggestions, there's already a thread going in the subreddit. You can toss in or you can leave a comment in the feedback thread for this episode. It's not that we're going to do right away, but it's definitely something I want to start thinking about now.

So when we do it, we do it right. Oh, totally. Well, I actually threw something to you in the Skype message in there. I think it's called Jekyll. It's something I've looked at in the past. It's very similar to what you guys were talking about earlier. RSS imports the whole package. Yep.

Yep. That's another one I've heard of, too. Yeah. Jekyll's looking good. And Ghost is another one I've seen a lot of common mentions. So some really interesting, way more options out there than I thought when I came up with this. Apparently, I'm nowhere near the first person to ever

think of this idea. Not surprising. Not surprising at all. And you know, I think a big part of that could be DigitalOcean, and that's why I think I'm going to mention our next sponsor over at DigitalOcean.com. I could easily see us using a droplet to manage the deployment or take care of some testing. In fact, there's so many amazing things you could use DigitalOcean for because you get great performance, great price, and unlimited access to the machine. Check it out. DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to spin up your own cloud server. You get root access to that bad mamma jamma, HTML5 console access. I know you like that. And users can usually get started in less than 55 seconds. I mean, seriously. Like, our audience, it's ridiculous. I mean, now, if you can get it below 40, really, the benchmark is 35 seconds. That's when you should be tweeting it, Chris. If you get it under 35 seconds now, and for $5 a

month, you're going to get 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of blazing fast transfer that's connected to data centers all over the world. In New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. They just posted a new New York data center picture on their Instagram feed.

It's got to be the best looking data centers I've ever seen. And I know that seems like a weird thing to comment on, but guys, I've been to a lot of data centers, and they never look as good. It's got to be the best-looking data centers I've ever seen. And I know that seems like a weird thing to comment on, but guys, I've been to a lot of data centers, and they never look as good. It's just, oh, man, I feel like I want to go back and just appreciate a well-designed data center because now that it's no longer my problem, oh, it's gorgeous.

But it's that interface that really stands out. I mean, it's not just their data centers that look great. It's their interface. Everything about DigitalOcean looks great. Their interface is intuitive. And the control panel, yet simple and powerful. And the best part is you can replicate the functionality with their straightforward API. You can write some scripts, snap it into your puppet management infrastructure, use one of the many applications built by the community. They've got all of it. That control panel rocks, and the community support around it rocks dns management one click deployment of git lab you know like for example if we were going to

actually start when we released an episode deploying that to the website via git you you absolutely bet it would be on a self-hosted instance up on digital ocean no question about it not only does that dashboard make get up and going super fast and straightforward, doesn't give me any pause, so I just get right in friction-free, but it also means that I'm going to have a blazing fast machine because DigitalOcean is SSDs throughout. They got great bandwidth, incredible SSD speeds. It really makes a difference. And it's just all those little things at every single level that make them so incredible. But I also know that if I ever get stuck, DigitalOcean has the best tutorials on the web.

And they're getting even better because DigitalOcean is willing to pay for them because they understand the importance of them. In fact, if you write a tutorial for DigitalOcean, you could get paid up to $200. And they have an editor that works with you too. So it's not like it's all on you. And they've had such success there, they've opened up an editing position. So here's what I want you to do.

I want you to try out DigitalOcean. You can try it for two months for free to see what I've been talking about. Use our promo code UNPLUGGEDNOVEMBER. That's going to get you a $10 credit. Unplugged November. Okay? You get a $10 credit. You apply that to your account.

In fact, I need to go in there and do that right now. This is another thing I like a lot about it is you pre-fund the account, and they just send you a message, hey, you need to add more funds. This is how I have it set up. I'm sure you could probably have it set up multiple ways. So I go in there right now. If I was trying out DigitalOcean, I put the promo code in, unplug November, and I get a $10 credit.

I think I might go do that. I could be trying it out right now. Try it out. Go over there. Get a $5 rig. See what you can do. And the best part is you don't have to worry about like – it's not like a system where they're going to get you.

Because if you need to upgrade to a beefier box, the pricing tier is crazy straightforward. You just go look at the pricing plans. It's like, okay, that's easy. It's another $5. That makes sense. Right? And you can even do hourly pricing. So if you just need to scale up for a little while and add some additional capacity or you're doing some testing for a day or it's a launch day or maybe you're going to do a gaming server for a few hours hourly pricing right because you got these snapshots you

can just spin it up when you need it for a little while and then shut it down digitalocean.com unplug november when you check out and a huge thank you to digital ocean for sponsoring the linux unplug program digitalocean.com unplug november when you check out. I always have like, whenever now we're talking about big projects, I'm always like, oh, I know what we're going to do. We're going to spin it up on a DigitalOcean droplet. That's always like, is this an excuse to have a droplet? That's like me now. It's like, I'm ridiculous.

Okay, so I'm pretty excited. So we've been talking with Charlie, and Charlie's there. I'm assuming, I'm picturing it right now. It's a classroom, probably a whiteboard, and there's like one laptop in the middle. And like all of these kids and students and teachers and I don't know who else, maybe Superman, I don't know, are all sitting around this laptop to talk to us. So I thought Charlie told us something that really struck me like, wow, this blows my mind as a previous school district employee. Some of the students, I'm not sure how many, maybe it's all, have root access to their boxes. And some of the students are involved in the help desk and troubleshooting. Like they get

tickets, they go in there and close tickets. And so Charlie, if maybe you could be my eyes and ears and hands for me and pick maybe a help desk representative, I'd love to ask somebody. I'll start. Here's the question. And then Charlie, I'll let you pick the person. What is a typical help desk call for a student it person what kind of troubleshooting do they have to do sure that's a great question and i'm looking at four gentlemen that are with me here and i'm gonna let one of our students answer that question for you great i'm curious hello um my name is Taylor. Hey, Taylor. How's it going? So what kind of questions are you wondering?

Well, give me like a common problem you run into. Just usually general things like why isn't this page loading and stuff like that because, I mean, they're not going to go to above and beyond the normal student population. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, I wonder, do you ever get people to throw their hands up and say, I don't know how this population. Sure. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, I wonder, do you ever get people to throw their hands up and say, I don't know how this Linux stuff works? What's going on here?

Is that ever the problem? Is it just this is Linux and I don't get it? Actually, when we first distributed them, we ran them all through tutorials. When the new freshmen come in, we run them through tutorials when a new student enrolls, same deal going on. And they're welcome to stop by with any questions or leave a ticket if they can't get down here. That's great. And do you run Linux at home now, too, or are you running something else at home? I used to have my one computer triple booted, but, yeah, I got a new drive and it's just running Mac OS X U70 right now. I got you. I got you.

It's okay. We still love you, Taylor. Oh, no, we won't hold it against you. It's okay. So, Taylor, when you go out there, do you get assigned a ticket? And this is Taylor's ticket and you have to resolve it? And is that tied into any kind of curriculum? Well, it's tied into the course. It's an honors-weighted course. And the whole ticket system deal is basically everybody that has admin privileges to view the tickets that are open,

they can assign it to themselves or transfer it to somebody else. And you just basically answer if you assign it to yourself or you transfer it to somebody else if you can't necessarily figure it out on your own. Okay, that sounds pretty reasonable. It sounds like a pretty good system. Is there ever a time where you're troubleshooting some of this stuff? And this is Taylor or anybody that wants to answer this. Is there ever a time where you're troubleshooting some of this stuff? And this is Taylor or anybody that wants to answer this. Is there ever a time when you're troubleshooting this kind of stuff and you think, gosh, if it wasn't Linux, this would be a lot easier?

Or do you find it sometimes is easier to do some troubleshooting because it is Linux? Both are things that do come up. With the wall that you hit when you're trying to find like something that would be maybe easier there's always alternatives you know stuff like that play on Linux to run Windows applications if we need to stuff like that that's pretty cool so you're getting into some of the wine stuff too and And how has that worked for you? The students seem to be pretty pleased with it. And it basically gets us around obstacles that like they want to, you know, they want to use a certain program and it's only supported on Windows and Mac. They download the Windows version and then they just open in there, and it does the rest for them. Yeah, that is kind of a nice thing.

And I wonder if, and anybody's free to answer this too, how do you guys manage user logins? Because one of the nice things about a Windows mobile lab or a Windows lab of computers on the desk or whatever it might be is, you know, it's Windows, but you can tie it into a domain, and it's easy to have one account across all the computers. And so is there a standard student login, or how are you managing all of those user accounts on all these laptops? Yeah, actually, I'm going to turn that over to one of my staff to jump in for a moment. I'll let him introduce himself and take that question. My name is Chad. Hey, Chad.

Hey, Chad. question? My name is Chad. Hey, Chad. So on the actual laptops themselves, well, as part of the rollout, every student kind of just resets the local password on the user. And then we actually don't even know what they are. And then as far as like any services that we provide as a district, we actually have Active Directory accounts for people. So we do centrally manage those, but that doesn't give them access to the laptop. It's a separate username and password. Sure. That makes sense. And as long as you have root access, you could always get in there and flip their password to something you need if you need to log in as them.

Have you ever walked up to a laptop and been shocked or surprised by something installed that maybe came from a repo that you didn't expect? Like they didn't have to go out and find it on the web. Somebody came down, they knew Linux, and they installed stuff? Or is this so different than what people are used to that that almost't expect? Like they didn't have to go out and find it on the web. They just, somebody came down, they knew Linux and they installed stuff. Or is this so different than what people are used to that that almost never happens? I'm looking to the student team to answer that. So I think we get two different answers

from the staff and the students. So Taylor, do you want to take that or Nick or somebody? Okay, Taylor's going to jump in. So were you ever surprised by anything you saw installed? Well, just aesthetic wise, I've seen some freaky wallpapers for one. I've seen one or two students that have actually tried to reinstall Ubuntu or actually try to install Windows itself. They just completely messed up everything because of it.

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. You know, I could see them like, well, I'll take this home and I'll put Windows on so I can play my games or something like that, and then they mess it all up. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. So, okay. I should, Chris, I should add just really quickly, again, we absolutely encourage our students to explore and tinker with the machines. There is an acceptable use policy. There is a mobile policy that our students do sign. The one thing that we ask them not to do is to reformat and reimage the machine.

That's one of the boundaries that we put up, and there's various reasons for that. You know, we have software that's installed for our testing mechanisms here at the high school. There's other unique items that are specific to the high school that we need to make sure are maintained on the boxes. So we do put that barrier up, and that's really more of a functional barrier because we do have certain expectations of what's on the machine itself. You know, also our filtering software, for example. You know, in a perfect world, we would remove those restrictions, but there's still the, you know, the quote-unquote business of education that we have to get done inside the school. Sure. That makes sense. I mean, you have to, at the end of the day, there have to be

tools that are available for learning. I'm curious, I'm picturing my environment, right? I'm picturing a setup like this. Who drives forward? It's everybody together and says, all right, it's been a few years. We deployed Ubuntu or whatever, Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04, whatever it is. Who's the person that now leads the initiative to say, we've got to update the Linux deployment toolkit and we've got to get the next version of all of the applications and the next version of the operating system on all of these laptops. Who has that initiative? Is that something that's driven from IT? Is that something that comes from the student body that says, look, we need these things? How does that work in this setup? Yeah, in our case, that's driven by IT. We'd like to stay on long-term support releases. I mentioned in the past, we actually started at the elementary level with Ubuntu on 1204. Our current implementation here at the high school is pretty close to stock Ubuntu 14.04 long-term support. We actually do use Unity.

But, yeah, at some point, we'll look at that. You know, my team and I will sit down and decide, well, it's time to rev and move up to the latest long-term support release. We're pretty happy with 14.04 right now. We're not seeing any roadblocks, but likely when the next long-term support comes out, we'll look at that again and build a fresh image. Now, of course, in the intermediate time, as there is applications that we need, we'll rev those as need be. We actually pulled back all of the one-to-one machines this past summer

and re-imaged them up to 14.04 long-term support. But again, it's really driven by the OS reps. You mentioned you're running Unity. What's the reaction been to Unity from the student body? I think I'm going to let the students answer that. We have two, just to give you a sense of who's with us today. We have two of our current help desk students, two current students here at Penn Manor,

and I also have three of our Vanguard help desk students. These are three individuals that actually just graduated last year, so they're here as well. But I think for the reaction to the Unity interface, Nick, would you like to take that? Sure. You want to jump in and take it? Hi, I'm Nick, and a lot of the students here actually kind of do like the laptops,

but some of them are complaining because they are so used to Windows or Mac and they can't play their games on here, so they keep coming down. But it's something that we can actually really do without installing a GUI or a different subprogram they can use. Overall, a lot of students do like them because it gives them the opportunity to bring the laptop home, work on stuff for school, and to bring it back without having to be back a couple of days or weeks. That makes a lot of sense. So, Charlie, I know you have – it sounds like you have a good range of experience there. Here's my question.

You know, here you are, a very large – what I find fascinating about this is it's a very large, concentrated Linux deployment of similar hardware with a specific use case in mind. And I'm curious, and maybe people might have a few opinions on this, what is Linux lacking that would make your job easier? What have you gone, oh man, if we just had this, or if we could just do this, X, Y, Z would be easier, or we could get this better accomplished. What's been lacking for this initiative that you've maybe worked around? It's not insolvable, but it's maybe not the best case. Yeah, I think several of us kind of jumped up and thought the same thing together. I'm going to introduce you to another member of my staff. Take it away, Alex.

Hi, my name is Alex. I will say two things that could be improved from the feedback from the students. First is that since the students get to take the computers home, they already have equipment at home, printers especially, different network setups, and it's the lack of drivers for many devices they run at home. Sometimes they have to come to us

and help them to install the drivers that they can't do themselves. The second one, there's a lack of polish on the GUI for most of the programs. And that from students that are used to carrying their Android phones or iPhones, the interface sells a lot. That's a really good point. Yeah, they see it as a polished thing. That's a good point. And the drivers I can see being an issue.

If you don't mind, Chris, if you don't mind, I was looking at some of the other students again, current and past students. Does anybody else want to add to that? What other impediments people are shaking their heads? Any other ideas? The fact that we can't actually print from these because we can't physically install the driver. Driver support for printing. That's another roadblock that we bump into. Although that's not terrible. It's gotten better over the years, I think. But it's still problematic. I think to add to that we hear a lot from students and parents that just are very unfamiliar with Linux,

and they run into roadblocks when they're trying to install their home printers and other devices. So that's pretty common. And have you guys experimented at all with something like Google Cloud Print or something like that that sort of normalizes the print driver, and then the actual print rendering is done on a separate box? Because that's a lot of times how network printing works. But Google Cloud Print, I know you're not big on a lot of the Google services, but Google Cloud Print might resolve the issue for home users? Yeah, we haven't really explored that, but it's not out of the question. I mean, it always could be something we look at down the road. My team is all kind of collectively

nodding heads up and down. I wonder, have you seen or heard of students, maybe not a lot, but have you heard of some students that were sort of encouraged, maybe motivated to install Linux on their home computer? Yeah, actually, Nick, go ahead, jump in. Last year, actually, when I decided to join this, my Windows 7 laptop was being corrupted and it wasn't working, so I decided to actually install Linux on here and it actually worked out for the better.

I kind of actually prefer that over Windows 7 right now because it seems to be very unstable. Windows 7 was unstable, right? Yeah. Well, that's great. And so I want to, we're going to keep pulling ahead here on some of the rest of the show,

but you guys feel free to jump in on any insights you have on any of the rest of the topics for today. I guess my final question is, what's next? Charlie, you mentioned getting down the rest of the school district. What kind of initiatives are next for this kind of huge project? Yeah, I think in our immediate future, we're having discussions about expanding our one-to-one program to the middle levels. Currently, the only students that are carrying laptops as part of the one-to-one are in high school. That's grades 9 through 12.

So we're beginning these planning stages for rolling that out to grades 7 and 8 for next year. You know, I think, you know, beyond that, you know, I'm beginning to think longer range. You know, what does this look like for an elementary implementation? You know, but that's just the operational side of the house. I think that, you know that ideally what I look forward to is just watching our teachers and our students

and the interesting creative uses that they have for the laptops. I mean, the whole reason we did this is as a learning initiative. Again, we talk a lot about it from the technical perspective, and it's very interesting and exciting. But at the same time, I think the learning opportunities for our kids, I mean, that's really what gets me excited. And I just can't wait to see what neat things our students begin producing and finding and discovering, you know, everything from coding to painting and drawing applications to what they do with the 3D programs. You know, I'm just really looking forward to what our kids do and what they can produce and build and, you know, projects that

they find personally meaningful. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's also maybe some long-term advantages on being on the Linux ecosystem, getting familiar with these interfaces, these program names, how they work. It seems like we are rapidly approaching a time where the Raspberry Pi and devices like it could become consumerized, productized, and be very accessible to low-cost deployments, like a school deployment. And the best part about that, in the case of the Raspberry Pi, is it's fundamentally different hardware than your desktop PC. But you can still run the same Unity desktop, the same Firefox applications and LibreOffice

and all of this stuff, and the school would, in theory, when these devices are powerful enough, if they're not already, would be able to jump in and start deploying those. And the cost savings, it just seems like it will continue to pay off over time. But I guess here's my really last question for you, Charlie, is down the road, you win the lottery or a lot of folks on the IT staff win the lottery.

Changeover happens maybe five, 10 years. Does this initiative continue on on its own? Does it have enough momentum? Or if the stars that are pushing it sort of fade, will the initiative begin to fade? And that dominant narrative from the parents and perhaps new faculty members who come in from other school districts come and say, well, this isn't Windows. Where's Office? Windows 10 just came out. It's amazing. These kinds will always be outside external pressures that are always constantly, when new eyes

come in, reassessing your project, reassessing what you're doing here, constantly questioning it. And I wonder, is this something that can hold up to scrutiny long term, say, if some of the key drivers behind it were to go away? Yeah, I think it can. And I think a large reason, really to that point, we've been building to this point. This isn't just something that we woke up one day and we decided, hey, we're going to roll out not only A, a one-to-one, but also B, we're going to do it on Linux.

We've been building on experiences and successes for well over a decade. We started, again, with a huge deployment of, well, actually it started small, but built up a huge infrastructure based around open source and Linux and demonstrated that it's not only the cost savings, but it can work and that open source works well in an enterprise environment in schools. So I think that, you know, culturally, it's really been threaded into our DNA and into our philosophy here at Penn Manor at this school. And I really don't see that unraveling anytime soon because we've demonstrated that it's a fantastic learning model for education and one that saves a truckload of money.

You know, now, who knows down the future? I mean, we would be remiss if we were not constantly reevaluating technology, both open source and proprietary. My team and I have a fundamental belief and our fundamental philosophy is obviously, you know, turn toward open source. But we continue to evaluate and see if there are better solutions. And at this point, I don't see anything in the near to long-term future that is better than a full open source implementation for us from an operational and more importantly, an educational perspective. Right. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, it fundamentally, at the end of the day, is the best tool for the job. It's not just one thing. There's a lot of aspects to it. Well,

that's great to hear. And Charlie, I've heard from a lot of people who think this is a great initiative. So major compliments to the whole team over there, all the students and everybody. It's really awesome. And I don't know, to be honest, it's brought back my optimism about it because it's something I'd seen fade away. So it's really good to see that it's still happening. There's people motivated to get into technology. So everyone over there, please continue to huddle around the laptop and join us for the remainder of the show. And feel free to jump in. Just flag us if you want to say something because I'd love to hear your insights on any of this stuff.

So if somebody has something they want to contribute, just raise your hand and I'll have Charlie ping me. this stuff. So if somebody has something they want to contribute, just raise your hand and I'll have Charlie ping me. So before we get into our next topic, which is I'm really happy with the way our chat with Mark Shuttleworth turned out. I recorded it yesterday on Monday at 10 a.m. I did it off air because I wanted to ask him a few things that I wanted him to feel comfortable not having a live audience answering them because I wanted to go a little bit deeper than the typical Mark Shuttleworth interview goes. And I called him out on a couple of things that I think are misconceptions, and he did a really good job of addressing them. So I really encourage you to tune in to Sundays, the upcoming Linux Action Show,

because we covered some ground that I think a lot of interviews have danced around, but nobody's asked Mark some of the direct questions. The preview I'm going to play in today's show is Mark's thoughts in light of the Debian community upsets. So this is very pertinent to the discussions we've had on this show. And I think it actually would be pertinent for some of the students that are listening right now on how conflict resolution has to kind of work in the open source community. Before we get to that, though, I want to thank our next sponsor, and that's Linux Academy. This is a great opportunity

for you to go bring your skill level up a little bit and have something on that resume. You know, we had an email earlier asking about something that Jesse, I believe it was, that wanted to go out and try to get something on the resume, try to put something on the books

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So if you're moving between distros or curious how the other side lives, it's a great way to do this. They have some great OpenStack courses. They have great Puppet courses. All of it. Just go over there and learn a little something. I hear from folks all the time. They've gone over there and said, geez, I had no idea how much content was available. I've heard you mention some of them, but I had no idea the sheer amount.

You could spend years in there learning, and that's amazing, right? Or entering in your, apparently I need to enter in my gnome password. Go over there right now, linuxacademy.com slash unplug. Get the 33% discount. Try out a few of their courseware. The reason I mention Puppet

is because they just refresh the Puppet stuff, and I think if you've got more than a couple of servers now or more than a couple of VPSs, this might be something that's worth looking into. Maybe you want to dip your toe into Android development or OpenStack. Maybe you're one of those quote unquote DevOps people all of a sudden. Did you just find yourself out? Did you just find out you're DevOps? Because I think people just randomly learn, oh wait, this is kind of a DevOps position. Maybe there's more I need to learn. Go over there right now, try it out. And they also have scenario-based training. So that way,

you'll actually implement everything from from setting up the web server, configuring the security, getting the CDN caching, deploying to the website, all of it. It's scenario-based training. So when you walk away from the course, you've already done the work. When you go to do it in a live production environment, it won't be the first time you've ever done it. That kind of confidence is invaluable. You get in-depth resources over at Linux Academy. They've got live Q&A streams. They've got a community that can help you get going if you stall out a little bit.

If you've got to move into AWS, go take some of their courses first. If you're managing a PHP server, go take some of their courses. The list goes. Git. If you've heard us talk about Git and you have no idea what it is or how it works, or you kind of have a rough idea, but you've never actually used it in a practical use case, they've got a course on it. You want to start doing your backups with rsync? They've got a course on it. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Linuxacademy.com

slash unplugged. Go check them out. I'm telling you. Game changer. It's a game changer because it's the difference between when you hear your general technologists talk about open source and Linux and they just butcher it. And when you hear Linux users talk about Linux stuff, it's that kind of difference because it's by the people that know the material through and through. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go check it. It's just, you know what I've noticed? All three of the sponsors in this show have like the best dashboards in the industry. When you log into Linux Academy, all of the courseware is broken out, how long it's going to take, and don't even get me started on their learning plans, because the learning plans,

you just tell them, hey, I've got this much time this week, and it automatically generates custom courseware for that availability. How slick is that? Like, it's the best of breed of technology with the best kind of backing, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Go become part of that vibrant community, linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Unplugged program. Love it so hard. All right. Before we jump in, if anybody has anything they want to mention, feel free. Otherwise, I'm going to play a little bit of the Mark Shellworth interview. We're doing a little bit of a tight show today because after the show,

if you're listening live, stick around. We're going to go through and try to find out the best moments of Jupiter Broadcasting for 2014. My hope is if we get that done, and I think we can, we got a good showing today. And I'll also put the link in the show notes. So if you're listening afterwards on the download, but there's a moment you think might be good for the best of, I will have a link to the form in the show notes. It just has a few questions you can fill them out, and I would really appreciate the help. You don't actually have to be here live.

I feel like it's more productive if we're all here live collaborating at the same time. We'll get a good chunk of it done. But I have the sense that we should give the download audience a chance to chime in as well. So I'll have a link in the show notes, towards the bottom of the show notes, if there was a best moment in Jupiter Broadcasting's 2014 run. Help us fill that out. My goal is if we get it all pulled off, we get all the moments noted, which is the hardest part of a best of.

Best ofs you'd think are less work because you don't have to show up and do a show. But it is way more work than doing an actual show. Especially when you have as big of a back catalog as we do. So it's a lot of help if you have a moment in your recent memory and you want to go let us know about it. I'll have a link in the show notes. I'd really appreciate it. But we're going to do it after the show here in just a little bit. All right. So let me shift gears. Let me shift over to the Mark Shuttleworth interview. I was talking to Mark about a lot of things, and I wanted to get his take on essentially if the tone of conversation has been getting more and more hostile. And why is that? Why is the tone as bad as it is?

And what can we do? These are a couple of questions that I started to ask Mark, and he jumped in with, I thought, some pretty good commentary on the topic. So here's just a couple of minute pullout from the whole interview, which we'll have in Sunday's Linux Action Show. To deal with that is just tell people to stop and ask them why they're involved and what they're involved in. If you're just here to be a talking head, and you're just going to bring opinions to the table,

then you need to back off because we're trying to get stuff done here. Do you think it's the result of the size of the communities now that there's now there's just so many people involved that there's just not as many people actually producing code? Well, no, I think it's I think it's more got to do with the fact that it's so easy to contribute an opinion because of because of the evolution of sort of the social thing. Right, right. So so it used to be that if you wanted to have an opinion on how Debian did something, you needed to show up. You needed to become a Debian developer.

You needed to go through a process that essentially gave you a sophisticated understanding of how all the parts fit together and who's contributing what and who's responsible for what. And get a sense of the culture. Because now you can just throw comments at LWN or you can just throw comments on Slashdot or somewhere else. So I think that's the real issue.

And it's the same thing with Gamergate. It's that in a sense it's so cheap just to throw another opinion on the fire. And in some ways it's rewarding to put out an opinion that's somehow polarized. And so as a result, we get a lot of polarizing opinions. It's not surprising, right? But I do think we have to be willing to defend our communities for it. And so, you know, you may have noticed that, you know, inside the Ubuntu community, we just continue to invest in building a clear, constructive conversation for people who want to get stuff done. And that's why

we, I think, continue to just, you know, steamroller forward, not just with Unity and Ubuntu, but actually across huge tracts of free software, right? Because people feel they can come there, be part of that conversation, and get stuff done. We have an incredible community council that are very thoughtful and supportive of a clear conversation. And we also don't fool ourselves that you can have a technical meritocratic decision by 500 people, right? You take a decision as to the three people who need to make a decision, and then they get on and do it, right? So what do you think, guys? I'll start, let's start at the bottom there, Wimpy. Is it just, is it that comments are cheap and that anybody can have an opinion and that's what's moved the tone forward?

Or is it that we are getting further apart on our fundamental beliefs of how technology should be implemented and it's really coming down to more of a philosophical difference? What's your sense of it, Wimpy? I think that it's the first thing. I think that it is far too easy for people to contribute comments to a wide audience that don't necessarily understand all of the technical merits of the discussion and repeat sound bites and clips that they've picked up from commentators elsewhere. So it's sort of like opinions are sort of like a dime a dozen. Everybody's got one. I want to ask...

But sometimes not their own. They're repackaging other people's opinions, not necessarily technically accurate opinions, and passing them off as their own. Boy, you see that in political debates all the time, right? And you've identified a few journalists who are guilty of this, of, you know, pinging backwards and forwards and citing each other over system D. Rotten Corpse, though, do you have the sense, though, that some of it is also that maybe there's less technically savvy people involved now and they're not understanding the nuances of the discussion? Well, that goes with the repackaging as well.

But the problem is that the people who are providing those repackaging opinions, they don't know as well. So there's a lot of people who are talking about – they don't understand the topic, the technical part of the topic. But then they're acting like they do and then spreading more misinformation that is then spread again. And it just, you know, it just rolls, keeps rolling on and becomes bigger and bigger. Web Wizard, break it down for me. You say you would argue one is because of the other. What do you mean? So basically when you go and you look at this and you say,

look at these opinions on either side and both say that they should be done this way or that way. And then there's these arguments and then we have to argue it out between, you know, 500 people, three people, whatever. It comes down to, well, I'm arguing this because of this reason and I know my reason is right. There's nothing that makes it wrong. So therefore, you must be wrong. And the other person has nothing wrong with their argument either. But they're thinking the exact same thing. There's nothing wrong with my argument. You must be wrong. And then you go and you have each other yelling at each other because you're both insistent that the other is wrong because there's

nothing wrong with my argument. Urban, do you feel like people have to pass a test before they can give their opinions online on technical issues, like a technical qualifications test? No, I'm not that far, but I think that people should give and need to give their opinions, but only if they know what they're talking about. If they don't have a technical background

to say about init systems, they should shut up about systemd. I think everybody thinks they know what they're talking about, though, right? That's part of the problem. Because everybody thinks they've got it figured out. All right, Lionhead, I want to ask you a question. You know, you and I, we sit here almost every morning on Tech Talk Today,

and we talk about technology news. We are one of these commentators that Mark is talking about. Are we, Lionhead, you and I, part of the problem? No, I don't really think so because, at least for myself, I know my limitations and I try to angle my point of view from what I actually do know.

And if I don't know something, I completely acknowledge that. And, yeah, so there is that kind of a view as well. Know your own limits kind of thing before you jump in. Yeah, that's a good point. And something else Mark says in the interview is that part of it is human psychology. It can be kind of satisfying to go online and drop a big wisdom bomb on everybody and be like, boom, here's my point. Look at me.

I thought of this, you know, and it's sort of a satisfying kind of feeling, a sensation for some people. And so it's a little human nature to do it, too, to jump in on something we all care about. I also think about the three people versus 500 people is not the argument of opinion versus opinion. It's more of the argument that three people having a discussion is a lot easier to compromise than 500 people. You know, let's ask Charlie a question. I'm always extremely curious how much of all of the inner turmoil and drama inside these

open source projects actually leaks out into real world. So Charlie, when you're talking about Linux and open source and people developing software all over the world, do you also say, and by the way, they fight a lot, like, is there a disclaimer? Do you say sometimes it's treacherous? What's that look like? How do you prepare people that might be looking into the open source world for the first time, or does it not even come up? Well, I think it's a huge concern, actually. I think part of my role, you know, as an IT leader for the district, for our organization is to, well, first off, I keep up with this as much as I can. Again, I'm not a developer, so some of the finer points, you know,

escape me. But I think what's key is that from my perspective, I need to have at least a finger in the pulse so I can get a sense as to whether or not projects are going to live or die. You know, for us, again, everything that we do, I think about from the enterprise perspective, you know, so not just the immediate, but how do I sustain support this, you know, over three, five, maybe even 10 years. So, you know, I think that the infighting on a lot of projects, it does certainly concern me because, you know, again, I've seen many, you know, many projects that, you know, were potentially killed or strangled by, you know, a community that just you know, were potentially killed or strangled by, you know, a community that just sometimes can't get their act together. Now, I don't, that's not an indictment.

You know, I think that's also a tremendous strength of open source and developing software in the open. You know, so again, from my perspective, it's a big concern. I think what it doesn't do is it doesn't necessarily help schools that by nature are not technical. They're looking for fast, easy, simple, fantastic educational solutions. So the minutia of technical arguments, it doesn't really help the conversation. So I don't know if that's what you're looking for in terms of that question, but I guess that's my perspective on it. I didn't even think about it in the fact of if I'm looking for an enterprise and I'm looking to get something that, you know, multi-year sustainability out of, of course, of course, the drama of a community would be a concern. And it almost becomes the responsibility of the person that's trying to implement that technology to at least have a bit of an understanding of how volatile the project is because in open source, you know, it's not the mighty dollar that drives that project.

It's the passion of the contributors in a lot of cases, in a lot of cases. So that makes so much sense that that would be that if you're sitting back and watching a project right now and you see a project that's just falling apart, you're not going to want to bet the farm on that for five years. You're going to try to find maybe something else that's maybe a little stable, maybe a little more tame. Well, ironically, you would have thought that would be Debian. Maybe something else that's maybe a little stable, maybe a little more tame. Ironically, you would have thought that would be Debian. You would have thought that was Debian to a T, but watching them fall apart, it even happens there too. I mean not fall apart.

That's kind of putting it over the top, but obviously they've been having issues. That's critical too because – again, I'm speaking specifically from education, but educational leaders, mean, they have limited dollars to begin with. You know, not like business and industry doesn't, you know, by the same token. But, you know, when you're betting on open source projects in general, it's not as if, you know, we can just turn to another vendor and say, hey, help support this. You know, we are one of the downsides of our current position is that, you know, I can't just easily go out and get support for the projects and programs that we have in place here. Now, I'm incredibly fortunate to have a phenomenal team of technologists. You know, you met Chad and Alex and, you know, Sean, my other system engineers, they're just great technologists. But, you know, if I didn't have that internal support, I would be at the mercy of vendors. And again, that's an incredibly precarious and dangerous position for a school

district or any organization that can't turn to somebody or something for support. Absolutely. Rotten Corpse, you have a question for Charlie. Go ahead. Yeah, I was wondering, do you find it more – based on when you started doing this, is it more recently? Have you noticed that there's a lot more conflict and there's more volatile situations in Debian or anything, particularly Linux community, based on before. Because at one point, like Debian has not changed how they do anything. There's a lot of people leaving and coming and going, and there's hundreds of people working on Debian, and people leave because of different opinions.

But now that they can make it public and that media people pick it up, do you think that has any effect for the perception that people have for this? That's for you, sir. Yeah, just kind of thinking out loud. Yeah, and I guess it's tough, and I'm not as up to speed on those specific arguments and discussions. I think I think the key is just the tone of these. These tend to be incredibly technical sometimes vanity discussions.

It doesn't help. It just doesn't help. The tech industry itself finds itself fighting all the time over, you know, Apple versus Microsoft, you know, iOS versus Android. You know, I think what we do in our industry, again, just infighting doesn't add to, it just doesn't add to, you know, to anything for technical leaders. So again, without knowing all of the, you know, all the details, the arguments, yeah, I just think it makes it more difficult.

I think we should all be focused on working together to make great software and programs and trying to minimize the strife. Yeah, preach it. All right, Charlie, will you do me a favor? Give everybody down. I'll give you a countdown. And when I get to one, hold down the push to talk and have everybody in the room say Linux Unplugged, all right, in three, two, one. Linux Unplugged. We've got to try that again.

Come on, whole group. Three, two. We totally have to try that again. He's going to give us a countdown to screaming Linux Unplugged. Yeah, we want to get the whole room in there, the whole room. Let's see if we can just break the whole thing in three, two, one. Linux Unplugged. That's pretty good. All right. Thanks whole room. Let's see if we can just break the whole thing in three, two, one. Lennox Unplugged. That's pretty good. Alright, thanks guys. Alright, well

we'll wrap it up right there. I think we've got to get out of here because we've got some Thanksgiving shenanigans here in the U.S. to prepare for. Matt, we're going to have a great show on Sunday. We've got not only the Shuttleworth interview, but we've got all our other regular stuff. Are you ready? I'm so ready, yes. Alright, you bring it. I'll make sure that, oh,

I got to go to the store and get some bacon. I cooked the last of the bacon today. I know, I know. But don't worry, Matt. I'll get bacon. I can handle that. All right, so those of you watching live, please do stick around.

We're going to do our best of summary. Don't forget Linux Unplugged is typically live on Tuesdays at 2 p.m. Pacific over at jblive.tv. jupyterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. linuxactionshow.reddit.com for the feedback, jupyterbroadcasting.com slash contact. Drop that down, choose Linux Unplugged and send it in. We need it. All right, everybody.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. See you right back here next week. Thank you. Well, that was fun. Thanks, everybody. It was a little tricky making one laptop work for everybody in the room, but I think it turned out okay, and we had a good discussion. So that was nice. So we're going to sort of shut down here and switch over to our best of thing, but let's go over to the JB titles real quick and pick ourselves a title before we do that. We got some business to take care of before we run, and I don't know, Matt.

I didn't see a lot of title suggestions. Uh-oh. Oh, jeez. Repackage your opinion. That's pretty good. I kind of like that. That's excellent. Oh, jeez. Repackage your opinion. That's pretty good. I kind of like that. That's excellent. Cool kids use Linux.

Yeah, there you go. JBTiles.com. JBTiles.com. Errbodyboat. Know your technical limits. That's pretty good. Know your limits is good. Unplugged education. I like that. That's good, too. Unplugged. I'm going to give that a boat right now. Good one, Keller.

Let's see. Let's see. Let's see. That one sounds I like that. That's good, too. Unplugged. I'm going to give that a boat right now. Good one, Keller. Yeah. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see. That almost sounds negative, though. What's that? Unplugged Education? Unplugging Education. Oh, I suppose, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, like, get rid of that thing. Get it out of here. Yeah, maybe we could just loan Charlie out to different school districts. That'd be cool, right? That was neat they were able to join us during the school day over there. That was awesome. It's got to be getting close to the end of the day for them, right?

I would think so. East Coast, they're 511 over there. Yeah, boy. Well, a big thank you to them for joining us. That was really cool. All right, jbutiles.com, we'll go pick a title and then get it. Did you guys hear about this Sony hack? Matt, have you heard about this? Yes. Where they replaced, it's Sony Pictures. I guess it's the movie arm.

But, like, this has got to be a Windows vulnerability they're taking advantage of here because it's full screen images and holding data for ransom, taking over Twitter accounts, replacing Google Play apps. This is a massive breach. And it's, of course, the week we take TechSnap off. Oh, man. Gosh. breach and it's of course the week we take tech snap up oh man well in hindsight though it'll allow more things to develop over time and you can come back to it we do like them deets that's a good point

alright jbtitles.com unplugged education I do like it but I could see the negative connotation repackage your opinions pretty good too though Linux powered schools cool kids use Linux school of. Cool kids use Linux. School of Linux. Cool kids use Linux again.

Open source education. Linux in schools is cool. Boy, I would have loved to have been a student back when that was going on. That would have been so neat. All right. Last chance and then we're going to run.

Last chance and unplugged education is ranking up the, but there's still a chance. Everybody go over there and boat! Repackage your education. Nice. Nice. Oh, yes. Boat, boat, boat.

The thing he's done in school sounds really interesting. Yeah, I agree. I wish my school did that. No kidding. I'm still in school, so interesting. Yeah, I agree. I wish my school did that. No kidding. Yeah. I'm still in school, so I have a chance to change it. The best you're usually going to get in school is freaking

Chromebooks. I would have loved to have anything remotely relevant to computer class. Yeah. I don't think it really counts to your entire hour of the class is Mavis Beacon.

Or Oregon Trail. Or Oregon Trail on an old man. Don't doubt Oregon Trail. That's how I learned about dysentery. Come on now. Exactly. I learned how to do punch cards in computer science at school. Oh, wait a minute.

Yeah. Well, now, that's been a really useful skill set that you've been able to bring forward. Yeah, even when I was taught it, it was about 20 years out of date, I think. Oh, wow. Did you have hanging chads? Yeah. Did you ever, like, drop all your punch cards and get them all mixed up? Oh, God.

Yeah, yeah, I've done that. And also, we had the paper tape as well, which, frankly, its only practical application is removing fingerprints. Wow. fingerprints. Wow. I was going to say, the only last person that I heard that actually used a tape drive to go and take it, well, sorry, a regular paper tape with punch

holes in it, was my teacher, and she's nearly 16 now. Yeah, it's an older generation thing for sure. Yeah, I'm not that old. Like I say, it was well out of date when I was at school, but this was the quality of computer education. I want to find

one just to experiment with it. My father-in-law has still got one from Mainframe Systems. He used to operate at Heinz. Maybe I'll dig that out at Christmas and take some photos. Schools have got slightly better.

Their only perception of Linux in books at the moment is Ubuntu that's a de facto screenshot for every single one I've seen I wonder if yeah I mean

Redhead desktop is pretty popular too I can see Ubuntu and especially with the Edubuntu spin and Zubuntu, being pretty useful for schools. And Ubuntu Montage. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

In fact, Wimpy, we were going to... Nice plug. Yeah, there was a... You were telling me about a pretty big deployment of... In fact, that was something I was going to ask Charlie, if they've played with Linux Terminal Services at all. Yes. When I was, that's what I used.

Yeah, there's a few in the embryonic stages at the moment. And I can't really say too much about it at the moment because it might happen and it might not. And if it looks like it's definitely going to happen, I shall be sure to fill you in on the details. But here's a little teaser. The X2Go gathering was sponsored by IBM. Really?

IBM? And they like those PowerPC things, and they contracted Canonical to port Ubuntu to PowerPC recently. Oh, I didn't realize that. You know, that would have been a good answer for the emailer who was saying, how do I repurpose these old XP and power PC Macs as maybe Linux terminal services.