LINUX Unplugged - Episode 70: Next Gen Fedora | LUP 70

Episode Date: December 10, 2014

Fedora’s project lead joins us to discuss today’s Fedora 21 release, the possibility of the project switching to an Intel style Tick-Tock release & what Fedora 22 might look like.Plus what the Ubuntu Snappy Core announcement means, why it’s a big deal & why it could be amazing for the desktop one day. Then was 2014 the year Roku killed XMBC for us?

have you got any feedback uh from uh for the leonard interview to read out on the show uh you know not really not to read on the show because i was in one of the debbie and fork i lurk in one of the debbie and fork irc channels there's a guy in there who was saying who was ranting a little bit about yeah you know obviously and uh wanted to come on and I said well come on the mumble and if there's any feedback I'm sure you can get involved yeah I mean I know that we must have

I wonder too if maybe people have just kind of given up that are really anti-systemity because I'm sure there was there's more than one Debian fork yes you mean it wasn't dev1 there's more than one Debian fork. Yes. What? You mean it wasn't Dev1?

Yeah, there's more than one Debian. Dev1 is one. There's more. There's another one. There's Dev1 and Dev2. Yeah. Really? I actually didn't know that. How come I haven't heard of it?

It's just called DevCon. What's it called, Popey? Let me just go and find it. To me, anything that's derived from Debian is a fork of Debian to me. Refactra? No, re... Refracta. Refracta.

Refactor. Can you link it in the... In that there IRC? Hang on. This is... So this project hasn't been getting as much of attention. I wonder why that is. Maybe because they didn't use the inflammatory language, the other one, the Linux veteran one used.

Oops. I just pasted far too much in the IRC. So that's actually the topic from the Debian fork channel where they link to the other Debian, the various Debian forks, including Dev1, Refractor, and what's the other one? XCGNU. So there's two. So now there's three. Three. There is three Debian forks.

Wow. Burnout squared. Brilliant. Yeah. So how is this going to play out? I mean, how can this... Do they genuinely mean like the full Debian project fork when they say this, or do they just mean like the x86 version? The derivative of that is there's no way they can fork the full Debian project fork when they say this, or do they just mean like the x86 version?

The derivative is that there's no way they can fork all of Debian. There simply is not enough people out there to go in to do it. There's barely enough people to do Debian. Well, and there's three of them. It's not just enough people to do one fork. It's enough people to do three forks. I think it's a bit of an overkill against forking Debian. Why don't we just make something else out of Debian

just by removing systems and putting in it? Well, that's exactly what they're doing. Well, I guess it's not really... They just don't want to be tied onto a way of doing things. That's why they're calling themselves Forks. For now, they're a derived distribution until they get to the point that, okay, it seems that Debian is going too far off and we are not tied to it,

and so it's better to call it a fork from the beginning, not get the flame later on. I guess it's also a mindset thing. But yeah, technically right now, what, they're going to copy everything and then just start working to not integrate systemd? Well, basically it's okay. Yeah, I mean, there's things like they need to find a replacement for login-d and they need to undo all the packaging

that integrates systemd into GNOME, for example, and then remove whatever else feature-wise that systemd does or have replacements. At least the board is saying that they actually will try to maintain compatibility with the main Debian thing because it not only will facilitate their work, but also if Debian wants, probably be able to re-aspect that back.

So this now, I guess, is the time, isn't it? Because you've got to do it now before systemd has been so fully integrated into Debian that it would be a huge chore to work it out. So now is the time to make your move. Well, about a year ago would have been the time. Yeah. Is everybody totally freaking out about this Linux Trojan?

It's horrible, right? Have you guys all read about it? It's on like every single news website ever right now. Until we know attack vectors, I'm not really caring. It's terrifying. It's horrible. It's infecting... What? I guess... It looks. It's terrifying. It's horrible. It's infecting... What?

I guess... Something. It looks like it's probably been around for a few years. I mean, it's also... They're calling it an advanced persistent threat. It looks like it's targeted at government embassies, pharmaceutical companies. Maybe even... Even the code could even be 14 years old, as OMG Ubuntu notes.

Infected hundreds of PCs on the Windows version across 45 countries. Can I say something? Yeah, yeah. I have a feeling this, even though people are going, oh, no, that's not safe, but it states something. I actually think this time it is actually a state-sponsored, because who has the money and the time to port a virus to nearly every single major platform ever.

And the thing you have to realize is it's not just the NSA that does this stuff. A lot of different divisions of the U.S. military have a cyber arm to them, and they have people that work on this stuff. But in the terms of the NSA, what? They have that tailored access division, and their entire purpose is to identify the technology that the target is employing and adapt malware to compromise that system. It is a tailored malware. You mean you think Stuxnet wasn't specifically tailored to go after those centrifuges?

Give me a break. So if a system is running Linux or FreeBSD or Mac OS X or Windows, they're going to take advantage of every zero-day exploit they could possibly find, and they're going to tailor-write something for it. And even here, it sounds like it is, from some of the speculation, it sounds like it jumps machines, like it actually still comes in on a Windows box

and then jumps up to the Linux box. I think this kind of stuff is going to be really common. Well, we're only getting to know it's not like they didn't exist right before not to mention uh it's like until we know the actual attack factor it doesn't mean anything like for all that matter you might need a specific software to be running so you can actually get infected in the first place, so it can actually leverage the permission issue. Yeah. So at that point...

Yeah. And, you know, there's now... See, and the reason why I think we hear about this more is it just makes better headlines now, and the press has learned how to write about it in a way that generates clicks. But also outside of that, there's just entire companies now that were not really so focused on this. Like, a lot of this came from work from Kaspersky Labs, right? You can find a lot of details on the Kaspersky Labs blog. Well, this has now become a huge,

huge, huge aspect of their business. They spend a lot of time and resources on, so they're exposing a lot more of this kind of stuff. Kits and Kitty, you said you had something you wanted to add? Yeah, back in my day, Trojans used to protect you from a virus. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show from a very windy Pacific Northwest. My name is Chris. And my name is Matt. Hey Matt, so is the wind still blowing up in your area? I'm getting some gusts.

You know, I took the dogs out here earlier. They didn't blow away, so I think we're doing okay. I like that. You go out there and you get blown around a little bit and i thought so you send me this message you're like hey so we still have power up here i'm like oh i guess you're like congratulations you paid your bill it's stormy like oh yeah no i figured you meant it was stormy okay but i'm like oh that's i want then i'm thinking to myself that either means uh uh it's gonna come down here or it could go the other way but no uh a little bit later it started blowing down here like crazy it's going to come down here, or it could go the other way. But no, a little bit later, it started blowing down here like crazy. It's one of those where it blew over the trash can,

so I go out into the front yard, I pick up the trash can, because I don't want the studio to look like we're slumming it. So I go out there, I pick up the trash can, I come back in, the wind trolls me, blows the trash can over again. Well, you don't want the studio to look like it's one of those 24-hour news networks, right? I mean, you want to have a little class here. Right, looking like CNN up in this business, Matt. Exactly.

Well, coming up in this week's episode, Fedora 21 shipped today. Matthew Miller, the Fedora project lead, joins us. He talks about the process they went through to transition to this new multi-spin version of Fedora. Also, I asked him to comment on the rumor that Fedora is switching to a TikTok release cycle, and then we also probe him for some details and features coming up in Fedora 22. So that's coming up a little bit in the show. Also, later in the show,

Ubuntu Snappy Core was released today. Ubuntu Snapper. And I'll tell you right up front, it's not for the desktop, but I want it on my desktop. We're going to talk about what Snappy is, where you can get it, what you need to know about it,

and where you can find out more information very soon on your local Jupiter Broadcasting Network. But, Matt, before we get to all that, we've got to get to some of our feedback and get going on some of that good stuff. We have a lot of stuff to cover. We have a really great show in the Mumble Room today. I'm going to bring them in here in just a second. But before we do that, I think I'll just give my last emergency plea. We are looking for your best of submissions

for Jupiter Broadcasting, mostly Coda Radio, Linux Unplugged, and TechSnap at this point. Last ones are fine too, but we've got a whole bunch of those because we want to give the hosts the Christmas week off

so that way they can just sit back and relax, but we can still have some new shows with some new content, some extra stuff in there, and also give you guys something you can hand just sit back and relax, but we can still have some new shows with some new content, some extra stuff in there. And also give you guys something you can hand out to folks and say, yeah, go check out this episode. Sort of cover some of their best of stuff.

But we need your submissions because it's a lot to go through when you have a back catalog as much as we do. So I have a link in the show notes, and it's our Jupiter Broadcasting Best of submission form. We just need the episode title, a link to the episode, the time about when it happens and why you liked it in the description, any other info you want to give us. To help out the network, we have a whole bunch of hardware stuff and software changes going on during that week, so the downtime is going to be used really well, too. And I'll be

putting out more information about that on the Tech Talk Today Patreon feed. Okay, Matt, well, let's get into the feedback, but before we do that, we should say hello and time-appropriate greetings to our awesome mumble room. Time-appropriate greetings, guys. Hey. Hello. Hello.

Hello. Time-appropriate greetings. Boy, we've got a great showing today. A lot of you. I think there's like 300 people in there. No, not really. Wow. No, I think that would crush our server.

All right. Ubuntu Addicted writes in with our first bit of mail, and he says, My ancient, original Apple TV runs Crystal Buntu 2.0. Crystal Buntu was developed by Sam Nazaracco, the same person who brought the world RAS BMC. Oh, okay, great. Crystal Buntu is based on Ubuntu 12.04, which auto-launches XBMC Gotham. He says, I love the show, by the way. You inspire me to spread Linux and open source to the masses.

And he says, keep up the great work. So, Matt, he submitted a photo here. Boy, look at that zoom. Holy smokes. Here it is. I'm triangulating now. He's got an old, old Apple TV, like the first gen. Oh, though. Looking at this setup, I remember you and I kind of talking about hacking the Apple TV. Like, it was something like, you know, hey, you could do this. This is a decent little device you could put XBMC on. That was sort of like at the beginning of 2014. And I'm curious for you, if now here we are at the end of 2014, has the Roku killed the XBMC dream for you? Have you just gone Roku and called it a day?

Well, so I guess you've got to back up a little bit and realize that I have others in the house that really don't care about the geekiness of an XBMC setup. So for me, Roku has just been kind of a natural fit for us. It just does the job. That will probably change as we explore new things coming out. But at this time, yeah. Yeah. For me, it was Roku plus Plex. Yeah, exactly. It gave me a couple of, it gave me like three critical things. Like you said, it had the spousal approval factor, which was very high. And that remote is great. It's like on the level of TiVo great. It's a really good remote. And if you get the Roku 3, it's got the headphone plug. So there was that espousal approval factor way high.

Plus the price is good. I'm going to include that in espousal approval factor. The other two things, though, were that Plex integration, which gave me resuming playback and centralized metadata for all of my content very easily. And then the third and very important piece was, is my kids can operate it, the Roku and the Plex together. It's simple enough where it's just straightforward. You get in and they can use it. And from three to five, they're able to operate this Roku player with full fluency. Whereas that might be possible, it probably would be possible in XBMC. I feel like the simple nature of the Roku, though, made it more of a possibility.

Popey, what are your thoughts? I don't know. I would love to have an XBMC box, but actually I've been using a Chromecast a lot and a bit of popcorn time now and then. And I can't motivate myself to build an XBMC box out of anything, really. Yeah, that might be part of what it is, too. Things like the Chromecast and Roku just make it so easy to essentially get what you want uh and you know keller uh 78 in the chat room says yeah i've got three roku's one for myself and two for the family wimpy what are your thoughts on this well i i went the roku route as well after

having a couple of xbmc boxes and i had a Roku in the bedroom and a Roku in the front room. And in the last month or so, the Rokus have been replaced by Fire TV. Yeah, that's interesting. I can see myself going that way too. Roku kills XBMC, Fire TV kills Roku. Yeah, because the Fire TV does everything the Roku does, just faster and a whole lot more besides. The Fire TV does everything the Roku does, just faster and a whole lot more besides. So the Fire TV has become my gaming, in air quotes, console in the front room.

Hmm. Yeah, and this all happened just in this year. All right, Daredevil, and your final thoughts on this topic? Unfortunately for me, as much as I love the projects, it's like just my TV cable service provider, I love the projects. It's like just my TV cable service provider. The box they have actually just appears as a network device, and I can send any file to it and it shows me on my TVs. And it actually makes it easier to exchange files between machines and everything.

So I end up having to use it. Yeah. All right. I mean, that seems reasonable. And I was just thinking about it, though. Here in the studio, if I got a really nice high-end display in the living room that maybe I wanted to showcase content for visitors that visit the studio and things like that, I have a suspicion I'd still probably want to go XBMC there. When I want to really make a showpiece, I want to have a really great Jupyter Broadcasting experience. You know, XBMC has a fantastic app,

Rotten Corpse. It's really quite good. There's a lot of really good content on XBMC that's great for showcasing on high-resolution displays. Same with Roku, for sure, but I just feel like if it was going to be a centerpiece, I probably would want to go XBMC still. So there's still, I think, a pretty reasonable space for it.

Well, and I would also touch on that and say, while I love the Roku, the UI makes me want to scream. I mean, it's horrible. It's really dated. And that's where Wimpy is coming in with the Fire TV because on the Fire TV, you get a great hardware rig. But you also get that more full-featured Plex Android app that is really pretty good. And it's much better than the – but, you know, the roku one is at least functional this is true well and it definitely feels like we're kind of entering a rock paper uh spock situation yeah um and it feels like fire tv could be the spock move

you agree that it's on the fire tv it's really really nailed it yeah um the ui is terrific so if you're just using the remote control which is almost identical with the number of buttons and the layout to the roku remote so super simple but the fire tv has this voice search facility and it's not like an afterthought and it's not hidden away somewhere and a thing you might use to sort of show off what it can do the voice search is front and center, and it's a principal way that you interact with the device, and it works really well. And it feels like the future has arrived when you talk into the remote, and then your stuff appears.

You are selling me on this thing. You know, okay, so then I think I would be remiss also. 2014 has been a pretty big year for Netflix, and it was even the year we got Netflix on the Linux desktop. And the fact that there's not a really like one-click app install kind of dead simple way to get Netflix integration to XBMC, or it's not even called XBMC anymore, but you know what I mean. That's also a factor.

But Rotten Corpse, I'll let you chime in as the final defender for our beloved media entertainment UI. You love it, right? I love XBMC, but I also work on add-ons and stuff like that too. But XBMC runs on anything you want it to. And the UI is great by itself in the default one, but you can customize the UI to hundreds of different options. And Aeon Knox, for example, is beautiful.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and you've got the Raspberry Pi, which makes a great media device. Like I say, there's still a great place for it. But for me, and I thought maybe for Matt, it sounds like for quite a few folks in the Mumble room, this has been a year where we've transitioned more to dedicated devices. They've maybe finally got it right. Actually, you could put XBMC on the Fire TV, so you get back to both worlds.

Yeah. So would that be the Android app, then? Or would that be something else entirely, like a firmware image? Yeah, it's the Android app that you sideload. And the Android app for XBMC is a full XBMC interface and everything. So you sideload it in. So the Fire TV wins.

That's amazing. That's absolutely amazing. I wonder how that Fire TV is going to work in 4K because I swear I want to get a 4K display one of these days. I'm skipping 3D, Matt. I'm going to 4K one day. I'm going to go fourth dimension. I think around that same time I'll also be single

and living on the streets. And your living room will look a lot like the original Enterprise. Yes, it will, though. I'll at least have that. All right, Matt. Well, we have some really great feedback to continue, including I need to make a serious correction. A mistake on my part. And a couple of, you know what?

We're going to call even an app pick in Unplugged. But first, I would be remiss if I didn't stop and thank the folks over at Ting. Go to linux.ting.com. That will take $25 off your first Ting device. Or if you've got a Ting-compatible device, which stay tuned, there could be a lot more of very soon, you get a $25 credit. So Ting is mobile that makes sense. It's no contract, no early termination fee, and you only pay for your usage, your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. You want to turn on hotspot and tethering? You don't have to have a special share plan or whatever, a smart

plan. All the plans are the same. You just pay for the data usage. The control panel lets you manage it. And if you ever have any questions, they have a no hold customer support. But something really crazy, crazy exciting is going on. So I want to tell you about it because I think it's going to seriously change everything. Before I tell you that, though, I should probably mention now has been a really good time to switch because Ting has a crazy great deal to get you out of your contract if you have an early termination fee, an ETF, as they call it in the biz. They're going to pay up to $150 per termination. And that's on top of our $25 credit. So you could get months of Ting service

by taking advantage of this ETF relief. But here's the great news. They just announced it a couple of hours ago. In 2015, Ting is going to start offering GSM network coverage on top of their existing CDMA coverage. It is going to be awesome for users like me who have a Nexus 5, and I'll be able to have CDMA and GSM in my freaking Nexus 5. They made a really great video for you audio listeners. Imagine a tech spec video where they break apart the product, you know, like when Apple introduced the Apple Watch, only it's for the Ting Sim.

So as you can imagine, they're going to support a lot more devices. And they have the coverage map up now, so you can check to see what the coverage is going to be like. This is going to be crazy great. You're going to be able to take advantage of a lot of GSM coverage and a lot of CDMA coverage back-to-back. You're going to be able to bring GSM phones over to Ting. That's going to open up a whole new category of devices. And right now, Ting has that early termination relief program. You could go over there.

You could get yourself a device. With that ETF, you could just grab a feature phone for now if you wanted to. February 2015, Ting is going to be supporting GSM. It's a pretty big deal. They really are on a mission to make mobile make sense. Linux.ting.com. Go there to show your support. Linux.ting.com. Go there to show your support. Linux.ting.com also gives you that $25 credit. That's going to stack

on top of their ETF relief programs. It's a great time to switch to Ting. Linux.ting.com. And congratulations to Ting on the announcement for GSM in 2015. That's a big deal. That is so cool. Man, that is really cool. It's going to be like when I travel now, I'm just going to Man, that is really cool. It's going to be like

when I travel now, I'm just going to have the best of both worlds. It's really slick. Okay, so I have a make good I got to talk about. I made a mistake when I was talking about Docker last week. Philip wrote in to correct me. He says, Hello, Chris and crew. I just listened to your reaction upon the announcement of Rocket. I want to point out

that it is actually possible to host your very own Docker registry where you can host your own images without having to use the global Docker hub. It's not quite as nice as the global hub, since it's essentially only the back-end. There's no web interface or search or anything like that. It cannot be hosted in a sub-dir, because

the Docker image name format. I currently maintain the AUR package for it, and I'm using it every day at my job at a big telco. I know it's marked out of date. As soon as I get some time, I'll update it. And he also has pull requests and he links to the AUR Docker registry page that he set up. And I wanted to thank Philip, you know, because I've actually made the mistake even just as recently as yesterday in Coder Radio. Because one of the differences between Rocket is a much more federated approach to the namespace for app containers.

And where Docker is very much doubling down on the Docker Hub, centralizing through the Docker service, use the Docker API. And that contrast stuck out to me so dramatically that I didn't really consider the fact that there is this sort of roll-your-own, not super fancy, but would certainly work Docker Hub for your own network. So, Philip, thank you very much for pointing that out to me. Man, I got like a chess thing going. Oh, Philip, thank you very much for pointing that out to me. Man, I got

like a chess thing going. Oh, no. That's not good. I'm going to sip on my coffee a little bit. Alright, so Jesse writes in, and this is almost our last email, and then we'll get to our interview with Matthew Miller from Fedora. Jesse says, Hello, Chris and Matt.

I was just wondering what you guys think about the new desktop environment called Moonlight. You can currently only build it on Arch right now, and it uses Qt 5. It's a fork of LXDE. Or, I'm sorry, LXQT. And he links us to the homepage, which I have linked in the show notes. I was wondering what you thought of this Qt desktop. It's just yet another desktop for the Raspberry Pi or PC.

In a way, this may be a sign that GTK 2 and 3 is dying, and it is the rise of QT. Which is cool. Maybe we'll get some more themes now. So here it is. It's called the Moonlight Desktop, a project that aims to create a desktop environment mainly for those who run on low-performance devices. Anybody heard of Moonlight? Have we talked about Moonlight? I think we've touched on it a little bit.

I'm not uber familiar with it, but then I'm pretty happy with what I got now. Yeah, Q5 is our Raspberry Pi guy, and he's not in here right now. But I wonder if he's heard of Moonlight. I'll ask him when we get off air. So anyways, if you're curious, at nogunu.org slash moonlightde. But Wimpy, are you familiar with it? Yeah, I've come across it in circles, and I did take a look.

But I don't think it's had any commit since sort of the end of September so well I know I don't know if it was like a summer project or yeah the copyright is 2013 on the bottom of their page that jumped out at me when I saw that yeah nine months ago looks like uh three months ago here's a here's a more recent commit three months ago so I don't know maybe they're looking for help could be could Could be. There's been no recent Git activity. Yeah. All right, Matt. Jim wrote in.

I think it was just on the live stream. I don't remember if it was actually in a show or not. But you and I were sort of grousing that we missed some of the old nice, just simple, down-to-business interface elements of Winamp. You remember that? Yes. Oh, my gosh, yes. So JLM writes in.

He says, I remember a few weeks ago when you and Matt were wishing for a small Winamp-like player for Linux. A few people wrote in, but I forgot to mention it. It's called Audacious. It's an awesome music player. Now, at first, Audacious doesn't look anything like Winamp, but it has everything Winamp had and more. But you can add a skin with a dockable EQ and playlist manager just like you did back in the day. And, Matt, it's all in the AUR. So here, for those of you watching the video version,

I do have it installed. Like if I play, I'm playing a little track right now and it does the visualization with the time code with the scrolling track name. This is a theme that I installed from the AUR and it is exactly like Winamp with no like, yeah, it's fun. So Audacious is a good one. So thank you to, who was it?

Let's see. Go back up here. To Jalem for sending that in. Audacious. And it's a make good. It's something I've been meaning to pick for a while. But I just never get around to it. And I thought we might have made mention to Audacious before,

but I wanted to give it an official plug now that I saw this theme. And I installed it. I thought I'd give you a chance to check it out. So it's very cool. It's the Audacious. Sweet. Audacious music player the Audacious Music Player. Audacious is good.

Yeah. Audaciously good. That's good, Matt. I like that. You should give that to him. What's going on over there, Kits and Kitty? What's going on over there? Alright, so why don't we take a quick break and then we're going to go talk to Matthew. Let's mention right here, right now, DigitalOcean. Go over to DigitalOcean.com

and get our brand new promo code ready, everybody, because it's the month of December. It's unplugged December. It's one word. DigitalOcean.com. It's a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to spin up a cloud server. You can get rolling real easy, real quick. Go check it out. Users can create a cloud server in less

than 55 seconds and pricing plans start at only $5 per month for 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer. And DigitalOcean has fantastic data centers, multiple data centers in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, and London. The interface to let you choose between them is super cool too. Boy, I should just go through the process of creating a droplet right now because it's that quick and easy.

And Matt, we've always talked about using DigitalOcean to easily deploy a WordPress droplet. Oh, absolutely. I've been getting a lot of recommendations to check out Ghost, which is a newer blogging platform. Yes. And DigitalOcean, again, one-click install. You deploy it. It's really easy. It's really slick.

So I think on top of the great interface, on top of the performance, on top of the flexibility where you can put the droplets, they've also got an API that lets you get even deeper into that. So their interface is super intuitive. Their control panel is awesome. But there's a lot of tools now built around the DigitalOcean API, like to snap it into Puppet, to do management, to just write scripts, to just restart them remotely from your applet menu bar. A lot of it takes snapshots before you go do an update. Like, this is really cool.

Like, you're SSH'd in. You're about to do something crazy. You just go up to your menu bar, snapshot. Exactly. And I do that all the time because I'm always doing something crazy. Oh, yeah. And they're also, they're paying now for tutorials because they really want to have some of the best tutorials on the web.

So go over to digitalocean.com. Use our promo code unpluggeddecember, all one word, lowercase. That's going to give you a $10 credit. You can try out the $5 droplet for two months for free. Why not? Seriously, check out Ghost. A lot of people have recommended it as an awesome blogging platform, and there's some really great free themes that I talked about in yesterday's Coda Radio. You can go grab those. It's a great way to display photos or just do text-only stuff or journals. It looked really cool, and you just one-click, boom, you've got it up on DigitalOcean. And since they're paying for those

tutorials, they've got the best tutorials, and deploying Ghost is one of them. In fact, they're going to pay up to $200. We've got a link in the show notes. DigitalOcean.com. And a big thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. All right. So we're going to talk with Matthew Miller.

He's the lead of the Fedora project. Fedora 21 came out today. Congratulations to them. This is a big one. A lot of stuff. This was the first release after they've refactored the way the distribution is done into the multiple spins. And so we brought on Matthew on the Linux Action Show on Sunday, and we pre-recorded this interview with him for today's show. We'll be out at 10 a.m. Eastern time.

Okay. Yep. So it'll be, it'll be out just for a little while. All right. Very good. Well, here we go. And I see two lights. We're good.

All right. So this is for Linux Unplugged, and we're going to start in three, in two. And I started by asking him how the team and how he's doing after such a major release in Refactor. Yeah, so first I want to step back and say thank you to everybody who worked on Fedora, all the contributors, because it really, this is an amazing release, and so many people put work into making it. So, you know, I said it's at the top of the project but it doesn't it's not quite a project where it's a top down kind of thing so

um i want to make sure everybody gets the right of course yeah lots and especially i mean really for this release too because this is now the release with the different types of spins i mean the project in between releases went through a pretty dramatic change in how it does development, right? Yeah, absolutely. And we've done a really good job, I think, of spinning up work, especially in the cloud and server areas where we had a little bit lack of direction and focus there. So it wasn't easy for people to plug into it. So now we have these new working groups, which kind of have sort of an attachment point for people who are interested in those that have really taken off in a positive way.

Yeah. So if I'm new to Linux, maybe I know we run some Red Hat Enterprise servers at my work or something like that. I'm looking at Fedora Workstation. Do I need to be a little afraid that it's too complicated for a new user? No, you do not. So one of the things we are really focusing on through our workstation is targeting software developers as the focus. But software developers are generally human beings as well. Most of the time.

Most of the time. You know, I know some of them are questionable. They need to have some access to Power User kind of things, but the basic desktop needs to be slick and get out of the way. And so we think that the GNOME desktop that Fedora Workstation is based on is really great at doing that and is really easy for new users as well. Fedora adds a fast-moving distribution with a lot of updates and things like that. Sometimes you have to be a new user who's really willing to learn and adjust and figure things out.

So I think that it's not necessarily something I would put on a new user who's off on an island somewhere, but a new user who's interested in learning and has technical friends. When I look at Fedora, too, I think there's a category of users out there that I don't think we talk about enough in the Linux community, and that is guys like my friend Chase, who have been maybe Windows admins for 10 years. They have a totally tricked-out Windows install with customizations and special drives. They deep dive into Windows as far as you can deep dive. So when he was switching to Linux, he actually wanted a Linux he could tinker with because

that's one of the things he does. And so I think Fedora, for the users that are very comfortable with their computers, it's like a slam dunk. But the one thing that you mentioned to us on Sunday's Linux Action Show, which really resonated with me because it's something we've talked about on Linux Unplugged a lot, is you're also hoping to reclaim some of those users who've switched over to MacBooks, right? Yeah, absolutely. You go to even a Linux conference these days, and you've got people who are doing cloud development,

and they've got the MacBook on their lap, basically. They're sitting in the audience not paying attention to the speaker. We'd like to get those people back to running Linux as much as we can. Now, but here's the one-two punch to that. Is there anything the Fedora project could do to make Linux not suck so bad on MacBooks? I hear there's constant Wi-Fi issues. Sometimes there's issues starting the iSight camera, no Thunderbolt display port. The Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter

only works if it's connected when the MacBook boots. It's a very clunky experience, but it's pretty well-respected hardware. Is there anything Fedora could do to maybe actually focus on that? So I know that some of our people on our desktop team, and I know also at Red Hat, people who are paid to work on the desktop, have some contacts that are working on that at Apple, and I don't know all the details on that, but we do really try to make that work. But, you know, it's hard when you're working with proprietary hardware. With no documentation, no source for any of that stuff that manages it, I know.

But it seems like we've overcome larger challenges before. But let's talk about another challenge. So while Fedora 21 is in development, this started happening before Fedora 21 went into development, but it seems like the container space went red hot, just super hot during the Fedora 21 development cycle. So not only is the team shifting gears for this new spin-style release cycle and development model, but at the same time, a big underlying piece of Linux technology is really changing. You have SystemD, which is coming in at the same time.

You've got containers, which is there's a lot of movement there. Is that a lot for a project that's in progress like Fedora right now to address? Or was that rolled in during the development cycle? Was it a challenge? Talk a little bit about looping containers. It's certainly an ongoing challenge. I think it also is the future of the operating system. Sure, yeah.

Seems like it. And so in Fedora, one of the things we're doing is we have, on the cloud flavor of the new Fedora, you'll see a thing called Fedora Atomic. And this is basically a host image in the current incarnation meant to run in cloud providers like OpenStack or an Amazon EC2, meant to run Docker containers. So it has basically tools for doing that and nothing else. It uses a thing called RPMOS tree. So it has a sort of an image-based version of the base OS, and then you run your Docker containers on top of that.

And I think we're going to be iterating a lot on that over the next release cycles. It's going to be a big thing. And so I think that right now we kind of have that off in the corner of the cloud space, which is where I think the energy around that is mostly focused. But there's a proposal for Fedora 22 to make it available on bare metal as well and kind of expand that out. And I think we'll see that kind of across all the different flavors of Fedora increasingly. So I guess kind of what your answer is there is Project Atomic,

which is a really interesting container management solution, is sort of being developed first on Fedora? Yeah. It's one of those things that's moving so fast that it's hard to know where it's all going. Yeah, right. I can imagine. So we're trying to, especially when we're looking at kind of the more forward-reaching kind of things in how is this really going to impact how we put the whole operating system together, Especially when we're looking at kind of the more forward-reaching kind of things in, you know,

how is this really going to impact how we put the whole operating system together? We want to look at Fedora as a space for experimenting with that. And so I know we also have people who are looking at containerized desktop, which is another thing. So containerized apps are obviously a really nice thing to have if you're having a desktop, especially if you have third-party apps that may be questionable or, you know, even first-party apps that you just don't want to – I don't know which party I should count there. But, you know, you don't want to put so much effort into because it just takes a lot of time to package these things up. So if you put it into a container, you can feel a little bit better about doing the worst

job for kind of edge of the operating system applications. Yeah, yeah. And so there's a lot of appeal to doing that, but containerizing desktop apps is a lot harder than containerizing server apps, which are sort of meant usually communicating over a network port, and that's what they do, maybe some other inter-process communication, whereas desktop apps are kind of used to being able to access the hardware, access dropping files wherever, reading files wherever, and so that's going to be a lot more work. How important do you think all of this is, the container management and containers themselves,

how important do you think that being successful and will implement it is critical to Fedora being considered a production candidate ready server OS? Because I think a lot of people right now don't consider Fedora a server grade OS. They'd probably rather go with CentOS, Scientific Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself, and not necessarily Fedora. But it sounds like these kinds of changes are maybe an attempt to get people to change their minds. So are these a critical part of that? Well, I think that we've actually always had a lot of people who have used Fedora, even in production on large-scale server things. They tend to not talk about it so much. I can believe it. But yeah, it's not on the scale that CentOS and URL and the big enterprise distributions are.

And that makes sense because it kind of fits into, if you look on the technology adoption curve kind of thing, we're way over in the innovators and maybe some of the early adopter kind of space. And that's just a much smaller segment. And with CentOS in the long tail there, there's going to be a lot more there, especially if you want to set up a server and, you know, not worry about it for 10 years. Right. It's not your best choice for that. But we want to make sure that we fit into the ecosystem in places where it makes sense,

where there's advantages in having the newest versions of things. If it's no problem to upgrade every year, like, okay, I want to keep the latest, so I'm following that. Fedora fits there. And, of course, people who have been following Fedora and making sure that they run it in some corner of their infrastructure are not surprised when RHEL 7 comes out. Yes. Not everything that goes into Fedora goes into RHEL. It's a downstream relationship that isn't always completely direct like that. But we try to make sure that everything that goes into RHEL does go into Fedora.

Right. Yeah, I follow. So if we can get more people who are running RHEL and CentOS running Fedora, it'll be better for them. And it also, of course, benefits our downstream distributions because they get the feedback from Fedora users early. And I think, you know, as SystemD finally got into RHEL 7 and people were surprised, I think that actually've had it in fedora for several releases and got a lot of polish and a lot of the things that were um it would have been right made much

smoother oh yeah yeah so it really really made it go much smoother there i think we kind of um we're going to have as the containerization and all these things change the operating system more and more we're going to have more of that. Yeah. Well, so I hate to do this to you. As we are sitting on the release day, I hate to be the guy to ask what's next, but you must be looking forward to Fedora 22 a little bit and have a few low-hanging fruits that you want to pick and something that you want to work into Fedora 22.

What's in front of mind for you? Yeah. that you want to work into Fedora 22? What's in front of mind for you? Yeah, so after having a one-year cycle here, going back to the six-month cycle is already like, wow, this is going to be fast because we're looking at a May release date, which means working back from the betas and the alphas

and things like that, that means that our feature work basically needs to be done at the end of January, and you figure out the holidays here. You're like, wow. So I think that there are some things that are going to be changes, but I don't think that there's going to be a lot of radical change in Fedora 22. It's going to be incremental on some of these things we talked about.

I've heard some scuttlebutt of maybe refactoring the release cycle to what people are calling a TikTok release cycle, too. Do you have any comments on that? Yeah, we just started kind of talking about that, and that's sort of the idea that we would, one, release concentrate on sort of the infrastructure and the QA and release engineering tooling, and then the next release focus on the features that go into it. And we're still working out that conversation.

Some people really like it. Some people feel like it would hold back the ability to move things quickly. I think one of the concerns I saw is somebody said, well, would that mean maybe like the talk release wouldn't see the latest version of GNOME brought in? It would still have the release from the tick. Yeah, well, that particular thing has the desktop people, both GNOME and KDE,

which is one of our other alternate desktops that we consider very important. They don't like that at all. They want to make sure their software gets in the hands of users very quickly. So I think even if we went to this kind of model, we would do it in a soft sort of way, so where the releases that focus on the infrastructure would still allow new things to come in as long as they don't get in the way of that. And a lot of those things, like a new GNOME release, probably don't as much get in the way. Okay. Right. So we'll see how that goes. Yeah, something to watch.

And it sounded like an interesting idea, and I could see some serious benefits to it. So might that be introduced during the Fedora 22 release cycle, or would that be a post-22 thing? I think that with the state of the conversation right now, it's probably a post-22 thing. And one of the reasons for that actually is that just because, as we're seeing running into the holidays now, it would be very advantageous for the feature cycle to be the spring cycle

and the infrastructure cycle to be the fall one. Sure, yeah. That's more likely to be disruptive. So we're kind of on the wrong cadence if that's what we want to do. Right. So having another release to talk about it is probably a good idea, especially since it's a big decision. Yeah, for Fedora 22, expanded Fedora Atomic and more container stuff is going to be a big theme.

Possibly even some test containerized stuff for Workstation, although I don't know how far that's going to go. There's some talk of that. There's a switch in the package manager level. There's a thing called DNF, which is likely to become the default, replacing YUM. So it uses the hockey backend a different, from a technical level, the depth solver is

different. And it should be a lot faster as well. And more importantly, from a development point of view, although users don't necessarily care, it has a much cleaner design and a better API, so it will be more maintainable for the future. That's exciting.

That's awesome. Yeah. All right. Well, for now, everybody can go enjoy Fedora 21. It should be out of mirror near you or a torrent near you as well. Matthew? Fedora.org. Fedora.org.

And also we'll have links to some of your social profiles in the show notes. Anything else you want to touch on before we run? I think that's it for now. This is going to be a great release. So I think you'll all enjoy it. And, again, thanks to everybody who worked on it. Yeah, I'll echo that. Great work to everybody on the Fedora team.

This is a solid release and a real screamer, too, at least on my rig. So I'm pretty happy with it. Thanks again, Matthew, and congratulations. Thank you. And if everything goes as planned on Sunday's Linux Action Show, we're going to break down the different specific spins

and really deep dive into each one of them individually and talk about that. And it should be, if everything goes as planned, like I say, because it's a live production, it should be a live panel of Fedora experts that will be helping us about that. And it should be, if everything goes as planned, like I say, because it's a live production, it should be a live panel of Fedora experts that will be helping us with that. I don't want to say any more, just so that way nobody's on the hook, but it should be a really great episode.

So expanded coverage in Sunday's Linux Action Show. Hey, Mumble Room, why don't we do a community review of Fedora 21 next week on Linux Unplugged? So as many of you that are willing, give it a spin, ideally on hardware, but a VM, if that's what you can do, would also be great. Fedora 21.

I already have the GNOME version installed. I'm actually going to do a fresh install just to sort of start over clean because I was really having some fun experimenting with all the different repositories and messing around with how far I could push the Nuvoo driver. So if you would join us next. And also, this is an open invitation to anybody listening that's not in the Mumble Room right now. You can join us next Tuesday.

We start at 2 p.m. Pacific. Go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar for the live time in your local area. You can join us in the Mumble Room. It's an open Mumble Room. We'll just do a mic check. Make sure you're not crazy or something. I don't know. And then we'll bring in and talk about Fedora 21 as a group

and see what everybody thinks. This is supposed to be kind of our bag, right? Fedora Workstation. That's right. Supposed to be kind of be for the power users. That's kind of us. So let's see what we think. And I hope as many of you can give it a go.

And I'll give you my thoughts too. And then on Sunday, join us for even more coverage. All right. So, guys, any thoughts on Fedora 21 in the Mamba Room today? It's release day. Before we move on, change topics. Sounds interesting and appears that everyone is – fortunately, everyone is now starting to look on making a good developer experience

which may render in good apps. Yeah, isn't that kind of exciting? Like the fact that he touched on that really made sure that we want to make it good for developers. We want to make it attractive to those MacBook switchers, which that's a topic that Kernel Linux has brought up a few times on this show when we go to these conferences is that it's a sea of MacBooks. And you kind of walk away and you go,

wow, it feels like everybody's on Macs. What are we all doing? Am I the only one that's doing this on the Linux desktop? And then, you know, some of them have it installed, but a lot of them don't. But if you can make something compelling for them, and he says that they might even end up talking with Apple, that'd be pretty great. Kitson, what do you think? So I'm on their website, and I noticed that under the workstation link it says user-friendly, but he's also talking about focusing developers.

Isn't there a little bit of dichotomy between the two? I think he means those are their users, so it's friendly to them. I think what they're actually kind of doing is by saying it's developer-focused, it's an acknowledgment in a sense that there is a barrier of entry. And we're saying developer because that is a label that we prescribe to something of a certain level of knowledge. But what it really means is if you're competent in some level of system administration and configuration and doing a little bit of research, really, maybe this is another caveat, right? What it's another way of saying is if you're kind of good at Googling and you know how to figure out how to fix stuff on your own and figure out their own solution through Googling, then this is a good desktop for you.

And they're not mutually exclusive either. Being user-friendly doesn't mean developer hostile and being developer friendly doesn't mean user hostile. It can be friendly to both. Right. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And that's pretty important. If you can't get the developer to feel comfortable, it's hard to

feel any user. Yeah. True. Yes, alright. So, I'll give you more thoughts on Sunday and on Tuesday. 21 is the release I've been looking forward to for a really long time because, you know, I already said this on Sunday, and I know I'm kind of

repeating myself. I'm sorry, but I'm really excited. It is really them trying to address some of the criticism I think that we've given them over the years. I'm not of repeating myself. I'm sorry, but I'm really excited. It is really them trying to address some of the criticism, I think, that we've given them over the years. I'm not saying they did it because of us, but I'm just saying, to me, it seems to be focusing them more specifically, something that we've said they've lacked. And they're doing it at a really interesting time, and they're going to do it in a really competitive way. And I think Matthew Miller is also a really good leader. I mean, he's really good at communicating. He also runs the Fedora magazine. He's extremely good at publishing relevant information.

The new Get Fedora website is really useful. And he's obviously very well at working with the podcast and the community to get the word out there. It's exactly what the Fedora project has needed. So they got the technology aspect of it right. And I think they've got the community aspect of it right. And I think they've got the community aspect of it right, too. So they're really, I think they're firing all cylinders. And I would assume 22 is just going to be even better. But I'll save my thoughts for another show. So before we go on to Ubuntu Snappy, or I guess maybe the technical term is Ubuntu Snappy Core,

which, boy, this has been an interesting couple of weeks in this space. I want to tell you about Linux Academy, though. Linux Academy is your resource to go better yourself on your own time, on your own rules, at your own schedule, for your own purposes. Maybe it's to challenge yourself to see if you still got it like I like to do from time to time. Maybe it's to just check another box off on that yearly review that says, yes, I went and I took some education. Or maybe it's to get certified in something new. Something to make you even more employable. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Go there to get our 33% discount. When you get that discount, and I recommend you go there because you're

going to want to keep Linux Academy's service once you get it. Once you get that discount, you get that 33% off. You get access to all of the content. All of it. And all of the new stuff that they add. I got an email here from Linux Academy. They said they just launched their Puppet Professional Certification Preparation course. This course can take you from zero, absolutely no puppet knowledge, to a certified, ready-to-go puppet technician. They've launched two new courses, one on Docker, which is, talk about great timing for that, and one on Vagrant, which is an excellent tool. In the past 30 days, they have added over 100 videos, 100 new practice exams, tailored practice exams, by people that genuinely know the content.

That's the huge differentiator here. The entire site is run by Linux enthusiasts. They fundamentally have it from that approach, which you know that makes all of the difference. They've got video streams they're doing all the time now, too, which you can interact and ask questions directly to the educator. Step-by-step video courses, downloadable comprehensive study guides. You can pick from seven plus Linux distributions, and they automatically adjust the courseware. They'll spin up virtual service for you on demand, give you access over SSH public. Boom. You can put DNS on there. You can do scenario-based deployments of Bind or all kinds of services, Amazon AWS.

It's a fantastic service. And it's one of these where you can go in there and say, I'm a very busy person. I mean, I really don't have a lot of time, but I can take advantage of Linux Academy. You can go in there and you can say, I have this much time available. Then the learning plan will create courseware for you based on that availability. And it does a good job of keeping you motivated, keeping you involved, sending you reminders about quizzes. It's such a great resource. Linuxacademy.com slash unplug.

Go save a little bit of money. And I'm not going to use the New Year's resolution line, but think about it. Just saying. It's probably a pretty good idea, too. Linuxacademy.com slash unplug. And a big thank you to Linux Academy for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged show. Alright, so Popey's here, but he swears up and down

he's not going to talk to me about Ubuntu Snappy. Right, Popey? Not going to happen. Well, if I knew about it, then yeah, maybe I would. I understand. No, I actually, and Dustin Kirkland, right? Is that his last name? Yeah. Yeah, he's Canonical's Cloud Storage Solutions Product Manager,

and he's the leading technical product strategy roadmap and lifecycle for the Ubuntu Cloud commercial offerings. He's going to join us on Sunday's Linux Action Show. Cool. So that's the horse's mouth. So what we get to do right now is tell you what it is and why I think it's kind of a neat deal, assuming I don't lose my voice before

the end of the show. So Mark Shuttleworth and a bunch of other people today announced it. I actually have the video. You know what? I'll play it. I'll play just a quick little bit of it. I won't play the whole thing. I'll just jump ahead a little bit where Mark is talking about what it is.

So what Mark does here, he compares how they've developed a firmware-like approach for the phone OS where they can deliver updates to the base OS that don't break. And if it does break, there's a built-in recovery mechanism that don't touch the application space. They don't change the state information, the application data, just like Android and iOS updates. These applications instantly available to users all over the world. And to make sure that updates to the applications are also transactional and bulletproof.

And you can try that out today. Take any of our supported devices, put Ubuntu on that device, and then watch how incredibly easy it is to update that device. It feels like you're on rails. So going back, okay, so this is sort of the basic idea of what they want to deliver with Ubuntu Snappy. Now you might maybe remember, Wimpy, what was it called, Ubuntu Juice? The super small Ubuntu core? Yeah, right, O4, GEOS, G-E-O-S, Juice.

Yes, right. Now that was sort of maybe an early go at this when virtualization was really, you were going to do all of your scaling through virtualization, which still happens, but you really wanted the most base, tiny operating system for the host, and then you just put all your stuff in the virtual machines. Well, now there's kind of a new approach

where it's kind of the same idea but with containers. And the idea here is you keep a really minimal base operating system that's actually even maybe could be read-only. And then you deliver all of the applications inside Docker containers. And the developers can publish those Docker container updates directly. So we've talked recently about how the own cloud project is a little miffed that when you do app get install own cloud on Debian stable, it's like a two or three year old version of own cloud. And it's not supported as real bad bugs. It makes them look bad. They don't like that. They would be self publishing these Docker containers. And these would just slide right

on top of a Ubuntu snappy release. That base OS is more like a firmware update, where you snap in a new version of that base OS and there's a rollback, there's a transactional rollback if it doesn't work, and the applications, your own cloud instance, your WordPress instance, your whatever, your database, all in these different Docker containers, just like your smartphone apps today, they don't get really affected by the underlying operating system being updated. It's kind of like, you know, what CoreOS is going for. And it's not a, you know, it's Ubuntu's take on it, right?

Guys, so far, anybody want to fact check me? I'm kind of getting all this right. So the applications can take advantage of new features in updates. So the underlying read-only image that updates periodically might have new features landing in it, and that's defined by a framework. And so an application can say, I can use framework 1.0 or framework 2.0 or framework 3.0.

So there's a feature platform aspect to this too, is what you're saying. Yes, exactly. And that's something that was taken straight from the phone. So the phone has the same concept of framework. So an application that says I can only work on 1504 and above will just not be visible in the store to anyone on a previous framework. So you could see how this is a really interesting approach to almost solving the rolling problem. The applications are updated maybe by the vendors or by the administrator in their own container.

The base operating system, you know, it could be a nice stable LTS that just gets features added on by the upstream vendor, in this case, Canonical. It's a very, like, sealed-off, hypoallergenic, like, kind of, like, approach to a Linux server. Any reactions in the Mumble room? William, do you have any thoughts on this? Anybody?

I just want to see it happen. All right. That's one of those things that I feel that you've got to try it. Kitson Kitty, what are your thoughts? Yeah, I had asked actually during the pre-show if this was the end product of all those rumors that were going through going rolling, if this is the actual manifestation of that. Well, it's kind of part of it on the server side and on the phone side. Arguably, the phone is somewhat rolling in that we can send out a new system update image

and developers can put their new apps in the store for the phone. The same thing happens for Ubuntu Core in the cloud. So in the cloud, we'll deploy a new version of the read-only snappy image and the developer, the own cloud developer in this case, or WordPress or Hadoop or whatever it is, will update theirs. And so it gets close to rolling. I mean, it's not because there's still gates on all of those things, but it's a lot closer to rolling than every six months, for example,

and you're ending up with a server in the cloud with your deployment on that you've got to think carefully about which bits you upgrade. You know, it makes me think, though, and Wimpy, I'd be curious to get your insights on this. Like, look at the Ubuntu Mate edition. If you could start, like, if this Ubuntu Snappy, you know, it's been out for a while, it's something you could build on top of.

By the way, by the way, systemd-based Ubuntu Snappy, right? It's systemd, first server cloud version of Ubuntu that used systemd. Hey-o. If you could take Ubuntu Snappy, right? It's SystemD, first server cloud version of Ubuntu that will use SystemD. Hey-o. If you could take Ubuntu Mate and base it on sort of this base system where components of your distribution are containers that ship on top of it, and when a new release of Mate comes out, you would just ship out a new container to your end users. Wimpy, are you jiving with this? Is this something you've thought about?

new container to your end users. Wimpy, are you jiving with this? Is this something you've thought about? It is something I've thought about, and not just as a result of this Ubuntu core release, but also from Lennart's proposal for namespaced subvolumes and shipping a thin OS, which you then provide libraries and applications as sub-volume overlays. And if you think about it, as the upstream desktop developers, so you could say the Marte development team or the GNOME team or KDE or any of the others, they are package managers in their own right, because all of the components that make up those desktops come with configure scripts where you can do configure make make install and that is essentially all you need

to build these overlay type systems and certainly it would make it much easier for the application developers and much faster for the application developers to ship their desktop environments, their applications in that sort of paradigm. I mean, the Snappy is, Ubuntu Snappy Core is premiering on Microsoft Azure. Why? Because, in their own words, Microsoft loves Linux, they say. But, so it's clearly, this is targeted for the server. But I'm like, okay, that's neat.

I'll just be sitting over here eating my popcorn waiting for the desktop implementation of this because this honestly sounds like how I want my desktop. I want a nice, really stable core base that gives maybe platform features that sound like Popey was talking about. But I want my apps – I want my core set of applications fresh and rolling. Right. fresh and rolling right well we've already said we're going to do that for the we're going to bring the technology that's in the phone to the desktop with unity 8 and siloed applications and app armor and all the kinds of things and the click store and click packages all the kinds of things that are on the phone we'll bring that to the desktop but over the next couple of years this kind of leapfrogs all of that straight to the cloud i think because it's just easier and

the time is right for it i mean you mentioned earlier about juice and ubuntu core from 804 i think they were a bit ahead of the time back then and now it seems the time is right what with core os and docker and the popularity of all of that i agree uh it does seem like the the right time and uh i think that's why honestly honestly, when Mark was on the Linux Action Show a couple of weeks ago, I specifically asked him about CoreOS because it seemed like it was filling a hole that Ubuntu didn't have a plug for yet. And this is sort of their take on it. But I wonder if it, to me, seems like it has some clear advantages to start in the cloud. Number one, Canonical has a pretty good track record there now. They have already a really strong deployment, so there's a lot of stuff built around that. Plus, you have a significant portion of Canonical's business is built around supporting that, so it's important to them. So it's a good bet if you're making, from an enterprise standpoint, if you're betting on that product. that there's a lot of users that are going to just easily transition. And I was starting to wonder if maybe Ubuntu was going to sort of turn into a bit of a runtime that would be deployed on top of things like CoreOS.

It would be the runtime that the Docker container actually used. But now this sort of prevents that from happening, where a shop that would still be using Ubuntu in the container, sort of the Ubuntu runtime, could now actually also be using Ubuntu on the base. And I think this came out a time before that bleeding even begun, so the timing of it's really good there. So anyways, I think Ubuntu Snappy is cool for the server. I want it for the desktop already.

I mean, screw it. Right, yeah, same here. Just stop it. Just move it over to the desktop. Get a GNOME container set up. Get a Chrome container. Whatever it takes. Just get all that, and I'll use that.

Make it so. Yeah, right. So we'll get more information about that soon any closing thoughts on that mumble room before we run anybody have any pontificating uh yes uh he mentioned something about bringing this to the desktop so are we going to see snappy and proper on the desktop or is this a totally different package manager, or what do you have that's bringing over from the phone to the desktop? How's that going to work with apt? Yeah, that's a great question.

It's more than a package manager, right? Oh, yeah. So on the desktop now, if you want to install some application, you go to the Ubuntu Software Center or you apt-get install something. Whereas on the phone, we have a click store where there's a siloed click application that you download from the store and install. And it's that that we will bring to the desktop. There you go. All right.

So we'll cover more as we have info in the news segment on the Linux Action Show. And you can go play with it now. There's, like, scripts out there to go get it. If you want to go play with a SystemD-powered version of Ubuntu, you can have at it. It's a new era of SystemD and Ubuntu starting on the cloud. Haters, commence your hating. All right, Matt. Well, we have a pretty packed show planned for Sunday.

I think we're going to have multiple guests again. It's been really busy. I know. The end of 2014, we got busy. We doubled down. It's really thanks to our producers, Q5Sys and Rotten Corpse. They've really been hauling. But, Matt, have a great week, and I'll see you on Sunday, okay?

Sounds good. See you then. All right, everybody. Well, thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We do this show on Tuesdays. We'd love to hear your community review of Fedora 21 next Tuesday. Join us over at jblive.tv. Don't forget the big show on Sunday for more Fedora coverage.

All right, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode. See you back here next Tuesday. Hi there, it's Chris Nanch here with the Patreon OnePick Theater. Hi. Oh, hi there. So, first thing I've got to talk about is I did something. So, I'm playing a little video on the way out. So great show.

Thanks, everybody. Mumble Room, you guys had a great showing. And I wanted to mention, you know, we talked about the Advent calendar last week. And this week, or today, the Advent calendar image of the day is the Ubuntu core for QMU. So if you want to go play with it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So here's an interesting thought.

You know, when we were talking about Upstart versus SystemD, it seems like years ago, but it was not that long ago. And I kept saying to everyone, you know, Upstart has way more deployments than SystemD when you think about it. There's like millions of Ubuntu users.

There's Mint users. There's Chromeuntu users. There's Mint users. There's Chrome OS users. There's RHEL users. They're all using Upstart, right? Cumulatively, there's way more Upstart users than there are systemd. Now, with Ubuntu Core, given how popular Ubuntu is in the cloud, it's possible that we could flip that the other way around just with us doing that. I'd have to go get my measuring stick though poppies and to tell but that I would be a jolly big measuring

Wow Well, it is it is of course the new rails the new rail seven uses system D There's probably quite a few deployments of that. Yeah, nobody uses that. Oh wow I Was by the way, I was just playing a video. I opened it up in the other tab. I just recorded a video for the Tech Talk Today Patreons. If you're a patron over there, I just posted a video. It's me talking about something very shameful that I have done, and I come clean. I even have my wife there as moral support while I make my concessions.

Is this one of those things where you stand out in front of a podium? I don't know. Well, it's pretty close to that. It's pretty close to that. It sounds like you're speaking from experience. You've not been doing elephant impressions, have you, Chris? No, I'm not going to go into details. It's too much shame.

It's too much shame. If you're a patron, you can watch it, though. Don't forget about the best of, too, everybody. All right. So Blaster, last week, Blaster, I said, you know, I'm thinking about finally breaking down and replacing the radio in my truck because I listen, you know, I drive about six, seven hours a week and I exclusively listen to podcasts during that entire time. And right now it's pretty ghetto. I have a Bluetooth speaker box that I turn on and I

just put on my dashboard while I'm driving. And I drive down the road with my Bluetooth connected to that. And I'm like, okay, I'm kind of tired of being an animal. I think maybe I'm going to go get like a dash replacement that has Bluetooth and aux in and USB. And I'm just going to finally do it, right? And it's about $130 for a decent one. And Blaster says to me, and I was like, I don't really want to do it because every time I replace the dashboard unit

I'm really unhappy. I usually think it doesn't match the speakers and I feel like I need to replace the speakers and then I need to get an amp and then I need to get a sub and I'm never happy with the way it looks and it's always too bright and it kind of looks tacky compared to what Dodge put in there originally. So I was like I was telling Blaster I don't really want to do this but

I'm just an animal with this Bluetooth speaker. I feel like I'm in the 80s with my boom box and he says well before you rip out your radio on your dashboard try getting an fm transmitter and i said this truck kills all fm transmitters i don't know if it has the world's weakest receiver but i have i have tried three or four solid, really well-reviewed, Bluetooth-wired, remote antenna where it's up on the dashboard, all different kinds of FM transmitters in my truck. They've never worked right for me. And he says, well, before you go in and you make the big change, try getting the GoGroove FlexSmart X2 Bluetooth Wireless In-Car FM Transmitter. And it's one of these deals where it's got like a bendable neck

and it plugs into the cigarette adapter. Oh, okay. It's got a separate power button on the cigarette adapter too so you can just turn off the power. It's got a digital display so you can dial in right exactly to the FM station you want.

It's got call and hang up buttons because it does Bluetooth hands-free dialing too. It's got an extra USB port so you can still charge a device over USB when you have it plugged in. And it also has aux in and out audio jacks. So that way if you don't want to use Bluetooth, you can have it go in over a headphone jack. And that's important. Yeah, because it's good quality.

And he's like, so just give this a shot and tell me what you think. I'm like, okay, fine. I mean this is way better than paying for somebody to install it and ripping out my dashboard. It's an old truck. It'll probably get screwed up. And I got to tell you, Matt, I've been using it for a week, and it has been flawless. So it does an auto scan. That's not too new.

And it just auto scans and finds the best frequency, and you can dial it up and down a little bit if you want. It connects over Bluetooth, so the phone just stays right in my pocket. And it just connects up, and it starts broadcasting immediately so i don't have like you don't turn the truck on and then until it connects no it just immediately is transmitting and then it connects over bluetooth within a few seconds and then it has play pause and skip the play pause like starts the podcast right up and the skip does 30 second forward so i can jump ahead or jump back if i need to and it's just perfect. And it was like $35, $40. So I have the $10,000 question because that sounds really enticing to me.

Where I live, if I want to listen to – let's say I'm trying to tune into one thing. There's a lot of mix and match stations between my county and your county. It goes from Canadian rock to mariachi music pretty quickly. So that type of thing. So does it self-adjust the frequency as it goes? Well, you can, but then you'd have to change it on the stereo. So what Blaster recommended I do, and this is what I've done, although I actually have needed to go to backup,

is I went to a trouble spot area that I thought I would have some issues by the airport here, and I went through, I turned turned off all my transmitters and I listened in the truck. I just dialed through the dial until I found an empty station in that area. And now I know if I need to, I can have a preset on the preset buttons and I can just turn the FM transmitter to that and switch over to that really quick. Oh, cool. Okay. Yeah.

Oh, that's awesome. So Blaster, thank you for the recommendation. Chris, if you've got... Yeah, it's great. So Blaster, thank you for the recommendation. Chris, a few goes on it. Yeah, it's great. Have you got a cassette player in your truck, Chris? I don't, just a CD. Yeah, I know. I could go that route too, yeah.

Yeah, because in my old car, I used a cassette adapter that had a Bluetooth receiver in it. So you put the cassette in the cassette player, and it's a bluetooth receiver and then you can send your audio over bluetooth and it plays through the cassette system was that in your car wimpy was that your ford anglia uh yeah no it was uh it was my uh ford pop wow all right what was it which one was it you had the gogroove flex my x2 yeah gogroove flex smart x2 all right, GoGroove Flex Smart X2.

All right, Matt, I'll let you go. All right, have a good rest of your week, Matt. See you Sunday. Bye. JBTiles.com, everybody go vote. I do believe there's an X3 model. Oh, what? There is.

However, I chose the X2, I think, for a reason. I think I remember reading some of the reviews on the X3. They say you can still get it in time for Christmas. Is defragging necessary on a solid-state technology? Actually, yes. It can be very necessary depending on your solid-state disk. What happens is you have a ton of different extents spread out across the LBA range

in such a way that it's actually mapping to the same die on the SSD, and you lose all the parallelism effects of the SSD and your speed drops to crap. Yeah, you bottleneck on the I.O. horribly. Okay, I always thought that defrag would cause wear on the device. It does cause wear, because you have to rewrite

the whole file somewhere else. Who cares about that now, really? Yeah, wear on your SSD is nowhere near as much? You could probably write like a petabyte to most MLC SSDs and be fine, so you're probably not worried about where in most cases. Well, on SSDs, why would you defrag anyway? Because if all

of the blocks get mapped onto LBAs which are on one die, then you lose all the effects of the performance of the SSD because you have to constantly be reading from one die, one request at a time and that makes it really slow. The more channels you use, the better. Yeah. That makes sense. Actually, the Samsung SSDs

that have a lot of... they have a cache mechanism which is sort of a species of RAM. When you're defragging, it actually uses that cache mechanism to avoid writing to you and at that point when there's a version of it, which is like about 8 gigs or something of cache that is RAM, it just increases. It makes the process a lot faster.

On the Samsung disks, they have 8 gigs of TLC, which is actually used in SLC form. So you're actually using those three different the different process technology as a one bit cell. And so you're using all of them as one, you're grouping a bunch of cells together as one cell. And so they call it fake SLC, but you get the durability approximately of SLC in this case. And they write to that as a cache. It's kind of like an S log in ZFS.

If you're familiar with that concept, they write a journal to that eight gig space and then slowly copy it into the TLC LBA ranges as time goes on. And the nice thing is this persists even if you power off because it's just more flash that they're writing to. But you get really good durability out of it, and you can write in order and then go ahead and throw stuff off and map them into different LBA ranges later. So as long as you're not doing super huge writes, you can get really good performance on those little slides. If you're writing a really large file, does it bypass that and go right to the slower stuff? I would imagine it should,

and that's probably okay for a really large file. This is mostly to help with a lot of random writes. They pretty much negate that problem altogether. It's flatline performance altogether of the 1TB 850 Evo drives nowadays. No, I want that. Most Evo drives do this.

Most Evo's. But all of the Evo's do.