LINUX Unplugged - Episode 84: On the Verge of Convergence | LUP 84

Episode Date: March 18, 2015

We get the scoop on how Ubuntu Touch plans to tackle Android’s market share & the challenges involved in moving some of our favorite desktop Linux apps to Ubuntu touch.Plus what makes the perfect laptop for our crew, why the future of Btrfs looks very bright & an Ubuntu MATE Update.

Did you guys see this ruggedized NUC? How crazy is this thing? You ready for this? It's a NUC with Broadwell and Bay Trail. You can go with a couple of gigabit ports on some of them. The standard one only has one gigabit port. It's fanless. It's got this built-in cooling.

One with two gigabit ports? Yeah, yeah. Router, bitches. Yeah, and also no fans. Look at that. It's got the finned cooling there. I think it's pretty cool. One thing I'm not happy with these Nux is the power supply,

but this one looks like it has an interlocking connector, a little bit better of a superior connector, which would be better for production. Like, I want to put these in a rack and make them Skype rigs. Pretty cool. I know it's overkill, but they're pretty neat. They're using the 14 nanometer Broadwheel processors.

These are kind of cool. Serial porters. Look at this, Alan. This is perfect. It's got a serial port right here on the front for you. I saw the newer ones with the serial port demonstrated. They got a live demo of Zen with FreeBSD as a host

at AsiaBSDCon. The guy brought a NUC that was all set up with FreeBSD Zen. So FreeBSD was the host of the Zen virtualizer? Yes, FreeBSD as DOM0. How does that work? Zen has been ported to FreeBSD. I thought that was a Linux kernel thing. Nope.

Wow, that's pretty cool now why would you have so close people what's that um well because Zen's even Zen can run Windows on previous D already and Beehive is a long way off for that gotcha got oh of course that makes sense yeah okay although Beehive is further ahead and hardware passed through but Zen will be able to catch up more easily. Basically, because Citrix realized that Linux is toxic. Oh, ouch, Alan. That hurts. They don't want to be the next VMware. Wow, Alan.

Oh my gosh, look at you. Nice. Those are good ones. That's fine, Alan. It doesn't hurt. Sorry, I wasn't trolling. I felt like good trolling. It's like good trolling. It's very good trolling, I understand. But at the same time, people just don't want to get sued.

Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's feeling the luck of the Irish. My name is Chris. And my name is Matt. Hey Matt, happy St. Patrick's name is Matt. Hey, Matt. Happy St. Patrick's Day, Terry. Are you doing anything to celebrate the festivities today? Realizing that everything I own that is green, it is dirty, and I am hiding in my house because of it.

You know what I mean. Yeah, that's a good call, Matt. That's a good call. See, the St. Patrick's Day, see, we're not big on the drinking these days, but we wanted to make it special. So eight years ago on St. Patrick's Day, I married the wife, the Angela Fisher. Yeah. So today's our anniversary.

So we get to have extra fun on St. Patrick's Day. So also a special happy anniversary to Angela. And I'll be going home after the next Unplugged, and maybe we'll do something fun for dinner. But we today have a great show, even though I don't think anybody's drinking. Man, we screwed that one up. I don't have any beer in the studio today. But we do have a great show coming up. I have a make good first.

Just a little bit towards the feedback. In the feedback, I wanted to play an interview with an Ubuntu representative at Scale a couple of weeks ago, but we had some clipping in the video, so I said, scrap it, scrap it. Well, I went back, I figured out why it was clipping, and I pulled out probably the most important bit. And that is Noah says, well, what are you guys going to do to challenge Android in the market share? He pins that question on him. Then after

he answers that question, Noah says, OK, so what are you going to do to get desktop staples like Thunderbird to work in a converged environment? And he has an answer for that. Two great questions, so I pulled those out. We're going to play those and see what Canonical's answer is in a converged desktop. But, Matt, we have a lot of other things to get to, like the ultimate Linux laptop.

We got a lot of other things, Matt. But right now, we got to stop and recognize that something very important has happened in the world of Linux today, Tuesday, March 17, 2015. Bioshock graces Linux. Right now, I have it installed on my machine upstairs. Bioshock Infinite is officially available for Linux. A little bit of a mixed blessing.

A really good game. Really, I played, I actually installed the trial, you know, like 120-day eval of Windows 8 to try this game. I was so excited. And I loved it. I just couldn't stand using Windows, so I quit playing.

And I said, I'll just wait for Linux. Now I know I love the game. I already own it. I'll just wait for Linux. I don't ever do that. I made an exception with this game. and I really, really enjoyed it. Today I downloaded it and started playing again. It was working beautifully.

I have it set to max settings, full screen resolution, which on my 2K monitor looks really great. However, it is using that same Eon wrapper that The Witcher 2 was using that got a lot of criticism. Well, so the $10,000 question is how is it affecting performance? Because that's always my go-to thing before we get into whether it's right or wrong. I think it's too early to say because last time we had this come out, I didn't have any performance issues. Again, I don't have any performance issues. But, of course, I'm running it on an NVIDIA card, pretty modern driver set, pretty good i7 off of a 10,000 RPM RAID 0 set of drives. It's a pretty good use case scenario for something that's going to be heavy.

And they recommend the NVIDIA 340 graphics driver. So it's semi-recent and at least a Radeon 7X or greater card. I don't know. I'm going to wait and see. I think we're going to have to see it on a wider range of hardware. But it's at least a title that we can – I mean it's now available for Linux. Oh, it will get grief just as soon as the whole how they're doing it comes about, I'm sure. But I think it's going to come down more to someone's –

whether or not that's a concern for them based on principles or whether or not they're just concerned about whether or not a game is buggy or not. Myself, I don't care if it runs on Cheetos. As long as it runs, it runs. And Humi points out Aeon has gotten better since the Witcher 2 release and they have. Here's one thing to consider. It is very easy from a non-developer's perspective to sit back on the side and go, oh, well, it's using some sort of API translator. It must be inferior.

But the reality is you and I, for most of us, we have no idea how game development works. They're probably using several layers of abstraction already, from the tools they're using to develop the game, right? I mean, all of this stuff is already pulled way away from the metal as it is. So we really don't know what we're talking about. It is, for all we know, perhaps using well-proven and laid-out development methods that they can then just easily wrap

some APIs around. Maybe that is a better way to go. Who knows? I don't. But I do know the game's now available, and I was able to play it for about 20 minutes today before the show started, and I really enjoyed myself. For me, it was worth the price. But I would say if you're concerned and I think maybe there's

a reason to be based on previous games, why not wait a week or two? You know the Linux Gamecast guys are going to review it at some point and see what they're going to say. Go read the reviews on Steam. Go check out Linux underscore gaming on Reddit. There's already a thread going about how it's working for people and the kind of performance they're seeing.

So go check out all of that. Before we move off of this, Daredevil, you had something you wanted to add? Yeah, for me as a developer, that's precisely why I care if they're using a wrapper or not. Because I know that when they are not using a wrapper, they're actually saying that Linux has the APIs required to make a good game happen. And Linux provides the capabilities needed for a developer. Now, yes, I understand that they're doing a port of an existing game, but still it doesn't show appreciation or doesn't actually endorse Linux.

It just says we have a market on it. No, see, this game is in that category of games that were developed many years ago. If you think about when that game came to market, how many years under development was it? So by the time it comes to market, they've already bet on a different type of technology platform. And there's just no financial sense in reworking that for a platform that has a tiny market share. So these wrappers make a lot of sense. But if you were to start a game today and, say, take advantage of something like the Unreal 4 engine, well, then you're going to have a first-class Linux game.

And I don't really think it's so much of a statement on the state of Linux because you can do it today with a first-class game using the right tools. I think it's more a statement on, like, how much it's worth it. for them. You could see a company like... You could see some companies maybe going in and doing a complete rewrite to make it work for the iPad because they could make thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars an hour on the iPad. But you're not going to see that when they're going to

sell maybe 1% to 2% to 5% of their overall sales go to Linux. It's not worth a complete rewrite. What it really is is to sort of check off that box and now you can say this title is available for the SteamOS platform. Sure, but then I think it's the way that you spread the message, right? Yeah.

It's like, now on Linux, like, that kind of is a little bit misleading, you know? No, and also it's not that they couldn't have used these things a while back as well because if it was just quote-unquote easy to use a shim to see and explore the waters of the platform, so they already had that thing. Because apparently they didn't create one new shim, they are just using some that already exist. Although Eon claims the shim is customized for each game. Okay. Yeah, I know. I know. Do you know if this actually came from the dev studio or is some company like Eon coming

up to the development studio and saying, let us be the guys who port it for you. Right, yes, exactly. Or shim it for you or whatever you want to call it. Yes. And the original developers have nothing to do with Link's version.

Which way is it? No, no, no. I mean, of course, they still have the original developers still have something to do with it. But yeah, a lot of times they contract it out to, not in this case, but in some cases, companies like Aspire and others that handle that aspect of it. Well, i just remember how it was with the original torchlight where the guy who was contracted to do it he actually made like a full-fledged port where he ripped out the original game engine whatever it

was and put awkward 3d instead in there and it was buggy, and Runic Games did not want to support it because a solid portion of it wasn't even their code. So porting games is a very, very complicated thing. And I think, like you mentioned before, complicated thing. I think, like you mentioned before, we just have to set our expectations to reflect whatever

game developers think they can make by how much mind they can make by porting the games to Linux. I'm going to sit back and see what the reviews say. Matt, you wrote an article this week. I was just going to point people's attention to

because we've been getting a lot of questions into the show about VoIP solutions for Linux. So kind of perfect timing. You had a state of VoIP in Linux right up over at Datamation. And I love it because you touch on Skype, which of course is the go-to. You got Jitsi in here, which I've been playing more and more with. And you nailed Jitsi.

It's like it's got its good and its bads in here, and of course, the classic EcaGia. So it's a good write-up. Good timing. I appreciate that. And it's something that Noah and I have actually gone back and forth. When you guys were first coming into the changeover for Linux Action Show, we were kind of looking at the different clients and fallback clients

and things like that. And it's not that cut and dry. It's like, when it comes to video, you're looking at WebRTC solutions. That's my opinion. I swear by them now. I've been playing with this one for a while. It's awesome. It's stupid easy.

There's no configuration. Anything on Linux, I think it's going to be Skype or that. I don't think anything else is going to matter. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And Matt talks about his favorite in the article and some of the key differences between it and Skype. so uh check it out yeah and i agree i played with him for the

the bsd now show and we really liked a couple of them but all of them had a local preview of my camera that i couldn't turn off oh no i forgot somebody else's face or something which made it hard to use for production yeah exactly it's the kind of stuff you don't even care about until you're doing in production like oh wait i can't have a preview video because that's in the shot i can't have it in the shot that's exactly what it's covering half of chris's face when we were doing if it was just me and chris were fine but if we were trying to have a third person on for the interview yeah it would cover a quarter of chris's face with a preview of my face and people only need one of my face at a time well i don't know you can never have too much alan face

but i guess you know one of the the web rt. Well, I don't know. You can never have too much Alan face, but I guess... We emailed one of the WebRTC platforms asking if they could make an option to hide that or turn it off or something for us. I think that would be very easy to do in Firefox Hello, but unfortunately, Firefox

Hello doesn't currently support conference calls, so it's just two people. I think you could do it in Jitsi Web, but I can't remember. Well, some of the options that I highlighted, you can actually do conference calls. You could do screen sharing via extension, which worked out really well. Chris put all the effort into getting all the screen sharing

and stuff working in Firefox on PCVSD. So it all shifts by default working perfectly now so that we could also do tutorials that way. But then my face covers up part of his face. It all shifts by default working perfectly now so that we could also do tutorials that way. Yeah. But then my face covers up part of his face. Yeah, and I'm with you on that. That's a big, big not going to work in production at all. That's a big thing that needs to be resolved for sure.

But, you know, the nice thing is there can be different implementations of it. And you know once it really gains traction, you know there's going to be one for podcasters and people. Oh, yeah. So that's the thing is The WebRTC is just so close to being perfect. It's one thing. It's like everything open source.

But it'll get there. I think it will. I think somebody will close the gap. And then some pioneering podcast network should just make a product and just sell it. Well, if what you're using is OpenStars, it

shouldn't be too hard to remove your face from being displayed at all. You should just have to delete three lines of code and it should work. The other thing that was difficult is Firefox didn't want to use a different playback

device. I can pick which camera and microphone to use. It's got to be your default system. I couldn't force it. Yeah. And for the podcast, I want that to be different. Yes. Yeah. Sometimes multiple audios.

Yeah. All right. So we're going to get to an email that came in that agrees with everything Wimpy had to say recently. So we'll talk about that in just a moment. But first, I should probably take just a moment here to thank our friends over at Ting. I have just so many good things to say about my Ting GSM service on the Nexus 5. I have gotten so excited at simple things these days.

I don't know what it is about it, but the combination of the Pebble watch with the Nexus 5 on Lollipop, unlocked on the GSM network, I feel like I have finally hit the trifecta of amazing. And the great thing is, not only do I have just amazing

coverage here at the studio, but I'm on Wi-Fi, so it's not like a huge deal, but my drive now is just impeccable coverage. Spotless coverage. So, yeah, I'm having a little fun. I'm downloading podcasts. I'm streaming stuff a little bit. But why not? It's like it's great coverage,

and that's one of the things I love about Ting is because I'm just paying for what I use. So this month, if I want to have a little fun, I don't have to worry about going over on some plan. That's not how it works with Ting. You just pay for your usage. It's a flat $6 for the line. And then Ting just takes your minutes and your messages and your megabytes

they add them up and that's just what you pay. I've got three lines. I've got an iPhone 5 an HTC One and a Nexus 5. Now the Nexus 5 is my daily driver and I have it totally tricked out these days to you guys. It is so I have like

I have if this then that all set up on here so it's like tracking all my time. I've got automatic. So I'm tracking all my car information and I'm logging my miles for taxes. And it's all powered by the Ting network. And so I always have connectivity. I'm always either on Wi-Fi or Ting GSM. I love the coverage.

And I love too that if I need to go somewhere maybe they have better CDMA coverage, I could always switch my Nexus 5 back because the Nexus 5 can do either or. That is so slick. And right now, if you go over to Ting, go to linux.ting.com. Go there. That'll support our show and give you a $25 off any device you want to buy from Ting

or a $25 service credit. Something you might want to consider picking up is the Ting GSM card. You go to linux.ting.com. They'll give you $25 of credit because this GSM card is only $9. And this GSM card. You go to linux.ting.com, they'll give you $25 of credit because this GSM card is only $9. And this GSM card is, you pop out, if you need a micro or a regular, whatever you need,

there are all the different cutouts already there, and you pop it in your device. Noah's got a couple of phones he uses as sort of like bat lines. My buddy Chase from Unfilter uses this for his home security system. You know you could put this on a module with a Raspberry Pi. I mean, there's so many. $9 and you have a GSM card. And then it's $6 for the line and just your usage.

So if it's something that's going to send an occasional report or something you check remotely from your phone from time to time, it is such an economical way to do that. Or $9 for the SIM card and then it's $6 for the line and you can turn it on and off too, by the way. So you don't always even have to be paying the $6. And throw it in. If you've got a tablet that has a GSM SIM slot, throw it in there.

And then when you do need it, you just turn it on and you have data. Or if you've got an old GSM phone. You can take advantage of the CDMA network or the GSM network. It's really cool. And you can start it by going to linux.ting.com $25 off that device or service credit. And go check out their blog.

They always got lots of good information. They just broke down what all the different phone acronyms are for the different codes in the phone that you have to give in

when you're activating stuff. And they also have a savings calculator so you can put your current usage in there and see how much you would save. linux.ting.com

Go check them out. No hold customer service to 1855-TING-FTW and a big thanks to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. linux.ting.com go check them out no whole customer service to 1855 ting ftw and a big thanks to ting for sponsoring linux unplugged linux.ting.com thanks you guys really appreciate the uh really now the long-term support of the linux unplugged show they were one of the first sponsors because they really thought this show you know a community focused show was somewhere they wanted to be and i really appreciate that vote of confidence so linux.ting.com is a great way to support the show

thanks ting okay so we got an email into the show that wanted to touch on a point that Wimpy had made about virtual reality recently in the pre-show. Brian writes in. He says, episode 82 goes down as one of my favorite pre-shows ever. I love the debate between Wimpy and Popey. It was excellent. And I have to agree with Wimpy. During college in 92 and 93, I recall the same 15-pound headset and getting some belt on to move around, this time it was a line art world, and lob some weird

projectiles at another player. Amazing for the time, but I definitely didn't see the push for 20 years later. To Popey's point, the world always moves to how do we get this in the hands of the average consumer. And that's where we're at now. Thanks for the laughs and memories. And to your point, Wimpy, you were essentially saying you think that VR

is just another fad again, right? Yeah. Yeah, I think it is. And I think I've come to an agreement with you. I think we're all meant to be reality. You know, I was – Oh, really? Yeah, and I know.

And I'm an Oculus SDK owner. And when I put it on, I felt like this is an amazing game changer, like life-changing technology. And I believe that statement to be true. I just don't think we'll ever manage to reach mass adoption. Not the way our world works anymore. There's already competing standards before a single headset's really even made it to the mainstream market. And now what's likely to make it to the market first in the fall is Samsung VR, which is a watered-down version of Oculus VR because it has to only work on mobile, which makes it easier for the average person, but it means you're limited to mobile games

and you don't get the super immersive experiences that you get with the desktop games. And that's just a fact. And that's going to be a watered-down experience, and it's not anything I'm all that interested in. I'm interested in the game changer, but I just don't see it. Three, four wires coming out of my head.

I've got to hook up HDMI. I've got to hook up two USB things, and I've got to hook up an infrared webcam. I've got to have that position just right. I've got to set up the mirroring just correct, and then I've got to make sure I have the correct and I've got to hook up an infrared webcam. I've got to have that position just right. I've got to set up the mirroring just correct, and then I've got to make sure I have the correct version of the game that supports the Oculus. Yeah. Now, I know they could make that easier,

but it's a long way from being easy enough for the average consumer, and I just don't think it's going to make it. And that makes me super bummed because I think it could be amazing. I think there's all kinds of applications, teleconferencing, podcasting, gaming, parenting, education. Oh, man, so many educational opportunities for VR. So I hope they don't quit working on it. But, you know, Samsung said that by the end of the year, VR was going to have, you know, VR, they were going to blast the market with VR.

And I don't think it's going to go anywhere by the end of the year. I think we'll be having the same discussion in 2016. That's just me, though. You know, I would like to see, I think probably, honestly, and this is going to sound terrible, but how cool would it be to have, like, to actually experience people's careers and things like that, or even Driver's

Ed, although it probably would be something like GTA, but whatever. You know, I mean, it would be interesting. You know, what it's like to be a surgeon for a day. That could be a little scary, but, you know, again, it could be interesting. Think about movies in virtual reality, the way you could present movies, right? Screw VR. I mean, screw 3D.

I want a virtual reality movie. Yeah, Derek Devlin, go ahead. You had a point to make. I was just thinking that perhaps it won't happen the way we're looking at, just consumer products directly, because actually there is the untapped professional market. So currently there are already extremely expensive simulators for avionics or even, you know, trying cars and things like that.

So I think those environments will get it first. And I could see military applications. Exactly. These will increase the production of these devices, which will significantly decrease the cost of production, which means that then it's accessible to the user market. So I think that's the most likely path. I have two comments. I think along with that, I think also high-end gaming because there you have a user base that's savvy enough to hook up HDMI and multiple USBs and understands the difference between USB 2 and 3 and video mirroring. be 2 and 3 and video mirroring.

And then I think that bodes well for Valve and Steam Machines because, again, Steam Machines are going to be much more accommodating to a VR headset than a console will be. So if that does enter the market and it's something high-end gamers want, Valve and Steam Machines will be uniquely positioned to take advantage of that. But at the same time, I really worry deeply

that it's all going to be proprietary and that open source and Linux will be the losers because so much of this stuff depends on, take your pick, incredible GPU compute power that demands proprietary drivers, check that box. Maybe a back-end cloud infrastructure that requires a subscription and uses a ton of proprietary software, check that box. And in most cases, it's only really going to work very well on the Windows or Mac desktops, so check that box.

So I'm a little concerned where we're going towards something here, where that leaves Linux and open source. Does anybody in the mumble room have any thoughts? That's actually interesting. So I think because of what I just mentioned, there is also the likelihood of bringing attraction back to the arcade places that you know you have

these huge consoles. People used to gather in these places and just play games. But once you have the device in people's hands, I don't think it's like if it's not open source by default, it will be. This is like a rule of nature almost. Yeah, I suppose eventually. Eventually we'll make an open source version. That's true.

I shouldn't worry. I'm hoping that happens with BitTorrent Sync too. Come on. Come on. Let's do BitTorrent Sync. Let's make an open source clone. Let's do it, everybody. That's true. I shouldn't worry. I'm hoping that happens with BitTorrent Sync too. Come on. Let's do BitTorrent Sync. Let's make an open source clone. Let's do it, everybody. Alright, good thoughts. All good things. And I continue to play with VR. Either way. I'll continue to play with it. I don't care if everybody else I don't care if it gets wide adoption as long as I get to

keep playing with it. I have a make good I want to play before we jump into our next segment. And I just it was something I wanted to play a couple of weeks ago, but it was clipping at the time. And this is Nathan from Canonical. He's at the Ubuntu booth. And, of course, they talk about all kinds of things, but Noah had a chance to ask him specifically about challenging Android market share and iOS market share. And then also getting some of our classic favorite Linux apps

on a converged desktop. So I'll play that, and here we go. What's your guess on Ubuntu or Canonical's ability to leverage market penetration in a very heavily populated iOS and Android world? Well, when Android came out, I was interested. I watched the press release. And 15 minutes later, when the pre-orders opened, I bought one and waited a month and got it.

And there were about 30 apps available for Android when it first came out. And there were about 30 apps available for Android when it first came out. And it was exciting because it was a Linux-based phone that promised to be one platform across many different model phones. Right. And so I think it lived up to that. But unfortunately, Google develops Android in secret. They do a release. They throw the code over the wall. And that's it.

You take it or leave it. Ubuntu, even on the phone, is developed the exact same way Ubuntu is on the desktop, on the server, on the cloud. It's all done in the open. People criticize, well, this is looking rough, or that's not ready yet. But the thing is that Ubuntu cooked for three years before we even saw it, whereas this was done in the open starting from the desktop images. And actually, Ubuntu on this phone is running 1504, or what will be 1504 in April. And it's the exact same system. If I open

the terminal, I have the new user space, I have everything there. So when I want to develop an app for the phone, if I don't have a phone or sometimes this can be tricky, I can develop it on my Ubuntu desktop or laptop. I run the app. It comes up in a window with the right interface. If I make the window bigger, that's a tablet interface. I can also do a little work to make it work on the desktop if I want to. And that exact same code, I bring it to my phone. It's running the exact same code. I get the exact same experience.

I can test it on the phone. I can package it. I can put it in the store. I can run the same program everywhere. So the development that I'm doing for the phone is identical to the development process on my desktop, on my laptop, the same thing I'm doing on the server. I get the same development story everywhere with Ubuntu. Now, how about going the other way? So, for example, to the best of my knowledge, Thunderbird doesn't exist for Ubuntu Touch, right? Right.

So let's say I took the Ubuntu version of Thunderbird. Is there a way I can put that on the phone? It would take a little bit of work, so we've done nothing to make that easy, but we've done nothing to restrict that. Oh, fair enough. So, for example, about three weeks ago, Will Cook posted a picture of his Ubuntu phone

running LibreOffice, which I believe is probably the worst possible way to experience LibreOffice, but it was running under XMirror, because this is running Mirror and Unity 8, so it was running. You could see everything. You could use it. You could tap, use a keyboard. So LibreOffice

is completely compatible with the phone. So the only thing LibreOffice has to do to make an Ubuntu app, and they might want to do optimization, but the only thing they have to do is get a mobile interface. Okay. Everything else works perfectly. I'm going to pause right there now because he has more to say,

but I don't want us to lose track. The only thing you have to do is make a mobile interface. Now that is sort of like the biggest but ever. That's kind of like a one more thing that is this huge announcement because if you think about all LibreOffice has to do is make a mobile interface, well, yeah.

That's a huge challenge. That's like the hardest thing possible for them, probably. So yeah, that doesn't mean it's necessarily easy. But he goes on to make the point that it's at least the same code base underneath. What you have to do is take your existing awesome Ubuntu app and optimize that for mobile.

And the Ubuntu SDK makes it really easy to build a really beautiful, responsive interface that spans from phone to tablet to desktop without extra work. That really lowers the barrier of entry. So I think when developers begin developing for Ubuntu, they're going to find that it's as easy and pleasant to develop for the phone as it is on the desktop because it's all Ubuntu. It's all one code base. That's pretty cool.

And, of course, I keep watching on Google+. I see more and more apps in Popey's feed all the time, which look really cool. And they're a little optimistic, though. I mean, really, it's kind of, it's a little nonchalant to say all they have to do is make a mobile interface. It does feel like the, I don't want to say the buck's being passed, but it does feel like it's being dismissed a touch, just a little. Yeah. Well, I actually have tried developing for Ubuntu Touch. Yeah.

tried developing for Ubuntu Touch. Yeah. And I have to say, well, yeah, there is a fairly big challenge with creating interfaces for existing applications. If you create a new application with Ubuntu Touch in mind, or even Ubuntu in general in mind, and you use Ubuntu SDK for it, then moving between desktop and tablets and phones becomes very easy because their SDK actually – I was surprised how good of a job they did with helping developers create interfaces that scale automatically.

I have that, by the way, linked in the show notes for today's episode. Although, of course, what did you just say? You just said it works great when you're writing applications for Ubuntu, right? I like applications written for Linux, but that's cool. I mean, I follow what you're saying. There is no

reason why I would not want to... Right. It would just look like butt. But I could run them somewhere else. Yeah, you could. There's no reason why you wouldn't be able to run it on other disc shows. Of course. It would just look like an Ubuntu app. Yeah.

The same way if you run a material design application from Android somewhere else, it looks like an Android app. Yeah, I suppose so. I do have to say that ultimately toolkits are adapting. If we look at the developments that are going to the toolkits, are also contemplating these new devices, these people's will to actually port things. And we also need to acknowledge that once you move to a different platform,

different device, not always you expect the same amount of functionality. Maybe you are just consuming. And maybe LibreOffice won't be so much as redesigning the interface, but actually hiding more elements and not make them accessible to the same context menu, for example. Because that's not the experience you're expecting. And that type of change is not as hard as actually going

and making an all-over halt of the UI. I agree. If you go in with the right set of expectations, it's actually not so bad. And Mike in the chat room is linking us to a video which I'll try to remember to put in the show notes of LibreOffice running on Ubuntu Touch. I'm just waiting for him to launch it right.

Yeah. So there's Google Maps. Okay. Yeah, we see that. I want to see LibreOffice, though. There he goes. He's launching LibreOffice. So you can see if you have a tablet, it just runs in like an XMirror window, and it's usable.

Right. So, I mean, of course, you would want to have a mouse and keyboard. But, you know, to be honest with you, I would prefer to have the option of carrying a mouse and keyboard, like a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, with me in my bag and be able to run LibreOffice when I need it. Like, for me, I like that. I don't mind that it's even actual LibreOffice because I don't, like, I know if I'm going to launch LibreOffice, I know what to expect and I'm going to bring a mouse and keyboard with me. So, for me, I think it's good. I'm just saying brand users, they're going to look at that, and they'll – I mean, everybody ridiculed Microsoft.

Everybody ridiculed Microsoft when people got the Windows RT tablets and you dropped down to the classic shell. Ridiculed them for it. Even though I kind of think it could be handy if you have the right set of tools. So there you go. Yeah. Just a little update. And it's an interesting discussion, and who knows. I also wanted to mention LinuxFest Northwest.

I know I'm getting obnoxious, but it's the end of April, 25th through the 26th. We're going to try to have as much of the crew there as possible and have multiple shows going on and go around and say hi to people. I got a little details this last Friday from the crew. There's going to be a new after party at a new location, Matt. Oh, really? A three-story hotel, as a matter of fact I believe or not a hotel a museum sorry and

so it should be quite a hell of a show and then Friday night for people that fly in early Fedora is sponsoring a board game night up in Bellingham so if you're getting in Friday night the night before the fest officially starts there will be a Fedora sponsored board game I believe at the Hampton but you'll have to double check on that.

I'll know soon. Yeah, so you said a museum. Is that correct? I believe it is a museum and I forget which one. I'm racking my brain. When you said three stores, one popped into my head instantly. I'm wondering if it's that one. Check this out. If you go over to LinuxFestNorthwest.org

and you scroll down to the best sponsors section, so you got gold sponsors. Yeah, I'm sure gold sponsors are pretty important. I wouldn't know. Yeah, I don't care about gold sponsors. Hold on. My touch thing's gone crazy, Matt.

My touch thing's gone crazy. But when you go down here, look here. Oh, media, Jupyter Broadcasting. Boom, right there. There it is. Friday night is Fedora. Saturday night, that party at the museum is actually being paid for by Microsoft. How about that?

Wow. Yeah. Wow. I'm still reeling from last year because they were downright civil, actually. It was just kind of like, okay. You know how expensive lanyards are? It's ridiculous. Yeah.

It's ridiculous. Anyways, we're going to have lanyards at LinuxFest Northwest to give out. It's going to be pretty cool. So if you're going to make it, there is a hotel up in Bellingham, Washington that you'll probably want to stay at. They're going to have a special LinuxFest Northwest deal and I think if it's not attached to the hotel, it's close to the hotel

and the best part is there's going to be a free shuttle between the hotel and the LinuxFest Northwest campus. So you'll want to stay at the Hampton Inn. That's where they'll have the free shuttle and I believe Hampton Inn might even be at the Bellingham Airport if you can just fly in right there. And you don't have to worry about transportation. And you can also call them and take advantage of the LinuxFest Northwest special. It's the Hampton Inn.

It's not at the airport, but it is a short drive from the airport. And they will pick you up from the airport if you call them. Perfect. Thank you, Blaster. Thank you. Is that where you stayed last year? Yes, it is. It's where I'm staying this year. Yeah. That's the one the best guys also recommend you stay at. So you got it dialed in over there, Blaster. Thank you, sir. Appreciate that info. And I'd love to see anybody in the audience there. It should

be a great show. And if you can't make it, we are intending to live stream the hell out of it. So we'll probably be live Saturday and Sunday from there. So you can check it out. I think it should be an it's one of the best. I think it's one of the best shows in the U.S. if you can make it. Alright, before we get to

our next topic, which possibly promises to be the perfect Linux laptop, but Chris is a little skeptical, I want to tell you about our next sponsor, and that's DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to making my data center dreams come true. No, I kid. No, they're really dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way to spin up a cloud server.

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Matt, I'm a bit of a hardware head. I mean, I'm pretty solid on laptops right now. I've got the Librem coming eventually and I got the XPS 13 because I think if you're going to get a non-System 76 laptop, like if you want sort of like the MacBook Air kind of

competitor with the super high resolution like 4K screen, I think the XPS 13 is a serious contender. And I think a lot of people will be looking at it to load Linux. That's why I picked it up, so I could try it out. And Dell has since then released another workstation. They call it part of their Sputnik project. It's the M3800 Developer Edition. And it's kind of like a MacBook Pro competitor. And I think Ars Technica

has the review to read on this. They really have a great write-up. And they talk about some of the issues that I've ran into. So I wanted to commiserate a little bit about my continued search for like my quote-unquote perfect Linux laptop. And then I kind of wanted to take some opinions from you guys too. But first, let's start on

a little bit of the review here. So to begin with, the price, about $1,500 at base. The one they tested at ours, a little over $2,000. And again, it's the M3800. Ships with Ubuntu 14.04. It has a high-quality build, no squeaks, no rattles, 16 gigabytes of RAM. He got it with a 256-g gigabyte SSD and i7 CPU. Display is bright, beautiful.

Thunderbolt port on it, though, doesn't really work well with Ubuntu except for video. I ran into that same issue. Applications are not really ready for high DPI like Chrome, and it ships with Chrome. It just does not look good in high DPI. That is a continued problem I have, too. Opera, much better. And, you know, it has a few other things like battery life when the NVIDIA GPU is devastating. Dell, when I got my XPS 13, Dell quoted me 15 hours of battery life.

And I've even heard some podcasters going, well, look at Dell's new laptops with 15 hours. Yeah, BS. I'm getting seven hours, eight hours tops. Perfectly fine. I don't really mind, but it's no 15 hours. So I wasn't surprised that he dinged that for the review. But I was looking at this thing. It's big. It's 15 inches. And I'm trying to think to myself, what makes the perfect Linux laptop? And this is something I've searched for and searched for and searched for. Kernel Linux, I don't know if you're still in. Did you leave? Because I know he's, yeah. Because he's just recently got a new laptop too, but he vacated.

And it's something that when I searched for, I'm pretty happy with the XPS 13, but the biggest downside for me is Linux's high DPI support is still pretty sucky, unfortunately. Yeah. Matt, for you, are you a laptop guy at all? Yeah, I had one. It one it did long since left the building but for me it was basically a matter of i don't like the glossy screen i want it to be you know matted that's just for my own eyes um does it manage to handle a wireless in connection cool uh is the battery life at minimum of three hours preferably more if it is great um that's

and then of course just the keyboard not spongy. That's another thing. I can't stand that. Right. You know. Yeah. And then touchpad sensitivity. What are my options as far as disabling it?

I know a couple of hacks that I can use to disable a touchpad while typing, but a lot of times you can actually get a touchpad that will work correctly when you set it to turn off. I noticed, too, that Dell, so the XPS 13 I got came with a Broadcom Dell proprietary Linux, not very happy-loving kind of wireless driver or wireless card. And I swapped it out with an Intel 7000 series, which is the same one they ship – yeah, the AC7260, which is the same one that Dell's put in this laptop. So I would imagine that would avoid the out-of-the-box wireless issue, which was my primary issue

when I tried my XPS 13 is my wireless didn't work out of the box. I don't think this is a particularly good-looking laptop either. Unfortunately, I think Dell kind of has a bit of a miss here. I think the XPS 13 is a lot more competitive than this, but, you know. Could be. It really could be. And it still has the window sticker on the bottom matt well i mean i go back to i mean actually years before i even was a part of jupiter

broadcasting years ago when i first came to system 76 what brought me to it was after a interesting dell experience and dating back to when i went to bought the actually bought the laptop from them which they promptly lost but when i bought the laptop from them, which they promptly lost. But when I bought the laptop from them, they were still recommending Office and various Windows software after I designated it. It's just like, really? It's like, I mean, come on, guys. For me, it's just like, eh.

They could come out with the coolest thing in the world. Honestly, I've been burned by them so badly, I don't know. I'd have a real hard time with it. Wimpy, I'm curious what makes your perfect Linux laptop. What is it for you that makes a good machine specifically to run Linux? Well, there's a couple of things. I like lightweight, so not very big, and I like a proper keyboard.

And I've got a ponch on the old um trackpoint nipple right yeah yeah so mostly i buy um relatively old second-hand think pads so my newest computer to me is a thinkpad x201 which i think is about five years old. And that's quite good for me because it's an i5 and everything. And battery life is important too. And the ThinkPads are good in that regard. And if you pair your Linux machine with TLP, you can probably get, in some cases... Go on. Well, so what you're telling me is essentially

what makes the perfect Linux laptop is Lenovo, but what do you do if, say, Lenovo starts making you unhappy? Where do you go? Are all your eggs in one basket? Well, they've suited me so far, but no. I mean, companies like System76 would be where I would have to go for a new machine. The problem is that I can't afford the upfront price for a new machine from those companies.

So if I needed a new computer, I'd have to save for some considerable time before I could afford one. But there are places I could go. So the screenshot I'm showing here from Ars Technica kind of shows you how the web renders on the Chromium browser on a high DBI display. It's tiny. It looks good, and Unity itself does a good job of scaling up, and other GTK applications will do a good job of scaling

up, but it's kind of hit and miss. I feel like if somebody came to me and said, I don't have a lot of money to spend, but I really want a high-resolution display, I would say, at this point, if you're tight on money I don't have a lot of money to spend, but I really want a high-resolution display, I would say at this point, if you're tight on money, don't get a 4K display because a lot of stuff looks fine, but a lot of stuff doesn't look fine. And if you are powering that with an Intel GPU, there are times it will work harder than you want it to.

If you have a dedicated NVIDIA graphics like this thing does, it's not so bad. But they notice when they turn that NVIDIA GPU on, battery life goes in half. Half! Oh, I believe it. I'm not surprised by that at all. But at the same time, it's like, when it comes to laptops or even desktops to a certain extent,

if you're someone that needs that kind of quality, that's got to be a larger consideration in your overall experience. But I think for Joe Average, honestly, I think a decent keyboard, a decent battery battery and a display that is reasonably good and of course not being not weighing a ton i think that's really what it comes down for most people i am uh waiting uh i i am waiting to hear uh updates on the uh the purism libram 15 uh we now have the uh the boot screen i guess that's going to be the boot screen right there.

There's just this nice white Purism logo. So, you know, it reached its funding, and they're still posting updates about the project. And I think Noah's been checking in with them from time to time as well. So it looks like when that ships, it's going to have an i7 in June. The 1L ship in April, 1L ship in June. And it's going to be a pretty nice rig. So hopefully we'll see.

I don't know if it's going to be the perfect Linux laptop, but the quest to find the perfect Linux laptop, in my opinion, continues on. So there's actually one thing that I don't know. I've noticed that in the text

on their campaign mentions an integrated Intel video card. In the video, they talk about the NVIDIA one. I don't know what's going on with that. Are you talking about the Libra? Yes, the period, yeah. Yeah, it's going to have both, yeah. It's going to have both because it's like in the text,

it only says the Intel one. Right. I think in our interview with him, he said it would have both, if I recall correctly, because I tried to would have both, if I recall correctly. Because I tried to clarify that point, if I recall. Okay. Yeah. I would have to go re-listen to remember that. It does look weird because for me, I was like, I was rechecking it and then the text only mentions one of the cards.

Then in the video, it mentions the NVIDIA. It feels a little bit sketchy. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Yeah, if you wanted to, you could check. I think it is in that interview. All right, I'll re-watch it. I'm looking forward to it.

I hope mine's in the April batch, even if it doesn't mean, because I really want to give it a review. And I don't know. I still feel like the quest continues on. The quest continues, just like the quest continues on to always better yourself, doesn't it? And that's why our next sponsor is so perfect. That's Linux Academy. Go over to linuxacademy.com slash Linux.

I believe that is our URL. No, I'm sorry. It's unplugged. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. You'd think I would know. The reason why I was a little distracted is I have the coolest note here that I wanted to read from a Linux Unplugged audience member who heard about Linux Academy. So, get started. Keep this in mind. LinuxAcademy.com

slash unplug. Go there to get started. You'll get our special 33% discount, which is really awesome. And Linux Academy is a great resource for you to learn more about the systems you're probably going to end up having to use, administer, be responsible for, or want to someday. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplug.

Go get started over there. I got an email in from Mike. He says, I just want to say thanks to the whole Jupyter Broadcasting community. I wouldn't have known about Linux Academy if it wasn't for you guys. I was able to get my Linux Plus certification and land my dream job as a Linux administrator for a hosting company. I went over to Linux Academy forums to thank them too and made sure they heard about it from you guys.

They knew it was from you guys. Thanks again, Mike. And I get stories like that all the time. Linux Academy is set up by people who truly care about this stuff and really know the subject material. And so they devoted their entire site to it. They hyper-focus in on this area and so that way they super-serve you. You know why that makes the difference. If you're a Linux enthusiast, you know how

much it makes a difference when the people behind it care and use Linux and open source. They have step-by-step video courses, downloadable comprehensive study guides, and it's never been a better time to join Linux Academy because they have a huge announcement coming very soon. where they're going to make some of their biggest content announcements ever over there. You're going to want to go check that out. Also, they've got some great news if you're going in for one of the LPI, like the LPIC1 exam or Linux Plus. They are now CompTIA-approved quality content, which means you can go take the study lessons from Linux Academy and then just go get your certification. And you can do this from the comfort of your own home. And what's really nice about that is Linux Academy will just let you get all that material offline. You can listen to

the courseware like when you're commuting. You can set how much availability you have and it'll automatically create courseware for you that matches that. You can get step-by-step this is where you're at percentage-wise. You can see I have this much time for this area. Then it's going to take me this long to move on to here. And you can do quizzes to check yourself. And there's seven

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It's a great time. And I love that you're going to get that 33% discount right now when they're just about to make the service even better. It's just such a cool opportunity. LinuxAcademy.com. Slash unplug. Something really nerdy happened this week.

And too bad Alan missed his opportunity to bash ButterFS and sing the praises of ZFS. Aw, shame. Too bad he had to leave early. Well, there was actually a pretty big developers conference going on talking about the future of Linux storage. Oh, I know. So exciting, right? Well, turns out maybe things are going to look up for a good old ButterFS. So let's dive in right into that because I think that's the piece that's the most relevant to our audience because we all want to see ButterFS succeed, but we all know it's got a little bit of room.

So Chris Mason, he's a Facebook software engineer. We've talked about him before. He's one of the ButterFS maintainers. He explained how Facebook uses ButterFS. ButterFS has many advantages of file systems, such as the ability to handle both numerous small files and single files as large as six exabytes,

a baked-in RAID, built-in file system compression, and integrated multi-storage device support. Facebook, of course, runs on Linux. To be exact, Facebook runs the 3.10 and 3.18 Linux kernels on an internal distribution which is based on CentOS. For Facebook, the real win is that ButterFS is stable and fast under an endless input-output operation per second, you know, IOPS, pounding from Facebook's constantly updating users.

That's good news. The bad news is ButterFS is still way too slow for traditional databases such as MySQL. For those systems, Facebook is still using XFS, which I thought that was kind of interesting. To coordinate the two file systems, Facebook uses Gluster, the open-source distributed file system. This is all kind of some good details we're getting here. Facebook, which works hand-in-glove

with upstream ButterFS Linux kernel developers, is working on improving ButterFS's database speed. Kind of neat. That is interesting. It's like, it's one of those things to where, you know, I think a lot of people go to these social sites and they just see everything, well, if it's Facebook, you know,

whether it works or not, it is kind of hit and miss. But most social sites work pretty well for the most part. And it's interesting to see what they're choosing and how that's going forward and where ButterFS fits into the whole thing. It's going to be fascinating to see where things go two, three years from now. It gives me – I'm not a big fan of Facebook. But I'm kind of glad that they have a bit of their horse hitched to that wagon. Is that the right – am I using that right? I think so, but I would definitely agree that it's not like attending the Federation Council or something when you go to Facebook.

It's pretty – the culture is definitely a little different. But the fact that – so the way that Facebook is approaching this is they seem to have identified ButterFS as a critical piece of Linux technology. So they hire one of the guys that works on it, and that's his job, and he interfaces directly with the Linux kernel team. And this is a pretty ideal situation. So it seems like it's pretty important to them. And in that case, that means ButterFS probably has a pretty good shot of having long-term funding and longevity of development behind it, which I think is pretty important. I think it's extremely important. Yeah.

Derek Devlin, you had a point about their upstream give back. Yeah. They've actually been very keen on trying to get things to the open source community back as fast as possible. I can give you the example of HHVM and their programming language. Right, right. They actually went immediately to the Debian folks and opened an ITP which is intended to package requests, and they've been working

directly with Debian maintainers to get that across and spread through there. It's like, they are doing an effort. And most of the times I see an actual, you know, just not put the project out and not maintain it. They actually continuously support the project and do an effort to make it lend to the community back as soon as possible. I think that's a good part of that.

That is really cool to hear, actually. That's good to know. Before we wrap up, has anybody else noticed all the attention the Ubuntu Mate project gets these days? Oh, yeah. Yes. Have you been noticing this? Oh, so Wimpy makes a video about including Tilda or something like that.

Wimpy announces that Ubuntu Mate 1504 will have Tilda, a very nice drop-down menu, and Wimpy made a very great video that sort of explains the rationale of how he came to use it and why, which maybe we can repeat here in just a sec. But next thing I know, I'm seeing it on three or four or five Linux news websites. Wimpy, you have a bit of a sensation on your hands here. Yeah, how did that happen? I don't know. I think it's great. So tell us about Tilda.

Yeah, everyone's really keen on such a simple feature. Yeah, I was very surprised by it. And you know what? I've heard you mention it before, but I liked your rationale and how you came to use it and why it's sticking in the distro. Yeah, so when I was working on the Compiz integration and I kept breaking Compiz, you're left without window decorators, so you're kind of stuffed. Yeah. So I installed Tiddler as my get out jail free card. In case everything breaks. Yeah, every time I broke Compiz, I could just F12, reset Compiz, start Marco, and get my session back up and running again. So whilst I was devving Compiz, that was my safety net. And I got so accustomed to using it, I started using it for other things.

And I thought, you know what, this is actually kind of useful, so I'm going to leave it in. That's how it came to be in the distro. And so why tilde over, say, like, Gwake? Because Gwake's always what I use. Yeah, well, I tried both, but Tilda runs in about 5 megs of RAM, and Gwake runs in about 25 to 30 megs of RAM. So if I want something that I'm leaving in

that's turned on by default, I don't want it to be too large, because most, well, I say most, there's a good number of people running Ubuntu Mate on resource-constrained hardware. So I didn't want to bloat it out unnecessarily. Of course. They really appreciate that, I'm sure. I think what it is is – and this is what I have ragged on Canonical for taking a little focus off the desktop for the last couple of years, is what I believe and what you're doing with Ubuntu Mate

may be proving this out is the Ubuntu desktop got really close, really close to the goal line. And what you're doing by adding things like sensible compass integration, the tilted integration, but also like the folder color stuff, just these little – it's not the final 10%. That's not the folder color stuff just these little it's not the final 10% that's not the right way to put it but these closing the gaps that adds these little things like

when I saw you and started including folder color I thought you know what I should probably install folder color I want folder color like that sounds like something I would just nice little visual indicator and it's these little things you're just sort of polishing off and adding a little bit here and there to this traditional desktop paradigm. And I think people

are recognizing that. Plus, let's be honest, Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 14.10 are decent platforms for people to distribute applications on, so there's some excitement there. And you guys are polishing off these little edges here and adding these nice little touches. I think that's why people are getting excited about it. Well, thank you very much.

And whilst you've mentioned FolderColor, the developer of FolderColor has been working on a new version which now supports the Numix icon themes and also has a facility where if you want to change the default color for all of your icons, so effectively theme your icons, you can now do that as well so whether or not that lands for 1504 we'll have to see there's a feature freeze exception filed for that hopefully that'll that'll make it in time if not it'll be in 1510

cool and you know i'm gonna uh something i've been following is the uh i know you have a lot of you have a lot of places you distribute info maybe Maybe this isn't even the best one, but one I've been following is the Google Plus community. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes. Yeah, everything somehow makes it to the Google Plus. So, yeah, that's probably the best place to follow. And if not there, then the actual Ubuntu Mate community where there's some deeper discussion with some of the community members. some deeper discussion with some of the community members. If you want to get the skinny on the Raspberry Pi development,

the Raspberry Pi 2 development, and the Odroid C1 development, that's all happening in the Ubuntu Mate community. Very good. And you know what? I actually had an email in about that, so thank you. So that's a good place to go to. Yeah. You know, I've been running the version of Ubuntu Mate based on 14.04 here as my Skype and Momma machine now for weeks, and it's just been rock solid. So I love it. I think it's a great distro. Well, I'll tell you, the more I use it, the more I become married to it um i just i just it's it's because i'm

finding that i'm not having to screw with the stuff i was having to screw with before without you just using the computer now yeah crazy thought right i could actually get my work done um and uh you know like what he mentioned with tilde i actually installed it after he mentioned it the first time before i even i was just like oh this is sweet yeah i got a low resource machine this is fantastic yeah yeah i thought it was pretty good. All right. Well, so we'll wrap it up there. And I have so much more I could talk about in regards to watches. I feel like I could talk about watches for some reason for like a whole episode.

But I'm saving all of you the burden of having to listen to me go on and on about my Pebble Watch. However, I will mention I installed a couple of really cool apps. If you've got a Pebble Watch, go get the – let's see. Where is it? And I assume you also have Lollipop. On 11, we'll sync your steps to Google Fit so you can track your Fit stuff with Google from your Pebble. And also there's a really great sleep app called – I think it's just called Android Sleep or something like that that works with the Pebble to track your sleep. I'm having a lot of fun with the Pebble, Matt.

I'm just going to – I'll just leave it at that. Very, very cool. I'll just leave it at that. I won't bore everybody else to tears with all the details. I'm sorry. Watches are cool. I used to have one with a calculator on it. It dates me a little bit, but that's okay.

No, it's the new thing. It's back. The new thing is the old thing. Right. Yeah. Matt, wouldn't it be nice if we had everybody join us next week? Now, I know Daylight Savings

has been a bit of an issue, but we do the Unplugged show on Tuesdays at 2 p.m. Pacific, and you can go over to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that converted to your local time zone.

You go to jblive.tv, we've got the chat room embedded. You can join our open mumble room. We just check your mic and you can comment on the stories. So we really would love to have you join us. Hey, Matt, have a great week,

and I'll talk to you next Tuesday, okay? All right. See you then. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of Linux Unplugged. See you right back here next week. Oh, I'm glad Daylight Savings worked out for you, Hume. You're the one audience member I think that hasn't been messed up by it. Yeah, Sleep as Android. Thank you, Micron89.

That's the app. It's really cool because Sleep as Android, if you have any sleep issues, it's really a good troubleshooting application because it uses the accelerometer in the Nexus. It uses the microphone to monitor noise in the room, and then it uses the accelerometer in the Pebble to detect any movement, and it combines all of that data together. So if I move and my Pebble tracks that, it will then at the same time correlate that to any room noise,

and it will show a waveform spike of any noise in the room so I can listen to somebody rip an ass or snoring or whatever it is. And then it'll also give me my total time of REM sleep. And that is extremely useful for me because that's what I'm troubleshooting right now. Because I go to bed at a decent time, but I wake up. If I go to bed, say, at 10.30 and I wake up at midnight versus I wake up at, say, 5 in the morning,

I feel exactly the same either way. It feels like I got the same amount of sleep. So I know there's something that's not right there. So I'm trying to troubleshoot how much sleep I'm actually getting at night, like how much good sleep. And that, according to the Pebble, is last night I actually got two hours of sleep. Chris, I've got a little tip for you.

Oh, okay. Because I got bitten in the ass by it this morning. All right. It synced, not synced, bit sync again. So I went around and updated a couple of my boxes this morning and bit sync 1.4 got replaced with bit sync 2.0. I was wondering if they were going to replace it. Okay, right.

Well, I don't know what OS you're running on, but in the AUR there's a BT.Sync 1.4 package, and the guy that makes the Ubuntu packages in his Debian repository, he's got a repository that is specifically pinned to the 1.4 version. And so it begins. So now there's essentially a 1.4. So I have to go uninstall BitTorrent Sync and install this 1.4 version. Have you upgraded to 2 yet?

No. No. So on the machines that I haven't upgraded to 2, I just installed the 1.4 version, you know, and that's fine. It just, you know, replaces the 1.4 version that I'm already running. So I just did an upgrade last night. Do you think it might have pulled? I have to check.

I don't know. Yeah. So there is a guide on the btsync2.0 help center. There is a guide on how to roll back to 1.4. on how to roll back to 1.4. And you are going to want to do this because BT Sync 2.0 is not 1.4 out of beta. It's a completely different product and it works in a completely different way.

And it will not suit your use case of handing out a key that multiple people can then snag. It's all designed about these are my devices in my network and i want to link them together and with the btsync 2.0 package there's no way to create what they now call a classic share where you say you know make me some keys, you can only now create these device-linked shares in the 2.0 system. Oh, no. What am I going to do? Do what I did. You can roll back. It's fairly straightforward to roll back to 1.4. Yeah, but what are you going to do about security fixes in the future?

Yeah, well, this is it. This is my holding position until I get C file up and running. And how is C file at distributing to large audiences files? You can share links via its web thing, but I haven't actually got around to testing that, so I can't say how well it will suit your use case.

Screwed. So I should downgrade back to BitTorrent Sync 1.4, huh? Well, it depends. I mean, I'm going to because the way I'm using the product, I could probably go to 2.0, but I was really wary of the fact that I didn't realize that it worked in a different way, and suddenly the two instances that I'd upgraded

were no longer connected to one another. The old classic shares were still syncing, but in terms of how new shares would work, that was, they weren't linked together. So I've rolled back so I can test BT Sync 2.0 in its own installation in a vm somewhere just to see how it works and figure it all out before i either stick with it and pay my money and upgrade or move to something else and quite possibly i'm going to move to c file this is super unfortunate because I'll give you another use case.

People have asked for a complete, as we have it, complete archive of the Linux Action Show. And there's not one spot you can go and get everything from episode one to episode 356 or whatever we're at. And part of that is because where do you store all that? But part of it is it's a lot of transfer, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the things we used BitTorrent Sync for was we started working on a collaborative effort where everybody went into their – some people have personal archives where we have gaps missing. And we started all collaborating and went one BitTorrent Sync folder, and I just gave them out the key on the subreddit. Yeah. I can't do anything like that with any other file services. No.

And so my advice is roll back to 1.4 as your holding position so so you retain the your existing you know behavior go and test 2.0 in its own vm that isn't linked in any way with your existing btsync devices and see if it's going to continue to work for you if you are running btsync 2.0 say i'm one of your subscribers if i'm running btsync 2.0 i can paste classic share keys in okay but you can't create them okay yeah because you know that's the other thing is i can't prevent the audience from upgrading. No, no. Yeah. This is screwed. This is so screwed.

And I can't do like – the other thing I was thinking is there are like – there are software packages out there that will automatically create like torrent feeds and all that kind of stuff. But it's not the same. It's not like a distributed content. It's just, oh, I should have seen it coming. I actually did see it coming. So I'm actually, none of this surprises me at all. I would not say I'm caught surprised by any of this. The only thing I'm surprised about is 1.4 was, you know, it's a beta, and 2.0 is the final product. But it's a completely different product it works

in a completely different way yeah so all of that beta testing we did we weren't beta testing the product that has just been released if you're running bt sync 2.0 now you are a beta tester again because it's so fundamentally different it can't have been have been tested at the scale that 1.4 was. I wonder where I can go to download the latest version of 1.4. Right, okay. Let me paste a link in the chat room.

I'm definitely going to be looking into Cfile. That's for sure. I've never heard of what Cfile is. Open source cloud storage for your teams and organizations. Organize files into libraries. Each library can be shared between users and into groups. A library can also be selectively synced to any device. Edit and comment on files online.

Hey, Wimpy, can you comment on that part? Edit and comment on files online. Is that like collaborative editing? I haven't tested any of that stuff yet i'm i'm really only interested in file sync yeah um and all and what i've you're doing the self-hosting right yeah and all i've done so far is gone and read the documentation a couple of times so i know what to do when i get the time to actually set up a server now Now, why use CIFAR? What about SyncThing?

I've used SyncThing. It's not even if you've only got, I've got maybe eight or nine devices that are in my Sync network and just managing that number of devices with SyncThing having to keep exchanging the keys every which way is unmanageable so it just doesn't scale you know if you've got two computers it's great if you've got four computers it's tricky and if you've got you know more than six

it starts to get really cumbersome okay I'm looking at ccloud.cc, which is an online commercial version of C file. Just because I was just curious. I'd probably roll my own, but this one uses Amazon Web Services for the backend storage. Gross.

Gross, huh? I'll play with it some more and we'll see what we get.