LINUX Unplugged - Episode 92: Linux Wife, Happy Life. | LUP 92

Episode Date: May 13, 2015

We get an update on our resident Mac users switch to Linux & the challenges she's run into. Ubuntu makes a deal with Microsoft and promises to ship snappy on the Internet of Things, but what the heck is a Snap package? And is it truly a transactional system?Plus hints on how Debian PPAs might work, the world's first $9 Linux rig & much more!

What's on your mind, Wimpy? Chris and Colonel Linux probably know the answer to this. So I've got an old microphone with a screw hole in the bottom of it that I imagine is some sort of standard. Is it a standard? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's sort of like for mounting on a tripod. Yeah, yeah. What I was thinking is, could I get, like, an arm that I can attach to the desk and screw this into it?

And do I have to buy anything clever or specific, or is it just a general thing? No, does it look... Yeah, I was going to say, does it look like it's about five-eighths of an inch? Because that is a really great arm that uses a standard microphone, five-eighths inch mount. Okay. I'm going to have to get my granddad's ruler out of the garage to tell you if it's five-eighths of an inch. Well, the chances are, if there's a screw hole at the bottom of the microphone, I highly doubt it would be anything else. But just the same, you have any other microphone stand that you can look and

see there it is there is a standard and i believe it's five eighths of an inch no this is an old this is an old mic oh i see yeah okay that looks about that looks about similar so the reason i'm saying about getting my granddad's thing out is because we're metric over here now for me so although so although we can speak feet and inches and all the rest of it, when you get down to sub-inch measurements, I've got no idea what that looks like. If you wanted a desktop boom arm, though, that is what I would get because it comes with both the clamp and the mount,

so you can either screw it into the desk or you can clamp it down onto the edge of a desk and it's still only $50. Yeah, I prefer to screw it into the desk. You're on a roll today. It's because of the photos we were taking before the show started, I think. We got things rolling.

I can see why you've got three kids, Chris. I'm a Scorpio. What about isolators? The rings that you mount. Oh, yeah, like the spider mount? Yeah, yeah. Are they any good?

Well, they'll help you from stuff like a kind of noise transfer like this from the table. This is like me picking up Angela's water bottle. They'll help isolate some of that. Is that what that is? Yeah. Stuff like a kind of noise transfer like this from the table. Like, you know, when we... This is like me picking up Angela's water bottle. It'll help isolate some of that. Yeah, I can't really hear that. So the thing is, is that obviously I've got my keyboard and what have you on the desk. So I'm thinking I might want to be typing and clattering away whilst I'm doing stuff.

Yeah, it's nice to have a spider mount. Especially if you're not doing video, then, you know, that's the only reason I don't have one really is because they're horrible on video we cover half your face in front of a camera yeah yeah yeah i haven't got that to worry about and frankly if anything covered my face up i have a face for radio yeah and what mic are you using i know you've told us once before but i couldn't tell you it's um some old old crap that I had when I used to be in a band, but I got out the loft. There's no brand or model number on it.

It's just a generic mic that I've jimmy-rigged with some USB adapters. Yeah, I don't know. Sounds good. I think, was it the AT220? There's an AT that's a good USB mic. AT2020, I don't know. Sounds good. I think it was at the AT220. There's an AT that's a good USB mic. AT2020, I believe. And then they have the AT2020 USB, which has a built-in analog-to-digital converter. That's nice.

PlayOnLinux is switching to Java. Did you guys see that? Really? Yeah. In 2015, that's what they're doing. Yeah, and PlayOnLinux is switching I know they even have a little of the screenshot up here

so I guess part of the reason is because Ubuntu 15.10 is going to drop Python 2 and their main problem was WXPython even WXPython 3.0 does not support Python 3.x PlayOnLinux's version code is really ugly and we don't want to maintain it any longer.

Moreover, because of bad design and changing WXPython to another library, as much as it takes, as much effort, we can completely rewrite the program. We really want to have clean code for Play on Linux 5. Python is really great, but working with dynamically typed has a lot of drawbacks when it comes to design and strong designed architecture. So they're going to have the core written in Java. Play on Linux 5 scripts would be written in Python. Goodbye Bash.

With a Play on Linux version 4 Bash script interpreter would be written in Python for backwards compatibility. Play on Linux going Java. Is this going to kill it, you think? I've got so many things going through my mind at the moment I'm very familiar with Python and Wix and Wix never really delivered on its promise unfortunately we have an application at work that we developed in Wix

and we realise now that was not such a smart move but six years ago that looked like the right thing to do. If we were doing it today, we'd use one of the cute wrappers for Python. We'd still use Python, though. But going to Java because of a widget library issue seems like an unusual rationalization. Right. I'm wondering if there must have been a preference in the team for Java already. Did this just make it easier? If they're strong on Java programming skills,

then that would be the reason why it makes sense. Yeah. So why Java and not another language? As said, Java is static and a compiled language. It means that it's easier to write clean code, and it also means that a large part of the problems are detected during compilation to avoid bugs. But Java is a good choice for several other reasons.

The code would be compatible with Linux and OS X with no effort. Hmm. I guess OS X is an issue. It's also true of Python, frankly. It's the most widely spread language. There's another reason for them. And there are many frameworks and libraries we could use to measure code quality to run tests. Boy, those are not super strong reasons, in my opinion.

And all... Because a lot of people use it as not a... Yeah, a lot of that applies. I saw a banner, I don't know if it was an advert or something, from Oracle saying Java on 6 billion devices. But of course, most of those are Android, which they would contest is actually Java. I think it's Mac support.

Play on Linux wants to target Mac OS. Otherwise, why wouldn't you just use... Is that a big gaming platform? No, that's why I think it's silly. But, you know, I have talked to the CEO of Crossover and it is what keeps their business afloat. In fact, he told me that if it wasn't for the Mac sales, they probably would have shut down.

They still make their Linux product, but they make the majority of their revenue on the Mac sales. I think it's just a larger user base. But, you know, the Macs have such crappy video cards across the board on average. So, I mean, half of their line just ships with only Intel graphics. Qt seems like it would have been a lot more sensical. And I just don't get Java, unless it's for Windows 10, don't you think? Well, like I say,

we maintain multi-platform tools in Python at work, not Mac as it happens, but Windows and Linux. And there are some, well, the same and similar issues. We have slightly more complex issues than most because of the nature of the work that we do. So the abstractions that we have to do are very low down, sort of at the hardware layer. But maintaining a multi-platform application on, you know, a Python application or java application is about the same really if you're not doing anything uh too clever it sounds like they're using it mostly for their front end rather than the back end so i'd have thought well there's lots of languages that would have been

straightforward um but yeah maybe they've got people on the team that are particularly proficient in java and that's why it makes sense because they can speed up the development and rapidity of their iterations maybe. So every year this Mother's Day thing gets me. Every year I have palpitations at the moment where I think, oh, shitabrick, I've forgotten Mother's Day. So much trouble. And then I remember, actually, we did that three months ago yeah i was just gonna say isn't yours like before march

yeah that is hilarious but twitter twitter facebook and google plus are just full of it's mother's day happy mother's day and you just have this oh shit moment yep and every it's it's a new thing ever since i've been on the social networks in the last three years and you suddenly think oh well and it's just getting worse too like this mother's day i don't know i think it's noah somebody's flapping um it's like everybody was saying happy mother's day yeah it's it's no longer a big deal this it's no longer just a happy mother's day to your moms yeah it's everybody out there if you're a mom you get a yeah and like i don't yeah it's too much i think it's yeah i think it's the homework holiday that i'm just like not interested in oh you say that then if i hadn't gotten you

anything you would have been interested in. No, no, no. No, private celebration is fine. Oh, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I don't know. I just. Private celebration where you get something. So publicly making it awkward.

Happy Mother's Day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because I just didn't, I didn't want to say Happy Mother's Day

to my mother-in-law and my mom on Facebook. You know? And I do want to say Happy Mother's Day to some friends of mine, but I don't want to do an all-encompassing one, and I don't just want to do them, because then other friends might be like, why isn't she saying it to me?

It's just stupid. It's complicated. Yeah, just send private messages. The answer to this is a PHP script. Yeah, you're right. Probably. Welcome to Linux Unplugged, your weekly Linux talk show that's converting one Mac user over to Linux at a time. My name is Chris. And I'm Angela. Hey there, Angela. You are the Mac user I was speaking of.

Yes. Guilty. And I figured, you know, if I could start there and work my way out. Okay. That's one person at a time. One. And actually, it's not only if we switch to one person, but so far it's stuck. Yeah. Yeah, we're going to talk about that.

Angela just recently switched over to Linux. She's rocking a Lenovo Yoga 3, and we'll get an update from her. And she's got like three or four tough questions, Linux desktop questions that she's going to pose to our virtual lug today. Put them to the test and see if they can solve some of the problems that she's ran into in her switch to Linux. And I think you will be surprised, and not surprised at some of them. Plus, in the show, we're going to talk about Ubuntu's jump into the Internet of Things with their good buddy, Microsoft. Yeah, Microsoft and Canonical announced a pretty big partnership along with GE and others

to ship Ubuntu on Internet of Things devices. What the hell does that mean? And what does this fridge do? We're going to talk about all of that. Plus, we're going to talk about the chip computer, the world's first $9 computer that runs Linux, and some of the cool things we could do with that. Plus, we've got some follow-ups, some catch-ups, some feedback.

It's a really, really big show. So before we go any further, it is now our duty to bring in our mumble room. Time-appropriate greetings, virtual lug. Hello. Hi guys. Hey, this is a story we've been following on the show and I just want to do a little follow up before we get into all of the meat just to kind of keep a trail going for this new Debian project leader that was elected recently and the whole talk around

PPA is coming over to Debian. Well well he sat down over at linux.com for an interview and they asked all kinds of questions i'll link to that in the show notes if you guys want to read them but i wanted to get right in on this ppa thing because i think this is some interest to some of us he says there's hundreds of ppas for ubuntu so the question will they work with debian mcgovern says i think this is unlikely although debian has a good relationship with ubuntu and other downstream distributions, we have different focuses. Keeping all of the main libraries in sync would create a lot of effort to allow this to happen, and it's not something we really have time to do while developing our own distribution. So because of the library differences, Ubuntu PPAs probably won't work on Debian.

How difficult will it be for developers who have Ubuntu PPAs to port them over to Debian, he was asked. McGovern answers, I don't think it would be particularly hard, but they're really two different things. Essentially, the work is creating a Debian-compliant package, and then a lot of the preliminary work has been done by creating the Ubuntu package anyways. So, Ange, you're not using Ubuntu, but on Ubuntu, there is a way you can get this thing called a PPA. It's like a personal package archive. And what that is is, like, say you wanted to get a version of Chrome, and you wanted to make sure you always got the latest version of Chrome when Google pushed out a new one, you could go get a Chrome PPA. And it's a personal archive that you could go then get that software from Google, and then they would keep updating it for you directly from their servers

when you do part of your regular system updates. So these PPAs are like little ways for software makers to put out software to Linux desktop, and then people to come sort of subscribe to it to get updates. It's kind of nice. Right. And so, but Ubuntu is like one of the few distributions that does this kind of system. But Ubuntu is based on Debian. And Debian is considering implementing a system like this. So Debian users have sort of the same functionality.

But the two systems will not be compatible. So you have two systems, similar name, similar function. But if you make a PPA for Ubuntu, you won't be able to have that PPA run on Debian. Wow, that's dumb. Yeah, that's what happens. Why do they conflict? Why can't they both be subscribed? Because the Ubuntu computers have a different set of libraries that the programs use than the Debian computers. And the developers can't expect both to be on.

Oh, I see. It's kind of unfortunate, though, right? I mean, from an end user's perspective, that seems a little confusing. But you either run Ubuntu or you run Debian. Right. So what that actually means, because it's exactly right, is there's going to be a lot more. There will always be more stuff available for Ubuntu because there's more people on the desktop using Ubuntu, things like that. Is this one way for software makers to keep a pulse on how many people are actually using your product?

Yeah, for sure, because they're going to get download stats off the repo and stuff. So you're going to see every time somebody connects to pull off. So it gives you an idea of how many people are keeping their software up to date. So it gets you an idea of how many users are out there using it. Yeah. Mumble Room, any thoughts? Well, the download thing, they don't really give you much information at all. They give you like a simple download thing, but it's not that easy. You get a number.

You get an idea of how many people have downloaded that package. But there's no real great metrics. I just hope that Debian doesn't call it PPA that way. There's no confusion. Well, they have been calling them PPAs so far. I think they're just describing what they're going to be. But if they call them something else, that would be much better because then there wouldn't be any confusion. Well, this PPA is for Ubuntu and this is for Debian and so on.

Yeah, we'll follow it. We'll see what happens. for Ubuntu and this for Debian and so on. Yeah, we'll follow it. We'll see what happens. The thing is, in order to submit a package to an Ubuntu PPA for building, you have to create a Debian source package. So once I've done that,

I could send that to the Ubuntu PPA system and whatever Debian's user package repository is. DPA, I like it. It's the same it's the same it's the same thing yeah uh what would we call it the other day dump user managed packages i like that a lot hey did you take a dump yeah put that in the dump that's pretty good actually all right uh well uh we we have talked a lot about wayland on the show we've talked about how great it's going to be how it's going to change everything well mandre writes in so hello mom baroom and chris and angela yay he says why do all of you want to switch to wayland

so freaking badly when replacing x do you not want to replace it with something more useful wayland throws all usefulness and even usability out the freaking window. In Wayland, security trumps all always. Performance does too, it seems. Ironically, most implementations will probably not even support online updating. And in the core of Wayland, we have only very basic functionality, drawing onto a buffer, support for input devices, and some very limited output protocols. Wayland is inherently inflexible. If anyone wants to add additional functionality, they must do it in the compositor, the window manager, and then publish the protocol.

If this is even up to all other compositors, window managers, and et cetera, to then support that protocol. What if the two compositor teams and the window manager teams write two different protocols to do the same thing? Naturally, there's some basic functionality missing in Wayland.

Wayland does not support screenshotting. Wayland doesn't support screen recording. Global hotkeys, clipboards, I think, or gamma correction. basic functionality missing in Wayland. Wayland does not support screenshotting. Wayland doesn't support screen recording. Global hotkeys, clipboards, I think, or gamma correction. All has to be done in the compositor. And this is just very basic functionality. But to finish it all off, Wayland is not network transparent, and networking is a nightmare.

Don't you realize that this is the future? And in the future, more devices are interconnected and network-oriented, not less? Security, shmurity, performance, smormance. Mandre. Wow. This guy does not like Wayland. What is Wayland? Like, what would you compare it to?

Wayland's what's going to get the, just in real simple terms, Wayland's is what's going to get stuff up on your screen. That's what's going to get the graph. This right here, this is an X11 graphics environment, right? So when I move this window around on my screen, that's X11 that's drawing that on my screen. Wayland's going to replace that. But it's basically a whole new way to do it. Totally new work needs to be done on the desktop environment and on their compositors.

And Mandry brings up some good points. So with X, you get some of the stuff just built in. By having X, you get some of these features. And with Wayland, you have to write some of your own. And so on that point... Do you not ever offer those? Or is it just because it's currently not available as a stable release anyway? Well, because the Wayland developers

think that it's not up to the server to do that stuff. It's up to the clients to do that stuff. You want to do screen recording? It should be the client, it should be the composer that does that, not the back-end infrastructure. The client is definitely the thing that should take care of something when it comes to user-facing interaction. But no, any keyboard or mouse or interactions with hardware to the compositor all go through

KMS and UVDev. It is kernel. Then it goes up to the compositor, which it then filters out throughout the way with clients. And did you guys see a friend of the show, Martin, the KWIN developer, just said after years of work, this was two days ago, the master KWIN branch now has become a proper Wayland compositor. So KWIN and GNOME both have rockin' Wayland support.

And they're doing those things in the compositor. That's where they're getting it done at. So there must be a benefit, right? Because is it just a way to redo something and potentially make it better? I could be wrong. I think the real true benefit is they're trying to build something that can last 20 years. And so if you build some of this stuff in on how we do it in 2014 or 2015, well, then in 2025 or whatever, or 2030 when we're using it, maybe we want a completely different way to record our screens. If you do that in the desktop environment, and that's just my generic way of saying the composite or whatever,

that's much more nimble. You can make the change there much quicker than pushing it out to the server that affects every Linux distribution on the planet. Right. So instead of just affecting the desktop environment. Also, the X architecture is kind of from the 80s, which is based on x86. So all the code is very very old

and it's all insecure by default wayland is trying to be secure by default and that's why it's a little bit hard for wayland programs at the moment since everything is a little bit immature yeah in order to communicate between each other yeah it is that's basically the issue is like sometimes the security is just a little too tight and it makes doing what they're trying to do a little impossible. I don't know. Didn't one of the X developers themselves that is working on Wayland denounce how X was doing their own code in itself? Yeah. And another benefit I see is that if the client needs to change and adapt, then Wayland doesn't need to change and adapt. That way they kind of future-proof it in a way.

So if something changes, you don't have to worry about the graphics layer. The other advantage, too, is if you're building for a very extreme unique use case, something like an embedded device that's maybe like a small embedded screen that's a presentation mode, you don't have to modify the entire backend infrastructure to accommodate this one-off. You just build that into that composer that that particular device is using. I mean, it makes sense to me, but it's a big transition. Yeah, Q5Sys, producer Q5Sys says,

wait till Wayland gets rolled into system D. I am. I'm hoping they roll in this kernel. You'll enroll in Wayland, just get all one big Linux D. We'll call it the D. That'll be good. I hope I get the D. Hey, you know what? That's a shot, everybody.

Hello, take a shot. So, you know, for me, I don't understand the problem because the Ola phone already uses Wayland and they already have all the features like screen sharing and all that. So it's actually not that big of an issue to implement it. Right, I guess in practice it actually hasn't been that bad. Yeah, and security is, you know, with all the NSA stuff, I think security needs to be more focused because really if you read some of the recent breaches, you know, taking security

as a backseat because of usability is not a good thing. It's not a big deal, I think, basically, if you look at it this way. Right. And there is a point where you have to start taking security seriously and you have to start making compromises. And I also think that we sometimes get trapped in dogma, thinking things will never change, that we can't build a better system once we've built the first version.

There's things as 2.0 and 3.0 releases, and things can change. Before we go any further, I have some things I want to dig into with Angela and her switch to Linux. But first I want to mention our first sponsor, and that's Ting. You know, go to linux.ting.com right now if you would. That'll support this show and give you a $25 discount. linux.ting.com. Ting's mobile that makes sense.

We've been using Ting for more than a couple of years. We've saved over $2,000 by switching to Ting. You can find out how much you would switch by using their savings calculator right there on their homepage. You can go to linux.ting.com. Ting is truly mobile that makes sense because there's no contract, and there's no early termination fee because there's no contract. And then you just pay for your usage, your minutes, your messages, and your megabytes. And whatever bucket you fall into, that's what you pay.

And it's really easy because it's just a flat $6 for the line. Yep, and you can bring your own device. Yeah, really nice. And if you bring your own device, you'll get a $25 service credit by visiting linux.ting.com. And that'll probably pay for more than your first month. At least. And they've got GSM networks now and CDMA. So you can bring over the iPhone or your favorite Android phone.

We've got an iPhone on Ting. We've got an HTC One on Ting and a Nexus 5 on Ting. And they're just all great because we only pay for our usage. We're on Wi-Fi a lot. So we're saving a ton on data and voice minutes. We use one for our nanny. It's a nice little perk benefit for her that she doesn't have to pay for her cell phone. Yeah, and we look like big ballers.

Meanwhile, it's $6 for that line. And I can communicate with her whenever I need to. That's key. That was the most important thing is that she had a good, reliable phone and phone service. The other nice thing, too, is once you get somebody on Ting, they're set because if they ever run into any kind of problems, Ting has no whole customer support. So, you just call them at 1-855-TING-FTW and a real human being answers your phone. And I like that.

They're there. They're set up. They're ready to answer your problems. I think that's a pretty nice perk. They also have all the features you'd expect like voicemail, caller ID, tethering, hotspot, three-way calling, call forwarding, all the other features that you might want. But then a whole bunch more. Like you can turn devices on and off if you don't want to pay for them. This is really slick, like if you get one of Ting's MiFi devices, because it's $6

to have data in your pocket. And then if you're going to go a couple of months where you don't need data in your pocket, you just go into the Ting dashboard and just turn it off. That's awesome. Isn't that great? Yes. And you just turn it back on. And now that Ting has CDMA and GSM coverage, you can roll over to either one, just make sure you get a device that's capable of doing that. Or just for the cost, you just get one on each.

Or if you just have a device already, you can get a $9 GSM SIM card from Ting and enable that. And it's good to go. It's so straightforward. They also have a social presence, at least Twitter and Instagram. I believe they're TingFTW on both. And they're on YouTube as well. They have links at the top of their website. And they're putting out great videos all the time.

They have a really active community at help.ting.com and on both. And they're on YouTube as well. They have links at the top of their website and they're putting out great videos all the time. They have a really active community at help.ting.com and on Reddit. There's a Ting subreddit that is always really good. I visit that from time to time because I'm kind of a Ting enthusiast. So I'm always kind of checking out to see what's going on. Like, you know, hey, how's the Edge being tested? Any Firefox OS devices on this kind of thing?

It's really nice. It's truly no BS mobile service. They have a whole range of devices from like $50 devices up to like the high-end like Nexus 6 and the Moto X2 and, you know, the Samsung devices. All the really great devices over on Ting. And then you get that amazing dashboard. If you go to Linux.Ting.com, that's Linux.Ting.com, you get to put Linux in your URL bar. That's pretty cool. That's why I would go.

But then you also get a $25 discount and you support the Linux Unplugged show. Linux.Ting.com. Huge thanks to Ting for sponsoring Linux Unplugged. You guys rock. Ding, ding. Okay, Angers. Let's get real here about your switch to Linux real quick. And I wanted to kick it off with an email that we got in from Kenny about your switch.

Oh, I haven't heard this. I know. I'm ready to be beat up. No, see, Ang, you don't even probably fully understand, but there's been quite a bit of controversy and debate on this show about your choice of Arch over Ubuntu. Oh. Yeah, yeah. Do they think I have a choice?

Well, see, Noah and I spent a lot of... Noah, do you have like a 10-second recap you can give Ange about how we almost went with Ubuntu and then we went with Arch? we went with Arch? So essentially, based on the hardware that we're originally going to set you up with, long story short, it ended up being more beneficial to go with Arch due to some of the limitations of the installer of the alternative distro. And then once you got it, we saw how excited you were. And the chat room was more or less celebrating the fact that you were using quote unquote real Linux, none of this Ubuntu stuff. And then we saw your reaction to that when we went back to redo it due to some of the issues we ran into the second time around, again, with the alternate distros.

We again, or I rather, again opted to go with Antragos. And one, that kept everything a similar experience to what you had on the original MacBook that we gave you to what you had on the Lenovo. And the Lenovo she uses here in studio. Right, but then the other side of that was there was a lot of people and I would have been one of them, honestly, if I'm

being honest about it, a week before I got there somebody would have said, we're going to switch my wife to Linux and she's never used Linux before, what should she use? The last answer that would have left my we're going to switch my wife to Linux and she's never used Linux before, what should she use? The last answer that would have left my mouth was Arch or Antigos. And it wasn't until we actually got there. And it's one of those things that if you weren't there in the studio doing it with us, then you won't understand why we made that choice. Hey-o.

So Kenny writes in and he says, in the past, I would have, kind of like Wimpy did, had suggested that you go with Ubuntu or one of its many flavors for Angela. But now, I might agree with your current decision to go with Anticross Gnome. I've had my girlfriend's Acer's laptop on Anticross Gnome for more than a year without issue, as has been the same with my own laptop. I did the initial setup, which involved no more or minor hassle than you would expect from setting up Linux on general hardware. I don't monitor the updates. She just pushes the button, and when the notification comes in, much the same as I do in fact now, No more or minor hassle than you would expect from setting up Linux on general hardware. I don't monitor the updates. She just pushes the button. And when the notification comes in, much the same as I do, in fact, now, it just provides a nice easy option for updates.

And if anything does go majorly wrong in the future, well, then I'll just boot off a USB stick, transfer files off and reload if I can't fix it directly. There's no difference to what I did when we were both on Ubuntu. Plus, being on the latest stable kernel has fixed far more issues than it has introduced. I can't think of any negatives, actually, at the moment. Because Antigros has extremely finessed skin on Arch, it gives you a gorgeous GNOME desktop right from the get-go, whereas Ubuntu GNOME doesn't. From the login screen through to the desktop, it's just lovely. Angela has already been impressed by that, and I would.

I venture I would easily notice the difference between GNOME 3.14 and 3.16. The whole notification thing is for start. Arch Linux provides an engine, but GNOME Antigros provides that polish and that beautifully veneered wheelhouse. I think this is the future for Ubuntu as well, with an Antigros-like shock absorber over the raw power of Linux. I wouldn't have gone with elementary precisely because it's a Mac-like interface. It's like dressing a wolf up as a sheep. It may look soft and cuddly, but sooner or later it's going to bite you. When something looks the same, you expect it to be the same.

And Linux is definitely not OS X. Thank you, Torvalds. Aye, aye. Kenny. So Kenny thinks it was a good call for you to go with Antigross, Andrews. And so you and I were kind of discussing a couple of issues that you ran into.

And you had some questions you wanted to bounce off the mumble room and see if they had some answers for you. Do you kind of remember? Yeah. Well, yeah. I forgot that I was going to be put on the spot. I should have written them down. Yes.

Because we were walking just before the show. I'll write them down. I was like, here are the things that I. So. All right. So the first one was there are constant updates. Yeah. Updates.

And I feel inclined to, you know, like it has a little pop up and i feel inclined to you know like it has a little pop-up and i i feel inclined to touch it well because you know it's a yoga 3 touchscreen um i just don't even go near them because i have no idea what they're going to do or what needs to happen and as it turns out we did some updates and uh it did like the first part of a wi-fi update and it broke the wi-fi so it couldn't get the second update. Yeah, she has a Broadcom wireless driver. And then I was stuck at home without being able to connect to the Wi-Fi. She had to wait for me to get home with my USB Ethernet

adapter so we could finish the updates. That's the first bump you've run into, really. I don't know. I'm on the fence on the updates. Yeah. With OS X, when you get an update, it's updating iTunes or it'll update OS X or Safari, right? But with Linux, see, like with OS X, when you get an update, it's updating like iTunes or it'll update OS X or Safari, right?

Right. But with Linux, every single program gets updated from everybody. Yeah. So all of your apps constantly are getting updated, not just...

So it's not just OS updates. It's like a new version of the editor, a new version of LibreOffice, a new version of Firefox. Right. So there's more reason to update, too. Yeah. I do...

Somebody asked if I liked the Numix theme or whatever but that's when you changed i changed it to evo pop yeah so we changed it because it was kind of hard like so i got i'm using i'm using evo pop on my screen right here i ordered a mouse because um i needed a smaller one a more portable one one, because I take this, you know, here. Or anywhere, really. And I was able to find the settings to slow down the mouse cursor, because, oh, my gosh. Like, it was flying off the screen.

But I couldn't tell that there was actually a circle to dial down the speed. Like, I just guessed that there was. And so we did change the theme, and I like the new theme better. Yeah. But let's see what else. I plugged in my iPhone. Oh, yeah. Okay, so hold on.

You're going too fast. Oh, I'm sorry. So let's stop right there. So constant updates. Mumble Room, what's the consensus? Do you guys think that we should just let Angela go at it and update

or do you think she should wait for me to come in about once a week and install the updates? Second thing. Yeah, second thing. Wait. I would have to say that, yeah, have a more experienced user guide her through the updates for a while.

Once she gets the hang of it, then hand her the ring. Yeah, I guess I could watch. Yeah, that's what she said. My vote would be that she waits for you because oftentimes, how often have you had that situation where you get the call from the user and they say uh my computer isn't working well what happened when it happened then they try to describe it to you and you ask them a very a very poignant question did you see an error that that resembled this or did this come up on the screen i don't know a bunch of text scrolled across the screen oh come on give me some credit here i'm not saying that you're the person that's

going to do that but i'm just saying if if if text comes up on the screen or an error message is presented that doesn't make sense to you, it's muscle memory. When we see stuff that we've seen a million times before, it stands out to us. And if that doesn't mean something to you, something that would be very, very important may not stand out to you. That's a good idea. Just disable update alerts. That would be nice. Well, I suppose we could do that. I was just thinking like every Friday you and I could just do them or something.

Yeah, after Tech Talk today. Yeah. So I have an alternative. What about having certain, like giving Angela a list of packages that like if she sees the package like Linux and Broadcomware, then she doesn need it, but everything else she can update. Yeah, I suppose we'd have to...

Just provide her at least like five packages that she cannot update and that's it. I'm thinking maybe, but I'm thinking that list would probably change. You can always put it, the Pac-Man hold, you know, don't update this package. Yeah, I suppose so. In the Pac-Man.com. Yeah. I don't think we need to go that far. I think just waiting once a week and doing that.

And if it breaks, then we'll talk about it. And we'll let people know. All right. So there's answer number one. Now, here's number two. And I don't know if we may be able to get this cracked for you. Maybe. I don't know.

We don't have a lot of iPhone users in here. But the number two problem that Angela has run into. Angela, go. Is plugging in my iPhone using the USB to lightning adapter. I went ahead and plugged it in. Nothing automatically opened, which was actually kind of refreshing, to be honest. Because you just hate it when stuff just pops up when you plug in your stuff? Because when I plug in my phone to a MacBook, it opens iPhoto and iTunes. Yeah, and the stuff just goes crazy.

And iTunes automatically starts syncing and updating, and I don't really prefer that. I'd like to be able to tell it, do it. But you're not looking to sync music, necessarily. You're looking to pull your photos off. The camera roll is the number one thing, right? That's the biggest thing. I do like play counts because there is a degree of accuracy to play counts in customizing playlists but not super important anymore um yeah so i opened um

shuttle shutter so lord shadow is saying if we install lib mobile device it might support it i wonder if oh yeah lib mobile device i'll take a look at that forgot the name of the photo program oh uh shotwell shotwell yes yeah so um i opened shotwell and i was pleased to see that it showed a mobile device attached um my iphone so i clicked on it and it said importing pictures in the middle of the screen. Oh, good. Yeah. Well, no. Well, the thing is I don't want it to automatically import. I don't want all my pictures up in there. Oh, really?

Hello. Because it also like at first I was like, oh, crap. And then I saw in the bottom right hand corner where it said import selected or import all. So I'm like, okay, good. So it's not going to automatically import even though it kind of looks like telling me that it's importing yeah um it just stays there i just left it there for a while it never actually pulls them out it sees them but no it doesn't see them it sees the device it doesn't preview any pictures and there's no like way to know if there's any pictures there um and those buttons aren't clickable you know import all or import some so yeah okay and uh lord shadow you say uh yeah here we go you got something the arch wiki on the eye and hooking up the ipod perfect

thank you awesome so one thing that i would like to um say that i like is when i open up my laptop, I don't know how to get it to the password screen other than to use my finger and pull the screen up. Yeah, you like that? I do. I do. It's so nerdy. And it's out of necessity because I don't know how to get it. Space bar. Oh, is it?

Okay. I think I've tried escape before, but it didn't work. Anyway, so I really enjoy that. Yeah, that is cool having the touch screen huh i'm surprised you like that so much yeah now i know we had a third issue i know there was a third item but i just don't remember what it was um oh i do remember what it was what um and this is uh this one may be one for knowing you to talk about the problem you had when you open up your bill spreadsheet oh yeah yes so uh this isn't LibreOffice hate, Noah.

Brace yourself, Noah. I have my Dropbox set up and I was going to just sync some files, but it's actually harder than I expected. I open up my bill spreadsheet, which I go off of like... Religiously? Religiously. That's how you track everything. Yes. With color codes and yeah and first i got a couple errors and i don't know what they were

i said something like unnamed dot odt not found or something like that like it gave a file name okay anyway i got like three or four of those, and then it ended up opening up the spreadsheet, which is good, but all the formatting was gone. Now, when you say that it says one file wasn't found, it makes me wonder... Unnamed. Unnamed. Unnamed.odt. Do you have multiple...

Was the spreadsheet... Is it connected to other spreadsheets by chance? No, I don't do that. Okay. That is complicated. So when you say all the formatting is gone, are you talking about like text formatting or are you talking about like the formulas? Like the color coding. Color shading.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I haven't worked extensively with very, very complicated spreadsheets. But if there's a way to strip out anything that's sensitive data, and if you could send me a copy of that spreadsheet, if I could look at it, I'd probably be able to tell you why it's not working correctly or find out the answer for you. Okay. Well, and I actually have a solution to it, and that is to use some kind of online

spreadsheet. Yeah, I was going to say, what do you think of her using Office 365 for this kind of thing? Yeah. Actually, Office 365 is, as a Linux user and as somebody who supports free and open source software, for me, I have to have an actual Office suite because that's just the way I prefer to work. But I can sell Office 360 or 365 or whatever they call it. No problem.

Because, A, it works flawlessly on Linux. It really does. And, two, if you think about it, the value there, if you're paying $99 a year versus the whatever it was, $300 or $400, you would be upgrading your Office software every four years anyway, right? Oh, it's not free? I don't think it's free. I think there's a basic version that you can use for free, but I think it's $99 a year. It's $10 a month unless you pay anything. I guess if it's for business.

Bonsai Joe says Mint.com, not Mint Linux. Yeah, I do use Mint.com for Jupyter Broadcasting and our personal. I've been using it since 2009, I think. Yeah, we've been using it for a long time. We're early adopters of that. Yeah, definitely've been using it for a long time. We're early adopters of that. Before they bought it. Yeah, definitely way before. Yeah, yeah. Angela, have you tried uploading that spreadsheet to Google Docs and see what it does with it?

No. They would read all of the things? Yeah, it is. I mean, it's my bill of spreadsheet. But the thing is, I tried to use Google Docs as my thing, but it is so pared down and limited that I just hate it. But I have started using it for sponsor tracking and host payment tracking. So I am dealing with it to a degree. It's just limited.

Yeah, I might be able to. And converting it so that I could use it in Excel, it made it a little complicated. Anyway, I was thinking that if I used some sort of web-based program instead or solution, then I wouldn't have this. I could run Ubuntu next week if I wanted to. Look at this. Wimpy is just giving us the command. I'm going to copy this right here.

He just gave us the command to install mobile support in Arch. Yay. Yeah, so that should work pretty good. Well, then I should have an update for you guys next week then. By chance, have any of you tried Caligra Sheets, the Qt version of the spreadsheet program? No. Instead of the LibreOffice version. No, no, I haven't.

So the last Mac user that we converted to Linux, I don't see him in the room here now, but he actually switched from Microsoft Office over to Caligre and said that it worked flawlessly for him. I know he does a lot of spreadsheet. A lot of his work is spreadsheet-centric. Okay, okay, cool.

Yeah, so the thing is, after I opened it, I was afraid of modifying it in any way because it's my live Dropbox saved there. It's not like a copy. I was afraid that if I modified anything and saved it, that it would drop the formatting, and if I opened it elsewhere, it would not have it anymore. And Wimpy, you have a suggestion maybe to help sort of bring some stability

to the Arch setup? Well, yeah, you were saying that you've got a Broadcom Wi-Fi device in that Yoga 3, and it was whilst you were doing a kernel update that you lost Wi-Fi. True. So I would suggest moving to the LTS kernel in Arch Linux on Angela's machine. Okay.

Because that way you're not going to encounter as many kernel updates, far, far fewer, in fact. And therefore, you know, it's just the applications and the utilities that are rolling then. And I think there's far less opportunity for breakage in that configuration. That's probably a good point. And really, there's really no, there's probably no disadvantage with her machine. I don't think her hardware requires like 31818 or 4.0, whatever it is. Yeah, I guess.

He actually does make a good point on that. She's on the LTS kernel with the last update. She might have an actual more stable machine because you have less updates. Yeah, I like that. That is a pretty good idea, Wimpy. That's a nice little touch. I'm going to write that down too and move over. The latest LTS kernel in arch is 3.14.41

so it's not like ancient by any means all right i'm taking notes for you andrews you like that what what you also need to do is if you've got any drivers kernel drivers you need to look for the dash lts suffix on the drivers you're using. Right, that is true. And that binds the two together and then you're good. Yes, and they get updated together. Alright, so any other things? Grader, or Grader, I don't know, just pointed out that if I have it saved as.xlsx

that might be making it buggy. Oh yeah, and you save as.xlsx. Yes, yes, I almost forgot about that. The XLSX and the Excel, whatever that file format actually is, doesn't work well in LibreOffice. If you have the older version file format saved, then it'll work flawlessly. It's the newer Microsoft formats that's got some sort of proprietary garbage

inside of the coding for the save files that corrupts it and anything else. Yeah. I think that's good. So, Andrews, will you give us an update in the future on how it goes for you? Yeah, definitely. You keep us posted. And, you know,

let's talk about something else you've been using pretty heavily since your switch to Linux. Wine? No, unfortunately for you, no. I actually just ordered a case because it disappeared from all the grocery stores. Your chocolate wine. I had to order a case online that's 12 bottles. Chat room, yes, she does drink chocolate wine. It is very true.

Choco vine, chocolate wine. Choco vine. It is creamy Belgian chocolate with some sort of probably cheap red wine mixed in there. Dutch. Yeah. Yeah, Dutch chocolate. No, you've been using our new DigitalOcean droplet with our Minecraft server. Oh, yes, I have.

Yeah, you have. Heck yeah. Yeah, let's talk about DigitalOcean real quick before we shift gears here. DigitalOcean is a simple cloud hosting provider dedicated to offering the most intuitive and easy way for you to spin up your own cloud server. We've got a few of them now, and one of them is a fairly beefy one running Minecraft that Angela and my son are playing on all the time now. It's really cool. And you know, one of the things

that's really great about DigitalOcean is it starts at only $5 a month, and you can get started in 55 seconds. So I knew for a really great price and really no time at all I could get my own droplet spun up, and at $5 you're going to get 512 megabytes of RAM, a 20 gigabyte SSD, one CPU, and a terabyte of transfer. I just knocked it up a couple, so I'm paying like $20 a month right now, I think, or something.

And the reason why I went with my DigitalOcean Droplet is because I wanted lots of transfer and lots of storage and lots of RAM. And I was looking around at the hosted Minecraft solutions. And no downtime. Yeah, and no downtime, too. Always running. Yeah. And the hosted Minecraft solutions that are dedicated for this are way more expensive, way less control, and I don't get to SSH in and get a command line. And with DigitalOcean, I can take snapshots.

I can manage it. So if you guys want me to back something up before you make a big change, we can do that. It's really easy. And, you know, I think the other thing is we have an international audience, and a lot of you are in other parts of the world. And DigitalOcean has data center locations in New York, San Francisco, Singapore, Amsterdam, Germany and London. They have a really great brand new one in Germany that has just incredible connectivity. 40 gigabit

E to each hypervisor. Their fastest SSDs yet. It's really though it's a great service because for the value for the price you can get started in 55 seconds and get up there and you can do anything you need to do. You own this box. You get root access. There's an HTML5 console. It's based on Linux using KVM as the virtualizer. SSDs throughout the entire stack, so you get incredible disk I.O.

No longer need those fiber-attached SCSI radars with the 10,000 RPM drives. Those are gone. And now you can create something locally on your own machine in a Docker container and push it up to your own droplet or set up a machine up there. And DigitalOcean has an amazing interface to make it all possible. It's super intuitive. This control panel freaking rocks. It sets the bar nobody else can touch it.

People are trying to rip it off, but they can't. Every time they try to do something, DigitalOcean does it better. And a point to that, they just revved their API. The new version of their API came out that allows you to take their straightforward dashboard and bring all that functionality on your own. You can take it with you. You can write it into your applications. You can take advantage of the community written applications.

You can snap it into your management infrastructure. You can just write a quick couple of lines of Bash script or Python or Ruby code to do something like take a snapshot of your machine before you do a system update. And then when you're on that DigitalOcean management where you get the HTML5 console, you can do full DNS management. You get snapshots and you can do templates. You get one-click installations of things like Docker

and GitLab and Ruby on Rails. All of this is Linux technology, open source stuff. It's really awesome code. And go check out Dooku. It's one of the projects that contribute to make this possible. They also work with upstream distributions like CoreOS and FreeBSD to make sure you get the best experience of those on DigitalOcean. $5 a month, people.

And when you use our promo code DOUnplugged, D-O-N-P-L-U-G-D, that's all one word. It's lowercase. It's going to give you a $10 credit. You can try out that $5 rig two months for free. Go get your own Linux box up in the cloud with crazy, crazy fast access, SSD drives. It's a real server that you get to control, and it's super neat. There's so many great things you can do with it.

I've got an own cloud rig, a BitTorrent sync rig, a Minecraft rig. I've got machines we've used for production purposes. We've got a droplet we use to bounce video signals off for remote hosts like Noah during Linux Action Show. There's so many use cases for DigitalOcean. They can be your back-end infrastructure or just use them for hourly testing. DigitalOcean.com. Use the promo code DEOUNPLUGGED.

Get a $10 credit. DEOUNPLUGGED. You just apply it to your account. You can do it anytime. In fact, if you created your account and you forgot to apply DEOUNPLUGGED, go use it. Go apply it. You'll get that $10 credit. DO Unplugged over at DigitalOcean.com. And a big thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Linux Unplugged program. You guys are rocking.

Rocking. And Angela's been using that droplet like a fool. So Popey didn't make it here today, it doesn't look like. But Heaven's Revenge and I wanted to talk about this story. Ubuntu has developed Ubuntu Snappy Core. We've talked about it before, and it has, in this last week, taken up a ton of traction. It's a brand-new version of Ubuntu that's not even really fully baked and made shipping on anything as far as I know. But today, Canonical and Microsoft and GE and Acer announced a partnership where they're going to become allies and work on the Internet of Things devices,

including, from GE's standpoint, a frickin' fridge that runs Ubuntu. A frickin' fridge. A fridge that runs Ubuntu. A Linux fridge. And they're all running off of Ubuntu Snappy Core. Ubuntu Snappy Core is the transactionally updated version of Ubuntu. You install an update. It installs that update to a new partition.

Why are we shocked that a fridge is running Linux? Because it shouldn't be able to. Why is that? Oh my gosh. Why does it need to? My point is I think the Internet of Things is a bit of a joke. Okay. But I'm glad they're choosing a good distribution. I mean, at least they're choosing

Linux. So they're using this transactionally updated version of Ubuntu called Ubuntu Snappy. And the way it works is you install an update, it writes those updates to a new file system. You reboot, it boots into that new file system. If it fails to boot, it just boots into the old one. It's kind of like a guaranteed update system.

So that's Ubuntu Snappy core. That's how you update the system. Now there's these new packages coming out called snaps. They're a new version of click packages. We're taking click packages, and we're calling them snaps. This is such a called snaps. They're a new version of click packages. We're taking click packages and we're calling them snaps. This is such a cute language. It's very adorable. Clicks and snaps and wow.

But I just, I look at this and I'm starting to get a little glazed over in heavens. I know you wanted to mention that the snaps, people might have maybe a bad interpretation of how snap packages work because I think people are assuming they're transactionally updated packages that means you'll never have a package that fails to install etc do you want to jump in and sort of you've been digging into this you've been looking

specifically about how snappy core is architected i know you have some observations here well yeah i've been looking at this for quite a few days Canonical is probably the worst source of information that you could have found in order to understand this system. But they actually have, let's say, one version of a piece of software. It's all static and installed under a version number directory in the file system. Then, after that, they just, by when they mean transactional, as the version numbers change in the directory structure, they change the symlink as a current to the different version number in the file system. Pretty simple. So when they mean transactional, they just mean changing a symlink. Right, to the other one.

Everything's statically in there. So this is a very bloated system. Everything is within this package. You mean everything, like if a program requires a library, instead of using the library that's already on the computer, it pulls down that library with itself. It brings its own version of the library, kind of like the PBI system does. Completely.

There's no reuse of system, barely any reuse of system libraries. They're all self-contained packages, which are statically compiled and possibly in little LXC containers. But what you're looking into, Snap packages themselves are not transactional. Like when I install an own cloud Snap, and then I want to go to own cloud 802, that's not a transactional update. In the traditional sense of transactional, no, because there's stuff that can fail within a certain package.

To me, transactional means all or nothing. So even like a file can be can fail to be put onto the file system that traditionally is not transactionally consistent okay but but where it is transactional and i'm not sure if this is implemented yet or if it's on the roadmaps but it was certainly presented if you take that own cloud example and you upgrade from own cloud 801 to own cloud 802, and there's a SQL schema change, it will make that schema change on the database and update. And then if you find a problem with that version and you roll it back to 801, those schema changes are undone and your database goes back to the…

What's tracking the schema changes? What rolls those schema changes back? I haven't looked into it in that much detail, but I know that this was the aspiration for what it can do. They would have to be looking at the block changes on the system, or at least copying everything, like a database completely separately between one version and the other. Or they have to do the block level differential.

Yeah, and maybe that will be achievable. And that would be only by what? ButterFS? Yeah. Or overlayFS. Right, but their current implementation is using extended for. Yeah, they require extended for at the moment. But I spent some time talking to some of the devs about this, and whilst I learned a lot, it wasn't clear to me how much of what I was being told is what's available now versus where the aspirations are. to do to flesh this out as a project and whilst they're encouraging people to get involved

um i was asking well you know could i build one of the derivative flavors of ubuntu based on snappy right same way they're proposing to do for um uh 1510 they're going to have a their plan is to have a desktop image of unity Next using the Snappy packaging. And I was kind of encouraged to maybe not dive into it that deeply just now, but to follow what was going on with Ubuntu's developments with their desktop and certainly start to look at packaging individual applications. But this is the other interesting thing about Snappy. What you consider a package traditionally and what is a snappy package could either be the same thing or very different so if you take um something like um the mate

desktop that's made up of lots of different components such as the mate session manager and the mate power manager and the kaja file manager and so on and so on. Each of those are separate packages at the moment. But in the Snappy landscape, the Marte desktop, the whole thing, could be a Snappy package. Right. So you could move the whole desktop environment between major and minor version releases with a single package. And this is a bit similar to what steam are doing right because steam provide effectively their sandboxed runtime yeah well each one of those snappy yaml files has dependencies that you can note and then it would basically update the entire desktop even though you're

updating all of them at the same time yeah and, and I think that they were saying that they were going to do Unity as a single, or what will be Unity 8, Unity Next, as a single snappy package to start with. So the whole desktop environment will be one package. All of its libraries and everything. Yeah, and then what they'll do is then start to tease that apart. So they'll start to pull bits apart from it. So different bits that make up the Unity desktop are delivered as different snaps. Yeah, so they're going to start with the whole thing,

because that's relatively easy as far as I understood it, and then start to tease it apart into sort of the subcomponents. But I think there'll still be bigger packages, you know, there'll be um more like meta packages in a way you know but bigger run times i think they are very quickly about to leave people behind um i'm seeing a lot of confusion about the software center still people don't understand how this fits in with that and they're not getting the message that the software center is kind of going away people i think I think they're starting to, I think because so much is happening so fastly, so fast, you know, you have Ubuntu Core, Snappy Core.

First you have Ubuntu Core, then you have Snappy Core, then you have Click Packages, now you have Snaps, and it's all happening very fast. And actually nothing's really shipped, right? But terms have changed, things have been iterated, and I think a lot of people out there are kind of getting left behind a little bit. iterated and i think a lot of people out there are kind of getting left behind a little bit um but i think not this all of this kind of seems like a very compelling interesting direction like they're truly doing something really unique here and yes snaps might be specific to ubuntu um and and there is some question about the snap back end being proprietary and the snap front end not and that's all kind of concerning but in some, I'm kind of excited because in a way, like you could be a couple years down the road,

you could have a systemd-powered Snap-installing converging desktop that canonical shipping. They could have the most unique, compelling Linux desktop out there in some respects if they pull all this off, let alone the Internet of Things crap, which I'm not excited about. I don't know if it's proprietary garbage. You think it's proprietary garbage? What I don't understand is...

Yeah, go ahead, Rust. No? Okay. Yeah, so what I don't understand is won't this intro like DLL hell? Like you have three different versions of the same idea on the system because it's like an image. it's not a shared library. Well, I mean, the programs will be statically linked to their specific library,

so they're not going to get confused, but you're going to have a ton of them on the file system. Yeah. But I feel like that's an old argument. I mean, we all have huge hard drives. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. This is how Android does it at the moment, so whether you know it or not,

if you need shared libraries in your APKs, you don't just have the shared libraries that you need multiple times over, but you have them for the different architectures as well. This is also a very simplified version of what Bedrock is doing. Yeah, yeah, thank you for bringing that up. Right. Go ahead. This is actually like the issue of it's being – it's a lot more packages. Yes, but those packages are usually tiny in comparison to how much we have as hard drives or just SSDs now are gigantic for cheap now. It's not a big deal anymore. And like if I have an extra 100 megs, ooh, whoop-dee-doo, I have three terabytes. If I have an extra 100 megs, ooh, whoop-dee-doo, I have 3 terabytes. Yeah, it did make more sense on the time of dial-up in every kilobyte you had to transfer mattered.

That, I think. Yeah, so size doesn't really matter is what we're getting at. I think it is what we're saying. Size doesn't matter, though. Well, if it's a tiny package. Yeah. My guess would be they're going to be around 3 times the size that we're used to now. Wow. That's perfect, isn't it? That's great, huh?

I'm on board. Yeah. Huh. I'm really curious to see where they go with this. I don't know how they're going to pull it off and transition, but they've got a lot of transitions coming up. They've got a lot to move people through. There is a lot of terms in Linux. Yeah.

It's great, isn't it? No. It's like every time I think I've got one down, then another is thrown and I'm like, oh my gosh, what did I do? We create like 100 new ones every week. I know, right? To keep everybody confused.

Oh, man. All right, so you know, I want to talk about chip. I want to talk about Ubuntu Rodent. Okay, we'll do that. You could probably put that on the chip. So I think this is going to be, I think you're finally, this is the device that's going to save our financial situation because at a $9 computer, you can't even, you can't even

balk at that. That's, that's something. Yeah. It's a, it's a wearable, right? Where you feed, feed an animal and you keep it alive. I remember those. Those were the worst. No, no, not that.

Before we get to that though, I want to tell you about something that's the best. That's Linux Academy. Go over to linuxacademy.com slash unplugged and get our special 33% unplugged discount. Oh, that's awesome. That is awesome. I know. Linuxacademy.com slash unplugged. Linux Academy freaking rocks. It's going to help you take your skill set up to the next level. So if you've got like a review coming up or you want to land a client or you just want to feel better about yourself, maybe challenge yourself. Or learn all the words like I still need to do.

Or another great one is because they have 7 Plus distributions you get to choose from. You can migrate. So if you want to go from Ubuntu to CentOS or something like that, you choose from the 7 Plus distros all of the courseware automatically adjusts. The labs, the virtual machines automatically get set to that distro. You've got self-paced courses with over 1,400 videos that you can watch. They've just rolled out a whole bunch of new stuff. I was just talking about this on Coder Radio yesterday, Angela,

but how much do you love this? Just a couple of weeks ago, Linux Academy rolled out a new feature called Nuggets. Oh, this sounds good already. It's like tiny bits of sparkly wisdom from experienced sysadmin and DevOps, just like one little bit of wisdom. So it's not a whole course.

It's Cliff Notes. Yeah. That's amazing. It makes you like one little bit of wisdom. So it's not a whole course. It's Cliff Notes. Yeah. That's amazing. And it just makes you do one thing a lot better. And so here's an example of creating a Pixie boot server for automated installs, setting up single sign-ons with Active Directory and Linux. That's a huge one for our audience. Or what is Active Directory from a Linux user's perspective,

and how do I make it work with my box? That's great. Here's LDAP, Ubuntu 1504, and why we care. Configuring Route 53 DNS. Quickly deploying Active Directory Open File Management, Foreground, and Nutshell SystemD versus SystemV and NIT. Setting up and using static routes.

Look at all of these. Editing an ISO image DOS box. Encrypting a folder. Changing Linux kernel parameters. Securing SSH. It goes on and on. These are all just one little quick courseware video course

you can go in there. And then, of course, as a Linux Academy subscriber you get access to all of the content. They just rolled out their new Red Hat certified system stuff. You subscribe and it's just kind of like Netflix. It's like a Netflix subscription but for education

on Linux. Stuff that makes you smarter. And you can do your own paste on the screen right now. A little bit ago Linux Academy announced a grant program. They're going to do a $5,000 open source grant program for open source licensed projects. People in the Linux Academy community

are going to get to vote on which projects get the funding. Oh, how do you submit? They're going to have a page up and I'll let people know. But here's how you can vote. I know this so far because they're rolling this out in bit by bit.

They've rolled out a new club that you can be part of, the Founders Club. And in there is a bunch of perks like access to beta content and new stuff and new site development stuff. But also you get to vote on where the grant money goes towards. And you just have to be an open source licensed project to qualify for the grant. So there's probably a few projects in our audience that could get that money. And if you're going for your Red Hat Certified System Administration stuff, they've got courseware up on that. And it has been a major hit on Linux Academy.

Their DevOps Essentials course was just updated. 50 video nuggets are now live. AWSCSA Pro course is available, and a lot more content coming all the time over at Linux Academy. It's so awesome. What I love about Linux Academy is we've always got something new to talk about because they're constantly pushing out new stuff. And those guys just must be working 24-7 over there. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Get our Linux Unplugged discount.

It's a great service built by Linux and open source enthusiasts, so it really makes a difference. They're not a generic training site, right? This is what they do. That's what makes them so awesome. LinuxAcademy.com slash unplugged. Now, it was actually, I think it was Popi that, or no, it wasn't Popi, but it was somebody in the Mumble Room that told me about Chip. Chip is the world's first $9 computer. And it's already phenomenally successful on Kickstarter, so they don't need our attention.

They've got 20,000 backers. They had a goal of $50,000. With 24 days to go? Yeah. They had a goal of $50,000, and they've raised a million. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So, here, I want to play Chip for you.

This is so cool. And of course, it's a Linux-based computer. This is Chip, the world's first $9 computer. Connect over composite, VGA, or HDMI. Chip does computer things. Save your documents to Chip's onboard storage. Surf the web over Wi-Fi. Play games

with a Bluetooth controller. But wait, there's more. This is Pocket Chip. It makes Chip portable. Take Chip, put it into Pocket Chip, and you can use Chip anywhere. How cool is that? You might have noticed chip looks

a little different than every other computer because we built chip to fit into your projects. And we're so excited to see what you can do with a $9 computer. Kickstarter, we need your help. To make chip for $9, we need to buy components in extremely large quantities. Help us make the $9 computer a reality and back Chip on Kickstarter today. Thanks. What do you think, Ange? That's adorable. The $9 computer.

Well done. And you can put it into your projects. Kind of looks like BMO. It does a little bit. Anybody in the mumble room been following Chip or backed it even? Any backers in there? I've been following it and nearly backed it. You haven't pulled the trigger, huh?

How come? Well, the shipping costs to the UK are more than twice the price of the device. Oh, yeah. And the delivery estimate is September 2016. Oh, wow. Yeah. So they have some there January and May. Oh, you pay more to get it sooner?

I don't know exactly. I'm looking at that right now. It was just a bit far out. Yeah. You know. Yeah. Gigahertz processor, 512 megs of RAM, 4 gig of storage, got Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. I really like

the thing that you kind of pooh-poohed Ange let's see where is it oh yeah the Game Boy looking yeah the pocket chip it's like a PDA

but look at this thing like so if this was a little computer for like Dylan or Abby like it's got a pencil hole so you can put a pencil in it to hold it up

which is adorable come on oh my gosh that is great and it's got the GPIO pins available so you can hook accessory devices up to it right there at the top. I don't know. It's got a five-hour battery.

I think it's a pretty neat idea. I really want to play with one of these. I'm not going to back it because I don't have any use for it, but I am so thrilled that computers... Oh, I'm sure you do. I don't know. You think? I don't know.

It looks like it was pretty versatile. Yeah. I do have an idea that you can use it for. If you were to get a few chip devices, you can use them as one as an LDAP server, one used as a Kerberos server, one used as a miniature file server, one used as a DNS server.

Have a whole network. Where's the Beowulf cluster joke? Hold on, that's the Beowulf cluster joke used to be right on tip of tongue for everybody. WW, this reminds you of the Ouya. Do you think that means it's going to flop? I don't know. Everybody thought that Ouya was going to be the best thing. We're going to have this portable gaming, and then it just totally flopped.

Yeah, we totally have one of those. It's still in the box. It came out for like a day. Yeah, the OUYA was a big flop. You're right. Well, the OUYA was also, it was a flop just in general. When I first saw it, I was like, okay, an Android console. I don't care.

Does anybody want our OUYA thing? OUYA? OUYA? It was wrong. They were off the mark with OUYA. This is different. This is more about, this is a component almost to a larger build. You buy this to build this into something else, I could see.

Right. So there's a lot more opportunity. So what does it do that Arduino and Pi doesn't? $9. I don't know, to be honest. Because, yeah, you could use Pi for $9. You know, the Pi is quite a bit bigger. It's like three times as big.

That's true. It is bigger. It's like three times as big. That's true. It is bigger. And it looks like, you know, like things that you'd insert into a tower. Like a teddy bear or something. No, a tower. No, no, no. The pie it is. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, this looks like something you could insert into like another toy. Like this chip looks like you could put it inside a speaker. You could put it inside a teddy bear and make it do sounds. Like this is so small.

It's as small as a VGA cable, basically. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. And it could be a full Linux system. Yeah. Yeah, this whole area is pretty competitive. I don't think it's necessarily bad to have another competitor in this space, though, and these guys kind of have a unique approach to it.

I like that they're... And Arduino is also much more limited than this thing. This has a lot more already built into it, so it can do things by itself. It has video out and everything like that. True, that's a great point. And they're working on, you guessed it,

an app store for this thing. Oh, jeez. Everything has apps. Yeah. Wow. I do like the idea of the pocket chip. I think that's my favorite part. I'm with iMacon. That's what really got me because that's like, okay, now I'm starting to see it. I get it now of the pocket chip. I think that's my favorite part. I'm with Icon. That's what really got me because that's like, okay, now I'm starting to see it. I get it now. Jeez.

The pocket chip looks so cool. Probably because it looks like something I would have played with in the 80s. That's exactly why they designed it like that. So we'll have a link to that in the show notes if you guys do want to back that. Like Angela said, they've still got 24 days to go, so you've got plenty of time to get in on it. They don't need your money. That's great, though. They don't need your money. That's great, though. They don't need your money.

And now they're going to be able to buy it in massive quantities, I would think. China. Yeah. Didn't they only ask for $50,000? Yeah. Yeah. And they got a million. So there you go.

And, you know, hey, guys, when's the last time we saw a device like this where they were pimping the fact that it runs Windows? You guys remember? Anybody? Anybody? Anybody? Anybody? Hold on. That calls for... Yeah. Exactly. That's right. I mean, nobody... Yeah, the Raspberry Pi 2 is going to eventually have some crappy stripped-down version of Windows.

But nobody launches their premier device on Kickstarter like this and talk about how it runs Windows or how it's going to run Windows ARM. Nobody does it. It's always Linux. Well, technically, the Pi also just said it could yeah true true yeah i i say good for them so it's by the next thing co and it's the chip and it's kickstarter.com and you just search for the chip on there it's like super successful so here i just want you to take this is the notes all right and i'll read those when i get home for how the things we're going to do to your machine do you haven't Do you feel like we covered everything for you today? I mean, I know you're going to

have another batch of stuff probably. Yeah. Do you have any final questions? We just need to get my second monitor hooked up to it. Yeah, because it has a micro HDMI out. Yeah. Yeah. Do we need to get input on that or?

No, I just have to get an adapter. It's no bigs. It's just, I just got to get a micro HDMI adapter, which we don't have one, of course. All right. Well, then we will leave it right there. I should probably mention before we go, last week was Matt's last episode of Linux Unplugged. He, though, is launching a whole new set of projects. He's like in a super creative phase right now over at MattHartley.com to find out what he is up to. Angela, though, thank you for joining us and going through the rundown.

I'd love to have you guys join us next week. We do this show live on Tuesdays over at jblive.tv, 2 p.m. Pacific, on a Tuesday. But go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar to get that converted to your local time zone. And then we will... What? You're looking at me like, what? No, no.

And then, because we have the mumble room, we've got all that stuff we'd love to have you guys in here. Mumble room, is there any other final notes you guys want to touch on before we run this week? All right, so just a little bit of details before we get out of here. Go over to linuxactionshow.reddit.com. That makes this show even better. linuxactionshow.reddit.com is where you can submit stories. You can submit feedback.

You can submit anything like that that you think would make this a better show, feedback threads, things like that. Angela, why don't you plug some of the stuff you're at? People might want to follow you on the network. Okay, so I am doing Women's Tech Radio, and we are currently, we've released two LinuxFest Northwest live interviews that we did. The first was with Scarlett. She works for

KDE and Kubuntu, and she's a Linux for lifer. Yeah, she is. And that's the title of the show, so check that one out. It's a quick one. And then the most recent one, actually, I'm sorry, it actually releases tomorrow. Yeah. Wednesday. Episode 26.

Yep, episode 26 is Andrea Frost. She was a firefighter in Alaska and injured her leg and decided to go back to school and get a math degree so she could teach math. But one of the prerequisites was to take a computer course. And that changed her life. She now has a master's in computer science.

Check out the Faux Show. Apple Watch versus Android Wear. I thought that was a pretty fun episode. Faux Show. Faux Show returned

yesterday. And it's live after Linux Action Show if you catch Linux Action Show. So there you go. That'd be a good one to join us on because

then you get to watch Linux Action Show and that show. It's a whole lot of show. All right everybody. Well thank you so much for tuning in to this

week's episode of Linux Unplugged. We'll see you right back here next week. It's a good show, Andrews. Thanks for being here. Didn't realize you had a time constraint there. Yeah, well, we just have the music playing. I know. It's fine.

Yeah. It's fine. So did you guys see the news about Floss Unplugged? I did a little bit. I just haven't gotten any links about it. Yeah, so we are working on a new show that will not be hosted by myself. It'll be hosted by Benjamin Carincia, I think is how you say his last name. Carincia. You may have seen him on our shows before.

We've interviewed him a couple of times. He is a developer. He speaks at a lot of conferences. He's an open source evangelist. He's a former Firefox community release manager. I think he used to be an Ubuntu member, but is no longer. I've bumped into him for a while,

and so he and I have been sort of talking back and forth about him creating a show with him and his co-host Alex, a show called Floss Unplugged, which would be more focused on the free and Libre aspects of open source, including Firefox OS devices and things like that. So it's still early.