Untitled Linux Show 170 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Hey, this week on the show we talk about the Raspberry Pi and Pi alternatives. We talk about some OSs like Zorin and Red Hat, then there is Torvalds weighing in on the rather nasty Rust versus C debate and, oh yeah, the real-time patch has finally landed. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love.

00:22 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
From people you trust.

00:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is Twit. This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 170, recorded Saturday, september 21st, always ten years away. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time to get geeky over Linux and open source and all kinds of fun things. You know, there's no telling what we'll get into here. During the pre-show, we were talking about which is better, star Trek versus Star Wars, and we are not going to comment on that on the air, because that's a good way to start a holy war and get ourselves into trouble. It is not just me, of course. We've got Ken, we've got David. We are here to talk Linux, not Doctor who, not Doctor who. We're going to let Rob get started.

01:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And the answer to the question was Stargate.

01:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We're going to get angry letters. Now, rob, stop talking about sci-fi and let's talk about the Raspberry Pi alternative. Which one are we talking about this week? Pi alternative which one are we talking about this week?

01:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So here on the Untitled Linux show, we are excited for our ARM feature and love the single board system on a chip, systems on a chip, so it's like the Raspberry Pi. And even though I believe ARM may be our feature, sometimes it doesn't quite work out for projects today that need more power, or the software you want to run isn't available for ARM, or maybe you want to be able to boot it from the free version of iVentoy. I've got just the thing for you for your next project, and it's called Radza X4, spelled R-A-D-X-A. I don't know if that's really how you pronounce it, but I'm going to be calling it Radza because I don't know how else you would say that.

02:18
So the Radza is a single board computer just like the Raspberry Pi, but instead, instead of ARM, it is powered by an Intel N100 CPU with an Intel UHD graphics, providing more power than the Raspberry Pi 5. Greater software compatibility at the cost of running a little bit hotter under load and more power consumption. The price is comparable to the Pi 5 at a base price of $60, $60 US, and available with a 4, 8, or 12 gigabit. Model was just announced. The CPU is a quad-core max turbo frequency of 3.4 GHz. The UHD graphics ports DirectX 12.1, opengl 4.6, opencl 3.0, intel QuickSync and H.264, slash 5, and AV1 decoding.

03:22
A 40-pin GPO header, mostly compatible with the Pi's GPIO.

03:30
Dual micro HDMI 2.0 ports, so you can have two monitors on it. Three USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, an Ethernet port onboard, wi-fi and Bluetooth, an ethernet port onboard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and the courage to include a 3.5 millimeter audio combo jack. There is no SD card slot on it, like the Raspberry Pi, but SD cards suck. Instead there's an M.2 PCIe 3 slot for M.2 SSD and you can also optionally get eMMC storage pre-soldered for just $9 more. There's a few different storage size options. The base model does not have eMMC on it, unfortunately. Like the Pi, this seems like it might be a little difficult to get your hands on, though a couple of models appear to be available at erasetech, and right before the show I stumbled upon another new device powered with a similar hardware. That new device powered with a similar hardware that I may talk about next week on our apparently the new hardware showcase corner, or as I like to call things, jonathan should buy my wife complains about you every time she does the bills.

05:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Like what is this 135. Rob.

05:09 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
So you moved from distro hopping to hardware buying.

05:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, you know flavor of the week, I guess. Yeah, I have at least one more thing. I mean, I go where the good stuff is, and right now it's just all kinds of interesting hardware coming out.

05:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So I've got to ask how long does this thing work? How many microseconds will it not burn itself out for if you don't put a heat sink on it?

05:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They do recommend a heat sink and they do have a heat sink available for 15. Recommend heat sink? Yeah, have a heat sink, uh, available for recommend. Yeah, they, they don't recommend not using one, um, but yeah, fifteen dollars for the heat sink um for their provided, one or their available one.

06:02 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, yeah, I sort of expect this thing to burst into flames without they. Might as well just add an extra 15 to the price and include the heat sink uh, yeah, I mean, this is for hobbyists.

06:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You may want to make your own. Who knows what you want to do? It's a single board computer.

06:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You might want to make water, water cooled you do want to make a more powerful heat sink than they're offering and fan I mean it doesn't look too terrible, but I I can't imagine an x86 machine not running hot, dangerously hot, without a heat sink. It's one of the things that they managed to do on the raspberry pi, like, yes, they'll get hot, but they can run safely without any sort of heat sink on them and still continue to run without crashing like they're really impressive, and I just I don't.

06:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't see an x86 doing that really yeah, well, the piece of hardware I might talk about next week. I'm kind of wondering where the heatsink fits into that, because apparently it's the same, and 100 um intel and well, all that stuff according to joey snedden's article, it starts throttling at about 90 degrees centigrade. Yeah, which is common for?

07:09 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Intel.

07:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's pretty hot. Actually, I want to say Intel throttles around 80 normally. I can't remember.

07:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It depends on the chip and what all it's doing. Yeah, some of them will candidly hit 100, 100 plus C. So we're talking Raspberry Pi alternatives. Let's talk for a minute about the OG, the newest kid on the block by the OG, I suppose. We of course have the Raspberry Pi 5. And something that people have been sort of eagerly anticipating is all of the other Raspberry Pi 5 things that hopefully, surely, are coming.

07:46
And we got a bit of a clue this week about the Raspberry Pi CM5. That's the Compute Module 5. That is, oh, let's see, do I have one here? I usually have one here. I'm sure there is one somewhere on the desk. Maybe mine are all in use. Anyway, the Under the keyboard, the little tiny no, I had to move. Anyway the little tiny compute module that you can plug into other boards. It is super useful for things like a lot of interesting uses People have made router boards that you can plug them into. Then you've got things like the Turing Pi where you can put several of them on a single board, some really interesting things that the compute module does.

08:28
Of course people are looking for that and of course, the Pi 500, we sort of expect to come eventually, but we got a clue in Ubuntu, and this is actually Ubuntu 24.10. Dot 10, uh, canonical has a, uh has a little ticket in there about. In order to provide support for the forthcoming cm5, we should incorporate all possible boot fixes for the cm5 into the oracular release, which apparently ubuntu 2410 is oracular oriole. Uh, they named it, I didn't anyway. Uh, but this is, this is a clue and it sort of makes me think that, uh, the, the, the, the people from Raspberry Pi and the people from Ubuntu talk like their people, called their people, and there was a conversation about when this is going to come out. Here are the things that you should do to make sure that it's going to work once it comes out Um, so soon.

09:20
All that to say, I expect the CM5 to come soon, and then on our wish list, we are going to have, of course, the Pi 500. And I tell you something else from Raspberry Pi that I would really like to see. Eben, if you're watching, I would love to see the RP1 on an X4 PCI Express card that we could plug into a desktop. That would be killer, that would be slick. Give us the 40-pin GPIO on the back of a desktop, man, that would be fun. But anyway, the CM5, it is coming, it is coming soon.

09:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So, with your request, plugging that into a PCI slot, would that just be to get the GPIO, or is there?

10:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You would get GPIO, you would get UART, you would get SPI which GPIO and SPI is really interesting to me because I work with Meshtastic and so then you can hang like a LoRa radio off of it and run Meshtastic right on Linux. I do a lot of work with that, like I am the Linux guy in the Meshtastic community, so that's one of the things I would love to have. But, but, like there's a, there's a bunch of things that you can do right now with the Raspberry Pi. It's genuinely hard to do on a desktop and that would just, it would just be really interesting to be able to put all those ports on their desktop.

10:40
One of the other things that I have personally asked Evan for and he responded relatively positively to this is on the Pi 400, mine is a little precarious right now. I can't just grab it. But like on the, you know, you type on one side, on the other side of it. We're like can you put like Visa mounts on the other side so that we can just like put it wherever we want it? So I'll have to look at how much that's going to cost. We're like oh, it would be so cool.

11:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So if we get these amounts, on a Pi 400 or on a Pi 500,? You're welcome. Now the question I got is I see that according to Joey Sneddon's article, he did an update saying that they have come out with a 12 gigabyte version of that Pi alternative. I think Raspberry Pi might do something like that.

11:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't know if we'll ever see a 12 gig. I think for the guys at Pi it would probably make more sense to try to do a 16. But that's going to be just a question of can they get the right so like physically sized ram chips, to be able to do it on their boards? Will the, the cpu they have supported? That might be like a pi 6 sort of thing. I don't know if that's going to come for the five, but I don't know, but definitely buy pi 10 I mean by that point.

12:01
16 gigs is not going to be enough for anybody.

12:05 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know they totally missed out when they were doing the Pi 3.

12:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
They could have had the Pi 3.14. I'm sure somebody made that joke internally somewhere. I was going to see what they really should have done. It's the successor to the Pi 3, rather than calling it the Pi 4. It should have been the Pi 3.1. And the one after that would be the pi 3.14. Sure that would have been the way to do it all right would be after the 3.14 3.141.

12:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
3.141 yeah, just go all the way down the string yeah, 3.141529, something like that.

12:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
that, that's all I know.

12:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And the string goes forever it goes forever.

12:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No stop, no breaks, no breaks on this train. All right, David, save us from the unending digits of pi with WireGuard. What's new in WireGuard?

12:58 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Nothing, and that's a good thing. So the reason why I'm bringing WireGuard uh, this is the first show I've been on, so it's been a couple weeks, but my last show we kept confusing wire shark and wire guard and I promised next week, so it's my next week, not the show's next week, to talk about wireGuard.

13:23
So when I went looking for a WireGuard news article Google's news aggregator the last article mentioning WireGuard was in April. So then I just went over to the CVS site and looked just to see if there were any issues, and the last real one was from 2023. And the last real one was from 2023. And for something that is security-oriented and all about securing your packets, that is a very good thing. So I linked to WireGuard's site itself because I wanted to bring out a couple of things that they list on their site.

14:04
First, it is extremely small.

14:10
They mentioned it has a minimal attack surface, but one of the things that I think is very interesting about it is it is specifically meant to be comprehensively reviewable by single individuals, and that is compared to the SWAN, ipsec or the OpenVPN, openssl stacks, which are BMS, and auditing even by a team of security experts is overwhelming tasks with both of those, and I think the fact that there are no CVEs no current CVEs for WireGuard and there haven't been that many when I looked back at the history, speaks to just how successful they've been in that it's getting picked up by everything.

14:57
If you do any networking stuff, ubiquity has it built into their products. Now the only thing that I'm not really seeing, which I would love to see, is WireGuard. Start to get more uptake at the enterprise level. I'm not sure about Palo Alto, but I know Fortinet does not support it yet and I don't think Cisco does either, but I really think that it is the future of VPN technology and is a strong contender to replace the ubiquity of IPsec. So, anyway, if you're looking for VPN, you should be looking at WireGuard.

15:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Is IPsec really the ubiquitous solution anymore?

15:41 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
It is at the enterprise level Really, because that's the common denominator. Like, if you want to connect fortinet to cisco, it's ipsec. You want to go in between vendors? Um, they may have their own proprietary stuff internally, but anything that's inner vendor is ipsec I suppose with ipsec encryption I suppose that makes sense.

16:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I haven't seen anything other than Ubiquiti with WireGuard either.

16:12 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Well, you can get it with like PS Sense and Well, sure, of course you can. You know the other ones. But as far as something you can, well I think it also may be in some of the lower end home router stuff. They're starting Ones where you find like OpenVPN, I think, like Netgear and D-Link and stuff might have little servers built into them, but anything at the enterprise level.

16:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I'm really talking about your comment on the enterprise. I haven't used any home routers for a few years, so I'm a little out of the loop there.

16:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Interestingly, wireguard you can implement in fewer bytes than OpenVPN. Yes, I remember working with the OpenWRT routers, the ones where we would squeeze them into four megs of flash. You could just barely get WireGuard in there, but there was just no way for OpenVPN to get in there. It just would not build. It took too many bytes to do the full SSL of the DAC. Yeah, well.

17:13
I was just reminding myself what all goes into the WireGuard encryption, and I was a little surprised to see X25519 in there which is built on elliptic curves, and that's interesting because that's not considered post-quantum secure. And so with wire guard, if post-quantum security is something that you care about, you've actually got to also use a pre-shared key, which of course there is. No, there is no quantum shortcuts for psks, um. So just a little tidbit there, not that anybody here actually cares about post-quantum security, because that's one of those things that's like forever, 10 years away. It's like nuclear fusion Nuclear fusion and usable quantum computers will arrive at the same time, and it's always going to be 10 years away.

17:58 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
The success of one of those will trigger the other one. We just don't know which one will come first.

18:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, the quantum computing will come first. The quantum computing will come first, and then that will give them the power to figure out fusion.

18:09 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Either that or fusion will come first, which will give you the power to run the quantum computing I guess that works.

18:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think that's the joke, Rob.

18:16 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
It's the modern equivalent to Schrodinger's cat.

18:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Ken now save us from this conversation Indeed.

18:31
Well, in that case, I guess I should tell you about what Paul Krill, senthik Kumar Palami, also known as SKT, wrote about this week. They wrote about Amazon Web Service transferring its open source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana what they called the OpenSearch project to the Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation has launched the OpenSearch Software Foundation to support the project and its search and analytic software. The OpenSearch Software Foundation will work with community maintainers and developers and founding member organizations to support the project and its search and analytic software. The OpenSearch Software Foundation will work with community maintainers. Sorry about that Now. Opensearch is used by developers around the world to build search, analytics, observability and vector database applications to the tune of more than 700 million downloads. Now, nandindi Ramini, vice President of Search and Cloud Operations at AWS. Vice presidents of search and cloud operations at AWS said in a public statement by transferring open search to the Linux Foundation, we are setting the project and its community up for its next stage of growth, with vendor-neutral governance that invites greater collaboration, along with programming and operational resources to further nurture the community. We look forward to working collaboratively with this new foundation to ensure everyone can continue to benefit from OpenSearch.

20:16
Now you've got to ask yourself why did OpenSearch join with the Linux Foundation? The decision to move OpenSearch to the Linux Foundation was yes. Why? The decision to move open search to the Linux Foundation was driven by a desire for more openness and community involvement. While AWS has been a key player in the project's early success, there was a recognition that a vendor-neutral foundation would encourage even more participation. The Linux Foundation, known for successfully nurturing projects like Linux and Kubernetes, was seen as the perfect place to help OpenSearch grow.

20:55
This transition brings several benefits, including enhanced collaboration, strong governance and, probably most important, access to resources. The OpenSearch community is excited about this transition, with many members and stakeholders pledging their support, including, of course, aws, and y'all have probably heard of SAP, uber and Avon. Y'all have probably heard of SAP, uber and Avon. Now SK also lists in his article many prominent members who extended their support, and Paul writes a technical steering committee will oversee it, as always. I recommend reading Paul and SK's respective articles for more details and their opinions on whether this will take open search yeah, so this is open search, is it's a?

21:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
it's a response to back in like 2021, when Elastic Search and cabana moved from an open source license to a source available license um, the server side of public license and the elastic license, that's what they call them. But they they moved away from open source and they did it. They did it because they felt like Amazon was eating, was eating into their, their profits. Right, this was one of the first, one of the first databases that had this problem and that their solution was to move away from open source, and it's interesting that Amazon was kind of the the vendor that kept it open uh, but it was it.

22:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
was it eating other profits or was it just getting a lot of profit out of their software without any kind of contribution back to it?

22:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, what was happening is the developers, the people that ran Elasticsearch and Gabbana they made their money by hosting it. And then Amazon came along and said oh, that's a nice open source project you've got there. We could host it too. And you know, it makes you wonder whether simply hosting your own software is the best business model when you're doing open source. Open source software as a service.

23:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Only if you've got the money to maintain a data center.

23:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think it's only if you don't get too big to where Amazon or somebody comes along and says, hey, we can do that.

23:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think mainly the main thing you have to ask yourself there is what value is it in having us host this, and could someone like Amazon come along and provide the same value for cheaper? And if the answer to that is yes, then maybe you really need to rethink your business strategy there.

23:42 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, I think Go with providing service and support I was going to say the same thing.

23:49 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
I mean, you really focus on your expertise, and your expertise isn't hosting. Your expertise is understanding how this solution works, whatever that is, whether you're talking about open search or one of the other products, and so you let the guys that are experts at hosting host and you focus on your expertise being your value add.

24:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I say diversify, do both. Post it, support it, and then if they want to eat your lunch in one section, you still got the other.

24:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that's fair, that's fair.

24:23 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And with it, going open source. Like this, this means you're not tied to just one cloud provider either.

24:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, if you really wanted to, you could go host it on Azure if you really wanted to.

24:36 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Or Google Cloud, and speaking of multiple cloud providers, aws released an article recently or a news release. Amazon did that. They're seeing their biggest competition being on-prem. People are coming back out of the cloud because of the cost associated with it. You can host open source locally if you need to.

25:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It is hilarious to me that on-prem is the new hotness right. That's the new big thing.

25:10 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Have your own servers. What happened was cloud blew up during COVID and then, after people started coming back to the office, the bean counters realized how much cloud cost.

25:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, especially when you're paying for a physical location also yeah, I think.

25:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think some people got surprised with some ten thousand dollar plus a month cloud bills. They went man, we could buy a lot of servers for that buy a lot of drives with that yeah, that too. All right, rob. Let's talk about uh, let's talk about, microsoft and direct x and the weird things that they're doing let's do that, but first I'm going to answer a quick question from youtube, from chris r.

25:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
He asks wonder if linux can be installed on a chromebook, and I want to say absolutely yes, it can. Sometimes there's hoops you have to jump around, but I have installed it on a on one of my Chromebooks.

26:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean technically speaking. Linux is already installed on Chromebooks.

26:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Technically, chrome OS is a Linux distribution, but you can install any other Linux distribution on there as well, indeed.

26:20 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So you can change from their default distribution that they've got to another.

26:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Sometimes you got to jump through the hoops to do the unlocking thing first.

26:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, there are hoops. So this week in Microsoft news this week may make games develop for Windows a little more easy to run on Linux. At least that is what much of the community is speculating that this story is about. Microsoft announced today that DirectX will be adopting SPIR-V, that's S-P-I-R-V, as the interchange format of the future. Spir-v is a cross-API intermediate language for parallel compute and graphics from the Kronos group. So, according to the Kronos site, using SPUR-V means that kernel source code no longer has to be directly exposed, kernel load times can be accelerated and developers can choose the use of common language front-end compiler, improving kernel reliability and portability across multiple hardware implementations. This along with the recent news that I don't think we ever talked about.

27:39
But recently there was also news that Microsoft would be moving forward with plans to move security out of the Linux kernel and much of the discussion about that was that anti-cheat for games would no longer have access to the kernel. It'd be somehow more at the user land level, which often has been an excuse for a lot of games to come to Linux. They said, well, anti-cheat can't come because it needs that kernel access. That also is another excuse chopped away potentially once they get that far for the games to work on Linux. And you know, to expand on that, you know Microsoft moving things out of the kernel. You know these, these two things we've talked about so far, um, it's not for the benefit of us. It all comes after the CrowdStrike outage and how that security software was tied in a little too deeply into the kernel that it was able to crash Lots of Windows.

28:54
But the effect may still help us over at Linux, yeah, over in the Linux world with gaming. So with DirectX supporting a more cross-platform API, it may make games easier to port or run on Linux through Wine Proton. Other games say they can't come to Linux because of that kernel level and that's another obstacle removed. As Linux because of that kernel level, that's another obstacle removed. As I kind of pointed out already In other news just today on Foronix, the SDL abstraction layer commonly used by cross-platform games now prefers using Vulkan on Windows as its ideal graphics API and Vulkan being cross-platform. It just seems like all the things are lining up to continually improve gaming on Linux. You know Valve's been really making a push over the last few years and now Microsoft is making a push.

30:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so these things, well, there's several directions to go here, but these will make WSL better. Right, it'll make WSL easier for Microsoft to keep up with and it'll give them the ability to do better acceleration inside of WSL. So that's, that's one thing, just like that's that's out there. That's one of the things that they're thinking on um the. I would love to see the link to that, uh, that post about security coming out of the kernel, because that's really interesting yeah, that was just something I recalled.

30:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And yeah, I'll find a link I looked it up to. Uh, yeah, make sure, but I haven't read the article again. Yeah, I, I'll find a link. I looked it up to make sure, but I haven't read the article again.

30:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I know they tried to do that back several years ago, like a decade ago, and they actually got blocked by government regulators who said well, this will mean that you get to choose the winners and the losers in the antivirus space, and we can't have that.

30:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, if I recall and we can't have that. Yeah, if I recall there it's. This is a vague memory, but it's like an API that's gonna be more outside, so it's not gonna be like tied in as tight.

31:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Is this similar to the API for the virus detecting software?

31:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, yeah, that's really. I think that is what it is. Yeah, At the same time, yeah.

31:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I would love to see games in particular, get their sticky fingers out of the Windows kernel. I think that's always been a terrible idea and I think Microsoft knows that that's a terrible idea and they're not real happy about it either, because the engineers at Microsoft, they are reasonable guys too and they realize that this is a knucklehead thing for games to be doing, to have kernel drivers for anti-cheat, it's just like. From any way that you look at it, it's a terrible idea and it would make things. It would make things so much easier to do inside of wine and proton. So I hope it happens. I hope microsoft finally is able to to put the kibosh on on the, the dumb kernel driver things. Um, you know, once upon a time in in windows land, that's how you did printers. All printer drivers were kernel drivers. This is how this is how this is how plugging in a scanner can besawed your windows machine. Live in front of people, as bill gates found out.

32:32 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That's how that happened scanner printer yes, yes an attachment to go to a projector yep, pretty much anything.

32:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
If it's a kernel driver, it can break your machine. All right, let's talk about the other kernel. That's got things going on. Uh, david the colonel sanders yes, no rust in the kernel and uh, how things have gotten a bit nasty. Maybe another holy war is kicking off, eh ah.

33:01 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
So um torvalds is uh, I don't know he. He's been around for a while. He's always been known for his very interesting um press in uh interactions. However, he seems like he might be becoming a press interactions. However, he seems like he might be becoming a bit of the older statesman when it comes to Linux. So I have a link to a Register article with the headline Torvalds weighs in on nasty Rust versus C for Linux debate. Got to love the Register for their headlines.

33:41
But there were a couple of things that I thought were quite interesting, snippets from his discussion and talking specifically about Rust and the kernel. First he said that the contention between Rust and C reminds him of when he was young and people were arguing about VI versus EMAX, to which the presenter interjected. They still are, as we know, on this show, which, if that's the comparison, that doesn't bode well for Rust and C. But he also said you know it has taken almost religious overtones and that's something you know when you're doing, especially with open source and everything. Technical debate is always positive. When you start moving to a camp simply because of your belief, then that's when things are a little bit get a little bit rusty. But AIM talks about the fact that there are people who just don't like the notion of rust and having rust encroach on their areas. But another thing that I thought was really interesting and this kind of shows his perspective and the kernel perspective, because we talk often about how quickly the kernel is releasing new versions and everything and they they move quickly on their release cycle, relatively consistently and quickly, but they take a very long view of development and we've got a discussion about real-time Linux that'll kind of touch on that long view. But this is what I thought was really interesting about that long view.

35:24
He said people have been talking about Rust integration being a failure. We've been doing this for a couple of years now, so it's way too early to even say that. So he considers a couple of years way too early and I think that's impressive. Just about looking long term at development. I mean, you got people like Google out there that have killed something after six months and so you know when we're looking at the kernel, if you've been doing something a few years you can't say whether it's a success or failure. But he says even if it were to become a failure at some point and he doesn't think it will. But that's how you learn, so you know again, we always fail forward, or ideally we fail forward. So he's not seeing this as so. Basically, his summary is that he sees the Rust thing as positive overall, even if some of the debates and arguments around it aren't necessarily always positive. The overall process is and that it's good for the kernel and the kernel development. So anyway, cool article.

36:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so this came up a while ago a couple of weeks ago and I've been watching ever since then, and there is active rust code in the kernel. There are drivers written in rust that are now in the kernel that may run when you plug in certain bits of software. I believe some of the some of the network cards are like purely rust based in their drivers, so I I don't, I don't see it going away. Right, it's there.

37:00
And the thing that has gotten to people, though, is you've got maintainers that don't speak Rust and don't really have any interest in learning Rust, but because Rust is sort of being added to things that they work on, there's this I don't even know what you would call it. I mean, it's sort of a challenge to a maintainer's competence in some ways, that there's now this language that they don't really understand that well, that they've suddenly they feel like they're being forced to come up to speed on, and they've lost some of their expertise in this area, and so, like I understand why people are, I get why people are passionate about it and why it's sort of a problem, I don't know. I think what Torvalds is doing here with playing the long game is probably the way to go, and we'll just wait and see.

37:54 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
He does make the point. He said C in the end is a very simple language. It's one of the reasons he enjoys C and why a lot of C programmers enjoy C. It's true, he said, and Rust is not. That's true.

38:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It is true, I've used simpler ones, yeah but you can't do all the things you can do with C, like C is the simplest language that can do everything that C can do. All right, let's see Ken. Let's talk about wind river and how, how this particular wind river thing came about.

38:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Right, and back.

38:38
Jonathan, you may even appreciate the irony in Christine Hall's article uh-huh she tells us how red hats decision to stop support for two centos led the wind river releasing a commercial Linux offering tailored for enterprise use. It's called, and I'm gonna just say, lx are Pro and is based on Debian instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's the same software as ELXR, a Linux distribution that Wind River released back in July, based on software initially developed for Starling X. Anybody remember that? Hmm, nope, that's the company's Kubernetes platform After Red Hat pulled the plug on CentOS, according to Wind River's chief technology officer, paul Miller, like many companies in the industry, when the CentOS announcement came out, we suddenly had a commercial product that we had a significant problem with. We took the hard look at the market and the open source community and we decided to move Starling X to a Debian-based operating system, and we did that to really align to a more pure open source methodology so that, frankly, our business couldn't be controlled by another enterprise's desires. Christine points out that the last point is why Wind River isn't falling in line behind the other RHEL clones. Paul Miller said we generally feel, after spending a lot of time studying that part of the industry and the open source community, that continuing down any type of rel path inevitably, inevitably ties you to the whims of red hat.

40:33
The folks at wind river seem to understand that open source is not some kind of business model and design business plans specifically designed for open source licenses. For example, when the company wanted to release and monetize its own server and edge versions of Linux, it started by releasing the software developed as the community distribution, elxr, giving away any ownership. What right Wind River had to the software to the community? What's in it for Wind River, you wonder? The answer is that it offers all sort of paid support for users who won't or need it. If people want a commercially supported version of ELXR that allows them to get security updates and STIGs and the type of things that are important for certain commercial use cases, we'll provide that as a paid service.

41:30
Paul Miller explained that's where ELXR Pro comes in. If it is downloaded and being used for free, it's just ELXR. Once support is purposed, it's then ELXR Pro. As Paul Miller puts it, elxr Pro is really a services and support offering against the ELXR open source project. Now I'm going to stop here and I recommend reading Christine's article if you want the rest of the story.

42:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah. So I was listening to this. I was thinking, oh, and I know, wind River, that's a name that's familiar to me. What do they do? I went and looked Wind River, that's VXWorks. That is the company behind VXWorks, which is one of the other very popular embedded OSs. It has even a smaller footprint than linux does in some cases. Uh, so that's interesting to me that the people behind vx works are making a linux distro and, uh, they're calling out red hat. That's fun.

42:34 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Good on them, it's fun, yeah yeah, not only that, but they're going back to before Red Hat with going with Debian.

42:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, I can't really blame them. It's kind of become obvious that Red Hat is not happy. They are not friendly to the idea of RHEL clones, so what are you going to do? All right, they are not friendly to the idea of rel clones, so what are you going to do? All right, we've talked a little bit already about Ubuntu 2410.

43:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Rob, do you know how to pronounce the code word for 2410?

43:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, I don't remember what it is. It's like oracular oriole or something. There you go, that's what it is. It's like oracular Oreo or something.

43:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
There you go. That's what it is.

43:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm not sure what either of those words mean. I know one is an adjective and the other one is an animal, but that's about it.

43:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oracular Oreo. Okay. So for KDE fans like Jonathan or Snap fans like Ken Sorry, david, I've got nothing about Windows here but for the other two, we've got some great news for you, as Ubuntu is working to snap up KDE Plasma. One day, installing KDE may be as easy as snap install KDE. Way to go Canonical, canonical snap up all the things. Okay.

44:06
Well, this time there is good reason for it, and that is for work on their immutable ubuntu core distro, and snaps which they're using on their immutable distro are allowing everything to be isolated and sandboxed from the core os, much like how android functions today. So, with the next release of umitu being their 20-year anniversary, they have ambitions. But there's also a lot of nostalgia on the way, and I think we've talked about many of many of these old things coming back to be new again, like the ubuntu brown inspired elements, the original ubuntu startup sound coming and another cool feature that purist will hate. I guess I do have something for you, david. I do have something for you.

45:05
Microsoft IntraID authentication with AuthD is being brought to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Intraid for those who don't know, it's what Microsoft used to call Azure AD. This week they're calling it Intra ID, so I believe this is going to allow users to log into Ubuntu with Microsoft online accounts. This may not be much for the general home user because they're not going to have an IntraID account, but I think this has a lot of potential to be huge in the enterprise and even medium, maybe, some small businesses, as many companies are moving their on-premise infrastructure to the cloud, intraid or Azure AD or whatever you want to call it is their unified authentication method to manage users.

46:08
I've seen quite a few people in the Windows world going there. Canonical or Ubuntu Linux wants to go along and be in that infrastructure. They got to support more than just the on-premise AD, probably the next great step. So on kdeorg's website there is a pdf title the road to kde neon core. Um, I have no idea how that fit into this whole story of ubuntu kde, but apparently that must mean that the non-official ubuntu desktop, kde Neon, is also going to be adopting snaps for one of their distros. Will you?

46:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is interesting. So this makes me think that Ubuntu is trying to go to the atomic. They're trying to go at the atomic direction with their primary, with their primary release, and I guess snaps are great for that right it makes sense.

47:14 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You gotta remember.

47:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
This is for Ubuntu core, not Ubuntu yeah, but all those snaps will still be available for regular Ubuntu. So even though regular Ubuntu won't be quote immutable, you could still run all those snaps they're still.

47:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
They're still moving Ubuntu. So, even though regular Ubuntu won't be quote immutable, you could still run all those snaps. They're still. They're still moving Ubuntu towards using snaps wherever they can. Yeah, I would, I would. I would make the argument that that means, like, by definition, they are moving Ubuntu towards being an immutable desktop.

47:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's definitely going to be pretty close to it. Until they, you know, the only thing missing will be that that last immutable core piece yeah well with the ubuntu core.

47:54 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It is an immutable version of ubuntu where all the components are in snaps well, I don't know if you've looked at your regular ubuntu desktop regular ubuntu desktop but uh, it's getting close to being all of the only 90 percent.

48:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that's interesting, they're putting as much of it in snaps. We will keep an eye on to that one and uh see where it goes. I'm going to save my story to wrap with. So if david is ready, we're gonna let him talk about hypervisor upgrades, sure all right.

48:32 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
So, um, I've got a link to another register, article, um, with another fun uh title, and it says desktop hypervisors are like buses none for ages and then four all at once. And for all of those of us living out rural areas, we don't get to experience that, but in the city you can be waiting for quite a while for a bus and then finally, when one comes, all of them seem to come. Yep, um, but in september, uh, they, they said four at once, but technically it's two different versions of VMware, so I kind of count that as one. So I'll say three.

49:15
But VirtualBox has released 7.1, which has been billed as a major upgrade. It's got a UI modernization. It's got a basic and experienced user level. It used to be called expert mode. I don't really think that the change in language is significant. They're just trying to differentiate it a little bit better. It also has added Linux and BSD code for ARM architecture so it can run on modern Mac OS hosts. Another interesting thing, and I'm not sure that you would want to take advantage of this but you can clone VMs from VirtualBox on the desktop directly into Oracle's cloud service and then the desktop hypervisor will give you access and report on the resource usage of those cloudy VMs, which is kind of interesting.

50:18
Parallels released an update. Parallels is primarily for Mac. Their big claim to fame is allowing you to run windows on mac, although, interestingly, when I was looking into them a little bit, uh, they also have a windows on chrome os virtualizer. I don't know why you would want to run that, but if you have some need, it's out there. Um, as far as I know, none of their are free, so they don't qualify as open source, but they are hypervisor. And then, finally, vmware, which is definitely not free oh, not open source. They do have some free versions. They've released.

51:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, never mind, they do.

51:04 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Yeah yeah, they've got free to use under special circumstances but not open source, and I got my tongue tied there. Um, they've come out with version 17.6 for their workstation and 13.6 for their fusion product, which is basically the. Fusion is the higher end of the workstation line, but they're both. Oh sorry, no, fusion is for mac os and workstation is for windows. So they've released new versions of of both of those and somewhat related because we're talking about hypervisors. I also have a link to a story down in the bottom of the show notes that I'm not going to dive into. But as part of the 6.12 Linux release, microsoft is moving some Hyper-V code to boot Linux faster when you have a whole bunch of CPUs under Hyper-V. So all kinds of VM goodness going on out there, you sure you?

52:11 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
don't want to go down that rabbit hole.

52:13 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
I'm sure We've chased enough rabbits already on this show.

52:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
A whole bunch of VMs I don't care about. There was no KVM there, I don't care.

52:24 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
KVM is all we need. Right, yeah, exactly.

52:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Fun stuff.

52:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Fun stuff there. I don't care, kvm is what we need, right? Yeah, exactly, yeah, uh, uh, fun stuff, fun stuff. Um, yeah, when I interrupted, it was uh, it was the. I was thinking about the esxi. You know, they used to have a free tier of that and that's the, the type one, the uh, the one that you install in bare metal and you know runs in data centers and whatnot. They used to have a free tier for hobbyists to use at home and they ended that. I can't remember if it was the beginning of this year but yeah, they ended that free tier.

52:58 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
They were like hobbyists would never run a bare metal VM server.

53:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And then I remember it was this summer when they brought Fusion and Workstation, when they made them free those were not free before or when they made free tiers. So yeah, Fun times.

53:14 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So now we just need an OS to try on these virtual machines.

53:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I take it, you have one for us.

53:21 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I've got a suggestion.

53:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right.

53:23 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
In fact, I got it from Sarav Rudra, marius Nestor and Bobby Borasov. They all thought the latest release of Zorin OS was worth writing about Now. Saurav writes that, along with turning 15 in July, zorin OS 17.2 introduced a hybrid user experience with this latest release. Marius talks about this Ubuntu-based distribution targeting Windows users and Linux newcomers with the latest and greatest LibreOffice 24.8 Office Suite as well as many other updated pre-installed apps. Bobby states Zorin OS 17.2 is backed with enhancements that promise to make your desktop experience smoother, faster and more secure. They all inform us that Zorin OS 17.2, powered by the same Linux kernel version as Ubuntu 24.04 LTS yes, I'm referring to version 6.8, brings updated drivers, enhanced security and long-time support, including receiving software updates and security patches until June 2027.

54:38
Zorin OS also has built-in support for Flatpak, appimage, rob yes and Snap packages if you want to install more applications. Also, zorin Appearance this is a customization tool that comes with the Zorin OS installation now allows users to change the cursor theme and makes installing third-party themes easier. There's also a new section that's called Windows, not to be confused with the OS, which opens up a customization for application windows. It lets users change the behavior of window placement, title bars and focus. As always, saurav, marius and Bobby include in their article links to the latest changelog and instructions for upgrading from previous versions. Bobby even links to the Netherlands-based company Laptop with Linux, who offered to pre-install Zorin OS on their laptop. Might be a good item for Jeff to look into if he's still looking for a new laptop yeah, interesting, uh, zorin.

55:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Zorin has kind of made its name by being an easy transition for Windows and Mac users. Um, I'm trying to figure out what the desktop environment is there. It almost looks like it's heavily. Uh, it almost looks like it's kde. That's been heavily um fiddled with it does look like it.

56:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I I actually had my hands on a zorin machine this week, only briefly, but there was one in the shop that uh, uh, they're, they're. They couldn't get obs studio to work on it and um, but yeah it. At a moment, you know, there's computers all over the place and at first glance I actually thought it was just another windows computer. It looked just like windows.

56:40
And then I saw the little, the little z in the bottom left corner, like wait a minute hey, that's zorin I wasn't working, my guys were working on it, but uh, I'm like, hey, that's zorn, and I did sit down and try to work on it a little bit, but I ran out of time and they didn't get it figured out. So I don't know where the status is. But I was gonna ask who's gonna ask it was, uh, the era was something about qt, something's plug-in plug-in.

57:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You'll have the correct version of QT. Probably sounds like it. Alright, it looks like they.

57:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They offer a KDE version, but I think their own is.

57:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't know. Now, that's the light version. I think it's gnome. I think it's gnome. I think it's gnome by default. Yeah, looks like it is actually gnome.

57:31 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They just make it look very not gnome, ish I don't know why this don't do kde the way it looks yeah, yeah, it seems like they're going for the kde vibe seems like it'd be so much easier with, especially with how uh yeah, gnome's always changing things. It's gonna like toll it. They're gonna pull the rug out, rug out from under in one of these days or something is it gnome or is it uh cinnamon?

57:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
it's not cinnamon yeah, I think it's. I think it's actually no, based on the the the internet article, I found all right, we've got. We have one more story that we want to cover and this is something that we have been talking about for basically as long as we've been doing the show and it's finally happened, and that is the real-time patches have finally been merged and should show up in Linux 6.12. And if you follow the link, there is a, there's a Twitter post and it's. It is the official moment at the real-time celebration where thomas bikesner handed lenis torvalds the official pull request printed out on paper wrapped in a gold ribbon, and, uh, hold the pull request. Um, so it is it. If it is official, and it is, uh, oh, it's been a long time coming. Um, I've got a.

58:51
I've got a link here off to the zd net article talking about the literal 20 years of history of the real time patches, and that digs into some of the reasons why someone might want to do it. You know, if you're running live audio, then real time could be helpful. Um, talking about how it's deterministic and how long things take. Real-time Linux will not help your games run faster, but if you're trying to do actual live audio. It can help with that, it can help with Jack, things like that. And then what's also interesting is all the things that have happened in the kernel because of the real-time patches like mutexes and the F-Trace tool. So very interesting stuff.

59:31
But it has finally come in 6.12. So we'll give that a month or two to bake and that will be out as a full release and then a few weeks after that it will be available on some desktops and I'll actually get to play with it. One of the things I'm not sure about is whether this can be turned on real time, whether you can go real time. Real time or is it a boot time argument, or is it a compile time setting? I'm not sure which of those it is. So once it actually comes out, I'll have to dig into that and find out. But it's here. It finally landed. We've been talking about it for a very long time.

01:00:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm guessing it very long time.

01:00:11 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'm guessing that's compile time. How long did it take?

01:00:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
20 years. The patches first got started about 20 years ago. Oh, very long time.

01:00:24 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
I'm racking my head. I feel like there's a real-time joke in here somewhere, but I can't come up with it, probably because it's of the delay.

01:00:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Lots of puns, lots of puns. Not a real great joke, though. All right, let's talk about some command line tips. And uh, what is rasta pasta mapski? That's the good, you have the GitHub link. It's the GitHub users Rastapasta, rastapasta's Mapski, gotcha.

01:01:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I forgot about the person who made it. But the command line is Mapski, and so, but the command line is mapski, and so have you ever been in the terminal and you know? Maybe ssh somewhere or just on?

01:01:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
a tty and needed a map. No well, me either, but maybe, maybe once or twice, actually, maybe once or twice either way, mapski s map, so it's m-a-p-s-c-i-i.

01:01:37 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You hit enter and you have a nice uh map of the world. Now, this is not just uh for those watching. I don't, I do not have this over here. Okay, just for those watching. I do not have this over here. Okay now for those watching.

01:01:53
This is not just a static map, this is interactive. So I can navigate around with the arrow keys. I can use A and Z to zoom in and out. I'm zooming in here to A. Let's go to the us, let's uh.

01:02:22
Yeah, anyway, look, you can get in there, zoomed in pretty good. You can get all the way to the streets, but it's it's not all that uh, visible. There's also, if you want to switch to block character mode, just click the c. You can get all the way to the streets, but it's not all that visible. There's also, if you want to switch to block character mode, just click the C, and that's maybe a little more, I don't know, visual and that's really about it. So let's see how far down we can go, and I even tried this on on a TTY, so it does not need to be in any GUI mode at all. Look at this. I'm zooming in here and you can see the streets and rivers. And there's no street names there. But oh, there is street names. I have not zoomed in this far yet, so you can even drill all the way down into the street names, so you have a full SEII map right on the terminal.

01:03:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So what's really fun about that is it actually has mouse support too.

01:03:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes, it does. If you are in a, in a console, obviously if you're in a TTY, there's no mouse support there.

01:03:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, fun, that's neat. I like that quite a bit. I wonder if it's just like taking Google Maps and rewriting it in in you know characters, or if it's actually like crunching the numbers itself. Uh, easiest way to play with it is telnet. You may have said this, but telnet mapskime or, if you really want to, it is. Uh, it is well, it's a Nodejs thing, so you install it with npm or you can get the snap if you really want to.

01:04:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And guess what, ken, I installed this with a snap.

01:04:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Honestly, that's a lot easier than installing Nodejs.

01:04:22 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It was the easiest method I saw. I suppose Telnet would have been easier, but for the live show I didn't know necessarily how reliable that would be, so I installed it, yep.

01:04:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Makes sense. Makes sense. All right, I've got a command line tip for you. This is something that I have been working on this week, and it is GitHub runners. If you don't know your organization to this, this is a. This is a very geeky command line tip, but if you need it, you need it.

01:04:48
If you're on GitHub, your organization has access to 20 GitHub-hosted runners at a time, and that might not be enough for you, so you may want to run some of your own. But if you're in the situation I was in, you want GitHub. Whenever you kick off a run, you want it to just pick whichever one is available, and so I got to look at it. Well, how can I put my runners and the GitHub runners in the same pool and make it just pick whatever? And that is not an easy problem to solve until I came across this, and that is when you kick off your runner, you could just give it the label Ubuntu-latest, and then GitHub will happily go and say give me Ubuntu-latest, and it will just pull either one of its or one of yours, and then, if you want to specify a GitHub runner, you can then just give it the label of Ubuntu 22.04, because that's actually what Ubuntu-latest is, and at some point in the future, of course, github will change Ubuntu latest to 24.04. And then you just have to go in and update those.

01:05:52
But I was trying all kinds of things Because you can give it a list it's bracket label, comma label, comma label, and you can give it a list of labels. But GitHub will look for a runner that matches all of those labels and there's no logic built in there to say I want to use either this kind of runner or this kind of runner. It just doesn't exist. So you just kind of cheat and you label your runners as Ubuntu latest and it just makes it happy. Everything works. So for anyone else out there, for all of one of you maybe that's listening that wants to be able to do that, you're welcome. I just saved you about 30 minutes of Googling, all right.

01:06:34 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
David is up next. Ah, yes, I have a little command line and that is glances G-L-A-N-C-E-S. I've got a link to a how to use document that goes through it. It's probably not there by default, but it should be in all of the repos and it's just another tool to let you monitor your system usage and it can include CPU swap, load, network and disk IO all in one app with a lot of different options, including running continuously, so that you can refresh the display at a given interval. It defaults to five seconds, but you can set that. You can monitor specific process, along with other options, including exporting statistics to a CSV file. You can monitor IO by disk name. You can monitor with a Docker plug-in. You can monitor specific containers, so it's kind of interesting. It's just another option for monitoring performance on a system.

01:07:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
nothing too big yeah, it's cool it is. It is yet another top program, essentially pretty much yep h top, g top, b top and glances. I like it though, very cool, all right, and I think that brings us to Ken, and I think we're talking about disks. Still, what do we have this week, ken?

01:08:15 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, this week I am ending my series and managing disk drives and block devices with the command U-D-I-S-K-S C-T-L. I've been pronouncing it U-DISKS-CONTRK-S-C-T-L. I've been pronouncing it UDISC's control, and you'll see I've got two terminals up In the bottom one. I'm going to go ahead and bring up the manual where it tells you that UDISC's control is the UDISC command line tool. In the top one I'm just going to enter UDISC's control by itself and what it does is it basically gives you the help screen. You can also get this by typing you just this control space help. As you see it shows.

01:08:57
For those of those watching the video, you'll see it's got a list of commands. The first one is help, which shows this information. Now if you pull up the man page for you just control, you will see it is the is used by typing you just control, followed by one of the other commands you want it to carry out. I am going to demonstrate next, using the just control to display this status. That gives you a high level level status of all your block devices. Right now you'll see I've only got two devices hooked up. That's going to change in a minute as I hook these up. Now I'm gonna go ahead and come down to the bottom one real quick and exit out, because one command that you can use is monitor, that's UDisc Control Space Monitor, and that will have you monitoring your UDisc daemon and watch the bottom screen as I hook these devices up for those that are watching.

01:10:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
For those that are listening. For those listening, this would be a good time to go and get a cup of coffee and come back after he gets done playing the Men.

01:10:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, oh, and I've got them both plugged in, as those y'all watching saw that the uh bottom terminal updated with status. As they were read. Quite a bit of information scrolled by there, didn't it? Yeah, quite a bit of information scrolled by there didn't it.

01:10:52
Yeah, and if we go back to the top terminal and repeat the UDISC control status, you'll see that we've got two more devices listed in the table. Now the table I'm talking about has four columns. The first one's the model column. It gives you the model number of the device. The second column is the revision. The third column gives you the serial or serial number. The last column gives you the device location, and by device I do mean slash, device slash, for example. The second row in the column is for my internal Seagate hard drive that's SDA.

01:11:42
And then, for those of you all listening, the table also just added the two external drives that I hooked up. One's the Western Distribute MyPath that I've been showing previously. This time it was hooked up as SDB. And then I've got a Seagate backup slim 2TB drive that was hooked up for SDC, and where that comes in is if you want to get more info about a particular one, you would type in you just control space, info space either dash, dash, block device. I'm lazy, so I'm going to go with dash B and then slash, dev, slash, sdb today for the Western Digital Device, and that gives you another over a screen full of information, and if you go up you'll see that it's got the configuration, a lot of fields, that it gives out whether or not the device we're here again, it actually gives the full device descriptor, in other words slash, depth, slash, spb, it. It even gives what the drive's called, the full drive is slash, org, slash, free desktop, slash, udes2, slash, drives, slash a combination of the drive's model number and serial number. If you look back up here you'll see that there's the model number and there's the serial number. Any spaces in the model number would be replaced with an underscore and you'd also have an underscore between where the model number ends and the serial number. So it gives you an idea of how you can come up with the model number or the drive name yourself. Come up with the model number, the I'd drive name yourself.

01:13:49
Another interesting, a bit of information against assembling good in here, it still using and, jeff, you may remember going over this back when you went over the Linux file system but it gets flashed in, flashed if slash by dash either is sequence ID or path and you'll see it's got the information for those. And then it's got user space mount options and any partitions that are listed on it. Now for the user space mount options. Currently it's blank on it Now for the user space mount options. Currently it's blank. Another command you can use with UDisc control is mount. That's M-O-U-N-T.

01:14:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Live demo gone wrong. Sdb is not a mountable file system.

01:14:56 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It is not Own SDB. 1.

01:15:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The first partition on it and there it goes and mounts it and displays all the information Includes and there it goes and mounts it, and displays all the information to include the mount point as well as the name Very cool very cool and if you were watching the video, you'd also see that the monitor that I still have running went through.

01:15:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Find out where it added it there added SDB. That's where I plugged it in here's where it added the SDB. That's what I plugged it in. Here's where it added the SDB1.

01:15:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, lots of info in there.

01:15:59 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And, of course, in addition to mounting actually I still have to mount it I did the info for the STB1.

01:16:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You can also unmount it if it is mounted.

01:16:20 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, I'll go ahead and mount it. When it is mounted, it gives you mounted at the device block and then the file system path that it's going to use, and when it is mounted you can unmount it along with the options that you would use in the file system table for mounting, such as read-only, so that's mounted as read only, and just to prove it quicker for me to type it try to touch something on it.

01:17:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so I've got. I've got a question for you. Um, you're not running this as root and yet it let you mount the drive. How did it let you mount the drive without running as root?

01:17:35 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Because it lets the user status, assuming the user has the capability to mount.

01:17:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Ah, interesting. I figured the answer was going to be that it had to be in your FS tab.

01:17:51 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No, ah, because this particular device is not in my file system table. Ah, cool, but it actually explains that in more detail in the manual and it did indeed mount.

01:18:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It read only very cool.

01:18:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Can you just taught me something? I did not ever know what fstab stands for the file system table I never put that together, I never thought about it, fstab. I just never thought about what that means.

01:18:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Here on the ULS, furthering education since like 2020 or whenever it was.

01:18:38 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And, if you noticed, I just did a. I listed the directory that it's mounted to and it's showing that everything that's on there is actually tied to root.

01:18:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So this is an easy way for.

01:18:53 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
If you've got an external drive that you just want to mount read-only without having to go into the file system table and edit it, you can do it that way.

01:19:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep, very cool. Alright, those are our tips. We have had, uh, we have had a blast, we have celebrated some stuff going into Linux and, uh, I think it is time to let the guys get the last word. If they want to, uh, we will let David go first. Anything you want to plug, any last words to get.

01:19:24 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Nothing to plug. I do have a last word in honor of jeff and wire guard. I um went to co-pilot while we were talking and asked for a haiku, and here is what it gave me. Oh boy, silent packets flow. Secure tunnels, weave through night data safe in flight.

01:19:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's surprisingly not bad. Exactly that was my thought, Ken. I see you've got a note here.

01:19:57 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, I do, and I just want to mention that Marius has an article about the GNU Linux-Libre project downstream release of the GNU Linux-Libre 6.11 kernel, which introduces detection of firmware loading parameters in Rust, among several other additions, and it's going to be great. If you want to build a 100% free computer that doesn't include any proprietary code, then definitely read Marius' article.

01:20:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Gotcha Alright and Robert.

01:20:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
List units. Start, stop, enable and disable. Goodbye to init. There's a haiku. I looked it up with at the beginning of the show and I've just had that here waiting. Dual haikus.

01:20:53
Yeah, ken, where's your haiku? Anyway, come find me, connect RobertPCampbellcom. I've had some new connections made. Recently, dr Frankenstein donated a coffee to me um, at least that's what he called himself on, uh, the the coffee page right here. And anyway, when you get to my website, you can't you too? You too can connect with me on linkedin, twitter, mastod, which is between, like I said before, mastodon and LinkedIn are probably my most active locations and if, if you want, you can also donate coffees to me. And you know, I have a new driver in the house this summer and um, a teenage driver who now is, has been using one of our two cars for the household, which means I've often been without a car and means I need to buy a new car, which means coffees, lots of coffees, will go a long way for a new car oh, what fun.

01:22:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, uh, and the things I want to mention. Of course, you can find more of my work at hackaday. That's where floss weekly is. At this past week we talked about jbang, which is java as a system scripting language. Super, super interesting. Had Jeff Massey there with us and we had a lot of fun with Jeff and Max, and, yeah, you should go check it out. The security column goes live every Friday morning at Hackaday as well, and we sure appreciate everybody that goes over and supports us there. Thank you to everyone that has been here, both live and on the download for the Untitled Linux show, and we will see you next week. You really enjoy the show and just wish you could somehow be plugged in for more. Would you like to be able to get ad-free versions of everything or join the Discord? Well, you need to check out the club. It's Club Twit. Find out more at twittv slash club twit for about the price of a cup of coffee per month. You too can join the club, and you should.