Untitled Linux Show 172 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 we've got news from Pine, we've got news about FFmpeg, we talk about Audacious. We look at XFCE's Wayland work, there's news about Linux 6.12 and a whole bunch more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust.
00:22 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
This is Twit.
00:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is Twit source and gaming and hardware and all kinds of other fun stuff. It is the Untitled Linux Show. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and we've got the regular crew. We've got Rob, we've got Ken, we've got Jeff, each in their proper place, because the chat room wouldn't let me get away with rearranging them.
00:56 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Ah well, but they couldn't stop me from rearranging my bookshelf.
01:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's true. You can rearrange if you want to, all right from rearranging my bookshelf. That's true, you can rearrange if you want to. All right, rob has it up first and my wife actually sent you coffee, so you're not allowed to talk me into buying anything.
01:16 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That is correct. So, jonathan, don't buy this. You don't want to buy this. I promised your wife I wouldn't tempt you to buy this and she donated me two coffees. I don't know if she told you that she spent that much money on me Two, not just one, which is very kind, because she knew that they took a chunk of it and wanted to make sure I could actually afford a full coffee and not just a part of a coffee.
01:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
These days in this economy.
01:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm getting gas station coffee, yeah. So I made sure to pick something that I was pretty sure you wouldn't want. So today I'm talking about the Pine 64 E-Ink tablet called the Pine Note. So the Pine Note. It isn't exactly new, but its initial release back in 2021 was limited to very few developer devices, so it isn't likely that any of you have your hands on one. Maybe one or two of you, I don't know, probably not Good odds that you don't have one if you're listening to this. So, and that's probably well, that's probably for the best, because you know there were some kinks to work out and the new PineNote will be making improvements from the initial feedback that they received from those few developer devices.
02:48
So, early developer units you know they were aiming to have the old pen. They're going to have the old pen replaced by a passive, no charging unit that still features the same buttons and, from what I read, the Linux operating system wasn't really ready back then but it really wasn't that functional. But Maximilian has done, and is still doing, a lot of work to the Debian-based firmware to provide a better user experience based firmware. To provide a better user experience. Or, as they say in the blog post quote results results in. Not only the results are in and not only will you get a bare bones capable OS, but a genuine, genuinely daily usable system that just works. So that's kind of amazing for an e-ink tablet of any kind, you know, even the nicer or the well-established ones. You know they have their quirks. I own one of those models myself. So, and with all these initial issues, you know they didn't feel comfortable taking a risk manufacturing a whole bunch of high notes that wouldn't sell and being stuck with them. So they waited. They held off a little bit well at now, after all this work that you know on all these changes, you know the launch date. You know, although the launch date hasn't been announced yet, they have announced that it is indeed coming back and in more of a bulk production, so hopefully they can get the cost down from the blog post.
04:46
We don't really know anything else is changing. Uh, besides those few things that I mentioned, um, maybe hopefully they're going to upgrade some things, maybe there's fine, I don't know. But the original sold for 399 us dollars, you know. And yet you know, hopefully, what I gathered from reading the post it seems like, with ramped up production, that they'll be able to get that price dropped. I don't know what drop means. I don't know if that means $350 or $299 or what, but hopefully, as some ramped up production, gets that price a little more down, maybe in line with some of the other E-Ink tablets. Well, some of the E-Ink tablets are already way more than that, but actually most of them are, I think. But there are a few like, I think, the Amazon scribe or whatever is. I think it's less than that. I don't remember, maybe it's not 389.
05:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't remember, maybe it's not $389.97 on Amazon.
05:49 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Okay, so already at the $399 rate that's pretty much right in there with the lower-cost e-ink tablets out there already. So I guess if they can get that down at all, that'd be a pretty good price for an e-ink tablet. So anyway, also, you know to to go on with, you know saying what the original had and we could probably estimate the new specs will be similar ish, it was a 10.1, which is a 10.1. Inch E ink display, which is far too big for Jonathan, and it has 16 levels of gray scale, which is far too big for jonathan, and it has 16 levels of grayscale, which is not of colors for jonathan either. You know he likes his hdr, so, um, grayscale's not for him, he doesn't love this.
06:35
Uh has a quad core, uh system on the chip, soc, four gigs of ram, 128 gigabyte emmc, two microphones um, I don't know if that's for like a stereo sound or what, but um seems odd to have that in a something, a reading device. But whatever, uh, usbc charging, wi-fi and bluetooth. And you know for me that 399 is a little more than I want to spend on it. But if the price comes down I may be interested. Fortunately, jonathan is not interested in this at all.
07:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, so two things. First off, they've got a video of running Doom on it.
07:25
I'm kind of a sucker for running doom on weird hardware uh and second reason to buy it right there and second, I am now imagining 3d printing a candy laptop, you know, one of the old ones that have monochrome display, putting this in there as its display. It would just be, it would be great. So, but I'm not gonna buy it. I've already made my big purchase for the month and uh, yeah, that was that was. That was enough that said you.
07:59 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You said for the month and you can't even order. You can't even order it or pre-order. Yet all All they say is it's coming yeah.
08:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm going to let it go there. I'll just say this I just yesterday, I think spent this amount of money on a replacement 3D printer.
08:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And I did not suggest that at all.
08:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It was not Rob's fault, the printer's fault, maybe it was my old printer's fault. I, I went to print something, went to print a case for a heltec, um and uh, it just it would not print. And so, well, okay, the nozzles clogged, pulled the old filament out of the nozzle and like the old filament was jammed in there to where I had to get a pair of ply, like had it heated up like 220 c and had a pair of pliers to get it out of there, like had it heated up like 220c and had a pair of pliers to get it out of there, and the filament broke off down inside. I finally took it all apart and like my hot end and the nozzle itself are just, they're totally full of charred and burned plastic from using it over the years. And it's like I really don't want to take the time, I don't want to spend the money on this old thing. And then I I discovered the the bamboo labs mini with the multi-material unit on there for like 350, on sale for 350. So it's like, okay, fine push the button
09:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
and a quick, quick side note buying uh stuff that runs doom and it was didn't do the story. It was pretty short, but well, an amd engineer has uh doom running on a amd graphics card yes, but not just normally what you think of, but using rock m and everything running everything on the video card.
09:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So it entirely runs on the video card now, is that the one where it's actually running the doom code, or is that the one where it's recreating doom using an llm?
09:48 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
uh, I believe it's actually running the doom code. Okay, so that is because you're using rock m to handle the logic in the this cpu part of it yeah, that that is impressive.
10:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I I saw another story speaking of doom um, where someone took Doom and fed it like fed the video of it, maybe with the keyboard inputs as well into an LLM and it generated like a playable version, a live, playable version of Doom. That didn't use the original source code, but just the entire thing was hallucinated by the AI. It was something I'll have to see if I can find that story too, because that was something to watch. The original source code but just the entire thing was hallucinated by the ai and it was. It was something I'll see if I could find that story too, because it was that was something to watch yeah, I just double checked it is.
10:31 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It is um. It's running a top an amd graphics card with rock m plus the llvm libc library, but it's running the classic doom on the gpu I've got a uh story in the uh down the rabbit hole that I just posted into the discord chat.
10:53 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Uh, that I don't think you'd be able to get doom to run on this computer is that the uh, like the original, that somebody finally booted linux on?
11:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I saw something about that too, like a 4004 somebody booted Linux on, but it took it a day and a half to actually get booted up. Yeah, those are always fun. I've seen people doing stuff like that.
11:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Like when you had the story on a Commodore 64 running Linux.
11:20 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No, this is on a processor that was created in 1971.
11:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, what they do to make that work is they essentially emulate a RISC core and then run Linux on that virtual RISC core, which is why it's so ridiculously slow. But it's fun, you can do it All right, ken? Instead of talking about Doom or Linux on RISC cores, let's talk about ffmpeg and the major. Well, I guess technically minor.
11:46 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
if seven is the major version, dot one is out now well, and I want to thank keith, keith's 512 because he'd post the one of the articles I'm referencing in the club discord earlier this week. But yes, jonathan, as you said, ffmp released version 7.1, dubbed Peter, don't ask me why. According to Marius Nister and Bobby Borisol, bobby even believes that one of the standard advancements in this latest version is the maturation of the versatile video coding, or sometimes called VVC decoder. This is a successor to the high efficiency video coding, what we commonly call HEVZ, and it is now stable enough for broad adoption to provide improved compression performance and support for an extensive range of applications. Bobby feels this development is particularly timely as the codec begins to gain recognition and support from broadcast standardization bodies, signaling a potential shift in industry standards.
12:59
Marius notes that FFmpeg 7.1 introduces the new low-complexity communications codec, commonly called LC3, and its sibling, lc3+. Both the deMuxer and Muxer. Now LC3 and LC3+ decoding and encoding will be using an external library called LibLC3. Called LIBLC3. These codecs operate at low latency, low computational complexity and a low memory footprint, and their modes range from medium bitrates for optimal voice transmission to high bitrates for high-resolution music streaming services, especially over short-range wireless communication platforms such as Bluetooth and digital enhanced cordless telecommunications.
13:50
Bobby also reports on FFmpeg 7.1's internal enhancements, including the improvements made to handle full-range images, addressing long-standing issues with color range, data paths and negotiations that began over a decade ago. This release adds support for cropping, metadata parsing and writing in Matroska and MPV or MOV demuxers and muxers. Adds support for matching stream specifiers in FF tools by stream disposition and it deprecates the VF underscore scale to ref and removes the DEC alpha DSP and its support code. Marius notes FF MPEG 7.1 brings a large number of ARM64 and RISC-V optimizations to accelerate FFmpeg decoding on non-X86 platforms. Ffmpeg 7.1 is marked as long-term support or LTS. Now I've only touched on some of the information that Marius and Bobby provided in the articles which I have linked to in our show notes.
15:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You introduced a new codec to me with VVC and I immediately had to go and look Is this one of those stupid patent-encumbered codecs? And yes it is. So don't anybody get excited about VVC. We won't be able to run anywhere for 15 years. Man, I hate software patents. They are just the worst thing anyway. Reach to the choir. Anyway. Yay for ffmpeg 7.1. And uh, it it runs. It runs the internet. So many things happen with FFmpeg.
15:50 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It shows being made using FFmpeg. Oh yeah, I'm sure.
15:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The libraries from it, the thing itself, probably in just about every step along the way.
15:59 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Restream OBS.
16:01 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, it's FFmpeg all the way down. Hopefully they're getting some good donations.
16:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
They do Gstream OBS? Yep, it's FFmpeg all the way down. Hopefully they're getting some good donations.
16:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
They do. They have some people that really support them. One of them is a German governmental service. Yeah, I'm trying to think of it now because that was actually mentioned in the article.
16:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I know the group you're talking about. They fund several open source things. Yeah, all right, let's talk about Linux in version 6.12. Jeff, there's something new that didn't end up happening there.
16:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah. So you hear us say that you shouldn't use RC kernels unless you're willing to take the risk of something breaking. Well, most of the time you know, because we talk about new toys coming, but sometimes there's a downside, and this is one of those times. This RC kernel broke something, specifically the PixArt PS2 touchpad, which is found in many different laptops, and a few others Things broke. This is a brand new driver for the 612 kernel and it was developed by PixArt in collaboration with Longsun Engineers. No specific vendor or models were called out, because it sounds like these touchpads are in a lot of different makes and models. Now it sounds like you didn't have support before and they broke something. Now sounds like you didn't have support before and they broke something. So there still isn't a working touchpad. Not terrible, right? Well, what was broken is still broken and they'll get it fixed. So things are going to just take a little longer to get fixed.
17:48
But the real problem is the driver was overambitious on taking control and being. You know, if the laptop didn't even have a pixart ps2 touchpad, basically this driver would take over touchpads that it didn't support. So what's going to happen? The driver was rolled out of the current rc until they can get the supported device code device selection code working correctly. As michael Larabolo at Phronix said, this driver was ejected from the kernel. You know, I also have the article linked in the show notes so you can take a look at it for full details. But you know this isn't the end of the road for the driver though. You know if they get the code working correctly, they can try again in the 613 kernel merge window or whatever kernel merge window you know is going on, based on whenever they get this sorted out. Yeah it. So. Basically, this thing not only it broke a lot of laptops, because it just said we're going to be the driver for everybody's touchpad. Well, it didn't work out so well. So if you were running 612 and found out your laptop touchpad stopped working, the next RC should fix it, because the offending driver isn't going to be there trying to take over. So if it worked before, you should go back to working again.
19:03
And I wanted to call this out because this is a nice example of how things can go wrong in the kernel RC code and an example of one of the solutions. Now, if it had been not so bad and they could have just had some patches, you know, they could have just patched it and then, oh, okay, the next version of RC would work fine, but because the decision making part of the code is messed up. So this is, this is a little more than just oh, we, we didn't, we forgot to carry the zero, or carry the one, or we forgot to. You know, we used to unsign when we should have used a sign. This is, this is a little more. So they got to go back and rework the logic. So then it gets removed. And then they then, uh, they get told just try again. So it's not that they can't ever have it going again, it's just all right, just go go to back to the drawing board, resort it out, we'll put it in the next available merge window and we'll go on again.
20:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So this is just one of those times where rc code isn't always stable yep, that's one of those things that happens um did they mention exactly what driver it was?
20:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
yeah, it was the Pixar PS2 driver. Ps2, so like the old school before USB was popular, ps2?. I don't know if that's the interface they're using, because it's in laptops and there's a long soon laptop coming out. They said that Pixar touchpad is probably going to be in those new laptops, so I don't. I don't know if that's the interface it's using internally. It didn't sound like it was a real old school, uh touchpad it looks like it.
20:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It looks like it's using ps2 internally. Oh, that's fun I can some standards never die yeah, they just slowly fade away and that one's not gone yet.
21:06 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, and if it only left broken PS2, you know, the Pixar PS2 touchpads it would have been fine. It's just hey, all these other ones, yeah, we're just going to take them all over.
21:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know that sort of implies that all the other ones that were broken were PS2 as well. So apparently, that's pretty common.
21:27 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Could be, and maybe that's all I mean. If you think of a touchpad, maybe that's all you need. I mean, I'm technically running a PS2 keyboard right now. It does have a PS2 to USB converter.
21:40 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's not PS2. It's PS slash 2. I think it might be a model number for the touchpad.
21:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Maybe I think PS slash 2 is what they used to call the IBM bus.
21:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I think so.
21:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, okay, rob. I'm not excited about talking about the next two stories, but we will soldier on. Rob's gonna break the ice and then I'm gonna put my foot in it. Here we go first up, rob. What's going on with network manager?
22:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
so network manager 1.5 has been released this week and has gone PC. No, don't worry, I'm not saying it has gone over to Windows. I'm saying it's gotten politically correct, at least more politically correct, by removing some potentially offensive terms in the settings key files. So, as part of Red Hat's conscious language effort, network Manager already stopped using offensive terms in their software and in the stuff that you actually see, but this release completes that task by ensuring such words are no longer newly written into key files. So to stay PC myself, I'm not going to go any deeper into this topic. Check out Veronica's article for more, or maybe Jonathan will go deeper. I'm not, so instead I'm going to tell you what some of the other great things about this release are. So first I'm just gonna take a quick step back.
23:22
So for those who don't know, network Manager is a system service that you use to connect your computer to the network, either via wired Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection. It's what you go into when you select your SSID or put in your static IP or DHCP or all that stuff. It's not on all distros, but it is on probably a good majority of them. Yeah, I don't know for sure, but from my experience Umin 2 is at least one of them. From what I've read, it's on most. So some of the other features is there's a new timeout option for connectivity checking. You can now configure virtual Ethernet interfaces in a 2E interface called NM2E, so 2E interface being a a textual user interface what?
24:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
text textual energy sure.
24:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Text, usual text, usual interface. I guess that's what it stands for, but yeah, it's command line user interface instead of just typing commands. Multiple gateways are now supported for single network in N disk connection, for channel with in AP mode for Wi-Fi connections, ability to reapply VLANs of a bridge port retry, host name resolutions if it fails. And when looking up system host name from the reverse DNS lookup address configured on interfaces, network manager will now take into account the contents of etc. Slash hosts, which is good, because I like to put things in there. And finally, the last thing I am going to talk about in this is that the DH client is going to be deprecated from it by default, in place for its own DHCP client. I guess you can recompile it in with a flag, I think is what I read.
25:38
But this one right here is going to mess me up for years to come, because DH client is kind of my muscle memory. Go to when, when, when my machine doesn't get a DHCP address. Michael was never. Just let's type DHC client. Okay, I got an address. Now let's, let's figure out what happened, but I'm gonna be typing as an icon there. It's just gonna be like when he went from uh, uh, if config to ip guilt all these changes, what was wrong with the way it was before?
26:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
yeah. So let's, let's talk for just a minute and we're gonna we're gonna try to not ruffle anybody's feathers too bad when we chat about this. I'm I'm gonna go ahead and talk about it, because my next story is also talking about basically the same thing. Um, the, the political correctness, or, or they went in and they got rid of some offensive terms. This is something that started to become popular in a lot of places a couple of years ago, three or four years ago somewhere around there, and just so we know it's.
26:36
Terms like slave and master, blacklist, whitelist, those sorts of things and those terms have been a part of kind of computer jargon for a long, long time and there's just been kind of a growing feeling among some, and so this is the interesting thing about this Not everybody agrees, and I still see new products where people use particularly the terms whitelist and blacklist, like those. As far as I can tell, it has not become an agreed upon thing that those are offensive terms. Um, I think the slave master kind of did catch on, as let's not use those and put those away and that's specifically one of the things and that's one of the terms in this yeah, that's specifically one of the terms that they stopped writing out to the, to the config file.
27:19
Um, on this one in particular, my take is I don't really care, like, for one thing. Unless I went and looked into the config file, I wouldn't even know that they were in there or not in there. I don't care. I do think it's interesting, though, just to kind of think through that. You know, how do these terms come to the point of being considered offensive, like, do we vote on that? Is there a master document? And to answer that question, like red hat does have a master document, red hat does have this. This, you know it's. It's listed in one of the articles here. They've got a, a document on how to not use terms that are considered offensive for them. Um, something that I have noticed is, I think red, red hats document is more careful than the rest of the computing industry, is right, and it's kind of to be seen whether all of these ideas about which terms are offensive, whether they stick or not, um, so that's basically all I have to say about that.
28:17 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I'll mention there are 15 pages of comments on that story. Imagine that about that.
28:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'll mention there are 15 pages of comments on that story. Imagine that it brought the people out of the woodworks. Well, so I mean, this is, this is something that people have strong opinions on right at a very minimum changing.
28:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
it doesn't hurt anybody yeah, that's true except except for those with the muscle memory that are typing in there like DH client. I mean, come on, dh client, why did you get rid of that?
28:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah that's fair.
28:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
DH client wasn't offensive.
28:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, I don't think that's why they changed that, but anyway, no, and it's fair. It's fair to say, though, that some people have very strong opinions about this in both directions, and so that kind of leads me into the story that I'm going to cover, and this is another one of those stories. Even more so than the network manager story, it's a story of I would love to be talking about anything other than this. I would love to be talking about the Godot engine and how they're doing cool stuff and fixing bugs, and it's open source and it's a win. So the Godot engine, on their Twitter slash X feed, made a statement about oh, game engines are woke now, and we don't have to. We're not going to go into what this is referring to. It's like almost Gamergate-ish stuff. So, like there's the whole, there's baggage behind this.
29:39
Anyway, they make this Twitter post oh, game engines are woke now. We're down for that. Show us your woke creations with Godot, which I don't. I don't care, I do personally. I do not care if Godot makes that post right. Some people did, and there was a range of responses, let say, um, ranging from I'm sure some people loved it. You had a bunch of people that said hey, why don't you guys concentrate on being a game engine rather than getting into politics or ideologies? And then, of course, as what usually happens when something like this happens, you've got like that fringe of people that not only disagree but want to let you know in the most vociferous and sometimes profane and graphic ways Right, don't, don't, don't be that guy, just don't be that guy.
30:35 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Person Thanks.
30:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Jeff. So so what happened? Thanks, jeff. Now, from my perspective, that group of people that are actually abusive about it and how they respond to this ban them. That's fine, that works for me.
31:10
The problem that I see with this is the Godot account was also just banning the people that said hey, let's not be political, you guys are supposed to be a game engine and I've talked to some people about this and I understand that part of where they were coming from with doing that banning was they felt like they were being the term is brigaded right. So like a couple of popular right-wing accounts shared this and now everybody's coming out of the woodworks and it's manipulated and so we just know all these accounts are bots and we're going to ban them all. The problem is that all those accounts were not bots and you should not have banned them all. The most hilarious one was a very simple hey guys, let's not get into politics. But it was a post by one of the titanium supporters. But it was a post by one of the titanium supporters, so like one of the upper level tiers of supporters, a guy that makes games using the Godot engine, and he got banned and he's like hmm, I'm not sure how I feel about this. So, all of this to say, I consider this to be an unforced error on Godot's part, not even necessarily the original tweet, although in retrospect maybe they should not have made that tweet but the response to it was, in my opinion, not handled as well as it should have been. I've got the link here to the Godot Foundation's response, which they try real hard not to say it but say we did not handle this as well as we should have.
32:44
And then I found this as I was preparing for this, and I thought it was hilarious. I will not offer any judgment on this, but I just found it funny and I will leave a link to it. You go and read it and make your own decisions, but the Statement of Inclusive Neutrality, version 0.9. I got a real kick out of that Again by linking it here. I am neither supporting nor disowning this. I just it was for my amusement. There is a fork that came out of Godot as a part of this. They're calling it Redo, which is also sort of humorous. My opinion on all of this is I wish we were not talking about it. I wish we were not doing this. I wish there was not a fork of this open source engine. It's an unforced error and I wish we were all still hacking on the same code base.
33:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, you know, I think one of my comments I made on this earlier in the week I'm pretty sure it was this is that political, political Forks, I don't think, tend to get very far yeah, I think that tends to be true.
33:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There's got to be, there's got to be something more to it, or you've got to have like a real um, if we have a real big group of people that go over and it's unclear whether that's the case or not I mean the.
33:59 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
The one example I could think of recently is is well, fairly, is the the gimp one? And I don't even remember what the fork was anymore, but I know somebody forked it because of the term gimp yeah, yeah, well, that's.
34:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's been a an in joke that people have gotten their feathers ruffled over for a long time now.
34:20 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Um but yeah, it was briefly program yeah, that one, that's the one.
34:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It was briefly a big thing for one new cycle, I don't know, two years ago, I don't remember.
34:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, now I don't even remember the name of the fork, so apparently it didn't go anywhere or maybe it got folded back in. I mean, that happens sometimes too.
34:42 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Um, I mean were they using kde?
34:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
oh goodness, I hope not. I have a feeling that, uh, you would get. It would sizzle trying to put the two of them together, right?
34:58 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
kdm, kde image manipulation program?
35:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
all right, let's move on from this silliness. And uh, what's up next? Ken the audacious is this. Is this a fork of audacity?
35:14 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
it is not a fork of audacity, but marius nester and joy Sneddon wrote about the latest release of Audacious, version 4.4.1. Joey starts by claiming a chorus of improvements are on offer in the newest update to the popular open-source cross-platform Audacious music player. Audacious music player they both note the Pulse Audio plug-in is now preferred over the Pipewire plug-in to improve backwards compatibility. But I personally have no problems using the Pipewire plug-in myself. I also confirmed the drag and drop now works under Wayland when using the GTK or the QT user interface. I even noticed that you can quickly change between the user interfaces and settings, though it does require a restart of Audacious.
36:10
Now Audacious 4.4.1 fixes several bugs to include excessive CPU usage with the Qt Multimedia output plugin, Handling Big Indian systems with the Mason build system, Building the sources with GCC and Mason compiler on Mac OS systems and writing tags into audio files on Windows systems. And I just thought I'd give you a quick demonstration of audacious. Here it is and what is really nice I've got it in the QT mode right now, but you can just grab I want to listen to Janice drop and say and just drop it into your new playlist tab and it immediately covers over now what they were talking about with the restart is when you go into and just drop it into your new playlist tab and it immediately covers over. Now, what they were talking about with the restart is when you go into settings. I can restart it in GTK mode and there we are.
37:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Very cool. I'm not surprised that their pulse audio let's say they're Pulse Audio they prefer Pulse Audio for backwards compatibility. I was just thinking about that, like, so a lot of people are running Pipewire now and Pipewire does really well with Pulse Audio because it was like one of the guys that helped write Pulse Audio also wrote Pipewire. So it's not entirely surprising that it's got really good backwards compatibility that way. Surprising that it's got really good backwards compatibility that way.
37:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know it's kind of timely. You bring up Audacious because recently we talked about the Winamp story and this week I saw I did not collect anything, but apparently there are some themes or something that you can apply to Audacious to make it look just like Winamp.
37:59 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That may be mentioned in one of the stories, if you want to go read them and that you can apply to Audacious to make it look just like Winamp. Oh fun, that may be mentioned in one of the stories, if you want to go read them. Nice it apparently has a dark mode, the.
38:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
GDK version does, but I actually prefer the QT myself. You can switch between the backends. That's cool. All right, Jeff. What? Jeff is torrenting jeff client you'll get your internet turned off.
38:28 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Look at us in trouble well, we're going out of limb this week, so let's put the pedal to the floor. Uh, qubit torrent is out with a new version, 5.0. Now some of you are saying wait a moment, why are we coveringa BitTorrent client? Isn't that used for bad things? Exactly, I would say. Like anything it can be, but there are a lot of legitimate reasons to use BitTorrent. For example, a lot of distributions are downloaded with BitTorrent. Now, before I go into what's new, let me tell you a little bit about BitTorrent. Now, before I go into what's new, let me tell you a little bit about BitTorrent for those who might not know about it.
39:05
So BitTorrent started in 2001 and was a way for peer-to-peer file sharing. In a very simplified explanation, imagine a three-by-three set of computers, so nine systems in total, and the center computer has a file the other eight systems want, instead of trying to upload that file eight times and the system being very limited on the speed they can. You know the other systems being limited on the speed they can download because of bandwidth caps and hardware constraints in the central computer. They all help each other get the file. The server computer can break the file and we'll just say eight pieces, and that's just an example. It uploads piece one to the first computer, second piece to the second computer and so on. Where the magic comes in is after the first computer has its first file piece. It can share that with other computers that don't have it, and the same with the second computer, and so on. So instead of getting the file from one computer, you can get the file from all the computers on the network and this greatly increases the speed of how fast you can get the file while you're downloading it, because you would also be uploading, because you're uploading the file at the same time that you're downloading the file and you're getting pieces that you don't have and you're sharing pieces you do have Now because the server computer doesn't need to upload the file more than once and everybody shares a piece they have. It's a lot more efficient Now, in reality, you upload more than once, but you kind of get the idea and this is a very high level. Look, there's a lot more details that you can go into, but that's way beyond what we need here. Just know that it's kind of a mesh distribution network so that everybody shares the piece they do have and the program. All the torrent clients. They make this mostly seamless in the background for all this to happen, so you don't have to worry about a lot of the complicated stuff. It's just built into the protocol.
41:05
Now this method is used, like I said, by a lot of valid. There's a lot of valid use cases in popular sites. Facebook and Twitter, for example, use it. There's many gaming sites that use it for updates. I mean, one of the big ones was World of Warcraft, their Blizzard downloader. Well, to get those millions of users, their data quickly, they used a BitTorrent client. It was in the background, you didn't see it, but that's how it worked.
41:34
But back to our story. Qbittorrent has released version 5.0, and this is a major release. So they've overhauled the code base, removed some legacy parts there was some Windows stuff I don't know Whatever, we'll skip that and they put in a lot of requested user features. So they made sure the program is now compatible with C++ 20, you know, as in 2020, so a much later version of C++ remove support for Qt 5 and now require Qt 6.5 or greater. They also require OpenSSL 3.0.2 or greater.
42:15
And now, with 5.0, you can pause and resume all active downloads in one click, so you don't have to individually select the files to pause and resume. You can now terminate a session after a specified period of time, so you can just say, okay, after 6 hours, 12 hours, stop this. They now support regex file filtering, which allows matching or exclusion of complex patterns across directories. And with the new version there's large torrent support. Because of increased bandwidth in today's world, larger block sizes can now be used there. You know. There's many other improvements, such as UI improvements, which can be seen either by looking at the article in the show notes and viewing the images they have, or following the instructions in the article to get or to update your very own QTorrent to version 5.0. So happy downloading.
43:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you know BitTorrent and Torrents was for the longest time the only way to download big files and it's still like one of the cleverest solutions for doing big file downloads, because it breaks it up into all those chunks and so you can download some of it and pause it and then download the next bit of chunks and pause it. It also has like built-in checksumming so you know if you got a bad download you can get it fixed.
43:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Bittorrent is still cool, you know though, besides threats from the ISP, there are other downsides. I mean, there have been times when I've gone to download it and at that moment apparently there was nobody uploading it. Yeah, that's true, nothing happens. I was like, well, I guess I have to go find some other link.
43:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You, rob, at this moment in time are the only person that wants this download. Or what's even more depressing is when, because you know, in your BitTorrent clients you can look and see the different downloaders and seeders there's no seeders in like one other person downloading, and they trickle to you what they have of the file and then finally you guys have the same blocks from the file and it's just you. You sort of sit there in silence for a while.
44:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's probably because the isp shut the rest of them down already well, I mean that might be.
44:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean, I don't know what you're talking about. I never download illegal stuff. That was, that was college me. That was years ago. Definitely long enough that the statute of limitations has run out I haven't used bit.
44:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Turn in years, well to remember that's how Twit had their podcast spread out when they first started.
44:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that's one of the way. Before CashFly came on, that was how they distributed some of their podcasts. We joke, we have a lot of fun with this. But yeah, bittorrent you still. You get like your big Linux ISO downloads. You can get them through Torrent Big data sets. I could imagine torrent really coming back for like a large language model data sets. Um, I remember getting the, uh, the rainbow tables for, you know, windows keys using bit torrent, uh, and and then you know, making that part of my toolkit as the it guy, uh, all kinds of stuff.
45:19 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Bit torrent has been a big part of my life well, the thing to remember too is like okay, you think I've got a one gig download speed on my internet. I'm I, I got this high bandwidth connection, but they pay on the on the server side. Yeah, based on the speed and the data they move, you're not going to get one gig down. You're probably. A lot of times I've got a one gig connection down and a lot of times I'll get 200, 280, but you use a torrent client, you can fill that one gig.
45:51 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean you can get it If it's a popular enough torrent yeah, there has to be enough people, just because I mean, there are still a lot of people who have asymmetrical internet where they have, like you, jeff, who have a gig down and what 50 up. So you know you need 20 people at least with their 50 upload speed to get your full gig download, with their 50 upload speed to get your full gig download.
46:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah. But you know, when you have that main server doing that, you know, say, a couple hundred up and then I'm getting the latest Kubuntu distribution and it's a few gigs and there's a bunch of people getting it. I can fill that pipe. I can get that distribution in like under a minute. Go ahead Ken.
46:41 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Just going to say what really intrigues me is the fact that they've included support for the system D power management now in it.
46:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Hmm, yeah. Yeah, they're really trying to be very conscious of what you know, not only network, so you can set timers and whatnot, so you can say, oh, I only want to run this in the middle of the night when nobody's on and nobody's uh you know I'm not going to mess up.
47:06 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Crypto miners, yeah, but I mean that way you can.
47:13 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, that way you know you're not messing with anybody else's internet connection because you're filling the pipe when everybody's trying to stream Netflix or whatever, or playing their games, or you know. And and of course, power and all that stuff why doesn't video keep pausing, dad?
47:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
yeah, that's buffer bloat. All right, let's talk about gaming and fedora with bazite. We haven't talked about this stuff enough. Rob, of course, is the distro hopper today, and have you actually hopped to bazite?
47:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
um, not as my main distro. I've have briefly tried it on a vm. So for those watching, this is a live vm here, um, but because it's a vm, I couldn't necessarily get all the try, all the great features. But you know, for those, you know, have you been waiting for steam os, you know, to release an iso so that you can install your on it on your own devices? Well, wait no longer. And yeah, valve still hasn't released an ISO for SteamOS. But maybe the best thing is, as Jeff mentioned, is Bazite. So Bazite is almost a SteamOS clone, but built upon the Fedora Atomic desktop From their site. Bazite is designed for Linux newcomers and enthusiasts alike, with Steam pre-installed and Jonathan liked this has HDR and VR, variable refresh rate support, improved CPU schedulers for responsive gameplay and numerous community developed tools and tweaks to streamline your gaming and streaming experience.
49:05
For games outside of steam, they also say that Lutris comes pre-installed. Junk store decky plugin, which I had to look it up, is a steam deck plugin for non steam games. So that's installed and it has, um, the heroic games launcher from flat hub and it cannot, you know, not of others. So you know you, you can install the desktop environment, which is what I had to do here, and it's you know I I picked the kde one because I knew jonathan and je Jeff would appreciate that Lutris has Steam or with a supported GPU, which in my Proxmox I do not have a supported GPU. With that, though, you can install Steam game mode. That automatically logs you into a single user game mode to the steam deck experience. I tried to install that anyway. There's actually a lecture where you say what you have and it's like well, you can't use this one, you have to use this one. So I lied and I got this, the one that with the, the steam game mode, and, yeah, it just got a black screen when I booted into. It's like's like ah, bummer, I was hoping I could at least see it, even if it didn't work well, but yeah, so I didn't get to see that exactly, just screenshots, so yeah.
50:49
So one question some of you may have is how is this different from Nobara? You know Nobara being another gaming distribution based on fedora that we have mentioned on the show before in the past, and here it is. The biggest difference is that basite is an immutable desktop based on the fedora atomic desktop, while no bara is based on fedora workstation and no, bara has, or not no, but Bazzite has the addition of the Steam Deck game mode. So, you know, being atomic kind of makes it more of a, you know, unbreakable kind of experience, something closer to the SteamOS because SteamOS is also an immutable desktop to the SteamOS, because SteamOS is also an immutable desktop. Really, in some ways, the biggest difference between SteamOS and Bazite is SteamOS is Arch-based, fedora is. I mean Bazite is Fedora-based, which well, we know how much Jonathan likes Fedora and I know Jeff has tried it too and likes it. So I'm sure they would prefer this over the.
52:07
Arch-based one.
52:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So this is interesting. It's neat to see these alternatives, like if you have a mobile gaming device, or even a desktop for that matter, although, like you just explained, Bazzite seems to be mainly designed for the mobile devices.
52:22 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Having options other than the the valve arch is kind of cool um yeah, you can install this on the the rock or whatever it is, or?
52:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
yeah, acs makes a handheld, or there's some. There's some kind of uh, generic chinese branded handhelds out there too.
52:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'd be interested in making a little console out of it, just to have hooked up to a TV.
52:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that's true. That could be definitely something interesting to do.
52:53 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'd like to play Lorne's Lurel.
52:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I was thinking you'd throw Cody on it as well and have a nice little theater.
53:02 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Pc could definitely be useful for that I mean with Steam, you have. I don't know what you have. I know you have the RetroArch, so you can have that.
53:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't know if you could tie. I don't think Steam has video playback, though not really I don't know if you could tie that.
53:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't think Steam has video playback, though Not really. Yeah, I don't know if you could tie that into it. I know they have a lot of you know they did say community tools and they try to tie a lot of things into Steam. I wonder if that what was that? Junkie store, decky plug-in or something else could pull in Kodi, or if it hasn't yet, maybe somebody could do something with that yeah, steam has video playback.
53:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You can get movies on steam. Really they haven't. They haven't had a ton, but yeah, I've got. I've got, for example, a movie on there and I've watched it. It's been fine, and they actually just added the av1 codec to it yeah, but like the, the, the interface for steam, it's really not.
54:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It doesn't strike me as being made, for I've got a thousand tv shows you know a thousand episodes of tv shows that I've ripped off of blu-ray.
54:11 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Let me put all that into my steam library that well, you also have to think about more of the steam deck interface, which is different than just the regular steam on the desktop.
54:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's true. Maybe it makes more sense there.
54:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Because that's more of a controller or touch friendly.
54:27 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I know on the desktop the movies are set up kind of like games. So you just, it's just, you think it was a game, but you just, oh, you hit play and then it plays your video.
54:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Suddenly there's a video playing.
54:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, but you just, oh, you hit play and then it plays your video. Suddenly there's a video playing, yeah. Or like if you have retroarch like I tested that on my steam deck before you go into that and now then you're all in the retroarch interface selecting different consoles and games. So I they somebody could theoretically do the same thing with cody, where you, you click cody and all of a sudden you're in the cody interface that'd be the easiest way to do it, for sure.
55:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And then have a server running Jellyfin somewhere. Yeah, if you want to, if Jellyfin is your thing. So there's a question that I have had, and I think we have an answer to it, and that is is Steam going to stick with Arch? You know it was kind of a weird choice that Steam use Arch as its core. You know it was kind of a weird choice that Steam use Arch as its core. You know there are more popular options out there Ubuntu, fedora, all sorts of different things and Arch was sort of a weird choice. So something I think people have been wondering over the years is is Valve going to go with something else for its Steam OS? Well, it's like no, valve is all in on Arch.
55:42
We have a story that broke this week that Arch Linux has announced that it's collaborating with Steam to work on a couple of pieces of their infrastructure, and it's a build service infrastructure.
55:54
So that's essentially a server farm, somewhere that's going to build packages for them and a secure signing enclave. There's some of this that we don't necessarily have all of the details on the security enclave. The article here talks about being able to sign packages with a single signing key, whereas the current process is each packager has their own key. So some interesting stuff there, but I think the main takeaway here is that Valve is still very interested in making Arch better and is still intending to use them for the foreseeable future. So that kind of makes me think that not only are they continuing to work with it on upgrades for their current systems, but Valve is working on more things. I don't think they would do this if they weren't working on more hardware and more steam os stuff that runs arch. So time will tell. Just sort of reading the tea leaves of this, it seems like something is coming I never had a doubt that they would stick.
56:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Wouldn't stick with arch.
56:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So I know they said originally they went with it because it was easier to put the latest software on than working with some of the other ones. But my prediction okay, late in the year I don't think steam is going to do another hardware. Steam deck themselves. I think they're going to partner I mean I think there might be another one coming out, but it's going to be a partnership with like uh, asus or lenovo or somebody like that that does the hardware, because they prove they can do it. Windows on those handhelds seems to not be going over so well, so then they'll be the enabler on the software side for somebody else's hardware yeah my prediction.
57:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Now here's the question on this, on this next device, whether it be, you know, just the, the valve name, monitor valve actually makes it in-house. Is it going to be an x86 or is it going to be arm based?
57:49
yeah, because we talked about that last week, yeah, and if they're gonna, if they're, if they're gonna farm it out and let other people make you know officially, uh, uh, officially, how, how would they put it? They put their stamp of approval. So Valve puts their stamp of approval on semi-official things that other people put out. You may see both. You may see Asus put out an x86 and, who knows who, samsung maybe put out an ARM based.
58:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I know they tried it in the past and they weren't really quite ready, but I'd like to see more of like another console kind of thing from them.
58:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I think it's going to be. An x86 arm could be coming, but I don't think it's there like it's not there yet yeah, it's going to be another generation away at least yeah, that's probably.
58:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's probably true. It's going to be a stretch for right now but?
58:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
and you mean generation like as in a hardware and software, generation like a person's generation 20 years from now gather around children.
58:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I will tell you of the day when everything ran on x86. An arm was simply a distant mirage in the future, I can imagine it was for calculators.
59:00 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Put it together based on Raspberry Pi 6.
59:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
put it together based on raspberry pi 6. I've heard some good things about those xlates and uh how well they're doing with just windows. I'd like I can't wait to really see linux take off on them yeah, yeah, all right, let's see.
59:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Let's talk about xfce and wayland support well, being a fan of xfc, I'll be more than happy to talk about that. I was glad to read and I do apologize if I mispronounced this Cynthia Kumar-Pellini's I'm just going to go ahead and call him SK through the rest of this story. But I read his article about some of the major improvements coming in XFCE 4.20. The XFCE developers are aiming to release XFCE version 4.20 this December. One of the most exciting features is the introduction of preliminary Wayland support. Introduction of preliminary Wayland support. According to SK, wayland is a modern display server protocol that is designed to replace the older X11 system. That will provide better performance and security, natively supports high resolution displays and gives compositors more control over the user interface, allowing them to manage window management animations and effects more effectively.
01:00:38
Xfce 4.20 aims to introduce preliminary Wayland support to its core components without losing compatibility with X11. This means that users have the option to try out Wayland while continuing to enjoy their familiar XFCE experience. The XFC components XFCE4-Panel, xf Desktop and XFCE4-sitting are already making progress in supporting Wayland. There are still some challenges for the XFCE community. For example, xfwm4, the window manager, is still being developed for Wayland. Additionally, support for various panel plugins and applications are being actively worked on. Providing a full-fledged XFCE Wayland session is a long-term goal, but the exact timeline is still uncertain. The developers are focusing on ensuring a smooth transition for users, keeping X11 compatibility in place for the foreseeable future. Sk includes a timeline in his article, along with his opinion on XFCE 4.20 and the future of XFCE's transition to Wayland. I recommend reading it if you want to find out both his opinion and the timeline.
01:02:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I wonder if the XFCE Weyland back-end is going to be lighter weight than running a full X11 back-end. I hope so. One would think that it should be but time will tell.
01:02:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It depends on which compositor they actually end up going with, doesn't it?
01:02:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
probably um whether how much of it they're writing themselves from scratch or basing off of somebody else's work. Yeah, that's true, um, but yeah, interesting stuff, um. I didn't mention it earlier, I'll mention it now. Something else that Valve is doing is working on Wayland. I've got linked above the Brody video on it, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite commentators on the Linux Wayland situation. He makes the case that a couple of engineers from Valve have gone in and just shaken everything up and said let's fix this mess. That is the Wayland governance. Some fun stuff there. Hopefully it'll make it easier for people to work with Wayland in the future.
01:03:18 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, I'm hoping for the best. Design by committee is never good.
01:03:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, and they're not getting rid of the design by committee, necessarily, but they're. They're putting some rules, they're they're putting limitations on the committee and codifying some things that were not codified, like one of those. One of those is um, you don't get to knack things unless you are one of these I don't know how many there are. There's like 10 or 12 people that can, that can knack. It's like if you are not one of these 10 or 12 people, you do not knack things and we will ban you for three months if you try to knack something and you're not one of these people. And that seems silly, but that's, that is a thing that was happening. They they had essentially drive-by commentators and a few people that were not core that were saying I'm going to knack this when it comes. It's like, dude, you're not one of the people that get to knack things. So it was kind of getting used as a hammer when really it should not have been. And then they've got some other things in there, like if a proposal is just stalled out, you could ask for a vote and if over 50% of these core contributors vote, yes, it goes in, unless you know one of these five or ten or however many people. Unless one of them knack it, then it goes in. So there's some fun stuff in there that's happening, hopefully for the better We'll see.
01:04:41
So far it's been reasonably well received too, the better we'll see. So so far it's been reasonably well received too. Um, I've I've heard said that, uh, wayland has one of one of the people that was causing problems. Apparently wayland has timed out. It's like you, you don't get to comment here for a little while, not permanently, but just temporary time out. We'll fix this stuff and you can come back. They put them in the think about what you said. Yeah, I think think about what you've done.
01:05:08 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
All right, now jeff is trying to sneak one over on us no, no yes, you've got two command line tips today well, I can't help but give what the people want I noticed that too all right right, go for it.
01:05:25
It's for you, the audience, why I'm doing this. See, I'm taking the heat in here, but I know what you want. So if you're in the Linux world, you're familiar with the sudo command. You type in something like sudo, apt, update and then you have to put in your password. There's a feature in most consoles which lets you bypass putting in your password for a short amount of time. This makes it easier to chain a lot of commands that you need privilege, and you don't have to type your password in when you just typed it in, like 10 seconds ago. Well, this trick is the same idea. But what if you never wanted to put in your password in and again for a specific command? If you look at the link in the show notes, you'll see an article and this can be done with the and. Well, okay, let me back up here. There's just a few easy steps to do this, so let me let me lay these out for you. First thing you do is get the path where your command is located. You know you can use the which or type command to get the full path. So type in the console which apt, because we're going to use apt for this example. So w-h-i-c-h space apt. And in my case I got slash user, slash bin, slash apt, which means that's the full path to the command. Then you need to get to the sudoers file, which can be found in the slash ETC, slash sudoers, s-u-d-o-e-r-s. And that's where it was for me In that slash ETC, slash pseudors. Now you will need pseudo privileges to open and edit this file on your favorite editor and at the very bottom of the file you put this line in, so the username you want to give this privilege to, and then a space. And then in all caps, all equals, open parenthesis, all close parenthesis. Now there's no spaces or anything in there and it's in all caps. And then you put a space and this is again in all capital letters, again in all capital letters N-O-P-A-S-S-W-D, colon. So you have that.
01:07:54
Now you put a space and not in caps, you put the path to your program. So in this case it's slash user, slash bin, slash apt. Now you save and close the editor. Now, when you try and type apt, even if you've not put in your password before, you should never have to put it in again. Now, if you want to do that for more than one command and we'll use our example again open the editor, put in a comma after apt, a space and then a full path to the next command.
01:08:27
Now here's where we go off the rails a little bit. If you want to really go wild and not want to put in a specific path to everything you decide, you know what? I don't want to put my pseudo password in ever again. You can do that In our example, after the no password colon, instead of the path to the command, you put a space and in all caps type A-L-L, which then after that no pseudo command will ever ask you for your password again.
01:09:07
Now I should say this should never be used on any of the systems that have to be secure no company, no enterprise. I wouldn't even use it at a house with roommates, but if you live alone or with a family, that isn't going to screw something up, you could do this. You know, keep in mind, setting all the commands do not require a password is very dangerous and basically it's like running in root all the time, which is a very quick way to mess up your system, and I don't really recommend using this at all and I file it under harmful Linux tricks, you know, unless you're really sure and secure in what you're doing. But if you feel this is something you need, you can look at the link in the show notes to see the examples, and the command lines are all typed out, so all you have to do is cut and paste. But you know, please be careful using this.
01:09:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So, interestingly, I'm pretty sure it's the Raspberry Pi OS ships with the no password all set up in your pseudo file, in your pseudo-ors. I don't know if that's all of Debian or all of Ubuntu, but I'm pretty sure the Raspberry Pi OS is one of those that's set up that way.
01:10:16 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I like it. I don't have to log in as root anymore, then yeah.
01:10:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know, if you're going to hit the wall, just put your foot into it up there with uh running rm dash rf space slash I think I think in modern versions of rm you have to add dash, dash force or dash just no preserve root or something like that.
01:10:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
For that to actually work, yeah, they actually made it a little force something like that.
01:10:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
They made it a little harder because I remember having a machine uh, this has been years ago, even it's quite a while ago but having a machine where, like, I'm just gonna wipe it, let's actually do the thing you're not supposed to do, and it took us a couple of minutes to figure out the right combination of flags to actually get rm to trash the drive uh, it's fun, fun times.
01:11:03 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Um, yeah, so definitely. Uh, unless you're really sure, don't do that. And and then it's more probably something like apt, where you're using it quite a bit. You're probably not worried about somebody's installing something stupid or removing something stupid, because you can and just so people are aware, if you go and try to uninstall and I had this happen on a system that someone uninstalled a language, oh, it took a lot of stuff with it.
01:11:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'd probably not put app. That's probably not what I would do, yeah. Maybe, snap yeah, flat pack yeah, maybe Snap yeah.
01:11:44 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Flat pack. They tried to remove Pearl, to be specific, and it ripped the innards right out of the OS. Yeah, we rebuilt it. It would have been simpler. At that point it was just like I wonder if we can bring it back. So then it was kind of more of a challenge and we were able to it would have been quicker to just reinstall Is what?
01:12:02 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It would have been quicker to just reinstall.
01:12:04 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
His what.
01:12:05 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It would have been quicker to just reinstall. Oh, totally.
01:12:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think I'd done that years ago and I just copied and pasted good files from another install.
01:12:17 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
No, there was actually a way. There's a log in your, when you've installed, of all the programs that are installed and you can grab that file and then reinstall that in. It's kind of like you go through the reinstall sequence again of every program that's on there. Yeah, makes sense fun stuff.
01:12:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Do be careful with sudo. All right, now that we have one of the command line tips out of the way, we're going to get into other command line tips and we're going to let rob nominally start the command line tips. What do we have, rob?
01:12:52 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
so my command line tip here it's loosely linux. It depends on how, where it partly depends on one where you, what you consider Android, I mean, is the Linux kernel. Is it Linux, is it not, doesn't matter, because the real point of this is really to get Linux working, and I guess you really could get anything else working. But have you ever been in a situation where you have one computer and the OS Linux died on it?
01:13:31
Yes, who knows, something died, and that was the only computer you had and you're like how am I going to make an ISO? How am I going to burn an ISO onto a USB drive? I got a USB drive or I can go buy one, but I don't have another computer. I have not been in this situation. I got too many computers lying around. But I've heard a lot of people online. You know from time to time hey, this happened to me, what do I do? Hey, this happened to me, what do I do?
01:14:05
And one of the solutions I have often heard suggested, suggested, suggested why can't I say that word? Is EtchDroid. So this is in the Play Store. It's an F-Droid, it's an Android app, If I didn't make that clear, An Android app. So you do at least need an Android device. So, anyway, with that you can get it in the Play Store. You can get it all kinds of places. It's on GitHub if you want to sideload it yourself and make that work whatever.
01:14:44
But easiest way, obviously for most people, is probably at the Google Play Store. You just go and get it from there and then you know, you follow the etcher prompts, One of them obviously be sticking your USB drive on your phone. One of the things you may have to do is if your computer is regular old USB-B and you have a USB-C like most modern phones, maybe you need to get an adapter or maybe, if you have a modern computer, you already have USB-C on both sides. That's another piece maybe you have to go buy, but you don't have to go buy a whole new computer because you can just use X-Droid and burn your iso onto a usb using your android device and then you can install your computer again very cool.
01:15:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There was an old utility. Now that you mentioned that one, an old utility comes to mind drive droid. Fortunately, that one only ever worked on rooted phones. But instead of burning to a usb key, your, your phone would act like a usb disk. You could just plug it in. Yeah, it was great. Uh, it looks like. Uh, it looks like they haven't done anything with it for a while, and the last change log was they upgraded to android 9 well, this is also well, I'm assuming it's the same people that make Etcher.
01:16:05 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I guess that could be a false assumption. If it is, it is made by the same people from the great Etcher software you already know, and if it isn't, that name is a little sketchy.
01:16:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Inspired by. Inspired by. That's fine. I have actually been in this position and that would have been the killer app that would have gotten me out of it. I ended up having to boot into windows to rescue my linux laptop. Oh, that's rough yeah I.
01:16:36
I felt dirty for a while. I had to go home and take a shower after that one, but we got the job done. I was at it. I was at a client, a customer's office too, it was. They saw you use windows. Oh, that's bad. Yep, yep, it was. It was something. All right, jeff, what is neovim, and can you get stuck in it?
01:16:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
um you want to hit ken first oh, now he's going to save the best for last.
01:17:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Ken, how do we install stuff? Sorry.
01:17:07 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, we use install and I'm going to go ahead and bring up my command line here so y'all can see it. I've gone ahead and used the long list to list a couple of directories here so I can demonstrate installing from a file from one to another. The basic command I'm going to use is install space-v, to be more verbose, in other words tell you what it's doing. The file I'm going to install is going to be from the source directory, so it's dot source dash or slash cap source. Let me start over. It's going to be installed space dash v, space dot slash source, slash capture underscore, control C dot shell, and I'm going to use install, which is a great way to copy files and set their attributes simultaneously. In this particular case, I'm just going to do a direct copy so it can be used just like direct copy At keys 512 in the club twit discord.
01:18:26
You may already be familiar with install, but there are several options. I'm just gonna touch on a couple of them because there's quite a few in the man page. Some of them I'm still learning how to use. But with the basic command here I'm gonna copy it into the destination directory and with the slash v it tells you where it's copying it from and indicates where it's copied it to. So if I go back and list the destination this time you'll see that it has copied it to the destination subdirectory and it's basically an exact copy of the capture, except for the time stamp on it. It now says it's October 15th at 1850 Central Time.
01:19:19
Now another way you can use it is to change the ownership or to change who has access to it, and that's going to be with the command. I'm going to use sudo this time because I do need super user rights to change the mode, just like you would with change mod, or the owner, just like you would with chome. So it saves you having to run those commands. But it's going to be sudo install space dash v. Space dash dash mode equals 700. Rob, can you tell me what that's going to do to the permissions on it?
01:20:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
700. The user gets all the rights and no one else gets anything. Right?
01:20:16 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And I'm going to change the owner using dash. Dash owner equals root and it's asking me for the password.
01:20:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Because Ken is responsible and didn't change his file to skip the password.
01:20:35 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So now we go back and list it and you'll see. This time it shows that the owner is root and that the only person who has rights to it read, write or execute access is a root, and it has also updated the timestamp to October 5th 1852. Now my here's your homework figure out how you can get it to keep the timestamp from the original file.
01:21:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh see, I was going to jump in and tell people how to do that. Okay, I won't. I already did the homework. It's not very hard, you can just use the man pages to look it up. But that's a fun install and you'll see the install command in scripts, in installation scripts, Go figure. And yeah, now we know exactly what it's doing when we see it.
01:21:31 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Cool and why it's being used.
01:21:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And why it's being used. Yes, All right, Jeff, can we get stuck in NeoVim?
01:21:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
We can. So first we're going to talk a little bit about religion. Emacs VI, vim, nano these are some of the big religious questions in the Linux world, no-transcript. So NeoVim is designed to be a drop-in replacement for Vim. It can use your Vim config file if you like, but unlike Vim, neovim will also let you write your configs in Lua L-U-A. Let you write your configs in Lua L-U-A. Basically, NeoVim wants to be a simpler, to maintain and extend version of Vim. So the main way it's doing this is the plugin ecosystem handles Lua, which is much more common than VimScript. They also have NeoVimim setup which can give you more control with the plugins to transfer the environment.
01:22:51
And if you're a fan of vim, take a look at the article in the show notes to learn more about neo vim. Uh, you know, there's it. It supports all of them commands and so it's it's a, it's built on top of them, basically. So whatever. So, whatever you can do in Vim, pretty much you can do in NeoVim, and plus more. Now, if you're new and not an old hat at VI or Vim, neovim comes with a built-in tutor, just like Vim does. So if you're brand new and you're like I think I'd like to learn it, but I don't know where to start. Well, there's a tutor command. Now I won't go into all the details of the article. They talk about configuring and customizing NeoVim for your particular needs. But just take a look at the article in the show notes If you'd like to learn more about an enhanced version of the enhanced version of VI.
01:23:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Very cool If you go to neovimio website. There's also a youtube video there neovim in 100 seconds and it gives you the history of neovim going all the way back to vi. So fun stuff, all right. Uh, my command line tip is, as usual, based out of something that I got to play with this past week. Uh, in my case I am looking at a really interesting question I call it slip streaming and that is we've got a firmware file and we put a placeholder text in there and then we use sed to replace the placeholder text with real text and basically it's just a way to customize this firmware file without having to recompile the whole thing.
01:24:24
It turns out these firmware files are hashed and sort of a poor man's signature put on them and the actual one byte of checksum. We have to use ESP tool to rewrite that. But then it also has a SHA-256 sum at the very end of it. It's literally the last 32 bytes of the file. Well, most of these tools that we use we've talked about before, but we've not ever mentioned truncate, and this one was one of.
01:24:54
You know my big bash command, my little bash script to make all of this work, to rewrite this file the way we needed it to. You can do a truncate dash dash size equals minus 32 and then give it the name of the file and it will literally just read the file in, write the file out to disk and leave the last 32 bytes off of the end of it. Just shrinks it by 32 bytes, which is perfect, because then we can do a you know, a shot to 56 over what's left and then reappend those bytes at the end of the file. So trying to do something like this in the command line can be a challenge, especially if you don't want to have to pull out something like Bless, your hex editor. And this was a fairly important piece of that solution.
01:25:39
So, turncape, it's a cool little utility. All right, very nice, yeah. So that's it. It's a cool little utility. All right, nice, yeah. So that's it. That's the show. It's been fun. I'm going to let each of the guys get the last word in. If they really want to put their foot in something, this would be the time to do it, or beg for coffees or whatever. We'll let Rob go first.
01:26:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
All right. So first I got a few things to plug, a few people to thank, uh. One of them is uh jonathan's wife, who donated two coffees to me, which I already mentioned early in the show. Um, and that's the bribe for not trying to get jonathan to buy stuff. Uh. Another one is I feel like this was before last week I didn't mention it, but maybe it wasn't before last week. Uh, maybe I mentioned it.
01:26:31
I forgot sean, I think his name was donated a coffee to uh jonathan ken and to Jeff, not me. Oh, yes, and I want to add, jeff has his own coffee site. I will get him this coffee, but I am not accepting coffees for Jonathan. If you want to donate to Jonathan, send them to him. I will accept for David, jeff and Ken, plus he doesn't need it anyway. And a third one um, I had somebody reach out to me on linkedin and get an address, so not not my address. I gave him an address. I don't know if he wants to be anonymous. I never asked his name is. I'll just say his name is john and he got me, uh, enough coffee. So I want to have to get coffee for a while. And I don't know if you remember I saying I need a new car. I have new cars, a whole box of cars, 20, 28 of them. I think it is 28 cars one free day of the month well, only in february, which my birthday is in february.
01:27:57
So that's uh, perfect out, it's perfect. I'll have one for every day of my birthday month 28, wasn't it 28? So if you want to connect with me and shower me with gifts, you can find me robertpcampbellcom. Connect to my LinkedIn. That's one way. That's how this person reached out to me.
01:28:27
And just fair notice, I'm not going to give you my home address. Sorry, but I have an address I can give you if you want to ship something. And then I got people who will go through and make sure it's not dangerous for me. Got people and then Twitter. You could try to connect and reach out to me about an address there, but I'm not on there very much. The best thing if you're going to connect with me there, it's more of a status symbol to say, hey, I'm connected to this guy, don't expect a whole lot of communication there. But if you want more communication in a Twitter to say, hey, I'm connected to this guy, don't expect a whole lot of communication there. But if you want more communication in a Twitter style place, mastodon is the place to be. Mastodon is where I do post things more often and that's that link here. And if you just want to send me coffees, you can send me coffees, coffees being a actual five dollar donation, and I get uh like 450 of that or something, 460 maybe it is somewhere around there.
01:29:35 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, all right, ken well, before you try out any of these commands we gave today, I do recommend that you back up your system, then back up again and then back up to the cloud.
01:29:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I like it All. Right and Jeff.
01:29:59 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Just a couple things. I would say thank you, sean, for the coffee and the fact that you stiffed Rob on the coffee. We laughed for five minutes on that.
01:30:09 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Like really hard.
01:30:12 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, I mean tears running down my face. I laughed so hard. Beautiful, loved it.
01:30:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Other than that, I cried for five minutes.
01:30:23 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That made us laugh even more. It that made us laugh even more. It was, it was great, it was glorious. Um, the only other thing I got is a technology. Haiku poetry corner. Sight is silent. Yes, no voices can be heard. Now the cows roll their eyes. Have a great week, everyone.
01:30:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, that's great. All right, thank you guys for being here. If you want to find me, of course you can check out Hackaday. I've got the security column goes live there Friday mornings. We record Floss Weekly there on Tuesday and it goes live on Wednesday. You can check out both of those things. I've also got the YouTube channel and, yes, you can find my. Buy me a coffee if you think I personally have earned a tip. No pressure, though. We appreciate everybody being here. We have a great crowd and we sure enjoy your support. Don't forget to support Twit. There is Club Twit. Let's see If I hit one of these buttons, is something going to happen? Ah, nope, nothing's going to happen. Oh, there, it is. There we go. You can join the club. You can join. It's over on this side. Join the club, club Twit. There's the QR code. It's about the price of a cup of coffee per month and it's the way to support Twit, and we sure appreciate that as well. We will see you all next week on the Untitled Linux Show.
