Untitled Linux Show 178 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 folks, this week we're talking about the new KDE Immutable Distro that looks to be coming. We're talking about what might be Ken's next laptop. Then there's the kernel 6.12, 6.13, merge window opening. We're talking about Fedora and the new KDE Edition. That's not just a spin. Oh, and then don't forget NET, the next version of Debian. Lots of good stuff you don't want to miss, so stay tuned.
00:28 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Podcasts you love.
00:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
From people you trust.
00:33 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
This is Twit.
00:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 178, recorded Saturday, november 16th. I'm interested in cash. Hey folks, it is Saturday. You know what that means. It's time to get geeky with Linux and open source and all kinds of fun stuff. It's the Untitled Linux Show. We're going to have a lot of fun today. I think it's time for a kernel refresh, as 6.12 is out and there's some gaming stuff going on. It's going to be a lot of fun, and of course, it's not just me. We've got the regular crew here and we are going to start with some KDE news, and this reminds me of something that I've been saying for a long time that one of the worst things about KDE Neon is Ubuntu. Rob, they finally listened, didn't they? Absolutely, that hurts a little.
01:29 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Kind of part of what I was going to get at here is um, you know, but also again, you know, I take a day off and and these guys came close to hitting all the big stories last week, but because this is a little bit of an old story now, you got real close. But when you talked about Ubuntu Core and the register article mentioning KDE Academy 2024, this is something else that was also announced there and, to be fair, this actually came out right before the last show that I was here on, so I kind of missed it too. So better late than never. So better late than never.
02:04
Exciting news about KDE working on their own bulletproof KDE Linux distro. So when I say bulletproof, this is a reference to its immutability, similar to Ubuntu Core's design, which references back to the story that they talked about last week. But unlike Ubuntu Core, kde Linux well, it's going to obviously feature KDE Plasma rather than GNOME, but then also KDE Linux, which is currently codenamed. Project Banana is a new KDE initiative, separate from the KDE Neon, and it's aiming to bring a seamless, user-friendly experience that merges KDE software's reliability and rich interface with the cutting-edge Linux technologies. And yes, as Jonathan has long explained the problems with KDE Neon, their current flagship KDE distro, and basing its distro on Ubuntu, you know, trying to have the bleeding edge version of KDE Plasma running on top of the relatively antiquated Ubuntu based. You know, at least you know behind a bit, behind the more bleep, bleep heads, bleeding edge gestures, but it was.
03:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It was ubuntu. Lts.
03:27
Right, it's not just that it was ubuntu, but it was ubuntu lts, lts, so they would be they would be running like a year old kernel in some cases, and some of the stuff kde is doing is really pushing the limit on what the kernel can do. And so there were times that I would try to boot into kde neon and it would just be broken like badly broken. Stuff would not come up at all, and it's because KDE was trying to, you know, trying to do all of its fancy stuff and the old kernel just didn't have support for it. So it was not just a slam on Ubuntu. Yeah.
03:57 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, you know, but I'll have a story later that's going to touch on something that might change that a little bit too, you know, but also you know, much like how SteamOS decided to rebase on Arch to keep up with the latest technologies.
04:13 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Kde Linux will also be rebasing on Arch, utilize Butterfest for its image-based snapshots, making rollbacks simple, and will utilize the newer SystemD boot that we've talked about in the past briefly, at least, with custom theming rather than using grub. The Butterfest architecture will include an image-based A-B update mechanism, kind of like what Android uses, with rollback capabilities and a recovery partition for added resilience. Users can benefit from the automatic backup system using ButterFS snapshots, which includes a user-friendly GUI similar to Apple's. Timeshift is what the article referenced. I like to think it also more like Linux, linux mints or Apple's time machine. Sorry, I like to think of it like Linux mints time shift. All immutable data, such as user home directories, cache locations, is encrypted. For enhanced security. With with most immutable desktops, you need a containerized method to deploy applications, and so KDE Linux will utilize Flatpaks and maybe Snaps, but you have to try to get away from moving to get away from Snaps too. I don't know. But even though, even though there's going to be a stable version, it will, it's still going to be rather bleeding version. It's still going to be rather bleeding edge. It's still Arch. But these techniques will make even though they're going to make a very safe, stable way to run.
05:57
Arch stable meaning runs well, not necessarily. Code isn't changing. There is a reason. The likes of Valve have also picked Arch for their base. The goals they have for the store are to be the KDE operating system, user-friendly, high-quality user experience.
06:23
Doesn't break or at least easy to recover, keeping security in mind, no packaging knowledge needed to develop for it, and focus on modern technologies attractive for our hardware partners. And any addition can be used as the main system by our developers for internal dogfooding purposes, support switching between additions, slash releases schedules at any time and exercise code paths for containerized apps and immutable base systems to improve KDE software deployment. But you'll still have the options to run. You know, even though the stable one is there, you're still going to have the options to run a testing edition and an enthusiast's edition, the testing being the most bleeding edge, then enthusiast be there in between. Uh, stable and testing. So you know, if they're stable isn't blending enough for you, they got these for you too. So maybe this distro will be enough to get me back into the KDE ecosystem and get me to try an immutable system, which I've been saying I should try for a long time.
07:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So there's an interesting note here on one of these pages that really makes me go, hmm. On the communitykdeorg KDE underscore Linux page. Kde Linux codenamed Project Banana is a work-in-progress name of a KDE-owned general-purpose Linux distribution proposed at Academy 2024. Not to be confused with KDE Neon, it does not say that it's replacing KDE Neon.
08:05 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Nope, it is a separate project.
08:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, obviously it's separate. But the question is does KDE Neon still have a life? Does it still have a purpose? Is it going to continue?
08:17 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Is it going to be like the prototype, where it just sits on the shelf after you finish it and move on?
08:29 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
well, I wouldn't say neon's really much of a prototype, since it's gonna in many ways be lagging behind where kde linux is yeah, although you figure kde linux may lag behind on the actual kde releases.
08:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
if neon is is more bleeding edge, I don don't know. It's an interesting direction to go, yeah.
08:48 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I mean when Neon was originally founded, they wanted super stable because they wanted to make sure that all the issues they were running into were coming from KDE and not from the underlying operating system. So that's why originally they wound up on LTSs and not on other newer releases, even running, like the .10 releases or anything like that only LTS. But later on we'll talk about how LTSs are going to start having newer kernels show up.
09:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh good, that will actually be very, very very handy.
09:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know this may not be a direct comparison, but you know when Ubuntu Core comes out, there's still going to be the regular Ubuntu, isn't there? Maybe not, maybe eventually no. Or when Fedora's Silver Blue came out, the regular Fedora came around or stuck around. So you know, those are major distributions with more than just an aim to show off the latest and greatest of kde. So you know, maybe, maybe they'll stick around for a bit and then they'll realize why maintain both.
09:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We could just put it all right here on this beautiful arch base system yeah, so I'll tell you another uh, another kde system that you might want to think about is uh fedora workstation.
10:13 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So I was gonna do you have that?
10:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
do you have that one, jeff? I do not, okay, so let's talk about it. I want to plug it here. There was a Fedora 40, I think it's for 42.
10:27
There's, you know, there's, all sorts of change proposals that the people that work on Fedora put together, and so they'll, you know, they'll write proposals and the steering committee will vote on it. That's how Fedora makes decisions. The KDE special interest group wrote a proposal and said hey, why don't we switch Fedora Workstation, which is like the flagship ISO, the flagship spin? It's not really the spin, it's the flagship version of Fedora for on the desktop. The KDE SIG folks were like why don't we just ship it with KDE instead of GNOME? And you know, of course, this is not something that they very seriously expected to get approved.
11:15
Um, but what ended up happening is the vesco. The steering committee said here's what we're going to do. We're going to make a flagship workstation kde version. So fedora kde is no longer going to be a spin, it is going to be a flagship with equal status to the gnome version. I'll get a link to this later. Uh, it's very, it's very interesting. And so then, the question that I have that I really am curious is is rel going to follow suit? Is rel going to become a kde, or somewhat kde, distro, as opposed to its current GNOME life?
11:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Very interesting. Does that mean the spin just goes away, or do they keep trying to hold?
11:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
on. I think the spin becomes the workstation. Yeah.
12:00 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, I want to say I think it was CentOS for a long time was running KDE. It may have, I'm not sure. At least the ones I've used in enterprise environments they were using KDE.
12:16 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
The CentOS I used in enterprise environments had no GUI at all.
12:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's true for mine too.
12:24 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, I was just going to say, though, if somebody's listening and they want to try a newer version of kde, I personally would recommend fedora then yeah, if, if that's for now, until kd linux comes out yeah, but I mean, even then I would say it's going to depend how much of an enthusiast you are and we'll see how stable it is, because it's work to get an arch stable, not really I don't know, especially if you're you're talking an immutable system like this with the a b yeah, so I'm.
12:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm guessing that the kde guys are going to do the work to get it stable and then that's going to ship. Their stable snapshot is going to ship as the immutable.
13:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I think it's going to. I mean, it's one of their main goals. I think it's going to work well. I don't think they're going to have the problems that base Arch users have. Yeah, there's problems getting Arch installed the first time, everything working smooth, but normally, my experience, once you have it working, it mostly works. Sometimes something's broken Mostly works. Yeah, Once you get it going, it works.
13:37 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That's kind of like let the hilarity ensue Exactly that kind of sounds like if it's not crashing, it's actually doing pretty good.
13:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No, exactly that kind of sounds like if it's not crashing, it's actually doing pretty good, no, well what? I mean, is it works great?
13:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
except for sometimes the user can do something that breaks something I never had.
14:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That experience much, but much, much. But there are other Arch-based, like Garuda, that I don't think has much of a problem, manjaro's one, but I hear lots of people giving Manjaro a hard time.
14:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I learn more when I break things myself that's true.
14:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I've told people for a long time now that the reason I understand how computers work is because I've broken and fixed my own so many times.
14:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
but with this yeah, with kd linux being an immutable arch, you're not going to be able to learn much. Probably you're going to learn.
14:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, roll it back all right, let's talk about the uh. Let's talk about the kernel. Uh, I think, I think jeff has a story about 613 and then we need to dive for a minute into all the things in 6.12. So, jeff, take it away and tell us what's up?
14:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I've got a couple stories here. Eventually, this first one, though. I wanted to focus on something specific, and in the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel there's going to be expanded atomic write support to the ext4 and XFS file system. Now I know a lot of you out there are probably cheering at that, and there's probably a lot more who are thinking what is Atomic Write support? Well, atomic Write support is not new, as we already have it in block devices, like with NVMe and SCSI support. For those that don't know SCSI, scsi, this came in kernel 6.11.
15:30
Christian Brawner explains this very well in his poll request, although I will be adding to his quote just to explain a few things better for those of us who don't have intimate knowledge of the file systems. He says an atomic write is a write issued with torn write protection. This means, for a power failure or any kind of hardware failure, all or none of the data from the write will be stored, never a mix of old and new data, and this is me adding in. Basically, he's saying you know, if something happens while you're trying to write, you will either get all the old data that was there before the write, so the new data won't be shown as written, or you will get all the new data that was going to be written with none of the old. So when you have a mix of the new and the old data, that's a torn write. It's kind of like you tore a page out of one book and tore it out of another and now you've got a little bit of a mess. Know, you might not have what you wanted, because maybe it was you lost the new data, but the existing data will be valid and make sense and it won't be just randomized garbage. Okay, he continues on.
16:36
This work is already supported for block devices. If a block device is opened with O underscore direct and the block device supports atomic write with O underscore direct and the block device supports atomic write, then Fmode underscore can underscore atomic underscore write is added to the file of the open block device. This pull request contains the work to expand atomic write file support to file systems, specifically EXT4 and XFS. Currently, only support for writing exactly one file system block atomically is added. Only support for writing exactly one file system block atomically is added, since it is now possible to have file systems block size greater than page size. For XFS, it's possible to write 4K or larger blocks automatically on an x86. So I did want to add in here. The XFS file system actually started working on support for this atomic write when they released the block atomic writes in Linux 6.11. So at that same time when they did that, the XFS file system was adding patches already so they could support atomic writes as well.
17:41
You know sometimes when you start adding you don't have enough. You know atomic rights as well. You know sometimes when you start adding you don't have enough. You know it can take a couple of releases before you're actually able to fully implement it. So now we're seeing the culmination of that work. Take a look at the article linked in the show notes for all the details. It contains links to the story when, the links to when the block devices had atomic rights added, and it even has the official pull request if you want to see all the the nitty-gritty details of everything. So I think very cool yeah, this is.
18:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh. This is related to what they call copy on right, isn't it?
18:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
yeah, yeah, I believe so, because it it is for that, uh, power failure or something goes catastrophically wrong and you, you don't have much time at all to finish what you're doing funny that you bring that up it either writes it or it doesn't I'll be talking a little bit about a copy and write later on in the show oh well, there we go, would you say
18:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
ken, I said either it either writes it or it doesn't when it powered down yeah, yeah, that's the idea, not halfway through.
18:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, halfway through is bad and a lot of times, yeah, a lot of times actually, block devices have some a little bit of safety built into them. Where that they can, they can continue to run for, you know, maybe a second or I mean it's not very long, it's very short time, but just to finish kind of what they're doing and try to get that last bit of data written before everything turns to garbage.
19:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, for flash, that's actually pretty important, and that's one of the reasons why it's so easy to corrupt SD cards on things like Raspberry Pis. Because for a flash device to write to a sector, a block you know, whatever they call that, whatever they call that smallest unit of data, it first has to delete the whole thing and then rewrite the whole thing. And so if you kill the power after it's deleted and before it's rewritten, you just lose the whole block, and that's not good, it's no bueno. So things like NVMe drives, they've got enough capacitance in them, they've got capacitors to be able to finish whatever that process is, so that you don't lose data every time the power gets interrupted. A page would be the smallest. There you go. That's the term, that's the one I was looking for. I knew a guy. I know a guy that knows the right term there.
19:55 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, that actually used to write tester code to test that exact thing, yes, you wrote code.
20:02 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I always thought you said you're not a coder.
20:06 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I did write a little. I never said, I never wrote code.
20:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'm just not particularly excellent at it.
20:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
What development platform do you use? I?
20:22 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
was using.
20:22 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
KDE, and that's SenOS running KDE, so I just ran it in a shell.
20:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Was it bash scripting or Python?
20:30 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I was writing some in Python. This was back when Python 2 was cool and 3 hadn't really come out yet. The other thing was there was some custom machine code, I guess. Thing was there was some custom machine code, I guess kind of a, but uh, almost like an assembly type language that I was writing and probably wasn't cross-platform then no, no, well, actually it kind of was it could run on both linux and solaris machines. Oh, oh, interesting, we could run it on some Spark stuff. Fun.
21:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, let's take a minute here and talk about the kernel, and I'm going to do this because nobody else is going to talk about 6.12. So I'm going to and there's some stuff in 6.12. Some really interesting stuff. So we are recording this on Saturday, november the 16th For those of you that get us on the download, of course, it will be later than this. So on the 17th the expectation is that Linux 6.12 is going to release. So for many of you, by the time you hear this, it is already out, and 6.12 has it's got about three or four different things that I'm really pretty excited for. So, first off, 6.12 finally has preempt RT, real-time Linux built into it officially there, and that has been coming for something like a decade now a very long time. It also has the Schedule EXT, the external scheduler, which, this one.
22:06
I don't think there's a whole lot using it yet, but I imagine that you're going to see use of it in things like the various gaming modes. You could do this in Steam. I think Feral has one of these where it's another program that you run and it goes and it puts your machine into a gaming mode. That you run and it goes and it puts your machine into like a gaming mode, where it currently it'll it'll use the performance scheduler and turn all your, you know, turn your course um, the, the, the core power usage up things like that. Um, I would not be surprised to see some of those use the external scheduler, um. And then we also have the qr code baked into the linux b-side. Yes, linux will now have a blue screen of death of its own and it'll have qr codes, um.
22:49
And then one other thing that really really interests me here is we've got the initial raspberry pi 5 support. Honestly, I thought this had already landed, um, but apparently it is just now getting there and I've not dug real deep into what all is supported on the Pi 5. But apparently it is initial support for the BCM2712, which that's the SoC that runs the Pi 5. And it is preliminary. So don't go looking for full video card, video device acceleration or any of that stuff. But it's there, it's enough to boot it. So that is cool and a little slower than I expected. But I am sure that the Raspberry Pi 5, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, their developers, are directly involved with this. So you know, as always, good for them. So 6.12 is out. That's why we're starting to talk about 6.13. And yeah, it's, it's another. It's another kernel development cycle just about in the can.
23:51 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, when they release 12, then they'll start the the pull cycle for 13. So and they actually have next branches that you can kind of predict what's going to get pulled, or have a request for pull, yes, and so you can watch that and that's what kind of predict what's going to get pulled yeah, or every request for pull yes, and so you can watch that.
24:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's what. That's what michael larable at pharonix does. He watches all those dash next branches. So all you know like a maintainer will have that branch and so you can just look in there and go. This is the stuff that he's going to send in the pull request to torvalds and get a pretty good, pretty good idea of what's going to land. So 6 exciting 6.13 obviously is going to be exciting too. There's some stuff that I'm waiting and looking forward to that hopefully is going to land in some of the 6.12 dot releases, bug fixes, so all kinds of fun stuff. Ken, you want to talk about NET?
24:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No, but let's go ahead and do it.
24:40 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm kind of surprised. Ken is not usually the Microsoft guy and I don't think of him as the NET guy either.
24:47 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, it sounded like a good article to cover, because Bobby Borisoff wrote it, of course, and he wrote about the launch of the latest and most advanced version of the NET free and open source development platform. We are, of course, talking about Microsoft NET 9. Now NET 9 has thousands of improvements, including substantial updates across the entire NET stack, bringing increased productivity, unmatched performance, intelligent features and enhanced security. According to Bobby, the server garbage collector has been adopted to better meet applications' memory requirements, especially in high-core environments, while reducing memory usage by up to 93% in certain benchmarks. According to developers, they've seen major gains in the tech and power benchmark, showcasing a significant 15% jump in request per second performance. These enhancements make NET 9 ideal for developers building high throughput, resource efficient applications.
26:03
Alongside NET 9 is NET Aspire 9, a powerful set of tools, templates and packages designed for creating production-ready applications easily. It has new APIs and features like the ability to keep containers alive between debugging sessions and integrations for platforms like OpenAI and Milvus. Bobby notes NET 9 continues to evolve full stack web development with ASPNET Core and Blazor. The NET multi-platform app user interface, or I believe it's pronounced Maui Delavalpos, can now easily build apps across mobile and desktop from a single code. According to Bobby, this release of NET 9 brings increased performance and deeper integration with Android, ios, mac OS and Windows platform features.
27:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, come on. Some of those others deserve a cough too, yeah.
27:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I suspect the same is true for Linux. I recommend reading Barbie's article to see what he says about a certain buzzword I've avoided using.
27:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Thank you buzzword. I've avoided using Thank you. So I've got. I've got a buddy that is a big NET fan and when you, when you talk about NET, you've got to remember this is not. This is not the decade ago NET where it was terrible and you had to run mono to make it work and everything was broken. And on Linux at least, although on on Windows 2, it was broken a lot of times.
27:53
Uh, no, net is now open source, fully cross-platform, runs natively on Linux and on Fedora. So, like, when you think about the different Linux distros and and how strict they are about packaging software, we're free versus open source and patent encumbered and all that Fedora is one of the strictest. I checked this just the other day fedora is one of the strictest and so, like, there's a lot of things fedora won't do because of patent reasons or other, you know, because of their rules. You can go to fedora and you can pull up dnf and you can install, uh, the dot net platform. It's just there, it is right in the fedora repos so you can install. Install it on RHEL, you can install it on Ubuntu. It's there, it works. Net is pretty nice. I've never programmed in it, but I've been told that it's not too bad these days, so it's a win.
28:38 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I've on the Windows side. I've done a bit of NET development using Visual Studio back in the day. I do really wish an IDE like Visual Studio would be available for Linux, for it and I'd get back into it.
29:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Rob what you realize that Visual Studio runs on Linux.
29:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No, that's Visual Studio Code.
29:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Okay, okay, okay, so does VS Code, not do NET.
29:11 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, like Visual Studio, you actually have the graphical. Like you have your, you put your canvas on there and then you drag a button over to it and you drag and then you click the button and it takes you to the code and you type in there what you want that button to do. It was easy to make things. You didn't have to know what you were doing, which is why a lot of bad code was done.
29:40 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It was easier than Visual Basic Rob liked it.
29:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's what I heard.
29:46 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It works great until it breaks. There's Gambus.
29:49 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Gambus is actually a very underappreciated platform in Linux. It's been around for years. I think they're on version 3 or 4 now and that's very much like it. If you want to see what it's like, try out the Gambus interface and it's very similar, Except for that's a basic language only.
30:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so that sort of interface is kind of like what people would call a low-code interface. Right, it makes it easy without having to write a whole lot of source code. It's just click and drag and do things.
30:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean the GUI part of it. You don't have to code, but when you actually code you still have to type all the code out. It just starts it for you. You click the button and it says on button, click parentheses, close parentheses. And then you type in there what you want to do and it has a lot of autocomplete or IntelliSense, I believe is what they started calling it eventually, rob. Control C, controlv is not typing code.
30:52 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So Visual Studio handles the graphics while you end up putting in the code that handles the logic behind what the application does.
31:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You don't have to manually, manually code out the the GUI part so it looks like there are extensions for VS code that can give you some of that same functionality, if you really really want it.
31:16 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, I'd be interested in checking it out then yeah, how.
31:19 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
How good was it at doing that? Because now I've only got experience with like one program, but I knew somebody when I was writing tester code. They they had a front end and it was in for python and I believe it was tk is what they were using and they had an automated system like that and it just generated so many lines of code.
31:38 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean, it was just I don't know, you don't, you can't even crazy. I don't know how you could even see what the gui code was in there. It just never showed it anywhere, so it could have been complete trash on what that was.
31:51
But that's actually kind of a problem when you can't get into the gui code to fix things or customize somewhere I probably could just open like the files that I actually created or something. But uh, it functioned well. I mean, I I had a program that I sold for years. Actually, I gave it away for years and I started selling it.
32:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
All right, we gotta make me think of atari pilot with turtle graphics we gotta, we gotta move on.
32:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We are running. We are running long here. If we don't want a two-hour episode, we gotta start moving. So, rob, try to sell someone other than me on some new hardware.
32:25 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's what I'm here to do. And now for another edition of something Ken should buy, not Jonathan. This is for Ken, even if most of us haven't gone out and purchased a framework laptop yet. Besides Jonathan, I think I could say we're all definitely fans of the philosophy and we are all interested in the future of RISC-V, and this summer we did share an announcement that this was coming, but now it is here.
32:59
You could now get the RISC-V board under early access for your Framework 13 laptop. So if you remove the value-added services, by default that is checked. But if you say no, you don't want that, you can get the basic package, just the board, for $199. Or select the standard for $299, the Pro for $799, and the Enterprise for $299, the Pro for $799, and the Enterprise for $999. Or add I think it's another $100 if you add for the top one there. So the Basic and Pro are just the add-on boards which you would use if you already have the Framework 13, while the Pro and Enterprise includes the entire laptop. Have the framework 13, while the pro and enterprise includes the entire laptop. So the basic package includes the dc roma risk 5 board, uh framework and cooler master case, uh two usbc expansion cards and sd card 64 gigabits. The standard includes everything that the basic has, plus a USB expansion card, hdmi expansion card, wi-fi module and Wi-Fi antenna and, like I said, the Pro Package. That's the same thing as the basic, but it also includes the framework laptop itself. And then the Enterprise is the same as the standard but includes the laptop. The framework laptop itself standard but includes the laptop. The framework laptop itself.
34:28
And if you choose the value add services, the price for that piece of it alone ranges from $99 to 169, depending on the package you get with those services. So, first access uh, like the, the um, the, the value add services they include. First, access get 50% off next generation mass production main boards, available in 2025. Discount code you can receive a 15% off for any product in the Deep Computing online store. Influence product development. You get a unique opportunity to provide valuable feedback to help shape the future product improvements. A feedback form will be provided upon receiving the product. And then you get a Bravo Monster discount Receive a 50% discount code for purchasing Bravo products at the Deep Computer online store.
35:30
So I don't know they're really pushing that. That's why they have the S check, but I guess I'd probably just select the no and get the hardware I want. So you can also get these preloaded with Ubuntu 24.04. I know Ken and Jeff will like that, but for Jonathan we also have Fedora 41 available, or you know. I guess Jeff also likes to dabble in both. You can actually get it with both images preloaded. So Fedora, ubuntu they must be listeners to the show. They know what you guys like. I'm not in the market for a laptop right now, but this would help. This would be on my top 10 list for sure, probably.
36:19
This is dangerously fascinating, especially for someone who already has a free one, a nice.
36:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Christmas present from Santa, there you go.
36:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's only 40 coffees For just the board, the basic board.
36:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, this is pretty fascinating. I like seeing, I love the fact that Framework is doing this with other companies, that they're sort of teaming up with them and letting other people do do cross promotions. Um, I think that's really cool and you know I I really like what framework is about. I think they're great, um. So, yeah, this is cool and it's super fascinating to see risk five coming into its own. I'm looking forward to the next iteration of what all of these companies are doing, particularly the next version of the Vision 5. Let's see what exactly is in there. Yeah, the J. What is it? Yeah, the Star 5.
37:25 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Jh-7. Yeah, the Star 5,.
37:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
JH-7110. I've got I think that's actually what's in this thing um, from also from star five, a little, a little carrier board. Yeah, it's the jh 7110. Um, they're not the most performant, right like so it's, it's less than a, uh, it's less performance than a raspberry pi four, less than a five. I don't remember if it's more or less than a four, it's, it's.
37:56 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think it trades blows with a four is essentially what happens where it's at this model is probably where it's finally kind of getting usable at a very low level. It definitely be interesting to see what the next model comes up with yeah, I, I did some.
38:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I did some testing on this and I wrote an article about about that particular chip on that board and I think the conclusion that I came to is that it's not really ready for running as a desktop, but it is ready to um, it's ready for developers to be able to build the software that will run on the desktop. So it brings RISC-V into the mainstream on the developer side, and then at some point we'll get a faster version of this thing, more cores or whatever it takes, and at that point it will then be usable more as a desktop. Yeah, it's slower than a pi 400. It trades blows with a pi 4. That's. That's essentially what the pharonix article says yeah, four really wasn't useful.
38:59 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You could make it work for your desktop, but you maybe probably don't want to. And five is when it really got usable. So you know, hopefully they kind of make the same same leaps and bounds, yeah I mean I would.
39:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I would love to see uh, I would love to see the vision 5 sort of leapfrog the pi 5. You know the excuse me, the, the vision 5 2, so the next version of that, the vision 5 3, maybe, whatever they call it. I'd like to see it leapfrog the pi 5 and be at least trade blows with the pi 5. That is when it would become really interesting. The other thing to keep in in mind is that you're going to have problems finding a browser, particularly a browser that has support for things like DRM right. So like, if you want to be able to watch Netflix, certain things on YouTube, that might not work on the RISC-V platform because that support's just not built out yet.
39:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's really probably best. I mean, the boards are probably best to have like a specific use case and then if you have this add-on board for your framework, you plug that in and you do your risk development for the, the risk boards that you're going to have for whatever appliance purpose you have in place yeah, well, so I mean's a.
40:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's a little bit more than that. So, like my, like I said, my take on it is this is good for developers for not just doing appliances but like for working on the desktop with the, with the view towards the next chip is going to be powerful enough for it to be usable.
40:25 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Right.
40:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I guess with the view that they'll be able to get a browser to work I mean sure, so you can get Chromium. Chromium is a different experience from Chrome, particularly if you go to do something like go to Netflix, because Netflix requires I think it's Wildvine DRM digital rights management.
41:01 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I mean, if you're planning to go to Netflix, it's just going to spin anyway, like the world all saw last night so what you're saying is, by the time you finish compiling chromium, the faster machine will be out thankfully, you don't have to compile it yourself.
41:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There is a fedora risk repo right like it's. It's there. This support is actually pretty good. I really need to grab it and do a fedora 41 install on this thing and see what it's like. Uh, it has been a while since I've had that thing up. Um, so, like most, of you're gonna have a good experience. It's gonna be around the experience of a raspberry pi 4, it's just there are some rough edges because risk 5 is still such a new platform rob, I think you have made a sale on one thing.
41:49 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I definitely need to get the framework laptop case.
41:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Right, and then you can just keep updating that for a long time.
41:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that is definitely one of the huge selling points. In fact, my dad just the other day was like so I really need a laptop, Could you build me one? Well, there's only one company right now that'll let you do that.
42:13 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But yes, actually you know, the beauty of of computers years ago was the fact that you could upgrade so many ass. I mean desktops.
42:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know when that's all you can with desktops.
42:25 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You still can, and and that's you often been the beauty of it, and you know it, never. It's almost amazing that we've gone this far into the laptop world and it's never really quite caught on. I don't know. Maybe the OEMs think they learned something they did wrong with the desktops. We're not selling enough desktops because they just upgrade them. We'll change that. We're not selling enough desktops because they just upgrade them.
42:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We'll change that, yeah, all right, let's move on to. Let's see, jeff, you've got Ubuntu, ubuntu 25.04. What, what year is it?
43:02 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh yeah, we're already going forward. So if you take a look at the link in the show notes, you'll find it takes you to the Ubuntu community discourse site. The topic we're on today is the monthly update for Ubuntu 25.04, the coming release in April, which will be codenamed Plucky Puffin, as Keith512 and I were talking in the ULS Discord. That codename opens up the door for a lot of interesting and cool wallpapers, so it'll be interesting to see what comes out of that. So Canonical says they're basically saying that they're going to have these monthly blogs to talk about how the upcoming release is doing and what they're working on and give more details under the hood. So that way you can kind of follow what they're doing development wise and you know they can give some background on choices they're making things like that. For example, the blog talks about how they want to have further refinements to their desktop installer. They want to provide additional messaging around the presence of other operating systems, provide out-of-the-box encryption options for dual boot installs as well as better handling of Windows BitLocker encryption situations. Now they also talk about accessibility improvements, which Ubuntu has been championing for quite a while. They're really behind accessibility, as in I mean they really back the accessibility. They talk about how they had a third-party audit of their desktop experience and found a wide range of things they can work on to improve keyboard navigation, screen reader capabilities, high contrast options, things like that. I mean that's just a few of the things that the third-party auditing found as they could improve on. They do talk about how excited they were to hear how much the community wanted an immutable Ubuntu core desktop during the Ubuntu Summit. So I won't go into detail on that, as we talked about it I think it was last week but they're really excited about that. A little more under the hood, they're planning on using GNOME 48. So now this is Ubuntu after all. We'll see what version Kubuntu uses for KDE, but they didn't touch on that in this article. Ubuntu is also going to use the Linux kernel 6.14, assuming that kernel development cooperates. But that's what they're planning Now. They do mention that Ubuntu 25.04, using the new kernel, will also allow 6.14 to be the hardware enablement kernel for Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS. So there will be a way that you can get a newer kernel into your LTS if you need it. Hardware enablement means just that you can load a kernel in, because that new kernel has support for some hardware that you want to run, fixes, bugs for something, things like that. So this aggressiveness, I guess, in having newer kernels in Ubuntu will have trickle-down effects even on their LTS systems.
46:04
Now the blog goes on to talk about apps as well, such as the Snap version of Firefox will not connect to smart cards, and they give some command line instructions if somebody wants to test their work, how it's working out right now. So they can if they. If you want to check the progress, you know if the issue affects you, but they're, they're working on it to try to fix it and you know, so you. You don't have to manually set some command line parameters Following the KDE nomenclature. They also say that they're working on paper cuts. For those who don't know, paper cuts are small issues and bugs which they're not catastrophic, but they can really be annoying. So they go through a list of various small things that they're trying to improve and polish and refine more. We should look forward to seeing these future updates.
46:55
About once a month the blog updates as 25.04 continues to get further along in the development cycle. Now it should go without saying. But while you can get nightly builds, a 25.04 release it's not even to the alpha stage yet. So don't expect any kind of stability or oh, it's rock solid. But you're one update away from total catastrophic failure. So this is a toy at the moment. This version is also where they're going to default to the new dash O 03 compiler optimization from the previous dash 02. So there could be possible issues with that, though they have successfully tested previous versions with the higher optimization level. But you know you're adding a different compiler flag. It could, you know, depending on your hardware, the age, age of what you've got, things like that could be an issue. So just don't. Don't think even the nightly builds are going to be something you want to trust too much. But I will say I think 2504 is going to be an exciting release and I am looking forward to it. Well, the KDE version of it.
48:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I've been looking at what they were, what they were touting here, and they talked about the um, what did they call the Ubuntu desktop installer? Um, and I, I this is this is sort of uh, tickling my memory that there used to be a Windows application that you could run that would install Ubuntu for you. Yeah, I remember that. Oh yeah, I don't know that that exists anymore, but it was cool.
48:41 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I tried it once. It was kind of weird. I don't know, as it does exist anymore. I think it handles Windows pretty good now. The one thing is because they go into better detail in the article, but they talk about if you have BitLocker on. They recommend you turn it off for Windows when you install Linux, like when you're dual booting. But they're trying to work around that so that they can maybe work with Windows. They want to not have BitLocker being such an issue during install.
49:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so nowadays when you go to install Ubuntu you write it to a flash drive, then you reboot the computer and boot off of the flash drive. There used to be an Ubuntu installer that was literally a Windows executable that you would run, and I guess maybe that just doesn't exist anymore. Maybe they discovered that wasn't such a great idea. It began with a W. Yeah, I don't remember either. That's been a long time ago and it actually, I think, installed.
49:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I feel like it installed Linux on actual NTFS or something what sounds interesting to me.
49:54 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I don't know if it is going to be proactive or scary, but they're talking about moving some of the additional system services and they say in quotes such as Pipewire into their own snaps to reduce the work needed for others to create their own bespoke sessions.
50:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, that could be interesting, we'll see.
50:22 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
We'll definitely be living in interesting times when they do that.
50:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, do that? Yes, well, that was one of. That was sort of one of the things that uh Pipewire is intended to be able to do, though right Is to to transparently work with your different um containerized programs. So that's sort of in scope for uh um for Pipewire, all right, all right, rob, you were right, I found it. Wubi, w-u-b-i, wubi. I finally found it the easiest way to install Linux. And, yeah, it looks like the last release was 10 years ago, so we're really showing our age on this one. Yep, yep, yep. That's not been around for a while, but it was a cool idea.
51:05 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, last work with those coal-fired computers.
51:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah.
51:21 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
All right, so let's talk about Debian. Debian has a new Bookworm point release. What is new in Debian 12.8 is the seventh, I repeat, seventh point release for the latest Debian GNU Linux 12 Bookworm operating system series. Now, according to Marius, debian 12.3, did anybody hear about that Was never released due to an issue in the ext4 file system that led to data corruption, so it doesn't count. So we've got .8 being the seventh point release. Now we're off by one Great. This latest release is powered by a newer kernel in the Linux 6.1 LTS series, the Linux 6.1 LTS series. Now Debian 12.8 provides those who want to deploy it on new hardware an update to up-to-date installation media where they won't have to download hundreds of updates from the repositories after the installation. This latest release includes 68 bug fixes for miscellaneous packages and 50 security updates, including fixing incorrect handling of some OCSP responses in
52:39
curl. Debian 12.8 installation images are available for download for and it's quite a list here 64-bit, that's the AMD 64. 32-bit has anybody heard of an i386? Mm-hmm Power PC 64-bit, little Indian, the PPC 64EL, and then you've got the IBM System Z MIPS 64-bit, little Indian, mips 32-bit, little Indian, the basic MIPS. Then there's the ARM EL, arm HF and ARM 64 hardware architectures that are all going to be have images for now. Debian 12.8. Live images are available for 64-bit systems pre-installed
53:36
with. Here's quite a list of desktop environments KDE plasma 5.27.5, the LTS version, gnome 43.9, xfce 4.18, cinnamon 5.6.8, mate 1.26.0, lxqt 1.2.0 and LXDE 0.10.1. These are all desktop environments. I'm surprised they didn't have a few more in there. Now a standard live ISO image is also available for download without a graphical environment. I wonder what you could use that for now. Mario's article includes links to download both the installation and live images. Now, if you already have Debian, gnu Linux 12.0 bookworm, just run sudo apt update, followed by sudo apt full upgrade. In fact, I did that on mine and I found it was already up to date on my Chromebook. I also noticed that my Chromebook has Linux kernel 6.6.50. Anybody else got a Debian, even if it's only in a VM?
55:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I have Debian on my Raspberry Pi. It's technically Raspberry Pi OS, but it's based out of Debian. Go ahead, Jeff.
55:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh, I was going to say I have run it but it's been a while. But I'd be more open to it. Now, where they're including the non-free, you can have the proprietary firmware and drivers now.
55:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, if we're going to include things based on Debian, I have some Ubuntu servers and actually I think I have some other bms too.
55:37 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I think my home assistant is actually debbie. Are those without?
55:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
a graphical environment.
55:40 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Obviously I said servers, so raspberry pi os is much closer to debbie, and then something like ubuntu is I. I just recently you mentioned the ARM, the three different ARM platforms. That really fascinates me because I just did some troubleshooting around this. And ARM L is actually it means ARM, little Indian, and that is actually ARM v5. And then ARM hf is actually ARM v7, which is interesting because the Raspberry Pi is actually ARM V6. And then ARM 64, of course, is ARM V8.
56:18
There's a little bit of decoder ring magic needed there to get those lined up properly. So the reason I was troubleshooting this is because we were building 32-bit ARM binaries and they weren't working on the Raspberry Pis, like the Raspberry Pi, the one, the two and the original Pi Zero, and I was like, why isn't this working? And finally come to find out we were using Debian ARM HF, which is ARM 32-bit, which is ARM v7. So we were trying to run ARM v7 binaries on arm v6 processors and that just didn't work. So we eventually we eventually got it straightened out by, strangely enough, by taking uh, taking the raspberry pi os disk image, turning it into a docker and then running that docker on arm64 hardware the crazy things we do to make things work.
57:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I was going to say just also. Ken touched on little eddian. I always heard it pronounced eddian, but it's little versus big is just the order the bytes are stored. So if you store, you know, smallest byte or bit in the lowest memory address or the highest memory address determines, uh, little versus big yes, and it's, it's indian, e-n-d-i-a-n right, so it's, it's which end it is.
57:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But if you're just saying it, you don't know what it is, then, yes, it, it sounds like another word yeah, that's what I thought it was the whole time.
57:56 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's a weird uh name for a processor no, so yeah it, it's what's really fun.
58:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
What's really fun is when you have to write code that converts between the two. I had to look at that a couple of times. That'll.
58:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That'll hurt your brain or rather I thought we were talking about some processors that were like from a long time ago and naming structures were a little looser back then no, no, it's.
58:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's referring to the the bit order inside the bytes as and yes and the end yes, all right, so let's move on to uh, deb, cow deb cow deb cow what's deb cow?
58:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
well, besides the picture that I have behind me, dev the cow. Uh, I'll just start by saying, before I get into exactly what DebCo is, because it needs a little bit of a backstory. So, with the popularity of copy-on-write file systems like ZFS, xfs, butterfess, bcachefs, becoming more popular you know a lot due to their snapshot capabilities, the extra write can actually slow some things down, like packaged installation. So with DebCal, debcal is looking to improve that. Debcal is an experimental implementation of deploying Debian packages on copy and write file systems. Devcow adapts DPKG, which is the Debian package manager, to use ref links or reference links rather than doing a full copy of the file each time, and this speeds up the installation process as much as six times. So this can make the installation process six times faster.
01:00:04
Deb Debcow transforms the Debian packages during the download phase and then a package version of DPKG installs these packages. As a real-world example, a comparison when using DPKG to dist upgrade Ubuntu 24.04 to ubuntu 24.10, it well, it took this person 90 minutes out of the box. If using dpkg cow or deb cow, the installation time drops by more than half, down to only 44 minutes. So this is a real world example of where time could actually mean something. You know, if you, if you have to update your computer before the show or something right, kim. So you know, and it made me wonder, you know, with Fedora also using Butterfest by default, I kind of wonder if any of D and F five's improvements the speed improvements that we've seen recently are anything similar to this. Or, if not, maybe they could utilize some of these techniques to speed things up even more.
01:01:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, ref links are interesting. So a ref link is basically a smart hard link. You could think of it so, rather than making a copy of the bits on the disk, it just makes a note hey, there's a copy of this file here and so long as nothing gets changed, the two copies point at the same bits on the disk. Uh, and then if you go to change either of them, it's smart enough, it tracks it and it will then make a copy of it. So it's like copy. One person says it's like copy on right, but for individual files so it's still experimental.
01:01:50 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, deb cow, there you go it's cool.
01:01:53 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
When I think of deb cow, I think of two cows t-u-c-o-w-s, the old file service. Oh yeah, remember that they still own things today, I think yeah, but the, the, the software, the freeware, whatever shut down about four years ago, I think three years ago yeah, company's still around, they're just not.
01:02:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You just can't download all the cool freeware from them.
01:02:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah all right, so let's talk something else in 613.
01:02:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
What's Jeff excited about? A lot of stuff. So if things go as expected, as Jonathan said, we should see the release of the 612 kernel this weekend, november 17th to be exact if you're listening to this at a later date. When that happens, as always, the 613 kernel pull request will start filling in and we'll see what the next kernel is going to look like. If you look at the article linked in the show notes, you'll see that Michael Larabelle has been keeping track of various next branches of the kernel tree. These are the branches which have a high likelihood of being submitted when the official pull request window opens up. Some of the stuff we can look forward to are things like the AMD 3D V-Cache optimizer driver is set to be merged.
01:03:10
Now, this is not for those that have a 7800X3D or a 9800X3D CPU if you're one of the lucky ones that has one, because they're sold out everywhere. These are for the chips such as the 7900X3D or the 7950X3D Chips that have more than one CCD, and they have one CCD which has the large 3D V-cache, and the other one has a smaller cache but it also has the faster cores. So it was kind of a hybrid CPU. It was a little bit like Intel's, where they have the performance and the efficiency. Well, except this one is some of those. One, ccd, was kind of for gaming, the other one was for regular productivity. Well, this will allow you to specify whether the user wants the faster cores or you want the larger cache to have priority. So, for example, if you're running a game versus doing something more computer intensive and the cat you know, because doing a game, we know the cat loves cache, games love cache, so it speeds that up. But if you're running like a simulation on something, maybe blender, well then it's more important that you have higher core speed. So this this will give hints in there. Or, you know, set the priority so it can tell what you're doing, where you should route your threads.
01:04:34
We have another set of code which is a mouthful for AMD, going to add heterogeneous CPU design topology patches. So these are somewhat similar to what we just spoke about with the X3D cache chips. But the TPH support allows for hints which can be injected to improve latency and lowering the traffic congestion when there are several possible cache locations on the server. Basically, this lets the system store data where it can be optimally used by the core doing the work without cross-cache misses. So this is similar to the X3D, except these are for the server chips and when you have multiple cores and CCDs, you can have one core accessing data on a cache on another CCD, which is okay, other than it's slower and it adds more traffic in the infinity fabric and you really want to have your loads, your threads, with the data you need right next in that cache, right next to the actual CPU core you're going to use. So this is going to help improve the traffic of that, so it'll make it run better.
01:05:48
Now we can't forget Intel, and they're working on the next generation XE3 graphics. We just had the XE2 graphics debut with Lunar Lake and we're waiting for Battlemage discrete GPUs which will have the XE2 graphics. The open source Linux engineers at Intel have already started working on enabling XE3, and XE3 shouldn't be too far away, as we should see it, next year's Panther Lake platform. Now Intel does have several patches going into the 613 kernel for Panther Lake. That seems to be where they're really putting their energy at right now, you know again, because it's probably not too terribly far away and we can see why. For example, they have support going for panther lake and they have the fifth generation npu support. Npu stands for neural processing unit. Basically it's a chip inside the cpu which is dedicated to api of functions. They got Intel GPU temperature supports going to finally be coming. They also have the PCIe cooling driver which is set to be merged in 6.13. Now this is where some late generation drives you know like fifth generation PCIe drives, for example the you know like SSD or NVMe type drives. They can run very hot and now Intel will be able to control the speed of the PCI link and slow the drive down if it's getting too hot. Basically it's a safety measure to keep the drive from cooking itself.
01:07:17
We also have things leaving the kernel, such as the industrial field bus system, which is basically a way of connecting different systems and components within industrial environments. But it was added five years ago. The code isn't being maintained, so it just needs to go. There are various old and no longer maintained staging drivers which are getting cleared out. We're also expected to lose the riser FS file system out of the kernel.
01:07:45
Now it'll still be around. If you want to run it, you just have to load it in. It won't be part of the kernel. You know it's not a hundred percent guaranteed that we're going to lose that, but it's high probability, it's expected. 613 is where it's going to get removed now. I won't go into the riser file system in detail, as we've talked about it in past shows and it's an entire story in and of itself, but just know it's going to go away. Now I'm going to stop there, but take a look at the article linked in the show notes, as it has many, many more changes and goes into much more detail, even on the things that I mentioned. So I'm just taking a very high level skim across the top here. We could probably spend multiple shows just talking about what's coming in 6.13. So have a look and dive into what piques your interest.
01:08:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, definitely some interesting stuff in there, especially when you talk about cash. I'm interested in that. Interested in cash? I'm interested in that. Interested in cache? I'm interested in cache. Let's show a title for you.
01:08:50 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Anybody interested in that? Preempt lazy support.
01:08:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It sounds like it could be interesting. Yeah, I'm kind of, you know, I know it's kind of futuristic here, but you know they've got that. Amd's got that cache prediction for the hybrid chips, you know the X3D with the more than one CCD.
01:09:13 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Is that like an economist?
01:09:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, cache prediction.
01:09:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
One thing that surprises me that they're doing I thought it'd already been done which is that the riser FSs file system uh being removed you know they said, they announced that they plan to.
01:09:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is when it's actually gonna gonna get. Yeah, they've had several uh deprecation announcements, but this is where it's actually gonna happen yeah, and then jeff was about to tell us about a future purchase plan of his well, I'm kind of curious if this is also going to apply to, like the, the 9950 and the 9900 x3d chips that are coming out.
01:09:52 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
If they're going to have with, now that they have faster cache because they're putting the cache beneath the cores, are they going to actually have these uh hybrid type cores? Are they going to have the 3d vcache on each ccd, so it'll be more like a double 9800 x3d chip?
01:10:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
yeah, I don't know. It's good. It's going to be interesting to see, it seems like, because both both cpu manufacturers and you have this on arm too um have this idea of, well, let's put different, not the same kind kind of cores together on a single CPU, and so it seems like there's an opportunity here for the kernel to have like some sort of a unified system to be able to deal with this. This core has better cache. This core has better speed. This core does not support whatever.
01:10:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And both Intel and AMD have been putting a lot of energy into that of late of just making that scheduler aware of what the hardware differences are and optimizing so that, like you said, you get the right workload going to the right hardware. Yeah, and Intel is really working on their next generation chips because they know that these didn't go over and there's some mistakes.
01:11:09
They're saying there's some microcode that's supposed to speed some things up, but they're really going, yeah, yeah, we put this out, but the next one, the next one is the one that's going to and I'll be optimistic and say you know, we've had the current leadership in there driving technology, pushing technology. This is about where we could see some changes really kicking in.
01:11:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep, yep, I'd agree. Intel needs a win. Intel needs a win to keep AMD on their toes, right?
01:11:41 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh yeah, yeah. And I've had over the years. I've had Intel and AMD chips and I will tell you there is no company that is your best friend. So people that are like, ah, I really like this, they're going to take money out of your wallet just as fast as the other one is. You just have to look at what is the current generation and go with that. And I think I've said on the show before I almost bought a 14700K when I got my current processor. It was just the schedulers weren't as up to speed at that time for a hybrid type CPU, so I went with the safer, symmetrical option.
01:12:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, absolutely All right. Do we want to talk about LibreOffice, Ken? Yes, we do.
01:12:29 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
All, all right, take it away. Well. And marius nester also wrote about the document foundation announcing the third maintenance update to the latest library office 24.8 office suite series. So this is going to be LibreOffice 24.8.3, not 4 or 5, 3. And LibreOffice 28.4, 28.4.8.3 improves its overall stability and reliability by addressing more of those pesky bugs. I've got a friend wants to get down. Speaking of pesky bugs, I've got a friend who wants to get down.
01:13:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Speaking of pesky bugs.
01:13:12 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That's a little mean, but For those that can't see the video right now we had a cat crawling over Ken trying to get away or get down off of the back of his chair.
01:13:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
After she got up there, but now LibreOffice 24.8.3 addresses a total of 88 bugs. Details about these bugs are available in the RC1 and RC2 change logs. This release also adds support for the Visio template format. Some people may see that referred to as VSTX. Now Marius recommends waiting until LibreOffice 24.8.3 point release arrives in your distros stable repos to update your installations. If you have an older version of LibreOffice, then LibreOffice 24.8.3 is available for download right from the official website as binaries for deb and rpm based GNU Linux distributions, as well as a source tarball for system integrators and those who like to compile software from sources. Keith 512, I'm thinking of you. The Liberty Office 24.8 Office Suite Series will be supported with seven I repeat, seven maintenance updates until June 12, 2025. The next point release Liberty Office 24.8.4, is planned for mid-December of this year. Be a nice Christmas present, won't it?
01:14:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, fun stuff. Fun stuff for most of us. It'll just happen, right. You just install your updates and you get it. You don't have to worry about it?
01:15:07 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
yes, it is, though I noticed with my tumbleweed, uh, that I've got installed. It hasn't got it available yet. I'll probably see it within a week yeah, I mean you figure it takes.
01:15:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
it takes a minute they've got they want to actually test it and move it into an unstable repository and test it there some more and then push it out to stable. It just takes time. Alright, let's get into some command line tips, guys. We'll let Rob take it first. You've got something interesting here. We're not quite deleting files, we're doing something else.
01:15:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So for those of you who listened to Ken and all his great tips with using alias to make all these great aliases, and maybe you made a mistake or decided now your systems are really kind of cluttered up with all these aliases and you don't know what to do. Well, the command you need to know is on alias. This will remove your command, your alias. So, for example, if you look here on for those watch, I'm gonna type alias just to see what aliases I have there I created. This is mostly default, but I created this one here called home. That's just just going to um, take me to home, so let me get somewhere else. If I type home, you see that alias took me right to the home. Well, maybe you can't see very well, but, um, what I'm going to do is that's a really stupid alias.
01:16:38
So I'm going to do on alias and just type the alias name and it's gone. So now, if I type alias, you're not going to see home in that list. Now let's say I have a whole bunch of these and I don't want any of these. Let's just type unalias-a and that's going to remove them all. So now if I type alias, I have no aliases left, which a lot of those default aliases I just got rid of. May have been nice to have kept, but hey, maybe just want the default system and you don't want any of those aliases there. So on alias, real simple to use. If you messed up your system with ken's alias command, just use unalias to get those dirty aliases out of there and get back to a more natural system.
01:17:31 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
There you go Now, is that persistent or will those aliases come back the next time you open a terminal?
01:17:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's for the user, so it should be persistent for that user. Well, unless you have them in, like your, one of your bashrc bashrc or something that's created them for you every time.
01:17:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Interesting. All right, Jeff, let's add a little spice to our lives.
01:18:00 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, this is for people that really want to fix their computer. So we're going to go hardcore geek this week with this tip, which is NG Spice. Now, this isn't a Linux tip per se, it's a little more of an open source tip for hardware. So it's a Spice simulator. Spice stands for Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis, and it's kind of a language, I guess, that was derived to simulate circuits and the initial release was in 1973, so 51 years ago, and it was written in Fortran.
01:18:36
Well, ng-spice is a modern version of SPICE and it's compatible with other SPICE model files. And what can you model? Your circuits can have JFETs, bipolar and MOS transistors, passive elements like resistors, inductors, capacitors, diodes, transmission lines and other devices all interconnected in a netlist. So digital circuits can be simulated as well, and with the combination of parts I mentioned, so you can have mixed signal circuits. I won't go into detail on how you write these net lists and generate these files, but there's a little bit of a learning curve to do this.
01:19:13
But you know, there might be a way to do it graphically and you'll have to stay tuned next week for the second part of this. So take a look at the link in the show notes as it goes to the NG Spice website and it has a ton of information along with frequently asked questions. It's got screenshots, the graphical plots. It can produce a ton of information. You know how it's, what all compiles in the package, or is it comprises of the package? You know it's a lot, and so, for those of you electronics people or you know, maybe you also follow jonathan on hackaday this would be a good circuit simulator and, like I said, stay tuned next week when we have part two putting a graphical front end on ng spice.
01:20:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So happy simulating yeah, that one actually sounds really interesting. I've got a couple of projects I meant to pull that out for.
01:20:09 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Sounds like fun yeah, for those of you that have used the old p spice, that we're going to kind of follow in those footsteps fun.
01:20:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, ken, tell me something I don't know about pipeipewire. Ken is muted, or else Ken tried to run his command and killed his Pipewire daemon.
01:20:31 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No, I haven't run it. In fact I'm playing it safe by taking screenshots for this. But this week's command line tip is pw-link. It lists, creates and destroys links between pipe wire port and, as you see with the screen I've got up, I've got the screenshot of running it with the dash-dash help. It gives you the syntax and options you can use, such as the generic is just PW-Link followed by the options, pw link, followed by the options. You've got the dash dash version which I actually ran underneath where it shows that um you running it on lib pipe wire 1.2.6. That's on my tumbleweed, not on the ubuntu studio that I'm currently on. It's another reason why I took screenshots and you've also got.
01:21:24
Now, when you go to list, you can list out the output input links and if you do the with any of that, you can add a dash capital I to put an ID in front of them. And I found the dash dash verbose or dash V a very good option when you're listing because it gives you verbose port properties, in other words, more information about the different ports. Now PW link does connect or create links between the different ports, so I found that using dash IO was helpful in listing both my input and my output for ports and here you'll see that it's got midi input and output or through ports. I've also got a hdmi stereo that's going to my sanyo tv for the audio going to, and then you've got the analog stereo. All of those are ALSA outputs, by the way, so you can see I'm using ALSA to talk to everything, but the analog has stereo outputs as well as stereo inputs. The basic format for any of those is going to be ALSA underscore. For example, input, dot, pci dash. I don't know if the numbering is going to be the same every time, but it's 0000, underscore 0F, underscore 00.6, then followed by dot analog dash stereo.
01:23:07
For example, colon capture FL for front left and those of you all listening, I'm showing that I've got outputs for HDMI analog stereo and then inputs from my webcam for the audio, for the mic on it, and one that I noticed when I was in tumbleweed was a blues midi, blues underscore, midi, dot server both in and out that looking forward to playing with after the show. And with the third screenshot it's showing where I've listed all the links that I had set up. I used a vlc media player to play an audio file and it shows that it's linked into the elsa output going to my senyo tv, the hdmi stereo playback put, going to my Senyo TV, the HDMI stereo playback, and then it also shows the link coming from the VLC into that. So it shows both methods. The fourth screenshot is where I used the Pipewire PW-Link-LM for list and monitor. That way it's continuously listing out what's happening as you're doing it. For those of y'all listening, it's given me a list where on the far left it either has a plus or a minus. The plus means it's creating a connection. One of those is for a KWIN underscore Wayland colon output one, and that's actually for passing videos. So we are starting to see a video appear in Pipewire and in fact this particular link was actually connected and disconnected when I was moving my mouse cursor between the display and up to the panel to highlight, to select for another screen. As I was doing the outputs I was selecting spectacles to capture each of the screens. So that was interesting.
01:25:26
Now the fifth screenshot that I took is a continuation of that. At the bottom of it, though, you'll see where I had to do a Control-C to stop the monitoring. You'll also see where I used PWLink to connect VLC's front and left output to my computer's line out to my handset, selecting to set audio only to the headset's left speaker. So there I was sitting with audio coming out of my into my left ear while the right channel was coming over the TV. Yeah, so that's some interesting things that you can do with it and definitely play with it. As I said, there's some stuff I want to play with, still with pw link, and the next one I'm going to demonstrate may show how you can connect between those snap devices and flat packs if you have to between those snap devices and flat packs if you have to.
01:26:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, interesting stuff. I've got a command line tip. It's really technical and it's for GitHub. It is for doing something very specific in GitHub, but if you need it, you really need it. So this is to go through and find your unavailable runners. So in GitHub you have GitHub is to go through and find your unavailable runners. So in GitHub you have GitHub, the idea of runners, where you do essentially continuous integration, and so if you're hosting your own runners, one of the things that you can run into is these runners sort of disappear, but they will stick around in the GitHub backend.
01:27:04
And I had a situation with one of my projects where I had like 5,000 of those hanging around and I couldn't add any new runners because we had a script that's lost its mind and continued adding runners when it shouldn't have, and so I went looking for how do you delete these and this is what I came up with. And so it uses the GitHub API and then it does some piping of that through things like XARGs and then back into the GitHub API and it'll just chew through all of those runners that are offline and delete them and get rid of them and it'll do about 2,500 or 5,000 at a time and the GitHub will send you back a message that says you're using the github abi too rapidly, please slow down. So you have to wait for about five minutes and kick it off again. But this really saved my bacon this week and so, uh, I'm putting it here so that I can find it again in the future and so that anybody else that needs it you know where it's at jonathan just does these tips for himself.
01:28:05 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It has nothing to do with you guys.
01:28:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean it's more than once. It's more than once and I've gone man, how do I do this? And gone back to our little spreadsheet to look it up. It's kind of like googling on how to do something and finding your own hackaday article from years ago. Oh yeah, I did write about that.
01:28:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It still works that spreadsheet definitely comes in handy, doesn't it does? Yeah, it's really nice I.
01:28:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I can't lie and say I've had a few of those, I've done something, and then went. Oh, that would be a good tip yep, yep and then found out.
01:28:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You already did gave it as a tip sometimes.
01:28:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Usually I find out, you already did gave it as a tip sometimes.
01:28:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Usually I find out you already did as a tip well sometimes.
01:28:51 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But sometimes it's good to revisit because there's there's. Sometimes we have them as tips. But somebody did a group of tips and there was like six or eight programs all at once and oh yeah, well, let's dig into this one a little more.
01:29:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Or it's one of those where the tip was real brief or real specific and there's other things that you can do with the command.
01:29:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yep, you're going to come back and expand on my alias tip.
01:29:22 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And if there's other options available to use with it, maybe cover the one written in rust.
01:29:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm sure there eventually will be All right. So let's, let's see. Do you guys have anything you want to plug? I know I know Ken does, but we're going to start with Rob, because that's the way we do it. Rob, what do you want to plug?
01:29:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
All right. So first I want to thank one of the fans out there. I won't say his full name, just go by John. He's never said one way or the other, but I don't want to give his whole name if he doesn't want to be, because you know, as you guys all know, I've been really interested in getting a new arm device. Well, he sent me one right here, the new arm device I got. Check this out. New arm beautiful, isn't that so?
01:30:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
my new arm. For those on, well say for those those not on video he held up part of a mannequin arm from the elbow to the hand.
01:30:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So thank you for the great arm device. Otherwise, for other people who want to connect with me out in the interwebs, in the interwebs First, the easiest way is go to my website, robertpcambellcom, and once you're there, you can easily find links to my LinkedIn, which I'm somewhat active on occasionally, twitter, which I'm not so much active on Mastodon that's my most active place and this little cup of coffee here is not a social place on the interwebs. That is a place where, instead of donating arm devices, you can just donate. It's a site to donate coffees. Really, you're just donating five bucks, so donate one coffee five bucks, two coffees ten bucks. Just that's a place where you can contribute back to me for all my hard work I do for you.
01:31:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep, All right Ken.
01:31:35 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I wanted to make sure I was unmuted first, but I want to share an article that Thomas I'm going to pronounce it. Claiborne wrote for the Register about what Firefox has accomplished now that it's 20 years old. I've got the link in the show notes and, after you read it, tell me if you think Firefox is still relevant.
01:31:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Interesting. All right, anything from Jeff.
01:32:02 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I guess you can find me at Mastod, jeff underscore massey. You can also find me on linkedin. You can always go to rob and we're connected and you can find me in there, but jeff jeff massey at linkedin and a little bit of news here. So I've got more poetry but they're not all haikus. So we're going to deviate a little bit but we're still going to have a lot more poetry corner at the end. So for example, for example, this one right here there once was an ancient PC still needed because legacy. When the floppy drive broke it started to smoke. What a pain in the butt for IT. Thank you everyone. Have a great week.
01:32:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's better than your old haikus. I like that.
01:32:45 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I like rhyming if I were the it maintaining it, I wouldn't like it. It happens and that.
01:32:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And I was gonna say the thing is, there's it, people listening to this going, oh, I remember the time that such and such machine broke, and so they can relate yes, yes, um, all right.
01:33:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So I do have one thing that I want to plug and, uh, that is that, uh, you can get half-life 2 for free. So this is the 20th anniversary of half-life 2 and you can get it for free. If you don't have it already, you may already have it. It may already be in your library. If it's not, you can go grab it. Uh, one of the one of the great games has held up very well, and the reason you might really really want to go ahead and grab it is that here, in a few weeks, there is half-life 2 rtx coming out. They're doing a ray tracing refresh of half-life 2, which is going to be really interesting to see, and so it's a free DLC. It's what they're calling a free DLC for everyone that has Half-Life 2 already, and right now you can get it for 100% off. And then, if you want to go and get the other Half-Life things, they're also all on sale. So, if you don't have Half-Life Alyx yet, it's 66% off. So go grab at least Half-Life 2 in your Steam account.
01:34:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And then get ready for some ray tracing goodness here in a few weeks, when that finally comes out.
01:34:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I bet you can pick up Half-Life 1 for almost probably nothing A couple bucks. The original Half-Life is currently on sale for 99 cents 99 cents more than Half-Life 2.
01:34:29
That's true, true. But you might actually be more interested in black mesa, and I don't know if that's on sale. Um, it is on sale. So black mesa is the. It started out as a fan remake of half-life 2, and then valve became aware of it, and whereas nintendo would have sent them a cease and desist letter, valve says, hey, this is really cool. Why don't we call it official? Buy Valve stuff, not Nintendo stuff. And so, anyway, black Mesa is the official remake of the original Half-Life on the Half-Life 2 engine. It's 75% off too. It's only $4.99. Be like Valve. Be like Valve, not like Nintendo.
01:35:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So where do I find a valve controller?
01:35:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
unfortunately those are only available second hand. I've got mine somewhere around here. I don't actually use it that often, but I do I do have it. I really like that, that controller it is.
01:35:18 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
There's a lot of other controller there's a lot of other controllers you can use with valve.
01:35:22 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
True, yeah, most of the nintendo I prefer a mouse and keyboard, but so I do too.
01:35:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, it is true, for for almost everything. There's some things that the controller is really good for, but most everything the mouse keyboard is great. All right, uh, that is it. We've covered everything. We've got the command line tips. Don't forget to scan the qr code if you're not part of the club. See, here's the thing about this. If people are not part of the club, they can't get the video. And if they are part of the club, why would they scan the qr code? Because they already have it. Uh, so if you're watching live and you're not part of the club, scan the qr code. If you are listening because you don't have the video, then come join the club, support twit, get to be part of club to it all kinds of advantages, and it's only about the price of a cup of coffee for a month. We appreciate everybody, everybody being here, those that watch us live and caught us on the download, and we will see you next week on the untitled Linux show.
