Untitled Linux Show 198 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 Fedora 42, ubuntu 25.04, lmde and all kinds of other good stuff. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

00:14 - Leo (Announcement)
Podcasts you love.

00:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
From people you trust.

00:19 - Leo (Announcement)
This is Twit.

00:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 198, recorded Saturday, april the 12th, the Boomer Distro. Hey folks, it is Saturday, it's time for some Linux news and geekery and goodness, it's the Untitled Linux Show. I'm your host, jonathan Bennett. It is of course not just me Today. We've got Rob and we've got Jeff. That makes us the three Linux amigos. Hmm, we're got Rob and we've got Jeff. That makes us the three Linux amigos. We're infamous. Infamous. Infamous means when you're more than famous, non-famous.

00:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Non-famous. Go ahead, Rob. Non-famous I was thinking more of the three compilateers, the three compilateers the three compileteers.

01:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That works too when we're, you know, making up terrible puns based on pop culture references of years gone by. Anyway, there's some stuff going on this week and one of the things that's going to happen about the time this show releases, or maybe a day or two afterwards, is that Fedora 42 is going to go live. We've got the beta out there and in fact the final RC is already out there. So if you really really want to get it, it's available now what the ISO is actually going to be. But Fedora 42 is going to do a final release. It's going to be widely available to the public on the 15th of this month, which is Tuesday, and it's got some interesting things that are coming are in Fedora 42. This is the first release of Fedora that has the full blown KDE edition. It's no longer a spin, it's no longer a second class citizen. Kde plasma desktop edition, which is a terrible mouthful, but that's the name that everyone finally was happy with. So there's that, and there is also the cosmic. Spin is going to be available for those of us that really like wayland and rust and not quite complete software. You can run Cosmic and no, it's still in Alpha. I think the last release of Cosmic was technically still in Alpha and they talked about getting to Beta soon-ish. So you know that's for the adventurous.

02:41
And then of course there's the things that Fedora always does. You know changes to Anaconda, which is the first run installer, and you know things like updates to DNF, a new version of Ruby, a new version of GCC and all of that. One of the interesting things that is here is that they are going to SDL three. It's the software something library. Oh my goodness, I don't remember what SDL stands for. Anyway, that is, that's one of those libraries that gets used, it's like for the backend of a lot of games and such. And I believe that SDL two to SDL three is not a seamless transition and so there's some things in there that they're doing to make that work, and I believe part of that also is like an SDL legacy layer to make old stuff work. So that could cause some problems, but it's in there.

03:37
And then, of course, the updates to KDE and GNOME and all of that stuff. So some really interesting stuff going on with fedora 42 and uh. So I've got a couple of links here in the show to that, uh, to michael's um michael's article on it, on pharonix, and then one of the uh, one of the announcements. The announce is actually off to the fedora 42 beta.

04:01
I don't know when the full-on 42 release announcement is going to happen. It will sooner or later, probably about the time that this actually gets edited and goes live, but anyway, I'm looking forward to it. I will probably. I'll probably wait about a week. That's usually what I do, because you know they do the, they do the freeze right, and then they do the ISO release. There's almost always something that's just ever so slightly not right, that they missed, just it's inevitable, and so it takes a couple of days for that to get worked out. And then there's like this avalanche of updates that gets released because nothing happens during the freeze, and so it kind of makes sense to give it about a week for that avalanche to calm down, and then it's about time to start using it.

04:44 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You don't like to update every day.

04:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't have a problem updating every day. It's just sometimes things are a little less stable than you might like for those first couple of days, just because so much stuff changes all at once. We call that excitement. I mean sure it's exciting. I have a pretty consistent amount of work that I need to get done on a weekly basis and I have deadlines and stuff. So if Thursday night I'm fiddling around with my repo trying to get my computer to boot instead of putting the finishing touches on my security article, it's going to be a bad time.

05:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, that Cosmic release might be a reason for me to jump back to Fedora again. Yeah, rob, running Fedora Cosmic, that'd be fun.

05:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I bet it's going to be a reason for me to jump back to Fedora again. Yeah, rob, running Fedora cosmic, that'd be fun. I bet it's going to be a pretty decent experience. You know, obviously it's not going to have all the bells and whistles that Katie and gnome are going to have, but it should work for most everything and you just go to the command line and fix stuff If you. If like so, like the tools that are not going to be there. It's going to be like configure your network okay, you can do that from the command line. Uh, configure, I don't know bluetooth from the command line.

05:52 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
like there's very few things that it's not going to have, that you can't work around to make work in another way yeah, and if you don't want to use command line, you can still install, like the ubuntu or not ubuntu, I mean the gnome I mean you might be able to. That might be a bad idea yeah, the the gnome uh version of uh. You know, whatever tool you need, I know.

06:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
When I did an early alpha uh, I tried running various uh gnome versions uh good, gd over on the youtubes says, and maybe first name git, I don't know, says so jeff finds dumpster fires exciting. Got it. And I must say, yes, dumpster fires are very exciting by definition, especially if you're a fireman, especially if you're fine, I mean just as any anyone nearby definitely exciting. It's exciting. Closer the more exciting.

06:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So last week's story, I was running the beta and it was a little rough. So you know I'm willing to jump in. It's not my server, it's not my, you know main machine.

06:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Somebody's got to do it, somebody's got to do it.

07:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So, jeff, actually this is a good place to hand it off to you to talk about the ubuntu. You were running ubuntu 2504 last week and we're talking about fedora 42 this week. Wouldn't it be nice if someone were to do a comparison of those two?

07:17 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
it may be a performance sort of way I, I think I know somebody, you know a guy, I know a guy. I got a guy, specifically Michael Larrabelle, over at Phoronix and he's conducted more benchmarking and this time it's on Ubuntu 25.04 beta and Fedora Workstation 42. And both soon to be released and in their final stages of testing. So while Fedora is maybe a little bit ahead, it's not long and Ubuntu is going to be out as well. Interestingly, both distributions are running Linux kernel 6.14. Now, historically, ubuntu would have opted for Linux 6.13 kernel. You know, know, if you look at historically how they pick the kernels. But canonical decided that from this last couple releases they're aiming to be more aggressive with kernel updates and they actually align with fedora for this release quite a bit. Now they canonical and I don't know if it's because they they don't want to backport so much stuff to older kernels or it's the new features or maybe a lot of feedback they've got but they're much more aggressive with their kernel updates. So they're keeping up with Fedora a little more Not completely, but they're not in the dust so much. Now, both distributions will ship with GNOME 48 on Wayland as the default desktop environment, alongside Mesa 25.0, graphics, python 3.13, and OpenJDK 21. And in fact, many software packages are identical between them, meaning there's actually more similarities and differences between them.

09:11
For hardware, michael chose the Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 6, which has an AMD Ryzen AI7 Pro 360 powered laptop, and this machine features an eight core Zen 5 CPU integrated Radeon 880M graphics Now, that's RDNA 3.5 graphics, not RDNA 4. It comes with 32 gigs of RAM and a one terabyte NVMe SSD. Now I thought this benchmarking was kind of intriguing that it was run on a laptop, because typically a lot of his benchmarks are run on desktops or server configurations I mean, that's kind of what we normally see. So I thought it was interesting it was on a laptop. In benchmarking Firefox web browser tests were close, but Ubuntu 25.04 edged out slightly, though Michael notes that it wasa razor-thin difference. Many other tests showed similar margin of results, with Ubuntu 25.04 often coming out ahead, but only within a statistical margin of error. Kernel benchmarks, of course, resulted in a dead heat, showing no significant differences.

10:19
One area where Ubuntu did hold an advantage was code compilation, but it was likely due to the different compiler versions used. So Ubuntu is still running GCC 14.2, which is a stable release, whereas, as Jonathan said, fedora is using GCC 15.0.1. Now it's an initial release that prioritizes new features over optimization. So typically GCC follows a two-step process, first introducing new capabilities, then refining and optimizing compile time in later versions. So this distinction likely accounts for some of Ubuntu's performance gains. So you can also read into that. Fedora will catch up soon when GCC puts out their stable release, when they've optimized a little more.

11:09
Out of 153 benchmarks conducted, Ubuntu technically came out ahead in the overall mean of the results 93 wins to Fedora's 60, but realistically the difference is so small it's largely inconsequential. Realistically, the difference is so small it's largely inconsequential. Most variances, like I said, can be attributed to compiler version and there's a few other software differences and compiler options. For a deeper dive into the full details of the comparison, check out the article linked in the show notes. And when I say full details, you can look at how the different distributions, you know the compiler flags that were used and so you can really see in minute detail the differences if you so desire. But at the end of the day these two distributions are virtually identical for all practical purposes, so no one should be too quick to claim victory or defeat. It's so close and difference is so small, it's all good.

12:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
My turn to forget to unmute the mic. I found this a particularly interesting kind of showdown shootout. There were a couple of tests that were pretty big wins in one direction or the other. Like looking at the last page of this, the LAMPS Molecular Dynamic Simulator, so that's a scientific workload. It was 35% faster on Ubuntu, whereas, say, the SRS RAN project, which I believe is also a scientific workload, 25% faster on Fedora. So there's a pretty, there's a pretty impressive spread there. Um, I I do sort of suspect that jeff is right and as these get some updates we just talked about that sort of tidal wave of updates that's going to happen within the first week for fedora um, I assume that some of the that gap is going to narrow and some of these things are going to get worked out oh, I fully think so, and especially where they're running such similar software.

13:09 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
There's just a few things that I think you could trace that they aren't fully optimized yet and because fedora went with some uh, pre-release software, it's there's still a little rough edges in there. But yeah, like like I said there, was a there.

13:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I said there was a comment that someone made in the Foronix comment section, which is always a fun place to go. Look that Fedora turns on some extra security hardening that maybe Ubuntu doesn't, and that could explain some of the differences too.

13:41 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, and I looked at the compiler options and they are different. I mean, there's a lot of similarities but there are differences in there too and I don't know how much that would have a difference. So not even just saying using different versions of gcc, but just the the decisions made on what flags they wanted to turn on yep, absolutely, it makes a difference, it does, it does.

14:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, rob, you were talking about OpenStreet, I am.

14:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So after over 25 years, our favorite remote command line tool has reached a new milestone. Anybody know what that is.

14:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I do, I do. I have your notes pulled up. Send that out.

14:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It is 10.0. And this time I'm not going, I don't have a trick for you, I'm going to say nope, that's just a number. But I thought you were going to think it was a trick question, but I didn't catch it this time. Anyway, with the new release there are some exciting changes. With the new release there are some exciting new changes with the most pressing issues involved in increased security. And you know, that's kind of a key component of SSH or secure shell, I believe, is what it stood for. Open SSH is what I'm talking about. Uh, open ssh is what I'm talking about, and our most pressing security issue today is obviously quantum computers.

15:12
The speed of quantum computers makes it pretty easy to crack old algorithms, theoretically so. To protect against this, open ssh now uses the hybrid post-quantum algorithm, mlkem. So Milkem, I don't know, 768x25519-sha252. So I think it's like Milkem 768 by 25,000 SHA252. I don't know, but anyway Not quite. And now uses that by default for a key agreement. And then OpenSSH now prefers AES-GCM to AES-CTR mode when selecting a cipher for the connection.

16:01
Support for the weak DSA signature algorithm that's been deprecated already for over a decade, or at least a decade it's finally been removed from Open SSH 10 DATO, so no more deprecated DSA signatures in there. This release also removes the code responsibility for the user authentication phase of the protocol from the per-connection SSHD session binary and then it goes to a new SSHD-auth binary and this, in effect, splitting this code into a separate binary, ensures that the crucial pre-authentication attack surface has been entirely disjointed or into a disjoint address space from the code used for the rest of the connection. So it separates the authentication with the rest of the connection. So it separates the authentication with the security of the connection and with this, having the separation also yields a small runtime memory savings, as the authentication part of the code will now be unloaded after the authentication phase is completed. So once that's done you're just worrying about connection. You don't need to keep that code in there.

17:29
Other things in here there's. A number of bug fixes were also fixed, including one of them, such as disable forwarding for X11 forwarding. That function apparently was failing to actually disable x11 forwarding before, so that was fixed and a number of other bug fixes little features on there, um, not worth going through each one, but all in all it looks like after 25 years open ssh is aging well and still has it going and setting itself up to continue moving forward into the future, which will be quantum computing uh, maybe I have thoughts someday okay, so well, maybe, um, I I I've spent some time thinking it applies to this because of some other work that I've done, and I can fill in a few of the details.

18:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Actually, if we would like, and I think we would.

18:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So are you asking for permission? No, it's my show. I'm telling you what's going to happen.

18:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So X25519, that is a very well known. It's a curve, it's an elliptic curve key algorithm and it is classical, right. So it is considered to be vulnerable to the theoretical quantum attack. And then you've got the other one that they mentioned is um, milcom, as you said, uh, MLKEM768. Um, and that is actually Kyber K-Y-B-E-R. That is what the US government calls Kyber Um, and it is a quantum secure algorithm, or at least as far as we know.

19:24
Now, that's really a pretty new security algorithm for doing key exchange, and for those of you that follow cryptography at all, that idea of using a new algorithm really should worry you. We do not like new algorithms, we like the ones that have been time tested and lots of people have looked at it and it's not been found to have problems. So that's the reason why they use both of these. They put them together so they run the key exchange through one and then they also run it through the other one, the idea being that you would have to break both of them to be able to break the encryption. And so if we're facing a future world where quantum computers really become a thing and you can break the 25519 elliptic curve, well then you still have the quantum secure, you know, milcom 768, as Rob puts it. But if we instead have a future where there wasn't enough time spent on this, Milcom 7-6, on Kiber, and there's a huge problem discovered in Kiber, even if it gets broken, that's fine because you still have the more time-tested elliptic curve and so you would have to break both of them. The question of whether we're ever going to have quantum computers that can actually break this is really iffy to me.

20:52
The problem with quantum computers is you have to have a certain number of qubits. They call it for anything to actually do anything useful, and they can make computers that have very small, like 32 qubits. Well, 32 qubits is enough to like literally, it's enough to factor four down to two or factor nine down to three. Right, that's like literally the sort of the realm that we're in. The problem is, as you add more qubits, you have to get them to all do their thing at the same time. You have to get all the cats herding in the right direction, and so, as you add more and more qubits, that problem becomes more and more of an issue.

21:38
And it's not clear see if I can put this the right way. It's not clear to me and to a lot of researchers that the problem that you have with cryptography. It's not clear which is the harder problem trying to do the you know, the classical analysis to break the cryptography, or trying to manage all the qubits to have have enough system all working at the same time to be able to break the cryptography. Like it may legitimately be a harder problem to make the quantum computer work than it is to just do the math to break the cryptography. And if that's the case, well then quantum computers are never going to be a thing. Now I don't know whether they will or not because it's a question of physics and whether engineers are clever enough to work around this physics problem.

22:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But like it's not a sure thing that we're facing a quantum future where all of cryptography gets broken, I figure, if we're around long enough, you know the human species that you know, someday maybe it's a thousand years, maybe it's multiple thousand years, I don't know. I figure someday you know, anything that's possible is gonna happen. But I don't know that open ssh will still be a thing when that uh, quantum future comes yeah, uh, who knows?

22:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean, maybe we'll just discover some um obscure drug from another planet that people can take and it'll make them smart enough to be able to figure out how to do things like we already have some obscure drugs that makes them think they're folding space.

23:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, a little different.

23:19 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, remember too, when you hear you know they have a computer that has X number of cubits, too, when you hear you know they have a computer that has x number of qubits most of them are for error checking to validate that it hasn't made a mistake, right right.

23:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, coherence, that's the term they use. You've got to get all of your coherent, all of your working qubits to cohere, which essentially means work at the same time, because if you lose coherence then you don't get a useful answer out of the system and it's like a um the the coherence problem. Not only does it get harder the more qubits you have, it seems like um, it's, it's like logarithmic, like it gets harder, faster the more qubits you add to it. Excuse me, not, not logarithmic, exponential, that's the word I want. Yeah, those are different. It seems like it's an exponential problem in and of itself. So that's the quantum corner. So let's talk about Weyland and KDE, and in fact the article that I've got here is Nate Grahamate graham's weekly coverage of all things kde and plasma, and there's multiple things in here. Of course, they're working on plasma 640. They have bug fixes for plasma 6-3. They've got some notable things where uh, plasma, for example, plasma browser integrations now support chrome and firefox variants like liberate wolf and ungoogled chromium when running a flat pack. So some fun stuff going on there. They're continuing to work on night light and changing the brightness. That's like where your computer automatically dims and changes its colors depending on the time of day, it is things like that.

24:59
But the one that really stuck out to me here, something that annoys me about running on Wayland, and that is the session restore protocol has been missing because they couldn't figure out how to do it in Wayland. Folks that have followed us for a while probably know this, but, like Wayland is notorious for bike shedding, the whole design by committee problem. And so, you know, someone comes up with a new idea, hey, it would be great if we could do this in Wayland. And someone else will say well, my distro or my desktop environment doesn't have any need to do that, or I think that's dumb, so nobody should be allowed to do that. You get that kind of thing in Wayland, so there's been some cat herding that's had to happen over there as well, some of that by valve, interestingly enough. But anyway, the Wayland session restore protocol has finally landed in the upstream Wayland repo and K win in the 6.4 work is finally adding support for it.

26:00
And that essentially is when your computer you know you have, say, four or five Chrome Windows and you shut your computer down and you bring it up and you've got it set to open those again currently under Wayland, you just get four Chrome Windows stacked on top of each other, and it has been suggested by people other than me, although I agree with this. That boy, it would be really nice if those Chrome windows would just go right back to where you had them before, and Wayland didn't have any way to do that. It now does, and so the session restore protocol, finally, is going to fix this. You can have your session set up with your windows where you want them to be, and it'll actually work now. It's been a long time coming, and because it's happening in 6.4, it's going to be a while before we actually get it on our machines. But uh, it'll get there, it's coming fun stuff.

26:55 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I don't know if it'll. I don't know if it'd be that long. I bet you by now I I don't know but a seat of the pants based on what we'd previously have seen. History wise, I bet you about june. It wouldn't surprise me.

27:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's going to start rolling out it depends on which district you're running right like fedora well, you'll probably push it. They'll probably push it in fedora 42. Uh, ibuntu 2510, maybe they're 20, 20, 2504. They may not push it midstream.

27:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They may wait until 2510 or if you're stuck on lts's. I think you got 2604 is the next lts.

27:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep it'll be a bit so, but it's coming. That's another one of those things that sort of irritates some of us to no end, and I'm sure some people don't care at all well, did you mention anything about snaps and flat packs there?

27:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I can't remember.

27:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Say something about that at the beginning one of the things is support for um like chrome and firefox derivatives um, and let me see if I can find that again well, I don't know flatbacks, so not not snaps or anything so I don't know how many people are running browsers and flat packs.

28:06 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Normally, I think a lot of people are using the one that comes with it, but if you are, that's likely to get updated much quicker that's true.

28:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't think I would want to run an entire desktop environment inside of a snap or a flat pack or an app image.

28:22 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That just does not sound like a good idea yeah, I guess I was thinking more of the browser, but I suppose it's the desktop environment that needs to get updated yes yeah yeah, well, let's, let's desktop environment a flat pack, that'll be fun but you got rolling releases.

28:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You got fedora will probably pull it in. On the kubuntu side, which is kubuntu with kde, you can run backports. It'll probably get in there so you can upgrade. So there's a lot of ways you can get it, even if your distro doesn't pull it in right away.

28:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yep that's true, that is true, all right. Um, what about magazine jeff? Nobody. Nobody gets magazines anymore. They don't even print magazines anymore, do they? All right? What about magazine Jeff? Nobody gets magazines anymore. They don't even print magazines anymore, do they?

29:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, this is going to be a little interesting here. So Ken has talked about PC Linux OS Magazine in the past, but we haven't mentioned it for a while, and now that the April 2025 issue is out, I thought it'd be a good time to bring it up again, especially for any new listeners. This might be something you'll want to check out. So pc linux os magazine is a product of the pc linux os community. It's published by volunteers. It's released under the this is gonna be a long one creative commons attribution, non-commercial share alike 3.0 unsupported license, which, well, yeah, quite a mouthful, but it really means is that all articles can be freely reproduced by any and all means after they're first published in the magazine, as long as the attribution is maintained for both pc linux os magazine and the original and a link is provided to the original publication. The link in the show notes will take you to the PC Linux OS Magazine website, where you can find several ways to read it. You can download it in PDF, epub or MOBI formats, or you can just check out the HTML version online.

30:24
Now, like a traditional magazine, it starts with an editorial from the editor before moving into regular stories, and this month's issue, the first article covers the shutdown of Skype, but there's also plenty of smaller news pieces, just a few paragraphs long, covering various topics. True to print magazine style, there's even a recipe corner, where this month's featured dish is peck cherry pasta I hope I said that right complete with ingredients and directions and just like a regular recipe in a magazine. There's discussion on progressive web apps, plus a fascinating story about a user who had to delete lines from a text file while working in an extremely confined memory space, leading them to write a custom script. Basically, if you're thinking, well, just fire something up. They had to delete chunks of the OS to actually make it fit into their machine, and so they go into more details, but there was a lot of constraints going on there. It wasn't as simple as you'd think.

31:30
Other highlights in the magazine include screenshots of Linux desktops. There's a lot of you know hey, look at screensaver pictures a lot of stuff like that so that you can get ideas or take pictures and use them for screensavers if you so desire. There was another recipe for banana pudding, tips on getting rid of unwanted files. So how to? Not just a single file, but if you have to go through and do a lot of different things, a lot a lot of different files in there Product review of an IDPRT M610 Pro thermal printer. And, for anyone who misses puzzles in print newspapers or magazines, they got a Sudoku and other puzzles and brain teasers in there, so you can have fun with that.

32:21
Check out the Linux in the show notes to read. This must issue as well as previous editions, and the magazine's been running since 2006. And here this is. This is kind of funny you said this at the start, jonathan, because being that PC Linux OS itself the distribution, they refer to themselves as the boomer distribution. So so a magazine format seems to be rather fitting, so happy reading okay, boomer you?

32:49 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
uh, you said there's puzzles in there. Is there crossword puzzles? I mean, I'm yeah, I'm not a I'm not a fan of crossword puzzles, but a linux crossword puzzle would be cool they.

32:58 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, they got a crossword. They has a crossword puzzle. Word find, sudoku. There was some kind of like jumble or some other thing in there. They had several puzzles in there.

33:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't know how you make a Sudoku Linux-centric or whatever.

33:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It doesn't look like the puzzles are actually Linux-themed. Not even the word find or crossword or anything. Air balance, community creatures, energy, forest, global habitat, healthy observed plants. Nah, man or crossword or anything.

33:25 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Air balance, community creatures, energy, forest, global habitat, healthy observe plants nah, man, I wonder if there's any linux crossword puzzles out there. Maybe I should make them. I'm gonna make a website there you go linux crossword puzzles you could do it.

33:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
The sudoku could be uh, linux, just uh. Make all the numbers powers of two.

33:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Just make all the numbers zeros and ones.

33:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, oh, that would be an interesting Sudoku puzzle. I'm not sure how that would work. It'd probably be pretty easy.

33:59 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I already have like two blocks or four blocks in each quadrant or whatever and then four quadrants you know, because you can't repeat a number, you'd have to have like four blocks total. You'd have to have like a two by two that's right let me guess 0 1, 1 0.

34:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Hey, I solved it a hexadecimal one oh now that could be interesting.

34:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's a good idea I like it.

34:33 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, get on that rob. That seems like a tough uh uh, oh yeah, not, we'll see, not, not for the faint of heart. Well, you could start out easier. You could start maybe octal or something, and you know, work, work your way up to hexadecimal definitely something instead, if anyone's got that idea.

34:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
If anyone wants to run out that idea, go for it. Uh, but under the creative commons, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah license. Give me some credit with attribution.

35:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's the. That's the term.

35:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You went there, it's attribution with the link to this show where we talked about it.

35:16 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So yes, that's all I ask, and I would love to check it out too hexadecimal sudoku puzzles by crazy dad.

35:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's already out there and he didn't even give me credit. He didn't even give you credit. I know that's terrible.

35:31 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You got ripped off, rob he looked into the future, listened to our show and went back in time and yeah, yeah, that's totally what happened. Oh yeah, it also known as super sudoku there's just no such thing as a new idea anymore nope, nothing new under the sun.

35:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's. That's fun, though I like. I like the magazine. Um, I miss, I miss linux magazines like the printed ones. Um, I, I was poor, I was very poor and I still am sort of poor, but I was very poor and counting every penny back when linux magazines were actually a thing, and about the time that I got to thinking that, oh, I can finally afford one, they all went under and stopped printing.

36:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's like yeah, I worked at a place that printed the linux journal so I, you know, got to read that at work, but I think I actually did subscribe, even even though I could read it for free at work, because they're there and I mean, what are you gonna do? I actually was a paid subscriber until they, um, stopped printing and, yeah, they cried are they sad too are they still putting anything out like digitally? Yeah, I don't think it's a full magazine. I think they put articles out though they may.

36:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
They may put a little bit out. It's not much, it's not like it was not real active it looks like there are some, like there's one here from april 10th a couple articles from april 10th a couple articles from april 10th, april 8th, april 3rd, so you know like one or two articles a week yeah.

37:01 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So this one might the p pc linux os might be the one that can scratch the itch, but it it does have a. You know it's got recipes, it's got some other stuff that aren't strictly Linux.

37:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So most stories are Linux and technology.

37:21 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But.

37:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, so I Googled for this and I found Linux magazine and it's got a button here to order print issue and if you click on that, we're're sorry. The page you're visiting no longer exists. Nobody prints magazines anymore. You know what?

37:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I got a great idea for a third-party service, like a service where you can print one-off magazines. It's not going to be cheap, but you can already print books you know, like the shutterfly picture books, on-demand books. You can have like a service like that where, like pc mag ties in with that and all you do is click, order, it sends it to them and yeah, I this is another great idea. Just buy me a couple coffees if you, if you, run with it no, haploeco says that you can.

38:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You can actually buy them. I assume he's talking about lennox magazine. You can buy them at barnes noble. He has march 2025 in his hand right now. So there you go. When you said you had.

38:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
When you said you had the button, you know, I thought it was just going to open your. It just said oh, you know, it opened up your printer or whatever, and then that would be one way to do it.

38:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Print it out, put it together with binder clips.

38:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, it's a magazine another like order staples here. I'm like an affiliate link to amazon.

38:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, all right, uh. So, rob, speaking of speaking of printing, no, pinta, what is pinta? I thought that said printed first. I think we're gonna talk about printing stuff, but now what is this?

39:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
well, pinta, um, it's a graphical program. So you know, we we've hyped up the coming of GIMP 3.0 for years, yes, and you know, now that it's finally here, you know there's nothing else to say about that. It's a great photo editing tool, but if you just want something simpler, maybe something more like Microsoft Paint or Paintnet I guess that's their current incarnation of it. You know, but this is Linux. You can't have Microsoft stuff on Linux. Well, I mean, okay, I guess you can run some things, but I mean, should you really? And anyway, when it comes to tools like Paint, you don't have to because there are great alternatives, like Pinta. So, as I said, Pinta is a graphical tool inspired by Paintnet and this week they haveIMP 3.0 just finally released support for GTK3, penta 3.0 just released, with support for GTK4. So you know, they got that going for them. And then, according to joyce netton, um, the toolkit bump, it's, it's more than just a superficial visual uh improvement it because, with, along with that toolkit bump, usability, performance and stability have improved. Um, any way, for those watching, you can see that's Pinta behind me um, with, uh, the Ontario Linux show, uh logo opened up in it.

41:05
Um, and and you know, with with the 3.0, the changes in Pinta 3.0 include, uh one, a button-based header bar as opposed to the text menus, and honestly, this actually confused me. Uh, when I first started up I I was looking for where's the uh, where's the file and edit and view, and I'm like, how do I get to options? What it's actually? The little uh, you know, this right here has all that right there and that button over on the right, a little hamburger menu, has them. So yeah, like Joey pointed out, some people like it, some people hate it. I was confused by it. So I don't know that that is necessarily friendly to first timers. It's not discoverable and kind of doesn't match the UI, the standard UI that's in the world for you know decades. But whatever, it maybe makes it a little more minimalized, I don't know. Anyway, it also has a new preference option. Let's you manually set dark or light color modes, irrespective of your operating system's current dark mode setting.

42:18
It has both layers and history panels can be collapsed to buttons with their respective options. Instead of surface, instead of surfaced, it's via a pop over which you know allows you to kind of open up that canvas. You know, another thing that's uh surprising here is this has layers and stuff in history which um is, I don't know it's. It's something you necessarily don't see in a lot of real basic ones. You know the old microsoft paint did have that. So it's got a little more features than that. I I'm not really familiar with paintnet. I've heard of it. I know it's their current incarnation, but I don't know anything else about it. Also, features If you open an image file in a format which supports layers and then you try to save it to an image file format which does not support layers, pinta 3 will now let you know hey, the image is going to be flat and you're going to be losing your layers.

43:20
So it's kind of a warning there. A grid can be overlaid in the canvas to help you align things up. And there's also many new effects such as dither, feathering, vignette and dense effects for Rony oh, diagram effects, tile reflection effects, fractal clouds and more. Pinta is available as a snap or flat pack. Flat pack was updated 3.0 already, but at the time of the writing of this, snap was not 3.0, but sometime shortly after that is also updated 3.0, but sometime shortly after that is also updated to 3.0.

43:56 - Leo (Announcement)
So you can get this new version either.

43:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I gave Pinta a try, as you can see here Anyone watching can see at least I gave it a try. I did have some issues with it crashing, like whenever I touched the maximize button it would crash. So, as awesome as it looks, I may wait till 3.1. And, as a responsible open source user, once the show is done I'll have to see if there is a bug report for this and, you know, maybe follow up on that, as this is repeatable on Linux Mint with Flatpak. You know, let me just give this a shot here If I do this. Oh gee, look at that, it went away. So a very repeatable bug right there. It's not supposed to do that. No, I kept doing it, I kept opening it. I'm like where'd it go? And I figured out oh, it's crashing every time I hit that.

44:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You got to run it under GDB now and figure out where exactly it's crashing. Get the backtrace, go fix it and send them a pull request.

45:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I only installed it today and haven't had a chance to get much further than to figure out that this is crashing when I do this. So before the show, I just didn't do that. You can still minimize and maximize by grabbing the corner and artificially, you know, dragging it to the edges uh-huh, yeah, yeah, that's that's, that's, that's a no, that's a no from me, dog, no thanks artificiallyized, naturally crash yeah I don't know.

45:36
You know that's a, that's linux mint under cinnamon. I don't know if it's just a bug it has with cinnamon. If it's a bug it has with flat pack version, where that bug is. I haven't tried out other distros or anything else yet.

45:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Um, definitely curious to see and there's a reasonable chance that once you reboot the machine it'll never happen again. I haven't tried that even come on, man, that's the first thing you try and you call yourself.

46:02 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I was very slow on my notes, uh, on all my stuff. Today I was. I was doing it right up till um, you know, right before the show. I was just finishing finishing up, which is not me. Normally I finish several hours. I'm I'm well prepared and and and yeah, I, I didn't even finish till barely. I was like sweating, I was like I'm running out of time here.

46:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right. Well, there was something that happened this week on the Linux kernel mailing list that really caught my attention because I saw the headline. I saw the headline over at Foronix and I went what, what is that? How does that even make sense? How is that a thing? And it is virtual swap space. But really why? Okay? So swap space?

46:50
It's the idea of we're going to take part of the hard drive and we're going to reserve it to be able to move things out of memory into it. So you've got your processes happening in memory and the kernel keeps track of that and it'll see hey, something in memory is stale, it's not been accessed for a long time. Well, we're going to unload it out of memory and put it on the local hard drive and then we can reclaim all that memory and pretend like we have way more free memory. Swap space pretty typical. How does it make sense for that to be virtual? Because the idea of something being virtual is that you would just put it in memory. So, like, how does it make any sense to swap something out of memory into other memory when it's all the same memory? I was very confused by this, so I actually went and read the LKML message, and it turns out that there are some reasons why you might want to do this, why you might want to have virtual swap space, and essentially what they're talking about here is, rather than just having a very strict mechanism where you have your swap spaces physically on the disk, it is split up into sections. Each of those sections is numbered and then in, like your actual physical memory, when you move something from one to the other, you just you put the number in a table. So essentially it works like a pointer, right, they're saying well, let's make it a little bit smarter than that, a little less one-to-one than that, so that you can do interesting things with it.

48:20
So I started looking at what are the interesting things they're talking about doing and a couple of ideas here that were actually really fascinating. One is Z-RAM Z-RAM as a swap mechanism instead of like a global Z-RAM. So Z-RAM, that is LZ compression. That's what the Z is from and that is the idea of well, let's compress the things that are in memory so that you can fit more in there. And so the idea here would be that you've got sections of memory that are compressed and sections of memory that are not compressed and you get to swap things between those two and it's like, oh, that's really interesting. One of the other ones was what they call multi-tier swapping and that is like if you have multiple places to store things and some of it's faster and some of it's slower, you can swap out of memory. Maybe eventually you could swap out of cache, even you could manage your cache a little bit more directly, but you would then swap from memory to, say, an SSD, and the things that are really stale on the SSD you could swap out to a slower drive. Swap out to a slower drive. Some really interesting things you could do there. And then yet another idea that is being worked on here is file compaction to alleviate fragmentation. Defragging your swap file is something else that this could support in making this a bit smarter and moving to a virtual swap. So really interesting stuff.

50:00
They do say that with this first proof of concept code, it does slow things down ever so slightly. It's actually not a whole lot, but this is a proof of concept code. This is not gonna get merged to the kernel the way it is now. Um, but this was a developer throwing it out as an idea, basically saying oh well, what do you think about this? Does this seem like an interesting approach? Um, and you know people have questions. They, they, uh trying to figure out again what the impact is going to be on speed, on, uh, you know, the regression as far as, uh, how fast things happen. What's gonna? What it's gonna mean for using up more space and memory or less, all kinds of interesting stuff. So I don't know if this is actually going to land in the kernel, but it is a uh, it's a really fascinating idea virtual swap space. It's crazy when you first hear it I'm glad you covered that.

50:59 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I was. I was looking into the story too and it was. It was on my list, I was gonna try to do it, but I was reading it and I didn't. I could not follow as as well as you dug into it what was really going on. I mean, I just just the fact that you know, swap's been kind of swap for years and I thought if there could be like some new, advanced improvement to it, that would be slick. So that was my, my initial thought, like it's like oh, wow, they're gonna do something to swap and it's like I don't, I don't, I don't get it, I don't know what's going on here. I'm sure it's cool, but I I don't have time to figure it out. As I said, I was doing notes right up to the show time I saw it and I thought it mirrored physical memory.

51:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So if you look at, you have multi layers of cache, you have different layers of memory, so you just don't have the ram you have. If you look into, like cxl, you have distributed ram where you can. It's slower but bigger and you can share it and you know, then you can start getting into data compression if you get on the, on the drives, and so it's to me it kind of mirrors that uh, same, same kind of architecture. I mean you could it's, or at least conceptualize it that way yeah, it's um I.

52:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think that is very similar to what they're talking and maybe some of those things directly. You know Intel has like the Intel Optane. That was sort of a similar idea to this and maybe it could reuse this as well. But you know, who knows, we may see a future where you can once again buy an expansion car that has ram soldered onto it, right, and so you have a slightly slower bit of ram that hangs off of your pci express bus. You could put you know 256 gigs of ram there and it's only slightly slower than your main system memory faster than a regular swap on a drive.

52:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yep, I think I would say you have a card that would maybe go into a router or a NAS, but you would have, say, 10 gigabit network at home and that drive could be shared by everything you start using, like CXL protocols where you can have a shared memory pool so all your systems could use it.

53:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, depending upon what you're doing, that can totally make sense too.

53:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And that way you're not putting a card into one system, you're putting that card into that NAS or whatever that central place, your router, you know if it's got an expansion port, and then you buy one and it works for all your machines. I can see that. Yeah, because they're already doing that in the server level.

53:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, To save on memory, and we know that things that happen in enterprise level do eventually trickle down and we get to see them in some consumer hardware. So I could see it yeah.

53:50 - Leo (Announcement)
Yeah.

53:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right. So what about Flatpak? What about the corrupted file object issue in Flatpak?

54:02 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, I basically came across an article I thought would be really helpful for anyone dealing with Flatpak update errors, especially if you've encountered a corrupted file object issue. You've encountered a corrupted file object issue. Since FlackPack is a widely used packaging format, running into these errors can be frustrating, but how do you fix them? The article linked in the show notes walks through the process of troubleshooting this exact issue. The author actually encountered the error firsthand and decided to document the steps they took to resolve it, and the guide is structured in a step-by-step format, making it easy to follow along. Basically easiest things first, and as you get more and more down the rabbit trail and things aren't getting fixed, you progress into the harder and less obvious things. So the article highlights several reasons why Flatpak updates might fail, which would include things like corrupted Flatpak runtime files, checksum mismatches, low disk space, flathub mirror issues and even network connection problems. So, like I said, it provides a clear troubleshooting guide and it's got the command line commands. So if you're not 100% sure or you know, it's just nice sometimes to be able to cut and paste even if you know what you're doing. So you have less typing to do Because, as people that probably deal with computers a lot. Sometimes it's nice to cut and paste rather than type, because we're kind of lazy that way, yeah.

55:28
But anyway, first step was just try repairing Flatpak and the first suggested fix is simply running flat pack repair command and, just like it sounds, flat pack space repair. Basically it checks and attempts to fix corrupted files and if it reports invalid objects on a dry run you may need to manually remove them. So he he does go in a little more detail about that. But you know removing corrupt runtimes. If the repair command doesn't work you can force remove the problematic runtimes. And then he goes into reinstalling the corrupted runtimes that you you know that you remove. Now you got to put the ones, the proper files, back in.

56:17
So he goes through how to reinstall them. He does go through how to check your disk for errors if you're still experiencing issues and you're not able to update yet. So he talks about how you can check your disk to make sure there isn't something else going on there. Now he does mention sometimes using a different flat hub mirror helps and he gives an example of switching to a different flat hub mirror that might resolve your issue. The next thing would be check your network connection just to make sure everything's stable, you don't have dropped packets, there's nothing causing corrupted downloads and as a last resort, if nothing else fails, he goes through on you how to completely purge and reinstall flat pack. So ever, all the necessary commands are included in the article, making it easy to follow and basically it's an easy way to get your flat pack applications running smoothly again. So you can check out the full article in the show notes good to know.

57:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Um, I don't think he actually mentioned it, but one of the things he mentioned it in the top part but then not in the examples and, uh, that is using df disk free to make sure that you're not out of hard drive space. Yeah, computers, computers, even linux computers, do very weird things when you're out of hard drive space on either your root partition or your user. You know, like your your slash home partition things.

57:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You don't have to be a hundred percent out. You start, you know you get 90 percent full. You're, you're gonna start maybe even 85 to up well, that depends on.

57:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Bigger drive is, if you got like a 20 terabyte drive and you're 90 full, you still got a lot of space well, it depends upon your file system type, because some file systems actually have part of it reserved for various things, so you can get errors from that. Uh, some file systems store large files in a different format than they do small files. I think BetterFS does this, and so you can run out of one of those types of storage before the other, and so your drive will show that it's still 10% free, but you can't put any more files on there.

58:33 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, once you cross I would would say even 80 you better start looking for cleanup bigger drive, move you, move some files do.

58:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
start taking preventative action yeah, like use a bleach bit you could that's a tip that we had in episode.

58:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I have no idea you know, um, there's a, there's a command line command I think it's ncdu that we'll go through and show you like the oh yeah percentages that each folder is, and so you know you can. You can drill down and figure out like, oh, I forgot, I had a steam folder on there with 100 gigabyte game installed. I can get rid of that. Yes, been there, done that. Or, oh, I have a. I have 15 old fedora isos that I can delete. Uh, stuff like that.

59:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's very useful for finding those things that are taking up switch room on your drive see, rob, you need a soundboard that has kind of a robotic garble to it so you can say, oh yeah, that was an episode. And then it looks like you knew exactly what you're talking about and something happened to the network connection and there you go.

59:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's fun. All right, let's see what is up next fresh mint. So rob and I kind of uh, we kind of dueled in the notes over which one of us got to talk about this. Rob had it first and then I added it, and then I noticed that Rob had it. I was like, okay, fine, I'll go find something else. I did not even know that you added it, I did yeah, went back and looked I was like, oh, I should go look at what the other guys have, and saw that you had that story.

01:00:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I got that story.

01:00:17
It's like oh yeah, maybe you'll have a bit to add to it then, if you uh have looked into it at all. Yeah, uh, so, yeah, you know, obviously we all know there are a lot of, uh, linux mint fans out there in the world, uh, but over the past couple of years, you know, I've seen many of those fans pushing people towards the linux mint debian edition over the default ubuntu based edition, just because people you know are disgruntled over ubuntu or whatever you know, but they like the debian edition. So linux mint has long been known as the easy button version of linux. I mean, okay, I guess I maybe I coined that specific phrase here, I, but you know what I mean. Um, it's been known as being easy, you know, at least for Windows users, and it's one of the Linux desktops that you know many say Windows users will be most comfortable with. But being easy isn't the only limitation Linux has to the masses. You know I've long said that one of the big issues is OEM deals. So unfortunately I am not here to announce any major OEM deals, oem deals with Linux Mint Debian Edition 7, or with Linux Mint.

01:01:33
But Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 will be getting support for an oem install. Uh, this will pre-install linux mint debit edition on uh onto devices so it's ready, ready to use for its first startup. So like when you buy a new computer with windows or something else, windows is installed but you still go through a wizard for your first startup. So I mean what they're going to see, what you know, if someone installs the oem for somebody like maybe they're set up for somebody else or they are an oem uh end user will receive the device and will be ran through a first-time wizard to specify location, language and keyboard layout, host name. You know the computer name, username, login and password and then they'll reboot and away they go without the complications of putting Mint on a USB and then getting it to boot up and figure out why can't I boot from the USB and you know all the other complications from that. You know, let your techie friend get that for you and you can do your first-time startup. Or maybe you want to refurbish a bunch of laptops or something. Use this and give it to them. They got a fresh Mint computer.

01:02:52
Linux Mint later said the team is working on adding support for keyboard layouts and input methods to the Wayland session of Cinnamon desktop environment. But as we've said before, right now on Linux Mint Cinnamon, the Wayland session is still considered experimental and I've been using Linux, the standard version of Linux Mint, for a few months and you know I don't want any spoilers for my final review, but it's been pretty good and Linux Mint DE7 should keep that momentum going forward. You know, and there's some other new features coming, such as Linux Mint expanding the Regex file search in Nemo so that way they can make it easier. The new filters allow you to search and sift and surface files using regular expressions, so of you know, typing a word and whatever, you have a lot more control of how to search things through their their nemo file manager. So that is another thing that is coming.

01:04:12
So a lot of good things coming to linux mint in the future coming, so a lot of good things coming to linux mint in the future. And since you've also been digging into this, um, jonathan, do you have some more uh any any other uh nice features or touches on this?

01:04:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
that, uh, that I missed yeah, well, you may have touched on it, I don't remember, but lmde is getting the OEM install option, and I found that to be particularly interesting.

01:04:39
I've heard several distros talking about this. The Fedora guys were talking about doing something similar, and it's sort of challenging to do right, to do it well, because this is not a thing that, like KDE, is not designed to have an OEM install. Gnome is not really designed with this in mind, but the idea is that you would do a Linux install but then you would stop it before you set any users up, and then you would get a first boot, sort of dialogue, first boot experience, where the system would then say, hey, welcome to your new linux laptop. Uh, give us your name, set a password and then probably do a reboot after that. Um, so that you know the end user can, uh, can, can, set the system up for themselves, but you get linux out of the box, which is really interesting. Um, I find it fascinating that multiple distros are sort of moving in that direction to support that.

01:05:38 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's like I said. It's like if you buy a new computer from the store, Windows or whatever is already installed. You just have to go through that first-time wizard.

01:05:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I wonder if this is happening because people are more and more annoyed with Windows 11 and more and more vendors are thinking about shipping with Linux.

01:06:01 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Wait till those advertisements hit yeah.

01:06:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I guess, Wait for that.

01:06:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I kind of wonder how that would be like in a I mean, like a real OEM. Is they probably have more automation than you know, plugging in the USB drive and installing it? I would like to think they do. Maybe they don't, you know, maybe they're using more of well, probably flashing or something. I suppose that's probably one thing you could do. You could probably install it, probably install it, and if the oem version and then you know you haven't gone through any of that customization, you could probably take that as your golden image, as they used to say, and then just copy that over and over.

01:06:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So yeah, that would that'd be the way to do it, mass, I suppose yeah, you, you probably want to do a little bit of cleanup on that image. So the one of the things that first off comes to mind is you want to make sure that your SSH key is not generated on your golden image. Multiple companies have gotten in trouble for doing that sort of thing before.

01:07:05 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean that really depends yeah, I mean that kind of depends on how well this OEM install works, because I guess you could if you're doing like one-offs over and over, but I guess I would hope that the way they're making this, you know if they're really making this for OEMs, they're making it so that way you could do the golden image in that and that is not something that's there. So that would be something interesting to check on.

01:07:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Let's just say, after covering security for a few years, that's, that's what to mind. That would be easy to forget and kind of bad to be left in there.

01:07:44 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Even though you said GNOME and KDE aren't really set up for that. I think if you had somebody like Adele or Lenovo that said we really want to do this, I think they could easily come up with a solution and go okay, here's your right.

01:07:59 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, there's an image there's got to be. I mean you could buy like an uber 2 from dell. It's I've I've never done it, but I imagine it's pre-installed and and you have some kind of oem, uh, startup like this, yeah.

01:08:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure the way that they do it is on first run rather than like a desktop manager. You get a, you get a welcome, you know let's set you up, and so it's just. It's just a different service that runs rather than either GDM or SDDM. So I mean, like that part of it is not too terrible it's. It's then sort of a question of well, do you want your desktop environment to be able to do this? Do you want that built into kde, or do you want every desktop manufacturer to have to build their own?

01:08:49 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
uh, well, I wonder if you really even need to build that into the desktop environment itself necessarily, or if there could be like an OEM pre-installer that could be used across distributions.

01:09:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you could. You could do it that way, and there might be one, I'm not sure. I've not looked terribly deeply into this, I just know that I've seen it. So I lurk in one of the Fedora forums, their matrix room, and I know the Fedora KDE guys were sort of complaining about this just the other day that OEM mode is hard. I don't remember all the details, but it was about this, like there's issues trying to get this done and they're figuring out how to do it.

01:09:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, that's the Linux men guys. Apparently they haven't figured it out. Linux men guys.

01:09:33 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
They got it Apparently they haven't figured it out, but I can see it becoming more of a thing just because, as you know, windows seems to be torquing more people off. They're going to have that desktop monitoring software. They're talking about ads and Linux is not near as I mean you can, just for the average user. You don't need to get into the command line anymore.

01:09:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I have another great idea business opportunity.

01:10:00
This is something multiple I mean many of us can do this, but with windows 10 ending life and windows 11 not supporting a lot of these not too old computers, a lot of people are just getting rid of their old computers and buying new ones and with that there may be a lot of people are just getting rid of their old computers and buying new ones, and with that there may be a lot of people you know getting rid of those, obviously, and you can have a service you take and recycle those for free and then you take this OEM and you resell them with Linux Mint OEM resell them with Linux Mint OEM. So you're helping the environment and you're helping your wallets all in the same. And you're helping Linux.

01:10:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think people have tried to do that with varying degrees of success.

01:10:50 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But I think right now is a bigger opportunity. Yeah, it's maybe not a new idea, but for those not thinking about it, right now might be the perfect time for that. Windows 11 and Windows Microsoft however, they're really hardcore cutting off. They could be a little hardcore cutting off. There are workarounds.

01:11:16
Trying to get rid of the local account pushing ads in the start menu but I mean, if you, if I'm just, I mean that all stuff sucks too, but I mean just using your old, keeping your old computer supported. You know, right, right right, they don't officially support windows 11. There are workarounds to get that old computer to run Windows 11, but there's also the warning, the caveat, that it's not officially supported. Theoretically, microsoft could break that really at any time. I don't think that's going to happen, but it could. I mean they're saying they're not supporting it, whatever happens on you after that point.

01:12:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You could even have a mobile service, just you want your machine to either bring it into our shop, or else, hey, we can stop by your house for a nominal fee and install it and get you on your way.

01:12:16
I don't want to sit in somebody's house for that long I've done IT work at people's houses before. It's never fun. No, thank you. That's not a fun day. It's bad enough having to sit in somebody's office waiting for their computer to install updates. Sitting in their house is just a special kind of bad, and I've done it multiple times. I've spent multiple hours sitting in people's houses looking at their computers.

01:12:37 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I have employees that do that on a regular basis.

01:12:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The most fun quick IT story with Jonathan time. The most fun I've ever had with one of those was the time when someone complained that their computer was just randomly shutting itself off, and so I popped the case to look at it and I discovered a layer of dust inside. But on the CPU cooler itself there was a layer of dust with a layer of red over it and I was looking at that and I said what is that? And then I looked up and the color of their ceiling matched the color on the cpu cooler. What happened is they painted their ceiling with a spray gun and they left their computer running at the same time and that computer sucked that paint in and absolutely made just really good thermal insulation on top of the cpu cooler. Dust and then paint on top of it, sealing it all together. Man, the thing was waterproof. You could have put that on a boat and would have been good. So peeled that off.

01:13:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They didn't have any problems afterwards that's the warning for today if you're painting where your computers are turn your computer off first goodness. So you were able to peel that off, though, uh, I suppose not not too easily or not too difficult, I guess, with uh, yeah, I was able to get it going nice yeah, amy.

01:14:05 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Amy wang, listening from linkedin, says that, uh yeah, side hustle. So I mean I'm thinking if you're 16 or something, this would be a great way to make a little extra money and just some word of mouth, get people hooked up, you know.

01:14:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep, you can do it. You can do it. I will say be careful, just generally speaking. Be careful about going into people's houses, like just especially as a 16-year-old.

01:14:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Just be circumspect of the ways that that could go wrong yeah, I like the idea of more of being a recycling service and then doing the work in your own home and then re-sell, distribute whatever. Yeah, and actually I know there are services like that. Uh, shout out in my area there's something called pcs for people, where they take in computers and and I think they sell them for pretty cheap too. I think generally low income, I think, is their target, but so I guess there already are services like that we.

01:15:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
We have something like that as well, where, uh, pc for kids and a lot of they'll, they'll take a lot of enterprise computers that you know just basic desktops are not ever going to be really great gaming machines or anything like that, but for a kid that you know very low income or whatever. They can surf the web, they can do their homework, they can, and they either give them away or else they're like super, super cheap for underprivileged kids.

01:15:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There is a project and I fiddled around with this and very quickly came to the conclusion that it was not worth continuing to work on. But it actually worked. I forget what it was called, but it was like an application, you know. It was a package you could install, I think, in Fedora that would grab a Fedora image, set up like a DHCP and then PXE server, and then you could just you could hang a whole bunch of laptops off of a dedicated network port and it would Pixie boot Fedora on all, all of those laptops. And it was designed, you know, for having a computer lab, um, and I made it work once and like it was kind of one of those deals where it's like somebody had a bunch of laptops, they're wanting to do it. It's like this is janky enough, took me a lot long enough to work on to get it working and these laptops are slow enough that, no, this is not a good idea, but it did make it work once.

01:16:37 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It was pretty cool you know what I would like to see. Uh, let's see what I call this. Like linux, mint, oem, pixie boot server, where you do that and you'd want to have this on isolated network because you wouldn't want, like any device, to pixie boot into it. But like where all it does is it boots up and it, you know, once you and the default and maybe the only thing is you know pixie boots into it and the only option is oem. So even if you do nothing, it eventually boots into it and just goes through the whole process all by itself. So all you have to do is make sure it pixie boots and then it would go through the whole process of installing the oem version.

01:17:20
You can see that that would make it real easy to do uh, in in bulk yeah but you, you wouldn't necessarily want to run that on a live network and have somebody plug in their computer and accidentally do an oem install over whatever they've got.

01:17:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, no, that'd be bad. That might be a big liability concern, but that's that's how you end up in the doghouse for a few nights, all right well let's get this command line tips. We've got jeff up first and his command line tip is cheat.

01:17:52 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I'm very curious yeah, that's right, I'm a cheater, so my command line tip for today is cheat. Now we previously talked about tldr command, which is you too long didn't read. So it's kind of the cliff notes version of the man page, because some man pages have a huge amount of details options, but a lot of times you just need four or five out of the 100 listed. Now Cheat is like that, but Cheat's an even more extensive collection of cheat sheets. It crowdsources content, pulling in the TLDR pages, stack Overflow posts and other resources and then combines them into an easy read format. Now there's two ways that you can use cheat. The first is you can use it without installing anything, by using curl. For example, if you want to check out a well-known tar cheat sheet, just type curl, space, cht, period, sh, slash tar. So it's basically just pulling in their website the sheet for tar. Now they also talk about in the article.

01:19:01
You can create an alias and add it to your bashrc file so you can simplify it a bit. But I think an even better approach is the installable Go version. Now, since I'm a Debian based system, I installed it it via Snap. Just a sudo, snap install cheat. That's all it took. Alternately, you can also install it using Go. So there's a you type Go space, install space, githubcom, slash cheat, slash cheat, slash, cmd, slash cheat, and then the at symbol latest.

01:19:42
So now, once installed, all you need to do is type cheat, followed by the command you want to look up, so you kind of think of it like a supercharged TLDR. The installed version provides extra lookup options, you know. So you can find things exactly. You can not only find exactly what you need, you can make it look how you want. Plus, you can even add your own custom cheat sheets, so you can you can grow it just on on your system. So check out the article in the show notes for all the details and happy cheating. Check out the article in the show notes for all the details and happy cheating.

01:20:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I like it. I will have to remember that one. I love the fact that it's just. It's based on curl. You can do it with just curl, nothing to install. That's. That's really slick.

01:20:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I tried them both and I like the installed version better.

01:20:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, I mean so that makes sense, that it's going to be a better experience when it's installed. But just the fact that you can go to any computer that's got curl installed which is going to be almost every linux machine and just pull it up, and not without having to install anything, that's pretty cool, oh yeah, I thought so yeah, all right. Uh, rob, you've got a tip for us as well. Well, sponge.

01:20:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Sponge is mine, so Sponge. So it's a what the Sponge does. I should add, this is another command in my more util series. So, like I said, this is Sponge and what it does is it soaks up standard input and write to a file. So for those watching, this one's going to be a little bit complicated to explain because it may not make sense why you would need this at first, but we'll get there. So let's just do a quick example for those watching.

01:21:30
If I do sponge Sponge file one dot TXT and right now it's just going to read my standard input Hello, yo, let's end. So I'm going to do a control D, d to end it, and I should do another line before I ended it. But now if I cat file one, it's got that in there. Now where this gets more exciting is if you pipe it to something. Now, for example, if you do cat file one dot text that I just made file one dot text that I just made, pipe that to sponge, we'll call that sponge file two. It's going to basically cat file one and it's going to sponge, is going to suck that up into file two. Now that seems the same as redirecting, right, which is pretty much, you know, the same as if you did something like cat file one dot text, redirecting it to file three dot text. Now, in effect, those two will provide the same result. But if I were to do something like cat file one and redirect that to file one, that does it as a stream. So what that means is it's going to cat file one and then start streaming that into itself into file one. But when it opens that it's starting the stream at the beginning, so it's going to wipe the whole file out. It's starting the stream at the beginning, so it's going to wipe the whole file out. Now, all of a sudden, that cat is catting nothing and basically I just blanked that file into nothing.

01:23:22
So if I wanted to actually take action on it before writing back to itself, I would want to use the sponge. So, for example, if I'm doing this and then sponge, so if I'm doing cat file one dot text, piping it to sponge file one dot text, first it's going to cat it, the whole file and it's going to sponge it up. So basically it's going to put it all into you know what a hidden variable or whatever inside there's going to take all that and then, after it has everything that's piped into it. It's going to close file one and then it's going to write it to file one and of course, right there it's not going to be changed. But now if I want to take action on it, if I want to cat it, pipe it to say, grab and do this and and then sponge that output up and input it back into the very same file that you originally catted, you won't run into that problem of messing up your stream as you are working with it. So it'll do all the work and then it will write it up.

01:24:36
So it's complicated to understand. Hopefully you understood it. So it'll do all the work and then it will write it out. So it's complicated to understand. Hopefully you understood it. If not, you could read the show notes and dig in deeper and try to figure out what I didn't make clear to you.

01:24:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right. So I've got one. It's fairly well. I say it's fairly simple. This is actually a fairly complicated program. I've started working it to wrap my brain around it and it was.

01:25:05
It was sort of I found it because I went to look for a midnight commander alternative for someone. Someone was like I want to be able to see the files in the folders. It's like, well, I remember the old midnight commander on the command line that lets you do that. I bet somebody has done something similar and, uh, someone has and it's ranger and it is installable with the command line from all the machines I've tried it on. So you know it's available on fedora, it's available on pop os, probably others, and it is very much in the vein of Midnight Commander and it lets you go through your files and folders visually run in the command line.

01:25:45
It will launch files. You might have to do a little bit of work setting it up to get it to launch the way that you actually want it to, but it has some neat stuff. It can also even do file previews. It can do image to text to get like ASCII art out of images Some really cool stuff that Ranger can do if you want to spend the time to set it up.

01:26:12
So I wanted to let folks know this is a tool and it's probably also a toy for me it's probably gonna be more of a toy than a tool, um, but that you can put into your tool slash toy box and have some fun with it. Uh, ranger, it's githubcom slash Ranger, slash Ranger, uh, or, like I said, dnf or apps probably can just install it without a problem. So there you go, fun stuff. All right, that is the show. I'm going to let each of the guys get in the last word. If they want to Plug whatever they've got to plug, give us poetry. If they have poetry ready to go, we're going to start with Rob and hope that he doesn't have poetry. Rob, that is the perfect way to go with the Vogon joke. Just mute yourself, save ourselves.

01:27:01 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So my poetry for the day is go to robertpcampbellcom and from there you can connect with me at LinkedIn. Am I linked here? I have a LinkedIn button there. I have a Twitter button there, I have a Twitter button there, I have a blue sky button there and I have a Mastodon button there, and on the very left I have a spot where you can donate coffee. I know that poem didn't rhyme. It's not that kind of poem. It's more like one of those emotional poems where you just kind of let your emotions flow.

01:27:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So, yeah, come connect with me. There's a, there's a great quote from, uh I forget who exactly it was. So somebody said, uh, avant-garde that's a famous French word for terrible, or it doesn't know how to rhyme or doesn't know how to sing, it goes something like that, and I think of that every time I hear somebody do one of those terrible poems or weird songs or you know all of 20th century music, just about, uh, yeah, avant-garde anyway, chef don't really have anything.

01:28:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So poetry. Computer is broken. Help desk number forgotten Grabbed the sysadmin Only heard crickets, For at last he had submitted no tickets. Have a great week, everybody.

01:28:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Very good, appreciate you guys being here. Thanks so much. All right, and you can find my stuff primarily at Hackaday. That's where the security column goes live on fridays. That's where floss weekly lives these days, and so if you want more of me, you can go there to find it. We appreciate everybody that's here, and if you found us through twit, which would be all of you, you should really check out uh, club twit. It is the way to support, it's the way to get ad free versions of this show and all of the shows on the network, and it's only about the price of a cup of coffee per month. Really worth it. You should look into it. We appreciate everybody that's here and those that watch us, both live and on the download, and we will see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show.