Untitled Linux Show 202 Transcript

Please be advised that 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)
This week we cover the Snapdragon laptop, linux performance, the latest on the Raspberry Pi and some changes coming to Debian. Oh, gnome has a new executive director, who isn't a professional shaman this time. Ubuntu 25.10 is going all in on Rust and the kernel is finally dropping support for the i486. A lot more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

00:25 - Leo Laporte (Announcement)
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit.

00:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 202, recorded Saturday, may the 10th. It's boring until it breaks. It's Saturday, folks, and you know what that means. It's time to get geeky with Linux. We're going to talk about all the news, some open source stuff, some hardware stuff. It's Saturday, folks, and you know what that means. It's time to get geeky with Linux. We're going to talk about all the news, some open source stuff, some hardware stuff. It's going to be fun. Let's dive in. It's not just me, of course. I've got Mr Rob and Mr Ken and we are going to have some fun here on the Untitled Linux Show. I think I forgot to say the name of the show. It's the untitled linux show episode 202 yes, welcome guys.

01:07
So we, uh we we talked before the beforehand that it was sort of a light news week. Do we still feel like it's a light news week?

01:14 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I didn't have any problem finding stories I, I didn't have any problem finding uh stories. In fact, uh I found quite a few that were about the same subject I found my stories.

01:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It just it just didn't have the drama that I like to bring there's I.

01:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I see no downsides here. This is a good thing.

01:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I thought a little. I found a little drama, at least a flashback sub drama I found some exciting drama.

01:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, I like boring stuff. I would prefer to talk about the boring stuff. Things are good, we're fixing bugs, we're introducing new features. Boring, yeah. No, you guys got to bring the drama you don't need a show for that, I suppose well, let's see if we can find some drama in the x elite, the snapdragon chips and rob. What's going on there?

02:01 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
there's probably I mean there's probably drama there, but really I'm just here to bring the excitement, because I mean it was around this time last year when we really started talking about and getting excited for the Snapdragon X Elite laptops At that time. We're coming out soon. They came out in June. Yeah, we still don't have an X Elite laptop powered by Linux out of the box. Tuxedo Computers announced last year they were working on one, but that hasn't materialized yet. So we're stuck making do with the Windows 11 X Elite laptops, making them work for our needs. I haven't had one yet, but for those who do, they're making them work for their needs Because I haven't got enough copies donated. But anyway, you know, unfortunately for that we have had Canonical with Ubuntu. They've been working hard, they've been working on the issue. I don't know how how they've been working, but um from the distribution side providing ubuntu 24.10 developer preview images for the x elite chips.

03:12
And so michael over at pharonix, he decided finally you know it's been almost a year finally let's purchase the acer swift 14 um and benchmark to see what the current state of things are. He goes through. There's some issues here and there. Apparently some things aren't fully functional yet, like the power management handling evidently isn't properly wired up yet, evidently isn't properly wired up yet and under load the laptop would get incredibly hot, to touch to the point where the system would turn itself off during the benchmark. Fortunately, most of us aren't taxing our systems like that. We're not running benchmarks, we're just using them. But you know, overall he noted his experience over the past week was rather disappointing, but he still ran a bunch of tests on it and you know, as expected it doesn't. It doesn't compete with the most modern processors on most workloads, but I thought it came out pretty well when comparing with with some of the processors from just a few years ago and to me that's kind of a win for ARM at least a good step forward.

04:30
So the benchmarks were against AMD and Intel, obviously, and they're ranging back to like the 8th, 10th gen Intel, amd Ryzen 7, 4700, stuff like that. And most of the benchmarks for the x elite was, you know, the. Actually it was down near the bottom, in the bottom half, but typically above many of the older processors on the list, like like the 8th and 10th gen intel processors. It was usually above those and the x elite actually came out on top on some of them, like Darktable 1 and a 7-zip benchmark. It actually came out on top on some of them. So you know there's some good things there. But you know, overall the Snapdragon X Elite within the Acer Swift 14 came out just ahead of the Core i7-1185G7 Tiger Lake laptop and similar to the AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U.

05:33
But obviously you know the article did not point this out, but I think it's obvious. I mean, nobody expected it to be the powerhouse like up there on top. I mean it means not apple silicon, but but obviously, as to be expected, um, it is still well behind the very newest amd strix point zen 5 and intel lunar light generations. But you know the overall, out of the 23 systems, the two actually devices he tested came out at number 16 and 17, so quite a few of them down there. You know, kind of three quarters of the way through.

06:10
But this is arm, you know, and to me, on arm chip that, uh, that doesn't come out last against amd and intel. It's a. I think it's a good sign for the future. Uh, I think I will. I would have loved to have seen. I kind of hinted there about it's not Apple. I would have loved to see a comparison against another kind of ARM chip. I would love to see a comparison with the M1, m2 Max, with Asahi Linux on there. I mean, sure you'd be comparing different distributions too, but I think that's fair for this, because Ubuntu is what you have for the X-Elites, Asahi is what you have for the M1 and M2 Macs. So you know, I think it's a fair comparison, no different than comparing Windows against Mac OS, you know, on comparable hardware. So I think that would have been, you know, even if it's not head-to-head hardware, I think it would have been uh cool to see where that fit in there yeah, definitely, definitely would have been interesting.

07:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, this, did he do a um like performance per watt sort of, uh sort of benchmark in there?

07:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
um, I think that was one of them. He couldn't because of the power stuff makes sense yeah, he did like web browser, like Firefox. It tested pretty well there. 7-zip there's like 15 pages on there. So there's a lot of things he went through I couldn't even summarize. Well, besides giving his overall score at the end, there's no way I could even summarize going through all of them. I try to pick out what some of the highlights are at the top.

07:50 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Based on this, I would probably pick the Framework 16 with the Ryzen 7 in it.

07:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's what he recommended. I think Sounds like what he said there, but that's if you're looking for pure power. I don't I guess. Like you said, I don't think he had the uh or, like I said, I don't think he had the uh power per uh. Um performance comparison there.

08:16 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'm looking at power per dollar.

08:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it's a slightly different metric, but one that is definitely important. Um, I I kind of thought I heard that these Windows Unarmed the Snapdragon laptops were not actually selling very well, and I went looking for a source on that and of course, I'm having trouble finding it. Apparently, amazon applies the frequently returned item warning to some of the ARM-based Surface laptops. So you know, make of that what you will.

08:50 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's too bad. I hope they're at least doing better than Microsoft's last attempt at ARM. I can't remember what that was, but I know there was one several years ago.

09:02 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I've got two questions First, would you use this in a server environment and second, how would you update it?

09:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No, not yet, Not these.

09:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You can use ARM in a server environment, for sure, maybe even this particular chip, but not in the laptop form, in fact. It really doesn't make sense.

09:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, how would you update it? I think he did update it to 2504, I thought he said in there, and I think it did perform quite as well, if I remember right.

09:40 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Was he able to update the firmware on it? Oh the firmware.

09:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I don't know if tools like Flopd are on ARM yet or not, but can you do? That on the Raspberry Pi? I don't know.

09:55 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You tell me yes they are, you tell us. I actually got two articles linked about Flopd. I've actually got two articles linked about FWPD. The first link is to an article that Michael Larabelle wrote about lead Linux vendor firmware service and FWPD developer, richard Hughes, where he talks at the Primday on-premises computing conference in Paris. Richard's talk was targeted at the Linux server space, where Linux vendor firmware service and FWAPD firmware update utility have seen a slower rollout. Now, according to Michael, we are seeing some adoption by different server ODMs and supporting Redfish and other plugins relevant for firmware updating in the Linux data center.

10:51
If you want to view Richard's talk, you can find it embedded in Michael's article. It was a great, approximately 30-minute talk. I'd have to go back and listen to it again if you wanted to hear every single detail, but I don't think we've got time for that, so I'm just going to move on to the second link, which is to Marius Nestor's article on the latest FWAPD release, which is version 2.0.9, or, if you're in the UK, z.9. Or, if you're in the UK, z.9. It contains support for more devices, new features and bug fixes.

11:31
This release introduces support for Intel Arc Battlemage GPUs, the ability to allow installing multiple database certificate updates at the same time, support for showing what certificate signed the EFI authenticated variable, new documentation about updating the KEK and database, as well as the ability to use read line to look up inputs from user and make it optional. This release also fixes a crash that occurred when installing some Wacom firmware types, a crash that occurred when parsing uEvents that aren't key equal value and a parsing issue with the DFU descriptor when not using the libUSB library. Starting with this release, fwupd is no longer enumerating non-updatable option RAM devices. It no longer exports Redfish backup partitions as devices I don't think I'd want to be updating those anyways Includes a resolution for more of the HSI failures and no longer allows updating updatable hitting devices with the FWPD tool command. Mario's article does provide more details and a link to the project's GitHub page if you want to get every single detail.

12:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So you asked about FWPD and the Raspberry Pi, and I did actually just find an article from late last year, what the version 1.9.22 brought unofficial support for updating the firmware, but in the Raspberry Pi 5. So, yes, you can actually do that, which is fairly useful because you don't want to have to. So if you're not going to run the official Raspberry Pi OS firmware or, excuse me, the official Raspberry Pi OS distro, then you're going to want to be able to use the normal tools like Flopd to be able to update it. So that's a good thing. It's a good thing to be able to run sort of your more vanilla stock Linux distros on the Pi. I approve All right, speaking of not exactly the raspberry pi os, but the thing that it's based on.

13:49
I've got some debian news and a couple of things. One of the big ones is that they just and they just elected their um, their, their new leader, the new leader for debian. What do they call him? Yeah, debian project leader Andreas Tilley is who was elected, and I've got a link here to his platform. You can read through the things that he said he wanted to do, and then he is now doing some of those things, and there's a couple of them that are very interesting to me. One is that he is joining in with the End of 10 campaign, and that is essentially the campaign that says hey, windows 10 is going end of life. By the way, windows 10 is going end of life October 14th of this year. That's going to be here before you know it. And there's a campaign where people are saying why don't we switch to Debian or Linux in general, instead of going to Windows 11? I approve of this message, by the way. So he is kind of throwing his weight behind that.

14:54
And then one of the other really interesting things here is that they're sort of not revamping but making some little changes to the Debian packaging system, particularly what happens when a package goes dormant or it's orphaned. You could say, Essentially, what happens when the maintainer for a given package disappears, steps away from the project, what has you? And one of the things that they are looking at doing is adding an intent to NMU or intent to orphan, and it's essentially a 21 day notice period where they say the maintainer for a given package has kind of gone missing in action MIA, and we are going to begin the process of turning this into an orphaned package which, from what I understand that, allows some things like non-maintainers to suggest updates to it. Basically, just, it changes the way that the the package is handled. Um and so and this is interesting that they're having to think about this um, it's kind of a sign that they do have some Debian maintainers that are stepping away, getting burnt out or retiring, you know what have you all kinds of different things. But yeah, I'm glad to see that some of that they are sort of looking into that.

16:16
It's a problem that a lot of distros and to some extent even the colonel, is starting to face. Like, as your maintainers get older and some of them start retiring, do you have people coming in to replace them? Sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes it's no, but in a lot of these places it needs to be thought about and dealt with. Potentially so interesting things. Some changes at Debian nothing huge, but a new leader and some of the things that he wants to work on.

16:45 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It sounds like he'll make a good leader.

16:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Hope so.

16:49 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'm wondering if he was the one behind looking at uh orphaning some of these uh abandoned packages in some cases.

17:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Um, yes, basically what they're doing is they're they're trying to figure out a way to make, they're trying to put a system in place to formally recognize that these packages are orphaned. Um, that I think there's a lot of packages that are kind of de facto abandoned, but they need a process and it's like we're going to put we're going to put a statement out and say in 21 days, this is going to officially be considered an orphan package. We're going to put a statement out and say in 21 days, this is going to officially be considered an orphan package, and that gives the previous maintainer 21 days to say no, no, no, I'm still here. I've just, you know, life happened or whatever, but if that 21 days goes by, then it can officially get marked as an orphaned package.

17:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And we're actually talking about a technical leader, not just someone at the top who has been in some nonprofit organization and doesn't even know what they're leading.

17:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, so interesting that you should mention that. Somebody has that story, right? Yeah, rob, you've got that story. We'll talk about that story later. Yeah, interesting things going on there Before then. You want to talk about Servo?

18:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No, I would like to skip to this one actually. Okay, you missed my message in the back channel.

18:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I did, I did. I had not gone to look at those. I've got the little red circle with the two in it in my Discord notifications and I figured as soon as I got done I would go check those Well too late, too late notifications and I figured as soon as I got done I would go check those.

18:25 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well too late, too late. But you know, when we have discussed uh odd choices uh gnome has made for executive directors at the gnome foundation, uh, you know, the previous one came in with a lot of non-profit experience and degrees in English and education. Oh, and she was a professional shaman.

18:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes.

18:50 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And I did put a link in the show notes her website. Apparently, after she became the executive director, the website went blank, according to an article I saw when I was kind of digging through stuff, but the website is up now. Went blank, according to an article I saw when I was digging through stuff, but the website is up now. If you want her shaman services it's Holly, something or other they are available again, it appears. Maybe with this kind of experience, maybe with their financial turmoil, they just needed someone to help with their funds. And well, she lasted a little more than half a year. After that there was an intern and they're Richard.

19:34
Whatever his name is, I don't remember, but some of us here we've often stated the importance of having technical people at the top of technology companies and, yeah, ok, it's not always necessary, you know, maybe they have a different focus, like fundraising or whatever, but this new announcement may be just what GNOME needs after a lot of turmoil they've had. So Stephen DeBald has been named the new executive director of the GNOME Foundation and, unlike the executive directors of the past, he is Canadian and a techie, a free software advocate and a GNOME user. He actually used the stuff since 2002. Actually used the stuff since 2002 and I don't know if that last one's good enough, honestly, because I first tried gnome back around 1999, so I probably should have been applying, but uh yep, you totally should have then again.

20:39
I mean, his background sounds a lot like mine, except we're up a few steps. But anyway, back then I was more of a KDE fan, I wasn't so much a Gnome fan. So I tried it back then. I didn't stick with it like supposedly he did. But some fun history around this guy. He's got some.

20:56
Apparently has had some technical chops, at least according to what he put out in his blog. He built a graphical MUD, m-u-d, before the term nmo rpg was coined. If you don't know what graphical mud is, look it up it's, it's a, it's a type of game, basically mm or pg multi. I can't remember what that stands for. Look it up, someone else can say it afterwards. So anyway, and then he started his first web development company when he was 15. I was like 20. He did it. It was in 1996. So also a few years before me. So he beat me there. He started a couple more businesses while he was in university around the time that he started using Linux and Gnome. He was a coder for a good 10 years until he had a bicycle accident or bicycle crash, as he states it in his blog which made it a little difficult for him to code after that because of I don't know the screen colors and stuff, I think I said but it sounded like.

22:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It sounded like his vision sounded like it was a problem with his vision yeah.

22:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So you know, if only he had a ai back then as an assistive technology. But anyway, after the crash that's coding he couldn't quite anymore. Um, he had a decade of what he says he's recruiting, sales management, startups, fundraising and product consulting, which I don't know. It sounds like a lot of good things. Uh, when you put those two together, got some technical stuff, he's got the, you know, all the other things that you might want in a CEO or executive director. Sorry, same-ish thing. So after all that, then he began applying at the Ganoan Foundation and here we are.

22:54
But it's always good to see an actual user of the product run a company. You know, it always seems a little off to me when the person at the top doesn't even know anything about their actual product. You know, like when a CEO at a gym clearly doesn't use the gym, I think it would be a little more inspiring to see them out there using the equipment alongside us once in a while and, you know, to get a better feel for what kind of change is really needed out there. You know, kind of goes for you know, good home to all the things like that. You should, should have some a good, a good knowledge of of what you're leading, so this guy might be a really good fit. Let's hope he stays around longer than seven months.

23:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, there are a couple of things that he talks about in his sort of intro letter that I really appreciate I think are good things. He talks about transparency, which is always good to see in an open source project, and then he also talks about reestablishing the GNOME project's foundations, and that's something we've talked about before as well.

24:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I hope that doesn't mean making it look like Windows again, like it used to. That's why I did not like about it back in 2000.

24:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't think so. So, as he says, the foundations are that the GNOME Foundation, pun intended here? It exists to support GNOME, to support design and development, to support contributors, like that's it. So you know, hopefully they can get it.

24:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
We talked about this with mozilla too yeah, I was gonna say hopefully they take this stance in the future too.

24:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's like spend your money on developers write code, ship good projects, ask for donations, rinse and repeat.

24:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's, that's your one job you have one job create a vpn.

24:48 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Oh no, that's, that's not to do resilience, resilience, yes, yes, gotta mess pronounce something one time just to get a laugh out of it, uh-huh that's what that was, oh my goodness.

25:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, so let's talk about the Raspberry Pi. Then the Raspberry Pi Connect.

25:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, there is a lot of interest in what Raspberry Pi did this week. I've got several links in the show notes. The first one is by Chris Louder. He's writing, actually for Raspberry Pi, about the latest Raspberry Pi Connect information. Chris reports that as of Raspberry Pi Connect version 2.5, they are dropping the beta. Prior to version 2.5, the Connect client software has had devices regularly waking up to make HTTP requests and higher data usage than needed, and starting with version 2.5, the Connect client now holds a single long-lived HTTP connection to a Raspberry Pi server. Http connection to a Raspberry Pi server, also starting in 2.5, each individual heartbeat is now compressed before it is sent to the server, making it about 50% smaller compared to previous versions. Chris also provides instructions in his article for updating to the latest version of Raspberry Pi Connect only, while recommending updating to the new version of Raspberry Pi OS, since it contains the latest version of Connect.

26:38
Speaking of the new version of the Raspberry Pi OS, that's what the remaining leaks in the show notes are about. They're to articles by Simon Long, bobby Borosoff, richard Speed, marius Nestor and our fan favorite, michael Arabelle, all writing about the new version of Raspberry Pi OS. They all say this is probably the final release of Raspberry Pi OS. That's sad to hear, isn't it, which is based on Debian Bookworm, since Debian Trixie should be released this summer? There's your drama, rob Drama. Some of the new Raspberry Pi OS improvements include using a modified version of Swaylock for its screen locking, version of Swaylock for its screen locking, separation of console and desktop, auto-login options under the Raspberry Pi configuration app, a new printers application for managing printers on Raspberry Pi OS and improved touchscreen handling under Wayland. Since I have just hit the highlights, I do recommend reading at least one of the articles for more details. My recommendation would be Marius's.

27:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, interesting stuff. You know it's funny. You talked about the whole. Maybe it was dumb for Firefox to introduce a VPN when they should have been working on Firefox and other other things we could observe about gnome. With raspberry pi, the raspberry pi connect it, one could make the argument that this falls into that same category. But man, everybody that's talked about it, that I've seen that actually like, has tried it and used it, has had glowing reviews and you kind of think about it and it's like well, having remote access into a little Linux box is sort of a useful thing. So maybe it just squeaks by into that category of sort of makes sense and wasn't a dumb thing to do.

28:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I mean not that we're talking about it today, but you could. Somebody could say the same thing about pop os with system 76. Focus on your hardware and not make this, but you know, that seems to have turned out okay for them that that worked out. I think it's worked out well and I'm out well for fedora as well well, yeah, because Fedora now ships a spin with the new Cosmic Desktop.

29:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, Well, I mean you could even make that same argument with System76 about Cosmic Desktop. You should have just stuck to your distro. You should have tried to spin up a desktop too. Jury's still out on how well that one's going to work, but so far so good. We will see.

29:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Some people are good at multitasking and others they just got to focus I guess that's true of some company like that. That is true of companies as well I mean, imagine where amazon would be if they just focused on selling books yeah, true that the world might be a better place. The world might be a better place, but Amazon would probably be gone.

29:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, exactly, exactly, all right. So let's talk about some other distro that's doing some other crazy things, and that is Ubuntu, with 2510. And the Internet has kind of been abuzz because Ubuntu has announced that they are going to use a Rust-based pseudo alternative, pseudo RS, by default along with some other core utils in Ubuntu 25.10. And that's super interesting. I've seen people decry this because pseudos is untested, which may be fair. I kind of have to think, though, that the only way that you really get it to be a tested tool is by making it default in some distro. So they kind of have a chicken and egg problem here, and they opted to go this direction for it. Yeah, I, I don't see this as being a huge problem, particularly because 2510 is not an lts right, so it is kind of the the ubuntu release, where they have permission to break stuff, um. So, yeah, I'm for it.

31:00
I think it's going to be cool, I think it's a, I think it's a neat idea to be, uh, be a little daring and see what happens. Um, if you want to be a little daring, they actually already have ISOs where they are building 2510. Now it is very early in the process, so these are going to be potentially very rough. Don't run it as your main desktop install. But if you have extra hardware kicking around or you want to put it on a VM, you can go play with 2510 now. It is due to actually it on a VM. You can go play with 2510 now. It is due to actually release on October 9th and of course it's got all kinds of fun stuff in it, like the Rust Core utils. But also it's going to have a brand new kernel, probably the 617 kernel, gnome 49, mesa 25.1. It's going gonna be a pretty neat release.

31:49 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Uh, 2510 will be will be cool and uh, you can go test drive it now I don't know if we've talked about it or if it was on another show floss weekly but um, or something like that. But I know somebody had pointed out like I feel like this was a discussion floss weekly and somebody said that it doesn't really make sense for Ubuntu to switch to the Rust core utils but that, like sudo-rs, the Rust-based sudo does make a lot more sense.

32:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We may have done that because you know we had the guys from the Rust core utils on the show back a few months ago.

32:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It wasn't them, that was somebody after that that that had their opinion on rust, it was. It was kind of a less positive opinion or along the facts of they're not going to uh, was it lunduk no, no, lunduk is against this, he's against it altogether.

32:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's a terrible idea.

32:51 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That's why, from what Rob was saying, I was wondering if he was talking about listening to Lunduk.

32:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Surely Rob doesn't listen to or read Lunduk. This was the.

33:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think it was the Alex C the Incas guy. Oh, okay, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I have a tendency on that show to tease everybody.

33:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The Incas guy. Oh, okay, yeah, that makes sense. That, yeah. Yeah, I have a tendency on that show to tease everybody about whether they're porting their software to Rust or not.

33:16 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So that brings up a lot of interesting conversations. Rust core utils that project's been around for a while and actually gotten quite far, because I remember covering using it as a command line tip. I'd have to look back to see what episode. Yeah, a while ago yeah, so there's.

33:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There's like three different core utils projects where people are either the original implementation or people are re-implementing them in different languages and they actually they work together quite a bit. They do things like share a test suite to try to keep them all bug for bug compatible, as it were, except for, you know, the few cases where, like, they intentionally do things differently. There are just a few of those.

33:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think what the Angus guy said was that, like core utils, you know it's been around a long time, it's very stable, very tested, and then when you re-implement something in Rust that even though sure you're I mean you're already something that's supposedly very secure, you're re-implementing Rust, you're getting rid of the memory safe stuff, but you're potentially introducing a lot of other bugs on the way that you have to figure out Right right and so, like that's the thing to keep in mind, the Rust language.

34:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It gives you guarantees about memory safety. It does not give you guarantees about any other type of safety. Right and logic, program logic being the big one, yes, and memory safety is not necessarily even the most exploited type of vulnerability, right. And then the other side of this is, on a Linux system, when you start thinking about the security boundaries, where are those going to be? Well, generally your core utils are not security boundaries, unless they're running with a set UID, whereas sudo is definitely a security boundary, and so having the memory safety there does sort of make sense. But then, of course, you have that same conundrum of it is newer code and there are other bugs that are not memory safety bugs, yeah, but that may have been introduced Right Right.

35:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
With core utils, you're also working on a whole bunch of different ones, so you may be less focused, whereas, like the Rust-based sudo may be more focused, where you can focus on those bugs quicker.

35:44 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
One thing you're going to have to watch with 2510, with Rust-based core utils, is some of your bash scripts breaking Really. Well, stop and think about it, depending on how they implement it, if it doesn't have a symlink to the old name and or it doesn't use some of the flags that the old one used, I'm sure it will so they're gonna.

36:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm quite confident that they're gonna symlink them with all the old names and the. The rust core utils are to the point now where they support basically all of the flags and like there there are a couple of, there are a couple of cases where they don't do exactly the same thing, but those are things like uh edge cases. No, it's not even edge cases, it's intentional decisions like uh. One of the questions was in the, the cp command, how it doesn't give you any feedback, and so the rust guys were like we could put a progress meter in there in the rust version. It's intentional decisions like that and I can't remember which, which, which way that particular one went but it was flag or by default, do you remember?

37:02 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I don't I think.

37:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think it would have been by default, um, but you know it's. It's things like that that, the intentional decisions, where they can look at the behavior of the old tools and try to find places where it's very unlikely to break things. But we can also make the user experience a lot better for people. So, other than that, though, they have they have a huge test suite like 1000s and 1000s of individual individual tests, where they go in and they said you know, let's make sure that the Rust core utils have exactly the same behavior as the old school query tools do. I don't have much fear about using Rust query tools in Ubuntu 2510. I think that's going to be a nothing burger. Nobody's going to notice it for the vast majority.

37:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I don't think you have anything to worry about Jonathan in Ubuntu 25.10. I mean mostly because you probably won't be running it.

37:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I have no worries about it. I will sleep well at night with Ubuntu 25.10 not on my machines.

38:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And honestly, I mean I use Ubuntu on things like on my servers, but I use LTS, so I won't probably be using it either you, but uh, I use lts so I won't probably be using it either.

38:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
you're not gonna download the daily build and run it in a vm. I might throw it on a vm just to say that I have, but I it's just not. It's not gonna be all that exciting. That's a jeff thing if, if they break something and there's like a proof of concept of you know, here's how you see this horrible breakage. Okay, that's exciting, but it's just, it's just gonna work for the vast majority of this stuff it's just gonna work and it's gonna be boring because it works you don't like the drama, but you sure like you're excited about somebody breaking something.

38:41
I guess yes, I don't like drama but I sure, like security breakage, it's fun especially to write about exactly, yeah, you know they can.

38:50 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That can lead to a lot of drama oh, that's true.

38:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's true. All right, we want to talk about servo now I'll talk about servo now.

39:02 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
so, um, you know it's it's been said before on this podcast and on others that I've listened to that at this point you know this far into the HTML and CSS and everything else in the development of that that it'd be nearly impossible to develop a web browser or web browsing engine from scratch, and indeed I'm sure it is a tough job. But we've brought up the Rust-based servo browser engine before and I think we all pretty much agreed or thought of it as just a hobby web browser, something that somebody's kind of doing just for the fun of it. That really didn't have much of a future in the consumer web browser space. But the improvements they have been making my turn to prove that thought wrong. The server web browser has been able to render basic sites for years. I've tried it. I didn't try this update. I was going to and I don't know I forgot, but I did try. I have tried in the past and it's kind of wonky in some sites. A lot of basic sites went just fine. They've been able to do the basic sites, though.

40:23
For years, more complex sites, the more popular websites like Gmail, have been a problem. Well, not anymore. The server web browser can now render Gmail and Google chat correctly, and if you can do that, then what else can it do? What else can it do? Those are some of the more complex things out there. I really wanted to try this before the show and try some other sites, but we'll see. But I'm thinking in the next few years we may see some serious web browsers start to consider their servo engine and, although it is debatable by some, it may bring a slightly more secure browsing future to a computer near you and you know those secure browser. It's not going to stop you, it's not going to secure you from everything you know, it's not going to keep you from being scanned by those phishing emails, but it may help with the memory safe issues that some programs have. In other news for the server browser another thing that they have this could be a bit of drama. They've been considering a policy that would allow some AI-based contributions via select AI tools like GitHub, copilot, but based on feedback, the developers have now decided to keep the ban in place and, based on the feedback I've been reading online, this doesn't necessarily seem like a very popular stance.

42:03
You know, like one commenter saying quote a bit sad about the blanket AI stuff. Ai has been crucial for me in keeping programming despite my RSI, so AI could be an assistive technology to some. So I don't know if the blanket AI statement is a good one. Well, the blanket AI statement is a good one, you know. And another he said it is ironic that a project aiming to be modern is taking advice from people stuck in the past.

42:38
Though others point out, you know there are obvious flaws with code being completely written in AI copyright issues, refractoring that could cause a mess when running a differential on code to see what's changed, because it could refractory and do it all different. So even though you really want to change a small piece, it could just refractory, redo it all different. But then it also, you know lots of them point out with these issues they can be solved rather than completely banning the use of ai. But along with that, others also point out that it's likely, you know, if you're not completely refractoring it, you're using it as a tool to just kind of help you with maybe a line or some piece here and there, not not doing all your coding for you. It's likely going to be difficult to enforce unless unless it's, you know, completely obvious like that.

43:36
But either way, good progress on the web engine code. No progress to changing a debatable policy. No progress meaning this is status quo, what they said before. It's still banned, so the same as before. Um, so to kind of move forward in some ways, and debatable on the other yeah, I in reading while you were talking, uh, something that surprised me.

44:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I didn't realize this. Servo was a mozilla project up until like 2020. And then Mozilla dropped it and the Servo people continued working on it on their own time, and it's continued on. I was thinking that Servo was under a different license, but it's actually under the Mozilla public license, which is compatible in most ways with the GPL. It is a copy left license, uh, which is uh, which is interesting when it comes to browsers, one of the other browser that's being made from scratch, ladybird uh, it is. It is a more permissive license and it actually has some commercial interest in it because of that. There are some things that companies can do using an embedded that they can't easily do with a copyleft license. So interesting stuff.

44:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I should compare those head by head sometime.

44:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Lady bird to servo. Yeah, yeah they. They have a lot in common as they are, they are sort of the two reasonably successful ground up browsers that are in progress right now. Yeah, ground up reasonably successful ground up browsers that are in progress right now. Um yeah, ground up, built from the ground up, not torn into little itty bitty pieces if mozilla loses their google funding, they could be ground up too oh man, the the world is going to be so.

45:27
It's going to be so different. If some of that stuff happens, oh my goodness. If Google is forced into selling Chrome and then Firefox loses their fund, oh my goodness, everybody will be using Internet Explorer again.

45:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I think there are some articles about that?

45:42 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
What version? I don't know, I think there's some art.

45:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think there's some articles about that this week, about you know how hurt they would be if, if they lost that funding. But really it's. It's nothing we haven't talked about already. So, it really wasn't worth bringing in a story about that again.

46:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, interesting, interesting stuff though.

46:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, so the the actual big story here was that Gmail now works in Servo. Do you have a Servo install? I have tested it in the past, but I don't have it installed right now.

46:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
How difficult is it to install? Is it just pretty much an app or a DNF away?

46:22 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think it was. It wasn't too hard, I don't remember.

46:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's not a flat pack away.

46:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean, if you're really into that sort of thing, I guess it could be.

46:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't remember it being difficult. I remember just doing it on a whim and testing it out.

46:40 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
What do they actually call it? What do they actually call it? It's not. There is no servo package, at least not in this machine. Live rust servo. Whole bunch of stuff about reservoir, nope, not available on apps on this machine interesting. Huh, oh, you could on apps on this machine Interesting.

47:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Huh.

47:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, you could. Uh, I mean, there's a download button.

47:13 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, there's a targz Um.

47:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Whatever you do, don't log into your bank with Servo just yet, Jonathan. Why? Well, because they recommend that on their download page.

47:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You're right, they do. I guess the idea there is that they don't have the guarantees yet about one website not being able to do something nasty. The whole, no remote code execution and all of that. It's not quite as hardened as some of the other browsers are. All right, fair enough.

47:57 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But it looks like it's a tar that you would be downloading.

48:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And probably building. Yeah, I grabbed the tar targz, but oh no, there's a binary in there. There's a binary in there, all right, all right, all right. Grabbed the tar targz, but oh no, there's a binary in there. There's a binary in there, all right, all right, all right, in the tar, yeah which is weird a tar ball with a binary in it. What's the world coming to?

48:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
just don't know about this um, that sounds like something you'd do for windows yes, that's because he downloaded from the windows like the top one there no, no goodness, it would have been a zip file.

48:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, it would have been the zip file. Uh, ken, you want to talk about caliber?

48:42 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I always want to talk about caliber. It's one of your favorites, isn't it? It is my favorite favorite and thankfully this week Marius wrote about COVID-GOIL releasing a maintenance update to, as I've been saying, my favorite e-book management software, calibre. This latest release version 8.4, provides a workaround with a QT slash Wayland bug that prevented the menu with the layout button from showing. That's a little button if any of you are familiar with Calibre, that lets you change the layout of your screen. You can have it where you sit up so you have like the covers of your books showing above the columns that list the data about the different books you have. And you also had a regression that broke the e-book viewers show book in main caliber link. That wasn't fixed. There's an issue where some links weren't processed correctly for very large EPUB files that contained many internal HTML files and the ability to handle links to missing internal files with an error pop-up. Now, in addition, calibre 8.4 improves tag merging in the metadata review dialog, updates the ebookscom plugin in the get books component I've used that occasionally for getting some books, though I actually have to admit my personal preference is Humble Bundle and fixes the next and previous links in news download. This release also prevents recursion when creating the base temporary folder if something on the system deletes the created temporary folder. As always, I recommend reading Maria's article for details. I have left out Now.

50:40
Next, I would like to share some of my favorite Calibre plugins. I'm going to put them into the show notes for those of you all that are listening later, so you can actually go look. But the first one that I have is going to be View Manager. This plugin allows me to manage the views that I use. Using it, I can quickly and easily switch between different views of my libraries. Yes, I have more than one library. That's.

51:19
Another advantage of Calibre is you can have multiple libraries One that I use for books that I lend from my local library through the OverDrive system. Another is one that I had created over the years for my paper books. So, depending on what I'm doing, I may be. It allows me to change the view I have depending on the library I'm in or what I'm doing at the moment.

51:55
Another plugin that I like is Extract ISBN. I use it to try to find the ISBN for a book using the text within the e-book's format. It makes it easier when you're doing a search for other metadata for it. And, of course, as I mentioned, overdrive. There is an Overdrive plugin that I can use to search my lending libraries for borrowable e-books and audio books that correspond to selected books in that lending library that I create. I'll just put an empty entry in and use that to search and then I can find out whether or not that book's at the library and then I can check it out, read it and return it. Saves me the time of having to do it manually through their webpage.

52:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that's actually really cool that it's got that built into. I didn't realize that.

52:58 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
A lot of local libraries are starting to do that. The whole e-book borrowing thing library with my goodreadscom account yeah Cool. And with the lending library that I've got and the paper library. Sometimes I'm having to manage the series that I've got set up. So there's a manage series link that allows me to quickly create and edit my series column values. But the show notes have been updated so you can see all these with links to their descriptions and how to add them to a caliber.

53:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know what we really need. To make that really useful, we need a Linux tablet that has an e-ink display on it. That would be cool. The.

53:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Pine tab.

53:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I suppose, I suppose that's true.

53:52 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No, it's not the Pine tab, it's like the Pine book or something.

53:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, Pine made one.

53:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But is there?

53:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
any software that actually runs on it. That's sometimes the problem with Pine stuff.

54:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think it just runs Ubuntu. So anything that's Ubuntu and ARM arm I think you can get to run on it. But how well it would be on an ink display.

54:15 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Pine note they call it I know, I'm sure you could take a raspberry pi and set up a ink display with it I mean you could, but that'd be kind of like carrying a brick around.

54:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That would not be a small or sleek device. Here's what you do.

54:31 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You get the display and then you get the Raspberry Pi and you have a wire going to it and you just clip it on like a belt clip, so you're just holding on to the lightweight e-ink display.

54:45 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It'd be no heavier than the old CD cd players we used to carry around. Yeah, yeah, definitely lighter than the old boom boxes yeah, you know 80s boom box on your shoulder yep, yep, oh, my goodness, blurry ah you watched five times at ritz-monte high, didn't? You?

55:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
so let's save ourselves from all of this and talk about, uh, 1989 wait a second, that sort of fits, uh. Anyway, there's a couple of things in here that's super interesting and, uh, several things actually I didn't know about. One is and this is kind of the the lead of this, and that is that the linux kernel is going to stop supporting the i46 intel cpu which, yes, did first release 36 years ago. Um, it released 36 years ago, but they only stopped selling it 18 years ago, which means that they sold that thing for 18 years. And you might think why in the world? Well, the really is because it was used in a whole bunch of industrial control. Um, the, uh, the six, five oh two is still being sold today, the, the old, uh, the old processor, the things like the Commodore 64 used because industrial controls and even some medical things still use those. Um, but Torvalds and Linux finally going to pull the plug on the 486 in the kernel, and that is interesting.

56:25
And it sort of led me down this rabbit hole of asking well, like, okay, if you actually have one of those, what are you going to do? And there is, of course, the idea of using the long-term support kernels from Linux and those will be around and support it for a while. That led me down this rabbit hole of the CIP kernel maintenance project and this I had no idea existed. It is the super long term support kernels and from what I can tell they pick essentially one something, this SLTS, from the CIP, the civil civil oh, I had it. It's something, something civil, something, something I don't remember Anyway, and the idea is it's for devices that are going to have a really really long lifetime, that are going to have a really really long lifetime, and you know they're talking. You talk about you know, linux distros. Red Hat, for example, may only maintain something for seven years, 10 years at the most, maybe up to 13 years. Well, these SLTS kernels, they're talking about trying to maintain them for 25, possibly all the way up to 50 years. So you know, their next one they're going to try to maintain until I think 4.4 is one that they've talked about, and so they're going to try to maintain that all the way up through like 2060.

58:15
Ridiculously long times for now. But you do occasionally find installs on set hardware, whether it be a mainframe or an industrial controller. You know, in some places, things like the computer that makes the trains run, the train track run the computers in things like your stoplights. You know these things will be there for a very, very long time and you do kind of want to be able to push security updates to them. So I was super duper interested to hear about this, the CIP kernels and it's not something I was ever familiar with. So you know we've talked about the kind of the decline of the LTS supported kernels. It is, it is and there's there's like three guys behind this. It sounds like they're hoping for more developers in the future, but super interesting to me that they have this goal of supporting kernels for possibly up to 50 years.

59:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Is that 4.4? Was that the oldest one? They have this goal of supporting criminals for possibly up to 50 years. 4.4, was that the oldest one, or?

59:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
did they go back further? That may be the oldest one.

59:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Love to get like a 1 dot and a 2 dot.

59:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, no, no, no. Nothing back that far. I actually found this through. There's a Wikipedia article on supported kernel versions. I'll see if I can find that and drop that in there as well.

59:42 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I remember covering SLTs sometime last year too.

59:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Interesting. Yeah, I didn't remember hearing about it at all.

59:57 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You know the other thing, I think I touched on it when we started talking about some of the distros going to a 10-year support.

01:00:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, this is way beyond that, though.

01:00:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, 25, possibly 50.

01:00:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, possibly up to 50 years. Man, that's a long time to try to keep code run. What are computers going to look like in 50 years?

01:00:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
you know though well, the ones that are going to be running these kernel zones are going to be looking like the ones we've got right now yes, but still.

01:00:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean, think about 50 years ago, in 1975. What did computers look like? And in some ways, yes, very similar, but in other ways radically different. You want to show you one from around 1983 do you have a 1983 computer?

01:00:48 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
boxed up at the moment. Which? What machine is it? Let's see r800 xl.

01:00:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
oh, very cool, very cool. That's a neat era of computing.

01:00:59 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, the problem is when I got back to the States the power supply when I tried hooking it up it had trouble converting back to 60 from 50 for 11 years.

01:01:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, it might need recapped and some other things you know, if you're running something that old, I mean you could just run the old kernel on and not ever upgrade it. The reason upgrade is so you have a secure kernel, right? No, no disagreement or yes that's basically the reason, yeah the problem you're still gonna run into is every other piece of software on there is going to be out of date and potentially insecure.

01:01:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's true, you, okay. No, I'm just trying to think what software would you be running on it that you needed? Because that's going to be the reason you're running that old in a kernel, isn't it?

01:02:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so like, for instance let's just say we've got this old piece of hard, this old computer. It's running some piece of hardware. You've got the kernel on it, well, you've also got systemd or sysv in it, depending on how old it is. You may have your tooling in a Python script systemd, or sysvn, depending on how old it is. You may have your tooling in a Python script. Well, then you've got an install of Python that can in and of itself have vulnerabilities, and then you've got the Python script to keep up to date. So Rob has a point. There's multiple moving parts here to think about.

01:02:33 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's more likely going to be an embedded system.

01:02:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, likely, but not for sure.

01:02:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And hopefully not connected to the internet.

01:02:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well then, who cares if the kernel's up to date, then there are laws that now kick in and have things to say about that and don't necessarily care whether it's connected to the internet or not. There are potentially reasons too. I'm thinking of the old NES exploits, nes and SNES exploits that people have found. Those are not connected to the internet, but in some cases you can actually with your thumbs. People have practiced enough to be fast enough to actually exploit, uh, the nes and snes manually, without using emulators. Have you not seen? Oh, you need to look into this, I'll, I'll I'll go find.

01:03:29 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'll go find the link videos about it, aren't there?

01:03:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
yeah, there's a, I think was it. Seth bling was the youtuber that did this. It's like in Super Mario Brothers no, Super Mario Brothers World. You can actually glitch the game out, and he has done it by hand. You can glitch the game out and warp to the end credits and beat the game from the first level and you're literally you know you're exploiting the game. You're overwriting a piece of memory in ram that's not supposed to be overwritten and you set things up to where you actually jump execution into code that you load into ram.

01:04:05 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's the coolest thing but if you have, you know, whatever old piece of computer you have, that's that you want to update the kernel on. If you have that kind of access to it, it's, it's exploited anyway, it doesn't matter there.

01:04:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I would just say there's a lot of nuance depending upon where a project, where a piece of hardware is what it's doing and, um, how much you like user interaction it gets, whether it's public facing at all. Even if it's not connected to the internet, if people can poke at it, there may be reasons that you want to keep it updated, even if just because of things like the 2038 bug there, you go, there's one. There's a really good one. You might want to update your kernel because of the 2038 bug.

01:04:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
There you go, you got it, I got it All it all right, let's move to some tips.

01:04:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We're gonna let rob take special variables. Do they write this for us?

01:05:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
so anyway, last time I was here I provided a tip and I demonstrated the results with the special variable, dollar sign question mark, to show the exit status. You know is either zero or one to show whether or not the command, previous command, was successful or failed. And I said I would follow up with an explanation of some of the special variables. Now I almost forgot about it. I started right away to my next, more utils tip and realized I was going to bring something to you guys and I almost broke my promise. But here we are. So for those watching, I brought up a little. I made a little script to just quickly demonstrate this. So the special variables I have to talk about is like dollar sign question mark, which shows the exit status of the last command. I already showed you that last week really. Then you have like dollar sign zero, that's going to show the file name of the script that's running in Dollar sign one is going to show the file name of the script that's running in dollar sign. One's going to show the first argument, dollar sign to the second, and three, four, five and so on, and then dollar sign hashtag, pound, symbol, number sign, whatever you want to call it, you know, dollar sign, uh, tic-tac-toe box that will show the number of arguments passed, and then dollar sign. Dollar sign is going to show the process id. So for those looking, I have a little script. It just echoes each of them out and it's going to show the results. So what I'm going to do here is go back to the command line and I am going to run my test script. So that is testsh space arg1-here. So that's my first argument. Arg2-here is my second argument. If I run that it's going to spit it out. So exit status is zero. A successful file name of the script. It tells me what the file name is. I just ran and it has the first argument pass. A second pass number of arguments passed is to the process I d. So you know that's the process id that showed up in in the you know ps um. You know, if I did another one, it's going to tell me. You know, if I add an argument there, it's going to tell me there's three arguments passed. But I don't have in the script anywhere to spit out that third one. Or let's say I go down to one. It's going to say one argument passed. The second argument it's blank because there's no second argument.

01:07:47
These special arguments are something you can use to make a script. You can use those arguments to find the name of the script. Use, not arguments, special variables. You can use special variables to do things like that. You can pass arguments to your script if you want it to be able to do different things depending on what you do to it. So basically, all the dash, dash, help, or dash H or dash, whatever you want, you know all those things that you do with other commands. You can pass them to your script and Work with them in various ways with these special arguments. I could see that. See that last one, because it was below my screen, but that was one right past one.

01:08:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Very cool. Yeah, super, super useful to write your own tools. Yep, yep, nice. All right, ken, you got some more Pipewire stuff.

01:08:52 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, I do, and this is going to be one that would be dangerous if I were doing it live. So I took screenshots while I was in Tumbleweed. There you go, for two reasons, and I'll go over both of those reasons in a minute. But this week I'm covering how you can manage the modules used by Pipewire. Sounds dangerous right there, doesn't it? Yeah, now I have linked the module section of the Pipewire documentation in the show notes for those adventurous ones, and let me go ahead and bring up my terminal so those watching can follow along here. I've already typed pw-cli, just went in for interactive, so I've got my pipewire-0 command prompt.

01:09:52
Now here is where I'll type in the commands load module, followed by the name of the module in question, the one I'm going to demonstrate. I didn't need to add any arguments for, thankfully, otherwise I'd have probably spent more time playing around with the arguments than actually preparing. But for those of you all watching, you'll notice that this particular version of Pipewire is version 1.4.2. There's a reason for that Going to be when we get to demonstrating the unload module. But moving to the second screenshot, the command is load-module, or, if you're doing it on the bash command line, it's pw-cli, followed by dash, dash, load-module. Then the name of the module that you're going to do, the module I'm going to be demonstrating loading is libpipewire-module-adapter. It's just a generic one, it doesn't need any arguments.

01:11:08
Thankfully, and as you see, when I hit enter, it came back with 1, equals at module colon 22. Came back with one, equals at module colon 22. This is a module variable that's used when you go to unload it, and the nice thing about doing it from the PWCLI's interactive option is you can load it multiple times. I just went ahead and went through two other screenshots showing where I loaded a second and third time. Each time it incremented to 2, equals at module colon 24, and 3, equals at module colon 26. Now I'm going to demonstrate. Now I'm going to demonstrate unloading. Unfortunately, pwcli's versions before 1.4 will give you an error message command unload module not yet implemented. You just tried it.

01:12:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, I just find that funny. That's awkward. That it's not. It was not implemented yet.

01:12:23 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, so when I was trying it on Ubuntu with 1.2.4 it was giving me that command. I'm going. I know I did this. Then I remembered it was in Tumbleweed. But I just put the unload-module with a space and then the dash-fee for three to unload. The third time I loaded it and it returned that. Then I went and reloaded it again and it reloaded it right back against that third variable. So that's how you can load and unload modules from the pw-coli's prompt and that way you can go in and play with some of the arguments for some of the modules, like the libpipewire-module-fado-driver. You might find that one interesting, jonathan, if you haven't already been playing with that one.

01:13:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I was just thinking about that.

01:13:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And another one that I'm playing with is the Pipewire-module-filter-chain. It's got a clamp plug-in that you can use. That might help with if I can get it set up to limit hearing any background noise through my mic when I'm not talking. Mm-hmm, clamp it, so it's in between a minimum and maximum volume level.

01:13:57 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Very cool.

01:14:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Have you gotten your?

01:14:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Have I gotten my what?

01:14:11 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Firewire device working with pipewire.

01:14:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I've not the last time I tried to do it. Their firewire implementation was very buggy and had problems. And've and I've not had time to fiddle with it. Since then I've got a usb interface, a reasonably nice usb audio interface that I'm using. So, yeah, all right. I have a tip, and this is because I was gming this week.

01:14:36
I was running a pathfinder game and we were in a module and the module had a player handout. It's like, oh well, I would like to give my players this handout, and it was. You know, it was nice. It was just a couple of pages of the module that I needed to give to them. I bet there's a way to just sort of remix a PDF and say I want just these pages. It's like, ok, I know I can do this, I can print to PDF and do it that way, and so you know, it'll give me the print dialogue and tell it I just wanted to print these pages and it'll give me a new PDF. But that's kind of lame. Why should I have to do the whole print thing? I'm sure there's another way to do this. So went to looking and found PDF Jam. Now there are multiple programs that will let you do this PDF Jam is the one that I use.

01:15:17
It seems to be about the simplest and it's just you give it these arguments, you give it the input PDF and then you give it your page arguments and you can repeat those two repeatedly, so like, if you want to, actually a few pages out of this PDF and then a few pages out of this PDF. You can totally do that. So it's like PDF jam input one, uh, 20 to 22, input to dot PDF, five to six, and then you give it a dash O and your output and it'll just. It'll take those pages, jam them all together and gives it to you in the output. Super useful for being able to give my players the um, the, the specific handout that they were supposed to get. Give it to them digitally, of course, because we're spread hither and yon and don't actually get together to play, but it was extremely useful and so if you find yourself needing to remix a PDF, combine PDFs, split PDFs, pdf Jam, it is one of the tools to turn to. I got a kick out of it.

01:16:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Where'd you say you were split?

01:16:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
hither and ya, hither and yawn. Are you have you? Have you never heard hither and yawn?

01:16:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
no oh, my goodness I have must be a southern thing yeah, it probably is I.

01:16:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I I have some very southern roots and sometimes those come out Hither and yon.

01:16:40 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, my southern roots are probably further south than yours. Very possible, since I was born and raised in Florida.

01:16:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Florida is not south, florida is not south.

01:16:50 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Florida is just Florida. It depends on the part of last century.

01:16:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Directionally it's south, not uh culturally or right.

01:16:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Florida does not have southern culture. Florida has florida culture ken is the florida man, sorry transplanted to oklahoma.

01:17:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
All right, you don't want to know about the, what the route I took around the world to get here.

01:17:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure let's let the guys plug whatever they want to get any ending thoughts in if they want, we'll let Rob go first. Rob what you got.

01:17:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Nothing special, just a way for you all, fans out there, to come and connect with me, and you can do that by going to robertpcampbellcom, and on that page, near the top, you can find links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my Blue Sky, my Mastodon and a place to donate a coffee to me or more. Come and connect.

01:17:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, pretty cool. Alright, and again, let me unmute first. You're sure I can hear you.

01:18:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I said that right after I hit the okay, I'm muted, but I've got a link in the show notes to uh article a updated article actually about the modular Cerebro cluster board that actually supports the Raspberry Pi CM4 and CM5, as well as the Jetson, the Raxda CM5 modular Cerebro cluster board supports. It has a lot of things in it that it supports but as being a cluster board, you can have multiple ones. So check it out. And Jonathan's wife I didn't mean to have him buy it.

01:18:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, I don't think I'm going to buy this one. I'm fairly satisfied with my Turing Pi 2 for doing this sort of thing, but it does always fascinate me the ability to put multiple computers in one little space. It's just, it's just cool, something about it. All right, thank you guys, appreciate it. I believe that's pretty much the show. We appreciate everybody being here. Do you want to find more of me? There is, of course, hackaday. That is where you can find floss weekly, as well as my security column, which goes live on Friday mornings. Go and check that out. Always a lot of fun. And if you're not part of Club Twit, well, we've got the QR code right up there. Scan the code, join the club, support the network that you love. We appreciate that as well. Thank you everybody for being here, those that watch and listen, those that catch us live and on the download, and we will see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show.

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