Untitled Linux Show 203 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 canonical giving back to the community through thanksdev. Amd is hiring, if you're interested. Rust celebrates 10 years and the Linux world gets behind the end of 10 project. It's a lot of good stuff this week. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

00:20 - Leo (Announcement)
Podcasts you love.

00:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
From people you trust.

00:25 - Leo (Announcement)
This is Twit.

00:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 203, recorded Saturday, may the 17th, notorious Flatpak. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time for Linux, open source, gaming hardware, all kinds of fun stuff. It is the Untitled linux show. I'm your host, jonathan bennett, and I've got a crew of of guys and we're going to talk about some stuff. Uh, you noticed, I didn't say that they were the best guys or the smartest guys we've. We've got a crew of guys dang it. Oh, we have fun and, uh, we've got volunteers.

01:03
Yes yes, that's true. Uh, we've got some. We got some fun stuff to talk about today, though. Oh, we have fun. He's got volunteers. Yes, yes, that's true. We've got some fun stuff to talk about today, though, and we're going to let Rob kick it off, and Rob's going to talk about Canonical, his second favorite computer company to talk about.

01:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah. So out of this group of guys here, we're going to start with the best. So Canonical, you know, it's kind of one of those uh, big names at linux that we like to or I like to, some of us like to razz on, put down whatever phrase you want to say, you know so some hate it for their, uh, for their choices they made with ubuntu, like forcing snaps. Maybe. Others hate the, the big corporateness you, the red hat, feel that they have, while some they're somewhat they see Canonical as somewhat anti-open source at times, With things like when they pulled LXD into an internal project, dumping the community and spurring the, uh, the fork of incas. Well, they're finally deciding to give back to the community. All right, I say, then, just a little bit, I'm I know they do plenty of overall good for the community, but, uh, they are now putting the money where their mouth is by donating $120,000 to open source projects this year or also another put $10,000 a month. In fact, they have downloaded or donated I mean to large projects before in the past, but these are large ones, like Eclipse Foundation, cloud Native Computing Foundation. You know big ones like that. But this, this new announcement here, it's going to spread out the funding to many more smaller projects. So they are utilizing a platform called thanksdev that analyzes Canonical's GitHub code to determine external projects, libraries and tools their code relies on and splits up the funds based on those dependencies. I took a look at the site and it says it's trusted companies like Canonical, square and some others I have not heard of but they're right there on the homepage and it shows Canonical has over 2,000 dependencies and, in comparison, square had 400 plus open source dependencies, open source dependencies. So since kicking off this initiative, canonical has donated more to more than 350 GitHub projects already.

03:52
Ben Holt, canonical software engineer, said quote while very few open source developers do it for the money, the feeling of being recognized, knowing that someone cared enough to show it, has real meaning for an open source creator, and I can confirm that myself. I've never been a big one, but, as someone who has done some open source development in the past, I did it because I was having fun, I enjoyed it. But knowing you know I've had some donations in the past and just knowing that someone appreciated what I did, enough to donate, you know, even if it was a dollar, you know, or whatever they had, you know it was appreciated. You know, same goes with the coffee donations for this kind of thing, with the coffee donations for this kind of thing.

04:51
But big projects often rely on many thankless small projects, that often they don't get recognized the recognition they deserve. When all is said and done, I imagine some projects may get nothing more than a few dollars out of this but, like I said, I would feel amazingly honored to receive a few dollar donations from canonical in recognition of of, uh, how my work has benefited canonical, which at this point is probably not at all, except for maybe here. Well, maybe I need to start by not bashing on them so much, um, and maybe I need to start showing them a little more love and then then they could call it a contribution, though I don't know that, uh, that they're. Uh, that dev platform is going to find uh me and their code to donate to but, anyway.

05:36
Um, it's kind of cool. You know there's a their project out there. They are a platform out there that they're utilizing to see where their funds should go and they're spreading out to all those little guys.

05:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So it's pretty cool, yeah, very cool. Um, I, I'm always, I'm always fascinated by stuff like this, because it's it's a fairly big problem. You've got all these little projects, and even projects that start just for the love of it. You do eventually get to the point where it's like somebody's going to have to give some money for this thing to really continue, or else the people that are doing it are going to have to go do something else.

06:11 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, it's like I'm kind of tired of doing this. If I had some money, maybe I could be incentivized to keep it up. Yeah, maybe why I don't maintain anything anymore that I've had before.

06:23 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yep Getting a paycheck for doing maintenance is a nice feeling, Even just the recognition, like you said. You know, oh, somebody actually appreciates the work I'm doing.

06:34 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I can actually get a cup of coffee now.

06:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it doesn't have to be a big paycheck. I mean, even just gas money is helpful for where a lot of us are at. To be honest, yeah, cool, good for them, and I'm very intrigued by thanksdev as well. That's a place to kind of keep an eye on. It's not the only group out there doing this, but the way that they're doing it is interesting. So they say, hey, let us hook into your GitHub. And then they go and they scan all of your repositories on GitHub and try to give you a breakdown based on the things that you're depending on, and that's, that's pretty cool. I'm not aware of anybody else doing quite that.

07:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So I like it and they help support the people that you depend on.

07:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Exactly, yeah, and I guess, as a note one more note to just be aware of they do take 5% of the donations. So if you want to, that's.

07:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
that is a smaller percentage than some other companies that I know that do similar things, so sure.

07:31 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
If you want to impact something more specifically, you know, always donate directly.

07:35 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But you know, it's a lot smaller than some of the gatekeepers I deal with on a daily basis.

07:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Indeed, indeed.

07:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, and you got to figure there's a little bit of overhead there you got to deal with, you know.

07:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
so five percent five percent is actually real reasonable. I can play cheaper than than you know the android app store or any of those what's similar to what a credit card uh transaction uh, gets charged usually like three, three point five percent for credit card transaction.

08:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
so, yeah, yep, all right. So let's chat quickly about one of those other things that we all are beginning to depend upon, and, ken, that's Rust. And Rust is celebrating 10 years now.

08:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, it is Happy anniversary, Rust.

08:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Happy Rustiversary.

08:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, this week, michael Larabelle and Bobby Borisoff wrote about Rust developers celebrating 10 years of Rust at of all places they went did the event at I hope I say this correctly Utrecht, netherlands. Bobby's article starts off explaining Rust is an open source modern systems programming language that combines memory safety with high performance. Its main advantage is its ownership model, which eliminates entire classes of bugs, such as data races and null pointer dereferencing at compile time, without needing a garbage collector. I still need a garbage collector. This makes it particularly attractive for performance-critical applications like operating systems, game engines, web browsers, and the list goes on. He then recounts Rust's almost legendary origin story, while informing us Rust officially reached version 1.0 on May 15, 2015.

09:37
Now, according to Michael, the Rust developers released Rust version 1.87 exactly 10 years to the day to celebrate this big milestone. Now, speaking of Rust 1.87, some of the things that it provides. It adds anonymous pipes to the standard library, save architecture intrinsics, inline assembly via ASML exclamation, and it can now jump to labeled blocks within Rust code and a number of stabilized APIs. Rust 1.87 also removes its i586 Windows MSVC target for old processors. If you want details on this or on the history, then follow the links I have in the show notes there's a complete list of the updated APIs that you can find through Michael's article.

10:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, rust is so interesting because it got basically complete redesign about halfway through that process. When Mozilla picked it up and said, hey, we're going to use this for the browser now, it changed dramatically. And then again when it entered into the kernel it changed very dramatically to be able to work in that space. So it is a very interesting sort of evolving language because of that.

11:01 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, that's like a happy Ferrous Oxide day.

11:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Had you ever heard the uh origin story for uh, how russ got created?

11:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
it was, uh, it was virtually like a phd, um or a professor broken elevator it involves a broken elevator no, I don't know the phd having to walk up 21 stairs flights of stairs.

11:25 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, bobby covers it better in his article.

11:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'll have to go check that out. I'm not sure I could tell you exactly what the story is. All right, well, let's talk about Live Update.

11:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Orchestrator. What is this? This one's a little more enterprise. What is this? This one's a little more enterprise. So today we're going to be diving into an exciting development from Google, and it's an update to their Live Update Orchestrator, or LUO. This program is designed to apply kernel updates while the system is running effectively, greatly reducing the need for a reboot. For the average user, this might not seem like a big deal, but for enterprise environments where uptime is absolutely critical, this is a major deal. Think high-demand servers, you know, running enterprise workloads where downtime is simply not an option. Luo allows administrators to apply updates and patches without ever needing to take the system offline.

12:24
Now, LUO is not the first of its kind. Linux already has several live kernel updaters, such as kpatch and ksplice, where you can update a running kernel. But what makes Google's LUO different is its primary focus not just patching an existing kernel, but moving to an entirely new kernel while keeping the system online without interruption. So this is a step beyond what previous solutions have offered. To quote Google's developers, live update is a specialized reboot process where selected kernel resources, memory, file descriptors and, eventually, devices are kept operational or their state preserved across kernel transitions For certain resources, DMA and interrupt. Activity might continue with minimal interruption during the kernel reboot. So, in essence, LUO enables a seamless transition where critical system functions remain uninterrupted even during a kernel update. So now, when they talk kernel reboot, they mean going from one kernel to the other, not a full system reboot, like most people think when you hear reboot.

13:40
Beyond that, LUO builds upon a foundational piece of code Google plans to upstream soon, known as kernel handover. There's a possibility we could see this integrated into the Linux 6.16 kernel, making it available to the broader community. Basically, to check it out, we'll have to wait for the pull request for 6.16, see if the code winds up in there. If the relevant code is included, LUO then would become widely accessible, allowing updates without reboots, at least in most cases. That being said, if you're doing something like a full distribution upgrade, it's probably still going to require a reboot, just to the sheer number of changes involved. It's probably still going to require a reboot just to the sheer number of changes involved. But you know routine incremental kernel updates, like a 0.01 version update or you. You know you go from a .15 to a .16, you know okay, your new kernel. You can do it without a full

14:49
system reboot. It is important to note that this technology is mainly designed for enterprise servers which use error correcting memory and other high stability server grade hardware. These machines prioritize stability above all else. You know. Consumer grade desktops and laptops, on the other hand, benefit from an occasional reboot, you know, because we can get consumer grade stuff, can get minor hardware glitches and that can still throw things off. So it might not be totally the fault of the operating system if something goes a little awry. So just be known that if you're running consumer grade hardware you might not get these super long uptimes Maybe, but your mileage will vary with the less stable and a lot of times faster running consumer grade hardware. But for system administrators managing mission critical environments this is a massive win. So you know, the era of seamless updates, where uptime is preserved without interruption is, it's within reach, you know, or at least uptime is greatly improved. So to all the sysadmins out there, get ready to rejoice.

16:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, interesting, that's pretty cool. I know there are a couple of companies and projects that do live patching. That'll let you do something similar, but swapping out the entire running kernel, that that's really fascinating. Uh, yeah, I can see. I I bet they have plans even for things like, uh, android, like let's do it there too, right, it would make sense in a whole bunch of different places. Oh yeah.

16:23 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I think once they get it fully ironed out and the that software I was talking to the code that they were going to put in there, the kernel handover. That was part of the kind of the base framework that will keep the status of all the memory, the hardware, where everything was to help with the transition of the orchestrator. So it's they kind of work in conjunction with each other I.

16:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think something like this actually finally makes you know uptime a real bragging point. You know over the years, a lot of people, various communities. I've been like how long is your uptime? And people are like I've been up for this many days and then you always get all the feedback, which I'm usually leaning on that side. It's like so you're not updating, then You're out of date. It's kind of critical to update, but you know this will be a new one. You know now I can get on those communities and say I have this long uptime and then when they come back, so you're not doing updates, I'll be like oh, I am, I've got this, yeah.

17:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'm using live update orchestrator.

17:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah.

17:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah Well, that's why, if your system has to get rebooted, say you're doing this and you're really trying and you're running consumer grade. I just wanted people to know that there is a difference in hardware quality and server. Enterprise steps back from the ultimate speed and there's a lot more error checking and redundancy to make sure things keep running at the expense of speed, so like. That's why, like a thread ripper or something, or epic, you know processor is not going to play games as fast as your normal consumer stuff because they have the stepping back and the slowing down anything.

18:20
They're going to underclock it yeah, just to make sure there's no errors, there's no hiccups.

18:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, on some of my servers I use the Uintube Pro, the live patch. I mean even that you still have to update once in a while, but it maybe minimizes that a little bit. Or reboot, I mean once in a while.

18:40 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Right, it seems like I'm rebooting Tumbleweed every other day.

18:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Is that because you have to, though?

18:49 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's because it recommends doing that after doing each distro update.

18:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I mean, it's Tumbleweed, it's a rolling release, it's not terribly.

19:00 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Not terribly. Yeah, that would be kind of I don't know, not terribly bad. That would be kind of I don't know. If you had a rolling release and then you included this, I guess maybe you could keep going.

19:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Let the kernel roll too.

19:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, you just have to close out certain programs occasionally.

19:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, because it's not only the kernel that sometimes needs that reboot, it's all the libraries and stuff that would cause problems too that the applications have open, Like try updating Firefox without having to restart it.

19:37 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yup, that would be tough.

19:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yup, yup, alright, let's see Up. Next, rob, are you looking for a new job?

19:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, if you're not looking for small donations from Canonical but instead a full-time job, this story may benefit you. Amd is again hiring more Linux engineers to work on their Ryzen client efforts under Linux with the next generation hardware enablement enhancing feature support for existing Ryzen systems and related efforts. They have already I mean they've already hired Linux engineers in the past. That's kind of nothing new. To work on things like server-side, where Epic, markershare and the data center continues to grow significantly, and seeing success in things like the Valve Steam Deck, that's primarily AMD and I guess even some Tesla and vehicle systems utilize it. You know it's all growing with the AMD Linux ecosystem and you know, when it comes to the GPU, I'm often touting that Jeff needs to, you know, avoid that other GPU company. But he has his reasons, so I'll let him stick with that. But I like AMD. But anyway, the goal of this role is to enable Ryzen APU CPU within Linux distros and work with the cross-functional team for Linux OS. Bring up Now, if you're looking at this, you may have to relocate, as this position is hiring in Taiwan. Taipei, taiwan. I had to think how to say that again. I forgot Taipei, so that's where it's at. Maybe it's not for a lot of our listeners, but if you are interested, the job posting description says you're going to have to plan, design, review and evaluate Linux OS specifications.

21:57
Ability to engage with external partners and customers to enable preferred kernels and distros on Ryzen platforms. Contribute to the design and architecture of high-quality, complex systems, linux environments and compatibility among commodities. Ability to debug complex system-level multi-component issues that typically span across multiple layers in the system, using either written or verbal skills. Collaborate in a team environment across multiple engineering disciplines, making architectural trade-offs required to rapidly deliver base level solutions for the platform. Experience in C and Python skills. Get familiarity with at least one major Linux distro and, they say, a proficient systems design engineer with a strong Linux skills. Take a primary role in in between silicon engineers, firmware engineers, software engineers, platform engineers and architects. So you know, although it you know it's in Taipei, but it's good it's still good to see when hardware manufacturers place an emphasis on Linux functionality, even if it's not their core. It's good to see that they're putting some work into Linux functionality rather than leaving it as an afterthought for the community to figure out on their own Apple. So you know they're hiring strong, really put a focus on linux.

23:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So go amd yeah, very cool, I like it. Now I wonder if that's a position that they would consider taking remote. Is the right person applied for it? I would. I would not like if you were out there and you were thinking to yourself man, I'm the perfect person to, but I don't want to move to Taiwan. They have the conversation. The worst thing they can do is say no, we're not going to hire you if you're not willing to move to Taiwan.

23:52 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I don't know what the specifics of it, if they require it to be in a specific location.

24:00 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, I bet you came in with a really shining resume. They would start making exceptions you're gonna apply jeff?

24:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm not a coder, I'm a hardware guy you've done python, I guess you don't do c, but I, I have done a little bit of c, but I mean it's very there you go, there, you go basic.

24:22 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, they're to look at me and go yeah, I've done basic. They'll say hey we want you for the fab, you know, interface with our foundry partners and but not, uh, not coding. But to correct what you said, I have team green video cards right now. Honestly, I would not buy team green right now. I'm actually I was toying with the idea of building another computer and it would be an AMD card. Team Green has just kind of run off the rails on this. This 5000 series is just terrible.

24:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Wow, you heard it here first.

24:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, you heard it here from the NVIDIA fanboy.

25:03 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, well, the driver issues the chips not having the full capability they're supposed to, the pricing the? I mean they're they not sending viewer review cards for the 50, 60, the 50, 60 series of cards because they don't want the reviews coming out that are just going to tell everybody do not buy these cards, they are a terrible value they're? Yeah, we can. We can talk about it in the after show, but it's not too much to talk about now yeah, yeah, all right.

25:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, let's talk about something that rob and I, at least, are going to have to think a lot about, and that is the end of 10. The end of 10 is coming.

25:50 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, first of all, what is the end of 10? Is it something radical? And why are we discussing this event on the Untitled Linux Show? The answers to these and other questions are found in the articles Christine Hall, liam Proven and Jack Wallen wrote about a collective of developers and others who are trying to help Windows 10 users transition their computers to Linux. Christine starts off saying genetics. Christine starts off saying wow-zee-zowie. I don't know how long it's going to last, but for the time being, some of that old time, we're doing something radical, important and good. Open source filling is back. It's like being part of a movement again, and I'm tempted to take the advice once handed out by David Crosby and to just let my source freak flag fly Now. According to Liam, the campaign is a noble attempt to raise public awareness.

26:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It carries Lost my train of thought there Carries something Yep.

27:09 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It carries. The campaign is a noble attempt to raise public awareness. It carries a simple, clear message in large, friendly letters when Windows 10 reaches the end of its life in five months time, you don't need to buy a new computer. Jack states. With the Windows 10 end of life on the horizon, it was only a matter of time before something like this arrived on the scene. Now this is coming from the end of the 10 website. Is this, jim, if you bought your computer after 2010,? The 10 website? Is this, jim? If you bought your computer after 2010, there's most likely no reason to throw it out. By just installing an up-to-date Linux operating system, you can keep using it for years to come. I'm proof of that. I bought mine secondhand and I'm still using it Now. By just installing an update date Linux operating system, you can keep using it for years and years. Yes, this movement has a website, even hosted by no other than KDE, which was initially scheduled to go live on May 28th. What's today, jonathan?

28:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Today's the 17th as we record this.

28:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So you may be watching this after the 28th, but it was launched actually a couple of days ago, but it's because it's a hopping place right now. Now, who's behind End of 10? According to Christine, end of 10 is supported by a coalition of FOSS projects which includes well-known open source projects such as Gnome, kde, free Software Foundation Europe, opensuse, and, in fact, several members of End of 10 worker contribute to some of these projects. The End of 10 Project's mission is threefold First, empowering users and promoting sustainability. Second, community-driven support. And third, distro agnostic approach. I'm glad to see it's a agnot distro agnostic, though. We do have our favorites, don't we?

29:33
uh, jeff yes, we do now, if you are asking, how do I get involved? Christine's article best answers your questions. I've got a link to hers in the show notes, as well as Liam's article which suggests installing Chrome OS Flex for Ubuntu, and you can read Jack's article to find out more about OpenSUSE joining the initiative and transitioning its upgrade to freedom campaign to the End of 10 movement. Now Jack also reports on OpenSUSE dropping support for the Deepin desktop environment, which I do recommend reading if you want to find out why.

30:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Interesting. All right, yeah, I've seen a couple of different places working with. I think the fedora guys are part of end of 10 as well, that it's a lot of different places. They're sort of grabbing onto this theme of boy. That's a whole bunch of desktops out there that you're going to have to update because of some of the things in windows 11.

30:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's like you know who's conspicuously, who's messing from this group, who's that Microsoft?

30:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh well, I mean, that's no great surprise, right? Microsoft raised the limits, sort of artificially, for Windows 11. And that's what's really driving a lot of this is that there's a bunch of machines that are otherwise quite usable. They just you're not going to be able to officially install Windows 11 on. There are some unofficial ways to do it, Like that's the worst thing about this Windows 11 will run just fine on this hardware, but it is not officially supported because of one reason or another. That's that's what's driving a lot of us crazy about it.

31:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm going to defend him just a little bit and that it's not completely arbitrary in that, from what I've heard, there are uh aspects of outlook, I believe. I believe I heard a story somewhere about new, the newer outlook using security features from the tpm2 and I don't remember what that is, but I've read some stories about that. I believe it was actually from a linux advocate, but I could be wrong about that yeah, well, I mean.

31:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So what microsoft is trying to do is they're trying to make all of your, all of your desktops, all of windows 11 desktops are supposed to be, uh, disencrypted using a tpm.

31:57 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And so if you don't have a, if you don't have a tpm, or you don't have your firmware tpm turned on, there's just, there's nothing for for windows to talk to you to be able to get an encryption key, and so rather than good well, I was gonna say, but they could very easily just let it run and just say, okay, look, here's the features you're not going to have and you're going to be a little higher security risk and you're oh, it's good yeah, I, I did put a link in the show notes too for a Brody Robinson video where he talks about it, about Windows 10. And I, you know, when I go see my mom in a couple months she does not like Windows 11.

32:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
What Chromebook time.

32:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
No, I'm going to load Linux on her computer. She's all for it because she hates Windows 11. That bad.

32:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And then you're going to use KDE and it's going to look like Windows 11.

32:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's going to look like KDE.

32:55 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's going to look more like Windows 10 and the start button is going to be in the corner where it belongs. The start button is going to be in the corner where it belongs.

33:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
There is one thing I would like to do Is look over the list of members of End of 10 and see if there's any hardware vendors.

33:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I do want to say Jeff, you can put the Windows 11 logo in the corner so it looks like Windows 10. Still, I figured it was probably. Well, I never know. Actually, I don't know if that was an option or not, because sometimes things that I thought should be done on windows you just can't do.

33:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't think I don't think it's possible. I think at first it wasn't, maybe I don't know.

33:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, but I'm, I'm going to do that for my mom, just get her started. I'll probably put her on Ubuntu LTS, so it's just set it for security updates and just pretty basic, because most of her stuff is just surfing the web.

33:57 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And she does play some games, but it's a lot of kind of point and click type games. Go ahead and set her up for Ubuntu Pro as well, you could.

34:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, before we do that, though, I'm going to make a pitch that you should use KDE, and that is because there is something very cool, very new, that is coming to KDE 6.4. And that is the new HDR. You knew it had to be something with that the new HDR calibration wizard. So this is sort of uh, this is addressing one of the complaints that I have about kde 6.3. Even for the longest time, my machine behind me is stuck on 6.2 because I didn't like the changes that they made. And, uh, they are adding the calibration wizards that you can go and set your max brightness and get in there and do a little bit more tweaking with exactly how an HDR screen is going to work. Um, it also. It's also adding the ability to do HDR like uh, you could call it HDR light perhaps. Um, with with On displays that have the ability to make the backlight brighter and dimmer in various regions, and there is a new feature that grants you the ability to emulate an HDR screen through that.

35:12
There's now some work on the Plasma RDP server. That's definitely an interesting thing. The remote desktop built right into Plasma Might have to make use of that. I've had use over the years of being able to remote into my local desktop, so having it built in is pretty cool. And then, of course, the link here is actually to Nate Graham's blog and all kinds of stuff in here Various bug fixes for the Plasma 6.3 series, a bunch of bug fixes for the 6.4, the frameworks, all kinds of other stuff. But the HDR news was the one that really stuck out to me because it is a felt pain point for me. I very much want to see that get fixed.

35:55 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Especially since you've got a HDR-capable monitor.

35:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I do. I do indeed. I enjoy my HDR capable monitor too.

36:03 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And I actually did see that story and I went oh, I bet Jonathan wants to do that one.

36:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, I saw that nobody got it and I'm like I'm going to do that one.

36:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I've heard Ubuntu is also gearing up for HDR.

36:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes, and for the record, I will be putting her on KDE. I'm going to have it match kind of what I have so that I easier, uh, troubleshooting maintain. Yeah, if I need to, yeah, yeah, but I'm going to set it else besides Firefox. Solitaire. I'll set her up with Steam so she can get games. She likes to play some of the old point and click games like Myst and some puzzle games like that which are pretty easy to run.

36:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So I'll set her up with that and then she'll be happy easy to run, so I'll set her up with that and then she'll have be happy. I mean the most popular game I know when I worked in a pc shop, when older, elderly people would brought their stuff and was just to make sure their solitaire worked afterwards. And I remember when windows 7 went to windows 10, some of those updated Windows 10 did not have Solitaire.

37:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's like Microsoft really did not understand their customer base with that one Goodness yeah.

37:31 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, just show her where the software center is. That's what I've done in the past.

37:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah. The nice thing is that most anything you can get through there is going to be fairly safe. All right, jeff, I have been hearing about a new AMD Ryzen chip and I've heard that it's actually pretty impressive. I also am of the opinion that it's a terrible naming convention. Are?

37:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
you going?

37:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
to try to talk me out of that.

37:58 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
No, okay. Well, I will say they missed the bar for the us usb naming, so the p, the people that had the standards for the usb standards um, they're, they're still, they're still winning this. This is maybe second or third tier, yeah, but now we we have spent a lot of time on the show discussing amd's latest processors for desktops, but we haven't really focused on the mobile ones. And you know, since we do like to talk about laptops every now and then, this article from Pharonix caught my attention the ZBook Ultra 14-inch G1A Mobile Workstation which features and here's the name AMD Ryzen AI Max Plus Pro 395 chip. Yeah, now, it's a powerhouse. It's got 16 cores, 32 threads and has Radeon 8060S integrated graphics. Now, the laptop itself is also packed with 128 gigabytes of memory. Now, let's get the obvious elephant in the room out of the way. Yes, it's very pricey, coming in at approximately $8,000. But keep in mind other 395 series processors are available at lower prices.

39:24
I looked and there were some laptops. I think more about 2000. This particular machine is a flagship, high-end workstation replacement designed for those. You know you need maximum performance in a mobile form factor form factor. So to kind of go in for a high-end niche probably company type customer here where $8,000 is easier to swallow when you're a very large conglomerate. Now what's really fascinating is that this laptop was put through a comprehensive comparison against 21 other machines, other laptops spanning a broad range of manufacturers. I mean there's Dell, msi, asus, acer, framework and more. Now these are all the laptops that can run Linux, even if they aren't always specifically marketed saying they can. So these are all benchmarks, so you know that they've got a pretty good Linux compatibility to them. The article dives deep into the tests, examining everything from computational power, ai processing, compression, media performance the entire gamut. However, gaming benchmarks were deliberately left out, as gaming performance is heavily dependent on the GPU rather than just the CPU, and some laptops include external GPUs, which would skew comparisons against machines running integrated graphics. So if you have an external GPU on your laptop, it's still going to be better than a lot of integrated GPUs.

40:55
Okay, now let's talk results. At the high level, the AI Max Plus Pro 395 absolutely dominates all the laptop chips. There's no doubt this is exceptionally powerful. That being said, while it's not a cheap option, you know some actually view it as more of a compact desktop replacement than a traditional laptop processor, and there are some very small form factor computers using this chip. So it's a lot of the computers like maybe it gets stuck to the back of the monitor on a VESA mount or something like that. So when you're maybe doing some office things where you don't need anything real powerful and it's running apps off servers or things like that, this chip replaces a much larger desktop model. Now, like I said, you can find them in other laptops cheaper, but you know, depends on your budget what you want to get.

41:52
But the real takeaway here in this comparison, I think provides valuable insight into how various processors stack up. So if you're in the market for a new laptop, this data lets you weigh, you know, computational power versus price so you can make the most informed decision possible. Because I mean there's several AMD chips, several generations, intel chips, a few different generations, so you have a wide gamut of mobile processors. So you can look and see how they all compare to decide what you actually need. You know.

42:29
For those wondering how Intel chips held up, you know AMD processors came out on top in most tests Intel's Core Ultra, 7, 256v and 258V. They made a respectable showing. They landed in 8th and 10th place respectively. Overall, so not terrible, but 8th out of 22 was the best. So Intel's got to come back a little more, but maybe they're not in high demand and you can find a heck of a deal on a laptop. I didn't check prices, so, but maybe something to consider. So if if you're, if you're considering a new laptop, take definitely take a look at the article in the show notes, explore the benchmarks and find the best solution for your needs and budget.

43:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I, I've looked at one of these before and they are, they're quite impressive. Um, I think framework actually has one of these uh, high level new amd cards that they're about to come out with and I looked at it. I was like, oh, they'd be so nice, but I just can't. I can't justify. I don't do enough with my laptop. I don't do enough high performance stuff. I don't actually need a mobile workstation.

43:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So that's, that's mine and at least right now, I want to say framework. They're running the, I think, 370 series chips which are, which are a tier down from the ai max chips. But I, I'm like you, I I don't do a, I do more like oh, I need, I need this in the shop for looking at these manuals. I need, you know, maybe I'm going to run a Dungeons and Dragons Well, sorry, pathfinder session. I prefer Pathfinder. There I said it and you know.

44:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I need.

44:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I need quite a bit of memory, but you know the processor can be a little slower for what I, what I'm doing on them.

44:22 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So, yeah, that reminds me when we're going to stream that, uh, that ULS Pathfinder game. We've talked about it.

44:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We can do it, uh, anyway. That's not really what we're here to talk about, though, um, but but the but the subject.

44:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You know, I bet you a lot of people who, like linux, either have or are currently playing a tabletop role-playing game I mean, I've got my binders pretty much within reach, it's true I can pull down my gamers. Nexus autographed case with my inductor polyhedral dice and uh yes, we're're all nerds.

45:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We admit it. You'll have to teach me.

45:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm not quite as big of a nerd, but would you run elementary OS on it?

45:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You?

45:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
could. Is there something new with elementary OS?

45:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's elementary, my dear Jonathan, so elementary OS. It's a distro we don't really talk about much, but it is a fairly popular distro, at least at least in a niche area, and one that I have had some interest in in the past for a while. Honestly, I tested it quite a few years ago I don't know five years ago, give or take, I don't remember and at the time it was okay. That's kind of how I felt about it then. But I feel like it's looking pretty slick these days and, with a new release of 8.0.1 just around the corner, I thought I'd share some of the cool things I've read about it that are coming up. Maybe I'll give a shot. I don't know, but we'll see. Maybe you want to give it a shot. So you know, project founder Daniel Foray. He recently recapped some of the features that are coming up. So here's one of the things.

46:24
The first thing I've thought the list is there is a they're adding a prevent sleep button. So you know, are there ever times when you don't want your pc to go to sleep? But you know, in that case your options are to maybe run something like. I know there's caffeine or stuff, a program called that that I've ran on some various different computers. Or you can go into the power settings and go and change it all so it doesn't shut off. That's a lot of work when you could just have a simple button built in A nice quality of touch, quality of life touch. So I know I would use it. There are definitely times I like to not like to keep my computer from falling asleep. There's also language settings, benefits from a more responsive design, wacom settings. So it's a stylus detection settings. So it's a stylus detection uh, and you know, no, no cause doesn't cause crash if none found.

47:29
Uh, in-app purchases also is another thing. You know app center labels, free apps with paid content inside. I know in-app purchase and maybe the bane of many people's existence, especially those that struggle with self-control, maybe have kids with a little too much access to it. But the truth is that in-app purchases have been a boon to mobile app development and many games across the spectrum. So having something like that on Linux, it boosted these platforms and helped developers also. It may also help boost the ecosystem, the app ecosystem on Linux. You may also end up with a lot of junk games along the way, but you just need to know which ones to go for and which ones to just skip. So it really could help the development if they got that there.

48:25
Then there's also a new system monitor app to show things like CPU, ram, gpu, and I saw the screenshot of it. It looks okay, but I think there are better ones out there that if I were doing it, I would just pick one of those and put it in. I think there are better ones out there that if I were doing it, I would just pick one of those and put it in and we've we've demoed or displayed a few at least a couple on this show that were pretty slick. That I think would be a better than this, but whatever. And then also another nice one, you know, for those who like multiple workspaces, which I do, the fact is one of the key, one of the things that really drew me to Linux back in the old days elementary OS. You're going to likely see these updates in a future 8.1 release, but if you are adventurous and want to see them sooner, you can sponsor elementary on GitHub to get early access to daily and monthly development releases for testing.

49:37
So I don't know, elementary is all it's a little bit I felt. I used to feel like they they're trying to look like apple, like mac os, but maybe it's just the gnomish of it. I don't know if it's it's gonna gnome that they use, but it's interesting. Uh, distribution and, and you know, not too far out there it's. It's not hannah montana, lin, linux or anything like that. If you're hopping around and you haven't tried it yet, it'd be worth giving it a shot, I think.

50:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Is it going to become not a niche Linux distro? Is it going to become a distro that you can actually recommend to someone?

50:16 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think you can recommend it. I don't know.

50:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You've heard my rant before. If someone's new to Linux, don't tell them to go to either Arch or one of these little niche distros that nobody's ever heard of. Tell them to go to Fedora or Ubuntu or Debian.

50:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think if somebody knew how to do it and definitely stay away from Gen 2. I think if somebody new came to elementary os, I think it'd be just, they'd be just fine. Um, it just doesn't wow me enough compared to like some of the others like it's just another distro I mean tumbleweed, that's.

50:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's kind of saying something, though, right when, when a distro has come to the point in development where it's just another distro, like you, you've actually you development where it's just another distro. You've actually sort of made it at that point to some extent.

51:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You have, but also you kind of want to differentiate yourself somewhere, because there's already plenty of other major. Just another distro out there.

51:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's true, it's true.

51:22 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I would put them up there in the top 10 or 20, yeah, or somewhere there now the question that I'm sure ken has is can you run flat packs on it? Absolutely. Why don't you tell us more about flat packs, okay?

51:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'll be more than happy to, and this week we've got Mario Snister and Jack Wallen both writing about the release of the popular Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework. Yes, that's the flat pack. This time it's version 1.16.1. Both Jack and Mario talk about one of its biggest improvements the ability to allow a child account to update existing apps by default when using parental controls, to ensure that security and bug fix updates can be installed.

52:18
Installed Flatpak 1.16.1 also speeds up the flatpak prune space dash dash, dry, dash run command by no longer calculating the potential freed space and avoiding operations that would need to hold a lock. It speeds up the flatpak permission reset command by only writing entries that have actually changed and adds support for looking for TLS certificates on slash, etc. Slash containers, slash certs, dot d when interacting with OCI registries. This release addresses various bugs, including a memory leak when installing extra data, showing fatal transaction errors twice and including all options in shell completion for Flatpak certs, as always. Since I didn't touch on the highlights, I do recommend getting all the details from Marius and Jack's articles.

53:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, interesting stuff. The notorious flat pack, the infamous flat pack. It means it's more than famous. That's fun, all right. Do we want to talk about the other AMDd thing, the other ai max plus?

53:46 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
thing. Well we're. We're kind of gonna hit the old one and some new so we're gonna get a halo in here I think there may be a halo.

53:55
I don't know, maybe some horns we'll We'll see here. So I've got a couple more stories about laptops coming up Now. The first one focuses on the AMD 395 processor again Same HP laptop, as we discussed earlier. This time Michael Arable from Pharonix compared it to Windows 11. So Windows 11 and Ubuntu 25.04 on the same hardware, ubuntu 25.04 on the same hardware, using a variety of benchmarks. Now this includes gaming benchmarks, so this adds an extra layer to the analysis.

54:29
Now I was going to do a full, deep dive into the system, but the bottom line is just clear. For this brand new AMD chip they've only been out, I think, a month or two months Ubuntu completely dominated Windows. Typically, when we see our comparisons like this, you know one system edges out the other slightly. But here Ubuntu secured 80% of first place finishes and when looking at the geometric mean, it demonstrated 30% better performance. Yes, three zero percent. You know to be fair, windows will likely improve over time fixing drivers, optimizing support, you know closing the gaps, but for now at least, this early hardware, linux simply outperforms Windows. No debate, no hesitation. Linux is faster, period. End of story, full stop. Second story so this ties into the first, but expanding the one I just talked about, but it's expanding the comparison between multiple Linux distributions on a different laptop. So there's no Windows involved in this one, but this one is the Framework Laptop 13. Features an AMD Ryzen AI9 HX370 CPU See, that naming is so much better 16 gigabytes of memory and a one terabyte SSD. So this is more like what people would normally get.

55:56
The Linux distributions tested were Cache OS Rolling, clear Linux 43280, debian 13 testing Fedora Workstation 42, manjaro 25, opensuse Tumbleweed, ubuntu 25.04. And they were all tested as they loaded. So it was all defaults, no tuning, no custom optimization. However it installed, is how it was tested. Now onto the results. Now, this is going to be a little interesting. System optimize, however it installed, is how it was tested. Now under the results. Now, this is this is going to be a little interesting, so stick with me here.

56:32
But Debian 13 testing took the most first place, finishes 60 in total, followed by CacheOS with 24 and Clear Linux with 18. Manjaro had five, ubuntu had two and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed managed just one. But things get even more interesting when you look at the geometric mean. Across all tests, clear Linux emerged as the leader, performing 4% faster than CacheOS, with Debian just 1% behind that, fedora, ubuntu and Manjaro respectively, were followed closely behind Debian. They're just like a couple percentage points. The biggest surprise, opensuse Tumbleweed finished in dead last, and not just slightly behind, but almost 30% slower than Clear Linux. And even compared to Manjaro, which was the next to the last distribution speed-wise it was SUSE was Tumbleweed was nearly 20% slower. I mean that's that's a significant gap.

57:40
Now a word of caution. So Tumbleweed's a rolling distribution, meaning its performance can fluctuate depending on when the benchmark was run. Maybe it had a bad update or there was something misconfigured, dependency or something was off, but it was really off. And another note is when Clear Linux won overall, but it didn't take that many first place wins. So what that means is when it did win it won big and when it didn't win, it performed consistently well and it took a lot of close second place finishes.

58:18
So for those unfamiliar, clear Linux is an Intel-backed distribution but it's not really built for everyday users. It's more of a database-tuned, testbed distribution. Cacheos is an Arch-based distribution and that would be the one. If you wanted a normal desktop experience and were not a novice user, I would say that could be one that you could run. It's the one I would recommend for people that actually wanted to run one of these distributions. So you know, after today's stories, have fun picking out new hardware and maybe a new distribution to go with it, because you now have a great array of laptops that have been compared and you have distributions that have been compared.

59:10 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So it's, it's uh absolutely yeah, I think I want to try out that clear winix, clear winix that's a window cleaner, right, you got to remember that's maintained by intel and their open source technology center.

59:27 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That's a window cleaner, right?

59:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you got to remember that's maintained by Intel and their open source technology center. Clear Linux is actually pretty interesting. It's all of the cool toys Intel puts into one distro. It's sort of where they show them off.

59:40 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And then optimizes it to run on Intel hardware.

59:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Wait yes and no. It's interesting how well Clear Linux does on Intel hardware. Wait, yes and no. It's interesting how well Clear Linux does on AMD hardware.

59:51 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes, it is optimized for Intel, but a lot of the optimizations do carry over to. Yeah, they do carry over. And I want to say we've benchmarked. We've seen the benchmarks before and I think Intel runs just a couple percentage points faster. I mean, it's surprisingly close how much it actually works. Yeah, that's pretty impressive.

01:00:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I like to see AMD make their own Linux optimized for AMD.

01:00:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that would be interesting.

01:00:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's interesting. Mice for AMD? Yeah, that would be interesting. It's interesting that Tumbleweed did so well when Clear Linux, or did so poorly when Clear Linux did so well, since they're both following a rolling release model. Yeah.

01:00:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, it's just, it's all of those the tunables and the well, pretty much all of it's going to be tunables, I guess Maybe some patches that Intel has in there, various compile-time options and stuff like that.

01:00:56 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Nothing to do with the fact that it's designed to be used by IT professionals for DevOps primarily.

01:01:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, I mean so that gets reflected in some of the decisions they make for how they set the tunables. We need to go through those at some point and, by the way, I thought about grabbing a few of them and using them for my command line tip today. I didn't, I went with something else, but those are really interesting to look at, like all the different knobs and switches that the Linux kernel gives you for things like how many TCP connections should we have open at a time, how many TCP connections should we allow to be in the process of being opened at a time before we start doing SYN cookies? All kinds of crazy stuff, and sometimes it matters. So, yeah, stuff like that. All right, let us speaking of which. Let's get into some command line tips. We've covered the news. We're going to let Rob go first, and Rob is this VIP? Rob is this vipe or is this vip?

01:01:50 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
vip, vip vip vip.

01:01:55 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I think it rhymes with pipe vi, I don't know.

01:02:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So this is another one in my series of more util. So we did do this one. I guess Ken did this one like three years ago, so I'm going to bring it back here and show it off again. That does is basically it allows you to edit an input before piping it on to something else. So if you're running a command and you want to pipe into something else, you just, you know, pipe that to something else. Now, if you want to be able to edit that midstream in between there you use something like vibe. So you know a small little, you know example of that. Let me just get that so you can see it.

01:02:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Okay, so live demos.

01:02:59 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I did not. That was, oh, I know why. No, I don't know why, I don't know why. I thought I had that all sized out right on my screen so you'd see it nicely, and I don't know what happened, anyway. So I'm going to do an example here. So in this example I have echo, quote test, piping that to VIPE and then I'm piping that to CAP. So if I do that, it's going to open up my default editor and it piped test into nano.

01:03:28
Now if I just change that into testing a third line here and then I exit it out with saving pipes at the cat and you guys can see at the bottom that it edited that, you know, maybe a better real world example might be if I wanted to do if data, which is one command that I did oh, I don't know a month ago or so it was in the more utils. So if I do if data, dash, pa, and then I do my interface, which is ENS 18, pipe that to ViP and then pipe that to CAT, I could pipe that anywhere, but I'm just going to, for demonstration purposes, pipe it here and it does what my local IP is of this machine. Now maybe I want to edit the next machine I change that to four or something. Then it's going to pass on your edit onto the next thing in your pipe stage.

01:04:31 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So that is vipe or vipe or whatever you want to call it so now could you use that with sed or something like that to automate on the fly.

01:04:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes, yeah, I mean there's going to be interaction because it opens up an editor. So you're missing that piece of the automation. But yeah, you could, you know anywhere. You can inject that anywhere you want and if you wanted to modify the data that's being piped Nice.

01:05:06 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Somewhere in the pipe where you needed to actually go in and massage the data that's being piped, nice, somewhere in the pipe where you needed to actually go in and massage the data before it goes on to the next point.

01:05:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, or maybe just make sure that it's formatted properly. For the next thing. It's like you know, maybe if I wanted to like IPA and it would have had all that data and I, you know, because I didn't, maybe I didn't know how to just pull out what I wanted I could delete all the other stuff and or, you know, send on just the IP or something like that Hopefully not something as complex as the results of IPA, because that would be a lot, cause the group command you keep trying, keeps grabbing everything else as well, yup.

01:05:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yup, yep, interesting. All right, ken, what do you have for us?

01:05:47 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I've got some more commands that you can use at the Pipewire command line interface. This time I'm going to go over working with remotes, transition to the terminal, so that we can play around with creating and connecting to and even disconnecting from remotes. Now I've got two commands. I want to create the remote in the terminal I have on the left and let me go ahead and blow that up so y'all can see that, because I think it's a bit small, isn't it? Is that better?

01:06:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I can see that.

01:06:37 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Okay, but the command I'm going to use to create a remote starts with an environment variable this is going to be in all caps pipewire underscore core followed by an environment variable this is going to be in all caps pipewire underscore core followed by an equal sign and after that it's going to be the name of the pipewire instance that I want to create, and I've went ahead and called it capital U, capital L, capital S, then in lowercase, pipewire-1. And then I'm going to follow it with the pipewire command line interface command. Then use a dash D because I want to daemonize it, and then a dash R so I can give the remote name. And again, I'm going to go with the uls pipewire dash one. When I hit enter it says welcome to pipewire version 1.4.2, type help for usage some, and we remember what help does. And then it also says remote zero is named remote 0 is named ULS pipe wire dash 1. Now, right now you're not really able to do anything with it.

01:07:52
I'm going to switch to the second terminal for a minute and I've got a command that you would use to list modules from a remote. It's PW dash, cli, space dash are to give you the so I can give the remote name Again, ulspipewire-1, followed by ls space module. When I hit it, nothing happens. I'm going to have to hit control-c to get back to the prompt. To get anything to work we've actually got to load a module. So we're going back to last week's uh command tip on how to load a module. In this case we're going to load the access module by using load dash module, space lib, pipewire dash modulecess. That's the module for access. When I load that, it comes back telling us that it's been confirmed, that it's been loaded. Now I can come back over to the second screen, rerun the pipewire command, and it's listing the modules that are in that remote session.

01:09:05
Okay, now, speaking of listing, how do you list your remotes? Well, it's going to be list dash remotes and, yes, I've got the S there. Found out, without the S it doesn't work. And there it lists just one remote, the one that I just created. So now we want to connect to some remotes.

01:09:36
In this case I'm going to use a command to connect to a special remote. It's the connect internal. It's the connect internal and the special remote that we're connecting to is actually the instance that we're in. The connect internal basically connects to your current remote. So we're going to run that. So we're going to run that, and here we see that it gives us a 2 equals at sign remote colon. And I'm not going to read all that. But it also comes back saying remote 2 is named ULS pipewire1. And it gives us an error about unsupported type pipewire colon interface, colon security context, which I think we've seen a few times as we're doing this. And now when I hit enter I also get a prompt. If I go back to the list remotes command, we have the two remotes. Now if you look at the entries, you'll see that the at remote equals or the at remote colon. It's slightly different for each one. I suspect that may be an address location.

01:11:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Kind of looks like it, yep.

01:11:09 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Now, with the connect, you could follow it with a remote name if you wanted to connect to one, or if I just want to connect to the default pipe wire configuration, which is pipe wire dash zero, I can just run connect with nothing after it. And now, when I list the remotes, I've got three remotes. Okay, now that I've got three remotes, what can I do? Well, how about switching between remotes? So, right now the prompt gives us a pipe wire dash 0. And you'll see that each one has a line that begins with 0, a line that begins with 2, and a line that begins with 3. So let's do a switch remote 0 and we'll list and we'll see that the order that they're listed in changed.

01:12:23
If I go to switch remote to again, the order is going to be changed when we do the list remotes and you'll notice that the pipewire command line interface prompt has changed to indicate which one we're actually using now, which is actually the zero that I'd done previously, or no, it's actually the two. But now we're going to go back to the pipe wire zero by selecting remote number three, almost Almost like doors. And there we go, and when we list it, we've got them in the same order again. And before I disconnect from the pipe wire zero, I'm going to go ahead and change to one of the other two, and now I can type in disconnect 3. And when I list I just have the two versions of the ULS Pipewire 1. But once you've got your remote Pipewire server set up, you can then go in and inspect the objects in it and maybe even create some. I'll be going over how to do that in the next couple of command line tips.

01:14:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, very cool, very useful to be able to do if you want to manage your remote pipe wire stuff. All right, jeff, what do you want to manage tasks?

01:14:21 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, this one's a little more niche here. This week's command is task set Now. This is's a little more niche here. This week's command is task set Now. This is definitely a specialized tool, but I'm certain there's at least one person out there who's going to think holy cow, I've been looking for this. I hope anyway.

01:14:38
So what does task set do? It allows you to control which CPU cores a task runs on. Well, why does that matter? Well, if you need absolute peak performance from your system and if your CPU has multiple cores spread across different NUMA nodes or you have multiple CPUs in your system, you may want to restrict where your task runs. Here's why, when processes jump between NUMA nodes or CPUs, there's a delay in the computation. So imagine something running on CPU1 and suddenly it's getting routed to CPU to finish.

01:15:17
Because of how things work with the whole system microcode, the scheduler these things shift around and it might have, for whatever reason, something in there decided it had to switch CPUs. Well, when that shift happens, you've got data transfers or cross-CPU, cross-numa cache requests. The additional logic to move it, it basically is adding latency. Now, for the average user, this overhead is imperceptible. But if you're running a highly specialized computation say, you're executing hundreds of trillions of calculations, those tiny delays start piling up. So by specifying which cores your task uses, you prevent unnecessary overhead, basically ensuring your system runs your program as efficiently as possible.

01:16:13
Now I'm not going to dive too deep into the technical details, but the simplest way to use TaskSet is sudo space, taskset space, dash C space, the cores that you want your task to run on, your program to run on space, and then the path to the task. So that's the simplest way that you can restrict what you want to run to one or multiple cores. Now, if you're interested in exploring the full depth of what task set can do including, you know, c groups, integration, scheduler control, custom load balancing I highly recommend checking out the article linked in the show notes, because it goes way under the hood. And this is one of those programs that it's kind of fun. You can play with it, but to truly utilize it if you have the load that requires it very, very powerful. But, like I said, this is not something you typically use on a general purpose system. But half the fun of Linux is playing right and it's a powerful tool worth exploring. So give it a look, maybe take a start and start taking control of where your processes run.

01:17:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely Very cool. All right, I've got a tip that hit me and some programmer buddies here recently and it's a bit of Linux networking lore, as it were and that is that the ports below 1024 are special. So you got to run a program and you say, hey, I want you to bind to a port listen for incoming requests anything under 1024. So you're 80, you're 443, you're 22, 23,. All of those low level ports, they are, they're special. And3, your 22, 23, all of those low-level ports they're special, and by being special, that means that they require generally root access to be able to bind.

01:18:17
So the quick and dirty way to make this happen is to run an application as root so that it can bind to that low-level port. It's not a good idea to run your applications as root if you can avoid it, and so there is a better way to do that, and that is through the capabilities. And specifically, the tip that I have here is something that you can add to a systemd service file. You can tell it ambient capabilities, equals, equals. So that's just sort of the background capabilities that you want the service to have, cap, net bind service, and that gives it the capability to bind to the network on one of those low service ports and so you don't have to run it as root and it can get port 443 or whatever port you want under 1024.

01:19:08
So a couple, a couple useful things there for everybody. And one is knowing that when you get weird networking errors from your applications, that is something to check. And two, this is one of the ways, one of the ways there's multiple ways one of the ways to fix it when it comes up. Are you running into this before rob?

01:19:29 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
um, no, not particularly. I'm just, I mean, I'm familiar with what privileged ports are, but and I think that, um, one of the things that makes uh, cali linux, uh, somewhat less secure, as they, I believe, at least at one point they removed privileged ports, so you could.

01:19:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
For what Kali is. That makes sense. Yeah, use any of them, it does.

01:19:53 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And I believe some of the early SecurityNow episodes actually go into great detail about that.

01:19:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, there's some really good stuff on those first couple of dozen SecurityNow episodes. They're just fundamental how the internet works stuff.

01:20:06 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, so I know we've talked about, I think, running a tiny little web server with, was it? Python, I think? We did it with Python, so you could run it with a non-root user and use one of these privileged ports and actually make it not quite as insecure. Yeah.

01:20:25 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yep, yep, for sure I would say. I was running a server one time and I had to un sandbox a port because of system D I'm sure they realize it till I had to dig around and went oh okay, I had to. Yep.

01:20:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep, there you go. All right, that is the show. I'm going to let the guys get the last word on what they want to, or plug anything if they want to. Uh, maybe even poetry.

01:20:48 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
jeff is up first um, a side note here. I would like to bring up that we were in a different order this episode and rob didn't bring it up once. I think that's a record. So, uh, just just thought I'd mention that Poetry Corner. So my time is not yours. You do not know my schedule. Make a damn ticket, have a great week everybody.

01:21:15 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, language, language, it's the family show.

01:21:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It is All right Ken.

01:21:21 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I just wanted to remind everybody about how, back in episode 201,. I just wanted to remind everybody about how, back in episode 201, jeff talked about Oregon State University's open source lab future being in jeopardy. Well, this week, saurav Rudra wrote about the incredible community response and the open source lab's future plans. If you contributed, then this article is a must read for you.

01:21:52 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah they got it. They're not going to close after all. It's pretty cool. It's a real success story. I'm glad I did the story. Yeah, we saved it.

01:21:59 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, we did that. All right, rob, yeah, so this week we're saving the best for last, and that is me. And to come find and connect with me, you can go to robertpcampbellcom and on that page there's links to my LinkedIn, twitter, blue Sky, mastodon and a place to donate a coffee for me just to show me how much you care. And I think you know. If you don't want to donate the whole coffee, I think you could change the increments. Maybe you can't, but you know, even a dollar would be kind of fun. Maybe it's not even worth a dollar because they take their cut and I don't know. Donate if you want or not.

01:22:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Here, kid, here's a quarter. Get yourself a cup of coffee. All right, fun, fun. Thank you guys for being here. It was a blast, as always.

01:22:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Always a fun time here.

01:22:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, all right, makes it so special for us. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, all right, if you want to find more of me, there's, of course, hackaday. I've got the security column. Goes live there on fridays and then floss weekly on we record on tuesday goes live on wednesday, except for this last Tuesday. I was down sick for the day and our guest had to reschedule so had kind of a twofer there, but should be back this next week with a guest and looking forward to that. Thank you all for being here and thank you for your support ongoing for twit. If you're not a part of club twit, you really ought to think about it. Take a look, it's about the price of a cup of coffee per month and it's how you give back, how you support the shows and the network that you love. Again, we do appreciate everybody that's here, those that watch and listen, those that get us live and on the download, and we will see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show.