Untitled Linux Show 206 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)
This week we're talking about updates to FastFetch and LibreOffice, the new carton tool for KDE virtualization management. There's some systemd news, there's a bunch of terminal tricks and, oh yeah, there's some weird stuff going on with X11. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

00:19 - Leo Laporte (Announcement)
Podcasts you love From people you trust.

00:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
this is twit this is the untitled linux show, episode 206, recorded saturday, june the 7th, the untitled episode. It's saturday and you all know what that means. It is time for the untitled linux show. I'm your host, jonathan bennett, and today we're going to talk about open source software, some hardware stuff, a little bit of drama going on this week, some weird stuff, but it's going to be fun because we're here talking about it. Rob is off being a loser, but we've got Jeff and Ken today and we are going to have a lot of fun and it is time to get started. And at first we're going to let Ken tell us a lot of command line tips today. Lots of command line tips we're going to start with the command line. Lots of goodness. Yeah, fast Fetch. Fast Fetch is the next generation successor to Neo Fetch.

01:20 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Actually, I'm going to be honest. This week, bobby did write about FastFetch as a replacement for NeoFix that you can use to show a summary of your system information right in the terminal. Fastfetch released its latest update, version 2.45. Fastfetch is rich in mainly in C, with a focus on performance and customizability. I practiced that one this week. Currently it supports Linux, macos, windows 7 and up Android, which I'm looking forward to playing with the coming week FreeBSD, openbsd, netbsd, dragonfly, haiku not the poem and SunOS.

02:12
Now, according to Bobby, on Android devices, fastfetch now supports detecting marketing names for OnePlus devices marketing names for OnePlus devices. You can now enjoy seeing your familiar consumer-friendly OnePlus branding. Reflected GPU detection has also been seeing a nice boost, particularly for Linux users, with support added for recognizing additional GPU vendors. Kde users running FreeBSD will appreciate the new KDE version detection support in FastFetch. Now FastFetch 2.45 introduces a new JSON-C configuration option. You can see it in the article, where it basically starts off with a logo open, curly bracket type command draw, then close curly bracket. This way, if you want to customize your output, you can use that. You can directly run custom commands and display their outputs as logos. Fastfetch 2.45 also has new logos for Starry Linux and rel-small, and updated color palettes and logos for Void Linux and Zinnia Linux. For more information, I recommend seeing Bobby's article.

03:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
BOBBY HYAM yeah, I went down a rabbit hole just now, because when you type in fast fetch on my machine, it suggests fast A fetch and it's like what is fast A fetch? And that is a tool for doing DNA sequencing Something very, very different. Not at all the same thing.

04:01 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I ran into this earlier because I was looking something up and I'm like I know NeoFetch is deprecated, but what was? Which other one did I install? And I thought what the heck? I hit NeoFetch and on my system it says NeoFetch is deprecated, running FastFetch instead. Oh cool.

04:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I wonder if that would work here.

04:25 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That's on Ubuntu 25.04?.

04:28 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes.

04:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Okay.

04:31 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
There's some beta stuff in there too.

04:33 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I was able to install it on 24.10.

04:41 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I didn't install it automatically, was in there for me.

04:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
What really fascinates me is, if you go to the fast fetch github page, um, they're not packaged. They're not packaged everywhere. There's a bunch of places where they're not packaged yet actually, uh, but they have a. They say here if that's fast fetch is not packaged, your distribution or an outdated version is packaged. Linux brew is a good alternative. I am. I am so fascinated to see more and more projects recommending using Brew for Linux to get stuff as kind of that extra package installer. It's a very fascinating thing to see.

05:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, but it's one of the various replacements. I thought it was interesting that we were seeing version 2.45 recently coming out. Indeed, in the past I've been trying Machina or Machina. I'm trying to think how you pronounce it. It's Machina.

05:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It'd be Machina, yeah, which is like Latin for machine, but it's popularized in the deus ex machina term.

05:46 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But yeah, and it's similar to NeoFetch and FastFetch. For those of y'all that are listening, I've actually got it as my background for the beginning of the show.

05:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, interesting, cool, Nice, all right. So up next we are going to talk about one of the other tools that everybody uses. Our machines are more than just $1,000 paperwork rates for running FastFetch and NeoFetch, and one of those things that you might know that you almost certainly have running on your machine is SystemD and there's something here Most all of us. Basically all of us. I don't know, With this show we probably have a few listeners that are not. But Jeff, what's new in the systemd world for you?

06:36 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, the article linked in the show notes is from HowToGeek and written by David Delany, where he explains why he continues using systemd-based Linux distributions. Now I found this interesting because I think it parallels discussions around X11 and Wayland that some people are adamant about never switching. So I thought it was kind of a good analog to what the systemd and sysv init to X11 and Wayland. Now to go into the actual SystemD part of it, just to provide some background. So before there was SystemD there was SysVINIT, and along with SystemD you find these programs, both of them, at the core of Unix and Linux distributions managing the initializations of programs and devices. Simply put, it's the system's initialization component and they're the first daemons to start during boot and the last ones to shut down. Now, that's super oversimplified, but that's the gist of it.

07:39
Now, sysv init was introduced with Unix in the 1980s, at a time when operating systems and environments were much more static. Machines didn't have USB ports and peripherals weren't frequently added or removed. If you were adding something to your machine, you shut it down, added it, fired it back up, and most of the time they were fairly static. You know, one drawback of SysV and NIT was that it started processes sequentially, without parallel execution. Now SystemD emerged in the early 2010s, initially sparking controversy. You know, while most of the debate has subsided, some distributions like EXE, gnu, linux and Oberon still rely on SysV and NIT. Now I personally remember a bunch of those arguments and what was better, and at the time I was kind of like, well, I don't know enough to say, but it seems like system D is pretty cool, but I have to let people that are smarter in those areas choose for me.

08:44
Now the author, for example, outlines why he switched years ago and remained satisfied with system D, and one major reason is reliability. He hasn't encountered any issues with system D and starting or stopping services is straightforward process, eliminating concerns about scripts and run levels and things like that. But the author does acknowledge that the service management is only a tiny part of his Linux workflow. For him, the tipping point was Arch Linux's adoption of SystemD, and Arch is guided by pragmatism and, as described in the Arch wiki, arch is a pragmatic distribution rather than an ideological one. The principles here are only useful guidelines. Ultimately, design decisions are made on a case-by-case basis through developer consensus.

09:32
Evidence-based technical analysis and debate are what matter, not politics or popular opinion, you know, and so the author goes on and emphasizes the importance of embracing change. You know hardware and you know hardware evolves. You know our software evolves and it needs to to keep up with the hardware. So we, we, you know change for the sake of change, you know, isn't beneficial. Beneficial, which I personally agree with you know. But we have to critically evaluate both you know changes, advantages and drawbacks, before we decide, you know, whether we're going to embrace it or not. You know, basically, system D and Wayland are here to stay. That isn't until something superior emerges. And when that happens, moving forward is only natural.

10:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Super interesting thoughts. I have not had a problem with system D itself. I have endless problems with system D, resolve resolve D and in fact I'm now looking again at how do I turn this thing off and keep it off. It looks like system CTL mask is the way to do it and I will be. I will be playing around with that after the show. So what is that? I guess that is your local DNS resolver. Oh OK, you know, in the past you would have a DNS host in slash EDC, slash resolveconf, and with systemd resolve d it actually changes all that and runs sort of a local, non-authoritative DNS server, which I'm sure for some people work great, but I've I've I've had continual problems with it. It just I would like to be able to actually set my own DNS. Thank you very much, um, but you're also not the typical user You're.

11:14
you're a little more of a power user than most people a little bit, but some of the things that I have problems with. I think other people are going to have problems with two things that just used to work, that don't work anymore. Oh, so you're not doing crazy things, you're just. No, in this case I'm not doing crazy things and it still is a problem from time to time. So, for example, wanting to change your system DNS to another host, like if I want to troubleshoot a problem by setting my DNS to Google's 8.8.8.8,. How do you do that with resolve D, like there's probably a way.

11:50 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, when do you do it? Are you you're talking about? On the local machine itself or at the router?

11:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well. So that would be the sort of thing that you're doing. You're bypassing the router's DNS to see what's going on. Or maybe you want to use you know, there are some dns services that are going to try to block malicious websites for you. Um, do some dns filtering right and like? I'm sure there is a way to do that with resolve d, but I've I've never found it and it always annoys me that I can't go into, etc. Resolvecom and just set it anymore. That was, that was a good feature, and I am still a little salty that part of system D has gotten rid of it and that kind of strikes at the heart of what I consider to be the most legitimate complaint about system D, and that is that it is an everything and the kitchen sink tool.

12:41 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You can even use it for restarting pipe wire, as I demonstrated last week.

12:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, so restarting services, I think, is in scope. That's what it was originally intended to be. And there are some of these plus kitchen sink features that work well, at least for me, like JournalD, the logging thing. I have no problem with that, that works well.

13:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And I think to get my keyboard's RGB lighting to work I had to do a systemd hack.

13:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, I can believe it. Keys 512 says you can remove the symbolic link, so it uses the slash, etc. Slash resolve dot comp file.

13:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That makes sense. Yeah, I can see that Again. Every time I've been annoyed with it, I've not had time to dive in and understand it, and so I just am perpetually annoyed.

13:41 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Sort of like when you get that splinter up under your nail that you can't get out.

13:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep, yep, all right. So, speaking of splinters under your nails, let's talk about Windows 10. And there is a bit of interesting news going on with the. Well, what was the term? Oh, I forget what they called it. There's like an ongoing campaign, uh, for leaving windows 10, ditch windows 10, or whatever they. Oh, there's a term end of 10. That's the one. Um, kde is getting in on the fun, and they're they're using a little bit different term, because their term is your computer is toast, and, and that is referring to Windows 10 losing support October 14th and the fact that so many computers just don't officially support Windows 11. And so KDE is getting in on the fun, and I had a conversation with Nate Graham this past week on Floss Weekly and that was one of the things that we talked about that we may be about to see another odd point in time where a lot of consumers actually do come over to Linux and try to use it.

14:51
And of course, there is the joke about oh, he's calling for the year of the Linux desktop. So I would say that we had this already once, when netbooks were a thing and Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows XP were a thing and Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows XP. And so then you suddenly had a lot of people getting OEM machines running at the time pretty terrible installs of Linux. And so this is what Nate and I were talking about Like are we about to enter a new, another day, another era, where you start to see OEM installs of Linux because maybe even some new computers don't meet the Windows 11 requirements?

15:28
And then are we ready for this? Are Linux installs decent enough? And I think, if you get the right distro, some of them are, and obviously getting better and better. But this end of 10 thing is super interesting to me. I think it's going to be real fascinating to see how the people, the public, respond to it. I know a lot of people are annoyed by 11 between recall and the fact that their machines won't run it. They're about to start getting annoyed pop-ups. That 10 is done. It's an interesting time.

16:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Why got 11 at work? Because it's an odd number.

16:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, there is the, there's the windows curse of the odd number and even numbers. I forget which way it goes.

16:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Uh, odd is good.

16:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, but but 10 is an odd number in windows world because they skipped over windows nine because of that curse which it should have been nine, and it actually is decent, but yeah, I got forced to 11 at work.

16:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh, I, I talk about it. It's a fisher price operating system. All the buttons got bigger. They space things out. Everything's a pastel color. Oh, I hate it. A lot of people. I have to run mods. Well, thank you, steve Gibson, because I got a mod that lets me have the vertical taskbar.

16:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh nice.

16:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You can't do that. It's like what is this 1995? How do you have a UI that lacks so much functionality? I just don't understand it. I think a big opportunity here, though, is Linux is in a lot different place than it was with the XP switch, and there's a lot of good ones out there. I just hope well, I know it's going to happen. I really hate to see when somebody's brand new to the Linux world and someone recommends oh, here's Bob's distribution, it's the greatest ever and it's like no Ubuntu Fedora. All the documentation is out there, it's easy to Google, it's everybody's got all the wikis and everything Easy to find, so grandma won't have problems.

17:46 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You're not having to switch disks to finish loading the operating system.

17:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Those days are gone, far behind us, thankfully, yeah.

17:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But I mean, that's why I preach those. I mean, are there better ones out there? Oh, you could arguably argue that there are better ones out there, but if you're Googling or binging or chat, gpt or whatever you want to do, where are you going to find the most support, those two operating systems, without getting? I mean you can, you can argue arch, but I don't want. I don't want grandma starting out on arch you know, probably not.

18:23
I don't want grandma starting out on arch, you know, probably not. Yeah, maybe, maybe if six months under Ubuntu or Fedora, then she can start running March and Gentoo and you know.

18:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But no, just start out easy, make you know yeah, it's kind of interesting Also thinking about that, like pop OS used to be on that list and I, I, I someone else has has observed this that the guys at popo, at system 76, they've started putting so much time into cosmic that pop os itself is suffering just a little bit, uh, and I'm hopeful that, yeah, I think it is true. I'm hopeful that when cosmic comes out, they they get back to updates on Pop OS and we can re-add that to the list of a distro that is worthy of putting on grandma's machine.

19:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Right and that was one of the stories I had a couple of weeks ago was mentioned that, yeah, they're still on 2204. That's why they weren't Because there was a performance that I believe Michael Larable did. A performance benchmark is what it was, and they said why no Pop OS? Well, they haven't done anything for a while. They're dumping so much time into the desktop and I don't even know if they want to make their own distribution. If they get Cosmic running, great, they could just load it on top of whatever. Do they need an?

19:41 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
actual desktop as well. I'm saying, they probably don't.

19:46 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
If they get the interface.

19:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
System76 laptops come pre-installed with Fedora running. Cosmic that would be. I can see that.

19:58 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Or at the time of ordering Ubuntu Fedora Tumbleweed.

20:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, there's kind of a weed, there's a, there's a maintenance burden there to go and test all of those. One of the things that they've been able to do is not have to test a whole bunch of different distros. Um, and there there are some things that they do in pop os specifically for their hardware to make it work together and be happy. But, um, yeah, I don't know. We could see that, I could see it being a fedora product at some point in the future yeah, I would say never put a, never put a rolling distribution on a uh consumer product like that, that is not.

20:35 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
No, you want, you want mainstream as you can get frog you could all.

20:40 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You could All right. What about KDE, ken? I like virtualizing and GNOME has boxes and I use VertManager. Is there anything in KDE that lets me manage my virtual machine?

20:55 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, maybe a promising new project, according to Bobby Borsoff again, because he also wrote about this promising new project called KARTON. That's spelled K-A-R-T-O-N, not C-A-R. It aims to provide a seamless virtual machine management experience tightly integrated with KDE's Plasma desktop environment, instead of relying on GTK-based virtual machine managers such as, as you'd mentioned, vertmanager or GNOME Boxes. Initially envisioned as a QEMU front-end, it is now being reimagined as a modern QT, quick or Kirigami-based interface leveraging Libvert as its backend. This integration promises to abstract low-level virtualization tasks.

21:53
Carton can already display existing virtual machines, start and stop them and manage basic installation and deletion processes. Now Derek Lin, the main apps developer, advanced Carton's capabilities significantly by developing a custom domain installer. This new feature can intelligently parse OS, installer disk images and generate tailored XML configurations, simplifying development and future feature additions. Derek plans on working on and polishing the virtual machine viewer. Some of the things he wants to address this summer are support snapshotting I'm sure we'd all enjoy having that feature Rework the user interface so that it uses space more effectively Sometimes you wish that GNOME boxes did that, didn't you? And then, of course, the system monitor to graph CPU and RAM usage of VMs, similar to Vert Manager, and some other configuration options for the installer to support device pass-through. Now, as always, you can learn more about Carton Virtual Machine Manager by reading Bobby's article.

23:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There is a killer feature that if has a command line pulled up, there's no technical reason why you should not be able to do it. Just grab the keystrokes off of the buffer, off of the copy paste buffer, and enter them into the remote machine and it would make my life so much easier so that I don't have to sit there and copy and paste by hand to type in long strings to make machines on the other side. Do things, please, make it.

23:55
I've been doing that with my vm that I've been running if you go and install guest editions, you can do it just fine. But if you just have an install, that's like a, particularly if there's no GUI on the other side, you can't do guest additions and like technically speaking, there is no reason why you can't. Just, you know, pop a text box up outside of the VM screen, paste into there and hit OK, I'm done, and it just spits all of that text into the machine, hit okay, I'm done, and it just spits all of that text into the machine.

24:28 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You'd think there'd be some way to pipe that into it exactly.

24:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
As far as I know, there's not a way to do it. Now. People are telling me various ways that they might be, that I might be able to do it and I can go try those, but I'm pretty sure it is not. It is not a thing.

24:46 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Let's see. I currently use Vert Manager.

24:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Indeed. I don't remember installing a guest addition into the OpenSUSE. Opensuse probably comes with it by default.

25:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Could be. Automatically installs it as part of it when you load into the virtual.

25:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, but if you've got a remote machine, that's just command line, no GUI at all.

25:17 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I've never found a way to be able to paste text into it, and there are times it would be so useful to be able to do yeah. For me, everything I run is with virtualized would be have a GUI and guest additions.

25:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep, yep, although, jeff, it sounds like you've got some other command line tips that might help here.

25:33 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I do so I consider using this as a source for command line tips and I probably could get several weeks worth of content. But you know, some of these tips I'm going to go over are quite small and some of them we've touched on in the past. But it's a well-organized collection and I thought it'd be helpful to go over them to make all your command line time more efficient. So there's 13 of these. So 13, run the previous command. If you've ever typed a command but forgot to add sudo I know I do it all the time rather than rewriting or arrowing up and editing the line, simply type sudo, space, exclamation point, exclamation point and this will execute your previous command with sudo.

26:21
Number 12. Run commands without logging them in history. So when you're using up arrow to cycle through previous commands, you may want to run some unique commands without saving it in your history. So then you know when you're up arrowing a lot, doing some repetitive things. You don't want that in there. To do this, simply start the command with a space. It won't save in your history file by doing that. Number 11, use the argument from the previous command. So if you've typed a long file name, for example, and there's no need to retype it again, press Alt plus to autofill the argument from your previous command.

27:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
To replay. That's alt plus.

27:07 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
period Alt plus period Alt plus period. Yes, you're right. Sorry about that. I even had it written correctly.

27:19
Number 10, replace a word in the previous command. So imagine you want to ping Google but you accidentally type goggle. Instead of rewriting the command you can use carrot goggle, carrot Google, and this will rerun your last command with the corrected word. So there's no spaces in any of that. Number nine swap characters before and after the cursor. So if you mistype a command such as LS and you type SL instead, you can press control plus T. So control T to swap the characters and correct it. Aliases Number eight's aliases. Aliases Number eight's aliases.

28:07
You know they streamline frequently used commands, but we've covered this extensively in past episodes so I won't go into details here. Number seven format data into organized columns. The column command arranges data into neatly formatted columns. For more information, check out episode 59, where Ken covered it in depth. For more information, check out episode 59, where Ken covered it in depth.

28:26
Number six run multiple commands consecutively. I know we've covered this but just as a refresher, you can chain multiple commands using, for example, command one semicolon, command two semicolon, and so on, which will run each command regardless of success or failure of the previous one To ensure the next command only runs if the previous one succeeds. Use command and the and symbol twice, so command and and and then command two. So command two will only run if command one successfully completes. Number five use your fingerprint instead of a password. With the fprintd program you can enroll your fingerprints and, after setting it up, if you're typing sudo, and normally when it would prompt you to scan your scan or put in your password, you can scan your fingerprint instead. So take a look at the article in the show notes on how to install and enroll your fingerprint. It's really simple though. Number four return to the previous directory. Switch between directories effortlessly by typing cd space dash. This is especially useful when you're frequently navigating between two very long different directories. Sometimes you're hopping back and forth. The dash command will take you back and forth.

29:52
Number three freeze and unfreeze your terminal. So this one's more of a. You might not know what's going on here. So this will help you out. If you accidentally press control S because maybe you're used to hitting control S to save something and you do it in your terminal now your terminal may appear stuck. Some of them will give you a notification and tell you what's going on. Some don't. So when you press control S, it sends the X off signal which pauses output. To resume, press control Q, which sends an X on signal to unfreeze it. This is a legacy holdover and is you know? Like I said, it's mentioned for someone who accidentally froze their terminal, but it doesn't really have a lot of use today.

30:42
Number two clear the terminal screen. You may already know the clear command, but you can also instantly clear the screen by pressing control L. Number one create nested directories. Using the makeder-p command, you can create multiple subdirectories within a parent directory in one command. So if you've got a, you know level one, level two, level three, you can put them all together and use the dash P and it just makes it all at once. So take a look at the article in the show notes for all the commands and more details and happy command line surfing.

31:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, very cool, I like those. There's another one that they mentioned down in the comments. That is control. L is a very quick way to clear your screen.

31:32 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Without clearing out the buffer.

31:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes.

31:36 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Was that when you mentioned I mentioned that was number two.

31:40 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I fell asleep while you were talking about that one, I guess, because I have no memory of that I just saw it in the notes at the bottom and thought it was cool.

31:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I'll take that as such a compliment, as long as you hear me talk and you're like Jeff's. Okay, yes, the world is right.

31:53 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Right around 59, I think I was doing a series of command line tips similar to this.

31:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it's very cool, though, to have them all in one place. Some of these I have to go back and reference from time to time because I it's like oh there's, there's that button combo that freezes the screen, which is actually useful if you're, uh, if you've got a command that's spitting out a bunch and you need to freeze it to be able to look at it. Now it's a little less useful these days, because most terminals have a way to do that already, but from time to time it might be something you need to do.

32:23 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Scroll back or pipe it, but if you're in a situation you could hit it.

32:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, I think it's kind of like a we're typing busier backwards along with pressing the Alt and print screen. I think it was.

32:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
What does busier backwards do? R-e-i-s-u-b resub reboots your machine oh, that's like it's part of this system break. Okay, yeah, yeah, so the the system rq key right? Yeah, I think a lot of machines actually have that disabled these days.

33:04 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I can still use it.

33:06 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
OS is disabling it.

33:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The OS. So, like a lot of Linux installs, I think, disable the system rescue key and the different things you can do with it. It has been so long since I've had a system where I had to do something even like that.

33:22 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So we should probably mention it for people that don't know. Now I have to hit control and alt, along with the system key as well. So when you, if you're, if your machine is really locked up, rather than maybe hitting the reset button or the power button, I mean you, you know you can't remote into it, you can, you can hit that system, break, control, alt and then r-e-i-s-u-b, and you want to give it a few seconds between each letter and it, it gracefully shuts down the machine. It starts like letting go of devices and unmounting file systems and things like that, and then the final B is boot and sometimes it will unstuck your computer.

34:08
Before you get to that final letter yeah, I've always had to hit the final one. Whenever I've used it, it's locked hard.

34:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, so the E is going to send a SIG term to everything but PID1. So all of your processes are being told to shut down. And then I is going to theoretically send a SIG kill and forcibly kill them all. S is doing a sync, which ideally writes anything in buffers to disk, and then a U does an unmount on your file system. Those are the two important ones really, and that is an attempt to not lose data when the power cuts on the system to get it back. Yeah, fun stuff.

34:54
Alright, so there is a hardware release. I'm curious what you guys think about this. The link I've got is off to the Pharonix article about the amd radeon rx 9060 and there's some interesting things with this. For one, from what I understand, the, the linux experience on the 9060 out of the box right now is really really good, like one of the best deliveries that amd has ever had. As far as you know, day one, linux support, um and yeah, and. So if you've got uh, um, six, 14, uh, linux 6.14 and Mesa 25, you are, you're doing well, 25.1 apparently has a few fixes, um, but it is, uh, yeah, it's in really good shape. So if you do decide to pick one of these up. You can pretty much just plug it in and go to town if you're running a modern system.

35:51
Um, as far as performance, well, this is not a flagship card. It is very much a budget card, and so it's not winning a whole lot of awards on performance, although in kind of its price range right now and versus the equivalent from last generation, like it is decent. The 16 gig version is decent. I actually saw a few reviewers really ranting about how bad the 8 gig version is and I'm not sure the price difference to even really comment on what that 8 gig card is for. But from everything I've been seeing, you don't want the eight gig, unless you are just absolutely not wanting to spend any money, in which case you're probably going to be good with the embedded GPU that's already in your processor, because I think at this point, basically all of the processors you can buy are going to have an embedded GPU of some sort. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm curious Are you guys kind of watching this? Did you see the reviews come out on the 9060? Do you have any thoughts on it?

36:52
Too expensive for my blood, I mean for a budget card. It's still like $349, which is kind of a lot.

37:02 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Performance-wise it does good. Yeah, like you said, it's not a high-end card. It's not, you know, nothing earth-shattering. Uh. The biggest thing is how it's looked at is based on the prices. It's you know, because you have msrp, which now is kind of a elusive target, and what are the aftermath? You know the partner card's going to be and how much more. But you know you've got things like NVIDIA, who's cutting back silicon from TSMC, which means they're not cutting back silicon, they're making AI chips instead. They're redirecting silicon. They're not stopping anything. But yeah, there's nothing wrong with the card. It's a solid performer. It's just a question of the value. There's a lot of people saying it should have been a little bit cheaper, should have been like a $299 card or something like that, which might be a pipe dream.

38:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean there's some simple supply and demand going on here. If, if silicon space is being used in fab runs for doing ai cards, then you know that improve that. That more aggressive demand is going to make the supply more expensive. I mean that it's like yeah, it's. We've seen it multiple times with. We saw it with bitcoin, now we're seeing it with ai. There are these other factors that are driving up the price and down the availability of video cards and it's kind of unfortunate to see like it's kind of a bummer for gamers. You got to pay more for these things. But it's just the way it is realities of the, the economy and the market.

38:50 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh yeah. But yeah, as everybody said, do not buy the eight gigabyte card. Never, ever buy it. Well, you know, you lock yourself out of 1440 and higher resolution gaming and even if you're like, well, I'm only going to 1080p, that's all I'm going to do. There's some games that even it doesn't do as well, because modern games take more memory and, as they put in some AI for you know, your computer generated opponents and all that kind of stuff it can take a little bit and they'll have some frame stuttering and 1% lows that are worse on the 8 gig than the 16. And otherwise they're identical cards. There's no clocking difference, it's simply how many chips they put on the board, but otherwise they're identical.

39:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I wonder what the thought process was behind selling the 8 gig version.

39:50 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
They were trying to capture a specific market segment, yeah, and NVIDIA was doing it. So somebody in a suit somewhere, a suit and tie, thought, well, we got to do that too. That's what we're going to do, and it's somebody that probably is never really game, they don't. You know, I played Minecraft once and I remember Pac-Man.

40:07 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That was pretty cool you know well, I played minecraft once and I remember pac-man. That was pretty cool. You know how much it is saving between the price, wise on the between the 8 and the 16k it's, I don't remember.

40:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's like, it's like 50 or less, it's not much, yeah you think about the amount of ram that's actually in there and I honestly kind of wonder whether they're making a little bit more money on the 8 gig card than they are. The 16 gig card? Um, because you know it's not like it's not like we're overflowing with silicon, right, and so every every one of these cards that they put an 8 gig and they're competing against putting that, you know, releasing a 16 gig card. I guess what might happen like so, these are just the reference cards. What might happen is the big guys like xfx and them may just not sell the 8 gig or make very few of them. If this is really kind of the overwhelming market.

40:59 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Uh, response to it is that the 8 gig is not worth it oh, yeah, and and if you see 8 gigs, you keep in mind it could be a contractual obligation. There could be a. That's true. There could be a. Yeah, that's true. Amd says you're going to make X number of eight gig cards, even if you really don't want to. You're like, geez, I don't want to, but I have to. So you know some of the. That's true.

41:19
Keep in mind some goofy things can be contracts that we don't have visibility into. That you just never know.

41:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That is true, and that is a good call out he doesn't have.

41:34 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Uh, he didn't do a test on the amd rafael, did he?

41:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
what is?

41:40 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
what is rafael? Uh, that's the integrated cpu, or gpu, with my amd ryzen 7 ah, yes, yes, those are, those are doing.

41:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Those are doing rather well. I mean, that's like that's what's in the steam deck and some other other devices.

41:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
People really seem to have good success with those and you could even argue a lot of the hundred dollar, two hundred dollar cards probably have gotten ate up with integrated gs being at that level of performance. So you kind of eat into that bottom level.

42:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, I absolutely remember the days when you would go pay $75 to $150 to get a discrete GPU, not because you wanted a game on it, but just because you wanted multiple monitor outputs. And man, that level of GPU just really doesn't exist right now, or if it does, it's something utterly ancient that you really don't want to run anyways. And yeah, I think you're right, it's because every CPU has an integrated GPU in it and just about every motherboard has a decent collection of outputs. I mean, you go look at Amazon and almost every motherboard is going to have HDMI, dvi and a good portion of them will have VGA as well.

42:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh yeah.

42:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's just a hard sell.

42:59 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And here's something to look forward to. There's rumors out there that, on the other end, amd might be going to release maybe call it a 9800, 9900 xt an actual flagship yeah, it now it won't.

43:13
It won't compete with the 5090 or the 6000, but the 6000 is not a consumer card anyway, it's a pro card. Yeah, um, they're talking it might trade blows with the 5080, but it's still very unknown if they're going to do it. But it sounds like the rdna4 silicon is well up to the task. So they could crank it up and and go and, and you know, when you hear about the 9700 xts, it sounds like there's a lot of headroom in them and there's. You know, they could really uh, fine-tune the process a bit and really really let them get their legs under them and just really yeah.

43:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It'd be really, really interesting to see.

43:52 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And has that been documented?

43:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's rumor. At this point, it's rumor. Yeah, that's why I said it's written up anywhere with any editor. Not no no, no no place that is announcing it as news right. There are plenty of places that are talking about it as rumors, presenting it as rumors.

44:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It's forums, it's Twitter, it's known leakers, kind of thing. Yeah, I think the closest thing to quote official news would probably be Moore's Law is dead. He talked about it from some sources and some of this is when you hear these leaks. They might have that 9,800 XT and it could. But they're also evaluating what's the market. What's it going to cost to sell? What's our current silicon allocation? Can we even make this without totally disrupting everything and breaking contracts? So there's a lot that goes into these decisions, not just can we make it. It's like is it going to benefit us to make it? Because they could say, well, okay, 3% of the people will probably buy it. We're going to have to change these contracts with TSMC or Samsung or whoever they're. You know they've got their boundary business on some of these allocations with. Can we buy more? Do we have to change a contract? And it's going to cost us for a change and you know there there's a lot that goes into that.

45:22 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Then the question is what office suite do they use for writing those contracts up with?

45:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I can tell you I assume that that was they're long. Yes, I assume that that was actually an attempted segue into our next topic. I don't think they're using LibreOffice, but we can go ahead and talk about what's new in LibreOffice 25.2.4.

45:45 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
What's up Well, jonathan. According to Marius Nestor, it's been about five weeks since the last time we even talked about a point release of the latest LibreOffice 25.2 series. This week, the Document Foundation announced the general availability of LibreOffice 25.2.4 as, yes, the fourth maintenance update. It addresses various bugs, crashes and other annoyances reported by users in an attempt to improve the overall stability and reliability of this popular open source, free and cross-platform office suite. Popular open source, free and cross-platform office suite. We may even be surprised to find some law firms or contracting offices do use LibreOffice. Now, if you're into numbers, then you might be interested to know that a total of 52 bugs were addressed.

46:42
Details about the various bug fixes and all can be found in the RC1 and RC2 changelogs. A couple of the fixes that caught my eye include application freezes on Save, as when you're doing a KFX on X11. This was patched by Michael Weghorn. I hope I said that correctly. Another one was all apostrophes changed to Asian font when there is Asian text in the paragraph. This one was patched by Jonathan Clark. So thank you, gentlemen, for helping to improve LibreOffice. As always, mario's article has details on how to upgrade or download LibreOffice 25.2.4, as well as links to the change logs if you want to look at everything that was updated.

47:37
People are still using.

47:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
X11?.

47:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We're going to talk about that here in just a minute. Yeah, so it humors me that they always say in these release notices that for enterprise class deployments TDF recommends a library office enterprise optimized version, and they don't have a link. That's what really surprises me. So surely they get money back from these guys that do this or at least patches back or you know something, and they don't have a link to any of them, and that always surprises me.

48:17 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Maybe it's under the contact me.

48:19 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Maybe If you think something like that should be out front.

48:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, yes, they need to make that link obvious and hard to miss. Libre Office Enterprise. Who makes it? What is it? What is it for? Oh well, it's not for me, that's for sure. Definitely don't need it. It is nice, though, to see that Libre Office still is continuing to come out on a clockwork basis. It has been a long time since the last OpenOffice release, so keep that in mind, guys. If you're running OpenOffice, it is time to switch. You are running very old, in some cases very broken code. So there's some new code out there, jeff, and it's BcacheFS. This is a. Oh, we didn't. Are you going to talk about the kernel drama around BcacheFS and the maintainer?

49:19 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I wasn't, unless you're talking about losing file systems.

49:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, okay, you talk about this. I'm going to get the link and we'll talk about that too, but take it away and tell us about BcashFS.

49:32 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Okay, so this week I have two articles discussing BcashFS. Now, pardon me, this is a file system I've been tracking for a while and BcashFS is a copy on write file system designed to be modern, robust and high-performing. Ideally it aims to replace file systems like ZFS while maintaining performance levels compared to, for example, ext4. And it boasts many built-in features. And it can do a lot of stuff and I'm not going to go into them here. It's not really the focus of the article. Instead, I want to focus on what's new. So with Linux kernel 6.16, several improvements have been introduced. So they've enhanced performance for snapshot deletion. They have faster device removal, reduction of redundant accounting updates, making journal commits more efficient. Bcashfs can now implement incompatible features which can be enabled at runtime via sysfs. So that would be like if you're beta testing something or you're trying to really do some developer work. It's now easier to do that. Additionally, updates have been made to its repair and self-healing mechanisms. For example, recovery pass is now run in the background whenever errors are detected. Now the first article in the show notes provides a detailed breakdown of these changes, along with the original pull request on the kernel mailing list, so you can see all the details of every little thing that they wanted in that poll. Now the second article covers even more updates leading up to the right.

51:15
Before the RC1 came out, they had a second round of polls, so this includes stack usage improvements. Now there's a lot of various repair enhancements they put in there and a critical fix for a serious bug in Linux 6.15 that could cause data loss. Now the developer, kent Overstreet, said the following this took longer to debug than and this is a quote this took longer to debug than it should have and we lost several file systems unnecessarily because users have been ignoring the release notes and blindly running fsck-y. Debugging required reconstructing what happened through analyzing the journal when ideally someone would have noticed. Hey, fsck is asking me if I want to repair this and it usually doesn't. Maybe I should run this in dry mode and check what's going on. As a reminder, fsck errors are being marked as autofix once we verified in real world usage that they're working correctly. Blindly running FSCK-Y on an experimental file system is playing with fire. Up to this incident, we've had an excellent track record of not losing data, so let's try to learn from this one.

52:35
This is a community effort and I wouldn't be able to get this done without the help of all the people QAing and providing excellent bug reports and feedback based on real world usage. But please don't ignore advice and expect me to pick up the pieces. If an error isn't marked as autofix and it is happening in the wild. That's also something I need to know so we can check it out and add it to the autofix list. If repair looks good and I haven't been getting these reports and I should be, since we don't have any sort of telemetry I am absolutely dependent on user reports. Now to be spending, I'll be spending the weekend working on a new repair code to see if I can get a file system back for a user who didn't have backups.

53:24
So the second article also includes a link to the second pull request and you can have all the details in there of every little thing that's getting included. But one important takeaway, and I want to emphasize this BcashFS remains experimental and is not yet marked as stable. If you're using it, always have backups and only store data. You know use it to only store data you're comfortable potentially losing. Now this applies to any beta or experimental software. You know you tread with care or want an abandon based on the quality of your backups and the value of your data.

54:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Interesting stuff, so they broke it. But I mean, so BcacheFS is still like an experimental file system, right, it's still got that big asterisk on it.

54:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yes, yes, it is so this is not ready for production Right and they said don't run FSCK, which is basically a file system check, and DashY says hey, repair this. Well, that's not a good thing to do, this, well, that's not a good thing to do. And so, yeah, that some people lost some data or possibly, but it was kind of user error as well because they weren't following the directions. They kind of just oh sure, this sounds good, I'll click yes and oops, not what you should do, you're not supposed to always click.

54:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes indeed no. No, the answer to that is no.

54:52 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You don't want to always click yes you don't always want to click no either indeed all right.

54:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So the developer that I was thinking about is actually keys cook. That is not the uh, that is not the file system guy, but he did have a bit of a run-in with Linus just over a week ago, and so in this case, the original email from Linus is the one that I've got linked, and the snippet here from Keys is please pull this small handful of hardening fixes. And Linus responds WTF, keys, you seem to have actively maliciously modified your tree completely. There are completely crazy commits in there that are entirely fake, and so you know it was it was. It was very nice for a linus rant, but it was a bit of a linus rant, um, you know, completely unacceptable in all caps, uh, but they did go ahead and disable keys account until they figured out what was going on because, like they said, it looked like it could have been malicious. Um, and uh, come to find out it was like a combination of a dying ssd and a problem with um, a script that one of the other maintainers wrote, uh, and some other things going on like a perfect storm of problems in git. Uh, not problems with git itself, but problems in tooling around git that created this like bad merge request that caused a whole bunch of extra work for multiple people. So anyway, that's what's going on. I'll get the link to it if people want to read through that. It's fairly interesting to see all the things going on. Again, it's kind of taking a look at the sausage being made there in the kernel, and so that is pretty interesting. There is another bit of sausage being made that's weird and that is Xlibre. This is the last link that I've got in the show notes, and this is Enrico Weigelt, and he has been banned from freedesktoporg for daring to try to maintain X11.

57:10
And this is a story. It's wild. So, as we've talked about many times over the last few years, the time of X11 has basically come to an end. The vast majority of developers that were working on X11 are now working on Wayland. We're now actually really close to the point to where Wayland is ready for primetime. That's kind of a funny thing to say, because most people are on Wayland by this point, I think.

57:37
But lots of problems have been worked out. They actually worked out some of their personnel and bureaucracy problems in Wayland. We have Valve to thank for that. Actually, my, my floss weekly interview with Nate Graham was kind of funny because I told him I have this conspiracy theory that valve came along and said that they were going to fork Wayland If Wayland didn't shape up and play ball. And and he's like, it's not a conspiracy theory, man, that's what happened. It's like that happened out in the open. They did fork it. It was called the frog protocols. It's like yep, yep, that's kind of what we thought. So thank you, valve.

58:22
Anyway, so that's been going on with Wayland and you've got Weigelt been going on with Wayland and you've got Weigelt who has been working on trying to keep things cleaned up in X11. And he got banned from the freedesktoporg GitLab infrastructure. Now, obviously there's a lot like behind the scenes here that is unclear. I don't know why exactly he got banned. I don't know what the communication was between him and the other people there. I do know that freedesktoporg has been a little overexcited about banning people. We've seen this in the past, that they have dropped the ban hammer on active developers in ways that was probably not appropriate. So that may be what's happened here. It is kind of.

59:13
I don't know that. I would say that it's Well. So multiple big companies like Red Hat are trying to end support for X11. They want to move away from having to support X11. They're going to move into the Wayland future, which is fine. I think that's obviously the direction that the Linux world is going. It may or may not be sort of a heavy-handed attempt here by banning him, heavy-handed attempts to make that happen and to prevent ongoing maintenance. I don't know. The whole thing is just weird at this point and yeah, I don't know exactly how this is all going to shake out. I don't think so. He is now forked X11. He's calling it X Libre. I really don't think there's much of a future for it. I think too many things are just moving in the Wayland direction at this point. But yeah, it's interesting to see and we'll see what happens If maybe there is a future for X11, maybe we'll have some niche distros that are Upstart and X11 and SystemD free and Wayland free.

01:00:21 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I don't know, we'll see, I'll play a devil's advocate and give a plausible. I don't know if this is the case or not, but I'll just throw this out here. The bigger companies are looking at this and back when they said, know, when they said, okay, we're starting over, we're done with x11, we knew that there's security holes in it. It is structurally configured without security, or at least there's. There's a lot of holes in it and the reason they did wayland is because they have to totally rewrite it. They're like the amount of revision we'd have to do and the amount of people that truly understand how it works. There is literally a handful.

01:01:06
So there could be a danger in forking it that someone says, oh look, I'm adding all these features, but they don't really understand everything that's going on and they wouldn't want anybody having this catch on and then have all these security issues and you know ability to have malicious things happen, because I mean, he might have the the best of intent, but he nobody really. The people that truly understand x11 are working on wayland. That is the group, the core group that understood x11, is working on Wayland. That is the group, the core group that understood X11, is now doing Wayland and they're the ones that architected it and just for security and health of the Linux ecosystem. It might be like we don't want this confusing people. We don't want people even going down this path.

01:01:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I would, actually I would say that it's probably a bad thing for someone to claim that X11 is maintained so like in this case, x Libre to to make the statement that X Libre is being maintained when it is just one guy working on it who may not understand it very well, like I, I get, I get that, and that that may be a big part of it. Um, like I, I get, I get that, and that that may be a big part of it. Um, it's probably also true that the fact that he went and gave an interview to lunduk did not help his cause. Like I, I don't think that's a conspiracy theory to point that, to point that out and to, uh, to say that that might have something to do with it he went to lunduk didn't contact him.

01:02:36
I don't know which way it went. You know I've got thoughts about that. I would say talking to a person online is not something you should get banned over, and I think people are. Like I said when I told the story, the people there are a little ban-happy. So yeah, other than that, I guess I don't really have anything to say about that.

01:02:57 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Which is worse, little, you're big band happy.

01:03:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't know, I'm pretty big band happy.

01:03:04 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So you're saying it could be, it could have been political reasons, it's possible there are.

01:03:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, so it's very likely to be a combination. Right, ok, so this guy comes along and he's going to try to revive X X11, which the people that really know it say is a dead end project but because he's going to say this is supported, this is maintained. That's actually kind of a magical world in Fedora land and in Red Hat land, because packages that are not maintained you can't include in Fedora and therefore are not going to get included in Red Hat. But if someone comes along and says, no, no, this is maintained, well, then you're allowed to continue updating those packages in Fedora and then make it into Red Hat.

01:03:48
So there are some complicated knock-on results on this, and so I'm sure that was part of it. They were looking at this and going it's just not something that we want to do officially as part of the freedesktoporg, but then among certain groups of people, you do not win yourself any brownie points by being a known associate of Lunduk. That's just the reality. It's the way it is and again, I you know people have different opinions on whether that's right or wrong. I don't love the idea of banning people just because they're associated with someone you don't like. But you know, again. That I'm sure was part of the decision.

01:04:29 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So well, you know, it throws a little for me it throws a little shade on it. Just that he had an initial public interview. I would, I would think you know if you're going to fork it and really try to do it right. You're going to fork it, research it maybe, maybe have a call for developers, or so I don't know, less it's. It seems like there's maybe a little bit of grandstanding going on here, but that that's. I really don't know much of anything about it other than what we've just said here.

01:05:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I mean that's probably fair. Um, it's probably also fair to say that grandstanding on about a project is one of the ways to attract developers to it. So I mean it kind of can go either way.

01:05:11 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Um, I think I'd have to hear the interview just to find out whether it was a lot of hey, I need help with this, I'm looking for this, or was it? Look at me, you know, I so I'm not saying it wasn't doing that, I just like when I hear something like that, I'm I'm get my extra deep, uh, skepticism goggles on and really dive in to go. What's really going on here?

01:05:35 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, Talking about those x-ray specs you get from the back of a comic book.

01:05:40 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, those, those are the ones yeah.

01:05:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
One thing I don't understand and I'll probably have to research a bit more after the show is why he's conspiring himself to Keith Packard.

01:05:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You know that is. That goes back to the xa x, was it x86? X3, x3, x3 86 yeah, and it forked and turned into xorg and yeah, we're gonna see it turn back into x3 86 now doubtful yeah I don't x86 might not be x86 in a few years, yeah I mean x86 doesn't exist anymore, it's all x86 64.

01:06:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Um, I don't, I don't remember the story with packard. I know he was part of forking it. I don't remember whether he got actually banned by somebody or not. Um, yeah, in 2003, according to wikipedia you know a completely reliable and unbiased source according to wikipedia, he got um ejected from x free 86 in 2003. Um, and I don't, I don't know the details behind that. That was actually sort of before. My time was a couple years before I really started following the. Uh, the open source linux.

01:06:55 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, I remember choosing like oh, do I want Xorg or X.386? And at the time not really knowing what the difference was, and you know I was pretty new on Linux back then.

01:07:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Back then it was do I want Windows or Linux?

01:07:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, how can I manage to get Linuxux installed on this windows theme, this windows laptop, and try to get the drivers to work?

01:07:22 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
that's really what the challenge was then yeah, and all the weird custom hardware and everybody rolled their own non-standard stuff.

01:07:32 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah now good old days. Yes, here's the scary thought how many xorg systems are we going to see a decade from now because of embedded systems?

01:07:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
probably a few yeah I don't know, um, some embedded systems don't actually even run xorg. You can do it, you can do it without it, just on direct frame buffer. So I don't know, we'll see. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna speculate too much on that. Um, let's move to some bandline tips. We've, uh, we've churned about the uh x11 drama long enough. Let's get into something a little bit, uh, a little bit more solid and concrete. Yeah, a little more fun. We're gonna can kick us off with more about the Pipeware command line interface. What are we doing this week?

01:08:21 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, this week I'm covering how to create a single node as either a virtual audio source or, in my example, I'm going to show how to create a virtual audio sync. Let me go ahead and bring up my command line, my terminals here. I've actually got two running in OpenSUSE. For those of you all listening, I've switched to the display in my VM where I've got pwtop displaying in the top terminal. The basic format of the command is pw-cli create-node. Then you follow it by the factory name that's going to be used to create the node and the properties that you want to assign to it. In my particular case, I'm doing this from the command line today instead of interactive, because it lets me do a bit more with it. But I'm going to be creating an adapter node. The properties I'm going to give it are factoryname equals supportnull dash audio dash sync. Next property is nodename will equal my-s sync. Then we have mediaclass will be equal to audio slash sync. Objectlinger equals true. Any idea why I'm doing that?

01:09:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You don't want it to go away.

01:09:56 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Correct. Then for the audio dot position I'm putting in the properties of front left, front right, front center, low frequency equivalent Subwoofer anybody Rear left and rear right. Also, monitor dot channelvolumes equals true. Monitorpassthrough equals true. Now when I hit enter, let's make sure I'm in that kernel, if y'all are listening.

01:10:32
The PWDOP just popped up with a new device with the name of MySync and it's got an ID of 75. In fact, if we do a pw-cli-info 75, we get quite a bit of information. Let me go ahead and scroll back and you'll see that the permissions that it receives is read, write, execute and metadata. It's showing six input ports and six output ports. Right now it's in a suspended state and as we look at the properties you'll see some of the ones that I created. Now it automatically added some like for factoryid equals 19,. The nodriver equals true. Clockquantum-limit equals 8192. And it's also created some parameters for it.

01:11:47
Now let me quickly show you how that looks in my QPW graph, for those of you all listening. It is showing the MySync. It's not connected to anything just yet. What I'm going to do in a minute is use the PWLink command to connect it to the playback left and right channels on my built-in audio analog for my virtual machine and I prepared for this by going ahead and having them typed up so I can just copy them Makes it a little safer. There's the left channel and the format of the command is pw-link-l L again to linger mysync colon monitor front left to the ALSA outputs playback front left and the next command is to do the front right. Now if we go back to a cube and you'll see that the pipe wire top updated to show that connection as well as in QPW graph.

01:13:06
Now here's what's interesting is with that setup I can open VLC select. I'm going to use one that I've recently played when I was testing this out and now I'm hearing that unfortunately y'all aren't. But if we go back you'll see that it's showing VLC connected in there too. And here's how it looks in QPW graph and I am going to mute that for a minute because I got it a bit loud, bit loud, but for those of y'all listening again, vlc's got a 5.1 output connection to my sync and then it's just using the front left and front right to go out to my audio. So if you've got a system where you say have a 5.1 audio output as one of the options. You could use this for getting other devices to automatically convert for the 5.1, if they don't automatically.

01:14:31
Very cool and, of course, as demonstrated, I want to say last episode, once everything's said and done, and you don't want to say last episode, once everything's said and done and you don't want to use it anymore. Guess what you can do Delete it or destroy it. Yep, I'm not at the interactive command line, so I need to include. Pw-cli and it disappears. And what do you think happened with the VLC output? Pw-cli and it disappears. And what do you think happened with the VLC output?

01:15:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, it automatically went back to default. Yep, ah, cool. I sort of thought it would have just left it hanging. Yeah, it would have hung, which is a thing too. Pipewire will totally let you do that.

01:15:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, very cool, just a total side note. When he side note, when he goes oh see, look, you can kill it. You could have muted him. And then everybody that was just listening, we lost ken where did ken go?

01:15:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
that would have been fun, but oh well, missed opportunities. All right, jeff, you've got a. You've got a command line tip in here about Kubuntu.

01:15:41 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, so a couple of weeks ago I covered the new version of Plasma 6.3.5 that was releasing and the upcoming 6.4, which was in beta. Now, so I do, I run Kubuntu, it's the KDE version of Ubuntu and I typically enable the backports repository, which I thought was active. So I have a. And, just for clarification, I sometimes I have a server system which I run a lot of things on, which is on very you know, lts long, you know very stable, you know very, very tested software. So it just runs, runs quietly, and then on the machine I use now it's like a gaming system and I sometimes mess it up and have to reinstall and you know it's it's the one that I can just totally mess up and it's okay. Now I I looked and I thought you know, after that I checked what version of Plasma I had and I think it was like 6.3.4, 3.3. And I'm like what the heck? You know, why aren't I receiving the latest Plasma updates? So I looked on how to install 6.3.5 or even 6.4 in my system. Now I initially assumed it might be a separate installation process, because not everything comes through backports, because sometimes they say, well, it's going to be too big of a change to your base OS so they don't include it. You have to install it separately. But I later discovered that, despite thinking my backports were enabled, they actually weren't.

01:17:15
So the link in the show notes provides instructions on installing Plasma 6.3.5 for Kubuntu and for 25.04. And it's a simple process. It's just a pseudo space add-app-repository and then the repository name and then you just do a full system upgrade. Now, additionally, at the bottom of the page there's a link to install the Plasma 6.4 beta, which requires a slightly different add apt repository command. But you do a full upgrade again and reboot and now you're in the beta version. Now if you decide the beta version isn't working for you or encounter issues, you can remove the PPA and revert or downgrade your packages. But if you're interested in testing the latest Plasma versions on Kubuntu or another Ubuntu-based distribution, check out the article to show notes for the full command line instructions.

01:18:17
I will say that so far Plasma 6.4 beta has been very stable for me. But keep in mind if you go and look at what version you're on, it won't display a 6.4. It will show something like 6.3.91, as it doesn't get the 6.4 label until it's officially released as stable. Get the 6.4 label until it's officially released as stable. Also, enabling backports means you receive the latest software intended for the 25.10 release, which includes beta software, which you know other things which may include some instability. For example, I have the Ken story on LibreOffice 25.2.4. I have it. There's some phasing stuff so it won't install it quite yet but it's queued up in there so it's waiting for a library or something to drop before I can fully install the latest LibreOffice as well. So you know it's beta, but sometimes it's fun to live on the edge a little bit.

01:19:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Sometimes it's fun indeed, and it looks like the tumbleweed uh virtual machine is uh using kde plasma 6.3.5 yeah, 6.4 is still a week anda half out from release something like that.

01:19:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Something like that yeah, mine actually says six dot, six dot, three dot 91.

01:19:40 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
and are you on the uh 6.15 kernel?

01:19:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
uh, I don't know what. Uh, I am on uh 614.

01:19:51 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
yeah, I think it just recently updated to the 615, the other day when I was doing the updates.

01:20:00 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Cool, all right, go ahead With backports. Kernels sometimes don't upgrade because it's one of those bigger. There's somewhere in there. There's a line where it can change the underlying OS too much. They won't turn it on and you have to actually install it separately than just getting it through the backports. Ppa Interesting.

01:20:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Probably something they detected breaks in there, or maybe it's just a never more than X number of versions who knows, could be All right. So I've got a real quick tip for you. It's kind of an explainer of a couple of different Git commands. I find myself doing this quite a bit here recently doing some development work, and it's git fetch F-E-T-C-H and git pull P-U-L-L, and so git fetch is kind of the more fundamental command here. And so Git, of course, is dealing with source code in essentially inside of blockchains, not cryptocurrency blockchains. Git existed before cryptocurrency did, but it uses the same idea of you know, hashed chains of blocks.

01:21:12
What a Git fetch does is it goes out to what the origin. So, like the, the, the home address of wherever your git folder is. In modern days it's a lot of times it's going to be github, right, github slash. You know whoever owns it. Slash the name of the project. Get fetch is going to go out there and say, hey, pull down all of the updates that you've got into sort of the Git hierarchy that I've got on my local machine. So all of this only works after you've done a Git clone. You do a Git clone first and it makes a local copy of the remote thing. Then you do a Git fetch and it goes out and it says, okay, pull all the updates down. But what a Git fetch? It goes out and it says, okay, pull all the updates down, but what a Git fetch? A Git fetch will not actually update the tree that you're currently looking at. So it sort of syncs your big Git object but it doesn't sync the code that you're actually looking at. So the code that you have checked out does not change when you do a git fetch.

01:22:18
A git pull is a git fetch, immediately followed by an automatic either git merge or git rebase, and I think it does a, at least on my systems. I think it does a rebase by default, unless it detects that there's going to be any kind of funny business, right? So if it's going to end up in an actual like manual merge or rewriting anything, it'll stop and it'll say, hey, you need to make a decision here, you know, do you want Git to try to do a fast forward, or do you want to do a merge or do you want to do a rebase, which at some point in the future we'll talk about the difference between a merge and a rebase and a fast forward, because that is interesting stuff in and of itself. So, but that's what a sort of fetch is. And so if you're going to like check out another branch that exists on that remote, doing a get fetch first is useful Because then you're going to know, like the up-to-date references, like where the actual head on that branch is at. But if you're wanting to like if everybody's on the same branch you want to just update it, a Git pull is the way to go.

01:23:30
I am slowly learning more and more about Git and it has been a long time. I I'm sort of proud of this. It's been a long time since I have gotten my. I gotten a git repo in such a bad state that I had to just rm the whole thing and reclone it. I've avoided that for a long time now did you just jink yourself?

01:23:51
I hope not. I have done it. I've I've had to do it, ken. I think you're, uh, I think your fire alarm is going off or something. It stopped. That's hilarious.

01:24:06 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
All right. The great thing is I can't hear it with the headset on.

01:24:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm not sure you could hear it with the headset off, my friend.

01:24:15 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You've been talking to my wife.

01:24:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, I think that's about it. I'm gonna let each of the guys get in the last word, whatever they want to talk about or plug.

01:24:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
We'll let ken go first and, uh, hopefully his battery backup will behave yes, I hope so too, though it has been coming in handy during the tornado warnings we've had recently. We've had some power fluctuations, but as a reminder, definitely, you want to back up and keep that. Three backups, two different types of backup and one off-site.

01:24:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Absolutely. I like it Back up, back up, back up. All right, Jeff.

01:25:03 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You know I'd like to say it's pretty cool. I've had several people reach out to me on LinkedIn. They connect through Rob, so whenever Rob's here, you can just follow him. If you find Rob, you'll find me, but other than that I just have Poetry Corner. My data is gone. Water and laptops don't mix. I should have backed up. Have a great week, everybody.

01:25:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah appreciate it. All right, thank you, guys. And if you want more of me, you can of course, find me on Hackaday. That is the Floss Weekly show from this past week and we had a lot of fun with that. It's hackadaycom slash floss. We'll take you directly to that. And then there's also the security column that goes live on every Friday morning. Other than that, we sure have a lot of fun here at the Untitled Linux show as well. We appreciate everyone that comes along with us. We'll be back next week, but I want to say thank you to everyone, whether you get us live or on the download. And then one little programming note before we go is you should think about Club Twit. It is roughly the cost of a cup of coffee per month, and if you want to support the network and the show and or you want to get ad-free versions of it all, club Twit is the place to go. Appreciate it. We'll see everybody next week. Bye.