Untitled Linux Show 207 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 Apple and some of the things announced at WWDC. There's a new Linux phone on the market, sort of Another government is going with Linux. There's updates, there's more to the Ex Libre stuff. The kernel is getting a stable API but that doesn't mean what you think it does and a whole lot more. 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 207, recorded Saturday, june 14th. The Distro Hopping Distro. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It is time for the Untitled Linux Show. We're going to get geeky with Linux and open source A little bit of hardware stuff, lots of software stuff, new releases. It's going to be a lot of fun. I hope you stick with us. It's not just me. We've got two-thirds of the regular crew, or three-fourths of the regular crew, if you count me, we've got Mr Rob Campbell and Mr Ken Ken Ken Co-host. That's it.

01:06 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Okay, Mr.

01:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Ken the co-host.

01:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
We do know his last name right. I mean not, that we Rob's, like I don't remember it either.

01:14 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It brings up visions of golden arches, that's right, oh yeah.

01:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Mr Ken McDonald. Well, that's an interesting start to the show. Mr Kitten McDonald. Well, that's an interesting start to the show. Rob, we're going to talk about something interesting that happened this week, particularly for our Apple fans, and why we care about it. What happened at WWDC, the Worldwide Developer Conference?

01:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
All right, so let's talk about something we can remember. All right, so let's talk about something we can remember. This week Apple was busy with their big annual WWDC conference and it looks like Apple users must have been a little jealous of those developers over at Windows. So, you know, for several years now, windows developers have had the ability to run Linux and, essentially, a well-integrated virtual machine called WSL or Windows Subsystem for Linux, while those poor Apple developers, you know they did get to use macOS's ZSH or ZShell command line. It was built right in or they could even switch to Bash if they wanted. And you know, although it was very close to Linux Linux-like it wasn't exactly Linux. You know, try developing a Linux app or running an actual Linux app on macOS command line and well, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, who knows? But the tool? Well, this week Apple released an initial build of its new open source container tool for creating and running Linux containers on macOS. The tool is called wait for it Container Creative.

02:55
Creative like always, apple, beautiful, good job. Good job with that one. And is written in Apple's beloved Swift language. Is written in Apple's beloved Swift language. But even though it is called Container, this tool actually creates an isolated, lightweight Linux virtual machine with some strictly enforced security around it. And even though Linux is ran in an isolated VM is ran in an isolated VM, the containers within that are still OCI or Open Container Initiative compliant, meaning you should be able to push and pull containers from other systems, such as dock. You know, run a Docker container in this or create a container in this and run it over in Docker. You should be able to use them interchangeably if they do continue to follow that standard appropriately.

03:48
One other difference in these VMs they used a streamlined, swift-based init system called VMInit. Unlike a standard Linux init system, vminit includes no core utilities dynamic libraries, libc but does do the usual stuff like environment setup, ip assigning, file system mounting, etc. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's a different thing. And so you know, although some of the technology used is a bit different than what Windows Microsoft is using, the use case and functionality seems pretty similar to me. You know, it's a developer's conference. It's for developers, kind of like Windows was thinking with their WSL, so I think it's safe to call this MSL or Mac OS subsystem for Linux. So once again I would like to thank Apple for inventing something new for us, for the developers out there in the world.

04:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Bravery and courage and all of that. Yeah, I think we should call it WSL for Mac OS. It's even better. It was what I immediately thought of when I saw that they did this. It's like, oh they, they did the, they did the windows thing.

05:07 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
What are they getting out of?

05:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
it. Uh, less annoyance by all the developers that have to do stuff with Linux. Docker containers is one of the big things.

05:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean same thing. Microsoft got running Linux.

05:23 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
There. I put a second link in the show notes as well as posting it into the Discord chat. It's got a table that compares the features between Docker's desktop and the Apple container. Now you realize, with the Apple container you're going to need a dedicated Linux kernel per container it's a virtual machine, yeah Whereas with Docker you can use a single Linux kernel for all your containers.

05:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, quite often containers are used on the kernel from the host, where the host here is Apple.

05:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So they're doing it a little differently.

06:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So if you do take advantage of Apple's container, it's going to be deeply macOS native and Swift-centric, whereas if you use the Docker system, it's going to be cross-platform and container-focused.

06:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I think the idea is that any of your Linux-based Docker containers are going to work there, just some of the tooling around it. I'm sure will be different.

06:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I want to see somebody take the SICKCO's.

06:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Docker OS X container and run it. Run Mac OS inside of Mac OS.

06:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That'd be fun. Now, looking at Bobby Borosov's article, he feels that Docker still offers way more flexibility and capabilities in Apple's new product.

06:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I'm sure there's actually a laundry list and people will discover this as they start fiddling with it. But I'm sure there is quite the list of stuff that just won't work for one reason or another Passing through networks, passing through USB devices, all kinds of stuff.

07:02 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I would say it does right now. But think about, you know, if they kind of go the same path that Windows went with WSL. You know, if they tie that into the system, get the integrations there so it could be more seamless with the macOS system.

07:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Then do we call it WSL2 for macOS or do we call it WSL from ECOS2? Msl2. Msl2?

07:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah there you go, and I've got the same question Bobby Borosov has. Why is Apple putting?

07:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
all this effort into creating this, they've gotten complaints from developers or, internally, their developers wanted it. Well, it's got to be one or the other Same reason Microsoft did it.

07:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know they want develop. You know the old, whatever his name was Developers, developers, developers. You know if Balmer, yeah, balmer, there we go. You know if all the developers, like developers all over the world, are using Linux one way or another, windows doesn't want those developers to just leave and just say well, you know, if you're not going to help me, I'm just going to go. Full-time Linux, mac Apple. Apple doesn't want their developers to transition away to full-time Linux, away from their stuff either. So if they give them these tools and options so they can use Linux within their ecosystem without leaving it, you know it helps them. Keep those developers with them.

08:31 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
For those developers that can afford to buy them Apple, Macintosh.

08:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes, I mean yeah, they're already. It's going to be targeting Mac users already, obviously.

08:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, there were some other interesting things at WWDC. There is, of course, the Glassy OS I forget what they call it now but the accessibility nightmare, the one where in some of the slides they showed on the platform, you couldn't read the words because it was like white text, unclear bubbles on a white background. It's like I can't read it. What does it say? One of the other interesting things is, like on the ipad, they are making it a little bit more of a mac os sort of experience with windows and things you know, being able to do multiple things at the same time. Um, now, what I've not seen is whether you can actually run like full on Xcode or VS code on your on your iPad. Yet, you know, I don't think they've unlocked it to the point of where you're going to be able to put Asahi on it, so it's not there yet. They need, need need to turn down the the obsessive control knob some more on on the iOS stuff Excessive control knobs, some more on on the iOS stuff.

09:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But you know, if Apple wants to get a little more legs friendly here, you know, since they don't at least they say they don't have all the telemetry that the other you know OS's have out there, then really they're making the money on their hardware and and they should not care a whole lot about what OS you're running on there, except for the ecosystem tie-in. Okay, that's there. But why not throw a bone to the types of Asahi and help them out a little too?

10:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I would really love to see official Asahi support for the iPad. I think it would make a lot of sense there. The problem is, though, that you say Apple makes their money on hardware. I doubt that that's true. I bet you Apple makes the majority of their money on the.

10:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
App Store. I mean, when it comes to the Mac OS, because I have a Mac. I never used the Mac App Store On my iPad. I do On my iPhone, I do.

10:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, they make a lot of money from their App Store.

10:46 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But you got the ecosystem pattern there too.

10:49 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And I think I know why they open sourced it.

10:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Why is that?

10:55 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Because that way they can get somebody else to create the GUI it needs.

11:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, but you know the way Mac works. Somebody else is going to come along and make that GUI and they're going to look at it and go. That's not the way we would have done it, and they'll have this obsessive need to remake it in a beautiful but terrible way, like they've done with everything else inside of Mac OS.

11:17 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
After somebody else has already done the legwork.

11:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, all right. Well, let's talk about something. I don't know if Audacity runs on any of the Mac machines, but Audacity has a new release, ken. What is it it does? All right, there you go. Is it on the App Store? Can you get it on the iOS devices? I don't know.

11:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But Ken what's new?

11:59 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, this week, bobby Borosoff and Marius Nestor wrote about the popular open source that could occur when closing large unsaved projects, as well as another that popped up when using real-time effects with delay compensation. This release also improves the effect preview to work when the track is muted. Now, according to Marius, audacity 3.7.4 also addressed an issue where the studio fade out feature would create a new clip when it was applied at the end of a video clip. According to bobby, mac users on older systems will be happy to hear. The update resolves compilation issues on legacy mac os versions. That's not going to make apple much money there. Now. I've only covered some of the various technical fixes mentioned in both bobby and marius's articles. If you uh do want more details, just follow the links in the show notes yeah, I have.

13:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I have been happy to see audacity continue know there. For a while it got forked and there was quite a bit of drama around it and it seems to be stable and sort of boring now, which is nice in an open source project.

13:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And I was looking at what version comes with Ubuntu Studio 2504. It's the previous one.

13:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's not surprising. It can take a little bit to get updated. It's the previous one.

13:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, it's not surprising it can take a little bit to get updated. It may get updated sometime before 2510 comes out. Have to wait and see.

13:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Install the flat pack. Yeah, we could Might as well. You'll get a newer version that way.

13:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's usually how it works. No, we're not going to go with that show title so one of the things they added was the open vino ai plugins. What, uh, do we know what all these are? Oh, I see their list of effects. Music separation you can separate a mono or stereo track into individual instruments. You can do noise suppression. Noise suppression is actually quite handy. Music generation and continuation. Ai-based music oh wow, that's interesting.

14:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Where's Jonathan at? You're a little too interested in AI to be the normal Jonathan I'm used to seeing.

14:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know, there are some things that it does well, and noise suppression is one of them. The music generation is just wild. So another one that they've added here is whisper, transcription, doingcription, doing audio to text with OpenAI. That is a good use of AI. That makes a lot of sense. I have no problem with AI when it's being used in ways that make sense. It's when people are like, hey, I'm gonna vibe a code of 10,000 line code base. I have no idea what any of it does, but here run the code. Trust me, bro.

14:47 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That I don't like, but this, this I like. What I found interesting was that there was a problem with possible incorrect calculations in the Hamming window derivatives. That was fixed in this release.

15:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm trying to remember what a Hamming window is.

15:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's been too long since I've done DSP stuff, I think it has to do with some of the it's. An algorithm used Was the audio with one of the effects.

15:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, it's part of fast Fourier transform, fast Fourier transform form. Oh my goodness, that is a hard thing to say.

15:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
What word are you saying?

15:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
FFT.

15:24
Yeah, FFT yeah yeah, that's where you take music, you take audio and you break it apart and it gives you the you know, the graph of your different frequencies in it. It's the window function. Anyway, let's move on to something a little more interesting, or less interesting, depending upon who you are and what you care about. Uh, so last week we ended the show by talking about the X11, x Libre stuff, and more has happened and I'm going to kind of come back and take the opposite viewpoint, as I did last week. I'm going to kind of give you the opposite side of the story about what's happening, because more things are happening and it's interesting and I get a little bit of behind the scenes. Look from some of the, the chat rooms I hang out in with some people like the fedora devs, and I see what's going on there. Uh, so quick recap what happened is well, over the last few years, uh, all of the people that were doing development on x11 moved over and started doing, started and then began doing development on wayland. Wayland is finally getting to the point now. It's good enough that people can start using it and it doesn't drive them bonkers, doesn't make us crazy to use it. So lots of desktops are starting to move to. It including and this is important rel, red Hat Enterprise, linux and all of Red Hat stuff, including Fedora, by the way is moving over to Wayland rather than X11. Well, one of the things that that means is the engineers on payroll at Red Hat are no longer fixing things on the old X11 code base, which means that X11 is basically unmaintained, and so there's been a move to make that official, because all of the people that really understand the code base are off working on Wayland, and so there's been a move to make it officially unmaintained. When that happened, there was a developer that came along and said, oh, I'll maintain X11. In the free desktop GitLab and basically, you know, started opening issues and writing patches, all kinds of stuff like that. Let's see, his name is Enrico Weigelt. Like, he's been working on X11 for a while now as basically the sole developer. He got banned from the free desktop git lab and they've gone through and they've closed all of his like patches and pull requests and issues that he made, and, uh, people have kind of been up in arms over that, and I was. I was, I partially still am, but I got to thinking about something and so here's the.

18:03
Here's the counter thought to all of this. It's ridiculous to think that the free desktop GitLab should, that they have any responsibility to host the code and issues of their somewhat hostile fork. And that's what X Libre is. It is a reasonably hostile fork. It is hostile to the idea that X11 is dead and it needs to be gone.

18:34
One of the reasons that this is such a pain is because, well, there's several things but one. You have a bunch of distros Fedora, ubuntu, other distros that are trying to finally get rid of X11, like not support it at all, and the reason for doing that is that it's unmaintained, like officially unmaintained. If you suddenly have Xlibre that is claimed to be maintained, talk about that just in a second. That is claimed to be maintained, I'll talk about that just in a second. But if there's a claim that it is maintained, well then your users can ask for it. But something you see in places like Fedora, where it's a very sort of democratic way of doing things, you can have just any of your maintainers come along and package it.

19:22
And so this has been a problem in Fedora before in trying to go from X11 to Wayland, like with the KDE stuff. This was a problem where the people doing the work on KDE said we're going to drop the X11 back in, we're going to go only to Wayland. And you had this kind of rogue maintainer come along and say I don't care, I'm a maintainer, I get to do this, I'm going to start packaging the KDE X11 stuff again. Well, so the answer to that was it doesn't matter here, in a couple of years this has been a couple of years ago the thought was well, it doesn't matter here, in a couple of years, x11 is going to be unmaintained and therefore we're going to drop it from Fedora for that reason.

19:55
Well, suddenly you have Ex Libre, which is claimed to be a maintained thing, and you then you then have this, um, uh, this kind of leadership problem. Really, like you know what is a distro going to do with some of these decisions to make and who gets to make that decision? And can one maintainer come along and kind of overthrow the will of what everybody else wants to do with a distro? It gets into those questions. Else wants to do with the distro? It gets into those questions.

20:28
And then one of the other things to really keep in mind is X11, now Xlibre is a lot of code and it's very old code and in some cases it is very broken code, particularly from a security perspective, and I am not convinced that one maintainer is enough to be able to say that it is maintained code, and I think there are some things in there that are so badly broken there's no fixing it, so I do not want to see it in my distros.

20:56
Now the other side of that is yes, it is absolutely free software, it's GPL, and so if somebody wants to fork it and take it and keep working on it, they can absolutely do so, but there's no guarantee that that lands in anybody's distros. You can't force a distro. I have a problem with the idea of one maintainer being able to force a distro to include software when the rest of the maintainers don't. So that is kind of the more nuanced and the other side of the argument, for me at least. I'm curious if you guys have been following this as well and if you have thoughts.

21:28 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I posted a link to an article by the Register that touches on a valid point Accessibility. I haven't seen much about providing accessibility under Wayland, but the XOrg or X.11 has had that in there for a while.

21:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I'm not super familiar with that because obviously I don't need any of those accessibility technologies. I know some of them work, like you can get a magnifier in Wayland and that's not a problem. What is it? Screen readers that sometimes have a problem. But there's been a lot of things done to Wayland to fix those kind of problems here recently, so I don't know if that's still the same level of not working as it has been.

22:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I thought we were in a much better state than we used to be, but I don't know either.

22:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
yeah, you know, with with wayland there were there were problems, and somewhere around a year ago we saw the the frog protocols pop up and uh, that apparently was valve laying down the law with waylandland and saying, look, if you guys aren't going to play, here's what we can do. We can just fork it and we can go fix it, which is pretty interesting. But things are a lot better and things have been landing. So there's a story I didn't cover, I didn't pick it up, but the mouse pointer warping has now landed in Weyland and it's going to be in Kde 6.5, and so that is that's the deal.

23:08
Like in your, when you're in a first person shooter game, you want your mouth, you want mouse look to work so you can look around with your mouse. Well, like as far as the desktop is concerned, you want the mouse to stay in the center, because you wind up with weird things like if your mouse is actually moving around, then you can only spin so far to the right and then you're stuck. You just hit this invisible wall because your mouse is going to the edge of the screen. You can't turn around any further. Those of us that ran Wayland, we've seen that it's a thing, and so they've finally implemented that standard in Wayland. There's a lot of those that are finally getting done, because again there was some pressure put on the knuckleheads at Wayland from.

23:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Valve. Yeah, or try playing a game over a remote desktop tool or protocol. It does that too. Indeed.

23:58 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Or try playing a game where you've got your system set up with local workspaces and you are going all the way to one side and go into the next workspace.

24:05 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yep, with this specific topic, though I don't have any strong opinion, I haven't really been following this specifically. In general, I'd love to see X just go away. I mean, that's what I always say all the time on here. I mean, that's what I always say all the time on here. But if there are some accessibility needs, then that may be a fair point. I would have to look into that more.

24:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you know I hear a complaint whenever we talk about this. I hear some complaints that there are accessibility problems. What I've not ever seen is proposals over on the Wayland GitLab to fix them and that's one of the points that I hear made by the actual developers and the actual maintainers over in Fedora and other places actually open issues and write some code and try to get things fixed rather than just clinging to the old X11 as kind of their favorite thing to not let go of. So you know I am again. I am a little I'm conflicted on this one. I do think that maybe the admins at the free desktop GitLab are a little band happy and they did a little too much here. That's probably a fair point, probably true.

25:31 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Which band are they happy for?

25:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, no, the band Hammer in this case. Anyway, I haven't heard of that band, but I'm sure it's not great when you get hit with it.

25:45 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Anyway, let's move on.

25:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Sledgehammer Indeed. Let's move on. Is that Peter Gabriel? I think it is yes. And let's talk about a Linux phone. I bet it runs, wayland, I bet you can't hit it with a sledgehammer either. Why? Because it doesn't exist yet.

26:06 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's the only reason I can think of. So, you know, but right now it's starting to feel like About once a year there is a new, possibly exciting, announcement for a new Linux phone. And well, 2025 is no different, Besides concerns of Linux being ready for the phone market. Yet, you know, is it? Yet? I don't know. Another thing we often see with these announcements is a relatively expensive phone for the specs the phone provides. You know you get a premium price for a not so premium phone, and I get it.

26:44
These are, you know, smaller runs, production runs, not mass-produced, which brings up the cost, which makes you wonder how is Libreux, that's L-I-B-E-R-U-X Libreux? How are they going to accomplish this? So Libreux is a Linux phone manufacturer based in Madrid. Their phones run on a mostly open source operating system built from scratch, completely independent of Android and iOS, called LibreX OS. It's somewhere else in there I read that it's also a Debian based Linux operating system, so I don't know if it's built from scratch or based on Debian A little confused, it said both things in there. So, built from scratch, debian-based, I don't know. So, anyway, they have a line of phones called Nexx, that's N-E-X-X that run Linux out of the box and, as mentioned above, I believe one of the things has been, you know, cost versus spec has been a limiting factor for other Linux phones, as it can be tough to spend a fortune on a niche and, to some, just a hobby device. So LibreX recently announced that it was working on a more affordable version to make the next accessible to a broader audience.

28:09
So let's look at their their original next phone. It had a, a rock chip rk3588s processor. It's a. It's a 4 cortex a 76 A76 plus 4 Cortex A55, up to 2.4 gigahertz, had 32 gigabits of LPDDR4 RAM and a 6.34 inch 2K OLED display. And for the price of almost $1,500, that's premium price phone range. I don't know how many they sold of those, but you know they're still around and they're going to make another one. So now what they have announced is a more affordable one. You know we've talked about some other phones on here, like the pine phone, which is like 150, the pine phone pro, which is closer to 500. So they're going to make a more affordable one is what they've announced.

29:15
More affordable, uh, the librax next called the librax next community edition with the following specs uh, 6.34-inch OLED display, quite similar, also the same RockTrip chip processor. 32-megapixel rear and 13-megapixel front camera, dual USB-C ports, a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack the initial had some of these too, but I didn't mention that 5,300 milliamp battery. A lot of the similar specs, very similar, but cheaper, because you get all of that now for $5,300. Right around $900 on Indiegogo, which, compared to the other phones I have shared on the show, that's still kind of too expensive, I think. But the plan is to have it's probably more quality. I mean, I think it's definitely more quality than the regular Pine phone. Well, I say definitely. I have not had my hands on any of these.

30:25
Um, the specs sound more quality, but but if you compare, if you compare this, if you're, if you're making a phone that's comparable, to say, like the higher in android ios phones out there today, you know if you're able to make a quality phone that's comparable, you know where LibreX is actually comparable OS that you can use as a daily driver. You know the cost in and of itself might be okay, but for most people, you know we're still looking at a niche product. That is likely to still be something mostly hobbyists will use, you know, unless they really, you know, get a product out there that that anyone could use, cause, you know, one of the other problems is, you know, at least for in the U S, I'm not, I've heard it's, I hear it's different in other countries but the U S cell phone user, uh, here in the U? S of course, uh, you know if they are, you know if they're looking for something that could actually replace their current daily driver. For a standard user, it needs to be available from sold from US cellular providers to really get a spread. You know, even the Pixel at the beginning, when it wasn't sold, had a hard time getting off the ground really, and that's from like a big, well-known provider.

31:47
Um, you know, with the crazy prices we pay for cell phones, a lot of people, most people, I know they're financing their cell phones through the provider. You know the, the, so the price just kind of blends right in with with their monthly bill. And they don't even know, and you know, then they buy those thousand multi-thousand dollar phones. I'm not going to be, that's about the only way I do it. I'd be sticker shocked if I put that all down at once. So you know, how are we going to finance this one so the cost disappears, you know. If it's not, you know. I hope they're able to be successful in this and I hope that this could seriously replace my daily driver.

32:33
But you know, I feel their their user of the use of the word affordable is different than mine. Personally, I haven't paid for a cell phone in years. I don't know if I've actually ever paid for one Last time. For a few years I had a company phone. I'd use that for personal, and then they said well, no more personal use, you can do a BYOD or you can have a personal phone and a cell phone. So so then I went and you know, because I was a new phone on my account, I was able to get a free phone at that time and in the past, like every phone used to be free when they were cheaper. So I don't think I've ever really paid for one.

33:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah. Oh, you've paid for one. Yeah, well, that's true.

33:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You do one way, that's for sure. Well, I haven't had to finance either.

33:28 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I haven't financed my bill.

33:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
My bill was the same if I would have bought the phone outright than if I didn't.

33:31 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So you just paid for it. You were paying for it without getting it.

33:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah yeah, that's probably what I'm doing too. Yeah, so they need to. You're right. For one of these Linux phones to really succeed, they're going to have to get listed in the T-Mobile store. It's going to have to be an option to get for free, and it's just hard at that cost to challenge.

33:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's not a big big similar problem with Linux in general. You know, we always say they need OEM deals and there are some out there and there's there's plenty out there, but it's not. Most of them aren't like where the general consumer are are buying. You know, I think there had been some in walmart years ago, but those were junk netbooks yeah, yeah, this is something I've been, I've been thinking about here recently.

34:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Are we about to see another, uh, another era similar to the netbook era, where people move away from windows 10 and they don't like the alternatives. So you start seeing some Linux hardware.

34:29 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
In a future story I'm going to tell you I'm going to talk about some other people that are moving away that maybe for some of these same reasons here, yeah it's very interesting.

34:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I remember the Nokia N900, I think, was the first Linux phone that I ever saw and really got excited about. I was too poor to buy it at the time. It was that same deal. I couldn't get it. I was really poor at the time, a college student or just out of college, and my carrier wouldn't offer it as one of the options, and so I just I wanted it and never could get a hold of it. And you know now, of course's it's completely hopelessly out of date. Um, but uh, yeah, we'll see. We'll see if any of these ever really take off. I didn't know nokia made it made a linux phone ever long time ago, long time ago back when, back when, no, did nokia own troll tech there for a while? The guys behind KDE, I think they did Well, not KDE specifically, but the libraries behind them, yeah, that was a whole thing.

35:36
I imagine we're going to see one of these at some point work and the price is going to make sense. I've seen so many gadgets out of Chinese factories that the price are just getting lower and lower and you can get impressive things for really reasonable prices, and so there's a lot of them right now that are microcontroller based but the specs on those keep bumping up and up and at some point there's going to be, I think, like this, intersection between what these companies can do for reasonable amounts of money. It's finally going to intersect with what you can, you know, get away with in a Linux phone. And then suddenly you're, you know, maybe overnight it's going to get really. There's going to be some phone that somebody is going to realize you can run. It's going to get really popular.

36:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You see things like that happen sometimes you know, a point that quippy makes in the chat is you know, the truth of the matter is that most people don't need all the capacity that their phones have and would be fine with a 250 to 600 dollar low to mid-range phone, which you know. Eventually, here phones are going to be, I don't know, you know tanks and you know what the bottom end is. It's going to be just fine for everybody well.

36:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But the other thing you've seen is that as the hardware has gotten better, the the software has gotten um less and less optimized. Yeah, worse, really. It's gotten worse. And so now you've got liquid glass on everything. Well, that means that every time you draw something to the display, you've got to do a full gpu pass on it, and so my current phone is getting laggy and it's not that old I've had time to reset it I've had older phones in the past that never had this kind of problem.

37:15
Same, I mean same brand of phones and stuff like that, just older models like yeah, and sometimes what's going on there where they get laggy is the battery is getting weaker and the firmware detects it and turns the speed down on the CPU so that you get the same battery life, but it makes it laggy instead. I think it was Apple that got caught doing that and got in quite some trouble for it.

37:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I'd rather get the speed. I'm usually close. Maybe you could just detect if I'm on my home Wi-Fi or something. Give me the power.

37:49 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
What's your charging habit with your phone?

37:52 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Probably every night, mostly every night, or in the car when I'm traveling.

37:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep, yep, yeah, you know, every once in a while I look at the cell phone and large phone and small tablet market and I get a little sad because there's some devices that I would really love to see and just either nobody makes them or nobody has made a refresh of them, like a decent Android 7-inch tablet. I would love to have it. You know how long it's been since they've made a 7-inch tablet? It's like since, like 2013 was the last time somebody made a good one. It's ridiculous. A 7-inch tablet Since 2013 was the last time somebody made a good one. It's ridiculous.

38:25 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I would love to see another Palm OS-based tablet and or phone come back.

38:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Because that'd make you feel younger again. Yes, I don't think that's going to happen. Somebody might make a Linux phone with a Palm OS style skin on it, but that's going to be about it. But you know, you think back through history and things have changed so quickly like blackberry used to be such a big deal and blackberry just disappeared almost overnight. It seems like nokia used to be such a big deal in the microsoft bottom and the curse of the microsoft phone stuck to nokia, um, but you know, some of the stuff changed just so fast and it would not surprise me again, it would not surprise me, to see some, uh, some, some company, probably out of china, because that's where so many cutting it, so much cutting edge manufacturing is happening right now.

39:15
Um, one of these guys make a phone, you know, do something like what oneplus has done, but not use android. Uh, it's interesting, you talk about android, um, so google has made some changes with the way android gets distributed, not the full-on aosp, the android open source project, but the, uh, the device tree bindings for, like, um, the pixel phones. They have stopped publishing those. That was kind of a big deal in the android hacker circles in this week too. I don't have a link for that at the moment, but I know there was at least one place where the headline was google kills aosp and it's like that's not quite what's going on, but we're certainly not excited about what google is doing.

39:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Interesting stuff you know, the easy way a big manufacturer could make a feasible, a well-priced Linux phone is to, you know, make their regular phone. But when they make it, make sure that it is designed in a way that you know they can install Android and it's Linux compatible at the same time so they can do their regular, normal run of Android devices. Take a few out of that run and just put Linux on it as it is.

40:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, so that was the thing with some of the OnePlus phones. Actually, I saw several people that were taking OnePlus phones and, because of the CPU that was in them and the way that it was not locked down, you could run the vanilla Linux kernel on it, and so that was actually a thing.

40:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, I know there are a few that you can install on there, but if the manufacturer made sure it was that way, they could install it themselves with one extra step and sell them.

41:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep, yep, all right. We talked a lot about little Linux on cell phones. What about the other end of the spectrum? Ken has a story about big Linux.

41:10 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And I'm going to start off by asking is anyone in search of a perfect system?

41:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
A perfect system. That'd be nice. Not sure what that looks like, though.

41:21 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Then you may want to try big Linux yourself, instead of just hearing Larry and I know I'm going to mess this up Cafiero's description of a Brazilian developed Linux distribution that is packed with programs you don't usually see in the Linux universe. Now, according to Larry, big Linux has an average footprint as far as how it sits on the system. Minimum requirements are 64-bit Intel, AMD or compatible processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM and 8 gigabytes of storage. That's pretty minimal, though. I think you will experience better performance on a system with 4 gigabytes of RAM and 40 gigabytes of storage. The list of included software is more comprehensive than any distro that Lurie has tested so far.

42:15
Music lovers will jump right into Deezer and Spotify. Gamers you'll get Lutris and Steam ready to go. You also get Rob. You're going to like this one the Microsoft Office 365 web app Set up by default as a shortcut. Chatters aren't left out either, with Telegram and Jitsi Meet included. No mention of Discord, though. Now other programs include the KDE family of software to include Dolphin File Manager, kpatient Card Games, gwynview what I've been defaulting to for my photo viewer at the moment as well as KText Editor, libreoffice Suite, brave Browser and a document scanner, just to name a few Now. I'm going to recommend reading Larry's article if you want to find out Big Linux's history or how Larry passed the time while he was installing it. Larry even talks about the big store that you can use for adding even more software.

43:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so this is interesting, the kind of the history of big Linux. So it was originally built on top of Kubuntu and then it switched to Deepin and now it is based on Manjaro with KDE Plasma as the back end. Very, very fascinating. So when they say they're in search of the perfect Linux system, maybe they're talking about their own system. They're trying to find the right backend for it One of these days.

43:57 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That's called. That's distro hopping at the core.

44:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Distro hopping, distro, distro hopping at the core. Yeah, yeah, fun stuff, yeah. So this is again. This is another one of these kind of niche distros I wouldn't recommend. It's somebody's first time but it could be fun to go and play around with. And you know, for Brazilian users, for native Portuguese speakers, it might be interesting because it might have really good internationalization in their language.

44:26 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Did you read down that? See how Lurie was passing the time while it was installing?

44:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, how did he pass the time while installing Playing a pawn game? Ah, oh, it's got the pawn game built into the installer. Okay, stuff like that is fun, I wish. More distros and more software did fun stuff like that.

44:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Stuff like that is fun, I wish more distros and more software did fun stuff like that. Well, and the interesting thing is, larry says he beat the computer with a score of 42 to 32.

44:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, bravo, all right. So there is something else brewing in Linux world, and that is a kernel API. Well, but it's not the kind of kernel API that you would immediately think of. So there is. This is a story.

45:13
So you may remember that Torvalds has this sort of ongoing beef. His forever slogan is don't break user space, and so the idea behind that is the API that the kernel exposes to user space, all of the system calls and IO, ctls and all those things never change them in a way that's going to break things in user space. You're basically always you should. The kernel itself should always strive to be compatible. In juxtaposition to that, people have long asked for an in-kernel API so that manufacturers can come along and write their own kernel modules and that the kernel modules don't break from kernel install to kernel install. And the kernel team and Torvalds have been, let's say, religiously antagonistic towards that idea. The reason being, of course, because if you make that too easy, then lots and lots of software is going to exist outside the kernel and they want that software to get added to the kernel as drivers Makes sense.

46:23
So when I first saw this this Pharonix article about a developer saying "'Hey, we should do a formal kernel API". I first went, ah ha ha, that's not gonna go anywhere. But it's not what I thought it was. It is not the internal API. It is actually taking that API that is exposed to user space and formalizing on that which might actually happen, and it does sound fairly interesting. It's a. It is a series of patches Last time I checked earlier today there weren't any comments on it yet, but which that may or may not be a good thing.

46:56
You know, nobody's called it garbage yet, but it does some interesting things, like being able to go in and automatically generate the, the API bindings and documentations, which is a very neat thing, and, as I said, it just kind of makes some of this more formal, more structured, theoretically, without breaking any of it, because that's sort of important. Very, very interesting though to see that you know kind of a direction the kernel might go to be a little bit more structured in the future as far as how we talk to it, but very fascinating. But it's not the kernel API. So I thought it was the first.

47:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I like APIs.

47:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
APIs are nice.

47:38 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It makes programming a little bit easier.

47:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Makes integrations easier.

47:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, a lot easier. It can help you avoid spaghetti code too, having good APIs.

47:51 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Though I do like spaghetti.

47:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, but not in my code.

47:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I mean, the alternative to an API is, I don't know, kind of hacking it and just finding ways to scrape and hack it in and hope it works and hope you don't find any crumbs in it from the garlic bread yeah scrape the results and try to do standard input into it and have a mess.

48:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, yeah, so there is a government that believes it has a mess on its hands and they are turning into one of our favorite things to try to solve it rob.

48:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So individuals are switching to linux all the time all over the world, but that isn't newsworthy. But when an entire government starts looking at switch, and that's big news. So we've had a couple stories of some governments switching to Linux and open source in the past. Well, here's another one, at least part of another one. So up to half of the employees at Denmark's Ministry of Digital Affairs will be switching to Linux in place of Windows and move from Office 365 to the leading open source productivity suite, libreoffice, and, if all goes well, the plan is to move the rest of the Ministry of Digital Affairs to follow.

49:17
The Danish government's digitization strategy is making digital sovereignty a priority for all government departments. You know, like many countries, they just want greater control over their own digital infrastructure, data cloud services, and you know open source is kind of about the only way to really achieve that effectively. So score one for open source there effectively. So score one for open source there. You know, if it doesn't go well, they do admit they could fall back to Microsoft, as some others have done in the past. You know, I think there's some German governments that have gone back and forth here and there, but it is 2025 now and it should be a lot easier to switch than you know. A decade or so ago was. Also, two of Denmark's biggest municipalities, aarhus and Copenhagen, have reportedly switched from Microsoft Office products already, citing concerns over the uh use of us based tech under their current, under the current, uh, new us government. So so that's kind of their reasons they cited.

50:34
Now I'm not going to get too political, but but but it's no secret that you know many countries right now aren't, aren't too happy with the current state of the US government. You know, be that as it looks like. Just one more thing. You know, be that as it is, it's just one more thing that could help out Linux and open source. So my conspiracy theory, all the upset is just to help out open source. No, I'm just kidding, but you know. So you know, it's just one more thing in the long list. You know, one of that list.

51:08
Some of those things are, you know, going for us is subscriber fatigue. You know. Subscribe to another thing. Another thing. Another thing you have to subscribe to everything to get it now with open source, windows 10 end of life and, uh, stricter hardware requirements for to go to windows 11 is hopefully another thing that will help us out this year and now, I guess, the US government, being that a lot of the big companies like Microsoft and Apple are US companies. If you don't like the US in general or government, I guess that's another reason to move. And then there's all the improvements to Linux, like Valve and Linux gaming, and all the improvements we've seen lately that really make it a very feasible way to go for almost anybody. So 2025 is looking like it could be a good year for Linux and open source all around.

52:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so I remember one of the. In the past there was a big government that was using Linux and several years ago they famously switched back to Microsoft. And I remember you, you dug into that story and I think it was in. Was it in Germany? It was someplace. Yeah, you dug into that story and like they were running their own homebrew Linux distro with their own homebrew file editors and and office. Like no wonder they hated it. And it kind of makes me nervous when this article says an unspecified version of linux like, oh no, just just put ubuntu or fedora or open something by open suza on there and call it a day and they very well may they just say slack, slack I mean you can use slack if you want to, but anyway, no, I mean so put one of the standard linux distros on there, one that actually gets updates.

53:14
Uh, you can even find one that you can pay some some money to to be able to get support. They're out there. There's decent ones out there. Um, yeah, ubuntu would be great. Honestly for this. Ubuntu would be great. Honestly for this Ubuntu would be great. Um, why not Debian? Yeah, yeah, I think does. Does Debian have a paid support program?

53:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't think they do. I think that's one thing that makes Ubuntu. That's. That's one of the things.

53:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, that's one of the things that Ubuntu brings that not all of the other distros do, and that is that if you actually want to use it in a business and you want paid support, if you want to be able to pick up the phone and call somebody and get help, you can do that with Ubuntu.

53:51 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, the big corporate solutions. There is pretty much Red Hat and Ubuntu as far as I know. I'd rather push for Ubuntu.

53:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
OpenSUSE as well.

54:00 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Oh yeah, and you've also got Rocky and Alma out there. Yeah, yep, you can get support with those as well.

54:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think you're going to talk about those later, aren't you? We might, we might. All right, yeah, we'll see what happens with this. What about Nano? What's your favorite text editor? Do you use Nano?

54:21 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
On the command line. Yes, there you go where else? Do you need a text editor? Well, if you're in a gui based system, then I use whatever the default is at the moment. But, jonathan, would you like the ability to pick up right where you left off after editing text file in nano?

54:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
that could be useful.

54:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It could be annoying at times, but it could also be useful well then, according to bobby barsoff, you may want to upgrade to gnu nano 8.5 and use the option dash dash position log. This will save anchor positions upon closing a file and restoring that position when you reopen the file. Now Bobby wrote about the latest version of our beloved lightweight text editor and, as I said, gnu Nano version 8.5, codenamed Sigourney, and it arrived with several practical improvements that streamline workflow and policy existing features. Now you're familiar with the control Q control Q and the control X control Q sequences. John Jonathan.

55:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'm not. That is not how I exit Nano Okay.

55:38 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well now these commands or sequences will cause Nano to exit with an error status. A minor but deliberate tweak that could help scripters and power users detect unintended exit. And then the control L will now center the cursor while the meta percent cycles it. Bob even talks about an undocumented option in his article that you can read about. Have you read ahead to see what that undocumented option is, jonathan?

56:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Nope, not yet. What is it?

56:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Oh, you want me to just tell you, I mean.

56:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
He doesn't give it away. He tells you what it is it's the dash dash whitespace option but he doesn't tell you what it does.

56:31 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I don't think he took the time to dig through the source code. I haven't done that yet either.

56:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Hmm, curious probably shows or doesn't show whitespaces as a special, possibly. I know I've seen some other editors probably shows or doesn't show white spaces as a special Possibly. I know I've seen some, I've seen some other editors that do that, like they show a symbol for a tab and a different symbol for a space.

56:55 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And these could be fairly useful to see what's going on. Get it has that as an option that you can toggle on and off I would.

57:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I would assume that the, the it's not documented yet because it's unfinished and probably it's probably like a test preview. The the dash, dash, white space is the equivalent of the konami code. Type this in to get the the eight dot six or nine what's that now? It'll be an eight dot, six or nine oh, yeah, yeah, and then one of the next releases. Yep, makes sense, okay, I, I still enjoy Nano. It is my on the, on the text, on the command line. It is still my text editor of choice.

57:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, what's your current version? Do you know?

57:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Let's see this one. It's 6.2. But on my main machine.

57:53 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Get logged into it. Nano dash dash version on my ubuntu studio.

57:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's 8.1, 8.1 on the fedora machine behind me. The pop os machine is old and out of date.

57:59 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I may need to install fedora on this little laptop you know, even if I am not on the command line, if I'm on the GUI, I open up a terminal and I go to nano.

58:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I kind of like KWrite and what's the other one called no? Kwrite is what I use most of the time for just a quick scratch pad. I also like VS Code a lot for doing coding stuff and that's very nice With using KDE as a desktop.

58:30 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
At the moment I'm finding I default to get Kate for the GUI-based one, Still nano at the command line if I need to actually edit. If I don't, I use less because all I got to do is add es to my ls command to find the file yep, yep, I find myself chaining lots, of, lots of commands, grep and find and sort and all of those fun ones.

58:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uh, all right, uh. So there is a bit of news in the RHEL world, the enterprise Linux world, and that is we have. Rocky Linux 10 is now officially out, and Alma Linux 10 has been and is officially out for a while. And RHEL 10 is out with an interesting feature that I had not heard about, so we're going to talk about that too. An interesting feature that I had not heard about, so we're going to talk about that too.

59:26
You might remember, rocky Linux is the bug for bug compatible version. It's a rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux using the exact same sources. Red Hat has become a bit antagonistic towards that, but Rocky has continued to find ways to get those sources and doing that rebuild in very much in the vein of the old CentOS. And so Rocky Linux 10 is Red Quartz is what they're calling it and it is now generally available. It is hit GA, as they say. It has some interesting things like support for RISC-V, but they're also dropping the Raspberry Pi from before the Pi 4, which I believe. That means that they're only running on the 64-bit versions. I can't remember if the Pi 3 was a 32 or 64-bit board, but anyway they're only running the two newest Raspberry Pi versions.

01:00:22
And then AlmaLinux is doing some interesting things. They are compiling a version that runs on x86-64v2, which, famously, you cannot run RHEL on anymore. So that's your older server hardware that is otherwise still quite serviceable. We'll just refuse to run because it's not been compiled for it. So that's something that AlmaLinux is on. Almalinux is also based on CentOS Stream serviceable will just refuse to run because it's not been compiled for it. So that's something that Alma Linux is on. Alma Linux is also based on CentOS Stream, as opposed to Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself, which means that it gets some fixes a little bit faster. And then, because it's no longer bug for bug compatible Alma Linux, they have in some cases pushed fixes before even CentOS Stream get it, which has been pretty interesting to see and in some cases they've been really nice to get.

01:01:10
And then RHEL 10 has Lightspeed now built into it by default. And Lightspeed is an AI, it is an LLM on the command line and you can ask it questions. It's an LLM bot and you can ask it questions like hey, how do I see how much free disk space I've got and it will think about it and it will give you an answer about how to do a thing and, as we have oftentimes said here, for a replacement for a search engine, llms are kind of decent and so this is not terrible. I would not necessarily trust the things that it tells you to do, because there are trolls on the internet and they will tell you to do things like RM-RF and the LLM is just matching the content it finds on the internet. So if you ask the wrong question it'll probably tell you to RM-RF your drive, and it's not a good day.

01:02:07
It is fun that to run light speed it is just c, the command c by itself, and that is a physics joke because c is the speed of light and it's the constant. C is the speed of light, so light speed is c, which is a fun joke, and I approve of that Interesting stuff in the enterprise Linux world. As the 10s are, they're out. They're out among us. You can go run them if you really want to. If you really want to, I don't know. I'm almost tempted to go get one of the free RHEL installs and play with Lightspeed just to see.

01:02:44 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You're not going to get it on a DVD anymore.

01:02:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, no, it's getting pretty big. Eight and a half gigabytes. You can put that on a double layer Like a dual density yeah.

01:02:56 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
If you can find a double layer.

01:03:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No, they're not that bad. They're not that hard to find, I don't know where to go anymore to find dvds.

01:03:07 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, what's interesting is, uh, your article that you've linked to by liam proven says that the light speed tool depends on an online service provided by red hat itself yes, you are not running that LLM locally, so do not, do not give it your files that you don't want to send to the Internet.

01:03:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Beware the LLM, it will share your stuff. Fun times. All right, that is our stories. Let's get into some command line tips. We're going to let Rob go first, because he wrote the show notes and he decided what order he wanted to put things in and he's got uptime. Kuma, what in the world is this, my friend?

01:03:51 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, it is not a command line tip, but as the open source Linux user, one of the things we like to do is projects and home labs and servers and monitoring things. So one of the things I do. I have a lot of various servers running at home. I have some web servers running out on the web and various services. So I've been wanting to monitor. I've used various tools over the years. I have some cloud ones. I've used some things like cacti yeah, things like that and this is I haven't used cacti. I've seen it. I haven't really used it extensively. At least I know some, I believe some. I believe we have that on our network, but I'm not in that area, but um, so anyway, this is a tool that can monitor.

01:04:46
So I'm going to show you mine for those watching, uh, nothing too confidential. You might see a little, a few websites behind my head, but uh, um, that's fine. I mean they're on the internet, so it's fine. So here is uptime Kuma. So you know I have this installed on my Proxmox at home and it's monitoring all kinds of things you know. On here you can see I have 17 up, zero down. You can't see it, but there's zero on main end zero on on, zero. Paused On the left here. I'm going to keep this bottom one not expanded because that's going to list a lot of my clients' websites and even though you can kind of see some of them behind my head, they have some statuses that had popped up over time. I'm not going to list them there, but anyway, here you can see a bunch of the things I'm monitoring, some of my own personal websites. This graph is 24 hours but you can also view out further. This is a Maria database server, so it's specifically checking that the MariaDB is still up, watching various servers. You can do it overall of the group. You can do it over all of the group. You can go in and Click and take a look specifically on On one of them. So let me scoot side over so you can see a little better. You can see, I can see the uptime for the last 30 days of my database server and and paying and a graph, all kinds of stuff there I can edit.

01:06:23
So if I want to say add a new monitor, I'll show this, because this will show you all the kinds of monitors you can add. So if I add a new monitor, I can do HTTP or HTTPS I can do, which is the default and you can have it on there. You set up a friendly name. These are all friendly names that you are all to monitor. How often to do. 60 seconds is the heartbeat interval. Default Retries you know if you want to retry once, if it fails or multiple times. Retry intervals, request timeouts, various things like that.

01:07:05
You can have a monitor SSL certificate for expiration so you can make sure that you know if you're you know for those who use CertBot or let's Encrypt, if you've got emails that say you know for those who use a cert bot or let's encrypt, if you've got emails that say you know they're not going to send you emails anymore saying that your certs are expiring, which you know. Sometimes something fails and gets goofy somewhere and all of a sudden it stops renewing your cert for you and that email can be handy and tell you. So you can monitor that here and it can send you notifications. It can tell you the different status codes to accept, put in groups, descriptions and the notifications. There are different kinds of notifications. You can have All kinds, have, um, all kinds uh, almost I don't know anything slack teams, pushy one by, whatever, all kinds of things. I have it going to email and I have it going to home assistant. There's home assistant, so I have that sending alerts to home assistant. That way it actually sends the home assistant app.

01:08:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It just pops on my phone if there's an outage you'd have red lights that flash whenever something goes really wrong I could.

01:08:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I thought about that because, like I have water sensors in my basement and I have to turn all my lights red if it detects water, all my lights red in the house and and my and my uh speakers say water detected in the basement. So I've thought about and that too. I don't know if the rest of the family needs to uh be alarmed you need the uh.

01:08:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You you need the old star trek red alert sound I could, I, so I'm not alert number one. I'm not done yet though.

01:08:50 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Okay, okay, okay. But uh, yeah, I was gonna go through the all. All the things you can. So hdp tcp port. You can things you can. So HTTP TCP port you can monitor.

01:08:58
You can do a ping, just a simple ping monitor for pretty much anything that accepts ping. You can do a keyword so I do a lot of this on a lot of my sites. You'll check the website and you have a look for words or phrases on your site. Then, if you know, maybe the site responds but it's not actually loading your page, or what's site responds but it's not actually loading your page or what's expected, it will call it down. Oh, and you also can authenticate too, if you have to. You can look for a JSON query, a keyword. You can monitor DNS, docker containers Not quite sure what this browser engine is, but it's beta.

01:09:43
You can do a push so you could set up, say, a cron job and have it push to this. So basically, this expects a get request on whatever occurrence you do and if it doesn't receive that, it counts as down. You can monitor Steam game servers, gamedig, mqtt, kafta, producer, sql Server, postgres, mysql, mariadb, radius, mongodb, redis. So you can do all those things, monitor all the things get alerts when it's down and also if you are providing services to people and you, I guess, whatever. So it shows the edit and go to dashboard button. But since they wouldn't be logged in because they're not me, they wouldn't see this In here.

01:10:49
If you have maintenance planned, you're going to upgrade your web servers. If you're doing website hosting, you're going to do maintenance. You can put a banner up here. You know scheduled maintenance Friday blah blah blah, 1 am to 3 am, or you know whatever. Or if there's like some kind of major problem, you can put something up there that notifies you. Yeah, we know it's down. There's a fiber cut or whatever somewhere. We're working on splicing that and you so you could put stuff up there that that the, your clients can view and see. So there we go.

01:11:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Uptime kuma monitor all things I'm curious, do you know does, can it talk to like md raid and and keep an eye on your hard drives, let you know when one of your drives dies? Um, that I'm not actually seeing.

01:11:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm not seeing that in the uh in the description no, but you probably could make something work either with the push. You you can maybe have something that monitors it and then sends a push notification to this. You could probably do that or something else.

01:12:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I see a feature request here from earlier this year. They got closed because the developer says I don't have time to work on this. This is going to be a big lift. It's not for me to do.

01:12:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, looking for that specific thing Monitoring raids yeah, yeah, you could probably make something not too difficult and plug it into it.

01:12:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's interesting that you bring this today. I've got something similar kind of on the other side of the fence. But, yeah, fun, all right, ken, you have another pipe wire.

01:12:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, I'm going to show you how you can manage object parameters. Now let me go ahead and give you a definition here. Parameters of an object are data with a specific, well-defined meaning, which can be modified and read out in a controlled fashion through the Pipewire API. They are used to configure the object at runtime. Parameters are the key that allow WirePlumber to negotiate data formats and port configurations with nodes by providing information such as multiple supported sample rates, channel count, as I demonstrated when I created that node I was using the other week, as well as positions, sample format and available monitor ports format and available monitor ports.

01:13:43
Now PW CLI allows you to view parameters with the enum dash params or just by typing e, so I'm going to switch to my let's go ahead and transition over, so you can see this and I'm going to demonstrate using the enum params. I've already got it typed out here so I can just copy and paste it and, as you saw, it gives you a lot of information. I'm looking at the object ID for my VLC media player that I've got running in the background, and this week I went ahead and disconnected my VM's audio out so I'm not having to listen to it while I'm talking, but you can see here, these are all the information you have, or parameters that you can set up, and one in particular I want to look at is Okay.

01:15:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Which one are we looking for?

01:15:16 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Actually let me go back and and pull it up with the info and up here let's look at it for the ALSA output.

01:15:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I know it's there let's say, this is a time where you could pipe it through grep and grep, for just what you're looking for Is your VM hung.

01:16:28 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No, I'm sitting alone. Not enough light on my keyboard.

01:16:33
That was the best of us but as I scroll back here, that's all the information about the my also output in the VM, and what I'm looking for is the new parameter you'll see here. It's false. So the other command that you can use is CIPARAM or S, and in this case I'm going to try to change that to true, in other words mute. And there it is, and it acts like it did, doesn't it? Yeah, but unfortunately, when I pull this up and scroll back up to the beginning, where it's got that, let's do. This Makes it easier to scroll back.

01:17:47
Yeah, for those of y'all listening, I cleared and now I'm scrolling back and we're looking at the props mute and it still says it's false.

01:18:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But yet I can come over here and mute it here.

01:18:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
With the GUI tool. And now we scroll back, get that and now we see that the mute is showing, true. But if I go here and change that to false and let me go ahead and move myself out of the way so y'all can see right down here that it's showing that the audio is muted and now it's acting like it took that right, but it's still muted. Yep, so I think this is one of those things that they're still working on with Pipewire. You can read it, but apparently you've got API so you can program it through a program that you've written in C to change that, but not necessarily doing it from the command line.

01:19:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Huh, that's kind of surprising. Is there a bug for this yet?

01:19:49 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I have not taken the time to put anything in about it because I wanted to double check and see if there was one already submitted for it.

01:19:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you would think you should be able to do that from the command line. That is interesting that you can Well. So, ken, next week you can tell us how to submit a good bug report to be able to get something fixed in your favorite library. All right, I've got a tip. It's not a command line tip. It's actually very similar to what Rob talked about.

01:20:21
I'm going to tell you about a service that has been very useful for me over the past couple of days, and that's Datadog. It's very, very similar to Rob's Uptime Kuma. It is unfortunately not open source. You don't host it yourself. It is unfortunately not open source. You don't host it yourself.

01:20:43
But Datadog is intended for either a bunch of servers or a server that has a lot of data output. We've got a part of the Meshtastic project. We've got a log that spits out a lot of data and we just dump it into Datadog, and so for the last couple of days we've been doing things, you know, going in and writing filters for that, and you know, I want a unique count of this and I want it based on this other thing, and then I want the top 10, and then I want you to do this and it'll give you data outputs and visualization. You can check things very, very quickly. It is extremely good at crunching large amounts of log lines. You have millions of logs. Datadog can probably take care of it for you.

01:21:20
I've been very impressed with it. There is a free tier, and so if you only have one or two servers and you only need to be able to see the last 24 hours of logging and information, you can do the free tier. If you have a small number of servers, the Datadog cost is not very much per month and it is manageable. If you have a bunch of servers, it appears to get very expensive very fast, so do keep that in mind. You pay per server that you're monitoring, and so for some of us that are home labbers or very small things, datadog might be something to take a look at, particularly the free tier.

01:21:58
Again, like I said, it's unfortunate it's not open source, but I have found it an extremely useful tool, particularly starting to do things on the medium business kind of scale. Yeah, I thought it was worth pointing out. I've enjoyed it. All right, I'm going to let the guys get in the last word. Ken is still just a command line, but I imagine he'll get that taken care of here. There he's back. We let the guys get the last word in. We're going to let Rob start and yeah, plug what you want to plug, man.

01:22:33 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
All right, all right, if you want to see more of me, send me, uh, send me a email on something. This is a place, robertpcampbellcom, and that said, this week, uh, I did receive an email from, uh, from a listener Arthur. Yes, from a listener, arthur. Oh, yes, he sent me a picture of a license plate that essentially said Ubuntu on it. I figured maybe I shouldn't actually share the full license plate online. Yeah, probably not. It was basically for Ubuntu, with some numbers and various things in there, from a specific location, obviously. So, anyway, but yeah, it was a fun license plate they shared with me, and he asked us a question which we didn't get around to answering, but we'll have to see if we can provide help on that.

01:23:31
So, anyway, if you want to be in touch with me, you can go to robertpcampbellcom with me. You can go to robertpcampbellcom. On there there are links to uh linkedin um, twitter, blue sky mastodon, a place to donate five dollar increments, uh, or a cup of coffee, and I think, I think my email must be on there somewhere. I don't remember he got it somewhere and emailed me, but, uh, so it's out there. I, I guess, come and connect.

01:23:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Another way to connect is you can go to helpstardesigncom and open the ticket and say, hi, Rob.

01:24:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes, that is true.

01:24:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That was part of your dashboard. I'm like, oh, that's an interesting URL, let's go see what's there.

01:24:22 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
All right, ken, ken, anything to plug? I just wanted to share an article I came across uh on the uh lwnnet that was contributed by lee phillips about the importance of free software to science. I found it an interesting read, especially how Lee says that the free or open source software can actually make it easier for scientists who want to share their work than having to depend on proprietary sources.

01:24:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, kind of surprised that the word CERN is not in there anywhere. They are one of the big science organizations that does a lot with open source. Yeah, I need to see if I can get ahold of somebody from CERN and have them on one of the shows. That'd be fun. Anyway, appreciate you guys being here. If you want to find more of me, you can find some stuff over at Hackaday. That's where Floss Weekly is at. The security column goes live every Friday morning as well. I have a lot of fun with both of those and, yeah, we appreciate everybody being here.

01:25:28
On the Untitled Linux Show, if you are a fan and you're not part of Club Twit, you should really think about it and take a look at it. It's not much more than the price of a cup of coffee per month, maybe every couple of weeks, and it gets you ad-free access to all the shows, access to the Discord, all kinds of good stuff. You should check out Club Twit. We appreciate everybody that does and those that watch and listen. Whether you get us live on the download. We do say thank you and we will be back next week on the Untitled linux Show.