Untitled Linux Show 210 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This week we're talking about sudo and a potentially nasty security vulnerability, and then the French city that is dumping Microsoft products. There's news about Pipewire, there's news about Raspberry Pi and some new hardware. There's Rust drivers to cover and a lot more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.

00:20 - Leo Laporte (Announcement)
Podcasts you love From people you trust this is Twit Podcasts you love From people you trust this is.

00:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Twit. This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 210, recorded Saturday, july 5th. Bash to the future. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It's time for Linux. Get geeky with some open source news, some hardware, all kinds of fun stuff. It is not just me. I've got a couple of the guys with me today. We've got Mr Rob Campbell and Mr Ken McDonald, and I remembered your names again. There was that one show a few weeks ago that I couldn't remember it until I started singing the song about his farm and then it came to me. But anyway, we've got some fun stuff. Rob is actually going to surprise us with a security story. That's usually my beat. Rob jumped in and got it this time and so what's up? It's kind of a big one around the Linux and the roots and all of that. What's going on?

01:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's a big tool in the Linux world. So a couple of new security vulnerabilities have been identified this week in sudo or sudo whichever way you want to say that that can allow an unprivileged user to run any command they want, under the right conditions, of course. But don't panic. Most of you home Linux desktop users likely don't have much to worry about, but you know, if you're running Linux devices that allow others to log in, like maybe in a CH rooted environment or an environment with, like, common sudo files among multiple Linux devices, you may want to listen up here. So the first vulnerability uh, strata scale researcher rich merch um. This vulnerability. He discovered it, um and it it. This first one is only scored with a CVSS score of 2.8, which is low Cause it out of 10 we're talking about. This vulnerability is noted as CVE-2025-32462. So in 2013, the dash H feature was added to sudo that allowed users to list a user's sudo privileges for a different host. But apparently this feature makes it possible to execute any command allowed by the remote host to be run on the local machine as well when running sudo command, with the host option referencing an unrelated remote host, with the host option referencing an unrelated remote host. So I think if you have other people in your system, there's probably a way that they may be able to take advantage of that. I'd have to dig in and try to figure it out myself. But the second bug was also found by Rich, and this one is CVE-2025, because that's how they all start out CVE-the-year, and that's dash 32463 with a CVSS score of 9.3. So that's pretty high because we're talking out of 10, I said so this is almost as severe as they get. So this is almost as severe as it gets. So if you have users logging into a system in a chroot environment, you definitely want to make sure this one is patched.

03:54
The vulnerability leverages the sudo's dash r chroot option to run arbitrary commands as root, even if they are not listed in a sudoers file. Although the vulnerability involves the sudo to root feature, I mean it does not require any sudo rules to be defined for the user, so the default configuration options will allow for this. As a result, any local unprivileged user could potentially escalate privileges to root if a vulnerable version is installed. The bug allows a user to load an arbitrary shared library by creating an etc. Slash ns or ns switchconf file configuration file under the user's specified root directory and then run commands with elevated privileges. So if you're relying on this feature, you may want to find a new option, as it has been suggested that this option will likely be removed from future releases.

05:04
So these bugs you know they were were responsibly disclosed on april 1st and patched in pseudo version 1.9.17p1, which I think when I checked I I wasn't there yet I updated on uh on one of my ubuntu servers and it only updated to 1.9.15, I think. So it doesn't look like it. Maybe it's not available everywhere yet. So find a way to not use those features if you have people on your systems, or find a way to get the updated sudo version. So time to update sudo and be on the lookout, if you have shared environments, for these kinds of abuses yeah, interesting stuff.

05:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I I didn't get a chance ahead of time to dig into this and I'm now pulling up the um, the open wallcom, the open source security list. This is where you're going to find some really good information on it. I'm trying to discover right now because I've seen this worded in two different ways about the dash H option, and in one case it sort of seems like the local machine is using the permissions from a remote host, which would be really bad, or the local machine is allowing someone to do something on a different remote host, which is probably not intended but not much of a security problem.

06:29 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, it's kind of the same thing if they have access to the remote host, If you have access to both hosts, you can do it either way probably.

06:40 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Right, but I mean so, like how many people actually use the host name portion of a pseudo or is very specific. Almost everybody just uses. You know all, slash, all. I couldn't even referring to the host name. Yeah, I I did, I didn't, so I suppose that is for when you have. What someone would use that for is essentially to have one sudo or file that gets distributed over a bunch of different hosts.

07:11 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, yeah, Like one of the things says like if you have an environment of them and you have like a LDAP that you know it's common across a bunch of hosts, yeah, that makes sense. Using the same sudoers file.

07:26 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that makes sense Using the same sudoers file. Yeah, that makes sense. All right, interesting stuff. It is bitfix.

07:32 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Just an aside. If you want to check what version you have, what command would you use? Dash?

07:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
v capital V.

07:44 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I just did dash dash version and it gave me mine.

07:47 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, that's way too much to type. Just do a capital or a dash-capital V.

07:53 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I knew it wasn't lowercase V, because that does something else.

07:56 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Remember.

07:57 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Jonathan.

07:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's probably verbose. Usually it's what it is, if it's not version number.

08:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
In Pseudo's case, it tells you sudo to prompt for the password.

08:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, okay, well, but that's what sudo does. If you just run sudo, no, no, it's not Okay. So what does sudo dash V do?

08:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
exactly, Well, I mean. Sudo by default does prompt for the password, depending on how the sudo file is configured, but Validate the dash.

08:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
the dash lowercase V is validate. It will update the user's cache credentials, authenticating the user if necessary. So you know how. You know how you can run a pseudo command and it'll prompt you for your password and then you can run the first time. You can run another command pseudo command and if it's within the timeout period, it won't prompt you. You can run this and then run a pseudo command and it won't prompt you because you validated it.

09:01 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Why would somebody want to do that, though, if they're already saved, is like I want to see. I want to check if I really have permissions here again.

09:09 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Let's, let's see, maybe you've got a script that you need to prompt and then you're still doing pseudos, right, continuous through that. So you do the pseudo dash V first, then the other pseudo commands.

09:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, that that could be a point. But if I'm making a script and I have multiple pseudos in there, if they're already putting their password in once, why would I want to make them do it over and over again?

09:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You don't, but if you don't, otherwise it will, because each is in a subshell. Remember.

09:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I mean, it depends upon how. Oh, that's true. Hmm, interesting, all right. Well, I think, ken, you've got some goodies about another command line tool, or it's more than a command line tool. Now, what happened at the Pipewire Workshop 2025 this year?

10:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, we can thank George let's see if I can remember how to say this Kiagi Dacus, but anyways, he wrote about the Calibora-hosted Pipewire Workshop and HackFest, where Embedded Recipes attendees got to meet with Pipewire developers and participate in direct discussions about the future of Pipewire. According to George, the agenda includes updates on video transport, rust efforts, tsn networking and Bluetooth support. Now the day started with Wynn Tamens sharing his updates on video transport within Pipewire. Wynn's idea is to eventually build a system that allows routing video just like audio. We're definitely looking forward to that, aren't we, jonathan? And he's wanting it with automated conversion to or from a common DSP format. He has already written a video converter that uses FFmpeg, with automated conversion to or from a common DSP format. He has already written a video converter that uses FFmpeg to convert between various video formats. Now there is also a Vulkan-based converter available that you can use. The next step is to improve the format negotiation. Some applications Firefox for instance seem to have very strange format requirements and expectations, making this next step difficult.

11:31
Now there was another discussion shared by Arun Raghavan's updates on the new Rust-based reimplementation of SPA and LibPipeWire of SPA and LibPipewire. Arun's new library re-implements the Pipewire protocol in Rust, with its goal being to enable Rust clients to talk to the Pipewire daemon over the socket natively, without calling in to see libraries. There was also a discussion on time-sensitive networking, the TSN I'd mentioned earlier. In Pipewire that was led by Alexey Rimpele and I do apologize if I'm mispronouncing all these names. It talked about some issues with the current code that uses slash dev, slash PTP as a clock source. I'm going to let you all read more about that instead of trying to dig into the details for that discussion.

12:28
But after lunch, martin Greer discussed various issues that he and his colleagues have been seeing over time in both pipe wire and wire plumbing. Martin made some good points about specific areas in the code base that need more attention and improvement. Now. Also discussed was the status of the work that Wim had started a while ago to expose multiple streams on nodes. Again, I'm going to let you read George's blog for more details about these and some of the other discussions that I didn't touch on, which includes discussions about G streamer and Bluetooth.

13:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
One of the one of the things reading through this that is very funny to see is that, uh, well, two things. One almost every time that you see someone talking about, we do such and such with live video, the, the. The meme is they're using their um, they're using ffmpeg underneath the hood, and so you look here, even at wire, plumber and pipeware, and, yep, they use ffmpeg underneath the hood, just like everything else. And then they call out firefox in particular for having very strange format requirements for doing video handshakes and negotiation and I've seen that too in some cases. So interesting stuff.

13:50 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, in my case, I'm kind of glad it does.

13:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And sometimes that's what makes everything work. Yeah, can only do this in Firefox. For whatever reason, audio and video is hard. We forget that sometimes because there's all these tools that try really hard to make it easy but like trying to keep audio and video synced up and so people don't desync and everything just works and it works on all platforms. It's a really challenging problem. All right, let's see. What do we have next? Oh, yes, so one of the things that the story Ken just had was about moving Rust into Pipewire.

14:28
Well, I came across a story this week about writing kernel drivers in Rust. Well, no, not kernel drivers, writing USB drivers in Rust. This came via Hackaday and it is a story from Crescent Rose. And it is a story from Crescent Rose. It's a quick little how-to about how to take a new USB device that doesn't have a driver, use LibUSB, which that is sort of a LibUSB is a bridge, you could say, between kernel space and user space. What's really interesting about it is you can run it in Windows as well. It is possible to do LibUSB in Windows, but you can run it in Windows as well. It is possible to do lib USB in Windows, but you can write a driver and you can put it in user space. You don't have to recompile your kernel to use it, and so you have a bunch of different devices that have driver support through this and it's a how-to of you start from scratch and in Rust, let's put together a user space driver for a usb device and, uh, it's actually, it's really good.

15:29
And the crazy thing is that, like by the end of it, um, he's got something that works fairly well in about 50 lines of rust code, which is, uh, which is really cool. Um, you know, it handles, handles, interrupts, it's, it's so this is, you know, this is like an RGB keyboard or something, and so all it does is it's just setting the color on the RGB once a second and then reading a button. You know, I mean, it's that level of stuff, but at the same time you can make it work, and within just a few lines of Rust code. So if you've got someb device out there and you've waited and wondered and you would love to have driver support for it, nobody in the kernel seems to be doing it. Well, maybe it's time to just roll up your sleeves and write some rust code it's all good how's your rust journey going, jonathan?

16:20
uh, it got set. It got set aside. So I started learning Rust to do the code calendar, the advent code calendar, and that was fun and I got through, like the first two and a half days.

16:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And then got distracted by real life.

16:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah yeah. Running a lot of C++ code these days, not nearly as much Rust code.

16:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I looked at it once and thought this looks complicated.

16:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I did like the advent calendar of code. It was a good way to go about doing it because they started you off with some really simple problems. There's really good documentation out there for how to do it in a whole bunch of different languages. I liked that too, because they actually used Cargo for, like your, package management inside the code challenge, and so you know it was really pretty slick to learn that way and I wish I had more time to be able to go back and do it.

17:22 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I should do that sometime yeah.

17:25 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You need to get back to that rusty journey yes, yes, um, I don't know.

17:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I've I've halfway joked and been telling people that I have about five jobs right now I'm trying to stay on top of and it's not really that much of a joke. So we're not going to add, we're not going to add rust back into that pile yet. We're going to have to get rid of some of these first. I don't know when that's going to happen. I enjoy doing all of them too much when you hire somebody to help you.

17:53
I guess I've got somebody in mind, but she is busy raising kids right now. So you know, 15 years, yeah, give it 15 years, then I'll get to help her. Or four yeah, give it 15 years, then I'll get a helper. Or four, Well, yeah, you know, rob, what's going on in France and why do we care?

18:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So the trend continues as more European countries grow wary of relying on Microsoft and other American companies for their government infrastructure. So you know there's a growing concern of privacy, digital sovereignty, government surveillance or even the possibility of digital attacks, you know, just taking down a system with an update or other undiscovered backdoors. I mean, even here in the US we have many of the same concerns with hardware and things like that. So it's really a concern everywhere, and not that I think these things are likely to happen. But why would any government want their infrastructure to rely on software or hardware controlled by another government or you know within another government, where, within another country, where that government could operate, put some pressure and control on it.

19:21
Whether they do well or not, you never know what political change could happen in the future. Unfortunately, some things are harder to replace than others. It would be almost impossible for every country to move all hardware manufacturing into their own borders, but software is far more easier for anyone to take control of. I could take control and bring software into my own house if I wanted, which is why the French city of Lyon, l-y-o-n, or however the French would pronounce that looks like Lyon to me. Why they have taken a major step towards moving away from Microsoft software, starting by replacing Microsoft Office with open source alternatives such as OnlyOffice, which we've spoken about recently, and moving from Windows to Linux, which we speak about every week. Additionally, they have launched the. So I'm going to translate to English, because I don't know how to say the French. In English it's open digital territory, but the French acronym is TNO. It's like territory, some word with an N that probably means digital and then a word with an O that probably means open. So anyway, the TNO integrates tools such as Jitsi for video conferencing, next cloud, paired with the old only office for document sharing and co-editing, zimbra for email and I should check that one out. I haven't heard of that one, um, but uh, french like, but French like it apparently Camellio for online training and Matrix for instant messaging. The project has 2 million euros in funding from the French ANCT another acronym that I'm not going to bother to figure out, you can look that up if you want which is close to 2.5 million USD about 2.3 something, I guess and is already being used. So the TNO is already being used, according to them, by thousands of employees across several local governments in France, local governments in France. So, even though this one city is moving towards it, there is this project that's really kind of getting spread out through a lot of French governments.

21:51
Apparently All the news of governments moving to open source is going to make this. You know they seem to be bringing this up a lot late, pretty soon. This is not going to be newsworthy very fast. You know it's kind of like the old segments bringing this up a lot late, pretty soon. This is not going to be newsworthy very fast. You know it's kind of like the old segments. You know some some have used out, used to see a lot of shows and various things about when something runs on linux, this run. Oh look what I found that runs on linux. This runs linux. Well, you know, everything really runs linux now. So kind of like how everything runs linux. It looks like like at least all the governments over in Europe at some point are just going to be using Linux and open source alternatives also. So you know, whatever the reason, it's a good trend for open source.

22:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I like to see it. Did they say what Linux distro that they were looking at going with? Or was it just a generic? We're going to dump Microsoft Windows for Linux? Yeah, they didn't say yeah.

22:50 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Interesting. I'm going to make a stab and say either Slack or OpenSUSE you would hope right.

22:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Why Slack?

23:02 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
OpenSUSE makes sense.

23:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's a European one, but Where's the Slack distro out of?

23:12 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I'm thinking it's a European country, isn't it?

23:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I feel like no, but.

23:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Slack Are we talking about?

23:23 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Slackware, slackware, right. I mean, that's like one of the oldest distros out there.

23:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And it's questionable whether it's still maintained, given that their last blog post was 2022. I think we've talked about this, so probably not, probably not Slackware. Yeah, this is interesting, though I'm kind of along those same lines. I hope what we don't have is what we had last time that European countries tried this and they were essentially rolling their own distros or using these very weird, very niche distros. It's like no, just use there are so many good ones now. Use one of the standards, go talk to Canonical, use Ubuntu, use Debian, even Use Fedora, although, you know, if they're trying to get away from US influence, then Fedora might not be the one that they want to go with, but one could make the same argument about using the Linux kernel as well.

24:18 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
If US influence is really what you're trying to get away, uh, away from yeah, but you know, on the plus side, you can break away and fork at any time, once you feel like, oh, I don't trust them anymore, I'm taking it here and forking it, and so that's something you can't do with windows or anything else. Yep, that is true, you know. I can't find where Slackware is from. It was developed by Patrick Volkerding.

24:46 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Slack, the communications application, was founded in Vancouver, british Columbia.

24:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Canadian, but that doesn't tell us anything about Slackware.

24:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't think they're related, are they? They are not related.

24:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I was going to say I didn't think so.

25:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Anyway, volkerman sounds German or Volkerding sounds German and. Opensuse is apparently based off of it. So OpenSUSE, I guess, according to Wikipedia. So there's a lineage there that maybe makes sense, yeah.

25:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, they're certainly going to get away from running on US married hardware too, so maybe they're going to go with the Raspberry Pi, that's quite possible. That was a segue, Ken.

25:34 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Or would you rather use the RP2350-Pi0?

25:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So what is this? I saw this this week. What is this thing? Take it away old McDonald.

25:48 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
According to Giorgio Mendezza, who wrote about it this week, it's a WaveSeer's embedded platform with a form factor similar to the Raspberry Pi Zero and, as I said, it's called the RP2350-Pi Zero. It is powered by the RP2350 microcontroller and includes a DVI interface for displays and a lithium battery connector for portable hardware applications. Now, according to Georgio, the RP2350-Pi0, I'm going to shorten that to Pi0 for the rest of this but it is built around the RP2350B microcontroller and uses a dual-core, dual-architecture design. In other words, two ARM Cortex-M33 cores alongside two Hazard-3 RISC-V cores. That sounds like it'd be interesting to play with. They're both running at up to 150 megahertz with dynamic architecture switching.

26:58
Try saying that one three times fast switching Try saying that one three times fast. The product page notes that the DVI output can drive most HDMI screens and the board supports USB host or device mode via the onboard PIO-USB port. Storage is available through a microSD card slot near the standard 40-pin GPIO header card slot near the standard 40-pin GPIO. Here Now, waveshare provides example demos on its wiki pages that highlight the board's capabilities. The Pi Zero development board is available now for $9.99 on the Waveshare website and I got a feeling that just calling it a Pi Zero may come easier.

27:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, that is very confusing actually, because the Pi Zero already exists. There is, in fact, okay. So this is not the board that you're talking about, but this is a Waveshare board. I happen to have one of these within reach. This is a Waveshare display module. It is made for the Pi Zero because Raspberry Pi already makes a little board with that same form factor.

28:05
And what Waveshare has done here which is really intriguing is they're taking the RP2350, which that is one of the newest, I think, chip from the Raspberry Pi embedded line and they're putting it on the Pi Zero form factor, which is crazy. I sort of have to ask myself why haven't Raspberry Pi done this Cost? I can't imagine that the cost would be. I mean, raspberry Pi already makes the 2350 in-house making the board to put it on. They already make boards in-house. Adding another spin board is is you know nothing? Um, I, it's just. It's just odd to me that they nobody at raspberry pi thought of this unless it is. We don't want to confuse people by putting out another board that's so different, using that same form factor and pin out Like that might.

29:06
So, and this thing, this 2350 board from Waveshare, you can't. You don't run Linux on it. It is an embedded. It is embedded hardware. You, you know, you use something like Platformio or the Arduino environment or, you know, maybe there may be a way to run zephyr on this. You know, real-time os, rt, artos that's the sort of thing that you run on this, not a full linux distro. Um, a lot of these, a lot of these little cores like you can't. In fact, there there's been a couple of really crazy stories of people running linux on boards like this by emulating a virtual CPU, and that's the only way to do it, because the CPU does not actually have, you know, the right extensions to be able to run Linux as it is. So you've got to build a virtual CPU on the one that you have and then boot Linux on that, and you know boot time is measured in days at that point because it's so slow. But yeah, people have done it. It's crazy, it's fun, fun stuff Basically it's using MicroPython.

30:07
You can run MicroPython on it. That's not the only thing that you can do on these Looks like another one's, cblink or c underscore blink.

30:17
Yeah, probably. I interviewed on Floss Weekly back two weeks ago, I think, guys that were taking the Elixir runtime and running it directly on these and so that's like that's, that's air laying, that's, that's the big Ericsson, it was written for big iron telecommunication stuff. And they're like, well, let's just reimplement the virtual machine on embedded devices, it'd be fun. Oh my goodness, you guys are crazy, it's really cool. And they're like, well, let's just re-implement the virtual machine on embedded devices, it'd be fun. Oh my goodness, you guys are crazy. It's really cool what they're doing.

30:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Um so, so yeah, so if we're done with this topic, let's back up to the last one here. I gotta finish off clean, clean the air out on this on where slackware is from. I had I had to dig into this a little bit. It wasn't that hard actually. I was looking at the wikipedia for slackware is from. I had I had to dig into this a little bit. It wasn't that hard actually. I was looking at the wikipedia for slackware and I couldn't find it.

31:06
So I'm like, well, let's just look, click on the developer to see where he's from, and I I'm proud to say he is from the united states. Well, I don't know about from or not, but he went to college in my state, minnesota, uh, at Minnesota state university, moorhead. So that's like less than 250 miles away from me, uh, which I know. For you people over in England sounds like you know all the way across the country, but that's really close here in the U? S. So in 1993, he graduated there and then a year later he made Slackware and the rest is history. He's a 58 years old. I don't know where he's at now. He's married to Andrea, and go check out his wiki page. There you go His.

32:03
Wikipedia page. But yes, so that makes it a US. I mean, I have no idea if he still lives here, but that makes it a US, in fact, a Minnesota product.

32:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's a Minnesota project. Yeah, there you go. Azure Flash reminds me that it was. Atomvm is the Erlang project that re-implements the virtual machine there, and they do some very cool stuff. Sticking with Raspberry Pi, there is something else new. This one is not from Waveshare, though there is something new this week from Raspberry Pi themselves, and it's also not running Linux. Raspberry Pi has announced the Pi Radio Module 2 and it is on sale for a whopping $4 a piece, and I will tell you this is super interesting. We're going to get there.

32:56
But first let me tell you what this thing is actually doing and what it's for. It is a little tiny embedded radio that gives you Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and that's it. That is all it is. It is their little spin on the Infineon CYW43439. And it's just a PCB with this radio on top of it and then a can on top of that, and you can make a design that takes this exact footprint and then build this little pcb, drop it on there, solder it in and you get radio. Right, you get, you can have wi-fi and bluetooth on your on your device, which is cool, like the ability to do that is really neat, um, but this is. This is really fascinating to me, because they're making this thing available commercially and so you can buy it. They're releasing a data sheet for it, you can buy it from places like SparkFun, it looks like, and some others, and so this is going to be a commercially available product. And I tell you why that's so interesting to me. And that is because they also have the rp. Well, they're the rp1 and the rp2. Um, I think it's the rp1 is the one that I'm really, yeah, the rp1 this is.

34:11
This is something that's been intriguing to me for a very long time. This is their cp, their, their chip. It's like an io expander really, but it takes, um, oh, the the name of it, uh, not nvme the pci express. It takes a pci express lane and breaks it out into essentially the 40 pin header on the raspberry pi. Okay, so something that some of us that do embedded work have really wanted to see for a long time is essentially the RP1 chip on a desktop sized expansion board, because all of our desktops have these PCI Express lanes. You could steal a PCI Express lane and then have essentially a 40 pin and they could do, you know, they could do support for it in the linux kernel and you would have the ability to have a 40 pin raspberry pi header on a desktop or a laptop like that would be very cool. So I want to see that and to make that happen, either raspberry pi themselves has to come out with it or they have to make the rp1 available.

35:18
And, uh, this, this story about the wi-fi chip, really intrigues me because it is a step in the direction of Raspberry Pi is thinking about making all of their special chips and things available for people to use in other projects, and so maybe we are, we. Maybe we have a future in front of us where we get to do some of these really cool things with, you know, chips like the RP one. I would, I would love to see that. That. That would be very cool.

35:45 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
We'd be super cool now, with the bluetooth and the wi-fi radios are pretty much fixed, you wouldn't be able to reprogram the frequencies they use, would you?

35:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I imagine. So here's the thing A lot of these little chips anymore are their software defined radio, but a lot of them anymore also are very difficult to put firmware on, like you can only run signed firmware. So like, is it physically possible to reprogram this thing to be able to get access to a few other frequencies? Or you know other protocols, probably technically, but is anyone going to actually be able to to a few other frequencies? Or you know other protocols, probably technically, but is anyone going to actually be able to do it? Probably not. And I don't know how this is implemented. You know how low level it is. I don't even think that they specify. You know what protocol it talks over. You know it's probably something like MDIO, I think is one of the ones that's typical for these things to talk over. It could be SPI, it could be I squared C. I mean, who knows? I can try to find out.

36:51 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
So it probably would not be the option. If you wanted to use a Raspberry Pi to replace an old radio remote control, probably not.

37:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, probably can't do that.

37:06 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And I don't know I've got the patience to mess with ESP32.

37:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, it's fun, though. I very much enjoyed my trip into the embedded world and writing things in C++ for embedded. It's fun. You occasionally run into undocumented bugs where things like standard sort Undocumented features. When standard sort causes crashes on embedded. But it works just fine on your Linux desktop. I wouldn't call that a feature, that's a zero-day. Spontaneous reboots of your embedded devices is not a feature.

37:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No, not for me. Microsoft calls those features, I guess.

37:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, rob, there's been some Fedora news.

37:53 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
This there has been. But one more clarification Vulker didn't graduate in 93, and Slackware was initially released in July of 93. I was skimming real fast. And the 1994 thing was the fact that he had attended 75 grateful dead concerts by april of 1994.

38:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So apparently he's a big grateful that fan that it's put it on the resume, central part of his cv now that we're done talking about slackware, let's talk about fedorica or dark.

38:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh wow, I was uh combining words there. I was gonna say fedora on their radical move to another radical move. I said Fedora and Kaisk. Yeah, anyway, as far as radical moves, you know, most people think Arch is known for being the distro on the bleeding edge, but Fedora is a distro known for pushing the limits, cutting off the old and aggressively moving into the new. You know, our arch just keeps on rolling and Fedora actually pushes things forward.

39:07
This week they're stepping back from one of their radical steps forward that they were going to do and replacing it with another potentially radical idea. Fedora had planned to drop all 32-bit support in an upcoming Fedora 44 release, but this led to a significant backlash and a lot of disapproving feedback from the community. Fedora Engineering Steering Committee member Fabio Valentini, after all this feedback, has withdrawn the proposal and acknowledged the backlash, stating the target for this change was it was too early, and pointed out that the technical problems mentioned in the proposal are. You know, they're not going to go away, you know, and he even apparently said that he didn't think it was going to go through anyway. So I guess that one's going down. For now Not going to happen.

40:11
So the new radical proposal this week is to drop UEFI boot support on MBR partition disks. Specifically, we're talking about the x86-64 system, starting with the upcoming Fedora 43 release. They believe this will simplify the installer code and will end support for boot configuration that is, a boot configuration that is rarely used, configuration that is rarely used, inconsistently implemented across firmware configs and not even officially tested by Fedora. So push now untested code. I don't know, but anyway, I guess you know. I guess this helps Fedora devs.

40:59
But what does this do for the users? Well, apparently the setup can cause the bootloader to crash, adding to its list of problems. So that's what it does for users. Make sure it's not going to crash. For you Existing users you know those who already have it set up it'll just keep on working if you keep updating. But what this does affect is new installations done via their Anaconda installer, where GPT would be required instead of MBR for UEFI boot. That's what this, where this would, who would that would affect? This also doesn't affect ARM or RISC-V architectures. So apparently, according to what they think, it is not going to affect many users. And one radical move to the next, I say we need a distro that pushes limits. Cut out that 32-bit support, just get rid of it. And drop that UEFI support on GPT MBR systems. Whatever it is, it's Linux. If you don't like it, there are many other distros to hop to. But having a distro that pushes things forward will help push the entire ecosystem, the entire community, forward. It allows us all to have nice things.

42:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I have a slightly different take on this, in both of them slightly different. And then there's one other thing that Fedora talked about dropping, adding in this case that they have not added. So the installer thing, the UEFI on MBR, that is strictly at install time. So if you already have one of these systems, it's going to continue to work. It's just this slightly odd combination is now not going to be offered at install, and if you're really a wizard and you know what you're doing, you can still install it that way. I promise it's still possible in one way or the other. So nobody's really losing out on anything. I am not aware of anybody that has this killer edge use case that I've got to have UEFI and MBR on the same system.

43:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
If you're radical enough to run that kind of configuration, you're radical enough to make it work.

43:20 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, and you've got limited storage space because of it.

43:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, and then the other thing with the 32-bit libs. 32-bit is not supported anymore by a lot of these upstream programs, and so that's the kicker. This is not really Fedora pushing this, this is every other program that Fedora ships pushing back against it and saying we don't support running as 32-bit anymore. So many distros have moved away from the ability to install 32-bit, like strictly, and so this sort of multi-lib support, where you've got the 32-bit packages installed alongside, is just kind of an oddball configuration. That, yeah, it is causing problems for users and it is not supported by much. Now, the problem with dropping it is that so many games are specifically 32-bit, and it makes me wonder if we're going to see an emulation layer pop up that will let you run 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit system and not have to do all these extra installs or do we already have one?

44:33
I am not aware of one, but I would not be surprised if it was out there. Um, I've, I I want to say I've looked for this a time or two and, uh, didn't have not found one. Um, I know Steam, so like, for example, steam has Soldier, I think is what they call it, and that is their little Linux runtime, and so that might be enough to give you 32-bit game support if you're running stuff in Steam.

45:00 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, and in the ITFOS or itsfoscom article they talk about Fedora fedora based distros like basite, which is specifically kind of designed for gaming.

45:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
apparently they have a higher reliance on the 32-bit yeah, I I think one of the one of the main takeaways and I can't remember where I saw this, but it was one of the fedora guys talking about it one of the main takeaways is this is inevitably going to happen and in fact, it's also inevitably going to happen to all of your major distros, and so the fact that we're talking about it now is a good thing, um, because it'll, uh, it'll get some solutions going. People start thinking about it and they will then be some of those libraries and that's why I say cut the cord, get people thinking about it faster yeah, well uh, how does that affect flat packs that would include 32-bit libraries with themselves?

45:57
yeah, that's. That's. That's kind of iffy on all of this stuff. Like where is that layer going to be where you can have a 32-bit talking to a 64-bit? Uh, how far down the stack to say, because obviously, like, at some point it works to run 32-bit talking to a 64-bit? How far down the stack does that? Because obviously at some point it works to run 32-bit stuff on a 64-bit kernel. But how much of the user space do you have to have running 64-bit or running 32-bit for a 32-bit application to be able to talk to it?

46:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I imagine a lot of that's embedded into Flatpak, but I don't know.

46:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you would think so. I don't remember having to install a whole bunch of 32-bit libraries to be able to get Flatpaks running, so apparently it sort of handles all that internally.

46:33 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I could see Snap doing it easier.

46:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Very possibly. Yeah, there was one other thing that we should quickly mention. That was a Fedora 44 probably. Uh recommend, not recommendation. Um proposal that got shot down, and that was x libre, the replacement um x11 fork. Someone was trying to uh include it and there was just an outcry of no, we are not going to do this for various reasons, did we? Not talk about that last week. I don't think we talked about it in Fedora, oh, okay.

47:09 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I thought we touched on it.

47:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, somebody talked about Ex Libre itself. Yeah yeah, it does not belong in Fedora. I have a reason that is different from a lot of the other people's reasons. I think just technically speaking it does not belong there.

47:28 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Since you're speaking about an X11 server, is there another possibility?

47:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There is. Is it time for this story? It is time for this, ken.

47:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Let's go way back now.

47:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, turn on the way back machine. If Ken did not grab this one, I was going to. So, ken, let's go back, way back.

47:48 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I'm going to go ahead and say thank you, liam Proven, for writing about a new project that addresses one of the biggest differences between how X11 and Wayland work. Now this project is by Aradne, connell and Ken I apologize because I know I'm messing that sound up name up but one of the core. She's one of the core Alpine Linux developers. The project is called Wayback. Now, according to Liam, wayback bridges some of the gaps and the disagreements between the brave new world of Wayland and the decades-old X11-based desktop environments. Now, quoting from the project's readme file, wayback is an experimental X compatibility layer which allows for running full X desktop environments using Wayland components. It is essentially a stub compositor which provides just enough Wayland capabilities to host a rootful X Wayland server.

48:56
Now Liam's article does a great job of giving a brief explanation and use of an X server, so I'm going to recommend that you do check that description and history out. His article also does a great job of pointing out that Wayland is just a protocol and there are no separate display servers for managing Windows. Instead, you have a compositor that combines the X11 functions of window management and the display server. Liam states Wayback is an effort to create a Wayland-based display server X11 style, which does not provide compositing. It aims to provide just enough support to run XWayland full screen and thus provide the underpinning so that you can start a traditional X11-based window manager or desktop environment. For Liam's thoughts on why this project is coming out now, I again recommend reading his informational and entertaining article that I have linked in the show notes. One last question for everybody what does this project, the Internet Archive and the cartoon Rocky and Bullwinkle have in common?

50:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
They all use the term the Wayback, the Wayback Machine. I don't remember exactly with Rocky and Bullwinkle, but I think there was a Wayback, something or other.

50:24 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, it was one of the other uh, cartoon skits, I guess would be the best way to put it. That was part of the walking rocking bullwinkle. So, mr pot, mr p body, ah yes, vented a way back a, w, a, b, a, c and I'm gonna have to go back back to the I think the Internet Archive borrowed that name to name their way back. Correct. In fact, Liam points that out.

50:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
What they all have in common is they take you back in time, indeed.

51:01 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
The time machine he created was called the Wormhole Activating and Bridging automatic computer maybe a, b, a, c.

51:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
somebody really wanted their name to spell out way back. Um this, this story is really interesting to me because it's not the first time that someone has done this and there is a blog, a couple of blog posts from back in 2023 with X Wayland in root full mode, which is essentially the same idea. I don't know if you guys remember this, but it was running root full. So running X Wayland with root enabled. Not, I don't think that's the root user, I think that's as like as the root compositor is. More that's getting at and it. This was progress being made towards getting an X 11 desktop running underneath Wayland and I yeah, they're. They're both doing basically the same thing, probably going about it in slightly different ways, but yeah, it's cool to see. It's neat to see, because there's some of these old desktops that would be nice to be able to still run. Some of them people really enjoy that are not ready for Wayland, and having other ways of going about it is pretty cool.

52:20 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And it may make it easier for some of them to actually transition to Wayland.

52:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Mm-hmm.

52:27 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yep very possible, or at least to get rid of X.

52:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, alright, would they be getting rid?

52:33 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
of X if they did this.

52:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Sort of Mostly Parts of it.

52:38 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean X itself would be getting rid of it. It's pretty much like what X Wayland is, except for a little deeper.

52:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Rootful, all right All the way to the roots.

52:50
Yeah, that deep. There's a couple of interesting updates from programs that you may have thought were done. You know there comes a point in the lifetime of something when it's done and you don't get any updates anymore. Well, here's some things that are apparently not done.

53:08
Bash we got the Bash 5.3 release. There's a couple of interesting things in here. There's a new form of a command substitution, which is not something I play with very often, but it's in there. It adds the reply shell variable when the command substitution is complete. That's neat. Bash 5.3 also gets updates for C23, the newest iteration of the C programming language. It has a read line as a new option for case insensitive searching, sensitive searching, glob sort a local variable that apparently will let you know how shell is going to sort results of a path name completion. Very interesting stuff.

53:56
Now there is one thing that's intentionally broken and that is that with the C23 conformance, bash no longer compiles under the old school K and R C compilers. So you can't take Bash 5.3 and go compile it for your Univac or your PDP-11 or whatever you're trying to run it on. That it will run. Unix won't run this anymore. So Bash is moving into the future. But anyway, there's some fun stuff there in bash 5.3 and then the other one that I saw very much along the same lines is pearl. Pearl 5.42 is out this week and it's got unicode 16 support. I didn't even know unicode was versioned, oh my goodness. Uh, unicode is such a pain to work with. Experimental features like any and all operators for working with lists, a writer attribute for field variables, more core subroutines, various stuff. That makes lots of sense to Perl programmers, but I've not done anything with Perl for a decade now. It's been a long time since I've done anything with Perl.

55:05
My first let's just say that when I went and did the code challenge, it was not Perl that I reached for.

55:11 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Perl was my first language that I ever learned, way back, let's see 25, 6 years ago, and that was basically at the time. Perl was a very common thing to do a cgi scripting on the web I've written some cgi websites, very, very simple ones so does this mean we need a new version of a good pearl uh reference?

55:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
book. Uh, you know, I don't know. Um, I'm sure there are pearl 5 reference books out there and I doubt that 5.42 is enough changes to require a whole new book.

55:50 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm sure somewhere, If you are an author of the Pearl and a Pearl series, now may be the time to release another one. Make some more money.

55:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The authors of the Pearl series that I am aware of have all moved on to other languages. That's the thing.

56:05 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I think our favorite author moved on to Go and Flutter.

56:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep Randall Schwartz is off in the Flutter Dart world doing fun stuff there.

56:14 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I was really only a Perl user for maybe a year or two and then I moved on to PHP pretty quick. Yeah, it's very similar-ish.

56:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
PHP always reminded me of C. I always felt like I was writing interpreted C code when I was writing PHP. Didn't feel that way with Perl, but with PHP and it's you know, it's the silly stuff like the kind of the way you use brackets reminded me so much of C, Not necessarily the rest of the syntax, but just there's a lot of PHP stuff, particularly doing very simple programs that are very C-like. Maybe that's why I enjoyed PHP. It's always like C, C and C++ Good languages, fun languages, All right.

56:57 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Definitely a lot different than assembly.

57:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, although you can make assembly programming look and work a lot like C or like basic Probably not like basic, but you can make your assembly look and work a lot like C or like BASIC Probably not like BASIC, but you can make your assembly look a lot like C. In fact, that's sort of how C started was just a whole bunch of macros on top of assembly. Anyway, let's move on to some command line tips and Rob is going to start us off with some Proxmox goodness.

57:25 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes, not a command line tip, at least, uh, not today. So I'm gonna do, I think I'm gonna start a proxmox series here. Uh, because you know, one of the things when I do have my free time and I want to uh, I don't know play around with some technology I have, I have some proxmox servers sitting around that I run things on. So sometimes when I got some time I'm just going out looking for new ways I can use it and new things I can do with it and new things in my home lab and whatever else can improve. So one of the things that helped me monitor and see the efficiencies and inefficiencies of certain things is a program called Pulse. So this is a Pulse monitoring system. So for those watching, I have it up on my screen. This is Pulse and it's showing you. I have two different Proxmox servers PV one and PV, or just PVE, I guess, and PV two in my cluster and you can't see all my servers. You could see, uh, my first uh, pv server. Uh, but, um, if you're, if you look there, what you know, after I installed this um on my Proxmox, it's, it's uh, right down. Where is it? Oh, yeah, it's down here. In the other. It's a, it's a lxc container which you can't see it because it's on the second server way down below. But, uh, one of the things you may notice here is and one of the things that I really noticed I thought I always knew containers were more efficient than a whole VM. I didn't really realize how efficient. If you look down here, the LXC containers are using so much less memory than VMs up here. You know where you have gigs of use and you know down in the containers we're looking at megs 100 to 200 megs of use. So you know, utilizing this, I've been going through and converting a lot of my VMs into containers. Well, not a lot, you can see, there's only like a few here, but I'm still working on that. I plan to move more and more of them into containers because so much better efficiency.

59:47
Um, but with this you know you could. You could see the the. You know you got the name, you got the type of vm or lxc container, got the id, you have the uptime which, uh, I got one of my vms 527 days of uptime. Um, you got your cpu usage, your memory usage, your disk usage and the vms on here. It just shows how much is provisioned for it, where the uh, the containers actually shows how much is provisioned, how much of that is used. So that's kind of nice and then you can see the read write net in, net out stuff as it cycles through, and you can filter different ways.

01:00:25
But then you can also go over. There's at the top there's tabs. You can tab over to the storage and look at all your storage you have attached to it. You can look at your backups. I don't have a whole lot on there, just some of the important stuff and it's.

01:00:41
I gotta figure something out here, cause I do have PBS, which is the Proxmox backup appliance. It's its own thing. It's more efficient than the built-in deduplication, all kinds of stuff like that. Those aren't showing up here and they're also not showing up under my PBS tab. So I must have something not quite right there. I've only been using. I've been using this probably several weeks, maybe a month, I don't know, but either way, on the backups tab, if you're not using PBS, it's going to show your snapshots, your PV backups. If you are using PBS and working rightly, should show that. Their recent failures, all that stuff there. So pulse is, is just. It's a nice, simple tool. There's a script, sorry, a script. There's a script I'm going to show, probably next week or whenever, a way to install this, along with some a lot of other nice, easy ways to install things. So there you go.

01:01:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Pulse to monitor proxmox servers nothing to do with audio in this case. Uh, no, not that kind of pulse. No, all right. Uh, very cool, ken, you've got a. You've got a grep tip for us, right?

01:02:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, I originally covered the basic use of REP back in Episode 27. So if you all want more detailed information about ways you can use REP, I'd recommend going back and listening to that one. I don't think there's any video with that one, in fact. But today I want to demonstrate how you can use GRIP contact line control to pull out information from a long output, like you may get when using PWDump or PW-CLI info all In fact. Let me go ahead and transition to my terminal. In fact, let me go ahead and transition to my terminal.

01:02:51
Everybody remembers when I did PWInfoWall and how much memory or information came out of that about your pipe wire configuration so much that you can't even scroll all the way back. But you can, of course, pipe that into grip and let's make sure that's a P Again, bryce and put in the string that you're looking for. Let's say you're looking for underscore output output and you can do that. And there it goes. Now, with just doing that, you'll notice that it's given me two lines here that are error lines. That's going to your standard error so that they show up as well as the line that grip filters out of the other stuff. Little benefit here.

01:04:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, redirects standard error into your standard output.

01:04:17 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Correct.

01:04:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah.

01:04:19 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And then you can use a dash capital F which tells it to just use fixed strings, dash capital F which tells it to just use fixed strings, and the man page for grip recommends putting those within single quotes. And then you can do a dash A, capital A, that is to look after the line. So for those of you all listening, I just did pw-cli info all to greater than symbol ampersand 1, then the pipe command grip, dash capital F, capital A and then in quotes I've got 15, and I'll explain why that's in double quotes in a minute, followed by in single quotes ALSA underscore output. The output of that had ALSA output in red, with the next 15 lines after that being displayed. Now if I go in and take away the quotes, what do you think is going to happen for that 15?

01:05:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I would think it would do the same thing.

01:05:52 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It may or may not Depends. Now you can do B to get the 15 lines before, but depending on the version of Bash you have, it may just take the 1 and drop the 5 or give an error because of the 5. The reason being is another way you can do it is instead of putting A or B, you can just put a dash followed by the number. And that's where it could get confusing, because if you put a one five, you think what do you think is going to happen?

01:06:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
it's going to see the one and it's going to throw an error on the five. No, it did see it. I expected. I expected it to get confused with that one, but it did not. I was expecting that too I think it's because I've got a later version of Bash. Some versions of Bash are smart enough to realize that that all goes together and others are not.

01:06:58 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Right, that makes sense. Or another way you can do that is capital C In there and then you can scroll back Correct. It says basically put that in the center. Now, another one that I'm going to recommend using is and I'm going to put this before these because it takes a double dash group. Get my fingers on the right keys. Here, dash separator equals, and here I'm going to use double quotes Without that space between the double quote and equal Mm-hmm.

01:07:57
Dash, dash separator Make sure I spell that right Followed by two dashes. Then put a space between that last quote and the FC and let's go with something that's going to give me more than just a one output, Like, say, ALSA dash. Now we've got input and output and you'll see it puts that separator in there so you can tell where each one is.

01:08:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Each block ends, begins.

01:08:41 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
That way it makes it a little bit easier.

01:08:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's handy.

01:08:45 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And with that you could then go in and say, for example, say I wanted to do ALSA input Control-Shift-C to copy that, and then I can come back down here and paste that in, and I've only got the one. And then you can go in and with that 15, work out, so you can find, well, that got us the end of this.

01:09:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You're adding 10 more lines of output to the beginning and the end of it.

01:09:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Right, but you still don't have the beginning of it because you're looking for the ID line for the beginning. So let's go ahead and double that To 50. And that should grab it. Maybe, yep, mm-hmm, maybe, yep, there it is, and so we're dealing with a node that doesn't have any input ports at the moment, has two output ports and its ID is 51. So that way you can get that information out and also look through and see what all that does.

01:10:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you can tame that crazy spew of information from the the pipe wire command.

01:10:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
From the unimaginable to almost manageable.

01:10:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah.

01:10:50 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Because that's still a lot of information just for that one node, isn't it?

01:10:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It is. But, yeah, great stuff. All right, I am going to attempt a screen share as well. Let's see if we can make this work. Yeah, there we go, all right.

01:11:09
So I've got an interesting command that I've been playing with and it's contact, and so this is actually one of the Meshtastic guys has written this. It is a command line client for Meshtastic and it's kind of like being in an old school IRC chat room. You can send test messages, you can chat with folks, and so there it's going to show that you hear my devices behind me dinging at me, because the live demo is actually live in this case. But one of the other really neat things that this has is support for going in and doing all of your configuration. So you know, if you wanted to go in and configure channel one, change the password, turn on MQTT, all of that stuff, it's just a. It's a really nifty interface to be able to play around with Meshtastic. If that's something that you want to do and of course, that's something that I want to do almost all of the time, and so that's why I find it pretty interesting Go hit the button, make it shut up.

01:12:19
It's a problem with being a developer. I'm surrounded by nodes and I send a message and they all start dinging at me at once. I was going to ask if you're just gonna leave that running the rest of the show. No, no, no, no, no, I'd be driving. Nuts would not be able to do that. Um, but anyway, contact is a cool little program. You can install it with pip x uh. Pip x install contact, I think, is all it takes to do it. The cool thing about it maybe I should do pip x as a uh command line tip at some point in the future, because that sets up your uh, your virtual environment for you so that you can install pip commands. You can install python commands using pip without breaking the rest of your system. That's always cool. Um, yeah, so that is a contact so.

01:12:56 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So that was like uh, irc on there can you actually chat with other people. Then yeah, you've got irc.

01:13:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So well, it's for mesh tastic With Meshtastic right, yeah, you can chat with folks on your local mesh. So if I was closer and had a Meshtastic connected to you, we could chat. That's cool. Yeah, it's fun. It's fun and I really like the old school terminal interface there. It's something the project has needed. It's great. It's a great add-on.

01:13:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I miss IRC. I'd tell you my favorite IRC client from back in the day, but the word isn't necessarily appropriate.

01:13:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I remember this. Yes, Thank you. Thank you for your discretion.

01:13:41 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Another one was, I want to say Trillium.

01:13:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, there's a bunch.

01:13:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
No, mine was command line, though mirc is one if you want a gooey, but no, gooey's boring gooey's are boring.

01:13:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yep, it's true. All right, we're gonna let the guys plug whatever they want to. We'll start with rob. I'm sure he's got a website and some other stuff to tell you about.

01:14:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Don't give away my surprise. If you all want to come and see more about me, connect with me, see what kinds of things I'm talking about. On the social web, you can find me at Robert P Campbellcom. That's R O B E R T P, then Campbell C A M P BL-Lcom, and on that page at the top, you'll find links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my Blue Sky, mastodon and a place to donate coffees in $5 increments. If you appreciate what I do for you, that's it. Did we lose Jonathan? Of course not, now that I am the star of the show, as always, I don't know. I've said all the things I had to say, but hey here we go, I'm back.

01:15:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That was weird. I got a little pop-up that said Connection lost and I could still hear you guys and I was pushing on the button like Get Rob off the full screen. We've got another Rob full screen.

01:15:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Sorry, similar to what happened to me last week when I was trying to start Restring.

01:15:24 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, Well, I don't know if you remember that time. I think it got stuck on Jeff when Jonathan's crashed, and that was for a good five minutes or so.

01:15:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, Ken, you have anything to plug?

01:15:37 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yes, I do. This week I'm going to go back to using Linux on a Chromebook by plugging how to Geek's senior editor Patrick Campanell's list of nine applications he enjoys using on his Chromebook. I've got that link posted in the show notes. I found it an interesting read and I'll have to admit most of the apps he uses I like using on my Chromebook. Very cool, all right it on my Chromebook.

01:16:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Very cool, all right, appreciate you guys being here. We appreciate everyone that is here catching us live and on the download. I want to let you know about two things. First off, you should go check out Hackaday because that's the other place you can find me. My security column goes live there on Friday mornings and that's also where we do Floss Weekly these days Show about free, libre and column goes live there on Friday mornings and that's also where we do Floss Weekly these days Show about free, libre and open source software. We record that on Tuesdays and it goes live on Hackaday on Wednesdays.

01:16:33
You should check it out. The other thing that you should check out is Club Twit. I've got a button here to press that will hopefully give you a QR code. Let's see if it works. But Club Twit is there's the QR code? Nope, nope, that way it's over that way over on the other side of rob. Uh, join the scan the qr code, join the club price of a couple cups of coffee per month and it is definitely worth it. You should come and check it out, be part of the club. It's where the cool kids are. We appreciate everybody that is in club twit. It's the best way to support the network and your favorite shows. We will be back next week. We hope you have a great week and we will be back to talk about more Linux-y goodness. So until then, take care hey buddy, are you a geek?

01:17:17 - Leo Laporte (Announcement)
Are you a tech enthusiast? Then I would love to invite you to join a tech community like no other. You can gain exclusive access to our incomparable quality tech content with Club Twit. As a member, you'll enjoy all Twit TV shows ad-free plus access, private video feeds for insider shows like iOS Today, home Theater, geeks and so much more. Dive into the members-only Twit Plus bonus feed for behind-the content club discussions and special events. But here's the best perk join our incredible discord community to watch live show productions, chat with hosts and participate in exclusive, members only activities. It's your backstage pass to the world of twit. Whether you're a tech enthusiast or a lifelong learner, club twit elevates your knowledge while entertaining your interests. Get two weeks free when you sign up now and unlock unparalleled access at twittv slash club twit. That's twittv slash club twit and, from the bottom of my heart, thank you and welcome to the club.