Untitled Linux Show 218 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.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:00]:
Hey folks, this week we're covering the newest in AI in Open source that includes the kernel and the Z editor. Microsoft's documentdb has joined the Linux Foundation. There's a new operating system and Linux distro made for your old Linux laptops. There's news in the kernel about butterfs and bcachefs and lots more. There's the Python documentary that you might want to check out. Oh yeah, and Android is disallowing sideloading. That's kind of a big deal. All that and more.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:30]:
You don't want to miss it, so stay tun.

Rob Campbell [00:00:34]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit.

Jonathan Bennett [00:00:43]:
This is the Untitled linux Show, episode 218, recorded Saturday, August 30th. We want to be evil. Hey folks, it's Saturday and you know what that means. It's time to get geeky about Linux and Open Source. Some hardware, some software. It's the Untitled Linux Show. We're gonna have a lot of fun. We've got the whole gang here together again.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:04]:
Rob and Jeff and Ken. And we've got some some news to cover for the week. Rob is up first and I of course get to see sort of behind the scenes. I have all of the show notes right in front of me. And Rob, is this about scanning? I am having sort of nightmarish flashbacks to making Twain work. Is Twilane anything like Twain?

Rob Campbell [00:01:28]:
That's Twilane as in welcome to this week in Linu AI news. First I like to thank.

Jonathan Bennett [00:01:37]:
That's terrible.

Rob Campbell [00:01:38]:
First I would like to thank our host for making this all possible. If it wasn't for our fearless leadership, I wouldn't be here talking about all this great AI in Linux news lately. So first up this week, the Linux Foundation Networking so LF Networking or lfn, which is under part of the Linux Foundation. So this is the largest set of open source networking projects in the world, formed by a broad industry coalition with the goal of fostering a commercial ready networking ecosystem that embraces open emerging and evolving technologies. And as I said, it's part of the Linux Foundation. This week at the Open source Summit Europe, LFN has released Esdom 1.0 for integrating AI into networking. You've heard of Software Defined Networking? Or maybe you haven't. Well, get ready for AI Defined Networking.

Rob Campbell [00:02:41]:
The project is focused on accelerating the integration of AI data models and applications for the open networking industry. And this release introduces foundational platform capabilities that support secure data connectivity, pipeline creation, model management and multi platform deployment across on premises and cloud environments. So the Key features of this release include connections so you can establish communication link between software systems to enable data exchange and integration across environments. Data sets Ingest and manage data from a variety of sources including storage buckets, MySQL databases and REST APIs. Pipelines build and manage both training and inference pipelines for AI slash machine learning workloads including model fine tuning and deployment models. So access and manage AI models from configured connections across platforms including on premises servers, AWS, SageMaker, Azure, ML and GCP. Vertex AI endpoints view and manage all connected endpoints including REST APIs and model services from a centralized interface. Adapters simplify integration with external services without needing to configure host details.

Rob Campbell [00:04:18]:
And finally on the list, remote executors. So run pipelines or programs on remote servers or virtual machines to optimize compute intensive processes. But if you don't actually want AI in your Linux code, how about AI helping developers determine patches for backporting in the Linux kernel to prior stable LTS kernel? So Linux LTS co maintainer and Nvidia employee Sasha Levin is now pushing this initiative ahead. So you know, typically kernel developers will CC stable for patches that are explicitly marked for backporting from the Linux upstream git to prior releases for patches not explicitly being marked. AI is now helping out given the demanding challenges of the upstream Linux LTS maintenance. So Jonathan, tell us what you hate about it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:05:27]:
I'm trying to look into ESADIM and discover if there's actually anything there. Like so far I've not found any source code. I've not found bound anything that's not just hype like this sort of sounds like vaporware to me. Maybe another spin on doing. Oh, what's the. What, what do they call it? The mc. Oh, I forget now what it's called. It's the, the thing that makes agentic AI work.

Jonathan Bennett [00:06:03]:
It's also the control, the master control system, MCS or whatever from Tron mcp. That's it, isn't it?

Jeff Massie [00:06:15]:
I think they're just leveraging their core competencies to have synergistic effects on their core user base.

Jonathan Bennett [00:06:22]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:06:23]:
Did you look at their GitHub?

Jonathan Bennett [00:06:24]:
I can't find their GitHub. I would love to go look at their GitHub.

Rob Campbell [00:06:28]:
So if you click through so there's a link to acidum.org and right at the top, right there is a link to GitHub. It's the little. I think that's the GitHub logo. Maybe it's the old logo, I don't know. Some Little guy up there.

Jonathan Bennett [00:06:41]:
GitHub.com esdumproject hey look, there is actually code somewhere. Yes, well, glory be, they made it difficult to find.

Ken McDonald [00:06:52]:
Was the term you were looking for.

Jonathan Bennett [00:06:55]:
Model Context Protocol mcp. Yeah, that is what this reminds me a lot of. It's essentially an MCP and that's where an AI can actually go out and interact with stuff.

Rob Campbell [00:07:07]:
So there's actually Python code in here.

Ken McDonald [00:07:11]:
The interesting thing is with this you're actually taking input, basically analyzing it and then providing a summary of it and why you should. Why it should be backported, basically.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:30]:
Oh, that's the other half. Right. So what Rob did here. So anybody that didn't catch it, Rob pulled a fast one. He's got two separate stories here that he's mashing together, but they're pretty distinct. And I was going to get to my comments on the Linux guys using AI. They've done this for a while and in fact you can go back to an interview we did over. It was.

Jonathan Bennett [00:07:51]:
It was Floss Weekly, but it was when Floss Weekly was still a part of twit. We did an interview with Greg KH and he was telling us about some of the AI stuff that they were using even then. And so I'm not surprised that they're doing this. One of the things I really like about the way that they're doing this is when the AI sends this email, it starts with LLM generated explanation. Maybe completely bogus. Yeah, I think that's actually pretty important that when someone is using AI to do something like this, it needs to be made clear that that's what it is. Where you really run into problem is people use AI to build stuff or write stuff and then they don't disclose it. And so you end up wasting developer resources, you wasting people's time on looking at it and then trying to figure out is this just AI slop or is there actually something to this?

Jeff Massie [00:08:47]:
Yeah, I find AI is wrong a lot, but it has kind of handy at times too.

Rob Campbell [00:08:53]:
I use that starting point.

Ken McDonald [00:08:55]:
So every time I use Grammarly I need to say that this was maybe totally bogus.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:01]:
Did Grammarly write it from nothing or did Grammarly just fix some of your stuff?

Ken McDonald [00:09:07]:
Well actually they took the abbreviations ahead.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:12]:
And expanded it out so not from nothing.

Jeff Massie [00:09:18]:
Go ahead.

Jonathan Bennett [00:09:19]:
What I want to know is about using AI in something like zed. I hear that that's now possible.

Ken McDonald [00:09:26]:
Yes, it is. In fact, Jonathan, we can thank Tim Anderson, he's the one who wrote about ZED Industries and Google introducing the Agent Client Protocol, or ACP as a standard way for AI agents to integrate with an integrated development environment or as we like to say, ide, with the idea that this will prevent developers getting locked into VS code. You're not locked into VS code, are you Jonathan?

Jonathan Bennett [00:10:02]:
Nope. I can stop anytime I want to.

Ken McDonald [00:10:07]:
Now I do want to quickly explain some of the acronyms that I'll be using in addition to the ACP and ide. One of them we just mentioned mcp, which as we've discussed was Model Context Protocol. Another one is going to be JSON rpc. It refers to a lightweight and simple remote procedure call protocol that uses JSON to transmit requests and responses between a client and a server. Now acp, which is still under development, is a standardized protocol for Agent editor, communications Agent process are started by the Code editor and communicate using the JSON RPC over standard I O. Now ACP reuses MCP specifications where possible while also adding its own custom types. Formatted Text is based on Markdown. The protocol is open source under the Apache license.

Ken McDonald [00:11:10]:
Any agent can implement it, potentially building on Gemini's CLI implementation as a starting point. The protocol is also open for other clients to adopt, according to Zed CEO and co founder Nathan Sobo. He may be a good guest for FLOSS Weekly. Jonathan they worked with Hope I'm pronouncing this right ali Morris of CodeCompany to bring support for ACP compatible agents to Neovim users. Nathan also wrote, we believe the best tools come from openness. Just as the language server protocol opened up IDEs to specialized tools, ACP creates spaces for an ecosystem of agents to tailored to every developer's workflow. We appreciate Google's open approach with Gemini CLI which made this collaboration possible and we're committed to the same. We intend to maintain enough control over the Agent Client protocol to continue to push it forward quickly while also evolving and versioning it carefully to encourage an ecosystem of agents and clients to develop.

Ken McDonald [00:12:30]:
For more details or if you want to join Zed Industries, check out the links in the show notes.

Jonathan Bennett [00:12:37]:
Yeah, I'm very intrigued by ZED and like you said, I have been wanting to interview them, talk to them about it. I like the ability to be able to choose your own LLM to be able to plug into your environment. I think that's pretty cool and is definitely sort of the the thing. It's the future, right? Like that's what people would like to see with their their AI and what's.

Ken McDonald [00:13:00]:
Really nice is they're not just restricting it to zed, they're making sure it can be used in other editors, like neovim.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:10]:
Yeah, so they've sort of written this SHIM layer that lets an editor talk to an mcp, which is. Which is pretty cool.

Rob Campbell [00:13:18]:
Can't wait to plug that into nano someday.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:25]:
Sure, why not?

Ken McDonald [00:13:26]:
Or Kate.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:27]:
Or Kate.

Rob Campbell [00:13:28]:
I don't.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:29]:
You don't Kate.

Jeff Massie [00:13:32]:
Eclipse, my favorite text editor.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:34]:
Yeah, nano.

Rob Campbell [00:13:36]:
That's pretty much my text editor.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:38]:
Yeah, I use nano a lot, too. All right, Jeff, I have a question for you. When are we going to see AI come to OBS Studio?

Jeff Massie [00:13:47]:
Oh, God, I hope never.

Rob Campbell [00:13:51]:
Imagine what you could.

Jonathan Bennett [00:13:52]:
Maybe as a plugin, I could see. I could see AI switching between camera views.

Rob Campbell [00:13:59]:
I could see it fixing Jeff's chroma key.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:03]:
I mean, sure, maybe that too automatically for him. There.

Jeff Massie [00:14:08]:
There are a few automatically.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:09]:
There are a few limited things where I could see AI being great for. Not a whole lot of things.

Jeff Massie [00:14:17]:
Well, you know, and it would. It would help quite a bit. I mean, I joke, but I mean, there would be a lot of stuff like, you know, and it's used in other places like static reduction and where it cleans up images and it could do a lot of that stuff on the fly and be smart about it.

Ken McDonald [00:14:33]:
Or like if you're in OBS and you got this screen capture you're doing and you just want to be able to expand to a certain section in it, maybe just use your mouse to quickly highlight it and haven't.

Rob Campbell [00:14:47]:
No, you got to type it in.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:50]:
I'm not sure.

Rob Campbell [00:14:50]:
Zoom in on right corner and view this part.

Jeff Massie [00:14:56]:
You're ruining Jonathan's segue is all I'm saying.

Jonathan Bennett [00:14:59]:
Yeah, it's true. Hush, guys, let Jeff talk.

Jeff Massie [00:15:02]:
And just before we started, just so you guys know, before we started, Ken tried to segue before the show started. We've got Jonathan now doing segues. This segue stuff is just chaos this weekend.

Rob Campbell [00:15:13]:
Enop, it's getting.

Jeff Massie [00:15:14]:
It's getting out of hand. Yeah, whole show's gone, Rob. But Anyway, talking about OBs, you know, that software that's near and dear to our hearts here at the Untitled Linux show, which is now out with a new beta. And I know most of us use OBS to do the show and we all might be using it, though I don't know if Jonathan is, since he has the mixer and command and console this fingertips and so do you use obs, Jonathan?

Jonathan Bennett [00:15:42]:
Not for this. Not for this show.

Jeff Massie [00:15:44]:
Okay, well, but he does use it, so there you go. We all use it so OBS32 is out for testing in beta and some of the things it brings is a VAD or a voice activation detection. Now this is for Nvidia audio effects and does little things like improve speech by suppressing a lot of background noise and you know, lets you hear the presenter better when the presenter is not in an ideal location. You know, maybe you're out in public, a lot of background noise. This will help clean some of that up. There's also an option for removing chairs in a scene in the Nvidia RTX background removal, so it'll help clean up what you're trying to present. Big news too is there's now a basic plugin manager which helps keep all the extra plugin features which OBS supports organized so you can have more stuff at your fingertips in an organized fashion without flipping through menus. Quite so bad.

Jeff Massie [00:16:43]:
Future plans for OBS are going to include UI updates and to better get ready for that they are adding custom OBS widgets. They don't say what the future UI stuff coming is, they just kind of make mention that there's there's big changes coming. There is an improved format selection. Excuse me, there's an improved format selection for pipewire. Video capture and chapter markers have improved accuracy in when in hybrid MPV or MP4 mov formats. Now AMD has some love in there too as they're getting updated default settings for AMD encoders, which is basically getting things ready for the metal renderer that's coming. Adding to the changes, OBS Studio will no longer load plugins built for newer releases of OBS to print future compatibility issues. So meaning if you built your plugin for version 32 of OBS and later the plugin comes out with a version for 33.

Jeff Massie [00:17:48]:
If you're still on 32, it'll keep loading version the plugin version for 32 so it'll prevent issues that you could run into there. You know it there sure seems like there are a lot of changes coming in the future when you read the read the release notes. Like I said, a lot of this stuff is kind of prepping for future things and preparing laying the foundation. So we'll have to see what they've got planned. I said they don't really mention what's coming. But also like all releases, there's a ton of crash fixes which I'm not going to go into all of them. Just know that they fixed a lot of common and some uncommon crashes, bugs and general wrong behavior. If you look at the two articles linked in the Show Notes, they have more details and a link to the GitHub release notes page which gives every single change which has been included with this beta.

Jeff Massie [00:18:41]:
So I, you know, I don't think I have to say this, but just in case, you know, this is beta, so it might not be rock solid and could still have some issues. You know, betas for testing phases. So be warned if you're using this for any kind of production or enterprise type of environment, but take a look and maybe give it a test drive.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:00]:
Yeah, interesting stuff. I knew that there were OBS plugins. I've not gone and looked through them for the longest time. I'm now wondering if some of the annoyances that I have with OBS are just easily fixed by one of these plugins.

Ken McDonald [00:19:19]:
I'm trying to think what plugins I'm.

Rob Campbell [00:19:20]:
Using, if they're making plugins more robust, you know that, you know, the AI is going to be in there some sometime.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:29]:
Oh, sure.

Ken McDonald [00:19:31]:
Because right now you don't really have any way to look to see what plugins you do have.

Jonathan Bennett [00:19:38]:
Yeah, you know, I don't have obs. I went to check, I went to Inside of Restream, I went to open up the tool menu for looking for plugins not running OBS here. But yeah, it'll be very useful to have the plugin manager, hopefully the ability to search and download plugins right inside of obs. That would be cool.

Rob Campbell [00:19:56]:
That'd be nice.

Ken McDonald [00:19:57]:
Yes.

Jeff Massie [00:19:58]:
Well, and they did say simple, so they made it sound too like this is the foundation for more improvements coming to the plugin.

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:10]:
Yeah, a lot of times with something like that, you've got to have that mvp, the minimum viable product. You've got to get that launched first and then once a version of Build comes out with that, then all of the extra stuff lands. And so I feel pretty good about this version may be very simple, but the version after that, people are going to go, oh, it'd be cool if it did this.

Jeff Massie [00:20:33]:
It'd be cool if it did that right now.

Ken McDonald [00:20:37]:
What's the oldest QT version that OBS currently supports?

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:42]:
Oh, I have no idea. Do you know yet?

Ken McDonald [00:20:45]:
Sounds like. No, I don't know. I just noticed that one of the bug fixes was to remove a workaround for some of those older QT versions that prevented docs from loading correctly while OBS is maximized.

Jonathan Bennett [00:20:59]:
Yeah, I bet there's a lot of old cruft like that because OBS has been around for a long time. It's it is definitely not new software, so it's, it probably has left behind more QT versions than it currently supports.

Ken McDonald [00:21:13]:
Yeah, let's hope so.

Jeff Massie [00:21:15]:
And you know, like I said, that's why I said there were some common and uncommon because some of them are the, you know, when you, when you're doing this menu in this specific resolution and facing, facing north while having a cup of coffee, this happens, you know, and. Oh, we patched that. Okay.

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:31]:
Yeah, absolutely.

Ken McDonald [00:21:32]:
No more getting echoes while you're talking. Hopefully.

Jonathan Bennett [00:21:36]:
Hopefully. All right, well, so there's some other news that we need to get onto and I'm very curious about this one. Rob has a story about something Microsoft is doing, teaming up with the Linux foundation and I'm skeptical about this one too, Rob, but take it away and tell us what it is. We'll see what we think.

Rob Campbell [00:21:56]:
As you pointed out last week, Jonathan, I like to bring the Microsoft and Apple news into our Linux show. It's what I do when I guess I can't find any other controversial stuff in the news. So let's go back a little bit. Back in 2014, Microsoft announced Azure DocumentDB a NoSQL database for storing, using and maintaining data in JSON documents. This then three years later, they added more data store models and rebranded it Azure Cosmos DB. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced a new documentDB, not in the cloud but local and attempting to combine NoSQL flexibility with the reliability of a Postgres SQL. And I don't remember if we, I don't think we mentioned this, but I remember reading about this announcement when it came out, wasn't all that interesting yet. But this week, this week, Microsoft DocumentDB finds a new home with the Linux Foundation.

Rob Campbell [00:23:10]:
The project was released under the MIT license and since it's released on Git since its release on GitHub it has gained, well, a lot of stars and apparently a lot of interest. So Microsoft, loving Linux and Open source as they do, you know, and all the things that are good, stated that a central and neutral home was essential to foster collaboration under the Linux Foundation. Microsoft hopes documentdb will grow under open governance while reducing the risk of vendor lock in. So, you know, they're kind of worried that if this thing stays a Microsoft product, people are going to shy away because of vendor lock in. I mean, it didn't hurt GitHub too much. But anyway, I mean, that's still a great point, especially when you have plenty of other options. A quote from the vice president of Azure Cosmos DB at Microsoft, Kirill Gavrieluk, said Quote we built documentdb with a simple goal. Give developers an open document database with the flexibility of NoSQL and the power and reliability, openness and ecosystem of Postgres.

Rob Campbell [00:24:31]:
In just a few months, the community has embraced the project. By joining the Linux foundation, we're deepening our commitment to transparency, open governance and developer first principles, ensuring documentdb remains an open extensible document database developers can confidently build on for years to come. I've had to dig in beyond the article I found. I had to do a lot digging to find a lot of this background about what documentdb is. You know, I guess it's a like a db more for managing documents. What's the benefit of NoSQL? I don't know, because you still use the SQL SQL commands. So honestly, I'm not really up to all that. I, you know, I've tried to figure out what the real benefits were using this over say, MariaDB or any other sequel, and really I struggle to find anything substantial.

Rob Campbell [00:25:34]:
So if anyone can clear that up for me, that'd be great.

Jonathan Bennett [00:25:41]:
Yeah, it's built on top of postgres and I know lots of people really like postgres. It seems to scale pretty well.

Ken McDonald [00:25:49]:
Well, there's a. Actually, Rob, to answer your question, an article by Saurav Rudra back in January may answer this. Document DB's advantage over its inspiration, one of the AWS products, since this is open source and that's proprietary.

Jonathan Bennett [00:26:17]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:26:19]:
You mean the benefit of this over the Cosmos db?

Ken McDonald [00:26:25]:
Well, yeah, among others.

Rob Campbell [00:26:28]:
Yeah. I'm just wondering. I mean, I don't understand NoSQL really either, especially since it actually uses SQL.

Jonathan Bennett [00:26:36]:
SQL style queries.

Jeff Massie [00:26:38]:
Yeah.

Rob Campbell [00:26:38]:
What makes it NoSQL? Isn't that command the query structure? What makes it a SQL? Apparently not.

Jonathan Bennett [00:26:47]:
NoSQL actually stands for not only SQL, not only SQL. Terrible name because it's literally the exact opposite of what you would think it means.

Rob Campbell [00:26:59]:
Well, okay, I'm learning.

Ken McDonald [00:27:02]:
So it's SQL expanded.

Rob Campbell [00:27:04]:
So it's. It's not no SQL, it's SQL and more. Okay, that helps.

Jeff Massie [00:27:10]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:10]:
Yep.

Ken McDonald [00:27:10]:
Sounds like SQL plus might be a better name.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:12]:
SQL. Yeah, yeah, because I was.

Rob Campbell [00:27:16]:
I was under the impression that was maybe a lighter SQL or something, but apparently it's probably even the opposite of that.

Jeff Massie [00:27:25]:
It looks like it's SQL.

Rob Campbell [00:27:28]:
Yeah, there is that too.

Ken McDonald [00:27:30]:
But with the NoSQL, it's MIT licensed.

Rob Campbell [00:27:36]:
Yes, this is MIT license too.

Jonathan Bennett [00:27:39]:
Yeah. So one other thing to sort of dive into here that's interesting is what exactly it means for something to join the Linux foundation. And I am, I am beginning to discover that the Linux foundation sort of works like a fiscal host. So if you're familiar with something like Open Collective or what are some of the other ones there are, you know, GNU has one that they do as well where if you want your project to be sort of like a nonprofit, but you don't want to go through all of the paperwork of setting that up, you go to one of these fiscal hosts. And from what I can tell, the Linux foundation sort of works like that. And so when you read that Microsoft spun DocumentDB off and it joined the Linux foundation. So like something to keep in mind, what that actually means is this is no longer like legally speaking, it is no longer under the Microsoft Corporation. It is now legally speaking underneath the Linux foundation, that's its umbrella organization.

Ken McDonald [00:28:40]:
So that Microsoft can count anything, any financial assistance they give it as a contribution.

Jonathan Bennett [00:28:49]:
I don't know if Linux foundation is actually a nonprofit in that way because it is more of a trade group than a full nonprofit. So I don't know if it counts. Being a business though, it's a little different from being an individual, right? Because as a business you're not looking for something to be a non profit necessarily to be able to write it off.

Rob Campbell [00:29:10]:
No, it is a 501C but not a 501C3. No, 501C6 which is not a non profit organization.

Jonathan Bennett [00:29:20]:
It is a. I don't remember exactly what the term is, but it's not exactly the same thing.

Rob Campbell [00:29:26]:
Well, AI just said yes, it was established in 2000 to support Linux and.

Ken McDonald [00:29:33]:
Take that with a grain of salt.

Jonathan Bennett [00:29:36]:
Yeah, a 501C6 that is like a, it's like a, it's like a business league, right? It's like a trade organization. I don't. It is tax exempt for itself, but I don't know that an individual would get a tax write off for giving to it. What I was going to say is it's different for a business because a business can say anything that is a valid business expense. The expense goes out the door. You don't pay taxes on your expenses as a business, so it doesn't have to be right for another business. So for Microsoft to give money to it, they could just say, oh, this is legitimate business expense and it'll come off of their taxes in the exact same way.

Ken McDonald [00:30:14]:
So any work that Microsoft employees do on this, Microsoft can just write it.

Jonathan Bennett [00:30:23]:
Off as they may be able to write it off. I am not a cpa. I'm definitely not a business cpa. Talk to your own CPA before you try to do this this. But yeah, there's plenty of details there. So let's talk about. Let's talk about something else. Let's talk about a distro.

Jonathan Bennett [00:30:44]:
I don't think we've had any distros yet today. Ken, what's new in OpenSUSE?

Ken McDonald [00:30:50]:
Well, with OpenSUSE we've got a new installer coming out and we can thank you, Ava Caligari and Michael Larabel. They both wrote about SUSE engineers finishing up work on their new Agama operating system installer. Now it's going to be a Gamma 17 and it's now available to install in SUSE Linux Enterprise installations or install those installations. It will also provide better representation of wired network connections and to correctly represent the situation in which several devices share the connection. Storage user interface improvements include reorganizing the information displayed at the Installation Devices section so its usage is more understandable at first sight. The new user interface also offers the possibility to direct directly use a disk or even a pre existing RAID device without creating partitions. In addition to registering the system on the SUSE Customer center or sec, the user interface can be used to register the system on a custom instance of the Repository mirroring tool or RMT. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 and OpenSUSE Leap 16 will use SELinux as a default Linux kernel security module, or lsm, but you do now have the option to adjust the software selection to install an alternative LSM or even no lsm.

Ken McDonald [00:32:41]:
For more details and to get Ava's opinion on how this installer impacts suse's ecosystem and what challenges we may remain, I do recommend reading both of the articles linked in the show Notes yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:32:56]:
Interesting to see OpenSUSE moving to the next the next big thing. It looks like the installer. It looks pretty good. The screenshots I see on Pharonix looks great.

Jeff Massie [00:33:08]:
Yeah, I like how installers now are kind of after years of kind of stagnation, it seems a lot of them are really stepping up and kind of evolving.

Rob Campbell [00:33:19]:
Yeah, they've been very blah for years.

Jonathan Bennett [00:33:22]:
I mean it worked, but thankfully most of them, at least they've improved without removing a whole bunch of options. Right? Like you can still set up a machine on almost all of these that we talk about. You can still set up a machine with all of the flags and gizmos. You know, the normal Linux stuff where you want to go in and customize it all over the place. You don't lose any of that. They make it easier to get the sort of. The default recommended installs.

Jeff Massie [00:33:49]:
Yeah, Grandma can get it loaded a lot easier.

Jonathan Bennett [00:33:52]:
Yes.

Ken McDonald [00:33:52]:
How many of them give you the option after you set those installation options up, save that as a batch file so you can just run that batch file on others.

Rob Campbell [00:34:05]:
Is that what this does?

Ken McDonald [00:34:08]:
I didn't see anything about that. But. But I think that's going to be a feature request I may put in for.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:14]:
I know there are ways to do that to set up. In fact, that's sort of the entire thing behind Is it Ansible? But that's sort of their whole game is you write your ansible scripts and then you can do this install.

Rob Campbell [00:34:26]:
Well, there's also quick install methods I think Ubuntu has. I think when you first boot up the installer, I think one of the options is to do a quick install and then you have to put a configuration file. I've never done anything with this. I don't know how you make that configuration file or how you get it, but I know there is a quick install feature like that.

Jonathan Bennett [00:34:49]:
I mean, you think about it. Most distros have the idea of spins and that is essentially what you're talking about. A spin is more or less an established configuration set of packages that get.

Ken McDonald [00:35:00]:
Installed on the desktop environment and any other.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:07]:
Yeah, you default install a lot of times the spin can determine what file system type, whether it's going to be butterfs or ext4, et cetera, et cetera.

Rob Campbell [00:35:17]:
On your Ansible mention there, a side note, I have been playing with Ansible quite a bit this week, so maybe at some point in the future I will have some discussions on that. Right now I have it set up to be able to. Basically I run the playbook to update all my key servers. I don't have much more going right now.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:39]:
Cool.

Rob Campbell [00:35:40]:
I want to have it do snapshots and other things too yet.

Jonathan Bennett [00:35:42]:
But we've got a couple of developers that are looking at setting up GitHub Runners using Ansible and that looks pretty interesting. I've not really done a deep dive yet into what they're doing there, but that'll be cool if they can get it working. So, Jeff, we mentioned BTRFS briefly and there's some news about butterfs in the kernel and some other file systems.

Rob Campbell [00:36:05]:
Yeah, there are.

Jeff Massie [00:36:07]:
And earlier in the show and Jeff.

Rob Campbell [00:36:10]:
Is bringing the drama here today, so.

Jeff Massie [00:36:12]:
Yeah, well. And you know, Rob did a couple of stories. I've got a quad set of stories. So Rob squared equals Jeff. Just saying you get more for your value, more Value here, you got robbed. Anyway, I, you know, we got, we got four stories and these, these are kind of, I put four of them together because these are kind of shorter little tidbits here, but they all kind of have the same theme. First off, Joseph Bakic is leaving Meta and stepping back from kernel development. Now he Joseph's been employed by meta, working on BTRFs for years now.

Jeff Massie [00:36:56]:
BTRFs from Wikipedia, the official pronunciation is better fs, butterfs, b tree, fs or BTRFs. Take your pick on which you prefer. Now Butterfs has been around since 2009, so this isn't a new kid on the block with a ton of development work. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's still getting supported and getting updates and it's the default file format for Fedora and Cashios, just to name a couple. I'm just meaning that it's not going through massive changes right now. A lot more fine tuning and things like that and you know, just adding a smaller feature here and there. But Joseph did have this to say. Today is my last day at Meta.

Jeff Massie [00:37:41]:
This has been the best team I've ever been on and I've been on some great teams. Next week I start a new chapter. I'll be joining Anthropic to help them scale out their infrastructure and put my decades of kernel and system experience to use. I'll be stepping back from kernel development as my primary job for the first time in my career. I'm sad to leave my colleagues, but I'm excited to try something new and see where it takes me Now Joseph was the co maintainer alongside David Sturba. So BTRFS still has a maintainer and others are still working on it. So you know opinions when you read comments and scuttlebutt around the Internet, the opinions are mixed from it's really sad to see him go to about time there was new blood on the project. Time will tell if this allows for major changes in the future of the file system or things stay, you know, steady as she goes.

Jeff Massie [00:38:33]:
We'll, we'll see. But there, like I said, there's no danger of it not being supported. It's just some One of the key people is now moving on on the topic of file systems. The second story is a resolution to what Linus Torvalds was going to do with bcachefs. Now this is the one that we had all the drama about. We talked about this for the last few weeks. He didn't take patches during the last pull request window. It's Kind of like what's going to happen.

Jeff Massie [00:39:09]:
Well, Linus said there were several public and private discussions and for now BCACHE FS will be externally maintained. The code which is already in the kernel will remain there for now so it doesn't break any user systems who do not have time to, who haven't had time to prepare for the change. They want to make sure nobody's going to get hurt when this happens. But what this does mean is that bcachefs will build an out of tree module and continue to develop there. Now ZFS has a similar status, so this isn't a kiss of death for the file system. It just means that the advanced users who would be picking, picking up this file system would need to add a couple of steps to make sure the module's loaded for the system for file system compatibility. It's not a, it's still too new to be a default on anything. So you know, maybe in a year, a couple years we'll see it come become default on something.

Jeff Massie [00:40:08]:
But at this point if you're, if you're running bcachefs, you're probably an advanced user anyway, so this won't be a major roadblock. The third story is about how GNOME executive director, they have their new executive director steps down after four months. Now just a little history to recap here we had Holly Milden who stepped down after less than a year. Filling Holly's shoes was Stephen Debault who after four months is stepping down. And that's who we're talking about today, is Stephen. The board of directors says that Alan Day is going to serve as the president and acting executive director until a replacement is found. You know there's a lot of scuttlebutt on that one too. What's going on? Did it make sense? Did it not make sense?

Rob Campbell [00:41:01]:
You know, they should have hired me.

Jeff Massie [00:41:04]:
Well, they've got some requirements or ideals what they would like the next person to have. So if you would like to apply Rob, the window is open now. Now the final story is about Alyssa Rosen Wig who's leaving Asashi Linux. Alyssa led all the mesa open sourced OpenGL Vulcan driver work for enabling the Apple M1 and M2 graphics hardware under Linux, she posted. And she's now going to be working at working on intel open source graphics drivers. Now it was noted that her post didn't say if she was actually working at intel or for one of the open source consulting firms. But her resume later was then updated to say she in fact is working at Intel. So a lot hate to See her step away from the Apple M series of chips and others are really excited to see what she can bring to the intel graphics stack.

Jeff Massie [00:42:04]:
One of the things kind of a side note is, you know, while Intel's going through some rough times now, it has been mentioned many times that Intel's GPU division is very lean and mean and they're actually kind of a model for the rest of the company to go after because of their speed and flexibility. So it. It doesn't totally surprise me that she got hired on at intel when they're actually cutting back a lot of other. Other positions at intel because a lot of it's in. In different divisions. But time will tell to see what. What comes out of that one. But take a look at the four articles in the show notes for more details.

Jeff Massie [00:42:44]:
You know, and there's a lot of interesting reading in the form of comments on the stories, you know, and just a lot of changes going on and you know, let us know on the discord, see what you think.

Ken McDonald [00:42:55]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:42:56]:
Interesting stuff. All of it. The. The Gnome. The Gnome director I am particularly humored by.

Jeff Massie [00:43:04]:
Yeah, I don't have to be one year and then four months and it. But it was supposedly a mutual decision. They both decided it was not a good fit. But.

Ken McDonald [00:43:14]:
Not having any health issues.

Jonathan Bennett [00:43:16]:
The. The mutual decision part, that almost makes it even scarier.

Ken McDonald [00:43:20]:
They.

Jeff Massie [00:43:20]:
The. If they probably had health, they would probably say personal reasons or something like that. At higher levels they get really vague on what's going on. I mean.

Jonathan Bennett [00:43:32]:
Oh yeah, you don't want to air the dirty laundry, but.

Jeff Massie [00:43:35]:
Right.

Jonathan Bennett [00:43:36]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:43:36]:
So. So it's. It's always going to be very. Oh, it was a mutual decision. Maybe, maybe not. You know, only. Only a few people in the room know what really.

Rob Campbell [00:43:45]:
We wanted to fire him and he didn't want to get fired, so he quit.

Jeff Massie [00:43:50]:
Yeah.

Ken McDonald [00:43:51]:
Or it could be that we can't afford him and he decided that. So we both agreed that it was time to.

Rob Campbell [00:44:00]:
I'm. He knew what he was getting into.

Jonathan Bennett [00:44:03]:
So yeah, unless their finances are. Went into a free fall in the past four months.

Rob Campbell [00:44:09]:
But yeah. Jeff, I don't think I'll apply. I have a history of staying at my jobs for a long time and so I don't think this will be a good fit for me.

Jeff Massie [00:44:15]:
Yeah, but you could. You could turn it around. This. This could be the thing that Gnome needs. It needs robified.

Rob Campbell [00:44:21]:
Well, I know it's what they need, but it's not what I need, I don't think.

Ken McDonald [00:44:24]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:44:28]:
Get back to the open source community. Do it for the love of the community.

Rob Campbell [00:44:33]:
Yeah, if they really want me, they can come find me. And if you're listening, just look for. I'll give you the info at the end of the show.

Jeff Massie [00:44:40]:
Robert P. Campbell.com yeah, you know, I, I'll be honest, I've not been a fan of Gnome, but I really like having something big out there besides just kde, you know. And right now it's kind of mostly a two horse race. You know, GNOME and KDE are kind of the, the big juggernauts. I mean you got a lot of stuff, you know, Cosmic is coming, you've got some other, you know, mate and Cinnamons and. But they're not, they, they don't have the, the market segment that the other two do.

Jonathan Bennett [00:45:19]:
Well, I mean it's kind of the same thing as the Linux desktop as a whole has. Right. They're not default installed on most any distros. You got to go seek them out. And so that's always going to limit the number of people that run them.

Rob Campbell [00:45:31]:
Right.

Jeff Massie [00:45:33]:
But I just like, you know, having a lot of options just so. Because even if you say okay, I'm totally kde, but they can get a lot of good ideas from other desktops and other desktops can get a lot of good ideas from K to E and it kind of everybody gets smarter together. You know, all the boats rise as the tide comes in kind of thing.

Rob Campbell [00:45:53]:
I mean that's the only reason together you don't need gnome. And we have xfce, lxq, Mate, Cinnamon.

Ken McDonald [00:46:06]:
Intel's hoping that Alicia can help reinvigorate their GPUs a bit more.

Rob Campbell [00:46:13]:
That's assuming she's actually working for them and not is that contributing.

Jeff Massie [00:46:18]:
Well, her resume says she is and I think that's what they're looking at because everything, the hardware for Intel GPUs is actually really solid. It's been drivers where they've had issues and they started off the wrong foot when they tried to take the mobile driver and use it as a desktop driver. And that philosophy.

Rob Campbell [00:46:38]:
I thought she said she was working on the intel gpu, not necessarily working for intel because you could.

Jeff Massie [00:46:45]:
Well, originally her announcement says she's working on the software and doesn't specifically mention Intel. It's her resume that got updated a little later that then came out and said yes, she officially is working for Intel.

Rob Campbell [00:46:58]:
Ah yeah. Don't want to be helping Apple out then.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:03]:
Conflict of interest now.

Jeff Massie [00:47:07]:
Well.

Ken McDonald [00:47:09]:
FS is going to actually have some advantages by being externally maintained.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:16]:
Oh yeah. To get back to that, sure. They can push changes whenever they want to.

Jeff Massie [00:47:24]:
Well, so to go back Asashi, she said that she feels it's still in good hands because there's still a lot of developers there and she's laid the groundwork and she kind of feels like she's ready to move on the bcash fs. Yeah, you're now developing and kind of at your own rate. You're not waiting for a lot of. Okay, now can I put this in? You're out of tree, so go nuts.

Rob Campbell [00:47:51]:
Yep, we'll see. I don't think it'll be good for him, though.

Jonathan Bennett [00:47:56]:
It's the same deal. As I said about the desktop environment, there is a higher barrier to entry now to run the code.

Jeff Massie [00:48:03]:
There is, but it's not at the place where normal users should be running it. I think a lot of your.

Ken McDonald [00:48:10]:
At least not on production devices.

Rob Campbell [00:48:13]:
Sure. But at some point when it is ready, are they going to just let them back in or are they going to still be kind of stuck on the sidelines or do they need to.

Ken McDonald [00:48:22]:
Let them back in?

Jeff Massie [00:48:24]:
They don't need to, but if they don't. So, okay, once. Once it hits stable, you know, it's it. Which they supposedly are going to do, they said, with the next kernel release. But let's just say, okay, in one year they're stable and they're rock solid. If they don't get in the kernel, they're in trouble. Unless. Because, well, unless somebody like Debian, a fedora, you know, Art, somebody bigger says, okay, we're going to make them default.

Ken McDonald [00:48:50]:
We'Re going to do the work and we're.

Jeff Massie [00:48:51]:
We're just going to. Yeah, or suse, whoever.

Jonathan Bennett [00:48:57]:
I think there's another alternative here where it's not a distro that says we want this, but a big company like if Facebook comes along and says it's great, we want to start running this on our infrastructure, then who cares if it's in the kernel or not? You've got, you know, it's going to happen installs.

Rob Campbell [00:49:14]:
It's kind of like. It's kind of like for Linux, in Linux, in the Linux space. It's kind of going to be in the same spot that ZFS is right now. You know, ZFS is native on bsd, but on Linux it's not in the kernel. People like Ubuntu and they're like almost the only one who's really tried to push it ever. So it's kind of struggled in Linux because of that people had to have to do it kind of manually on their own. But it's great. So people do.

Jonathan Bennett [00:49:40]:
But why, why, why does ZFS zfs? Why does it have that problem? Licensing.

Rob Campbell [00:49:45]:
Licensing? Yeah. I guess this won't have that problem. Right, right.

Jeff Massie [00:49:51]:
So if it gets enough momentum and people say oh it's solid, we want it in there, they could definitely just roll it right into the kernel tree. And maybe they will after they say okay, look, this is pretty stable now. We're not getting weird pull requests. We're not. No more panic mode.

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:09]:
Yeah. So that's when you compare it to zfs. It is a valid comparison. But you do have to keep in mind ZFS has this, this big huge ugly licensing question. Right. And so that's going to keep your fedoras and your Ubuntu's from ever shipping it even.

Rob Campbell [00:50:23]:
Not Ubuntu. Not Ubuntu.

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:25]:
Does Ubuntu ship it?

Rob Campbell [00:50:26]:
They have. Really?

Jonathan Bennett [00:50:27]:
I am surprised by that. Maybe the licensing issue is not as bad as I thought it was, but anyway. But that's also going to keep certain businesses that are very risk averse from being willing to use it too.

Rob Campbell [00:50:41]:
Yeah, but I'm just backing up to the point that if it doesn't get pulled back in to the, to the, to the kernel, that that's going to be one more barrier. Now if it has something really great that like a distro is just going to want to put that in there themselves, that could, could, could bypass that. It'd make it work. But if they aren't don't have anything good enough for that, it's, it's not going to be really easy for most users just to say, you know what I want, I want that. Let me go find that and figure that out.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:17]:
Yeah. Yep, absolutely.

Ken McDonald [00:51:19]:
Now what would be interesting that I don't see it really happening is if Joseph Basak actually started collaborating with the BCAS FS folks to help and preparing it for when it is eventually ready to merge into the kernel.

Jeff Massie [00:51:39]:
Well, he was one of them that actually, and this was brought up in the comments too, he was one of them that actually pushed against BCACHE fs. So he was one that was not happy with how they were putting stuff in.

Jonathan Bennett [00:51:52]:
That's an interesting confabulation of events then that they both sort of left the kernel at the same time.

Jeff Massie [00:51:59]:
Yeah. And, and people said that and they said well, but really that their kerfuffle happened like six months ago. So it sort of unrelated, you know.

Ken McDonald [00:52:08]:
It'S what's really amazing is that it took this long for Linus to make that decision.

Jeff Massie [00:52:17]:
Well, I think they wanted to have a very, because, because pulling something out like that is, is a big decision and I think they really wanted to in a, they had a lot of talks, I guess privately too. So there was probably a lot going on. They were pulling in a lot of the, the core people and saying, okay, what's, what does this mean? What do we do? How do we handle this? You know, is his behavior going to get better? Is it, you know, so I think they said, you know, the, the best thing to do right now, pull it out of the kernel. It's not going to hurt most people and they can always pull it in at a later date. I mean, nothing says that once things calm down, they can't go, okay, we'll allow you to merge it in and put it back in a tree once.

Ken McDonald [00:53:00]:
You get it, reach the point where you can claim this as a stable and will be a long term supported version as you experiment with the others.

Rob Campbell [00:53:11]:
And I'd like to see somebody ask Linus that question if, if there's a chance they could ever come back or if you're just not ever having anything to do with them.

Jeff Massie [00:53:23]:
Well, it's just a kinder, gentler Linus now.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:26]:
I, I, I suspect from, from listening to him over the years, I suspect he's going to say, I don't know. It would depend upon, it would depend upon what's his name?

Jeff Massie [00:53:36]:
Kent Overstreet.

Jonathan Bennett [00:53:38]:
Thank you. It would depend upon Kent agreeing to play by the rules. Like that is what Torvalds would say. I don't know if it could happen, but he would have to play by the rules.

Jeff Massie [00:53:49]:
And I think it would be easier once they get it marked as stable and it's less about.

Ken McDonald [00:53:55]:
That.

Jeff Massie [00:53:56]:
It needs to be stable to go in there. But I think once it's stable it's going to slow down the code pulls and there's not going to be all these weird panic feature code pull requests during an RC and, and I think that that'll kind of, kind of help it or you know, maybe Kent kind of steps aside after a while. There's a group of people taking care of BCash FS. He kind of steps aside and they go, hey, we want to, you know, we're good citizens. We want to get Kent.

Rob Campbell [00:54:25]:
God, let us then.

Jeff Massie [00:54:27]:
What?

Rob Campbell [00:54:28]:
Kent's gone. Let us in.

Jeff Massie [00:54:30]:
Yeah, you know, Rob, you can take that over while you're running Gnome and you can just, you can just fix everything yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [00:54:39]:
So Rob, if you were to make your own distro, what INIT system would you run on it?

Rob Campbell [00:54:45]:
Well, I would still have to use systemd. Sorry, but for all you haters of systemd that just want to see the world of INIT systems continue to move forward, a new INIT system has been released this week aimed at to be a minimalist process supervisor for Linux called Nitro. So like systemd, it acts as a supervisor managing and monitoring services to ensure they start correctly and continue running reliably. But it is designed to be lightweight, simple and efficient, making it suitable for small systems, embedded devices and containerized environments. This is, this doesn't just come out of nowhere from some complete no name developer. Nitro is being developed by Leia Neukirchen. Okay, who is that? Well, I didn't know either, but apparently she is involved in the development of Void Linux. I think we've heard of that.

Rob Campbell [00:55:56]:
So I'm guessing maybe that is where we may see Nitro show up first. So Nitro organizes services in simple folders with scripts to configure, start, stop or log each service. It can handle one time tasks as well as services that need to run continuously. It keeps all runtime data in memory ram, making it suitable for systems with limited resources, sources or read only file systems. It can also run efficiently in containers, providing fast and reliable service supervision. So to keep it lightweight and easier to manage, Nitro focuses solely on starting and supervising services. You know, while systemd kind of goes a lot deeper. Managing dependencies has its own internal logging, systemd, timers, networking, and really a whole lot more that maybe it shouldn't be doing, I don't know.

Rob Campbell [00:56:59]:
But you know, if you want to compare to other INIT systems, say like Run it. Nitro keeps runtime state in memory and allows flexible service setups. It is compact, efficient, and here's to modern Linux standards while remaining easy to understand. So a little different than run it there, you know. But for those of you who maybe still like systemd, I'm gonna show you a tip later on that that helped me out this week and that I probably should have learned many years ago. But I'm still sticking with System B D. But maybe some of you in IT guys can. In IT guys, gals, folks, whatever, can have another option to switch to.

Jonathan Bennett [00:57:56]:
Yeah, you know, we had a couple of INIT systems that were based on raw scripts and there were some downsides to that. People referred to it as brittle and you know, held together by duct tape and hopes. I don't Know, I, I've, I've not really had problems with, with systemd. It pretty much does what I needed to do.

Rob Campbell [00:58:18]:
I mean, I'll admit that when it switched, switched from INIT to systemd, it was a shock. I wasn't, I wasn't like following the news. I didn't know. All of a sudden it's different. But I was using INIT systems with the scripts that I was comfortable with. You know, I understood how to go and look at the scripts and then all of a sudden it's like, where's all my RC D? Or whatever they were, all those files? Like, I, I don't know what's going on here. So it took me a long time to figure that out. I mean, as, as you can see, like I've learned a new tip that I'm still learning.

Rob Campbell [00:58:50]:
There's a lot to learn.

Jonathan Bennett [00:58:51]:
Yeah.

Jeff Massie [00:58:52]:
Well, it seems though that this isn't really a. It's, it's only a partial replacement for systemd. It's kind of some of the specialized cases. It's at least, well, at least the way I read it with, you know, the smaller systems. And.

Rob Campbell [00:59:10]:
It could fully. I mean, it's an INIT system, you just have to do it. All the other things you have to do in scripts pretty much as INIT systems are meant to be, as proper.

Jonathan Bennett [00:59:21]:
INIT systems should be.

Ken McDonald [00:59:26]:
So how easy would it be to put it in place of systemd on say, an Ubuntu system?

Rob Campbell [00:59:34]:
Well, the problem there is that snaps rely on. That's probably the biggest problem is that snaps rely on System D today. So there'd have to be redesigned there. But something like Antics or MX Linux may be a little easier, you know, if they want to, because they're still using by default, I think the old init 5, last I looked, I believe that's what it is. But you know, you can like MX Linux, you can optionally choose systemd, but default is, is the old init system. So maybe they want to modernize on something like this.

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:06]:
Yeah, so that's the deal. Systemd has sort of put its tendrils into everything on the Linux desktop. And so trying to get rid of it. You don't get rid of it on Ubuntu or Debian. You make your own Linux that may be partially based on those, but like that is make your own distro territory.

Rob Campbell [01:00:25]:
Yeah, I think Ubuntu is also involved. Systemd is also involved in the networking and, and other things. Not just Snap, I guess, but I don't even know what else it's involved in. But I know Ubuntu is really deeply tied in, at least with their snaps and probably because of the others are.

Jeff Massie [01:00:39]:
At one time when I was running a music server I had I had to get into systemd to allow something to run in one of the var directories because it was by the system level it was locked out. So it's tied into a lot of the security stuff too.

Jonathan Bennett [01:00:59]:
Yeah. All right, well, let's talk about QFOS Q4OS.

Ken McDonald [01:01:08]:
I've been calling it Q4OS myself.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:10]:
QFOS sounds good though.

Rob Campbell [01:01:14]:
QFASA QFAS QFORCE.

Jonathan Bennett [01:01:19]:
QFORCE. Yeah, that one's good too. They really should have brought us on board to help them workshop the name we're coming up with A great idea.

Rob Campbell [01:01:26]:
Is.

Ken McDonald [01:01:28]:
But this week it's Ayusha Pandang that's writing about the four reasons he believes Q4 Q4S is the best operating system to breathe some new life into an old laptop. Now it still supports the older 32 bit systems in the industrial ecosystem, you know, especially those in embedded systems and with the X86 ISO barely occupying more than 690 megabytes. So there's another reason why he likes it. Q Force can be configured on a pre existing Windows setup and is compatible with the older versions of Microsoft's flagship os. So you can even test it out on a Windows 7 powered x86 machine. Q Force is based on Debian and incorporates most of the popular services. It is compatible with systemd so you can have systemd in it. I don't know how nitro in it would work, but Ayush finds it a lot easier to use, especially if he wants to bring an old laptop back to life as a no nonsense everyday machine.

Ken McDonald [01:02:52]:
Q Force serves as a middle ground that combines the light design of most command line integrated distros with the intuitive interface of graphic user interface systems thanks to Trinity Desktop. This ultralight desktop Environment lists a 350 MHz CPU and 256 megabytes of RAM as the minimum requirements and can easily fit inside a 3 gigabyte hard drive. You also have the option to switch from Trinity Desktop to KDE Plasma if you do have a somewhat capable laptop or one of those ancient ones that has a lot of power to it. Now I do recommend reading Ayush Outer Core if you are interested in Q Force.

Jonathan Bennett [01:03:49]:
Yeah, interesting. So it's is it laptop specific though? It talked about the the laptop angle but like you could run this on A desktop too.

Ken McDonald [01:04:01]:
I wonder how well it would run on an old X86 Bell based Dell system that I've got sitting behind me.

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:10]:
Yeah, yeah, it'd be worth it to try. You know, we talk about the, the X86 64 like the V1, V2, V3, V4 thing. And something I'm sure most of our listeners know is like it's not. It does not use those names. But that is totally a thing on the 32 bit as well, you know, because you have the 3864-86586 I-686 I think was the one of the last big ones that that most 32 bit software gets compiled for. But like Linux was originally written for the. What was it?

Ken McDonald [01:04:44]:
386?

Jonathan Bennett [01:04:45]:
Was it 386? Yeah. But trying to find a distro that'll run on one of those. Those are old machines now. Trying to find a new distro that will run on one of those old machines is a challenge. I don't remember the name of the one I used last time I did that. It's been years ago now.

Rob Campbell [01:05:02]:
Puppy, Puppy Linux.

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:04]:
I don't remember if it was puppy or not.

Jeff Massie [01:05:06]:
You know though, a friend and I were talking at work and he's a big Linux guy too and we were talking and you have one of those old 386, 486. What are you going to do on that with modern software with the single core? You know, we kind of, we kind of both agree at least personal opinion, a lot of that old stuff, just run the old software, let it do what it's doing and just call it a day at that. Because it's.

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:37]:
I mean you certainly can. But I mean part of the fun of it is trying to get a more modern kernel on. I mean that's kind of a goal. A project in and of itself.

Rob Campbell [01:05:47]:
A thin client or SSH terminal or.

Jonathan Bennett [01:05:51]:
Even a, you know, a web host for a static page that only one or two people are going to be on at a time. Time. That's what I did back in the day. The last time I did, I think it was like a 486 install. It was just a place for me to be able to upload some pictures from a vacation live.

Rob Campbell [01:06:08]:
You'd probably save money in the long run just buying a Raspberry PI just because of electricity.

Jeff Massie [01:06:14]:
Oh yeah, we actually talked about that too, you know, wow, I'm saving the environment. It's like, well, but you're using this old technology that the transistors are so inefficient compared to what we have now and that you're burning watts instead of milliwatts.

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:32]:
Yeah, I had a conversation with, I forget the name of the group, but a group that their thing was trying to get people to run Linux on their old hardware. Their opinion was that environmentally speaking, the E waste is a much bigger problem than the energy usage.

Ken McDonald [01:06:53]:
How much energy would it cost to try to take that E waste and recycle it?

Jonathan Bennett [01:06:59]:
Recycling is expensive. So there's a reason that companies for profit don't do a whole lot of recycling. It's because you can't do it at profit. If you could actually make money from recycling, companies would be falling all over themselves to do it.

Rob Campbell [01:07:15]:
We got a place that pays us for our E recycling.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:18]:
Yes. How are they able to pay you for it? And then what do they do with it? And I will tell you the reason that they are able to pay you for it is because they get kickbacks from governmental organizations to do it. And their E recycling is probably just shipping it off to another country and then pretending that they don't know what happens to it. That's. That's the sad truth of most of those systems these days. Anyway, let's move on to Python. Python the documentary. Is this a.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:48]:
Is this another B grade horror film, Jeff?

Jeff Massie [01:07:51]:
No, this is actually a really good film.

Jonathan Bennett [01:07:53]:
Okay.

Jeff Massie [01:07:54]:
You know, comedy. A little bit. Little bit. You know, we're always talking about rust and how it's getting in the kernel and you know, we all know about C and C and how it's everywhere, but those do. But do those languages have a movie like Python now has? I don't know of one, so if you know, let me know. But Python's the only one I know that has a movie dedicated to it. And it's, it's a 90 minute documentary about how a little side project, you know, evolved into the most popular language, at least according to the TIOBE index, and most popular in what people are programming in now. Not by volume of code already out there, but it's, it's the number one language for, for a little while now.

Jeff Massie [01:08:45]:
The movie basically starts in Amsterdam in the early 90s, well, even a little bit before that, if you want to get technical, where Guido Van Rossum started Python as a side project. You know, he even jokes he had had no idea the success he was going to have with his side project. But technically the video starts out in the 80s where Rossum started out working on the ABC language project, which was supposed to be an easier to program language and how it continued on from there. And he used other languages to program some operating systems and issues he found with them. And you know, and I think it does a really good job of explaining things like the ABC language. When it came out, everything was on major servers and computer time was so expensive. They even talk in the documentary that programmers were nothing compared to computing costs. You know, so if a language was hard and obscure, yeah, it didn't matter.

Jeff Massie [01:09:45]:
We don't care about the programmer time. The machine has to run efficiently. We need the language to really, you know, get the most out of the machine. Yeah, it takes a, you know, 50 rocket scientists to do hello world doesn't matter compared to the cost of the hardware. You know, in the movie they talk about where it was written partially as a basically kind of competitor to Perl and which if you didn't know, Python and Perl kind of have opposing views. Perl says there should be more than one way to do something and Python says there should be one way to do something and it should be obvious. So there, you know, they, they talk a little bit about the lang. The thoughts of the language is going on at the time as well as this is.

Jeff Massie [01:10:33]:
This continues to evolve, you know, and there's a lot of little humor and you know, it's not truly a comedy, but there's some kind of chuckle bits in there and parts that'll make you smile and you know, because they do a great job of talking about the origins and, and this, like I said, the state of the computing at the time and you know, and they even talk about how when they finished the ABC language that, that he was a part of when they wanted to release it, they didn't have a good way to tell users because at the time there was no Internet, most people didn't have a computer and if you wanted that language, you wrote a letter to the university and they would send you a five and a quarter inch floppy disk, you know, so it, so they do a real good job of setting the stage of like, well here's what happened here. You know, maybe ABC could have been wonderful and huge, but at the time they didn't have. Well there they mentioned there's some problems with it, but you know, it, it, it goes into like what shackled these, these projects early on and now later they do talk about how when they released Python originally they did it in Usenet posts. Now some of our older listeners might remember taking multiple messages, combining them, decoding the MIME encoding and turning it back into binary. I was, I was one of them back in the day. I remember that stuff. And overall, I think the movie's excellent and captures a lot of the supporting reasons why Python took off as a language. The, you know, what was going on with the computing at the time, the evolution of the language, you know, problems they found and things they overcame.

Jeff Massie [01:12:16]:
So I thought it was pretty, actually entertaining. If you take a look at the article in the show notes, it has a link to the YouTube where you can watch the movie and learn. Learn the history of the currently most popular programming language in the world.

Rob Campbell [01:12:30]:
Yeah, I have an objection.

Jonathan Bennett [01:12:33]:
Objection, objection.

Rob Campbell [01:12:34]:
The one thing you're. So Python's stance is there should be one way to do it and it should be obvious. Okay. Requiring exact spacing for everything to be exactly correct before it works is not completely obvious. Put it in brackets. So that way if you have a space wrong here and there or a extra space, not enough spaces, the spacing. I like Python otherwise, but that is just completely stupid.

Jeff Massie [01:13:06]:
I would. I would totally disagree. Because it makes picking up somebody else's code so easy because of how it's spaced. I originally didn't care for it, but after programming for a while in Python, it be. I think it's. It forces good programming structure.

Rob Campbell [01:13:24]:
Structure.

Jeff Massie [01:13:25]:
I don't know how many times I've seen C or other languages where, oh, I'm gonna mash everything in on one line. And you don't see. Okay, for sure.

Rob Campbell [01:13:33]:
That's what standards are for. Let standards do their job. But if somebody wants to do something different, you know, if they have a different. Rob, they have a different visual. If they have a different visual style, let them Rob.

Jonathan Bennett [01:13:48]:
You realize that that is the point of Python. Whereas in Perl, there's multiple different ways to do it, and you are free to do it whichever way you want to. Python is a.

Rob Campbell [01:13:58]:
It's a very opinionated.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:00]:
Yes.

Ken McDonald [01:14:01]:
Structured.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:02]:
Structured is a very opinion. No, opinionated is the term I was going for. It's a very opinionated language. It has opinions and you must follow the opinions.

Rob Campbell [01:14:09]:
Yes. Okay, but don't say obvious.

Jeff Massie [01:14:13]:
That's part of the Python tenant.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:16]:
That's their goal, is for these things to have all been obvious. Maybe the white space didn't quite meet that goal.

Rob Campbell [01:14:21]:
Yeah, that's all I gotta say.

Jeff Massie [01:14:24]:
Somebody in Discord will probably be able to help me. I don't remember what it is off top of my head, but if you type in Python space and then there's like something it gives you, the tenants of Python.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:36]:
Oh, Interesting. Did not know that.

Jeff Massie [01:14:38]:
Yeah, there's not going to like it.

Rob Campbell [01:14:41]:
You could talk all you want. I'm not going to like the spacing.

Jeff Massie [01:14:46]:
Well, you can be wrong all you want, Rob.

Rob Campbell [01:14:47]:
That's okay. All right, on another topic, Revolution OS is a good documentary from 2001.

Jonathan Bennett [01:14:56]:
Oh. So I was going to say the Python movie. There's a link here. But if you don't realize it's available right on YouTube. It is. It is free to watch. I've got it queued up and I'll try to watch it at some point in the next couple of days because that does sound like a lot of fun.

Jeff Massie [01:15:10]:
And it's in the show notes if.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:11]:
You don't care to see it.

Ken McDonald [01:15:13]:
And it's got to be a great movie for the price.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:17]:
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Rob Campbell [01:15:20]:
They say if. If you're not paying for it, you're the product. So.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:24]:
Yeah, that's not always. Always.

Ken McDonald [01:15:25]:
Well, that's because the platform makes this product.

Jonathan Bennett [01:15:30]:
All right, well, there's one more story that we've got. I'm surprised nobody else picked this up, but I am going to because we have to talk about it. And that's something new on Android. So we talk about Linux on the phone every once in a while and we've never really taken it seriously. But I'm gonna have to start thinking about running Linux on my phone because the one thing that's really kept me on Android all these years is. Is gonna go away. It's the one complaint that I've had about Apple for years now and Android. Google official Android is joining the ranks and I'm a little ticked about it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:16:10]:
So Google has announced that beginning in 2027, I think they are going to require side loaded packages to have developer verification. Which means, among other things, that F Droid is no longer going to work on officially verified Google device Android devices. It will also mean that if you don't have. If you don't have developer verification on your Android apps, you can't run them on your Android phone. Which of course, like, that is a huge. From like the software freedom perspective, that is a huge freedom violation because, dang it, it's your phone. You should be able to run whatever software you want to on it. Now the other side of this coin is that there are a lot of people that do indeed get hit by fake applications and it is a little too easy sometimes to install malware on Android phones because someone just sends you a dot apk.

Jonathan Bennett [01:17:15]:
So I do get that as a security problem. I understand why Google wants to make this not a thing anymore. But yeah, it is the one big thing that keeps me on Android and it will now be gone if places like the European Union allow this to happen. Because you might remember that we have recently gotten some rulings out of the EU that says that Apple cannot do this sort of thing. Apple is required to allow third party software repositories. Now what I'm not sure with that is whether it also requires the third party repositories that Apple's required to support in the eu. I don't know if they require developer verification or not. That's not clear to me.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:09]:
But yeah, I understand why they're doing it, but I am still disappointed. I'm not mad Google, I'm just disappointed.

Rob Campbell [01:18:16]:
I think one of the reasons why Apple's only been able to get away with it as much as they have too, and even the US and other places still, is because it's on their own devices where Google Android, they're making this, you know, for their Google Pixel, but they're also licensing this to other vendors to use on their phones. And I feel like that could be part of where that legal problem is.

Jonathan Bennett [01:18:46]:
Yeah. So something to keep in mind is that Google already has antitrust problems in the US I'm not sure that this is the wisest course of action given.

Rob Campbell [01:18:56]:
That I don't like it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:00]:
Oh but yeah, I don't, I don't like it either. I really enjoy being able to side load apps.

Rob Campbell [01:19:05]:
I think they're at least, I think they at least need a way because it's, it's one of the things that, that keeps Android kind of being better in some ways at least you know, have a, a setting, you know, to disable it or something and you know, just put super strong warnings like this puts you at risk and, and let people do it if they. Yeah, I think you have, you have you already. I'm pretty sure today you have to put into like developer mode anyway to silo.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:36]:
Yeah, I think so.

Rob Campbell [01:19:38]:
So it's, it's not like as easy as just sending somebody apk. You have to direct them like on here, but into the developer mode. So you know, just put stronger language there.

Jonathan Bennett [01:19:49]:
Yeah, you know it, Google has been sort of flirting with how to make open source Android less open for a long time now. Right. And so this is their big stick is, you know, is a device certified by Google and then. Well if it's certified by Google, then and only then can you get the official Google binaries on it. GMAIL and Chrome and all of those things. The. The Play Store being another one of them. And once a device is certified by Google then there's also, you know, this list of requirements that you've got to follow to keep that certification.

Jonathan Bennett [01:20:26]:
And so they're just, they're adding this as a list of requirements. But something we've seen is like hand in hand with that is more and more of the key functionality of Android is moving out of aosp, the Android open source project, and into the Google libraries that only come that, you know, they're inside APKs, they're not part of the core system. And yeah, it's kind of unfortunate to watch. It is sort of this slow neutering of the Android project. Yeah.

Rob Campbell [01:21:01]:
So Linux phone. Linux phone makers need to step up their game. Fortunately, I mean they have a year and a half then.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:10]:
I am now very interested in the idea of a Linux phone. I think it would be very cool to be able to get one and make it happen. There are some options out there for it. We'll see.

Ken McDonald [01:21:19]:
So with Android doing this, how will this impact say you've got not a blessed device or a Google blessed Android device, but one of the ones where it's got the, the open Android on it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:38]:
Won't affect it shouldn't affect it really.

Ken McDonald [01:21:40]:
And then side loading Google Play on it?

Jonathan Bennett [01:21:44]:
Well, I mean it's difficult to sideload Google Play onto these in some cases and I think Google is going to continue to try to make it more difficult to do so. But if you're sideloading. Well, I think if you're sideloading play onto one of these phones that sort of implies you've got root on it so you can do whatever you want to on that.

Rob Campbell [01:22:02]:
I miss their old motto do no evil. I miss that indeed.

Jonathan Bennett [01:22:08]:
We really should have known that something was up when they dropped that.

Rob Campbell [01:22:11]:
Yeah, I mean why else would you drop a great model like that? Like okay, we want to do some evil now. Let's do it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:22:17]:
Don't be evil.

Rob Campbell [01:22:19]:
We want to be evil now.

Jonathan Bennett [01:22:24]:
All right, let's move into some band line tips. We've got Rob at first Rob is embracing the dark side with some systemctl tips.

Rob Campbell [01:22:33]:
Yes, you are correct. I am embracing. Pretty soon I'm going to extend and then I will extinguish and go all with the. The other INIT system I talked about earlier that I can't remember because I'm old. So anyway, what I'm going to talk about today is something I should have known how to do this A long time ago, I just never bothered looking into it. So I really don't know systemd that much. But so I had some web servers crashing just occasionally, rarely, and I never really ducked in. Why? Because it wasn't happening that often.

Rob Campbell [01:23:12]:
So I did dig into why and I fixed that problem actually. But I'm not going to talk about that. What I'm going to talk about is, you know, it's nice to just have a watchdog there that keeps an eye on your services, at least the critical ones that you want and just restarts them for you. So I'm going to show you how to. For those watching you'll get a lot better. For those listening you can check the show notes and I will try to say what I'm doing. But so first to see if you don't know the name of the service, you can use that the TUI tool that I mentioned a week or two ago, two or three, I don't know to see your system services. Or you could type systemctl space list units space dash dash type equals service space dash dash state running.

Rob Campbell [01:24:09]:
I do that and it's going to show me how many running services. Now the one that I want to do something with is. Is Apache 2. So and if you already know it, you could just check the state of the service of Apache 2. So for example, if I do, can you guys see that you can systemctl space status space apache2 and you can see the status of that service that you want to work with. So what I want to do is edit that status with systemctl space edit space apache2. And if you go in here so I already put it up here. I put this, this was not here originally.

Rob Campbell [01:24:57]:
So I put in brackets service and then below it I have restart equals always. There are a few other options you can have only on I should have that should have had that open or had in my notes. The other options you can have is so on failure on on abnormal or on on a watch targets to restart the service if it times out while running. So in this case I went with restart always and then I have the seconds to wait. So I put 30 seconds just so if something's going on, I didn't want to just keep causing the problem. I'd give it give you a few seconds to rest. So what this will do if for any reason Apache 2 stops in 30 seconds, it's going to restart it always. So also one key thing to note this actually threw me off is if you look at the second line here Says anything between here and the comment below will become new contents of the file.

Rob Campbell [01:26:07]:
And then below that says lines below this comment will be discarded. I kept putting my, my edits at the very bottom because I wasn't reading and I. And it wasn't working. And I go back in and they're gone. I'm like, what's going on? And then I read it. So it's like, oh, so you know, read what you're doing and pay attention. So after you do that, you're going to want to reload your daemon. So systemctl space daemon dash reload and then systemctl restart your service.

Rob Campbell [01:26:43]:
So restart space Apache 2 and then after that you can do systemctl space show space Apache 2 and then pipe that to grep restart to see if. If your changes are loaded in there. So when I do that, I see my restart always and my restart in 30 seconds. On another service, an interesting thing, I put 60 seconds, but here it actually showed 1m for one minute. And I'll just. I guess I'll just show that out of. So for. I did a Maria PB.

Rob Campbell [01:27:22]:
I spelled it right. That's 100 milliseconds.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:29]:
Might help you with that.

Rob Campbell [01:27:30]:
I thought I remembered maybe that was on a different server. I don't know. Anyway, that's beside the point. I was starting to go on a tangent there. Anyway, that is how you can set systemd to monitor service and restart it if it. For whatever reason. I guess if it stops, dies, fails.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:51]:
Very cool.

Jeff Massie [01:27:51]:
Maybe on that server your time is set to metric.

Jonathan Bennett [01:27:55]:
Metric seconds. That must be what it is. All right, Ken, you've got WPCTL inspect. What are we inspecting?

Ken McDonald [01:28:08]:
Well, what do you think we're going to be inspecting?

Jonathan Bennett [01:28:11]:
Something to do with a wire plumber?

Ken McDonald [01:28:14]:
Yes. And fact, we're going to be inspecting objects. The objects in question will be dependent on the ID you provide. The basic premise is that. Let me go ahead and get in here. Here I have my VM up. Hope I've got it big enough for everybody to see. In the top left terminal, I've run WP CTL status just so I can get the current ID for my audio syncs and sources.

Ken McDonald [01:28:57]:
And the basic command is B WP CTL space inspect. Now, if you do dash H, that'll give you the help information. And as you can see, for this particular application, you've got two options that you can use a dash R for or dash A to look at either objects that are referenced in the object you're inspecting properties or to show associated objects. So let's go ahead and inspect my Sink, which is ID 49 and I've typed that in, I'm just going to run that and now I'm going to expand that up so we can see. And as you can see with that, it's giving all the information about that id. It tells you that the it's a node, gives you information about the driver name, what the components of it are and what the client ID for it is. Now I'm going to come over here and show using the DAS R and you'll notice it's a little bit longer. Now over here where it gives you the client id.

Ken McDonald [01:30:32]:
With the dash R it breaks that out and gives information about that client ID. And then here where we've got the device ID =42 without running the dash R, it goes straight to device profile description where it says analog 0, but with the dash R it breaks that out and says id 42 type pipewire interface device and then goes in and gives you the card name, components, driver name and even its client ID and all that other information before going on to giving you the device profile description. So let's clear that out and use the dash A so we can see the associated objects. And here again it starts off by giving you the all the information or metadata about the id 49, my pipewire or my node for my house ALSA card, the output. And then it comes down here after all of that and gives you the associated objects. There's four of them, IDs 52, 53, 54 and 55, which when you look at the status, they're not showing up anywhere. But when you look into the information about them, you find that all four of those are pipewire interface ports. And 52 for example is audio channel equals FL and the port direction equals N.

Ken McDonald [01:32:56]:
So if you remember from when I covered using PWLink, now that's going to be the input on that link device that you would create. So that's a. This would be a quick way to get the information you'd need for say doing a link into your Alsac card or finding where if you've got another device running that's being sent into it how to get that information. But. But you'll see that the 52 and 53 is the front and left input and output. 54 and 55 are front right input and output. Then that's using WPCTL to inspect.

Rob Campbell [01:33:53]:
Very.

Ken McDonald [01:33:53]:
Cool your different ID objects and maybe get some information you need for configuring a Virtual device.

Jonathan Bennett [01:34:04]:
Yeah, absolutely. All right, Jeff, you're going to talk about aptitude.

Jeff Massie [01:34:10]:
I am. And I've got a little bonus tip here. So what I was talking about earlier was the Python tenants. So if you start Python and start the interpreter and then use the command import, this, it will give you the Python tenants. So that's what I was trying to think of. But my actual command line tip this week is Aptitude. And this is basically a text based front end for the APT package manager. It's like N Curses based.

Jeff Massie [01:34:44]:
So when, when you know, you just type in Aptitude and it will let you see what can be updated, what packages have installed, packages you might not need anymore. It's interactive on the console so it allows you to preview actions you're going to take with different colors for different actions and you know, you can retroactively retrieve and display the change log for packages. You can even use it in a command line mode if you so desire though the command line mode, little bits, kind of funky, you know, it's like, well, why not just use apt, you know, save a few keystrokes. But, but if you so desire you like Aptitude, you can definitely do that. And it, there are menus to help guide what you want to do. You can easily navigate up and down levels, so it'll show you where something's going to go and what sub directory it's in. Things like that, you know, it's. It's really handy if you want to have a more guided tour, I guess, or usage with apt.

Jeff Massie [01:35:49]:
And you like menus and you want to use something a little more graphical, but it still runs in a terminal. Take a look at Aptitude. If you look at the link in the show notes, it's for the Debian wiki for Aptitude. And you know, and it's also good if you have a hard time remembering all the power of apt. You know, there's a lot of things APT can do. You know, Aptitude will help you fully take control of the packages on your system without having to remember, look everything up.

Jonathan Bennett [01:36:18]:
So yeah, it also looks like Aptitude because it runs sort of. It runs interactively like that. It might be more useful for trying to disentangle a system that's gotten itself into a weird state.

Jeff Massie [01:36:31]:
Yes, that too because it. And there's a whole lot of sub functions it does based on what APT does. And apps got a ton of things.

Ken McDonald [01:36:44]:
Is the Aptitude installed by default on most systems?

Jeff Massie [01:36:49]:
I believe so.

Ken McDonald [01:36:50]:
Base systems.

Jeff Massie [01:36:52]:
It was on mine.

Jonathan Bennett [01:36:53]:
Yeah, it looks like it depends. And I'm seeing some comments here where people are saying, nope, not by default, but I bet it is on some systems.

Ken McDonald [01:37:00]:
Yeah, because I seem to have remembering having to install it one time after doing a fresh installation of Ubuntu on a system where another time I may have installed it long ago and forgot and found it was still there.

Rob Campbell [01:37:18]:
Could it be the difference between a minimal install and a full or whatever they call it?

Jonathan Bennett [01:37:25]:
It's very possible. All right, I had an interesting issue come up this week that I think will make great fodder. So I have. It's the same system that we've talked about before. It's a backup system that's virtualized and last time we went through a whole. We went through a whole multi stage tip about how to expand that system's hard drive, the virtual hard drive on it. Last time I did it I went up to two terabytes and I ran out of space again on this backup system because I've got multiple people pushing backups to it realized it was out of space. So okay, well we need to upgrade it again.

Jonathan Bennett [01:38:03]:
So I went back to my notes from the show here, started going through them, got about halfway through, upgraded it to 3 TB and then went to resize the partition. And my partition editor said, no can do. This is an MBR partition, maximum partition size 2 terabytes.

Rob Campbell [01:38:27]:
Bummer.

Jonathan Bennett [01:38:29]:
So I then started looking. Is there a way to convert one to the other? Interestingly, I had to do this on a Windows system to try to get someone up to Windows 11 back a few weeks ago. Microsoft provides a tool to do a Windows 10 MBR to GPT conversion and it worked. I backed the system up first, you better believe. But it did work. So I came to this. I'm like, well, Microsoft has this tool. Surely there's something similar in Linux.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:02]:
Took me a little bit of searching to find it, but I did discover that there is a tool. There's actually several tools, but gdisk is the one that really got me started. And gdisk is GPT fdisk. It is literally just. It's an FDISK replacement specifically for GPT. And if you run gdisk on an MBR drive, it is a. The first thing it's going to do is it's going to tell you, hey, this is mbr. Do you want to convert this over to a GPT encoded drive? Now, there are a couple of gotchas when you do this, one of which is that you're going to have to create a bios boot partition and install Grub to it.

Jonathan Bennett [01:39:51]:
So I've actually got a link to a GitHub gist where someone goes through the steps of here's how you make this work. And he's got instructions for if you're doing the old BIOS boot style or if you're doing the new UEFI style. You know, there's a couple of different ways to go about it. For what I needed, I was able to just do the simple instructions. Once I did a Grub install and reboot, everything came up and I was then working on a GPT encoded drive and I could then go in and once again follow those instructions from last time and then get to a three terabyte partition instead of just two terabyte. Wizardling asks why do you need Grub? What is Grub for? Grub? Grub is that little tiny program that runs when you first turn your computer on. It then goes and looks at your configuration and actually loads the kernel and the initramfs. So Grub is the Linux bootloader essentially.

Rob Campbell [01:40:55]:
Maybe he wants to know why you're not using something like System Debut or.

Jonathan Bennett [01:41:01]:
I don't think systemd boot.

Rob Campbell [01:41:02]:
Lilo. Lilo.

Jonathan Bennett [01:41:03]:
I don't think systemd Boot exists for the old. It's either Almalinux or Rocky Linux and it's like 8, 7 or 8. It's not new, it's not a new install. It's been around for a while.

Rob Campbell [01:41:15]:
So it should be Lilo or Lelo. You remember that?

Jonathan Bennett [01:41:17]:
Well, yeah, vaguely. I tell you, the thing that actually I really thought about doing is in Libvert D you can actually do direct to kernel boot. You don't have to use Grub at all. But the problem with was that doing kernel updates, it's not going to automatically get the new kernel picked up. You have to go in and sort of configure it each time.

Rob Campbell [01:41:39]:
He says, why did you need it for this purpose though? For.

Jonathan Bennett [01:41:42]:
Because the only real alternative was to go into libvirtd and tell it to directly boot this kernel. In Initrd you've got to have something in there to get your system actually running.

Jeff Massie [01:41:53]:
And lylo has a 2 gig limit.

Jonathan Bennett [01:41:57]:
Interesting. Did not realize that.

Jeff Massie [01:41:59]:
Yeah, because that was. That was a big push for Grub is because I remember back in the day you had to have your. Well, there's ways you could like okay, you. You jump in if your disc was bigger, you jump into Lylo. But it's got to have that boot partition on the first Part of the drive and then you can jump to another.

Rob Campbell [01:42:14]:
It was like, yeah, I just remember Lylo going and then stopping. It's like.

Jonathan Bennett [01:42:22]:
Never a good day, was it? Never good.

Rob Campbell [01:42:25]:
A little too often, yeah.

Ken McDonald [01:42:26]:
Now, you said you were doing this with a virtual system.

Jonathan Bennett [01:42:33]:
Yep.

Ken McDonald [01:42:35]:
So with that. So you were actually having to go in and modify the drive that that virtual system was using after backing it up before you started.

Jonathan Bennett [01:42:48]:
I didn't back it up before I started because, well, for one thing, this is just a backups drive.

Rob Campbell [01:42:53]:
Drive.

Jonathan Bennett [01:42:53]:
Right. And so as soon as I got something up and working again, all those backups would just stream right back in. So, like, it wouldn't be the end of the world. I also knew that it was possible to like everything that I did. It was possible to undo it fairly easily. I knew, you know, I know where the partitions are. But yeah, I yolo'd it just a little bit, I suppose. But everything came up and worked.

Ken McDonald [01:43:18]:
I actually came across an alternative. I don't know how well it would work with your system, where I created a VM that booted off of a gparted ISO. Then I attached the virtual disk that I created for a Windows system to that, and within gpart, it used it to do a resize after using the command you used to physically expand the file that it was in.

Jonathan Bennett [01:44:01]:
Gpartet is pretty cool. I've done things like that before. You can pretty easily boot from an ISO on a virtualized system. But I wanted to do it a different way this time. I thought it would be fun.

Ken McDonald [01:44:11]:
Just to see if you could.

Jonathan Bennett [01:44:12]:
Yeah, just to see if I could.

Ken McDonald [01:44:14]:
Which is why we love Linux.

Jonathan Bennett [01:44:16]:
It's part of the point.

Ken McDonald [01:44:17]:
We can go in and just try anything. Just to see if we can.

Jonathan Bennett [01:44:20]:
Yep, absolutely. All right, so let's. We've hit the end of the show. We have gone over our tips. Let's let each of the guys plug whatever they want to. And Rob. Rob is up first. What do you have for us, Rob?

Rob Campbell [01:44:33]:
So I'm going to start by saying I figured out my error during my tip. Now, for those watching, you can see here that systemctl show mysql and pipe that to grep restart. And there it shows my restart in your seconds. One minute. But if I do edit MySQL I have 60 seconds in there. Now, what my problem was, if you didn't just figure that out, is I have my SQL on the server, not MariaDB. I am ready to be on my other newer servers because I've pretty much switched to that. But this is an older server and still has my SQL on it.

Rob Campbell [01:45:11]:
So that's where my flaw was in that. Otherwise I'm going to go on with my normal closing of the show. And that is if you enjoyed watching me, want to get more of me, you can come connect at Robert P. Campbell. Com on my website. There's all kinds of things about me, like my resume and other stuff, but the key things you're probably looking for is links to my LinkedIn, my Twitter, my blue sky, my mastodon, or. I know the one you really want is a spot to donate a coffee for me. And to remind you, I did pay Jeff in advance, so he owes me a couple coffees.

Rob Campbell [01:45:50]:
So if you want to donate a couple there and get him all caught up, you can do that too.

Jonathan Bennett [01:45:55]:
All right. And to Jeff.

Jeff Massie [01:46:00]:
If you want to find me, actually probably the easiest way is go to Rob's, like LinkedIn or something like that. I'm on there connected to Rob, so you can find me if you so desire. I don't post a lot of stuff. I'm kind of not very social. Not very social. Yeah. This is my social media outlet right here, pretty much. But to finish it off, let's have a bit of a poem.

Jeff Massie [01:46:23]:
Oh sweet discontent, My love's MPEG this content is NOT supported. Thanks everybody. Have a great week.

Jonathan Bennett [01:46:34]:
Good stuff. And Ken.

Ken McDonald [01:46:36]:
Well, I just wanted to recommend everybody read an article I came across by Stevie Bonifield where he puts out why he thinks we may want to go back to using DVDs and CDs.

Jonathan Bennett [01:46:53]:
I support this idea. I still buy CDs and DVDs because I've actually owned the thing, not renting it from somebody.

Jeff Massie [01:47:02]:
Not so sure it's not.

Ken McDonald [01:47:04]:
And you don't have to worry about a streaming services license expiring. And all of a sudden you're halfway through the season and you can't finish watching it.

Rob Campbell [01:47:13]:
Yes, I like to watch faster. I watch most seasons and like one day watch faster.

Jonathan Bennett [01:47:19]:
Yes. Thank you, Rob, for those words of wisdom. You need to watch faster, but I.

Ken McDonald [01:47:24]:
Like to rewind and go back and catch. What I really like about the buying, the DVDs is the specials, the additional stuff they put on them.

Rob Campbell [01:47:37]:
Let me give you.

Ken McDonald [01:47:38]:
You're not going to see streamed my.

Rob Campbell [01:47:40]:
Quick perspective on it. There are so many movies out there, so many TV shows, I could never watch them all. Because of that, I only watch a movie once and I never watch it again. So. And same goes for TV shows, except for in a few Rare occurrences. So it almost doesn't make sense for me to go through all the trouble of purchasing it, ripping it, back it up, all that stuff.

Jonathan Bennett [01:48:10]:
I think what you're missing there, Rob, is that there are, yes, there are way too many TV shows and movies, but only a small handful of those are going to persist as the classics. And having an actual ownership of one of those is something that you can't.

Rob Campbell [01:48:25]:
Well, there are a few. I do own the Back to the Future trilogy and intend to watch that with some future generations and some point, but there's not many. I'm not gonna. That's why I'm not gonna be purchasing a whole bunch of movies. There are some that I, you know, I especially like, like Revolution os. I do have that. Okay. A lot of these I'm listing I bought before streaming was a thing.

Rob Campbell [01:48:47]:
But still, still out of principle, I would still today.

Jonathan Bennett [01:48:50]:
Yeah. You know, the vinyl. Vinyl has come back. We've seen a big resurgence of vinyl. I anticipate a few more years and you're gonna see a resurgence. CDs and maybe not DVDs but CDs and Blu Rays.

Jeff Massie [01:49:02]:
CDs and Blu Rays have started coming back more because of the streaming services and what you can, you know, and. Oh, you don't actually.

Ken McDonald [01:49:09]:
Licensing agreement. So is it on this service or this service?

Rob Campbell [01:49:13]:
I have a child that is kind of into what retro stuff, I guess would be the word. So they kind of, they like to buy old things and also are into cassettes, CDs, VHS's. Haven't gone back to vinyl yet, but that's probably coming.

Ken McDonald [01:49:33]:
And the nice thing about CDs is you may not have a CD player anymore, but I bet you your Blu Ray player will still let you listen to it.

Rob Campbell [01:49:43]:
And the other thing, unlike movies and shows, I do listen to music more than once.

Jonathan Bennett [01:49:49]:
Good for you.

Rob Campbell [01:49:51]:
There's not enough songs that I care to listen to for me not to. So that's kind of.

Jeff Massie [01:49:56]:
I, yeah, see, I never stopped buying that media. So I've got tubs of movies and CDs and you know, I, but what I do is I, I purchase them, I put them on my computer. I just store away the, the media in tubs so it's all carefully taken care of. And then I've got like a Netflix, Netflix music type player that I can just. I'm not fiddling with the physical media. I'm just, oh, I want to watch this movie. And, and if you care about high definition, your 4K, you know, high res movies, they are better quality when you buy the disc because people are not streaming them at full fidelity.

Jonathan Bennett [01:50:43]:
It's true.

Jeff Massie [01:50:44]:
And vinyl is coming back because a lot of times they sound better. And it's not because of the technology and it's analog. It's because if you're buying.

Ken McDonald [01:50:57]:
It's in your head.

Jeff Massie [01:50:58]:
No, it's. No, it's because if you're buying a record or the same thing applies to its 96, 192 kilobit or 24 bit, 192 kilohertz or 96 kilohertz, whichever standard song, they know you care about the audio quality, so they master it much more carefully and they do a better job. Where a lot of the. Especially the online streaming stuff, they. There's. You can look up a bunch of articles about loudness wars. They squash the dynamic range just to make it play louder and they kind of distort it so that it gets in the radio and you hear it more because it's louder. But it's.

Jeff Massie [01:51:41]:
But if you're buying those formats, they go, oh, they care about the quality. We've got to actually do.

Rob Campbell [01:51:46]:
I mean, to master this. Vinyl always has that sound that sounds kind of like Ken's air conditioner in the background though.

Jonathan Bennett [01:51:56]:
No, that just means you have dust on your records.

Rob Campbell [01:51:59]:
Yeah.

Jonathan Bennett [01:52:00]:
All right. We are far, far away from talking about Linux. We are going to end the show here and probably continue talking about audio stuff in the after show. If you really want to get in on that, you should be a part of Club Twit and watch us live. Get the whole thing without ads. Get the after show. Club Twit. It is definitely something to check out.

Jonathan Bennett [01:52:20]:
Let's see. We don't have a QR code. There's the QR code, the QR code for Club Twit. It's right up there. Scan it with your phone. Come join the club.

Rob Campbell [01:52:30]:
Might be in the way there.

Jonathan Bennett [01:52:32]:
Nah, it's about the price of a cup of coffee per month. A little bit more and it is definitely worth it. I want to say thank you to everyone that watches and listens. If you want more of me, there is plenty over at Hackaday. That's where my security column goes live on Friday morning. And that is also where Floss Weekly is at these days. Have a lot of fun over there. We appreciate everyone that's here.

Jonathan Bennett [01:52:52]:
Those catch us live and on the download and we will be back. We'll see you you next week on the Untitled Linux Show.

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